Missing Mother 
Graham Robb
- Romanticism and Its Discontents by Anita Brookner
Trying to define Romanticism has always been a typically Romantic activity, especially in France. The word romantisme first appeared in the year of Napoleon’s coronation (1804) and soon began to acquire a large retinue of definitions. Mme de Staël associated it with the misty, melancholy North and declared Romanticism to be primarily an effect of climate. Victor Hugo and his followers allied it to the vanished monarchy, then to the departed Napoleon, and finally to ‘liberalism in art’. Stendhal and Baudelaire produced more durable definitions by linking it to the present. For Stendhal, ‘Romanticism is the art of offering people the literary works which, in the present state of their habits and beliefs, are likely to give them the greatest possible pleasure. Classicism, by contrast, offers them the literature which gave the greatest possible pleasure to their great-grandfathers.’ For Baudelaire, ‘whoever says Romanticism, says modern art.’
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Graham Robb has written biographies of Balzac, Victor Hugo and Rimbaud. Strangers: Homosexual Love in the 19th Century was published in 2003.
Other articles by this contributor:
Walking through Walls · the world’s first anti-hero rogue cop
Come Back, You Bastards! · Who cut the tow rope?
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