Claudia Moscovici 
Introduction
The Branches of Romanticism
E. H. Gombrich declared in his monumental history of art that “There really is no such thing as Art. There are only artists”(15). By this he meant that art has no timeless standards of value or beauty; there is no essence that encompasses that which different periods and cultures call artistic. Rather than trying to capture the essence of art, Gombrich focuses instead on the particularity of artistic movements and the accomplishments of individual artists. Which is not to say that he leaves aesthetics to the philosophers. His descriptions of artistic movements interweave the texture that holds groups of artists together under a dialogue of assumptions, perceptual problems they are working on, innovations, economic possibilities and modes of representation. In the same way, I’ll say that there’s no such thing as Romanticism, only Romantic artists and writers. What unites these artists, at least if we look at them retrospectively as belonging to a historical and artistic moment, is the manner in which they emerged as relevant to their times—and ours—in a particular way, and that’s what I wish to describe in this book.
In mentioning the relevance of Romanticism, I’m led to an equally famous citation by another well-known intellectual historian, Isaiah Berlin. Berlin begins his own introduction to Romanticism with the resounding claim, “The importance of Romanticism is that it is the largest recent movement to transform the lives and the thought of the Western world” (The Roots of Romanticism, 1). One can easily interpret Berlin’s thesis in such a way that it produces a pretty general agreement. If we take the author to say that Romanticism was important to Western culture and that it influenced Modernism, then his argument is uncontroversial, but also less interesting. But in reading Berlin’s book we discover that, as we might expect, he’s making a more significant and bolder claim. He traces the roots of Romanticism to help us see how it affects us today. Given that we tend to think of Romanticism as a cultural movement (or movements) whose time has long passed, it’s the stronger version of Berlin’s thesis that needs to be explored further.
Initially, the claim that Romanticism is in some significant sense alive today may seem—to say the least—a bit of an exaggeration. Since Modernism and postmodernism have taken the cultural stage, Romanticism appears to have taken a bow. A visit to any museum of contemporary art should suffice to convince even those who are most nostalgic. While if we step into such a museum we can still see conceptual art that resembles the geometry of Mondrian, the colorful flourish of Pollock, or the pop readymades and silkscreens of Warhol, we’re not likely to spot any contemporary Delacroix or Géricaults. If by some odd chance we did, we would dismiss them as anachronisms and pay ten euros for their paintings, the way we do for Impressionist sketches sold on the streets of the Latin Quarter in Paris.
Those who wish to preserve the Romantic spirit in today’s literature face the same barrier as those who look for it in contemporary art. Reading Flaubert’s one thing, but writing like him nowadays is quite another. No writer is likely to receive critical attention—except in the less welcomed form of ridicule—by writing in a lyrical, ornate and “Romantic” style. Romantic works in general appear to be a thing of the past, relegated to the museums, history books and Great Books courses that still cling to the tradition of the Western canon.
Even in those cases where the impassioned lyricism made famous by the Romantics continues in realist and Modernist texts, it tends to be safely protected from criticism by a shield of irony. I’m thinking of Nabokov’s Lolita (1955) in particular, a novel that has been rightfully called the best love story of the twentieth-century. For who can resist being moved by Humbert Humbert’s obsessive, hopeless passion for the little nymphet, Dolores Haze? While the subject of a middle-aged man falling in love with a pre-adolescent girl is not likely to arouse universal sympathy, the beginning of Lolita is hauntingly “Romantic”:
Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down to the plate tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta. She was Lo, plain Lo, in the morning, standing four feet ten in one sock. She was Lola in slacks. She was Dolly in school. She was Dolores on the dotted line. But in my arms she was always Lolita. (Lolita, 9)
Passion is not the only Romantic theme, but it’s certainly a central one. Few writers have conveyed passion with such an erotic and emotive power as Nabokov, where the most viscerally physical aspects of love are inseparable from a longing for a union with the beloved that touches upon the transcendent. “Nabokov writes prose the only way it should be written, that is, ecstatically,” John Updike is quoted as saying on the back cover of the Vintage International edition of Lolita. Nabokov’s intense lyricism; his intricately ironic style; his focus upon a love that is intensified by the taste of taboo and, above all, his expression of a sensuality that is inseparable from emotion, all recall novels such as Flaubert’s Madame Bovary. Yet much as Flaubert had to convey late Romantic themes in a realist manner protected by a thick layer of irony to disassociate himself from a late Romanticism that was already passé, so Nabokov felt compelled to transform passion into pathology and lyricism into a hallucination of unrequited and absurd desire to make Romantic themes palatable to an audience used to the cynicism and textual play of Modernist literature.
This book is both about Romanticism and its postromantic survival. I wish to look at Romantic works, and particularly at the representation of passion in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, as a tradition that remains vital to our times. Along with Berlin, I’m convinced that Romantic views on passion—in bonds of love, in our transcendent aspirations, in how we conceive art and in what we expect to deliver through knowledge—continue to influence our culture, values, sensibilities and ways of seeing the world. I plan to carry Berlin’s proposition even further by presenting Romanticism not only as the root of our modern times, but also as its trunk, branches and leaves. As co-existing with and shaping the very contemporary trends that seem to go against it. To imagine such postromantic continuities, let’s first briefly consider an intellectual history of Romanticism.
https://rowman.com/ISBN/9780739116753/Romanticism-and-Postromanticism
