The work presented here, never previously published, is the second and concluding part of Frederic Ewen’s magnum opus on the Romantic period of European literature in its social and political context. It gives central emphasis to the crucial influence exercised by the 1848 revolution, and its failure, on many Romantic and Victorian literary figures. Prof. Ewen seems to have begun work on this big project in the late 1960s, but the first volume, Heroic Imagination, was not published until 1984, and this companion volume has had to wait almost two decades after the author’s death to appear in print.
Despite prior publication of Heroic Imagination both in the 1984 Citadel edition and in a 2004 reprint by NYU Press, it is only now, with the appearance of A Half-Century of Greatness, that the full scope of the project can be appreciated. Though each volume stands on its own, each gains by the other’s company, and together they present a broad and striking panorama.
Ewen’s orientation is Marxist, but not obtrusively so. He writes not as a theorist but a historian, allowing the reader to see the age in vivid perspective. In the light of more recent work, Ewen’s approach is most akin to writers such as Marshall Berman (Adventures in Marxism, 1999), Richard Wolin (Walter Benjamin: An Aesthetic of Redemption, 1994), or Michael Löwy and Robert Sayre (Romanticism Against the Tide of Modernity, 2001). Like these writers, Ewen discovers the roots of Marxism in the fertile soil of Romanticism, an international movement with political as well as artistic dimensions. The approach is original in that Romanticism is territory conceded by scholars far more readily to the right than to the left of the political spectrum. Yet Ewen makes us think again, and in so doing, revises to a considerable extent the more familiar map of 19th-century intellectual history. He shows that what we think of today as “the Right” and “the Left” arose from the same revolutionary impulse, which Löwy and Sayre call “Romantic anticapitalism”—a term originally used by George Lukacs in a retrospective preface (1962) to his Theory of the Novel (1916) to describe his own pre-Marxist outlook. Ewen’s dyptich can also be compared with E. P. Thompson’s unfinished work on Wordsworth, Coleridge, Godwin, and Thelwall, The Romantics: England in a Revolutionary Age (1997)—itself a posthumous publication.1
The appearance of A Half-Century of Greatness thus not only demands a new hearing for Heroic Imagination, but also compliments recent research on Marxism and Romanticism and links it with earlier scholarship. Considering the period in which Ewen began this project, one may regard him as a bridge between the Old and the New Left (cf. Alexander 1999).
Ewen’s erudition is evident throughout. His references include primary and secondary sources not only in English, but also in French, German, Russian, and Ukrainian. (Ewen was born in Lemberg, Galicia—now Lviv, Ukraine—and did not emigrate to the United States until he was 13 years old.)
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While I am unable to provide a full history of the manuscript, it is clear that it began life as something called Heroic Imagination, covering European romantic literature from 1800 to 1880. This manuscript grew and grew until the author recognized that it could not be published as a single book. Instead he carved one book out of it, which, retaining the title Heroic Imagination, was published in 1984.
At the time of Prof. Ewen’s death in October 1988, it was well known that he had been preparing a sequel to Heroic Imagination. Indeed, because his son Joel ran a printing business, Ewen enjoyed an advantage almost unknown in the days before the advent of desktop publishing. While still working on the book, he had galleys, and later page proofs set, section by section, using a then new but now obsolete phototype process that stored the information on magnetic tapes, allowing for easy changes. This went on over a long period of time, everything being done according to the author’s exact instructions and under his supervision. Although an early title page bears the imprint “Helicon Press, Roanoke, Virginia,” this was not an actual book production process; it simply allowed Prof. Ewen—without having to wait for the book’s completion—to control the text and layout, making it easier for him to work on and, hopefully, easier to get published one day.
Prof. Ewen left a large number of papers and tapes of his writings and lectures. His widow, Miriam Gideon (1906–1996), a distinguished composer, did her best to collect and preserve his legacy. She set certain papers aside in the belief that they represented the last book that Prof. Ewen had been working on, and these were among the materials she gave to the Brooklyn College archives, where Ewen had taught from 1930 to 1952. The great majority of papers, however, remained to be sorted.
In the early 1990s, the author’s grandson and executor, Alexander Ewen, gathered all the remaining papers together, and Veronica Farley sorted the pages that appeared to belong to the present book. While this was necessary, it was far from sufficient, because the papers represented an unknown number of different recensions, including some dating from before the original project had been separated into two different books. This initial sorting yielded what appeared to be the makings of a book, but it still was not clear how, or if, they could be fit together into a complete work.
At that time a large number of photographic page proofs and galleys were also discovered. As the phototypes were faded, some of them quite badly, photocopies were immediately made. (The magnetic tapes corresponding to the phototypes were never found.) One set of copies was sent in 1995 to the poet and translator Aaron Kramer, Professor Emeritus at Dowling College and a former student, friend, and colleague of Prof. Ewen, on the basis of which he wrote a short foreword, included with this volume. Kramer passed away in April 1997. Meanwhile, owing to the vicissitudes of moving and storage, the proofs, along with the copies, went astray and were not rediscovered until several years later.
In 2003 a professional editor was engaged to see if a publishable book could be put together from the typescripts believed to belong to it. The attempt was not encouraging. Clearly there were sections missing, and the position of certain other sections was not clear.
In 2004 Alex Ewen, with whom I have collaborated on numerous writing and research projects over the years, asked me to see if it was possible to salvage the book. From what I had already heard, I was neither confident nor eager to undertake the task, but at Alex’s urging, and with the generous support of the Kurz Foundation and the Solidarity Foundation, I agreed to attempt it.
In retrospect, it can be seen that one of the main obstacles to previous attempts at reconstruction or reassembly of the manuscript was that the table of contents found among the Ewen papers did not correspond to the final version. Either it corresponded to some recension of the early, longer version of Heroic Imagination, or it was no more than an early outline, since there were no page numbers. For the preliminary sorting of papers it had been a useful guide, but in reconstructing the second book it now seemed more a source of confusion. Indeed, no table of contents matching the present text has ever turned up.
On the hypothesis that this “table of contents” might have outlived its usefulness, I abandoned it and set off on a different path. I began work on July 21, 2004 by reviewing the version put together by the previous editor. On July 26 I took an initial look at the papers in the four archival boxes from Brooklyn College held at the office of the Solidarity Foundation in New York.
On July 27 I collated the manuscripts to determine the final state in which Prof. Ewen left them; and in doing this I realized that many of the sections given to the previous editor were one or sometimes two versions prior to Ewen’s final manuscript.
I also determined that the final recension is basically what the Brooklyn College archivist had labeled “Manuscript A” (i.e., first half of book) plus other sections (second half). Manuscript A is a typed manuscript, beginning with page number 5 (presumably pp.1–4 were front matter, now lost), put into continuous sequence by the Brooklyn College archivist. It was among the materials first given to Brooklyn College by Prof. Ewen’s widow.2
“Manuscript A” ends with page 564, the end of the chapter on Wagner. Although the archivist could not have known this, to me there was no question that “Manuscript A” was an incomplete version of the sequel to Heroic Imagination, closely matching many parts already known. But clearly p. 564 was not the end of the book. The breakthrough soon came when I found the continuation of Manuscript A in the form of a typescript of the previous recension with its page numbers crossed out and new ones written in and not subsequently crossed out. These new handwritten page numbers, obviously the most recent, were found to continue directly the paging sequence of “Manuscript A” (i.e., with the chapter on Herzen, beginning on p. 565). Together these comprise the only manuscript of this book as a separate work with its own pagination, rather than as the second half of the uncut original Heroic Imagination, where the corresponding material begins somewhere around p. 700 and obviously represents earlier versions. As with any puzzle, I knew that if this was the right approach, the remaining pieces would fall into place rather easily—and they did. This continual pagination served as the “backbone” of the reconstructed “final recension.”
On July 28 I searched through Section 5, Box 4, of the Frederic Ewen Papers at the Tamiment Library, New York University, to determine what was in folders 11–14, the only materials that seemed from the finding guide to be pertinent. On July 29 I reviewed my notes of the previous two days to further determine the manuscript’s continuity; I also found a “missing” piece of Manuscript A (pp. 565–586, on Herzen) in another box.
The section on George Eliot (also among the Brooklyn College boxes) was separate and unpaginated; initially it was not clear to me (or to the previous editor) whether it was part of this book. I tentatively hypothesized that George Eliot was probably meant to come after the Brontës.
On July 30, 2004, in assembling the working manuscript, I discovered a fourteen-page gap (which later turned out to represent only eleven pages of text). These corresponded to the final page of the chapter on Carlyle followed by the first ten pages of the Dickens chapter. From the context it was clear that the end of the Carlyle chapter contained a quotation from Harriet Martineau. As for the Dickens pages, I expected on the basis of my Tamiment notes to find them in that archive, and indeed later that day I did. I did not find the last page of the Carlyle chapter. However, with the exception of that one page, I believed I now had pretty much the complete manuscript, although the status of the George Eliot section (part six) would remain under a question mark until the rest had been copyedited.
Due to other responsibilities, I was not able to begin the actual copyediting until February 2005. At its completion about the end of May, I prepared a detailed table of contents. Only while doing this did I realize, to my distress, that there was a forty-five page gap (pp. 413–458) in the manuscript corresponding to most of the second chapter of part three, except for the beginning of section one.
Fortunately, much of Ewen’s final recension had turned out to be a repaginated and only lightly revised version of the previous one, and that was the case here: the corresponding forty-five pages from the previous recension (977–1022) fit the gap perfectly in both sequence and number. Any changes Ewen may have made in these missing forty-five pages would have been minor.
Significantly, the missing sections also correspond exactly to the running heads that Ewen designated in a note to the typesetters found among the papers—that sections 3 and 4 dealt with France, section 5 with Germany, and section 6 with Austria. (This portion also contains sections numbered 7 and 8, on the failure of the revolution.)* A likely explanation for the gap then was that the forty-five pages were given to the typesetters and never found their way back to the manuscript. Corroborating this, the forty-five pages missing from the manuscript corresponded exactly to a gap in the proofs (which are, both preceding and following the gap, in the more preliminary state of galleys rather than page proofs).*
It is also interesting to note that in earlier versions of the huge work from which both Heroic Imagination and the present book were carved, the corresponding Part Three—there called Floodtide, 1848–1849—contained additional sections: 8 was on Grillparzer, 9 on Lenau, 10 also on Grillparzer, 11 on Hebbel, 12 on Nestroy, and 13 on the ballad and the Lied, treating of Eichendorf, Mörike, and Adalbert Stifter. What this tells us is that these portions were cut from the present work by Ewen himself, and they are not included in Heroic Imagination either. They exist in two different recensions, one containing sections 8 through 11, with pp. 1312–1313 missing; the other consisting of most of section 9 (except for the first one or two pages), part of section 10 on Grillparzer, and sections 12 and 13. The content of the two versions is similar, but the text differs considerably in wording. There are also a few pages from yet a third version.
Like the manuscript on George Eliot that now forms Part Six of this book, the whole of Part Five (England: Crystal Palace and Bleak House) in this final recension was also originally unpaginated (except for the first page, originally written in as 1376, then 670). But on the upper right hand were originally penciled in page numbers 1–71, then 1–28, then 1–30 (39 removed), five originally unnumbered pages, then 5/1 plus one unnumbered, 6a/1 plus two unnumbered, 7/3–7/15, one unnumbered, 7/17–7/19, and seventeen unnumbered pages (msp.776–793). All of this is evidence of an extensive rewriting and, mainly, great expansion, of this material (for example, the sequence 7/3–7/19 suggests a great expansion of an original p.7). Also, the Brontë chapter is roughly written and needed heavier editing—and no galleys or page proofs exist for this section, nor did the author specify running heads as he had in all previous sections.
These observations fit with what we know from plans of the earlier book that the Brontës and Eliot were originally conceived as going into a single concluding chapter. There are also no proofs or running heads for Part Six on George Eliot.
Rough writing and expansion is also seen in the section in Germany and the Poets (ms pp. 655–688), but this was evidently done somewhat earlier, since it exists in proofs.
To sum up: the manuscript on which this edition is based, what I call Ewen’s last recension, is a substantially complete manuscript of slightly more than 900 pages. It is “unfinished,” first, in the sense that the author was still evidently in the process of fine-tuning certain sections, or intending to. This is especially true of the chapter on the Brontës in Part Five, which had been revised but not yet retyped. As for the final section (Part Six: George Eliot), this existed only in an older, unpaginated manuscript that never received the final revision that most of the book underwent.
After preliminary editing of the rest of the manuscript, I turned to the George Eliot material. Ewen had placed this in a type of binder similar to those used for some other sections. But since it was unpaginated, I still was not sure whether it was actually part of the book or not. Fortunately, this did not remain a mystery for long. Numerous references to matters brought up in other parts of the manuscript prove that the Eliot not only belonged to the book, but was intended as a kind of summing up.
Over all, the editing was far more arduous than anticipated: on closer scrutiny much of the writing proved rougher than expected; also, through revision and retyping over the years, many corruptions had crept into both text and quotations.
When the missing page proofs were rediscovered in November 2005, it turned out that neither Parts Five and Six of the book, nor the endnotes and bibliography, were among them. This must have been one of the main reasons why the family believed that the work had never been completed. And they may have been correct in thinking that Ewen abandoned it after becoming discouraged that he would never be able to get it published. Whatever further light Joel Ewen might have been able to shed on this problem was precluded by his death just a few years after his father’s, long before anyone had thought to investigate these questions.
Prior to the recovery of the proofs, I was able to consult only a photocopy of proofs of Chapter One found in the Tamiment archive. This includes a title page, and curiously, the title is given simply as Heroic Imagination: The Creative Genius of Europe from Waterloo (1815) to the Revolution of 1848, volume II. When the missing page proofs were found, it became clear that the Tamiment proof fragment was an earlier version.
Chapter One in the Tamiment fragment, however, was the same as in the later proofs—the only real difference was in the title of the book itself. According to a surviving table of contents of an early version of the larger project, the second part was already called “A Half-Century of Greatness: The Heroic Age of European Literature, 1830–1880.” The Tamiment proof fragment calls it simply Heroic Imagination, vol. 2. The rediscovered proofs reveal that Ewen eventually changed the title back to its original form, but gave it a new subtitle: The Creative Imagination of Europe, 1848–1883.
Fortunately, the temporary disappearance of the proofs turned out to be no great disadvantage to the editing. The text of the proofs shows only minor differences from the manuscript recension that, on independent grounds, was identified as the final one and is the basis for the text edited here. This is because the proofs were set, at least for the most part, from that manuscript. Handwritten typesetters’ codes can be seen on the upper left hand corner of many of the pages.
Not only do the proofs incorporate the author’s handwritten changes to the final manuscript, but they also contain mistakes left uncorrected in that manuscript and add new typographical errors. So on the one hand they provide a “blind” confirmation of the text as reconstructed from our final recension, and on the other, they show that the manuscript was the better text.
In fact, the book could not have been reconstructed from the proofs. This is because parts five and six of the book are entirely lacking from the proofs, as are the reference citations. In the typescript these notes appear on the line following the corresponding superscript or close to it; but the fact that they do not appear as footnotes on the proof pages indicates that Ewen wanted them placed with the back matter as endnotes, and these too were never set in type.
The proofs nevertheless had their own value on a few specific points: (1) to ascertain Ewen’s latest choice of title; (2) to restore the text of the final page of chapter 1—never found in ms.; and finally, (3) to serve as the ultimate authority on chapter subdivisions, titles, and running heads (specifically designated by the author for most of the book). Indeed a number of doubts and minor discrepancies were settled in favor of the proofs.
My goal was to reconstruct the author’s latest intentions and, having done that, to treat the results as with any book submitted for editing, also bearing in mind that the author was still revising or intending to revise certain sections, especially parts five and six. Unfortunately he is no longer around to answer queries. Thus I did not treat the text as sacrosanct, but edited as lightly as possible, altering Ewen’s prose only where I felt it necessary to add clarity or variety. Ewen was a stimulating and compelling writer, but like most writers he had certain recurrent stylistic quirks and in the last analysis English was not his native language. Among the most typical traits, he has what one might call a “shaggy” style, paratactic and somewhat Germanic; his sentences are often very long and often stray from parallel structure where it would be stylistically desirable and would be easier to follow, he almost never uses participial phrases, and so on. As noted also by Prof. Kramer in marginal comments, some sections of the book are particularly rough, because he did not finish revising.3 (Kramer’s incisive obervations were of great help to me throughout.)
These peculiarities are also consistent with what I learned anecdotally: that Ewen always composed directly and rapidly at the typewriter—and working with a typewriter (for those who do not know or no longer remember) is a very different experience from working with a word processor!
Thus I edited in such a way as to retain the author’s style while clarifying the flow and connection of his thought. Ewen’s punctuation is quite idiosyncratic. Among other things, he was what can only be described as “dash-happy.” I reduced the number of dashes by perhaps 20 percent—substituting commas, colons, or parentheses. On the other hand, I actually inserted dashes on occasion where they helped to clarify the structure of some of his very long sentences. Although he almost never used participial phrases, there were sentences here and there that cried out for them.
I also gradually came to notice, after having edited quite a bit of the book, that at least one person other than Ewen had made edits. Thus, where I have indicated “author’s deletion,” this may include cuts by someone other than the author—but anyway not by me. Whatever cuts I made throughout the book are very few and very short. In a few instances I changed the position of a sentence in a paragraph. I inserted exactly one sentence (in the Eliot section) to remedy what I felt was a serious problem of continuity.
Ewen’s reconstructed manuscript was found to contain almost all necessary reference notes. The problem was that most of them are given in short form—sometimes very short form—often with nothing more than a surname and page number. As it turns out, these surnames sometimes refer to an editor rather than an author, but the distinction is almost never indicated. I decided to leave these notes as the author left them (except to correct silently certain obvious errors), but they have been rendered functional by the provision of a bibliography. The reconstruction of the bibliography of cited sources on the basis of Ewen’s notes was carried out mostly from July through November 2005 and in March 2006. While requiring much time and effort, the reconstruction was for the most part not too problematic, except for some of the cases where Ewen had not provided a title. These were eventually identified, but often not without considerable labor.
Even when a citation was identified, it was sometimes impossible to tell what edition Ewen had used. This was especially true of works printed in numerous editions—most of the Dickens titles and a few of the works by Carlyle and John Stuart Mill. Fortunately, the question is of little practical consequence. The same can be said of the choice between American and British editions, or exactly which reprint he might have used—it really makes little difference. In such “indifferent” cases, I tried to cite the more widely available editions. An inventory of Ewen’s library, prepared after his death by Veronica Farley, proved to be of surprisingly limited value for the purpose, since very few of the titles cited by Ewen were found there.
It is a paradox of textual editing that, if the work is properly done, it should not be noticed. It will therefore be my greatest satisfaction if the effort that went into the preparation of this volume allows Prof. Ewen to speak directly to the reader as he intended.