The Middle Ages or the Dark Ages were dark on many counts: learning, attainment, and romance were all subject to a benighted millenium. The Arthurian legend purports to be romantic but is too cloyingly adventuresome. Petrarch and Dante qualify more on this score than the apocryphal British King. Boccaccio deserves mention here as well but his Decameron possesses more the character of today’s diversionary tales than the astonishing visions of the Middle Ages’ two greatest poets. Then again, with Europe securely in the maw of the plague one can allow the people some clemency and understand the need for escape. Today, the urge to flight stems from idleness and not from the fear of slow, black death.
The Renaissance could possibly be the most romantic metaphor the world has ever known. Throughout the thousand years of western darkness, men –philosophers, alchemists- searched for a way to turn base metals into gold.
Without their evenknowing it, the Renaissance delivered to them what they sought. Their minds and their cultures were freed. They received the gold they would never find by way of physical experiment and manipulation. From the bosom of the Renaissance sprang Spenser, Shakespeare, and Montaigne, and they revivified the romance that had been missing for so long.
Shakespeare’s sonnets are without a doubt truly romantic. They sing of the power of love to destroy and to capture eternity. The modern romantic fancies himself an admirer of the sonnets, but he understands them not in the least. To the modern romantic, the sonnets are stanzas of verse meant to woo a lady or impress literati. They are not the precious bits of immortality and truth they actually embody. It’s not as if the modern romantic does not possess the correct tools with which to construct his castle; he has them, yet these tools are blunt and untrained.
Montaigne’s line appears at a predictable point in the history of romance.
After a time of prolonged Philistinism, he hoped, I believe, for a return or even a reinvention for romance. The true romantic is an expert in the art of love-making not simply making love. The true romantic is the one who can win, capture, or possess the beloved’s will. He is not merely a suitor who wins a woman’s hand; he dominates, he takes title and the power of rationality from the object of his fascination.
After Montaigne, Shakespeare, Spenser, and Cervantes departed the living Earth, romance became dormant once again. Its hibernation was not the result of a period of superstition as in Mediaeval times, rather it was due to that era’s monicher, the Enlightenment.
The infusion of learning and introspection the Enlightenment produced may have been too much for some to bear, for at this time the great Romantics rose from the kindling and the ashes of the French Revolution (the end result of enlightenment). Austen, the Brontes, Radcliffe, Keats, Shelley, Shelley, Byron, Blake, Beethoven, Coleridge, Wordsworth, Stendahl, and Goethe. Their works stand at the vanguard of the Romantic Literary Age; a pax Romantica, if you will.
The modern romantic often employs these authors to adduce his kinship with the great romanticists, and he also oftentimes purloins bits and pieces of the treasure they bestowed upon us. Again, however, the modern romantic misinterprets and misuses the masters, and that is one of the curses of romance in the modern era, a perversion of gospel.
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