Romanticism and Spain

In a review of Joseph von Eichendorff’s collected works ( TLS , October 1, 2004), Carol Tully points out the fascination of German Romantics for Spain:

“For the poets and theoreticians of the Romantic age in German, Spain was somewhere very special indeed. The nation and its culture were eulogized in terms which owed little to historical accuracy and much to wishful thinking.

“To the Romantic writers of the cold, Ossianic north, Spain was truly the aspirational ‘Other.’ Here, far from the clutches of French-driven Enlightenment prescription, was a nation and a culture free from the fetters of universalist ideals, its essence grounded instead in a set of organic values which had developed over the ages in line with the spirit of the nation and the Volk itself. Still guided by the twin powers of throne and altar, Spain, to the Romantic eye, was the living embodiment of the medieval ideal, a nation whose very soul exuded chivalry, honour, love and piety, an image granted credence by the popular uprising against Napoleon in 1808.

These values, coupled with the oriental mysticism of Spain’s Moorish legacy, imbued the nation’s literature with a life and colour which stood in stark contrast to the arid pedantry of the rational age. Exhilarated by this vision, German Romantic thinkers received Spain’s literary culture in terms of pure hyperbole. August Wilhelm Schlegel praised Calderon as ‘a poet if ever anyone deserved the name’; his brother Friedrich said of Don Quixote that it was ‘the only truly Romantic novel.”

This is very intriguing, for it suggests that Spain played a much larger role in the development of modern European thought than is generally supposed. (Quick, name a prominent modern Spanish philosopher.) Given the important place that German Romanticism had in the development of European civilization, Spain’s influence as a model of a traditional, organic “Volk” was significant for European politics as well as for European letters.