It was Lord Bacon who said ‘there is no excellent beauty that hath not some strangeness in the proportion’. It was this need for ‘strangeness’, the worship of nature, the thirst for the bizarre and the erotic, the glorification of the uncontrollable, the belief in the great man, the desire to free oneself from urban restraint and to run through desolate, untamed woods or along black, craggy shores with the sinister spirits and dark forces unlocking the mysteries of the German soul, which characterized the Romantics. The term ‘Romantic’ was first used to describe medieval tales and songs written in Latin languages and by the seventeenth century already evoked something that was mythical, distant or fantastic. It was Madame de Staël who in 1813 first used the term to describe the poetry of the heirs of Sturm und Drang as the works concentrated not on events, but on the emotions of the main characters. The diverse artists, writers, poets, painters and philosophers who called themselves ‘Romantics’ were brought together by a common world view or Weltanschauung, and although there were expressions of Romanticism throughout Europe from England to Italy the movement reached its most intemperate heights in Germany. The private world of melancholy, darkness, fatalism, death, despair and cultural pessimism seemed to touch something in young Germans, and their new hero – the lonely misunderstood genius – was one they instinctively understood.
The new artistic hero was the antithesis of the hated French savant who had reduced the individual to a mere cog in the machine. For the Romantics there was no law higher than art; only the artist was sensitive to the laws of nature, only he could free himself from the restrictions of society and dedicate himself to the pursuit of truth. The Romantics revered men like Beethoven who had so spectacularly broken with convention. They repeated stories of his bravado and independence – how wonderful it was that in 1806 he had turned to his erstwhile protector and friend Prince Lichnowsky and said: ‘Prince, what you are you are by the accident of birth; what I am, I am of myself. There are and there will be thousands of princes. There is only one Beethoven!’28 There was, of course, a price to be paid. The genius would almost certainly be misunderstood by the masses; he would probably suffer, struggle, be cast out by family and friends; he would be laughed at, he would be cold and hungry and lonely, and he would probably die young. But it would be worth it, for the suffering he bore would heighten his awareness and make him greater still. This belief in the benefits of pain became a self-fulfilling prophecy; Charlotte Stieglitz was so convinced of its power that she stabbed herself in her Berlin house so that her husband could write better poetry; sadly it did not work.29 Countless young men and, to a lesser extent, women struggled in garrets and lonely rooms trying to paint or write or compose Lieder and, as Sheehan has put it, ‘often poor, almost always insecure and unsettled, the Romantics paid dearly for the artistic autonomy they celebrated in their work’.30 Many died young – Hardenberg (Novalis) at twenty-nine, Wackenroder at twenty-five; Kleist committed suicide in Berlin aged thirty-four.
The notion of the individual against the world was echoed in all Romantic literature. Shakespeare’s tragedies were held up as the first role model because of the human conflicts they revealed; Hamlet was seen as the quintessential Romantic youth tormented by ghosts and drowning lovers and his own fears – ‘that dread of something after death’ – which made him incapable of action. King Lear was a tragic figure staggering towards his death blind and betrayed; the play Macbeth was filled with Romantic symbolism from hideous witches on the bleak moor to the bloodstained hands that could not be cleaned, and the eternal punishment for ‘unnatural deeds’ committed by ‘infected minds’. The German Romantics wanted nothing to do with society novels and had no time for Jane Austen or pretty French farces; their works were about suffering and pain and fate. In Ahnung und Gegenwart Eichendorff describes the traumatic experiences of a young man during the Napoleonic occupation; in Undine a mermaid is visited by her husband on the forbidden day and is forced to return to the sea for ever; Friedrich Schlegel’s Lucinde, subtitled ‘An Apology for Nature and Innocence’, describes a heroine who is so carried away by her own passions and natural urges that she flouts all norms of conventional morality. It is a tale of such eroticism, raw emotion and sexuality that it caused a scandal when it was published in 1789, but Schlegel defended his creation, announcing that Lucinde was innocent because she had merely been following her true nature.
The new mood was echoed in the Romantic music which combined the cult of genius with deep human passion. Beethoven, Weber, Schubert and Schumann were venerated and E. T. A. Hoffmann called music ‘the most Romantic of all the art forms’; he was so enamoured of Mozart that he added ‘Amadeus’ to his name. Liszt said that music is ‘the embodied and intelligible essence of feeling; capable of being apprehended by our senses, it penetrates them like a dart, like a ray, like a dew, like a spirit, and fills our soul.’31 Music itself featured in Romantic works: Wilhelm Wackenroder’s Joseph Berglinger is about a composer torn between the inspiration of his music and the mundane life he is forced to lead. Lieder and programme music often evoked Romantic themes. Schubert’s Die schöne Müllerin and Winterreise, which echoed around the Berlin salons of the 1820s, captured a world in which sensibility was all; Carl Maria von Weber included themes of wonder and magic in Der Freischütz of 1821 in which a forester goes into the woods in search of a magic spell which will restore his marksmanship but instead meets the sinister Black Ranger.32
The forester’s journey into the wood was another of the great Romantic themes linked to the love of nature and the fascination with the dark forces of life. Rousseau had said ‘no flat country, however beautiful it may be, ever appeared so to me. I need torrents, rocks, firs, dark woods, mountains, rough tracks to climb up and down, precipices by my side.’33 The German Romantics echoed this fascination with nature and landscape; they wanted nothing to do with fussy manicured lawns or carefully laid out paths; they wanted eerie forests, deep streams, strange grottoes and lonely seascapes far away from town and people. Nature, real or imagined, was the antithesis of and an escape from the city, where so many of these prophets lived; from the increasingly troubled world of the Industrial Revolution, and from the oppression of occupied Berlin. Even the ‘English garden’, the rage at the time, was planted to look as if it had