Romanticism

Romanticism (also the Romantic era or the Romantic period) was an artistic, literary, musical,
cultural and intellectual movement that originated in Europe toward the end of the 18th century,
and most areas was at its peak in the approximate period from 1800 to 1850.

Romanticism was characterized by its emphasis on emotion and individualism as well as

glorification of all the past and nature, preferring the medieval rather than the classical. It was
partly a reaction to the Industrial Revolution, the aristocratic social and political norms of the Age
of Enlightenment, and the scientific rationalization of nature—all components of Modernity. It was
embodied most strongly in the visual arts, music, and literature, but had a major impact on
historiography, education, the social sciences, and the natural sciences. It had a significant and
complex effect on politics, with romantic thinkers influencing liberalism, radicalism, conservatism
and nationalism.

The movement emphasized intense emotion as an authentic source of aesthetic experience,

placing new emphasis on such emotions as apprehension, horror and terror, and awe— especially
that experienced in confronting the new aesthetic categories of the sublimity and beauty of
nature. It elevated folk art and ancient custom to something noble, but also spontaneity as a
desirable characteristic (as in the musical impromptu). In contrast to the Rationalism and
Classicism of the Enlightenment, Romanticism revived medievalism and elements of art and
narrative perceived as authentically medieval in an attempt to escape population growth, early
urban sprawl, and industrialism.

Although the movement was rooted in the German Sturm und Drang movement, which preferred
intuition and emotion to the rationalism of the Enlightenment, the events and ideologies of the
French Revolution were also proximate factors. Romanticism assigned a high value to the
achievements of "heroic" individualists and artists, whose examples, it maintained, would raise the
quality of society. It also promoted the individual imagination as a critical authority allowed of
freedom from classical notions of form in art. There was a strong recourse to historical and natural
inevitability, a Zeitgeist, in the representation of its ideas. In the second half of the 19th century,
Realism was offered as a polar opposite to Romanticism. The decline of Romanticism during this
time was associated with multiple processes, including social and political changes and the spread
of nationalism.

Basic characteristics

Defining the nature of Romanticism may be approached from the starting point of the primary
importance of the free expression of the feelings of the artist. The importance the Romantics
placed on emotion is summed up in the remark of the German painter Caspar David Friedrich that
"the artist's feeling is his law". To William Wordsworth, poetry should begin as "the spontaneous
overflow of powerful feelings", which the poet then "recollect[s] in tranquility", evoking a new but
corresponding emotion the poet can then mould into art. To express these feelings, it was
considered that the content of the art had to come from the imagination of the artist, with as little
interference as possible from "artificial" rules that dictated what a work should consist of. Samuel
Taylor Coleridge and others believed there were natural laws that the imagination—at least of a
good creative artist—would unconsciously follow through artistic inspiration if left alone. As well
as rules, the influence of models from other works was considered to impede the creator's own
imagination, so that originality was essential. The concept of the genius, or artist who was able to
produce his own original work through this process of creation from nothingness, is key to
Romanticism, and to be derivative was the worst sin. This idea is often called "romantic originality.
Translator and prominent Romantic August Wilhelm Schlegel argued in his Lectures on Dramatic
Arts and Letters that the most phenomenal power of human nature is its capacity to divide and
diverge into opposite directions.

Not essential to Romanticism, but so widespread as to be normative, was a strong belief and
interest in the importance of nature. However, this is particularly in the effect of nature upon the
artist when he is surrounded by it, preferably alone. In contrast to the usually very social art of the
Enlightenment, Romantics were distrustful of the human world, and tended to believe that a close
connection with nature was mentally and morally healthy. Romantic art addressed its audiences
with what was intended to be felt as the personal voice of the artist. So, in literature, "much of
romantic poetry invited the reader to identify the protagonists with the poets themselves".

According to Isaiah Berlin, Romanticism embodied "a new and restless spirit, seeking violently to
burst through old and cramping forms, a nervous preoccupation with perpetually changing inner
states of consciousness, a longing for the unbounded and the indefinable, for perpetual
movement and change, an effort to return to the forgotten sources of life, a passionate effort at
self-assertion both individual and collective, a search after means of expressing an unappeasable
yearning for unattainable goals."

Etymology

The group of words with the root "Roman" in the various European languages, such as "romance"
and "Romanesque", has a complicated history, but by the middle of the 18th century "romantic" in
English and romantique in French were both in common use as adjectives of praise for natural
phenomena such as views and sunsets, in a sense close to modern English usage but without the
amorous connotation. The application of the term to literature first became common in Germany,
where the circle around the Schlegel brothers, critics August and Friedrich, began to speak of
romantische Poesie ("romantic poetry") in the 1790s, contrasting it with "classic" but in terms of
spirit rather than merely dating. Friedrich Schlegel wrote in his Dialogue on Poetry (1800), "I seek
and find the romantic among the older moderns, in Shakespeare, in Cervantes, in Italian poetry, in
that age of chivalry, love and fable, from which the phenomenon and the word itself are derived."

In both French and German the closeness of the adjective to roman, meaning the fairly new
literary form of the novel, had some effect on the sense of the word in those languages. The use of
the word did not become general very quickly, and was probably spread more widely in France by
its persistent use by Madame de Staël in her De l'Allemagne (1813), recounting her travels in
Germany. In England Wordsworth wrote in a preface to his poems of 1815 of the "romantic harp"
and "classic lyre", but in 1820 Byron could still write, perhaps slightly disingenuously, "I perceive
that in Germany, as well as in Italy, there is a great struggle about what they call 'Classical' and
'Romantic', terms which were not subjects of classification in England, at least when I left it four or
five years ago". It is only from the 1820s that Romanticism certainly knew itself by its name, and in
1824 the Académie française took the wholly ineffective step of issuing a decree condemning it in
literature.

The period

The period typically called Romantic varies greatly between different countries and different
artistic media or areas of thought. Margaret Drabble described it in literature as taking place
"roughly between 1770 and 1848", and few dates much earlier than 1770 will be found. In English
literature, M. H. Abrams placed it between 1789, or 1798, this latter a very typical view, and about
1830, perhaps a little later than some other critics. Others have proposed 1780–1830. In other
fields and other countries the period denominated as Romantic can be considerably different;
musical Romanticism, for example, is generally regarded as only having ceased as a major artistic
force as late as 1910, but in an extreme extension the Four Last Songs of Richard Strauss are
described stylistically as "Late Romantic" and were composed in 1946–48. However, in most fields
the Romantic Period is said to be over by about 1850, or earlier.

The early period of the Romantic Era was a time of war, with the French Revolution (1789–1799)
followed by the Napoleonic Wars until 1815. These wars, along with the political and social turmoil
that went along with them, served as the background for Romanticism. The key generation of
French Romantics born between 1795–1805 had, in the words of one of their number, Alfred de
Vigny, been "conceived between battles, attended school to the rolling of drums". According to
Jacques Barzun, there were three generations of Romantic artists. The first emerged in the 1790s
and 1800s, the second in the 1820s, and the third later in the century.

Context and place in history

The more precise characterization and specific definition of Romanticism has been the subject of
debate in the fields of intellectual history and literary history throughout the 20th century,
without any great measure of consensus emerging. That it was part of the Counter-
Enlightenment, a reaction against the Age of Enlightenment, is generally accepted in current
scholarship. Its relationship to the French Revolution, which began in 1789 in the very early stages
of the period, is clearly important, but highly variable depending on geography and individual
reactions. Most Romantics can be said to be broadly progressive in their views, but a considerable
number always had, or developed, a wide range of conservative views, and nationalism was in
many countries strongly associated with Romanticism, as discussed in detail below.

In philosophy and the history of ideas, Romanticism was seen by Isaiah Berlin as disrupting for
over a century the classic Western traditions of rationality and the idea of moral absolutes and
agreed values, leading "to something like the melting away of the very notion of objective truth",
and hence not only to nationalism, but also fascism and totalitarianism, with a gradual recovery
coming only after World War II. For the Romantics, Berlin says, in the realm of ethics, politics,
aesthetics it was the authenticity and sincerity of the pursuit of inner goals that mattered; this
applied equally to individuals and groups – states, nations, movements. This is most evident in the
aesthetics of romanticism, where the notion of eternal models, a Platonic vision of ideal beauty,
which the artist seeks to convey, however imperfectly, on canvas or in sound, is replaced by a
passionate belief in spiritual freedom, individual creativity.

The painter, the poet, the composer do not hold up a mirror to nature, however ideal, but invent;
they do not imitate (the doctrine of mimesis), but create not merely the means but the goals that
they pursue; these goals represent the selfexpression of the artist's own unique, inner vision, to
set aside which in response to the demands of some "external" voice – church, state, public
opinion, family friends, arbiters of taste – is an act of betrayal of what alone justifies their
existence for those who are in any sense creative.

Arthur Lovejoy attempted to demonstrate the difficulty of defining Romanticism in his seminal
article "On The Discrimination of Romanticisms" in his Essays in the History of Ideas (1948); some
scholars see Romanticism as essentially continuous with the present, some like Robert Hughes see
in it the inaugural moment of modernity, and some like Chateaubriand, Novalis and Samuel Taylor
Coleridge see it as the beginning of a tradition of resistance to Enlightenment rationalism—a
"Counter-Enlightenment"— to be associated most closely with German Romanticism.

An earlier definition comes from Charles Baudelaire: "Romanticism is precisely situated neither in
choice of subject nor exact truth, but in the way of feeling."

The end of the Romantic era is marked in some areas by a new style of Realism, which affected
literature, especially the novel and drama, painting, and even music, through Verismo opera. This
movement was led by France, with Balzac and Flaubert in literature and Courbet in painting;
Stendhal and Goya were important precursors of Realism in their respective media. However,
Romantic styles, now often representing the established and safe style against which Realists
rebelled, continued to flourish in many fields for the rest of the century and beyond. In music such
works from after about 1850 are referred to by some writers as "Late Romantic" and by others as
"Neoromantic" or "Postromantic", but other fields do not usually use these terms; in English
literature and painting the convenient term "Victorian" avoids having to characterise the period
further.

In northern Europe, the Early Romantic visionary optimism and belief that the world was in the
process of great change and improvement had largely vanished, and some art became more
conventionally political and polemical as its creators engaged polemically with the world as it was.
Elsewhere, including in very different ways the United States and Russia, feelings that great
change was underway or just about to come were still possible. Displays of intense emotion in art
remained prominent, as did the exotic and historical settings pioneered by the Romantics, but
experimentation with form and technique was generally reduced, often replaced with meticulous
technique, as in the poems of Tennyson or many paintings. If not realist, late 19th-century art was
often extremely detailed, and pride was taken in adding authentic details in away that earlier
Romantics did not trouble with. Many Romantic ideas about the nature and purpose of art, above
all the pre-eminent importance of originality, remained important for later generations, and often
underlie modern views, despite opposition from theorists.

Romantic literature

In literature, Romanticism found recurrent themes in the evocation or criticism of the past, the
cult of "sensibility" with its emphasis on women and children, the isolation of the artist or
narrator, and respect for nature. Furthermore, several romantic authors, such as Edgar Allan Poe
Italian poet Isabella di Morra, sometimes cited as a precursor of Romantic poets and Nathaniel
Hawthorne, based their writings on the supernatural/occult and human psychology. Romanticism
tended to regard satire as something unworthy of serious attention, a prejudice still influential
today. The romantic movement in literature was preceded by the Enlightenment and succeeded
by Realism.

Some authors cite 16th century poet Isabella di Morra as an early precursor of Romantic literature.
Her lyrics covering themes of isolation and loneliness which reflected the tragic events of her life
are considered "an impressive prefigurement of Romanticism", differing from the Petrarchist
fashion of the time based on the philosophy of love.

The precursors of Romanticism in English poetry go back to the middle of the 18 th century,
including figures such as Joseph Warton (headmaster at Winchester College) and his brother
Thomas Warton, Professor of Poetry at Oxford University. Joseph maintained that invention and
imagination were the chief qualities of a poet. Thomas Chatterton is generally considered the first
Romantic poet in English. The Scottish poet James Macpherson influenced the early development
of Romanticism with the international success of his Ossian cycle of poems published in 1762,
inspiring both Goethe and the young Walter Scott. Both Chatterton and Macpherson's work
involved elements of fraud, as what they claimed was earlier literature that they had discovered or
compiled was, in fact, entirely their own work. The Gothic novel, beginning with Horace Walpole's
The Castle of Otranto (1764), was an important precursor of one strain of Romanticism, with a
delight in horror and threat, and exotic picturesque settings, matched in Walpole's case by his role
in the early revival of Gothic architecture. Tristram Shandy, a novel by Laurence Sterne (1759–67)
introduced a whimsical version of the anti-rational sentimental novel to the English literary public.
Germany

An early German influence came from Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, whose 1774 Title page of
Volume III of Des Knaben Wunderhorn, 1808 novel The Sorrows of Young Werther had young men
throughout Europe emulating its protagonist, a young artist with a very sensitive and passionate
temperament. At that time Germany was a multitude of small separate states, and Goethe's works
would have a seminal influence in developing a unifying sense of nationalism.

Important motifs in German Romanticism are travelling, nature, for example the German Forest,
and Germanic myths. The later German Romanticism of, for example E. T. A. Hoffmann's Der
Sandmann (The Sandman), 1817, and Joseph Freiherr von Eichendorff's Das Marmorbild (The
Marble Statue), 1819, was darker in its motifs and has gothic elements. The significance to
Romanticism of childhood innocence, the importance of imagination, and racial theories all
combined to give an unprecedented importance to folk literature, non-classical mythology and
children's literature, above all in Germany. Brentano and von Arnim were significant literary
figures who together published Des Knaben Wunderhorn ("The Boy's Magic Horn" or cornucopia),
a collection of versified folk tales, in 1806–08. The first collection of Grimms' Fairy Tales by the
Brothers Grimm was published in 1812.

Great Britain

England

In English literature, the key figures of the Romantic movement are considered to be the group of
poets including William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, John Keats, Lord Byron, Percy
Bysshe Shelley, and the much older William Blake, followed later by the isolated figure of George
Henry Harlow, John Clare; also such novelists as Walter, Scott from Scotland and Mary Shelley, and
the essayists William Hazlitt and Charles Lamb. The publication in 1798 of Lyrical Ballads, with
many of the finest poems by Wordsworth and Coleridge, is often held to mark the start of the
movement. The majority of the poems were by Wordsworth, and many dealt with the lives of the
poor in his native Lake District, or his feelings about nature—which he more fully developed in his
long poem The Prelude, never published in his lifetime. The longest poem in the volume was
Coleridge's The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, which showed the Gothic side of English
Romanticism, and the exotic settings that many works featured. In the period when they were
writing, the Lake Poets were widely regarded as a marginal group of radicals, though they were
supported by the critic and writer William Hazlitt and others.

In contrast Lord Byron and Walter Scott achieved enormous fame and influence throughout
Europe with works exploiting the violence and drama of their exotic and historical settings; Goethe
called Byron "undoubtedly the greatest genius of our century". Scott achieved immediate success
with his long narrative poem The Lay of the Last Minstrel in 1805, followed by the full epic poem
Marmion in 1808. Both were set in the distant Scottish past, already evoked in Ossian;
Romanticism and Scotland were to have a long and fruitful partnership. Byron had equal success
with the first part of Childe Harold's Pilgrimage in 1812, followed by four "Turkish tales", all in the
form of long poems, starting with The Giaour in 1813, drawing from his Grand Tour, which had
reached Ottoman Europe, and Orientalizing the themes of the Gothic novel in verse.

These featured different variations of the "Byronic hero", and his own life contributed a further
version. Scott meanwhile was effectively inventing the historical novel, beginning in 1814 with
Waverley, set in the 1745 Jacobite rising, which was an enormous and highly profitable success,
followed by over 20 further Waverley Novels over the next 17 years, with settings going back to
the Crusades that he had researched to a degree that was new in literature.[47]

In contrast to Germany, Romanticism in English literature had little connection with nationalism,
and the Romantics were often regarded with suspicion for the sympathy many felt for the ideals of
the French Revolution, whose collapse and replacement with the dictatorship of Napoleon was, as
elsewhere in Europe, a shock to the movement. Though his novels celebrated Scottish identity and
history, Scott was politically a firm Unionist. Several spent much time abroad, and a famous stay
on Lake Geneva with Byron and Shelley in 1816 produced the hugely influential novel Frankenstein
by Shelley's wife-to-be Mary Shelley and the novella The Vampyre by Byron's doctor John William
Polidori. The lyrics of Robert Burns in Scotland and Thomas Moore, from Ireland reflected in
different ways their countries and the Romantic interest in folk literature, but neither had a fully
Romantic approach to life or their work.

Byron is now most highly regarded for his short lyrics and his generally unromantic prose writings,
especially his letters, and his unfinished satire Don Juan. Unlike many Romantics, Byron's widely
publicized personal life appeared to match his work, and his death at 36 in 1824 from disease
when helping the Greek War of Independence appeared from a distance to be a suitably Romantic
end, entrenching his legend. Keats in 1821 and Shelley in 1822 both died in Italy, Blake (at almost
70) in 1827, and Coleridge largely ceased to write in the 1820s. Wordsworth was by 1820
respectable and highly regarded, holding a government sinecure, but wrote relatively little. In the
discussion of English literature, the Romantic period is often regarded as finishing around the
1820s, or sometimes even earlier, although many authors of the succeeding decades were no less
committed to Romantic values. The most significant novelist in English during the peak Romantic
period, other than Walter Scott, was Jane Austen, whose essentially conservative world-view had
little in common with her Romantic contemporaries, retaining a strong belief in decorum and
social rules, though critics have detected tremors under the surface of some works, especially
Mansfield Park (1814) and Persuasion (1817). But around the mid-century the undoubtedly
Romantic novels of the Yorkshire-based Brontë family appeared. Most notably Charlotte's Jane
Eyre and Emily's Wuthering Heights, both published in 1847, which also introduced more gothic
themes. While these two novels were written and published after the Romantic period is said to
have ended, their novels were heavily influenced by Romantic literature they'd read as children.

Byron, Keats and Shelley all wrote for the stage, but with little success in England, with Shelley's
The Cenci perhaps the best work produced, though that was not played in a public theatre in
England until a century after his death. Byron's plays, along with dramatizations of his poems and
Scott's novels, were much more popular on the Continent, and especially in France, and through
these versions several were turned into operas, many still performed today. If contemporary poets
had little success on the stage, the period was a legendary one for performances of Shakespeare,
and went some way to restoring his original texts and removing the Augustan "improvements" to
them.

France

Romanticism was relatively late in developing in French literature, more so than in the visual arts.
The 18th-century precursor to Romanticism, the cult of sensibility, had become associated with
the Ancien regime, and the French Revolution had been more of an inspiration to foreign writers
than those experiencing it at first-hand. The first major figure was François-René de hateaubriand,
a minor aristocrat who had remained a royalist throughout the Revolution, and returned to France
from exile in England and America under Napoleon, with whose regime he had an uneasy
relationship. His writings, all in prose, included some fiction, such as his influential novella of exile
René (1802), which anticipated Byron in its alienated hero, but mostly contemporary history and
politics, his travels, a defence of religion and the medieval spirit (Génie du christianisme 1802),
and finally in the 1830s and 1840s his enormous autobiography Mémoires d'Outre-Tombe
("Memoirs from beyond the grave").[66]

After the Bourbon Restoration, French Romanticism developed in the lively world The "battle of
Hernani" was fought nightly at the theatre in 1830 of Parisian theatre, with productions of
Shakespeare, Schiller (in France a key Romantic author), and adaptations of Scott and Byron
alongside French authors, several of whom began to write in the late 1820s. Cliques of pro- and
anti-Romantics developed, and productions were often accompanied by raucous vocalizing by the
two sides, including the shouted assertion by one theatregoer in 1822 that "Shakespeare, c'est
l'aide-de-camp de Wellington" ("Shakespeare is Wellington's aide-de-camp").[67] Alexandre
Dumas began as a dramatist, with a series of successes beginning with Henri III et sa cour (1829)
before turning to novels that were mostly historical adventures somewhat in the manner of Scott,
most famously The Three Musketeers and The Count of Monte Cristo, both of 1844. Victor Hugo
published as a poet in the 1820s before achieving success on the stage with Hernani—a historical
drama in a quasi-Shakespearian style that had famously riotous performances on its first run in
1830.[68] Like Dumas, Hugo is best known for his novels, and was already writing The Hunchback
of Notre-Dame (1831), one of the best known works, which became a paradigm of the French
Romantic movement. The preface to his unperformed play "Cromwell" gives an important
manifesto of French Romanticism, stating that "there are no rules, or models". The career of
Prosper Mérimée followed a similar pattern; he is now best known as the originator of the story of
Carmen, with his novella published 1845. Alfred de Vigny remains best known as a dramatist, with
his play on the life of the English poet Chatterton (1835) perhaps his best work. French Romantic
poets of the 1830s to 1850s include Alfred de Musset, Gérard de Nerval, Alphonse de Lamartine
and the flamboyant Théophile Gautier, whose prolific output in various forms continued until his
death in 1872. George Sand took over from Germaine de Staël as the leading female writer, and
was a central figure of the Parisian literary scene, famous both for her novels and criticism and her
affairs with Chopin and several others.[69]

Stendhal is today probably the most highly regarded French novelist of the period, but he stands in
a complex relation with Romanticism, and is notable for his penetrating psychological insight into
his characters and his realism, qualities rarely prominent in Romantic fiction. As a survivor of the
French retreat from Moscow in 1812, fantasies of heroism and adventure had little appeal for him,
and like Goya he is often seen as a forerunner of Realism. His most important works are Le Rouge
et le Noir (The Red and the Black, 1830) and La Chartreuse de Parme (The Charterhouse of Parma,
1839).

United States

Romanticism on American writers

The European Romantic movement reached America in the early 19th century. American
Romanticism was just as multifaceted and individualistic as it was in Europe. Like the Europeans,
the American Romantics demonstrated a high level of moral enthusiasm, commitment to
individualism and the unfolding of the self, an emphasis on intuitive perception, and the
assumption that the natural world was inherently good, while human society was filled with
corruption.

Romanticism became popular in American politics, philosophy and art. The movement appealed to
the revolutionary spirit of America as well as to those longing to break free of the strict religious
traditions of early settlement. The Romantics rejected rationalism and religious intellect. It
appealed to those in opposition of Calvinism, which includes the belief that the destiny of each
individual is preordained. The Romantic movement gave rise to New England Transcendentalism,
which portrayed a less restrictive relationship between God and Universe. The new philosophy
presented the individual with a more personal relationship with God. Transcendentalism and
Romanticism appealed to Americans in a similar fashion, for both privileged feeling over reason,
individual freedom of expression over the restraints of tradition and custom. It often involved a
rapturous response to nature. It encouraged the rejection of harsh, rigid Calvinism, and promised
a new blossoming of American culture.

American Romanticism embraced the individual and rebelled against the confinement of
neoclassicism and religious tradition. The Romantic movement in America created a new literary
genre that continues to influence American writers. Novels, short stories, and poems replaced the
sermons and manifestos of yore. Romantic literature was personal, intense, and portrayed more
emotion than ever seen in neoclassical literature. America's preoccupation with freedom became
a great source of motivation for Romantic writers as many were delighted in free expression and
emotion without so much fear of ridicule and controversy. They also put more effort into the
psychological development of their characters, and the main characters typically displayed
extremes of sensitivity and excitement.
The works of the Romantic Era also differed from preceding works in that they spoke to a wider
audience, partly reflecting the greater distribution of books as costs came down during the period.
In the visual arts, Romanticism first showed itself in landscape painting, where from as early as the
1760s British artists began to turn to wilder landscapes and storms, and Gothic architecture, even
if they had to make do with Wales as a setting.