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XI. On the Discrimination of Romanticisms

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 December 2020

Arthur O. Lovejoy
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Extract

We approach a centenary not, perhaps, wholly undeserving of notice on the part of this learned company. It was apparently in 1824 that those respected citizens of La-Ferté-sous-Jouarre, MM. Dupuis and Cotonet, began an enterprise which was to cause them, as is recorded, “twelve years of suffering,” and to end in disillusionment—the enterprise of discovering what Romanticism is, by collecting definitions and characterizations of it given by eminent authorities. I conjecture, therefore, that one of the purposes of the Committee in inviting me to speak on this subject was perhaps to promote a Dupuis and Cotonet Centennial Exhibition, in which the later varieties of definitions of Romanticism, the fruit of a hundred years' industry on the part of literary critics and professors of modern literature, might be at least in part displayed. Certainly there is no lack of material; the contemporary collector of such articles, while paying tribute to the assiduity and the sufferings of those worthy pioneers of a century ago, will chiefly feel an envious sense of the relative simplicity of their task. He will find, also, that the apparent incongruity of the senses in which the term is employed has fairly kept pace with their increase in number; and that the singular potency which the subject has from the first possessed to excite controversy and breed divisions has in no degree diminished with the lapse of years.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 39 , Issue 2 , June 1924 , pp. 229 - 253
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1924

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References

1 An address delivered by invitation at the fortieth Annual Meeting of the Modern Language Association of America, December 27, 1923.

2 Le Romantisme français, 1919, p. 141 and passim.

3 Jour. of Philosophy, XIX (1922), 645.

4 Egotism in German Philosophy, pp. 11-20, 54-64.

5 Mme Guyon et Pénelon précurseurs de Rousseau, 1918.

6 “Schiller and Romanticism”; Mod. Lang. Notes, XXXVII, 267, n. 28.

7 Proc. Brit. Acad., 1915-16, pp. 146-7.

8 The Art of Poetry, 1923, pp. 79-80.

9 Contemporary Review, April, 1919, p. 473.

10 Classical and Romantic, 1923, pp. 32, 31.

11 Editor's Introduction to Essays in Romantic Literature by George Wyndham, 1919, p. xxxiii.

12 The Art of Poetry, p. 79.

13 Aspects and Impressions, 1922, p. 5.

14 La Liquidation du Romantisme, 1199, pp. 14 f.

15 The Art of Poetry, p. 50.

16 The Architecture of Humanism, 1914, p. 39.

17 P. M. L. A., XIII, 222.

18 The Drift of Romanticism, 1913, pp. xiii, 247.

19 Marie Joachimi, Die Weltanschauung der Romantik, 1905, p. 52.

20 Le mal romantique, 1908, p. vii.

21 Cf. R. Gillouin, Une nouvelle philosophie de l'histoire moderne et française, 1921, pp. 6 ff; Seillière, Le péril mystique, etc. pp. 2-6.

22 Wernaer, Romanticism and the Romantic School in Germany, p. 3.

23 Neilson, Essentials of Poetry, 1912, ch. III.

24 For the last mentioned, cf. Gosse in Proc. Brit. Acad., 1915-16, p. 151.

25 Le mal romantique, p. xli.

26 “Il y a même beaucoup de romantique dans la façon dont le combattent certains traditionalistes imprudents, dont M. Lasserre paraît avoir quelquefois écouté les suggestions dangereuses” (loc. cit.).

27 Essays and Studies by Members of the English Association, VIII (1923), 113.

28 Le Catholicisme chez les Romantiques, 1922.

29 “Two Pioneers of Romanticism,” Proc. Brit. Acad., 1915, pp. 146-8.

30 Essais, I, 31. There is a certain irony in the fact that the sort of naturalism here expressed by Montaigne was to be the basis of a Shakespeare-revival in the eighteenth century. For Shakespeare's own extreme antipathy to the passage is shown by the fact that he wrote two replies to it—a humorous one in The Tempest, a serious and profound one in The Winter's Tale.

31 This is not rhetorical exaggeration; at least sixty different senses or applications of the notion of “nature” as norm can be clearly distinguished.

32 So apparently Mr. Gosse: “When the history of the [Romantic] school comes to be written, there will be a piquancy in tracing an antinomianism down from the blameless Warton to the hedonist essays of Oscar Wilde and the frenzied anarchism of the futurists” (op. cit., p. 15).

33 Essais, III. 12.

34 The title of the poem and some elements of its thought and feeling—especially its note of religious “enthusiasm” for “Nature” in the sense of the visible universe—are akin to, and probably derivative from, Shaftesbury's Moralists. But in Shaftesbury there is no opposition of “nature” to “art” and no antinomian strain, either ethical or aesthetic; “decorum,” “order,” “balance,” and “proportion” are among his favorite words.

35 Spectator, No. 144.

36 Cf. the writer's “Schiller and the Genesis of Romanticism,” Mod. Lang. Notes, XXXV. 1-9, 136-146.

37 Quotations in this paragraph from F. Schlegel are from Athenaeum, II, 1, p. 29; III, 1, p. 12; I, 2, p. 68; III, 1, p. 19. Those from A. W. Schlegel have already been cited by Marie Joachimi, Weltanschauung der Romantik, pp. 179-183.

38 “The Meaning of Romantic,” etc. Mod. Lang. Notes, XXXI. 385-396; XXXII. 65-77.

39 Review of Herder's Humanitätsbriefe; in Minor, Fr. Schlegd, 1794-1802.

40 Vorrede to Die Griechen und Römer, in Minor, op. cit., I. 82.

41 Vorsckule der Aesthetik, I, Programm V, § 23.

42 Vorlesungen über dramatische Kunst und Literatur, 1809-11, in Werke, 1846, V. 16. Cf. also Novalis's Hymnen an die Nacht.

43 Op. cit., V, 17.

44 De l'Allemagne, Pt. II, chap. XI.

45 Cf. Pünfte Rede: “Nirgends is die Religion so vollkommen idealisiert als in Christentum und durch die ursprüngliche Voraussetzung desselben; und eben damit ist immerwährendes Streiten gegen alles Wirkliche in der Religion als eine Aufgabe hingestellt, der nie völlig Genüge geleistet werden kann, Eben weil überall das Ungöttliche ist und wirkt, und weil alles Wirkliche zugleich als unheilig erscheint, ist eine unendliche Heiligkeit das Ziel des Christentums. Nie zufrieden mit dem Erlangten, sucht es auch in seinen reinsten Erzeugnissen, auch in seinen heiligsten Gef ühlen noch die Spuren des Irreligiösen und der der Einheit des Ganzen entgegengesetzten und von ihm abgewandten Tendenz alles Endlichen.”

46 Typical is the review of the book in the Athenaeum, II, 299: “Für mich ist das Christentum und die Art wie es eingeleitet und das, was ewig bleiben soll in ihm, gesetzt wird, mit das Grösste im ganzen Werk.” Cf. also Schlegel's defense of Fichte against the charge of having “attacked religion”: “Wenn das Interesse am Uebersinnlichen das Wesen der Religion ist, so ist seine ganze Lehre Religion in Form der Philosophie.” There are, undeniably, also occasional manifestations of a conflicting strain in the Frühromantiker, especially in Novalis; but these are not the usual, dominant, innovating and characteristic things in the body of ideas of the school; they are rather vestigial structures, such as are to be found remaining in all new developments.

47 There are, for example, passages in the penultimate section of the Essai sur les révolutions which present a close parallel to some in The Enthusiast; e.g.: “O homme de la nature, c'est toi seul qui me fais me glorifier d'être hommel Ton coeur ne connaît point la dépendance; tu ne sais ce que c'est que de ramper dans une cour ou de caresser un tigre populaire. Que t'importent nos arts, notre luxe, nos villes? As-tu besoin de spectacle, tu te rends au temple de la nature, à la religieuse forêt…Mais il n'y a donc point de gouvernement, point de liberté? De liberte? si: une délicieuse, une oéleste, celle de la nature. Et quelle est-elle, cette liberté?…Qu'on vienne passer une nuit avec moi chez les sauvages du Canada, peut-être alors parviendrai-je à donner quelque idée de cette espèce de liberté.”

48 On the two strains in Atala, cf. Chinard, L'Exotisme américain dans l'oeuvre de Chateaubriand, 1918, ch. ix.

49 The section on Shakespeare was published in April, 1801 (Mélanges politiques et littéraires, 1854, pp. 390ff.).

50 It is somewhat difficult to reconcile this with the eloquent passage on the Gothic church in the Génie du Christianisme (V, Ch. 8); yet even there, while ascribing to the Gothic style “une beauté qui lui est particulière,” Chateaubriand also refers to its “proportions barbares.”

51 With this topic, upon which there is a good deal to be said, the writer is dealing elsewhere.