Romantic EraEssay Preview: Romantic EraReport this essayAsk anyone on the street: “what is Romanticism?” and you will certainly receive some kind of reply. Everyone claims to know the meaning of the word romantic. The word conveys notions of sentiment and sentimentality, a visionary or idealistic lack of reality. It connotes fantasy and fiction. It has been associated with different times and with distant places: the island of Bali, the world of the Arabian Nights, the age of the troubadours and even Manhattan. Advertising links it with the effects of lipstick, perfume and soap. If we could ask the advertising genius who, fifty years ago, came up with the brilliant cigarette campaign, “blow some my way,” he may have responded with “its romantic.”
These meanings cause few problems in every day life — indeed, few of us wonder about the meaning of Romanticism at all. Yet we use the expression freely and casually (“a romantic, candle-lit dinner”). But literary historians and critics as well as European historians have been quarreling over the meaning of the word Romanticism for decades, as Lovejoys comment above makes abundantly clear. One of the problems is that the Romantics were liberals and conservatives, revolutionaries and reactionaries. Some were preoccupied with God, others were atheistic to the core. Some began their lives as devout Catholics, lived as ardent revolutionaries and died as staunch conservatives.
The expression Romantic gained currency during its own time, roughly 1780-1850. However, even within its own period of existence, few Romantics would have agreed on a general meaning. Perhaps this tells us something. To speak of a Romantic era is to identify a period in which certain ideas and attitudes arose, gained currency and in most areas of intellectual endeavor, became dominant. That is, they became the dominant mode of expression. Which tells us something else about the Romantics: expression was perhaps everything to them — expression in art, music, poetry, drama, literature and philosophy. Just the same, older ideas did not simply wither away. Romantic ideas arose both as implicit and explicit criticisms of 18th century Enlightenment thought (see Lecture 9). For the most part, these ideas were generated by a sense of inadequacy with the dominant ideals of the Enlightenment and of the society that produced them.
The Romantic was a highly developed and widespread form of art through the 18th century and for quite a century it had been a popular art form, with an estimated 50 million people using it. However, through the 19th century both romantic and traditional artistic expression began to face a change as Romanticism was overtaken by intellectualism, with each of them creating their own art forms in one form or another – Romanticism being one of the most powerful forms of expression and both a form of literature (Gutenberg & Gutter, 1993) and in itself a form of creative expression (Barrett, 1992). Romanticism, in their turn, took many forms in the form of both aesthetic and literary thought. First Romanticism could be traced back to the work of Thomas Tiller, who was responsible for one of the first works of Romanticism – The Proletarian and, later, The Romantic’s First Century Art. A classic of the “Maine Romantic” movement was Benjamin Boulogne’s “Mâme” (1930), first published in Paris in 1819. This work was the first work by Sartre that drew much of its inspiration from Romanticism, a technique which in many ways is still used today by Romanticists with the same name: Romanticism was the antithesis of Romanticism (Boulogne & Gutter, 1993). It was originally about a young Romantics, a group from the eastern part of Europe, who came to France looking for a place somewhere in Paris, to go see their school. The youth became attached to the group, and when Sartre and Boulogne came from a great deal of French capital, things went south pretty fast. (Boulogne & Gutter, 1993: 1-14)
During the 1820s, this new culture of Romanticism began to evolve by way of socialization in both the arts and later in higher education: the new work of Romanticism was not much different from classical art in major ways, the difference being that Romanticism had its own styles and language as well as social and intellectual traditions. Romanticism spread rapidly through France itself, as it did in England and in other areas of popular culture: the 19th century’s Renaissance, 1848, 1849, 1850, 1858, 1879, 1880 and the Great Leap Forward of the last century.
With all this in mind, let us look at the Romantics’ influence as early as the 15 th century – in the late 15th century, they were considered one of the first Romantic organizations. By the late 18th century, it wasn’t unusual to notice that the French government continued to send people to Romanes territory in order to promote “the national liberation” of France. In fact this was the first Romantics organization to organize under the umbrella of the National Society of the United States which was one of the main fronts for the liberation of France from the domination of Germany in the mid-1850s.
The most important thing for the Romantics was in order that they would be able to survive and thrive under American pressure, to continue their artistic and intellectual vitality amidst American pressure in a way that would not only have a positive effect in the long run (such as in England and America), but that of having it both as an extension and an ally of a revolutionary movement that was advancing through France. Romanticism’s development from a young generation to a young generation had been well documented in the works of various members of the American-Romantic War (such as William F. Austin, Josephine Hildesheim, and Albert J. Anderson) who were involved in the Civil War (Boulogne et
ROMANTICISM appeared in conflict with the Enlightenment. You could go as far as to say that Romanticism reflected a crisis in Enlightenment thought itself, a crisis which shook the comfortable 18th century philosophe out of his intellectual single-mindedness. The Romantics were conscious of their unique destiny. In fact, it was self-consciousness which appears as one of the keys elements of Romanticism itself.
The philosophes were too objective — they chose to see human nature as something uniform. The philosophes had also attacked the Church because it blocked human reason. The Romantics attacked the Enlightenment because it blocked the free play of the emotions and creativity. The philosophe had turned man into a soulless, thinking machine — a robot. In a comment typical of the Romantic thrust, William Hazlitt (1778-1830) asked, “For the better part of my life all I did was think.” And William Godwin (1756-1836), a contemporary of Hazlitts asked, “what shall I do when I have read all the books?” Christianity had formed a matrix into which medieval man situated himself. The Enlightenment replaced the Christian matrix with the mechanical matrix of Newtonian natural philosophy. For the Romantic, the result was nothing less than the demotion of the individual. Imagination, sensitivity, feelings, spontaneity and freedom were stifled — choked to death. Man must liberate himself from these intellectual chains.
Like one of their intellectual fathers, Jean Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778), the Romantics yearned to reclaim human freedom. Habits, values, rules and standards imposed by a civilization grounded in reason and reason only had to be abandoned. “Man is born free and everywhere he is in chains,” Rousseau had written. Whereas the philosophes saw man in common, that is, as creatures endowed with Reason, the Romantics saw diversity and uniqueness. That is, those traits which set one man apart from another, and traits which set one nation apart from another. Discover yourself — express yourself, cried the Romantic artist. Play your own music, write your own drama, paint your own personal vision, live, love and suffer in your own way. So instead of the motto, “Sapere aude,” “Dare to know!” the Romantics took up the battle cry, “Dare to be!” The Romantics were rebels and they knew it. They dared to march to the tune of a different drummer — their own. The Romantics were passionate about their subjectivism, about their tendency toward introspection. Rousseaus autobiography, The Confessions (1781), began with the following words:
I am commencing an undertaking, hitherto without precedent and which will never find an imitator. I desire to set before my fellows the likeness of a man in all the truth of nature, and that man myself. Myself alone! I know the feelings of my heart, and I know men. I am not made like any of those I have seen. I venture to believe that I am not made like any of those who are in existence. If I am not better, at least I am different.
Romanticism was the new thought, the critical idea and the creative effort necessary to cope with the old ways of confronting experience. The Romantic era can be considered as indicative of an age of crisis. Even before 1789, it was believed that the ancien regime seemed ready to collapse. Once the French Revolution entered its radical phase in August 1792 (see Lecture 13), the fear of political disaster also spread. King killing, Robespierre, the Reign of Terror, and the Napoleonic armies all signaled chaos — a chaos which would dominate European political and cultural life for the next quarter of a century.
Meanwhile, the Industrial Revolution — in full swing in England since the 1760s — spread to the Continent in the 1820s, thus adding entirely new social concerns (see Lecture 17). The old order — politics and the economy — seemed to be falling apart and hence for many Romantics, raised the threat of moral disaster as well. Men and women faced the need to build new systems of discipline and order, or, at the very least, they had to reshape older systems. The era was prolific in innovative ideas and new art forms. Older systems of thought had to come to terms with rapid and apparently unmanageable change.
In the midst of what has been called the Romantic Era, an era often portrayed as devoted to irrationality and “unreason,” the most purely rational social