Romanticism in Literature and Politics

Romanticism in Britain and Germany diverged in the second generation as a result of very different political experiences during and after the Napoleonic wars. Freed from the climate of oppressive wartime fear, though not from the continuing repressive policies of the British government, Byron and Shelley felt it was time to revive the original radical impulse of the first generation, and sharply criticized Wordsworth for his frightened apostasy from the cause of liberty. Both, however, understood the legitimate reasons for his fearfulness: Freedom had been perverted during the Revolution, and its champions knew that they had to explore and exorcise the inner temptations that a fledging radical autonomy bred before it could be safely embraced. In his dramatic poems "Manfred" (1816) and "Cain" (1821), Byron wrestled with the problem of guilt over (possibly sexual) misuse of freedom and of the religious temptations of forgiveness and consolation at the cost of submission to authority, ultimately rejecting them for an affirmation of individual agency and moral responsibility. In Prometheus Unbound (1820), Shelley identified the tyrannical Zeus, who had punished the rebellious Prometheus, as an emblem of humanity's own worst potential, the corruption of freedom and love into self-love and the lust for domination. Only when freedom recognized its own temptations to omnipotence and controlled them was it capable of the mutuality on which both true love and a free polity were based. But in the end their Romantic visions were quite different. Shelley celebrated love, earthly and divine, as the symbol of the fusion of the individual and the whole. The relentless satire and irony of the late masterpiece Don Juan (1819–1824) have seemed to some later critics un-Romantic, and certainly very different from the restless questing and world-weariness of the Byronic hero of the earlier Childe Harolde (1812–1818), but they were in fact the other side of Romanticism, a display of the "mobility" Byron ascribed to his most positive character in the epic, the ability to respond spontaneously to every new stimulus without false sentimentality. In his own time, "Byronism" was second only to the cult of Napoleon—which Byron himself helped promote—in mythifying one Romantic life model: life as an experiment without bounds, the infinite conquest of experience.

The fiction of Scott showed, however, that the Romantic dialectic could produce yet another kind of synthesis. In the Waverly novels (first published in 1814) and in medieval romances like Ivanhoe (1819), Scott, a modernizer but an anti-Jacobin fearful of the radical effects of revolutionary individualism, in effect extended the ideal of individuality from person to nation. In the increasingly conservative and patriotic vein of the postrevolutionary Wordsworth, he established the genre of the historical novel as a vehicle for the creation of national identity through (mythic) national history. From a very different vantage point Mary Shelley also offered a critique of Romantic—and modern scientific—hubris in her novel Frankenstein (1816–1818), which, as she herself wrote in a preface to the third edition, was intended as the story of a "human endeavor to mock the stupendous mechanism of the Creator of the world." Contemporary feminist critics have pointed out that the creation of the "monster" was also a masculine attempt to usurp the feminine role in reproduction. The two interpretations are not mutually exclusive.

The transformation of individualism that Scott worked implicitly, the German Romantics of the second generation advanced programmatically. Most of the Jena Circle had by the late 1790s and early 1800s already become more conservative while striving to retain the forms of political freedom. In Belief and Love (1798), Novalis argued that the integration of monarchy and republic was the highest form of liberty. As inherently free egos, all men were in principle worthy of the throne. The legitimacy of the Prussian monarch derived from his being both incarnation of the Fichtean absolute ego—made possible, of course, only by the indispensable love of his queen; the purpose of his rule was to ultimately cancel out his own authority by preparing all men, through his example, for freedom in a polity of self-governing equals. The evolution of Friedrich Schlegel's politics, preceded by his conversion to Catholicism, brought him to an idealization of the Holy Roman Empire's universalism, whose unity under the aegis of the Roman Catholic Church had made safely possible the harmonious flourishing of plural national individualities.

Adding to the chaos produced by the French Revolution, the humiliations inflicted on Germany by Napoleon intensified German Romantic conservatism. Yet even when it seemed to elevate the nation or the state to dominance, it never wholly surrendered individualistic ideals. The second generation devised a putatively unique German version of individuality that displaced that idea from the person onto the collective entity. True individuality was thus not incompatible with social solidarity, as was merely "French" or self-interested individualism; rather it was the salutary effect of identifying with the unique spirit of one's collectivity. Many Romantics embarked on the construction of a unique "personality" for Germany out of its history, language, and folk culture, for example, in the folk songs collected (and composed) by Arnim and Brentano in The Boys Magic Horn (1808), or the folk tales assembled (and revised) by the brothers Grimm (1812). These celebrants of folk culture recognized the "higher reality" of magic and the supernatural as vehicles of the collective unconscious, as did the tales of E. T. A. Hoffmann (1814, 1817), and thus as agencies of an expanded national individuality not constrained by the limits of universal rationality.