THE WISDOM OF THE ROMANTICS

Ten representative lives trace the amorphous outlines of the European Romantic movement.

As Kellogg acknowledges in his introduction, “Romanticism was a much messier business” than the more easily defined Enlightenment and Renaissance, subjects of the two previous books in his “Wisdom of” series. Nonetheless, a few unifying threads can be discerned in his brisk overviews of the lives and work of artists (and one philosopher), from Jean-Jacques Rousseau to Honoré de Balzac. All emphasized the importance of lived experience, whether relished with rapture in the poetry of William Wordsworth or examined with irony in the novels of Jane Austen. Even the lone philosopher, Hegel (explicated here with about as much lucidity as his knotty tomes can allow), grounded his search for Absolute Truth in empirical reality as well as abstract reasoning. The inclusion of Stendhal and Balzac, commonly viewed as realistic portraitists of young men on the make in a corrupt society, may surprise some readers, but Kellogg argues persuasively that both writers, like their antiheroes, are Romantics as much as realists. Goethe may have disowned the solipsism of his quintessentially Romantic novel The Sorrows of Young Werther in favor of a more classical style in Faust, but Kellogg demonstrates that the soul-selling doctor still has a characteristically Romantic goal: “to learn firsthand all that life has to offer.” The world-capturing aims of Alessandro Manzoni and Alexander Pushkin contrast with the intensely individual vision expressed in John Keats’ great odes, but all three relish words with a passion that is decidedly Romantic. Indeed, Kellogg reminds us, Manzoni and Pushkin basically invented their national languages in I promessi sposi and Eugene Onegin. Those who have read the books examined here may find Kellogg’s detailed exegeses rather basic, but readers unfamiliar with these seminal works of world literature will get a good sense of their significance.

An accessible introduction to a key period in Western civilization.