Romanticism

ROMANTICISM. - By R. is meant that movement of a literary, artistic, philosophical, political and social character which arose in Europe in the second half of the 18th century and spread in the first half of the 19th, and which, reacting against the spirit of the Enlightenment, establishes a new way of feeling, with the predominance of imagination and sentiment over reason, of inspiration over rule, of the popular character of the work over aristocratic isolation; it draws upon the sources of medieval Christian civilization and promotes, in antithesis to formal classicism, a new civilization of letters, founded on the freedom and truth of art.

I. LITERARY ROMANTICISM.

I. GERMAN ROMANTICISM

German Romanticism is one aspect of European Romanticism: a complex movement of the German spirit that encompasses religion, literature, music, the figurative arts, philosophy, the sciences and a conception of life in general. From 1796 (G. Wackenroder, Herzensergiessungen eines kunstliebenden Klosterbruders) until about 1830, it dominates almost all fields of spiritual life in Germany and influences other peoples, especially through poetry, music, philosophy and the sciences. It develops from premises existing in Hemsterhuis, Bodmer and Breitinger as well as in the Sturm und Drang (Heinse, Herder, the young Goethe) and in the French Revolution; its religious lyric is based on Pietism. Critically it is antithetical to the Enlightenment, to Weimar Classicism and, in part, to Protestantism and to Neo-Humanism. The word romantisch already appears in Wieland and Herder, who use it to designate particularly medieval chivalric poetry in the Romance languages; in the Schlegel brothers it initially retains this meaning, but then, in opposition to the ancient, it is extended by them to the modern field and to their theory of art. Criticism regards Goethe's novel Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre (1795-96) as a typically "Romantic" work because of its interpenetration of the poetic element into real life.

Romanticism arose from the speculations of the generation born around 1770 (early Romanticism). Starting from Kant, Fichte elaborates the doctrine of the "absolute I," whose essence consists in ceaselessly free moral action: Romanticism deduces from it absolute formal freedom and, in part, moral libertinage. Schleiermacher frees religion from rational-dogmatic-historical bonds; he defines it as "sense and taste for the infinite," a feeling of "absolute dependence" on God: this corresponds to the free religiosity and the longing for the infinite of Romanticism. Schelling regards nature and history as manifestations of the same reality, which he synthesizes in a poetic manner: for Romantic poetry the animation of nature and the synthesis of all spiritual activities are thus justified.

Consequently poetry, painting and music stand in an intimate relationship: "Colour and form sound"; colour, fragrance, song are "brothers" (Tieck). In Runge the idea of the total work of art appears, an aspiration later held by Wagner. F. Schlegel, on the other hand, moving from Classicism, does not yet include music in his definition of poetry: "Romantic poetry is universal-progressive poetry. Its aim is not merely to reunite all the separate genres of poetry and to connect poetry with philosophy and rhetoric; it also wants, and must, now mix, now fuse poetry and prose, genius and criticism, art poetry and folk poetry; to make poetry living and social, to make life and society poetic...". Nevertheless Wackenroder, Tieck, Brentano, and later Hoffmann, Grillparzer, Mörike establish in their poetry intimate relationships with music: thus there arises, alongside novels about the lives of painters (Tieck, Franz Sternbals Wanderungen), dramas about the lives of poets (Grillparzer, Sappho), the novella about musicians (Heinse as precursor; Hoffmann, Mörike). The realization of the Romantic artistic program is based on the creative power of the imagination; the fairy tale counts as the purest expression of poetry. The fantastic merges with the mysterious; the boundaries between waking and sleep are lost; somnambulism, as, in general, all the "nocturnal elements of nature," draw the Romantics into their orbit. The lyric urges the soul toward an atmosphere wholly strained toward a mysterious infinite, for which man eternally yearns: the symbol of this Sehnsucht is the "blue flower" (F. Novalis, Heinrich von Ofterdingen). At the same time, however, Romanticism feels the contrast between the longed-for infinite and limited reality, representing it either through a fragmentary-aphoristic form (F. Schlegel, later Nietzsche), or a fusion of forms and styles (Tieck's dramas), or the disenchantment of the atmosphere (Heine) into ironic distance. The "irony" of early Romanticism takes nothing entirely seriously and begins to play with the spirit; the difference between confidential conversation and public manifestation is lost. Thus the way is opened to mere cerebralism and to cold exercises.

At the same time the Romantic Sehnsucht turns to what is distant in time and space: the sense of history arises. During the spread of Protestantism in Germany, literature had acquired preponderance over the other arts; the spirit had become anti-figurative; large Catholic strata had remained extraneous to the Protestant-humanistic cultural world. Now, Novalis attempts to resolve the religious and cultural schisms in Germany, deducing from Protestantism the much-combated Enlightenment and positing as a goal the medieval unity of faith and culture (Die Christenheit oder Europa, 1799; published only in 1826): "The initially personal hatred against the Catholic faith was transformed little by little into hatred against the Bible, against the Christian faith and, finally, against religion. Still more, hatred against religion extended very naturally and logically to all the objects of enthusiasm: it proclaimed fantasy and feeling, morality and love of art, future and past, to be heretical, placed man barely at the head of the series of natural beings and reduced the infinitely creative music of the universe to the monotonous roaring of a gigantic mill...". Europe must be reconstituted through a "regeneration"; no longer antiquity, but the Christian Middle Ages serves as the model.

To this return to the Middle Ages corresponds the revaluation of the past. Romanticism "discovers" ancient German art (Wackenroder, Tieck), the philosophy of the mystics and of Böhme (F. Schlegel, Tieck, Baader, Werner), ancient German poetry: Tieck renews German chapbooks; Tieck, the Brothers Grimm, Uhland reprint ancient German poems; Tieck, A. W. Schlegel, v. d. Hagen, Lachmann publish and translate the Nibelungenlied; Arnim and Brentano collect folk songs: Des Knaben Wunderhorn; the Brothers Grimm Kinderund Hausmärchen and Deutsche Sagen; finally primitive Italian art is discovered (the Brothers Riepenhausen give accounts of Giotto and Cimabue). The poetry of other peoples, especially the Latin ones, is translated into German with unsurpassable Romantic sensitivity: A. W. Schlegel: Shakespeare from 1797; Schleiermacher: Plato; Gries: Tasso, Ariosto, Calderón; as well as Dante, Petrarch and the Portuguese poets. At the same time the modern history of literature arises (A. W. Schlegel, Vorlesungen), Germanic studies (Görres, the Brothers Grimm, v. d. Hagen, Uhland), Romance philology (Diez), comparative linguistics (the Schlegel brothers, W. v. Humboldt) and research on myths (Creuzer, Görres, later Bachofen). Alongside those already mentioned, other great philosophical systems are furthermore developed (Hegel, Schopenhauer). The natural sciences (A. v. Humboldt, Carus) and natural philosophy (G. H. Schubert, Baader, Steffens) receive a decisive impulse. Just as in the consideration of nature the idea of the organic dominates, so too in political science (Fichte, A. Müller, Gentz, K. L. v. Haller); the latter seeks to overcome, through the corporative state, the contrast between individual and community, and then ends, however, in reactionary practice. The historiography of the "historical school" (Savigny, Niebuhr, Raumer, Luden, later Ranke) is for an entire century effectively influenced by the tendency toward the past and by the artistically representative gifts of Romanticism.

Early Romanticism produced only two important poets: Tieck as a writer of artistic fairy tales, Novalis as lyric poet and novelist; the attempts of the Schlegel brothers to transform their theories into poetic practice did not succeed. Late Romanticism, on the other hand, detaches itself from speculation, while it succeeds in producing valid achievements in many fields of art. In every literary genre a true flowering manifests itself: Brentano, the Günderode, Eichendorff, Uhland, Kerner, Heine as lyric poets; Brentano, Arnim, Kleist, Fouqué, Hoffmann, Eichendorff, Chamisso as narrators; Kleist, Werner, the young Grillparzer and, in part, Raimund as dramatists. The Napoleonic domination and the wars of liberation gave rise to dramatists (Kleist, Körner) and patriotic lyric poets (Arndt, Körner, Schenkendorf), as well as important political prose writers (Kleist, Arndt, Görres). Several works of the great isolated spirits of the age, Jean Paul, Hölderlin, Grabbe and Büchner, are imbued with Romantic thought. Goethe, in his late works, accepts Romantic gestures, although he remains hostile to the "neo-German religious-patriotic art" and to the Romantic worldview ("I call the classical healthy and the romantic sick," 1829); the 4th part of Faust would be inconceivable without the Romantic premise. Hauff, Grillparzer, Lenau, Mörike, Stifter and Droste preserve the Romantic heritage in the age of Biedermeier and realism. In Wagner's musical dramas, in Nietzsche's philosophy and lyric poetry, as in the fin-de-siècle neo-Romanticism, Romanticism lives its last flowering.

Romantic music in the strict sense is later than poetry. Schubert creates the Romantic lied as a genre that reaches a further development in his spirit (Schumann, Silcher, Brahms, Wolf up to Reger, Pfitzner and R. Strauss). As Mozart and Beethoven influence the formation of the theory of Romantic art and poetry, so Romantic poetry, for its part, gives rise to popular opera (Weber, Marschner) and popular melodrama (Lortzing). The Romantic symphony (Schubert, Schumann, later Bruckner, Brahms) adheres more closely than poetry to the classical forms of expression; harmony and melody are its principal means of expression, while rhythm is cultivated ever more artistically.

The detachment from the closed form determined by antiquity prevents the development of a Romantic architecture and sculpture; the attempts exhaust themselves in the sterile imitation of past styles: Schinkel remains more closely bound to classicism. On the contrary, the Romantic spirit speaks through two painters: Friedrich paints religious motifs and discovers the boundlessness of the North and Central German landscape, whose intensity of light and air he renders with delicately shaded colors. Runge succeeds in the most animated portraits of the age; in drawings and sketches he realizes the theoretical demand that "the symbolic meaning of the divine mysteries and the hinting at them" constitutes the true goal of art. With this he prepares the way for the cenacle of "Nazarene" painters who between 1810 and 1830 work in Rome in monastic community (Confraternita claustrale, Confraternita di S. Luca; Koch, Pforr, Overbeck, Cornelius, Schnorr v. Carolsfeld, Fohr, the Veit brothers). They start from Italian Renaissance painting, draw inspiration from subjects of classical Italian poetry, imprint painting with a Christian spirit and renew mural painting in common works (Casa Bartholdy, Villa Massimo at the Lateran). Schwind and Richter keep Romantic painting alive beyond the middle of the century.

Finally, Romanticism considerably influenced social life in Germany. In its centers, Jena, Berlin, Dresden and Heidelberg, literary circles formed, often animated by the intimate friendship of their members, which spread the heritage of Romantic thought in journals (the Schlegel brothers, Athenäum; Arnim and Brentano, Zeitung für Einsiedler; Kleist and A. Müller, Phöbus, Berliner Abendblätter). In the salons the ladies, who are generally also writers, play a leading role (Karoline and Dorothea Schlegel, Karoline Günderode, Sophie Mereau, Dorothea Tieck, Rahel Levin, Bettina v. Arnim, Klara Schumann). Some of them fight for the emancipation of women and of the Jews, or are the driving forces behind the conversion of numerous Romantics to the Catholic Church (the first "Romantic" conversion under the influence of ancient Christian art: the painter Maria Alberti; furthermore F. and Dorothea Schlegel, the Veit brothers, A. Müller, Overbeck, Werner, K. L. v. Haller, Karl – brother of Novalis –, Sophie – sister of Tieck – and others).

Horat Rüdiger

II. ROMANTICISM IN ENGLAND

In each of the major poets of the first and second Romantic generations there seems to be exemplified one or another of the various, at times contradictory, aspects of which the fabric of Romanticism in England is woven.

The poets who come from the north (the "Lake poets" Wordsworth and Coleridge, as well as the Scotsman Walter Scott, who does not belong to their school) represent the primitive aspect, that is, the more elementary and immediate, the more spontaneous and popular, even though in them one must presuppose a long study of the old and the new language, a careful distinction between fancy and imagination, a vivid knowledge of history and legend. The poets, on the other hand, who come from the south (Byron, Shelley and Keats) betray a more openly reflected aspect, more deliberately thought out in relation to values that are more practical and less intrinsically poetic. By this it is not intended to assert that poetic expression was attained with less certainty.

Nature, in its everyday aspects, in the humility of the particular, is the constant inspiration of the lyric poetry of William Wordsworth (1770-1850), who sets forth the first Romantic manifesto in the preface to the second edition (1800) of the collection entitled Lyrical Ballads (1st ed. 1798). Such simplicity of content must, according to Wordsworth, be clothed in a similar simplicity of language, as far removed as possible from that artificial form in which the poetry of the preceding period had long been confined. His predecessors in this field had been the pre-Romantics who, from James Thomson (1700-47) to Thomas Gray (1716-71) to Robert Burns (1759-96), had preferred the life of the humble and the simple description of nature.

Alongside Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834) draws his best inspiration not so much from nature as from the supernatural, if by this term one means the sense of the mysterious and the fascinating. Coleridge makes more than one reservation about his friend's theories, where the latter maintains that the language of the lower classes is more sincere and truer, and therefore more poetic than any other. Coleridge's most successful verses aim to make extraordinary experiences comprehensible and common, rather than to describe the contemplation and narration of ordinary things. If the poetic wonder of the one can be called precisely contemplation of the common and the usual (albeit under an unusual light), that of the other is a start and an enchantment at the sudden appearance of the unusual in a magical panorama. He had been preceded, with different content, by William Blake (1757-1827), who indulges every suggestion and every excess of fancy. Walter Scott (1771-1832) as a poet presents himself almost as a combination of Wordsworth and Coleridge, in that his interest in history and his interest in legend intertwine the natural motif and the fantastic motif.

Scott thus authoritatively continues that taste for the primitive which had manifested itself in the second half of the eighteenth century with the search for popular poetic manifestations, a taste of which the collection by Thomas Percy (1729-1811) entitled Reliques of ancient English poetry (1st ed. 1765) remains the model.

With George Gordon Byron (1788-1824) it is by now a matter of another contemplation. He is the most restless of the Romantics, and the heroic ideal is enclosed in him in the two pilgrims named Harold and Don Juan. The contemplation of his eyes dwells on the perpetually agitated sea, on horrid and grandiose panoramas, on ruins that recall the destructive waves of time, and the contemplation of his spirit rejoices or torments itself, in any case sings, before the problems for which the names of titanism, predestination, mystery recur. The contradictions of his spirit, and perhaps also his aristocratic origin and education, place him on a plane quite different from that of the other Romantics with regard to the classicist poets, and Pope is his master, while on the other hand the "Lake poets" do not inspire sympathy in him. His eternal wandering has as its goal the search for solitude rather than communion with other men. Of Harold, with whom he identifies himself, he sings: "... soon he found himself the man least suited to join the flock of men, with whom he had very little in common; ... still he did not wish to yield the invitation, to souls against which his own rebelled, the dominion of his mind, proud in solitude; of his mind that could find in itself a life to live outside humanity."

Pervaded instead by a desire for universal liberation, by a will for communion not only with things but also with men, is the work of Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822). The liberation of which he makes himself the herald must come through reason (Queen Mab), or else by means of love (The Revolt of Islam), whose second name is beauty (Epipsychidion). Shelley feels himself profoundly a poet, that is, of the company of those great ones who, according to what he writes in A Defence of Poetry, "are, not only the authors of language and of music, of the dance, and architecture, and statuary, and painting; but they are the institutors of laws, and the founders of civil society, and the inventors of the arts of life, and the teachers, who draw into a certain propinquity with the beautiful and the true, that partial apprehension of the agencies of the invisible world which is called religion." Setting aside the certainly inadequate concept that Shelley had of religion, he felt above all things the vocation of the poet. "Poets, according to the circumstances of the age and nation in which they appeared, were called, in the earlier epochs of the world, legislators or prophets: a poet essentially comprises and unites both these characters... The poet participates of the eternal, the infinite, and the one." In these, as in the other affirmation: "A poem is the very image of life expressed in its eternal truth," there seems to be enclosed the ending of John Keats's Ode on a Grecian Urn: "Beauty is truth, truth beauty – that is all – ye know on earth, and all ye need to know." The Romanticism of John Keats (1795-1821) feeds, more than that of his other contemporaries, at the sources of ancient classicism, is educated in the school of the English classics from Spenser to Milton, while, on the other hand, the very young poet does not hide his admiration for the one whom he considered the first Romantic poet, William Wordsworth.

Alberto Castelli

III. ROMANTICISM IN FRANCE

The Romantic movement burst into the momentarily stagnant milieu of French literature of the Napoleonic era like a disruptive gust of foreign origin. Yet Romanticism by no means marks a retreat from the positions of intellectual hegemony over Europe held by France throughout the 18th century: the Paris of the Restoration and then of the July Monarchy, on the contrary, reasserts its own function as the greatest cultural center of the world, even in the definitive renunciation of political hegemony. It lives the Romantic battle and transposes it into properly literary terms in a manner all its own, with a vivid and immediate awareness of the historical forces operating upon contemporary reality, with an exceptional capacity to feel the great travail — political, spiritual, religious — that has its roots in the extraordinarily rich and multiform heritage of the French 18th century and in the problems that sprang from it, sharpened rather than resolved by the Revolution.

Two distinct phases have been distinguished (Baldensperger) in the evolution of French Romanticism, staggered across the two twenty-year periods intervening between the First and Second Empires. The publication in Paris of Mme de Staël's Allemagne and De la littérature, preceded by Sismondi's De la littérature du midi de l'Europe and by A. G. Schlegel's Cours de littérature dramatique (1813), and the conquest of the stage of the Théâtre français, bulwark of Classicist resistance (1820-30), mark the chronological limits of the first phase, colored by polemics far more clamorous and bitter than in any other country. The years between 1830 and the middle of the century offer the new school the possibility of developing fully and of giving the measure of its own worth; toward the end of that period the impetus of spiritual liberation and the very creative drive of Romanticism grow faint, while the demands of realism and the aspirations toward art for art's sake that would dominate the literary panorama of the age of Napoleon III begin to take shape and assert themselves.

Interest and discussions around the principles already elaborated doctrinally by German Romanticism flare up almost suddenly, in 1813, when the forced compression of the Empire in favor of tradition and spiritual autarchy comes to an end. The two opposing parties take shape, and their respective aesthetic positions are clarified (not always happily) with an obstinacy all their own, destined to be taken up and echoed immediately afterward in Italy. The demand for a complete correspondence of art to the spirituality and the questions of the modern soul is explicitly asserted. A new historical consciousness, refined by faith in the creative power of the spirit and perhaps by the subversive will to "start over from scratch" that had asserted themselves in the 18th century, drives one to recognize the relativity of aesthetic values and canons, to understand the vital and creative impetus of civilizations previously ignored or neglected as uncultured and barbaric. In the political and social situation of Restoration France, the religious and mystical awakening, the assertion of the postulates of constitutional liberalism, the still obscure emergence of new protagonists of modern life, thirsting for social and economic equality amid the now irrevocable collapse of the traditional state order, converge and make their weight felt upon the discussions around the new literary and artistic program, conceived in function of life and enriched by the consciousness of the supreme spiritual reality of the self in the face of uncorrupted nature.

Alongside the literary salon, for two centuries the principal nursery for the preparation and diffusion of new currents (and those of Deschamps, of Délecluze, of Jules de Rességuier, and above all those of Charles Nodier, librarian of the Arsenal, of Victor Hugo, of Ste-Beuve, have remained famous), there stand and are superimposed, with their far vaster resonance, the reviews: Lettres normandes, La Minerve française (both founded in 1818 and suppressed by the censors in 1820), La Minerve littéraire (1820-22), Lettres champenoises (1817-25), Le Conservateur littéraire (1819-21), La Muse française (1823-24), Annales de la littérature et des arts (1820-29), Revue encyclopédique (1819-33), Le Mercure du XIXe siècle (1823-32). Beside them stand the political newspapers, whose importance lies especially in their theoretical elaborations and in their presentation of the principles of "doctrinaire" liberalism: Censeur européen (1817-20), Courrier français (1819-31), Archives philosophiques, politiques et littéraires (1817-18), Le Lycée français (1819-20), Tablettes universelles (1820-1824), and above all Le Globe (1824-30). On their pages, or in separate writings for the most part of no great weight (Racine et Shakespeare by Stendhal, moreover anticipated in articles in the Monthly Review between 1823 and 1824; V. Hugo's preface to Cromwell, 1827; E. Deschamps's preface to the Etudes françaises et étrangères, 1828), the new postulates are proclaimed: "Away with theories, poetics and systems, away with the artificial facade imposed upon art! There exist no models or rules other than the general laws of nature, extending also to artistic manifestations, and the special laws resulting from the peculiar conditions of individual themes. The former are eternal, immutable; the latter extrinsic, subject to change and serving only once." Poetic creation, for two centuries subordinated to a rigid rationalistic control, must instead respond in every respect to whatever is intimate, personal, immediate in inspiration. The lyrical impetus pours forth with a violence hitherto unknown in the most fortunate collections of the Romantic generation: Lamartine's Méditations poétiques (1820), Victor Hugo's Odes et ballades (1822-28), Alfred de Musset's Contes d'Espagne et d'Italie (1830); the images dear to the artist's heart are evoked in more subdued tones, but always frankly individual, in the song of Alfred de Vigny, of Marceline Desbordes-Valmore, of Maurice de Guérin, of Charles-Augustin de Ste-Beuve, of Gérard de Nerval.

A revival of religiosity likewise distinguished the years of the Restoration; the depth of the Christian message was rediscovered, and after so many upheavals the benefit of the spiritual discipline of the Catholic Church came to be fully understood. In 1819 the two volumes of Du Pape appeared; in 1821, posthumously, the Soirées de St-Pétersbourg ou Entretiens sur le gouvernement temporel de la Providence of Joseph de Maistre; between 1817 and 1823 the Essai sur l'indifférence en matière de religion of Lamennais; in 1825 the Nouveau Christianisme of St-Simon; in 1827 the Prolégomènes to the Palingénésie sociale of Ballanche. But with the second Romanticism everything seems to dissolve into a generic theism, into a pure cult of the values of the spirit (the "religion of liberty"). Lamennais, after submitting to the condemnation of the Avenir (1830-32) pronounced by the Mirari, burst forth in the Paroles d'un croyant (1834) and in the republican Livre du peuple, marking his definitive separation from the Church; the thinkers of the new generation were named Victor Cousin, Théodore Jouffroy, Edgar Quinet; the historians, after Guizot and before Tocqueville, Thierry and Michelet; poets and novelists fought, after the battle against absolutism, the battle for the emancipation of the people from the yoke of the old social order, and of man from the bonds of traditional morality, pushing to the extreme the proclaimed rights of sentiment, of nature, of passion (Hugo, Lamartine, Musset, Dumas, G. Sand, Stendhal). Catholics remained apart, while nonetheless striving strenuously in their effort not to separate — indeed to strengthen — their own orthodoxy through a close adherence to the political and social postulates of the modern world (Montalembert, Ozanam, Ravignan, Lacordaire).

Enzo Bottasso

IV. ROMANTICISM IN ITALY

As a literary movement conscious of itself, with an explicit program of renewal, Italian R. arose more than a decade later than the foreign one, particularly the German, and, while it responded to ethical and intellectual needs alive since the mid-eighteenth century, it received its impulse from outside and often adopted as theoretical principles and as polemical instruments the extreme or partial results of a spiritual movement not known in its total and organic reality. Hence the coexistence in it of diverse and sometimes contradictory impulses, the scant originality of its aims and its results, its in a certain sense elusive physiognomy, for which it was even possible to doubt that an Italian R. had actually existed, or else the most genuine romantic manifestations were sought in the work of writers officially extraneous or hostile to the movement, such as Foscolo and Leopardi, or even flourishing much later, such as Pascoli and D'Annunzio.

The spark of the polemic between romantics and classicists was the publication of an article by Mme de Staël (On the manner and the utility of translations) in the Biblioteca italiana of Jan. 1816, an article in which Italians were urged to know and translate foreign literatures as a means of renewing their own. Italian men of letters divided into two camps: those who defended with greater or lesser intransigence fidelity to the classicizing tradition and regarded Mme de Staël's invitation as an incitement to betray the fatherland, and those who saw in the broadening of knowledge, in the acquaintance with expressions of thought and art of other peoples, the possibility of re-invigorating a now exhausted culture and thus of regaining a substantial originality. The latter called themselves romantics, and their first writings: Intorno all'ingiustizia di alcuni giudizi letterari italiani by L. Di Breme (June 1816); Avventure letterarie di un giorno by P. Borsieri (19 Sept. 1816); Sul Cacciatore feroce e sulla Eleonora di G. A. Bürger: Lettera semiseria di Grisostomo al suo figliolo by G. Berchet (Dec. 1816), are considered the manifestos of Italian R. Subsequently the defenders of the new ideas gathered around the journal Il Conciliatore, while the classicists had their principal organ in the Biblioteca italiana. The polemic, having gradually widened from the initial nationalist motive to other problems (mythology, dramatic rules, imitation of nature, etc.), continued heated until about 1820, then gradually died down, and already in 1823 Manzoni could summarize its conclusions in his letter Sul romanticismo to the Marquis Cesare d'Azeglio. It had a brief revival after the publication of the sermon Sulla mitologia by V. Monti in 1825.

The fundamental principles upheld by the Italian romantics are: 1) there is no single type of beauty: art varies according to peoples and epochs; therefore modern literature, if it wishes to be a living thing, must abandon the exclusive imitation of the Greek and Latin classics and draw inspiration from national traditions (Christian religion, chivalry, medieval history, etc.), in particular must banish the use of mythology, which reflects a mentality by now dead; 2) the object of art is the true, but the historically true, not the typical or ideal true sought by the classicists; 3) the faithful representation of the true demands that the artist be free from any external constraint: therefore all arbitrary rules must be abolished, in particular those of the three dramatic unities of time, place and action; 4) literature does not have as its end the simple delight of a few men of letters, but the education of the whole people: therefore it must be moral and popular; 5) a living, educational and popular literature must adopt a living and simple language (on this point Manzoni insisted more than anyone else, proclaiming the necessity of using spoken Florentine in writing). All these affirmations can be traced back to a single principle, that according to which «literature is the expression of society», understood both as a canon of interpretation and judgment and as an inspiring criterion of literary activity. This conception of literature the Italian romantics had taken up above all from the works of Mme de Staël, which, and in particular De l'Allemagne, constituted, together with De la littérature du Midi de l'Europe by Sismondi and the Corso di letteratura drammatica by G. Schlegel, the group of foreign texts that exercised the greatest influence on their cultural formation; but it was already alive in the criticism and teaching of Foscolo. Following in Foscolo's wake, they set themselves the restoration of literature as a premise for the ethical re-education and the political risorgimento of the Italian people, and they deemed this possible only through a rapport with contemporary European culture. Hence the spirit at once nationalist and European and the more or less openly political tone of Italian R. From this point of view it appears as an essential aspect of the Risorgimento, the freedom proclaimed in art as the symbol and the foretoken of political freedom. Moreover the representatives of the first and most notable romantic group are animated by a sincerely Christian inspiration, joined with an ideal of spiritual and practical equilibrium, of sentimental and expressive moderation: an inspiration and ideal especially evident in the work of the one who is at once the greatest of all and their model: Manzoni (to whom, in this respect, Pellico comes closer than anyone else in Mie Prigioni and Doveri degli uomini). This marks the detachment from Foscolo, whose dramatic and rebellious passionateness acts rather on certain writers of classicist principles or on others, romantic though they be, but extraneous to the Manzonian group, such as Mazzini, Guerrazzi and others, who also feel the influence of foreign writers of a temperament akin in certain respects to Foscolo's, especially Byron.

This moderate and reasonable character, by which, within certain limits, it seems to continue and develop the work of the Enlightenment writers, particularly the writers of the Caffè (v.), likewise distinguishes the first Italian R. not only from the Nordic one, but also from the French. While the tendency to individualistic affirmation and autobiographical effusion appears very weak in it, and an exception in this sense is represented above all by certain aspects of Tommaseo's personality, the fundamental motive in it is that of fidelity to the true, for which a historical foundation is deemed necessary for every literary work. Hence the great flowering of historical tragedies (l'Adelchi and the Conte di Carmagnola of Manzoni, the Francesca da Rimini of Pellico, etc.), historical novels (I promessi sposi of Manzoni, Nicolò de' Lapi and Ettore Fieramosca of D'Azeglio, Marco Visconti of T. Grossi, etc.), historical lyrics (the Fantasie of Berchet, etc.), etc. This production draws its inspiration mainly from the models of the Englishman W. Scott and of the Germans Goethe, Schiller and Bürger, known however usually in French translations. In it, apart from Manzoni, in whose work, and in particular in the Promessi sposi, the spiritual needs and literary tendencies of Italian R. had their most complete and perfect expression, historical fidelity is generally interpreted in a superficial and conventional manner, as the reproduction of certain characteristic aspects of custom and of settings (especially medieval), and history often becomes the pretext for picturesque descriptions and sentimental digressions, in which, more than an interest in the true, there manifests itself an attitude of dreamy «nostalgia for the past». Moreover the contrast between the precision and the con-

expressive concreteness, demanded by the faithful reproduction of real facts and characters, and the most constant tradition of our literary language produces frequent formal imbalances in both verse and prose; so that the realist requirement finds a happier development in dialect poetry (Porta).

The languidly sentimental and melancholy vein, which already pours forth in the direct disciples of Manzoni, inspiring above all the genre of the novella in verse (cf. the Fuggitiva and the Illegonda of T. Grossi, the Algiso of C. Cantù, the Torre di Capua of G. Torti, etc.), in a second phase becomes predominant, partly also in the wake of the painful national events, and will end up constituting, together with the taste for a certain musical vaporousness of expression, the distinctive character of what was called the second "Romanticism," which had its major representatives in Prati and Aleardi. But on the other hand the realistic tendency of the first Romanticism does not take long to develop logically from itself the interest no longer only in the past, but in contemporary life and psychology; an interest of which two almost contemporary works appear as significant documents: Fede e bellezza by N. Tommaseo (1840) and Edmenegurda by G. Prati (1841). Along this path the cerismo would later unfold. In the second Romanticism there is already fairly accentuated also that tendency toward individualistic affirmation in life and in art which, almost nonexistent in the first, would then dominate the movement of the scapigliatura, in connection with a more direct and intense influence both of the early German Romantics and of the French decadents (v. DECADENTISMO).

On the theoretical-critical plane and on the plane of artistic creation Italian Romanticism had relatively modest outcomes, if one excepts on the one hand the work of De Sanctis, which is in large part the natural development of principles that it had laid down, and on the other that of Manzoni. It nevertheless marked a profound cultural renewal, bringing Italian culture back into a beneficial contact with the highest expressions of European culture and freeing it from the by then formalistic and sterile deference to tradition without disowning what in tradition was perpetually alive and fruitful; a renewal in contents and in style whose effects were felt, more or less, by all subsequent literary movements, including those that asserted themselves in opposition to Romanticism, such as the neo-classicism of Carducci, in which, for example, the Romantic cult of history lived again in a new form.

Mario Puppo

V. ROMANTICISM IN SPAIN

The atmosphere favorable to Romanticism had been prepared by Jovellanos, Menéndez Valdés, Cienfuegos and Quintana.

At the same time, the diffusion of novels and of adventures or sentimental stories had formed an environment in which inferior Romanticism would have found easy purchase. In fact, after a vain attempt to link the movement back to its German sources, English models and above all French ones imposed themselves and were followed in their most obvious and facile aesthetic principles. In 1814 Nicolás Böhl de Faber translated fragments of the Vorlesungen of Schlegel, provoking a brief polemic with the classicist José Joaquín de Mora: a polemic taken up again, with greater violence, in 1817 by another classicist, Galiano. If their opposition failed to prevent the advent of Romanticism, not even Böhl's work served to orient it toward Germany; the books of Chateaubriand and of Mme de Staël, with their rapid dissemination, brought all of Spain's interest back to France.

The most important moments of this diffusion are represented by the publication of certain reviews: by El Europeo (1823), directed by Carlos Arribau and Ramon Lopez Soler (his theories are confirmed in 1828 by Agustín Durán with his Discurso sobre el teatro antiguo español); and then in 1835-36 by El artista, for which Eugenio de Ochoa and Federico de Madrago obtained the collaboration of the best Spanish Romantics, among them Espronceda, Zorrilla, Pastor Díaz, Escosura, Ventura de la Vega, Salas y Quiroga, and which, upon its extinction, was continued by other periodicals (Semanario pintoresco español; El Liceo; Observatorio pintoresco; No me olvides). Certain literary tertulias also formed, among them the Parnasillo and, more celebrated, the El Ateneo of Madrid, constituted in 1835 under the presidency of the Duque de Rivas, and El Liceo.

Influenced also by W. Scott, Spanish Romanticism produced numerous novels on national subjects, such as Doña Isabel de Solís by Martínez de la Rosa, El Señor de Bembibre by Gil y Carrasco, the best of this pallid production. Of greater importance is El Moro Exposito by A. de Saavedra, duke of Rivas (Paris 1834). At the same time the performances of La conjuración de Venecia by Martínez de la Rosa and of the Macías by Larra triumphed over the many polemics aroused around the theater. In 1836 came the Don Alvaro e la fuerza del sino of the Duque de Rivas and El Trovador by A. García Gutiérrez. There followed, the next year, Los Amantes de Teruel by Hartzenbusch and, in 1844, the Don Juan Tenorio by Zorrilla.

The already mentioned works of Rivas, of Zorrilla and the poems of Espronceda constitute the major expressions of Spanish Romanticism, yet none attains artistic completeness. The defect is common to the whole of Spanish Romantic production, which seeks in vain to return to the memories of the golden age without recapturing its essential sentiments and, above all, its religious aspect. The traditional forms thus appear emptied of their intimate content and are exhausted in a merely showy elaboration.

Guido Mancini

VI. ROMANTICISM IN POLAND

Polish Romanticism was stamped by the particular characteristics of the spirit of the nation and of its historical conditions. It was not, as in England, France and Germany, a predominantly literary and philosophical fact: but it coincided, as in Italy, with national aspirations and with the struggle against the foreign oppressor.

In Poland, Kościuszko's insurrection and the participation of the Poles in the Napoleonic wars are considered Romantic; in 1818 Kazimierz Brodziński (1791-1815) published an essay: O klasyczności i romantyczności tudzież o duchu poezji polskiej ("On Classicism, Romanticism and the Spirit of Polish Poetry") in which for the first time the essence of the two currents is defined in relation to Polish poetry, which Brodziński wanted firmly bound to national life and reflecting the conditions of Poland, an agricultural country, the background of rural idylls. In harmony with his theories he wrote the Pieśni rolników ("Songs of the Farmers") and Wiesław, a delicate idyll in the manner of Goethe's Hermann und Dorothea. To this current belong the works of the poets of the Ukrainian school: Marja by Antoni Malczewski (1783-1826); Zamek Kaniosski ("The Castle of Kaniow") by Severino Goszczyński (1801-76); Rusalki ("The Order") by Bohdan Zaleski (1802-86) and other works by various poets and prose writers. Nevertheless the Romantic school would perhaps not have been able to struggle with the classical one, which had a flourishing center in Warsaw, had not Adam Mickiewicz brought to it from Vilna the warm and impetuous adherence of his genius; and after him Juljusz Slowacki and Zygmunt Krasiński (v.), the three greatest poets of the time; H. Rzewuski and M. Czajkowski among the prose writers; the historian J. Lelewel and others. The spiritual values of Romanticism: the predominance of feeling over reason, enthusiasm, heroism as a duty, indeed as a necessity of life, create a new current that is reflected not only in the theories of certain philosophers, but in the very essence of literary and artistic productions: that is, messianism.

In 1831 the same Brodziński delivered a Discorso sulla nazionalità dei Polacchi, in which the characteristics of Polish history were analyzed: the sacred fire for liberty, kept alight amid the storms; the brotherhood of men and peoples under the sun of religion; the defense of the faith and of civilization against oriental barbarism. For these qualities of hers the people that had elected the Virgin Mary as its queen was sacrificed, partitioned and horribly oppressed. But even in its present tragic conditions it continues its work as antenurale christianitatis, opposing as in the past its breast to the oriental invasion; it does not yield, it continues its struggle.

From here to the concept that the sorrowing fatherland was the Christ of Nations, there was but one step. The philosophers who go under the name of messianic: Brzozowski, Trentowski, the obscure Wróński, the mystic Towiński, developed the concept of messianism in different ways; and August Cieszkowski (1814-94), a Hegelian, meditating on the history of humanity explained it following one by one the seven demands of the Poter. But even apart from the philosophers and their influence, Polish Romanticism fused in works of great beauty the concepts of faith and moral elevation with those of a patriotism that transcends earthly boundaries and expands into the love of all humanity. Romanticism lasted in Poland until the revolution of 1863; its failure was followed by the spreading of positivist reaction.

VII. ROMANTICISM IN RUSSIA AND THE SLAVIC COUNTRIES

The romantic taste was prepared in Russia by "sentimental" literature, by the imitation of fashionable English novels, and by the influence of Rousseau.

This literature exalted the humble, turned its gaze toward "nature," and vaguely interwove the ideals of a so-called "primitive Christianity," none too well defined, with the "humanitarian" tendencies of the Masonic lodges. The sentimental and pre-romantic currents did not flow in Russia into a Romanticism with well-defined features. The fact remains that Russian literature experienced in the first decades of the nineteenth century its sudden maturation, its great flowering. Pushkin, Lermontov and Gogol were in a certain sense romantics, but they gave to romantic suggestions of Western origin a tone and a coloring unmistakably Russian, and resolved — more or less — into "realism" the most vivid and modern traits of the romantic school itself. In Lermontov, who died very young, one sometimes feels in a marked way the influences of a fashionable Byronism, but in his most limpid and vigorous moments he breaks and surpasses those schemata. Pushkin yielded only apparently to the tastes of his time and instead anticipated with his tales a whole orientation characteristic of the great Russian narrative prose of the nineteenth century. Gogol freed himself rather early from his youthful fantastic-romantic inspirations, capturing the deepest traits of Russian life through "local" episodes which, in their framework, rise to epic grandeur. Lacking, in the nineteenth century, a "Romanticism" comparable to that of the European literatures, Russian literature and Russian social life itself nonetheless experienced in the early twentieth century, in an environment dominated by symbolism, a curious reflowering of medieval ideals, of pre-Raphaelite echoes, of a cult of the "accursed poets," of a revaluation of romantic aesthetics, while a political terrorism unleashed from the "underground" of a country on the brink of revolution spread far and wide, with extravagant interweavings of different epochs.

Among the smaller Slavic peoples, Romanticism did nothing but continue the aspirations and efforts of the Enlightenment period toward a cultural emancipation (national in character) from foreign, predominantly German, superstructures. The Czechs had only one great romantic poet, K. H. Mácha: Czechoslovak Romanticism had predominantly folkloric and erudite characteristics and passionately studied "Slavic archaeology," later harking back with sentimental notes to the Slavic peoples that had disappeared in the course of the Middle Ages. In the climate of Czechoslovak Romanticism the study of Slavic philology received a notable impulse, and Prague exercised a certain influence also on the Slovenian and Croatian cultural world.

Wolf Giusti

II. ROMANTICISM IN PHILOSOPHY.

Philosophical Romanticism, which had a European influence, is almost exclusively German. In England the term romantic, used since the seventeenth century, derived from the word romance, meant "Old French" and precisely a tale invented in verse and subsequently a narration invented in prose; therefore it meant "medieval," "Gothic," rediscovery of the Middle Ages, and in this sense it was opposed to "classical" or "ancient." In France, until the end of the last century, its use was solely artistic-literary.

From the philosophical point of view, Romanticism can be defined (but imperfectly) as the revolt of the "philosophy of life" against the Enlightenment's "philosophy of reason." It is evident that, thus defined, Romanticism is not only a historical moment of an epoch, but an attitude proper to the human spirit in every age, and therefore one can speak of a Greek Romanticism, as of a later Romanticism (the manifold "philosophies of life" from the end of the 1800s to today) than that movement which is commonly indicated by this name and which runs from the end of the 1700s to the first half of the nineteenth century. It is characterized by a reaction (at times polemical) to the spirit and methods of the Enlightenment (v.), although its recent origins are to be sought precisely in the Enlightenment itself.

Kant's transcendentalism (v.) is, at bottom, a powerful sense of subjectivity: man's autonomous dominion over the world (science), autonomy of the will (morality) and of the development of humanity (history); in this sense Kant acted strongly upon Romanticism. But Kantian subjectivity is still, in Enlightenment fashion, "rationality," and his conception of nature is the mechanistic one of Galileo and Newton. Therefore Kant's influence must be considered together with others no longer Kantian, whose seeds are to be sought precisely in certain motives internal to the Enlightenment, expressed, for example, in France by Voltaire (v.) and by Rousseau (v.), in Italy by P. Verri, as well as by the so-called sensiblerie of the 1700s; already German Enlightenment itself (Lessing, Herder, etc.) is a movement that is linked to Romanticism proper.

Even under the purely philosophical aspect, Romanticism is a complex movement, different from nation to nation, from one romantic to another. Its complexity is such that, if one considers its aspects abstractly, one loses its profound unity, which seems to dissolve into so many contradictory affirmations. In fact, Romanticism is, at the same time, individualism (v.) or anarchy and an almost sacred sense of national unity; consecration of the irrational forces of life or of the arbitrariness of the "genius" and celebration of the inner freedom of the spirit; "irony," which destroys with laughter that conceals tears, and exaltation of existence as a conquest advancing toward the infinite; vindication of the imagination that makes and unmakes in free play, and affirmation of a higher plane of rationality; exaltation of the perpetual becoming of the spirit and contemplation of the eternity of being; primacy of subjective feeling and a profound systematic exigency; return to the Catholic Middle Ages and affirmation of pantheism and of "confessionalism," etc. With Romanticism there is surpassed the ideal of a universal "humanity" and the other of an "eternal nature," which eternally flows within immobile and immutable laws, the "rational dream" of the Enlightenment. Not abstract "humanity," but the individual; not trust in providential natural laws that govern men and things according to an order, perfect in its mechanical rationality, but exaltation of life rich in initiatives; not leveling cosmopolitanism, but the life of the spirit which in individual peoples takes on character and is realized through the perpetual movement of their history.

Romanticism has a religious sense of values (aesthetic, moral, religious, etc.), of history and of nature, of the past; but of everything, at the same time, it has an indefinite sense, almost a perception that is lost in unfathomable darkness, in mystery or in dream. Wishing to gather all its essential elements, one can thus specify its characteristics: deepening of the Kantian principle of the synthetic activity of the spirit; revaluation of religion; sensitivity to the beauty and charm of tradition and therefore interest in the past (in the classical world, model of serenity and harmony, realizer — especially for Goethe [v.] and Schiller [v.] — of the ideal of humanitas; and in the medieval world — the "barbarous" age of the Enlightenment thinkers —, the epoch in which peoples began to differentiate themselves and nations to form; which was the expression of Catholicism, unifier of all the forms of spiritual life; the primitive and youthful age and therefore the age of great poetry) and vindication of the value of history (historicism); exaltation of all that is irrational and immediate in the spirit and affirmation of the person (v.); consciousness of nationality (the nineteenth century was called the "century of nations"); critique of the mechanical conception of nature, whose life is, instead, the manifesting of a living principle of inexhaustible creative power of infinite forms.

There is undoubtedly in the Romantic an heroic generosity (when it is not pose), which is concretized in feelings of "sacrifice" for the great ideals of political liberty, of country, of artistic and moral beauty (Schiller synthesizes the two moments of sensibility and morality in the "beautiful soul"); a contempt for mediocre, banal, routine life, the exaltation of the exceptional, of the qualified, strongly characterized man. Many Romantics lack the sensibility to grasp the beauty (even moral) of small things that express great sentiments: the accentuation of personality is not sought on the side of humility and heroic charity (Manzoni is the exception). Hence the lack of proportion, the excessive, the exaggerated, and all that is redundant and oratorical, morbid and contradictory in Romanticism. Hence also the tendency to absolutize human values and man himself, a free and creative spirit, the "little god," who "constructs" reality through philosophy and science; who creates morality (liberty and good); who "invents" life, his own and that of nature, with art (v.), expression of beauty and harmony, of the divine which, immanent in the world, makes its exuberant and manifold life spring forth. This serves to clarify the concepts of religion and of Christianity as understood by philosophical and non-philosophical Romanticism: religion is often a pantheistic cult of nature and an exaltation of man, religiosity without dogmas, and a mysticism that is egocentrism and idolatry of the person. It is the fundamental irreligion of an age that nevertheless felt most strongly the fascination of religious values, especially Christian ones; but it is an aesthetic fascination, of a Christianity reduced to its historical and human dimensions, more an artistic and historical valorization of it than a religious one. The "person"

of the Romantic is no longer the Christian one: it is not a creature, it is a creative principle of itself; it is not freedom in relation to a transcendent law that disciplines it, but is "freedom of nature" or spontaneity. Similarly, Romantic interiority is not Christian; it is the subjectivity of truth, its immanence in the subject, who "creates everything"; it is a development and also an "interpretation" of Kant's "Copernican revolution." And so interiority is lost either in exasperated subjectivism (Novalis [v.]) or in Schelling's philosophy of nature or in the dialectical panlogism (v.) of Hegel. Not life as being, but as becoming; as perennial aspiration and dynamic tension (all spiritual attitudes included in the term Sehnsucht).

Transcendental idealism (v.), which is what is called philosophical Romanticism, is radically immanentist: it resolves all of the real into the idea and the idea into thought: thought (v.) is all of the real, human (history) and physical (nature), and all of the real is thought. Transcendental idealism is a circle: monism (v.) and immanence (v.). Kant's criticism results from this, profoundly and critically elaborated in contact with the reborn interest in Spinoza (v.), the philosopher "drunk with the divine," the "impious" mystic of pantheism, the author preferred by Goethe and by Herder (v.). Criticism and Spinozism become, as has been noted, "in their profound contrast, the two poles of philosophical thought" of Romantic-idealist thought (W. Windelband, Storia della filosofia, II, Italian trans., Palermo 1948, p. 257). Within these poles, the influence of Plotinus (v.), of the Italian Renaissance and the mysticism of the preceding centuries is not to be neglected. In this complex, philosophical Romanticism presents itself now as theistic and now as pantheistic, at times oriented toward a conception of the world as the very system of reason (v.), at times toward the revaluation of intuition and of the irrational, now religious and now worldly. On the one hand, Jacobi (v.) claims the cognitive validity of feeling (v.), which is immediate apprehension of the true, the source of faith, which has its principle and its term in God, an object not of knowledge or of thought, but of the indissoluble certainty of faith itself; on the other, Hegel contemptuously calls "edifying philosophies" this one of Jacobi and that of Schelling, and to them he opposes true philosophy, which is logical thought, mediated or reflected knowledge. This bipolarity of Romantic-idealist thought, which is not only initial, is not to be neglected. The same master current of transcendental idealism develops into four systems that must be kept distinct, though without losing sight of their common metaphysical principle (the I posits itself and the other than itself and conquers itself through becoming as self-consciousness, in which the process concludes): the ethical idealism of Fichte (v.), the aesthetic idealism of Schelling (v.), the logical idealism of Hegel (v.) and the religious idealism of Schleiermacher (v.).

Fichte's idealism struggles with a twofold exigency: that of science, which is mediation and objectification, and that of the unobjectifiable individuality. Fichte never overcame this antinomy, which is moreover internal to all forms of transcendental idealism; therefore he can be considered both a pure, Spinozistic rationalist and also an irrationalist. To his thought and to the German Romantic milieu is linked Schelling, the most Romantic of all the idealists. Nature is spiritual life at reduced power, "petrified intelligence," in which the absolute Principle is immanent, which then manifests itself as conscious I in the life of the spirit. Of it, an undifferentiated unity of nature and spirit (pantheism), there is no knowledge but "conceptual intuition" ("intellektuelle Anschauung"; Sistema dell'ideal. trascendentale, sec. 3); in the intuitive moment of art is the model of the original unity of nature and spirit. Art is therefore the "organ of philosophy." For Hegel, on the other hand, philosophy is only logical thought, science of the Absolute (v.). On the other hand, Hegelian reason is historical, indeed it identifies itself with history, which is its history: it is restless reason, dialectic of opposites, which compose themselves in the dynamic synthesis, which always moves forward. The world is the development of the absolute, of the divine Spirit self-determining and self-developing. There is no distinction between absolute thought and absolute being: thought is nothing but thought of being and being is nothing but thought. This is the fundamental metaphysical principle of Hegelian philosophy, which unfolds architectonically as "philosophy of nature" and "philosophy of spirit," always with the dialectical rhythm of thesis, antithesis and synthesis up to the three moments (art, religion, philosophy) of absolute Spirit. For Hegel philosophy has a rigorously logical character: it is science, indeed the science: it justifies itself to itself and from itself. It is evident that the Romantic philosophical milieu must have appeared to him vague and obscure: "true philosophy, in which truth consists, cannot be anything but the scientific system of the same" (La scienza della logica, introduction; cf. bk. I, "With what must science begin?").

Besides the German one, there is an English philosophical Romanticism, influenced by the former, which has its writers in Coleridge, whose Neoplatonism absorbs motifs from Kant and Schelling, and in Carlyle (v.), close to Jacobi and Schiller. One cannot speak of a French philosophical Romanticism, nor even an Italian one, inasmuch as Rosmini (v.) above all and also Gioberti (v.) are on a line of thought essentially different.

Not only literary-artistic Romanticism, but also philosophical Romanticism (and even that of Hegel) is, at bottom, the "desire for the impossible," the going outside of reality, the soaring in dream, in the free play of fantasy, the seeking of a pure freedom, which is possible only if one wills nothing determinate and remains in indefinite possibility. The three idealisms of Fichte, Schelling and Hegel tend toward "impossibility": the total realization of the absolute in the world and above all in man, where the Absolute itself acquires consciousness. Thus morality, art and philosophy are assumed one by one as the forms in which this realization is brought about. It is an illusion, a utopia, too, of which the Romantic philosophers themselves are in part aware. But for them the illusion or the dream is worth more than reality; indeed their truth is the dream itself. Therefore philosophical Romanticism too presents itself to us under the form of evasion, the spiritual category typical of Romanticism as such. But the evasion from the real attempted in all forms leaves the Romantics discontented, restless and dissatisfied (hence "irony," Hegel's "unhappy consciousness," Schopenhauer's (v.) noluntas, etc.); and the principal motive is to be sought in the essential pantheism that lies at the basis not only of philosophical Romanticism, but of all German Romanticism. In fact, given the pantheist conception, the Romantic "infinite," which is more properly the indefinite and the indeterminate, is always a "naturalistic" and not a spiritual infinite, spatial and temporal, worldly "historical" and therefore always a real finite, even if a finite that expands to infinity. Consequently both the "dream" and "freedom," "spirit" or "nature," even in their infinity, are always at the level of the finite real; that is, given immanentism and pantheism, if nature is made adequate to spirit, spirit too is made adequate to nature. Once transcendence is denied, however immense the "dream" may be, its content cannot be anything but a finite, even if it be the whole human and physical universe. This explains the evasion into a fictitious or artificial "paradise," whatever it may be. The Romantic "evades," "goes outside" reality, with which he is discontented, without ever succeeding in "standing outside," which is the condition of "ecstasy," which belongs to the theist, whereas evasion belongs to the pantheist and to the dynamic pantheism proper to philosophical Romanticism. Romantic evasion is typical of one who is not a Christian and no longer knows how to be even a man; and he who no longer knows how to be a man wants to be God himself, to place himself beyond the human. And indeed Nietzsche (v.), a Romantic too of a generation no longer Romantic, translates the Romantic anxiety for absoluteness and totality into the myth of the "superman."

Michele Federico Sciacca

III. ROMANTICISM IN ART.

It is customary, in the field of the figurative arts of the 19th century, to define as Romantic, almost in opposition to the Neoclassical and Purist ones, those manifestations that arise in time precisely after those and that on their own account precede the first veristic manifestations in the field of sculpture and painting and eclecticism in that of architecture.

In such manifestations, defined as Romantic and which were brought about for a good part of the first half of the 19th century, particular emphasis is placed on the expressions of certain themes typical of Romanticism of all times: such as the theme of death as relief from earthly ills, the theme of love that gives intoxication and the sense of transcending the human, such as that of fleeing from the true, because the true destroys illusions and therefore accentuates the tedium of life; such as the taste for travel, for adventures in distant lands, and so on. That is, emphasis is placed on the need to escape, whether in time or in space, determined by discontent with one's own condition and therefore by the aspiration to transcend the limits of a measure determined by norms, customs and traditions. Now it should be remembered how such a need for escape in space and time had already urged Neoclassicists and Purists to accept as current the forms and expressive languages of the past, and attempted — with a clearly Romantic spiritual attitude — to make them express new feelings. The men of the succeeding generation, on the other hand, the Romantics properly so called, having set aside classical and Renaissance forms, oriented themselves predominantly toward the Middle Ages. Toward the mysterious and, at the time, almost unexplored Middle Ages which appeared to most, still in the first half of the 19th century, as a world of extraordinary adventures in which could be reflected, almost in a mirror turned to the past, the same heroic aspirations that then inflamed consciences. The change in the figurative arts is clearly identifiable first of all in a change of subjects. These now treat predominantly themes derived from stories or legends of the Middle Ages or of the East, or insist on describing particularly pathetic scenes and feelings. While in architecture, to classical forms, whether of Greco-Roman or Renaissance tradition, those of Gothic, Romanesque or Moorish architecture are now preferred. But at a second stage, while architects attempt new paths and new forms, availing themselves also of new constructive means, painters and sculptors, dissatisfied with the old academic forms, themselves seek new expressive freedoms better suited to the new ideas to be expressed. Hence eclecticism and then functionalism in the fields of architecture, verism, impressionism and so on in the fields of painting and sculpture.

Emilio Lavagnino