3. Romanticism
The predominant literary movement of the early part of the 19th century was Romanticism, which in literature had its origins in the Sturm und Drang period in Germany. An awareness of this first phase of Romanticism is an important correction to the usual idea of Romantic literature as something that began in English poetry with William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge and the publication of Lyrical Ballads in 1798. Moreover, although it is true that the French Revolution of 1789 and the Industrial Revolution were two main political and social factors affecting the Romantic poets of early 19th-century England, many characteristics of Romanticism in literature sprang from literary or philosophical sources. A philosophical background was provided in the 18th century chiefly by Jean-Jacques Rousseau, whose emphasis on the individual and the power of inspiration influenced Wordsworth and also such first-phase Romantic writers as Friedrich Hölderlin and Ludwig Tieck in Germany and the French writer Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, whose Paul et Virginie (1787) anticipated some of the sentimental excesses of 19th-century Romantic literature. Positive as it was, the influence of Rousseau must also be seen as a partly negative reaction against 18th-century rationalism with its emphasis on intellect.
Belief in self-knowledge was, indeed, a principal article of Romantic faith. Late 18th-century French writers such as Fabre d’Olivet sought to explain the physical world by an idea of a “breath of life” similar to the “inspiration” of Wordsworth and Coleridge. The Romantics believed that the real truth of things could be explained only through examination of their own emotions in the context of nature and the primitive. Because of this emphasis on inspiration, the poet came to assume a central role—that of seer and visionary. Simultaneously, such formal conventions as imitation of the classics were rejected as binding rules. A new directness of the poet’s role emphasized the language of the heart and of ordinary men, and Wordsworth even tried to invent a new simplified diction. Poetry became divorced from its 18th-century social context, and a poet was answerable only to ultimate truth and himself. Two classic poses of the Romantic poet were the mystic visionary of John Keats and the superman of Lord Byron—indeed, satirization of the Byronic hero was to become a theme of later novelists such as Fyodor Dostoyevsky, even though he himself had Romantic antecedents.
The fact that Dostoyevsky was a Russian showed how the Romantic stream flowed across Europe. In Spain and Italy, Hungary, Poland, and the Balkans, it took the form of drama, which in England failed to produce great works. The early and middle 19th century was a time of poetry and prose rather than of drama. The Romantic style in poetry was seen everywhere in Europe—in José de Espronceda in Spain; Ugo Foscolo and Giacomo Leopardi in Italy, where it became identified with nationalist sentiments; Aleksandr Pushkin and Mikhail Lermontov in Russia; Adam Mickiewicz in Poland. In America, a Romantic thread also allied with the emergence of national feeling could be seen in the adventurous stories of James Fenimore Cooper; in the supernatural and mystic element in Edgar Allan Poe; in the poetry of Walt Whitman and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow; and in the Transcendentalist theories of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau, which, as Wordsworth’s pronouncements had done, affirmed the power of “insight” to transcend ordinary logic and experience.
The impetus of Romantic poetry began to slacken after about 1830 and gave way to more objective styles, although many of its themes and devices, such as the misunderstood artist or the unhappy lover, continued to be employed.
Arguably the first post-Romantic poet was a German, Heinrich Heine, but German poetry in the mid-19th century mostly followed Wordsworth, though new tendencies were to be found in August von Platen Hallermünde and an Austrian, Nikolaus Lenau. The principal development was to be seen in France in the growth of a movement known as Parnassianism. Originating with Théophile Gautier, Parnassianism in some ways was an offshoot of Romanticism rather than a reaction against it. In concentrating on the purely formal elements of poetry, on aesthetics, and on “art for art’s sake,” it changed the direction of French poetry and had much influence abroad. Its most illustrious representative was Charles Baudelaire, who believed that “everything that is not art is ugly and useless.” Another branch of new development was the growth of Impressionism and the Symbolist movement, a result of “borrowing” from movements in painting, sculpture, and music. Paul Verlaine, foremost of the Impressionists, used suggestion, atmosphere, and fleeting rhythms to achieve his effects. Symbolism, a selective use of words and images to evoke tenuous moods and meanings, is conveyed in the work of Stéphane Mallarmé and Arthur Rimbaud. The advance of French poetry in the middle and later part of the century was an achievement of individuals, based on invention of a personal idiom.
The spread of education and, in England, of circulating libraries increased a demand for novels. At the beginning of the 19th century Jane Austen had already satirized the excesses of the Gothic novel, a harbinger of medievalizing Romanticism in the latter part of the 18th century, in Northanger Abbey and the conflict of sense and Romantic sensibility in Sense and Sensibility. In France the conflict of intelligence and emotion appeared in the work of Benjamin Constant (Adolphe, 1816) and most notably in Le Rouge et le noir (1830) of Stendhal and later in Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary (1857). The detailed verbal scrupulousness and Realism exhibited in the work of Flaubert and of Honoré de Balzac were carried forward by Guy de Maupassant in France and Giovanni Verga in Italy; they culminated in the extreme Naturalism of Émile Zola, who described his prose in novels such as Thérèse Raquin (1867) as “literary surgical autopsy.”
But Realism and nationalism seem irrelevant as descriptions of the great writers of the period—for example, George Eliot, Charles Dickens, and Thomas Hardy in England and Nikolay Gogol, Ivan Turgenev, Leo Tolstoy, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, and Anton Chekhov in Russia. In such writers there was a distinct bias toward literature with a social purpose, stimulated by awakening forces of liberalism, humanism, and socialism in many Western countries.
A decline of the Romantic theatre into melodrama was fairly general in Europe, and it was slower than the novel to take up problems of contemporary life. When revival came, through the work of a Norwegian, Henrik Ibsen, Romantic conflicts of visionary and realist, individual and society were restated, and this was true also of the plays of August Strindberg in Sweden. In Russia a modern theatre became a vital influence that could trace its beginnings back to Gogol’s Government Inspector (1836) but was to be felt later in the century in Turgenev’s Month in the Country (1850) and, above all, in the work of Anton Chekhov, a great dramatist of the period.
When the 20th century began, social and cultural conditions that prevailed in Europe and America were not too different from those of the middle and late 19th century. Continuity could be seen, for example, in the work of four novelists writing in English at the turn of the century and after. Joseph Conrad, Thomas Hardy, Henry James, and D.H. Lawrence all demonstrated in the progress of their work the transition from a relatively stable world at the end of the 19th century to a new age that began with World War I. The awakening of a new consciousness in literature was also to be traced in such works of fiction as the first volume of Marcel Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past (Swann’s Way, 1913), André Gide’s Vatican Cellars (1914), James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922), Franz Kafka’s Trial (published posthumously in 1925), and Thomas Mann’s Magic Mountain (1924).
Various influences that characterized much of the writing from the 1920s were at work in these writers. An interest in the unconscious and the irrational was reflected in their work and that of others of about this time. Two important sources of this influence were Friedrich Nietzsche, a German philosopher to whom both Gide and Mann, for example, were much indebted, and Sigmund Freud, whose psychoanalytical works, by the 1920s, had had a telling influence on Western intellectuals. A shift away from 19th-century assumptions and styles was not limited to writers of fiction. André Breton’s first Manifeste du surréalisme (1924; “Manifesto of Surrealism”) was the first formal statement of a movement that called for spontaneity and a complete rupture with tradition. Surrealism showed the influence of Freud in its emphasis on dreams, automatic writing, and other antilogical methods and, although short-lived as a formal movement, had a lasting effect on much 20th-century art and poetry. The uncertainty of the new age and the variety of attempts to deal with it and give it some artistic coherence can be seen also in Rainer Maria Rilke’s Duino Elegies and Sonnets to Orpheus (1923); in T.S. Eliot’s Waste Land (1922); and in Luigi Pirandello’s play about the instability of identity, Henry IV (1922).
The international and experimental period of Western literature in the 1910s and 1920s was important not only for the great works it produced but also because it set a pattern for the future. What was clearly revealed in the major works of the period was an increasing sense of crisis and urgency, doubts as to the 19th century’s faith in the psychological stability of the individual personality, and a deep questioning of all philosophical or religious solutions to human problems. In the 1930s these qualities of 20th-century thought were not abandoned but, rather, were expanded into a political context, as writers divided into those supporting political commitment in their writing and those reacting conservatively against such a domination of art by politics. Nor did World War II resolve the debate concerning political commitment—issues similar to those that exercised major creative imaginations of the 1930s were still very much alive during the last quarter of the century.
It would be tempting to explain what seemed to be a relative scarcity of great writers in the period after World War II as an inevitable result of the cumulative pressure of disturbing social and technological developments accelerated by that war. Under such fluctuating and doubtful circumstances, it would not seem altogether strange if writing and reading, as traditionally understood, should cease. Indeed, in certain technologically highly developed countries, such as the United States, the printed word itself seemed to some critics to have lost its central position, having been displaced in the popular mind by a visual and aural electronic culture that did not need the active intellectual participation of its audience. Thus the communications media that helped to create something resembling an international popular culture in many Western countries did nothing to make the question of literary value easier to answer. Given the extraordinary conditions in which a modern writer works, it was not surprising that reputations were difficult to judge, that radical experimentation characterized many fields of literature, and that traditional forms of writing were losing their definition and were tending to dissolve into one another. Novels might acquire many features of poetry or be transformed into a kind of heightened nonfictional reportage, while experimentation with typography gave poems an appearance of verbal paintings, and dramatic works, shorn of anything resembling a traditional plot, became a series of carefully orchestrated gestures or events. But formal experimentation was only part of the picture, and to say that modern writing since World War II has been primarily experimental would be to ignore other characteristics that writing acquired earlier in the century and that still continued to be issues. Most good critics felt that there was no lack of good literature being written, despite the lack of major reputations and despite the possibly transitional nature of much of the period’s work in its variety of styles and subjects.
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