The Romantic Past

I first learned the last stanza of Keats’ “Ode to a Grecian Urn” as a young boy, from an encyclopedia. That was some thirteen years ago; and for thirteen years I had misunderstood what Keats was saying. The last stanza’s sixth line reads, “When old age shall this generation waste.” I had always interpreted “this generation” as being the line’s subject, and “old age” as being the object. In other words, I thought the line referred to a time when this generation, having been given the gift of old age, would waste it. Only recently did I realize that what Keats meant, more likely, was for “old age” to be the sentence’s subject and “this generation” to be the object– referring to the time when this generation becomes old and loses its vigor. Upon reflection, however, my former, mistaken interpretation rings strangely true. The Romantics uniformly placed high value and honor on the ancient past: the very fact that Keats composed an ode to a Greek vase reminds us of this. This aspect of Romanticism is crucial: by understanding the Romantic fixation on the past, we can better place Romanticism as a historical movement, and better see how the poets and writers of its pantheon helped beget the future, for better and for worse.

The Romantic obsession with the past is a continuation of their veneration of nature. Rousseau, who deserves the title of progenitor of the Romantics perhaps more than anyone else, believed in the superiority of the society that existed before property, when man lived “naturally.” Oppression, according to Rousseau, was a recent development; and just as he escaped to the fields around Lake Bienne to escape injustice, so could man escape the injustice of tyrannous property by returning to his natural state. This natural man, existing before the taint of civilization, is also manifest as the child whom the Romantics adore. Children appear so often in Romantic poetry because their perception of the world is uncorrupted, their sensibility unprejudiced by social constraint. Man is “natural” in his childhood, be that the springtime of his civilization or the early years of his life.

Later writers, more strictly Romantic than Rousseau, also saw a connection between times past and the value of nature. We are moved by the mountains immortalized in Coleridge, Wordsworth’s “Sea that bares her bosom to the moon,” and the lonely moors of John Clare not only for their beauty and their immunity to human pettiness but because they are so much older than we could possibly fathom. In fact, the feeling of the sublime – best illustrated by Coleridge, by the Alpine descriptions in Frankenstein, or by the painted crags and storms of Caspar David Friedrich and J.M.W. Turner – is often conjured by reflection that nature is so unthinkably longer-lived than humanity. Nature and the past are inseparable: it is befitting, therefore, that the generation of artists who so thoroughly threw themselves into mimesis of and mediation on nature should come to venerate old age and the past with an equal zeal.

It is also befitting that a generation so obsessed with forces outside society should also have so much to say about the classical, pre-Christian world. Keats, after all, was apostrophizing a Greek urn, and figures from mythology appear frequently in his verse. Shelley paid homage to the “true Poetry of Rome.” Hölderlin wrote an entire novel, Hyperion, set in Greece; and although the story takes place in the nineteenth century, during the independence struggle against Turkish domination, Hyperion’s visit to the Parthenon is a glorification of classical Athens and everything that entails: the pristine marbles of Praxiteles, the eloquence and magnanimity of Pericles, the high-minded thoughts of Socrates. All of these are voices calling from a world as devoid of modernity’s unpleasantries, at least in the 19^th century imagination, as the meadows of the Swiss countryside, the rugged hills of Scotland, or the tumbledown shepherds’ cottages of rural England.

But Hölderlin’s enthusiasm for the past stretched even further back. The name of his protagonist comes from a Titan, one of the divine beings that preceded the Olympian gods. On the same note, Hölderlin’s poem “Kunst und Natur” is a denunciation of Jupiter in favor of Saturn. Saturn, like Hyperion, came from a generation of mythological spirits that existed before civilization; Saturn was associated, among the Romans, with time and the cycle of seasons, familiar motifs in the Romantic canon. In the worship of Saturn, Hölderlin gives us a vision of man whose spiritual focus is nature, observation and celebration of nature, simple and without trapping. He gives us natural man. Jupiter, desposer of Saturn and giver of mighty laws, is thus the great violator of natural man. He is the property that Rousseau sees as causing man to live everywhere in chains; he is the religion that so revolted the adolescent Shelley; he is the man who, like Mary Shelley’s narrator Walton or even Victor Frankenstein, violates the will of older generations and plunges himself into misery. He is the generation of whom I misunderstood Keats to write, receiving the gift of old age and squandering it.

The influence of the Romantic attachment to the past goes beyond these poets. Romanticism had political ramifications and reverberations, not the least of which was the bold Prometheus of French revolutionary liberalism – Bonaparte, who dared to snatch fire from the gods of history and thrust it into the hands of Europe. Napoleonic art was Romantic, but also strongly neoclassical. We can imagine both Percy Shelley and his stuffy professors approving of a painting like David’s Oath of the Horatii; Canova’s tomb for Napoleon’s sister has the graceful proportions of the Aphrodite of Knidos, and yet we can see the marble woman as the girl sitting on John Clare’s lap in one of the simple ploughman’s love sonnets. The nationalist movements that followed, or revolted against, the changes in Europe ushered in by Napoleon all hearkened back to times past. The image of revolution in politics, just as in poetry, began to derive from memory, and would continue to do so even after the rise of Marx, realism, and the disdain for sentiment.

For this reason, the political adoption of the Romantic love of the past has proved a dark legacy. The romantic nationalists of Germany had as clear and unique an image of natural man and the natural past as had Rousseau and Wordsworth. This in itself was nothing to lament; in fact, it gave us such classics as the collected folklore of the Brothers Grimm and the sweeping symphonic epics of Wagner. But looking at history, we see a direct line of descent beginning with these attempts to reclaim the natural spirit of a nation and ending with the torchlight processions of Nürnberg and the twentieth century’s most fearful and hideous scar. This, too, was the legacy of Romanticism. We see, at last, the face of Frankenstein’s monster, created in the best of faith and carried out in the worst; and we find it in the same history to which Rousseau appealed against tyranny, to which Hyperion turned against the wretchedness of modernity. Old age can be turned to; its lessons, however, can also be wasted. Keats’ line in the “ode to the Grecian Urn,” whether he meant it so or not, was prophecy.