British and German Romanticism: Revolutionary art, counterrevolutionary politics

The Romantic Movement has become part of our cultural consciousness to such a degree that its assumptions regarding the centrality of the individual, its elegiac idealization of the pastoral, and its belief in human spirituality that could not be understood with pure rationality have become associated with the essence of art itself. While the birth of the Romantic movement is associated with the French Enlightenment philosopher Rousseau's novel, The New Heloisie, Romanticism had a distinct spirit of anti-rationality, mysticism, and belief in the spiritual realm that neo-Classical Enlightenment philosophy lacked, although there was a great deal of cross-pollination between the two ideologies at first. "The Enlightenment believed in the unity of all humanity, in the universal rights of men, and the uniformity, if not the equality of all rational beings" (Cranston 22).

Romanticism was both a reaction to the Enlightenment as well as fueled by it and ultimately became more of an artistic rather than a scientific and rationalist consciousness (Cranston 22-23). The belief in the ability of human beings to create orderly change that fundamentally challenged the assumptions of societal hierarchies was shattered by the French Revolution, in which the attempts to apply rationalist, scientific analysis to politics seemed to go hopelessly astray. This paper will argue that although some Romantics (particularly early Romantics) were political liberals, the Romantic Movement in both Great Britain and Germany had elements of a conservative, backward-looking ethos based in nostalgia rather than a belief in the forces of progressive ideology. Romanticism was not necessarily inherently liberal or conservative -- rather the movement had the capability to embody both ideas simultaneously. German Romanticism in particular was noteworthy for its intensely individualistic quality that disdained sociological analysis of the human. Both forms ultimately adopted a conception of a Romantic hero that was individualistic in nature rather than focused upon social liberation.

It is true that many of the original English Romantic poets began as political radicals. Many of them were notable political proto-Socialists such as Blake, Coleridge, Byron and Shelley: despite their privileged backgrounds, all tirelessly fought for political liberation. The poet William Blake was vociferous in his opposition to the Industrial Revolution and its "dark Satanic mills" (Cranston 55). But although some of Blake's criticisms of the Industrial Revolution (such as his poignant poetry about a young chimney sweep) are proto-socialist in nature, Blake's hatred of urbanization and industrialization suggests a fundamental idealization of the pastoral and a desire to return to an older way of life, rather than a forward-looking ideology. The language Blake used to articulate this resistance was religious in nature, as he condemned the dark satanic mills in theological terms and imagined young chimney sweeps sleeping amongst the angels.

Even the most politically active English Romantics' political philosophy was vaguer than that of their revolutionary Enlightenment predecessors. "Coleridge protested he had not lost his faith in the ideals which the French once proclaimed, and then violated; he only wanted to find new ways of achieving them" (Cranston 56). Coleridge briefly and unsuccessfully tried to create a kind of a utopian commune based upon his ideals: this failed and this represents the radical, more aspirational components of English Romanticism. Instead of trying to change and reconfigure society it suggests a stepping-away from institutional or military modalities of enacting change. English Romantic literature had a backward-looking quality. Keats mourned the loss of ancient Greece in his ode to a Grecian urn; Wordsworth mourned the loss of his childlike innocence and connection to nature. Rather than attempting to build a feasible political system for the future, Romantics looked to the past

Furthermore, not all English Romantic thinkers embraced this concept of the need to create an 'ideal world.' The conservative politician Edmund Burke's vehemently criticized the French Revolution from a Romantic perspective, stressing the dangers of trying to create 'new' institutions as an unwise social experiment. Burke saw the French Revolution as a failure of rationalism and used the analogy of over-pruning: society, like a tree had grown over time and to cut away too much would kill it. The focus...

"Burke's romantic conservatism rested, like the romantic vision of Herder in Germany, on a belief in the primacy of history, as opposed to the Empiricist society of the Enlightenment" (Cranston 51).
Rather than seeing history as linear and progressive, Burke conceived of history as an enclosed system that could easily be broken by attempting to root out its fundamental values -- society and the social contract could be broken or 'killed' like a living plant leaving nothing in its wake For Burke, the social contract must be regarded as imperishable at the peril of the larger social order and the negatives of change outweighed the positives (Cranston 51). This association between Romanticism and history was resonant in Germany as well, with Hegel's concept of history as dialectic: Hegel's notion that Germany must act as a counterweight of stability to France had the effect of dampening politically revolutionary fervor with his home nation and similarly provided a conservative, counterbalancing influence to the Romantic movement. This was in direct counterpoint to Karl Marx's celebration of the dialect between the haves and have-nots which he hoped would one day spark a liberating proletarian revolution. Marx's concept of history can be seen as directly harkening back in its enthusiasm for political revolution to the Enlightenment -- the past is regarded as shrouded in darkness and ignorance and leading to a fundamentally asymmetrical way of life for the haves and have-nots that is life-extinguishing. The Romantics, in contrast, saw the potential benefits of our relationship with the past as so valuable they should not be destroyed, even at the cost of inequality.

It should be noted that the Romantics, much like the Enlightenment philosophers of both Germany and particularly England did not see modern life as necessarily 'good.' But the solution lay not in political reform, but inward-looking qualities and the past, not in creating something that had never existed before. The Romantic hero may have been fundamentally transgressive but was not necessarily transgressive in a particularly political radical fashion. This partially explains what seems to be the curious idealism of the English literary Romantics' in their portrayal of Napoleon and Napoleonic heroes (Cranston 82). How could the British celebrate a figure who diametrically opposed the interests of England? However, the dual nature of Napoleon, as seen through the Romantic consciousness is embodied in the paintings of David, who painted both scenes of the French Revolution but later painted highly idealized depictions of the Emperor Napoleon -- Napoleon was seen as the ultimate individual, embodying the spirit of the age in his persona if not necessarily his politics (Cranston 82).

The Romantics, particularly the British Romantics, saw Napoleon into a Romantic figure, not a man who rationally advocated for universal human rights, but one whose person embodied the Romantic ideal of the individualistic hero striving for his country. "Despite his attachment to neo-Classical aesthetic, Napoleon was surely a Romantic personality, indeed, after a succession of Romantic anti-heroes, he could be seen, at last, as a romantic hero, a man of humble origins rising by courage and strength of will to conquer a continent" (Cranston 82). In the emphasis on his individualism, the uncomfortable tyranny of some of Napoleon's policies and actions were forgotten. "That he committed crimes along the way" did not impinge upon the idea that he was a man of liberty, even if he only liberated himself (Cranston 82). Both Byron and Bronte's Heathcliff are portrayed as Napoleonic figures, rooted in their individualism, often at the expense of others: the portrayal of Napoleon as heroic figure with a flowing cape completely ignores those who might follow him as foot-soldiers.

It is true that even within English Romanticism's backward-looking ideology and fascination with the heroic, Napoleonic figure some pockets of resistance could occur to the dominant, hegemonic ideals. For example, Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights presents a fundamentally radical vision of society where the unity of souls, not class divisions, unites men and women. Her heroine Catherine Earnshaw marries Edgar Linton for social esteem but quickly realizes her mistake: she is unsuited for fine society. "I am Heathcliff. He's always in my mind; not as a pleasure any more than I always am a pleasure to myself but always in my own being" (Cranston 75). But it is "the badness in Heathcliff, like the badness in Byron, is part of what makes him a Romantic hero" (Cranston 75). Napoleon was admirable to Romantics because of his personal daring, even though his ambition left a path of destruction in its wake much like Heathcliff.

Wuthering Heights, despite its heroine, is a quintessentially Romantic novel because of its apolitical nature as well as its attractive yet dangerous heroes (Cranston 75). The novel takes…