The Early Romantics

In terms of actual achievement, the revival of Catalan literature in the early nineteenth century owes almost everything to the Romantic Movement. As early as the 1790s, in the pages of the newly founded Diario de Barcelona , one finds a growing interest in the remote and the exotic, and a little later, the traditionalist reaction provoked by the Napoleonic Wars brings with it a heightened sense of the national past which is easily assimilated into the ideology of the time. None of this is very consciously formulated before the 1820s: the first landmark is the publication of a magazine, El Europeo(1823–24), whose contributors describe themselves as an ‘escuela romántico-espiritualista’. Two of the editors of El Europeo , Bonaventura Carles Aribau and Ramón López Soler, were eventually to become leading figures in the Renaixença , as the literary movement came to be known, the first as the writer of the first important Romantic poem in Catalan, and the second as the author of Los bandos de Castilla(1830), a historical novel in the manner of Scott, whose preface is one of the earliest manifestos of Catalan Romanticism. In spite of its short life, El Europeoreflects very accurately the major preoccupations of the moment: the aesthetics of Friedrich Schlegel, the vogue of Mme de Staël and Chateaubriand, the revaluation of Shakespeare, and, above all, the achievement of Goethe, Schiller, Scott and Manzoni. What was lacking at this stage was any serious attempt to write in the Catalan language, the whole status of which was to remain in doubt for the next few decades. Because of this, the work of those Catalan authors who continue to use Spanish is an important index to the sensibility of the time, and occasionally, as in the poetry of Manuel de Cabanyes (1808–33) and Pau Piferrer (1818–48) or the historical novels of Cosca Vayo (1804?–?) and Juan Cortada (1805–68), it contains some of the most original writing of the period.

The language problem is partly a matter of audience: it is significant that the first successful plays in Catalan were not staged until the 1860s and that the first nineteenth-century novels of any serious literary merit came even later.