century. One or two anticipations aside, notably Laurence Sterne and
Denis Diderot in literature and Goya in graphic art, it was to be Scott who
created the Romantic sensibility to warfare that constitutes the primary
secular tradition to rival the just war in modern times. He took the world
by storm with his first novel, Waverley.
Romanticism is often depicted as a conservative, counter-Enlightenment
impulse. It is beyond question that the movement was implicated in the
restoration of hereditary monarchy and the authority of the Church
following the final defeat of Napoleon. But there is a second, and equally
plausible account of Romanticism, which better accounts for the
durability of the movement and its peculiar aptitude to speak of war, and
this centres on the tension between binary pairs, such as authority and
violence, masculinity and femininity, deduction and narrative, rationality
and authenticity and, indeed, Classicism and Romanticism itself: a
process which in some ways mimics war itself and finds (Romantic)
expression in Clausewitz’s contrast between escalation and friction.
One of the primary differences between Classical and Romantic music is
the manner in which the Romantics move into ever more remote keys,
deferring resolution further and further as the century progresses. In much
22
. Sir Walter Scott, Waverley ([1814] Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986).
23
. Karl Kroeber, ‘Frictional Fiction: Walter Scott in the Light of von Clausewitz’s On War’ in James
Pipkin (ed.), English and German Romanticism: Cross-currents and Controversies (Heidelberg: Carl
Winter, 1985)
19
Convention