Rolf P. Lessenich: Romantic Disillusionism and the Sceptical Tradition
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Rolf P. Lessenich: Romantic Disillusionism and the Sceptical Tradition
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Romantic Disillusionism and the
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Rolf P. Lessenich: Romantic Disillusionism and the Sceptical Tradition
Experience is the chief philosopher,
But saddest when his science is well known.
Byron, Don Juan (1819–1824)
Our life is a false nature, ’t is not in
The harmony of things.
Byron, Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage (1812–1818)
I lament now, I must ever lament, those few short months of Paradisiacal
bliss; I disobeyed no command, I ate no apple, and yet I was ruthlessly driven
from it.
Mary Shelley, Matilda (MS 1819–1820)
Je ne crois pas, i Christ! / ta parole sainte:
Je suis venu trop tard dans un monde trop vieux.
D’un siHcle sans espoir na%t un siHcle sans crainte;
Les comHtes du nitre ont d8peupl8 les cieux.
Alfred de Musset, Rolla (1833)
Poor bird, that cannot ever
Dwell high in tower of song:
Whose heart-breaking endeavour
But palls the lazy throng.
Thomas Lovell Beddoes (1844–1848)
Le romantisme est une gr.ce, c8leste ou infernale, / qui nous devons des
stigmates 8ternels.
Charles Baudelaire, Salon de 1859
Nature’s dark side is heeded now –
(Ah! optimist-cheer disheartened flown) –
Herman Melville, Misgivings (1860)
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Rolf P. Lessenich: Romantic Disillusionism and the Sceptical Tradition
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Rolf P. Lessenich: Romantic Disillusionism and the Sceptical Tradition
Contents
The Two Sides of Romanticism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
9
Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
31
I
Romantic Disillusionism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
129
II
Heterogeneous Man’s Weak Will and Mind . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
191
III The Vanity of the Passions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
1) The Vanity of Love . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
2) The Vanity of Glory . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
231
231
278
IV The Injustice of the World . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
309
V
Doubt of Synthesis: The Aimlessness of History . . . . . . . . . . .
335
VI Doubt of Resurrection and Regeneration: Cultural Pessimism . . .
379
VII Man’s Isolation and Progressive Disappointment . . . . . . . . . .
409
VIII The Falseness of Philosophical Essentialism and Systems . . . . . .
433
Retrospect and Outlook: The Intellectual Searcher’s Negative Epiphany .
455
Select Bibliography . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
461
Index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
473
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Rolf P. Lessenich: Romantic Disillusionism and the Sceptical Tradition
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Rolf P. Lessenich: Romantic Disillusionism and the Sceptical Tradition
The Two Sides of Romanticism
The revival of Plato and Platonism – in the sense of all philosophies and theologies that derived their ultimate inspiration from Plato1 – in eighteenth-century
Preromanticism and Romanticism was a reaction against the Enlightenment’s
programme of divorcing metaphysics from philosophy including aesthetics, and
its consequent low estimation of Plato’s and Platonism’s “reveries” and “ungrounded fanatic fancy” as in the writings of Johann Jakob Brucker, Voltaire,
d’Holbach, Samuel Parker, and Samuel Johnson. Platonism’s heterogeneity,
diffuseness, and incoherence in the history of philosophy and cultural memory
notwithstanding, integral theory distinguishes the idealist Platonic traditions
from the empiricist and materialist Western ones. “Tous les sp8cialistes de
l’histoire du platonisme sont donc conscients de l’8cart qui existe entre le texte
des dialogues et la tradition platonicienne, ou platonisante”.2 Through the mediation of Origen, whose Christian theology was heavily influenced by the Pagan
Neoplatonists, and St Augustine, whom Platonism had converted from Manichaeism to Christianity, and through the mediation of Marsilio Ficino’s syncretic Theologia Platonica as well as Erasmus (“O Sancte Socrate, ora pro
nobis”), Platonism remained an indelible presence in the Christian world even
when not acknowledged, integrating Christianity in the Classical Tradition. In
the philosophy of the transition from the Enlightenment to Romanticism, one of
Immanuel Kant’s great achievements was finding fault with and overcoming the
Platonism-Empiricism dichotomy by reintroducing metaphysics through
1 For the diffuseness of Platonism see James A. Notopoulos, The Platonism of Shelley, Durham
NC 1949; M.H. Abrams, Natural Supernaturalism, New York NY 1971; and Dermot Moran,
Neoplatonism and Christianity in the West, in: The Routledge Handbook of Neoplatonism, ed.
Pauliina Remes – Svetla Slaveva–Griffin, London 2014, 508–524, who traces the intricacies of
divergent Pagan and Christian Neoplatonic views to the “new outbreak of Christian Neoplatonism with the so-called Cambridge Platonists in the seventeenth century” (522). See also
D.P. Walker, The Ancient Theology : Studies in Christian Platonism from the Fifteenth to the
Eighteenth Century, London 1972.
2 Michel Brix, Platon et le platonisme dans la litt8rature franÅaise de l’.ge romantique, in:
Romantisme, 113 (2001), 44.
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The Two Sides of Romanticism
transcendental philosophy.3 It remains to be investigated in detail how the
Preromantic Platonic Revival came about, what was the role played by the unforgotten late seventeeth-century Cambridge Platonists, by Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and by others. Platonism’s chief propagator in Romantic-Period England
and America was Thomas Taylor (1758–1835), whose translations of Plato, Aristotle, and the ancient Neoplatonists such as Plotinus, Porphyry, and Proclus
– rediscovered in German Romantic-Idealist philosophy 1781–1831 – exercised
a considerable influence on such Romantic authors as William Blake, Percy
Bysshe Shelley, William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and Ralph Waldo
Emerson. And Platonism’s chief propagator in Romantic-Period France was
Hegel’s friend the eclectic philosopher Victor Cousin (1792–1867), translator of
Plato’s dialogues and author of a famous treatise on the Platonic jakoj!cah_a,
Du vrai, du beau et du bien (1836).
The Platonic (also termed Positive) Romantics generally agreed with William
Blake in preferring the breaking up rather than the dismissal of the Classical
Tradition, mixing classical with non-classical myths and their own mythopoetic
dreams and fantasies, contesting the Classical Tradition’s claim to hegemonic
exclusivity and universal validity. They were visionaries who believed – or rather
tried to believe – in the immutability of metaphysical revelations of unalterable
and eternal truths and values inaccessible to the senses and independent of the
world’s changes. Their Platonic-Christian idealism was still alive and acknowledged in the works of the American Transcendentalists though infected by
their reading of the sceptic and empiricist David Hume, less doubt-ridden in
Ralph Waldo Emerson, more doubt-ridden in Walt Whitman.4
Their opponents within the Romantic Movement were the pessimistic Romantic Disillusionists (also termed Romantic Sceptics or Negative Romantics).
With the technique and arsenal of weapons typical of the Romantic Period’s
Streitkultur, or art of arguing, inherited from and updated by the Classical
Tradition (eristike techne),5 these would-be believers yet must-be realists voted
with the sceptic Pyrrho (or, rather, what they believed Aristotle’s contemporary
Pyrrho taught in his lost works) against the idealist Plato (or, rather, against the
Christian and Pagan Platonism that resulted from Plato’s diffuse and syncretic
3 Historisches Wörterbuch der Philosophie, Platonismus, ed. Joachim Ritter, Darmstadt 1971–
2007, VII. 980–981.
4 See Emerson’s essay Plato, or, The Philosopher, 1850, in: Representative Men (1850) and
Whitman’s poem The Base of All Metaphysics, 1871, in: Leaves of Grass (1855–1892). For the
complexities and duplicities of Emerson’s and Whitman’s Platonism see Paul Giles, American
Literature and Classical Consciousness, in: David Hopkins – Charles Martindale (gen. eds.),
The Oxford History of Classical Reception in English Literature, vol. 4 (1790–1880), Oxford
and New York NY 2015, 169–170.
5 Rolf Lessenich, Neoclassical Satire and the Romantic School 1780–1830, Super Alta Perennis,
Göttingen 2012, passim.
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Rolf P. Lessenich: Romantic Disillusionism and the Sceptical Tradition
The Two Sides of Romanticism
11
reception in the Christian West). Blake, for instance, was a Platonic-Gnostic
Christian, and William Wordsworth’s “Immortality Ode” that paradoxically saw
the child as father of the man resumed the Platonic-Gnostic tradition of the
Corpus Hermeticum (1st to 3rd centuries AD) translated by Ficino.6 The Romantic
Disillusionists, avoiding deception on both socio-political and personal levels,
inverted the ranking of Platonism over Pyrrhonism, although they cannot have
been blind to the symptoms of doubt in the Platonism of their adversaries and
their occasional adoption of decidedly Disillusionist positions. Platonic foundationalism and optimism became their ostensible targets in their efforts to
bring man back to the truth of daily experienced reality.7 The case of the antiPlatonist Herman Melville, a reader and student of Byron, who even visited the
Holy Land in an unsuccessful effort to retrieve the lost Christian faith of his
childhood, shows how the experience of injustice and war in the name of religion
turned would-be Romantic believers into Romantic sceptics.8 Thus, Lord Byron
made the narrator of his satirical epic Don Juan (1819–1824) – written in the
wake of the dynamically updated and sceptically modernized Classical Tradition
– oppose experience to the wisely foolish optimism of such school philosophers
as Socrates, Christ, Bacon, and Locke:
’Tis thus the good will amiably err
And eke the wise, as has been often shown.
Experience is the chief philosopher,
But saddest when his science is well known:
And persecuted sages teach the schools
Their folly in forgetting there are fools.9
In the light of experience, the theological virtues of love, hope, and charity as
taught by Christ have forever remained remote ideals. This extreme doubt and
disorientation is typical of the “poetry of disillusionment”, in which the
“characteristics of high Romantic poetry are all to be found […] but the positive
goals are persistently inverted”.10 On his life journey back to an imagined
6 Aleida Assmann, Wordsworth und die romantische Krise: Das Kind als Vater, in Das Vaterbild im Abendland, 2, ed. Hubertus Tellenbach, Stuttgart 1978, 48–61.
7 For the characteristic clashing of spiritual ideals and earthly realities in Romantic literature
see Allan Rodway, The Romantic Conflict, London 1963.
8 Merton M. Sealts, Pursuing Melville, 1940–1980, Melville and the Platonic Tradition, Madison WI 1982, and Mark Anderson, Moby-Dick as Philosophy : Plato – Melville – Nietzsche,
Nashville TN 2015. In his numerous references to Socrates and Plato, “Melville repeatedly
employs the language of philosophical idealism […] but without endorsing Platonic doctrine
itself” (Sealts 290).
9 Byron, Don Juan, 1819–1824, 15. 17. 3–8, in Complete Poetical Works, ed. J.J. McGann,
Oxford 1980–1993, V. 593–594. All subsequent quotations from Byron’s poetical works are
from this edition.
10 Fiona J. Stafford, The Last of The Race, Oxford 1994, 167.
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The Two Sides of Romanticism
Paradise or Platonic world of ideas, or his life odyssey back to a mythical Ithaca,
“exiled man” in his Romantic nostalgia (Heimweh, Sehnsucht, Wanderlust)
“wanders on and on, unconsoled by the journey home, and denied reunion with
his race”.11 The Romantic Disillusionists could not share the Positive Romantic
hope, still maintained by Blake and Schiller, that the fragmentation of mankind
into races, classes, cultures, and religions as well as the increasing isolation of the
individual would one day be overcome through art in a saving reintegration.12
Emily Bront[, the sceptical daughter of the perpetual curate of Haworth in
Yorkshire, wrote a hymn-like poem on hope which, however, treats it as being
baffled by experience. Confined in a “grated den”, her speaker meets Hope (or
Spes) as a reserved, cowardly, treacherous, and sadistic female guard who tortures rather than comforts the sufferer. She never really enters the speaker’s
prison. And, when most needed, she escapes to heaven and leaves her charge
behind, forever unprotected in the reality of this godless world:
Hope – whose whisper would have given
Balm to all that frenzied pain –
Stretched her wings and soared to heaven –
Went – and ne’er returned again!13
If we read the prison as modern man’s isolation after the loss of his religious
community, it is the experience of the failure of mutually true love that haunts
Emily Bront[’s poems, be they biographical self-constitutions or Gondal fictions. Hopes and dreams of lasting happiness collapse as solitary man grows
aware of the corruption in all men’s minds, including his or her own:
First melted off the hope of youth,
Then Fanceys rainbow fast withdrew
And then experience told me truth
in mortal bosom never grew.14
Experience was, in fact, the chief philosopher of the Romantic Disillusionists, as
it had been to the Enlightenment empiricists. The Classical Tradition’s cult of
common sense as understood by the seventeeth- and eighteenth-century Augustans appealed to them. Its prevalent Enlightenment optimism and Augustan
demand for a system of rational literary rules and conventional political and
moral order, however, and its distrust of innovation, upset them. With the
Positive as well as the Negative Romantics, the Classical Tradition’s afore11 Ibid.
12 Ibid. 161–162. Stafford’s reference is to Friedrich Schiller’s philosophical treatise Über die
ästhetische Erziehung des Menschen, 6th letter (1795).
13 E. Bront[, Hope, MS 18 December 1843, lines 17–20, in: Poems, ed. D. Roper, Oxford 1995,
142–143.
14 E. Bront[, I Am The Only Being, MS 17 May 1839, lines 17–20, ed. cit. 80.
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Rolf P. Lessenich: Romantic Disillusionism and the Sceptical Tradition
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13
mentioned hegemonic Alleingültigkeitsanspruch was unanimously challenged,
though for divergent reasons. And the pugnacious and chameleon-like Lord
Byron, steeped in – though partially critical of – the Classical Tradition, was the
most outstanding literary figure and the major literary influence in European
Romantic Disillusionism. It was Marguerite, Countess of Blessington who, in her
record of her conversations with Lord Byron, represented him as a highly impressionable poet who loved to read Virgil and Pope alongside James Beattie and
Samuel Taylor Coleridge, “a perfect chameleon […] owing to the extreme mobilit8 of his nature”.15 Chameleon Byron was often accused of plagiarism due to
his versatility and fortune to be endowed with such a good memory, at least
before critical theory developed the concept of intertextuality.16 Owing to the
heritage of Preromanticism, however, he was by no means the only Romantic
poet who could write in both the Neoclassical and the Romantic modes.
In his brilliant essay entitled “Romanticism”, first published in Macmillan’s
Magazine (November 1876) and republished as “Postscript” to his Appreciations
(1889), Walter Pater said of Rousseau, a spirit whom Byron thought akin to
himself:
It is in the terrible tragedy of Rousseau, in fact, that French romanticism, with much
else, begins: reading his Confessions we seem actually to assist at the birth of this new,
strong spirit in the French mind. […] His strangeness or distortion, his profound
subjectivity, his passionateness – the cor laceratum – Rousseau makes all men in love
with these. […] For Rousseau did but anticipate a trouble in the spirit of the whole
world; and thirty years afterwards, what in him was a peculiarity, became part of the
general consciousness. A storm was coming: Rousseau, with others, felt it in the air, and
they helped to bring it down: they introduced a disturbing element into French literature, then so trim and formal […]17
Here Rousseau, the “father of French Romanticism”, is not charged with having
sparked off the movement alone out of his own “torn heart”. While stressing his
fractured and tortured personality, as well as his fascinating literary qualities,
Pater nevertheless insists that Rousseau was one of many voices of early Romanticism to rebel against the established dictates of Neoclassical rules as well as
philosophical and political reason. He was, though unadmittedly, a Platonist who
contributed to the Preromantic Platonic Revival, directing his times’ focus on the
regression of civilization back to original nature close to the world of ideas.18 He
became the exponent of a whole, long, many-voiced movement, although each
15 Blessington, Conversations of Lord Byron, 1834, ed. Ernest James Lovell, Princeton NJ 1969,
71.
16 Richard Lee Townsend, Lord Byron as Literary Chameleon: A Study in Literary Influence,
PhD thesis, University of Michigan microfilm 1971, 8, for echoes of Pope 53–70.
17 Pater, Appreciations, Postscript, 1889, in Works, London 1900–1901, V. 251–252.
18 David Lay Williams, Rousseau’s Platonic Enlightenment, University Park 2007.
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The Two Sides of Romanticism
involved author had his or her own very distinctive characteristics of thought
and style. As with all those authors, conditions of production and reception were
essential to Rousseau’s communicative act with his readers.
Much the same is true of Lord Byron, who shared Rousseau’s Gothic feeling of
being helplessly exposed to a dark fate, without the redemptive powers of selfdetermination or self-control.19 While Byron’s very particular and individual cor
laceratum can hardly be denied, he was the major cultural voice in the chorus,
not the originator, of the multifaceted literary phenomenon that has been variously called Byronism, Negative Romanticism, Romantic Pyrrhonism, Romantic Scepticism, romantischer Desillusionismus, or – restricted to Romanticism’s dark underside featuring blatant violations of social and moral order –
Romantic Agony, Dark Romanticism, schwarze Romantik, romanticismo nero,
romanticismo oscuro, soleil noir, and romantisme fr8n8tique.20 The Gothic was
Romanticism’s transgressive doppelganger from its Preromantic beginnings
with the poetry and prose of the Graveyard School in the 1740s as it subverted
both the earlier Enlightenment’s and later Platonic Romanticism’s optimism by
recalling attention to and exploring man’s ever-present dark unconscious and its
everlasting enmity to clear reason and progress. As such, it had to defend itself
against imputations of qualitative cheapness to serve the taste of the uneducated
masses for mere lucre, – a favourite traditionalist argument in the period’s
Streitkultur.21 The darkening of the Enlightenment, caused by increasing doubt
of the omnipotence of human reason and the perfectibility of man,22 preceded a
Janus-faced Romanticism so that it has remained a matter of debate whether
Heinrich von Kleist and Lord Byron were rather disillusioned Enlightenment or
disillusioned Romantic authors. Contemporaries of the Romantic Movement
were aware of this duality. Visiting England in 1789, the German Radical naturalist and traveller Georg Forster found that the work of Henry Fuseli was not
merely aiming at sensational effects in the interest of sales figures, but was also
searching for the truth of nature in its most terrible expression, as the flights of
his fancy did not lead his audience into the fairy-land of the ideal but into the
forbidden region of ghosts and spectres.23 As a “Jacobin” seeking to break political as well as aesthetic conventions, Forster advocated for the Gothic versus
19 Maggie Kilgour, The Rise of the Gothic Novel, London and New York 1995, 1997, 41–42.
20 As defined by G.R. Thompson; see Thompson (ed.), The Gothic Imagination: Essays on Dark
Romanticism, Pullman WA 1974. This does not yet apply to the Graveyard School.
21 Michael Gamer, Romanticism and the Gothic, Cambridge 2000, 163–165.
22 Howard Mumford Jones, Revolution and Romanticism, chapter 4, Cambridge MA and
London 1974, 57–80.
23 Georg Forster, Geschichte der Kunst in England: Vom Jahre 1789, in: Felix Krämer (ed.),
Schwarze Romantik von Goya bis Max Ernst, Städel-Museum, Frankfurt am Main, Ostfildern
2012, 76.
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The Two Sides of Romanticism
15
conventional Neoclassicism. The Gothic was subversive, transgressive, antinormative, revolutionary, anarchic, and irrational. With its success seen in the
book market, it formed part of the “popular culture” associated with the French
Revolution and thus violently opposed by the anti-Jacobins, who supported a
Neoclassical “high or polite culture” dominated by rule and reason.24 Understanding Romanticism as the most modern expression of beauty according to
the morals of the time – including the sombre beauty of the Dark Romantic
painters Francisco Goya, EugHne Delacroix, and Th8odore G8ricault – the poet
and art critic Charles Baudelaire expressed his awareness of these two sides, light
and dark, heavenly and hellish: “Le romantisme est une gr.ce, c8leste ou infernale, a qui nous devons des stigmates 8ternels”.25
In doubting both the cognitive faculty of general reason and the restriction of
reality to daylight and waking consciousness, Preromantic and Romantic novelists, poets, philosophers, and physicians influenced each other in their discovery and exploration of the unconscious. German Idealist philosophers,
Coleridge’s favourite Schelling above all, tried to overcome the Kantian split
between freedom and (deterministic) nature by a philosophy of the conscious as
well as unconscious of the invisible Spirit working in visible nature including
man (and the artist in particular).26 The joint activities of idealist speculation
and empiric introspection resulted in the foundation of psychoanalysis and
psychiatry. David Hume, Horace Walpole, Rousseau, Gibbon, Byron, and other
literati exhibited their traumas and split selves.27 The historian Edward Gibbon,
for instance, was a convert from Protestantism to Roman Catholicism, a reconvert to Protestantism in Lausanne, and then, after a reading of and personal
acquaintance with the French philosophes such as Voltaire, a sceptic of religion in
general and Roman Catholicism in particular. He wrote one French and six
divergent English versions of his autobiography, each from another point of view
as if there were seven Gibbons. His six-volume History of the Decline and Fall of
the Roman Empire (1776–1788), read across Europe, both fascinated and disconcerted his readers for his ever-changing assessments, ironizations, and images of historical personalities so that Emperor Julian the Apostate appears as a
mosaic of contradictions. The orientalist and lawyer Sir William Jones, to give
24 Andrew McCann, Cultural Politics in the 1790s: Literature, Radicalism and the Public
Sphere, Basingstoke and London 1999, 107–144.
25 Baudelaire, Salon de 1859, in: Œuvres complHtes, ed. Y.-G. le Dantec – Claude Pichois,
BibliothHque de la Pl8iade, Paris 1961, 1062. For Baudelaire’s definition of Romanticism see
his Salon de 1846.
26 Odo Marquard, Transzendentaler Idealismus, romantische Naturphilosophie, Psychoanalyse, Cologne 1987.
27 Rolf Lessenich, Romanticism and the Exploration of the Unconscious, in: Romantic Explorations, ed. Michael Meyer, Trier 2011, 185–197, and Christa Schönfelder, Wounds and
Words: Childhood and Family Trauma in Romantic and Postmodern Fiction, Bielefeld 2013.
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The Two Sides of Romanticism
another example, was well aware of (and often ridiculed for) his contradictions:
tutor to the aristocracy and colonial officer as judge at the High Court of Calcutta
on the one hand, Radical Whig and anti-colonialist on the other ; simultaneously
a lover of the literatures of the Western Classical Tradition and of the totally
different “primitive and oriental literatures” of the East, all read in the originals.
The wild fantasies of the Arabian Nights, which Jones re-translated, impugned
the Eurocentric monopoly of the Neoclassical canon, just as the Enlightenment
cult of daylight was challenged by a Preromantic and Romantic cult of night, in
literature, art, and science. Edward Young wrote his Graveyard School poem
Night Thoughts (1742–1745), and Gotthilf Heinrich Schubert his Ansichten von
der Nachtseite der Naturwissenschaften (1808) and Die Symbolik des Traumes
(1814). As in Goya’s Gothic Los Caprichos design of 1797–1799, the sleep of
reason produced monsters (“El sueÇo de la razjn produce monstruos”).28 Poets,
painters, philosophers, and scientists probed deep into their individual minds
and discovered a paradox there: the simultaneity of both angst and fascination
when confronted with the uncanny sublime – be it a huge mountain, a dark
cavern, a criminal, a vampire, or a fatal demon lover. The heroine of the seduction novel, along with its authors and readers, was magically attracted by the
demon lover’s dark secret, be it a Byronic hero or one of his descendants,
Charlotte Bront[’s Rochester or Emily Bront[’s Heathcliff. “The Romantics,
those poets who always admired the view from the eyes of the child, were
everywhere mesmerized by the villain, by strangeness in beauty, by the corrupt,
the contaminated, the imperiled”.29
The sheer proliferation of so many new experimental methods and private
institutions for the treatment of mental patients in the Romantic Period – serious
like that of Dr Esprit Sylvestre Blanche or fraudulent like that of Philippe-Jacques
de Loutherbourg and Count Cagliostro – reveals the extent to which loss of
orientation and doubt of one’s identity could unbalance the minds of sensitive
intellectuals.30 There is a strong element of madness in the Byronic heroes, whose
balance of mind, goodness, and virtue are corrupted by repeated disillusionments, succeeding the villains of the Radical rather than the Gothic novel. With
the enormity of his suffering, these overarching figures make visible the condition of all mankind, as in the case of Conrad the Corsair :
His heart was formed for softness – warped to wrong;
Betrayed too early, and beguiled too long;
28 Felix Krämer (ed.), Schwarze Romantik von Goya bis Max Ernst, 62.
29 Deborah Lutz, The Dangerous Lover: Gothic Villains, Byronism, and the Nineteenth-Century Seduction Narrative, Columbus OH 2006, 29.
30 For the history of treatment in mental hospitals see Heinz Schott – Rainer Tölle, Geschichte
der Psychiatrie, Munich 2006, 252–279.
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Each feeling pure – as falls the dropping dew
Within the grot – like that had hardened too;
Less clear, perchance, its earthly trials passed,
But sunk, and chilled, and petrified at last.31
It has been observed that the Byronic hero is covertly bisexual, and that Byron
himself was unsure whether his penchant for same-sex love was a symptom of
genius or madness. The Byronic hero is only in love with women when they are
absent or dead, and he loves the company of boys (Conrad and Gonsalvo) or
women disguised as boys (Conrad and Gulnare alias Kaled).32 This adds to the
Byronic hero’s suffering from social discrimination as it did to Byron’s own. His
half-sister Augusta, who knew of his love of adolescent boys and clung to the
theory of his insanity as much as his divorced wife Annabella, attested to his fear
of madness in one of her letters to Annabella: “It is the only point on which he is
afraid – ‘qui le fait trembler jusqu’au fond de l’ame’”.33
After the success of the first two cantos of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage (1812),
Byron’s work became famous all over Europe. It featured his first Byronic hero, a
sceptical and melancholy young man grown old and exhausted before his time,
promiscuous and covertly bisexual in his past love affairs, disorientated and cut
off from belief in a benevolent God and divine Providence – in short, disillusioned by personal experience. It gave prominent expression to a manyvoiced movement already long underway in the wake of Enlightenment scepticism.
The logocentricity of the Enlightenment concept of reason had divorced it
from theology and metaphysics in particular, until reintegrated in Kant’s Kritik
der reinen Vernunft (1781, 1787). The Cartesian dualism of spirit and matter had
postulated two separate ontological entities. Plato and Platonism offered
themselves as a path to overcome that dualism. This led to the Romantic revaluation of Platonism against Empiricism: Romantic Platonism could conceive
empirical nature as an ensemble of Emersonian symbols that the creative
imagination could reattach to the mind and the world of ideas – Einbildung as
Wiederineinsbildung, which Coleridge translated as “esemplasy”34 and which
William Blake formulated in the famous lines of his Auguries of Innocence (MS ca
1805), under the influence of Thomas Taylor whom he read and possibly met in
the house of his artist-colleague John Flaxman:
31 Byron, The Corsair, 1814, 3. 23. 662–667.
32 Peter Cochran (ed.), Byron and Women (and Men), Introduction: The Bisexual Byron,
Newcastle upon Tyne 2010, XLIV–L.
33 Malcolm Elwin, Lord Byron’s Family : Annabella, Ada, and Augusta 1816–1824, edited from
the author’s typescript by Peter Thomson, London 1975, 30.
34 Nicholas Halmi, The Genealogy of the Romantic Symbol, Oxford 2007, passim.
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The Two Sides of Romanticism
To see a world in a grain of sand
And a heaven in a wild flower,
Hold infinity in the palm of your hand
And eternity in an hour.35
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel’s concept of religious “speculation” as the
cognitive “eye of the mind” may be read in this context of overcoming Enlightenment dualism. Once de-theologized Enlightenment reason had established the doubt, however, the erosion of certainties and the consequent metaphysical homelessness were destined to both coexist with and subvert Romantic
Platonism, as well as contribute to what a philosopher of modernity has called
the great occidental event of Sinnverfinsterung.36 Enlightenment reason divorced
from theology had become subject to its own critique, as in the philosophy of
Kant. The initial optimism of the Enlightenment had gradually been darkened
with rising doubts about the general sovereignty of reason and man’s autonomy
in shaping his future. Nourished by the Lisbon Earthquake of 1755 that triggered
Voltaire’s anti-Leibnizian novel Candide (1759), Enlightenment pessimism became the Enlightenment’s Other, “firmly rooted in the thought of the age”,37 just
as Romantic Disillusionism was Positive Romanticism’s dark underside. There is
a gap between Descartes and Spinoza and Leibniz at the beginning of the Enlightenment, and Hume and Kant in its further course. The loss of theological
and metaphysical certainties made Europeans more and more aware of the
manifest construction of their norms and values, with the effect that the modern
subject, individuality, and perspectivism came into anthropological focus. In the
Romantic Period then, the “humanities” of the arts faculties of European universities assumed their modern function of continually adapting unstable norms
and values as well as reading texts for modern needs. Philosophy, as distinct
from the exact sciences, shifted its perspective to focus on how man was conceived in his historicity instead of metaphysical fixity.38 Even the most representative and canonical texts of the mid eighteenth-century Enlightenment
evince a layer of doubt below the surface of the praise of autonomous man’s
sovereign general reason, tolerance, and progress. Gotthold Ephraim Lessing’s
drama Nathan der Weise (1779), for instance, projects the solution of all problems between Jews, Christians, and Muslims in the Holy Land into a utopia that
blatantly offends against the Neoclassical rule of probability. Not only are the
35 William Blake, Auguries of Innocence, Pickering Manuscript, MS ca 1805, in Complete
Poems, ed. W.H. Stevenson, Longman Annotated English Poets, 3rd edn. London, 2007, 612.
36 Manfred Frank, Gott im Exil, Frankfurt am Main 1988, 20.
37 Henry Vyverberg, Historical Pessimism in the French Enlightenment, Cambridge MA 1958,
231.
38 Paul Geyer, Die Entdeckung des modernen Subjekts: Anthropologie von Descartes bis
Rousseau, Würzburg 1997, 2007, 261.
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play’s plot and d8nouement overwrought so as to undercut the practicality of its
rationalist and progressivist message; its titular hero, Nathan the wise and benevolent old Jew, can also be read as a rational ancien-r8gime paterfamilias and
tyrant who abuses reason and humanitarianism to enforce his will upon all
others.
In their Dialektik der Aufklärung (1944), Max Horkheimer and Theodor W.
Adorno argue that the Enlightenment produced its own antithesis, a return from
rationality to myth and from the subjection of nature under the control of
sovereign man to the subjection of man under brutal nature.39 From this perspective, Negative Romanticism – including the Gothic – was the unexpected
and undesired side effect of the Enlightenment. Reading the Marquis de Sade as a
philosopher of the French Enlightenment, Horkheimer and Adorno draw attention to his negative anthropology as exposed at the outset of his novel Justine
ou les malheurs de la vertu (1791), his perversion of Samuel Richardson’s Pamela, or, Virtue Rewarded (1740–1741) – a concept of man as a “malheureux
individu bipHde” badly constructed by a sadistic creator, or spiritus malignus,
also to be found in Negative Romanticism.40 One might add Mary Shelley’s tale of
Victor Frankenstein, who has an enlightened view of human society perfected by
a new race, but finds his creature turn into a “Monster”.41 And one might further
add an allegorical reading of “The Haunted Palace”, the poem included in Edgar
Allan Poe’s “The Fall of the House of Usher” (1839), which begins with a picture
of a radiant palace ruled by “the monarch Thought”, a symbol of the Enlightenment, and ends with the return of the expelled ghosts and the slow decay of
that same palace, a symbol of the Enlightenment’s dark eroding undercurrent.
If we classify the novels of the Marquis de Sade as being written by a sceptical
Enlightenment philosopher we should, however, keep in mind his debt to Romanticism and the dark, subversive Gothic novel and tale, even without the
Gothic supernatural along with the Sadean individual’s role as a Romantic
solitary and pre-Byronic hero. Here, the Gothic in the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century sense of the irrational, the irregular, the barbarous, the diverse,
the perverse, and the monstrous42 had become a constituent of human nature,
including the recently explored human unconscious with its disquieting illogicality and heterogeneity. In its regression to a state of undifferentiation, the
Gothic (and the Sadean Gothic in particular) perverted the Positive Romantic
39 Ibid. 4–6, 136.
40 de Sade, Justine ou les malheurs de la vertu, in: Œuvres, ed. Michel Delon, BibliothHque de la
Pl8iade, Paris 1990–1998, II. 131.
41 Nicola Trott, Gothic, in: Nicholas Roe (ed.), Romanticism: An Oxford Guide, Oxford 2005,
486.
42 Josef Haslag, “Gothic” im siebzehnten und achtzehnten Jahrhundert, Cologne and Graz 1963,
passim.
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ideal of man’s return to a union with nature into promiscuity, universal prostitution, and natural disorder.43 In 1843 Sainte-Beuve observed that the two
presiding geniuses of Romanticism were Byron and Sade.44 There is a close
kinship between the hypocritically pious monastery of flagellant friars in Sade’s
Les infortunes de la vertu (MS 1787) and the hypocritically pious monasteries of
Ambrosio and the Abbess in Matthew Gregory Lewis’s The Monk (1796). The
difference is that, in the case of Lewis’s Gothic novel, vice is confirmed as such
and ultimately punished. In both novels, however, we glimpse rot and torture
chambers just below surfaces of decency in a “universe that is indifferent or
hostile to human purposes, where humans prey upon one another, and in which
the finest impulses only betray us to horror and destruction”.45 This tradition of
Sadean immoral narrative was carried on by P8trus Borel in his scandalous
Champavert (1833). This collection’s six “contes immoraux”, including the tale
of the old anatomist Vesalius who furiously drags his faithless young wife Maria
from the splendid chambers of his gorgeous mansion to his subterranean laboratory where he coldly dissects her body, reveals the Gothic view of man as a
ferocious animal hidden below a veneer of cultivation and respectability. “Le
lycanthrope” was the nickname that Borel, a member of the rebellious JeunesFrance with their cult of Byronic dandy poses, defiantly and proudly adopted
from his conservative critics as a confession of his anthropological and moral
scepticism. Here, again, the failure of revolutionary expectations (now the
failure of the July Revolution of 1830) cast doubt on the traditional doctrine of
man’s divine origin and historical destiny, the fixity of his moral law, and his
capacity for understanding truth beneath the surface of things. As a poet and
novelist, Borel provided a link between English Gothic fiction (Charles Robert
Maturin in particular), the Marquis de Sade, and Charles Baudelaire, who held
Borel’s work in high esteem.
Romantic Disillusionism linked in with Enlightenment scepticism. It increasingly expressed the theological and political disillusion of its time notwithstanding its expanding scientific discovery ; disbelieved the progress of
civilization and the redemptive power of the Romantic imagination; and protested against official rule, political correctness, and public doctrine, placing the
liberated individual in its stead. It negotiated Platonic foundationalism with
Pyrrhonian scepticism, increasingly to the detriment of Positive Romanticism.
This is mirrored in Byron’s whole opus of poems, dramas, letters, and journals.
Bertrand Russell correctly observes that Byron was “more influential on the
43 Rosemary Jackson, Fantasy : The Literature of Subversion, London 1981, 72–76.
44 David Coward in the Introduction to his English translation of de Sade, The Misfortunes of
Virtue, MS 1787, World’s Classics, Oxford 1992, 1999, XXII.
45 David S. Miall, Gothic Fiction, in: Duncan Wu (ed.), A Companion to Romanticism, Oxford
1998, 353.
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Continent than in England”, and David Nokes adds that “Byron had a radical
effect in transforming consciousness in post-Napoleonic Europe”.46 However, to
depersonalize Byron, to declare his very individual psyche and biography irrelevant as T.A. Hoagwood does in his otherwise very illuminating study of
Byron’s scepticism, overshoots the Poststructuralist mark.47 By contrast, E.A.
Bernhard Jackson’s study of Byron the sceptical philosopher, though basically
inimical to a biographical approach, admits that an understanding of Byron’s
literary works and developing philosophy cannot be altogether separated from
his life experience, let alone from his reading of sceptical philosophers of the
Enlightenment.48 Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage (1812–1818), for instance, can only
be fully understood in the context of Byron’s divorce, exile, and the consequent
need to fashion a new self and a new life for himself.49 And Anthony Howe – who
examines Byron’s scepticism in the Classical Tradition from Arcesilaus of Pitane,
Pyrrho of Elis, Sextus Empiricus, Montaigne, Pierre Bayle, and Hume – also
insists on Byron’s life experience, although he contests the previous theory of a
development of Byron’s philosophy as frame for his poetry.50 Many texts by
numerous other authors with comparable life experiences and sceptical world
views, of various literary quality and influence, could be related to Byron’s texts,
be it only to prove that doubt and disillusionment had existed under the surface
of Positive Romanticism before Byron began to write. Yet every text had its
author’s own distinctive voice, notoriety, and quality. There is no such thing as a
democracy of texts and common egalitarian body of 8criture. Byron’s admirer
Alfred de Musset, for example, had a life experience and poetic voice very
distinct from Byron’s, and thus gave his own unmistakeable expression to Romantic Disillusionism’s general awareness that the heritage of the Enlightenment, doubt without a substitute for lost faith, matured into the Romantic Period
and undermined Romantic Platonism. This was Musset’s chief explanation for
his mal du siHcle. It is the cause of the tragic fate of Jacques Rolla, the eponymous
Byronic hero of Musset’s Pyrrhonian verse tale, who finds no other aim in life but
to burn his candle at both ends; he dissipates his fortune and wastes his life in
drink, love, and gambling due to a shattered traditional morality. The end sees
Rolla’s active suicide in the bed of a prostitute, a modern variation of the tragic
motif of Liebeslager und Totenbett:
46 Nokes, review of Richard Cardwell (ed.), The Reception of Byron in Europe, London 2004, in
TLS, 5370, 3 March 2006, 26.
47 Hoagwood, Byron’s Dialectic: Scepticism and the Critique of Culture, Lewisburg PA 1993.
48 Emily A. Bernhard Jackson, The Development of Byron’s Philosophy of Knowledge: Certain
in Uncertainty, Basingstoke 2010, 9.
49 Ibid. 102.
50 Anthony Howe, Byron and the Forms of Thought, Liverpool 2013, 15–42.
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The Two Sides of Romanticism
Dors-tu content, Voltaire, et ton hideux sourire
Voltige-t-il encor sur tes os d8charn8s?
Ton siHcle 8tait, dit-on, trop jeune pour te lire;
Le nitre doit te plaire, et tes hommes sont n8s.
Il est tomb8 sur nous, cet 8difice immense
Que de tes larges mains tu sapais nuit et jour.51
Romantic Philhellenism may serve as another example of faith being progressively undermined by doubt. Philhellenism had been a strong movement,
manifesting itself in many different voices and cultural forms long before Byron
espoused it in 1823, dying for it a year later. He gave the cause an unprecedented
impetus, famous stanzas, a name, and a myth ensuring its first partial success in
1830, although his scepticism doubted the possibility of any historical progress.
He was thus the figurehead of a popular movement, though not in the positive
sense of Thomas Carlyle’s On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History
(1841). Romantic Philhellenism saw Greece fall from Turkish control to that of
the ancien r8gime, which had Otto of Bavaria crowned king in order to prevent
the rise of a Greek democracy. After all, it was Carlyle who identified Byronism
with Scepticism or Pyrrhonism when, in 1831, he diagnosed self-conscious
doubt as the chief disease of his time and demanded a practical dialectic, Victorian rather than Romantic. Doubt must produce a new faith and new social
commitment – the Victorian work ethic, based on a new vital belief in God,
progress, and a malleable, improved future by successfully breaking the circles of
history. The nihil sub sole novum of the Classical Tradition and the Old Testament Book of Koheleth, which Romantic Disillusionism had revived in sceptical
opposition to eighteenth-century progressivism, had to be overcome:
Our whole relations to the Universe and to our fellow-man have become an Inquiry, a
Doubt […] Belief, Faith has well-nigh vanished from the world. […] For young Valour
and Thirst of Action no ideal Chivalry invites to heroism, prescribes what is heroic; the
old ideal of Manhood has grown obsolete, and the new is still invisible to us, and we
grope after it in darkness, one clutching this phantom, another that; Werterism, Byronism, even Brummelism, each has its day. […] Behold a Byron, in melodious tones,
‘cursing his day’: he mistakes earth-born passionate Desire for heaven-inspired Freewill; without heavenly load-star, rushes madly into the dance of meteoric lights that
hover on the mad Mahlstrom; and goes down among its eddies. […] Launched into a
dark shoreless sea of Pyrrhonism, what would remain for us but to sail aimless,
hopeless; or make madly merry, while the devouring Death had not yet ingulfed us?
51 Musset, Rolla, 1833, 4. 1–6, in: Po8sies complHtes, ed. Maurice Allem, BibliothHque de la
Pl8iade, Paris 1957, 283–284.
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[…] The fever of Scepticism must needs burn itself out, and burn out thereby the
Impurities that caused it; then again will there be clearness, health.52
Three years later, Sir Henry Taylor, whom Byron’s poetry had fascinated a young
man, rose in similar opposition against literary Byronism, denigrating it as a
short-lived fashionable pose of misanthropy and doubt in the “Preface” to his
dramatic romance Philip van Artevelde (1834). Taylor blamed Byron’s philosophically deficient “knowledge of human nature which is exclusive of what is
good”,53 and he portrayed his own fourteenth-century Flemish national hero in
conscious opposition to the Byronic hero. John Stuart Mill had a similar literary
experience. Passing his life in review in his Autobiography (MSS 1861 and 1871,
posth. 1873), Mill remembered how the fashionable reading of Byron with his
passionate, self-centred heroes had aggravated his early suicidal depression and
the subsequent reading of Wordsworth in the autumn of 1828 had alleviated it.
Carlyle, Taylor, and Mill had good reason to complain that Byronic Pyrrhonism was still going strong. Byron’s emulator Philip James Bailey characterized the titular hero of his 40.000 line dramatic poem Festus (1839, 1845) on
the combined model of Byron’s Manfred and Goethe’s Faust, whom Byron had
read as a Byronic hero notwithstanding the character’s advanced age and final
repentance and salvation. Festus, Bailey’s Byronic hero-poet, endures a dialectical career of doubt, despair, disdain of mankind, and crime before his final
conversion. Yet Festus’s recovery of faith and mankind’s universal redemption
are hardly credible, and Bailey’s readers and critics enjoyed the poem for its
Byronism and un-Victorian Spasmodism rather than its strained, superadded
and lengthily commented orthodox Christianity.54 The work, as its contemporary critic William Edmonstoune Aytoun correctly remarked, subverts its
own proclaimed doctrine. The Byronic hero, of whom Manfred is the extremest
manifestation, is in search of an identity after the loss of his metaphysical
foundation, a solipsist that sees the world as a mere projection of himself55 and
thus shows the dark side and ultimate failure of Romantic individualism and
perspectivism, a self-conscious Kantian or Wordsworthian or, more radically,
Fichtean ego that half perceives and half creates the world as the non-ego
(subjective idealism). He lives “in a world in which the solid ground offered to
the traditional hero has been cut away, leaving merely self-assertion, self-crea52 Carlyle, Characteristics, 1831, in: Works, Centenary Edition, ed. H.D. Traill, London 1896–
1899, XXVIII. 19–40.
53 Taylor, Philip van Artevelde, Preface, 1834, Boston 1863, 15.
54 Mark A. Weinstein, William Edmonstoune Aytoun and the Spasmodic Controversy, New
Haven and London 1968, 66–76.
55 Jochen Ecke, Lord Byron, Manfred, in: Bernhard Reitz (ed.), Das englische Drama und
Theater von den Anfängen bis zur Postmoderne, Trier 2016, 186–190.
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tion”,56 in an age of isolated, titanic figures such as Napoleon and Byron himself.
Shaping obedient crowds to his solipsistic will like Conrad the Corsair, Byron’s
Napoleon is a Byronic hero, hated as a war criminal and enemy of tradition, yet
admired as a gifted leader by many Victorians. Bailey’s Festus belongs to the
numerous post-Byronic and post-Napoleonic works of Romantic Disillusionism
budding below the decent bourgeois surface of the Victorian mainstream, resurging into the Neoromanticism of the Decadence and Fin de SiHcle.
Around the same time, Karl Immermann wrote his convoluted modern bildungsroman Die Epigonen (1836)57 featuring a hero infected by his age’s disillusionment and in search of a new aim in life. Hermann’s final success, however, offers no practicable solution as it arrives thanks to the mere contingency of
an unexpected inheritance, an immense property on which he settles as a farmer.
Some doubt remains; the vision of an impossible and vast millennium is replaced by the vision of a somewhat less impossible Biedermeier idyll, restricted
in time and space and pinned down in a concrete framework, much as in Samuel
Taylor Coleridge’s and Robert Southey’s abortive pantisocracy in Somerset or
the equally abortive American Brook Farm experiment as portrayed in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s anti-Transcendentalist Blithedale Romance (1852). Such a
Biedermeier idyll had already been subtly satirized in Jean Paul’s humorous
novel Leben des Quintus Fixlein (1796), with its Shandyesque mixture of sentiment and ridicule; the latter aimed at the arbitrariness of petty German ancien
r8gime princes and the small-scale happiness of the comic hero’s withdrawal
into the privacy of a boring paradise. Jean Paul’s previous novel, Leben des
vergnügten Schulmeisterlein Maria Wuz in Auenthal (1793), is significantly
subtitled “a kind of idyll”, as it is a satire on limitation and Spießertum rather
than a Gessnerian idyll. The comic protagonist’s home, a petty principality in the
Roman-German Empire, defines his intellectual limitations. Too stupid to make
his kitschy Messiade incomprehensible, he makes his manuscript at least unreadable. In his Vorschule der Ästhetik (1804, 1813), Jean Paul subversively defined his view of the idyllic as “Vollglück der Beschränkung”.58 In his later period
– from his novella “Des Lebens Überfluss” (1822) to his death in 1853 – Ludwig
Tieck treated retirement idylls with similar irony. Heinrich and Clara, romantic
lovers from different classes of society persecuted by the ancien r8gime for
marrying against the rules of the feudal state, fly from persecution and withdraw
into an isolated life in a poor home that they beautify with their imaginations and
the reading of Jean Paul. Tieck commented that the irony of idyll-making in a
dreary and unjust world is that it does not offer a real solution to the problem in
56 Jeffrey N. Cox (ed.), Seven Gothic Dramas 1789–1825, Introduction, Athens OH 1992, 64.
57 Subtitled Familienmemoiren in neun Büchern aus den Jahren 1823–35.
58 Jean Paul, Vorschule der Ästhetik, 1804, Berlin 1813, 255–256.
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the sense of Paradise Regained, but instead poeticizes what cannot be redeemed:
“[…] der tiefste Ernst, der zugleich mit Scherz und wahrer Heiterkeit verbunden
ist”.59 Furthermore, we shall see that Franz Grillparzer’s fairy-tale drama Der
Traum ein Leben (MS 1817–1834, 1840), often understood as a Biedermeier call
to happy retirement from political activity and contentment in privacy, in reality
subverted its own politically correct message.
Contrary to its popular associations, Biedermeier was not a return to firm
faith, an old-aged pensioner’s or repentant former revolutionary’s kitschy idyll,
but a doubt- and angst-ridden relocalization. It marked a return from visionary
Positive Romanticism to the self-restraint of the Augustan Classical Tradition
– from Plato, William Blake, and Percy Bysshe Shelley to Horace, George Crabbe,
and Jane Austen – as mirrored in the evolution of Wordsworth’s Prelude (MSS
1797–1850). It was a process of domestication, a return from isolated heresy to
dutiful membership of a congregation, from Promethean overreaching to humility, be it genuine or ironic.60 This reintroduction of earthbound realism, or
“Welthaftigkeit”, which pointed forward to Victorianism had many expressions.61 It could be Wordsworth’s “despondency corrected”, hiding its remaining doubt; it could be Eduard Mörike’s uneasy retreat into conservatism in
search of idylls that ultimately prove troublesome perturbationes domesticae; or,
more radically, it could be Felicia Dorothea Hemans’s and Letitia Elizabeth
Landon’s conscious ironic subversion, praising traditional dogmas and values
so as to discredit them subtly. Mörike’s two-part novel Maler Nolten (MS 1830,
1832), for instance, reveals the dark fatalism and nocturnal side of life below
seeming idylls, calling them up repeatedly only to destroy them one after another in a kind of narrative Byronic bubble-pricking technique.62 Covert Biedermeier subversion, we shall see, became the favourite option for women that
dared not openly endorse Byron’s male Romantic Disillusionism and sacrilegious Satanism. A recent critic has contended that this renunciation, ironization,
and integration of High Romantic individualism into the broader currents of
European literature was a largely feminist agenda, cutting Byron’s Corsair down
to size.63
Two decades after Immermann, Matthew Arnold echoed Carlyle when he
59 Rudolf Köpke, Ludwig Tieck, Erinnerungen aus dem Leben des Dichters nach dessen
mündlichen und schriftlichen Mitteilungen, Leipzig 1855, II. 238.
60 Richard Cronin, Romantic Victorians: English Literature, 1824–1840, Basingstoke 2002, 4.
61 Friedrich Sengle, Biedermeierzeit: Deutsche Literatur im Spannungsfeld zwischen Restauration und Revolution 1815–1845, Stuttgart 1971–1980. Also see Virgil Nemoianu, The
Taming of Romanticism: European Literature and the Age of Biedermeier, Cambridge MA
1984, 6.
62 Ulrich Kittstein, Eduard Mörike: Jenseits der Idylle, Darmstatt 2015.
63 Caroline Franklin, The Female Romantics: Nineteenth-Century Women Novelists and Byronism, New York and London 2012, 1, 60–82, and passim.
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