Browning, himself a romanticist through and through, has summed up the spirit of romanticism in a single stanza of his «Old Pictures in Florence»:
«On which I conclude, that the early painters, To cries of 'Greek art and what more wish you?' Replied, 'To become now self-acquainters, And paint man, man, whatever the issue! Make new hopes shine through the flesh they fray, New fears aggrandize the rags and tatters: To bring the invisible full into play! Let the visible go to the dogs--what matters?'»
The individualism, the subjectivity, the mystical distrust of definite forms, so stirringly championed in these lines, are vital principles in the work of all the composers of the generation after Beethoven. Thus in Schumann's music, for example, the generality of the emotional burden of classical music is changed to something far more individual and introspective. Expression is more tinged by temperament; the work of art exhales a personal fragrance. Schumann tells us not merely of love, longing, and passion, but of Robert Schumann's love, longing, and passion. His work, for all its beauty, is much less inclusive and complete than the classical masterpieces. In the same way Chopin filled his nocturnes and preludes with the lovely but often unhealthy poetry of the isolated dreamer, and Wagner, separating the passion of love from the other interests of the heart, and thus throwing out of balance the spiritual economy, sacrificed as much in health as he gained in potency. And of the men we have been studying, Grieg, Franck, and Tschaïkowsky also illustrate in various ways the tendency to «paint man, man, whatever the issue,» to let the «flesh be frayed» and the «visible go to the dogs.» It is hardly necessary to say that all these men have their legitimate place. Their message of passion and unrest, already audible in Beethoven, was the inevitable and indispensable expression of one of those self-conscious phases in man's growth when he freshly realizes his finitude. Their utterances make a deeply pathetic appeal to us, because they reveal all the terrible sadness of personal life which as yet finds no resting-place in the universal. Aspiration and disappointment, bitter grief and blind pain, speak in their fragmentary loveliness. The romanticists will never want for our love, since they interpret to us a part of our own experience.