Chapter 57 Part Two Results Chapter Fourteen Art 3

3 It is never wise to ignore the psychic element, which reason knows nothing of.Like thinkers confined to the confines of economists and physicists, poets are left far behind, but they see not only deeper, but sometimes clearer.Few saw the social upheavals caused by machines and factories earlier than Blake in the 1790s, yet he judged on little more than London's steam-powered factories and brick kilns.With a few exceptions, the best accounts of urbanization come almost exclusively from imaginative writers whose seemingly wildly unrealistic observations are borne out by the actual urban evolution of Paris.Carlyle's knowledge of Britain in 1840 was vaguer but deeper than that of the industrious statistician and compiler McCulloch; and if the younger Mill was better than other utilitarians it was because a personal crisis made him Be the only utilitarian who knows Germany and the Romantics, knows the social critical value of Goethe and Coleridge et al.Romanticism's critique of the world, though vague, was not trivial.

Romanticism longed for the past unity of man and nature.The bourgeois world is a deeply deliberate selfish society. It ruthlessly cuts off the feudal fetters that make people subordinate to the "natural chief", and it makes no connection between people except naked interests and ruthless "cash transactions".It submerges the sacred arousal of emotions such as religious piety, knight's zeal, and petty bourgeois sentimentality in the icy water of egoism.It has reduced human dignity to exchange value, and in place of innumerable chartered and self-earned liberties has the conscienceless liberty of trade.

This is the cry of the Communist Manifesto, but it also represents Romanticism as a whole.Such a world may enrich or comfort one—despite the obvious fact that it also starves and wretches others, the greater majority—but it also leaves the soul naked and alone.It makes people like "alienated" people who are homeless and lost in the universe.The Romantic poets in Germany thought they knew better than anyone that these lonely souls could be saved only by a modest life of labor in those quaint, pleasant former industrial towns dotted around the In the mirage-like pastoral scenery, their incisive descriptions are really irresistible.The young people in the small town must leave, chasing the "flowers of melancholy" endlessly according to the definition, or missing their hometown, singing Eichendorff's lyric poems or Schubert's songs, wandering forever.The song of the homeless is their signal song, and nostalgia is their companion.Novalis even defines philosophy in such terms.

The world's longing for this lost harmony is relieved by three sources: the Middle Ages, the early peoples (or something like that, exoticism or "folklore"), and the French Revolution. The first source appeals primarily to reactionary romanticism.The stable class society in the feudal era was an organic product of the slow formation of the times.Adorned with heraldic coats of arms, shrouded in mythical forests, and overlaid with an unquestionable Christian heaven, it is the apparent lost paradise of the opposition of conservative bourgeois society.These people's interest in piety, loyalty, and a minimum of literacy among the lower classes was increased by the French Revolution.This is, with local changes, the ideal that Burke used against the rationalist Bastille attackers in his Reflections on the French Revolution (1790).But it found its classic expression only in Germany, a country which in this period acquired something not far from the peculiar medieval dream, perhaps because of the cosiness and order that prevailed under the roofs of the Rhine castles and the Black Forest, It is easier to idealize itself than the filth and cruelty of the more veritable medieval states. "Oh, Hermann! Oh, Dorothy! How pleasant!" wrote Gautier, who, like all French Romantics, admired Germany. "Haven't people heard the stagecoach driver's horn from afar?" In any case, the medieval heritage is the most important part of German Romanticism, and it is the most important part of Romantic opera or ballet (Weber's Freeshooter or Giselle), Grimn's fairy tales, historical theory, or in the form of German-inspired writers such as Kirzing, Carlyle, etc., spread out from Germany.However, medieval relics, in their more general form, the revival of Gothic architecture, became emblematic of conservatives everywhere, especially religious anti-bourgeois factions.Chateaubriand, in his "Genie du Christianisme" (Genie du Christianisme), advocated the Gothic style against the Revolution; the supporters of the Church of England favored the Gothic style against the Rationalists and Nonconformists because the latter's The buildings are still classical; the architect Pugin and the ultra-reactionary "Oxford Movement" of the 1830s were thoroughly Gothic.At the same time from the misty Scottish backwoods - a country with a long history that can condense ancient dreams like Ossian poetry - the conservative Scott also provides Europe in his historical fiction. A kind of medieval picture.The fact that the best of his novels deal with fairly recent historical periods is overlooked by many.

After 1815, reactionary governments tried to turn this dominant medieval legacy into a poor justification for absolutism; the medieval legacy of the left was irrelevant, except for the conservative one.In England it existed chiefly as a current of popular radical movement which tended to see the period before the Reformation as a golden age of labor and the Reformation as the first step toward capitalism. A major step.In France it is far more important, because there its focus is not on the feudal ruling class and the Catholic estate, but on the immortal, suffering, restless, creative people: the French nation has always reiterated its characteristics and mission.The poet and historian Michelet was the greatest of the revolutionary democrats of the medieval tradition; Quasimodo in Hugo is the most famous product of this preconceived notion.

Closely related to Medieval heritage—especially through its focus on mystical traditions of religious piety—is the search for the older, deeper mystical sources of Eastern irrational wisdom, such as the romantic and conservative Kublai Khan Dynasty or Brahman Kingdom.Sir William Jones, the acknowledged discoverer of Sanskrit, was an honest Whig radical who, as an enlightened gentry should, cheered the American and French Revolutions; but most amateurs of the Orient and the writers of imitation Persian poetry—from whose enthusiasm much modern Orientalism arose—were anti-Jacobin. Quite peculiarly, their spiritual goal was Brahmin India rather than the one that had attracted 18 The Enlightenment's vision of the exotic and the secular and rational Chinese Empire.