Every career now lies open, potentially, to the individual. His opportunities, and therefore his desires, but not his powers, have become boundless; and "inordinate desire is always accompanied by inordinate melancholy." His release from the old order, which limited his importance, has set him free for self-idolatry; the old laws have broken down, and everything now seems permissible. He no longer feels himself part of a whole; he feels himself to be a little world which reflects the great world. The belief in the saving power of enlightenment had been rudely shaken, and the minds of men were confused like an army which receives contradictory orders in the midst of a battle. Sénancour, Nodier and Benjamin Constant have left us striking romances picturing the human spirit in this dilemma; they show also a new feeling for Nature, new revelations of subjectivity, and new ideas of womanhood and of passion.
But of the emigrant literature Madame de Staël is the chief and central figure. The lawless savagery of the Revolution did not weaken her fidelity to personal and political freedom. "She wages war with absolutism in the state and hypocrisy in society. She teaches her countrymen to appreciate the characteristics and literature of the neighbouring nations; she breaks down with her own hands the wall of self-sufficiency with which victorious France had surrounded itself. Barante, with his perspective view of eighteenth-century France, only continues and completes her work."
II.—The Romantic School in Germany
German Romanticism continues the growing reaction against the eighteenth century; yet, though it is essentially reaction, it is not mere reaction, but contains the seeds of a new development. It is intellectual, poetical, philosophical and full of real life.
This literary period, marked by the names of Hölderlin, A. W. Schlegel, Tieck, Jean Paul Richter, Schleiermacher, Wackenroder, Novalis, Arnim, Brentano, resulted in little that has endured. It produced no typical forms; the character of its literature is musical rather than plastic; its impulse is not a clear perception or creation, but an infinite and ineffable aspiration.
An intenser spiritual life was at once the impulse and the goal of the Romanticists, in whom wonder and infinite desire are born again. A sympathetic interest in the fairy tale and the legend, in the face of Nature and in her creatures, in history, institutions and law, and a keener emotional sensitiveness in poetry, were the result of this refreshed interior life. In religion, the movement was towards the richly-coloured mystery and child-like faith of Catholicism; and in respect of human love it was towards freedom, spontaneity, intensity, and against the hard bonds of social conventions.
But its emotions became increasingly morbid, abnormal and ineffectual. Romanticism tended really, not to the spiritual emancipation that was its avowed aim, but to a refinement of sensuality; an indolent and passive enjoyment is its actual goal; and it repudiates industry and utility as the philistine barriers which exclude us from Paradise. Retrogression, the going back to a fancied Paradise or Golden Age, is the central idea of Romanticism, and is the secret of the practical ineffectiveness of the movement.
Friedrich Schlegel's romance, "Lucinde," is a very typical work of this period. It is based on the Romantic idea that life and poetry are identical, and its aim is to counsel the transformation of our actual life into a poem or work of art. It is a manifesto of self-absorption and of subjectivity; the reasoned defence of idleness, of enjoyment, of lawlessness, of the arbitrary expression of the Self, supreme above all.
The mysticism of Novalis, who preferred sickness to health, night to day, and invested death itself with sensual delights, is described by himself as voluptuousness. It is full of a feverish, morbid desire, which becomes at last the desire for nothingness. The "blue flower," in his story "Heinrich von Ofterdingen," is the ideal, personal happiness, sought for in all Romanticism, but by its very nature never attainable.