Eric Hobsbawm - Age Of Revolution 1789 -1848

THE ARTSDaumier's lithograph of the Massacre in the Rue Transnonain (1834),with its murdered nondescript worker, added to the romantic imagery.The most striking consequence of this junction of romanticism withvision of a new and higher French Revolution was the overwhelmingvictory of political art between 1830 and 1848. There has rarely beena period when even the least 'ideological' artists were more universallypartisan, often regarding service to politics as their primary duty.'Romanticism,' cried Victor Hugo in the preface to Hernani, thatmanifesto of rebellion (1830), 'is liberalism in literature.' 11 'Writers,'wrote the poet Alfred de Musset (1810-57), whose natural talent—likethat of the composer Chopin (1810-49) or the introspective Austro-Hungarian poet Lenau (1802-50)—was for the private rather than thepublic voice, 'had a predilection to speak in their prefaces about thefuture, about social progress, humanity and civilization.' 12 Severalartists became political figures and that not only in countries in thethroes of national liberation, where all artists tended to be prophets ornational symbols: Chopin, Liszt and even the young Verdi among themusicians; Mickiewicz (who saw himself in a messianic role), Petofi andManzoni among the poets of Poland, Hungary and Italy respectively.The painter Daumier worked chiefly as a political cartoonist. The poetUhland, the brothers Grimm, were liberal politicians, the volcanicboy-genius Georg Biichner (1810-37) an active revolutionary, HeinrichHeine (1797-1856), a close personal friend of Karl Marx, anambiguous but powerful voice of the extreme left.* Literature andjournalism fused, most notably in France and Germany and Italy. Inanother age a Lamennais or a Jules Michelet in France, a Carlyle orRuskin in Britain, might have been poets or novelists with some viewson public affairs; in this one they were publicists, prophets, philosophersor historians carried by a poetic afflatus. For that matter, the lava ofpoetic imagery accompanies the eruption of Marx's youthful intellectto an extent unusual among either philosophers or economists. Eventhe gentle Tennyson and his Cambridge friends threw their heartsbehind the international brigade which went to support Liberalsagainst Clericals in Spain.The characteristic aesthetic theories developed and dominant duringthis period ratified this unity of art and social committment. The Saint-Simonians of France on one hand, the brilliant revolutionary Russianintellectuals of the 'forties on the other, even evolved the views which* It should be noted that this is one of the rare periods when poets not merely sympathizedwith the extreme left, but wrote poems which were both good and agitationally usable. Thedistinguished group of German socialist poets of the 1840s—Herwegh, Weerth, Freiligrath,and of course Heine—deserves mention, though Shelley's Masque of Anarchy (1820), a riposteto Peterloo, is perhaps the most powerful such poem.269