ABSTRACT
There would seem to be no likelier field in which to find counterparts between French and German literature than in the emergence of their Romantic movements. For the past fifty years or more, ever since the appearance of the first volume of Paul Van Tieghem’s Le Préromantisme. Etudes d’histoire littéraire européenne (Paris: Rieder, 1924), it has been customary to emphasize the interrelatedness of European literatures from the second half of the eighteenth century onwards into the nineteenth. The evolution of thought and expression away from the Neo-classical patterns towards a Romantic silhouette certainly testifies to the presence of similar forces in various lands. Sentimentality, fascination with the past, attraction to the natural as a way of living and of writing, melancholy, curiosity about the workings of genius and the meaning of originality, the lure of the Gothic and of the picturesque: these are recognized as the familiar features of that rather amorphous transitional phase generally described as Pre-romanticism. A flourishing network of translations, influences and international connections has been traced by Van Tieghem and his disciples: the cult of the nocturnal and the sepulchral in its spread from Gray’s Elegy written in a Country Churchyard, Young’s Night Thoughts and Hervey’s Meditations among the Tombs across the English Channel into virtually every corner of Europe; the almost frenzied sweep of Ossianism into the poetry, painting, drama, music and even garb of the age; the associated dissemination of Scandinavian mythology; the mode for the pastoral stemming from Gessner and his successors; the predilection for the sentimental novel in the manner of Goldsmith and particularly Richardson; etc. So much so that the later eighteenth century often seems to be regarded as a grand European banquet to which each nation brought its speciality: English gloom, Scottish mists, the German idyll, the French flirtation with the exotic. The community of direction essential to a true counterpart is undoubtedly in evidence here as parallel tendencies develop within the framework of diverse national traditions. In the preface to the first volume of Le Préromantisme Van Tieghem indeed advocates the simultaneous study of ‘courants internationaux’ and ‘traditions nationales’ (p. 9).
