The Triumph of Imperfection: The Silver
Age of Sociocultural Moderation in
Europe, 1815–1848 by Virgil
Nemoianu (Columbia, SC: University
of South Carolina Press, 2006). 258 pp.

ANNE BARBEAU GARDINER is Professor Emerita of
English at John Jay College and the author of several
works on the poetry of John Dryden.

While most cultural historians depict
the period between 1815 and 1848 as
an age of upheaval, Virgil Nemoianu presents
it as an age of “Biedermeier” figures—
authors who acted as mediators between past
and present amid cultural conflicts spawned
by the French Revolution. In The Triumph of
Imperfection, a work of extraordinary range
and depth of erudition, Nemoianu demonstrates
how well such authors defused and
redirected revolutionary energies towards a
“feasible regeneration.” Conservatives of
our time could learn a lot from this work
about how to slow down, defuse, and rechannel
explosive change.

Romanticism was essentially unstable,
“perhaps even an absence,” Nemoianu observes,
since the core works of Romanticism
were already laments about lost Romantic
integrity. Ironically the movement proved
most fertile after its “relative defeat,” when
the next age achieved the “triumph of imperfection.”
Instead of the Romantic age’s
universalist and utopian goals, the next age
had finite goals such as social reform and the
revitalization of national communities. It
triumphed by exchanging the perfection that
exists only in the mind for the limited success
that can be achieved in the real world.

While he touches on a myriad of writers,
Nemoianu pays special attention to the works
of Chateaubriand, Goethe, Scott, Cooper,
and Southey as “historical mediators.” Poised
between radical and reactionary discourses,
these authors redirected the violent currents
of change “into modes of intelligible accommodation.”
Nemoianu also deals with the
revival of religion in the same period and
with the appropriation of travel literature for
Biedermeier purposes, as well as with the rise
of Central Europe’s “learning ethos” as a key
to upward mobility.

Chateaubriand, whom Nemoianu considers
one of the “founding fathers of the
modern age,” embraced views similar to
those of his kinsman Tocqueville. He wanted
the past to have a major role in shaping the
future, for he knew that even if change of an
exterior sort is inevitable, morality and religion
can provide continuity and a solid
foundation to any new worthwhile society.
He foresaw that the future would “inevitably”
bring about a “mass society” with
“centrifugal individualism,” but he hoped
that our age-old civilization would nevertheless
survive. He believed such a society
could be kept from excess by the freedom
that grows “out of religious values, and
preeminently, Christianity.” According to
him, Christianity is

the most compassionate and the most universal of
all religions and philosophies,” the one uniquely
“capable of a growth based on transfer of values:
detaching values and tenets from the physical (or
historical) environment in which they are embedded
and carrying them over to other shapes in
which their essence can remain constant.

Chateaubriand is an exemplar of the progressive
conservative who preserves the best
of the past by transplanting it into new ground.
Another great Biedermeier author is
Goethe. His masterpiece Faust may be read
as a survey of modes of government, beginning
with the medieval city state, looking
back to an archaic clan organization, then
going forward to “imperialist macroeconomic
frameworks” and a futurist “democratic,
state-socialist construct.” The character
of Faust pays little attention to the past,
Nemoianu notes, but the work Faust is a
“monument of the struggle with, and for,
memory.” In this work Goethe brings to
bear his “conservative skepticism” on the
age’s “utopian pressures for progress.” Like
Chateaubriand, he accepts historical change
as inevitable but trusts that we can preserve
the best of the past in spite of “radically
modified historical environments.” The religious
element at the end of Faust is his way
of saying that “imperfection” is “too integral
to ‘being-human’ to be eradicated except by
transcendence of the human.”

Nemoianu finds a lesson for our times in
Goethe’s view of radical change as something
to which we must respond with “moderating
discourses of deflection and digression.”
We need to provide some time and
space for the transfer of values. The big
question for Goethe, as for Chateaubriand,
Guizot, and Tocqueville, is how to preserve
our inherited “spiritual principles” under
“categorically modified historical circumstances.”

Yet another major Biedermeier figure
was Sir Walter Scott. It seems that Goethe’s
Faust was indebted in part to Scott’s Kenilworth
and his Letters on Demonology and Witchcraft.
In turn, Scott was also influenced by Goethe.
In 1815 Waverley appeared, and the historical
novel reemerged as a major way of
recording conflicts between “two great modes
of life.” The historical novel now became a
strategy for taming revolutionary energies.
Not only did it provide a “gentle” explanation
for what had led to the present, but it
demonstrated that a transfer of values was
necessary and feasible. Scott had a legion of
imitators, most prominently James Fenimore
Cooper, but also—to a greater or less extent—
Balzac, Hugo, Vigny, Dumas Père,
Pushkin, Manzoni, Mickiewicz, Arnim,
Hauff, Alexis, Stifter, Immermann, Jovellanos,
Szécheny, and Eötvös.

As a follower of Burke in both politics and
aesthetics, Scott was keen to show how the
“spirit of tradition” might survive huge
political convulsions. He realized that history
was inevitably moving away from “organic
bindings of blood and soil” toward a contractual
“society of unattached individuals.” Even
so, he thought it possible to rescue the spiritual
treasures of the past by detaching them
from earlier historical contexts and incorporating
them in modern times. One of Scott’s
strategies to instill moderation was to depict
the extremes of “reactionary” and “revolutionary”
as strangely alike.

Besides the historical novel, histories of
the literary sort became the rage after 1815.
One example is Thierry’s “literary-visionary”
history of the Merovingians that influenced
Marx. Nemoianu also mentions
belletristic histories penned by Michelet,
Guizot, Lamartine, Schiller, Carlyle,
Macaulay, Karamzin, Raumer, Bãlcescu and
Palacký. A big demand arose for historical
portraits in the manner of Landor and Sainte-
Beuve and for historical paintings like those
of Delacroix. Memoirs, too, promoted a
kind of history that made much use of
imagination and empathy. The Biedermeier
effect of these works is that they showed,
despite real differences, “large areas of commonality”
between races and cultures.

Nemoianu places James Fenimore Cooper
among the “most serious” of Biedermeier
“thinkers,” on the same plane as
Chateaubriand, Scott, and even Goethe. In
the Leatherstocking tales, Cooper dramatized
the tragic conflict between Amerindians
and Euro-Americans in the New World.
Nemoianu praises Cooper for reflecting deeply
on multiculturalism and for attempting to
find models for the “interpenetration of
cultures.” One model was the deep, abiding
friendship between Chingachgook and
Leatherstocking, but since friendship between
men is sterile, this model implied the
failure of the “intercultural and interracial
project.”

Cooper presents us with the inevitable
problem that besets all multiculturalism,
namely “the need for integration and the
need for distinction (or specificity).” Since
he did not regard racial distinction as ultimate,
Cooper made a point of emphasizing
the common capacity of mankind for good
and evil by distributing across cultural lines
many “gestures of moral rectitude and integrity,”
as well as “of aggression and ruthlessness.”
Due to this vision of our human
commonality in spiritual matters, he was not
in favor of an “absolute separation of cultures”
on racial or ethnic grounds, and he was
also doubtful that human history would culminate
in the “unquestioning” adoption of
Western models.

In a densely packed chapter devoted to
religion, Nemoianu begins by chronicling
how religion had suffered in the years leading
up to 1815. A striking example he gives is
that only thirty out of one thousand five
hundred Benedictine abbeys still remained in
all of Europe. Little wonder then that when
the violence and upheaval subsided, many
thought it was time to “reassess” the place of
religion in society. Catholicism now regained
much of its social and intellectual
influence, the Oxford Movement reawakened
Anglicanism, while Methodism, Pietism, and
Hasidism gained new legitimacy. A sign of
the times was that Hannah More, a “typical
Biedermeier figure” who wrote moral and
religious works, became the first person in
history to sell a million copies of a book. This
showed a widespread thirst for a “more
complete understanding of human nature.”

There was a new debate about how religious
needs might be accommodated, for
very few asked for a “full restoration” of
former church privileges. Schleiermacher
developed his theory that religion was founded
on sentiment and intuition, while
Chateaubriand emphasized the beauty, rather
than the truth, of Christianity. There were
many European writers of that age who took
up Chateaubriand’s “aesthetic argument.”
The study of comparative religion arose at
this time, too, particularly in Montalambert,
Ozanam, Lacordaire, Lamennais, and
Migne—Catholics who accepted the idea of
a “double revelation” and saw non-Christian
religions as forerunners of Christianity. Thus,
after the radical secularization that led up to
1815, religion was welcomed back in the
Biedermeier age, only now in the new role of
“guardian of the emotional, imaginative,
and symbolic resources of humanity.”

Another manifestation of the Biedermeier
spirit can be found in travel literature. As
people became aware of the world’s immensity
and variety, travel guides from Baedeker
and Cook appeared, as well as informative
accounts of transcontinental expeditions. Such
works sought “in exotic alterity salvation
from the pressures of the home situation.”
One kind of conservative response to this
escapism was to put greater value on the
immediate locale. In his Rural Rides (1830),
William Cobbett showed there is “infinity in
smallness” as he traveled through just a few
English counties, reporting not merely on
their natural delights, but also on their “spider’s
web of parasitism, artificiality, and alienation.”
Like other Biedermeier figures,
Cobbett wanted to transfer the spiritual treasures
of the past into the present, as well as to
channel revolutionary energies into local
reform. Likewise De Quincey and
Immermann demonstrated “how the close
can become the distant and how the intimate
can become the picturesque and the unusual.”
Another example of this genre is
Xavier de Maistre’s Expedition nocturne autour
de ma chambre (1825), where the author
travels around his room, making this intimate
space interesting by revealing “the
thickness of existence and the delights of
limitation.”

Cultural history and geography were also
useful in the transfer of values, as seen in
Hazlitt’s Notes of a Journey through Italy and
France (1826), which influenced Burckhardt
and Pater, and in Germaine de Staël’s De
l’Allemagne (1813), where the “internal structures
and contradictions” of a single culture
were mapped out for the sake of offering
political alternatives to “dictatorship, revolution,
and stagnation.” There was also the
political treatise in the guise of travel literature,
as in Tocqueville’s Democracy in America.
In this kind of travel literature, Nemoianu
remarks, romantic “universality” is “parceled
out (much in Biedermeier fashion)”
and “organized into practical units.”

Still another strategy for redirecting the
revolutionary impetus into constructive channels
was the central-European “learning
ethos” which posited that a person or group
might advance through increased “access to
science, information, and humanistic values.”
Europe was envisioned as a place where
people, regardless of background, might better
themselves through learning that would
then “justify” their wealth and status. This
ethos was “officially sanctioned,” with the
result that many from marginal groups, such
as Jews, Transylvanian Romanians, and
Serbians in Hungary, achieved titles and
high positions based on military, economic,
or scholarly merit. Nemoianu mentions Joseph
von Sonnenfels, a Freemason of Jewish
background, as the “architect and prime
mover of the central-European learning
ethos.”

In connection with this “learning ethos,”
national academies arose across Europe, half
of which pursued cultural and intellectual
goals, and reading clubs, as well as “reading
cabinets” stocked with foreign books proliferated.
A new competitiveness emerged regarding
native literature, now seen as the
“indispensable” validation of an ethnic or
national group. At this time Beowulf, Das
Nibelungenlied, and Le Chanson de Roland
were published and reached the status of
founding myths.

In a chapter on Robert Southey,
Nemoianu contends that he was yet another
Biedermeier figure who espoused the ideology
of smallness, local attachment, and fertile
imperfection. In The Doctor, for example, a
work of multitudinous digressions, Southey
wanted to protect the older kind of thinking
by opting for “radical intertextuality” and
drawing from such disparate sources as Brahmins,
Druids, Moses, and George Fox. This
chapter failed to persuade this reader that
Southey can be put on a par with
Chateaubriand and Goethe, or even Scott
and Cooper.

What all these Biedermeier figures had in
common was the “pacifying power” they
exerted when they married progress to tradition.
They embraced imperfection to prevent
Western society from unraveling in a
moon-eyed pursuit of utopian perfection.
Such mediators are needed in every age to
add “graduality” to the pace of change,
while not “denying the validity of this
emancipatory progress itself.”

Throughout this learned and judicious
work, Nemoianu makes incisive applications
to the contemporary American academy.
He warns of “a powerful system”
which has taken root in literary criticism and
cultural studies and is drawn from both
“recent western European theories of
deconstruction” and from “left-oriented interpretations
of the Nietzsche-Heidegger
philosophical tradition.” When combined,
these ingredients become “dogmatic,” and
although the system is “squarely rooted inside
Western horizons,” it is “mostly bent on
undercutting Western certitudes,
affirmations, and modes of behavior.” This
dogmatic nihilism, which has “inscribed
itself in the family of leveling utopianisms,”
Nemoianu explains, is the “heir or ally of
doctrines that have produced and justified
totalitarian and destructive regimes in the
twentieth century.” Despite its claims, too, it
actually diminishes human difference. In
another place, Nemoianu declares that, contrary
to Edward Said, “some of the worst
forms of mental and physical oppression
invented by the West were but a consequence
of high-minded progressive and utopian
purposes.” Evidently our age, too, has
need of Biedermeier figures to redirect destructive
intellectual energies into creative
channels.