With romanticism the night took on a temporality all its own

 

This new interest in Africans and the colonies remained limited and was not sufficient to restore to the color black the prestige it had lost many generations earlier. That would occur a few years later, when the Romantic wave began to lead artistic and literary Europe into its dark imaginings and gradually reassign black the position it had formerly held: the first and foremost. The transition did not take place all at once, but in many phases. The first generation of Romantics was not so much attracted by night and the macabre as by nature and dream. By the same token, in terms of colors their preferences were first for green and blue, and only then for black. In the second half of the eighteenth century, for the first time in the West, the idea of nature was no longer systematically associated with the four elements (air, water, earth, fire), as it had been almost ever since Aristotle, but with vegetation. Henceforth nature was made up of fields and woods, trees and forests, leaves and branches. It became a place of repose and meditation and even took on metaphysical value. In the country the Creator seemed to be more present than in the city and to manifest himself there differently, both more directly and more peaceably. Certainly such ideas were not really new, but in about the years 1760–80, they took on enough importance to begin to alter sensibilities, especially with regard to color. Green, neglected or disliked until then by the poets, became the favorite color of nature lovers, those “solitary walkers” whose praises Jean-Jacques Rousseau sang.25Not only was green a favorite, but so was blue, as these strollers lost themselves in their dreams and aspired to inaccessible worlds. The mysterious “blue flower” introduced by Novalis (1772–1801) in his unfinished novel, Heinrich von Ofterdingen, is perhaps the most perfect symbol of these impossible quests.26But it constitutes an end, not a point of departure. The fashion of Romantic blue began a generation earlier, probably in 1774, when Goethe published his epistolary novel, The Sorrows of Young Werther, and gave his hero a blue coat combined with yellow breeches. The work enjoyed immense success in bookstores—one of the biggest best-sellers of all times—and “Werthermania” spread throughout Europe and then America; not only did artists take to representing the principal scenes of the novel in paintings and engravings, but for at least two decades young men dressed “à la Werther,” in the famous blue coat.27 Another color, however, was lurking in the shadows, awaiting its hour. Early in the next century, which marked nearly the end of Romantic or Pre-Romantic blue and green, black began to take over. Following the joys of communing with nature, the dreams of beauty and infinity, came ideas that were distinctly darker and that would dominate the artistic and literary scene for almost three generations. Rejecting the sovereignty of reason, proclaiming the reign of emotion, dissolving in tears and being consumed with self-pity were no longer enough; the Romantic hero had become an unstable, anguished individual who not only claimed “the ineffable happiness of being sad” (Victor Hugo) but believed himself marked by fate and felt an attraction for death. The English gothic novels had launched a trend in the macabre as early as the 1760s, with The Castle of Otranto by Horace Walpole, published in 1764. This trend continued into the turn of the century—The Mysteries of Udolfo by Ann Radcliffe (1794), The Monk by Matthew G. Lewis (1795)—and with it, black made its great comeback. This was the triumph of night and death, witches and cemeteries, the strange and fantastic. Satan himself reappeared and became the hero of many poems and stories—in Germany, those of Hoffman; in France, those of Charles Nodier, Théophile Gautier, and Villiers de L’Isle-Adam. Similarly, Goethe’s Faust exerted considerable influence, especially the first part, published in 1808. Inspired by a historical figure—a small-time magician who lived in the sixteenth century and quickly became a figure of legend—Goethe’s hero makes a pact with Mephistopheles (one of the names for the devil, “one who does not love light”): in exchange for his soul the devil promises to restore Faust’s lost youth and with it all the pleasure that could satisfy his senses. The story unfolds in a particularly black atmosphere. Nothing is missing: night, prison, cemetery, castle ruins, dungeon, forest, cavern, witches and sabbat, Walpurgis Night, on the heights of Blocksberg, in the mountains of Harz. The time of Werther seemed like the distant past and under Goethe’s pen his blue suit was replaced by a darker palette.

With romanticism the night took on a temporality all its own: the poets sang of how it was both gentle and ghastly, a place of refuge and nightmares, of fantasies and obscure travels. The Hymnen an die Nacht (1800) by Novalis and Musset’s Nuits (1835–37) echoed back to Night Thoughts by Edward Young, published many decades earlier (1742–45). These meditations, in which the idea of death dominated, were translated into all European languages and then engraved in a hallucinatory style by William Blake in 1797. In his Nuits de décembre, Musset is haunted by a mysterious figure who assumes a series of different appearances (a poor child, an orphan, a stranger) but who is always “dressed in black” and resembles the poet “like a brother.” Chopin did the same thing in many of his Nocturnes (1827–46) by translating into music this theme of the appearance of the double in the night. Everywhere the sense of melancholy triumphed; that century’s ill, which was for the Middle Ages a true illness—etymologically, an excess of black bile—became for the Romantic poets a required condition, almost a virtue. All poets had to be melancholic, to die young (Novalis, Keats, Shelley, Byron), or to retreat into everlasting mourning. Gérard de Nerval did this better than anyone, at the beginning of his sonnet El Desdichado (1853), in the most famous quatrain of all French poetry:

I am the shadowed—the bereaved—the unconsoled,
The Aquitainian prince of the stricken tower:
My one star’s dead, and my constellated lute
Bears the Black Sun of Melancholia.28

This black sun, which reappeared many times in Nerval’s work and which undoubtedly had its pictorial origin in a fourteenth-century miniature, replaced Novalis’s blue flower.29 It constituted the symbol of a whole generation that delighted in morbid states, and it prefigured the frightening verse in the haunting voice of Baudelaire a few years later: “Oh Satan take pity on my pain.”30 Faust’s pact with the devil remained more than ever a matter of current events.

Moreover, a current of the “fantastic” ran through the nineteenth century. Even if this adjective did not become a noun in French until 1821, what it designated predated it.31 It no longer had anything to do at all with the magical supernatural of early romanticism, but was of a much darker nature, bringing together the strange, occult, frenetic, and even the satanic. Esotericism and spiritualism were the fashion; some poets met in cemeteries, others attempted to practice black magic, still others belonged to secret societies or enjoyed taking part in funeral banquets and drinking alcohol from empty skulls. At the end of the century, in his novel À rebours (1884), Joris Karl Huysman (1848–1907) began his account by evoking such a “feast of mourning”: “While a concealed orchestra played funeral marches, the guests were waited on by naked black women, wearing stockings and slippers of silver cloth sprinkled with tears.” Over the course of this meal only black, brown, or purple foods were eaten, and only drinks of these same colors consumed:

From black-rimmed plates they ate turtle soup, Russian rye bread, ripe Turkish olives, caviar, salted mullet roe, smokedFrankfurt black puddings, game in gravies the colour of liquorice and boot-blacking, truffled sauces, chocolate caramel creams, plum puddings, nectarines, preserved fruits, mulberries, and heart-cherries; from dark-coloured glasses they drank the wines of Limagne and Rousillon, of Tenedos, Val de Peñas, and Oporto, and, after the coffee and the walnut cordial, they enjoyed kvass, porters, and stouts.32 A similar taste for death and mourning appeared in the theater by the 1820s; there was no longer any hesitation about showing scenes of violence and crime. The late eighteenth century had rediscovered Shakespeare; romanticism would go further and appropriate many of his characters, making tutelary figures out of them. Hamlet, especially, became a Romantic hero, and his famous black costume, a veritable uniform, was more in keeping with the sensibility and style of the era than Werther’s too sensible blue suit, henceforth totally obsolete.33 Society was not to be outdone, making black the dominant color for men’s clothing and for the duration. The phenomenon began in the last years of the eighteenth century, grew during the French Revolution—an honest citizen had to wear a black suit then—triumphed in the Romantic period, lasted throughout the nineteenth century, and only exhausted itself in the 1920s. It involved elegant clothing as well, the dress of dandies and worldly gentlemen, made fashionable in England by Brummel about 1810, and also the limited wardrobes of men of modest means, who believed (naively?) they had found in black a color upon which the increasing filth and pollution seemed to have less impact.34

25. His Rêveries du promeneur solitaire, written between 1776 and 1778 and left unfinished, were published after his death (July 1778) in London in 1782.

26. Unfinished, this novel was published by Ludwig Tieck, Novalis’s friend, in 1802. The book opens with the account of a dream, minstrel Heinrich’s dream: he sees himself crossing marvelous countrysides and discovering near a spring the strange blue flower that offers a glimpse, between its petals, of a young woman’s face. When he wakes, Heinrich decides to go in search of that flower and that woman. This quest, a merging of dream and reality, constitutes the principal theme of German romanticism.

27. Pastoureau, Bleu, 134–41.

28. Text reproduced from Gérard de Nerval, The Chimeras; translated by Peter Jay, with an essay by Richard Holmes (London, 1984). 15.

29. M. Pastoureau, Une histoire symbolique du Moyen Âge occidental (Paris, 2004), 317–26 (“Nerval lecteur des images médiévales”).

30. C. Baudelaire, Les Fleurs du mal (Paris, 1857), 92 (“Les litanies de Satan”).

31. In his story “Smarra ou Les démons de la nuit” (1821), Charles Nodier seems to be the first French author to use the term fantastic as a noun and to give it the meaning it still has today. Before that it only existed as an adjective; it characterized what did not exist in reality, what was a matter of the imagination, and the “black” aspect of it was absent.

32. J. K. Huysmans, Against Nature; translated by Margaret Mauldon, edited with an introduction and notes by Nicholas White (Oxford, 1998), 11–12. This “meal of mourning” is the “announcement dinner for a virility momentarily dead” offered by the hero, Des Esseintes.

33. On Hamlet as Romantic hero: Harvey, Des hommes en noir, 105–16.

34. On this long-standing clothing phenomenon, ibid., 133–230.

Black - The History of a Color
Michel Pastoureau