Introduction

In the 1940s, when Gilbert Highet wrote his account of the classical tradition in the Romantic era, he avoided the word ‘‘Romantic.’’ For Highet, the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century in Europe ‘‘was a time of revolt, and it would be better called the Revolutionary than the Romantic era’’ (Highet 1949: 356). Political rebels invoked classical history to justify their principles of government; writers, insofar as they showed classical influences, did so in unorthodox ways, or deliberately championed Greek culture as a way of rebelling against the prevailing emphasis on Rome and the Latin classics. Throughout, Highet resisted yoking the terms ‘‘Romantic’’ and ‘‘classical,’’ as if to do so would be an act of violence on both words. Highet’s study appeared in the same year as Rene Wellek’s seminal essay ‘‘The Concept of Romanticism in Literary History,’’ a work that restored the word ‘‘Romantic’’ to scholarly respectability In his essay Wellek articulated a ‘‘system of norms’’ (Wellek 1963: 129) that characterized Romantic literature, and that can be located in the literary works of Europeans and Americans writing in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. These norms are ‘‘imagination for the view of poetry, nature for the view of the world, and symbol and myth for poetic style’’ (161) and show an enormous debt, not just to German literature, but to Wellek’s understanding of German Idealist philosophy, a very different basis for understanding Romanticism than the political upheavals that inform Highet’s ‘‘Time of Revolution.’’ Yet Wellek, like Highet, had a difficult time using the words ‘‘Romantic’’ and ‘‘classical’’ in the same breath. Schiller’s ‘‘Die Gotter Griechenland,’’ for instance, is not really classical, but ‘‘a typical romantic dream.’’ Herder is ‘‘an extremely irrationa-listic pre-romanticist,’’ in spite of his role in championing historical criticism of the Homeric poems. And Goethe, who ‘‘for a time expounded a classical creed’’ and ‘‘wrote some works... [with a] classical spirit,’’ nonetheless wrote his best works, such as Faust, Werther, and Wilhelm Meister, when his view of nature, imagination, and poetic style were indistinguishable from Schelling’s, and hence Romantic (162).

Wellek’s concept of Romanticism has given shape and direction to Romantic scholarship since the 1950s. Since his essay appeared, studies of Romantic writers have focused on the interaction of the creative imagination with nature, on nature itself, on Romantic myth and myth-making, and on Romantic concepts of the imagination. Few of these studies have looked to the ways in which Romanticism engaged itself with the classical tradition, in more than nominal ways. Even in the 1980s, when it became fashionable to write of Romanticism and history again, and the French Revolution became the great backdrop against which all Romantic writing was to be seen, the resulting criticism was too often ignorant of classical models, classical methods of education, and contemporary developments in classical scholarship. The result is an extraordinary gap in Romantic scholarship, which only a handful of studies have attempted to fill. Yet to be educated in the Romantic age meant to be learned in the classical languages: students began to study Latin by the age of eight and moved on to elementary Greek by their teens, and university education across Europe concentrated primarily on the study of classical authors. What is more, during this period classical scholarship itself was undergoing immense change: new historical methods of literary criticism reshaped the ways in which ancient texts were read; there was a revival of Greek studies at European universities, which led to the pan-European phenomenon of Romantic Hellenism; archaeological discoveries, especially at the recently-excavated sites of Pompeii and Herculaneum, altered long-held preconceptions about the cultural achievements of ancient societies; and the removal from the Parthenon of the so-called ‘‘Elgin Marbles’’ inspired a passionate debate about the nature of ancient art that challenged neoclassical ideals. All this informed the works of Romantic writers, whether it is Goethe writing his Roman Elegies, Madame de Stael describing Pompeii and Herculaneum in Corinne, or Keats viewing the Parthenon Marbles. Indeed, one could argue that what we have called ‘‘Romanticism’’ is a kind of classicism, reinterpreted through the magnifying lens of empirical research.

In this chapter I will look at two subjects widely regarded as central to Romanticism: literary primitivism and emotion. The rise of historical criticism in the eighteenth century, which resulted primarily from developments in classical, especially Homeric, scholarship, made possible the interest in primitive epic and folksong that is characteristic of Romantic poetry. Romantic ideas of emotion developed from the renewed interest in classical, especially Stoic, emotion theory. I make no pretense here of giving a comprehensive overview of Romantic debts to the classical tradition. But by exploring the classical origins of both of these Romantic concerns, I hope to demonstrate that Romanticism and classicism are not the antithetical terms we have come to consider them to be.