Romanticism, II: Art and Politics.

Art by Iris Skow

Part I treated Romantic ideas about reality, and knowledge, and virtue (as understood by Isaiah Berlin), but wasn’t Romanticism primarily a movement in the arts? Yes and here also is effected a revaluation of values.

Tragedy. In the standard account—Aristotle’s—the proper subject matter for tragedy is a flawed but noble hero. Macbeth is a tragedy because Macbeth, though a great warrior, is overly-ambitious. The Romantics thought differently. The tragic hero might well be perfect. What’s required for tragedy is that the values and ideals the hero has made his own are opposed by powerful forces, or by powerful people, holding other (but no less correct) values, and that in this conflict the hero is destroyed. If anything is to be lamented, it is not that the hero was not better, or stronger, but that reality itself was too limited to contain him. Berlin writes,

What matters is that people should dedicate themselves to these values with all that is in them. If they do that, they are suitable heroes for tragedy.

...Milton’s Satan, who, after he has seen the appalling spectacle of Hell, nevertheless continues with his evil designs, [and others like him,] are tragic figures because they assert themselves, because they are not tempted into conformity, because they do not yield to temptation, ... because they cross their arms upon the crossroads, and they defy nature; and defiance...in the name of some ideal to which you seriously commit yourself...is what makes for tragedy, because it creates a conflict, a conflict in which man is grappling against forces either too great for him or not, as the case may be.

The Sublime. If in the classic and the neo-classical ages the highest artistic value was beauty, for the Romantics it was the sublime. Beauty required order, proportion, symmetry, and boundedness, and inspired pleasure; but the sublime was unbounded and infinite—not literally of course, but these could be approximated by asymmetry things, by figures way out of proportion, the very large laid against the very small, mountains and volcanoes and storms, any natural phenomenon that dwarfed the human; and rather than pleasure, the sublime inspired an awful terror. If the Romantics opposed “facts to which one must submit,” one can see why they would be moved to make this shift: aiming to create beauty means being hemmed-in by the requirements of symmetry and proportion. The sublime imposed no such restrictions.

This interest in the infinite as a subject matter linked to an interest in the infinite as an ideal for one’s artistic ambition. Thus the renewed interest in writing epics—Wordsworth’s Prelude, for example—and also in conceiving of epics of such ambition that they were unfinishable, and certainly unfinished (Coleridge, The Brook; Blake, Vala). Wordsworth wrote “Our destiny, our being’s heart and home, / Is with infinitude, and only there;” commenting on this, M. H. Abrams wrote

Wordsworth evokes from the unbounded and hence impossible hopes in the French Revolution a central Romantic doctrine; one which reverses the cardinal neoclassic ideal of setting only accessible goals, by converting what had been man’s tragic error—the inordinacy of his “pride” that persists in setting infinite aims for finite man—into his specific glory and his triumph.

Poetry: form and content. English Romantic poetry also manifests the Romantic idea that “all rules must be blown up.” The received view was that poetic diction must be elevated; the poet wrote in iambic pentameter, yes, but did so using fancy words and Latinate syntax. To this Wordsworth famously said oh yeah? He would write art poetry in the real language of men. He would write art poetry in low forms—the ballad, for example—about low subjects: convicts, female vagrants, gypsies, idiot boys, and mad mothers (Hazlett). Don’t like it? Then you’re bringing to the poems, and imposing on them, “external” values: standards for poetic goodness not derived from the poem itself. That, the Romantic says, is not how art works. The artist creates the taste by which he is to be enjoyed (Wordsworth, “Essay, Supplementary to the Preface,” 1815).

The French Revolution. Romanticism cannot be understood apart from the French Revolution. Which is weird: the revolutionaries’ ideals were the the ideals of Romanticism’s enemy, Enlightenment Rationalism. The revolutionaries had discovered the universal rights of man. Ancien regime France trampled on those rights; ancien regime France must be razed to the ground. Reason revealed that noble privileges were unjust—so nobility was abolished. Similarly, religion was superstition; and so Catholicism was de-authorized, and eventually an attempt was made at de-Christianizing French society. To be built on the newly-cleaned social slate was a new polity, devoted to securing the rights of man, and organized on rational principles of just institutions.

But the Romantics loved the French Revolution, at least for a while, some longer than others. What was going on? Freedom, of course: the revolution’s battle-cry was also Romanticism’s banner idea. The Revolution destroyed an existing order to which its subjects had to submit, and in what remained or was built in its place, citizens could (in theory) create their own lives. That part of the Revolutionary project was a Romantic project. And the revolutionaries, even if they were (by romantic lights) misguided in thinking the principles they fought for were universal, had nevertheless pledged themselves completely to a set of ideals, and stood behind them so wholeheartedly they were willing to die in their defense. That, a romantic cannot but admire.

The Revolution’s fall from rational ideals into terror and war and dictatorship also confirmed some Romantic theses: