Life is experienceELEMENTS OF ROMANTICISM
PART IV:
THE ROMANTIC IMAGINATION
The Romantic view of the imagination and its functions was of central importance to the movement. The Romantic imagination does not accept limitations. Experience and expression are to be limitless (subjective and objective), as are the feelings and passions. No subject is outside of the experience of the Romantic imagination.
Dreams are permissable, as are the supernatural, the uncanny. Since that is the case, we often find Romantics writing fragments, rather than what we would normally considered works with an end that offers finality to the experience.
Life is experience
Experience constantly changes; it never ends
Life is therefore characterized by a longing for
fulfillment--the beautiful--the true--the unattainable
Since we are perpetually "becoming," we naturally can never
achieve complete fulfillment/perfection--we can only long for it, and the
Romantics do so incessantly while realizing at the same time the impossbility of
achieving it. That is Romantic irony.
Like life, then, the story never really ends--only an episode
is reported--to be picked up later perhaps, as experience grows. Of
course, this fits in nicely with the organic theory of art and literature
previously discussed.
Clearly, limitless imagination allows for exploration of infinite experience--beyond objective experience (the known). Put another way, the capacity for revelatory illumination belonged, according to the dominant 19th century view, to the imagination, a mysterious and virtually sacred power of individual consciousness. For imagination was a visionary and unifying force through which the gifted person discovered and communicated new truth. The imagination could create the material for its own rejuvenation.
The Italian poet, Leopardi, in a long lyric ("The Broom"), made explicit a contrast implied by many of his contemporaries on the continent and in England. It was the contrast between scientific reason, perceived as deadening, and the true enlightenment of the imagination. Imagination derives from the soul, the aspect of human being that links the human with the eternal. Through the soul, men and women can transcend earthly limitations, can express high aspirations, can escape, and help one another escape the dreariness of mortality without necessarily positing a life beyond the present one. This connection between the artist's soul (or imagination) and the immortal truths was voiced throughout Europe.
Alfred de Vigny speaks of the calm of a
man absorbed in incessant inner processes that make him feel shadowed by
phantoms: "The poet seeks out in the stars which route God's finger indicates to
us."
Across the channel, William Blake said
that "This world of the imagination is the world of eternity: it is the divine
bosom into which we shall go after the death of the vegetated body. This
world of imagination is infinite and eternal, whereas the world of generation or
vegetation is finite and temporal."
Friedrich von Hardenberg (Novalis) says
that "The imagination puts the future world either up in the heights or down in
the depths, or in some transsubstantiation. We dream of journeys throught
the universe: is the universe not within us? We do not know the depths of
our souls. It is inwards that the mysterious path leads. Within us,
or nowhere lies eternity and its worlds, the past and the future. The
outer world is a world of shadows, it casts its shadows onto the realm of
light."
August Wilhem Schlegel concurs: "The
infinite is where we are--we are a part of it. It cannot be sought or
grasped beyond this world. But we cannot experience infinite beauty,
infinite truth, for example, by mere reason or the senses. It is only
through the connection of the imagination or soul to the infinite that infinite
beauty can be experienced and expressed in literature, art,
music."
We will see several of our authors creating supernatural, or at least uncanny, situations: and why not? The imagination, or creative imagination, allows us to experience/to feel in situations impossible in the realm of reason, of objectivity, of finite laws.
For some of you, a final point of reference that might help will be included that is English. Samuel Taylor Coleridge (a visitor to the continent and to French and German Romanticism) formulated a theory of creative understanding based on the faculty of the imagination in his Biographia Literaria (1817, rather toward the "declining days" of Continental Romanticism) that was already understood on the continent:
The artist wields what Coleridge calls the
"secondary imagination," becoming thereby a fairly literal creator by
shaping and forming the welter of raw experiences, which in themselves are a
chaos.
To do so, he must use the powers of the
psyche--emotion and reason--for the goal is an organic integration, not the
analytic dissection for which reason alone would suffice.
Underlying the artist's secondary
imagination is what Coleridge calls the "primary imagination," identified with
all normal human perception.
This perception, however, is not a
receptive act, but the shaping of chaotic matter into forms such as trees and
chairs, which in themselves are a welter of meaningless bits of
matter.
Both forms of imaginative creation are
echoes of the ultimate act of creation by God, whose power is manifested less by
making matter out of nothing than by giving it living form
and order. Thus, once again, we have expressed the universal notion (odd
phrase for such individualists) that the soul/imagination is the link to God/the
infinite, where all truth lies. And Coleridge has given clearer meaning to
the biblical phrase of the Creation: "In the beginning was the WORD!