Chapter 58 Part Two Results Chapter Fourteen Art 4

4 The long-gone dream of primitive harmony has a longer and more complex history.Whether it took the form of the golden age of communism, the "man farming and the women weaving", the age of Anglo-Saxon freedom not yet conquered and enslaved by the Normans, or the noble barbarism that exposed the joint flaws of a corrupt society, it was always an irresistible revolutionary dream.Thus, apart from being purely places of escape from capitalist society (such as Gautier, and the exoticism of Merimee, where a noble savage was discovered on a trip to Spain in the 1830s), or historical continuity makes primitive Aside from something that became a model for conservatism, Romanticism's antiquity made it more compatible with left-wing rebellion.That's what "the folk" is worth noting.Romantics of all styles accepted that "countryman" meant a preindustrial farmer or artisan who was an example of pure virtue.To return to that simplicity and virtue was Wordsworth's aim in the Lyrical Ballads.It was the ambition of many Teutonic poets and composers (several artists have succeeded) that the work could be absorbed into the encyclopedia of folk songs and fairy tales.The widespread movement to collect folk songs, publish ancient epics, and compile dictionaries of living languages ​​was also closely associated with Romanticism, and the term "Folklore" is a coinage of this period (1846).Scott's Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border (1803), Arnim and Brentano's Des Knaben Wunderhorn (1806), Green Fairy Tales (1812), Moors' Irish Melodies (1807-1834), Dobrovsky's History of the Bohemian Language (History of the Bohemian Language, 1818), Vuk Karajic's Dictionary of the Serbian Language (1818) and Collection of Serbian Folk Songs (1823-1833), Tegner's Fredjof Frithjofssaga (Frithjofssaga), Lonnrot's Kaleuala, Green's German Mythology (1835).Asbjornson and Moe's Norwegian Folk Tales (1842-1871), so many enduring masterpieces, are achievements of this movement.

"Village" could be a revolutionary concept, especially among oppressed peoples who were about to discover or reaffirm their national identity, especially those lacking a native middle class or aristocratic class.In those areas, the first dictionary, the first grammar, or the first collection of folk songs were politically significant events, the first Declaration of Independence.On the other hand, the archaic cult at home affords a conservative interpretation of the contented, ignorant, pious populace fashioned by the simple virtues of the people, and those who trust in the wisdom of the pope, king, or tsar. (How can we explain the popularity of ballroom dancing based on folk dances during this period, such as the waltz, mazurka and scottische, as a mere matter of taste. It is certainly a Romantic fashion.) "Villagers" represents a combination of innocence, mythology and long-standing tradition that capitalist society is destroying every day.Capitalists and rationalists are enemies of kings, squires and peasants, and against these enemies they must maintain the Holy Alliance.

The simple primitive people exist in every village, but in the golden age hypothesis of primitive communist society, it is a more revolutionary concept, and it is manifested in the free and noble savages overseas, especially the red Indians.From Rousseau, who regarded the free social man as an ideal, to various socialists, primitive society has always been a utopian model.Marx's three-stage division of history—primitive communism, class society, and higher communism—echoes this tradition, albeit with a twist.The ideal of primitive style is not particularly romantic.In fact, some of its most ardent advocates are in the tradition of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment.Romantic quests took their explorers into the great deserts of Arabia and North Africa, among the warriors and court ladies of Delacroix and Fromentin, across the Mediterranean world with Byron, or with Lermonto Lermintov to the Caucasus - where natural men in the form of Cossacks fight natural men in the form of tribesmen in canyons and waterfalls - instead of taking them to the pristine, erotic utopian society.But Romanticism also brought its explorers to America, where primitive peoples were fighting a doomed battle, a situation that brought them closer to the Romantic mind.Lenau of Austria-Hungary, in his Indian poems, protested loudly against the expulsion of the red race; if this Mohican had not been the last of his tribe, he would have been quite a figure in European culture. Influential logo?The Noble Savage's influence on American Romanticism was of course far more important than in Europe—Melville's (Moby Dick, 1851) is his greatest enduring work—but Cooper is best known for his Leatherstocking Tales ( Leatherstocking dumped the old world, but Natchez, the conservative Chateaubriand, never did.

The Middle Ages, the countrymen, and the noble savages all cling to ideals of the past.Only through revolution can the "spring of nations" point to the future, and even the most serious utopian socialist will find it encouraging to seek precedents for the unprecedented.Finding precedents for what had no precedents was not easy until the second generation of Romanticism, which produced groups of young people for whom the French Revolution and Napoleon were historical facts rather than their autobiographies A painful chapter. The year 1789 has been applauded by almost every artist and intellectual, and though some have been able to keep their enthusiasm alive through a whole period of revolution, terror, bourgeois corruption, and empire, their dream is no longer a pedagogical or intellectual one. Easy to spread the dream away.Even in England, the first generation of Romantics, Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Southey, Campbell, and Hazlitt, were all Jacobins, and by 1805 they were disillusioned , neoconservatism has taken over.In France and Germany, the term "Romantics" was arguably a counter-revolutionary slogan coined by conservative anti-bourgeois elements (often disillusioned ex-Leftists) in the late 1790s, which explains why in these countries Among them, many thinkers and artists who by modern standards should be considered distinct Romantics have traditionally been excluded from this category.However, in the last years of the Napoleonic Wars, a new generation of young people began to grow up, for whom, after the washing of the years, they saw only the great liberating flames of the Revolution, its excesses and ashes of corruption disappeared from sight. and, after Napoleon's exile, even characters as indifferent as he were, became half-mythical phoenixes and liberators.As Europe advances year after year, it sinks more and more into the low-lying wilderness of reaction, censorship and mediocrity, and into the dead swamp of poverty, misery and oppression, yet the impression of a liberating revolution It's getting brighter and brighter.

Thus the second generation of Romantics in England—Byron, his apolitical fellow traveler Keats, and especially Shelley's generation—were the first to combine Romanticism with positive revolutionary principles.The desperation of the first generation of Romantics for the French Revolution had been tempered by the palpable horror of the capitalist transformation of their own country.On the Continent, the combination of Romantic art and revolution had begun to take shape in the 1820s, but it did not take full effect until after the French Revolution of 1830.It is also true that perhaps the so-called revolutionary romantic vision and the romantic style of the revolutionaries have been best expressed by Delacroix's Liberty Leading the People.In this painting, surly young men with beards and tall black top hats, workers in open shirts, and defenders of civil rights with their hair flowing beneath them, stand amid tricolor flags and Frychio Surrounded by fedoras, the revolution of 1793 was reproduced—not the mild revolution of 1789, but the revolutionary pomp of the Second Year of the Republic—setting its battleground in every city of the Continent.

It is admitted that the Romantic revolutionaries were not entirely new.His immediate predecessors, and pioneers, were the Italian-style Masonic revolutionary secret societies—the Carbonari and pro-Greek independence members, who were directly influenced by the living old Jacobins or those like Buonarroti. The agitation of the Babeuvians.It was a typical revolutionary struggle of the Restoration, all the energetic young men in the uniform of the Guards or Hussars, temporarily putting aside operas, social gatherings, trysts with duchesses or highly ceremonial society meetings, and To stage a military coup or to make oneself the leader of a fighting nation is, in fact, the Byron model.Yet this revolutionary approach, not only more directly inspired by eighteenth-century ways of thinking, but perhaps even more exclusive than the latter in general, still lacked the key elements of the Romantic revolutionary vision of 1830-1848: the barricades, the populace, the emerging and The desperate proletarian.Daumier's lithograph Massacre in the Rue Transnonain (1834), with the massacre of the unnamed laborer, adds these elements to the Romantic gallery.

The most striking consequence of Romanticism combined with the vision of a newer and more radical French Revolution was the overwhelming triumph of political art in the period 1830-1848.Rarely has there been a period when even the least "ideological" artists generally belonged to a party and made political service their primary duty.The preface to Hugo's play Hernani is a rebellious manifesto (1830), in which he exclaims: "Romanticism is liberalism in literature." The poet Musset's Genius—like that of the composer Chopin and the introspective poet Reinau of Austria-Hungary—expressed a personal rather than a public voice, he wrote: "The writer has a way of talking about the future in his preface, about social progress. , human and civilized preferences." Some artists even became political figures, and this phenomenon was not limited to those countries that were agitated by national liberation.All the artists of those countries are easily conceived as national prophets or symbols: among musicians Chopin, Liszt, even the young Italian Verdi; among Polish, Hungarian and Italian poets respectively Mickiewicz, Pedo Fee and Manzoni.The painter Daumier worked primarily as a political cartoonist, the irascible prodigy Büchner was an active revolutionary, and Heine was an ambiguous but influential spokesman for the far left and a close personal friend of Marx. (It should be noted that this was a rare period when poets not only sympathized with the extreme left, but also wrote poems that were both beautiful and agitational. Among the outstanding group of German Socialist poets in the 1840s—Her Herwegh, Weerth, Freiligrath, and of course Heine, and of course Heine deserve special mention, although Shelley wrote in response to the "Peterloo massacre" One poem, "The Mask of Anchina," but in 1820 it was perhaps the strongest poem of its kind.) The hand in hand of literature and journalism was most evident in France, Germany, and Italy.In other ages a figure like Lamenet or Michelet in France, Carlyle or Ruskin in England might have been regarded as a poet or novelist with views on public affairs; but in this age , they become statesmen, prophets, philosophers, or historians inspired by poets.In this regard, the poetic prowess that burst out with Marx's youthful intellect is rare among philosophers or economists.Even the mild-mannered Tennyson and his Cambridge friends gave moral support to the international corps that went to Spain to support the liberals against clericalism.

The unique aesthetic theory that developed and prevailed during this period recognized the unity of art and social obligation.The French Saint-Simonists on the one hand, and the brilliant Russian revolutionary intellectuals of the 1840s on the other, even developed ideas that later became the canons of the Marxist movement, aggregated under names such as "social realism" Below, this lofty and irresistible ideal of success derives as much from the austere virtues of Jacobinism as from the Romantic belief in spiritual power that led Shelley to describe poets as "unrecognized legislator of the world". Art for art's sake, though articulated by conservatives or artistic half-asses, is no match for the position of art for man, art for nation, or art for the proletarian.It was not until the Revolution of 1848 destroyed the romantic hopes of a great human regeneration that independent aestheticism prevailed.This political and aesthetic shift is illustrated by the development of such figures as Baudelaire and Flaubert in the 1840s, and Flaubert's Sentimental Education Still the best written record for this.Only in a country like Russia, which did not experience the disillusionment of 1848 (and that is only because it did not have the Revolution of 1848), art is as socially obligatory as ever, or preoccupied with social affairs as before.