Romanticism and absolute love: passion, night and death

Between the late eighteenth and the mid-nineteenth century European literature gave love a value it had never known before. For the Romantics passion was not a chapter of social life but an absolute experience, able to reveal the infinite and to set the individual against the world. This exaltation was often bound up with the idea of death, understood more as fulfilment than as an end.

The German Romantics

In Germany Friedrich von Hardenberg, known as Novalis, became engaged to the very young Sophie von Kühn, who died in 1797 at the age of fifteen. From his grief came the Hymns to the Night, published in 1800, in which night and death become the place of a spiritual union with the beloved and with the divine. Human love is thus transformed into a mystical, almost religious experience.

Friedrich Hölderlin, for his part, sang of Susette Gontard, wife of the banker in whose Frankfurt household he worked as a tutor, calling her by the Platonic name of Diotima. In the epistolary novel Hyperion, published between 1797 and 1799, Diotima is the woman who embodies the beauty and harmony of an ideal Greece. The allusion to the Symposium shows how the Romantics reread the ancients in the light of their own feeling.

Italy, between Foscolo and Leopardi

Ugo Foscolo published in 1802 the Last Letters of Jacopo Ortis, an epistolary novel in which the impossible love for Teresa, promised to another man, is interwoven with political despair after the Treaty of Campo Formio, by which Venice was handed over to Austria. The hero takes his own life, like Werther, but his tragedy is also that of a lost homeland.

Giacomo Leopardi devoted some of his most intense poems to love in the early 1830s, when he fell unrequitedly in love with the Florentine Fanny Targioni Tozzetti. From this came The Dominant Thought, Love and Death and Aspasia, in which the poet acknowledges the power of love and at the same time its nature as illusion. In Love and Death the two are presented as siblings, born together of fate.

England and France: passion and its theory

In England John Keats wrote passionate letters to Fanny Brawne, to whom he became engaged shortly before the illness that killed him in Rome in 1821, at the age of twenty-five. Percy Bysshe Shelley, in the poem Epipsychidion, celebrated love as a fusion of souls. Later, in 1847, Emily Brontë published Wuthering Heights, a novel in which the passion between Catherine and Heathcliff defies social convention and even death.

In France Stendhal tried to analyse the feeling methodically in his essay On Love, of 1822. His theory of crystallization is famous: just as a bare branch thrown into a salt mine near Salzburg becomes covered with sparkling crystals, so the lover clothes the beloved in imaginary perfections. It is an attempt to explain rationally what the Romantic poets exalted as a mystery.

Romanticism bequeathed the still widespread idea that true love is unique, total and at odds with convention. Behind this idea many older voices can be heard: the love madness of Sappho and Catullus, the unattainable lady of the troubadours, the fatal passion of Tristan, the ennobling love of Dante. The Romantics fused them into a single, powerful modern mythology.