“Yes. It was once said that ‘idleness is the ideal of genius, and indolence
the virtue of the Romantic.’ It was the duty of the Romantic to experience
life—or to dream himself away from it. Day-to-day business could be taken
care of by the philistines.”
“Byron was a Romantic poet, wasn’t he?”
“Yes, both Byron and Shelley were Romantic poets of the so-called
Satanic school. Byron, moreover, provided the Romantic Age with its idol, the
Byronic hero—the alien, moody, rebellious spirit—in life as well as in art.
Byron himself could be both willful and passionate, and being also handsome,
he was besieged by women of fashion. Public gossip attributed the romantic
adventures of his verses to his own life, but although he had numerous
liaisons, true love remained as illusive and as unattainable for him as
Novalis’s blue flower. Novalis became engaged to a fourteen-year-old girl.
She died four days after her fifteenth birthday, but Novalis remained devoted
to her for the rest of his short life.”
“Did you say she died four days after her fifteenth birthday?”
“Yes . . .”
“I am fifteen years and four days old today.”
“So you are.”
“What was her name?”
“Her name was Sophie.”
“What?”
“Yes, it was. . .”
“You scare me. Could it be a coincidence?”
“I couldn’t say, Sophie. But her name was Sophie.”
“Go on!”
“Novalis himself died when he was only twenty-nine. He was one of the
‘y°un9 dead.’ Many of the Romantics died young, usually of tuberculosis.
Some committed suicide . . .”
“Ugh!”
“Those who lived to be old usually stopped being Romantics at about the
age of thirty. Some of them went on to become thoroughly middle-class and
conservative.”
“They went over to the enemy, then.”
“Maybe. But we were talking about romantic love. The theme of
unrequited love was introduced as early as 1774 by Goethe in his novel The
Sorrows of Young Werther. The book ends with young Werther shooting
himself when he can’t have the woman he loves . . .”
“Was it necessary to go that far?”
“The suicide rate rose after the publication of the novel, and for a time
the book was banned in Denmark and Norway. So being a Romantic was not
without danger. Strong emotions were involved.”
“When you say ‘Romantic/ I think of those great big landscape paintings,
with dark forests and wild, rugged nature ... preferably in swirling mists.”
“Yes, one of the features of Romanticism was this yearning for nature
and nature’s mysteries. And as I said, it was not the kind of thing that arises in
rural areas. You may recall Rousseau, who initiated the slogan ‘back to
nature.’ The Romantics gave this slogan popular currency. Romanticism
represents not least a reaction to the Enlightenment’s mechanistic universe. It
was said that Romanticism implied a renaissance of the old cosmic