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Benichou finds the consecration of the writer disturbing. "How is it that
literature...can be capable of assuming such a role?" But for the most
part he charts this development rather than attacking it.
Benichou acknowledges that liberal romantic writers of the period,
who were not as hostile to the
philosophes
as the royalists were, did not
generally have such an exalted view of the poet. Many liberals thought
poetry flourished only in primitive times, and that the advancement of
civilization meant the inevitable decline of poetry. But Benichou persua–
sively argues that both the liberals, who were critical of traditional reli–
gion, and the royalists, who supported traditional religion, subscribed
to a "secular spiritualism" that drew its strength from an appreciation
of the beauties of art and nature. And this secular spiritualism, he says,
had its origins in the eighteenth-century worship of sensibility: the wide–
spread assumption that aesthetes-those who are receptive
to
the beau–
ties of art-are likely
to
be more moral and even more spiritual than
philistines. (Jane Austen went against the current, for she regarded the
man or woman of sensibility as a somewhat ludicrous figure.)
According to Benichou, the key word that connects the Enlighten–
ment with the romantics is enthusiasm-a word that in mid-eighteenth–
century France and Britain increasingly came to have a positive
meaning. In Samuel johnson's
Dictionary
the third definition of enthu–
siasm is: "elevation of fancy; exaltation of ideas." Both romantic royal–
ists and romantic liberals, Benichou says, celebrated enthusiasm. In the
writings of Madame de Stael "poetry and religion are nearly synony–
mous... being properly speaking neither poetry nor religion, but vari–
ants of the enthusiasm that is at the heart of her credo." De Stael herself
says that "enthusiasm gathers together different feelings, enthusiasm is
the incense of the earth climbing toward heaven, it joins one to the
other." The romantic writers, Benichou says, became "theologians of
enthusiasm" who hoped art would bring about the spiritual renewal of
society. Yet as the century progressed most writers-especially the
poets-began to despair of their mission, regarding bourgeois society as
unredeemable. After the July 1830 revolution, "the incompatibility of
romanticism and bourgeois values becomes shockingly obvious."
Benichou supports his argument with extensive quotations from a
wide range of early nineteenth-century French writers. He looks at well–
known figures-de Stael, Constant, Hugo, Lamartine, de Vigny, Sainte–
Beuve-but he also looks at obscure writers who he says are "justly
forgotten." At times the survey of writers becomes tedious, but we need
to keep in mind that this is a work of intellectual history, not literary
criticism, so Benichou would be giving a misleading portrait of the age
