At its best the Romantic is a land of moist, sun drenched soil. There the gestures of the resistance fall like seed, germinating, maturing, yielding at last the reforms and innovations which are just, true, and absolutely beautiful. It is a land where growth subsists within the higher economy of external light; where days and seasons and weather and geography define, and limit, what kinds of growth may proceed.
But the intoxicating potency of The Romantic Hero may produce another kind of fertility: that of the fetid cesspool. There in that darkness chemosynthetic life forms absorb the nutrients of decay and leach the energy from molecular bonds - the legitimate inheritance of another life lived in the light - pouring across the once-live landscape in a soup of multiplying germs swimming in acidic waste. This is the end of the self aggrandizement, self importance, and primacy of agenda which may infect any movement, and to which the Romantics are inclined if not governed by higher impulses. Germany in the era 1850-1940 would become the testing ground.
Albert Speer's autobiography (Inside the Third Reich) gives us some insight into the complexities of the German psyche at the turn of the century, when Romantic force had slipped into cultural and nationalistic channels. Speer was born in 1905. He remembers:
"Many of our generation sought such contact with nature. This was not merely a romantic protest against the narrowness of middle-class life.
We were also escaping from the demands of a world growing increasingly complicated. We felt that the world around us was out of balance."
But there is also this:
"Often, from the mountain tops, we looked down upon a deep grey layer of cloud over the distant plain. Down there lived what to our minds were wretched people; we thought that we stood high above them in every sense. Young and rather arrogant, we were convinced that only the finest people went into the mountains."
Here is the hubris Toynbee warned us about. Disaster inevitably follows.
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