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A History of Modern Political Thought in East Central Europe: Volume I: Negotiating Modernity in the 'Long Nineteenth Century'

Balázs Trencsényi, Maciej Janowski, Monika Baar, Maria Falina, and Michal Kopecek

Print publication date: 2016

Print ISBN-13: 9780198737148

Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: April 2016

DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198737148.001.0001

Title Pages

(p.i) A History of Modern Political Thought in East Central Europe (p.ii)

(p.iii) A History of Modern Political Thought in East Central Europe

(p.iv)

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A History of Modern Political Thought in East Central Europe: Volume I: Negotiating Modernity in the 'Long Nineteenth Century'

Balázs Trencsényi, Maciej Janowski, Monika Baar, Maria Falina, and Michal Kopecek

Print publication date: 2016

Print ISBN-13: 9780198737148

Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: April 2016

DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198737148.001.0001

Introduction

Balázs Trencsényi

Maciej Janowski

Mónika Baár

Maria Falina

Michal Kopeček

DOI:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198737148.003.0001

Abstract and Keywords

The Introduction provides an overview of the methodological and interpretative perspectives of the book. It argues that it is impossible to construct a narration of East Central European intellectual history without the necessary layer of— often asymmetric—comparative references to the broader European context, as well as to the various imperial (Habsburg, Ottoman, Romanov, and Hohenzollern) and post-imperial frameworks. At the same time, rather than projecting Western European historical narratives and analytical categories onto the whole continent, it pleads for developing a regional interpretative framework, without, however, turning it into a “regionalist” narrative, that is, essentializing East Central Europe as a self-containing and self-explanatory historical entity. Avoiding such an essentialist view is important, since even within the region in different cultural configurations the processes of ideological reception and appropriation unfolded according to markedly different rhythms. Along these lines, the introduction formulates the program of a context-sensitive and flexible understanding of “political modernity,” formed as a result of multidirectional transfers and transcultural “negotiations.

Keywords: political thought,transnational history,comparative method,intellectual history, contextualism,modernity,East Central Europe,Western Europe

The principal aim of this work is to provide an overview of the history of modern political thought in East Central Europe. Being equally open to supranational and subnational (regional) frameworks of interaction, it offers a genuinely transnational intellectual history. It is not a compendium of case studies, nor does it follow the type of deductive area-studies approach that tends to eliminate differences in the interests of forging a generalized model. It is a synthetic narrative—the result of the efforts of a multinational team working together for almost a decade.

Since 1989 there has been an increasing demand for a more context-sensitive rethinking of European political thought. However, such a project cannot be based merely on the projection of Western European historical narratives onto the whole continent, but requires careful scrutiny of specific regional and local ways of dealing with modernity. In particular, recent debates in comparative European politics have focused on the role of indigenous political cultures in developing and sustaining democracy. All this points to the need for wellinformed, methodologically advanced empirical studies to help create a more complex framework for comparing and linking political traditions. By shifting the reference point of historical thinking from the “West” to the cross-European experience with a special emphasis on East Central Europe, these two volumes aim to contribute to a rethinking of the “negotiation of political modernity,” facilitating the move from “methodological nationalism” and oversimplification towards a more encompassing notion of what constitutes the European intellectual heritage.

Consequently, our aim is twofold: to globalize the history of East Central European political thought, while at the same time to “renegotiate” the European intellectual canon. In order to accomplish this, however, we must go beyond the task of expanding the pool of “shared” references. We need to rethink the very categories in which the history of modern political ideas—and thus of political modernity, as such—has traditionally been formulated. By analyzing the contested models of modernity these cultures developed over the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, from the Enlightenment up to the postCommunist period, we hope to contribute to the formation of a new (p.2) transnational intellectual history that takes into account the radical multiplicity of contexts as well as the complex processes of ideological transmission and reception.

When we first started our work eight years ago, we were conscious of the need to devise such a synthetic perspective because hardly any work of this sort was available to the public. It is perhaps symptomatic that the otherwise excellent Cambridge History of Twentieth-Century Political Thought contains only a single entry on East Central European thinkers, on Georg (György) Lukács, conveniently placed under the heading “Western Marxism.”1 Similarly, of the 258 pages of the synthetic European Political Thought, 1815–1989, only seven are dedicated to any aspect of East Central and Southeast European political thought, specifically in connection with the opposition movements of the 1970s and 1980s.2 In the newly published eight-volume Encyclopedia of Political Thought one can find only nine political thinkers from this part of the world (Gellner, Heller, Kołakowski, Kristeva, Lukács, Luxemburg, von Neumann, Przeworski, Žižek) among well over 300 entries on individuals, and it is symptomatic that practically all of them became world famous while living outside of the region.3 One of the very rare successful attempts at integrating some East Central European thinkers into the broader European context is by Jan-Werner Müller, who included Lukács, Bibó, and Patočka in his overview of twentieth-century European political thought; but obviously such a work could not aim at a more detailed and contextual analysis of the various intellectual traditions present in the region.4

Besides offering a remedy to the absence of references to intellectual traditions east of Germany and west of Russia, which makes these political cultures hard to understand for an external observer, there is a more theoretical purpose in devising such a narrative. Approaching political questions from the semiperiphery has often meant that the paradigms originating in Western European contexts had to be “negotiated” in a setting marked by radically different local conditions. Thus, the conflicts and ambiguities surrounding them became even sharper and more visible, making research into their reception, transformation, or rejection all the more relevant for debates about European values and identity and the possible emergence of “post-national” political cultures. Along these lines, apart from knowledge production, our work also necessitated the “trading” of concepts—both in the direction of inserting specific historical experiences and analytical categories into (p.3) European circulation and, conversely, testing the heuristic power of analytical concepts in our specific contexts.

In order to meet this challenge we needed to develop a very flexible framework of symmetric and asymmetric comparisons, giving voice to both synchronicity and asynchrony. Significantly, in different cultural configurations the processes of ideological reception and appropriation unfolded according to markedly different rhythms, often creating different temporalities in one and the same geographical zone. The multilayered comparative scheme (comparing these cultures to each other, but also taking into account the broader European context) made it possible to discern what is general and what is region-specific or nation-specific in a given cultural phenomenon, and thus to identify the universal and the local-residual aspects of a given ideological trend. Besides the task of mediating between the local canons and the pan-European perspective, we also became aware of a pressing need to tackle these phenomena within the framework of the entangled history of the region itself. Looking at the national political traditions from a regional and cross-national perspective is a useful corrective, challenging the purported uniqueness and mimetic competition of these traditions.

The geographical scope of the project comprises the national cultures of East Central Europe writ large, that is, the countries wedged between the four empires up to 1918: Ottoman, Russian, Habsburg, and Prussian/German.5 It is important to stress, however, that our perspective is regional but not regionalist: arguably, an essentialist use of East Central Europe would cause more harm than good, turning into a “quasi-national,” exclusionist narrative with an “Orientalist” gaze towards the East and with the resentment of the subaltern “Other” towards the West.

In order to locate East Central Europe on the map of comparative intellectual history, we sought to trace the interplay of local ideological subcultures with their “Western Others,” bearing in mind the dynamic nature of the “Other” in their understanding: sometimes homogenized as a compact entity (“the West”) and sometimes compartmentalized into competing sources of influence (e.g., Germanophiles vs. Francophiles vs. Anglophiles). Indeed, “the West” should not be taken here as a geographical but rather as a symbolic category, as in many contexts “Westernization” often arrived from the East—as in the case of the Danubian Principalities (Moldavia and Wallachia) in the 1820s and 1830s, where the Russian military and administrative elite was the catalyst of “Westernization,” or of parts of the Balkans in the late eighteenth (p.4) and nineteenth centuries, which looked to the center of the Ottoman Empire, Istanbul, for modernizing impulses.

Significantly, it is impossible to construct a narration of East Central European intellectual history without the necessary layer of—often asymmetric— comparative references to the various Western contexts; most of the time we are studying ideas that originated outside (even if this “outside” did not mean, in view of the common European cultural tradition, some kind of radical “otherness”) but were contextualized inside. As a result, the Central European context has often been constructed in light of a generally unilinear process of cultural transmission by which the ideologemes were formed in a constant interaction with something familiar but external (of course, there are certain examples of the reverse process as well—for example, the role of Polish émigrés in the 1830s in coining the Western canon of Romantic revolutionary discourse— but these influences could also be seen as self-reflections of Western modernity).

Although it would be an exaggeration to perceive Western Europe as the sole locus of organic development, one might argue that one finds in the West a considerable internal evolution of concepts and that the process follows a more linear pattern, while the specific nature of East Central European cultural receptions, coupled with the perceived asymmetric relationship between the model “nation-states” in the West and the overlapping national projects in the East, created an intellectual climate where the different layers of modernity, incorporated at different moments and leading lives of their own, often clashed with each other and prompted reflection on modernity in terms of reception and/ or indigenous development.

As political modernity in East Central Europe is related to the idea of a temporal and spatial lag and the imperative of following the already existing models of the “civilized West,” the asymmetric and relational notions of Europeanization, Westernization, modernization, and backwardness became constitutive of the political languages of the region. Along these lines, modern Eastern European intellectual history has often been framed—from such otherwise rather divergent perspectives as those of Yurii Lotman, Mircea Eliade, Jerzy Jedlicki, and Katherine Verdery—in light of the “eternal debate” between local cultures and imported ideas. The emerging modern political languages indeed reflected this duality, as it was at the root of the conflicts around the representation of the political community. From the late eighteenth-century reception of enlightened political ideas onwards, we can observe the clash of institutionalist/statecentered discourses (with metaphors of artificiality) and culturalist/societycentered (organicist) discourses. Two conceptual aspects kept these options together, and thus set the framework for their conflict: first, the paradoxical presence of imported Western terminology on both sides (the very concept of “organicism” witnesses the imported nature of the autochthonist discourse), which indicates the plurality of “modernities” (p.5) competing with each other; second, the common integrative battleground—the semantics of nationhood. Therefore, rather than projecting this duality on each and every ideological conflict, our aim is to go beyond the conventional vision of a binary opposition of these ideological stances and point out the complex intertwining of positions which have produced innumerable ideological hybrids over the last two centuries.

With its basis in a transnational negotiation process, our work is intended to contribute to the rethinking, and hopefully the teaching as well, of the history of European political thought and the history of Europe in general. The perspective of the book lies somewhere between the genealogical approach, telling the “story” of the emergence of various, often conflicting, versions of political modernity in the region (taking as a methodological example Quentin Skinner’s Foundations of Modern Political Thought) and the more synchronic perspective (characteristic, for instance, of the Cambridge History of Political Thought series) that follows the parallel lives of various ideological traditions.

Beyond the obvious methodological and “national” divergences, the modern history of political thought has come to concentrate on social and political “contexts,” rhetorical conventions, and discursive frameworks. This methodological shift disqualified the traditional ways of writing intellectual history, which focused mainly on the understanding of paradigmatic theories as elements of an ahistorical philosophia perennis, but also questioned the onesidedly determinist perspective which seeks to deduce the nature of a political move from socioeconomic factors. Instead, historians of political thought try to renegotiate the relationship between history, literary studies, and the social sciences, pointing out that the understanding of a political interaction might necessitate the use of a variety of different interpretative techniques and approaches.

In telling the story of political thought in the region, we can no longer draw on some sort of idiographic method or Geistesgeschichte-based presumption depicting the changing “spirit of the age”; rather, the principal focus of our inquiries is the interplay of different discursive traditions and individual projects contesting or legitimizing power. We have been particularly inspired by Reinhart Koselleck’s theoretical writings on Begriffsgeschichte and his analysis of the ways in which the inherent temporality of concepts shapes political discourse. It goes without saying that the very notion of modernization in the region is intimately linked to the emergence of modern terminologies and the fundamental transformation of vernaculars that made them capable of expressing and transmitting the new ideological programs. At the same time, rather than delving into historical linguistics, we focus on how certain ideas became pronounceable, how the meanings of certain keywords changed, and how the speakers of these vernaculars reflected on the task of “constructing” a new conceptual framework to drive home their messages. Rather than tracing individual keywords, our work aims at mapping political (p.6) languages and ideological configurations. In this sense our perspective was shaped by the methodological and historical writings of J. G. A. Pocock and Michael Freeden.6 Along these lines, we analyze the interplay of three factors: intended meaning (the self-positioning and discursive strategy of the speakers), the socioinstitutional setting of the discourses, and the meaning-generating process of language itself (how certain concepts start to live a life of their own in the reception process).

The precondition for producing a genuinely comparative history of European political thought is to devise a sufficiently flexible image of modernity into which the divergent experiences of the multiple modernities of Europe can be incorporated. If we fail to do so, our analysis might easily become merely the projection of a question taken from one canon onto another, mixing mutually incompatible senses of relevance. The methodological aspect of our research cannot therefore be separated from the substance of our research. The two have a “dialectical” relationship—only a more sensitive historical vision of the emergence of political modernity in East Central Europe can lead to a more sophisticated methodological approach, while only a considerable refinement and adjustment of the methodological options available to us can lead to a more complex understanding of political modernity. To avoid the circulus vitiosus implied by this “double-bind” of mutual conditioning, we need to view both our methodology and the research process as an open-ended dynamism which is permanently being reconstituted by a multiple dialogue—incorporating both the plurality of voices representing different historical itineraries and sensitivities within the region and the different methodological traditions and historical visions of German, French, American, British, Dutch, Italian, Russian, Spanish, and Scandinavian scholarship.

Seeking to map the processes of ideological transfer while simultaneously being steeped in the process of methodological transfer, our work bridges various historiographical traditions. Thus, in addition to applying methods of contextual and conceptual history to our region, we have also relied upon the findings of various prestigious Central European “schools” of intellectual history, such as the “Warsaw School of the History of Ideas” (L. Kołakowski, B. Baczko, A. Walicki, J. Jedlicki), and a range of studies on the emergence of modern nationalism in its social and cultural setting (M. Hroch, V. Macura, J. Szűcs, N. Genchev, A. Duţu, P. Kitromilides). Last but not least, our project was inspired by —and in a way rooted in—the East Central European classics of comparative history-writing, such as Marceli Handelsman’s study of modern nationalism,7 Josef Macůrek’s history of Eastern European (p.7) historiography,8 and István Bibó’s analytical essay on the “misery of Eastern European small states.”9

However, in its geographical and temporal scope there is hardly any precedent for our venture: what is available consists of either local case studies or synthetic works on the broader region where political thought is subordinated to a general narrative of social, political, or cultural history.10 The works stemming from the “industry” of Nationalism Studies tend to offer broad-ranging generalizations on the history of nationalist political ideas in the region, without however being in a position to actually conduct research afresh on all the cases analyzed and thus often unwittingly, and paradoxically, reproducing the ideologically laden self-perceptions of national(ist) scholarship in these countries.

Indeed, very few titles can be cited that aim at a more comprehensive vision of the history of political ideas in East Central Europe. It is symptomatic, however, that even the exception is a compendium of nationally based case studies written by mainstream historians from the several national contexts, without offering a common narrative based on comparative analysis, and thus remaining on the level of registering parallel phenomena.11 Perhaps the only regional synthesis with a similar transnational perspective, albeit dealing not with political thought but with literature, is a series edited by Marcel Cornis-Pope and John Neubauer offering a comparative perspective that seeks to transcend the parochialism of national historiographies.12

Our work has a number of direct antecedents in the methodological and organizational sense. The research project “Regional Identity Discourses in Central and Southeast Europe (1775–1945),” hosted by the Centre for Advanced Study Sofia, resulted in the publication of a collection of formative texts with extensive commentaries.13 While this project mainly aimed at source publication, (p.8) their intensive interaction throughout these years helped the members of the team (some of whom also contributed to the present volumes) to develop various skills of transnational history-writing and shaped a common interpretative framework which served as the starting point for the present endeavor. Similarly, the project “We, the People” brought together a dozen Central and Southeast European researchers to study the institutionalization and politicization of the concepts of folk and ethnicity in the region.14 The principal aim of these projects was to bring to bear the major “Western” methodologies available (from conceptual history to discourse analysis) on the local contexts and develop a syncretistic but not incoherent local application, being aware of the rootedness of these methodological options in their particular historiographical traditions but also weighing their transferability into other research environments.

The most innovative aspect of the present work is that it is based on a dialogical method, which is also reflected in the way the chapters were written. Rather than assigning separate chapters to individual contributors, our work was collective in the literal sense of the word. Every section is the result of collective brainstorming, after which usually two members of our “core group” of authors drafted a text which was again read, commented on, and adjusted by everyone in the group; finally, we also incorporated the comments of the relevant country experts from among our broader circle of collaborators. As a result, the chapters reflect the dialogue between various perspectives and historiographical intuitions, integrating various cultural, ideological, and conceptual traditions.

One of the obvious advantages to such an approach is that it allowed us to test the interpretative assumptions present in various national historiographies against the evidence of neighboring countries. A case in point is the notion of Late Enlightenment, which acquires a completely different heuristic force when we realize that the drift between ideological and aesthetic frameworks and the surprisingly long survival of some elements of the Enlightenment program, such as the model of stadial history and the issue of sociability, is a regional phenomenon crucial for understanding the nation-building narratives of the nineteenth century. Very often the local interpretative traditions constructed retrospectively with the intention of “canonizing” the national ideology fused the texts written in the late eighteenth century with those of the 1830s and 1840s, inserting a kind of teleology into the formation of a modern national consciousness. By drawing attention to the intellectual influences and paradigms of the Late Enlightenment, we hope to question this vision of (p.9) an unproblematic evolution and to highlight the cleavages between “Enlightenment” and “Romantic” projects.

Certain phenomena become visible only in a comparative framework, where the research questions based on the historiography of a given case initiate a dialogue with other cases and lead to the formation of a new analytical category or research hypothesis which then needs to be tested regionally. A case in point is the notion of “critical turns,” which was originally used for the anti-Romantic intellectual trend of the Romanian Junimea movement in the 1860s and 1870s, but can be extended as an analytical category to describe various intellectual groupings in the region inspired by Positivism and attacking “National Romanticism,” while often developing a new organicist understanding of nationality.15 Comparison opens up questions we might not think to ask in the light of any particular national context. Only if we identify that there was a strong “peasantist” intellectual stream in interwar Romania, Croatia, or Hungary can we ask why it was relatively weaker in Poland or Serbia, the existence of various peasant parties notwithstanding.

We can compress these comparative “operations” into three basic types: (a) accentuating the common European intellectual horizons of discourses which are commonly inserted into a teleological national narrative (the Late Enlightenment question); (b) bringing together in one analytical category various phenomena which bear different labels in their respective contexts (the case of “critical turns”); and (c) questioning the apparent non-existence of a phenomenon on the evidence of its presence in other comparable contexts, and discussing the reasons for this absence, or identifying it as part of a noncanonical but existing tradition (e.g., the issue of peasantism mentioned above).

The temporal range of the project, covering the period from the late eighteenth century to the beginning of the twenty-first, also posed methodological problems when it came to comparing cases with “different temporalities” at different points of time. While the Hungarian, Polish, and Bohemian Enlightenments are comparable both in their intellectual influences and in their temporal horizons, we encounter a rather different historical dynamism if we move east or southeast, where some of these ideas often can be traced in the mid-nineteenth century more than in the late eighteenth. The same goes for the long shadow of National Romanticism, which in certain cultures of the region extends well beyond the temporal framework usually allotted to Romanticism as an aesthetic category in the West. It is a sinister irony of history that the moment of “synchronization” for many of these cultures, which happened in the interwar period, coincided with the anti-modernist fashion in Europe; thus Europeanization in this context meant precisely the rejection of a liberaldemocratic value system based on an evolutionist vision of history.

(p.10) Significantly, rather than suggesting one single Sattelzeit which would have changed the outlook of political thought once and for all in the whole region, we preferred rather to discern processes of local adaptation and negotiation as well as moments of crystallization—such as 1791–92, 1848, 1863–67, 1878, 1917–20, 1945, 1968, 1989—characterized by a compressed time frame where many alternatives co-existed for a short interval, in a way both synthesizing the developments of the preceding decades and opening up the possibilities that would come to be charted during those that ensued.

In line with our general methodological commitment to analyze “political languages,” we have identified the constitutive elements of this jigsaw not so much as the individual thinkers but as narrative patterns, rhetorical devices, keywords, as well as clusters of thinkers, intellectual milieus, and networks of ideological transmission. Thus we sought to reconstruct the negotiation of modernity in the light of the change of intellectual paradigms (Enlightenment, National Romanticism, Positivism, Social Darwinism, Konservative Revolution, Stalinism, National Communism, Revisionist Marxism, Neoliberalism) that framed the local contexts and, in their turn, came to be framed by them.

From this perspective, the very notion of “political thought” also raises a number of questions—what is political at a given moment can radically change in different spatial and temporal frameworks. For instance, a treatise on the national language in general could become part of political thinking in the Enlightened and Romantic frameworks when it was linked to the creation of a particular political community rooted in common linguistic-cultural markers. While it would usually cease to function as a political text in the positivist framework of academic debate, in certain cases (like Albania or Macedonia) where nation-building has remained linked to the question of national language, such a text might still qualify as political thought even as late as the midtwentieth century. Moreover, while we also occasionally analyzed texts of political manifestos, treaties, or constitutions as reflective of particular trends of political thought, we focused primarily on texts that also reflected to some extent on political problems and thus went beyond merely pragmatic policy recommendations. In a way, we have sought to locate political thought at the meeting point of action and reflection.

Interpreting discourses, concepts, and political languages as interfaces of different cultural and political orientations, we also aimed at locating authors both in their sociocultural settings and in the (inter)textuality of their works. It is important to stress, however, that contextualization as it is employed here does not imply reducing the various intellectual positions represented by our protagonists to a national framework of references. As a matter of fact, it was more the rule than the exception that they had multiple loyalties and cultural backgrounds and there is perhaps no more typical East Central European figure in the nineteenth century than the “national awakener” who himself (or, in exceptional cases, herself) experienced national ambiguity, often being (p.11) committed to more than one national program during his or her literary and political career.

One possible trajectory was to move from the imperial or dominant sub-imperial “centers” to the “peripheries,” for example, starting out as a Slavist in Vienna and only later developing a strong identification with one of the Slavic nations, or first opting for a culture with a more dominant position (like Polish, Greek, or Hungarian) and then challenging it from the position of the marginalized “other” (Ruthenian/Ukrainian, Bulgarian, or Slovak). However, there were cases that did not entail any dramatic shift of identification, as the two loyalties intersected or were concentrically related to each other (for instance, in the case of Polish-Lithuanian krajowcy at the turn of the twentieth century, whose Lithuanian local patriotism went together with support for the Polish political project of restoring the lost statehood). Besides, for many key figures and intellectual subcultures, there were other important cultural-political frameworks of reference and identification that can hardly be described in national terms. In some cases they operated in subnational (such as Vojvodina, Galicia, Transylvania) or supranational frameworks (for example, in imperial contexts or within various transnational ideological movements like socialism or feminism), while in other cases the most relevant context for interpreting their political thought was a multiethnic urban milieu with its specific culturalpolitical practices and discursive traditions (Prague, Salonica, Budapest, Sarajevo, Lemberg, etc.).

Admittedly, such a venture cannot be comprehensive. Thus when we presented various draft chapters to academic audiences we consistently encountered two diametrically opposed criticisms: the representatives of East Central European cultures complained that certain canonic local figures were not even mentioned; while readers outside of the region felt paralyzed by the plethora of “obscure names” whom “nobody knows.” It would be a cheap and arrogant response to claim that we felt ourselves in the right exactly because we encountered simultaneously these two opposed reactions, but the clash can be considered indicative of the very different expectations we faced—to be extensive, and at the same time to leave out some of the detail in the interest of presenting a coherent narrative. In any case, our aim was to avoid compiling a handbook that would contain all locally important names but would not have much of an analytical edge, but neither were we intent on producing a subjective essay discussing themes on the basis of randomly selected source materials.

Taking all this into account, we have striven to devise a synthetic framework and a concise “story” to tell to both colleagues and students. In order to enhance narrative coherence we followed a number of issues through the volumes, those which can be considered the constitutive problems of political thought in this part of the world. These include: the frameworks of symbolic geography underpinning the political discourses; the issues of political (p.12) participation; the horizons of social transformation; the problem of ethnic plurality; the question of nationalization and the alternative supranational allegiances; and finally the relationship between religion and politics. At the same time, our work seeks to challenge the existing “grand narratives” of a fundamental common Eastern European path, let alone Sonderweg. Our venture implies an interpretative framework of East Central European discourses which goes deeper than—and cuts across—the normative symbolic geographies of traditional cultural and political history (contrasting East and West, the Balkans and Central Europe, etc.), the dichotomic taxonomies of Nationalism Studies (like cultural vs. civic, exclusive vs. inclusive, ethnic vs. political), and the civilizational hierarchies contrasting peoples with or without history, or “backward” and “developed” societies and cultures.

Our work consequently aims at challenging the conventions of the East Central European national(ist) historiographical traditions, which usually describe their object of analysis in terms of a discursive autarchy. Along these lines, we have sought to point to the many convergences, border crossings, interferences, and entanglements between these national contexts. From this perspective, what makes political thought in this region rather peculiar is the constant overlapping of two fundamental concerns: the task of creating the political community and that of its optimal organization. While one cannot speak of this as an exclusively East Central European feature, it is remarkable that in contrast both to mainstream Western European political cultures and also to that of Russia, in the case of these relatively small and often highly unstable national contexts the very existence of the polity could not be taken for granted and the political and national communities rarely if ever came to overlap. All this could also lead to a feeling—or even psychosis—of a collective “existential” threat of disappearance, as memorably described by István Bibó; but even in its milder forms it remained in the back of the minds of most political actors and thinkers in the region.

The ambitious project of producing a synthesis covering more than a dozen languages and national cultures would not have come to fruition without the help and expertise of a great many scholars. Our research was made possible by a generous Starting Independent Researcher Grant of the European Research Council (2008–13).16 Balázs Trencsényi, as Principal Investigator, conceptualized and coordinated the project, moderated the dialogue between the team members, and took responsibility for the final coherence of the chapters. (p.13)

The “core group” who co-wrote the chapters consisted of the Principal Investigator and four permanent team members: Mónika Baár, Maria Falina, Maciej Janowski, and Michal Kopeček. In addition, the research team included a research assistant, Luka Lisjak Gabrijelčič, who also co-authored some of the chapters.

In the interest of further extending the framework of negotiation and including local knowledge for all the cultures in question, another level of participation was incorporated, namely a broader circle of “external experts.” We are extremely thankful to the group of researchers who worked with us throughout these years and helped with their “local knowledge” to put together the pieces of the regional jigsaw: Nevenko Bartulin, Rytis Bulota, Khrystyna Chushak, Iván Zoltán Dénes, Augusta Dimou, Elvis Fejzić, Andrej Findor, Ivars Ījabs, Zsófia Lóránd, Tchavdar Marinov, Alexander Martynau, Attila Novák, Kaarel Piirimäe, Valentin Săndulescu, Ostap Sereda, Ivana Trkulja, Alexandr Voronovici, Piotr Wciślik, and Lea L. Ypi. An important impulse for the entire venture was the ongoing conversation with Michael Freeden, the late Tony Judt, László Kontler, and Jan-Werner Müller, four eminent practitioners of the history of political thought who were kind enough to serve as members of the informal advisory board of our project.

Beyond the inner circle of associates, we also invited a number of scholars to discuss with us various topics related to the modern political thought of Europe. We are grateful to the participants of the research workshops in Sofia, Budapest, Ljubljana, Prague, Belgrade, Amsterdam, Bucharest, Warsaw, Berlin, Drežnica, Tartu, Sarajevo, Tirana, Lviv, Florence, Vienna, and Dublin who shared their insights on issues raised by our project, as well as to those colleagues who commented on various draft chapters of the book, especially Sorin Antohi, Balázs Apor, Nikolay Aretov, Odeta Barbullushi, Mark Biondich, Kateřina Čapková, Roumen Daskalov, Justinas Dementavičius, Ivaylo Ditchev, Amir Duranović, Stevo Đurašković, Šaćir Filandra, Robert Gerwarth, Hannes Grandits, Miroslav Hroch, Moshe Idel, Branimir Janković, Pieter Judson, Tomasz Kamusella, Georgiy Kasianov, Klejdi Këlliçi, Jeremy King, Paschalis Kitromilides, Gábor Klaniczay, Pavel Kolář, Szonja Ráhel Komoróczy, Axel Körner, János Mátyás Kovács, Ivan Krastev, Ferenc L. Laczó, Joep Leerssen, Jolanta Mickutė, Nick Miller, Zoran Milutinović, Dirk Moses, William Mulligan, John Paul Newman, Vytautas Petronis, Vladimir Petrović, Eva and Pärtel Piirimäe, Brian Porter-Szűcs, Jacques Rupnik, Martin Schulze Wessel, Teodora Shek Brnardić, Marci Shore, Timothy Snyder, Zeev Sternhell, Tomasz Stryjek, Enis Sulstarova, Aurimas Švedas, Philipp Ther, Andrej Tichomirov, Galin Tihanov, Edoardo Tortarolo, Avi Tucker, Leon Volovici†, Larry Wolff, Oleksandr Zaytsev, and Esad Zgodić. We are greatly obliged to Frank Schaer, who has worked on the linguistic editing of this complex text with infinite care and discretion. The administrative and editorial support of Alexandra Lăzău-Ratz, the proofreading help of Thomas Szerecz, and the technical (p.14) assistance of Emily Gioielli in the last phase of the project are also highly appreciated. Furthermore, we are indebted to the Imre Kertész Kolleg of the Friedrich Schiller University Jena, which hosted two of the authors for ten months—Michal Kopeček (in 2012/13) and Balázs Trencsényi (in 2014/15)—thus facilitating the completion of the manuscript. It was a pleasure to work with Oxford University Press on preparing our manuscript for publication and we are particularly thankful to Dominic Byatt, Sarah Parker, Olivia Wells, Lydia Shinoj (SPi Global), and Elizabeth Stone (Bourchier) for their professional care and attention in steering our voluminous work towards completion.

Most of all, we are extremely grateful to the hosting institution of the project, the Centre for Advanced Study Sofia, a truly hospitable research hub with a strong international and interdisciplinary orientation. Our special thanks go to Diana Mishkova, who has been of invaluable help, not only as director of the hosting institution but as an ongoing intellectual partner of the whole team. Last but not least, by virtue of the academic links of many of the research team members, the Central European University served as an important academic hub for us, not simply by hosting a number of formal and informal meetings but also by providing a cohort of graduate and postgraduate students willing to contribute to our work. The cooperation between these two institutions also proved extremely fruitful in bringing together Southeast and Central European research networks that traditionally have been institutionalized along separate lines. We hope that the landscape of the major debates and intellectual trends in the region as we have delineated them, and the model of cooperation we have devised, will open up new venues for investigation, and that our work will be a catalyst of scholarly interaction and an example for further research projects on these topics within and beyond East Central Europe.

Notes:

(

1)Terence Ball and Richard Bellamy, eds., Cambridge History of TwentiethCentury Political Thought (Cambridge, 2003).

(

2)Spencer Di Scala and Salvo Mastellone, European Political Thought, 1815–1989 (Boulder, 1998).

(

3)Michael T. Gibbons, ed., The Encyclopedia of Political Thought, 8 vols. (New York, 2014).

(

4)Jan-Werner Müller, Contesting Democracy. Political Ideas in TwentiethCentury Europe (New Haven and London, 2011).

(

5) Originally we had hoped to include Greece, but it proved impossible to find a Greek colleague committed to work with us on this project for five years. At a deeper level this might reflect the surprisingly limited interaction of specialists in modern Greek history with those of East Central Europe, a lasting effect of the Iron Curtain separating Greece politically, symbolically, but also mentally from the rest of the Balkans and Eastern Europe.

(6) See especiallyJohn G. A. Pocock, “Languages and Their Implications: The Transformation of the Study of Political Thought,” in Politics, Language & Time (Chicago, 1989 [1971]), 3–41; andMichael Freeden, Ideologies and Political Theory: A Conceptual Approach (Oxford, 1996).

(7)Marceli Handelsman, Rozwój narodowości nowoczesnej (Warsaw, 1923).

(8)Josef Macůrek, Dějepisectví evropského východu (Prague, 1946).

(9)István Bibó, A kelet-európai kisállamok nyomorúsága (Budapest, 1946).

(10) The most important and influential regional overviews areRobin Okey, Eastern Europe 1740–1985: Feudalism to Communism (London, 1987);Piotr S. Wandycz, The Price of Freedom: A History of East Central Europe from the Middle Ages to the Present, 2nd ed. (London and New York, 2001);Andrew Janos, East Central Europe in the Modern World: The Politics of the Borderlands from Pre- to Postcommunism (Stanford, 2002);Iván T. Berend, History Derailed: Central and Eastern Europe in the Long Nineteenth Century (Berkeley, 2005); John R. Lampe, Balkans into Southeastern Europe (New York, 2006).

(11)Michel Maslowski and Chantal Delsol, eds., Histoire des idées politiques de l’Europe centrale (Paris, 1998).

(12)Marcel Cornis-Pope and John Neubauer, eds., History of the Literary Cultures of East-Central Europe: Junctures and Disjunctures in the 19th and 20th Centuries, 4 vols. (Amsterdam, 2004–10).

(13) Discourses of Collective Identity in Central and Southeast Europe (1775–1945): Texts and Commentaries, vol. 1: Late Enlightenment: Emergence of the Modern “National Idea,” and vol. 2: National Romanticism: The Formation of National Movements, ed. by Balázs Trencsényi and Michal Kopeček; vol. 3/1: Modernism: The Creation of Nation-States, and vol. 3/2: Modernism: Representations of National Culture, ed. byAhmet Ersoy, Maciej Górny, and Vangelis Kechriotis; vol. 4: Anti-Modernism: Radical Revisions of Collective Identity, ed. by Diana Mishkova, Marius Turda, and Balázs Trencsényi (Budapest, 2006–14).

(14)Diana Mishkova, ed., We, the People: Politics of National Peculiarity in Southeast Europe (Budapest, 2009).

(15) SeeMaciej Janowski, “Three Historians,” in Central European University History Department Yearbook 2001–2002 (Budapest, 2002), 199–232.

(16) Grant no. 204477. For the description and documentation of the project see <http://www.negotiating.cas.bg>. In addition to the publication of the present volumes, our project has catalyzed a number of further outcomes, including the devising of new courses based on our research and a thematic issue: “Coping with Plurality: Nationalist and Multinational Frames of Mind in East Central European Political Thought, 1878–1940,” ed. by Maria Falina and Balázs Trencsényi, East Central Europe 39:2–3 (2012).

A History of Modern Political Thought in East Central Europe: Volume I: Negotiating Modernity in the 'Long Nineteenth Century'

Balázs Trencsényi, Maciej Janowski, Monika Baar, Maria Falina, and Michal Kopecek

Print publication date: 2016

Print ISBN-13: 9780198737148

Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: April 2016

DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198737148.001.0001

(p.15) Part IThe Discovery of Modernity: Enlightened Statecraft, Discourses of Reform, and Civilizational Narratives

DOI:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198737148.011.0001

The Enlightenment is usually depicted as a great cultural epoch of the type that gives to every region in which it appears a certain easily recognizable imprint, manifesting itself in a specific type of phraseology, social behavior, or public activity. The pronounced universalism of this intellectual tradition, which at least at first sight seems to stress only the common features of human nature as opposed to local and historical specificities, also contributes to this impression of general uniformity. Nevertheless, it is obvious that the project of Enlightenment relied everywhere on local preconditions that tinted it with various sorts of local concerns. Local thinkers, authors, artists, and intellectuals had their own dilemmas and problems, stemming from the hitherto existing intellectual traditions and their specific sociocultural contexts. Consequently, the history of Enlightenment political thought in East Central Europe also needs to be told from the perspective of the plurality of “Enlightenments,” rather than “a unified and universal intellectual movement” radiating concentrically from Paris.1 These local “Enlightenments” were shaped by local and transcultural agents, transfers, and debates. What provided for them a common framework, however, was a comparable set of questions and a mindset shaped by this transcultural dialogue.2

(p.16) In the context of Enlightenment political thought across Europe, a central theme was the feasibility of keeping together and in harmony societies marked by institutional and denominational diversity that had been accentuated by devastating religious and civil wars throughout the seventeenth century. This search for cohesion could be framed in terms of a new understanding of rulership and reason of state seeking to satisfy the needs of the population. This also implied the reinterpretation of patriotism in terms of an identification with the institutions or “spirit” of the fatherland. Second, cohesion could be defined in the light of a new understanding of social bonds: along these lines, the Enlightenment moved away from previous paradigms praising frugality and martial valor as the key virtues of a polity and developed a new understanding of society stressing polished interaction and commerce. As sociability became a central category, it led to the re-evaluation of the social functions of conversation and the creation of specific settings promoting civility such as salons, academies, and theaters and a new style of printed press, as well as the social role of women as being among the principal “agents” of sociability.3 Third, during this period a principal constitutive experience was the expansion of cultural and geographical horizons, exposing the radical diversity of civilizational patterns and political arrangements.4 All this gave the notion of civility, as a marker of enlightened European societies, a specific resonance. The growing awareness of the spatial and also temporal multiplicity of civilizational forms prompted Enlightenment thinkers to frame their cultural and political projects in a hierarchy, locating the relative position of a given community on a “scale” and thus by implication marking out the desirable direction of development.5 Last but not least, in the face of this experience of religious, societal, and civilizational plurality these thinkers focused on the question whether it was possible to base political norms on reason, transcending the seeming multiplicity of cultures and deriving them from the universally valid laws of nature.

The political thought of the Enlightenment in East Central Europe was the product of a multilayered interaction with paradigms stemming from different sources. The ideas coming from various centers, from Paris and Edinburgh to Göttingen and Pisa, encountered specific local intellectual and social conditions to which they had to accommodate. The peculiarities of reception and “negotiation” often meant that a particular thread of Enlightenment could coexist with another, although in the “original” setting they were consecutive (p.17) rather than simultaneous. Thus, sentimentalism in Poland appeared at the same moment as classicism and both developed simultaneously, whereas in France sentimentalism was the reaction of a post-classical generation. Sometimes the situation was even more complicated: in Southeast Europe, strong Enlightenment influence appeared simultaneously with the reception of Romantic ideas in the 1820s and even later. What is more, one might encounter traces of Enlightenment political thought in some contexts as late as the 1840s and 1850s, already feeding into Positivism.

These mutations have to do with the political situation of the various regions, with their variegated social structures and their plurality of religious denominations, as well as with the nature of their cultural and linguistic development prior to the mid-eighteenth century.6 Generally speaking, in East Central Europe the nobility and the clergy were the strata most receptive to foreign intellectual influence. Only at some distance was the secular intelligentsia, still in the very early stage of formation. Furthermore, the clergy’s imprint differed among Catholic, Protestant, and Orthodox territories. In the Catholic lands, the late Baroque intellectual formation, with its curiositas and encyclopedic interest in collecting and systematizing, provided the background for the intellectual activities of the Enlightenment. This is especially visible in Bohemia, where great Baroque thinkers such as Bohuslav Balbín laid the foundations of the historical criticism which came to be developed by the Bohemian Enlightenment.7 In Protestant lands, however, it was the influence of Pietism rather than “erudition” that served as the vehicle of new ideas which— radiating from the center of Pietist education, the University of Halle, as well as the newly founded University of Göttingen—distinguished themselves especially in the realm of educational reforms.8 While in certain cases it also had an impact on Catholics, the most immediate Pietistic influence was on Protestants in what is now Latvia and Estonia and was then the historical province of Livonia, until 1772 divided between Poland and Russia and later entirely under Russian rule.9

In Orthodox cultures the transfer was usually even more complex. In some cases it came about as a result of the Western and Central European travels of the local elite who were becoming conscious of the gap between their society and the civilization of the West; in other cases it was linked to “reforms from above” deriving from ideological models stemming from Istanbul or (p.18) St. Petersburg. Obviously, the relative proximity to Western European sources in each case influenced the trajectories of transfer and adaptation. It is telling that Fénelon’s Les Aventures de Télémaque, written in the late seventeenth century but often read as a popularization of the Enlightenment vision of virtuous rule, was translated into Hungarian by László Haller in 1755, while the Bulgarian translation by Paraskev G. Piperov was published almost a century later, in 1845.

The political transformations marking the second half of the eighteenth century in East Central Europe were closely interrelated. One of the most visible developments was the emergence of a new type of increasingly bureaucratized and centralized territorial state, manifested in the rise of Prussia and the growth of the regional power of the Habsburg Monarchy and Russia (although all of these polities remained composite states, albeit to varying degrees). Against this, we can identify polities that were unable to adapt to this new model of statehood and thus entered a path of decline. This was certainly the case with the Ottoman Empire, which was becoming increasingly exposed to foreign intervention (manifested notably by the humiliating Treaty of Küçük Kaynarca which concluded the Russo-Turkish war in 1774), but its most symbolic instance was the decline and ultimate collapse of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth (1795), a composite state that failed to transform itself into a centralized polity.

While this process has been commonly described in terms of the rise of “enlightened absolutism,” we need to bear in mind the contested nature of this concept. Both noun and adjective are equally misleading.10 Absolutism in the eighteenth century was a project, not a political reality. The perfect bureaucratic machine that would implement the will of the benevolent monarch was but a dream: the state apparatus was far too small to influence local customs and social structures, and far too divergent in its origins and vested interests to be able to act as an obedient tool of the ruler. The monarchy itself was in practice much more involved in the power struggles with the estates, the clergy, and other social forces than the idealized picture would like to have it. The wholly “enlightened” nature of absolutism is also doubtful. The reference to the Enlightenment could justify very different types of politics—centered on the estates or on a monarch, anticlerical or moderately religious, industrialistmercantilist or agriculturalist-physiocratic, and so on. Despite these qualifications, it seems that the concept of enlightened absolutism, as a model rather than a reality, cannot be completely excluded from a story of (p.19) Enlightenment political thinking in East Central Europe, bearing in mind that its ambiguities are themselves part and parcel of the story.

However, it was not only absolutism that was ready to strengthen its legitimacy through Enlightenment ideas and catchwords. It was also possible to reformulate the privileges of the estates by using an enlightened political rhetoric and to try to reform the polity along the lines of modern territorial statehood, but not in the direction of a more concentrated royal power. In Poland, where noble republicanism had the greatest following among the political cultures of the region, those who did not confine themselves to the unreflective defense of the existing system called for a reform of parliamentarianism that would take from the king those prerogatives that he still possessed and transfer them to the diet. The diet, in turn, would have to be transformed in various ways so that it could serve as a viable central power itself. Elements of this agenda can be found already in the reasoning of Stanisław Dunin-Karwicki, who presented a draft of reform plans in the first decade of the eighteenth century.11

In Hungary, among the strongest intellectual traditions was the doctrine of the Holy Crown, which had undergone tremendous changes but proved unexpectedly vital through the late eighteenth and even the nineteenth centuries.12 This pre-modern representation of the community intersected with the assertion of the corporate privileges of the nobility but could also accommodate a new patriotic understanding of the political community. In Bohemia, apart from the Hussite tradition, overshadowed for a time by the Counter-Reformation but revived in the late eighteenth century, the tradition of Baroque erudition had a “patriotic” flavor, in the sense of both defense of territorial privileges and pride in Slavic ancestry. These themes were also picked up by Enlightenment thinkers. In the Danubian Principalities as well, Enlightenment references, inspired by the Polish and Western European republican traditions, were used to legitimize the collective privileges of the nobility.13 The rise of the projects of “enlightened absolutism” and the competing estate-based reform discourses presented the political elites and all individuals willing to take part in political life with an inescapable dilemma: to support or to resist the ruler? This dilemma would be the starting point for much of the political reflection in the region in the second half of the eighteenth century.

(p.20) What made this dual scheme all the more dominant was the relative sociopolitical and ideological weakness of the stratum that came to reconfigure the political and ideological field in late eighteenth-century Western Europe: the “third estate.” The main hindrance to the emergence of an enlightened third estate in East Central Europe was the absence of urban centers that could rival Paris, Naples, and Edinburgh, with a citizenry capable of playing a significant political role and even able to exert physical pressure. In Hungary, as Kálmán Benda reminds us, the population of all Hungarian towns taken together was still about 100,000 less than that of Paris.14 The only city in the region that could at certain moments produce an environment of a specific urban politics was, for a short time, Warsaw. At the turn of the 1780s and 1790s we encounter an organized movement originating from the third estate that presented their demands to the diet. A member of the Warsaw burgher elite, Michał Świniarski, was committed by the City Council to prepare a memorandum with arguments for the admission of urban delegates to the diet. His arguments were almost exclusively historical, recalling the unjust expulsion of the third estate from the diet and evoking ancient privileges. Whatever allusions to fashionable political ideas, such as human rights or natural law, that are found in Świniarski’s text were inserted there by one the most important ideologists of Polish Enlightenment, Hugo Kołłątaj (1750–1812), a priest of gentry origins who clearly wanted to put together some sort of ideological manifesto rather than just a technical argument for the redress of grievances.15

Elements of bourgeois political identity could be observed in much smaller and demographically stagnant urban areas that possessed a tradition of municipal autonomy. Especially on the Baltic and Adriatic coasts, many towns maintained at least some vestiges of medieval self-government, even though most of them had been incorporated into larger states by the end of the early modern period. In the late eighteenth century, there were attempts to resuscitate these traditions and use them as a vehicle for the broadening of political representation. In the Venetian-ruled eastern Adriatic, the 1770s saw the emergence of radical politics that challenged the governing bodies of the municipalities. This was especially true for some coastal towns in Istria, where the city councils became the arena for a political contention between the old patrician elite, which dominated the municipal institutions, and the emergent middle classes demanding a larger share of political influence.16 Just as in the case of Warsaw, these demands were usually uttered in a political (p.21) language of legal privileges rather than natural rights. Although they lacked a cohesive vision of social or political transformation, the pursuit of these demands brought about an alliance between segments of the urban middle class and the plebeian population, which was to gain momentum on the eve of the Napoleonic occupation.

While the first part of the period in question, up to the 1780s, was characterized by a relatively slow transformation, the political and cultural upheaval in the decades around the turn of the century was extremely dramatic and changed the entire outlook of the region. A key experience of the elites in the region was that of the partitions of Poland, which had double consequences: they transformed the balance of power in the region, creating a new and different constellation with Russia as one of the central players, and they opened the way for the accelerated growth of national ideas. A “historical nation” (whatever that ambiguous term may mean) deprived of its polity necessarily felt the deprivation as something especially unjust, as a reduction to the level of simple “peoples.” Consequently, the Poles for at least half a century served as the most ardent propagators of national and revolutionary ideas in East Central Europe.

In a broader sense the most important constitutive experiences of the period were doubtless the repercussions of the French Revolution and especially the Napoleonic Wars. The early 1790s saw a number of local reform movements, to a certain extent inspired by events in France but also by the local crises of “enlightened absolutist” statecraft, which aimed to reconstruct their respective political systems and extend constitutional liberties to social strata that had been denied them so far. In the Habsburg Monarchy this tension came to the fore after the death of Joseph II in 1790, which opened up a veritable Pandora’s box of complaints and manifestos, with various groups seeking either to protect the rights they had acquired as a result of reforms from above (such as the emancipation of the non-Catholic denominations and the regulation of the status of serfs) or to recover their lost privileges (especially the nobility, which sought to restore its immunity from taxation). This triggered agitated debates, especially in those cases (like Hungary, Bohemia, and Croatia) where the coronation of the new king, Leopold II (r. 1790–1792), was linked to the convocation of the diets. Significantly, the accumulated frustration of the estates with the centralism of the former monarch and the hope of former supporters of the Josephinian project for social and religious emancipation met in a common agenda of reform at these diets.17 Furthermore, those national groups which did not have constitutional traditions of parliamentary representation (such as the Serbs in Hungary) also had a noticeable tendency to hold assemblies and assert their corporate privileges. Leopold seemed to be (p.22) a fitting partner for all these initiatives of constitutional self-assertion, having already gained a reputation as an enlightened and peace-loving ruler of Tuscany, where he had used much more tactful means than his brother to co-opt and contain the various strata of society.

While these diets were classical early modern institutions for the representation of the privileged estates (the aristocracy, high clergy, country gentry, and—to a very limited extent—the cities), the European political atmosphere, and particularly the events of the French Revolution, which had caused the transformation of the Assembly of Estates into an Assemblée Constituante, had a considerable impact on the political imagination of the East Central European elites and opened up discussion about the basis and forms of government. In Austria, for some time it seemed that it would be possible to develop a broad coalition of forces on a common constitutionalist platform. However, Leopold II’s short reign, troubled by foreign problems (the new emperor inherited a war with the Ottoman Empire), resulted in an aborted reformist impetus that generated a great deal of frustration. These constitutionalist movements foundered on the growing fear caused by the radicalization of the Revolution, which made any open call for reform an object of official suspicion and led to repressive measures. Paradoxically, it was often the movements’ own weaknesses, that is, their inability to maintain the delicate internal consensus reached vis-à-vis the monarch, which made them look more dangerous to the established order than they arguably were, since the dynamics of internal conflicts seemed dangerously similar to the meltdown of the French Estates that gave birth to the French Revolution.

One outcome of these tensions and growing disaffection was the emergence of radical streams outside of the traditional framework of political negotiation (diets, etc.). These streams were usually referred to as “Jacobin,” although most of the East Central European representatives were far removed from the revolutionary egalitarianism of the French and had close links to the noble constitutionalism of the previous decades. The most spectacular case of such a movement, the ill-fated Martinovics conspiracy in Hungary (1794–95), represented this ambiguity in its very organizational structure, as it was divided into a more moderate noble reformist branch and a more radical bourgeois democratic one.

After the turn of the century, the dynamic military situation led to a reconfiguration of the political and social outlook of the region, as seemingly everlasting political frameworks such as the Holy Roman Empire collapsed (in 1806), new political entities emerged (Serbia during the first uprising, 1804–13; the Duchy of Warsaw in 1807; the Illyrian Provinces in 1809), and even those that did not change their status (like Hungary and Bohemia which were part of the Austrian Empire, or the Danubian Principalities remaining under Ottoman rule) were profoundly shaken by the course of events. This period of upheaval came to an end with the Vienna Congress of 1815, when (p.23) the political map of Europe was redrawn to consolidate the Restoration order. This, however, did not mean a similarly clear-cut turning point in ideological terms, as both the counter-revolutionary camp and the post-revolutionary liberals developed an ideological mix blending Enlightenment elements with the new Romantic sensibilities. Thus, rather than a brisk and irreversible shift from Enlightenment to Romanticism we find a number of transitory forms, hybrids, and dialogue between different intellectual subcultures.18 (p.24)

Notes:

(1)John G. A. Pocock, Barbarism and Religion, vol. 1: The Enlightenments of Edward Gibbon 1737–1764 (Cambridge, 1999), 13.For an attempt to balance local contextualization and generic definition in a Western European comparative framework seeJohn Robertson, The Case for the Enlightenment: Scotland and Naples, 1680–1760 (Cambridge, 2005).

(

2) László Kontler, “Introduction: The Enlightenment in Central Europe?” in Discourses of Collective Identity, 1:33–44; andKontler, Translations, Histories, Enlightenments: William Robertson in Germany, 1760–1795 (Basingstoke, 2014). For a more skeptical take on conceiving of the Enlightenment in East Central Europe in regional terms, emphasizing instead the importance of local sociocultural settings, seeTeodora Shek Brnardić, “Intellectual Movements and Geopolitical Regionalization. The Case of the East European Enlightenment,” East Central Europe 32:1–2 (2005): 7–55.

(3)Anthony La Vopa, “Conceiving a Public: Ideas and Society in EighteenthCentury Europe,” Journal of Modern History 64 (1992): 76–116.

(4)Anthony Pagden, European Encounters with the New World (New Haven, 1993);Peter Hulme and Ludmila Jordanova, eds., The Enlightenment and Its Shadows (London, 1990).

(5) Accounts of stadial or conjectural history in the context of Scotland:Harro M. Höpfl, “From Savage to Scotsman: Conjectural History in the Scottish Enlightenment,” Journal of British Studies 17 (1978): 19–40.

(6)Roy Porter and Mikuláš Teich, eds., Enlightenment in National Context (Cambridge, 1981).

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like cucumbers than men, and are introduced merely that the knight may have the pleasure of slicing them.

We cannot claim any condensed poetical merit for the Metrical Romances. They have very few quotable passages and fewer vigorous single lines. Their merit consists in a diffuse picturesqueness, and reading them is like turning over illuminated missals in a traveler’s half-hour, which leave a vague impression on the mind of something vivid and fanciful, without one’s being able to recall any particular beauty. Some of them have great narrative merit, being straightforward and to the purpose, never entangling themselves in reflection or subordinating the story to the expression. In this respect they are refreshing after reading many poems of the modern school, which, under the pretense of sensuousness, are truly sensual, and deal quite as much with the upholstery as with the soul of poetry The thought has nowadays become of less importance than the vehicle of it, and amid the pomp of words we are too often reminded of an Egyptian procession, in which all the painful musical instruments then invented, priests, soldiers, and royalty itself, accompany the triumphal chariot containing perhaps, after all, only an embalmed monkey or a pickled ibis.

There is none of this nonsense in the Old Romances, though sometimes they are tediously sentimental, and we wonder as much at the capacity of our ancestors in bearing dry verses as dry blows. Generally, however, they show an unaffected piety and love of nature. The delight of the old minstrels in the return of Spring is particularly agreeable, and another argument in favor of the Northern origin of this class of poems. Many of them open with passages like this:

Merry it is in the month of May, When the small fowls sing their lay, Then flowers the apple-tree and perry, And the little birds sing merry; Then the ladies strew their bowers With red roses and lily flowers,

The damisels lead down the dance, And the knights play with shield and lance.

Some of the comparisons, also, drawn from Nature, are as fresh as dew. For example, when a lady sees her lover:

She is as glad at that sight As the birds are of the light.

Or,

As glad as grass is of the rain.

A knight is said to be

As weary as water in a weir,

a simile full of imagination.

The most airy glimpses of the picturesque occur sometimes; as describing a troop of knights:

They rode away full serriedly, Their gilded pennons of silk of Ind Merrily rattled with the wind; The steeds so noble and so wight Leaped and neighed beneath each knight.

After quoting various specimens of these poems, Mr. Lowell gave the following sketch of the manners and customs of Romance-land, “condensed from the best authorities.”

If you are born in this remarkable country and destined for a hero, the chances are that by the time you are seven years old your father will have gone off to fight the infidels, and a neighboring earl will have taken possession of his estates and his too-hastily-supposed widow. You resent this in various ways, especially by calling your step-father all the proper names you can think of that are improper. He, for some unexplained reason, is unable to get rid of you, though he tries a variety of plots level with the meanest capacity. You, being of uncommon sagacity, are saved by the aid of three or four superfluous miracles. Meanwhile you contrive to pick up a good knightly education, and by the time you are seventeen are bigger and stronger and handsomer than anybody else, except, of course, the giants. So, one day you buckle on your armor, mount your horse, who is as remarkable in his way as yourself, and go adventuring. Presently you come to a castle where you are most courteously received. Maidens as white as whale’s bone and fair as flowers (they are all so in Romance-land) help you off with your armor, and dress you in richest silks. You then go to dine with the Lord of the Castle, who is a knight of very affable manners and agreeable conversation, but with an aversion to religious topics. His daughter, the fairest lady on the ground, assists at the meal. You are conducted to your chamber, and after a refreshing sleep meet your host and hostess at breakfast. At a suitable time you return thanks for your kind treatment and ask for your horse. The knight, however, in the blandest manner tells you that a little custom of his will interfere with your departure. He is in the habit of fighting with all his guests, and has hitherto been successful in killing them all to the number of several hundred. This is precisely the account which you are fond of settling, and after a few allusions to Mahomed and Termagant and Alcoban, you accept the challenge and, of course, come off victor. This seems to settle the matter for the young lady whom your lance has just promoted to her inheritance, and she immediately offers herself and her estates to you, telling you, at the same time, that she had long been secretly a Christian. Though madly in love with her, and interested in her religious views, which she details to you at some length, you mount your steed and ride away, but without being expected to give any reasons. You have a particular mission

nowhere, and on your way to that interesting country you kill a megalosaurus (for whose skeleton Professor Owen would have given his ears), and two or three incidental giants. Riding on, you come to a Paynim-land, ruled over by a liberally-minded Soldan, who receives you into favor after you have slain some thousands of his subjects to get an appetite for dinner. The Soldan, of course, has a daughter, who is converted by you, and, of course, offers you her hand. This makes you think of the other lady, and you diplomatize. But there is another Paynim-land, and another Soldan, who sends word that he intends to marry your beautiful convert.

The embassy of the proud Paynim somehow results in your being imprisoned for seven years, when it suddenly occurs to you that you might as well step out. So you pick up a magic sword that has been shut up with you, knock down the jailers, mount your horse which is waiting at the door, and ride off. Now, or at some other convenient time, you take occasion to go mad for a year or two on account of ladye-love number one. But hearing that ladye-love number two is about to yield to the addresses of her royal suitor, who has killed her father, burned his capital, and put all his subjects to the sword, you make some appropriate theological disquisitions and start to the rescue. On your way you meet a strange knight, join combat with him without any questions on either side, and after a doubtful fight of a day or two, are mutually overcome with amazement at finding anybody who cannot be beaten. Of course it turns out that the strange knight is your father; you join forces, make short work with the amorous Soldan and his giants, and find yourself encumbered with a young lady, a princess too, all of whose relatives and vassals have been slaughtered on your account, and who naturally expects you to share her throne. In a moment of abstraction you consent to the arrangement, and are married by an archbishop in partibus who happens to be on the spot. As your late royal rival has slain all your late father-in-law’s lieges, and you have done the same service for him in turn, there are no adventures left in this part of the world. Luckily, before the wedding-ring is warm on your finger, a plesiosaurus turns up. This saves many disagreeable explanations with the bride, whom you are resolved to have nothing to do with

while the other young lady is alive. You settle her comfortably on the throne of her depopulated kingdom, slay the monster, and start for home with your revered parent. There you overcome the usurping Earl, reinstate your father, and assist cheerfully at the burning of your mother for bigamy; your filial piety being less strong than your reverence for the laws of your country. A fairy who has a particular interest in you (and who, it seems, is your real mother, after all—a fact which relieves your mind of any regrets on the score of the late melancholy bonfire), lets you into the secret that ladye-love the first is your own sister This revives your affection for your wife, and you go back to the kingdom of Gombraunt, find her reduced to extremities by another matrimonial Soldan, whom you incontinently massacre with all his giants, and now at last a prospect of quiet domestic life seems to open. Dull, peaceful days follow, and you begin to take desponding views of life, when your ennui is pleasantly broken in upon by a monster who combines in himself all the monstrosities of heraldic zoölogy. You decapitate him and incautiously put one of his teeth in your boot as a keepsake. A scratch ensues, physicians are in vain, and you die with an edifying piety, deeply regretted by your subjects, if there are any left with their heads on.

On the whole, we may think ourselves happy that we live under somewhat different institutions.

LECTURE IV THE BALLADS

(Friday Evening, January 19, 1855)

One of the laws of the historical Macbeth declares that “Fools, minstrels, bards, and all other such idle people, unless they be specially licensed by the King, shall be compelled to seek some craft to win their living,” and the old chronicler adds approvingly, “These and such-like laws were used by King Macbeth, through which he governed the realm ten years in good justice.”

I do not quote this in order to blacken the memory of that unhappy monarch. The poets commonly contrive to be even with their enemies in the end, and Shakspeare has taken an ample revenge. I cite it only for the phrase unless they be specially licensed by the King, which points to a fact on which I propose to dwell for a few moments before entering upon my more immediate object.

When Virgil said, “Arma virumque cano,” “Arms and the man I sing,” he defined in the strictest manner the original office of the poet, and the object of the judicious Macbeth’s ordinance was to prevent any one from singing the wrong arms and the rival man. Formerly the poet held a recognized place in the body politic, and if he has been deposed from it, it may be some consolation to think that the Fools, whom the Scottish usurper included in his penal statute, have not lost their share in the government of the world yet, nor, if we may trust appearances, are likely to for some time to come. But the Fools here referred to were not those who had least, but those who had

most wit, and who assumed that disguise in order to take away any dangerous appearance of intention from their jibes and satires.

The poet was once what the political newspaper is now, and circulated from ear to ear with satire or panegyric. He it was who first made public opinion a power in the State by condensing it into a song. The invention of printing, by weakening the faculty of memory, and by transferring the address of language from the ear to the eye, has lessened the immediate power of the poet. A newspaper may be suppressed, an editor may be silenced, every copy of an obnoxious book may be destroyed, but in those old days when the minstrels were a power, a verse could wander safely from heart to heart and from hamlet to hamlet as unassailable as the memories on which it was imprinted. Its force was in its impersonality, for public opinion is disenchanted the moment it is individualized, and is terrible only so long as it is the opinion of no one in particular Find its author, and the huge shadow which but now darkened half the heaven shrinks like the genius of the Arabian story into the compass of a leaden casket which one can hold in his hand. Nowadays one knows the editor, perhaps, and so is on friendly terms with public opinion. You may have dined with it yesterday, rubbed shoulders with it in the omnibus to-day, nay, carried it in your pocket embodied in the letter of the special correspondent.

Spenser, in his prose tract upon Ireland, has left perhaps the best description possible of the primitive poet as he was everywhere when the copies of a poem were so many living men, and all publication was to the accompaniment of music. He says: “There is amongst the Irish a certain kind of people called bards, which are to them instead of poets, whose profession is to set forth the praises or dispraises of men in their poems or rhythms; the which are held in such high regard or esteem amongst them that none dare to displease them for fear of running into reproach through this offense, and to be made infamous in the mouths of all men.”

Nor was the sphere of the bards confined to the present alone. They were also the embodied memory of the people. It was on the wings of verse that the names of ancestral heroes could float down

securely over broad tracts of desert time and across the gulfs of oblivion. And poets were sometimes made use of by sagacious rulers to make legends serve a political purpose. The Persian poet Firdusi is a remarkable instance of this. Virgil also attempted to braid together the raveled ends of Roman and Greek tradition, and it is not impossible that the minstrels of the Norman metrical romances were guided by a similar instinct.

But the position of the inhabitants of England was a peculiar one. The Saxons by their conversion to Christianity, and the Normans still more by their conversion and change of language, were almost wholly cut off from the past. The few fragments of the Celtic race were the only natives of Britain who had an antiquity. The English properly so called were a people who hardly knew their own grandfathers. They no longer spoke the language, believed in the religion, or were dominated by the ideas of their ancestors.

English writers demand of us a national literature. But where for thirteen centuries was their own? Our ancestors brought a past with them to Plymouth; they claimed descent from a great race; the language they spoke had been ennobled by recording the triumphs of ancestral daring and genius; it had gone up to Heaven wafted on the red wings of martyr-fires; mothers hushed their new-born babes, and priests scattered the farewell earth upon the coffin-lid, with words made sweet or sacred by immemorial association. But the Normans when they landed in England were a new race of armed men almost as much cut off from the influences of the past as those which sprang out of the ground at the sowing of the dragon’s teeth. They found there a Saxon encampment occupying a country strange to them also. For we must remember that though Britain was historically old, England was not; and it was as impossible to piece the histories of the two together to make a national record of as it would be for us to persuade ourselves into a feeling of continental antiquity by adopting the Mexican annals.

The ballads are the first truly national poetry in our language, and national poetry is not either that of the drawing-room or of the kitchen. It is the common mother-earth of the universal sentiment

that the foot of the poet must touch, through which shall steal up to heart and brain that fine virtue which puts him in sympathy, not with his class, but with his kind.

Fortunately for the ballad-makers, they were not encumbered with any useless information. They had not wit enough to lose their way. It is only the greatest brains and the most intense imagination that can fuse learning into one substance with their own thought and feeling, and so interpenetrate it with themselves that the acquired is as much they as the native. The ballad-makers had not far to seek for material. The shipwreck, the runaway match, the unhappy marriage, the village ghost, the achievement of the border outlaw—in short, what we read every day under the head of Items in the newspapers, were the inspiration of their song. And they sang well, because they thought, and felt, and believed just as their hearers did, and because they never thought anything about it. The ballads are pathetic because the poet did not try to make them so; and they are models of nervous and simple diction because the business of the poet was to tell his story, and not to adorn it; and accordingly he went earnestly and straightforwardly to work, and let the rapid thought snatch the word as it ran, feeling quite sure of its getting the right one. The only art of expression is to have something to express. We feel as wide a difference between what is manufactured and what is spontaneous as between the sparkles of an electrical machine, which a sufficiently muscular professor can grind out by the dozen, and the wildfire of God that writes mene, mene, on the crumbling palace walls of midnight cloud.

It seems to me that the ballad-maker, in respect of diction, had also this advantage—that he had no books. Language, when it speaks to the eye only, loses half its meaning. For the eye is an outpost of the brain, and wears its livery oftener than that of the character. But the temperament, the deep human nature, the aboriginal emotions, these utter themselves in the voice. It is only by the ear that the true mother-tongue that knows the short way to the heart is learned. I do not believe that a man born deaf could understand Shakspeare, or sound anything but the edges and shores of Lear’s tempestuous woe. I think that the great masters of speech have hunted men and

not libraries, and have found the secret of their power in the street and not upon the shelf.

It is the way of saying things that is learned by commerce with men, and the best writers have mixed much with the world. It is there only that the language of feeling can be acquired.

The ballads are models of narrative poetry They are not concerned with the utterance of thought, but only of sentiment or passion, and it is as illustrating poetic diction that I shall chiefly cite them. If they moralize it is always by picture, and not by preachment. What discourse of inconstancy has the force and biting pathos of this grim old song, the “Twa Corbies”?

As I was walking all alone I heard twa corbies making a moan. The one unto the other did say: Where shall we gang and dine to-day? In beyond that old turf dyke I wot there lies a new-slain knight, And naebody kens that he lies there, But his hawk and his hound and his lady fair His hound is to the hunting gone, His hawk to fetch the wild-fowl hame, His lady’s ta’en anither mate— Sae we may make our dinner sweet. You’ll sit upon his white neck-bone And I’ll pick out his bonny blue een; With a lock of his golden hair

We’ll thatch our nest when it grows bare. Many a one for him makes moan, But none sall ken where he is gone; O’er his white bones when they grow bare The wind shall blow forever mair.

Observe, the wind simply blows. That is enough; but a modern poet would have sought to intensify by making the wind moan, or shriek, or sob, or something of the kind.

Mr. Lowell here quoted a ballad which tells a story of a child-murder. It begins:

Fair Anne sate in her bower

Down by the greenwood side, And the flowers did spring, And the birds did sing, ’Twas the pleasant Mayday tide.

The ballad singers had all the advantage of that spur of the moment which the excitement of speaking gives, and they also received the magnetism which came from the sympathy of their hearers. They knew what told, for they had their hand upon the living pulse of feeling. There was no time to palaver; they must come to the point.

The Percy came out of Northumberland, And a vow to God made he That he would hunt in the mountains Of Cheviot within days three, In the maugre of Doughty Douglas And all that ever with him be.

They plunge into deep water at once. And there is never any filling up. The transitions are abrupt. You can no more foretell the swift wheel of the feeling than that of a falcon, and the phrases flash forth sharp-edged and deadly like a sword drawn in wrath. The passions speak out savagely and without any delicacies of circumlocution.

It is worth thinking of whether the press, which we have a habit of calling such a fine institution, be not weakening the fibre and

damaging the sincerity of our English and our thinking, quite as fast as it diffuses intelligence.

Consider the meaning of expression—something wrung from us by the grip of thought or passion, whether we will or no. But the editor is quite as often compelled to write that he may fill an empty column as that he may relieve an overfilled brain. And in a country like ours, where newspapers are the only reading of the mass of the people, there is a danger of a general contentedness in commonplace. For we always become what we habitually read. We let our newspapers think for us, argue for us, criticize for us, remember for us, do everything for us, in short, that will save us from the misfortune of being ourselves. And so, instead of men and women, we find ourselves in a world inhabited by incarnated leaders, or paragraphs, or items of this or that journal. We are apt to wonder at the scholarship of the men of two centuries ago. They were scholars because they did not read so much as we do. We spend more time over print than they did, but instead of communing with the choice thought of choice spirits, and insensibly acquiring the grand manner of that supreme society, we diligently inform ourselves of such facts as that a fine horse belonging to Mr. Smith ran away on Wednesday and that a son of Mr. Brown fell into the canal on Thursday, or that a gravel bank fell in and buried Patrick O’Callahan on Friday. And it is our own fault, and not that of the editor. For we make the newspapers, and the editor would be glad to give us better stuff if we did not demand such as this.

Another evil of this state of things is the watering, or milk-andwatering, of our English. Writing to which there is no higher compelling destiny than the coming of the printer’s devil must end in this at last. The paragraphist must make his paragraph, and the longer he makes it, the better for him and the worse for us. The virtue of words becomes wholly a matter of length. Accordingly, we have now no longer any fires, but “disastrous conflagrations”; nobody dies, but “deceases” or “demises”; men do not fall from houses, but are “precipitated from mansions or edifices”; a convict is not hanged, but “suffers the extreme penalty of the offended law,” etc.

The old ballad-makers lived in a better day They did not hear of so many events that none of them made any impression. They did not live, as we do, in a world that seems a great ear of Dionysius, where if a scandal is whispered in Pekin we hear of it in New York. The minstrels had no metaphysical bees in their bonnets. They did not speculate about this world or the next. They had not made the great modern discovery that a bird in a bush is worth two in the hand. They did not analyze and refine till nothing genuine was left of this beautiful world but an indigestion.

The ballads neither harangue nor describe; but only state things in the least complex way. Those old singers caught language fresh and with a flavor of the soil in it still, and their hearers were people of healthy sensibilities who must be hit directly and hard. Accordingly, there is a very vigorous handling. They speak bluntly and to the purpose. If a maiden loses her lover, she merely

Turns her face unto the wall And there her heart it breaks.

A modern poet would have hardly thrown away the opportunity offered him for describing the chamber and its furniture; he would put a painted window into it—for the inkstand will supply them quite as cheaply as plain glass. He would tell you all about the tapestry which the eyes of the dying maiden in her extreme agony would have been likely, of course, to have been minutely interested in. He would have given a clinical lecture on the symptoms, and a post-mortem examination. It was so lucky for those old ballad-mongers that they had not any ideas! And when they give a dying speech they do not make their heroes take leave of the universe in general as if that were going into mourning for a death more or less.

When Earl Douglas is in his death-thraw, he says to his nephew:

My wound is deep; I fain would sleep;

Take thou the vanguard of the three. And hide me by the brakenbush That grows on yonder lily lee. O bury me by the brakenbush Beneath the blooming brere. Let never living mortal ken That a kindly Scot lies here.

The ballads are the only true folk-songs that we have in English. There is no other poetry in the language that addresses us so simply as mere men and women. Learning has tempered with modern poetry, and the Muse, like Portia, wears a doctor’s cap and gown.

The force and earnestness of style that mark the old ballad become very striking when contrasted with later attempts in the same way. It is not flatness and insipidity that they are remarkable for, but for a bare rocky grandeur in whose crevices tenderness nestles its chance tufts of ferns and harebells. One of these sincere old verses imbedded in the insipidities of a modern imitation looks out stern and colossal as that charcoal head which Michael Angelo drew on the wall of the Farnesina glowers through the paling frescoes.

Mr. Lowell here read a number of passages from the old ballad entitled “Margaret’s Ghost,” and compared them with a few stanzas from an “improved” version of the same by Mallet. He also read from the ballad of “Helen of Kirkconnell,” and from others.

Of the tenderness of the ballads I must give an instance or two before I leave them. In the old ballad of “Clerk Saunders,” Margaret follows the ghost of her lover to his grave.

So painfully she climbed the wall, She climbed the wall up after him, Hose nor shoon upon her feet, She had no time to put them on.

O bonny, bonny, sang the bird Sat on a coil o’ hay, But mournfu’, mournfu’, was the maid That followed the corpse o’ clay.

Is there any room at your head, Saunders? Or any room at your feet?

Is there any room at your side, Saunders? For fain, fain I would sleep.

She’s sat her down upon the grave And mourned sae lang and sair That the clochs and wanton flies at last Came and built in her yellow hair.

In further illustration Mr. Lowell read from the “Clerk’s Two Sons of Oxenford.” He concluded his lecture thus:

I think that the makers of the old ballads did stand face to face with life in a way that is getting more and more impossible for us. Day by day the art of printing isolates us more and more from our fellows and from the healthy and inspiring touch of our fellows. We continually learn more and more of mankind and less of man. We know more of Europe than of our own village. We feel humanity from afar.

But I must not forget that the ballads have passed through a sieve which no modern author has the advantage of. Only those have come down to us which imprinted themselves on the general heart. The new editions were struck off by mothers crooning their children to sleep, or by wandering minstrels who went about sowing the seeds of courtesy and valor in the cottage and on the hillside. Print, which, like the amber, preserves all an author’s grubs, gives men the chance to try him by the average, rather than the best, of his yield.

Moreover, the Review of the ballad-singer was in the faces of his ring of hearers, in whose glow or chill he could read at a glance a

criticism from which there was no appeal. It was not Smith or Brown, but the human heart that judged him.

Doubtless another advantage of these old poets was their out-ofdoor life. They went from audience to audience on foot, and had no more cramped a study than the arch of heaven, no library but clouds, streams, mountains, woods, and men. There is something more in sunshine than mere light and heat. I fancy that a kind of flavor we detect in the old ballads is due to it, and that it may give color and bloom to the brain as well as to the apple and plum. Indoor inspiration is like the stove-heat of the forcing-house, and the fruits ripened by it are pale, dropsical, and wanting in tang. There may be also a virtue in the fireside which gives to the Northern wind a domestic and family warmth, and makes it skilled to teach the ethics of home. But it is not to the chimney-corner that we can trace the spiritual dynasties that have swayed mankind. These have sunshine in their veins.

Perhaps another charm of these ballads is that nobody made them. They seem to have come up like violets, and we have only to thank God for them. And we imply a sort of fondness when we call them “old.” It is an epithet we give endearingly and not as supposing any decrepitude or senescence in them. Like all true poetry, they are not only young themselves, but the renewers of youth in us; they do not lose, but accumulate, strength and life. A true poem gets a part of its inspiring force from each generation of men. The great stream of Homer rolls down to us out of the past, swollen with the tributary delight and admiration of the ages. The next generation will find Shakspeare fuller of meaning and energy by the addition of our enthusiasm. Sir Philip Sidney’s admiration is part of the breath that sounds through the trumpet of “Chevy Chase.” That is no empty gift with which we invest a poem when we bestow on it our own youth, and it is no small debt we owe the true poem that it preserves for us some youth to bestow.

LECTURE V CHAUCER

(Tuesday Evening, January 23, 1855)

It is always a piece of good fortune to be the earliest acknowledged poet of any country. We prize the first poems as we do snowdrops, not only for their own intrinsic beauty, but even more for that force of heart and instinct of sunshine in them which brings them up, where grass is brown and trees are bare, the outposts and forlorn hopes of spring. There never comes anything again like a first sensation, and those who love Chaucer, though they may have learned late to do it, cannot help imaginatively antedating their delight, and giving him that place in the calendar of their personal experience which belongs to him in the order of our poetic history.

And the feeling is a true one, for although intensity be the great characteristic of all genius, and the power of the poet is measured by his ability to renew the charm of freshness in what is outworn and habitual, yet there is something in Chaucer which gives him a personal property in the epithet “vernal,” and makes him seem always to go hand in hand with May.

In our New England especially, where Mayday is a mere superstition and the Maypole a poor half-hardy exotic which shivers in an east wind almost as sharp as Endicott’s axe,—where frozen children, in unseasonable muslin, celebrate the floral games with nosegays from the milliner’s, and winter reels back, like shattered Lear, bringing the dead spring in his arms, her budding breast and wan dilustered cheeks all overblown with the drifts and frosty streaks of his white

beard,—where even Chanticleer, whose sap mounts earliest in that dawn of the year, stands dumb beneath the dripping eaves of his harem, with his melancholy tail at half-mast,—one has only to take down a volume of Chaucer, and forthwith he can scarce step without crushing a daisy, and the sunshine flickers on small new leaves that throb thick with song of merle and mavis. A breath of spring blows out of the opening lines of the “Canterbury Tales” that seems to lift the hair upon our brow:

When that Aprile with his showers soote

The drought of March hath pierced to the roote, And bathed every vein in that licour Of whose virtue engendered is the flour; When Zephirus eke with his sweet breath Enspired hath in every holt and heath The tender croppes; and the younge sun Hath in the Ram half of his course yrun; And little fowles maken melodie, That slepen all the night with open eye, So nature pricketh them in their courages.

Even Shakspeare, who comes after everybody has done his best and seems to say, “Here, let me take hold a minute and show you how to do it,” could not mend that. With Chaucer, the sun seems never to have run that other half of his course in the Ram, but to have stood still there and made one long spring-day of his life.

Chaucer was probably born in 1328, seven years after the death of Dante, and he certainly died in 1400, having lived consequently seventy-two years. Of his family we know nothing. He was educated either at Oxford or Cambridge, or at neither of these famous universities. He was, perhaps, a student at the Inner Temple, on the books of which a certain phantasmagoric Mr. Buckley had read a record that “Geoffrey Chaucer was fined two shillings for beating a Franciscan friar in Fleet street.”

In the thirty-ninth year of his age he received from Edward III a pension of twenty marks (equal to $1000 now), and afterwards a grant of a pitcher of wine daily, and the custody of a ward which gave £104 a year, and two places in the customs. In the last year of Edward III he was one of three envoys sent to France to negotiate a marriage between the Prince of Wales and a daughter of the French King. Richard II confirmed his pension of twenty marks, and granted him another of like amount instead of the daily wine.

Chaucer married Philippa Pycard or De la Roet, sister of Katherine Swynford, the third wife of John of Gaunt. By this connection he is supposed to have become a favorer of Wycliffe’s doctrines, and was in some way concerned in the insurrection of John of Northampton, which seems to have had for its object some religious reform. He was forced to fly into Holland, and is said to have made his peace at last by betraying his companions. I think one’s historical comfort is not disturbed by refusing to credit this story, especially as it stains the fame of a great poet, and, if character may ever be judged from writings, a good man. We may grant that he broke the Franciscan friar’s head in Fleet street, if it were only for the alliteration, but let us doubt that he ever broke his faith. It is very doubtful whether he was such stuff as martyrs are made of. Plump men, though nature would seem to have marked them as more combustible, seldom go to the stake, but rather your lean fellows, who can feel a fine satisfaction in not burning well to spite the Philistines.

At this period of his life Chaucer is thought to have been in straitened circumstances, but a new pension and a yearly pipe of wine were granted him by Richard II, and on the accession of Henry IV these were confirmed, with a further pension of forty marks. These he only lived a year to enjoy, dying October 25, 1400.

The most poetical event in Chaucer’s life the critics have, of course, endeavored to take away from us. This is his meeting with Petrarch, to which he alludes in the prologue to the Clerk’s “Tale of Griseldis.” There is no reason for doubting this that I am able to discover, except that it is so pleasing to think of, and that Chaucer affirms it. Chaucer’s embassy to Italy was in 1373, the last year of Petrarch’s

life, and it was in this very year that Petrarch first read the “Decameron.” In his letter to Boccaccio he says: “The touching story of Griseldis has been ever since laid up in my memory that I may relate it in my conversations with my friends.” We are forced to believe so many things that ought never to have happened that the heart ought to be allowed to recompense itself by receiving as fact, without too close a scrutiny of the evidence, whatever deserved to take place so truly as this did. Reckoning back, then, by the finer astronomy of our poetic instinct, we find that a conjunction of these two stars of song did undoubtedly occur in that far-off heaven of the Past.

On the whole, we may consider the life of Chaucer as one of the happiest, and also the most fortunate, that ever fell to the lot of poets. In the course of it he must have been brought into relation with all ranks of men. He had been a student of books, of manners, and of countries. In his description of the Clerk of Oxford, in which there is good ground for thinking that he alludes to some of his own characteristics, he says:

For him was liefer have at his bed’s head

A twenty books clothed in black or red, Of Aristotle and his philosophy, Than robes rich, or fiddle or psaltery. But albeit that he was a philosopher, Yet had he but a little gold in coffer; Of study took he the most care and heed, Not a word spake he more than there was need; And that was said in form and reverence, And short and quick, and full of high sentence; Sounding in moral virtue was his speech, And gladly would he learn, and gladly teach.

What a pleasant, companionable nature the last verse testifies to. The portrait of Chaucer, too, is perhaps more agreeable than that of any other English poet. The downcast, meditative eyes, the rich