Europe: A History (160 page)

And Juliusz Slowacki (1809–49), intense and eloquent, celebrated the exalted inner life:

Kto mogac wybrad, wybrat zamiast domu,
Gniazdo na skalach orla, niechaj umie
Spac” gdy irenice czerwone od gromu
I stychác jçk szatanów w sosen szumie.

(Whoever, having the choice, in place of a home, would choose I an eagle’s nest on the cliffs, may he know how I to sleep though his eyes be reddened from the lightning I and to listen to the moaning of the spirits in the murmur of the pines.)
¹⁴

In due course Romanticism elicited a reaction against its own heady success. The reaction took the form of a revival of the ideals of Classicism: in short, of Neo-classicism. Thereafter, the rival trends remained major influences throughout the century. Their rivalry was specially evident in architecture. Rival railway companies would build their terminal stations in contrasting styles: the London and North Western built Euston Station in elegant classic; the Midland Railway built the adjoining St Paneras Station in flamboyant Neo-gothic.

The Classical-Romantic mix was particularly fruitful in literature. The three giants of the age, Alexander Pushkin (1799–1837), Adam Mickiewicz (1798–1855), and J. W. Goethe, defy easy classification, exactly because their works fuse Classical and Romantic elements into an indivisible whole. Their masterworks—
Eugene Onegin
(1832),
Pan Tadeusz
(1834), and
Faust
(1808–32) were all verse-novels or verse-dramas, completed at almost the same moment. Their supreme mastery of language at a juncture when literacy was spreading rapidly gave their authors the status of national bards, making their lines and phrases an integral part of everyday communication. There is not a Pole who cannot recite ‘Oh,
Litwo
, my homeland, you are like health …’; not a German who has not been bewitched by ‘the land where the lemon-trees bloom’; no Russian schoolchild who has not been taught the lines of ‘The Bronze Horseman’ from St Petersburg:

(Here we are destined by nature | To cut a window into Europe; | And to gain a foothold by the sea … I love you, Peter’s creation, | I love your severe, graceful appearance, | The Neva’s majestic current, | the granite of her banks… | City of Peter, stand in all your splendour, | Stand unshakeable as Russia! | May the conquered elements, too, make their peace.)
¹⁵

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832), however, was not merely a national bard. He was an Olympian who bestrode almost all intellectual domains. The variety of genres in which he excelled, his awareness of a rapidly changing world, and the numerous evolutions through which his creativity passed gave him a claim to be the last ‘universal man’. Born in Frankfurt-am-Main, educated in Leipzig and Strasburg, and resident for half a century in Weimar, he was poet,
dramatist, novelist, philosopher, scientist, traveller, lawyer, administrator. His initial Romantic proclivities faded in the 1780s; his classical phase, strengthened by his friend Schiller, continued until c.1820. The vast psychological panorama of
Faust
embraced a lifetime’s reflections on the human condition. When he died, he was the greatest personality of Europe’s greatest cultural era, endlessly reaching for the unreachable:

Alies Vergängliche
1st nur ein Gleichnis;
Das Unzulängliche
Hier wird’s Ereignis;
Das Unbeschreibliche,
Hier ist’s getan;
Das Ewig-Weibliche
Zieht uns hinan.

(All transient things I Are only a parable; I The inaccessible I Here becomes reality; I Here the ineffable is achieved; I The Eternal Feminine I Draws us on.)
¹⁶

The later phase of Romanticism acquired a specially morbid flavour. It has been related to the tuberculosis from which many artists suffered, and to the opium which was routinely prescribed to cure it. A seminal figure was Thomas De Quincey (1785–1859), who ran away from Manchester Grammar School and who lived as a homeless stray before becoming an Oxford drug addict. His
Confessions of an English Opium Eater
(1822) exercised a formative influence on the American writer of the grotesque, Edgar Allan Poe, and on Baudelaire. The strange, mystical outpourings of Slowacki’s last years belong to this same story,
¹⁷
as do the verses of Gerard Labrunie or de Nerval (1808–55), a schizophrenic, the ‘super-Romantic’, ‘the most Romantic of them all’:

Oú sont nos amoureuses?
Elles sont au tombeau.

(Where are our lovers, our girls? They are in their tomb.)
¹⁸

In the apparent derangement, and the interest in visions and hallucinations, it is not difficult to see the early seeds of the Symbolism, Freudianism, and Decadence which were to form such important elements of Modernism (see below).

The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood was founded in 1848 in a house on Gower Street, London, by a circle of poets and painters who congregated round Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828–82), the son of a Neapolitan exile. Despite Continental sources of inspiration, it remained an exclusively English movement, but archetypal of the age. Apart from the Rossetti brothers, its leading members included J. E. Millais (1829–96), W. Holman Hunt (1827–1910), Ford Madox Brown (1821–93), and Edward Burne-Jones (1833–98); and it found a champion in the critic John Ruskin (1819–1900). The group took its name from its members’ common enthusiasm for the art of the Italian quattrocento, which fuelled their rebellion against contemporary academic painting. They were strongly exercised by the
links between art and literature—D. G. Rossetti being the translator of both Dante and Villon—and applied their principles to everything from architecture and furniture to mosaics, tapestry, stained glass, and interior design. They cultivated what they took to be both the techniques and, above all, the spirit of late medieval art. They imitated the clarity of form and brightness of colour of icono-graphic painting; and they exuded a moral seriousness, often expressed in mystical religiosity. Among their most celebrated images would be Millais’s
Ophelia
(1851) and Hunt’s
The Light of the World
(1854). One of their later recruits was William Morris (1834–96), poet, primitive socialist, craftsman, printer, and designer. At Kelmscott Manor Morris hosted some of the Brotherhood’s most inspired activities, long after the group as a whole had broken up.

That same era also saw the efflorescence of the novel across the Continent. Honoré de Balzac (1799–1850) and Charles Dickens (1812–70), born
en face
at Rouen and Portsmouth, were among the first to capture the popular imagination. But in time all the major novels were translated into all major European languages. Critics differ in their estimations; but the parade of the premier division should certainly include
I promessi sposi
(The Betrothed, 1825) by Alessandro Manzoni, Balzac’s
Le Père Goriot
(1834), Dickens’s
Oliver Twist
(1838), Mikhail Lermontov’s
A Hero of Our Time
(1840), Charlotte Bronte’s
Jane Eyre
(1847), W. M. Thackeray’s
Vanity Fair
(1848),
Madame Bovary
(1857) by Gustave Flaubert, Victor Hugo’s
Les Miserables
(1862), Leo Tolstoy’s
Anna Karenina
(1877), Fyodor Dostoevsky’s
Crime and Punishment
(1866) and
The Brothers Karamazov
(1880), and
Lalka
(The Doll, 1890) by Boleslaw Prus. Through the analysis of social and psychological problems fiction had become a central feature of Europe’s common culture. Authors adopted the convention of projecting their own most intimate observations into their fictional creations: Flaubert was reported to have said: ‘Madame Bovary, c’est moi.’

In the realm of music, as in literature, the nineteenth century assembled a vast and varied corpus of works which greatly extended the repertoire founded by the classical and early Romantic masters. Johannes Brahms (1833–97), born in Hamburg, must surely be rated the central figure. He combined an intellectual concern for Classical form with a Romantic passion for lyricism and emotional intensity, thereby earning the title of ‘true heir to Bach and Beethoven’. The succession of more obviously Romantic orchestral composers began with Hector Berlioz (1803–69), whose ‘Symphonie Fantastique’ (1831) broke all the existing rules. Berlioz relied heavily on Romantic literature for inspiration. It was said: ‘Victor Hugo is a Romantic, but Berlioz is Romanticism itself.’ The Romantic list continued with the languid Polish exile Frederic Chopin (1810–49), the supreme master of the piano; with the indefatigable Hungarian virtuoso Franz Liszt (1811–86); with Robert Schumann (1810–56) and Felix Mendelssohn-Bartholdy (1809–47). It contained most of the names who are often classed as leaders of national schools (see pp. 819–20); and it continued later in the century with the magnificent Russians Anton Rubinstein (1830–94), Peter Tchaikovsky (1840–93), and Sergei Rachmaninov (1873–1943); with the German Protestant, Max Bruch (1838–1920)
and the Swiss Jewish Ernest Bloch (1880–1959); and with a strong contingent of Austro-German neo-Romantics led by Anton Bruckner (1824–96), Gustav Mahler (1860–1911), Richard Strauss (1864–1949), and the song-writer Hugo Wolf (1860–1903). Throughout the century, the French School produced a series of brilliant talents marked by great delicacy and originality, from César Franck (1822–90) and Camille Saint-Saèns (1835–1921) to Gabriel Fauré (1845–1924), Claude Debussy (1862–1918), and Maurice Ravel (1875–1937).

Grand opera, which married music to historical and literary drama, was a medium well suited to the Romantic style. Its success was driven by the rivalry of its three leading centres: the French opera, led by Charles Gounod (1818–93), Giacomo Meyerbeer (1791–1864), Georges Bizet (1838–75), and Jules Massenet (1842–1912); the German opera, launched by Mozart and Weber and culminating in the stupendous figure of Richard Wagner (1813–83); and the Italian opera, whose unequalled melodic traditions were promoted by Gioachino Rossini (1792–1868), Gaetano Donizetti (1797–1848), Giuseppe Verdi (1813–1901), and Giacomo Puccini (1855–1924). The genre variously known as
opéra comique
, operetta, or musical comedy also thrived, especially in the Paris of Jacques Offenbach (1819–80), the Vienna of Johann Strauss II (1825–99) and Franz Lehar (1870–1948), and the London of Gilbert and Sullivan. (See Appendix III, p. 1278).

The nineteenth century saw the rise of all the institutions which would turn the art of music into a major public enterprise—the conservatoires, the orchestral and choral societies, the purpose-built concert halls, the musical publishers, and the departments of musicology.

Philosophy
in the Romantic era came to be dominated by the powerful speculations of G. W. F. Hegel (1770–1831), Fichte’s successor at Berlin. Hegel was particularly un-Romantic in many of his attitudes, and as a professional philosopher saw himself in the line of the rationalists. On a tour of the Bernese Oberland he was moved to remark: ‘The spectacle of these eternally dead masses gave me nothing but the tedious idea, £5
ist so
[That’s what it’s like].’ On the other hand, the originality of many of his ideas attracted tremendous attention in a period of intellectual ferment; and he provided many distinguished pupils and critics, more rebellious than he, with a store of ammunition. Having brushed close to Napoleon in Jena in October 1806, on the day he finished his
Phenomenology of Mind
he wrote admiringly of the Emperor’s ‘World Soul’.

Two of Hegel’s favourite ideas were to prove specially fertile. One of these was the Dialectic, the productive clash of opposites. The other was the
Geist
or ‘Spirit’, the essence of pure identity, which in his
Philosophy of History he
assigns to every political state and to each stage of developing civilization. The Dialectic, which Hegel confined to the realm of pure ideas, turned out to have many further applications which endowed the whole concept of progress with a dynamic and universal explanation. It seemed to make sense out of turmoil, to promise that good could emerge from conflict. The historical Spirit, on the other hand, which Hegel used for the glorification of the state, turned out to be a weapon in the hands of
national movements struggling against the powers of the day. Hegel’s views were intensely Germanocentric, and would seem to rationalize the Protestant and Prussian supremacy that was coming to the fore in his own lifetime. He praised war and military heroes, and gave the leading role in modern civilization to the Germans. ‘The German spirit is the spirit of the new world. Its aim is the realization of absolute Truth as the unlimited self-determination of freedom.’ Americans may or may not be flattered to learn that this po-faced purveyor of mystical metaphysics awarded America ‘the final embodiment of the Absolute Idea, beyond which no further development would be possible’.
¹⁹
This may help explain the deep-seated Germanophile traditions in American academia.