BRILLIANT ANALYSIS OF ROMANTICISM
Netboy, Anthony
Brilliant Analysis Of Romanticism ROMANTICISM AND THE MODERN EGO, by Jacques Barzun. Little, Brown and Company. An Atlantic Monthly Press Book. $2.75. Reviewed by Anthony Netboy TEACHING and...
...Barzun therefore deserves a lot of praise for ventilating' the subject thoroughly and showing what romanticism is and is not...
...Reviewed by Anthony Netboy TEACHING and writing about art, music, and literature has too long suffered from the mania of ticketing every modern artist, composer, and author as romanticist or classicist, and putting him into a convenient pigeonhole...
...In other words, individuals are complex mixtures, as modern psychology shows, and none is more so than the creative person, who is usually so fully aware of his ego...
...These labels do not apply to all romantics...
...By 1914 romanticism, according to Barzun, had virtually petered out, and the first World War practically killed it...
...But it is too narrowly concerned with art and music and literature and fails to use the material of these fields for a searching illumination of the social problems of our time...
...It is not exclusively a love of stability, and order, decorum, good manners, the sacrifice of emotion for reason, content for form, etc...
...In brief, there is no hope for a revival of romanticism...
...And now, amid a carnage and destruction that makes the last war seem relatively mild, the artistic ego, according to Barzun, is clamoring for peace and certainty—for a classical age with its stability, order, and decency...
...Prof...
...According to Barzun, it is not, as we have been led to believe, "a return to the Middle Ages, a love of the exotic, a revolt from Reason, a vindication of the individual, a liberation of the unconscious, a reaction against scientific method, a revival of pantheism, idealism and Catholicism, a rejection of artistic conventions, a preference for emotion, a movement back to nature, or a glorification of force...
...So uncritically have these labels been used that the words romanticism and classicism have been practically emptied of meaning, and one critic after another has parroted the familiar dicta without stopping to examine them...
...Romanticism and the Modern Ego is a brilliant analysis of modern literary and esthetic history...
...He also throws much light on how the romanticist era evolved out of the neo-classical when the latter had grown stale and new forms and ideals were needed to lift up men's souls in order to endure the political and social upheavals that accompanied the indus- trial revolution...
...In every great classicist there is a good deal of these tendencies, but you will also find them in many romanticists...
...What is romanticism...
...some revealed many of these tendencies, others but a few, yet they were truly romantic What is classicism...
Vol. 7 • December 1943 • No. 49
