430964

Modernity and Literary Tradition Author(s): HansRobertJauss Source: Critical Inquiry, Vol. 31, No. 2 (Winter 2005), pp.
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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 designating, unmistakably, the unique features of an epoch. It is true that the French noun form la modernite is, like its German counterpart die Moderne, a recent coinage. Both words make their rst 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 romanticisms historical endpoint, the emergence of the neologism la modernite does in fact seem to signal a changed understanding of the world. In France, it was Baudelaire above all who promoted la modernite whose earliest known use dates to 1849, in Chateaubriands Me moires doutre-tombe1 as a slogan for a new aesthetic.2 In Germany, die Moderne had become fashionable by 1887, after Eugen Wol, in a lecture to the Berlin literary society Durch, formulated his new
1. See Paul Robert, Dictionnaire alphabe tique et analogique de la langue franc aise (Paris, 1951 64), s.v. modernite . 2. Above all in Charles Baudelaire, Le Peintre de la vie moderne, in Oeuvres comple tes de Baudelaire [Paris, 1950]; hereafter abbreviated P. See also Gerhard Hess, Die Landschaft in Baudelaires Fleurs du Mal (Heidelberg, 1953), pp. 4042.
Critical Inquiry 31 (Winter 2005) English translation 2005 by The University of Chicago. 0093-1896/05/3102-0000$10.00. All rights reserved. From Hans Robert Jauss, Literaturgeschichte als Provokation Surhkamp Frankfurt am Main 1970.
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Hans Robert Jauss / Modernity and Literary Tradition
Princip der Moderne (principle of the modern) in ten theses; although set alongside Baudelaires turn to surnaturalisme, this can only attest to a cer, harbintain national backwardness.3 And yet even Baudelaires modernite 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 nouns most recent meaning depends on the original adjective modernus, which, in turn, is part of an even older literary tradition, one of Late Latins last bequests to the modern world.4 And, at rst glance, this tradition seems perfectly poised to expose as illusory the claim that is intrinsic to the concept of modernity itselfthat the present age, generation, or epoch has a unique claim to novelty 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 Tacituss Dialogue on Orators, the dispute with the admirers of the old ways would are 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 conrm the wise words with which Tacitus has Materna settle the quarrel between Aper and Messalla: 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 without diminishing any other age.5 From this perspective, the historical selfconsciousness with which the moderni have squared o 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 European culture as the alternation of generations is in biology. The whole series of La Querelle des anciens et des modernes, which marks European literatures 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 wouldnt 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), 2:391415. 4. Ernst Robert Curtius, Europa ische 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
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of the ancient inheritance, prefashioned on classical models? Isnt our present consciousness of modernity nally 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 philological metaphysics, itself originated by the anciensthe ruse of traditions. This ruse has been variously deployed by Ernst Robert Curtius in his European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, the prototype of all scholarship on antiquitys afterlife; most impressive are the passages where Curtius adduces Pseudo-Longinuss On the Sublime, one of the works 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 rst to enunciate, however tentatively, the notion of creative literature thus yields a weighty historical point. It ares up like a mystical lantern in the twilight hours of the aging world. It lay extinguished for nearly fteen hundred years. In the dawning brilliance of Goethes youth, it ickers back to lifeas though it were still substantially the same thought, which, sadly, was strangled by traditions unbreakable 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 essential 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 antiquity 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 ancient canons normative past as preformed on the model of the ancient moderni and antiqui; to ignore the break between the ancient and Christian conceptions of modernity; and nally to absorb modernitys irreparable rupture with a historical ideala 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 conceal, 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 denition 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 consciousness 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-o of some past.
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The ordinary use of the word modern should be enough, for a start, to demonstrate that the words 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 phenomenon in this regard, modern marks the dividing line between that which is newly produced and that which the newly produced has sidelined, between 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 para tra biento t le plus vieux, cest ce qui dabord aura paru le plus moderne.6 But if what is modern today cannot in any essential way be distinguished from what will be de mode 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 a ` 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 classic. 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 examination 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 rst signs are to be found in France, among Baudelaire and his generation, whose consciousness of modernite in many respects still determines our aesthetic and historical understanding of the world.
2 How does a certain consciousness come to the fore in the appearance and history of the word modernthe consciousness, that is, of having taken a step from the old to the new? And how does the historical self-understanding of a period become tangible in the various antitheses to modernity, which is experienced, over and over again, as new? The following word history 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 reection of an experience of time, which one could, following Schelling, call the sloughing-o of the past and which can be seen as constitutive of any epochs consciousness of itself as epoch.7
6. Andre Gide, Les Faux-Monnayeurs, quoted in Robert, Dictionnaire alphabe tique et analogique de la langue franc aise, s.v. moderne. 7. Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von Schelling, Die Weltalter: Fragmente, ed. Manfred Schro ter (Munich, 1946), p. 11: How few know the genuine past! There can be no past without a powerful
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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 testies to an awareness that antiquity 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 moment. 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 Freundwhose excellent account I am following herehas emphasized with good reason that the latter is the decisive nuance, the one that justies 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 Gelasiuss Epistolae ponticum, which uses the word to set apart recent eventsadmonitiones 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 fty 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 contemporaries, a thing of the past (M, p. 28). At the beginning of the fth century, Orosius had already described his own epoch as the tempora Christiana. His philosophy of history backdated the onset of the Christian erathe germina temporis Christianito the period of peace under Augustus, with which he contrasted the relative peacelessness of the pagan past. In this version of history, which dissolves the antithesis between Christianity and the Roman Empire into the transhistorical continuity of all time since Christs 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 noneor rather, he will never emerge from her. He lives forever in her. 8. See Walter Freund, Modernus und andere Zeitbegrie 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 disgured 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. 510, 31.
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conceptual opposition between a modern present and an authoritative antiquity.10 It is in Cassiodorus, who already looks back on Rome and ancient culture as though onto a sealed past, that this opposition becomes visible for the rst time in the new verbal pair antiqui and moderni. Cassiodorus imparted a rst coloration to this consequential antithesis, which, under the term antiquitas, disconnects an exemplary past from the modernity of an onward-moving present. For him, the gothic imperial present has as its ideal and task the renewal of imperial Romes lost grandeur. In formulations like the following from his letter to SymmachusAntiquorum 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 armation of modernitys historical 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 renascences, 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 terms subsequent history, which, in the Middle Ages, exhibits the full spectrum of meanings between temporal boundary and epoch. If you follow the etymology as it has been reconstructed by Freund and Johannes Spo rl, what emerges is basically a process of progressive periodization. Edging ever forwards, 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 rst enters common use in the Carolingian Age, thus begins the ninth century by separating Charlemagnes new universal empire, understood as the seculum modernum, 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 Spo rl, Das Alte und das Neue im Mittelalter, Historisches Jahrbuch 50 (1930): 312.
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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 fourteenth century when the newest dispute between schoolsthe dispute between Ockhamite nominalism and Scotist and Thomist realismso 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 Origenes 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 watershedof the dawning of the new age, compared 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 oldthen 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 ancient pattern (EL, p. 106).16
12. See Marie-Dominique Chenu, Antiqui, moderni, Revue des sciences philosophiques et the ologiques 17 (1928): 8294. 13. See ibid., p. 88, and M, p. 100. 14. Chenu, Les Philosophes dans la philosophie chre tienne me die vale, 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 dierently. 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
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The self-consciousness with which, around 1170, a new generation of Latin and vernacular writersincluding Matthaeus of Vendo me, Jean de Anville, Walter of Cha tillon, Walter Map, Chre tien de Troyes, and Marie de Franceposition themselves against the old authors is rooted in the same ground as the twelfth-century Renaissance more generally. It is the historical self-perception of a golden age, which unlike Italys humanist Renaissance, was experienced neither as the emulation nor as the revival of antiquitas, but rather as its intensication and culmination. The twelfthcentury moderni s experience of time is, as Friedrich Ohly has shown, typological, not cyclical.17 It has the specic form of Christian historical experience: Typology takes moments separated in time and relates them to one another as the intensication 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, rst employed by Bernard de Chartres and later interpreted in antiquitys 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 admiration one can also hear the consciousness of a typological intensication 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 mentors could also be validated by a sentence from Priscianuss Latin grammar: quanto iuniories, tanto perspicaciores. The prologue to the Lais by the vernacular poet Marie de France gives some indication of how that sentence was cited and understood: The ancients already knew that their descendants would be more clever because they (the successors) can write commentaries on a texts 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. 35069. 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. Bucks 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 Salisburys 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. 916. We are following the interpretation put forth by Leo Spitzer, Romanische Literaturstudien 19361956 (Tu bingen, 1959),
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Priscianuss 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 hiddenwhich is to say, the Christianmeaning of ancient writings for the rst time because these meanings had remained in darkness for the ancient 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 Clige s (circa 1176), by her contemporary Chre tien de Troyes, bespeaks the pride of one who sees his own time as the pinnacle of world-historical progress, which need therefore advance no further. Knighthood and knowledge, 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 worlds 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. 314. On the medieval use of Priscianus, see Spo rl, 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 quele i soit retenue Et que li leus li abelisse Tant que ja mes de France nisse Lenors qui si est arestee. Des lavoit as autres prestee, Mes des Grezois ne des Romains Ne dit an mes ne plus ne mains; Daus est la parole remese Et estainte la vive brese. [Chre tien de Troyes, Clige s, ed. Wendelin Foerster (Halle, 1910), ll. 3044, pp. 12] On the Translatio studii and Translatio imperii, see Buck, Gab es einen Humanismus im Mittelalter? p. 226.
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modernitas has been unpopular (omnibus seculis sua displacuit modernitas), so his own work will only command respect after some remote future 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 dened here for the rst time: when he calls our times modernitas, he species 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 classication 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 Maps 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 rst known usage of modernitas is therefore derogatory. The new term, as Freund has shown, is part and parcel of reformist thought during the Conict 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 consciousness, kicks o a development that will remain conspicuous throughout 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 beginnings of the humanist Renaissance, we will rediscover, though under rather dierent circumstances, the Christian moderni s three-stage theory of his22. 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 inniti lii, qui ex patrum et avorum relationibus certissime teneant que non viderunt. Centum annos qui euxerunt, 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 Spo rl, Das Alte und das Neue im Mittelalter, pp. 33641.
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tory and especially that middle phase, called media aetas in the typologically 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, orent ingenia) points to something more than the changed consciousness of a single epoch.26 It has become 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, canstraightaway, from its very onsetbecome conscious of itself has clearly hardened into a scheme for historical thought, and this makes it dicult to recognize the utterly dierent experience that characterizes the thresholds to other epochsthe beginning of the Enlightenment, for instance. For the step across such thresholds is not always bound up with the perception that, lo, everything has become new again. Huttens 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 o 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 nally 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 Catullus manuscript, we nd another image, in addition to that of return, for the dawning of a new intellectual golden age, and that is the image of resurrection (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 fulllment, the time of the church and of eschatology (p. 359). 26. O seculum! o litterae! Iuvat vivere, etsi quiescere nondum iuvat, Bilibalde. Vigent studia, orent ingenia. Heus tu, accipe laqueum, barbaries, exilium prospice (Ulrich von Hutten, letter to Bilibald Pirckheymer, 25 Oct. 1518, Schriften, ed. Eduard Bo cking, 7 vols. [Leipzig, 1859], 1:217). 27. Questi fu quel Dante, il quale primo doveva al ritorno delle Muse, sbandite dItalia, aprir la via. . . . Per costui la morta poesia meritamente si puo ` dire suscitata (Boccaccio, Vita di Dante [135759], 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 nibus exul (quoted in R, p. 13).
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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 consciousness 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 modernity of the incipient Renaissance at rst negates the threefold division of history that would later emerge from this moment in the form of a worldhistorical framework: antiquity, middle ages, and modernity.31 The humanists 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 o, which for them are a dark age, but in some rediscovered antiquitas 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 rst owering, 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 delity.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 Sa kularisierung der universalhistorischen Auassung (Go ttingen, 1960), the notion of the media aetas or medium aevum was current among the humanists as early as 1518. The rst 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): 325. 32. The publication of one of the Strasbourg Colloquia is enough to provide a glimpse into this phenomenon. See LHumanisme me die val dans les litte ratures romanes du XIIe au XIVe sie `cle, ed. Anthime Fourrier (Paris, 1964). The papers collected here examine lhumanisme me die val in the vernacular literatures during and after the Renaissance of the twelfth century, and they come, via dierent paths, to the same nding. 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 timein pseudo-ancient romances, which, with
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regard themselves as separated from their medieval forebears by a new era in which ancient culture has been reawakened; for the moment, they possess, above all, a rather dierent 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 aemulatio. In the notion of the Dark Ages, we see the rst signs of the Renaissances new understanding of history, which has made it possible, in historiographical 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 history 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 Diocletians 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 signicant 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 Petrarchs 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 societa ` : 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, 193342], 2:58). See also Theodor E. Mommsen, Petrarchs Conception of the Dark Ages, Speculum 17 (Apr. 1942): 22642, esp. p. 232, whose account I follow here. 34. Petrarch, Epistolae de rebus familiaribus, quoted in Mommsen, Petrarchs Conception of the Dark Ages, p. 234.
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occupies the position that, for medieval historians, had been reserved for the soteriological break that was Christs birth. But both this new worldhistorical 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 occasionally uses this metaphor in its older sense,36 was presumably the rst 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 o the other. And yet the competition between linear and cyclical history, which would play such an important role in the further course of the conict between the anciens and the modernes, has its origins in Petrarchs reinterpretation of the light metaphor to describe Romes 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 fulllment of that hope, Huttens contemporaries saw in the present-day ourishing of learning and the arts the revival of antiquitys lost grandeur, there appeared on the heels of the light metaphor the cyclical periodization of history, which had remained implicit in Petrarchs age of darkness.39 Hoc enim seculum tanquam aureum liberales disciplinas, ferme iam extinctas 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): 83871 and La Rinascita 3 (1940): 16386, 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, 9.45157, quoted in Mommsen, Petrarchs 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 ame of enlightenment. It is the sun de lantiqua 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 Selbstversta ndnis der Neuzeit [Mainz, 1965], p. 343). 40. Ficino, letter dated 13 Sept. 1492, quoted in Fritz Schalk, Das goldene Zeitalter als Epoche, Archiv fu r das Studium der neueren Sprache und Literaturen 199 (1962): 87. 41. Examples can be found in ibid.
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alternation of light and dark to the cyclical return of the golden age. But with this short step the dark ages between Romes fall and its return shrivel to a mere passageway, the memory of which is snued 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 emulationperhaps, 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, universalist 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 Acade mie Franc aise. 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 understanding that would undo the initial opposition in a way that no one had anticipated. In this quarrel, which raged because the modern party had pitted 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 dierent circumstances. 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 doro (quoted in ibid., p. 88). 43. See the Encyclope die, ou, Dictionnaire raisonne des sciences, des arts, et des me tiers, ed. Denis Diderot and Jean dAlembert, 36 vols. (Geneva, 1778), 12:367: Ce Perrault, et quelques autres, dont le versicateur Boileau ne tait pas en e tat dappre cier le me rite: La Mothe, Terrason, Boindin, Fontenelle, sous lesquels la raison a fait de si grand progre ` s.
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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 Paralle `le des anciens et des modernes, Perrault oers as his chief argument against the prejudicial notion that antiquity is to modernity as teacher is to pupil que cest nous qui sommes les Anciens. The Greeks and Romans should not really be called les anciens because successors are heirs to their predecessors knowledge and the present-day moderns command the heights of all previous human experience, which means that the modernes must be the more experienced 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, rst 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 rst to glean this insight, before Bacon and Giordano Bruno, and he has established, as well, its importance for modernitys self-understanding.45 Perrault would, in later years, often adduce the sentence veritas temporis lia 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 consciousness, one that understood modernity as a new beginning and neverending task.47 Immediately following his argument that the modernes are the genuine ancients, he claries 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 a ge 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 sie `cle de Louis XIV, might decline again.48 Fontenelle also sees the human race as having arrived at its virilite , but then breaks o the analogy so as to avoid the unavoidable prognosis of old age and death.49 This modernitys new consciousnesswhich, under the sign
44. Charles Perrault, Paralle `le 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 Selbstversta ndnis der Neuzeit, pp. 35760 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, quil ny a rien que le temps ne perfectionne (PA, p. 443). 47. See, for instance, Blaise Pascal, Traite du vide (1647), Oeuvres comple `tes, ed. Michel de Guern (Paris, 1998), pp. 452531. See also Blumenberg, Kopernikus im Selbstversta ndnis der Neuzeit, p. 357 and p. 359 n. 2. 48. Nest-il pas vray que la dure e du monde est ordinairement regarde e comme celle de la vie dun homme, quelle a eu son enfance, sa jeunesse et son a ge parfait, et quelle est pre sentement dans sa viellesse (PA, p. 113). 49. See Hans Robert Jauss, introduction to PA, p. 22.
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of scientic progress, revolts against the anciens regard for antiquity as origin and norm and thus also against the self-understanding of an accomplished French classicismis caught between understanding its own present as humanitys twilight and, alternately, seeing history in the light of critical reason as moving inexorably onwards in the age of progress. The literary conict at the turn of the seventeenth to the eighteenth century incorporates this ambivalence in the following way: the modern faction tries to undo the contradiction between the concept of perfection (as it pertains to the ne arts) and the concept of perfectability (as it pertains to science and learning) by resolving them into the perspective of human historys general and continuous progress. And yet the large-scale comparison 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 querelles 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 ancient 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 naturally equal; and, second, they began, as well, to subject the ancients creations to the absolute criteria of bon gou t. They began, in other words, to bring the ancients to the bar of classicisms prevailing tastes (les biense ances). At rst, the anciens responded, defensively, by arguing that every period had its own distinct customs and thus its own distinct taste, as well. They demanded 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 beaute universelle there was also beau relatif. The gradual dismantling 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 ne 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 dierences between an50. On this point and for the following discussion, see Jauss, introduction to PA, pp. 4360.
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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 rst to take stock of this development: nous envisageons la nature autrement que les anciens ne lont regarde. As early as 1685, he laid down a challenge, later to be met by Montesquieu: that the dierent characters of ancient and modern epochstheir ge nie du sie `cle be reviewed in art as in the changing forms of religion, government, custom, and other such phenomena.51 With this new view of antiquity, modernitys self-understanding was bound to change as well. Signs of a new consciousnessan awareness that the beam of enlightened reason has illuminated the way to a new and eminent age, unlike any previous epochcan be found as early as the querelle and multiply in its wake. In his Nouvelles de la re publique des lettres, Pierre Bayle speaks of a sie `cle philosophehe 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 sie `cle he seizes hold of a notion that had hitherto been reserved, in the main, for Christian doctrine: Cest a ` nous qui vivons dans un sie ` cle plus e claire de se parer le bon grain davec la paille . . . . On se pique dans ce sie ` cle de tre extre ` mement e claire .52 In the Enlightenments early years, the lumie `res de la raison square o against divine illumination, the lumie `re du Ciel. In the course of the eighteenth century, le sie `cle eclaire will come to be identied more and more with ones own century. In 1719, for example, a journalist will speak of the sie ` cle e claire ou ` nous sommes, 53 which has produced more writers than any other period. The enlightened age is a sie `cle eclaire , lled with pride to its modern and civilized peak, claiming for itself the title sie `cle humain, sie `cle philosophique. 54 As of the midcentury, it is common for contemporary literature to use sie `cle des lumie `res 55 and sie `cle philosophique interchangeably with dix-huitie `me sie `cle. The emphatic use of sie `cle is a manifestation of the Enlighteners historical selfconsciousness and contributes to the words taking on a new meaning centuryin French in precisely this period. On the one hand, the old,
51. Saint-Evremond, Sur les poe `mes des anciens, in Oeuvres, ed. Rene de Planhol, 3 vols. (Paris, 1927), 1:279. 52. See Schalk, Zur Semantik von Aufkla rung in Frankreich, in Festschrift W. v. Wartburg, ed. Kurt Baldinger, 2 vols. (Tu bingen, 1968), 1:25166. 53. See Werner Krauss, Der Jahrhundertbegri im 18. Jahrhundert, Studien zur deutschen und franzo sischen Aufkla rung (Berlin, 1963), pp. 940, esp. p. 14: The following instances come from the sphere of Francophone journalism in Holland: Dans le sie ` cle e claire ou ` nous sommes, il ne sagit pas de faire le docteur. And in the same connection: vous savez quil ny a jamais eu de sie ` cle si fertile en auteurs, que celui dans lequel nous avons lhonneur de vivre. 54. See ibid., p. 13. 55. See Krauss, Zur Periodisierung der Aufkla rung, in Grundpositionen der franzo sischen Aufkla rung, ed. Krauss and Hans Mater (Berlin, 1955), p. viii.
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Christian sense of sie `cle 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 sie `cle, 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 sie `cles temporal compass outgrew the sie `cle de Louis XIV, eventually coinciding with the beginning and end of the new century, which, over and against the beau sie `cle just passed, claimed a historical mission of its own.56 The external classication 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 Abbe de Saint-Pierres 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 novels 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 futures 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 nal years, conducted the querellea form that Schiller and Friedrich Schlegel would take up again around 1800, namely, the comparative parallel.59 Since the Renaissance, this literary genre had been cultivated after various ancient models, especially Plutarchs; it ourished 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 Jahrhundertbegri im 18. Jahrhundert, pp. 911, 17. 57. See Schalk, Das goldene Zeitalter als Epoche, p. 96 n. 27. 58. See Krauss, Sie `cle im achtzehnter Jahrhundert, Beitra ge zur romanischen Philologie 1 (1961): 95 and Der Jahrhundertbegri im 18. Jahrhundert, p. 18. 59. See section 2 of this essay.
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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 Lyce e 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, Cre 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. Chateaubriands Ge nie du Christianisme (1802), which is still organized much like Perraults comparison of the arts and sciences as practiced by the anciens on one hand and the modernes on the other, can surely be regarded as the last signicant work in this genre. But it also spells the end of the vision of history developed by Renaissance humanism. For the historical parallel, which began as a literary form, was more than a neutral framework of comparison. It presupposed a standard of comparisonthe point de la perfectionand thus also an analogy with organic growth or biological lifespan. This is the analogy used by the humanists (and at rst by the moderns as well) to trace the course of history in generalthe crowning epochs of antiquity and the eta ` modernaas 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 another 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 evenby the lights of this same point de la perfectionbe outdone. To the extent, however, that a new experience of history included both antiquity and modernity in the irreversible progression of historical time, making all epochs seem equally perfect (or, in a later formulation of Rankes, equally close to God),62 the
60. See Buck, Das heroische und das sentimentale Antike-Bild in der franzo sischen Literatur des 18. Jahrhunderts, Germanisch-romanische Monatsschrift 13 (Apr. 1963): 166. 61. On Renaissance humanisms 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): 322. On this theorys 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
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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 conside re es dans leurs rapports avec la revolution fran caise. 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 lhomme faible dans ses moyens et dans son ge nie, ne fait que se re pe ter sans cesse.63 The comparison is carried out on ve ancient and seven modern revolutions 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 extensively 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 innityspirals, in other words.65 Ancient and modern societies are funGerold, 2 vols. [Munich, 1953], 2:31). This break away from humanisms cyclical theory of history is also clear in another of Herders moves. He gets himself out of the contradiction between, on the one hand, the new sense of antiquity and modernitys historical dierence and, on the other hand, the old historiography of humanitys 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 Providences 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 atthat is, death! a worn out corpse lying in bloodand at that point, in the north, a new man was born. [Ibid., 2:39] 63. Franc ois-Rene Chateaubriand, Essai historique, politique, et moral sur les re volutions anciennes et modernes, ed. L. Louvet (Paris, n.d.), p. 613; hereafter abbreviated EH. See also Reinhard Koselleck, Der neuzeitliche Revolutionsbegri als geschichtliche Kategorie, Studium Generale 22 (1969): 82538. 64. Mobstinant dans lEssai a ` juger le pre sent par le passe , je de duis bien des conse quences, mais je pars dun mauvais principe; je nie aujourdhui la majeure de mes raisonnements, et tous ces raisonnments tombent a ` terre. Dazu geho re vor allem der Irrtum de vouloir conclure de la socie te ancienne a ` la socie te moderne; de juger, les uns par les autres, des temps et des hommes qui navoient aucun rapport (EH, pp. 61415). 65. Le ge nie de lhomme ne circule point dans un cercle dont il ne peut sortir. Au contraire (et pour continuer limage), il trace des cercles concentriques qui vont en se largissant, et dont la circonfe rence saccro tra sans cesse dans un espace inni (EH, p. 614). The gure of the spiral
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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 historicismthe 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 culminated, at last, in the historical consciousness of a new generation, which congured 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 reected in etymology as well. One could show in detail how moderne gradually withdrew from the antithesis to ancien and entered instead into other oppositions. Replacing the polemically laden term ancien, antique will now often take over the function of designating the modern worlds historical distance from the ancient. When, in its 1779 edition, the Encyclope die 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 gou t, for instance, gothic architecture. Modern tastewhich, in the very next sentence, makes the overtly classicist move of pledging its allegiance to the gou t de lantiquehere sees its antipodes in Gothic taste.66 Twenty years later, it is precisely the gou t de gothique, the return to the Middle Ages as undertaken by Chauteaubriands poetry or the rst historical novels, that inaugurates a new self-understanding of modernity, which, in turn, places its historically variable opposition to antiquity in a dierent 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 clasmakes possible a compromise between a historical progression that is periodic and one that runs irreversibly into innity, but it also leads out the analogy with organic life. 66. Naude appelle modernes parmi les auteurs latins, tous ceux qui ont e crits apre ` s Boe ` ce. On a beaucoup dispute de la pre e minence des anciens sur les modernes; et quoique ceux-ci aient eu de nombreux partisans, les premiers nont pas manque dillustres de fenseurs. Moderne se dit encore en matie ` re de gou t: ainsi lon dit larchitecture moderne, par opposition a ` larchitecture gothique, quoique larchitecture moderne ne soit belle, quautant quelle approche du gou t de lantique. [Encyclope die, 22:24]
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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. Whats more, when, in the eighteenth century, the age of Louis XIV slipped over the horizon of lived experience, broke away to form a completed past, and was elevated to the status of Frances classical age, the meaning of the phrase nos auteurs classique did not narrow suciently to serve as a periodizing term.67 As late as 1810, Madame de Stae l had to go out of her way to explain that classique in A. W. Schlegels sense of the word was not a synonym for parfait but referred rather to the two great periods in world literature: Je men sers ici dans une autre acception, en conside rant la poe sie classique comme celle des anciens, et la poe sie romantique comme celle qui tient de quelque manie ` re aux traditions chevalereques. Cette division se rapporte e galement aux deux e ` res du monde: celle qui a pre ce de le stablissement du christianisme, et celle qui la 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 irretrievable, 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 Herders and Schlegels ideas, the relationship indicated by this antithesis had already developed in Francethe 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 sie `cle de Louis XIV, but from 1751 on he employs the formulation nos auteurs classiques; see Pierre Moreaus Le Classicisme des romantiques (Paris, 1932), p. 5. Between these two dates, there had appeared the programmatic poem Le Temple du gou t, in which Voltaire constructs a rst 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 Encyclope dies entry on classique: Classique se dit aussi des auteurs me mes modernes qui peuvent e tre propose s pour mode ` le par la beaute du style. Tout e crivain qui pense solidement et qui sait sexprimer dune manie ` re a ` plaire aux personnes de gou t appartient a ` cette classe: on ne doit chercher des auteurs classiques que chez les nations ou ` la raison est parvenue a ` un haut degre de culture. 68. See Madame de Stae l, De lAllemagne (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 go ut moderne. 69. On the basis of new material, Krauss has, in the end, corrected any prejudice about the Enlightenments hostility to history (Krauss, Franzo sische Aufkla rung und deutsche Romantik,
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by the end of the querelle, that the ancient and modern worlds were simply dierent. 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 periodswhich Fe nelon, in his 1714 Lettre a ` lAcade mie, elevates to a demand that a history be written on the basis of the detail des moeurs de la nationalso opened ones eyes to the te ne `bres de notre antiquite moderne. 70 Both the rst attempts at a new, historical criticism (which, after Raymond Naves, are connected with the eorts of the Acade mie des Inscriptions et des Belles Lettres) and the beginnings of the rst, 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 towards one another and further apart. On the one hand, one begins to regard antiquitywhich has gone from being an emulatable model to a historical antitypein ever-changing stylizations of its historical otherness: in the idealized, bucolic images of its original simplicite and na vete ; or, alternately, in the primal poetry of its archaism and barbarity; or in the lionized conception of the political life of the Greek polis and the Roman Republic; or nallyafter the excavations of Herculanum and Pompeiin the sentimental beauty of its ruins.72 On the other hand, the Middle Ages get recovered, 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 naWissenschaftliche Zeitschrift der Karl-Marx-Universita t Leipzig 12 [1963]). The following comments complement his thesis by examining the perspectives that opened out for the Enlightenments historical thought from la querelle des anciens et des modernes. 70. Le point le plus ne cessaire et le plus rare pour un historien est quil sache exactement la forme du gouvernement et le de tail des moeurs de la nation dont il e crit lhistoire, pour chaque sie ` cle. Un peintre qui ignore ce quon nomme il costume ne peint rien avec ve rite (Franc ois de Salignac Fe nelon, Lettre a M. Dacier, sur les occupations de lAcade mie, Oeuvres de Fe nelon, 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. 219by my reckoning the earliest introduction of antiquite 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 Gou t de Voltaire (Paris, 1938), pp. 10818; Henri Comte de Boulainvilliers Essai sur la noblesse de France is from 1732, Abbe Du Boss Histoire critique de le stablissement de la Monarchie Franc oise dans les Gaules from 1734. 72. Buck has discussed this development under the rubric of antiquitys afterlife; see Buck, Das heroische und das sentimentale Antike-Bild in der franzo sischen 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. Antiquitys changed statusfrom model to antitypewould make clear the historical process whose meaning has been mostly profoundly and decisively delineated by Schiller, in the antithesis between the na ve and the sentimental.
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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 Me mories sur lancienne chevalerie to the Acade mie des Inscriptions. He concluded, after 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 Ge nie du Christianisme of 1802): Un contraste singulier de religion & de galanterie, de magnicence & de simplicite , de bravoure & de soumission; un me lange dadresse & de force, de patience & de courage, de belles actions produites par un motif chime rique & de functions Presque serviles ennobles par un motif e leve . Moeurs a ` la fois grossie ` res et respectables, aussi dignes de tre e tudie es sur-tout par un Franc ois, que celles des Grecs ou des Orientaux, comparables en bien des points, & me mes supe ierues en quelques uns, a ` celles des temps he roiques chante s par Home ` re.73 The image of the Middle Ages that is commonly attributed to Chateaubriand and Madame de Stae l can, in many respects, already be detected in Sainte-Palaye and the works of the other Enlightenment scholars who followed his lead by researching and editing medieval literature. All that was left for the Ge nie du Christianisme was to carry out the analogies already sketched out between the two antiquitiesthe old, heathen, heroic age and the modern, Christian one. The innovation hereChateaubriands distinctive contributionlies, then, in his modern poetics, which ushers in romanticism, the age of modernity (la ge 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, suspended in the opposition between barbaric social conditions and a perfect
73. Jean-Baptise de la Curne de Sainte-Palaye, Memoires sur lancienne chevalerie, conside re e comme un etablissement politique et militaire, 3 vols. (Paris, 175981), 1:8. 74. See Chateaubriand, Ge nie du Christianisme (Paris, 1948), bk. 2, chap. 11, Le Guerrier De nition du beau ide al; hereafter abbreviated GC; see esp. the following passage: Si au contraire vous chantez la ge moderne, vous serez oblige de bannir la ve rite de votre ouvrage, et de vous jeter a ` la fois dans le beau ide al moral et dans le beau ide al physique. Trop loin de la nature et de la religion sous tous les rapports, on ne peut repre senter de ` lement linte rieur de nos me nages, et moins encore le fond de nos coeurs. La chevalerie seule ore le beau me lange de la ve rite et la ction. [P. 197]
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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 whi of the faraway (GC, p. 195).75 Modernitys sense of self, which Chateaubriand denes as an indeterminacy of the passions unknown to antiquity and that he personied in the gure of Rene , transcends the contemporary because it experiences beauty only in the no-longer; it experiences the authentic only in the sentimental return to na vete . The Ge nie 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 poetrythe word romantic, whose history 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 landscapethe lure of the faraway and the perception of unconstrained natureso tightly together that the turn of the centurys generation found its consciousness of modernity aptly expressed in the correspondence between the two? The major stages in the words history sketched out here can be reduced to a common denominator, which Friedrich Schlegel has surely given its sharpest formulation: the separation of modern from ancient art is directed by governing concepts; it is articial culture. The prehistory of the romantic oers the best imaginable example of the articial origin of modern poetry.76 The word was rst 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 inte re t; mais nous aimons a ` entendre raconter des faits obscurs qui sont de ja ` loin de nous. Cest quau fond les plus grands e ve nements de la terre sont petits en eux-me mes: notre a me, qui sent ce vice des aaires humaines, et qui tend sans cesse a ` limmensite , ta che de ne les voir que dans le vague pour les agrandir. [GC, p. 195] ber das Studium der griechischen Poesie, ed. Paul Hankammer 76. See Friedrich Schlegel, U (Godesberg, 1947), p. 62: Art must follow nature; articial 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 nds unmistakable traces of the articial 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.
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the vernacular) to designate the most successful postancient genre, the romance (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 romantic appears for the rst time in England between 1650 and 1660 in various forms and spellings.77 It means resembling the old romances and is thus the opposite of the true, the nonctional, or the prosaically real.78 From this root meaningsomething that only happens in romances, not in real lifethere emerge side-by-side both a derogatory meaning and a laudatory one. On the one hand, the word romantic develops into a byword for the improbable, the merely ctional, 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 imagination did not cease to be alluring for romance readers for whom the improbability 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 comparable 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 1800the 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. 317; hereafter abbreviated FW. 78. See Fernand Baldensperger, Romantique, ses analogues et ses e quivalents, Harvard Studies and Notes in Philology and Literature 19 (1937): 13105. Baldenberger, to whom we have referred for all earlier literature, gives as rst citation the following title from the year 1650: Th. Bayly, Herba Parietis: Or, the Wallower . . . Being a History Which Is Partly True, Partly Romantic, Morally Divine. 79. Thus in Goethes 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 e quivalents, p. 75. 80. The following citationfrom the entry on romantisch in the Grimm Brothers dictionary sums up this development: Hartenstein, in the rst 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 Wo rterbuch [Leipzig, 1893], p. 1155, s.v. romantisch).
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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. 1011). A few years later, in Samuel Pepyss diary, we nd the rst evidence of the extension of romantic to describe an out-of-the-ordinary event. At a funeral, a group of simple sailors movingly declare their loyalty to their dead commander, which Pepys introduces with the following words: There happened this extraordinary caseone 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 poetry over history, though in Pepyss comments it serves only to give the poetry of life an edge over prosaic reality. The romantic moment is distinct because it fullls an expectation that ordinarily only a romanceand not real lifecould redeem. In these terms, romanticism is an attitude that sees itself as viewing life through the medium of literary experience and sensation. This is no less true of its further development, in which romantic is transferred from old castles and romancelike settings to unconstrained nature. The articial 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 sentiments derived from poetry and ction (FW, p. 13). The texts show step by step how the romantic qualities of landscapes were rst viewed by way of analogy with descriptions in romances,82 from which they later became more and more detached so that ever since Addisons Remarks on Italy (1705) and Thomsons Seasons (172630) 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 romanesque 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, 189399), 5:307. 82. Thus, for instance, John Evelyns 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 e quivalents, p. 25). 83. See James Thomsons Seasons, quoted in FW, p. 11: oaks romantic, romantic mountain, where the dun umbradge oer the falling strem, romantic, hangs.
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paysages [1777]), also explains why the word pittoresque is not an adequate substitute for romantic in this context.84 Like the romanesque, the picturesque 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 eect nature engenders: Si la situation pittoresque enchante les yeux, si la situation poe tique inte resse lesprit et la me moire, retrac ant les scenes acradiennes en nous, si lune et lautre peuvent e tre forme es par le peintre, et la poe ` te, il est une autre situation que la nature seule peut orir: cest la situation Romantique.85 The romantic qualities of nature are here understood as an eect 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 romantique had imported into it from the world of romance, and yet all memory of the articial formation of the romantic sense of nature is not thereby extinguished. As late as 1798, the Dictionnaire de lAcade mie retains, in its explanation of romantique, the literary analogy that underwrites its original function: Il se dit ordinairement des lieux, des paysages, qui rappellent a ` limagination les descriptions de poe mes 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 Stae l. Romanticism understood as the aesthetic experience of nature, which Chateaubriand described in his chapter on the modern poe sie descriptive that Christianity had made possiblehe called it the poetry of solitude86 this romanticism had to fuse rst with romanticism understood as the allure, rst 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 nest que pittoresque, cest un point de le tendue qui pre te au peintre et qui me rite de tre distingue et saisi par lart. Mais sil est Romantique, on de sire sy reposer, loeil de pla it a ` le regarder et biento t limagination attendrie le peuple de sce ` nes inte ressantes (quoted in Baldensperger, Romantique, ses analogues et ses e quivalents, p. 76). 85. Quoted in Robert, Dictionnaire alphabe tique et analogique de la langue franc aise, s.v. romantique. To the quoted passage, Girardin adds the following explanation: Jai pre fe re le mot anglais, Romantique, parce que celui-ci de signe pluto t la fable du roman, et lautre . . . la situation, et limpression touchante que nous en recevons. 86. Chateaubriand: Jusqua ` ce moment la solitude avait e te regarde e comme areuse; mais les chre tiens lui trouve ` rent mille charmes. Les anachore ` tes e criverent de la douceur du rocher et des de lices de la contemplation: cest le premier pas de la poe sie descriptive (GC, bk. 1, p. 233).
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the old romances to the Italian romantic epic and then further on to Wieland, explaining how it is that romantic could come, over the second half of the eighteenth century, to describe the entire period of chivalric and troubadour poetry (see FW, p. 15).87 It may be enough to adduce a passage from Herders tract Auch eine Philosophie der Geschichte zur Bildung der Menschheit, which shows that the word romantisch, as a periodizing term, still preserved something of the aesthetic bearing that seemed most tting 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 nowbetween the Romans and usas a ghost, a romantic adventure; once it was nature, it wastruth.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 something to this image of the gothic past, and this new element accounts for its romantic character: once it was nature, it wastruth. It is not yet the rediscovered national and Christian past but rather its irrecoverably vanished presentthe now improbable, but once true adventure of bygone timethat 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 denition, 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 testies most beautifully: The so-called romantic quality of a region 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 worlds totality!91 In
87. See Richard Ullmann and Helene Gotthard, Geschichte des Begries 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 Greeksand indeed found points of comparison. The possible aliation between the two demands closer examination. 90. See Goethe, maxim 868 (written between 1818 and 1827), Maximen und Reexionen, in Goethes Werke: Hamburger Ausgabe, ed. Erich Trunz (Munich, 1981), 12:488. Compare the following sentence from GC, p. 192: Enn, les images favorites des poe ` tes enclins a ` la re verie sont presque toutes enprunte es dobjets ne gatifs, tels que le silence des nuits, lombre des bois, la solitude des montagnes, la paix des tombeaux, qui ne sont que labsence du bruit, de la lumie ` re, des hommes et des inquie tudes de la vie. sthetischen in der 91. The relevant discussion is Joachim Ritter, LandschaftZur Funktion des A modernen Gesellschaft (Munich, 1963)
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this bearing, which looks into the distant reaches of history to nd the truth of a nature that was and looks into the nearness of the natural surroundings to nd the absent totality, humanitys 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 conict with the present age and no longer as an antithesis to the olden days. Regardless of whether they located their historical archetype in the transguring distance of the Christian Middle Ages or expected the peak of modern culture to arrive in the future in the form of Friedrich Schlegels aesthetic revolution, discontent with ones 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 modernity in a rather dierent relationship to history.
9 In romanticisms historical self-conception, the consciousness of modernity 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 modernitys loosening itself from its equation with the romantic, an equation canonized by A. W. Schlegel. If the symbiosis of the romantic and the modern falls prey to the terms oft-observed dynamicif, that is, a new consciousness of the modern comes to the fore, determined to be more modern than the romanticthen something emerges at this point that we have yet to encounter in the history of the term. While the word modernes semiotic compass is busy narrowing itself from the Christian age in its entirety to the life span of a single generation, nally shriveling away to the fashionable alternation of the latest literary trends, the newly coined term modernite no longer even understands itself as epochally opposed to some determinate past. The consciousness of modernity that succeeds romanticisms 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 romantic to the classical is reduced to the relative opposition between whatever, for a given set of contemporaries, is current and those same things appearance to the following generation as overtaken and outmoded. And in the reection on this process of art and tastes accelerating historical change
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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 Solgers 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 modernnow whittled down to the present, the current, the realisticand, by identifying it with the Zeitgeist, 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 reversals rst moment, which sets the ball rolling, leading again to that modernite which only ever distinguishes itself from itself. It was Stendhal who, in his great essay Racine et Shakespeare (18231825), 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 generations special, indeed unprecedented, historical experience. De me moire dhistorien, jamais peuple na e prouve , dans ses moeurs et dans ses plaisirs, de changement plus rapide et plus total que celui de 1780 a ` 1823; et lon veut nous donner toujours la me me literature.93 For Stendhal, history since 1789 stands in complete contrast to its entire course heretofore. He nds in the revolution an event separating the Franc ais 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 nd the classics, their comedy and their pathos alike, unbearable (see RS, pp. 79, 45). The knowledge that the course of history has become utterly dierent 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 ancien re gime not only by its new constitution, its habits and its ideas, but also by its taste, by a dierent 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 inniment ces sortes de classiques, et je les plains de tre ne s dans un sie ` cle ou ` les ls ressemblent si peu a ` leurs pe ` res. Quel changement de 1785 a ` 1824! Depuis deux mille ans que nous savons lhistoire du monde, une re volution aussi brusque dans les habitudes, les ide es, les croyances, nest peut-e tre jamais arrive e (RS, p. 91).
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those qualities that ones grandfathers found most delightful in literature that now make the grandchildren yawn. If one regards its eects, beauty is directly beautiful only for its initial public, the one for which it was produced, 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 denition of the romantic, which broke with the previous history of the word, converting 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 eld of tension, over against the real and the everyday. The romantic is rather the latest trend, whatever is beautiful nowwhich, once outmoded, will have to forfeit its immediate allure, capable then of arousing a merely historical interest: Le romaticisme est lart de presenter aux peoples les oeuvres litte raires qui, dans le tat actuel de leurs habitudes et de leurs croyances, sont susceptibles de leur donner le plus de plaisir possible. Le classicisme, au contraire, leur pre sente la litte rature qui donnait le plus grand plaisir possible a ` leurs arrie ` re-grandspe ` res (RS, p. 39). With this denition, 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: Sophocle et Euripide furent e minemment romantiques (RS, p. 39). Stendhals notion of the romantic takes over the original function of the Latin modernus: to designate the historical now of the present; it gives the modern the meaning of the highest worth and explains everything classicalin purely functional terms, via a simple shift of historical modalitiesas the romanticism that once was. And with that we have come full circle, and the subsequent experience of modernity is set. In contrast to the tradition of the term moderne up to this point, the word romantiquein its new meaning of current, that which culminates in the now of the presentis 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 rst 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.
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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 dened 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 modernite itself becomes antiquite , 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 nouveaute , 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, impervious 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 the orie rationnelle et historique du beau, is meant to stand in opposition to conventional aesthetics, returns to Stendhals modern denition of beauty: que le Beau nest 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 trendsthat is, the characteristic features of an epoch, its fashion, its morality, and its passionsnor by simply reviewing the antique store classicism of bygone masterworks, on which the aesthetic Philistinism of the bourgeois is based (see P, p. 873). Beauty in the terms demanded by Baudelaires consciousness of modernity is clearest in fashion as seen by Constantin Guys, who makes an eort de de gager de la mode ce quelle peut contenir de poe tique dans lhistorique, de tirer le ternel du transitoire (P, p. 884). Fashion is the starting point for Baudelairesmodern 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 Baudelaire calls the twofold nature of beauty, which is his abstract denition of
96. This formulation occurs in Baudelaire: En un mot, pour que toute modernite soit digne de devenir antiquite , il faut que la beaute myste rieuse que la vie humaine y met involontairement en ait e te 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. Lide e que lhomme se fait du beau simprime dans tout son ajustement, chionne ou raidit son habit, arrondit ou aligne son geste, et me me pe ne ` tre subtilement, a ` la longue, les traits de son visage. Lhomme nit par ressembler a ` ce quil voudrait e tre (P, p. 874).
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modernite : La modernite , cest le transitoire, le fugitif, le contingent, la moitie de lart, dont lautre moitie est le ternel et limmuable (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 foreseen endpoint. For now we can see with what justication 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 contemporaries, so the appearance of the new word la modernite after 1848 can serve, for our epochal consciousness, as a boundary line between the departed historical world and the familiar one. Baudelaire introduces la modernite 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 modernite 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 Baudelaires formulation entails. This opposite of modernite is not, as one might expect in this case, romanticism.100 Although romanticism is in fact the past that lies directly behind Baudelaires modernity, it is for that very reason not regarded as the latters antithesis. Because in the process of historical experience modernity for Baudelaire, like romanticism for Stendhal, is always separating itself from itself (Il y a eu une modernite pour chaque peintre ancien) (P, p. 884), every modernite inescapably becoming an antiquite in its own right, no particular pastnot even, pace Benjamin, classical antiquitycan 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 modernite a stationary pole that comes into being as the past is repeatedly sloughed o. 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 rst be distilled. Similarly, the experience of modernite includes, for historical consciousness, an aspect of the eternal as its opposite number. But
99. Il [Constantin Guys] cherche ce quelque chose quon nous permettra dappeler la modernite ; car il ne se pre sente pas de meilleur mot pour exprimer lide e en question. Il sagit, pour lui, de de gager de la mode ce quelle peut contenir de poe tique dans lhistorique, de tirer le ternel du transitoire (P, p. 884). 100. In Chateaubriands Me moires doutre-tombe, 6 vols. (Brussels, 1849), which provides Robert with his earliest citation, the word modernite still stands in direct opposition to the romantic; pressed shoulder to shoulder with vulgarite , its meaning is derogatory: La vulgarite , la modernite de la duane et du passeport, contrastaient avec lorage, la porte gothique, le son du cor et le bruit du torrent.
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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 antithesiss opposite! For eternel here takes the place earlier occupied by antiquity or the classical; like ideal beauty (le beau unique et absolu), the eternal (le ternel et limmuable) has, as the antithesis of modernite , the character of a sloughed-o past (P, p. 875).101 Even that which appears timelessly beautiful to us at some point had to be produced. Timeless beautythis necessarily follows from Baudelaires the orie rationnelle et historique du beau and his exposition thereof with reference to fashionis 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 eeting and the contingent an element of undying beauty; it sets poetic qualities free in fashion and history, which classical taste had ignored or prettied. For Baudelaire, true art, then as now, cannot do without an e le ment transitoire, fugitif, dont les me tamorphoses sont si fre quentes. If it is absent, the work of art stumbles inevitably into the empty space of a beauty as abstract and indeterminate as the beauty of the only woman before the Fall.102 Eve after the Fall is the epitome of beauty in modernite 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 modernite and eternel, which opens up the most recentand for our purposes lastchapter in the terminological history of the modern, but which also testies to the anti-Platonic impulses in Baudelaires 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 passe can also be found at the end of the essay on Richard Wagner et Tannha user: Je me crois autorise , par le tude du passe , cest-a ` -dire de le ternel, a ` pre juger labsolu contraire, etc. (Baudelaire, Richard Wagner et Tannha user a ` Paris, Oeuvres comple `tes de Baudelaire, p. 1066). 102. Cet e le ment transitoire, fugitif, dont les me tamorphoses sont si fre quentes, vous navez pas le droit de le me priser ou de vous en passer. En le supprimant, vous tombez force ment dans le vide dune beaute abstraite et inde nissable, comme celle de lunique femme avant le premier pe che (P, p. 884). 103. In Baudelaire, this break with the Platonism of classical aesthetics is visible only in its rst outlines; but in Vale ry, 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 sthetik colloquium dedicated to the transition from classical to modern art: Immanente A sthetische Reexion: Lyrik als Paradigma der Moderne, ed. Wolfgang Iser (Munich, 1965). A

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Modernity and Literary Tradition Author(s): HansRobertJauss Source: Critical Inquiry, Vol. 31, No. 2 (Winter 2005), pp.

Modernity and Literary Tradition

Hans Robert Jauss / Modernity and Literary Tradition

Critical Inquiry / Winter 2005

Hans Robert Jauss / Modernity and Literary Tradition

Critical Inquiry / Winter 2005

Hans Robert Jauss / Modernity and Literary Tradition

Critical Inquiry / Winter 2005

Hans Robert Jauss / Modernity and Literary Tradition

Critical Inquiry / Winter 2005

Hans Robert Jauss / Modernity and Literary Tradition

Critical Inquiry / Winter 2005

Hans Robert Jauss / Modernity and Literary Tradition

Critical Inquiry / Winter 2005

Hans Robert Jauss / Modernity and Literary Tradition

Critical Inquiry / Winter 2005

Hans Robert Jauss / Modernity and Literary Tradition

Critical Inquiry / Winter 2005

Hans Robert Jauss / Modernity and Literary Tradition

Critical Inquiry / Winter 2005

Hans Robert Jauss / Modernity and Literary Tradition

Critical Inquiry / Winter 2005

Hans Robert Jauss / Modernity and Literary Tradition

Critical Inquiry / Winter 2005

Hans Robert Jauss / Modernity and Literary Tradition

Critical Inquiry / Winter 2005

Hans Robert Jauss / Modernity and Literary Tradition

Critical Inquiry / Winter 2005

Hans Robert Jauss / Modernity and Literary Tradition

Critical Inquiry / Winter 2005

Hans Robert Jauss / Modernity and Literary Tradition

Critical Inquiry / Winter 2005

Hans Robert Jauss / Modernity and Literary Tradition

Critical Inquiry / Winter 2005

Hans-Robert Jauss / Modernity and Literary Tradition

Critical Inquiry / Winter 2005

Hans Robert Jauss / Modernity and Literary Tradition

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