Chapter 56 Part Two Results Chapter Fourteen Art 2

2 However, even the art of a very small number of people in society will still make a loud noise that shocks all mankind.This was the case with the literature and the arts of the period in question, and the result was "romanticism."As a style, a genre and an era of art, there is nothing more difficult to define and even describe by means of formal analysis than "romanticism". Even "romanticism" vowed to rebel against "classicism", Nor is it so difficult to define and describe.Even the Romantics themselves can hardly help us, for although their descriptions of the things they follow are certain, they often lack rational content.Romanticism, for Hugo, "is to do what nature does, to merge with its creations, and at the same time to mix everything together: that is, not to mix shadow and light, strangeness and grandeur— — in other words, the body and the soul, the corporeal and the spiritual — are conflated.” For Charles Nodier, “The last resort of the human mind, weary of ordinary emotions, is the romantic Romanticism--marvelous poetry, quite in keeping with the moral conditions of society, and the needs of generations who indulged in the desire for sensationalism at any cost..." Romanticism, Novalis believed, meant endowing "Things that are taken for granted add an infinite aspect to finite things in a higher sense."Hegel believed: "The essence of Romantic art is that the object of art is free and concrete, while the spiritual concept is in the same noumenon—all of which are mainly introspection, rather than revealing anything to the outside world." We cannot expect How much inspiration can be drawn from such explanations, because Romantics love vagueness and evasion, prefer rambling explanations, and loathe clear expositions.

When taxonomists try to date Romanticism, they find its beginning and end elusive; when they try to define it, its criteria become invisible generalities.And yet, although it confounds classifiers, no one seriously doubts Romanticism's existence or our ability to discern it.In a narrow sense, Romanticism, as self-conscious and militant, emerged in England, France, and Germany around 1800, and in Europe and North America after the Battle of Waterloo.Before the dual revolution, its predecessors (again mainly in France and Germany) were Rousseau's "pre-romanticism" and the "storm and stress" of young German poets.Perhaps it was most widespread in Europe during the revolutionary period 1830-1848.Broadly speaking, Romanticism has dominated several creative arts in Europe since the French Revolution.In this sense, composers like Beethoven, painters like Goya, poets like Goethe, and novelists like Balzac, the "romantic" element in them is the decisive factor of their greatness, Just as Haydn or Mozart, Fragonard or Reynolds, or Mathias Claudius or Choderlos de Laclos were not great here (they all lived to the end of this book). on the age); none of them, however, could be considered a full-fledged "romantic" or would want to call himself a "romantic." (Since "romanticism" is often the watchword and manifesto of a limited number of groups of artists, we risk giving it a very special meaning if we limit it to them entirely, or exclude those who disagree with them altogether. The risk of the limited significance of history.) In a wider sense, the orientation of art and artists, characterized by Romanticism, tended to become the standard orientation of middle-class society in the nineteenth century and is still very influential today.

However, while it is not at all clear what Romanticism is for, it is quite clear what it is against, and that is the centrist.Romanticism, whatever its content, is an extreme creed.One can find narrowly defined Romantic artists or thinkers on the far left, like the poet Shelley; Law and many disappointed supporters of the French Revolution; Hugo is representative of the jump from royalism to the extreme left position.But it is almost impossible to find Romantics among the moderates or Whig-Liberals at the heart of rationalism, the de facto bastion of "classicism".Says the old Tory Wordsworth: "I have no respect for the Whigs, but the Chartists carry a great deal of weight in my heart." Exaggerated, for the still-fiery revolutionary and conquering qualities of this youthful class strongly appealed to Romantics.Napoleon, like Satan, Shakespeare, the Wandering Jew, and others who transcended the norms of everyday life, became one of the mythical heroes of the Romantics.The diabolical quality of capitalist accumulation, the limitless, endless quest for more wealth beyond the calculations of reason or purpose, beyond the limits of need or luxury, haunted them like a ghost.Some of the most typical heroes of Romanticism, such as Faust and Don Juan, and the commercial adventurers in Balzac's novels share this insatiable greed.Romantic traits, however, remained secondary, even in the bourgeois revolutionary phase.Rousseau provided some appendages to the French Revolution, but he had a decisive influence on the Revolution only in its period when it outgrew bourgeois liberalism, that of Robespierre.But even so, the basic appearance of the period was Romanesque, rationalist, and neoclassical.David is the representative painter of this period, and reason is the supreme master of this period.

Therefore, Romanticism cannot simply be classified as an anti-bourgeois movement.In fact, many of the typical slogans of pre-Romanticism, which arose decades before the French Revolution, were devoted to the praise of the middle classes, whose true and unsophisticated feelings—not to mention sentimentality—had become the obstinates of a corrupt society. in stark contrast to culture; to praise their spontaneous reliance on nature, believing that it was destined to sweep aside court intrigue and clericalism.However, once capitalist society achieved de facto victories in the French Revolution and the Industrial Revolution, there is no doubt that Romanticism will become its essential enemy.

The emotional, befuddled, yet meaningful dislike of Romanticism towards capitalist society is undoubtedly attributable to the vested interests of disqualified youth and professional artists, as well as romantics. The main member of the communist commando.There was never such an age as that of Romanticism for young artists, living or dead: The Lyrical Ballads were the work of twentysomethings; Byron rose to fame at twenty-four, an age when, Shelley also gained fame, and Keats was almost in his grave.Hugo began his poetry career at the age of 20, while Musset was already famous at the age of 23.Schubert wrote (Erlkoenig) at 18 and died at 31; Delacroix painted The Massacre at Chia at 25; Petofi published his Collected Poems at 21.It is very rare among Romantics to have not achieved fame or masterpieces by the age of thirty.Young people, especially young intellectuals and students, are their natural breeding grounds.It was during this period that, for the first time since the Middle Ages, the Latin Quarter of Paris was not only home to the Sorbonne, but became a cultural (and political) concept.The contrast between a world theoretically open to genius and in practice grotesquely ruled by soulless bureaucrats and potbellied philistines cries out to the heavens.The shadow of the cell—marriage, honour, obsession with mediocrity—looms over them, and Night Owl, with his elderlike appearance, predicts (and often quite accurately) their inevitable verdict, like Hoffman ( E.T.A. Hoffmann's "Goldener Topf" (Goldener Topf), the rector Herl Brandt, with his "sly and mysterious smile" makes the following startling prophecy: the poetic student Anselm Will become a member of the Privy Council of the Palace.Byron was sane enough to foresee that only an early death could save him from a "respectable" old age, and A. W. Schlegel proved him right.Of course, there is nothing universal in this rebellion of the young against their elders.This rebellion is itself a reflection of a dual revolutionary society.Yet this particular historical form of alienation, of course, distorts Romanticism in many places.

Even to a greater extent, so did the alienation of artists, who responded by turning themselves into "geniuses," one of the most characteristic innovations of the Romantic age.Where the social function of the artist is clear, his relationship with society is direct, what he should say and how he should say it, such questions have been answered by tradition, morality, rationality or some accepted standards, an artist may be a A genius, but he has a hard time acting like a genius.Only a very few, predecessors of nineteenth-century geniuses such as Michelangelo, Caravaggio, or Salvator Rosa, could stand out from the standard professional craftsmen and performers of the pre-revolutionary period, The latter include Bach, Handel, Haydn, Mozart, Fragonard and Gainsborough.Where things like the old social status remain after the dual revolution, the artist remains a non-genius, although he may very well have the false name of a genius.Architects and engineers construct buildings of apparent use in a particular pattern, imposing clearly understood forms.Interestingly, during the period from 1790 to 1848, the vast majority of distinctive buildings, or indeed all famous buildings, were in neoclassical style, such as Madeleine Church, British Museum, Lenin St. Isaac's Cathedral, Nash's reconstruction of London, and Schinkel's Berlin, were otherwise as ingenious as the marvelous bridges, canals, railroad buildings, factories, and greenhouses of that age of technological ingenuity. is functional.

In a far cry from the artist's style, however, the architects and engineers of the era represented expertise rather than genius.Moreover, in truly popular art forms such as Italian opera or (at a higher social level) the English novel, composers and writers still work with the mentality of entertainers, thinking that box-office supremacy is the natural condition of art, and that Not a destroyer of creation.Rossini's expectation of writing a non-commercial opera is far less than Dickens' expectation of publishing a non-serial novel, or modern musicians' expectation of composing an original song. (This may also help explain why Italian opera of this period, despite its natural and vulgar penchant for blood, thunder, and "moving" spectacle, was hardly romantic.)

The real problem is whether the artist is divorced from a recognized function, patron, or public, and leaves his soul as a commodity to be cast in a blind market for selection by merchants; , generally working within the patronage system, which is also economically untenable.Therefore, when the artist is alone and cries out against the night, he may not even hear an echo.As a matter of course, the artist should transform himself into a genius, create what belongs only to him, ignoring the existence of this world, and against the will of the public, whose only right is to accept or not accept it at all according to the conditions set by the artist. At best, the artist can expect to be understood by a select few or some unknown posterity, like Stendhal; at worst, he can only write plays that cannot be staged, as in Grabe, or even Goethe's Faust Part II; or for a gigantic orchestra that doesn't exist, like Berlioz; Nerval) and several others.In fact, a misunderstood genius can sometimes be well rewarded by princes accustomed to grandeur, or by rich bourgeois eager to be arty.Liszt never starved in the proverbial romantic attic.Few were as successful in living out their megalomaniac fantasies as Wagner.However, between the revolutions of 1789-1848 princes tended to be skeptical of non-operatic art (with the exception of the somewhat indescribable King Ferdinand of Spain, who, despite both artistic and political provocations, insist on funding the revolutionary Goya.), while the bourgeoisie is too busy accumulating instead of consuming.As a result, geniuses are generally not only misunderstood but also impoverished.So most of them are revolutionaries.

Young people and misunderstood "geniuses" always have a romantic antipathy against philistines, against bourgeois fashions full of temptations and surprises, against demi-mondes and bohemians. ) (both words acquired their present connotations during the Romantic period), against the conventions and standard censorship of respectable people.But this is only an insignificant part of Romanticism.Mario Praz's encyclopedia of erotic extremism is no more "romantic outbursts" than Elizabethan symbolism's discussions of skulls and souls are about Hamlet.Behind the Romantic youth (and even young women—this was the first period in which Continental women artists appeared in numbers in their own right) and the artist's dissatisfaction with sexuality, lay the antithesis of the dual revolution. This kind of society is more generally full of wood. (Mme de Stael, George Sand, painter Mme Vigee Lebrun, Angelica Kauffman; German Bettina von Arnim, Dross Annette von Droste-Huelshoff.Of course, female novelists were already common in middle-class Britain, where the art form was recognized as offering a "respectable" way of earning money for well-educated girls.Fanny Burney, Mrs Radcliffe, Jane Austen, Mrs. Gaskell, the Blondy sisters, like the poet Browning, belong in whole or in part to The period covered by this book. )

Precise social analysis was never the Romantics' forte; indeed, they did not believe in the vaunted mechanistic materialism of the eighteenth century (represented by Newton and the two scares of Blake and Goethe), which they rightly referred to as Considered one of the main tools by which capitalist society is built.We cannot, therefore, expect them to offer a sensible critique of capitalist society, although something like that, wrapped in the mystical cloak of "natural philosophy," wanders among the churning clouds of metaphysics, in the broad sense of "romanticism." " within the framework of and contribute to Hegel's philosophy.Something similar was developed among the early utopian socialists in France with an impracticality bordering on paranoia and even madness.The early Saint-Simonians (though not their leaders), especially Fourier, can almost only be described as Romantics.Of these Romantic critiques, the most enduring was the notion of human "alienation," which would play a pivotal role in Marx and suggest a perfect future society.However, the most effective and powerful critiques of capitalist society come not from those who totally and a priori reject it (and the traditions of classical science and rationalism associated with it in the seventeenth century), but from those who make its classical thought Tradition pushes towards those who object to bourgeois conclusions.There was nothing romantic in Owen's socialism, it was all that of eighteenth-century rationalism, and political economy, the most bourgeois of the disciplines.Saint-Simon himself is best seen as an extension of the "Enlightenment".Interestingly, the young Marx, educated in the German (i.e., early Romantic) tradition, did not become a Marxist until he combined the critical teachings of French socialism with the wholly unromantic theory of British political economy .And as the core of his mature thinking, it is political economy.