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Jauss H R - Modernity and Literary Tradition PDF
Jauss H R - Modernity and Literary Tradition PDF
Author(s): Hans Robert Jauss
Source: Critical Inquiry, Vol. 31, No. 2 (Winter 2005), pp. 329-364
Published by: The University of Chicago Press
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1
The word modernity, which is meant to distinguish, in epochal terms, the
self-understanding of our era from its past, is paradoxical. If one looks back
over its literary tradition, it seems evident that it has always alreadyforfeited,
through historical repetition, the very claim it sets out to make. It was not
coined specially for our period, nor does it seem in the least capable of des-
ignating, unmistakably, the unique features of an epoch. It is true that the
French noun form la modernité is, like its German counterpart die Moderne,
a recent coinage. Both words make their first appearance at a time when
our perception of the familiar historical world is separated from a past that
is no longer accessible to us without the mediation of historical knowledge.
Romanticism, as both a literary and a political period, can be considered
remote in this sense, a past that has been sundered from our modernity. If
one takes the revolution of 1848 as romanticism’s historical endpoint, the
emergence of the neologism la modernité does in fact seem to signal a
changed understanding of the world. In France, it was Baudelaire above all
who promoted la modernité—whose earliest known use dates to 1849, in
Chateaubriand’s Mémoires d’outre-tombe—1 as a slogan for a new aesthetic.2
In Germany, die Moderne had become fashionable by 1887, after Eugen
Wolff, in a lecture to the Berlin literary society Durch, formulated his new
1. See Paul Robert, Dictionnaire alphabétique et analogique de la langue française (Paris, 1951–
64), s.v. “modernité.”
2. Above all in Charles Baudelaire, Le Peintre de la vie moderne, in Oeuvres complétes de
Baudelaire [Paris, 1950]; hereafter abbreviated P. See also Gerhard Hess, Die Landschaft in
Baudelaires “Fleurs du Mal” (Heidelberg, 1953), pp. 40–42.
329
3. See Fritz Martini, “Modern, Die Moderne,” in Reallexikon der Deutschen Literaturgeschichte,
ed. Paul Merker and Wolfgang Stammler, 4 vols. (Berlin, 1958), 2:391–415.
4. Ernst Robert Curtius, Europäische Literatur und lateinisches Mittelalter (Bern, 1948), p. 257;
hereafter abbreviated EL.
5. “Nunc, quoniam nemo eodem tempore adsequi potest magnam famam et magnam quietem,
bono saeculi sui quisque citra obtrectationem alterius utatur.”
2
How does a certain consciousness come to the fore in the appearance
and history of the word modern—the consciousness, that is, of having taken
a step from the old to the new? And how does the historical self-under-
standing of a period become tangible in the various antitheses to modernity,
which is experienced, over and over again, as new? The following word his-
tory is focused on these questions. It is oriented, above all, to the transition
between epochs, aiming to discover, in the meaning of the word as in its
opposite numbers, the reflection of an experience of time, which one could,
following Schelling, call the sloughing-off of the past and which can be seen
as constitutive of any epoch’s consciousness of itself as epoch.7
6. André Gide, Les Faux-Monnayeurs, quoted in Robert, Dictionnaire alphabétique et analogique
de la langue française, s.v. “moderne.”
7. Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von Schelling, Die Weltalter: Fragmente, ed. Manfred Schröter
(Munich, 1946), p. 11: “How few know the genuine past! There can be no past without a powerful
present, arising in the separation from itself. The man who is incapable of standing in opposition
to his own past has none—or rather, he will never emerge from her. He lives forever in her.”
8. See Walter Freund, Modernus und andere Zeitbegriffe des Mittelalters (Cologne, 1957), p. 5;
hereafter abbreviated M.
9. This function was not (or was no longer) performed by the near synonyms present in this
period. The borrowed word neotericus often gets disfigured and gradually fades from use; praesens
changes into a demonstrative and, like coetanus or novus, designates something more than the
historical (that is, the current) present; see M, pp. 5–10, 31.
3
The antithesis of Christian present and pagan antiquity that makes itself
most strongly felt in the scholarly circle around Charlemagne and then
again in the so-called twelfth-century Renaissance is only part of the term’s
subsequent history, which, in the Middle Ages, exhibits the full spectrum
of meanings between temporal boundary and epoch. If you follow the et-
ymology as it has been reconstructed by Freund and Johannes Spörl, what
emerges is basically a process of progressive periodization. Edging ever for-
wards, the temporal boundary of modernitas expands to encompass a larger
period of time and then leaves this period behind, transforming it into a
self-contained epoch, so a new past gets inserted between the “modern”
present and pagan antiquitas. The word modernus, which first enters com-
mon use in the Carolingian Age, thus begins the ninth century by separating
Charlemagne’s new universal empire, understood as the seculum moder-
num, from Roman antiquity (see M, p. 47). But, soon thereafter, the glory
days of Charlemagne will strike the German emperors as an ideal past in its
own right, and the renewal of his empire will come to seem every bit as
pressing as the revival of imperial Rome.11 In the realm of philosophy and
10. Orosius lacks any notion of antiquitas to designate the past, nor does the metahistorical
present of his tempora Christiana grant a distinct historical identity to the present age; see M, p. 22.
11. See Johannes Spörl, “Das Alte und das Neue im Mittelalter,” Historisches Jahrbuch 50 (1930):
312.
pp. 3–14. On the medieval use of Priscianus, see Spörl, “Das Alte und das Neue im Mittelalter,”
p. 328.
21.
Ce nos ont nostre livre apris,
Que Grece ot de chevalerie
Le premier los et de clergie.
Puis vint chevalerie a Rome
Et de la clergie la some,
Qui ore est an France venue.
Des doint qu’ele i soit retenue
Et que li leus li abelisse
Tant que ja mes de France n’isse
L’enors qui s’i est arestee.
Des l’avoit as autres prestee,
Mes des Grezois ne des Romains
Ne dit an mes ne plus ne mains;
D’aus est la parole remese
Et estainte la vive brese.
[Chrétien de Troyes, Cligés, ed. Wendelin Foerster (Halle, 1910), ll. 30–44, pp. 1–2]
On the Translatio studii and Translatio imperii, see Buck, “Gab es einen Humanismus im
Mittelalter?” p. 226.
22. Walter Map, De nugis curialium, ed. Montague R. James (Oxford, 1914), p. 158. See also EL,
p. 25 n. 1, and M, p. 81.
23.
Nostra dico tempora modernitatem hanc, horum scilicet centrum annorum curriculum, cuius
adhuc nunc ultime partes extant, cuius tocius in his, que notabilia sunt, satis est recens et
manifesta memoria, cum adhuc aliqui supersint centennes, et infiniti filii, qui ex patrum et
avorum relationibus certissime teneant que non viderunt. Centum annos qui effluxerunt, dico
nostram modernitatem, et non qui veniunt, cum eiusdem tamen sint racionis secundum
propinquitatem; quoniam ad narracionem pertinent preterita, ad divinacionem futura. [Map,
De nugis curialium, p. 59]
24. But see Spörl, “Das Alte und das Neue im Mittelalter,” pp. 336–41.
4
“O seculum! O litterae! Iuvat vivere.” The famous cry with which Ulrich
von Hutten, in a 1518 letter to Willibald Pirkheimer, greets the revival of
learning and great minds (“Vigent studia, florent ingenia”) points to some-
thing more than the changed consciousness of a single epoch.26 It has be-
come proverbial or paradigmatic, a kind of archetype for the dawning of a
new age. The notion that an epoch, having undertaken the step from the
old to the new, can—straightaway, from its very onset—become conscious
of itself has clearly hardened into a scheme for historical thought, and this
makes it difficult to recognize the utterly different experience that charac-
terizes the thresholds to other epochs—the beginning of the Enlighten-
ment, for instance. For the step across such thresholds is not always bound
up with the perception that, lo, everything has become new again. Hutten’s
letter goes on to refer to the historical situation, and it does so by showing
that the sense of good fortune that comes from being able to live here and
now in a newly emergent world is, in a special sense, set off by a unique
experience of the past or the old days. Heus tu, accipe laquium, barbaries,
exilium prospice: barbarism will be put in chains; it is just waiting to be
exiled! “Barbarism” means the now-sundered past of the Middle Ages. This
image ties into the notion, common since Boccaccio, that the muses had
finally returned from a long period of exile; the barbarism of the period just
ended is in for a fateful reversal of the historical situation.27 In a very early
source, the 1323 poem by Benvenuto Campesani on the discovery of a Ca-
tullus manuscript, we find another image, in addition to that of return, for
the dawning of a new intellectual golden age, and that is the image of res-
urrection (de resurrectione Catulli).28 Soon afterwards the image of a literary
25. See Ohly, “Synagoga und Ecclesia,” who cites passages from works by Rupert von Deutz,
Gerhoh von Reichersberg, Bonaventura, and Joachim of Fiore: “The original period of achieved
perfection moves to the middle of time and takes on the character of a turning-point into
fulfillment, the time of the church and of eschatology” (p. 359).
26. “O seculum! o litterae! Iuvat vivere, etsi quiescere nondum iuvat, Bilibalde. Vigent studia,
florent ingenia. Heus tu, accipe laqueum, barbaries, exilium prospice” (Ulrich von Hutten, letter
to Bilibald Pirckheymer, 25 Oct. 1518, Schriften, ed. Eduard Böcking, 7 vols. [Leipzig, 1859], 1:217).
27. “Questi fu quel Dante, il quale primo doveva al ritorno delle Muse, sbandite d’Italia, aprir la
via. . . . Per costui la morta poesia meritamente si può dire suscitata” (Boccaccio, Vita di Dante
[1357–59], quoted in B. L. Ullmann, “Renaissance: The Word and the Underlying Concept,”
Studies in the Italian Renaissance [Rome, 1955], p. 15; hereafter abbreviated “R”).
28. See “Versus domini Benevenuti de Campexanis de Vicencia de resurectione Catulli poete
Veronensis,” which begins, “Ad patriam venio longis a finibus exul” (quoted in “R,” p. 13).
anachronistic abandon, transplant ancient heroes into knightly garb and the twelfth-century
present; or in the newly created genre of the verse romance, which departed from its
Alexandrinian materials; or in the rewriting of the Narcissus myth, which, in the Roman de la rose,
is transposed into its opposite meaning (the fons mortis becomes a fons vitae); or in the translation
of ancient authors, which are appropriated in free adaptations, until word-for-word renditions
appear on the scene, in which another type of linguistic reverence makes itself felt. This shift from
the medieval to the humanistic attitude towards the classical texts has also been demonstrated on
the evidence of Italian vulgarizations of the due- and trecento. See Cesare Segre, Lingua, stile, e
società: Studi salla storia della prosa italiana (Milan, 1963), p. 56.
33. “Multis de historiis sermo erat, quas ita partiti videbamur, ut in novis tu, in antiquis ego
viderer expertior, et dicantur antique quecunque ante cenebratum Rome et veneratum romanis
princibus Cristi nomen, nove autem ex illo usque ad hanc etatem” (Francesco Petrarch, Le
Familiari, ed. Vittorio Rossi, 4 vols. [Florence, 1933–42], 2:58). See also Theodor E. Mommsen,
“Petrarch’s Conception of the ‘Dark Ages,’” Speculum 17 (Apr. 1942): 226–42, esp. p. 232, whose
account I follow here.
34. Petrarch, Epistolae de rebus familiaribus, quoted in Mommsen, “Petrarch’s Conception of
the ‘Dark Ages,’” p. 234.
5
The protest that, at the end of this period, broke the spell of the humanist
ideal of perfection and that led to the dismantling of the classical, univer-
salist image of world and man was introduced by Charles Perrault on 27
January 1687, at the height of French classicism, in a session of the Académie
Française. It began a new querelle des anciens et des modernes, which would
engulf all the leading minds of the day, splitting them into two opposing
camps only, after more than twenty years, to reunite them in a new under-
standing that would undo the initial opposition in a way that no one had
anticipated. In this quarrel, which raged because the modern party had pit-
ted the notion of progress, as developed by the methods of modern science
and philosophy since Copernicus and Descartes, against the anciens and
their belief in the transhistorical exemplarity of the ancient world, we see
the transition to a new epoch. In other words, we see the possibility of dating
the onset of the French Enlightenment as epoch. One could at this point
fall back, as Werner Krauss does, on the weighty testimony of Diderot, who,
in his entry on “encyclopedia,” does in fact exalt Fontenelle and Perrault as
the trailblazers of enlightenment.43 But, even so, the fact remains that, by
contrast with the Renaissance, the transition from the old to the new is hard
to recognize here because it transpired under entirely different circum-
stances.
The trailblazers of enlightenment quickly adopted as a party label the
term modernes, which had hitherto been a historical designation; and yet
these modernes were by no means conscious of witnessing the dawn of a
42. “Come la fenice / Rinasce dal broncon del vecchio alloro, / Cosi nasce dal ferro un secol
d’oro” (quoted in ibid., p. 88).
43. See the Encyclopédie, ou, Dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts, et des métiers, ed. Denis
Diderot and Jean d’Alembert, 36 vols. (Geneva, 1778), 12:367: “Ce Perrault, et quelques autres, dont
le versificateur Boileau n’était pas en état d’apprécier le mérite: La Mothe, Terrason, Boindin,
Fontenelle, sous lesquels la raison a fait de si grand progrès.”
44. Charles Perrault, Parallèle des anciens et des modernes en ce qui regarde les arts et les sciences
(Munich, 1964), p. 113; hereafter abbreviated PA.
45. See Buck, Kopernikus im Selbstverständnis der Neuzeit, pp. 357–60 and Die kopernikanische
Wende (Frankfurt, 1965).
46. “Sur quelque Art que vous jettiez les yeux vous trouverez que les Anciens estoient
extremement inferieurs aux Modernes par cette raison generale, qu’il n’y a rien que le temps ne
perfectionne” (PA, p. 443).
47. See, for instance, Blaise Pascal, Traité du vide (1647), Oeuvres complètes, ed. Michel de Guern
(Paris, 1998), pp. 452–531. See also Blumenberg, Kopernikus im Selbstverständnis der Neuzeit, p. 357
and p. 359 n. 2.
48. “N’est-il pas vray que la durée du monde est ordinairement regardée comme celle de la vie
d’un homme, qu’elle a eû son enfance, sa jeunesse et son âge parfait, et qu’elle est présentement
dans sa viellesse” (PA, p. 113).
49. See Hans Robert Jauss, introduction to PA, p. 22.
50. On this point and for the following discussion, see Jauss, introduction to PA, pp. 43–60.
51. Saint-Evremond, Sur les poèmes des anciens, in Oeuvres, ed. René de Planhol, 3 vols. (Paris,
1927), 1:279.
52. See Schalk, “Zur Semantik von ‘Aufklärung’ in Frankreich,” in Festschrift W. v. Wartburg, ed.
Kurt Baldinger, 2 vols. (Tübingen, 1968), 1:251–66.
53. See Werner Krauss, “Der Jahrhundertbegriff im 18. Jahrhundert,” Studien zur deutschen und
französischen Aufklärung (Berlin, 1963), pp. 9–40, esp. p. 14: “The following instances come from
the sphere of Francophone journalism in Holland: ‘Dans le siècle éclairé où nous sommes, il ne
s’agit pas de faire le docteur.’ And in the same connection: ‘vous savez qu’il n’y a jamais eu de siècle
si fertile en auteurs, que celui dans lequel nous avons l’honneur de vivre.’”
54. See ibid., p. 13.
55. See Krauss, “Zur Periodisierung der Aufklärung,” in Grundpositionen der französischen
Aufklärung, ed. Krauss and Hans Mater (Berlin, 1955), p. viii.
6
In the eighteenth century, the separating-out of antiquity and modernity
into two historical epochs, each in its own way perfect, can be traced via the
gradual disintegration of the literary form in which French classicism had,
during its final years, conducted the querelle—a form that Schiller and
Friedrich Schlegel would take up again around 1800, namely, the compar-
ative “parallel.”59 Since the Renaissance, this literary genre had been culti-
vated after various ancient models, especially Plutarch’s; it flourished in
France as an important instrument in the polemic between the anciens and
the modernes and remained popular in the eighteenth century as a way of
56. See Krauss, “Der Jahrhundertbegriff im 18. Jahrhundert,” pp. 9–11, 17.
57. See Schalk, “Das goldene Zeitalter als Epoche,” p. 96 n. 27.
58. See Krauss, “Siècle im achtzehnter Jahrhundert,” Beiträge zur romanischen Philologie 1
(1961): 95 and “Der Jahrhundertbegriff im 18. Jahrhundert,” p. 18.
59. See section 2 of this essay.
60. See Buck, “Das heroische und das sentimentale Antike-Bild in der französischen Literatur
des 18. Jahrhunderts,” Germanisch-romanische Monatsschrift 13 (Apr. 1963): 166.
61. On Renaissance humanism’s cyclical theory of history, see Hans Baron, “The Querelle of the
Ancients and the Moderns as a Problem for Renaissance Scholarship,” Journal of the History of
Ideas 20, no. 1 (1959): 3–22. On this theory’s afterlife in the French querelle, see Jauss, introduction
to PA, p. 27.
62. An account of the term perfection could make visible the process by which a new sense of
history is formed: In the eighteenth century, perfection drifts further and further away from norms
of universal and timeless validity and fastens instead onto the relatively beautiful; as early as 1774,
Herder is applying the term expressly to what is unique in time and place: “Every human
perfection is national, secular, and, if observed with utmost precision, individual” (Johann
Gottfried Herder, Auch eine Philosophie der Geschichte zur Bildung der Menscheit, ed. Karl-Gustav
Gerold, 2 vols. [Munich, 1953], 2:31). This break away from humanism’s cyclical theory of history is
also clear in another of Herder’s moves. He gets himself out of the contradiction between, on the
one hand, the new sense of antiquity and modernity’s historical difference and, on the other hand,
the old historiography of humanity’s life cycle by simply splitting the homme universel in two:
Anyone who considers the condition of the Roman lands (and they were formerly the cultured
universe!) in the last centuries will admire and marvel at Providence’s curious way of
replenishing human powers . . . . The beauties of Roman law and knowledge were unable to
replenish powers that had disappeared, to reconstruct nerves that felt no breath of life, to
rouse the motivating forces that lay flat—that is, death! a worn out corpse lying in blood—and
at that point, in the north, a new man was born. [Ibid., 2:39]
63. François-René Chateaubriand, Essai historique, politique, et moral sur les révolutions
anciennes et modernes, ed. L. Louvet (Paris, n.d.), p. 613; hereafter abbreviated EH. See also
Reinhard Koselleck, “Der neuzeitliche Revolutionsbegriff als geschichtliche Kategorie,” Studium
Generale 22 (1969): 825–38.
64. “M’obstinant dans l’Essai à juger le présent par le passé, je déduis bien des conséquences,
mais je pars d’un mauvais principe; je nie aujourd’hui la majeure de mes raisonnements, et tous
ces raisonnments tombent à terre. Dazu gehöre vor allem der Irrtum de vouloir conclure de la
société ancienne à la société moderne; de juger, les uns par les autres, des temps et des hommes qui
n’avoient aucun rapport” (EH, pp. 614–15).
65. “Le génie de l’homme ne circule point dans un cercle dont il ne peut sortir. Au contraire (et
pour continuer l’image), il trace des cercles concentriques qui vont en s’élargissant, et dont la
circonférence s’accroı̂tra sans cesse dans un espace infini” (EH, p. 614). The figure of the spiral
7
This process leading up over the eighteenth century to this epochal
change is reflected in etymology as well. One could show in detail how mod-
erne gradually withdrew from the antithesis to ancien and entered instead
into other oppositions. Replacing the polemically laden term ancien, an-
tique will now often take over the function of designating the modern
world’s historical distance from the ancient. When, in its 1779 edition, the
Encyclopédie uses the terms anciens and modernes in order to distinguish
antiquity and modernity, with Boethius serving as epochal border point, it
takes pains to specify that in matters of taste moderne no longer stands in
categorical opposition to ancien but rather to anything de mauvais goût, for
instance, gothic architecture. Modern taste—which, in the very next sen-
tence, makes the overtly classicist move of pledging its allegiance to the goût
de l’antique—here sees its antipodes in “Gothic taste.”66 Twenty years later,
it is precisely the goût de gothique, the return to the Middle Ages as under-
taken by Chauteaubriand’s poetry or the first historical novels, that inau-
gurates a new self-understanding of modernity, which, in turn, places its
historically variable opposition to antiquity in a different light. The new
modernity, which, after the turn of the century, thinks of itself as romantic,
designates its opposition to antiquity with a word that, in this meaning, it
has to borrow from the brothers Schlegel: classical. In France, the word clas-
makes possible a compromise between a historical progression that is periodic and one that runs
irreversibly into infinity, but it also leads out the analogy with organic life.
66.
Naudé appelle modernes parmi les auteurs latins, tous ceux qui ont écrits après Boèce. On a
beaucoup disputé de la prééminence des anciens sur les modernes; et quoique ceux-ci aient eu
de nombreux partisans, les premiers n’ont pas manqué d’illustres défenseurs. Moderne se dit
encore en matière de goût: ainsi l’on dit l’architecture moderne, par opposition à l’architecture
gothique, quoique l’architecture moderne ne soit belle, qu’autant qu’elle approche du goût de
l’antique. [Encyclopédie, 22:24]
8
How could a word that in its origins designated the bygone world of the
old chivalric romances come over the eighteenth century to mean a new
feeling for nature, eventually linking history and landscape—the lure of the
faraway and the perception of unconstrained nature—so tightly together
that the turn of the century’s generation found its consciousness of mo-
dernity aptly expressed in the correspondence between the two? The major
stages in the word’s history sketched out here can be reduced to a common
denominator, which Friedrich Schlegel has surely given its sharpest for-
mulation: the separation of modern from ancient art is directed by “gov-
erning concepts”; it is “artificial culture.” The prehistory of “the romantic”
offers the best imaginable example of the “artificial origin of modern po-
etry.”76
The word was first derived from the Middle Latin romanice (“poetry in
75. The reasoning here seeks to explain why true literature is a poetry of the past and cannot be
found in the present:
Nous voyons chaque jour se passer sous nos yeux des choses extraordinaires sans y prendre
aucun intérêt; mais nous aimons à entendre raconter des faits obscurs qui sont déjà loin de
nous. C’est qu’au fond les plus grands événements de la terre sont petits en eux-mêmes: notre
âme, qui sent ce vice des affaires humaines, et qui tend sans cesse à l’immensité, tâche de ne les
voir que dans le vague pour les agrandir. [GC, p. 195]
76. See Friedrich Schlegel, Über das Studium der griechischen Poesie, ed. Paul Hankammer
(Godesberg, 1947), p. 62:
Art must follow nature; artificial culture must follow natural culture . . . . Nature will remain
the guiding principle of culture until it has lost this right . . . . Even in the earliest periods of
European culture, one finds unmistakable traces of the artificial origin of modern poetry. The
power, the material may have been provided by nature; but the guiding principle of aesthetic
culture was not the drive, but rather certain governing concepts.
77. “Romance story,” “romancial tales,” “romancial,” “romancy”; see Logan Pearsall Smith,
Four Words: Romantic, Originality, Creative, Genius (Oxford, 1924), pp. 3–17; hereafter abbreviated
FW.
78. See Fernand Baldensperger, “‘Romantique,’ ses analogues et ses équivalents,” Harvard
Studies and Notes in Philology and Literature 19 (1937): 13–105. Baldenberger, to whom we have
referred for all earlier literature, gives as first citation the following title from the year 1650: Th.
Bayly, Herba Parietis: Or, the Wallflower . . . Being a History Which Is Partly True, Partly Romantic,
Morally Divine.
79. Thus in Goethe’s Werther (1774): “It is settled, Lotte, I mean to die, and I write that to you
without romantic exaggeration.” Compare Baldensperger, “‘Romantique,’ ses analogues et ses
équivalents,” p. 75.
80. The following citation—from the entry on romantisch in the Grimm Brothers’ dictionary—
sums up this development: “Hartenstein, in the first ed. of 1764, later romantische handlungen
[romantic plots]; insofar as beauty or the sublime exceeds their familiar averages, one tends to call
them romanisch (or romanhaft in a later edition)” (Jacob Grimm and Wilhelm Grimm, Deutsches
Wörterbuch [Leipzig, 1893], p. 1155, s.v. “romantisch”).
81. Samuel Pepys, entry for 13 June 1666, The Diary of Samuel Pepys, ed. Henry B. Wheatley, 9
vols. (London, 1893–99), 5:307.
82. Thus, for instance, John Evelyn’s diary entry for June 23, 1679: “The grotts in the chalky rock
are pretty: ’tis a romantic object, and the place altogether answers the most poetical description
that can be made of solitude, precipice, prospect” (quoted in Baldensperger, “‘Romantique,’ ses
analogues et ses équivalents,” p. 25).
83. See James Thomson’s Seasons, quoted in FW, p. 11: “‘oaks romantic,’” “‘romantic’
mountain,” “where the dun umbradge o’er the falling strem, romantic, hangs.”
84. “Si ce vallon n’est que pittoresque, c’est un point de l’étendue qui prête au peintre et qui
mérite d’être distingué et saisi par l’art. Mais s’il est Romantique, on désire s’y reposer, l’oeil de
plâit à le regarder et bientôt l’imagination attendrie le peuple de scènes intéressantes” (quoted in
Baldensperger, “‘Romantique,’ ses analogues et ses équivalents,” p. 76).
85. Quoted in Robert, Dictionnaire alphabétique et analogique de la langue française, s.v.
“romantique.” To the quoted passage, Girardin adds the following explanation: “J’ai préféré le
mot anglais, Romantique, parce que celui-ci désigne plutôt la fable du roman, et l’autre . . . la
situation, et l’impression touchante que nous en recevons.”
86. Chateaubriand: “Jusqu’à ce moment la solitude avait été regardée comme affreuse; mais les
chrétiens lui trouvèrent mille charmes. Les anachorètes écriverent de la douceur du rocher et des
délices de la contemplation: c’est le premier pas de la poésie descriptive” (GC, bk. 1, p. 233).
87. See Richard Ullmann and Helene Gotthard, Geschichte des Begriffes “Romantisch” in
Deutschland (Berlin, 1927), p. 93.
88. Herder, Auch eine Philosophie der Geschichte zur Bildung der Menscheit, 2:45.
89. The sentence that follows the passage quoted here would, for what it is worth, serve as a
description of de la Curne Sainte-Palaye: “One has compared the spirit of ‘Nordic chivalry’ with
the heroic ages of the Greeks—and indeed found points of comparison.” The possible affiliation
between the two demands closer examination.
90. See Goethe, maxim 868 (written between 1818 and 1827), Maximen und Reflexionen, in
Goethes Werke: Hamburger Ausgabe, ed. Erich Trunz (Munich, 1981), 12:488. Compare the
following sentence from GC, p. 192: “Enfin, les images favorites des poètes enclins à la rêverie sont
presque toutes enpruntées d’objets négatifs, tels que le silence des nuits, l’ombre des bois, la
solitude des montagnes, la paix des tombeaux, qui ne sont que l’absence du bruit, de la lumière,
des hommes et des inquiétudes de la vie.”
91. The relevant discussion is Joachim Ritter, Landschaft—Zur Funktion des Ästhetischen in der
modernen Gesellschaft (Munich, 1963)
9
In romanticism’s historical self-conception, the consciousness of mo-
dernity reaches back to the Middle Ages as a self-designated point of origin
and thus encompasses the longest chronological period in the history of the
term. In the nineteenth century, this consciousness develops along peculiar
lines. This development, in fact, is characterized by something more than
modernity’s loosening itself from its equation with the romantic, an equa-
tion canonized by A. W. Schlegel. If the symbiosis of the romantic and the
modern falls prey to the term’s oft-observed dynamic—if, that is, a new
consciousness of the modern comes to the fore, determined to be more
modern than the romantic—then something emerges at this point that we
have yet to encounter in the history of the term. While the word moderne’s
semiotic compass is busy narrowing itself from the Christian age in its en-
tirety to the life span of a single generation, finally shriveling away to the
fashionable alternation of the latest literary trends, the newly coined term
modernité no longer even understands itself as epochally opposed to some
determinate past. The consciousness of modernity that succeeds romanti-
cism’s understanding of the world emerges with the experience of how
quickly the romanticism of today can, upon becoming the romanticism of
yesterday, appear classical in its own right. With that, the great historical
antithesis between the old and the new, between ancient and modern taste,
gradually loses its currency. The world-historical opposition of the roman-
tic to the classical is reduced to the relative opposition between whatever,
for a given set of contemporaries, is current and those same things’ ap-
pearance to the following generation as overtaken and outmoded. And in
the reflection on this process of art and taste’s accelerating historical change
95. For a parallel in the realm of history writing, which, since the revolution, has been faced
with the problem of “catching up with an accelerating history,” see Reinhard Koselleck in
Nachahmung und Illusion, ed. Jauss (Munich, 1964), pp. 194, 234.
96. This formulation occurs in Baudelaire: “En un mot, pour que toute modernité soit digne de
devenir antiquité, il faut que la beauté mystérieuse que la vie humaine y met involontairement en
ait été extraite” (P, p. 885).
97. The opposite position, that of conventional aesthetics, is made clear at the outset by the taste
of sundry visitors to the Louvre, who believe that, in the presence of “masterworks,” they now
have art in its entirety.
98. “L’idée que l’homme se fait du beau s’imprime dans tout son ajustement, chiffonne ou
raidit son habit, arrondit ou aligne son geste, et même pénètre subtilement, à la longue, les traits
de son visage. L’homme finit par ressembler à ce qu’il voudrait être” (P, p. 874).
99. “Il [Constantin Guys] cherche ce quelque chose qu’on nous permettra d’appeler la
modernité; car il ne se présente pas de meilleur mot pour exprimer l’idée en question. Il s’agit,
pour lui, de dégager de la mode ce qu’elle peut contenir de poétique dans l’historique, de tirer
l’éternel du transitoire” (P, p. 884).
100. In Chateaubriand’s Mémoires d’outre-tombe, 6 vols. (Brussels, 1849), which provides
Robert with his earliest citation, the word modernité still stands in direct opposition to the
romantic; pressed shoulder to shoulder with vulgarité, its meaning is derogatory: “La vulgarité, la
modernité de la duane et du passeport, contrastaient avec l’orage, la porte gothique, le son du cor
et le bruit du torrent.”
101. The association between the eternal and the passé can also be found at the end of the essay
on “Richard Wagner et Tannhäuser”: “Je me crois autorisé, par l’étude du passé, c’est-à-dire de
l’éternel, à préjuger l’absolu contraire, etc.” (Baudelaire, “Richard Wagner et ‘Tannhäuser’ à
Paris,” Oeuvres complètes de Baudelaire, p. 1066).
102. “Cet élément transitoire, fugitif, dont les métamorphoses sont si fréquentes, vous n’avez
pas le droit de le mépriser ou de vous en passer. En le supprimant, vous tombez forcément dans le
vide d’une beauté abstraite et indéfinissable, comme celle de l’unique femme avant le premier
péché” (P, p. 884).
103. In Baudelaire, this break with the Platonism of classical aesthetics is visible only in its first
outlines; but in Valéry, it and all its consequences will emerge into the light of day; see
Blumenberg, “Sokrates und das ‘objet ambigu,’” Epimeleia: Die Sorge der Philosophie um den
Menschen (Munich, 1964), p. 285. Since the present essay, as a contribution to the history of
concepts, leads no further than the threshold of our present-day modernity and thus cannot
untangle the aspects of the modern in contemporary literature, I would like to refer the reader to a
colloquium dedicated to the transition from classical to modern art: Immanente Ästhetik—
Ästhetische Reflexion: Lyrik als Paradigma der Moderne, ed. Wolfgang Iser (Munich, 1965).