The stature of man by Wilson Colin 1931-

Author:Wilson, Colin, 1931-
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Civilization
Publisher: New York, Greenwood Press
Published: 1968-10-25T16:00:00+00:00

with their periodic complaint: "Nothing to be done." The Byronic hero, who is sensitive, handsome, and sinful, usually finds plenty to do (especially by way of sinning) but has to die in the end because nothing he ever does makes him feel better. (Manfred is a candid imitation of Faust.) The romantic heroes of Hoffmann, Tieck, N oval is, and Jean Paul follow the same pattern. In Theodor Storm's popular Immensee, the hero fails to get the girl and drifts on into old age, sentimentally mooning about his youth and lost love. As a device for ending the story, this was even neater than killing off the hero, for it could give a sense of inevitability, which the arbitrary death of the hero often lacked, and could distract attention from the hero's indecision in letting the heroine get away.

But nineteenth-century romanticism, for all its sentimentality, had certain advantages over the realism of the twentieth century. It never lost sight of the importance of the individual or of the importance of the ideal. The intensity that is only rarely achieved in twentieth-century writing, in such books as From Here to Eternity or The Caine Mutiny, is achieved every time by the romantic writers, simply because they were more concerned about the solitary individual and his relation to nature. As soon as the reader opens a book by Hoffmann or Kleist or Brentano, he is transported into a world of greater intensity. The romantics felt no guilty conscience when they turned their back on society.

Some Nineteenth-Century Heroes

Stendhal's Le Rouge et le Noir is of particular interest as a bridge between romanticism and modern realism. The

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