Modernity and Its Discontents

Modernity and Literary Tradition
Hans Robert Jauss
Translated by Christian Thorne
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.
Critical Inquiry 31 (Winter 2005)

English translation 䉷 2005 by The University of Chicago. 0093-1896/05/3102-0000$10.00. All rights reserved. From Hans Robert
Jauss, Literaturgeschichte als Provokation 䉷 Surhkamp Frankfurt am Main 1970.
329
330 Hans Robert Jauss / Modernity and Literary Tradition
Princip der Moderne (“principle of the modern”) in ten theses; although set
alongside Baudelaire’s turn to surnaturalisme, this can only attest to a cer-
tain national backwardness.3 And yet even Baudelaire’s modernité, harbin-
ger of a new artistic epoch, should not make one forget that this coinage is
the late child of a long linguistic history, that even the noun’s most recent
meaning depends on the original adjective modernus, which, in turn, is part
of an even older literary tradition, “one of Late Latin’s last bequests to the
modern world.”4 And, at first glance, this tradition seems perfectly poised
to expose as illusory the claim that is intrinsic to the concept of modernity
itself—that the present age, generation, or epoch has a unique claim to nov-
elty and can thus profess to have made progress over the old ways.
For throughout nearly the entire history of Greek and Roman literature
and culture, from the Alexandrian school of Homer criticism to Tacitus’s
“Dialogue on Orators,” the dispute with the admirers of the “old ways”
would flare up around precisely such claims to “novelty.” Namely, insofar
as the “new men” themselves would inevitably metamorphose, over time,
into antiqui, the later generations would take over the role of the neoterici,
and this natural, cyclical sequence would seem to confirm the wise words
with which Tacitus has Materna settle the quarrel between Aper and Mes-
salla: “Since no one can achieve great fame and great tranquility at the same
time, let every man enjoy the advantages of the age that is granted him with-
out diminishing any other age.”5 From this perspective, the historical self-
consciousness with which the moderni have squared off against the antiqui,
again and again, in every Renaissance since the Carolingian, can then be
taken for a literary constant, as normal and natural in the history of Eu-
ropean culture as the alternation of generations is in biology. The whole
series of La Querelle des anciens et des modernes, which marks European
literature’s path to its national classicism, arose out of the repeated asking
and answering of a certain question: Is antiquity exemplary and what does
it mean to imitate it? But wouldn’t these quarrels themselves then be part
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.”
H a n s R o b e r t J a u s s was emeritus professor of romance languages at the

University of Constance. His publications include Toward an Aesthetic of
Reception. C h r i s t i a n T h o r n e is an assistant professor of English at Williams
College.
Critical Inquiry / Winter 2005 331
of the ancient inheritance, prefashioned on classical models? Isn’t our pres-
ent consciousness of modernity finally trapped in this same cycle, the cycle
of unrecognized or unacknowledged emulation?
Behind this line of argument, however, there lies one of the ruses of phil-
ological metaphysics, itself originated by the anciens—the ruse of traditions.
This ruse has been variously deployed by Ernst Robert Curtius in his Eu-
ropean Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, the prototype of all scholarship
on antiquity’s afterlife; most impressive are the passages where Curtius ad-
duces Pseudo-Longinus’s On the Sublime, one of the work’s key texts, in
order to suggest that even the modern notion of creative imagination was
preformed by an ancient tradition long buried. “The inconspicuous fact
that the late-pagan Virgil cult was the first to enunciate, however tentatively,
the notion of creative literature thus yields a weighty historical point. It
flares up like a mystical lantern in the twilight hours of the aging world. It
lay extinguished for nearly fifteen hundred years. In the dawning brilliance
of Goethe’s youth, it flickers back to life”—as though it were still substan-
tially the same thought, which, sadly, was “strangled by tradition’s unbreak-
able chain of mediocrity,” strapped for a congenial spirit until Goethe
happened along (EL, chap. 18, §5). In these terms, even the modern notion
of creative art, which was directed against the ancient principle that art
should imitate nature, can be rescued for the mystical continuity of an es-
sential European culture. La querelle des anciens et des modernes takes on
the same meaning in this context: It is a literary trope dating back to an-
tiquity and returning repeatedly in the generational revolt of the young; it
indicates nothing more than the shifting proportions of writers old and new
(see EL, chap. 14, §2). It becomes possible, then, to see even the secular
process by which modern literature and art have broken away from the an-
cient canon’s normative past as preformed on the model of the ancient mod-
erni and antiqui; to ignore the break between the ancient and Christian
conceptions of modernity; and finally to absorb modernity’s irreparable
rupture with a historical ideal—a rupture that our modernity completes—
back into the cycle of some natural recurrence. If one looks instead at the
historical process that this putatively self-governing tradition works to con-
ceal, the history of modernus as word or concept will show that the meaning
of the Late Latin term was not given in full at the moment of its coining;
its subsequent course was not to be foreseen. The definition of modernus
cannot be subsumed in the sempiternal meaning of some literary trope. It
only begins to disclose itself in the historical transformation of the con-
sciousness of modernity, becoming recognizable to us as a history-making
force at those points where its necessary antithesis comes to light, in the
self-understanding of a new present and its sloughing-off of some past.
The ordinary use of the word modern should be enough, for a start, to
demonstrate that the word’s meaning is best grasped via its opposites. The
word modern marks the dividing line between today and yesterday, between
what, at a given moment, counts as new and what counts as old. To be more
precise, and to put the point in terms of fashion, a most instructive phe-
nomenon in this regard, modern marks the dividing line between that which
is newly produced and that which the newly produced has sidelined, be-
tween what was still in yesterday and what is already out today. In the realm
of fashion, crossing over into the modern is the process by which whatever
was only just now current not only loses all value but is abruptly remanded
to the masklike vizier of the outmoded, without the gradual decay of organic
processes: “Ce qui paraı̂tra bientôt le plus vieux, c’est ce qui d’abord aura
paru le plus moderne.”6 But if what is modern today cannot in any essential
way be distinguished from what will be démodé tomorrow, consigned to the
laughable role of anachronism, then the opposite of the modern must be
sought somewhere beyond change. And, indeed, the enduring opposite of
a dress à la dernier cri is not, say, the same dress after it has fallen out of
fashion, but rather a dress that the salesperson coos over as timeless or clas-
sic. Modern in the aesthetic sense of the word is to be distinguished, for us,
not from the old or from the past, but from the classic or the classical, the
eternally beautiful, that which holds for all time. At the end of our exami-
nation we will see that this preunderstanding of the modern, as revealed in
this use of the word and in its implicit antithesis, originated some hundred
years ago in a new turn to the aesthetic. Its first signs are to be found in
France, among Baudelaire and his generation, whose consciousness of mod-
ernité in many respects still determines our aesthetic and historical under-
standing of the world.
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
The earliest known use of the word modernus dates to the 490s, the period
of transition from ancient Rome to the new Christian world, so one cannot
help but wonder whether this new word testifies to an awareness that an-
tiquity has ended and the Christian age begun. In the earliest sources, the
word has nothing more than a technical meaning; it marks the boundaries
of the current, which is what one might expect from its etymologicalorigins.
Modernus is derived from modo (as hodiernus is from hodie), and modo, at
this time, meant something more than “merely” or “only” or “just this mo-
ment.” In all probability, it already meant “now,” as well, which is how it
survives in the romance languages. But then modernus does not simply
mean “new.” It also means “of that time,” and Walter Freund—whose ex-
cellent account I am following here—has emphasized with good reason that
the latter is the decisive nuance, the one that justifies the neologism.8 Among
related temporal terms, only modernus performs the exclusive function of
designating the historical now of the present.9 This it how it appears in 494–
95 in Gelasius’s Epistolae pontificum, which uses the word to set apart recent
events—admonitiones modernas or the decrees of the latest Roman synod—
from antiques regulis. The antiquitas for which modernus comes to supply
a kind of antithetical supplement is the ecclesiastical past of the patres or
veteres, that period, in other words, that begins with the apostles’ successors
and extends to the bishops assembled at the Council of Chalcedon (see M,
p. 11). The boundary at which this particular antiques presses up against the
present (nostra aetas) is the year 450, some fifty years back. The pagan or
Roman past is nowhere in sight, though it will soon appear as antiquitas in
Cassiodorus, where it is distinguished from nostris temporibus or the seculis
modernis, which suggests, for its part, “that by the year 500, at the latest,
Helleno-Roman culture was considered, by a whole series of contempo-
raries, a thing of the past” (M, p. 28).
At the beginning of the fifth century, Orosius had already described his
own epoch as the tempora Christiana. His philosophy of history backdated
the onset of the Christian era—the germina temporis Christiani—to the pe-
riod of peace under Augustus, with which he contrasted the relative peace-
lessness of the pagan past. In this version of history, which dissolves the
antithesis between Christianity and the Roman Empire into the transhis-
torical continuity of all time since Christ’s birth, there is no room for any
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.
conceptual opposition between a “modern” present and an authoritative
antiquity.10 It is in Cassiodorus, who already looks back on Rome and an-
cient culture as though onto a sealed past, that this opposition becomes
visible for the first time in the new verbal pair antiqui and moderni. Cas-
siodorus imparted a first coloration to this consequential antithesis, which,
under the term antiquitas, disconnects an exemplary past from the modern-
ity of an onward-moving present. For him, the gothic imperial present has
as its ideal and task the renewal of imperial Rome’s lost grandeur. In for-
mulations like the following from his letter to Symmachus—“Antiquorum
diligentissimus imitator, modernorum nobilissimus institutor” (quoted in
M, p. 32)—one hears an ethos of admiration for the old ways, which can
without compunction be combined with an affirmation of modernity’s his-
torical claims, because the question of progress or decadence or rebirth has
not yet been posed. It is precisely on this point that the relationship between
modernity and antiquitas in Cassiodorus distinguishes itself from later re-
nascences, as well as from the historical self-conception of the medieval
moderni, which was based on a belief in the equality, indeed the superiority,
of the tempora Christiana.
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.
letters, the term moderni distinguishes Christian writers from the Greek and
Roman writers of pagan antiquity, with Boethius serving as a boundary,
although in the doctrinal tradition the distance back to the antiqui can get
shorter and shorter until the connection with classical antiquity is severed
altogether. In the thirteenth century, the conceptual pair is left indicating
nothing more than a changing of the generational guard among scholastic
philosophers: the antiqui, who taught in Paris from 1190 to 1220 or so, and
the moderni, who, upon succeeding them, introduced the “new philosophy”
of Aristotelianism.12 This accelerated movement freezes again in the four-
teenth century when the newest dispute between schools—the dispute be-
tween Ockhamite nominalism and Scotist and Thomist realism—so
hardened that the opposition between the via moderna and the via antiqua
would last for nearly two hundred years past its moment of terminological
timeliness (see M, p. 113).
There is another sense in which the counterterm antiqui detached itself
from pagan or Roman antiquity. Antiquitas, as the name for an exemplary
past, could be applied to the Christian veteres or to Old Testament believers
or to the church fathers.13 But the common use of this one word, so laden
with tradition, should not hide the fact that there was, after all, a distinction
drawn between Christian and pagan authors, between patres (sancti) and
philosophi, a dividing line that even humanists like John of Salisbury kept
to, even if he placed Virgil and Terence in “our camp” and once called Or-
igenes a “Christian philosopher.”14 The Middle Ages did not yet see pagan
and Christian antiqui as forming a single “pagan-Christian antiquity.”15
And if the twelfth-century moderni were unusually conscious of living
through some temporal watershed—“of the dawning of the new age, com-
pared to which everything that came before is ‘old’ (Horatian poetry, the
digests or pandectae, philosophy) and indeed old in the same sense that the
Old Testament is old”—then there was in this “rebellion of the young”
against scholasticism and the authority of classical authors something more
than a generation gap behind which Curtius once again discerned an an-
cient pattern (EL, p. 106).16
12. See Marie-Dominique Chenu, “Antiqui, moderni,” Revue des sciences philosophiques et
théologiques 17 (1928): 82–94.
13. See ibid., p. 88, and M, p. 100.
14. Chenu, “Les ‘Philosophes’ dans la philosophie chrétienne médiévale,” Revue des sciences 26
(Jan. 1937): 29. Exceptions are cited in M, p. 86.
15. “If we speak of the ‘ancients,’ we mean the pagan authors. For us, the pagan world and
Christianity are two distinct spheres for which there exists no common denominator. The Middle
Ages thought differently. The Christian and pagan authors of the distant past were both called
veteres. No century experienced the opposition between a ‘modern’ present and pagan-Christian
antiquity as keenly as the twelfth” (EL, p. 258).
16. “But the moderni of this period are so dependent on their schooling in ancient models that
they emulate even when they protest” (EL, p. 106). Curtius did not recognize the typological
The self-consciousness with which, around 1170, a new generation of
Latin and vernacular writers—including Matthaeus of Vendôme, Jean de
Anville, Walter of Châtillon, Walter Map, Chrétien de Troyes, and Marie de
France—position themselves against “the old authors” is rooted in the same
ground as the twelfth-century Renaissance more generally. It is the his-
torical self-perception of a golden age, which unlike Italy’s humanist Re-
naissance, was experienced neither as the emulation nor as the revival of
antiquitas, but rather as its intensification and culmination. The twelfth-
century moderni’s experience of time is, as Friedrich Ohly has shown, ty-
pological, not cyclical.17 It has the specific form of Christian historical
experience:
Typology takes moments separated in time and relates them to one an-
other as the intensification of the old in the new. The new preserves the
old, the old lives on in the new. The old is redeemed in the new, the new
is built on the foundation of the old. . . . Typological interpretation is an
act of appropriating the old with the power of the new. It preserves the
past in the elation of the present.18
With the typological experience of history there originates a famous image,
as well, first employed by Bernard de Chartres and later interpreted in an-
tiquity’s favor: the moderni as dwarves sitting on the shoulders of giants.19
The trope bespeaks admiration for the antiqui, to be sure, yet in this ad-
miration one can also hear the consciousness of a typological intensification
of the old in the new: the present can see farther than the past! The progress
that the Christian present sees itself as having achieved over its ancient men-
tors could also be validated by a sentence from Priscianus’s Latin grammar:
quanto iuniories, tanto perspicaciores. The prologue to the Lais by the ver-
nacular poet Marie de France gives some indication of how that sentence
was cited and understood: “The ancients already knew that their descen-
dants would be more clever because they (the successors) can write com-
mentaries on a text’s wording and thus enrich its sense.”20 Here we see
scheme that underlies the moderni’s experience of time, although he himself describes antiquity as
“old in the sense of the Old Testament” (EL, p. 259). He clearly understands this as mere
metaphor.
17. See Friedrich Ohly, “Synagoga und Ecclesia: Typologisches in mittelalterlicher Dichtung,” in
Miscellania Medievalia, ed. Paul Wilpert (Berlin, 1966), pp. 350–69.
18. Ibid., p. 357.
19. See M, p. 83; Ohly, “Synagoga und Ecclesia”; and August Buck, “Gab es einen Humanismus
im Mitteralter?” Romanische Forschungen 75 (1963): 235. Buck’s notion that the image is motivated
by a “harmonizing balance of self-consciousness and faith in authority” is belied by its appearance
in John of Salisbury’s Metalogicon, which quotes Bernard and then launches into a pointed
critique of Aristotle.
20. Marie de France, “Prolog,” Lais, ed. Karl Warnke (Halle, 1925), ll. 9–16. We are following the
interpretation put forth by Leo Spitzer, Romanische Literaturstudien 1936–1956 (Tübingen, 1959),
Priscianus’s observation that grammar, brought into conjunction with the
exegesis of the Old Testament and then typologically construed, has made
progress in the last few centuries. The full and objective meaning of the text
is initially hidden and only unfolds in the course of time through the new
commentaries of later readers. This meaning will eventually, once it gets its
last gloss, become fully apparent in a form that has been manifest to divine
wisdom from the very beginning. It becomes possible, then, to decipher the
hidden—which is to say, the Christian—meaning of ancient writings for
the first time because these meanings had remained in darkness for the an-
cient “philosophers” or pagan poets. But while Marie de France modestly
inserts herself into the ongoing process of deciphering the true, leaving any
judgment on her work to the superior discretion of posterity, the prologue
to Cligés (circa 1176), by her contemporary Chrétien de Troyes, bespeaks the
pride of one who sees his own time as the pinnacle of world-historical pro-
gress, which need therefore advance no further. Knighthood and knowl-
edge, which had merely been on loan to the ancients, have traveled, via the
translatio studii, from Athens to Rome and from Rome to France where,
God willing, they have found their permanent home.21
It is in these same years that Walter Map demands precedence for the
present age over antiquity, the precedence that old copper is otherwise given
over new gold, and with this demand he stands on its head the classical
notion of the world’s four ages. His protest against the low regard in which
the present is normally held makes use of the argument that in every century
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.
modernitas has been unpopular (“omnibus seculis sua displacuit moder-
nitas”), so his own work will only command respect after some remote fu-
ture has conferred antiquity upon it.22 His tract De nugis curialium (written
between 1180 and 1192) is also notable for its multiple uses of the new word
modernitas, which is expressly defined here for the first time: when he calls
“our times” modernitas, he specifies that he means the last hundred years,
the century just expired, because the events (notabilia) from this period are
still fresh, immediately in the memory of all men, easily understood, and
narratable.23 Historically, this classification coincides more or less with the
twelfth-century Renaissance; functionally, it could serve as the horizon of
memory for later generations right down to our own current modernity.
The word modernitas was not Map’s own coinage, however. It appears as
early as the eleventh century in a report composed by Berthold von der
Reichenau on the Lenten synod at Rome of 1075, which had been convened
by Pope Gregory in order to call to mind the instructions handed down by
the church fathers but now forgotten by modernitas nostra (see M, p. 67).
The first known usage of modernitas is therefore derogatory. The new term,
as Freund has shown, is part and parcel of reformist thought during the
Conflict of Investitures. A certain consciousness of time takes shape here
not simply in the antithesis of past and present; it arises, rather, with a view
to a twofold temporal break, “one break at the end of the exemplary age of
the antiqui and a second just before the immediate present, whose vocation
it is to reinstate that distant antiquitas” (M, p. 59). Modernitas appears then
as an interlude or middle phase in the progression onwards toward some
third and higher stage, which will be achieved in the future by reformatio.
This threefold division of time, which belongs to a reformist historical con-
sciousness, kicks off a development that will remain conspicuous through-
out the age of early monastic reform, from Peter Damiani to Joachim of
Fiore, but which cannot be followed here.24 As we turn now to the begin-
nings of the humanist Renaissance, we will rediscover, though under rather
different circumstances, the Christian moderni’s three-stage theory of his-
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.
tory and especially that “middle phase,” called media aetas in the typolog-
ically conceived world of salvation history and capable of attaining the
dignity of a “high middle age.”25
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).
reawakening will be used in reference to Petrarch and the great Florentine
writers.29 And Filippo Villani praises Dante for having summoned poetry
back from an abyss of darkness, for having helped it back on its feet from
its position of utter prostration.30
These images precede the later metaphoric of the Renaissance, which
construes the revival in organic terms. Underlying all of them is a con-
sciousness of modernity that is rather curious in that it refuses to grant its
own past, which it has only just put behind it, the character of a separate
epoch or even of a preliminary stage. The period just ended appears here
as nothing more than a via negationis, as barbarism or obscurity, so, from
the humanist moderni’s view, a gap, empty and dark, occupies the position
that, in the Christian reformers’ typological conception of history, had been
reserved for the media aetas as an elevated period of transition. The mo-
dernity of the incipient Renaissance at first negates the threefold division
of history that would later emerge from this moment in the form of a world-
historical framework: antiquity, middle ages, and modernity.31 The hu-
manists reinstate the grand antithesis between the antiqui and the moderni,
scouting out a past for themselves, not in the centuries that have just been
sloughed off, which for them are a dark age, but in some rediscovered an-
tiquitas of Greek and Roman authors, who have become both more remote
and better understood. This new remoteness is the clearest index by which
to distinguish medieval humanism from the humanism of the Renaissance
proper. For in the so-called twelfth-century Renaissance, the moderni stood
in such easy proximity to their ancient prototypes that they could just as
well have been reading works from their own period. And whenever the
vernacular literature, in its first flowering, appropriates ancient materials,
it employs and modernizes its models with remarkable openhandedness,
which suggests that no one was yet penned in by some humanist principle
of textual fidelity.32 The humanists of the Italian Renaissance do not yet
29. The image is used by Coluccio Salutati; see “R,” p. 14.
30. “Ea igitur iacente sine cultu, sine decore, vir maximus Dantes Allagherii, quasi ex abysso
tenebrarum eruptam revocavit in lucem, dataque manu, iacentem erexit in pedes” (quoted in “R,”
p. 17).
31. According to Adalbert Klempt, Die Säkularisierung der universalhistorischen Auffassung
(Göttingen, 1960), the notion of the media aetas or medium aevum was current among the
humanists as early as 1518. The first known usage occurs in the formulation media tempestas in a
1496 letter by Giovanni Andrea. See Nathan Edelmann, “The Early Uses of Medium Aevum,
Moyen Age, Middle Ages,” Romanic Review 14 (Feb. 1938): 3–25.
32. The publication of one of the Strasbourg Colloquia is enough to provide a glimpse into this
phenomenon. See L’Humanisme médiéval dans les littératures romanes du XIIe au XIVe siècle, ed.
Anthime Fourrier (Paris, 1964). The papers collected here examine l’humanisme médiéval in the
vernacular literatures during and after the Renaissance of the twelfth century, and they come, via
different paths, to the same finding. Instead of the expected imitation des anciens, the texts in
question approach the ancient inheritance with a remarkably free hand, a freedom that later
humanists would not seize for a good long time—in pseudo-ancient romances, which, with
regard themselves as separated from their medieval forebears by a new era
in which ancient culture has been reawakened; for the moment, they pos-
sess, above all, a rather different consciousness of the historical distance
between antiquity and their own present, visible here in the metaphorics of
the dark interlude. In the realm of the arts, this is experienced as a distance
from perfection and is at the root of the new attitude of imitatio and ae-
mulatio.
In the notion of the Dark Ages, we see the first signs of the Renaissance’s
new understanding of history, which has made it possible, in historiograph-
ical terms, to arrange the antithesis of antiqui and moderni, an exemplary
antiquity and a self-conscious modernity, into a periodic cycle of recurrence
or rebirth. In the literary tradition, this turning away from a notion of his-
tory as linear, as directed towards its telos in an irreversible succession of
stages, becomes visible, as an event, in Petrarch. In 1341, on the occasion of
his coronation as poet laureate, Petrarch visited Rome for the second time.
His letter to Giovanni Colonna, with whom he had once made the rounds
of the city, recalls the moment when they were sitting together on the ruins
of Diocletian’s baths, talking about the past and divvying up history into
two great periods, the ancient and the modern, which found their historical
dividing line in the victory of Christianity over Rome.33 In his tract De viris
illustribus Petrarch had wanted to linger over this second period, but later
he would refer to it as an age of darkness: “Nolui autem pro tam paucis
nominibus claris, tam procul tantasque per tenebras stilum ferre.”34 Ancient
and modern history are henceforth divided for him at a significant turning
point: the moment when Rome fell under the rule of “barbarians,” when,
with the fall of the Roman Empire, ancient culture began its descent into
darkness. In Petrarch’s version of history, the eclipse of ancient Rome thus
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.
occupies the position that, for medieval historians, had been reserved for
the soteriological break that was Christ’s birth. But both this new world-
historical turning point and the metaphor of darkness refer back to some
original, religious conception. It is darkness that the pagans lived in before
Christ brought the light of faith into the world.35 Petrarch, who himself oc-
casionally uses this metaphor in its older sense,36 was presumably the first
to give it this new meaning, designating the light of ancient culture, which,
after darkness has been defeated, will shine forth again, fresh and pure, in
a better future.37 The old and the new, the Christian metaphorics of light
and its humanistic reinterpretation, are pressed up against each other here,
directly side by side.
Petrarch himself surely had no intention of playing the one off the other.
And yet the competition between linear and cyclical history, which would
play such an important role in the further course of the conflict between
the anciens and the modernes, has its origins in Petrarch’s reinterpretation
of the light metaphor to describe Rome’s fall and return. In that same letter
from 1341, he articulated a certain hope: “Quis enim dubitare potest quin
illico surrectura sit, si ceperit se Roma cognoscere?”38 And when, as though
in fulfillment of that hope, Hutten’s contemporaries saw in the present-day
flourishing of learning and the arts the revival of antiquity’s lost grandeur,
there appeared on the heels of the light metaphor the cyclical periodization
of history, which had remained implicit in Petrarch’s “age of darkness.”39
“Hoc enim seculum tanquam aureum liberales disciplinas, ferme iam ex-
tinctas reduxit in lucem”: Ficino takes his own epoch for a new golden age,
which has led the liberal arts, once nearly extinguished, back into the light.40
The new trope of a returning golden age is still bound up here with the light
metaphor, which gets replaced in countless other sources from the period
by the metaphorics of rebirth.41 It is only a short step from the periodic
35. See Franco Simonel, “La Coscienza della Rinascita negli Umanisti,” La Rinascita 2 (1939):
838–71 and La Rinascita 3 (1940): 163–86, esp. p. 177.
36. See the passage, adduced by Mommsen, in which Petrarch charges Cicero with having gone
and died just before the night of error began to fade; see Petrarch, De sui ipsius et multorum
ignorantia, ed. Luigi Mario Capelli (Paris, 1906), p. 227.
37. See Petrarch, Africa, 9.451–57, quoted in Mommsen, “Petrarch’s Conception of the ‘Dark
Ages,’” p. 240.
38. See Petrarch, Le Familiari, 2:58.
39. Hans Blumenberg has shown how this cyclical aspect can be connected with the
metaphorics of light. Giordano Bruno uses the image of a new light igniting to describe
Copernican reform as an event: “This light, which is said to have lit itself between Copernicus and
Bruno, is, however, not yet the flame of enlightenment. It is the sun de l’antiqua uera philosophia,
and this metaphor is connected to the notion of a cyclical history, in which the absence of light is
as ‘natural’ an occurrence as its return” (Hans Blumenberg, Kopernikus im Selbstverständnis der
Neuzeit [Mainz, 1965], p. 343).
40. Ficino, letter dated 13 Sept. 1492, quoted in Fritz Schalk, “Das goldene Zeitalter als Epoche,”
Archiv für das Studium der neueren Sprache und Literaturen 199 (1962): 87.
41. Examples can be found in ibid.
alternation of light and dark to the cyclical return of the golden age. But
with this short step the dark ages between Rome’s fall and its return shrivel
to a mere passageway, the memory of which is snuffed out as soon as it has
been traversed. The last wagon in the Florentine Carnival procession of 1513
displays the Triumph of the Golden Age, glossing its own scene with the
image of the phoenix, rising into the air out of its own ashes;42 such is the
symbol of an epoch that understands itself, its own world, as emerging from
the incineration of an iron age but that nonetheless becomes conscious of
its modernity by turning back to an ideal past, by gazing in admiration at
the archetype of a perfection once achieved by antiquity and to be achieved
again, it is thought, by emulation—perhaps, someday, even to be surpassed.
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.”
new age; much to the contrary, they thought that humanity, having spent
its youth in antiquity and its middle age in the Renaissance, had now entered
into its senescence. In the opening dialogue of his Parallèle des anciens et
des modernes, Perrault offers as his chief argument against the “prejudicial
notion” that antiquity is to modernity as teacher is to pupil “que c’est nous
qui sommes les Anciens.” The Greeks and Romans should not really be
called les anciens because successors are heirs to their predecessors’ knowl-
edge and the present-day moderns command the heights of all previous
human experience, which means that the modernes must be the more ex-
perienced ones, hence the genuine anciens. 44 Behind this argument stands
the formulation, made famous by Bacon, that truth is the daughter of time,
as well as the notion, first expressed by Giordano Bruno, that any insight
into progress across time can be transferred onto the history of the entire
human race. Blumenberg has established that Copernicus was the first to
glean this insight, before Bacon and Giordano Bruno, and he has estab-
lished, as well, its importance for modernity’s self-understanding.45 Perrault
would, in later years, often adduce the sentence veritas temporis filia and
was eager to demonstrate its validity for the realms of art and custom, as
well;46 and yet he did not yet connect it with a progressive historical con-
sciousness, one that understood modernity as a new beginning and never-
ending task.47 Immediately following his argument that the modernes are
the genuine ancients, he clarifies that sentence by bringing in the age of the
homme universel, classifying the present as a kind of senility and not, as one
might expect, as the âge parfait. In fact, in another passage, he does not shy
away from pronouncing that the development of the human race, having
reached its pinnacle in the siècle de Louis XIV, might decline again.48 Fon-
tenelle also sees the human race as having arrived at its virilité, but then
breaks off the analogy so as to avoid the unavoidable prognosis of old age
and death.49 This modernity’s new consciousness—which, under the sign
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.
of scientific progress, revolts against the anciens’ regard for antiquity as or-
igin and norm and thus also against the self-understanding of an accom-
plished French classicism—is caught between understanding its own
present as humanity’s twilight and, alternately, seeing history in the light of
critical reason as moving inexorably onwards in the age of progress.
The literary conflict at the turn of the seventeenth to the eighteenth cen-
tury incorporates this ambivalence in the following way: the “modern” fac-
tion tries to undo the contradiction between the concept of perfection (as
it pertains to the fine arts) and the concept of perfectability (as it pertains
to science and learning) by resolving them into the perspective of human
history’s general and continuous progress. And yet the large-scale compar-
ison of all the arts and sciences, ancient and modern, undertaken to this
end by Perrault came to an unexpected conclusion, which is representative
of the querelle’s cumulative course and eventual upshot. At the end of his
four-volume opus, the modernes’ spokesman feels compelled to confess that
the distance between antiquity could not, in all the arts, be gauged along a
scale of progress. It is not that Perrault now wants to deny modern poetry
or oratory any claim to progress, but rather that, in the meantime, he has
become unsure, as the anciens themselves are, of the comparability of an-
cient and modern art.50 The process that leads to this intellectual revolution
can be summed up in three steps: First, the modernes countered the claim
that antiquity was without peer, that it set for all time the benchmark of
artistic perfection, by arguing, in rationalist terms, that all men were nat-
urally equal; and, second, they began, as well, to subject the ancients’ cre-
ations to the absolute criteria of bon goût. They began, in other words, to
bring the ancients to the bar of classicism’s prevailing tastes (les bienséances).
At first, the anciens responded, defensively, by arguing that every period had
its own distinct customs and thus its own distinct taste, as well. They de-
manded accordingly that the Homeric epics be judged by the customs of
another age. In the course of the discussion, step for step, this argument
gave rise to the new insight, now shared by both camps, that alongside the
eternally beautiful there was also the historically or conditionally beautiful,
that alongside beauté universelle there was also beau relatif. The gradual dis-
mantling of classical aesthetic norms thus led, via this route, to a historical
understanding of ancient art.
The discovery that antiquity and modernity are, in the realm of the fine
arts, unlike each other is the consequential upshot of the querelle, which, in
France, diverted the historians’ gaze to the dimension of unrepeatable time
and thus ushered in the Enlightenment. From the differences between an-
50. On this point and for the following discussion, see Jauss, introduction to PA, pp. 43–60.
cient and modern art, via the varied customs of antiquity and modernity,
the historical particularity of various epochs came increasingly into view.
Saint-Evremond was the first to take stock of this development: “nous en-
visageons la nature autrement que les anciens ne l’ont regarde.” As early as
1685, he laid down a challenge, later to be met by Montesquieu: that the
different characters of ancient and modern epochs—their génie du siècle—
be reviewed in art as in the changing forms of religion, government, custom,
and other such phenomena.51 With this new view of antiquity, modernity’s
self-understanding was bound to change as well. Signs of a new conscious-
ness—an awareness that the beam of enlightened reason has illuminated
the way to a new and eminent age, unlike any previous epoch—can be found
as early as the querelle and multiply in its wake. In his Nouvelles de la ré-
publique des lettres, Pierre Bayle speaks of a siècle philosophe—he is thinking
of the natural sciences, which have been expanding rapidly throughout the
1680s, and of the new historical criticism engendered by Protestantism—
and on behalf of this siècle he seizes hold of a notion that had hitherto been
reserved, in the main, for Christian doctrine: “C’est à nous qui vivons dans
un siècle plus éclairé de séparer le bon grain d’avec la paille . . . . On se pique
dans ce siècle d’être extrèmement éclairé.”52 In the Enlightenment’s early
years, the lumières de la raison square off against divine illumination, the
lumière du Ciel. In the course of the eighteenth century, le siècle éclairé will
come to be identified more and more with one’s own century. In 1719, for
example, a journalist will speak of the “siècle éclairé où nous sommes,”
which has produced more writers than any other period.53 The enlightened
age is a siècle éclairé, filled with pride to its modern and civilized peak, claim-
ing for itself the title siècle humain, siècle philosophique. 54 As of the mid-
century, it is common for contemporary literature to use siècle des lumières
and siècle philosophique interchangeably with dix-huitième siècle. 55 The em-
phatic use of siècle is a manifestation of the Enlighteners’ historical self-
consciousness and contributes to the word’s taking on a new meaning—
“century”—in French in precisely this period. On the one hand, the old,
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.
Christian sense of siècle as “worldly time,” to be distinguished from the
kingdom of God, persists despite gradual fading. But, on the other hand,
the more narrow sense of siècle, derived from the notion of a human lifetime
and meaning “reign” or “term of rule,” expands more and more until it
means, in epochal terms, “century.” The borders of siècle’s temporal com-
pass outgrew the siècle de Louis XIV, eventually coinciding with the begin-
ning and end of the new century, which, over and against the beau siècle just
passed, claimed a historical mission of its own.56 The external classification
system of centuries, which the church had already been using, thus took on
board the new notion, formulated in the saeculum of Enlightenment, that
each century could, like the present one, be seen as having a distinct content
and thus as forming an epoch unto itself.57 But what most characterizes the
altered historical self-consciousness of the enlightened modernes is that they
began, as of the Abbé de Saint-Pierre’s famous analysis of the present in
1735, to see their own day and age as standing before the forum of future
history. On the basis of much impressive evidence culled from utopian nov-
els and political utopias, Krauss has shown that, as of the 1760s, the question
arises again and again whether or not actions taken in the present would
hold up under the keener eyes of a more advanced mankind.58 It is in this
previously unencountered and epochal leitmotif that the modernity of the
Enlightenment turns its back most decisively on the counterposition of the
humanist anciens; from this moment on, the standard by which the history
of the present is to be judged, by which its claim to modernity is to be
gauged, lies in the open horizon of the future’s budding perfection and no
longer in the paradigms of some perfect past.
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.
representing the social and cultural history of the ancient and modern
world.60 It was still in these terms that La Harpe, for example, discussed
world literature in his Lycée ou cours de literature ancienne et moderne (1786–
1803). On a smaller scale, the comparative framework could take up literary
themes, the treatment of Electra, for instance, by Sophocles, Euripides, Cré-
billon, and Voltaire, but it could be carried over into other realms as well.
There were “parallels” of Aristotelian and Cartesian physics, of ancient and
Christian ethics, of ancient and modern heroes, of economic systems, and
even of ancient and modern revolutions. Chateaubriand’s Génie du Chris-
tianisme (1802), which is still organized much like Perrault’s comparison of
the arts and sciences as practiced by the anciens on one hand and the mod-
ernes on the other, can surely be regarded as the last significant work in this
genre. But it also spells the end of the vision of history developed by Re-
naissance humanism. For the historical parallel, which began as a literary
form, was more than a neutral framework of comparison. It presupposed
a standard of comparison—the point de la perfection—and thus also an
analogy with organic growth or biological lifespan. This is the analogy used
by the humanists (and at first by the moderns as well) to trace the course
of history in general—the crowning epochs of antiquity and the età mod-
erna—as well as the more modest phases of national development, all of
which were described as the periodic recurrence of growth, maturity, and
decay.61 This model of history made it possible, above all, to bring the
achievements of historically distinct epochs into comparison with one an-
other and thus to judge them by a transhistorical standard of perfection:
past and present are not unique, qualitatively dissimilar epochs. They are
comparable blocks of time in which the past can repeat itself as present, in
which it can, via emulation, be achieved anew or even—by the lights of this
same point de la perfection—be outdone. To the extent, however, that a new
experience of history included both antiquity and modernity in the irre-
versible progression of historical time, making all epochs seem equally per-
fect (or, in a later formulation of Ranke’s, “equally close to God”),62 the
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
comparability of history itself vanished. And with that the historical parallel
lost its meaning, as Chateaubriand himself attested most impressively for
the French case in his Essai historique, politique, et moral sur les revolutions
anciennes et modernes considérées dans leurs rapports avec la revolution fran-
çaise.
In the version of the Essai published in 1797, Chateaubriand still aimed
at examining whether the new revolutionary government rested on “true
principles” and thus promised to endure or whether, alternately, even this
change in world circumstance would lead to the realization “que l’homme
faible dans ses moyens et dans son génie, ne fait que se répéter sans cesse.”63
The comparison is carried out on five ancient and seven modern revolu-
tions and results in a discrediting, decided in advance, of this most recent
revolution, which he loathed. But when Chateaubriand published a new
edition of the Essai in 1826, he considered it necessary to comment exten-
sively on his old text and not only out of political opportunism but because
he had, in the meantime, come to the conclusion that the historical parallels
he had drawn in 1797 were mistaken in their very premises. He had been
wrong to believe that he could draw inferences about modern society on
the basis of ancient society or that he could compare periods and people
that in actual fact had “no relation” to one another.64 It was wrong to claim,
additionally, that human destiny traveled in a perpetual circle; if one wanted
to retain this image, better to think of circles expanding concentrically into
infinity—spirals, in other words.65 Ancient and modern societies are fun-
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
damentally dissimilar and thus not legitimately comparable. Nothing in
history repeats itself. Nothing about the present can be demonstrated or
learned from the past. With this lapidary comment, Chateaubriand attests
to the utter triumph of historicism—the triumph, that is, of the intellectual
revolution that broke onto the scene when the querelle came to an end, that
developed in the historical thinking of the Enlightenment, and that cul-
minated, at last, in the historical consciousness of a new generation, which
configured its opposition to antiquity in a new way, expressly conceiving of
its modernity as the experience of a rediscovered Christian and national
past.
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]
sique had not yet appeared in opposition to moderne because the French
term had, throughout its history, preserved the sense of the exemplary,
which had already developed in antiquity. What’s more, when, in the eigh-
teenth century, the age of Louis XIV slipped over the horizon of lived ex-
perience, broke away to form a completed past, and was elevated to the
status of France’s classical age, the meaning of the phrase nos auteurs clas-
sique did not narrow sufficiently to serve as a periodizing term.67 As late as
1810, Madame de Staël had to go out of her way to explain that classique in
A. W. Schlegel’s sense of the word was not a synonym for parfait but referred
rather to the two great periods in world literature: “Je m’en sers ici dans
une autre acception, en considérant la poésie classique comme celle des
anciens, et la poésie romantique comme celle qui tient de quelque manière
aux traditions chevalereques. Cette division se rapporte également aux deux
ères du monde: celle qui a précédé l’éstablissement du christianisme, et celle
qui l’a suivi.”68
The history of the word has at this point led us to the epochal moment
in which a new generation announces its historical self-understanding by
christening its modernity with a name of its own, le romantisme, which
binds the present to its autochthonous origins, the Christian Middle Ages,
and disassociates it from classical antiquity, understood now as an irretriev-
able, historically regarded past. The French may have borrowed the terms
classique/romantique from the Germans, but they did not have to borrow
the things themselves. Over the course of the eighteenth century, well before
the import of Herder’s and Schlegel’s ideas, the relationship indicated by
this antithesis had already developed in France—the relationship, that is,
of modernity to the Middle Ages as its proper past and to antiquity as a now
remote past. The rediscovery of the Middle Ages did not take shape against
the Enlightenment;69 it was, in fact, ushered in by the notion, widespread
67. In his Lettres philosophiques (1734), Voltaire still refers to the bons ouvrages du siècle de Louis
XIV, but from 1751 on he employs the formulation nos auteurs classiques; see Pierre Moreau’s Le
Classicisme des romantiques (Paris, 1932), p. 5. Between these two dates, there had appeared the
programmatic poem Le Temple du goût, in which Voltaire constructs a first canon of classical
French poetry from the preceding age of Louis XIV. The subsequent history of the word classique
in the eighteenth century shows, in the meantime, that classic was still understood in the
normative sense of a canon that could encompass both ancient and modern authors. Compare the
Encyclopédie’s entry on classique: “Classique se dit aussi des auteurs mêmes modernes qui peuvent
être proposés pour modèle par la beauté du style. Tout écrivain qui pense solidement et qui sait
s’exprimer d’une manière à plaire aux personnes de goût appartient à cette classe: on ne doit
chercher des auteurs classiques que chez les nations où la raison est parvenue à un haut degré de
culture.”
68. See Madame de Staël, De l’Allemagne (1810; Paris, 1857), p. 145, where she warns that anyone
who does not accept this distinction will never succeed in “juger sous un point de vue
philosophique le gôut moderne.”
69. On the basis of new material, Krauss has, in the end, corrected any prejudice about “the
Enlightenment’s hostility to history” (Krauss, “Französische Aufklärung und deutsche Romantik,”
by the end of the querelle, that the ancient and modern worlds were simply
different. From this notion there sprang a further idea, which Montesquieu,
in the Esprit des lois, was to give its richest orchestration: that every nation,
and not just every historical period, had its own unique, incommensurable
“genius.” The interest awakened by the querelle in the variety of customs
and literature from other periods—which Fénelon, in his 1714 Lettre à
l’Académie, elevates to a demand that a history be written on the basis of
the detail des moeurs de la nation—also opened one’s eyes to the ténèbres de
notre antiquité moderne. 70 Both the first attempts at a new, historical criti-
cism (which, after Raymond Naves, are connected with the efforts of the
Académie des Inscriptions et des Belles Lettres) and the beginnings of the first,
politically interested representations of the Middle Ages by Boulainvilliers
and Du Bos fall during or just after the querelle. 71 It is possible to follow in
this a reciprocal process by which modernity and antiquity drift both to-
wards one another and further apart. On the one hand, one begins to regard
antiquity—which has gone from being an emulatable model to a historical
antitype—in ever-changing stylizations of its historical otherness: in the
idealized, bucolic images of its original simplicité and naı̈veté; or, alternately,
in the primal poetry of its archaism and barbarity; or in the lionized con-
ception of the political life of the Greek polis and the Roman Republic; or
finally—after the excavations of Herculanum and Pompei—in the senti-
mental beauty of its ruins.72 On the other hand, the Middle Ages get recov-
ered, step by step, as an exemplary and national past; they get described in
their institutions and customs as a time of heroic and Christian virtue and
are brought to the present in the exemplary continuity of this or that na-
Wissenschaftliche Zeitschrift der Karl-Marx-Universität Leipzig 12 [1963]). The following comments

complement his thesis by examining the perspectives that opened out for the Enlightenment’s
historical thought from la querelle des anciens et des modernes.
70. “Le point le plus nécessaire et le plus rare pour un historien est qu’il sache exactement la
forme du gouvernement et le détail des moeurs de la nation dont il écrit l’histoire, pour chaque
siècle. Un peintre qui ignore ce qu’on nomme il costume ne peint rien avec vérité” (François de
Salignac Fénelon, “Lettre á M. Dacier, sur les occupations de l’Académie,” Oeuvres de Fénelon, 8
vols. [Paris, 1854], 5:478). The description of the Middle Ages as a “modern antiquity” comes from
Jean Chapelain, De la lecture des vieux romans, ed. Alfred C. Hunter (1646; Paris, 1936), p. 219—by
my reckoning the earliest introduction of antiquité to designate a national and medieval past,
implying a comparison to antiquity while still clinging to the notion of a “dark interval.”
71. See Raymond Naves, Le Goût de Voltaire (Paris, 1938), pp. 108–18; Henri Comte de
Boulainvillier’s Essai sur la noblesse de France is from 1732, Abbe Du Bos’s Histoire critique de
l’éstablissement de la Monarchie Françoise dans les Gaules from 1734.
72. Buck has discussed this development under the rubric of “antiquity’s afterlife”; see Buck,
“Das heroische und das sentimentale Antike-Bild in der französischen Literatur des 18.
Jahrhunderts.” If one considers the historicization of antiquity initiated by the querelle, the same
process would now have to be portrayed in another light. Antiquity’s changed status—from model
to antitype—would make clear the historical process whose meaning has been mostly profoundly
and decisively delineated by Schiller, in the antithesis between the naı̈ve and the sentimental.
tional tradition. The discovery of the medieval origins of the modern state
was promptly followed by the discovery of chivalric poetry, the songs of the
knights and troubadours, in the service of which scholarly research and
popular editions worked hand in hand. Special mention must be made here
of de la Curne de Sainte-Palaye, who, in 1746, began presenting his Mémories
sur l’ancienne chevalerie to the Académie des Inscriptions. He concluded, af-
ter a lifetime of study, that the customs of the Christian Middle Ages were
not equal to the customs of the Homeric age; they were in some respects
even superior (the passage could just as well come from Génie du Chris-
tianisme of 1802):
Un contraste singulier de religion & de galanterie, de magnificence & de
simplicité, de bravoure & de soumission; un mélange d’adresse & de
force, de patience & de courage, de belles actions produites par un motif
chimérique & de functions Presque serviles ennobles par un motif
élevé. Moeurs à la fois grossières et respectables, aussi dignes d’être étu-
diées sur-tout par un François, que celles des Grecs ou des Orientaux,
comparables en bien des points, & mêmes supéierues en quelques uns,
à celles des temps héroiques chantés par Homère.73
The image of the Middle Ages that is commonly attributed to Chateau-
briand and Madame de Staël can, in many respects, already be detected in
Sainte-Palaye and the works of the other Enlightenment scholars who fol-
lowed his lead by researching and editing medieval literature. All that was
left for the Génie du Christianisme was to carry out the analogies already
sketched out between the two antiquities—the old, heathen, heroic age and
the modern, Christian one. The innovation here—Chateaubriand’s dis-
tinctive contribution—lies, then, in his modern poetics, which ushers in
romanticism, the age of modernity (l’âge moderne) that comprises both the
Christian Middle Ages and the historical present, and yet it appears as an
age whose high point has already passed.74 The rediscovered poetry of the
Middle Ages is now attractive not only because the Christian knight, sus-
pended in the opposition between barbaric social conditions and a perfect
73. Jean-Baptise de la Curne de Sainte-Palaye, Memoires sur l’ancienne chevalerie, considérée

comme un établissement politique et militaire, 3 vols. (Paris, 1759–81), 1:8.
74. See Chateaubriand, Génie du Christianisme (Paris, 1948), bk. 2, chap. 11, “Le Guerrier—
Définition du beau idéal”; hereafter abbreviated GC; see esp. the following passage:
Si au contraire vous chantez l’âge moderne, vous serez obligé de bannir la vérité de votre
ouvrage, et de vous jeter à la fois dans le beau idéal moral et dans le beau idéal physique. Trop
loin de la nature et de la religion sous tous les rapports, on ne peut représenter fidèlement
l’intérieur de nos ménages, et moins encore le fond de nos coeurs. La chevalerie seule offre le
beau mélange de la vérité et la fiction. [P. 197]
religion, lives up to the highest notions of heroism and ideal beauty but also
because true poetry requires “cette vieillesse et cette incertitude de tradition
que demandent les muses”; it arises, therefore, from historical distance and
a whiff of the faraway (GC, p. 195).75 Modernity’s sense of self, which Cha-
teaubriand defines as an “indeterminacy of the passions” unknown to an-
tiquity and that he personified in the figure of René, transcends the
contemporary because it experiences beauty only in the no-longer; it ex-
periences the authentic only in the sentimental return to naı̈veté. The Génie
du Christianisme is still missing a word for this, a word that would bring
together a sentimental relationship to nature with the lure of the historically
remote as discovered in medieval poetry—the word romantic, whose his-
tory we turn to now.
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.
the vernacular”) to designate the most successful postancient genre, the ro-
mance (Fr. romanz, Eng. romount), but its ascendancy began at a time when
the distance between the medieval romance world and contemporary life
was strongly felt. This feeling both sparked a critique of the romance and
laid bare a new aesthetic allure in anything romancelike. The adjective ro-
mantic appears for the first time in England between 1650 and 1660 in vari-
ous forms and spellings.77 It means “resembling the old romances” and is
thus the opposite of the true, the nonfictional, or the prosaically real.78 From
this root meaning—“something that only happens in romances, not in real
life”—there emerge side-by-side both a derogatory meaning and a lauda-
tory one. On the one hand, the word romantic develops into a byword for
the improbable, the merely fictional, the chimerical, or, with an eye to the
feelings of the romance characters themselves, the hysterical (see FW, p. 7).79
But what was dismissed by disparagers of novels and critics of the imagi-
nation did not cease to be alluring for romance readers for whom the im-
probability of the plots was the most strange and gripping thing about them
and for whom the extravagance of emotions could come across as unusual,
even admirable.80 And so the word romantic develops, conversely, from the
unrealistically romancelike to the out-of-the-ordinary and further on to the
poetic, with the allure of the romancelike soon insinuating itself into com-
parable real-life events, events in antiquated places and similar settings and
eventually in the solitude of nature itself. This is what marks the path to the
world-understanding of the romantic generation, which came to the fore
around 1800—the steps of a progressive transferal of the word romantic
onto moments of real life and aspects of nature.
At the beginnings of this development there are places that call romances
to mind and that are therefore described as romantic. As early as 1654, John
Evelyn was recording in his diary that “Salisbury Plain reminded me of the
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”).
pleasant lives of the shepherds we read of in romances.” Elsewhere, he trots
out the new word for just such a memory: “There is also on the side of this
horrid Alp a very romantic seat near Bath” (quoted in FW, pp. 10–11). A
few years later, in Samuel Pepys’s diary, we find the first evidence of the
extension of romantic to describe an out-of-the-ordinary event. At a fu-
neral, a group of simple sailors movingly declare their loyalty to their dead
commander, which Pepys introduces with the following words: “There hap-
pened this extraordinary case—one of the most romantique that ever I
heard of in my life, and could not have believed, but that I did see it.”81
Improbable, yet true: “romantique” comes close here to stepping into the
formulation that, in Aristotelian poetics, establishes the higher truth of po-
etry over history, though in Pepys’s comments it serves only to give the “po-
etry of life” an edge over prosaic reality. The romantic moment is distinct
because it fulfills an expectation that ordinarily only a romance—and not
real life—could redeem. In these terms, romanticism is an attitude that sees
itself as viewing life through the medium of literary experience and sen-
sation. This is no less true of its further development, in which romantic is
transferred from old castles and romancelike settings to unconstrained na-
ture. The artificial origin of the romantic sense of nature is, at this point,
palpable, as Logan Pearsall Smith long since recognized: “It is Nature seen
through the medium of literature, through a mist of associations and sen-
timents derived from poetry and fiction” (FW, p. 13). The texts show step
by step how the romantic qualities of landscapes were first viewed by way
of analogy with descriptions in romances,82 from which they later became
more and more detached so that ever since Addison’s Remarks on Italy
(1705) and Thomson’s Seasons (1726–30) natural scenes get called romantic
even when they no longer call to mind potentially romancelike events.83
With this semiotic turn, the English word romantic moved further away
from its French counterpart romanesque, which, in the eighteenth century,
retained the narrower sense of the romancelike. And so it happened that in
1776, the French translator of Shakespeare, Letourneur, found that roman-
esque did not properly capture the sense of romantic, leading him to borrow
the word romantique back from English to describe the romantic qualities
of nature. Letourneur, like Girardin soon after him (De la composition des
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.”
paysages [1777]), also explains why the word pittoresque is not an adequate
substitute for romantic in this context.84 Like the romanesque, the pictur-
esque or painterly refers to the objective qualities of an image or natural
scene. The romantic, however, has less to do with the objective beauty of
nature than it does with the subjective, melancholy, or “interesting” effect
nature engenders: “Si la situation pittoresque enchante les yeux, si la situ-
ation poétique intéresse l’esprit et la mémoire, retraçant les scenes acra-
diennes en nous, si l’une et l’autre peuvent être formées par le peintre, et la
poète, il est une autre situation que la nature seule peut offrir: c’est la sit-
uation Romantique.”85 The romantic qualities of nature are here under-
stood as an effect produced by nature alone and touching the imagination,
while the picturesque speaks only to the eyes. Girardin clearly no longer has
in mind that, in fact, the romantic, no less than the picturesque,presupposes
a scene from life or nature regarded through the medium of art, of romance,
or painting. He now attributes to nature itself everything that the word ro-
mantique had imported into it from the world of romance, and yet all mem-
ory of the artificial formation of the romantic sense of nature is not thereby
extinguished. As late as 1798, the Dictionnaire de l’Académie retains, in its
explanation of romantique, the literary analogy that underwrites its original
function: “Il se dit ordinairement des lieux, des paysages, qui rappellent à
l’imagination les descriptions de poëmes et des romans.”
The foregoing development of the word romantique does not yet capture
the full concept of the romantic, however, as cultivated by the romantic
school in Germany and then brought to France by Madame de Staël. Ro-
manticism understood as the aesthetic experience of nature, which Cha-
teaubriand described in his chapter on the modern poésie descriptive that
Christianity had made possible—he called it the poetry of solitude—86 this
romanticism had to fuse first with romanticism understood as the allure,
first discovered in medieval poetry, of a world sunk into the distant past and
only knowable by its relics. There is no need to trace out this other lineage
behind the word romantic (or the German romantisch), which leads from
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).
the old romances to the Italian romantic epic and then further on to Wie-
land, explaining how it is that romantic could come, over the second half of
the eighteenth century, to describe the entire period of chivalric and trou-
badour poetry (see FW, p. 15).87 It may be enough to adduce a passage from
Herder’s tract Auch eine Philosophie der Geschichte zur Bildung der Men-
schheit, which shows that the word romantisch, as a periodizing term, still
preserved something of the aesthetic bearing that seemed most fitting for
the word in its recent adjectival forms: “The spirit of the century weaved
and tied together the most incongruous qualities: bravery and monasticism,
adventure and gallantry, tyranny and magnanimity; tied it to the totality
that appears to us now—between the Romans and us—as a ghost, a ro-
mantic adventure; once it was nature, it was—truth.”88 The traits that
Herder singles out from the period, which he still regards as an “interlude,”
are familiar to us from de la Curne Sainte-Palaye.89 But Herder adds some-
thing to this image of the “gothic” past, and this new element accounts for
its romantic character: “once it was nature, it was—truth.” It is not yet the
rediscovered national and Christian past but rather its irrecoverably van-
ished present—the now improbable, but once true adventure of bygone
time—that makes up the allure of the romantic. To write history is to create
an image of the lost nature of another, now alien, yet still familiar time! If
one takes stock of what it is that makes history romantic in this definition,
then its connection to the romantic qualities of landscape will become clear.
For in nature as in history, the romantic impulse is not to look for what is
present; it is to search out everything distant, absent, as the antiromantic
Goethe testifies most beautifully: “The so-called romantic quality of a re-
gion is a quiet sense of the sublime in the guise of the past or, what is the
same, solitude, absence, seclusion.”90 Landscape is nature in the guise of the
past; it is the sensation of some lost harmony with the world’s totality!91 In
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)
this bearing, which looks into the distant reaches of history to find the truth
of a nature that was and looks into the nearness of the natural surroundings
to find the absent totality, humanity’s lost childhood, history and landscape
come together in a reciprocal relationship. In this relationship is rooted the
self-image of a generation that, paradoxically, experiences its modernity as
a conflict with the present age and no longer as an antithesis to the olden
days. Regardless of whether they located their historical archetype in the
transfiguring distance of the Christian Middle Ages or expected the peak of
modern culture to arrive in the future in the form of Friedrich Schlegel’s
“aesthetic revolution,” discontent with one’s own incomplete present is the
common denominator shared by conservative and progressive romantics
alike. It hurries us on to the point when a new generation will root its mo-
dernity in a rather different relationship to history.
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
there now coalesces a consciousness of modernity that ultimately only ever
distinguishes itself from itself.
Fritz Martini has shown how the historical period encompassed by the
romantic notion of the modern progressively shrinks in Germany once there
comes to pass a certain reversal, anticipated by Solger’s Erwin (1815). In
Heinrich Heine and the Young Germans, modernity and romanticism go
from being synonyms to being antitheses.92 In the 1830s, the Young German
movement gave a new explicitness to the term modern—now whittled down
to the present, the current, the realistic—and, by identifying it with the Zeit-
geist, they turned it programmatically against the ramshackle romantic
world. This is preceded, however, by a retooling, in France and Italy, of the
terminological pair romantic and classical in which we can see this reversal’s
first moment, which sets the ball rolling, leading again to that modernité
which only ever distinguishes itself from itself. It was Stendhal who, in his
great essay “Racine et Shakespeare” (1823–1825), gave this process its decisive
turn, furthering the polemic over romanticismo begun in Italy in the circle
around Ludovico di Breme and appealing to his generation’s special, indeed
unprecedented, historical experience.
“De mémoire d’historien, jamais peuple n’a éprouvé, dans ses moeurs
et dans ses plaisirs, de changement plus rapide et plus total que celui de 1780
à 1823; et l’on veut nous donner toujours la même literature.”93 For Stendhal,
history since 1789 stands in complete contrast to its entire course heretofore.
He finds in the revolution an event separating the Français de 1785 from his
generation as though by an abyss. It would be unreasonable to expect an
appreciation of classical literature from the “children of the revolution,”
who instead of reading Quintus Curtius and Tacitus, went marching against
Moscow, witnesses to the astonishing upheavals of 1814; they would find the
classics, their comedy and their pathos alike, unbearable (see RS, pp. 79, 45).
The knowledge that the course of history has become utterly different since
1789 stands at the beginning of an epochal consciousness that perceives the
step from old to new as a total rupture in time; the revolution has cut the
cords between past and present. Modern society is separated from the an-
cien régime not only by its new constitution, its habits and its ideas, but also
by its taste, by a different relationship to the beautiful.94 For it is precisely
92. Martini, “Modern, Die Moderne,” p. 402.

93. Stendhal, Racine et Shakespeare, ed. Pierre Martino (Paris, 1925), p. 45; hereafter abbreviated
RS.
94. “Je respecte infiniment ces sortes de classiques, et je les plains d’être nés dans un siècle où les
fils ressemblent si peu à leurs pères. Quel changement de 1785 à 1824! Depuis deux mille ans que
nous savons l’histoire du monde, une révolution aussi brusque dans les habitudes, les idées, les
croyances, n’est peut-être jamais arrivée” (RS, p. 91).
those qualities that one’s grandfathers found most delightful in literature
that now make the grandchildren yawn. If one regards its effects, beauty is
directly beautiful only for its initial public, the one for which it was pro-
duced, and it is beautiful only to the extent that it aims for and achieves this
currency. It is from this notion that Stendhal derived his famous definition
of the romantic, which broke with the previous history of the word, con-
verting its traditional meaning into its opposite. The romantic is now no
longer the allure of that which transcends the present, the remote and the
bygone, which stand, as though in a field of tension, over against the real
and the everyday. The romantic is rather the latest trend, whatever is beau-
tiful now—which, once outmoded, will have to forfeit its immediate allure,
capable then of arousing a merely historical interest: “Le romaticisme est
l’art de presenter aux peoples les oeuvres littéraires qui, dans l’état actuel
de leurs habitudes et de leurs croyances, sont susceptibles de leur donner
le plus de plaisir possible. Le classicisme, au contraire, leur présente la lit-
térature qui donnait le plus grand plaisir possible à leurs arrière-grands-
pères” (RS, p. 39).
With this definition, romantique ends its run as a periodizing concept;
the great historical antithesis between romanticism and classicism is over.
For everything classical was once, in its own moment, itself romantic: “So-
phocle et Euripide furent éminemment romantiques” (RS, p. 39). Stendhal’s
notion of the romantic takes over the original function of the Latin mod-
ernus: to designate the historical now of the present; it gives the modern the
meaning of the highest worth and explains everything classical—in purely
functional terms, via a simple shift of historical modalities—as the roman-
ticism that once was. And with that we have come full circle, and the sub-
sequent experience of modernity is set. In contrast to the tradition of the
term moderne up to this point, the word romantique—in its new meaning
of “current,” that which culminates in the now of the present—is no longer
opposed to some antiquitas, some authoritative past. In the experience of
recent history, the events of 1789 have made the subsequent period seem
like a movement freshly begun and accelerating under its own weight and
the previous period like a mired-down and motionless long-ago.95 Stendhal,
accordingly, no longer opposes to this (in his sense of romantic) modernity
some antiquity, some past that predated it and could serve it as model or
first stage. In his 1823 tract, the consciousness of modernity only ever repels
itself, so whatever is current today gets left behind, ever and again, in this
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.
362 Hans-Robert Jauss / Modernity and Literary Tradition
perpetual stop-and-start, becoming the romanticism of yesterday and thus
classical in its own right. There emerges now a new notion of classicism,
which is defined only in negative terms, by the pastness of successful works,
and no longer by some bygone perfection.
If, in the incessant conversion of the current to the classical, even mod-
ernité itself becomes antiquité, 96 then one wonders about the nature of the
beauty that this never-ending process is always producing. How can beauty
satisfy this constantly shifting ideal of nouveauté, how can it mirror in art
the unique qualities of the present age while at the same time standing in
opposition to itself, insofar as, once deemed classic, it seems immortal, im-
pervious to historical change, indeed eternal? This is the question asked by
Baudelaire in his remarks on Constantin Guys, the Peintre de la vie moderne
(1859). His answer, which, as a “théorie rationnelle et historique du beau,”
is meant to stand in opposition to conventional aesthetics, returns to Sten-
dhal’s modern definition of beauty: “que le Beau n’est que la promesse du
bonheur” (P, p. 875).97 According to Baudelaire, Stendhal was wrong to
claim that beauty is utterly subject to the ever-changing ideal of happiness
(see P, p. 876). The nature of beauty can be grasped neither by one-sidedly
surveying current trends—that is, the characteristic features of an epoch,
its fashion, its morality, and its passions—nor by simply reviewing the an-
tique store classicism of bygone masterworks, on which the aesthetic Phi-
listinism of the bourgeois is based (see P, p. 873). Beauty in the terms
demanded by Baudelaire’s consciousness of modernity is clearest in fashion
as seen by Constantin Guys, who makes an effort “de dégager de la mode
ce qu’elle peut contenir de poétique dans l’historique, de tirer l’éternel du
transitoire” (P, p. 884). Fashion is the starting point for Baudelaire’smodern
aesthetic because there is a twofold allure peculiar to it. It embodies the
poetic qualities of historical things, the eternal in the ephemeral. Beauty
steps forth in fashion, not as a timeless ideal known in advance, but rather
as an idea of beauty made by man for himself, in which the morality and
aesthetics of his period disclose themselves and which allows him to become
something like what he wants to be.98 Fashion demonstrates what Baude-
laire calls the “twofold nature of beauty,” which is his abstract definition of
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).
modernité: “La modernité, c’est le transitoire, le fugitif, le contingent, la
moitié de l’art, don’t l’autre moitié est l’éternel et l’immuable” (P, p. 884).
With this last milestone in the history of the word, our remarks have
arrived at the threshold of our own present modernity and thus at the fore-
seen endpoint. For now we can see with what justification it was said at the
outset that our preunderstanding of modernity reaches back historically to
the aesthetic and historical self-understanding of Baudelaire and his con-
temporaries, so the appearance of the new word la modernité after 1848 can
serve, for our epochal consciousness, as a boundary line between the de-
parted historical world and the familiar one. Baudelaire introduces la mod-
ernité into his ruminations on the connections between le beau, la mode, et
le bonheur expressly as a neologism.99 It is meant to name the twofold nature
of beauty, in which the vie moderne of both the historical everyday and of
current political events discloses itself to our understanding; the aesthetic
and the historical experiences of modernité coincide for Baudelaire. The
changed historical self-understanding that manifests itself in this modernity
can once again be grasped by considering the opposite number that Baude-
laire’s formulation entails. This opposite of modernité is not, as one might
expect in this case, romanticism.100 Although romanticism is in fact the past
that lies directly behind Baudelaire’s modernity, it is for that very reason
not regarded as the latter’s antithesis. Because in the process of historical
experience modernity for Baudelaire, like romanticism for Stendhal, is al-
ways separating itself from itself (“Il y a eu une modernité pour chaque
peintre ancien”) (P, p. 884), every modernité inescapably becoming an an-
tiquité in its own right, no particular past—not even, pace Benjamin, clas-
sical antiquity—can serve as constitutive antithesis to the beauty of modern
art. It is wholly in keeping with this new aesthetic experience that Baudelaire
opposes to the unstoppable, onward-rolling wheel of modernité a stationary
pole that comes into being as the past is repeatedly sloughed off. For the
producing artist, the ephemeral, the momentary, the historical is only half
of art, from which its other half, the lasting, the immutable, the poetic must
first be distilled. Similarly, the experience of modernité includes, for his-
torical consciousness, an aspect of the eternal as its opposite number. But
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.”
this is by no means a belated variant of the Platonic-Christian antithesis of
time and eternity, which romanticism had revived and worn out. This is,
rather, that antithesis’s opposite! For éternel here takes the place earlier oc-
cupied by antiquity or the classical; like ideal beauty (le beau unique et ab-
solu), the eternal (l’éternel et l’immuable) has, as the antithesis of modernité,
the character of a sloughed-off past (P, p. 875).101 Even that which appears
timelessly beautiful to us at some point had to be produced. Timeless
beauty—this necessarily follows from Baudelaire’s théorie rationnelle et his-
torique du beau and his exposition thereof with reference to fashion—is
nothing other than the idea of beauty in its status as the past, an idea of
beauty proposed and then repeatedly cast aside by men.
The exemplary art of the peintre de la vie moderne discovers in the fleeting
and the contingent an element of undying beauty; it sets poetic qualities
free in fashion and history, which classical taste had ignored or prettified.
For Baudelaire, true art, then as now, cannot do without an “élément tran-
sitoire, fugitif, dont les métamorphoses sont si fréquentes.” If it is absent,
the work of art stumbles inevitably into the empty space of a beauty as ab-
stract and indeterminate as the beauty of the only woman before the Fall.102
Eve after the Fall is the epitome of beauty in modernité’s understanding of
the world, the emblem of a revolt against the metaphysics of timeless beauty,
truth, and goodness! This bold analogy puts the seal on the antithesis of
modernité and éternel, which opens up the most recent—and for our pur-
poses last—chapter in the terminological history of the modern, but which
also testifies to the anti-Platonic impulses in Baudelaire’s aesthetic, which
cleared the way for the aesthetic experience and the new artistic canon that
characterize the modernity of our own present day.103
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).

Modernity and Its Discontents

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Modernity and Its Discontents

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Modernity and Literary Tradition

Hans Robert Jauss

Translated by Christian Thorne

Critical Inquiry 31 (Winter 2005)

H a n s R o b e r t J a u s s was emeritus professor of romance languages at the

Wissenschaftliche Zeitschrift der Karl-Marx-Universität Leipzig 12 [1963]). The following comments

73. Jean-Baptise de la Curne de Sainte-Palaye, Memoires sur l’ancienne chevalerie, considérée

92. Martini, “Modern, Die Moderne,” p. 402.

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