Eric Hobsbawm - Age Of Revolution 1789 -1848

THE ARTSof the past, and as the free noble savage abroad; especially as the RedIndian. From Rousseau, who held it up as the ideal of free social man,to the socialists primitive society was a sort of model for Utopia.Marx's triple divisions of history—primitive communism, classsociety, communism, on a higher level—echoes, though it alsotransforms, this tradition. The ideal of primitivism was not speciallyromantic. Indeed some of its most ardent champions were in theeighteenth century illuminist tradition. The romantic quest took itsexplorers into the great deserts of Arabia and North Africa, amongDelacroix's and Fromentin's warriors and odalisques, with Byronthrough the Mediterranean world, or with Lermontov to the Caucasus,where natural man in the shape of the Cossack fought natural man inthe shape of the tribesman amid chasms and cataracts, rather than tothe innocent social and erotic Utopia of Tahiti. But it also took them toAmerica, where primitive man was fighting and doomed, a situationwhich brought him closer to the mood of the romantics. The Indianpoems of the Austro-Hungarian Lenau cry out against the red man'sexpulsion; if the Mohican had not been the last of his tribe, would hehave become quite so powerful a symbol in European culture? Naturallythe noble savage played an immeasurably more important part inAmerican romanticism than in European—Melville's Moby Lick(1851) is his greatest monument—but in the Leather stocking novelsof Fenimore Cooper he captured the old world, as the conservativeChateaubriand's Natchez had never been able to do.Middle ages, folk and noble savage were ideals anchored firmly tothe past. Only revolution, the 'springtime of peoples', pointed exclusivelyto the future, and yet even the most Utopian found it comfortingto appeal to a precedent for the unprecedented. This was not easilypossible until a second generation of romanticism had produced a cropof young men for whom the French Revolution and Napoleon werefacts of history and not a painful chapter of autobiography. 1789 hadbeen hailed by virtually every artist and intellectual of Europe, butthough some were able to maintain their enthusiasm through war,terror, bourgeois corruption and empire, theirs was not an easy orcommunicable dream. Even in Britain, where the first generation ofromanticism, that of Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Southey, Campbelland Hazlitt, had been wholly Jacobin, the disillusioned and the neoconservativeprevailed by 1805. In France and Germany, indeed, theword 'romantic' had been virtually invented as an anti-revolutionaryslogan by the conservative anti-bourgeois of the later 1790s (very oftendisillusioned former leftists), which accounts for the fact that a numberof thinkers and artists in these countries who would by modern267