The German Genius

understood not as contemplation but activity . What mattered now was the individual’s search for his freedom, in particular “the creative end which fulfils his individual purpose.” What matters for the artist now is “motive, integrity, sincerity…purity of heart, spontaneity.” Intention , not wisdom or success, is what counts. The traditional model—the sage, the man who knows, who achieves “happiness or virtue or wisdom, by means of understanding”—is replaced by the tragic hero “who seeks to realise himself at whatever cost, against whatever odds.” Worldly success is immaterial. 20
    This reversal of values cannot be overstated. Since man’s values are not discovered but created, there is no way they can ever be described or systematized, “for they are not facts, not entities of the world.” They are simply outside the realm of science, ethics, or politics. Harmony cannot be guaranteed, even within one individual whose own values may shift over time. For the Romantics, martyrs, tragic heroes who fought for their beliefs against overwhelming odds, became the ideal. The artist or hero as outsider was born in this way.
    T HE S ECOND S ELF
     
    It is an idea and ideal that leads to a form of literature, painting, and (most vividly) music that we instantly recognize—the martyred hero, the outcast genius, the suffering wild man, rebelling against a tame and philistine society. As Arnold Hauser rightly says, there is no aspect of modern art that does not owe something important to Romanticism. “The whole exuberance, anarchy and violence of modern art…its unrestrained, un-sparing exhibitionism, is derived from it.” 21
    Associated with all this at the time was the notion of the “second self,” the belief that inside every Romantic figure, in the dark recesses of the soul, was a completely different person, and that once access to this second self had been found, an alternative—and deeper—reality would be uncovered. This is, in effect, the discovery of the unconscious, interpreted here to mean a secret, ecstatic something, which is above all mysterious, nocturnal, ghostlike, and often macabre. (Goethe once described Romanticism as “hospital-poetry” and Novalis pictured life as “a disease of the mind.”) The second self, the unconscious, was seen as a way to spiritual enlargement. The early nineteenth century was the point at which the very concept of the avant-garde could arise, with the artist viewed as someone who was ahead of his time and apart from the bourgeoisie. The concept of genius played up the instinctive spark in new talent at the expense of painfully acquired learning over a lifetime of effort.
    T HE M ARRIAGE OF P OETRY AND B IOLOGY : R OMANTIC S CIENCE
     
    The Romantic mentality that coalesced in Germany in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries emerged in the first instance through the close friendship and intense passions that welded together a group that became famous as the die Frühromantiker or “early Romantics.” They were poets and painters, philosophers and historians, theologians and scientists, and they were young. 22 As with other young revolutionaries, both before and since, they came to disdain conventional thought. Their movement was widely held to be one of resistance to or rebellion against the Enlightenment, asserting the primacy of the “poetry of the heart” above the prosaic nature of the modern world. In particular they scorned the Terror in Paris in 1793, and the optimism of that same Enlightenment, so eloquently expressed by Kant in “Zum ewigen Frieden” (Of Eternal Peace; 1784), which they believed had proved so illusory.
    The “intellectual architect” of the movement, in the words of Robert J. Richard, was Friedrich Schlegel (1772–1829). A poet, a literary critic, and historian, he provided the initial meaning of romantisch . The French word roman (novel) had entered the German language toward the end of the seventeenth century, when, as romanhaft , it carried the meaning of an action-packed adventure. In the late 1790s, however, Schlegel argued that literature that is romantisch is characterized by a “continual striving after the perfect realisation of beauty” and is always trying to attain a higher state for man, even though one can never be sure what that higher state is. 23
    The close and closed nature of the early Romantics is epitomized by Schlegel and his brother, Wilhelm. Friedrich fell in love with