Main Currents in Nineteenth Century Literature - 1. The Emigrant LiteratureBrandes, Georg
History
Main Currents in Nineteenth Century Literature - 1. The Emigrant Literature
Brandes, Georg
Literature, Modern -- 19th century -- History and criticism; Naturalism in literature; Romanticism
There was, then, a return to Catholicism. But the spirit of Italian
Catholicism was still too classic, too antique. A huge, light church
like St. Peter's at Rome was not sufficiently mysterious; it was, as
Lamartine observed, fitted, when all dogmatic religion should have
disappeared from Europe, to become the temple of humanity. In Italy it
was with the pre-Raphaelite painters alone that the Romanticists felt
themselves akin; in Spain they found a kindred spirit in Calderon,
whose mysticism they soon set high above their earlier favourite,
Shakespeare's, realism and liberal-mindedness. Even Heiberg ranks
Calderon above Shakespeare. There is a regular cult of the Gothic
in art. Men turn with renewed admiration to the great monuments of
their native land, to that style begotten of the deep feeling and the
superstitious terrors of northern barbarians--Frenchmen, however.
Albert Dürer, genuinely German, popular, simple-minded, but above all
(with his stags bearing crosses between their antlers, and all the
rest of his symbolical fancies) mystic, was canonised by the German
Romanticists; even with us, Oehlenschläger and his sister persisted in
seeing more in Dürer than other people could see. The infection was
so universal that even the poet of the Gulnares, Alis, and Gulhyndis
imagined himself a devotee of mysticism. Men's hearts were certainly
not agitated by the religious agonies and hopes of the old pious
times; but the strangeness of the Gothic style, and the extravagance
which betrays itself in its artistic symbolism, harmonised with the
unnaturalness and restlessness of their morbid modern imaginations. It
may be related, as not without significance, that when Oehlenschläger
first came into the presence of the leaders of the Romantic School,
in whom he had naïvely expected to find a set of eager, emaciated
ascetics, he was somewhat taken aback by the sight of Friedrich
Schlegel's "satirical fat face shining cheerfully at him."
It was, however, in the course of the ardent struggle against the
neo-classical tendency that Friedrich Schlegel rendered his one
true, and also really great, service to science: he introduced the
study of Sanscrit, and thereby opened up to Europeans an entirely
new intellectual domain. He laid the foundation, first of one new
linguistic science, the Indo-Oriental, which henceforth developed
alongside of the Greco-Roman, and then of a second, namely, comparative
philology.
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