Every work of art is at once end and means, governed by its own internal
ecology.ELEMENTS OF ROMANTICISM
PART II:
ROMANTICISM AND NATURE
Literature was to be, in a sense, like nature herself. Although originality and the avoidance of imitation was of paramount importance, literature and art, for that matter, were to be organic.
Every work of art is at once end and means, governed by its own internal
ecology.
The
distinction between form and content is annihilated because form grows from the
essential idea or inspiration of a work as a plant does from its seed. It
grows naturally, according to its own rules, and becomes what it "becomes," and
nothing else. It is an unfinished, on-going process. The
Linden tree will become a Linden tree: it grows, becomes dormant, grows again
from its previous stage, forever, unless it is
consciously stopped from doing so by some sort of outside
interference. So it is with the creator of art and his/her
art.
Thus, the process of creation is inseperable from its seed (the
imagination) on the one hand, and the product created, on the other, and in a
sense, the product is never finished, but constantly evolving.
Organicism emphasizes development and growth and accounts for the emergence of new forms, such as the spiritual authobiography which is less concerned with plot than with the evolution of the author's psyche. A fictional sibling of this form was the "Apprenticeship" novel or poem--Goethe's Wilhelm Meister's Lehrjahre (William Meister's Apprenticeship"). This particular form--the so-called Bildungsroman (developmental novel) was a particular favorite of the Germans and French--Theodore Storm, Thomas Mann, Hermann Hesse, Robert Musil, Balzac, Flaubert, de Maupassant, Sartre, Camus, and others kept it alive well into the twentieth century--and, of course, James Joyce's Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man is a familiar 20th century variation of the form.
Nature, for the Romantics, also meant God, the Eternal, Innocence, and so on (in a very Eastern way) in its more physical/spiritual form. And of course, the idea was for the soul of the author to link up with the soul of God in inspiration and creativity: an idea that his its similarities in Wordsworth's notions of poetry, nature and the poet. Very often nature settings will be secluded, in a wilderness, or pastoral, or exotic setting one way or another. Supposedly these types of settings are natural for inner meditation, reflection, and bring out the best in man (the idea of "the Noble Savage" and his homily wisdom was a Romantic notion borrowed from antiquity). Nature also seems to reflect the Romantic Hero's moods and feelings (the pathetic fallacy). Again, savages in the wilderness are "noble," uncorrupted by the evils of civilization. They are usually eloquent, wise, understanding, and essentially more civilized and human than the man of civilization (Chateaubriand's Rene illustrates these ideas admirably).
III. ROMANTICISM AND THE IMPORTANCE OF EMOTIONS/FEELINGS