Faust’s author, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, saw where all this was going. He had lived through the French Revolution and Napoleon’s conquest of Germany. He tried to head things off with his famous pronouncement “Classicism is health, Romanticism disease.” No doubt he was thinking of Romanticism’s brooding pessimism, the craving for intensity of experience, however immoral or bizarre, which in his mind stood in such contrast with the timeless serene stability of Greek and Roman art. Indeed, Goethe’s remark set off a debate about the meaning of classic and Romantic in the arts that has kept
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