Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

The imagination of Northern men soars beyond this earth, on which they live; it soars through the clouds on the horizons that are like the mysterious gateway from life to eternity. (Germaine de Staël 1820 ) Scotland seems to have been hitherto the country of the Useful rather than the Fine Arts. We are more prone to study realities than appearances … (William Hazlitt 1822) Madame de Staël, surveying European literature at the turn of the nineteenth century, saw a continent divided by geography, climate, and politics. In the warm South, writers, basking in the lovely Mediterranean sunlight, had been filling their poems with color and voluptuous imagery since the days of Homer. By contrast, the frozen wastes of the North, fostering a fierce independence and seriousness, had given rise to the most original and sublime poetry. Whatever the legacy of classical Greece or Renaissance Italy, Northern Europe was the true homeland of the modern Romantic imagination, its ultimate ancestor, the ancient Scottish bard, Ossian. With such unreserved contemporary affirmation of Scotland's importance to Romanticism, it is somewhat startling, then, to find William Hazlitt spitting with indignation over the practical, utilitarian attitudes he perceived north of the Border. “Scotland,” he observed, “is of all other countries in the world perhaps the one in which the question, ‘What is the use of that?’ ... log in or subscribe to read full text