Romanticism

• 1. Introduction

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  Romanticism declared, in the words of the German painter Caspar David Friedrich, that "the artist's feeling is his law". That single idea overturned centuries of European assumption. It said a poet's passion mattered more than any rulebook, that beauty was whatever stirred a strong emotional response, not whatever obeyed a tidy notion of form. This was an artistic and intellectual movement that began in Europe near the end of the 18th century. It argued that passion and intuition were essential to understanding the world. Its followers revered nature and the supernatural. They idealized the past as a nobler era. They were drawn to the exotic, the mysterious, the heroic, and the sublime. They rejected the social conventions of their day in favour of a moral outlook called individualism. Why did so many artists across so many countries turn against reason at the same moment? What were they reacting against, and what did they put in its place? How did a movement built on feeling end up shaping nationalism, environmentalism, and the orchestral scores of Hollywood films? And why, when the last of its figures died in the 1940s, were they already seen as anachronisms?

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• 2. Revolt Against Reason

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  Sturm und Drang, German for "Storm and Stress", gave Romanticism its first ideas. This German Counter-Enlightenment movement attacked the Enlightenment's claim that humans could fully grasp the world through rationality alone. It insisted instead that intuition and emotion were keys to insight. Published in 1774, The Sorrows of Young Werther by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe began to shape Romanticist ideals. Its protagonist was a young artist of sensitive and passionate temperament, and young men across Europe took to emulating him.

  The Industrial Revolution and the Age of Enlightenment were the forces Romanticism set itself against. Where the Enlightenment prized the scientific rationalization of nature, Romanticism prized emotion and individualism. It preferred the medieval over the classical. It treated the artist's unique imagination as more important than the strictures of classical form. The Romantic poet William Wordsworth wrote that poetry should begin with "the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings", which the poet then "recollects in tranquility".

  The French Revolution, which began in 1789, fed directly into the movement. Many early Romantics across Europe sympathized with the ideals and achievements of the French revolutionaries. Samuel Taylor Coleridge and others believed there were natural laws that the imagination of born artists followed instinctively, when those individuals were left alone during the creative process. Many Romantics held that works of genius were created ex nihilo, from nothing, without recourse to existing models, an idea often called romantic originality.

  The philosopher Isaiah Berlin captured the temper of it: "a new and restless spirit, seeking violently to burst through old and cramping forms", marked by "a longing for the unbounded and the indefinable" and "a passionate effort at self-assertion both individual and collective". One Romantic luminary, Percy Bysshe Shelley, described poets as the "unacknowledged legislators of the world" in his "Defence of Poetry".

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• 3. A Word With A Past

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  Roman is the root that ties together a tangle of European words like romance and Romanesque. By the 18th century, languages including German, French and Slavic tongues used "Roman" to mean what English calls a novel, a work of popular narrative fiction. The usage came from "Romance languages", the vernacular speech set against formal Latin. Most such novels took the form of chivalric romance, tales of adventure, devotion and honour.

  August Wilhelm Schlegel and his brother Friedrich Schlegel, critics and founders of the movement, began speaking of romantische Poesie, romantic poetry, in the 1790s. They contrasted it with the classic in terms of spirit rather than mere dating. The modern sense spread more widely in France through Germaine de Staël, who used it persistently in her De l'Allemagne of 1813, an account of her travels in Germany.

  The Académie française took the wholly ineffective step in 1824 of issuing a decree condemning Romanticism in literature. It was only from the 1820s that the movement certainly knew itself by its name. In England, Wordsworth had written in an 1815 preface of the "romantic harp" and the "classic lyre", while as late as 1820 Byron could still write about it, perhaps slightly disingenuously.

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• 4. Three Generations Of War

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  Conceived between battles, attended school to the rolling of drums. That is how Alfred de Vigny described the key generation of French Romantics, those born between 1795 and 1805. Their childhoods were shaped by conflict. The French Revolution ran from 1789 to 1799, followed by the Napoleonic Wars until 1815. This turmoil was the background against which Romanticism formed.

  Jacques Barzun counted 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. The consensus is that the movement peaked from 1800 until 1850, though the dates vary greatly by country and medium. Margaret Drabble placed it in literature roughly between 1770 and 1848. The critic M. H. Abrams placed English literary Romanticism between 1789, or 1798, and about 1830.

  Music ran on its own clock. Musical Romanticism is generally regarded as ceasing as a major artistic force only as late as 1910. In an extreme extension, the Four Last Songs of Richard Strauss are described stylistically as Late Romantic, and they were composed in 1946 to 1948. The final Late Romanticist figures to hold the ideals died in the 1940s, still widely respected but seen by then as anachronisms.

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• 5. The German Heartland

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  Jena, where Fichte lived alongside Schelling, Hegel, Schiller and the Schlegel brothers, became the centre of early German Romanticism, also called Jena Romanticism. The philosophical influence came from the German idealism of Johann Gottlieb Fichte and Friedrich Schelling. Important writers gathered there, among them Ludwig Tieck, Novalis, Heinrich von Kleist, Friedrich Hölderlin and Heinrich Heine. Because Germany was then a multitude of small separate states, Goethe's works carried a seminal influence in building a unifying sense of nationalism.

  Heidelberg later became a second centre, where Clemens Brentano, Achim von Arnim and Joseph Freiherr von Eichendorff met in literary circles. Travelling, nature such as the German Forest, and Germanic myths run through the work as recurring motifs. Brentano and von Arnim together published Des Knaben Wunderhorn, a collection of versified folk tales, in 1806 to 1808. The first collection of Grimms' Fairy Tales by the Brothers Grimm appeared in 1812.

  Darker themes arrived later. E. T. A. Hoffmann's Der Sandmann, The Sandman, came in 1817, and Eichendorff's Das Marmorbild, The Marble Statue, in 1819, both carrying gothic elements. One of the Grimm brothers, Jacob, published Deutsche Mythologie in 1835, a long academic study of Germanic mythology. Friedrich Schiller's play The Robbers of 1781 showed another strain entirely, with its highly emotional language and its depiction of physical violence.

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• 6. Byron, Scott, And The British

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  Lyrical Ballads, published in 1798 with many of the finest poems by Wordsworth and Coleridge, is often held to mark the start of the movement in English. Most of its poems were by Wordsworth, many about the lives of the poor in his native Lake District. Its longest poem was Coleridge's The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, which showed the Gothic side of English Romanticism. In their writing years the Lake Poets were widely regarded as a marginal group of radicals.

  Lord Byron and Walter Scott, by contrast, won enormous fame across Europe. Goethe called Byron "undoubtedly the greatest genius of our century". Scott succeeded immediately with his narrative poem The Lay of the Last Minstrel in 1805, then the epic Marmion in 1808. Byron matched him with the first part of Childe Harold's Pilgrimage in 1812, followed by four Turkish tales beginning with The Giaour in 1813, which drew on his Grand Tour through Ottoman Europe. These featured the various forms of the Byronic hero.

  Waverley, set in the 1745 Jacobite rising, effectively invented the historical novel in 1814. Scott followed it with over 20 further Waverley Novels across the next 17 years, researching settings as far back as the Crusades. A stay on Lake Geneva with Byron and Shelley in 1816 produced Frankenstein by Mary Shelley and the novella The Vampyre by Byron's doctor John William Polidori.

  Byron's death at 36 in 1824, from disease while helping the Greek War of Independence, seemed a suitably Romantic end and entrenched his legend. Keats died in Italy in 1821 and Shelley in 1822. Blake died at almost 70 in 1827, and Coleridge largely ceased writing in the 1820s. Around mid-century the Brontë family's novels appeared, Charlotte's Jane Eyre and Emily's Wuthering Heights, both published in 1847, both shaped by the Romantic literature the sisters had read as children.

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• 7. Nations And Exiles

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  Adam Mickiewicz's first poems, published in 1822, are often taken to begin Romanticism in Poland, which ended with the crushing of the January Uprising of 1863 against the Russians. Polish Romanticism was strongly marked by interest in Polish history, reviving the old Sarmatism traditions of the szlachta, the Polish nobility. It is unique, many scholars note, in having developed largely outside Poland and in its emphatic focus on Polish nationalism. The Polish intelligentsia left in the early 1830s during what is called the Great Emigration, resettling in France, Germany, Great Britain, Turkey, and the United States.

  The idea of the poeta wieszcz, the prophet or bard, grew from this struggle, a figure who served as spiritual leader to a nation fighting for independence. Mickiewicz was the most notable poet so recognized. Zygmunt Krasiński argued that Poland was the Christ of Europe, chosen by God to suffer and eventually be resurrected, a claim he made in his dramas Nie-boska komedia of 1835 and Irydion of 1836.

  Russia found its principal exponent in Alexander Pushkin, whose works include Ruslan and Ludmila of 1820 and Eugene Onegin of 1825 to 1832. His work led to his recognition as Russia's greatest poet. Mikhail Lermontov, heavily influenced by Byron, explored metaphysical discontent with society and self in the novel A Hero of Our Time of 1839. Fyodor Tyutchev worked in categories like night and day, cosmos and chaos.

  Nationalism shadowed the movement everywhere it touched politics. Isaiah Berlin saw Romanticism as disrupting the classic Western traditions of rationality and moral absolutes for over a century, leading "to something like the melting away of the very notion of objective truth", and so not only to nationalism but to fascism and totalitarianism, with recovery coming only after World War II.

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• 8. Brush, Stone, And Stage

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  The Raft of the Medusa, painted by Théodore Géricault in 1818 to 1819, remains the greatest achievement of Romantic history painting, carrying a powerful anti-government message in its day. In the visual arts Romanticism first showed itself in landscape painting, where from the 1760s British artists turned to wilder landscapes, storms, and Gothic architecture. Caspar David Friedrich and J. M. W. Turner, born less than a year apart in 1774 and 1775, took German and English landscape painting to their Romantic extremes. Friedrich often set single figures or crosses alone amid a huge landscape, making them images of the transitoriness of human life.

  Eugène Delacroix made his first Salon hits with The Barque of Dante in 1822, The Massacre at Chios in 1824, and Death of Sardanapalus in 1827. The Chios scene came from the Greek War of Independence, completed the year Byron died there. His Liberty Leading the People of 1830 remains, with the Medusa, among the best-known works of French Romantic painting. Francisco Goya was called "the last great painter in whose art thought and observation were balanced and combined to form a faultless unity", though how far he was a Romantic is a complex question.

  Sculpture remained largely impervious to the movement, partly because marble does not lend itself to expansive gestures. The leading sculptors Antonio Canova and Bertel Thorvaldsen, both based in Rome, were firm Neoclassicists. True Romantic sculpture was oddly missing in Germany and found mainly in France, with François Rude, David d'Angers, and Auguste Préault, whose plaster relief Slaughter caused such scandal at the Salon of 1834 that he was banned from the exhibition for nearly twenty years.

  French Romanticism developed on the Parisian stage. Victor Hugo achieved success with Hernani, a historical drama in quasi-Shakespearean style with famously riotous performances on its first run in 1830. His novel The Hunchback of Notre-Dame of 1831 became a paradigm of the French Romantic movement, and inspired a resurgence of interest in the Middle Ages that reshaped French architecture. Prosper Mérimée, first head of the commission of Historic Monuments, had cathedrals like Notre Dame de Paris restored through the architect Eugène Viollet-le-Duc, who also worked on the fortified city of Carcassonne and the Château de Pierrefonds.

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