We may in part account for Romanticism by recalling that it was the product of an age which was no longer in sympathy with its own tasks, an age of political miseries and restrained powers, which turned away from its own surroundings and sought to be free from all contact with them, striving to benumb its sensations by an auto-intoxication of dreams.

Romanticism is built upon the imposing corner-stone of the unique importance of the Individual:  “To become God, to be man, to develop one’s own being, these are expressions for the same thing.”  As personality is supreme, it is natural that there should follow a contempt for the mediocrity of current majorities, standards and opinions.  It abhorred universal abstractions, as opposed to the truth and meaning of individual phenomena.  It stoutly believed in an inexpugnable right to Illusions, and held clarity and earnestness to be foes of human happiness.  “The poem gained great applause, because it had so strange, so well-nigh unintelligible a sound.  It was like music itself, and for that very reason attracted so irresistibly.  Although the hearers were awake, they were entertained as though in a dream.”

Hence a purely lyric attitude toward life, which was apprehended only on transcendent, musical valuations.  Poetry was to be the heart and centre of actual living; modern life seemed full of “prose and pettiness” as compared with the Middle Ages; it was the doctrine of this Mary in the family of Bethany to leave to the Martha of dull externalists the care of many things, while she “chose the better part” in contemplative lingering at the vision of what was essentially higher.  A palpitant imagination outranks “cold intelligence;” sensation, divorced from all its bearings or functions, is its own excuse for being.  Of responsibility, hardly a misty trace; realities are playthings and to be treated allegorically.

The step was not a long one to the thesis that “disorder and confusion are the pledge of true efficiency”—­such being one of the “seed-thoughts” of Novalis.  In mixing all species, Romanticism amounts to unchartered freedom, “die gesunde, kraeftige Ungezogenheit.”  It is no wonder that so many of its literary works remain unfinished fragments, and that many of its exponents led unregulated lives.

“Get you irony, and form yourself to urbanity” is the counsel of Friedrich Schlegel.  The unbridgeable chasm between Ideal and Life could not be spanned, and the baffled idealist met this hopelessness with the shrug of irony.  The every-day enthusiasm of the common life invited only a sneer, often, it is true, associated with flashing wit.