that it’s the day Hilde’s father gets back from Lebanon?”
“No, I didn’t, actually.”
“It can’t possibly be pure coincidence that he lets you arrange a
philosophical garden party the same day as he gets home to Bjerkely.”
“I didn’t think about it, as I said.”
“I’m sure he did. But all right, we’ll talk about that later. Can you come to
the major’s cabin this morning?”
“I’m supposed to weed the flower beds.”
“Let’s say two o’clock, then. Can you make that?”
“I’ll be there.”
Alberto Knox was sitting on the step again when Sophie arrived.
“Have a seat,” he said, getting straight down to work.
“Previously we spoke of the Renaissance, the Baroque period, and the
Enlightenment. Today we are going to talk about Romanticism, which could
be described as Europe’s last great cultural epoch. We are approaching the
end of a long story, my child.”
“Did Romanticism last that long?”
“It began toward the end of the eighteenth century and lasted till the
middle of the nineteenth. But after 1850 one can no longer speak of whole
‘epochs’ which comprise poetry, philosophy, art, science, and music.”
“Was Romanticism one of those epochs?”
“It has been said that Romanticism was Europe’s last common approach
to life. It started in Germany, arising as a reaction to the Enlightenment’s
unequivocal emphasis on reason. After Kant and his cool intellectualism, it
was as if German youth heaved a sigh of relief.”
“What did they replace it with?”
“The new catchwords were ‘feeling,”imagination,”experience,’ and
‘yearning.’ Some of the Enlightenment thinkers had drawn attention to the
importance of feeling—not least Rousseau—but at that time it was a criticism
of the bias toward reason. What had been an undercurrent now became the
mainstream of German culture.”
“So Kant’s popularity didn’t last very long?”
“Well, it did and it didn’t. Many of the Romantics saw themselves as
Kant’s successors, since Kant had established that there was a limit to what
we can know of ‘das Ding an sich.’ On the other hand, he had underlined the
importance of the ego’s contribution to knowledge, or cognition. The individual
was now completely free to interpret life in his own way. The Romantics
exploited this in an almost unrestrained ‘ego-worship,’ which led to the
exaltation of artistic genius.”
“Were there a lot of these geniuses?”
“Beethoven was one. His music expresses his own feelings and
yearnings. Beethoven was in a sense a ‘free’ artist—unlike the Baroque
masters such as Bach and Handel, who composed their works to the glory of
God, mostly in strict musical forms.”
“I only know the Moonlight Sonata and the Fifth Symphony.”
“But you know how romantic the Moonlight Sonata is, and you can hear
how dramatically Beethoven expresses himself in the Fifth Symphony.”
“You said the Renaissance humanists were individualists too.”
“Yes. There were many similarities between the Renaissance and
Romanticism. A typical one was the importance of art to human cognition.