Baroque and Classical Music

The title of one of the most genial of 18th-century symphonic compositions, Haydn’s Surprise Symphony, can be applied to the music of the entire age, for 18th-century music is continually full of surprises. Indeed, in contrast to developments in contemporary art and literature, where innovation was comparatively rare, the 18th century was the most fertile period of invention in all of western European musical history. Probably the major explanation for this is that early-modern composers did not have to concern themselves about how much they would borrow from the music of classical antiquity. Early-modern composers invented form after form in two successive major styles, the Baroque and the so-called classical, treating their listeners to surprise after surprise.

Baroque music, like Baroque art and architecture, emerged around 1600 in Italy as an artistic expression of the Counter-Reformation. Yet from the beginning Baroque composers were perforce more inventive than their artistic counterparts. The first important figure in the history of Baroque music was the Italian Claudio Monteverdi (1567-1643). Pursuing the Baroque goal of dramatic expressiveness, he found that deep human emotions were difficult to convey, and that dramatic intensity becomes greatest when music is combined with theater. Having no classical models to draw upon, Monteverdi thus virtually single-handedly invented a new musical form, that of opera. In addition, he wrote instrumental accompaniments so forceful that they have earned him the title of “the father of instrumentation”. Since Monteverdi’s new form of opera fully suited the spirit of his times, within a generation operas were performed in all the leading cities of Italy.

Moreover, whatever lull there may have been in the composition of masterpieces was more than compensated for in the last phase of the Baroque era by the appearance of Bach and Handel, two of the greatest composers of all time. Born in the same year very near each other in northern Germany, Johann Sebastian Bach (1685-1750) and George Frederick Handel (1685-1759) had very different musical personalities and very different careers. Bach was an intensely pious introvert who remained in the backwaters of provincial Germany all his life and wrote music of the utmost individually, whereas Handel was a public-pleasing cosmopolitan whose music is more accessible than Bach’s in its robust affirmativeness. Despite these differences, however, both Bach and Handel were distinctly late-Baroque stylists in their commitment to writing music of the deepest expressiveness.

Bach was an extremely prolific composer in the entire gamut of contemporary forms, his professional duty was to provide new music regularly for Sunday and holiday services. Therefore much of his work consists of religious cantatas, motets, and passions. But Bach, an ardent Protestant who was entirely unaffected by the secularism of the Enlightenment, seems to have written each one of his church pieces with such fervor that the salvation of the world appears to hang on every note. As for Handel, he established himself in London after spending his early creative years in Italy. There he tried at first to make a living by composing Italian operas, but he eventually realized that he would never survive unless he turned to some more salable genre. This he found in the oratorio, a variety of music drama intended for performance in concert form. Marking a transition from the spiritual to the secular, Handel’s oratorios were usually set to biblical stories but featured very worldly music, replete with ornate instrumentation and frequent flourishes of drums and trumpets.

Although only a few decades separated the activity of Bach and Handel from that of their greatest 18th-century successors, the Austrians Franz Joseph Haydn (1732-1809) and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756-1781), the two pairs appear worlds apart because their compositional styles are utterly different. This is to say that whereas Bach and Handel were among the last and certainly the greatest composers of Baroque music, Haydn and Mozart were the leading representatives of the succeeding “classical” style. The musical style that prevailed in Europe in the second half of the 18th century is called classical because it sought to imitate classical principles of order, clarity, and symmetry. Moreover, composers of the classical school innovated in creating music that adhered rigorously to certain structural principles. Undoubtedly the spread of the ideals of the Enlightenment influenced the development of the classical style, yet there were elements of elegant aristocratic Rococo influence at work as well, for the music of the classical era customarily has a lightness and gaiety about it that is most reminiscent of Rococo pastels.

The perils of struggling for a living by composing music in the later eighteenth century can be seen best in the sad career of the sublime genius Mozart. As a phenomenal child prodigy, the young Mozart – who began composing at four, started touring Europe as a keyboard virtuoso at six, and wrote his first oratorio at eleven – was the darling of the aristocracy. The Austrian empress Maria Theresa embraced him and the pope made him “Knight of the Golden Spur.” Although he spent every year of his mature life in bountiful productivity, he had to live from hand to mouth until he died at the age of thirty-five from the effects of an undiagnosed wasting disease. Only a handful of people attended the funeral of one of the greatest creative artists of all time, and he was buried in a pauper’s grave.

Haydn’s career provides an instructive contrast. Only toward the end of his life, in 1791, did Haydn, now famous, strike out on his own by traveling to London, where he was greeted as a creative genius. Thus his Miracle Symphony, written for performance in a London concert hall, is so called because during one performance a chandelier came crashing down and many would have been killed had it not been for the fact that the entire audience had moved up as close as possible to get a better view of the “genius” Haydn who was conducting. Also, his stay in London foreshadowed the future, for the music he wrote on that occasion was wholly secular. Indeed, the music of the entire classical era was predominantly secular, and this secular writing advanced primarily on three fronts – opera, chamber music, and orchestral composition. By far the greatest operatic composer of the era was Mozart, whose Marriage of Figaro, Don Giovanni, and The Magic Flute remain among the most magnificent and best loved operas of all time. As for the realm of chamber music, the classical era was the most fertile age of chamber music origins, for the genre of the string quarter was invented at the beginning of the period and was soon brought to the fullest fruition in the quarters of both Haydn and Mozart.

Yet probably the most impressive invention of the classical era was the symphony – so to speak the novel of music – for the symphony has since proven to be the most fertile and popular of all classical musical forms. Haydn is usually termed the “father of the symphony” because in over one hundred works in the symphonic form – and preeminently in his last twelve symphonies, which he composed in London – Haydon formulated the most enduring techniques of symphonic composition and demonstrated to the fullest extent the symphony’s creative potential. Yet Mozart’s three last symphonies (out of that composer’s total of forty-one) are generally regarded as greater even than those of Haydon, for the grace, variety, and utter technical perfection of these works are beyond comparison. Mere words cannot do justice to any of the marvelous musical creations of the 18th century, yet it may confidently be stated in conclusion that just one or two of Mozart’s musical compositions alone would be enough to place the century among the most inspired ages in the entire history of the human creative imagination.


Chapter 7 THE RISE OF LIBERALISM AND NATIONALISM
The history of 19th-century Europe was to a great extent shaped by the interplay of the forces of liberalism and nationalism. The middle classes of France and England, where liberalism was strongest, espoused a set of doctrines reflecting their concerns and interests. Liberalism to them meant (1) an efficient government prepared to acknowledge the value of commercial and industrial development; (2) a government in which their interests would be protected by their direct representation in the legislature – in all probability, a constitutional monarchy, and most certainly not a democracy; (3) a foreign policy of peace and free trade; and (4) a belief in individualism and the doctrines of the classical economists. Many middle-class men and women in other European countries shared these beliefs and assumptions, and worked diligently and with some success to carry through specific liberal reforms. But for them, an equally important and often more immediate objective was the achievement of some form of national unity. In this chapter, we shall examine the phenomenon of liberalism, primarily as it affected the fortunes of England and France, and describe the way in which liberalism combined with nationalism to reshape the history of central Europe.

If the history of 19th-century Britain and France can be studied against a general background of middle-class liberalism, that of much of the rest of Europe during the same period must be understood in terms of a more complex combination of the forces of liberalism, nationalism, and nation-building. We shall define nationalism as sentiment rooted in broad historical, geographical, linguistic, or cultural circumstances. It is characterized by a consciousness of belonging, in a group, to a tradition derived from those circumstances, which differs from the traditions of other groups. Nation-building is the political implementation of nationalism, the translation of sentiment into power. Men and women in Britain and France during the 19th century entertained national as well as liberal sentiments. Nineteenth-century nationalism in other areas of Europe was to be a more assertive phenomenon than it was in Britain and France. Elsewhere, common traditions and assumptions were less clearly articulated.

Neither nationalism nor nation-building stood in necessary opposition to liberalism. Indeed, to some extent, it reflected liberalism’s abhorrence of traditional privilege. Yet to liberalism’s readiness to accept the new, nationalism responded with an appreciation, if not veneration, of the past. And to the liberals’ insistence upon the value and importance of individualism, nation-builders replied that their vital task might require the sacrifice of some measure of each citizen’s freedom. The success of nation-building rested upon the foundation of a general balance of international power, achieved by the European states during the half century after 1815. The emergence of new nations would require readjustments to that balance.
1. Liberal Gains in Western Europe

Liberal gains in Britain came after an era of reaction that paralleled that which occurred on the Continent. The conservative Tory party had enjoyed almost unbroken political supremacy since the younger William Pitt had become first minister in 1783. The French Revolution had turned him, along with his fellow Tories, into a staunch defender of the status quo. The Whigs had throughout the long years of the revolutionary and Napoleonic conflicts remained to some degree conciliatory to the French. Within a surprisingly short time British political leaders reversed their opposition to everything new. Instead, they displayed an ability to compromise which kept their country free from revolution. These “liberalizers” among the still essentially conservative Tories went so far as to abolish the laws that had kept both dissenting Protestants and Roman Catholics from full participation in public political life.

What the conservatives would not do was reform the system of representation in the House of Commons, heavily weighted on the side of the landed interests. Here the Tories, the majority party in Parliament, drew the line and showed themselves still basically committed to the status quo. Yet members of the liberal middle class argued that such a reform was absolutely necessary before they could themselves play a constant and active role in shaping British policy to comply with their own interests. “Interest” was, indeed, the key word in the debate over parliamentary reform. It is important to note that the liberal middle class was not arguing in favor of reform on the basis of a belief in democracy. Spurred by the example of liberal reformers on the Continent and by the oratory and organizational abilities of middle-class and artisan radicals at home, the movement for reform intensified after 1830. Sensing the grave danger of a possible union of the working and middle classes, the governing class once more accommodated to change, as it had in the 1820s.

The Reform Bill of 1832, however, was not a retreat from the notion of representation by interest. The vote was granted to the middle class, but to very few of the working class. Probably more significant than its extension of the franchise was the bill’s scheme for a redistribution of seats. One hundred forty-three seats were reallocated, and thereby increasing the political power of the industrial middle classes. Though the bill was the product of change and itself brought change in its wake, it was understood as a conservative measure. It by no mans destroyed the political strength of landed aristocratic interests. The liberal, industrial middle classes had been admitted into junior partnership with the landed oligarchy that had for centuries ruled Britain and was to rule it for at least one more generation.

Efforts to introduce liberal political reforms were not limited to Britain during this period. Other countries in Europe caught the revolutionary fever in the summer of 1830.
2. Liberalism in Britain and France

The Revolution of 1830 in France and the Parliamentary Reform Bill of 1832 in England represented a setback for aristocratic power in both countries. No longer would it be possible for the legislatures of France and England to ignore the particular interests of the middle class. Henceforth representatives would include members from that class in sufficient numbers to press successfully for programs that accorded with liberal beliefs. One of the major accomplishments of the first British Parliament elected after 1832 was passage of a new law governing the treatment of paupers. The result clearly reflected the liberal, middle-class notion of how to achieve “the greatest happiness of the greatest number.” Inspiring this new legislation were the liberal belief that poverty was a person’s own fault and the liberal assumption that capitalism was capable of providing enough jobs for all who genuinely wanted them. Yet the law’s failure did not shake the liberal conviction that poverty was, in the end, an individual and not an institutional problem.

Even more symbolic of the political power of Britain’s middle class than the new poor law was the repeal of the Corn Laws in 1846, which symbolized to the middle classes the unwarranted privileges of the landed aristocracy. Legislation during this period reflected other middle-class concerns, directly conflicted with the liberal doctrine of non-intervention. Many members of the urban middle class professed devotion to the tenets of Christianity, and the belief in the ability of an individual to achieve salvation accorded well with more general middle-class notions about the importance of individualism and the responsibility of the individual for his or her own well-being. It produced legislation such as the abolition of the slave trade in British colonies (1833), and the series of Factory Acts. The religious issue affected educational reform as well.

The years of Louis Philippe’s reign in France were not so marked as those in England with significant reforms. In the first place, France was not confronted with anything like the same degree of rapid industrialization that was compelling legislative activity on a number of fronts in England. Under the succession of governments dominated by France’s leading politician of the period, Francois Guizot (1787-1874), the French expanded their educational system, thereby further underwriting their belief in the liberal doctrine of a meritocracy, or careers open to talent. Everyone was free, he argued, to rise to the upper middle class and thus to a position of political and economic power. His advice to those who criticized his complacency was: “enrich yourselves.” Louis Philippe did little to counteract the lifelessness and corruption that characterized his regime. In France, radical agitation produced very different results.

Meanwhile radical members of the French and British lower middle and working classes who had assisted the forces of liberalism to victory in 1830 and 1832 grew increasingly dissatisfied with the results of their efforts. In Britain they soon realized that the Reform Bill had done little to increase their chances for political participation. For a time they devoted their energies to the cause of trade unionism, believing that industrial, rather than political, action might bring them relief from the economic hardships they were suffering. After the defeat of the Grand National, the efforts of radical democratic reformers turned back from trade union to political activity, centering on attempts to force further political reform upon the uninterested government through the device of the “People’s Charter.” The fortunes of the Chartist movement waxed and waned. In 1848, revolutionary outbreaks across the Continent inspired Chartist leaders to plan a major demonstration and show of force in London. However, rain, poor management, and unwillingness to do battle with the well-armed constabulary put an end to the Chartists’ campaign. Increased prosperity among skilled workers disarmed the movement after mid-century.
3. The Revolution of 1848 in France

The February revolution in France was a catalyst which helped to produce uprisings in the succeeding months throughout much of Europe. The tension between middle-class republicans and radical socialists, which had been masked by a common disgust with the government of Louis Philippe, now emerged to shape the political events of the ensuing months in several specific ways.

Paris meanwhile attracted numbers of radical writers, organizers, and agitators. The provisional government had removed all restrictions upon the formation of political clubs and the dissemination of political literature. Delegations claiming to represent the oppressed of all European countries moved freely about the city, attracting attention. This sentiment was fortified as a result of elections held at the end of April. By late spring, a majority of the assembly believed that the workshop system represented both an unbearable financial drain and a serious threat to social order. In the aftermath of the “June Days,” the French government moved quickly to bring order to the country. Assembly members therefore arranged for the immediate election of a president.

The astonishing upstart Louis Napoleon had spent most of his life in exile. By the summer of 1848 he was welcomed by members of all classes. With dreams of emulating his uncle, Louis Napoleon was not long content to remain president of France. Almost from the first he used the power he already had to achieve the further power he desired. In 1851, alleging the need for extraordinary measures to protect the rights of the masses, he proclaimed a temporary dictatorship and invited the people to grant him the power to draw up a new constitution. The new constitution, which he put into effect in January 1852, made the president an actual dictator. After one year he assumed the title of Napoleon III, emperor of the French.

What is the significance of the French Revolution of 1848 and its political aftermath in the history of middle-class liberalism? Two points need particular emphasis. First, we must recognize the pivotal role of the liberal middle class. Yet 1848 proved that there was now in France another element – class consciousness may, at this point, not yet be the correct term – that governments ignored at their peril. If mid-nineteenth-century Europe saw the middle class closer than ever to the center of power, it saw the workers moving rapidly in from the edge. Middle-class liberalism, if it was to thrive, would not only have to pay lip service to working-class demands, but in some measure accommodate to them as well.
4. Liberalism in France and Britain after 1850

Napoleon III recognized the vital role that public opinion had now assumed in the management of affairs of state. He labored hard and successfully to sell his empire to the people of France. He argued that legislative assemblies only served to divide a nation along class lines. With power residing in him, he would unite the country as it had not been for generations. Napoleon III modeled his constitution upon that of his uncle. France was a democracy only in the sense that its people were periodically afforded a chance, through elections, to express their approval of Napoleon’s regime. In return for the gift of almost absolute power, Napoleon III gave the French what they appeared to want. Liberalism, if it existed at all, existed as the freedom to have one’s own economic way. Napoleon III, though he catered to the middle class, appealed to the workers much as he appealed to the middle class. His foreign policy reflects clearly how far he – and the rest of France with him – had subordinated the liberal heritage of the first French Revolution to that of another of its legacies: national glory.

What, meanwhile, of the liberal tradition in Britain? The decade or so following the passage of the Reform Bill of 1867 marked the high point of British liberalism. Britain celebrated the triumph of the liberal principles of free trade, representative – but not democratic – government, and general prosperity. There the course of liberalism was altered by changes occurring within the working class. Industrialization had, by this time, begun to foster and sustain a growing stratum of labor “aristocrats”. Having succeeded within the liberal economic system imposed upon Britain by the middle class, they were now prepared to accept many liberal, middle-class principles as their own. They believed in self-help, achieved by means of cooperative societies or through trade unions. They believed in education as a tool for advancement. Yet the labor aristocracy, as it came to appreciate its ability to achieve a decent life for itself within the capitalist system, grew all the more dissatisfied with a political system that excluded it from any direct participation in the governmental process.

Together with working-class leaders, the middle-class dissidents organized a Reform League to campaign across the country for a new reform bill and a House of Commons responsive to their interests. The reformers made it clear by their actions that they were determined to press their case to the utmost. The leaders of both British political parties, Conservative (formerly Tory) and Liberal (formerly Whig), were prepared to concede what they recognized it would be dangerous to withhold. The “responsible” working class had been deemed worthy to participate in the affairs of state.

Nationalism was in part a child of the French Revolution. It was closely related, as well, to the intellectual movement that has been called “romanticism.” Romanticism was so broad and so varied that it all but defies definition, if not analysis. Romanticism represented a reaction against the rationalism of the 18th-century Enlightenment. Where the 18th century relied on reason, the romantics put their faith in emotion. The 18th century understood the mind as a blank tablet, which received knowledge from impressions imprinted upon it through the senses by the external world. Romantics also believed in the importance of sense experience. But they insisted that innate sensibility – that which constituted a person’s own particular personality – was inherited, and therefore present in the mind from birth. Knowledge, then, for the romantic, was the product of both innate feelings and external perceptions. Romanticism thus stressed individualism, and the individual creativity that resulted from the interaction of unique personality with external experience. At the same time, by stressing the inheritance of attitudes, it also celebrated the past. And that celebration was its link with nationalism.

Romanticism and nationalism were connected by their common belief that the past should be made to function as a means of understanding the present and planning for the future. It was in Germany that this notion received its fullest airing and most enthusiastic reception. One of the earliest and most influential German romantics was Johann von Herder (1744-1803). A Protestant pastor and theologian, his interest in past cultures led him, in the 1780s, to set out his reflections in a lengthy and detailed treatise, Ideas for a Philosophy of Human History. Herder traced what he perceived to be the progressive development of European society from the time of the Greeks through the Renaissance. He believed that civilization was not the product of an artificial, international elite – a criticism of Enlightenment thinking – but of the genuine culture of the common people, the Volk. No civilization could be considered sound which did not continue to express its own unique historical character, its Volksgeist. He insisted only that each nation must be true to its own particular heritage. He broke dramatically with the Enlightenment idea that human beings could be expected to respond to human situations in more or less the same fashion, and with the assumption that the value of history was simply to teach by example.

Herder’s intellectual heirs, men like the conservative German romantics Friedrich Schlegel (1772-1829) and Friedrich von Savigny (1779-1861), condemned the implantation of democratic and liberal ideas in German cultural soil. History, they argued, taught that institutions must evolve organically – a favorite word of the political romantics, and that proper laws were the product of historical growth, not simply deductions from universal first principles. This idea was not peculiar to German romantics. The English romantic poet and philosopher Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834) argued against the utilitarian state and in favor of giving that ancient institution, the national church, a larger role in the shaping of society. The French conservative Chateaubriand (1768-1848) made much the same case in his treatise, The Genius of Christianity (1802). The past, and in particular the religious experiences of the past, are woven into the present, he declared. They cannot be unwoven without destroying the fabric of a nation’s society.

The theory of the organic evolution of society and the state received its fullest exposition in the writings of the German metaphysician Georg Wilhelm Hegel (1770-1831). Hegel wrote of history as development. Social and political institutions grew to maturity, achieved their purposes, and then gave way to others. Yet the new never entirely replaced the old, for the pattern of change was a “dialectic.” When new institutions challenged established ones, there was a clash between what had been and what was becoming, producing a “synthesis,” a reordering of society that retained elements from the past while adapting to the present. Hegel had no use for the theory of a state of nature, so popular with philosophers like Rousseau and Hobbes. Men and women have always lived within some society or other, Hegel argued. The institution of the state was itself a natural historic organism; only within that institution, protected by its laws and customs from personal depradations, could men and women enjoy freedom, which Hegel defined not as the absence of restraint but as the absence of social disorder.

These theories of history and of historical development articulated by the romantics relate directly to the idea of nationalism formulated during the same period. The French Revolution provided an example of what a nation could achieve. Nationhood had encouraged the French to raise themselves to the level of citizenship; it had also allowed them to sustain attacks from the rest of Europe. Applying the historical lessons of the French Revolution and the theories of romantics, Germans, in particular, were roused to a sense of their own historical destiny.

Nationalism, derived from romantic notions of historical development and destiny, manifested itself in a variety of ways. The brothers Grimm, editors of Grimm’s Fairy Tales (1812), traveled across Germany to study native dialects, and collected folktales that were published as part of a national heritage. In Britain, Sir Walter Scott (1771-1832) retold in many of his novels the popular history of Scotland, while the poet William Wordsworth (1770-1850) consciously strove to express the simplicity and virtue of the English people in collections such as his Lyrical Ballads (1798). Music, too, reflected national themes. Architects, though they found it difficult to escape entirely from the neo-classicism of the 18th century, often tried to resurrect a “national” style in their designs. All this creative activity was the spontaneous result of artists’ and writers’ enthusiastic response to the romantic movement. Yet politicians soon perceived how historical romanticism might serve their nationalist ends. They understood how an individual work of art, whether a painting, a song, a drama, or a building, could translate into a national symbol. And they did not hesitate to assist in that translation when they deemed it useful.

Though romanticism and nationalism shared a common devotion to the past, romantics were not necessarily nationalists. Indeed, romanticism was explicitly international in its celebration of nature, and above all, of individual creativity. The romantics declared that nature was best perceived not by reason, but by the senses. And they respected those elements of nature that appeared to be the product of chance, not rational order. Men and women were declared free to interpret nature – and life as well – in terms of their individual reactions to it, not simply as it might reflect a set of general rational precepts. The English poet Percy Shelley (1792-1822), the German poet Heinrich Heine (1797-1856), the French novelist Victor Hugo (1802-1885) – all characteristic figures of the romantic movement – expressed in their works romanticism’s concern for the experiences of human individuals. Human experience, romantics believed, was not linked to any one national tradition, but rather to transcendent nature. The paintings of the Englishmen William Blake (1757-1827), although he often reflects “Englishness,” transcend nationalism by recording a communion with the fundamental elements of nature.

Romantics were internationalists because they enjoyed freedom from the confinement of any boundary – metaphysical or political – which tended to restrict a person’s ability to realize his or her potential. In this way romanticism encouraged women to make themselves heard. They exemplify romanticism’s readiness to break with the past, and its assumptions and stereotypes, if they stood in the path of individual expression.

Romantics, as worshipers of individuality, worshiped “genius.” The genius was possessed of a spirit that could not be analyzed and must be allowed to make its own rules. And the human spirit must never allow itself to be fettered by national prescriptions, any more than by social conventions, in such a way as to prevent enjoyment of its most precious possession, its freedom. Freedom and the problem of self-recognition were major themes in the works of two of the giants of the romantic movement, the composer Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827) and the writer Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832). The most remarkable quality about Beethoven’s compositions is their uniqueness and individuality. In the Fifth Symphony Beethoven reaches the summit of symphonic logic, the Sixth is a glorification of nature, the Seventh a Dionysian revelry, the Eighth a genial conjuring up of the spirit of the 18th-century symphony. Five piano sonatas, five string quartets, the Ninth Symphony, and the great Mass, constitute his final legacy. They fill the listener with awe because they express boundless individual will and power.

Goethe’s dedication to the idea of individual freedom was, in part, the product of his having been born and raised in the free imperial city of Frankfurt. Goethe was free from the particularist, nationalist influences that directed the work of other German romantics. His own “genius” drove him first to the study of law, then medicine, then the fine arts and natural sciences. Influenced by Herder, Goethe had already published various romantically inclined works, including the immensely popular Sorrows of Werther, a novel expressive of Goethe’s early restlessness and emotionalism. The almost excessive sensitivity characteristic of Goethe’s earlier writings gave way, in his middle years, to the search for a new spirit, equally free and yet more ordered. In 1790 Goethe published the first part of his masterpiece, Faust, a drama in verse, which he completed a year before his death in 1832. The play, in its retelling of the German legend of the man who sold his soul to the devil in return for universal knowledge, reflects the romantic unwillingness to restrain the spirit; it also expresses Goethe’s own recognition of the magnitude of humanity’s daring in its desire for unlimited knowledge and its own fulfillment.

Romanticism and nationalism bear much the same relationship to each other in the history of 19th-century Europe as they do in the thought of the men and women we have just surveyed. At some points, as in England, they appear to run separate courses. At others they join together, as they did in Germany, whose own history lies at the center of the history of both romanticism and nationalism.

The history of the revolutions of 1848 in central Europe can most easily be understood in terms of two major themes: the first, the struggle of various nationalities, particularly within the Austrian Empire, to assert their own autonomy; the second, the contention between the forces of liberalism and nationalism in Germany.

The forces of national sentiment that had brought Austria to its knees then succeeded in allowing the empire to recoup its fortunes. The paradox of nationalism, as it manifested itself in central Europe, was that as soon as a cultural majority had declared itself an independent or semi-independent state, other cultural minorities within that new state complained bitterly about their newly institutionalized inferiority. Although the Austrian government was at this time a liberal one, the product of the March revolution in Vienna, it was no less determined than its predecessor had been to prevent the total dismemberment of the empire, for economic as well as political reasons.

Germans engaged in the debate that provides the history of central Europe in these revolutionary years with its second theme: liberalism vs. nationalism. Delegates had been chosen from across Germany and Austria to attend the Frankfurt Assembly. They generally devoted to the cause of middle-class liberalism. Many had assumed that they would draft a constitution for a liberal, unified Germany. The Frankfurt Assembly was grounded upon nothing but its own words. It was a collection of thoughtful, well-intentioned middle-class liberals, committed to a belief that a liberal-national German state could somehow be constituted out of abstract principles. Almost from the start, the assembly found itself tangled in the problems of nationality. Who, they asked, were the Germans? A majority of the delegates argued that they were all those who, by language, culture, or geography, felt themselves bound to the enterprise now underway at Frankfurt. This point of view came to be known as the “Great German” position. In the end the Great Germans settled that the nation for which they were drafting a constitution should include all Austrian lands except Hungary. This decision meant that the crown of their new country might most logically be offered to the Habsburg emperor. At this point the voice of the “Little Germans” began to be heard. Reduced to the status of dependents, the Frankfurt delegates nevertheless, in the spring of 1849, produced a constitution. Many of them, disillusioned by their experience, convinced that their dual goal of liberalism and nationalism was an impossible one. Some emigrated to the United States, where they believed the goal had already been achieved. Some convinced themselves that half the goal was better than none, and sacrificed their liberalism to nationalism.

One German exile who took hope for the future from the events of the revolutions of 1848 was the young Karl Marx (1818-1883), whose radical ideas and activities had compelled his emigration to England. He moved first to Paris and then to Brussels, where he helped found the Communist League, a body whose declared aim was the overthrow of the middle class. While in Paris, Marx had renewed a former friendship with Engels (1820-1895). Together, during the late 1840s, they produced a theory of revolutionary change that was published by Marx at the request of the League in 1848, at the height of the struggles on the Continent, as The Communist Manifesto.

In the Manifesto Marx outlined a theory of history that owed a good deal to the German philosopher Hegel. Hegel had argued that ideas, the motive force of history, were in constant conflict with each other, and that this clash between ideas in turn would produce an eventual synthesis, representing an advance in the history of the human race. Marx adapted this particular progressive notion of history to his own uses. Whereas Hegel perceived conflict and resolution (a dialectic) in terms of ideas, Marx saw them in terms of economic forces. Society, he argued, was at any time no more than the reflection of a hierarchy of classes dictated by those who own the means of production and control the distribution of its material goods. As history had progressed, so had the means changed. Feudalism and manorialism were vanquished by capitalism. And capitalism, Marx declared, would be vanquished in turn by communism. That process, however, would first involve the concentration of capitalist economic power into the hands of fewer and fewer members of the middle class (the bourgeoisie), and the consequent opposition of an ever-increasing and ever-debased working class (the proletariat). Once the proletariat overthrew the bourgeoisie by revolution, as it was bound to do eventually, society as a whole would be emancipated. An interim period in which a “dictatorship of the proletariat” rid the world of the last vestiges of bourgeois society would be followed by an end of the dialectical process and the emergence of a truly classless civilization.