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The Roots of Romanticism is the long-awaited text of Isaiah Berlin’s most celebrated set of lectures, the Mellon Lectures, delivered in Washington in 1965 and heard since by a wider audience on BBC radio. For Berlin, the romantics set in train a vast, unparalleled revolution in humanity’s view of itself. They destroyed the traditional notion of objective truth in ethics, with incalculable, all-pervasive results. In his unscripted tour de force Berlin surveys the myriad attempts to define romanticism, distils its essence, traces its development, and shows how its legacy permeates our outlook today.

The Roots of Romanticism

The A. W. Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts, 1965 The National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC

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Copyright ©The Trustees of the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC,
The Isaiah Berlin Literary Trust and Henry Hardy 1999

The moral right of Isaiah Berlin and Henry Hardy to be identified as the author and editor of this work respectively has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Isaiah Berlin was born in Riga, capital of Latvia, in 1909. When he was six, his family moved to Russia: there in 1917, in Petrograd, he witnessed both the Social Democratic and the Bolshevik Revolutions.

In 1921 his family came to England, and he was educated at St Paul’s School and Corpus Christi College, Oxford. At Oxford he was a Fellow of All Souls, a Fellow of New College, Professor of Social and Political Theory and founding President of Wolfson College. He also held the Presidency of the British Academy. His other main publications are Karl Marx, Four Essays on Liberty, Russian Thinkers, Concepts and Categories, Against the Current, Personal Impressions, The Crooked Timber of Humanity, The Sense of Reality, The Proper Study of Mankind, The Power of Ideas and Three Critics of the Enlightenment. As an exponent of the history of ideas he was awarded the Erasmus, Lippincott and Agnelli Prizes; he also received the Jerusalem Prize for his lifelong defence of civil liberties. He died in 1997.

Henry Hardy, a Fellow of Wolfson College, Oxford, is one of Isaiah Berlin’s Literary Trustees. He has edited several other books by Berlin, and is currently preparing his letters and his remaining unpublished writings for publication.

ALSO BY ISAIAH BERLIN

EDITOR’S PREFACE

Every thing is what it is, and not another thing.

Joseph Butler^fn1

Everything is what it is …

Isaiah Berlin^fn2

BUTLER’S REMARK WAS among Isaiah Berlin’s favourite quotations, and Berlin echoes it in one of his most important essays. I take it as my starting-point here because the first thing to be said about the present volume, in order to dispel any possible misunderstanding, is that it is not in any degree the new work on romanticism Berlin had hoped to write ever since giving the (unscripted) A. W. Mellon Lectures on this subject, in March and April 1965, at the National Gallery of Art in Washington. In the years that followed, especially after his retirement from the Presidency of Wolfson College, Oxford, in 1975, he continued to read widely with a book on romanticism in mind, and a large mass of notes accumulated. In the last decade of his life he collected all his notes together in a separate room and started afresh on the task of pulling them together: he made a list of headings and began dictating on to cassette a selection of the notes, marshalling them under the headings as he went. He also considered using his material as a long introduction to an edition of work by E. T. A. Hoffmann rather than as a free-standing study of his own. But the new synthesis continued to elude him, perhaps partly because he had left it too late, and so far as I am aware not so much as a sentence of the intended work was ever written.

Clearly it is a matter of great regret for his readers, as it certainly was for Berlin himself, that he did not write his revised account. But its absence is not all loss: had it been written, the present book, which is simply an edited transcript of the lectures, would never have been published; and there is a freshness and immediacy, an intensity and excitement in the transcript that would inevitably have been obscured, to some extent, in a carefully reworked and expanded version. There are several other unscripted lectures delivered by Berlin that survive as recordings or transcripts, and some of these can be directly compared either with published texts that derive from them, or with previously composed texts on which they are based. Such a comparison shows how the repeated revisions Berlin tended to undertake on the road to publication, for all that they enrich the intellectual content and precision of a work, can sometimes have a sobering effect on the extempore spoken word; or, conversely, it shows how a long underlying text – a ‘torso’ as Berlin called it – can acquire new life and directness when used as a source for a lecture not read from a prepared script. The lecture delivered from notes and the carefully constructed book are, one might say in pluralist terminology, incommensurable. In this case, for better or worse, only the former incarnation of one of Berlin’s central intellectual projects is available.

The title I have used is one Berlin himself suggested at an early stage. It was supplanted by ‘Sources of Romantic Thought’ for the delivery of the lectures because in the opening pages of Saul Bellow’s novel Herzog, published in 1964, the hero, a Jewish academic called Moses Herzog who is undergoing a crisis of self-confidence, is struggling unsuccessfully to deliver a course of adult-education lectures in a New York night-school – lectures entitled precisely ‘The Roots of Romanticism’. As far as I know this was a coincidence – Berlin himself certainly denied any direct connection – but, however this may be, the earlier title was certainly more resonant, and if there were any grounds for abandoning it at the time, they have by now surely disappeared.^fn3

Even if Berlin’s introductory remarks before he began the lectures proper are too occasional to appear in the body of the published text, they remain of some prefatory interest. Here, accordingly, is the greater part of them:

These lectures are primarily intended for genuine experts on the arts – art historians and experts on aesthetics, amongst whom I cannot possibly count myself. My only valid excuse for choosing this subject is that the romantic movement, naturally, is relevant to the arts: the arts, even though I know not very much about them, cannot be altogether kept out, and I promise not to keep them out beyond measure.

There is a sense in which the connection between romanticism and the arts is even stronger. If I can claim any qualification for talking about this subject, it is because I propose to deal with political and social life, and moral life as well; and it is true, I think, to say of the romantic movement that it is not only a movement in which the arts are concerned, not only an artistic movement, but perhaps the first moment, certainly in the history of the West, when the arts dominated other aspects of life, when there was a kind of tyranny of art over life, which in some sense is the essence of the romantic movement; at least, I propose to try to demonstrate that this is so.

I should add that the interest of romanticism is not simply historical. A great many phenomena of the present day – nationalism, existentialism, admiration for great men, admiration for impersonal institutions, democracy, totalitarianism – are profoundly affected by the rise of romanticism, which enters them all. For this reason it is a subject not altogether irrelevant even to our own day.

Also of some interest is the following fragment, which appears to be a draft opening of the lectures proper, written before they were delivered. It is the only piece of prose composed by Berlin for this project that I have found among his notes:

I do not propose even to attempt to define romanticism in terms of attributes or purposes, for, as Northrop Frye wisely warns, if one attempts to point to some obvious characteristic of romantic poets – for example, the new attitude to nature or to the individual – and to say that this is confined to the new writers of the period from 1770 to 1820, and to contrast it with the attitude of Pope or Racine, someone is bound to produce contrary instances from Plato or Kalidasa, or (like Kenneth Clark) from the Emperor Hadrian, or (like Seillière) from Heliodorus, or from a medieval Spanish poet or pre-Islamic Arab verse, and finally from Racine and Pope themselves.

Nor do I wish to imply that there are pure cases – a sense in which any artist or thinker or person could be said to be wholly romantic, and nothing else at all, any more than a man could be said to be wholly individual, that is to say, to share no properties with anything else in the world, or wholly social, that is to say, to possess no properties unique to himself. Nevertheless, these words are not meaningless, and indeed we cannot do without them: they indicate attributes or tendencies or ideal types the application of which serves to throw light, to identify and perhaps, if they had not been sufficiently noticed earlier, to exaggerate what, for want of a better word, have to be called aspects of a man’s character, or of his activity, or of an outlook, or of a movement, or of a doctrine.

To say of someone that he is a romantic thinker or a romantic hero is not to say nothing. Sometimes it is to say that what he is or does requires to be explained in terms of a purpose, or a cluster of purposes (perhaps internally contradictory), or a vision, or perhaps glimpses or intimations, which may point towards some state or activity that is in principle unrealisable – something in life or a movement or a work of art which is part of its essence, but not explained, perhaps unintelligible. No more than this has been the purpose of most serious writers on the many – the countless – aspects of romanticism.

My intention is even more limited. It appears to me that a radical shift of values occurred in the latter half of the eighteenth century – before what is properly called the romantic movement – which has affected thought, feeling and action in the Western world. This shift is most vividly expressed in much of what seems to be most characteristically romantic in the romantics: not in all that is romantic in them, nor in what is romantic in all of them, but in something quintessential, something without which neither the revolution of which I intend to speak, nor those consequences of it recognised by all those who have acknowledged that there was such a phenomenon as the romantic movement – romantic art, romantic thought – would have been possible. If I am told that I have not included the characteristic that lies at the heart of this or that or even every manifestation of romanticism, the case is made – I assent only too readily. It is not my purpose to define romanticism, only to deal with the revolution of which romanticism, at any rate in some of its guises, is the strongest expression and symptom. No more than this: but this is a great deal, for I hope to show that this revolution is the deepest and most lasting of all changes in the life of the West, no less far-reaching than the three great revolutions whose impact is not questioned – the industrial in England, the political in France, and the social and economic in Russia – with which, indeed, the movement with which I am concerned is connected at every level.

In editing the transcripts of these lectures (in the light of the BBC recordings) I have tried to restrict myself, on the whole, to making the minimum changes necessary to ensure a smoothly readable text; I have regarded the informality of style and the occasional mild unorthodoxy of idiom that are natural in lectures given from notes as assets to be preserved, within certain limits. Even though a good deal of syntactic repair-work was sometimes required, as is normal in most transcripts of spontaneously uttered sentences, there is rarely any real doubt about Berlin’s intended meaning. A few minor alterations made to the transcripts by Berlin at an earlier stage have been incorporated, and this explains some of the few substantive discrepancies that will be noticed by a reader who, with this book in hand as a libretto, listens to the recordings of the lectures that are available.^fn4

I have as always done my best to trace Berlin’s quotations, and have made any necessary corrections in what were clearly intended as passages quoted verbatim from an English source, or as direct translations from another language, rather than as paraphrase. There is, however, another device in Berlin’s armoury, intermediate between verbatim quotation and paraphrase, that might be called ‘semi-quotation’. The semi-quoted words are sometimes presented between quotation marks, but they have the character of what an author might say, or what he in effect said, rather than claiming to reproduce (or translate) his actual published words. This is a familiar phenomenon in books written before our own time,^fn5 but has perhaps rather fallen from favour in the contemporary academic climate. In the collections of Berlin’s essays that I published in Berlin’s lifetime I usually confined myself to direct quotation, checked against a primary source, or overt paraphrase. In a book of this kind, however, it seemed artificial and unduly intrusive to attempt to conceal this perfectly natural and rhetorically effective middle way by insisting that quotation marks should be used only for exact quotation. I mention this so that the reader is not misled, and as background to some further remarks about Berlin’s quotations that I make at the beginning of the list of references (here).

The lectures were broadcast by the BBC on its Third Programme in August and September 1966, and again in October and November 1967. They were repeated in 1975 in Australia, and in Britain, on BBC Radio 3, in 1989, the year that Berlin reached the age of eighty. Excerpts have also been included in later programmes about Berlin’s work.

Berlin himself steadfastly refused to allow the publication of this transcript in his lifetime, not only because until the last years of his life he still hoped to write the ‘proper’ book, but also, perhaps, because he believed that it was an act of vanity to publish a straight transcript of unscripted lectures without undertaking the labour of revision and expansion. He was well aware that some of what he had said was probably too general, too speculative, too crude – acceptable from the podium, maybe, but not on the printed page. Indeed, in a letter of thanks to P. H. Newby, then head of BBC Radio’s Third Programme, he describes himself as ‘letting loose this huge stream of words – more than six hours of hectic, in places incoherent, hurried, breathless – to my ears sometimes hysterical – talk’.^fn6

There are those who believe that this transcript should not be published even now – that for all its undoubted interest it will devalue the currency of Berlin’s oeuvre. With this view I disagree, and I derive support from the opinions of a number of scholars whose judgement I respect, in particular the late Patrick Gardiner, the most fastidious of critics, who read the edited transcript some years ago and voted unequivocally for its publication as it stood. Even if it is indeed a mistake to publish material of this kind in its author’s lifetime (and I am ambivalent even about that), it seems to me not only acceptable but highly desirable to do so when the author is as remarkable and the lectures as stimulating as in this case. Besides, Berlin himself clearly accepted that the transcript would be published after his death, and referred to this eventuality without indicating that he had serious reservations. Posthumous publication, he believed, is governed by criteria quite different from those that apply in an author’s lifetime; and he must have known, though he would never admit it, that his Mellon Lectures were a tour de force of the extempore lecturer’s art that deserved to be made permanently available, warts and all. It is now time for this view – to quote his own words about his avowedly controversial book on J. G. Hamann – ‘to be accepted or refuted by the critical reader’.^fn7

I have a number of debts of gratitude that I should record – more, no doubt, than I can remember. Those concerning the provision of references I mention here. Otherwise my main obligations (mostly the same as in the case of earlier volumes) are to the most generous benefactors who have financed my Fellowship at Wolfson College; to Lord Bullock for ensuring that I have benefactors to thank; to Wolfson College for housing me and my work; to Pat Utechin, the author’s secretary, who has now been my patient friend and supporter for some twenty-five years; to Roger Hausheer and the late Patrick Gardiner for reading and advising on the transcript, and for many other forms of indispensable aid; to Jonny Steinberg for some valuable editorial suggestions; to the publishers who have to withstand my many and exacting requirements, especially Will Sulkin and Rowena Skelton-Wallace at Chatto and Windus, and Deborah Tegarden at Princeton University Press; to Samuel Guttenplan for moral support and useful advice; and finally (though I have thoughtlessly not mentioned them before) to my family for enduring the rather strange form of single-mindedness that underlies my chosen occupation. I hope it is almost superfluous to add that my greatest debt is to Isaiah Berlin himself for entrusting me with the most fulfilling task that an editor could possibly hope for, and for giving me a completely free hand in performing it.

^fn1 Fifteen Sermons Preached at the Rolls Chapel, 2nd ed., ‘To which is added a PREFACE’ (London, 1729), preface, p. xxix.

^fn2 ‘Two Concepts of Liberty’ (1958): p. 197 in The Proper Study of Mankind: An Anthology of Essays (London, 1997; New York, 1998).

^fn3 Other titles considered by Berlin include ‘Prometheus: A Study of the Rise of Romanticism in the Eighteenth Century’ (mentioned only satirically and immediately rejected), ‘The Rise of Romanticism’, ‘The Romantic Impact’, ‘The Romantic Rebellion’, ‘The Romantic Revolt’ and ‘The Romantic Revolution’.

^fn4 Berlin’s highly individual and arresting manner of delivery has been a central ingredient in his reputation, and the experience of listening to him lecturing is highly recommended. The whole series may be heard (by prior appointment) at the National Sound Archive in the British Library in London, or at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC; and a compact disc of the last lecture is provided with the hardbound British edition of this book so that readers can hear something of how the lectures sounded when they were given.

^fn5 Though it is hard to distinguish it from a straightforward lack of the intention to be accurate by today’s standards. As Theodore Besterman puts it in the introduction to his translation of Voltaire’s Philosophical Dictionary (Harmondsworth, 1971, p. 14), ‘modern notions of textual fidelity were unknown in the eighteenth century. The words Voltaire places within quotation marks are not always accurate or even direct quotations.’ In Giambattista Vico’s case matters were even worse, as Thomas Goddard Bergin and Max Harold Fisch record in the preface to a revised edition of their translation of Vico’s New Science (New York, 1968, pp. v–vi): ‘Vico quotes inexactly from memory; his references are vague; his memory is often not of the original source but of a quotation from it in some secondary work; he ascribes to one author what is said by another, or to one work what is said in another by the same author …’. However, as Bergin and Fisch put it in the preface to the first edition of their translation (New York, 1948, p. viii), ‘A complete exposure of Vico’s errors … would not touch the heart of his argument.’

In Berlin’s case, at any rate, there is the further problem that, to the extent that his quotations are not strictly accurate, they are usually improvements on the original. He and I often discussed this, and he was delightfully self-mocking about it, but usually insisted on correction once the facts were established, even though his relaxed approach to quotation almost never distorted the quoted author’s meaning, and sometimes clarified it. Of course, the remarks made about Vico by Bergin and Fisch are an enormous exaggeration if applied to Berlin, though, since Vico was one of Berlin’s intellectual heroes, the (very partial) analogy has a certain resonance. However, Bergin and Fisch aptly point out (1968, p. vi) that Fausto Nicolini, Vico’s famous editor, treats Vico’s scholarly shortcomings ‘with chastening love’ – surely an exemplary editorial attitude.

^fn7 From the foreword written specially in 1994 for the German edition of The Magus of the North: see Isaiah Berlin, Der Magus in Norden (Berlin, 1995), p. 14. [The original English text of this foreword has now been published in Berlin’s Three Critics of the Enlightenment: Vico, Hamann, Herder (London and Princeton, 2000): for this remark see p. 252 in that volume.]

IN SEARCH OF A DEFINITION

I MIGHT BE expected to begin, or to attempt to begin, with some kind of definition of romanticism, or at least some generalisation, in order to make clear what it is that I mean by it. I do not propose to walk into that particular trap. The eminent and wise Professor Northrop Frye points out that whenever anyone embarks on a generalisation on the subject of romanticism, even something so innocuous, for example, as to say that a new attitude sprang up among English poets towards nature – in Wordsworth and Coleridge, let us say, as against Racine and Pope – somebody will always be found who will produce countervailing evidence from the writings of Homer, Kalidasa, pre-Muslim Arabian epics, medieval Spanish verse – and finally Racine and Pope themselves.¹ For this reason I do not propose to generalise, but to convey in some other way what it is that I think romanticism to be.

Indeed, the literature on romanticism is larger than romanticism itself, and the literature defining what it is that the literature on romanticism is concerned with is quite large in its turn. There is a kind of inverted pyramid. It is a dangerous and a confused subject, in which many have lost, I will not say their senses, but at any rate their sense of direction. It is like that dark cave described by Virgil, where all the footsteps lead in one direction; or the cave of Polyphemus – those who enter it never seem to emerge again. It is therefore with some trepidation that I embark upon the subject.

The importance of romanticism is that it is the largest recent movement to transform the lives and the thought of the Western world. It seems to me to be the greatest single shift in the consciousness of the West that has occurred, and all the other shifts which have occurred in the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries appear to me in comparison less important, and at any rate deeply influenced by it.

The history not only of thought, but of consciousness, opinion, action too, of morals, politics, aesthetics, is to a large degree a history of dominant models. Whenever you look at any particular civilisation, you will find that its most characteristic writings and other cultural products reflect a particular pattern of life which those who are responsible for these writings – or paint these paintings, or produce these particular pieces of music – are dominated by. And in order to identify a civilisation, in order to explain what kind of civilisation it is, in order to understand the world in which men of this sort thought and felt and acted, it is important to try, so far as possible, to isolate the dominant pattern which that culture obeys. Consider, for instance, Greek philosophy or Greek literature of the classical age. If you read, say, the philosophy of Plato, you will find that he is dominated by a geometrical or mathematical model. It is clear that his thought operates on lines which are conditioned by the idea that there are certain axiomatic truths, adamantine, unbreakable, from which it is possible by severe logic to deduce certain absolutely infallible conclusions; that it is possible to attain to this kind of absolute wisdom by a special method which he recommends; that there is such a thing as absolute knowledge to be obtained in the world, and if only we can attain to this absolute knowledge, of which geometry, indeed mathematics in general, is the nearest example, the most perfect paradigm, we can organise our lives in terms of this knowledge, in terms of these truths, once and for all, in a static manner, needing no further change; and then all suffering, all doubt, all ignorance, all forms of human vice and folly can be expected to disappear from the earth.

This notion that there is somewhere a perfect vision, and that it needs only a certain kind of severe discipline, or a certain kind of method, to attain to this truth, which is analogous, at any rate, to the cold and isolated truths of mathematics – this notion then affects a great many other thinkers in the post-Platonic age: certainly the Renaissance, which had similar ideas, certainly thinkers like Spinoza, thinkers in the eighteenth century, thinkers in the nineteenth century too, who believed it possible to attain to some kind of, if not absolute, at any rate nearly absolute knowledge, and in terms of this to tidy the world up, to create some kind of rational order, in which tragedy, vice and stupidity, which have caused so much destruction in the past, can at last be avoided by the use of carefully acquired information and the application to it of universally intelligible reason.

This is one kind of model – I offer it simply as an example. These models invariably begin by liberating people from error, from confusion, from some kind of unintelligible world which they seek to explain to themselves by means of a model; but they almost invariably end by enslaving those very same people, by failing to explain the whole of experience. They begin as liberators and end in some sort of despotism.

Let us look at another example – a parallel culture, that of the Bible, that of the Jews at a comparable period. You will find a totally different model dominating, a totally different set of ideas, which would have been unintelligible to the Greeks. The notion from which both Judaism and Christianity to a large degree sprang is the notion of family life, the relations of father and son, perhaps the relations of members of a tribe to one another. Such fundamental relationships – in terms of which nature and life are explained – as the love of children for their father, the brotherhood of man, forgiveness, commands issued by a superior to an inferior, the sense of duty, transgression, sin and therefore the need to atone for it – this whole complex of qualities, in terms of which the whole of the universe is explained by those who created the Bible, and by those who were to a large extent influenced by it, would have been totally unintelligible to the Greeks.

Consider a perfectly familiar psalm, where the psalmist says that ‘When Israel went out of Egypt … the sea saw it, and fled: Jordan was driven back.² The mountains skipped like rams, and the little hills like lambs’, and the earth is ordered to ‘Tremble … at the presence of the Lord.’ This would have been totally unintelligible to Plato or to Aristotle, because the whole notion of a world which reacts personally to the orders of the Lord, the idea that all relationships, both animate and inanimate, must be interpreted in terms of the relations of human beings, or at any rate in terms of the relations of personalities, in one case divine, in the other case human, is very remote from the Greek conception of what a God was and what his relations were to mankind. Hence the absence among the Greeks of the notion of obligation, hence the absence of the notion of duty, which it is so difficult for people to grasp who read the Greeks through spectacles partly affected by the Jews.

Let me try to convey how strange different models can be, because this is important simply in tracing the history of these transformations of consciousness. Considerable revolutions have occurred in the general outlook of mankind which it is sometimes difficult to retrace, because we swallow them as if they were familiar. Giambattista Vico – the Italian thinker who flourished at the beginning of the eighteenth century, if a man who was totally poor and neglected may be said to have flourished – was perhaps the first to draw our attention to the strangeness of ancient cultures. He points out, for example, that in the quotation ‘Jovis omnia plena’³ (‘Everything is full of Jove’), which is the end of a perfectly familiar Latin hexameter, something is said that to us is not wholly intelligible. On the one hand Jupiter or Jove is a large bearded divinity who hurls thunder and lightning. On the other hand, everything – ‘omnia’ – is said to be ‘full of’ this bearded being, which is not on the face of it intelligible. Vico then argues with great imagination and cogency that the view of these ancient peoples, so remote from us, must have been very different from ours for them to have been able to conceive of their divinity not only as a bearded giant commanding the gods and men, but also as something of which the whole heavens could be full.

Let me give a more familiar example. When Aristotle in the Nicomachean Ethics discusses the subject of friendship, he says, in what is to us a somewhat surprising manner, that there are various kinds of friends. For example there is the friendship which consists in passionate infatuation by one human being with another; and there is also a friendship which consists in business relations, in trading, in buying and selling. The fact that for Aristotle there is nothing strange in saying there are two kinds of friends, that there are people whose whole lives are given to love, or at any rate whose emotions are passionately engaged in love, and on the other hand there are people who sell shoes to one another, and these are species of the same genus, is something to which, as a result, perhaps, of Christianity, or of the romantic movement, or whatever it may be, we find it rather difficult to acclimatise ourselves.

I give these examples merely in order to convey that these ancient cultures are stranger than we think, and that larger transformations have occurred in the history of human consciousness than an ordinary uncritical reading of the classics would seem to convey. There are of course a great many other examples. The world can be conceived organically – like a tree, in which every part lives for every other part, and through every other part – or mechanistically, perhaps as a result of some scientific model, in which the parts are external to one another, and in which the State, or any other human institution, is regarded as a gadget for the purpose of promoting happiness, or preventing people from doing each other in. These are very different conceptions of life, and they do belong to different climates of opinion, and are influenced by different considerations.

What happens as a rule is that some subject gains the ascendancy – say physics, or chemistry – and, as a result of the enormous hold which it has upon the imagination of its generation, it is applied in other spheres as well. This happened to sociology in the nineteenth century, it happened to psychology in our own. My thesis is that the romantic movement was just such a gigantic and radical transformation, after which nothing was ever the same. This is the claim on which I wish to focus.

Where did the romantic movement take its rise? Certainly not in England, although technically, no doubt, it did – that is what all the historians will tell you. At any rate, that is not where it occurred in its most dramatic form. Here the question arises: When I speak of romanticism, do I mean something which happens historically, as I appear to be saying, or is it perhaps a permanent frame of mind which is not exclusive to, is not monopolised by, any particular age? Herbert Read and Kenneth Clark^fn1 have taken up the position that romanticism is a permanent state of mind which might be found anywhere. Kenneth Clark finds it in some lines of Hadrian’s; Herbert Read quotes a great many examples. The Baron Seillière,⁴ who has written extensively on this subject, quotes Plato and Plotinus and the Greek novelist Heliodorus, and a great many other persons who, in his opinion, were romantic writers. I do not wish to enter upon this issue – it may be so. The subject with which I myself wish to deal is confined in time. I do not wish to deal with a permanent human attitude, but with a particular transformation which occurred historically, and affects us today. Therefore I propose to confine my attention to what occurred in the second third of the eighteenth century. It occurred not in England, not in France, but for the most part in Germany.

The common view of history and historical change gives us this account. We begin with a French dix-huitième, an elegant century in which everything begins by being calm and smooth, rules are obeyed in life and in art, there is a general advance of reason, rationality is progressing, the Church is retreating, unreason is yielding to the great attacks upon it of the French philosophes. There is peace, there is calm, there is elegant building, there is a belief in the application of universal reason both to human affairs and to artistic practice, to morals, to politics, to philosophy. Then there is a sudden, apparently unaccountable, invasion. Suddenly there is a violent eruption of emotion, enthusiasm. People become interested in Gothic buildings, in introspection. People suddenly become neurotic and melancholy; they begin to admire the unaccountable flight of spontaneous genius. There is a general retreat from this symmetrical, elegant, glassy state of affairs. At the same time other changes occur too. A great revolution breaks out; there is discontent; the King has his head cut off; the Terror begins.

It is not quite clear what these two revolutions have to do with each other. As we read history, there is a general sense that something catastrophic occurred towards the end of the eighteenth century. At first things appeared to go comparatively smoothly, then there was a sudden breakthrough. Some welcome it, some denounce it. Those who denounce it suppose this to have been an elegant and peaceful age: those who did not know it, did not know the true plaisir de vivre,⁵ as Talleyrand said. Others say it was an artificial and hypocritical age, and that the Revolution ushered in a reign of greater justice, greater humanity, greater freedom, greater understanding of man for man. However that may be, the question is: What is the relation of the so-called romantic revolution – the sudden breakthrough in the realms of art and morals of this new and turbulent attitude – and the revolution which is normally known as the French Revolution? Were the people who danced upon the ruins of the Bastille, the people who cut off the head of Louis XVI, the same persons as those who were affected by the sudden cult of genius, or the sudden breakthrough of emotionalism of which we are told, or the sudden disturbance and turbulence which flooded the Western world? Apparently not. Certainly the principles in the name of which the French Revolution was fought were principles of universal reason, of order, of justice, not at all connected with the sense of uniqueness, the profound emotional introspection, the sense of the differences of things, dissimilarities rather than similarities, with which the romantic movement is usually associated.

What about Rousseau? Rousseau is of course quite correctly assigned to the romantic movement as, in a sense, one of its fathers. But the Rousseau who was responsible for the ideas of Robespierre, the Rousseau who was responsible for the ideas of the French Jacobins, is not the Rousseau, it seems to me, who has an obvious connection with romanticism. That Rousseau is the Rousseau who wrote The Social Contract, which is a typically classical treatise that speaks of the return of man to those original, primary principles which all men have in common; the reign of universal reason, which unites men, as opposed to emotions, which divide them; the reign of universal justice and universal peace as against the conflicts and the turbulence and the disturbances which tear human hearts from their minds and divide men against themselves.

So it is difficult to see what the relation is of this great romantic upheaval to the political revolution. Then there is the Industrial Revolution too, which cannot be regarded as irrelevant. After all, ideas do not breed ideas. Some social and economic factors are surely responsible for great upheavals in human consciousness. We have a problem on our hands. There is the Industrial Revolution, there is the great French political revolution under classical auspices, and there is the romantic revolution. Take even the great art of the French Revolution. If, for example, you look at the great revolutionary paintings of David, it is difficult to connect him specifically with the romantic revolution. The paintings of David have a kind of eloquence, the austere Jacobin eloquence of a return to Sparta, a return to Rome; they communicate a protest against the frivolity and the superficiality of life which is connected with the preachings of such men as Machiavelli or Savonarola or Mably, people who denounced the frivolity of their age in the name of eternal ideals of a universal kind, whereas the romantic movement, we are told by all its historians, was a passionate protest against universality of any kind. Therefore there is, prima facie at any rate, a problem in understanding what happened.

In order to give some sense of what I regard this great breakthrough as being, why I think that in those years, say 1760 to 1830, something transforming occurred, that there was a great break in European consciousness – in order to give you at any rate some preliminary evidence of why I think there is even a case for saying this, let me give an example. Suppose you were travelling about Western Europe, say in the 1820s, and suppose you spoke, in France, to the avant-garde young men who were friends of Victor Hugo, Hugolâtresor

ABOUT THE BOOK

The Roots of Romanticism

CONTENTS

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

ALSO BY ISAIAH BERLIN

EDITOR’S PREFACE

1

IN SEARCH OF A DEFINITION

Wolfson College, Oxford	HENRY HARDY
May 1998