/lit/ - Literature

>lib.ru

>Delphi Classics Complete Works

>But a great movement of the nineteenth century that pervades the nations of Europe cannot be pedantically trivialized by treating the rest of the world either as a candidat à la civilisation française or as an aspirant to German culture, and by ascribing the predicates German or Germanic to romanticism in addition to those of fanciful and passionate. It is worst of all when such predicates are intended to serve a pedagogical purpose. On the one hand, romanticism appears as a new life and true poetry, as the vigorous and the robust in opposition to the torpor of age. On the other hand, it appears as a wild outbreak of morbid sensibility and a barbaric incapacity for form. For those who take the first view, romanticism is youth and health. Those who take the second view quote Goethe's maxim according to which the classical is the wholesome and the romantic is the diseased. There is a romanticism of energy and a romanticism of decadence, romanticism as the immediacy and actuality of life and romanticism as flight into the past and tradition. Knowledge of what is essential to the romantic cannot proceed from positive or negative hygienic-moralistic or polemical-political assessments of this sort. It may lead to these assessments as a practical application. As long as no clear knowledge is established, however, it remains basically arbitrary how the predicates are combined and allotted here and what is singled out from this extremely complex movement as the truly "romantic" in order to praise or damn it. Under these circumstances, the easiest thing to do would still be to follow Stendhal and simply say that the romantic is what is interesting and the classical is what is boring, or naturally the other way around. That is because this tiresome game of praise and blame, enthusiasm and polemics, revolves around a narrow stick with two ends; it can be grasped from either side.
t. schmitt