TB: In many respects the Romantic revolution was a religious revival. And if one's looking for the origins — and again we go back to Rousseau — then one finds that very often it's this emphasis on the inner light. This comes out again and again in Rousseau's Confessions. He says if anything is to have validity it has to come from the inside, it's got to be the inner inspiration, the inner light; it's got to be true. Incidentally, I scribbled a note right at the beginning of this conversation when we were talking about where Romanticism contributes to present-day culture, that one of these axioms of value in modern culture is integrity, originality and spontaneity. All these things come out of Romanticism. That certainly takes us back to the notion of religious experience. If a religious experience, as the Romantics saw it, and as their religious precursors saw it, or an ethical act is to have any value, it must come from the inside, must be self-determined and cannot be performed because the Ten Commandments tell you to. It mustn't be as a result of an external injunction. It's got to come from the inner light. Again and again we're back with the Germans. When looking for the origins of a German proto-Romantic experience it comes from Pietism, from that movement of the late 17th century with its emphasis on the need for an inner light, a personal conversion experience which has nothing to do with institutions and dogma. There are equivalents, of course, in every other part of Europe: certain forms of Jansenism in the Catholic Church, with Methodism and certain elements of Nonconformity in the English-speaking world, the Great Awakening for example. I think that religion is right in there. It's another reason why I have problems including Byron as a fully paid-up member of the Romantic movement. 

JB: The fault line then comes with the question: to what do you attribute a quasi-religious feeling? For me the great example of this is Coleridge, who wrote a poem called A Hymn Before Sun-Rise in the Vale of Chamouni, which is actually, like many of Coleridge's works, a free translation from the German — it's based on a poem by a German Romantic called Friedrich von Braun. Coleridge writes as he's looking up at Mont Blanc, "Who would, who could be an atheist in such a valley of wonders?" So it's a revival of natural religion: the sublime of the mountain takes you to God. When Shelley stayed in the same hotel in the Vale of Chamonix, he wrote in the visitors' book, Percy Bysshe Shelley — Atheist. Clearly a reply. In his poem, Mont Blanc, he has the same feelings of sublimity in response to the mountain, but for Shelley that's just coming from within, it's not from God. So the feeling of the religious sublime is there but it's just a question of whether you attribute it to a God who's out there, or whether it's a product of human minds' imaginings. That's where the fault line comes.

DJ: Let's bring politics into this. Again, you have the passionate feelings aroused by the French Revolution, then by Napoleon, and then again, a new wave in 1848 which catches up people like Wagner for example, but many others such as Heine who, we mentioned, see Romanticism as essentially reactionary. How does that work? It's both atheist and religious, both, as it were, left- and right-wing. 

TB: I don't think it's very atheist. One can overdo these contrasts. I wouldn't say Shelley was an exception but if you lined up all those Romantics on one side of the room who believed in some form of God and on the other side of the room the atheists, the latter group would be seriously outnumbered. 

DJ: Although they use the word God sometimes in a very subjective way, don't they? Can you really say that Goethe believed in God? Perhaps a kind of pantheism.

TB: It's possible to have a Christian pantheism, of course. Wordsworth surely is a Christian pantheist. And it's possible to have non-Christian pantheists, those who believe in some sort of transcendental realm, who in other words are not materialists. Going back to the politics, this is a very interesting phenomenon and I don't think it's actually anything to which a simple answer can be given. Let's take the French Romantics. Given that the official ideology and culture of the revolution was classicism, and then that is continued — or perhaps perverted — by Napoleon, if you were against the revolution and particularly if you were opposed to Napoleon, then there was a natural tendency, compulsion even, to adopt the alternative: Bourbon restoration, Bourbon royalism. You can see that in virtually all the early French Romantics, the most important of them of course being Chateaubriand, who wrote The Genius of Christianity among other things. That is then propagated and encouraged by the great Madame de Staël, who was, as it were, a transmitter of German Romanticism into the Francophone world. But once the Bourbon restoration has taken place in 1814 and decisively in 1815, you can almost see someone like Victor Hugo beginning to shift from Right to Left. They start off as conservative, clerical royalists and then as the awful nature of Louis XVIII and more especially of his brother Charles IX after 1824 becomes apparent you can see them shifting Left. So by the late 1820s Victor Hugo is a fully paid-up member of the liberal opposition. France is an interesting example of a swing from Right to Left. It's much more complex in the German world.