The Roots of Romanticism

PUBLISHERS WEEKLY 1 FEB 1999

In this posthumous volume, the British philosopher and historian of ideas quickly establishes his theory that Germany--not England or France--was the birthplace of the romantic movement. A sense of provincial insignificance and ressentiment against the sophistication, prestige and military power of the French underwrote the movement's birth, he contends. Still, the territory covered by "Romanticism" seems so vast as to be contradictory, containing both "primitivism" and "dandyism," the worship both of the noble savage's simplicity and of "red waistcoats, blue hair, green wigs, absinthe, death, suicide." While others have, understandably, thrown up their hands at the idea of uniting such disparate enthusiasms, Berlin sees contradiction itself as central to romanticism's legacy. Before romanticism, he argues, people believed that for any question there should be only one right answer, however difficult to discern. To a romantic, all beliefs, however incompatible, can be admired if they are held with real conviction--a notion from which both relativism and pluralism (like Berlin's own) are born. Further, the romantics sought to free the human will from all constraints: "the attempt to blow up and explode the very notion of a stable structure of anything," he asserts, is "the deepest and in a sense the most insane in this extremely valuable and important movement." As if in illustration of the romantics' own principle, Berlin, despite his belief that the movement's ideals ultimately become dangerous, nonetheless gets inside the minds of the thinkers he analyzes--Herder, Kant, Schiller--and presents their ideas persuasively. Written for a lecture series in the early '60s and not originally intended as a book (Hardy is to be commended for a masterful editing job), Berlin's work here transcends these limits. It is thoroughly brilliant, often thrilling and yet always accessible.