Romanticism vs. Classicism revisited

Here is a sentence from F.L. Lucas's book The Decline and Fall of the Romantic Ideal (see previous post) that throws light on Goethe's "Romantic" tendencies: "The Odyssey seems to me ... a standing proof of the superiority of work that, with all its Romantic dreaming, yet maintains to the end Classic sanity and self-control." Lucas might seem to be talking about Goethe here, whom he quotes on occasion, mostly with that misleading judgment of Goethe's concerning the "diseased" nature of Romantic poetry.

The second chapter of Lucas's book concerns the "pasts" of Romantic literature, which he defines as a "dream-picture of life; providing sustenance and fulfillment for impulses cramped by society or life." This is the most prosaic thing Lucas writes in what is otherwise a fascinating excursus into ancient and modern literatures. In this chapter he begins with the Romantic tendencies of the Greeks, for instance, the imaginative nature of Greek mythology, which has "turned our heavens to a constellated tapestry of the stories of Orion and Andromeda and the rest." Indeed, as he writes, "few things are more romantic than 'classical' mythology."

At the same time, the Greeks did not fall prey to the excesses of imagination exhibited by Goethe's Jena contemporaries. As Lucas writes, the "Romantic" elements seen in classical writers, such as the golden bough by which Aneas gains entrance to the underworld in Virgil's Aeneid, "surprise, like strange plants sown by some wandering bird or wind in fields far from home." The ancients always had a guardian standing at the portals of the dream world to turn back shapes too fantastic. Of interest to me was the objections of Longinus to the fantastic elements of the Odyssey, which he thought made Homer less great. His objection to the shutting of the winds in a bag, or Circe's turning men into swine show, according to Lucas, "how over-wakeful and over-sober, here as always, is the Classic sense of fact!"

He goes on to talk about the Hellenistic era, in which the countryside of Theocritus looks forward to that of Wordsworth, and of the late Greek romances (The Golden Ass), in which the classical sense of reality and grasp of character have totally faded. The latter also characterize much literature of the Middle Ages, in which "Romance blooms everywhere, like the mistletoe in the orchards of Normandy." It was in the Middle Ages, before the modern attitude to the world was born, that imagination really ran riot. "Men believed what they read, and what they believed, they embroidered."

Lucas's exemplary case is Aucassin and Nicolette. Like Homer's Achilles, Aucassin will not go to battle because the woman he loves has been taken away. "But Homer hardly tells us how Briseis looked, or how Achilles felt for her. She remains in his hands a dazzling shadow -- 'fair cheeked,' 'like golden Aphrodite.' ... How vividly, by contrast, Nicolette looks out of her prison window in Beaucaire, or clambers down from it by her rope of sheets and towels!" Reading Lucas reminds me of why I first studied literature.

And, finally, another insight into Goethe, as Lucas writes of the reason for the "lasting triumph" of Greek literature: its balance of classicism, realism, and romanticism. Sappho writes, he says, with a heart of madness, but her hand does not shake. I think that describes Goethe, after his encounter with Italy, but this combination is lacking in 18th-century neoclassicism.

I had not encountered F.L. Lucas before a week ago, but he has a breadth as impressive as Curtius or Auerbach. And what an impressive oeuvre, both critical and literary.

Romanticism vs. Classicism

No matter how often one tries to pin down what Romanticism is all about, or the difference between Classicism and Romanticism (in the critical, not the historical, sense, since, as has been pointed out, many of the canonical Greek and Roman writers were deeply "Romantic"), one's ideas on this subject are always in the process of growing or taking on added dimensions. Some things you simply have to repeat to yourself over and over. For the most part, I think it is extremely difficult to transport oneself mentally to the era in which "Classical" standards reigned. Emotions, fantasy, inspiration, even egoism were all harnessed, encased in form or ritual or convention. Such restraint is evident today mostly in politics, in conservative thought.

I have been reading a slender but rich book on this subject by F.L. Lucas, from 1936, entitled The Decline and Fall of the Romantic Ideal. Lucas is quite ecumenical, opening in highly satisfactory fashion by quoting a poem by Heine, the one beginning "Ein Fichtenbaum steht einsam/ Im Norden auf kahler Höh." Besides English poetry, Lucas ranges widely into other European languages and is also not restricted to the turn of the 19th century. Not only Wordsworth and Chateaubriand, but also, e.g., Housmann and Baudelaire.

I think there is a connection between the rise of Romanticism in art and literature in the late 18th century and the sublime, on which I have posted frequently. The connection is the rise of taste and of individual "judgment" in the arts. Power passed from the former arbiters. Initially criticism sought to anchor judgment in reason, which was a universal human capacity, but in time there was a revolt against reason's seeming dictates. Lucas introduces charming figurative language to distinguish between classicism and romanticism. Of the former he writes, elliptically: "Grace, self-knowledge, self-control; the sense of form, the easy wearing of the chains of art hidden under flowers, as with some sculptured group that fills with life and litheness its straitened prison in the triangle of a pediment." Of the latter: "Remoteness, the sad delight of desolation, silence and the supernatural, winter and dreariness; vampirine love and stolen trysts, the flowering of passion and the death of beauty."

He then goes on to explore what the "psychological differences" between the two. Drawing to an extent on Freud, he writes of the reconciliation by the "art of life" of two conflicting forces: the instinctive impulse of the human animal versus the influences of other human beings, the latter of which become second nature, so that "A man not only likes or dislikes certain things; he likes or dislikes himself for liking or disliking them." Romanticism is an attempt "to drown this difference and liberate the unconscious life." Venturing an "Aristotelian definition" of Romantic literature, he writes: "a dream-picture of life; providing sustenance and fulfilment for impulses cramped by society or reality."

I am trying to fit Goethe in here, since there is so much that fits with Lucas's exposition, and I speak not merely of the Goethe of the Sturm und Drang years, when he was affected by Herder's ideas concerning the priestly character of primitive poetry and the delights of common, realistic detail. Lucas mentions the dependence of Romantic writers on inspiration and their disinclination to revise. It is true that Goethe went back and revised his early works, in particular The Sorrows of Young Werther, in the period when he was beginning to work against his Romantic tendencies and to exercise more control over his imagination. Otherwise, however, Goethe was not a great reviser. He simply added on, as in the case of Faust. He hated "correcting" -- or being corrected.

While Goethe recoiled from "fantastic" in the productions of contemporary German poets and their pilgrimages to the Middle Ages, he wrote much poetry set in distant times and places, the West-East Divan being the most prominent example. And "vampirine love": how about The Bride of Corinth? There is also something lacking in Goethe's other three novels, namely, a plot. Lucas writes of "the quiet sympathy a writer needs in order to observe and delineate characters other than his own or shadows of his own." Goethe, unlike Jane Austen, lacks that sympathy.

Goethe was, however, vigilant against excess, against the "airy-fairy." If he thought reality left much to be desired, he relentlessly came to terms with that lack. He was able to create beautiful poetry while wearing, as Lucas writes, "a stiff shirt front." A Romantic in the shape of a Classic.

Goethe and Romanticism

Goethe is often considered a "Romantic" writer. He pointedly distanced himself from the literary movement that is usually referred to as German Romanticism and that includes such diverse writers as the brothers Schlegel, Ludwig Tieck, Novalis, Clemens Brentano, Heinrich von Kleist, Friedrich Hölderlin, E.T.A. Hoffmann, and Wackenroder. Goethe was a bit closer intellectually (and perhaps by sensibility) to the philosopher Schelling, but he literally seemed afraid of "contagion" by the younger generation, many of whom had come of age just as the French Revolution occurred. What made things worse for Goethe is that the younger writers took him as their model. Goethe's early writings, after all, had produced a new epoch in German literature, but by the time the German Romantic writers appears on the scene, by the late 1790s, Goethe had turned away from his own youthful literary enthusiasms. As Nicholas Boyle writes (in the first volume of his Goethe biography), by the 1780s Goethe "became more closely identified with the court culture," while gradually "his attention was turning to the classical civilizations of the Mediterranean."

These thoughts on Romanticism are prompted by my viewing yesterday of the film Bright Star, directed by Jane Campion. My friend Elizabeth Denlinger, curator of the Pforzheimer Collection of Shelley and His Circle at the New York Public Library, invited me to a showing sponsored by the Pforzheimer and the Keats-Shelley Association of America. The preview was in conjunction with the release of the movie, after its showing at various film festivals, this week in the U.S.

The movie, which concerns the relationship between John Keats and Fanny Brawne, gives more attention to Fanny than is usually the case with accounts of Keats's life. That is to say, Fanny hasn't traditionally come off too well in biographies of Keats. Jonathan Bate, for instance, has referred to the relationship as pitiful. Campion's film is in some sense revisionist, drawing on the more sympathetic reading of Fanny in Andrew Motion's recent biography of Keats.

There are plenty of sources concerning the relationship between John Keats and Fanny Brawne, including this one, which I leave for readers to investigate. What interested me was the portrayal of what might be called Romantic sensibility. As I have often stressed, it is really impossible wholly to enter into the mentality or even the material conditions of the past. Yet we never cease making the attempt. In the case of Bright Star, I kept thinking of the Jena Romantic circle, both the intensity of the poetic vocation and the volatile romantic relationships.

Something of the influence of Romantic-period painting can be seen in the photo below of actress Abbie Cornish, who plays the role of Fanny Brawne in Bright Star. For Romantic-period paintings of similar "Rooms with a View," see my posting of February 1, 2009.

Goethetc. on the Net

I was contacted a month or so ago by Isabel del Rio, the cultural editor of a bilingual (Spanish-English) cultural magazine called Yareah. Each issue of the on- and off-line magazine focuses on a single topic. Recent issues, for instance, were devoted to James Joyce's Ulysses, the Niebelungenlied, and 1,001 Nights. The May issue was to be on Romanticism/ Romanticismo, and I was asked if one of my Goethetc. posts could be included. Actually, I have not yet posted on Goethe as a Romantic, but apparently the world considers Goethe one. The magazine's contents are drawn from websites and blogs. Besides my post on Goethe and America, another one of Yareah's pages in this issue was on The Sorrows of Young Werther ("Amor y Muerte: Goethe") by Alberto [!] Javier Maidana, an Argentinean. As Alberto writes: "La asociación de amor y muerte es una caracteristíca del romántico. Werther es romántico y como tal el amor atrae como sentimiento puro. Pero no alcanzará la armonia en el amor. El ama el amor por el amor mismo." He adds this quote from Novalis: "Todas las pasiones terminan en tragedia, todo lo que es limitado termina muriendo, toda poesía tiene algo de trágico." So have the literary Germans been Hispanicized.

There are small essays on Novalis and Hoffmann as well as on Byron and the other usual suspects in this issue, written by many young bloggers. All the bloggers (including Goethe Girl) are pictured with small thumbnail-sized photos.  One of my favorites among the contributors is the Chinese teacher pictured here, who contributed an essay to Yareah on the differences between American and European Romanticism. His name is Zhang Huaming who, judging from his biography, has never left China. More power to him.