Literary Historicism: Romanticism, Philologists, and the Presence of the Past

Nous entrons dans l'avenir à reculons.

—Paul Valéry

Between 1780 and 1840 a huge rediscovery of the early medieval vernacular roots and rootedness of the various European languages and literatures took place, in a process that reverberated back and forth between the fields of philology, antiquarianism, and imaginative literature. It revolutionized the European self-image and historical consciousness and led to the national diffraction of the Enlightenment's idea of culture and literature. Instead of one European culture cradled in classical antiquity, people came to envisage a plurality of European cultures, each rooted in the nation's vernacular and tribal origins. It was as if, in the words of one worried Oxford professor, those philologists who were "nourishing our language not from the humanity of the Greeks and Romans, but from the savagery of the Goths and the Anglo-Saxons," were "about to reverse the renaissance."¹

I wish to view this "reversal of the renaissance" in a fresh light, as a period and condition that might be called literary historicism.

Double Talents

Romanticism involved a new interest in the past, preferably the medieval past. Romantic medievalism runs from The Castle of Otranto to Ivanhoe —and not just in the narrative imagination: between Goethe's essay "Von deutscher Baukunst" (1772) and Victor Hugo's Notre-Dame de Paris (1831), Romantic authors are implicated in the great flourish of neo-Gothic public architecture that we link with the names of Eugène-Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc and Augustus Welby Northmore Pugin, with the Parliament buildings of Westminster and Budapest, with the restoration of Carcassonne and the completion of Cologne cathedral.²

The medievalism characteristic of Romanticism was not restricted to literature or architecture; we encounter it also in public pageantry, monuments, and the general flavor of the public sphere. Indeed, if we attempt to subsume the great vogue of medieval taste under Romantic poetics—say, by such notions as "escapism"—not only do we belittle the scholarly and nonescapist aspect of Romantic authors as diverse as Sir Walter Scott, Ludwig Uhland, Joseph von Eichendorff, and Prosper Mérimée, but we also marginalize their connections and continuities with learned endeavors outside the field of literature. It would make more sense to see such medievalism in a broader context, one less concerned with literary poetics: that of early-nineteenth-century historical consciousness and historical sensibility. Indeed, the careers and talents of many authors of the time indicate the inadequacy of seeing them merely as Romantic littérateurs. The period is rife with "double talents," whose sensibility and work involve them in a historicist recuperation of the past well beyond the realm of literature.

If literary historians remember Uhland (1787-1862), for instance, it is usually as a minor Romantic, author of the Vaterländische Gedichte (1815), whom Heinrich Heine castigated; one tends to overlook his scholarly and political career. He was a lawyer, secretary at Württemberg's Ministry of Justice at Stuttgart, later professor of German language and literature at Tübingen (1829-33), and an important prodemocratic voice in the constitutional debates and politics of the time; in addition, he brought out many editions of and studies of older Germanic literature and folk ballads.

Eichendorff (1788-1857), too, was not just a lyrical poet and narrator of wanderlust, nostalgia, and the ironic vagaries of coincidence; he also wrote a German literary history, Geschichte der poetischen Litteratur Deutschlands (1857). What is more, as a Prussian official (he had a law degree), he took part in the restoration of the main keep of the Teutonic Order in Prussia (the Marienburg), which he had used as the setting of a historical drama, Der letzte Held von Marienburg (1830); he also supported the completion of Cologne cathedral.³

Similarly, Mérimée (1803-70), whom we now chiefly remember for his torrid passion-and-death tales Colomba...