Magnificent Rebels: The first Romanticists and the Invention of the Self by Andrea Wulf

The Jena set and the birth of Romanticism

German-British writer Andrea Wulf wrote one of my favorite nonfiction books of the last decade, The Invention of Nature, about the Prussian explorer Alexander von Humboldt. In that book, Wulf demonstrated an exceptional talent for writing intellectual history in an accessible and even exciting manner. She does so again in her latest book, Magnificent Rebels, published in 2022.

Magnificent Rebels is a group biography of a coterie of philosophers, poets, and scientists who crossed paths in the city of Jena, a university town in what is now Germany, from 1794 to 1806. Alexander von Humboldt and his brother Wilhelm play supporting roles in this story, but this history focuses primarily on several men and women of letters who founded the philosophical and literary movement of Romanticism. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe is the elder statesman and mentor of the group, as well as the glue that held the clique together while everyone else was bickering. The Jena set also included popular university lecturers Friedrich Schiller, Johann Gottlieb Fichte, and Friedrich Schelling. August Wilhelm Schlegel, his wife Caroline, and his brother Friedrich Schlegel were also major players in this social and intellectual scene, as well as their good friend the poet known as Novalis. Philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel came late to the party and only enters the scene towards the end of the book.

Soon after the French Revolution, Romanticism built upon the idea that people were destined to be more than just slaves to despotic monarchs or even to nature itself. In their view, the human mind, the self, was a powerful force in not only understanding nature but also in shaping it. Counter to the Enlightenment, these Romantics placed more importance on imagination and emotion than on empirical science and rationalism, and they championed individual freedom over social duty and convention. I was also surprised to learn that these scholars were instrumental in rediscovering the works of Shakespeare and elevating him to the legendary status he holds today.

Particular attention is given to Caroline Schlegel, whom Wulf clearly admires as an independent woman who did not allow herself to be held down by the social restrictions placed upon women of her day. Though Caroline’s achievements were often attributed to her husband, here Wulf reveals her to be an accomplished intellectual and woman of letters in her own right and a worthy contributor to the Romanticist circle. In the interest of giving credit where credit is due, Wulf’s depiction of Caroline sometimes flirts with hero worship, but as the book progresses the picture becomes less flattering. By the end, very few of these literary illuminati come out of this narrative with a spotless reputation.

As in The Invention of Nature, Wulf’s writing is impeccable. By delving deeply into the correspondence of these early Romanticists, she vividly brings to life the social dynamics between the movement’s members and the atmosphere of intellectual interchange that spawned their philosophical and literary breakthroughs. Wulf deftly renders complex concepts of Romantic literature and philosophy in concise and user-friendly terms without dumbing-down the content. At the close of the book, she also gives a thoughtful synopsis of the legacy of the Jena set in the thought of later intellectuals, particularly the American Transcendentalists. Wulf doesn’t always succeed, however, in convincing the reader of the importance of some of these revered writers’ works, which at times sound a little flighty and masturbatory. This Jena crowd were basically the college-town hipsters of their age, and their love affairs, spiteful squabbles, and catty insults often feel awfully petty. While I didn’t always care for the subjects of this book, however, I was always captivated by Wulf’s writing of them. 

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The Theory of Colours by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Esoteric observations in perplexing prose

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe was the most important figure of German Romanticism and a polymath who excelled in multiple fields. Not only was he perhaps the greatest man of letters in German history, he was also a philosopher, a statesman, an artist, and a scientist. Among his scientific writings, his book The Theory of Colours was published in 1810. It was written partially as a response to Isaac Newton’s analytical studies of color, which yielded the ROYGBIV theory that white light is in fact composed of all colors in the visible spectrum, as shown when refracted through a prism. Goethe, being a Romanticist, was less concerned with the physical nature of color but rather with the human eye’s perception and human mind’s conception of color. In addressing the physiology of human vision, largely ignored by Newton, Goethe’s Theory of Colours proved influential not only to scientists but also to philosophers, poets, and painters.

Goethe organizes his analyses of color phenomena into a rigid structure of progressive sections encompassing 920 numbered paragraphs. Unlike Newton, who examined color as a phenomenon independent of human perception, Goethe the humanist begins his study with the eye and proceeds outward. He first discusses what he calls “physiological colors,” which arise from the eye itself. For example, when one stares at a red object and then looks at a white wall, the eye perceives a green after image. Goethe examines many such optical illusions in great detail before proceeding to “physical colors,” which involve hues that arise through the use of prisms, lenses, cameras obscura and the like. The third part discusses “chemical colors,” detailing the ways in which colors can be brought forth, augmented, or fixated in certain substances through chemical processes. Subsequent sections cover topics such as the emotions generated by colors and the use of pigments in dying and painting. While the chapter structure looks very ordered in the table of contents, in the actual text it often feels counterintuitive and veers into digressions. To categorize his observations, Goethe invents confusing terminology like dioptrical, catoptrical, and epoptical colors, and even his use of the words objective and subjective is puzzlingly atypical.

Goethe created several plates of colored diagrams for this book, and often refers to them in his text. Public domain editions might not include these illustrations, but they can be found online through a Google image search. Goethe’s color wheel looks much the same as modern color wheels you’ve seen. In fact, he originated the idea of complementary colors that reside on opposite sides of the wheel. When verbally describing his scheme of color, however, Goethe’s ideas are much more confusing. Rather than three primary colors, Goethe proposes only two: yellow and blue. While admitting that green arises from the mixture between the two, he also asserts that somehow red is an intermediary between blue and yellow, a perplexing concept that defies not only the physics of the visible spectrum but also the perceptual logic of human vision.

Overall, Goethe’s prose is so confusing it’s often difficult to get any useful meaning out of many of his numbered paragraphs. Much of the blame for this, however, must fall upon the 1840 English translator Charles Lock Eastlake. Goethe’s Theory of Colours was no doubt an important and groundbreaking work for its time, but its value to today’s readers is questionable. The physics of light has come a long way in the past two centuries, so the science is only valuable for its commendable historical significance. Nowadays, this book will probably only be of interest to artists looking for some arcane wisdom on color use, of which they will find little of practical worth. Readers interested in the physiological and psychological science of color would be better off reading a more recent text like Rudolf Arnheim’s Art and Visual Perception.

Illustrated plates from Goethe’s The Theory of Colours.

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The Sorrows of Young Werther by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

The ultimate unrequited love story
When published in 1774, The Sorrows of Young Werther caused a literary sensation throughout Europe. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe wrote the book, his first novel, at the age of 24, and it immediately catapulted him to stardom. This novel epitomizes the sturm und drang period in German literature that presaged Romanticism, the dominant literary movement of the 19th century. Though Goethe would later distance himself from Romanticism, in many ways this book was the flagship publication that launched the movement, much in the same way that Stephen Crane’s Maggie: A Girl of the Streets (1893) was the flagship publication of American literary naturalism. In hindsight, The Sorrows of Young Werther may not be one of the greatest books in Western literature, but it is likely one of the more important books for the profound influence it had on subsequent authors who either tried to emulate or repudiate it.

The book is an epistolary novel, meaning it is written in the form of letters, mostly from the young protagonist Werther to his friend Wilhelm. Werther has recently left his hometown and taken up residence near the village of Wahlheim. While attending a ball he meets Charlotte, a young woman who cares for her younger siblings since her mother has passed away. Werther falls in love with Charlotte, even though he knows she is betrothed to another man named Albert. Werther makes frequent visits to Charlotte’s home, becoming almost an honorary member of the family. He even develops a friendship with Albert. Charlotte is grateful for his platonic companionship, but when he makes open protestations of love towards her she becomes uncomfortable and asks him to visit less frequently. The situation becomes intolerable to Werther as he is gradually consumed by emotional agony over his unrequited love.

Later in the book some of Werther’s letters are addressed directly to Charlotte, and towards the end Goethe does depart from the epistolary format in favor of third-person narrative. With most of the prose penned in Werther’s own words, however, the novel amounts to an in-depth examination of this one character’s psychology, and a very perceptive and compelling one at that. Werther is a deep thinker who often expresses very profound thoughts on life, love, and nature. This makes the book a very thought-provoking read, but as Werther becomes more and more unhinged the story becomes more uncomfortable than insightful. In what should have been the book’s climactic moment, Goethe inserts an extended reading from the epic poems of Ossian. Proto-Romantics of Goethe’s era would have gladly eaten that up, but readers of today are likely to find it a disappointing narrative choice. The ending is inevitable but nonetheless moving.

As a protagonist, Werther definitely has some off-putting qualities that may not have even been intentional on Goethe’s part. A man who sacrifices himself for love certainly qualifies as a literary hero, at least from a Romantic perspective, but the behavior Werther exhibits in getting there is less than admirable. Readers of today are likely to see the novel as a penetrating study of mental illness, whereas readers of Goethe’s era, the emo hipsters of their day, may have viewed Werther’s sensitivity, petulance, and emotional histrionics as commendable expressions of a poetic soul and a steadfast heart. Even Goethe himself, who based the novel on one of his own youthful loves, had mixed emotions about the book as he got older. Though readers of the 21st century are unlikely to wholeheartedly sympathize with Werther’s plight the way those of the 18th did, there is still great literary value to this novel, and it delivers a more satisfying read than much of the later Romantic literature it inspired.
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