Romanticism (or the
Romantic era/
Period) was an artistic, literary, and intellectual movement that originated in Europe toward the end of the 18th century and in most areas was at its peak in the approximate period from 1800 to 1840. Partly a reaction to the
Industrial Revolution,
[1] it was also a revolt against aristocratic social and political norms of the
Age of Enlightenment and a reaction against the scientific
rationalization of nature.
[2] It was embodied most strongly in the visual arts, music, and literature, but had a major impact on historiography,
[3] education
[4] and the
natural sciences.
[5] Its effect on politics was considerable and complex; while for much of the peak Romantic period it was associated with
liberalism and radicalism, in the long term its effect on the growth of
nationalism was probably more significant.
The movement validated strong emotion as an authentic source of
aesthetic experience, placing new emphasis on such emotions as
apprehension,
horror and terror, and
awe—especially that which is experienced in confronting the
sublimity of untamed nature and its picturesque qualities, both new aesthetic categories. It elevated
folk art and ancient custom to something noble, made spontaneity a desirable characteristic (as in the musical
impromptu), and argued for a "natural" epistemology of human activities as conditioned by nature in the form of language and customary usage. Romanticism reached beyond the
rational and
Classicist ideal models to elevate a revived
medievalism and elements of art and narrative perceived to be authentically medieval in an attempt to escape the confines of population growth,
urban sprawl, and
industrialism, and it also attempted to embrace the exotic, unfamiliar, and distant in modes more authentic than
Rococochinoiserie, harnessing the power of the imagination to envision and to escape.
Although the movement was rooted in the German
Sturm und Drang movement, which prized intuition and emotion over Enlightenment rationalism, the ideologies and events of the
French Revolution laid
the background from which both Romanticism and the
Counter-Enlightenment emerged. The confines of the Industrial Revolution also had their influence on Romanticism, which was in part an escape from modern realities; indeed, in the second half of the 19th century, "
Realism" was offered as a polarized opposite to Romanticism.
[6] Romanticism elevated the achievements of what it perceived as heroic individualists and artists, whose pioneering examples would elevate society. It also legitimized the individual imagination as a critical authority, which permitted 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.
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 untrammelled feeling is summed up in the remark of the German painter
Caspar David Friedrich that "the artist's feeling is his law".
[7] To
William Wordsworthpoetry should be "the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings".
[8] In order to truly express these feelings, the content of the art must come from the imagination of the artist, with as little interference as possible from "artificial" rules dictating what a work should consist of.
Coleridge was not alone in believing that there were natural laws governing these matters which the imagination, at least of a good creative artist, would freely and unconsciously follow through
artistic inspiration if left alone to do so.
[9] As well as rules, the influence of models from other works would impede the creator's own imagination, so
originality was absolutely 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.
[10][11][12][13] This idea is often called "romantic originality."
[14][15][16][17][18]
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."
[20]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 directly and personally 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".
[19]
In English literature, the group of poets now considered the key figures of the Romantic movement includes
William Wordsworth,
Samuel Taylor Coleridge,
John Keats,
Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley,
Percy Bysshe Shelley, and the much older
William Blake, followed later by the isolated figure of
John Clare. 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 the poet's feelings about nature, which were to be 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.
Though they have modern critical champions such as
Georg Lukács, Scott's novels are today more likely to be experienced in the form of the many operas that continued to be based on them over the following decades, such as
Donizetti's
Lucia di Lammermoor and
Vincenzo Bellini's
I puritani (both 1835). 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.
[45] Unlike many Romantics, Byron's widely-publicised 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.
[46] 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.
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 but based in London or elsewhere 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.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".
[43] 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. 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.
[44]
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).
[47] But around the mid-century the undoubtedly Romantic novels of the
Brontë family appeared, in particular
Charlotte's Jane Eyre and
Emily's Wuthering Heights, which were both published in 1847.
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 dramatisations 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. The greatest actor of the period,
Edmund Kean, restored the tragic ending to
King Lear;
[48] Coleridge said that, “Seeing him act was like reading Shakespeare by flashes of lightning.”
