Entry from Journal
March 25, 1940
Life was mysterious and impressive to Beethoven, and like a true artist, he was gratified when it showed his face to him. The caprice of fortune he understood very well, the uncertainties of life were always with him. This is clearly in all of his music. What is the romantic temperament? It is amazed, impressed, delighted and enraged by the caprice of life. It is impulsive, swaggering, remonstrating, scolding, pleading, straining, sulking, appealing, denouncing the unfairness of life. It is the romantic who cries out that he is out of harmony with life — by which he means that life is not in harmony with his vision of the way he saw it as a youth with moral and idealistic hunger to m ix his hands in it and live it fully and deeply. The classic art is to accept life, the romantic to reject it as it is and attempt to make it over as he wants it to be. The classic accepts the forms and conventions of life around it, the romantic breaks them down, rejects, and rebels against them — they do not fit him — they were made for the dead and let the dead clutch them in the graves! Yes, with the romantic it is all self-discovery and self-exploration. The injustice and coldness of life is constantly throwing him back on himself, and it is from this center of the expanding demanding growing ego that the romantic functions. The romantic’s nature inwardly is one of chaos; this is because there are no accepted or standard values for him — he will not and does not accept a code made by others. Everything must be tested and measured by his own experience — anything else is rejected.
It is typical that Beethoven scorned the teachings of Haydn and only when much older was able to return to those lesson books and say that he should have paid attention in his youth to the lessons. But to have paid attention would have implied not a Beethoven but a Haydn! The roar of pain which comes from the romantic is real pain, albeit often a pain self-made.
Beethoven roars, Chopin complains, Brahms is resigned and sad. But in each case their pain comes from this real meeting: their ideal vision of life met the reality of life, and they are left with this utterance, “What, is that all it is? Is this all? Nothing else? Down with it!”
True, there is something vastly self-destructive in the essential nature of the romantic, but when he is a good artist he builds a form to gird him in, to prevent the scattering of his life — his art teches him a way of life and he lives it! Simply that he insisted till the moment he died that his ideal vision of life, of the conduct of men and their interrelationships, was the correct and most valid way to live — his world was better, and he was willing to fight and die for this belief: he did!
The romantic of the Stendahl type is rare. He understands what has happened to him and his aspirations — HE DOES NOT ASPIRE IN HIS WORK — and this detached sense of what has happened later forms the basis of his work, writing, in this case. But this is possible only when the man waits for a good ripe age before setting to work. Stendahl, if we chose, we could call a “romantic iconoclast”, the romantic turned ironist, psychologist who looks underneath to reveal with contempt the pitifully paltry forms of life and convention around him.
Again like Rand: “The classic accepts the forms and conventions of life around it, the romantic breaks them down, rejects, and rebels against them — they do not fit him — they were made for the dead and let the dead clutch them in the graves! . . . [T]here are no accepted or standard values for him — he will not and does not accept a code made by others. Everything must be tested and measured by his own experience — anything else is rejected.” That could almost come from The Romantic Manifesto.