Romanticism, II: Art and Politics.
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? The revolution’s battle-cry was freedom. It was destroying an existing order to which its subjects had to submit, and (in theory) creating a space where they could create their own lives. That part of the project is 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:
what [the Revolution] attracted attention to was not at all reason, peace, harmony, universal freedom, equality, liberty, fraternity … but, on the contrary, violence, appalling, unpredictable change in human affairs, the irrationality of mobs, the enormous power of individual heroes, great men, evil and good, who were able to dominate these mobs and alter the course of history in all kinds of ways. It is the poetry of action and battle and death which the French Revolution stimulated in people’s minds and imaginations … it had an effect exactly opposite to that which it was intended to have … it stimulated the notion of a mysterious nine-tenths of the iceberg … although the upper portion of human social life was visible—to economists, psychologists, moralists, writers, students, every kind of scholar and observer of the facts—that portion was merely the tip of some huge iceberg of which a vast section was sunk beneath the ocean.
Since Romanticism is visible today mostly in the various social liberation movements that grew out of 1960’s activism, it looks to have a political valence: left-wing, progressive. Berlin cautions against this, as over-simple. Romanticism, he says, is more centrally against, than it is against conservative ideas themselves. Some Romantics, finding themselves in an atomized society that lets everyone be whoever they want, yearned for the values that had now been rejected: those one might find in a medieval past, where strong social groups enforced strong social norms, and created a sense of belonging that had gone missing.
Consequences of Romanticism. True or false, Berlin clearly thinks that Romanticism was dangerous. If fidelity to one’s ideals is the greatest virtue, one will be prepared to do horrible things in their name. A Romantic idea that I have not emphasized is its relativism. Each embraces their own values; no values are wrong. Some Romantics had a more subtle view. The right values for me may depend on who I am, and who I am may include the fact that I am French, or Serbian, or whatever. Thus, Berlin claims, Romanticism contributed to the rise of nationalism: since some values can only be realized collectively, politically, those who belong to the same “people” must have their own state. And a Romantic nationalism that, at first, sees other peoples as other, can and did end up seeing them as less.
The paradoxical flip-side, in Berlin’s telling, is that Romanticism also contributed to the rise of liberalism, in particular the doctrine of tolerance:
if these ideals are incompatible, then human beings sooner or later realise that they must make do, they must make compromises, because if they seek to destroy others, others will seek to destroy them; and so, as a result of this passionate, fanatical, half-mad doctrine, we arrive at an appreciation of the necessity of tolerating others, ... The result of Romanticism, then, is liberalism, toleration, decency and the appreciation of the imperfections of life.
But if Berlin is right about this (and I do not know that he is), Romanticism should not get too much credit for Liberalism. Tolerance is not itself a Romantic ideal; instead, disaffected Romantics end up Liberals because they’re not strong enough to win.
I admit confusion at this point. If I’m a Romantic, and so super into freedom, don’t I automatically value toleration, which is simply allowing others to exercise their freedom? Why must I embrace toleration only grudgingly, as part of a compromising truce called after seeing the futility of repeatedly punching each other in the face?
Romanticism was “an attempt to impose an aesthetic model upon reality, to say that everything should obey the rules of art.” But
this attempt to convert life into art presupposes that human beings are stuff, that they are simply a kind of material, even as paints or sounds are kinds of material.
To this Berlin objects, rightly, that human beings are not “stuff.”
But—in these moments Berlin seems to over-simplify his own account. When Walt Whitman, American Romantic par excellence, wrote “I contradict myself. I contain multitudes,” he could have been speaking for Berlin’s Romanticism generally. If the vibe is sometimes that humanity can be completely understood, as an infinitely malleable “material” that each of us can freely mold however we choose, the vibe is also that the “already given” facts about us are so complex that we are beyond understanding, and that attempts to make of us what you will are therefore bound to fail; that
human beings in general [cannot] be explained by oversimplified views such as were prevalent in the eighteenth century and such as are still enunciated by over-rational and over-scientific analysts either of human beings or of groups. We ... owe to Romanticism the notion that a unified answer in human affairs is likely to be ruinous... The notion ... of the imperfection of all human answers and arrangements; the notion that no single answer which claims to be perfect and true, whether in art or in life, can in principle be perfect or true—all this we owe to the Romantics.