Eric Hobsbawm - Age Of Revolution 1789 -1848

THE ARTSthe standard approach of nineteenth-century middle class society, andstill retains much of its influence.However, though it is by no means clear what romanticism stoodfor, it is quite evident what it was against: the middle. Whatever itscontent, it was an extremist creed. Romantic artists or thinkers in thenarrower sense are found on the extreme left, like the poet Shelley, onthe extreme right, like Chateaubriand and Novalis, leaping from leftto right like Wordsworth, Coleridge and numerous disappointedsupporters of the French Revolution, leaping from royalism to theextreme left like Victor Hugo, but hardly ever among the moderatesor whig-liberals in the rationalist centre, which indeed was the strongholdof 'classicism'. 'I have no respect for the Whigs,' said the old ToryWordsworth, 'but I have a great deal of the Chartist in me'. 6 It wouldbe too much to call it an anti-bourgeois creed, for the revolutionaryand conquistador element in young classes still about to storm heavenfascinated the romantics also. Napoleon became one of their mythheroes,like Satan, Shakespeare, the Wandering Jew and other trespassersbeyond the ordinary limits of life. The demonic element incapitalist accumulation, the limitless and uninterrupted pursuit of more,beyond the calculation of rationality or purpose, need or the extremesof luxury, haunted them. Some of their most characteristic heroes,Faustus and Don Juan, share this unappeasable greed with the businessbuccaneers of Balzac's novels. And yet the romantic element remainedsubordinate, even in the phase of bourgeois revolution. Rousseau providedsome of the accessories of the French Revolution, but he dominatedit only in the one period in which it went beyond bourgeoisliberalism, that of Robespierre. And even so, its basic costume wasRoman, rationalist and neo-classic. David was its painter, Reason itsSupreme Being.Romanticism is therefore not simply classifiable as an anti-bourgeoismovement. Indeed, in the pre-romanticism of the decades before theFrench Revolution, many of its characteristic slogans had been usedfor the glorification of the middle class, whose true and simple, not tosay mawkish, feeling had been favourably contrasted with the stiffupper lip of a corrupt society, and whose spontaneous reliance on naturewas destined, it was believed, to sweep aside the artifice of court andclericalism. However, once bourgeois society had in fact triumphed inthe French and Industrial Revolutions, romanticism unquestionablybecame its instinctive enemy and can be justly described assuch.No doubt much of its passionate, confused," but profound, revulsionagainst bourgeois society was due to the vested interest of the two groups259