This paper was written in 2933 for Professor George S. Brett of the philosophy department at the University of Toronto. It was submitted for Philosophy 4g, “Modern Philosophy,” one topic of which was the romantic movement. On the title-page Frye wrote, “The first part of this essay deals with the general definition, concepts, and features of romanticism, the second part with romantic philosophy, the third with romantic music, the fourth romanticism in English literature, and the conclusion indicates the general trend in politics. I have not had time to deal with the painting or with Continental literature. I hope that the inordinate length of the essay will prove to be as necessary an evil as it is an unmitigated one. Romanticism being a cultural phenomenon, the centre of gravity of this essay lies in the realm of aesthetics.” The asterisks Frye used to mark footnotes have been changed to numbered superscripts. The typescript is in the NFF, 1991, box 37, file 8.
The essay is broadly organized as follows:
Part One. Introduction
I. Romanticism as a Cultural Term
II. Romanticism in Terms of Space and Time
III. The Organization of the Critical and Creative Arts
IV. The Four Periods of Romanticism
V. Romantic Conflicts: Youth versus Age, Male versus Female
Part Two. Romantic Philosophy
I. Rousseau
II. Kant
III. Fichte
IV. Schelling
VI. Schleiermacher
VII. Schopenhauer
VIII. Nietzsche
IX. Bergson and Spengler
Part Three. Romantic Music
Introduction
I. The Break-up of Rhythm
II. The Break-up of Counterpoint
III. The Attack on Strict Forms
IV. The Exploitation of the Minor Scale
V. The Replacing of the Harpsichord by the Pianoforte
Part Four. Romantic Literature in England
Introduction
I. Poetry: The Lyric-Essay
II. The Positivistic Novel
III. Rehabilitated Romanticism
Conclusion. Romanticism in Politics
What is born must live; what lives must die. The consideration of any problem in history belongs to life. Hence, it is essential in examining any historical phenomenon to keep in mind the unit of life, so to speak, to which it belongs, and the larger the scope of the phenomenon, the more essential this is, and the nearer the ultimate background approaches. With a purely cultural question to deal with, such as romanticism certainly is, we are at once implicated in the larger one. Our initial survey, then, takes in the duofold question: What unit of life is implicated in romanticism? and, Where and how does romanticism come into that life?
The word culture in itself helps to define our unit. There is no satisfactory adjective in common use which does so, but the nearest is the term “Western.” Romanticism is neither a national movement nor a universal one. It springs up at the same time in England, France, Germany, Italy, and even in America, but there is no Oriental and not even a true Russian romanticism. We altogether misunderstand the term in its strict sense as a cultural phenomenon (i.e., as distinct from the merely general use of the words romance and romantic) unless we regard it as definitely a phase in the organic life of that culture-soul which arose in Western Europe at the beginning of the “medieval” period and has confined its range if not its influence to Western Europe, spreading later into virgin territories like the Americas. Romanticism, then, is a cross-section of Western culture. There is no necessity other than an abstractly logical one to bring the whole history of that culture into its ramifications, but it should be advisable to outline the general form in order to show romanticism in its proper context. To give an exposition of romantic philosophy and a criticism of romantic literature, music, and painting without at least attempting to deal with the how and the why, as well as the what, might be exhaustive and painstaking, but would remain two-dimensional, superficial, and, in the last analysis, meaningless.
Romanticism signifies the second cultural change in the Western world since the great migrations, the other being the Renaissance-Reformation. Now a change in a living form is inevitable and not accidental or adventitious; the fully developed plant is implicit in the seed. The “starting point” of the Renaissance is so elusive that it baffles all attempts to grasp it, though some persevering scholars have chased it halfway through the Dark Ages before giving up and declaring that there is no starting point and, consequently, no Renaissance. We do not propose a similar pursuit, believing that such an attempt is based upon a false conception of the problem involved. We shall attack first, not the question of what originates romanticism, but of what underlies it.
The great medieval civilization is essentially a culture of the land and soil. The economic system is feudal, the central art form architecture, the philosophy bound up with religion and directed toward a complete cosmogonic synthesis. All these are land symbols; the village is a market place and the town a nexus or focal point around which all the land systems centre. Necessarily, the activity being directed toward the town, there comes a time when the town suddenly takes on a change of status. It becomes something in itself, something distinctive and opposed to the land. That change underlies the Renaissance and Reformation. The burgher and guilds appear; the arts separate out and are practised by a school of great masters. The old religious land-synthesis is shattered: the instinctive communal affinity of the earlier period changes to an appeal to reason centred in the individual. The town, now become alien, becomes fascinating as well, and eventually tears itself up by the roots from the countryside and becomes, no longer the culture-town, but the metropolis. That change occurred at the close of the eighteenth century, and romanticism is to the metropolis what the Renaissance was to the culture-town—its philosophical and artistic product.
We should clearly understand that this metropolitan growth represents a new idea, a new form of life, and not simply an expansion of the smaller centre. Even older cities which had been central points of their respective national units, like London, Paris, or Vienna, did not simply grow faster: they swelled up and burst. Paris was in 1900 five times as large as it was in 1800. In England Liverpool, Glasgow, Birmingham, Manchester, appear as suddenly as fungi. In Germany the culture-towns like Nuremberg, Leipzig, Munich, either change into the metropolis form or disappear, and the new spirit rears its head in the gigantic symbol of Berlin, which gradually absorbs the whole of Germany and a great deal of Austria and Scandinavia. In America the change is clearest when we see how utterly different the spirit of colonial revolt in Boston and Philadelphia is from the immense energy which annihilated the Southern culture and incarnated itself in New York and Chicago. New colonies with small populations, like Canada or Australia, immediately have all their energy sucked dry in evolving two or more unnatural and tumorous city-growths. Japan, with no culture-soul of her own, takes on the Western form and produces Tokyo; China and India reached the megalopolitan stage centuries ago and do not change. In Russia we can see the radical difference between precultural centres like Moscow or Kiev and the Western impositions of Leningrad and Odessa, as thoroughly exotic as a rubber plant in a New England homestead. Of course, it is conventional to say that this change was “caused” by the Industrial Revolution; let us suspend this question for a moment and examine the nature of this new cosmopolis.
The Western metropolis is a general Western phenomenon. The great cities are not national centres, in spite of their being so often used as nation-symbols by jingoists and reactionaries. Even the accidental differences of language are almost obliterated in extreme forms like New York. Travellers returning from Tokyo or Buenos Aires are never tired of repeating that they are “just like any big city over here.” The metropolis, then, is a formless and chaotic floating mass, and is essentially an inorganic form. If we compare the culture-towns of any culture with its later metropolis-forms, we can easily see this difference between the city developing out of the soil like a plant with an organic self-contained growth and the dead confusion of its gigantic successor. Tyre as against Carthage, Republican as against Caesarian Rome, Athens as against Alexandria, Mecca as against Baghdad, all show the same opposition of, say, Florence as against Berlin. What is more, this sudden tearing up of the metropolis out of the land must of necessity represent the final stage of a culture. We have seen that the life of a culture is commensurate with its urban development; therefore, when the city becomes inorganic and limitless, the culture dies. Now in every case of which we have any record this movement has always been associated with a cultural development corresponding in every essential respect to our romanticism.
It is possible to reduce this basis of romanticism to lower terms. As any culture, unlike the metropolis, must have some kind of a root, it follows that it must have that root in only one of the big cities over which it spreads when in that stage. Classical civilization in its last stage had Rome, Antioch, Alexandria, and Constantinople, but the romanticism of the classical world centred in Alexandria. Similarly Mohammedan romanticism emanates from Baghdad rather than Cairo or even Cordoba. And although Western civilization has dozens of big cities, the supreme symbol of romanticism is Paris, not the Paris of Louis Quatorze or Louis Quinze, but modern Paris, which was born on the Fourteenth of July,1 We shall find that the subversive approach of romanticism to what precedes it centres in Paris in every instance. Its irresistible attraction for sophisticates and artistic novices, and its reputation among the unsophisticated as very gorgeous and splendid but very wicked, mark it out as the focal point of the last effort of Western cultural activity. Instinctively feeling its significance, provincials of other countries revolt from it just as the Hebrews did from Nineveh and Babylon, two sinister names which ring through all subsequent prophecy with the same meaning as the classical delenda est Carthago.2 In spite of Shakespeare, Rabelais, Cervantes, the Renaissance centres in and radiates from the Italian culture-town. In spite of Calvin and Knox, the Reformation was produced by German burghers. And similarly, in spite of the easy supremacy of England and Germany in literature, philosophy, and music, romanticism centres in and radiates from Paris.3
Now that Buckle and Mommsen4 have finally been embalmed in their unreadable opuses5 and responsible historians are taking the organic view of history for granted, more and more use has been made of cultural terms like Renaissance, baroque, rococo. Not only do we speak of the art, literature, or philosophy of these periods, but we are also beginning to talk of Renaissance science, baroque mathematics, rococo economics, and so on, including all departments of life under a Zeitgeist terminology. But romanticism obviously does not apply to a culture period having the same universal connotation. Everyone knows in a general way what is meant by a romanticist in art, literature, philosophy, or politics, but what romanticism in mathematics or science could be, other than a term of contempt, is hard to imagine. We shall see later that there are romantic approaches to both, such as that of Fechner to physics,6 but we feel that these have overstepped their boundaries. Similarly, the economic, scientific, mathematical, and engineering activity contemporary with it rests on a basis which might be called, for want of a better term, positivistic. There is a positivistic philosophy, of course; we can see traces of positivist influence in literature—Zola, for instance—but the question of what kind of music, let us say, that a positivist composer would produce has never, so far as I know, come up for detailed consideration. It would appear that there is a fundamental and irreconcilable opposition here which we do not find in the earlier periods.7
Obviously all cultural activity, in fact all activity of any kind, is comprehended through the two ultimate data of time and space. It therefore follows that the organic development of a culture would be fundamentally an organic synthesis of temporal and spatial concepts. In mankind the two great temporal symbols are the blood and the reproductive faculty: the senses and reasoning are spatial. The former is, thus, implicated in being, the second in thought. Thought is plainly an abstraction of which the concrete entity is being, so that a creative activity, in the strict sense of the word, is one in which thought is subservient to the demands of being. Hence, in the climax of a creative period, mathematics, the purest form of thought, would be worked out in ontological implications, and the completion of the organic number-world would bring with it a statement of the ultimate convictions which emanate from the blood.8 The derivation of the word religion from religare, to bind together, suggests that religion is the name given to that activity which forces the world comprehended by sense and reason into line with the inner intuitive urge of the throbbing temporal propulsion. Consequently, we should expect to find that the greatest creative mathematicians, such as Descartes, Newton, Pascal, and Leibnitz, were all men of a profoundly religious nature. Opposed to these figures are Bacon with his rigid program of inductive empiricism, and Hobbes with a thoroughgoing scientific materialism,9 both thoroughly sceptical natures, one ignoring the importance of mathematics and the other a mathematical dilettante. The first thing that strikes us about romanticism, then, is that philosophy becomes unmathematical and the great romantic philosophers uniformly carry on without it. Mathematics separates out from philosophy and goes over to the camp of its old enemy, empirical science. This leaves philosophy shorn of a good deal of its metaphysics. With the advent of the Kantian critical philosophy that field begins to narrow. The ultimate questions it pursues change from the ontological to the ethical. A new and dominant activity moves up beside this—the philosophy of history and the history of philosophy. Now a concentration on the historical and moral aspects of speculation is a concentration on the temporal element. Similarly science parts from its moorings and shifts over to a purely spatial ground of empiric positivism. Now if religion be the binding and linking force holding together temporal and spatial outlooks, the force which separates them can logically be called skepsis.10 This, then, is the second great underlying fact of romanticism.
It is not difficult to see the essential connection of skepsis with the metropolis. There is something plantlike about the growth of a culture, and it takes root in a certain place just as any vegetable colony does. This taking root is always accompanied by a religious spirit which dominates every activity. Precultural or nomadic peoples, who have not yet taken root, make no attempt to turn their vital powers in the direction of an organized spatial thought-conquest of the world. “Taking root” as a matter of course suggests the development of agriculture. It follows that a religious spirit has a close affinity with the soil,11 and when the metropolis arises and culture becomes an epiphyte, this connection disappears. A metropolitan, thus, floats free in space, with his senses and reasoning powers no longer bound to arrange his world for him in accordance with what he feels to be right. He is in a position to look at life, but not to feel its upthrust inwardly.
There is an integral connection between atomism and chaos (atomism in the old-fashioned sense of constitution by indivisible units), the conception usually being associated with atheism. The structure of a metropolis is atomic, each individual existing by himself with no essential connection with anyone else. Friends are friends of elective affinities,12 attracted by the senses and reason. In a metropolis it is impossible that a group as varied as the Canterbury pilgrims could all travel together to the same place with the same object. There is not the same religious or linking force present. Consequently, it is necessary that in a metropolitan existence there should be implicit an idea of absolute relativity. Each individual must constitute himself the centre of the world. Subjective nominalistic idealism must be taken for granted. Now in the soul there are will, an outward-directed faculty with a social connotation, reason, an ego-effacing faculty with a universal one, and feeling, the differentiating and peculiar aspect. An egocentric approach to the world must, therefore, subordinate will and reason to feeling.
If the temporal and spatial concepts begin to separate, it follows that time and space pose separate problems. Having already traced out the fundamental opposition of romanticism and positivism, it would seem logical that, as positivism is obviously associated with spatial problems, romanticism represents the temporal side. Evidently the egocentric contemplation of time as a sense datum, which replaces the inward feeling of its propulsion, is a space-approach, and reduces time to a kind of fourth dimension. In other words, it is a paradoxical, antitemporal attack on the mystery of time-movement, and so rests on a sceptical basis, whatever religious doctrines it may carry over from an earlier tradition.
It is not difficult to see what a sceptical approach to time would implicate.13 It is plainly its business to look at time, and, hence, to classify and work out the formal ordering of temporal manifestations. This means that what is interesting in philosophy, for instance, is not the attempt to formulate an impregnable system, but to show and explain the growth of all the impregnable systems that have already been formulated. The history of philosophy is only part of the universal aim of a philosophy of history.14 Philosophy is a spatial fixation, history a time-movement. Similarly when we examine the work of writers and composers whom the world has agreed to call romantic, we shall find them attacking a temporal dynamic art statically and pictorially.
There are three compulsions of activity. The first is the time-compulsion to action, or morals. The second is the space-compulsion to thought, or logic. The third is the feeling-compulsion of aesthetics. Justice, truth, and beauty is a triad as old as Plato. Let us consider the time-space opposition in this light for a moment. Obviously the religious approach would be from time, to implicate truth in morality. This is just as true of Leibnitz as it is of the patristic tradition, or any thinking done in a creative period. If truth is moral, then there is implicit an optimistic basis for thought. The classical soul is different from ours, and when Plato, who corresponds to the Leibnitzian period in his culture, attacked this problem, he did so from the typical classical viewpoint, which is the opposite of ours, starting from the spatial side and attempting to enmesh justice by logic. Now this is just what a critical approach to Leibnitz in Western philosophy, such as that of Kant, would do. Plato was as little satisfied with the result of his investigations as Kant was. The separating out of justice and truth under pressure of skepsis destroys this optimistic basis of thinking and results eventually in pessimism—romantic pessimism. This is implicit in Kant, who reached essentially the same solution as Plato— conviction of God’s existence, or any working hypostasis of optimism, resides in the blood and not the brain. But the Western mind differs from the classical in its possession of an historical sense. Such a sense precludes scepticism from being a mere denial or suspension of judgment. The proposition that we know nothing is dismissed, and the proposition that we know only phenomena replaces it. And, as we have shown, to treat time-manifestations as phenomena is to treat them spatially. But now let us take this third compulsion—the aesthetic, which belongs to feeling. If romanticism subordinates to feeling will and reason, then correspondingly it would subordinate to aesthetics morals and logic, and we shall find that it does this very definitely. It would be expected, too, that romantic pessimism would turn to beauty and away from both life and science for solace, and we shall find that this, too, is so. But as time and space are ultimate data, feeling cannot be outside them, nor can it belong only to one, which would absorb it in will or understanding. There is only one thing left for it to be—an interfusion of time in space.
There is, therefore, an opposition in aesthetics between art regarded as a spatial abstraction from a temporal force and art regarded in the other direction as a living time-phenomenon frozen into a space-dimension. The temporal approach belongs to the religious period, spatial to the sceptical. As the word creative has been so frequently used in connection with the former, the latter suggests the antithesis—“critical.” This opposition runs parallel with all the others previously mentioned. Creation is realistic, in the universalia sunt realia15 connotation, and deals with the abstracting of types and patterns in space and time. Criticism rests on egocentricity and subjective idealism; the world remains exactly as it is, and the faculty of artistry is spatial, one of selection and arrangement.
In the prereligious stage of culture the central art form is, of course, a more or less chaotic interpenetration of time and space feelings. The subject matter is a mixture of creation and criticism, or legend; the presentation a similar mixture, or poetic narrative. The basic art is in short the epic. With the religious sense comes, necessarily, the sense of objective form, and out of the womb of the Church are born the great time-creation of music and the space-creation of drama. As a sense of form depends upon a power of forming, it follows that the plastic arts last as long as the religious period does. Architecture is the great plastic time-form which goes along with music, sculpture the space-form associated with drama. With the rise of skepsis, architecture disappears as an art form, the last true style being the Empire, and there is no typically romantic architecture, but only a romantic approach to architecture, that is, taking what styles already exist and selecting and arranging them. The same is true of sculpture. It should be noted here that, as the approach is in Western culture from the temporal side, a great deal of Western sculpture is absorbed in architectural detail, and drama has a tendency to approach a musical form in some cases.16
Running along with these four is the art of painting. Now painting differs from the others in being a sort of commentary art, an individualist approach and reaction to the world. That is why it became most prominent when the Italian Renaissance brought individualism into prominence. It is, in short, a critical art, a religious time-space criticism. It definitely emphasizes selection and arrangement rather than abstraction and is the only art requiring versatility in the artist. It bears a personal signature and has nothing of the anonymity of a Gothic cathedral or the abstract completeness of a fugue. As a running commentary on the others, it absorbs some power from each—architectural in Giotto, sculptural in the Renaissance carven line, musical in the technique of evolving an outline by flecks and dots of colour, and dramatic with the narrative painters.
But we have shown that the criticism of organic life forms is the chief business of the romantics, so that their whole aesthetic ideal must be concentrated on the pictorial. The shift in painting psychology from a succubic to an incubic status is the prime feature of romanticism in the arts. We shall trace this idea out in more detail later on. Now out of painting come a time and a space criticism, the one descending from music, the other from drama. The abstract tonal presentation of the accented rhythm of life becomes a subjective reaction to it, giving us an art form which I am unable to find a name for and for the present will call the lyric-essay. The critical analogue of the drama is more evidently fiction.
To illustrate by a diagram:
We have said that the difference between creation and criticism is the difference between abstraction and arrangement. The rhythms, patterns, and symmetries implicit in nature underlie the first, nature itself the second; hence, the question of form is external in the former instance and relative to the artist in the latter. Here is the chief cause of the popular antithesis of classic and romantic, the one imitative of form and depending on the artist for content, the other reversing the process. Impressionistic implications in romanticism are not hard to find, as we shall see. This means that with the rise of skepsis the spatial activity of science will depend upon arrangement, or experiment, and the temporal activity of life similarly upon arrangement of time-phenomena, or philosophy of history. But the point is that in the latter case we are not really dealing with phenomena, which are spatial, and, hence, historical thought cannot, if it works from its own premisses and not those of science, found its case on historical facts as they are, but on the significance and meaning of their appearance. Every time-phenomenon is a symbol. Hence, the form of the philosophy of history is that of the picture, and this extends itself over every ramification of romanticism.
So at last we arrive at a working definition of romanticism as the cultural manifestation of an activity directed toward a critical and symbolic time-synthesis. As such, it remains in opposition to positivism, which is similarly a critical and factual space-synthesis. The distinction is, of course, only an emphasis difference—there are few things more romantic, for example, than some aspects of the thought of Comte. But the distinction is there.
In arriving at our definition we have ignored the implications of some of the steps, and have so far considered romanticism in its negative aspect as an opposition to the spirit of the precedent age. The movement we have just defined as romantic, however, shows in itself a development extending from the middle of the eighteenth century to the present day, and to gain a perspective it might be well to trace out its general course before following it out in more detail in its various fields. In general, it shows four periods which defy strict chronology:
I. The period of sensibility and the primitivist thesis.
II. Systematic period.
III. Postromanticism and decadence—rise and domination of positivism.
IV. Rehabilitation in a synthesis of exhaustion.
The opposition of romanticism to rococo is preceded by a transitional, thetical, argumentative period which compared them to the advantage of the newer. This is first of all an attempt to justify the shift to feeling as the centre of the individual. The dying rococo age is characterized by a remarkable phenomenon called the cult of “sensibility,” where the man of fine feeling was regarded as the highest type. Sensibility as practised was almost equivalent to sentimentality, but the word has its uses for our thesis. What men like Richardson, Klopstock, Rousseau were really getting at was not so much sensibility as sensitivity. The refined man was the man most open to emotional impressions from every side. Here is the birth of romanticism: a swing out to the senses and divorcing them from every other part of the soul. The emphasis on the emotional response to sensations, rather than mere observational power, shows that they were regarded, not as facts to be examined, but as symbolic of the observing activity. The chief result was, therefore, not an immediate expansion of knowledge but a flood of egocentric and highly self-conscious letters, diaries, confessions, which by their very nature were marked for sudden death. In our day the man who is awed by everything he sees and writes great stretches of letters and diaries is the provincial finding himself in the big city for the first time, and enthusiastic about it.17 (The fact that this cult antedates the Industrial Revolution and its metropolis by about fifty years proves nothing except that a consistent economic determinist has on his hands an enormous mass of recalcitrant facts to explain away.)
This was followed by the primitivist postulate. It should be noted that while the thought of an organic period rests on the optimism brought out by Leibnitz and shown by Kant to be the product of the blood rather than the brain, such optimism is unintelligible without the doctrine of original sin. Optimism in thought requires to balance it a sort of working pessimism as the basis of action. But with the collapse of the former imminent, it was necessary to bolster it up by carrying the exaltation of feeling a stage further. The man of feeling, that is, the individual and peculiar man, is by nature good. The whole organic development of the religious period has conspired to make him bad. Religion itself is an invention of self-seeking priests, and mankind was far happier before it came, back in the nomadic days. In this is concentrated the whole extent of romantic pessimism in thought and positivistic optimism in action. The noble savage arises to symbolize the new sceptical revolt arising from suddenly turning around and looking at the propelling force of life. The new metropolitan eyes the soil from which he has been cut off, and when he thinks of having lived in connection with it he grows bitter. But as a new form of sense experience, he is delighted with it. The idea of a country vacation for a city worker springs up, and Marie Antoinette goes forth to milk cows.18 The noble savage represents the joys of living in the country without the responsibilities attached to a peasant cultivation of the ground.
On the other hand, the sudden consciousness by the Western world of its own cultural traditions brings the latter into the limelight for consideration as well. The organic period had taken it more or less for granted that the Middle Ages were a nightmare of horror and stupidity and that civilization was developing away from them into a Utopian promised land governed by pure reason. But the earlier romantics who had the courage to look back upon this Sodom and Gomorrah found that it would bear more sustained investigation. Here is another source of the classic-romantic opposition. An organically developing period must, broadly speaking, ignore the whole of its earlier traditions, because its face is set in the other direction. But if it can see another culture which has been completed and can model and discipline itself upon what it has seen done, it gains a tremendous impetus, just as any poet finds the work of others more valuable to him for imitation than his own earlier productions. The whole of Western culture up to this time had been modelled upon the work of the classical civilization, so potently from the Renaissance on that it got from it a momentum that often propelled it through decades of sterility. However, this practice is bound to make for pedantry eventually, and revolt is as natural to pedantry as a recoil to a gun. It should be noted that a creative activity, which requires a model, usually looks at the later and more critical period for it. Hence, the classical influence on this period is, largely speaking, more Roman than Greek—the Hellenic nature of the Renaissance movement is now recognized as greatly overestimated. The critical period of Western culture takes in a more sympathetic appreciation of the Greek and tends to swing toward Euripides and Pindar and away from Ovid and Seneca. On the other hand, the proportion of classical influence as a whole dwindles appreciably. This formula is confirmed in a negative way by the political movements which signified the growth of the romantic spirit. A change in history is duofold—ideal and material.19 A period of ideal change must for stability be worked out in a static environment, as with Kant and Hegel. Conversely, a material change such as a revolution must consolidate the status quo in thought—a revolution engineered by a theorist being foredoomed to failure. The ideal change collateral with the French Revolution was the exaltation of feeling over will and logic—but the Revolution itself ended up in the worship of the goddess of reason. Similarly, the classical influence upon the French and American revolutions was overwhelmingly Latin.20 The new critical spirit could understand its own culture as well, and a revival of interest in medievalism was the result. Heine, who is certainly a romantic, defined romanticism as an enthusiasm for the Middle Ages.21 Hence, we find romanticism associated with extreme liberalism or extreme conservatism according as the viewpoint is focused on the noble savage and the natural man or on the period of Gothic feudalism. Heine’s definition taken together with the curt but profound remark of Goethe—“Classicism is health; romanticism is disease”22—will give us a basis for approaching what are now seen to be the two leading features of romanticism, which we may call the exotic tendency and the esoteric tendency. When these two tendencies are held together the result is romanticism; when they separate, we have positivism and postromanticism. Let us trace this movement out.
The romantic theory of imagination, which says that the intuition of the critical artist is more to be respected in matters of form than any external dicta, implies that the greater the artist, the wider his range of sensation will be. Hence, it is necessary for him to study more and receive a great deal of purely second-hand artistic or philosophical inspiration. Of course, everything he perceives has to be thoroughly absorbed into his mind in order to rank among the egocentric ideas which form his world. But the ideas are transplanted from outside, and in a sense every artistic idea in a critical period is exotic. Originality, which consists in selection, depends, thus, to some extent upon the novelty of that selection, and it is necessary for the artist or philosopher to have a wide range of subjects at his command. The poets turn to the landscape and from the landscape, after that novelty has worn off, into the strangest and remotest countries. Many scenes from romantic plays, novels, and poems are enacted in places that are little more than geographical concepts. Indian, Arabian, Chinese influences are brought wholesale into philosophy. Painting includes some of heaven and nearly all of hell in its range. In the case of an art, the influence of other arts filters in. Literary and pictorial programs for music, social problems for literature, and so on, become commonplaces.
All this is quite in keeping with the viewpoint of the wide-ranging watcher which the artist or philosopher has become. We have shown, however, that mere ranging is not done for its own sake, but the external sensations are exploited purely with reference to the perceiving soul. As they are not in the last analysis fully comprehensible by anyone else, the implication of the esoteric in the exotic is, thus, seen as essential. Now we have noted that romanticism is a factor of the approach which depends on the selection of phenomena. But, of course, the selective process, though fundamental, cannot be the whole of activity, and in, say, an artist, there must be a struggle with an abstracting and creative tendency. The result of this battle is that artistic work tends continually toward making some kind of abstracting pattern out of the subjectively arranged ideas, and, of course, a subjective abstraction arises. Here we see the source of that recondite turning away from life and “literature of escape” motif which is so closely associated with romanticism. Hence comes with romanticism the dominant symbol of the narcotic. The fumes of alcohol, tobacco, and opium rise in clouds from the work of the greatest romantics—Coleridge, Poe, De Quincey, Carlyle, Berlioz, Doré. Art and literature in many instances become opiates, romantic politics possessed of an unmistakably alcoholic stimulus—augmented to heroin in some cases—and philosophy itself, in its tendency to broad and occasionally lazy generalizations, reminds one of the quiescent reflectiveness of tobacco smoking.
This means, of course, that a subjective, individual critic must for his work abstract himself from life. What connections he has with life are as a matter of course sense connections and his reconditeness is the result of the romantic repudiation of the organic life preceding it. Philosophy, too, must go through a similar repudiation. The man of feeling looks back on a period of temporal propulsion as under the domination of will. Looking at it pictorially, the philosopher sees it as dreary and miserable. To go back into the world-as-will would be as undesirable as impossible; all that is possible is a retreat into the abstracted idea, or egocentric idea-group, the world-as-idea.
Man is by nature good: the world-as-will has made him bad. Hence, self-expression must be right. We cannot prove that God exists or that he ever incarnated himself in man; but we can feel those things. Proof henceforth can only be given by the agreement of individuals. Activity of some sort is necessary, and the only satisfactory form under this new condition is not the elaboration of a religious world-synthesis, but simply the acquisition of a large stock of ideas and comparing them with those of others to see which ones will work. This gives us the beginning of positivism. Work is necessary; this kind of work is the only possible one.
So thought turns from the contemplation of the time-world-as-will into the conquest of the space-world-as-idea. The new gospel becomes, therefore, a gospel of reform in analytic action. With the rise of positivism non-Euclidean mathematics appears, replacing the old intellectualized concept of abstract space, and empiric science begins to work out its development, acquiring the time-provinces of biology and economics. Metaphysical foundations of this structure are not present, because this science is not a structure at all, but an excavation, a search for hidden secrets in the world, with a vague unexpressed hope of finding a rock-bottom formula somewhere. Now an activity like this must of necessity either slight the time-problem or reduce it to a space-dimension. In the latter case the great romantic philosophies of history are replaced by the pseudoscientific banalities of materialism, and in the former romanticism becomes decadent. The narcotic art and literature noted above change from the wine of Shelley or Heine to anodynes and chloroforms. The abstraction from reality becomes a sentimental glossing of it. The exotic tendency is carried to the most tasteless limits, for instance in architecture. Positivism hates romanticism because of the latter’s insistence on the former’s lack of foundations and its predictions that science will break its shins eventually on the mystery of time-movement. In this period romanticism acquires a bad name. It becomes associated with large loose generalizations and the most presumptuous question begging in philosophy, with wild-eyed and exceedingly cloudy liberalism and radicalism in politics, with sentimentality in music, with flamboyance in painting, with gaudy but futile daydreams in literature. Romanticism, in short, is equated with the faults of romanticism. And, as we are still in the backwash of positivism, this attitude persists in many quarters. When I announced my choice of a thesis to a Toronto-Oxford graduate of recent standing, a fanatical and in this post-pragmatic era a somewhat belated empiricist and sceptic, he said: “You’ll find it interesting if you don’t get the idea that there is anything in it.” However, a movement which finds philosophical expression in Fichte, Schelling, Schleiermacher, Schopenhauer, and strikes its roots deep into Kant and Hegel, may be repudiated, but cannot very well be dismissed with a gesture.
Under the domination of positivism romanticism turns into post-romanticism. This has the same attitude to the world-as-will, and cannot content itself with a retreat into the idea and turn into pure positivism because its dislike for the world-as-will is too strong, and positivism looks like a compromise with it. Neither can it hang back in the pictorial stage of romanticism proper, because that is out of harmony with the tendency of the age. The exotic has been lost to positivism; there is nothing to do but continue with the esoteric. Some conception must be evolved whereby the action-program of positivism can be gathered into the individual and not referred to a majority vote. This conception is the will to power, and, as that is doomed to frustration in practice from the start, it manifests itself largely in crankiness, freakishness, and the baiting of humanity in general, whereby it continues the tradition of the supremacy of the feeling-compulsion of aesthetics. Consequently, it is practised by abnormal intellects which are either partly insane, as Strindberg, Baudelaire, perhaps even Wagner, or function normally for a time and then go to pieces—Nietzsche, Schumann, MacDowell, Hugo Wolf, and Van Gogh. This merges insensibly into a somewhat rancid decadence of extreme disillusionment, supercilious erudition, and a contempt of convention.
But at the same time it becomes increasingly clear that the reduction of everything to a space-dimension is equally decadent. Pure materialism, economic determinism of history, linear adaptive evolution, are found unsatisfactory because they are time-problems worked out from an entirely spatial bias, and the only way to deal with the problems arising from the outgrowing of these primitive conceptions is to turn back to time. A reaction sets in against decadence which is really a renovation of romanticism. With the scientific recognition of entropy as a continually increasing random element, a creative or emergent (from this particular point of view it does not matter much which) factor is postulated, first in evolution with Bergson, then in history with Spengler, and the tentative systems of the epigones of Darwin and Marx, as they stand, collapse before a reincarnation of Fichte and Hegel. Pragmatism springs up to show that spatial truth, however abstract or eternal, is in the last analysis relative to the temporal conditioning.
This is the final stage of romanticism. The new era is not one of combining romanticism and positivism in a supreme synthesis, but simply a recognition that each is equally valid and that there is a great and impassable gulf between. Romanticism itself had shattered the great attempt at a synthesis from time; it had returned to shatter its descendant attempt at a synthesis from space. Civilization is a continual abstraction of the city from the soil, materially considered. Considered ideally, it is equally a continually increasing development and abstraction of thought from being. The former is a space-conquest, and when it finally breaks off from time it can only revolve around it like the moon around the earth, brilliant but completed, systematized, and inorganic.23
In life, that is, in time-movement, there are two great conflicts and contrasts. The first is the conflict of youth immersed in time with age abstracted from it. The second is the clash between male and female as opponent spatial and temporal tendencies.
First, then, romanticism falls almost entirely into the hands of young men. The symbolism of the rise of youth seems to emanate from Mozart, just as the rise of the woman seems to emanate from Goethe. But we feel Mozart’s early death as something abnormal and monstrous: the insensate exploitation of Mozart the child burns out too quickly Mozart the man. We get the same idea of early exhaustion in the romantics, but it cannot fairly be said to be premature in any case that I have reviewed. An artist with an urge to create is bound to die young; a philosopher who gains his viewpoint in youth has no further continuous compelling urge and may live on, like Schopenhauer.24 A romantic politician, too, may live on after finishing his work, though there is marked danger, due to change in conditions, that he will become an infernal nuisance if he does—Mazzini being the best example.25 The reason for this dominance of youthfulness is not hard to see. Romanticism is an attempt to work out a philosophy or art by dealing with temporal factors from what must necessarily be a spatial standpoint. Youth is that period of life in which the time-urge is most evident. Hence, in general in the organic period, youth undergoes a continual subjection similar to that of woman, because a spatial abstraction can only be the work of a man arrived at an abstracted and spatial viewpoint—that is, a mature man, in whom the various time-surges of enthusiasm and exuberance, notably the sex instinct, do not run away with the attempt to impose a spatial discipline. In other words, a youthful approach would be one preoccupied with temporal considerations, which is what developing art or philosophy cannot be and what romanticism must be. Youth is the period, too, of feeling and imagination, and the supremacy of these is helped along by the fact that the great romantics so often reach their true style almost with their first attempts. The result is a sharp clash with age—Schopenhauer versus Hegel, for instance, or Mazzini versus Cavour26—the revolt of romantic genius against academic pedantry being largely the dislike of a young fool for an old fool. Unfortunately, the public for artistic and philosophical attempts contains an overwhelming majority of mature people—the very strength of the temporal force in youth makes them as a rule interested in other things. Besides, all the power and prestige belongs to maturity. The great romantics, thus, usually lead lonely, unrecognized, and poverty-stricken lives. Our conception of a young genius starving in a garret probably dates from this period. Not that lack of recognition is peculiar to romanticism, but we do not get quite the same phenomenon of ignoring a young artist or philosopher completely and then suddenly recognizing him at a time when, if he were still alive, he would be in his old age. Usually he has starved to death long ago, Schopenhauer being an isolated exception.
The sexual implications of romanticism are more elusive. The romantic movement, broadly speaking, changes the status of woman from primarily mother to primarily wife—that is, from a time- into a space-symbol. In the creative period woman is the great reproductive force, and she fights a silent battle with time while man evolves his religious, scientific, and artistic space-conquests and abstractions. When she is cut off from the soil she becomes, not so much the evolutionary force which produces man and makes possible his work, as a complement and rounding out of his nature. This as a matter of course causes the sexes to approach steadily in costume,27 build, and environmental opportunity. A gradual interabsorption of sex characteristics in temperament results, the female assuming those of the male, the male losing those which distinguish him sharply from the female. The historical development through mother and son, the one continually pulling away from the other, shifts to a settling down into marriage as the fundamental basis for activity. The economic system of the market place and culture-town was a constant copulation of the masculine city and the feminine soil— industry and agriculture. Now agricultural development becomes a source of raw material for industry, and economics is worked out on a purely industrial and masculine basis in which recurrent depressions of ever increasing intensity and vicious annihilation wars which sweep along millions helpless in its grip are inevitable features. These bear an obvious relation to auto-eroticism, and the hope that they will eventually effect the complete sterility of a nationless and classless society is not an unnatural one.
Hence, when the great romantics came they were brought face to face with the mystery of sex as a symbol of time. The springing up of a large number of priapic romantic artists and the great mythological figure of Don Juan go along with the romantic struggle with the time-problem. The positivistic turning away from time brings with it, therefore, a nervous prudery, anticipated by Schopenhauer’s misogynistic absorption in sex.28 The romantic rehabilitation cancels this and returns to the romantic attitude under changed conditions.
As long as the sexes are separate, the one is seen to be the great time-symbol of will, the other the great space-symbol of understanding. When they intermingle, the organic thrust and parry is metamorphosed into an endless static conflict in the one soul, of primarily sexual significance—the conflict of libido and ego. Hence, the theory of artistic and philosophical production as the result of suppression and sublimation of the libido falls down by its inexactness of perspective when applied to the organic period, but becomes far more plausible in connection with romanticism. We can see a good deal of suppressed libido in the great romantics and a good deal of suppressed self-expression and frustrated will to power in the postromantics, for instance in Tschaikowsky and the English poet James Thomson.
The recognition of woman as wife and rejection of her as mother is, thus, essential to the metropolitan break-off. The romantic period is the period of the mistress, with Byron, Chopin, Shelley, Burns, Goethe, and many others. The positivist period establishes her as wife. The great romantics often fight with their mothers—Byron, Schumann, Schopenhauer, Fichte are examples—and a deep-rooted hatred of the old woman past the desirable age begins to appear, chiefly, of course, in the records of humour. The most celebrated humorous productions of the positivistic era—the Gilbert and Sullivan operas—in almost every instance have their plots based on the ridiculing of an old woman, which impresses the next generation as unspeakably caddish.29 The positivistic attitude is worked out theoretically by Weininger and in drama by Strindberg.30 With the rehabilitation of romanticism women are recognized as a symbol of the dominant time-force which is at last admitted to absorb everything finally in its movement. Humour, from Bernard Shaw to the comic strips, makes the supremacy of woman its central theme. Tragedy consists in watching with a fascinated horror the ego going down before the libido... .31
Those periods in which the time-problem is squarely faced or at least recognized as valid are, consequently, feminine periods. The cult of sensibility is unmistakably the first feminine entry into culture. The order of the sopping handkerchief rules supreme, from the literary “confession” to the fussy intricacies of architecture. Philosophy takes a similar trend. What is silly and amusing about the noble savage myth results chiefly from its being largely a feminine admiration for the strong man, and Rousseau’s doctrines seem to be as fully intended for feminine digestions as Richardson’s novels. Obscenity in the grand style immediately collapses in literature, particularly in England. The organic period dominated by the male is necessarily associated with obscenity, because the sexual impulse in man is what holds him down to time, and his spatial abstractions in literature must contain a good many shrugs, winks, and guffaws at the force which so potently pulls him back. On the other hand, the sexual characteristics are the essential part of femininity, and to a woman flippancy in connection with them is unbearable. In the positivistic period this is supported by the masculine desire for purity of spatial abstraction from time, and as sex remains a relentless and unyielding time-force, it is impure. With our romantic rehabilitation, feminine dislike and masculine love of obscenity are combined to form a constant but in the main serious and frequently morbid preoccupation with the theme.
For my personal point of view I have always found it convenient to illustrate historical vistas in colours, and I usually think of Western culture, with its continually lowering vital force and advancing maturity, as a descending spectrum. The gorgeous fierce terror of violet is in the Romanesque; deep mystical indigo ecstasy in the great Catholic period; cold blue abstraction in late scholasticism; lush and often rank naturalism of green in the Renaissance; yellow, with its pomp and its blinding illuminating intensity, is in the logic and state-form of the baroque; orange, the colour of gold, for the romantic-positivistic era; and red, the colour of sex, irritation, and restlessness, for our own day. If we are not afraid of symbolism, we may find it a help to visualize the rise of romanticism as an introduction of a red colour scheme into culture. Red is the colour of sexuality, as any animal knows,32 and is, consequently, the great time-colour which underlies all the rest and which eventually succeeds them, the other two primary colours being both abstractions into space, the one religious and mystical, the other religious and logical. We shall see later how romanticism in politics works through to a movement of irritation and force, symbolized by communistic red and the red of British imperialism alike. We have seen the rise of a tremendous sexual force in life which the early religious period recognized when it associated the red arising from orange—scarlet—as the colour of adultery, and we have seen that romanticism signifies it.
And so, having endeavoured to make clear the general concept of romanticism even to the point of visualization, let us proceed to our analysis.
After what has been said, we should expect romantic philosophy to show a development corresponding to the general outline we have given. First, a period in which the attention was turned from thought-conquest to the edifices already built by civilization, the reaction of the feeling-man rather than the thought-man. Then a systematic period of development in which the distinction between the world as it is and the world as we see it gradually grew to be, not one of greater spatial homogeneity, but one of time and space. After this, a strenuous egocentric struggle to power and transvaluation of values, and finally, the working out of the final implications of the romantic position.
The first period is usually regarded as synonymous with Rousseau, according to the principle that the destructive attack of romanticism is always French. Rousseau was the first dissentient voice in the chorus of tranquil placidity which prevailed throughout the rococo. As such, he brought the “enlightenment” down to earth by a historical retrospect—a fictitious one, certainly, but still an appeal to history. Like Schopenhauer after him, life as represented in history is evil, and, consequently, civilization as we have it now is bad. It really is bad, in spite of its being the “best of all possible worlds,”33 and that fact, the natural reaction of the man of feeling, contains the seed of the great romantic skepsis. Rousseau had learned from experience that most of our elaborated theories are merely justifications for our feelings. No matter how compelled we may be to think logically, still all our thought aims at vindication of our original bias of mind, which is embodied in prejudices. This fact is amply verified in experience.
Now we must digress for a moment to show the implications of Rousseau’s position. All organized thought, up to this time, was based in large upon reason. But mere reason does not come into existence of itself; it must be formulated by a will to reason. The will is the time-force, reason a spatial conquest, and, hence, the organic thought of a culture is an impregnation of nature by the force of spirit. It is this force which abstracts forms from matter, which are the tools of knowledge and art. But the great nominalistic space-conquest from the Renaissance to Leibnitz had concentrated on reason so much that the will had become unconscious and instinctive, or, as Schopenhauer would say, blind.34 Thought, space-conquest, is good, but too much dwelling on action is paralysing and evil. Now feeling is also an interfusion of time-and space-concepts, but it is not a living or organic synthesis of them. It is the spatial reaction which looks at the “religious” one. Feeling, criticism, skepsis—these three words are all closely interrelated. Hence, feeling must reverse the presupposition of religion that thought is good and will bad until it recognizes that the latter is separate and unknowable. The thought-conquests actualized in civilization are bad, and men who have produced them are bad. What is good comes from nature. If we ask what this nature is, we discover that it is the world beneath our spatial abstractions of it. It is, with Kant, the thing-in-itself, and with Schopenhauer, the will. Thus, the “nature” of Rousseau turns out to be more on the side of what the Germans would call Geist.
The reason for this is that Rousseau symbolizes the new metropolitan, who has turned to look at the soil, but has not yet turned on the force propelling him out of the soil. But it should be noted that even here there is no complete surrender to a “state of nature.” The point is significant that Rousseau approved of the state of nature because in it wants and the capacity to satisfy them are equivalent, and the will cancels out. What Rousseau wanted to recapture was that rare moment of culture-birth which combined the pleasures of nomad and culture-man; civilization had spoiled this by making a temporal attack on space. Amour propre is a sign of the struggling will, and struggle, or useless energy, is bad. This must be reversed. We must return to a life which is fundamentally contemplation—that is, the natural expression of our feelings or reactions. Positive education, which annihilates the child and regards him as an imperfect adult, must be replaced by negative education, in which the validity of the child’s time-absorption is recognized. The political outlook is, of course, focused on romantic sympathy—the atomic attraction of the metropolis.
Will is not good, nor is it in itself bad. Reason is similarly irrelevant to moral values. It is the use made of them that is significant. The only moral value lies in the picture-blend and criticism of them, which is feeling and is organized by conscience. That is fundamentally good. Rousseau’s thought, as we have seen, is self-contradictory. The organizing will is bad, certainly, but nature, in which the good of man lies, is also will when the concept is pressed hard enough. But as the contradiction is a historical necessity, we cannot dismiss it by discovering it.
It is, however, in Kant that the matrix of romanticism lies. This is true, not because Kant was a romanticist, but because it was Kant who definitely ended the organic period and thereby gave romanticism its raison d’être. Romanticism and positivism represent a contradiction, and it was Kant who pointed out the contradiction while laying down the program for both. In discussing Kant’s relation to romanticism, therefore, it is necessary only to indicate his general historical importance for philosophy.
We have shown how all romantic artistic activity is subjective and critical; we should expect romantic philosophy to exhibit the same characteristics. It was Kant who destroyed both dogmatism and scepticism, which are obverse and reverse of organic philosophy, and made necessary for all future philosophers the critical approach. Now dogmatism, for Kant, is an attempt to build a philosophical structure from first principles. But the fact that none of these systems have stood the ultimate test of universal and unfailing application in any period of time suggests that those first principles are in every case insufficiently analysed. The general characteristic of these principles is that they refer to a fundamental distinction between the sensible world and the intelligible world—the world as sense impression and the world as evolved from understanding. Philosophy, which explains the one from the other, ends up in scepticism or scholasticism respectively. But when we come to analyse the origin of these first principles, we find, first, that they all depend upon our two ultimate forms of perception for their existence— space and time.
Now it is peculiar that the great tradition which comes down to us from the Greeks, differentiating the worlds of thought and of experience, postulates the former as higher and more truly real, no matter which it starts from. And if we ask in what the difference consists, we find that the one is always true, unchanging, and eternal, while the other is constantly shifting and dissolving—one is always there and the other perplexes by its constant change and instability. The world of sense perception is a world of extension in which extended objects are continually getting messed up, as it were, by the relentless time-force of succession. The ultimate goal of knowledge, then, is toward complete space-abstraction. The existence of God is the hope held out that there is a pure being who forms within himself a cohesion and immortality independent of becoming.
The higher our knowledge, the more independent of time it is, and the more it tends to spatial abstraction. Thought is fundamentally a space-conquest. But, says Kant, there is no difference in the last analysis between what we think and what we see—everything that is an object of knowledge originates in experience, and everything we can know is phenomenal. The sensible world we find difficulty in conquering, because there is something in it that we cannot ultimately know—time. Knowledge strives to get at the essence of the world by throwing out this element, but the result is no more real than the other in the sense of being any less dependent on experience. No knowledge can get beyond the spatial world. This is the ultimate skepsis which ended the creative period of philosophy.
Now if even a world of pure forms is just as phenomenal as the ordinary world of mixed objects, it is fully as pictorial. All knowledge is a synthesis, and the totality of concepts is a world-picture and nothing more. In this world-picture space in its essence exists, but time in its essence certainly does not. Succession has to be necessary—that is, phenomena following in time have to be thought of together as bound in a relationship which excludes the time-element. Any dogmatic philosophy must proceed from a spatial grasp of time—the axiom of causality. The ultimate in organic skepsis, similarly, has been reached, when this principle is attacked. The same is true for the relationship of potentiality to actuality. All twelve categories are space-concepts.35
The next step is, what evolves this world-picture? The perceiving subject, obviously. But the subject is a time-entity, who does everything in time. His world-picture is similarly a temporal product, though it represents a temporal negation. We perceive in time—hence, a world of pure space we do not perceive. But knowledge is an activity, and we perceive actively an outer world. A picture is two-dimensional, and what an eye passively receives must similarly be two-dimensional. What gives us activity must be a depth-experience producing form. But this must proceed from the nature of living, which is a temporal force. Form, then, must be the impregnation of the sensible world with a time-force of being (being with a small b; living, the concrete of which thought is an abstraction). The more formal, that is, the more purely spatial, knowledge becomes, the greater the temporal force required to condition it. All organic knowledge results from an interfusion of time in space. We have seen that this points to feeling, and so all creative knowledge rests, not on reason, but on faith—the underlying feeling-compulsion. Religious philosophy is an artistic product.
Critical philosophy, then, must recognize that if dogmatism, or creative philosophy, is a living form, it can live only as long as the temporal-spatial interfusion force lasts. Once time is recognized as there, as unbeaten and the real baffling force behind the phenomenal world, we have two problems confronting philosophy. One, positivism, deals with the exploring and exploiting of the universal picture. The other, romanticism, with the examination of the time-problem by its spatial deposit of history. Do not invent universal formulas—they must be hidden somewhere. Romanticism says, can we by seeing what lies back of the organic development of history discover the nature of the force which pushed it on? The reason why the case of romanticism is so much weaker than that of positivism is that it could not examine facts, which are space-phenomena, except insofar as they symbolized a time-force. Out of the fossilized remains of a dinosaur one may evolve a skeleton and infer a picture of what the animal was like. Both results are purely spatial and phenomenal. Romanticism tried to produce a living dinosaur, on a false basis—that time is phenomenal. Only its spatial manifestations are phenomenal, and that is all we can know of time.
Hence, romanticism has to be revolt against Kant. Had Kant been universally accepted, or, rather, had the implications of his teaching been recognized, we should have expected that the whole subsequent philosophical activity would have been positivistic, or simply repetitive. Romanticism is under the influence of the great systematic tradition, and its philosophy is just as much of an art form as that of the preceding age, its very name being a metaphor derived from the arts. It is a sort of appoggiatura,36 or suspension, of positivism. We therefore find two stages in its development—one the idealistic stage of enthusiasm, the other the weary disillusioned stage which turns to positivism. Fichte, Schelling, Hegel, and Schleiermacher represent the first stage, in approximately that order; Schopenhauer is the supreme example of the second.
The systematic stage is committed to idealism for two reasons. First, the thing is a pure spatial fact, the idea is symbol of it; and we have seen that romanticism is fundamentally a symbolic activity. Second, the time-problem refers to the percipient who evolves the idea out of the thing. Fichte rejected materialism on the ground that, while each approach was self-contained and consistent, the material one cannot start from the beginning (this is a time-word, and, consequently, begs the question) because it does not explain the possibility of ideas, nor does it recognize that being can do without consciousness of being.37 Time is fundamentally stronger than space, and all spatial ideas are subservient to time. Our approach must be egocentric and critical throughout, and subjectively idealistic. Everything outside us is non-ego, against us and a counterconcept to us. We are saved from solipsism by the obvious independence of the non-ego from our purely temporal activity—that is, our will. But if our idealism is to be consistent, then, if our world-picture is the product of a limited ego, the world itself is evidently the product of an absolute ego. The basis for scientific activity, then, which a solipsistic interpretation of idealism would paralyse, lies in this recognition of our limitation. This is the negative way of stating the Kantian idea of forms—for form, negatively considered, is a limitation with a meaning. We have seen that form springs from feeling, so here again is a basic romantic conception. Feeling is obviously identified with conscience. Here, out of Fichte’s thought there begins to shape an idea which was to bring about the eventual destruction of systematic romanticism. If all activity is formal, one has only to bring in its obverse statement that activity consists in working within limitations to arrive at the concept that life is all struggle and effort. This was grasped as early as Lessing, and is explicitly recognized in Fichte and many other romantics. Now give this statement again its antithesis, and we say, first, that because life is all struggle and will, it is all dissolution and change and is, therefore, chaotic, and because life is all effort, it is a great weariness and hopelessness and is, therefore, evil. Recognition of the inevitability of a time-force implies recognition of its irresistible power. But we anticipate.
In Fichte we first find the romantic application of the great law of the three stages upon which the present thesis is based. Kant had named dogmatic, sceptical, and critical as his three. Applied generally to history, this would coincide with the one which actually took place and which can instantly be seen once we postulate the culture as the unit of history, if we understand that here scepticism means simply an empiric and nominalistic approach to the dogmatic point of view. But with Fichte the second period drops out as merely transitional, and his three are the so-called “normal nation” of barbarism, the age of authority, the age of reasonable knowledge.38 This is the first and the primitivist one of the several romantic interpretations which found their essence in Hegel. The wide-ranging nomad of the steppes is rehabilitated by the wide-ranging uprooted nomadic metropolitan critic. Both are antitemporal existences separated by a temporal-to-spatial age of authority of chiefly a disciplinary value.
In Fichte, too, come the storm troops of the conflict of contraries. A limited ego, compelled by its nature (Fichte names no other source) to struggle with its limited non-egoistic world-picture, finds its activity composed of a mutual interaction of limitations. The egoistic acts are identified with time, the non-egoistic phenomena with space. These two forms of perception are antithetical, and one cannot be deduced from the other. But, Fichte says, a synthesis results from these two, and that is why we can have organized thinking, which could not proceed out of a flat opposition. But, of course, as we can only “know” time spatially, there is no doubt about the synthesis, except that it does not signify anything more than the romantic pictorial attack on time.39
In Schelling we are deeper into romanticism and more conscious of some of its difficulties. Fichte’s interest in philosophy was largely of ethical orientation—the problem of time brings in the regulation of time-compulsion. But to Schelling philosophy starts with the untrammelled freedom of the ego, instead of regarding that as a final ideal. As he recognizes no adequate distinction between consciousness and content, or even mind and matter, ethics has little importance in his work. We might summarize the leading theme of his philosophy by calling it a world-as-time idea. As the ego exists in time, the world is its idea. Here Schelling breaks with Fichte. With the more critical philosopher Natur and Geist are antithetical. Schelling attacks Fichte on what is definitely a weak point—if this is true, no knowledge can result from mere opposition, which cancels both parties to it, and how can a synthesis be formed if we do not start with some basis of essential understanding of nature by spirit? Fichte had given no satisfactory answer on this point. If time and space are antithetical, one of them we do not know, unless one be included in the other. If we “start” with the ego, space is included in time, and the world must be explained in terms of forces. Nature then is an “Odyssey of the Spirit,” and exists as in a measure symbolic of it— the actuality of nature is the potentiality of spirit.40
Therefore, the intelligible world, the world of reality, is the world of symbols. Schelling rejects empirical science, not referring even to it for verification, because it deals only with facts as facts, and, consequently, rests on a hypothetical basis. Science is not rejected, however, as it was with Parmenides, for the sake of a motionless and timeless world of pure being. The reciprocal interconnection of phenomena is all right in itself; we cannot understand anything without it. But space is contained in time, and all science is a surface ripple behind which lies the time-force. It does not go deep enough. Science must deal with dead or deadened material—the fact is dead, the symbolic interpretation of the fact points to life. All thought consists in comparing and analysing, as Kant had shown. Facts in space may be compared ad nauseam. But is there not some underlying principle by which we can arrive at a comprehension of living forms? It may be assumed that the time-force is uniform; hence, whatever is uniform in nature is significant. The way to understand living forms, in short, is by analogy. But the sense of analogy is from an external impression which makes an immediate appeal to us independent of reasoning analysis, so that our comprehension of the world is intuitive.
But in Schelling, too, we find that when time is approached it becomes a space-dimension, and so his world-view is just as motionless and pictorial as that of any positivist, except that in him the foreground is comprehended in the background, while with the opponent philosophy the reverse is the case. With Schelling the world is a world of forces, or powers, of constantly rising purity from absolute nature to absolute spirit, or ego. Underneath all there is a peculiar animism—forces and motions in nature form approximations to conscious life. This is evolution, certainly, and it is the first romantic evolution. Conscious life is the ego, and the ego is implicit in the approximations to consciousness. As Natur is contained in Geist, what is apparently its independent development is the result of the world becoming idea. In Schelling absolute idealism begins to lift its head, and as long as that expression makes sense we can have romanticism. When the world-as-idea begins to separate out from the working through of the force which is recognized as will, romanticism is doomed. In any case, the ascending scale of powers means that everything is transitional between Natur and Geist, and whatever is transitional must contain an inner contradiction which connects it to both its neighbours. This contradiction, or polarity, in Schelling corresponds to the subject-object distinction, so that here again is the conception that the essential reality of everything is form, and form to a romantic, as we have so often seen, implies the creative force of time. As any scale is quantitative, Schelling is quite right in calling his scheme “dynamic atomism.”41
Schelling is far more advanced than Fichte, to say nothing of Hegel, and is far closer to Schopenhauer, in that the synthesis in connection with the opposition of Natur and Geist in his philosophy underlies the latter and remains hidden, thus making thought-activity fundamentally an excavation. One needs only to draw an inference from this to arrive at the differentiated conceptions of will and idea. Schelling did not arrive at any explanation of this underlying blend, except to name it “indifference,”42 but later, when he turned to the religious problem, having once established his position in his youth, he could only get as far as calling the antithesis fundamental and saying that evil is as necessary to God as good. Like practically all subjective idealists and egocentrics, he develops his position in early youth and turns to mysticism with maturity.
The connection of Hegel with romanticism rests chiefly on Hegel’s own conception of the Zeitgeist as symbolic of the inner unity of the time-problem. He disliked romanticism because its idealism did not press forward into reality. His own chief interest, as well as his interest for posterity, centres on the strong impulse to unify and cohere the spiritual side of life into a conception sufficiently clear to be recognized as the driving force of material. He wanted the idea to penetrate the innermost interstices of reality; and in this he revolted against romanticism because he attempted what they desired but shirked. He started out with Schelling, attacking earlier critical philosophers, notably Kant and Fichte, because their approach had destroyed the systematization resultant from the matching of subject with object. Like the romantics, he was necessarily a subjectivist critic, yet he hated subjectivity because he faced out to the world-as-idea and was bent on its idealistic conquest, a process easily ruined by introspection. Then he broke with Schelling because of the arbitrary and formalized schemata of that philosopher, which represented to him an immature and hasty jumping at conclusions. He wanted to realize idealism and to idealize reality, and no one can attempt this without in some measure being answerable to the charge, when the approach is made from the ideal side, of having butchered facts to make a theorist’s holiday.
It should now be clear what we meant earlier by saying that the ultimate aim of a romanticist was a philosophy of history. History is simply the space-manifestations of time, and, hence, the approach to the time-problem is gradually forced down to a purely historical basis. If the earlier romantics did not recognize this, it was because they had a static, pictorial goal ahead of them and wished to capture the whole of time, instead of a section of it bearing some semblance of spatial order, which Hegel called the Zeitgeist, in a visible presentation. Hence, Hegel is the stage intermediate between Schelling’s thermometer diagram of creation and the positivistic dislike of all history. There is still an attempt to rein in the conception of a universally evolving world, toward which precipice romanticism was rushing, for in Hegel’s world of absolute idea there is little allowance made for organic growth in time or an inner integration directed toward development. To allow a causative force in the world was a step of great boldness; to consider the force homogeneous and invariable was one of shrinking authoritarianism. Both these characteristics are evident in Hegel.
In Hegel’s dialectic lies, of course, the sine qua non of Hegelianism. The dialectic of a thesis carried over into an antithesis and resolving upon a synthesis is another romantic approach to Kant’s law of three stages. It breathes as well the very essence of that optimism in action which was to become the keynote of positivism. From the three stages of Comte’s43 historical outlook to the three-volume novels with happy endings, the positivist era was dominated by a belief that it constituted a third and final section of development leading to Utopia.44 But with Hegel there is no more development in this than there is in a syllogism. The thesis becomes a synthesis, not because it is outmoded, but because it is limited, and by bursting out into the empty receptacle of its antithesis it is simply breaking down a barrier in a homogeneous, constantly preserved mass of knowledge. This dialectic is Hegel’s world-process. Pessimism underlies this, as it underlies all romantic thought, because when closely examined the negation of an antithesis takes us to a region suspiciously resembling the purlieus of the original thesis. But it was not conceived pessimistically—on the contrary, it gave the romantics what seemed a powerful bludgeon to wield on the proposition that we know only (space) phenomena. If reason or the idea is the causative factor of experience, the development of pure reason could still take in all existence. And there is necessarily no “creative evolution” in this type of thinking. Romanticism was to find, however, that the greatest of all theses—space—had for its antithesis time, and that one, as Fichte under the influence of the critical philosophy had pointed out, was not deducible from the other.
Hegel concludes the romantic assault on the time-problem by his complete all-embracing spirituality. There is no development in nature, but only metamorphosis, and a constant refinement of externality into spirit. His theory of the state is almost Hobbes’s leviathan seen in reverse. Similarly the mind-thesis embodied in psychology unites with the material antithesis embodied in sociology to form the universal mind embodied in the great synthetic structures of art, religion, and speculative philosophy. This is the peculiarly human stage, and with Hegel the romantic skepsis herewith receives its antinomian confirmation.
In Schleiermacher we are brought face to face with the religious problem, freed from the ethical and social overemphasis with which Fichte and Hegel had charged it. Here we have the antithesis of temporal religious synthesis and spatial feeling-grasp directly presented. The lack of emphasis on social ethics thus results from Schleiermacher’s denial of a universal compulsive synthesis. In application to ethics this destroys the idea of a valid moral law. The break-up of a religious or linking force among humanity has left “feeling” a purely individual affair. Protestantism, then, is reduced with Schleiermacher to its lowest terms—any doctrine, or ism, is a personal contribution to and an individual slant on knowledge. Evangelism presupposes the individual as unit; the only permanent, lasting good is obtained by personal example and reciprocal exchanging of influences. Let each intellectually honest or decent person take his own way, and he will not go far wrong. Here is the systematic working through of the primitivist postulate that man is by nature good. His nature, according to the romantics, is fundamentally feeling.
When the feeling-critic is brought up against and opposed to religion, or a feeling-creativeness, he makes a pictorial reproduction of it which converts religion into something very like aesthetics. The attempt to show that the good is good because it is beautiful is at least as old as Shaftesbury,45 and with Schleiermacher the influence of the spirit of God comes to man through the attunement of his feeling. The romantic esoteric draws himself in to the very essence of his own soul, and there he can, if a sensitive aesthete, detect for an instant the mysterious moving time-force of the will of God. This sounds like mysticism, but it is nothing of the kind. With a thinker who summed up the creative period, like Blake, it easily becomes so, but mysticism is impossible to a romantic. A mystic works, not only with a psyche, or subjectively idealistic soul, but with a pneuma, or universal spirit in which individuality is completely absorbed. Schleiermacher has the soul, but the spirit of God is revealed only in that, and between the peculiar soul and the entelechic pneuma there is fixed the great gulf between creation and criticism. The romantic skepsis pushes God out of the actual world and positivism digs a scientific mine under the gulf to try to find his materialistic incarnation.
Thus, in this system dogmas are to religious thought, or rather contemplation, what the ordinary conventions of society are to the thinker—they have no deep-rooted immutable foundations in reality, but they save time and trouble in exchanging ideas in social intercourse. Religion, once for all, does not trust to proof, whether cosmological or ontological. Reason has, it is true, a connotation of universal mind-compulsion, but reason can take us no further than phenomena, as Kant had shown. The underlying opposition of Natur and Geist remains, for Schleiermacher. Reason may conquer Natur, but that is all. The way out is to recognize that man’s nature is not by any means exhausted in his reasoning faculty, and there is something in him which lies deeper, which is far older, and constitutes his real essence. This faculty of feeling gives us ideas which transcend experience. It is true that these ideas have only a symbolic value. But if symbolism is present, there must be a reality outside all possible experience of which it forms a mirage. This is, of course, that unknowable force which is called God, will, or time, depending on the attitude. There is infinite variety in humanity because of the infinite potency of the differentiating feeling. Hence, feeling alone can deal in any way with infinity—knowledge works through form, or limitation. Similarly, what gives the reason-structure vitality, what dynamizes it and connects it with the time-force, is the original, personal thesis expressive of common nature.
If feeling underlies reason, faith knowledge, our idea of God, which implies the unity of thinking and being, must be taken as a starting point, and also as unknowable. The goal is the completed world-idea, which is unrealizable. The activity in between is the understanding, organizing, positivistic space-construction based on a blood-feeling of God, and works with limits, or force-engendered forms. Criticism, in the world of living conscience, checks up on this activity and compares it with the inaccessible terminus. Only religious feeling can go back to the starting point, God, for strength and solace. Its feeling is real, but its meaning and expression are symbolic. God-consciousness is the highest thought-activity; yet it is not knowledge, but only a grasp at the root of knowledge. Christ was a transmitter of God-consciousness.
This romantic religion is the logical working out of Kant’s ethics and marks the beginning of romantic disillusionment. Thoughts correspond to being, and a totality of concepts to a causal relation. Here we are very close to Schopenhauer. The miraculous in religion is abolished, and the way cleared for positivism. God as unity to world as totality is an infinite series, but still a series. Schleiermacher represents the last attempt of the romantics to hold together Natur and Geist, space and time, world and God. With him they hang together by a feeling which is opposed to the organizing activity of science. There is real opposition, then, implicit, and the next step would be to separate them and, in giving supreme expression to romanticism, destroy it as it stood.
This step was taken by Schopenhauer. Romanticism, as we have seen, resolves itself into positivism as inevitably as positivism itself resolves into neoromanticism, the total progression reminding one of a six-four cadence—in fact, probably symbolized by it. Thus, Schopenhauer, because he is the last systematic romantic, is the first positivist. Romanticism struggles to approach the time-problem and is, thus, a kind of reversed systematic philosophy; positivism turns to space. Schopenhauer, in finally making the division, marks in himself the turn. Near the end of systematic romanticism we find in every field a group of essentially bourgeois minds bringing out the positivist implications in it. The exotic tendency in romanticism is, thus, seen to be the bourgeois tendency, as the contiguous neighbours of a metropolitan are so infinitely varied, his friends being the result of sense selection. The esoteric romantic, on the other hand, conceives it his duty to épater le bourgeoise.46 Schopenhauer speaks very definitely with the voice of the middle class and is, like Schumann, a typically German phenomenon. His intense originality among philosophers is largely one of style and expression. I am given to understand that he was practically the first philosopher of his race to write readable German.47 Thus, Schopenhauer is a genuine world-historical phenomenon, appearing with the same inevitability of necessity as any other figure. The smug self-complacency which ascribes Schopenhauer’s pessimism to environmental or even physiological factors and then dismisses it is taking a totally unwarranted step. To say that pessimism generally is mainly faulty elimination, and Schopenhauer’s in particular only the complaint of a dissatisfied soul, and, therefore, something of an accidental irruption into philosophy, is like saying that Schleiermacher’s religion is merely the self-justification of a liberal-minded preacher, or Fichte’s hard and rigorous ethical doctrines the dogmatic self-assertiveness of a stern and unyielding fighter. These statements are all quite true, no doubt, but they mean very little, and they do not prove anything at all. What the man is, per se, is of no importance; why that type of man should have become prominent in that age is another matter.
In Schopenhauer the full implications of romanticism stand out. We know only phenomena. Sensation is all that is immediately given, and as all space-phenomena exist in the unknowable time, the underlying law of knowledge is the spatial grasp on time, or the causal law. Outside this causal law is the thing in us, the thing propelling us through time. That is totally separate from what we can know, and is, consequently, the world-as-will. The latter is the world-as-idea. The world-as-will lies outside knowledge and, hence, the noumena, or things in themselves, are symbolic of the will, and phenomena, including our own bodies, are their material projections. The content of this world-as-idea is, thus, material. The world-as-will can be known only as an idea, and its existence must be implied from its manifestations. The will, though a blind unconscious thing, is pure energy, because it is time, and, hence, there is a sort of animism recurring all through the world-as-idea which the understanding dehydrates, so to speak, when it builds up the purely spatial structures we have dealt with above. This living power is signified by force. Here Schopenhauer makes a clean break with all systematics. For a complete system, everything must be accessible to our knowledge, and Schopenhauer, by showing once for all that the will-force was inaccessible, reversed the procedure of earlier thinkers, who made will a product of force, and, hence, got their cognitive distinction of matter and motion.
We have seen that romantic skepsis is the complete reversal of organic religiousness because it overturns the optimism in thought and pessimism in action of the earlier period. Romantic thought is pessimistic through and through, because the growing conception of something unknowable against which knowledge will beat its wings in vain comes gradually to be recognized as the dominant force in the world. With Schopenhauer, the will struggles to incorporate itself more and more completely in phenomena—the doctrine that works through to be creative evolution. It progresses up from mechanical interaction to the spatial incarnation of causality, and from that up to consciousness and conquest of the world-as-idea. Systematic organic growth is a product of the will, and the optimism of thought it results in is the will’s instinct for self-preservation. The development suddenly snaps when the consciousness is discovered to be will—the opposition of Natur and Geist, always a real opposition, now becomes final and irrevocable. The force of the will is existence. Existence is struggle, and struggle is mainly suffering. But to say that life is worth the struggle is a totally unproved hypothesis, and it is, of course, again suggested by the will. Death is less evil than life; hence, the death of a culture, which romanticism signifies, is a higher development because of its break-off from the will. Schopenhauer’s philosophy breathes a dislike for everything connected with the time-problem. In the first place, he disliked all the romantic philosophers, Fichte, Schelling, Hegel, all being stuffed shirts and windbags. Secondly, he made a most indelicate remark about history, calling it a tissue of lies, which it certainly is when its data are examined as facts instead of as parts of an embracing synthesis.48 Third, he hated women, the great symbols of the time-force of will.
Now no romantic in the systematic period believed in a real development of nature in time. The reason for this is that their time-view was held static and pictorial. Schopenhauer has no faith in progress, which can only mean a progress of the will—the individual grown self-conscious is the only possible unit of deliverance. There are two avenues of escape. In the first place, the great static abstractions which have signified the conquest of the idea over the will in the religious period are the masterpieces of art, which, when will interferes, become philosophy. This kind of art is no longer possible, but the critical arts leading to self-absorbence and subjectivity are far better adapted to this new age, the greatest of all arts being, of course, music, the epitome of life. Struggle, again, can be ironed out in that romantic sympathy as engendered by sense connections of which the saint is the corresponding ideal in the religious period. In the metropolis the only true friendship possible is a communion of interests—hence, though I do not know that Schopenhauer draws this inference, there is possible an excavation activity on a large scale in the world-as-idea in which the only interest taken is the scientific one and no clash of individual wills can result. These two avenues of deliverance are obviously connected with the esoteric and exotic tendencies mentioned above. Romanticism had held them together; Schopenhauer rent them apart, and, hence, postromanticism separates out from positivism.
In postromanticism the typical figure is easily seen to be Nietzsche. There is no systematic philosopher who seems to have much in common with this period, for the will to power instinct is implicated more in the realm of politics than systematic philosophy. Nietzsche is, of course, more of a poet than a philosopher, but still what is noisy and arresting about him seems to have eclipsed the deeper aspects of his thinking. Unsystematic philosophers have a peculiar way of being justified by events, however, and the rise of Hitlerism in Germany should provide a favourable opportunity for a reconsideration of the author of Also Sprach Zarathustra, who happened to be right when so many apparently sounder contemporaries went wrong.
Rousseau wanted to recapture the birth-ecstasy of culture; Heine had admired the Middle Ages; Nietzsche is most enthusiastic about the Renaissance. He wants a new Renaissance in Western culture; that is the whole nexus of his position. The Renaissance had brought to life the great constructive possibilities of formal Western art and logic, and what the romantic revival signified had killed it. It must be reborn. The corresponding period in Greek culture was the Dionysian cult, whose infusion upon the Apollonian religion had liberated tragedy and sculpture, just as the Renaissance had liberated music and drama from the Church. Apollo, Dionysus, and Socrates; these represent the three stages of every culture—in our culture the medieval, the baroque, and the contemporary scenes—dogmatism, nominalistic skepsis, and the criticism which represents the ultimate skepsis. His attitude is impossible thoroughly to disentangle until we realize the fact, and take it as a starting point, that he cries out for a resurrection of culture and a return to an organic development, and if his work is full of contradictions, they cannot be entirely unexpected in a philosophy based on such a quixotic impulse. With this motive in mind, it is inevitable that he should begin by acclaiming figures such as Schopenhauer and Wagner, who in their novelty bewildered and dazzled, and, by closer inspection finding that they were inevitable to their time, end by despising them eventually as decadents. The point is that Nietzsche himself, born in a positivist era, wants action, and the action turns out to be a liberation of the strongest passions of his own age. Hence, the pessimism in thought and optimism in action characteristic generally of romanticism is augmented to a titanic conflict which results in a blind worship of strength, and a furious yea-saying combined with a bitter aversion to mankind and emphasis upon the loneliness of the thinker and a desire to wipe out the human race and bring to birth another and better. We must have a new Renaissance, but it is not for us.
The main importance of Nietzsche as intermediate between systematic and rehabilitated romanticism lies in his having put the former on a dynamic basis. The pictorial attack on time was motionless but gradually worked out to be an emphasis upon the evolution of the idea. Nietzsche aims at an obvious practical application of Hegel’s doctrine of the idea controlling reality—development out of imperfection in a creative evolution. Nietzsche is on this side of the pessimism which recognizes the world as evil and imperfect. The old hierarchy of angels, men, and beasts appears in a new light. If men once were little better than beasts, why should they not deliberately labour even in pain to produce an Übermensch which could carry on the torch of life falling from our dying hands? Something cannot very well come out of nothing, so that this creature must come from the best we have now. An extreme aristocracy results. As this is a gospel of action, the aristocrats are the forcemen, who transcend morality. There is, in fact, very little morality except slave morality, which was engineered by Christianity, against which Nietzsche is bitterly opposed, and is perpetuated by the great slave race, the Jews. The aristocrats must remove themselves to a paradise of their own—it is in this where the esoteric quality of postromanticism comes out—those social virtues, such as pity (the scavenger of misery, as Shaw calls it),49 which aims at a general eugenics among helots, are to be abhorred. The aristocrats despise the weak; they will not harm them, but they will not help them. The whole value of history is concentrated, or at least embodied, in great men; for those great men to have absolute sway is, therefore, the highest duty. Just how those not of the elect are to be persuaded of this does not worry Nietzsche. His outlook seems to be practically Karl Marx turned inside out—the opposition of German against Jew goes very deep—the same class war between exploiter and proletariat, growing more and more acute until the weaker class—with Nietzsche the slaves—are exterminated. This political opposition will appear more clearly later on. We need only say here that slaves like peace, masters want war, because it is so much fun for them and is part of their self-expression. Nietzsche, like most sissies, had an inordinate admiration for strength, and was immensely impressed by the efficiency of Prussian militarism.
The central impulses underlying Nietzsche’s thought are so obviously a reductio ad absurdum of the romantic narcotic that they have about them the atmosphere of a Freudian dream with the emphasis shifted from sex to desire for power—the typical day or waking dream. We have seen earlier why it is so likely that a postromanticist should be of rather abnormal mental development. In Nietzsche the fact that a dead civilization coming to life again implies the nonpermanence of death may have led him, psychologically if not logically, to the hideous cyclic theory which preluded his insanity.
A complete survey of romantic philosophy would take in many names of minor importance, such as Schlegel, Schiller, Novalis, Hamann, and other figures of the systematic period who all added their more or less digressive comments to the general stream of thought, would analyse the concepts of those poets who held all the ideas of romanticism in their grasp intuitively, notably Blake and Goethe, would include English Hegelian reverberations such as Coleridge and Carlyle, would estimate the value of the work of Lotze in putting the idealistic claim into a better working harmony with reality, and would do many other things beyond our present scope or grasp. As, however, there does not seem to be a great deal of intelligent writing on romanticism, much less any attempt at synthesizing its total activity, we shall probably have to wait some time for an adequate appraisal of its various manifestations in the history of culture. In our contemporary field there are many figures illustrating the exhaustive stage of romanticism, notably Bertrand Russell, whose religious opinions I have characterized in another essay as a mixture of Schopenhauer, Satan and Superstition50—all integral elements of romanticism. The contemporary attitude in its more entelechic exponents such as Freud, Shaw, or even Einstein would have its connection as well. But the romantic synthesis of exhaustion proper is actualized in two great stages which call for a brief indication before we close this part.
The first stage is Henri Bergson, a Frenchman leading the destructive attack again. The implications of his position are precisely what would be inevitable for anyone immediately succeeding the positivist period. In him, the time-world finally assumes supremacy. A detailed exposition of Bergson’s philosophy is, of course, out of place here: all that concerns us is his work in making time achieve its ultimate conquest. First of all, he definitely shows that the positivistic attack on time which makes it a space-time or space-dimension does nothing toward solving the mystery of time at all. This phenomenal time is not duration. The whole world behind our spatial abstractions, the sum of noumena, is pure becoming or time, and this does not imply a mass of dead matter vitalized but simply a reflection of universal becoming upon a particular intellect. For the intellect can know only space-phenomena. It perceives because it limits as much as it takes in; in other words, as we have seen as far back as Kant, knowledge is formal, and form implies limitation. But as we know only phenomena, we can never know reality. The intellect busies itself with space-worlds, and as Bergson’s innovation in philosophy consists chiefly of his having explicitly recognized the universal noumenon or world-as-will as temporal, due to his having come after the evolutionary development, becoming is reality, and so all science does not close with reality. Romantic skepsis can hardly go further. There is, however, the faculty of intuition, which is practically putting oneself in tune, or rather in rhythm, with the temporal force. The romantic descent of this intuition is evident enough in Schelling; it was what music represented to Schopenhauer and practically what Schleiermacher meant by a religious experience.
The romantic pictorial concept of the world was motionless; there was little evolution in it except the complete liberation of the idea from reality. When romanticism became esoteric postromanticism, this meant that the idea turned from reality. Evolution, in the Darwinian sense, is pure positivism, the survival of the fit, fitter, or fittest and adaptation to environment are both purely spatial attacks on time which reduce it to a space-dimension, because it postulates an unbroken chain of causality through life, and causality, as we have seen, is the primal space hold on time. Neoromanticism shows time as noumenal and baffling—the élan vital is there, but it is there for intuition and not the knowledge of scientific analysis.
The second stage is Oswald Spengler—the final one because we have seen the ultimate aim of romanticism to be, consciously or subconsciously, the philosophy of history, or the actualization of conscious life—the time-force aware of itself. The working through of the absolute idea in Hegel was as far as romanticism proper could get in this direction, and be consistent with its pictorial outlook. Positivism brought the counterparts of Darwin to postulate a similar unbroken causal chain in history springing from environment. The most important protagonist of this view is, of course, Marx, though Buckle and, more by implication than by direct statement, Mommsen, were better known at the time.51 But with Spengler the time-element becomes supreme in conscious as well as unconscious life. In about ten pages he explodes the linear conception of history and builds up his thesis on all the final implications of the factors in romanticism.52 “The causal sequence of social phenomena” is a bizarre and monstrous conception of life, as we find trivial causes for disproportionately huge effects; the Great War being “caused” by the murder of an imbecile prince. History is incarnated in culture-growths, the secret of life in them being unanalysable, because it belongs to time. With Spengler time, the cosmic, is finally separated from space, the microcosmic, and can be comprehended only by intuition of the type whereby we size up a stranger, a man who exists previously unknown to us in time, at a glance. Hence, the fundamental opposition between history and science is seen to be the working through of Schelling’s scale of polarity. Hegel’s concept of the absolute idea in history becomes, after evolution, an idea of a culture forcing the world into subjection by the energy of a living growth. In the Decline of the West neoromanticism receives its final word, and it is not easy to see how its concepts can be developed any further, except by criticism and commentary. The “decline” is merely the particular historical context of the principle that time is a force that eventually overmasters space. It is unfortunate that this same context has led to an overemphasis of the pessimism inherent in the word decline and has led to the book being regarded as the work of a calamity howler of the Max Nordau genre.53 But we have seen that pessimistic inferences can be drawn from any romantic.
The romantic attitude of the critic contemplating time cannot be unmusical, but it may in a very definite sense be antimusical. Life, as a Western mind conceives it, is a dynamic accented force, the accent residing in the catastrophe, the hero, the renaissance, in any foreground event, but the force moving with it and producing it. In consequence our civilization formulates its supreme artistry in a dynamic accented art, moving, like life, in time, devoid of the resisting material tending to make for a static effect. This is as a matter of course music. To us, music is the epitome of life, and comprehension of it brings a quicker and more intuitive comprehension of life than any other approach can possibly do.
Hence, the pictorial synthesis of history brings with it a recognition of music as the art par excellence, as we can see in Schopenhauer. At the same time a creative faculty means a power of entering into the pre-romantic attitude which is out of the question for those not born in it. The prime art of romanticism is painting, and painting, a visual, spatial, static, and intensely subjective art, is the direct antithesis of living music. The romantic approach to music would, thus, in tending to make a pictorial concept out of it, destroy its essence.
Music is essentially dynamic and its essence is rhythmic counterpoint. Melody is the pure temporal element in it; harmony the pure spatial. There is no idea of body in a bare tune unharmonized, no idea of vitality in harmony. The word harmony implies a static, quiescent, satisfied unity, which will not do for music. Music usually ends on a harmonic chord, but harmony always implies a pause: music even harmonically conceived must move in discords, as we shall see later. The “religious” element in music is, therefore, counterpoint, melody and harmony mingled. Rhythm is its distinguishing temporal force. So a pictorial approach to music would be a “sceptical” one; we should expect to see rhythm overcome and melody and harmony to fall apart. Again, music is the most abstract of all the arts and is, therefore, the most intensely personalized; the more objective an art, the greater effort of genius it takes to tear it up bodily by the roots, as it were, out of life. In consequence music is dependent on the effort of great musicians for its life to a far greater extent than, say, the lyric is dependent on the supremely great lyricist, there not being the same room for a minor composer that there is for a minor poet. Similarly its performance must be an ensemble; this is due not only to its contrapuntal construction but to the fact that an objective art is too many-sided for a soloist, which latter might as well be the author himself. Lastly, the audience for an objective, abstract, creative art must be a select, to some extent esoteric, group of patrons and sympathizers, such as might be found, for instance, in a church. Hence, we should expect to find in romantic music a tendency pursued as far as possible toward democracy in composition, solo performance, and a large and more undiscriminating audience, patronage being replaced by popularity. Conformably to the general principles laid down above, we should also expect a basis of religious optimism replaced by one of atheistic pessimism, a change to an egocentric and subjective approach, and the commencement of a definite winding up of the possibilities inherent in the art. Let us see how this works out.
The initial romantic attack is, of course, French. Contemporary with Bach, Handel, and Scarlatti, the Frenchmen Couperin and Rameau were definitely attempting the visualized tone poem, writing pieces habitually with imaginative (visual, that is) titles—La Poule, Le Coucou, Les Barricades Mystérieuses, etc. The first treatise on harmony (1722) was that of Rameau,54 and in it he prophesied the speedy extinction of music due to the ultimate exhaustion of melodies. Now this is as pure primitivism as Rousseau. Only a man who thought of melody and harmony as disparate could say that. The fact that so great a musician could think of music as fundamentally a succession of harmonized tunes forebodes an attack on music as thoroughgoing as Rousseau’s attack on philosophy. Again, the French, particularly Couperin, overcame rhythm by smothering their pieces in ornaments—reminding us acutely of Empire architecture. This was their way of dealing with the short sustaining power of the harpsichord, in opposition to, say, Scarlatti and the other Italians, who overcame it rhythmically, by increasing the speed. When romanticism itself came, the same tendencies were in evidence.
The rhythmic force of music is incarnated and symbolized in the dance. Hence, men like Bach, Handel, Haydn, Mozart, were all dance composers. The suite or collection of dances in one key was a standard art form, and later, when the sonata sublimated the dance rhythm of the suite into a stricter form, the minuet, in many ways the typical dance, was very often retained. With romanticism the dance was overthrown, and idealized dance replaced it—the dance in which the rhythmic propulsion is subordinated and does not stand out in its pure energy. Weber’s Invitation to the Dance starts the attack on the waltz. With Beethoven, and generally from him onward, the minuet is replaced by the scherzo. Scherzo means joke, and the Beethoven scherzi are definitely parodies of the minuet—they retain the rhythm but burlesque the spirit by rushing the speed and thumping the accents.55 From romanticism on the popular dances—polka, schottische, and so on—drop out of music. Chopin is usually considered a master of dance forms; let us see what forms he used. First, and most frequently, the mazurka, which is a syncopated dance, and syncopation is a fight against rhythm. Older composers used syncopation almost altogether for slow movements, in order to bring attention to the rhythm and prevent the music from lagging, and its use in faster music is generally characteristic of romanticism. Secondly, the waltz, the most fundamental and persistent of dances, and, consequently, the one to be conquered at all costs. We are not surprised that Chopin loves the mazurka and turns out some fine gems in that form, and that he often degrades the waltz to a salon show piece. Third, the polonaise. This is very similar to the march ( 
) and a march is not a dance; it moves by mechanical propulsion. The march is never seriously treated in music until the rise of romanticism, because it is not a vitalizing dance but a dance of death. Schumann, and after him many postromantics, was the first to be fascinated by it, taking his cue from Beethoven. The funeral march is not, so far as I know, ever even attempted until the romantic period,56 and the mere fact that with Beethoven, Chopin, and Berlioz music, the epitome of life, can symbolize death as well, reveals the depth of the romantic opposition to the art.
Now if the dance is the typical rhythmic form, it follows that in rhythmic music it must have a close affinity with a life-rhythm. The whole being of a listener can enter into the light easy swinging balance of Bach or Mozart. But a composer who does not feel but who can see this life-rhythm makes it necessarily into a picture and handles the qualitative differences in time fearlessly. Rush and hurry, on the one hand, and dragging and shuffling, on the other, are not rhythmic, but they are temporal. Rhythm can only be felt. Hence, romantic music tends to extremes of speed. The slow as distinct from the merely slower movement appears in music with romanticism. The great Italians all yawned over slow movements, and Haydn or Mozart rarely go slower than andante (walking). Even the magnificent slow arias of Bach usually have an insistent beating rhythmic figure under them. To listen to adagios, largos, lentos, and so on brings in an outside stimulus to the listener, a sort of philosophical contemplative attitude being necessary. On the other hand, the pounding, driving allegros and prestos of Beethoven’s finales are things to be watched, as we watch a race. And when these are written for a soloist, the latter usually takes care that the main interest is centred on his technical agility.
Coincident with the overthrow of rhythm, and far more important, comes the break-up of counterpoint. The first thing that strikes us is that the song is brought into music by a romanticist. In the song the melody is more or less a conventionalized and harmonized tune, and for this reason it accompanies a breakdown of organic development in music. In the very early period, when music was being organized by abstract scholars in cathedrals and monasteries, the people developed of themselves the folk song. Consequently, it is an approximate rule that a nation’s contribution to systematic music is in inverse ratio to the wealth of its folk-song material. Germany, the nexus of Western music, has a far poorer folk song than France or England; Ireland and Wales are richer than all three but have done little of importance for music. We said above that we should expect a tendency toward democracy in composition. There is a revival of folk-song interest, which increases all through the nineteenth century and is now a dominant musical activity, especially in Great Britain. This tendency is, of course, common to the primitivistic stage of romanticism, being associated with the poetry of the “natural man” and contemporary attempts to show that Homer’s uncommon poetry resulted from an aggregation of common men. Inevitably in romanticism, however, comes up the art song and Schubert.
Schubert perhaps did more than anyone else to smash counterpoint, not because he lacked contrapuntal skill, but because what contrapuntal skill he has consists largely in melodic combination, and viewed from a harmonic point of view much of his work is little short of infantile. He lacks the restraining disciplinary sense which would prevent his larger works from spilling over at the expense of the plasticity of the form. As a result, even his instrumental works are largely vocally conceived; they often consist of a pleasant but well-nigh interminable succession of melodies. The ensemble performance breaks down into a solo one. It need hardly be said in passing that the solo song is the most typical form of the pictorial approach to music. The dependence of Der Erlkönig or Am Meer (to mention only two) upon the picture need not detain us here.
In Chopin the pictorial inspiration is obvious enough, though never definitely stated in a title; we learn from biographers of the effect produced on him by pictures, and there is hardly a composition of his that does not irresistibly suggest a visualized scene. It was Chopin who developed the nocturne—obviously a pictorial metaphor—and all through his work the harmonized tune excludes counterpoint. In this, Chopin is typical of the French school. He developed as well the separate prelude, which is so obviously a picture-form that he could not find a musical name for it, and, conformably to the traditions of romanticism, made a good deal of the ballade—a form which dominates his sonatas as well. Schumann’s inspiration is also thoroughly pictorial—the titles of his pieces state that more definitely than in the case of Chopin. The “novelette” could by its very name hardly have any other effect. Schumann, too, was a great song writer, and his visual imagination is made evident in his love for the carnival. Schumann is one of the first to introduce visual effects into music. Former touches of program music, except the French school, gather up sound into music: if we listen with a divided attention, it is because we hear something behind the music. Thus, in the St. Matthew Passion we can hear the cock crowing in the tenor recitative, the dropping of tears in Peter’s aria, and the hideous creaking of chains in the night wind in the Golgotha solo. But with romanticism the program music is visual—thus, in the Schumann Papillons (op. 2) we can “see” in the music the various figures in the carnival, the guests departing at the end, the clock striking, the blowing out of the candles, and the exit of the janitor. Anyone who has ever read Liszt’s interpretations of the Chopin Preludes will be amazed at the lengths to which this sort of the thing can go in romantic music. As for Liszt himself, the subject of his program music is a painful one and utterly obvious to any listener, so we shall let it go at that.
Now, what has all this pictorial element to do with the overthrowing of counterpoint? Well, a picture being a statically conceived art, it follows that pictorial music will treat counterpoint statically, that is, harmonically. The way to do this is just to isolate one part of the counterpoint and subordinate all the others to it—only in this way can we have a “perspective” necessary for visualization. This is the reason for the development of the song in Schubert, the song-form in Chopin, and the square-cut conventionalized tunes in Schumann. A similar tendency is found in Berlioz, and, of course, it could only be a matter of time until the advent of Mendelssohn and the “song without words.” Now it is interesting to note that harmonically conceived music throws the discord into prominence. The discord gives an effect of pain and the impulse to proceed to a smooth concord, which never comes until the end of the piece. It is not too fanciful to see how the contrapuntal interval of Bach or Mozart is creative and at its basis “optimistic”—it throws the emphasis ahead. The discord perpetually seeking resolution in romantic music is its direct antithesis—music, the microcosm of life, is an uneasy stumbling toward peace and rest. Hence, the rise of positivism brings with it a conception of music, not as harmonic but as “harmonious,” that is, dead. With the romantic rehabilitation the discord idea is renewed, with the final concord sometimes granted and sometimes not.
But if romanticism, by bringing the discord into music, is antimusical, the nervous dread of discord which is engendered in the positivistic era is not antimusical, but simply nonmusical. One has only to glance at Victorian England to assure oneself that they were as tone-deaf as the petrified city in the Arabian Nights. All through Tennyson and Coleridge is evidenced a total and often ludicrous ignorance of poetry’s most powerful ally. The culture theorists all ignore music. The exception is Browning, who, as the interpreter and voice of his age, as Shakespeare and Milton were of theirs, could not get along without it, but in him the music is eighteenth-century and is based on the harpsichord as thoroughly as Milton’s is based on the organ. The music of the time was as concordant as possible, discords only being brought in in order that they might melt into sweet sounds again. The affinity of Tennyson, Mendelssohn, and Dickens,57 who all produced the same effect in their respective spheres, is evident, and the story of Mendelssohn’s rushing downstairs half-dressed to resolve a dominant seventh a friend had played on the piano is full of profound significance for the student.58
With neoromanticism the conception of the single chord (a discord, of course) as a splash of colour is ushered in. Scriabin, for example, starts out on a thoroughly romantic basis, his earlier work being almost indistinguishable from Chopin. He carries the harmonic-stiffening ideas of the romantics to their logical conclusion. He overthrows the contrapuntal modes of music (major and minor), substituting a purely harmonic one—the scale of overtones. His last five piano sonatas are based on an initial single but quite sufficiently hideous discord—an idea foreshadowed as far back as the Eroica symphony, one of the first great apologias of romanticism. Romantic pessimism receives its ultimate justification when a series of sensuous chords—that is, a delight in discord—comes in to overthrow the rhythmic propulsion.
As we shall see later, colour is a predominant feature of romantic painting; hence, we should expect a similar effect in music. The tendency to regard the chord as a splash of colour has been noted; but in the early stages of romanticism the affinity of colour with timbre was first taken into account, and there arises the great massed colour-orchestra of which Berlioz is the progenitor. Berlioz, a Provençal, wrote a classic treatise on orchestration59 (the parallel with Delacroix is striking) and remains the supreme apologist of orchestral colour. His attack on counterpoint is, thus, even more open than that of his contemporaries. In Le Damnation de Faust a company at an inn are singing a short and rather shaky fugue, whereupon Mephistopheles remarks, “Here we find bestiality in all its frankness.”60 The journalistic articles of Berlioz contain many attacks on the Palestrina and Bach traditions. But if colour is not music, we are not surprised that Berlioz is not the steadiest of musicians. The dynamic difficulty must be overcome, first, by constant variety in orchestration, which means an immense orchestra and a loud noise. “Ah,” said the King of Prussia to Berlioz, “you are the composer who writes for five hundred performers.” “Wrong, sire,” said Berlioz, “sometimes I write for four hundred and fifty.”61 Second, music must lean heavily and creakingly on a nonmusical program for support, which culminates (perhaps) in Richard Strauss.
Of course, we can learn more about romanticism in music by popular compositions than in any other way. We should expect a pretty tune gently harmonized on arpeggios, like the Spring Song,62 to be the most hackneyed work of the positivistic era. If the modern trend is toward the conquest of harmony over counterpoint, we should expect that a piece like the Prelude in C# Minor,63 in which dead harmonic chords trample on the bleeding and unresisting body of counterpoint with a fiendish collocation of howls and bellows, would be greeted with much glee. Similarly, at the close of negative romanticism, we should expect some vicious outburst of Philistinism of a precisely similar nature, and when Gounod takes a Bach Prelude, forces it into an accompaniment and writes a tune over it, calling the result Ave Maria,64 we bow our heads in the presence of destiny. With jazz the harmonized tune has completely conquered, and the relentless syncopation of the upper register and the equally relentless thumping out of a lifeless beat in the lower grinds all the rhythmic vitality of music to atoms in its jaws.
The attack on strict form follows as a corollary. Every art form, whether associated with time or space, contains within itself two specific strict forms, one embodying the temporal and the other the spatial tendency in the art in question. In music the supreme pure instrumental form which seems almost to have evolved out of architecture and contains the whole time-force of music is the fugue, and the form which tends more to a spatial and dramatic presentation is the sonata. These two forms were carried to their height by Bach and Mozart respectively. The vocal forms associated with them are obviously the oratorio and opera, which were similarly treated by the same composers. The romanticists had no sympathy with either fugue or sonata, particularly the fugue. Couperin and Rameau had, of course, ignored both. Berlioz’s opinion of the fugue has been recorded,65 and earlier another Frenchman, Grétry, had attacked the sonata form as tiresome and tautological, concentrating his fire on the repeating of the exposition.66 The fugue is most peremptorily dismissed. For all their admiration of Bach, the romanticists did not revive this form. Schubert avoided it, Chopin and Weber ignored it, Schumann played with it a bit and developed the “fughetta.” Beethoven starts the attack on the great classic form of the variation, which in the Bach or temporal period appears as the passacaglia and in the Mozart period as the theme with variations. At the very outset Beethoven made what was practically a suite out of the form. Later, after he had torn it to pieces in the Diabelli waltz variations,67 the variation form disappeared, to be replaced by the Liszt “metamorphosis of themes” and the Wagner “leitmotif”—both adjuncts of program music and essentially nonformal.68 (The fugue is merged in these as well.)
The oratorio is a tragic form of art, and the opera similarly comic. The drama is divided into tragedy and comedy just as the two musical forms are, tragedy tending to the temporal and comedy to the spatial, and the musical forms correspond. Hence, when Mozart brought the opera to its highest stage of development, it would have to be the comic opera. We have dealt earlier with the principle that a spatial abstraction from a felt time-force rests on a basis of religious optimism. Romanticism, in denying this, would have to evolve in revolt the tragic opera. This represents a shift to the pictorial, and, hence, takes on a continually increasing trend toward the theatrical, which culminates in Wagner, perhaps the greatest theatrical genius of all time.
Beethoven’s attack on the sonata form is more subtle. Broadly speaking, it centres around the pictorial approach, and, hence, the compression and economy of the Mozartian sonata disappears, and the sonata takes on a greatly enlarged aspect. The speed no longer swings about a balance, but the various movements (Beethoven expanded the three-movement form to a four-movement one) are rhythmically contrasted. The middle theme of Mozart is expanded to a tremendous development section—a purely pictorial idea which analyses every implication of the given themes and holds them up to the light, as it were. A similar impulse leads Beethoven to develop the coda. The egocentricity of his later forms is, if often exaggerated, nonetheless present, and it can hardly be altogether an accident that the greatest of romantic musicians became deaf in his later years, whereby the individual concentration power would be so much augmented. There is in Beethoven, however, a good deal of the will-to-power spirit as well. In his later works he is no longer content merely with a spatial attack on the sonata form; he must probe deeper and analyse the fundamental secrets of the time-problems in his art form. In consequence, the two works of his last period which are on perhaps the largest scale deal first of all with an exhaustive and distinctly pessimistic and despairing analysis of the sonata form, ending in a slow movement, and followed by a terrific burst of energy which tears to pieces, in the one case the fugue, in the other the oratorio. The two works in question are Hammerclavier Sonata, op. 106, and the Choral Symphony (see note [at end of pt. 3, sec. V]).
The harmonic basis of Western music is the chromatic scale, that is, an octave arbitrarily and compromisingly divided into twelve semitones, on which are based a system of interlocking major and minor scales. This “equal temperament” system, though not formally recognized until the time of Bach, is more or less implicit since Byrd at least. The major scale is evolved with the concept of rhythm, and may, therefore, be presumed to have an integral connection with it. The major and minor concords are the only “points of repose” yet discovered in Western music. Now it is evident that the creative period of music from Byrd to Mozart felt the major scale as the essential foundation of music and the minor only as a modification of it. The usual classical theme with variations contains one minor variation sensibly regarded as a contributing and essential but subordinate element. In the great apologia of equal temperament, The Well-Tempered Clavichord, fully half the preludes and fugues in minor keys end on the tierce de Picardie or parallel major chord, in the first volume, though in the second, published two decades later, this decreases. All of the composers before Beethoven show a marked preference for a major key, and when they use a minor they tend constantly to modulate into the major. Now while there is only the one major scale, there are three minors. First, the natural minor scale, which has always impressed the writer as rhythmless; it is used as a basis for much pre-Elizabethan strict counterpoint and for the folk songs of unmusical countries (which would be richest in them, as see above [pt. 3, sec. II]). The major scale, on the other hand, seems powerfully and irresistibly rhythmic. Now when the major scale emerged as the leading mode of music, the minor was brought into line with it. This attempt disclosed the fact that in a major-scale music the minor was unconquerably “sceptical” or duofold, possessing a separate melodic and harmonic form. It is, thus, more pliable and subjective than the major. In short, the major is the fundamental scale of metaphysical optimism, the minor that of romantic pessimism, and anyone with a pair of ears knows that the minor sounds sadder and more adaptable to tragedy than the major.
The preference of Chopin for the minor is so marked that it is distinctly cloying. To anyone who feels an atmospheric difference in keys, as Berlioz did, C# minor seems the most thoroughly romantic of all, and is Chopin’s obvious favourite.69 It is interesting that in a similar conflict which runs through Beethoven the antithesis is usually presented as relative (i.e., one of key-signature, as E-flat major and C minor (three flats)). On the other hand, Mendelssohn, in trying to blend them, habitually thinks of the contrast as parallel (i.e., one of pitch, as E major and E minor). In the former the minor is breaking away to independence, in the latter feeling its way back to classical spontaneity. And as we should expect, the early Frenchmen are particularly fond of minor keys, and often their dances are in ternary form enclosed in a minor theme. The contrast here is also usually parallel.
Antiromantic music, therefore, avoided the minor mode. But any exploitation of a minor scale must imply a recognition of the major scale as essential if not basic, and two notes more bring in the entire chromatic scale. Neoromanticism, thus, begins with the exploitation of the chromatic resources in their entirety. The romantics were the first to acclaim Bach. It was Bach who foreshadowed contrapuntally the full resources of music and thereby implied its eventual termination. But he expressed himself in terms of the great contrapuntal tradition he summed up, and so to follow Bach at that time was death. His successors, who had to develop the sonata form, turned their backs on him, and it was not until the time of Mendelssohn that he was rehabilitated. Now Bach is about as romantic as Spinoza, and he was revered for the same reason—that in the abstract completeness of his music is incarnated the universal grasp which is the great romantic desideratum. Now the exploitation of the chromatic scale as such begins with César Franck and Wagner, and their followers, who were, of course, mainly Frenchmen. The chromatic scale is the half-tone scale, and abstractions made from it lean, not to major or minor, but to simple chromatic multiples—the whole-tone scale (Debussy) or the quarter-tone scale (Schoenberg).
If there is such a thing as a third-dimensional element in music, it is probably the question of key-relationship. Thickness, solidity, support, all derive from the modulation, and it is the balance of these modulations that sustains the music. To reduce this to a pictorial or two-dimensional concept would require that the idea of key-relationship be replaced by the idea of key-contrast. Tracing out this factor through Beethoven is easy enough, and in general the sudden modulation may be considered typical of romanticism. Again, we find in pre-Beethoven music, apart from the propagandic Well-Tempered Clavichord, an extreme conservatism in regard to the use of keys—those remote from C major are almost altogether avoided. With the romantics comes a fairly impartial use of the whole twenty-four. The keys more remote from C major are esoteric, tertiary, and typically romantic.70 Besides, it is evident that in the period of major-scale dominance C major, whatever its sound, symbolizes the architectural stability of music, and the prodigality of the romanticist is a symbol of the uprooting of this.
Romanticism saw the harpsichord replaced by the pianoforte, which latter is the basic instrument of the romantic period. There are several reasons for this. In the first place, the pianoforte lends itself to a harmonic concept of music better than any other instrument. The damper pedal is its chief auxiliary, and this is essential to a harmonic concept and utterly meaningless in connection with a contrapuntal one. Again, the question of dynamics is brought under control of the performer. The “shading” of dynamics, another pictorial concept, comes into romantic music. The harpsichord and pre-Beethoven music generally recognized loud and soft, but the performer’s control of all nuances of shading was as meaningless as any similar control over rhythm. The whole tendency in the performance of romantic music, conformably to the basic idea of romantic egoism, is to make the performer a soloist and give him as much critical power as possible. Improvising as a fine art begins to vanish and composers of concertos give up the practice of leaving the cadenza bar blank. But in order to produce a pictorial effect it was necessary to have an instrument that could outline a melody and subordinate the rest, and this the pianoforte could do better than the harpsichord. Again, harmonically conceived melodies are bound closely together. An instrument that could produce a legato effect was, thus, necessary. In harpsichord music the notes appear from nowhere; in pianoforte phrasing they are drawn, in groups. There was, therefore, an effort to make the piano as legato an instrument as possible. It was to be an Aeolian harp, not a kettledrum. But all this power given to the performer naturally resulted in a rise of virtuosity of effort in the will-to-power period. Anyone comparing, say, Mozart with Liszt cannot fail to see the change from technic to pyrotechnics, from cleanness to brilliance. That factor, which the Germans call Zopf, is an inevitable outcome, too, of the romantic shift from patronage to popularity, necessitating the larger audience and the big concert grand pianos and massed orchestras, providing for executant strugglers and romantic heroes like Paganini, Rubinstein, and conductors through to Toscanini. The positivist contempt and dislike for music was similarly reflected in the endless procession of tasteless arpeggio artists on the piano or violin, who regarded music as dramatic elocution and played through a stock of regulation warhorses by Beethoven, Chopin, or Liszt until music practically ossified under their iron grip. With the rehabilitation of romanticism, there is a tendency, corresponding to several others, to atomize the notes of a piano and make it frankly an instrument of percussion. Stravinsky is perhaps the leader in this field.
After dealing with Beethoven’s attack on the sonata form, its subsequent development was inadvertently omitted. There is not much to say about it, except that it practically disappears, as in its enlarged form no one can handle it except Brahms, who bears about the same relation to romantic music that Lotze does to romantic philosophy. The subjective pictorial form of the symphonic poem replaces the symphony. This is almost invariably program music, and, being allied with postromanticism, deals extensively with a twisting and manipulation of themes (metamorphosis) rather than with developing them. The symphonies of Tschaikowsky require for their propulsion a force almost approaching hysteria, and the treatment of the Frenchmen succeeding Franck leans more to the suite than the sonata. As for Franck’s Symphony in D Minor, it should be noted how even in that work there is a tendency to bind the whole symphony together thematically, and that in the first movement particularly an idea suggestive of neoromanticism appears, it being in a way a “creative evolution” of a three-note motive.71
The problem of romanticism in England is complicated a little by the fact that the material and ideal changes which produced it really started in that country with the Puritan Revolution. The same victory of London over the land, of the moneyed merchant over aristocracy, of democratic constitutionalism over despotism, of colonial enterprise over insularity, which romanticism brought to other countries, all begin early in the seventeenth century in England. If there is such a thing as a national bias, we may say that that of England has been in the main directed toward that condition of life in which romanticism finds itself—urban and mercantile, but held culturally by a compact atomic idealism. Romanticism proper brought a recrudescence of poetic energy into England which no other country approached, not even Germany, whose romanticism was preceded by Goethe. There is also a sort of romantic stream running through English literature from Chaucer down, which is most strikingly brought out in Spenser.
Let us look back at our diagram of the arts for a moment. We should expect that music and drama would give place to a group of pictorial arts marked off into the lyric-essay and fiction. Music and drama collapsed after the Elizabethans under the rise of the Puritans, who waged a fierce war upon both, and the lyric-essay and fiction traditions date from Milton and Bunyan respectively. However, the Puritans were not only critical, but positivistic, and the change they brought about was far too sudden to be permanent. The Restoration consolidated a shift which stopped halfway between creation and criticism. The central art forms become a blend of music and drama on the one hand, and of architecture and sculpture on the other. The former, which brings a dramatic situation directly into the accented rhythm of life, is actualized in the comedy of manners; the latter is more obviously furniture. The trend is, however, toward the spatial: thus, the comedy of manners becomes far more effective and powerful the nearer it approaches the spatial or pessimistic side of satire, as with Swift and Hogarth, and the psychology of artistry is more concentrated on furniture than on the comedy. When we speak of the poetry of Dryden or Pope, we judge it in furniture terms—polish, elegance, symmetry, finish, smoothness, and so forth.72
Dealing first with the poetry, we find romanticism centring around what I have called the “lyric-essay,” the critical pictorial art form which descends from music. Music is, as we have seen, the great time-creation which epitomizes life; its critical analogue would, therefore, be the subjective reaction to life which sees life as a picture, and goes along with the romantic musician’s attack on music. The lyric-essay cannot be equated with lyric poetry generally, because lyric poetry does not always mirror the individual personality; a great deal of it, the Elizabethan lyric, for instance, is pure singing, and singing, being under the influence of music, is more abstract. (This sounds inconsistent with what we said of the vocal solo as a relapse into criticism with Schubert, but the question is, as we have seen so often, one of orientation and a contrast of a lyric form pulled over into music and a musical form pulled over into lyricism.) Nor is the expression invariably poetic—the “purple passages” of the prose writers, such as Ruskin, De Quincey, Pater, Meredith, Hardy, belong here too. The term “purple passage” is vulgarly used to denote a passage of prose which is written for the purpose of giving the writer’s reaction as emotionally as possible, and with this the distinction between prose and poetic utterance becomes accidental. Now we have seen that every general division of art carries within itself two specific strict forms, one embodying the temporal tendency and the other the spatial tendency. In the lyric-essay the former, a time-reaction representing the thrill and rush of the temporal urge through the egocentric artist, is the ode; the other, representing a mirror of his reflection, is the sonnet.73
Romantic poetry and poetic prose, then, must centre on a pictorial eye-synthesis. Being critical, the poet has to arrogate the function of criticism. The pseudo-Aristotelian pedantries of the type of critic who was supposed to have murdered Keats are replaced by poet-critics, of whom Byron, Coleridge, and Poe are outstanding examples. The new idea that the poet is the centre of his own world is heralded by many extreme and often absurd examples of romantic egoism. According to Blake, all art consists in pure self-expression, and the imitation resulting from long education is a sin against genius.74 Earlier we have primitive stirrings of this in Goldsmith’s writing airily at great length on subjects he knew nothing about, which for sheer “cheek” can be equalled only by Rousseau’s contemporary experiments in music.75
A picture, however, is an optical art, and poetry appeals to the ear; hence, the dominant feature of romantic poetry is a sound pattern. In English literature this means a careful and exact choice of words and balance of phrases, combined with a practically motionless rhythm. There is almost no suggestion of speed in romantic poetry—the words are intended to be looked at and lovingly dwelt upon:
Thou still-unravish’d bride of quietness,
Thou foster-child of silence and slow time. [Ode on a Grecian Urn, lines 1–2]
The exquisite static balance and variety of vowel-sound in Keats is counterbalanced by Coleridge’s more Teutonic preoccupation with consonants and his use of alliteration. In more extreme forms of romantic poetry this pattern becomes a motionless dream haze, like Kubla Khan, an effect imitated in Tennyson’s Lotos-Eaters. (Kubla Khan, of course, is actually of dream origin.) Alliteration and vowel assonance are all part of a general echolalia scheme developed most typically by Poe, which makes for repetition of words and a sort of suppressed refrain:
He holds him with his skinny hand,
“There was a ship,” quoth he.
“Hold off! unhand me, gray-beard loon!”
Eftsoons his hand dropt he.76
It therefore follows that rhyme is essential to romanticism in poetry. Blank verse drops out, and free verse is a later development. The heroic couplet, which is the smoothest form of verse, clinches a balanced antithetical form of expression which has nothing to do with the subjectivist’s peculiar world-picture and, therefore, seldom appears except in its more pliable octosyllabic form. A favourite stanza is the Spenserian, with its close-knit rhyme scheme and its dreamy Alexandrine chiming in like the undersea bell in Debussy’s tone poem. Rhyme is the great external musical symbol in poetry, because it draws attention to the word as pure sound. Looking again at our diagram, poetry which looks across at music is rhymed; poetry which definitely approaches it drops it out, as it has in a measure a tendency to become “wordless” and shrinks from calling attention to the word. We can see this progression in Shakespeare. Romantic verse is attached to rhyme because it is almost altogether unmusical—the “lonely flute” of Coleridge [The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, line 364] being a random shot at a sympathetic approach. Except for Browning77 the postromantics carry this still farther.
Stylistically, then, romanticism represents the epitome of the synthetic and subjective world-picture of which the philosophy of history forms the macrocosmos. It is quite rigid and formalized—a prosodist, no matter how pedantic, will take more examples from Keats than from Pope or Dryden. Positivism, therefore, brings an attack on this. It is dangerous to generalize, but, broadly speaking, positivism in English literature is represented by Browning; postromanticism by Swinburne. With Swinburne rhyme and a choice of words go hand in hand with a tremendous surging rush. Comparison of any alliterative passage in Coleridge with one in Swinburne should be enough to show that the one deals with the contemplation of the world-as-idea and the other with the will to power:
Five miles meandering with a mazy motion
Through wood and dale the sacred river ran,
Then reached the caverns measureless to man,
And sank in tumult to a lifeless ocean. [Kubla Khan, lines 25–8]
From the depth of the dreamy decline of the dawn through a notable nimbus of nebulous moonshine,
Pallid and pink as the palm of the flag-flower that flickers with fear of the flies as they float
Are the looks of our lovers that lustrously lean from a marvel of mystic miraculous moonshine
These that we feel in the blood of our blushes that thicken and threaten with throbs through the throat? [Nephelidia, lines 1–4]
The latter is admitted to be a vicious and unfair example, but it emphasizes the point. Similarly the romantics had held their rhythms tightly together in a static, arrested pattern, which was not disturbed by any pounding rhythmic propulsion:
When the lamp is shattered
The light in the dust lies dead—
When the cloud is scattered
The rainbow’s glory is shed.78
The above is a skilful reining in of two rather restive metres. But with Swinburne the iambic norm of English poetry, which the romantics in the main clung to, is torn to pieces, and a galloping procession of dactyls, choriambs, and anapests symbolizes the postromantic activity.
We have seen that postromanticism is a sort of running commentary on positivism, so we should expect there similar tendencies but less compromise. Browning’s poetry is markedly spatial—Oscar Wilde in reacting from him called him a prosaic fiction writer,79 and that way he certainly tends. His plays are not successful, not because they are bad, but because they are imperfectly dramatized novels. He launches an energetic attack on the romantic picture. He revives blank verse, and his choice of words is nonexistent, except insofar as his brusque guttural diction makes for a discordant destruction of colour blending. His attack on rhyme is even more uncompromising:
While, treading down rose and ranunculus
You Tommy-make-room-for-your-uncle us!
Troop, all of you—man or homunculus
Quick march! for Xanthippe, my housemaid,
If once on your pates she a souse made
With what, pan or pot, bowl or skoramis
First comes to her hand—things were more amiss!
I would not for worlds be your place in—
Recipient of slops for the basin!
[Of Pacchiarotto, and How He Worked in Distemper, lines 518–26]
There is a marked tendency among many of the positivistic poets to fight rhyme by reducing it to a like absurdity in trying to rhyme the most impossible words, and, thus, getting rhyme out of the literature for good and all. The whole of the positivistic attack on rhyme and rhythm is concentrated in Hood’s Bridge of Sighs. Browning’s chief model was Shelley, who anticipates the positivistic era, his position being somewhat analogous to that of Beethoven. There is a sort of bourgeois philosophy and an interest in spatial facts, a cheerful recognition of atheistic materialism, and a tendency to let his verse move faster, to be far-flung and spacious, which distinguishes him from other romantics.
Antitheses between romantic and postromantic go far deeper, however, than stylistic evidence alone. We have spoken of Don Juan as a great romantic myth which stands, cynical and smiling, to represent the time-force, victorious and baffling all spatial conquests. Similarly, we should expect another figure less purely sexual in symbolism to represent the romantic shift to feeling, the romantic egotistic recognition of a relentless temporal revolt against spatial abstraction, which was dominant in the religious period. Now the latter, being religious, is obviously associated with God, and romantic skepsis, therefore, evolves the opponent time-symbol of the Devil. There is no Goethe in English poetry, because of the suspension of the century between the creative period and the critical, and what that poet signified had to be actualized in three stages—Milton, Blake, and Shelley. With Milton Satan was baffled just as was the Puritan positivism, and the dauntless warrior of the first part of Paradise Lost gradually wastes away and degenerates, until in Paradise Regained he has become a sniggering little imp. In Blake the Mil-tonic plan is reversed; all moral values are explicitly inverted, putting evil where good formerly was. Blake starts out as a diabolist and worshipper of evil, or time, “the active springing from energy” [The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, pi. 3]. God, or Urizen, is a tyrant who invented law and logic, spatial inhibitions both. Hence, the Satanic time-power is expressed as revolt—Satan becomes a Messiah and engineers the French and American struggles for liberty. The clearest symbol of the revolt stage is Ore. Later, as Blake developed, he turned to deeper fundamentals, and the great myths of the Prophetic Books are dominated by the mighty Los, the God of time out of whom space (Enitharmon) proceeds as an emanation struggling to free herself. Finally she does free herself and runs shrieking from Los, only to be pursued, caught and reabsorbed. .. -80 Shelley is no prophet, but he is an anticipation of the new empiric attack on space, and Prometheus is the great figure who, armed with the new fire of time-energy, stands unbound and triumphant before the Zeus of religion, who does not possess it, because it possesses him. Positivistic poetry, therefore, turned its back on the time-force. It becomes as sexless as possible and attacks the time-problem only from the point of view of the spatial conquest of it—in other words from the moral side. In Browning love becomes the highest form of morality and God is reinstated as the rock-bottom formula of the excavating scientist,81 being always just one step away:
We find great things are made of little things,
And little things go lessening till at last
Comes God behind them. Talk of mountains now?
We talk of mould that heaps the mountain, mites
That throng the mould, and God that makes the mites.
The Name comes close behind a stomach-cyst,
The simplest of creations, just a sac
That’s mouth, heart, legs and belly at once, yet lives
And feels, and could do neither, we conclude,
If simplified still further one degree:
The small becomes the dreadful and immense!
[Mr. Sludge, “The Medium,” lines 1112–22]
Tennyson and Swinburne are less committed to this orientation and relapse into pantheism.
Similarly the approach to medieval culture is external and unsympathetic. With primitivism the interest in it was mainly directed toward the ballad, just as, and for the same reason that, the romantics in music revived the folk song. The most powerful formative influence on romantic poetry was Spenser, the pictorial critic of medievalism, and a glance at the poems of Coleridge or Keats which deal with this period is sufficient to show that they were far more attracted by the colour of illuminated missals than edified by their contents. The great Christian romances deal with a definite search for something, like the Holy Grail, and opposed to these is the horror of the atheism of an older civilization incarnate in the wandering Jew, who travels blindly under a curse. Romanticism brings back the weary and aimless wanderer in two well-known but opposed figures: the Ancient Mariner and the Flying Dutchman. In the latter, as almost everywhere in Wagner outside of Tannhäuser, the wanderer symbolizes the endless revolution of space-abstraction around the time-force, into which latter he is finally drawn by his sexual attachment to it—in other words, he is “redeemed by love.” The Ancient Mariner arrives at a positivistic solution, losing his esoteric haughtiness in a purely exotic impulse to take every spatial concept into his soul. Positivistic poetry revives the search for the Grail, at least four major poets becoming absorbed in Arthurian legends (Tennyson, Swinburne, Masefield, and E.A. Robinson)—chiefly the Tristram and Isolt story, where the love-redemption theme centres.82
If romanticism is typified by the lyric-essay, we should expect positivism to centre in the novel, and romanticism to tend to the destruction of that form. The novel is, of course, the critical successor to the drama, the arrangement and selection of life by a watching narrator replacing the purely objective abstraction presented on the stage. Now just as music and drama are ensemble performances for audiences, so the critical arts are written by and addressed to individuals, and this applies as much to a novel as it does to the lyric-essay. We altogether misunderstand the idea of the novel if we think of it as objective. In its essence the novel is the subjective presentation of an ordered picture of life as an idea in the mind of the author. It is not a cross-section of reality, but it typifies one. There must then be a kind of localization, whether one of place or one of social stratification. The centre of an idea, being the ego, is unapproachable; therefore, the novel consists essentially in variety of characters grouped around a hero and heroine whose psychology is not examined but who are left alone to symbolize the abstract normality of the mind of their creator. The marriage of hero and heroine symbolizes the closing up of the lacuna in the said mind through which came the novel, and, hence, signifies the end. The central theme is, consequently, love and the treatment comic, with a happy ending. These are not rules for novel-writing; they are merely principles which underlie the actual historical fact of the art form, which flourished—that is, lived and died—entirely within the era of positivistic dominance. They are not satisfactory to contemporary novelists, but neither is the novel.
The positivist novel corresponds, of course, to the contemporary experiment in science—given certain factors with certain conditions, let us see what will happen to them. A novel without a happy ending in which all difficulties are smoothed out and explained away would be as meaningless as an experiment without a calculable result. But it is evident that an art form in which love culminates in marriage and forms the central theme has affiliations with the sexual point of view of the positivist period.83 We should expect that romanticism, which made several onslaughts on the novel and finally destroyed it, would be associated primarily with the long-ignored but irresistible time, and to some extent, therefore, with the masculine reaction which reaches such bitter depths in Weininger and Strindberg.
In the first place, the great aim of the romantics we have seen to be a philosophy of history, and positivism, starting with Schopenhauer, turns its back on history. The typically romantic attack is, therefore, the historical novel of Scott, which bears with it all the political implications attacked by Borrow that we shall endeavour to trace in part five.84 Scott halted the development of the novel for several years, because he was a great artist in his own line and had behind him all the force of romanticism, whose historical imagination was focused on the Middle Ages and the Stuarts.85 But a force allied with him lay even deeper. We have seen in music how romanticism, by first recognizing time and space as separate concepts, brought about the separation of melody and harmony in counterpoint, these being respectively time and space elements. Music being propelled by a temporal force, its exhaustion would be accompanied by a victory of harmony. Conversely, the life of the novel residing in its spatial abstracting power, we should expect the time-element to destroy it. The “harmony” of a novel is what sustains it, and that is obviously its balance of characterization. The “melody” is the story, or the plot. The story, like the folk tune, is the popular element, and in the creative period of masculine domination it entirely runs away with the characterization which goes to make a novel. The Catholic period was that of the knight errant, but the Renaissance destroyed it in Don Quixote and replaced it by the picaresque tradition. In England the picaresque novel reigned supreme from Bunyan to Smollet as the masculine form of the novel. The women, whose demand was as yet chaotic, read instead the chaotic Scudéry type of romance.86 In the eighteenth century Richardson brought into existence the modern novel on a feminine basis (developing it out of the letter, the prime symbol of individual communication) and Fielding annihilated the picaresque in Jonathan Wild. The novel was now firmly established, and the first protest of romanticism proper was a flood of cheap horror tales. These were not effective and were shipwrecked on the iceberg of Jane Austen, who shaped the novel into its ultimate positivist form. Scott’s historical attack followed, but that could only last as long as romanticism did, and then came Poe, who isolated the time-skeleton of the novel, or pure plot, and produced the detective story. This centres around a crime and is, thus, the direct descendant of the rogue-romance. Both are concentrated on the antisocial because the novel is an experiment in life and demands controlled conditions—that is, a static society. What attacks this would have to be antisocial. The novel demands a certain smug self-satisfaction in the novelist, because of this fact and because it tends naturally to a happy ending.
The critic contemplating life, or the set of symbols he has evolved out of life, is, of course, a romanticist, and the novelist shrinks from the full implications of the “view of life.” Characterization in the novel proper is purely external, and society is postulated as static, because the novelist is turned away from the attitude which would recognize the time-implications in life. He does not consider either the macrocosm of the world or the microcosm of the individual. He must abstract a section from the former and group the latter, dealing with both as spatial. The romanticist, then, when he finally comes up to rehabilitate himself, destroys the plan of the novel by his insistence that there is something wrong with the world. The detective story is the strict objective form embodying this conception. Several novelists in the positivistic era, headed by Charles Reade, bring in the social problem. This destroys the novel as an art form, because it replaces it with a propagandic type subservient to a thesis. It is significant of the complete overthrow of the novel that the usual reaction to this approach urges the other: “it is the business of a novelist just to tell a plain story.”
There is naturally a strong pull upon the novelist to draw him into the sweeping time-sequence of life and make a reformer out of him. This pull is almost inevitable, in fact, and I do not really know of any pure novelist, in the formal sense, except Jane Austen, who first defined that form. George Eliot, Zola, Balzac, Thackeray, even Flaubert, all kept ulterior motives in the background. The clearest example of this difficulty is found in Dickens. From a purely technical point of view Dickens is not only the world’s greatest novelist, but one of the supreme artists of all time: the ease with which he manipulates an immense host of characters around his two central figures, intertwining them with a superb sense of pictorial contrast, is little short of miraculous. But the pull of the plot is too strong. He did not seem to consider his technical faculty as evidence of real technique at all, and laboured much over the composition and working out of an alien and absurd plot. As a novelist, he could not very well go in for straight detective stories, but compromised with the mystery, to which he gradually sacrificed his greater talents, culminating in his last unfinished work,87 and even in his great novels the long impossible subterfuges of some of the characters, which reveal the so-called mystery at the end, are very miserable affairs. He suffered precisely similar inhibitions with social reform, though he handled this better than did George Eliot, for example.
So even in the greatest practitioners of novel-writing the time-element overrides. But romanticism has not yet altogether shot its bolt. We have said that a novelist draws his characters externally, because they exist only as ideas in his mind. A novel moves by the shifting interplay of characters, and a prolonged examination of one figure destroys its spirit. Hence, we have a movement precisely analogous to the chord-as-colour concept attack on harmonic music, which isolates one portrait and studies it—the biographical novel, which is developed through to the huge tomes of Jean-Christophe and Ulysses. This reverts to a temporal consideration. It is the romantic view of time made individual instead of synthetic and symbolic. There is infinite variety in individuals, just as there is infinite variety in the world as a whole, and infinity is too big to be contained in a defined art form.
We have avoided giving the same exposition of romantic English literature that we did of philosophy and music, because the field has been so frequently covered, and to reinterpret it all in terms of our thesis would be at this stage tautological. The illustration of the working through of the romantic force is certainly more interesting and probably more significant. When the reign of positivism is over, rehabilitated romanticism sets in. As we have seen, positivism posits an optimism in action and a sort of suspended judgment in thought that makes it inseparable from a peculiar set, posed quality we usually call smugness. When the cocksureness of material science begins to break up, the time-element is recognized as beyond our apprehension, and “space-time,” or the manifestation of time in space-phenomena, becomes separated out from it. In literature this has a similar repercussion in that the question of the will is no longer approached from the point of view of the compulsions binding it to space. In other words, literature from now on does not aim so constantly at the moral and respectable point of view. The decadence of postromanticism, which culminated in the trial of Wilde, produced a reaction, certainly, but the literary reaction was a swing toward health. Romanticism had come into its own.
The subversive attack for this era is again French. But a little later than the positivists come the symbolistes, who turned romanticism into impressionism. These two latter terms are connected as are reality and truth—the one is the product of the other and is begotten by the critical mind. Impressionism is to romanticism as romanticism itself is to the creative period. It aims at the photograph, not the painting. Consequently, it depends upon a single effect. But the effect must be an instantaneous reproduction of reality. Its art is too swift to permit of its being filtered through a working mind. The camera sums up reality at a glance; the painter interprets it by prolonged watching and communion with it. The opposition of “realism” to “romanticism” implies that the latter, in its flight from the world-as-will and its absorption in the world as subjective idea, is to the latter as seashell pink to dirty drab (this figure occurs somewhere in Meredith)88 and, consequently, takes that view of life. But we should remember that the idea that prettiness is unreal and that the “real” depicted in realism is ugly (journalists usually replace this word by “stark”) spring from the same postulate—the romantic pessimistic rejection of the world-as-will. When romanticism is rehabilitated, the world-as-will is finally and squarely recognized without any emotional reactions. But we cannot know this world-as-will—that we have finally discovered—hence, it can only be lit up by a lightning flash, held spatially for an instant, and symbolized by an instantaneous appeal to feeling.
Now this sudden comprehension of the world-as-will must be pictorial, but must use some force powerful enough, as the lyric-essay and the novel certainly are not, to bring about an immediate response. Hence, the neoromantic period brings a revival of music and drama in this new flashlight form. Music has been dealt with, and we have seen that its unit is fundamentally the single chord. The reason, of course, is that the chord signifies the isolation of a single impression of the underlying evanescent unity. Atmosphere represents the same thing in painting. In exactly the same way the dramatic and fictional arts tend. The grasp of form in the drama is centred on the scena or one-act play in Yeats, Synge, Shaw, and O’Neill. The longer works of the latter two are scenas strung together. The novel gives way to the short story, which exhibits a constant tendency to approach the dramatic scene, a tendency running through Poe and de Maupassant to Hemingway and Katherine Mansfield. Poetry centres on the presentation of one theme, long poems being generally the work of minor poets. These are very general statements, because of the experimental complex of the age which results in trying everything at least several times, but it is hardly possible to escape from the conclusion that this impressionist technic is the dominant note of the artistic activity of the whole of the contemporary neo-romantic period and generally characteristic of and inevitable to it.
In literature this ultimate exhaustion is made possible by the break-up of poetry into prose. The essential distinction between these two forms is chiefly that in prose the idea is microcosmic and exists independently, while in poetry it is cosmic, the rhythmic beat of its formulation being its essence. Now as the microcosm is reflected in the atomic individualism of the prose, a new “naturalness” comes into poetry which starts with Blake, perhaps the first great poet to keep a natural speaking rhythm enclosed in a line of metrical verse. As the speech became more forceful, free verse was developed by Whitman and strict verse exploded by Browning. The great bulk of poetry today is in free verse, and after puzzling over its raison d’être for some time, the writer has finally been forced to the conclusion that if a generalization can be made about it, it would be that in the case of those major poets who obviously know best what they are doing, free verse tends constantly in its technique toward bringing out and emphasizing the rhythmic implications of the sentence. The sentence is evidently the unit of modern prose. The prose of the creative period is forced into a quasi-poetic mould in which the rhythm is too subtle to be detected and the period is more a caesura than a full stop. Comparison between the prose style of Berkeley, Hume, or Gibbon with the echoless thumping of Macaulay or Mill should show that in the latter the writing is more “natural,” that is, more colloquial and with a mechanizing tendency to equate the sentence with the idea. In prose stylists, like Ruskin or De Quincey, the sentence is exploited to a degree unparalleled since the naive attempts of euphuism. Romanticism, then, brings English literature down to the sentence, and the sentence is the pictorial representation, completed and balanced, of a temporal art. The mechanizing tendency of the sentence is far more obvious in music than in literature, because there it is made up in a regular progression of beats. A measure is a single rhythmic pattern, two measures a phrase, four a section, eight a period, and sixteen a typical conventionalized tune. The whole of popular music is centred on the last-named unit—some time ago I glanced through several volumes of popular songs in an endeavour to find one that was either more or less than sixteen measures in length, being finally rewarded by discovering one with thirty-two. In the closing stages of music we find this preoccupation with the precise, clipped, two-or-four-bar rhythmic unit to an irritating extent in Grieg and Scriabin.
The snobbishness of erudition, starting from the romantic “escape from life,” is, of course, easy enough to trace, through Baudelaire and Browning to the decadents, and through the decadents to Pound, Eliot, and Joyce. The metropolitan spirit finds an antithetical provincial protest in the regionalism of France, the United States, and the English pastoral poetry which has a marked primitivistic bent. The two tendencies in romanticism, the exotic and the esoteric, are, as we have seen, opposed, one turning to space and positivism, the other to time and postromanticism. Hence, the one is allied with the metropolitan looking at the countryside, the other with the metropolitan looking in upon himself.89
The French origin of the neoromantic period gives it a strong appeal to those English-speaking countries which in their revolt against the literary supremacy of England have turned to France and have sided in with the French destructive attack on Western culture. The growth of English literature in England becomes repetitive and self-commentating after the close of the last century, its contemporary development being in the hands of Ireland and America. The intense nationalistic self-containedness of the smaller country has given it a more organic grasp and has swung it further toward the drama and mysticism in the lyric-essay, while the Americans, representing in the main the protest of individualism, have tended more to the lyric. Both countries went through a cultural renaissance heralded by a movement of expatriation to England—Moore, Shaw, and Wilde from Ireland, Pound and Henry James from our neighbour. One reason for their greater susceptibility to the Parisian déraciné attack is their own orchidaceous position with regard to Western culture, both countries lacking the systematic cultural growth of England and any musical or architectural traditions of their own—architecture as a creative time-art and not a product of applied science, and music as an art form and not as a folk song.
A closing word should be said concerning the romantic attack on the drama. We have seen in music how the opera became tragic with romanticism, so it seems natural that the tragedy should become operatic. As the romantic drama belongs more to German literature, with Schiller, Kleist, Grillparzer, and others, than to English, this does not at the moment concern us. The most notable operatic tendencies in our own tradition are the dramatic scenes in Byron. Plays of English romanticism, even so powerful a work as the Cenci, belong more to the lyric-essay than to the drama. It was not until the positivist period that sufficient sympathy with a spatial art could be attained to formulate a definite attitude toward the drama, albeit from a subjective point of view. An objective, spatial, dynamic art form would naturally be symbolized by a sphere, while a subjective, spatial, static art form would be better represented by a ring. Hence, Browning’s great drama (it has nothing to do with epics), which the Roman gold ring so symbolizes, as the poet expressly tells us [The Ring and the Book, lines 1–31], presents modern literature with the technique of the modern drama worked out in full. The characters illuminate the subjectively conceived theme like floodlights—that is all they exist for—and a perfect modelled drama would have the complete balance of the ring. This secondary contribution of characters to theme is most plainly evident in Shaw. The theme of The Ring and the Book also has obvious affinities with the detective story, because the strict form of the theme of the novel90 is similarly the detective story.
We have shown above that impressionism restores the dramatic sphere in its microcosmic seed-coat. We might note in this connection that an experimentally produced sphere, blown up until it burst, would represent the whole essence of the pessimistic approach to the age. Hence, the ghastliest short story in literature, Henry James’s Turn of the Screw, employs this technique: an embryonic dramatic scena becomes more and more unendurable until it reaches the breaking point, and then vanishes exactly like a soap bubble. Ravel’s Boléro does the same thing in music, and the fact that this piece has been called the musical description of an orgasm is not at all inconsistent with the sexual implications of neoromanticism discussed in part 1. In art this psychology underlies the advertisement, which reflects in epitome a neoromantic world continually inflating economically to the breaking point and then vanishing in the depths of depression or war.
There is room for only the briefest mention of the movement of romanticism through politics.
The period of systematic romanticism is usually associated with an eager-eyed liberalism of the type of Shelley: of a bitter resentment of all forms of tyranny and a post-Rousseau insistence on the rights of man and of the individual’s liberty. This is the first and primitivist stage: the after-echo or feeling reaction to the French Revolution. The rights of the common man were lauded by all romantics, though many, including most of the English poets, repudiated the revolution because of its guillotine, and because it had not brought either the liberty it promised or an immediate progress in ideas. However, this peculiar vague and sentimental love of humanity represents much of both romantic and positivist ideals. The overthrow of creative religion meant the annihilation of the God transcendent; the God immanent, or rather pantheistic, was the conception replacing it, and he could be perceived only in humanity. Worship of humanity is, then, the romanticist’s religion as well as Comte’s. The difference is that a time-synthesis from a spatial viewpoint will recognize a unity in succession more clearly, and will, consequently, postulate a present one which is incorporated in Hegel’s conception of the Zeitgeist. This word was practically a shibboleth of young German romantic liberals, and considering Hegel’s own viewpoint, it is obvious that the conception is too deep and broad to be identified with either liberalism or conservatism, which indicate the wings and not the centre of the social development. The worship of the Zeitgeist was the romantic religion. It was not Schleiermacher’s religion, but Schleiermacher signified its dissection into the individual and is, thus, midway between Hegel and Schopenhauer, the latter of whom saw in it a cross-section of the hated will. In England a somewhat similar movement took place through the humanitarianism of Shaftesbury to the individualism of Methodism, by far the greatest and most powerful product of romantic religion, becoming insensibly and subtly an ally of capitalism. Schleiermacher’s thought, therefore, has a double aspect. The romantic political worship of the Zeitgeist meant practically that God exists in the world of men, because where men are gathered a consensus results which evolves a new factor greater than the sum of individuals, which is the highest thing we can know. We worship in society. Schleiermacher represents a feeling-reaction to this—look inside, not outside, into your own soul for God-consciousness. This leads alike into the esoteric narcotic ecstasy of the postromantic and the spatial conquest of the world-as-idea.
All of which is by way of introduction to the fact that a Zeitgeist must have some defined form. In the world there are two such forms: the nation and the race-language group. One could imagine on the one hand an English, German, or south Slavic racial and cultural Zeitgeist, and on the other a British, Austrian, or American national one. But the former alone has its roots in time and partakes of the mysterious time-force. The latter is a space-symbol and space-conquest. The political activity of romanticism, then, centred on attempting to make national units identical with racial and cultural ones. The most prominent exponent of this school, both in theory and practice, is Mazzini.91
Positivism is a logical development of this, for a space-conquest has geographical as well as scientific connotations, and positivistic politics is incarnated in imperialism. Romanticism is not imperialistic, except where the will to power enters into it, for imperialism is sustained only by a continual and purely spatial production of goods supported by exploitation, a continually increasing one, of raw-material markets. Postromantic political thinking, then, develops in opposition to this the conception of class. If the nation is the unit of romanticism, it is because it holds together the exotic and esoteric tendencies, whose cohesion is essential to it, as no other unit will; there is room both for the sense connections of the metropolis and the facility of intercourse of language which binds them together. The class represents the carrying through of the divorced esoteric element, just as the empire carries through the nation divorced from language-entity. There are two protagonists of the conception of society as divided, not into nations, but into classes—Nietzsche and Marx. But Marx cannot be called a postromantic, because his whole thesis rests on an inversion of Hegel’s romantic approach to history, and is rather far gone into positivism. As a result, there is a class struggle, but no class distinction: the difference in class is one of economic or spatial position; if the proletariat win out, it is a purely quantitative victory of numbers. This theory is almost postpositivistic, being an inference drawn from the positivistic politics of laissez-faire and capitalism. Nietzsche’s master class, on the contrary, are qualitatively superior to the slaves, and it is their ideal and blood-supremacy which results in the extermination of the latter. The metropolitan upheaval brought into existence the bourgeois class as we now understand the term; systematic romanticism was a bourgeois product. Postromanticism, an abstraction from the bourgeoisie, has nothing to do with millionaires or proletarians in themselves; they are not opposed to the bourgeoisie in the restricted sense of the middle class, but to the bourgeoisie in the larger sense of the whole of society, differentiated only by the accidental position of wealth. Épater le bourgeois, however, is not political action; the cranks by their very nature are not an organized class. So while many, like Baudelaire, deliberately cultivate a taste for homosexuality or something else objectionable enough to exasperate society, this political action is incorporated mainly in anarchism, which, like every other subversive approach, centres in France and descends from Proudhon to Sorel and syndicalism.
The rehabilitation of romanticism brings in a new idea. We have seen that in thought the romantic broadening of the idea was overturned by the positivist idea of evolution, with its continually increasing differentiation and wider spatial activity. Romanticism came back to shatter the linear evolution by showing that the idea had to be there as a creative factor. A precisely analogous change takes place in politics. The concept of nationality as synonymous with cultural affinity was replaced by the expanding state. The return of romanticism brings with it the fact that the essence of imperialism is still the nuclear nation. Hence, it could only arise after imperialisms had clashed. Socialism, or state control of industry, is a general statement of which imperialism, shorn of its laissez-faire connotations, is a particular application. Neoromanticism, therefore, following the war, is actualized politically in National Socialism. In Italy Mazzini’s controversy with Marx92 shows the connection of romanticism with Fascism easily enough; and Mussolini’s own thinking, we learn from his biographers, was largely dominated by two postromantics, Nietzsche and Sorel.93 Hitlerism is practically the working through of Nietzsche, even to its anti-Semitism. It seems a pity that brave and generous spirits such as Byron, Mazzini, Heine, and Fichte should find a remorselessly logical outcome in the development of a Philistine Italy and in the vicious cultural suicide of Germany. But “classicism is health; romanticism is disease,” and what we have called rather clumsily the rehabilitation of romanticism in a synthesis of final exhaustion can only be the return of that disease in a chronic form.