2. Infinite Imperfectibility John R. Rosenberg, “Infinite Imperfectibility: Romancing Spanish Romanticism.”

3. “Perhaps the major distinction between the Classicists and the Romantics was their concept of perfection.” “Neo-Classicists adopted the ancients’ attitude toward absolutes that made perfection possible, but at the same time Enlightenment optimism, working within a context of Christian belief that shattered the deterministic cycle, demanded that man locate the key moments of his species’ history on an ever-ascending line.” “Romantic theorists went one step further. They rejected both the circular notion of history and the ascending but always finite line of the Enlightenment. In their place they adopted the ascending yet infinite line.... Humanity was now seen as advancing eternally towards perfection, yet, paradoxically, perfection could be found only in the movement itself.”

4. Drawing on Fichte, Rosenberg notes, “This noble goal [subordination of the irrational], however, is ‘completely inachievable and must always remain so; as long as man continues to be man and not God (who is the only being capable of perfectly mastering the irrational). Imperfection circumscribes man’s condition of being. As a result his ‘ultimate goal [is] unobtainable and... His path [will be] infintely long. Thus, it is not man’s vocation to reach his goal. But he can and should draw nearer to it, and his true vocation qua man, i.e., insofar as he is rational but finite, a sensuous but free being), lies in endless approximation toward this goal’ (p. 9; Fichte’s italics). Man’s vocation, therefore, is to ‘perfect himself without end’.”

5. Looking to Friedrich Schlegel, Rosenberg notes, “Romantic poetry... ‘is still becoming; indeed, its peculiar essence is that it is always becoming and that it can never be completed.... The fragment suggests the possibility of totality, but at the same time denies the poet’s ability to possess it. Totality, or completeness, suggests a perfection that must remain beyond the modern’s reach: ‘Many works of the ancients have become fragments’, Schlegel writes, ‘many works of the moderns are fragments at the time of their origin’ (p. 121).”

6. “[A. W.] Schlegel insists that ‘the poetry of the ancients was the poetry of possession, our poetry is that of yearning.... The former has resolved its problem of perfection; the latter can be content with its aspirations toward the infinite only by approximation (pp. 183-184).” “... new mythology...” “What is clear is that the basic Christian plot of redemption surfaces again and again in Romantic literature.” According to Abrams the new mythology was“ ‘... To recast, into terms appropriate to the historical and intellectual circumstances of their own age, the Christian pattern of fall, the redemption, and the emergence of a new earth which will constitute a restored paradise’ (p. 29)

7. “... quest romance...” “In the terminology of the quest motif we might say that the Spanish Romantic, having fallen from the paradisaical bliss of perfection and possession offered by the Classical model, wanders in an intellectual desert in search of a new structure capable of sustaining modern man in his scepticism of the promises of pure reason.” “... the pilgrimage is eternal: the goal exceeds the grasp; totality crumbles into fragments; the pilgrim’s usually well-defined destination remains in the realm of infinitude; his destiny is one of infinite imperfectibility.” “The nineteenth-century versions of romance plots do not allow possession to take place. They splinter the absolutes that the medieval God, honour, or love provided and instead postulate a world where the just may wander without reward, the virtuous bemoan the absence of love, and the brave suffer endlessly from unachieved honour.”