ROMANTICISM

Coming on the heels of the French Revolution and the enormous political turmoil that event entailed, the European Romantic movement of the first half of the nineteenth century was in many ways a reaction against the methods and ideals of the preceding eighteenth-century Enlightenment. Whereas the Anglo-French Enlightenment displayed considerable coherence and consistency in its basic ideas, however, Romanticism often appears a loose collection of diffuse characteristics, if not a mass of contradictions. The movement had no institutional locus, or organizational identity, or central publishing project. It was "Romantic" to exalt individual subjectivity but also to champion le peuple and the Volk. It was "Romantic" both to reject neoclassical formalism and to hark back nostalgically to Greco-Roman art and mythology. Romantics embraced the abstract and the infinite as well as the particular and the singular. What the thinkers and artists of the Europe-wide Romantic era did share was a rejection of the Enlightenment's secular, skeptical rationalism. The early Romantic German composer Franz Schubert (1797–1828) thus begged "imagination" to free him from the scourge of the preceding "Age of Reason," that "empty skeleton without flesh or blood." A survey of Romantic ideas reveals a shared emphasis on a desire for mystery, intensity, and profundity, reinforced by a fascination with individual subjectivity in all its forms. Ironically, this feature was itself derived at least in part from the individualism of the Enlightenment ideal of free and independent intellectual inquiry.

Chronologically, the French philosophe Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778) predates Romanticism. (The movement is generally agreed to range from the 1780s to the 1840s, although its manifestations in the fields of music and architecture extended well into the late nineteenth century.) Yet Rousseau's valorizing of the psychological Self—"I may not be better, but at least I am different," the "pre-Romantic" author wrote in the opening paragraph of his autobiographical Confessions (1782)—his communion with the world of nature, his defense of the "common man," and his rejection of the pretentious city life of his fellow philosophes all announced the birth of a new model of thought and apprehension. Romantics spoke of the Self and its creative resources in powerful, at times ecstatic, terms. Whereas Enlightenment thought tended to emphasize the physical and intellectual mastery of the natural world, Romantic garden and landscape designs brought out nature's wildness, beauty, and inspirational qualities. Whereas the mid-eighteenth-century French thinker Denis Diderot (1713–1784) defined love as "the rubbing together of two membranes," Romantics sought the mystery and magic of sexuality in an extensive "cult of love."

the enlightenment/romanticism dichotomy

No generational dialectic in cultural history is more fundamental than the Enlightenment/Romanticism dichotomy. The historic divide pits head against heart. If in his influential Discourse on Method (1637) the philosopher-geometrician René Descartes (1596–1650) had famously quipped "I think therefore I am," thereby centering rational cognition as the quintessential human faculty, the Romantic retort might well have been "I feel therefore I am." Romantics preferred to imagine and emote rather than to analyze and quantify. Whether the Enlightenment was really as sterile and hyperrationalistic as some Romantics claimed, or this vision was a self-serving ideological construction against which a subsequent generation defined itself, remains an open question. Whatever its nature, the "Romantic rebellion against reason" was perhaps the most salient characteristic of the movement, one of the few features shared by nearly all its followers. Romantics were intrigued by mental and emotional states that transcended the orbit of reason—dreams, horror, fantasy, the passions, madness, death—or what the Swiss painter Henry Fuseli (1741–1825) called "the dark side of life." Scholars debate whether Romantic antirationality represented an actual rejection of reason per se or rather a plea to explore a wider spectrum of emotional experience. Present-day psychologists have gone so far as to contend that the Enlightenment and Romantic styles of sensibility map onto two fundamentally different personality types. But, for all its familiarity and convenience, this division was not absolute and can be overstated, especially in the German-speaking cultural world: in their lives and work, titans like Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) in metaphysics, Ludwig van Beethoven (1770–1827) in music, and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832) in letters traversed both periods and simultaneously display "Romantic" and "Classical" traits.

In keeping with this dialectic, the Romantic period witnessed the early formation of the so-called two cultures. After cohabitating comfortably in antiquity, the Renaissance, and the eighteenth century, art and science began to go their separate ways in the Romantic era. With its exaggerated intellectual claims and its drive to mathematize all human knowledge, science, British literary Romantics claimed, represented a set of methods, activities, and ideologies antagonistic to art. Thus William Wordsworth's charge that the meddling scientific intellect "Misshapens the beauteous forms of things / We murder to dissect;" William Blake's drawing of a godlike Sir Isaac Newton (1642–1727) methodically reducing the cosmos to geometry; and Samuel Taylor Coleridge's assertion that "Poetry is not the proper antithesis to prose, but to science." Yet on this point, too, there were exceptions: Johann Wolfgang Goethe, who created the weepy, proto-Romantic protagonist Werther in the mid-1770s, later published entire treatises on plants and optics informed by the best science of his day. To similar effect, the gifted, young British poet John Keats (1795–1821) was trained medically, and the French Romantic novelist Victor Hugo (1802–1885) hailed science as progressive.

the romantic mind and the emotional self

As these examples imply, the "Romantic mind" is perhaps best manifested in the artistic works of the period; these are astonishingly rich and varied. In contrast to the formalistic neoclassical spirit with its academically mandated methods and standards, Romantic art brims with free-flowing, emotive motifs. Thus, the brilliant landscapes and seascapes by painters as diverse as England's J. M. W. Turner (1775–1851), France's Eugène Delacroix (1798–1863), and Germany's Caspar David Friedrich (1774–1840); the melodic and instrumental extravagances of Richard Wagner's operas; and the nature-based emphasis on intimate affective experience in the poetry of Coleridge, Wordsworth, Keats, and Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792–1822). The search for idioms of art that enhanced emotional expression generated entire new forms of music and poetry. The most original and affecting examples of these experiments in form occurred in symphonic and instrumental music: the rhapsody, nocturne, fantasy, prelude, impromptu, ballad, intermezzo, and tone poem were all compositional genres for orchestra or keyboard pioneered by Romantic composers such as Johannes Brahms (1833–1897), Franz Schubert (1797–1828), Robert Schumann (1810–1856), Frédéric Chopin (1810–1849), and Franz Liszt (1811–1886). Romantic songs for solo voice deploy a greater range of tones and harmonies than ever before in music history. In the world of painting, color and light rather than line and form, the eighteenth-century preoccupations, became all important. And in literature, Romantic aesthetic ideology deemed poetry to have greater expressive appeal than the "rationalistic" prose of the age of Alexander Pope (1688–1744) and Samuel Johnson (1709–1784). The ode became the Romantic literary form par excellence. Emotion, in the Romantic ideal, should be captured by the poet, composer, and painter; but it was also to be experienced by the reader, listener, or viewer.

Along these same lines, the exploration of the emotional Self became a Romantic preoccupation. Literary "ego-documents"—autobiographies, memoirs, confessions, autobiographical novels, compilations of letters—cascaded from the European press during the Romantic decades. Fictional writings betray a sharp increase in the use of the first-person "I." The Romantic cult of the Self extended to the visual arts, too: the portrait as a genre of painting flourished under Romanticism, with a subject's individuality mattering more than their social standing or occupational identity. The Enlightenment, including its most important political documents, had spoken grandly and abstractly of "Man"; Homo Romanticus was above all a singular individual.

Of all the emotional states the Romantics lavished their attention on, two emerged as recurrent themes: melancholy and love. In France, the literary productions of François-René Chateaubriand (1768–1848), Alfred Musset (1810–1857), and Alfred de Vigny (1797–1863) feature tearful and introspective protagonists, typically males, who suffer from a vague disenchantment with life and the world. This was the style of the French mal du siècle, which presages mid-twentieth-century existentialism. Weltschmerz, or "world pain," the German literary counterpart, tracked back to Goethe's tragic lovesick hero Werther of the 1770s. This gloomy side of Romanticism reached its highest philosophical expression in Arthur Schopenhauer (1788–1860), the anti-idealist "philosopher of pessimism" whose monumental World as Will and Representation appeared in 1819.

Not surprisingly, in light of the movement's name, love was a second cherished Romantic affliction. La grande passion, as they called it. But whereas the Enlightenment construed love primarily as fleeting sexual titillation—not coincidentally, pornography as a genre originates in eighteenth-century France—Romantic-era writers probed the countless permutations of love: Platonic love, unrequited love, love between friends, love between siblings, doomed love, the love of god. For them, love was not only an extraordinary, enigmatic force but also an artistic inspiration. Prominent romantic liaisons among artists—John Keats and Fanny Brawne, Chopin and George Sand (Amandine Dudevant; 1804–1876)—characterize the period. Published love letters proliferated, and Schubert and Schumann elevated the love song arguably to its highest musical level. Here the generic and historical meanings of the word romantic (lower case) and Romantic (upper case) merge.

At the same time, Romanticism was not an ideology of feminism. The Romantic idealization of women excluded a vision of political and legal equality for the female half of the population. As scholars have shown, the best-known Romantic artists, overwhelmingly male, sought to embrace what they perceived to be the specifically feminine modalities of intuition and sensibility in their search for heightened creative capacities. Yet artistic and intellectual genius remained wholly masculine, in their view. Romanticism was gendered male, but as a newly feminized version of masculinity. Furthermore, the creative roles played by women in certain male Romantic careers—for instance, the personal and artistic interplay between William Wordsworth and his sister Dorothy (1771–1855) and between Robert Schumann and his wife, Clara (1819–1896)—were often striking. Mary Shelley's (1797–1851) ever-popular novel Frankenstein (1818) is a protofeminist Romantic critique of modern science's destructive pretensions to self-sufficient masculine creativity. The movement's most substantial challenge to the traditional norms of gender identity was probably its fascination with the intermixture of masculine and feminine elements in history, culture, and biography—"Romantic androgyny," as one scholar has called it.

nature mysticism

Another feature of Romanticism was nature mysticism. The Enlightenment world had been centered in the cities; it was nothing if not cosmopolitan, and its most characteristic organization had been the group salon. In contrast, self-styled Romantics preferred the country to the city. This was the age of the rural walking tour. Emblematically, Rousseau, in a much-discussed episode, abandoned Paris, the epicenter of the Enlightenment with its overcivilized salonnières, and retreated to an island in Lake Geneva. There he undertook his "reveries of a solitary walker." In Britain, the literary return to nature is best exemplified by Wordsworth, who in 1799 settled at Grasmere in the Lake District of the northwest of England. He and his fellow Romantics Coleridge and Robert Southey (1774–1843), who lived nearby, became known as the Lake Poets. From Dove Cottage, Grasmere, Wordsworth took long daily walks through the lovely, rolling countryside, poetizing upon returning home. (The poet's Guide to the Lakes of 1810 chronicles his countless outings.) This immersion in the natural world, Romantics insisted, was not just for its beauty; nature also served as a direct source of spiritual solace and artistic inspiration. The American counterpart of course is Henry David Thoreau's (1817–1862) extended experiment of living at Walden Pond, which in 1854 occasioned the most important Romantic prose work from the New World.

Appropriately, the Romantic exaltation of nature reached it highest expression in landscape painting. John Constable (1776–1837) and J. M. W. Turner, both Britons, depicted the natural world in two different moods: in canvases like The Hay Wain of 1821, Constable captured soothing, arcadian scenes of the English summertime, with its cottony cumulus clouds puffing across a rustic landscape. Turner's oeuvre was a good deal less tranquil. The most prolific of the Romantic painters and Britain's finest painter ever, Turner was powerfully drawn to "the Romantic sublime." In his famous sunsets, sea squalls, snowstorms, and shipwreck scenes, nature appears at its most awesome and destructive. Turner's and Constable's German contemporary was Caspar David Friedrich, whose empty, expansive landscapes at dusk and in the snow are often populated by only a solitary tree or person. They are highly evocative images. For these artists, the neoclassical paintings of the previous 150 years, with their idealized forms and moralizing messages, ceased to appeal.

romantic medievalism

The Romantic turning away from neoclassicism also ushered in a renewed interest in the European medieval period (which had been cast contemptuously by eighteenth-century intellectuals as "the Dark Ages"). In the field of architecture, a spirited "Gothic Revival" characterized the day. Remarkably, architects in the Romantic era applied a late medieval Christian/Catholic building style of tall spires, ribbed vaults, pointed arches, and decorative tracery to notably secular monuments in largely Protestant countries. Charles Barry's (1795–1860) and Augustus Welby Pugin's (1812–1852) Houses of Parliament, built along the River Thames in London during the 1840s, 1850s, and 1860s, is the best known example; the Oxford Museum (1851) and Manchester Town Hall (1877) are equally fine expressions. In France, an ambitious program to record, recover, and restore the nation's medieval heritage, foremostly Notre Dame Cathedral in central Paris, was supervised by Eugène-Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc (1814–1879). Later in the century, the "mad" King Louis II of Bavaria (r. 1864–1886) had royal architects construct the spectacularly sited, fairytale castle Neuschwanstein (1869–1886) deep in the Bavarian Alps. Romantic neo-gothic style eventually reached rather kitsch proportions. In Britain, wealthy and eccentric landowners built pseudo-gothic "ruins" on their property, and extravagant private estates like Strawberry Hill, where the politician Sir Robert Walpole lived, and Fonthill Abbey were anything but livable. Neuschwanstein became the model for the original Disneyland castle in the United States.

New interest in the Middle Ages was not limited to architecture. Wordsworth chose the remains of Tintern Abbey, a twelfth-century Cisterian church in Wales, as the subject of his most famous poem. Neo-gothic elements also crop up time and again in such hugely popular literary works as Walter Scott's Waverly (1814) and Victor Hugo's Hunchback of Notre Dame (1831). The "gothic novel" emerged. The medieval legend of Faust in particular inspired not only Goethe's poetic masterpiece by that name (1832) but a symphony by Hector Berlioz (1803–1869), a tone poem by Liszt, and an opera by Gounod. In this same cultural atmosphere, medieval historical scholarship flourished, and the first accurate translations into English, French, and German of the great late medieval Italian poet Dante Alighieri (1265–1321) appeared.

spirituality and religious experience

Romantic medievalism points to a further feature of the movement: the return to spirituality and religious experience. Many Europeans who had left the church during the materialistic and anticlerical Enlightenment returned in the post-Revolutionary period. Voltaire's (François-Marie Arouet; 1694–1778) cultural standing declined. Nonetheless, the eighteenth-century scorn for religious dogma and church hierarchies by and large remained intact throughout the early decades of the 1800s. What typically interested Romantic Christian worshipers was the emotional and spiritual core of religious experience, including a direct relationship with the divine. Early in the new century, the German Protestant theologian Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768–1834) introduced a highly subjective "Theology of Feeling" that emphasized the presence of god within each one of us. More personalized, interiorized versions of religious experience came to the fore, including eccentric, individualized faiths like the English poet William Blake's prophetic, symbolic mythology. In figures such as the early German Romantic philosopher Johann Gottfried von Herder (and, for that matter, the American Ralph Waldo Emerson), philosophical pantheism integrated the worship of nature and the new religiosity; for them, physical nature itself incarnated a divine life-force. In France, a spirited Catholic Revival, abetted by Napoleon Bonaparte's Papal Concordat of 1801, marked the post-Revolutionary period and finds its most massive illustration in Chateaubriand's multivolume Genius of Christianity (1802)—"The Bible of Romanticism," as it has been called. But, once again, there are exceptions in this age of individualism: Schopenhauer's philosophy was overtly atheistic, and Shelley's no-holds-barred "The Necessity of Atheism" (1811) got the poet expelled from Oxford.

In Germanic central Europe, the Romantic spiritualist impulse even found its way into the new philosophy of the age. The metaphysician Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel's concepts of a "World-Spirit" and "the Absolute" potentially offered a version of God that was active in the very unfolding of history—or rather, "History"—in marked contrast to the distant and unknowable entity favored by Enlightenment deism. Hegel's concept of the "world-historical" event and hero, presented in his influential Lectures on the Philosophy of History of the 1820s, was part of a Romantic fascination with and reverence for historical geniuses. These larger-than-life figures were alternately political/military (Hannibal, Caesar, Napoleon) and cultural/artistic (Leonardo, Beethoven, Wagner, Hegel himself). The musical virtuoso, along the lines of the Hungarian pianist Liszt and the Italian violinist Niccolò Paganini (1782–1840), attracted swooning crowds who envisioned the performers as demigods. Hegel's contemporary in German philosophy Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von Schelling (1775–1854) produced a theory that glorified the process of artistic creation itself.

"political romanticism"

No dimension of Romanticism proves more difficult to determine than the political. Scholars have spoken of a "Romanticism of the left" and a "Romanticism of the right." Shelley rhapsodized in "Ode to Liberty" (1820). In 1823–1824, the British poet George Gordon Byron (1788–1824) perished famously in Greece during the War for Independence against the Ottoman Turks (although the cause of his death was unrelated to the war). And Delacroix's painting Liberty Leading the People (1830) and François Rude's sculpture relief Departure of the Volunteers, 1792 (1833–1835) are quintessential visual representations of heroic republicanism in France. In parallel fashion, the pre-Marxist ideas of French social thinkers like Henri de Saint-Simon (1760–1825) and Charles Fourier (1772–1837) are sometimes labeled "Romantic Socialism." To a significant degree, the end of Romanticism corresponds with the failed democratic uprisings of 1848 in many European cities.

At the same time, however, both Wordsworth in Britain and the statesman and man of letters Alphonse Lamartime (1790–1869) in France moved rightward politically during their lives, and in the culture wars of the Napoleonic and Restoration periods, Chateaubriand believed that the Catholic Church was the greatest source of French national identity and stability. Edmund Burke (1729–1797), the Anglo-Irish critic of the French Revolution and defender of church and throne, is often dubbed a political Romantic, although the label applies as much to Burke's flowery, impassioned style as to his political ideology. Correspondingly, Hegel regarded the state as the greatest expression of the world-spirit, and the Hegel-inspired cult of the messianic leader surely conduced to nondemocratic governance, so much so that some mid-twentieth-century Cold War commentators tracked the origins of totalitarianism back to the Romantic era. This seems far-fetched, but there is little doubt that in central and eastern Europe, as well as in Italy, the Romantic period brought a great upsurge of cultural nationalism, which later in European history fed less benign nationalistic sentiments and activities.

resisting definition

Coleridge once neatly summarized the Romantic desire for new and intense experience when he wrote to his fellow poet Wordsworth that "the rationally educated" could not comprehend life's deeper dimensions. It was above all the quest for these more profound levels of experience that united the Romantic project. Inevitably, the vagueness and generality of this type of cultural consciousness leaves abundant room for confusion and contradiction. Decades ago, the historian of ideas Arthur Lovejoy recommended speaking not of one but of several "Romanticisms." The sheer diversity and multiplicity of the strands of Romanticism are themselves pertinent descriptive features of the period. Rejecting the Enlightenment belief that empirical and rational inquiry, patterned on the physical sciences, would lead to a single, complete, and universal "truth," the European Romantics generated an age of intense experience that deliberately sought to cultivate diversity and resist definition.

So what finally is the "meaning" of Romanticism? Observers have been posing the question for nearly two centuries. In its essence, should Romanticism be seen as a kind of Counter-Enlightenment? Or was the Romantic phenomenon, as chronology might suggest, the cultural and artistic working out of French revolutionary ideals? Or perhaps above all it was a reaction in the realm of philosophy and the arts to the rise of material, industrial civilization with its values of capitalist production and consumption. Does Romanticism represent the first inklings of our own age's postmodernism? And did it bring a salutary reintegration of the emotional and spiritual aspects of human nature or a dangerous collapse into mass irrationalism? Similarly, is Romantic emotionality fated to end in mawkish sentimentality and self-indulgent narcissism? Inevitably, these attempts at totalized interpretation all flounder in the face of the movement's endless internal variety. Regardless of these multiple readings, this much is certain: the Romantic movement of the years 1780 to 1850 was the richest and most far-reaching period in European cultural achievement between the Italian Renaissance and the cultural transformation of modernism.

See alsoBarry, Charles; Beethoven, Ludwig van; Berlioz, Hector; Blake, William; Brahms, Johannes; Burke, Edmund; Byron, George Gordon; Carlyle, Thomas; Chateaubriand, François-René; Chopin, Frédéric; Coleridge, Samuel Taylor; Constable, John; David, Jacques-Louis; Delacroix, Eugène; Fichte, Johann Gottlieb; French Revolution; Friedrich, Caspar David; Gender; Géricault, Théodore; Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von; Goya, Francisco; Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich; Herder, Johann Gottfried; History; Hugo, Victor; Industrial Revolution, First; Lamartine, Alphonse; Liszt, Franz; Louis II; Michelet, Jules; Music; Napoleon; Nationalism; Paganini, Niccolò; Pugin, Augustus Welby; Revolutions of 1848; Rude, François; Sand, George; Schelling, Friedrich von; Schlegel, August Wilhelm von; Schopenhauer, Arthur; Schubert, Franz; Scott, Walter; Shelley, Mary; Shelley, Percy Bysshe; Turner, J. M. W.; Viollet-le-Duc, Eugène; Wagner, Richard; Wordsworth, William.

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