German Romanticism

The German romantic movement was the result of defective culture, of bodily and mental derangement, of spiritual and nervous disorder. It is a work of degeneration, deformation, and disease. And it bears on its front the stigmata of its infirmities - absurdity, folly, inanity, and confusion. There is Hardenberg, the pattern of the school, who falls in love with a chit of thirteen and at her death a year or so later dedicates himself to the grave, an unblemished sacrifice of love, unblighted by sickness, violence, or sorrow, the cheerful victim of his own regret. In the meanwhile he begins a new era and dates his note-books from the epoch of her decease