ABSTRACT
The central romantic dilemma is that of the relation between spirit and reality. Pure spirit, infinite and eternal, is both everything and nothing. A national consciousness of a kind had, of course, survived, but it needed the imaginative and emotional power of the romantic mentality to turn it into a political force. The German romantics were more willing than most to undertake this voyage and suffered shipwreck correspondingly more often. They knew the dangers of the poetic life and often wrote them out in 'wrecked' characters like Hoffmann's Kreisler or Wackenroder's Berglinger. The real subject of romantic literature or art is often not the ostensible 'external' one, but the Gemut itself and its both individual and infinite experience. The great romantics stand out by virtue of their ability to control the process, in the full knowledge that they were thereby denying themselves complete satisfaction.
