The Romantic Imagination

From Hubert F. Babinski, The Mazeppa Legend in European Romanticism (NY: Columbia University Press, 1972):

Mazeppa's use in European Romanticism is at once the story of a minor figure who captured the imagination of many important artists and of an unbroken chain of artistic influence and inspiration. As a result, one can see the Romantics' minds at play with a subject that had wide and deep cultural appeal throughout Europe in the Romantic period (p. 148).

By understanding how one figure was utilized by Romantic artists in different ways, one can, perhaps, see a little more clearly some of the qualities considered characteristic of the Romantic mind: gothicism, new uses and meanings of history, the transformation of subject from one art form to another, the preoccupation with the artist in society and with the creative process, the emphasis on individual suffering (which moves from Ichschmerz toward the spiritual or mystical), and the relation of politics to art. Although these characteristics existed to varying degrees in artists of different countries at slightly different times, there is a general sense that Romanticism as a movement underwent an evolution in Europe between 1789, to use a convenient though imprecise date, and 1840. It seems to me that, for better or worse, the end point of that evolution, reflected in the matured Romantic imagination, is messianic mysticism (p. 149).

The Romantics were extremely interested in liberators who could deliver nations from political oppression, an interest prompted no doubt by their contemporary history and political idealism. Such liberators, the Romantics felt, had to be tried and refined by suffering in order to be purified for their messianic task. Often the Romantics looked to myth and history for their examples, or, like Blake, they created new myths. The suffering of the liberators, or heroes, was usually beyond the range of human experience; or, perhaps more aptly, what the Romantics thought and felt was usually beyond the range of human experience. Such suffering gave these heroes a special spiritual character in the minds of the Romantics, and often, as a result, they so appeared in Romantic art. That special quality can be called, in a broad sense, mystical. Since many Romantics shied away from institutional religions, the quality of the mysticism in their works often seems areligious. It is a mysticism that acknowledged a spiritual dimension in man that can work either good or evil, though the Romantics generally tended to avoid such orthodox classifications of the spirit. Very few were able to accept the total goodness of the human spirit, though such total acceptance seemed to be the point of a good deal of Romantic art and philosophy. Notable exceptions are Blake, the late Slowacki, and Krasinski. The mysticism that most often appears in Romantic art, then, resembles the implicit Christianity of Job, Ecclesiastes, and the Sermon on the Mount with variations of gnosticism. The work of Blake, the late Wordsworth, and the late Shelley was mystical in this way. Slowacki and Mickiewicz carried the mystical in their work to a maturity equalling if not surpassing Blake's (pp. 149-150).