Introducing Romanticism E-Book

Duncan Heath

• Herausgeber: Icon Books
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Serie: Graphic Guides
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 148

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2014

Beschreibung

Philosophy, art, literature, music, and politics were all transformed in the turbulent period between the French Revolution of 1789 and the Communist Manifesto of 1848. This was the age of the 'Romantic revolution', when modern attitudes to political and artistic freedom were born. When we think of Romanticism, flamboyant figures such as Byron or Shelley instantly spring to mind, but what about Napoleon or Hegel, Turner or Blake, Wagner or Marx? How was it that Romanticism could give birth to passionate individualism and chauvinistic nationalism at the same time? How did it prefigure the totalitarian movements of the 20th century?  Duncan Heath and Judy Boreham answer these questions and provide a unique overview of the many interlocking strands of Romanticism, focusing on the leading figures in Britain, Germany, France, Italy, Russia and America.

Leseprobe

Published by Icon Books Ltd, Omnibus Business Centre, 39-41 North Road, London N7 9DPEmail: [email protected] 

ISBN: 978-184831-178-7

Text copyright © 2014 Icon Books Ltd

Illustrations copyright © 1999 Judy Boreham

The author and illustrator has asserted their moral rights

Originating editor: Richard Appignanesi

No part of this book may be reproduced in any form, or by any means, without prior permission in writing from the publisher.

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

What is “Romanticism”?

“Romantick”

“Romantisch”

The Problem Child of the Enlightenment

Universal Enlightenment

Reason and Feeling

Blurred Edges

England, America and Revolution

Enlightenment Neo-classicism

More Blurred Edges

The Gothic Revival

Gothic Architecture

Sublime Imaginings

Classical Tour, Romantic Journey

Terribilità for the Connoisseurs

Sublime Ruins

The Solitary Walker

Myself, the Model

Nature and Society

Rousseau’s Influence

Kant and the Romantic Revolution

What is Idealism?

Metaphysical Terror

Thoughts on the Sublime

The German Romantic Movement

Herder on Language and History

Organic History

Sturm und Drang

Werther and the Crucible of Change

The Dual Character

The Return to Classicism

Versions of Faust

The Unity of Nature

Schiller – Classical or Romantic?

The Robbers

Spiel or Natural Play

Freude or Liberated Joy

The French Revolution

The Moment of Joy

Romantic Terrorism

The Ghost of Rousseau

The Imperialist Revolution

Turning Inwards

The First English Romantics

The Lyrical Ballads

The “Lake School”

Criticism of the Lake School

Romantic Fakes: Ossian

Napoleon – a “Fake Romantic”?

The Impact of Napoleon

Goya: the Horrors of War

Latin American Nationalism

German Romanticism: the Jena Phase

The German Folk as Pure Ego

A Romantic Religion of Creation

German Romanticism: the Berlin Phase

Hegel’s Aesthetics

Hegel’s Dialectic

Hegel’s Idealism

Hölderlin – Romantic Philhellenist

Nature and the Romantics

Subject and Object

The Egotistical Sublime

The Uncertainty Remains

Estrangement from Nature

Solipsism

Romantic Irony

World Irony

The Romantic Fragment

Critical Awareness, Romantic Aesthetics

The Critic and the Reader

Shakespeare and Romantic Critics

The Romantic Concept of Time

Art is a Language

Synaesthesia: the Unified Art Work

The Inner Vision of Landscape

British Romantic Landscape

The Shift from Classical to Picturesque

Constable: the Stay-at-Home Radical

The Immediacy of Paint

Turner: the Maelstrom of Change

Blake: the New Jerusalem

Fearful Symmetry

Blake Compared

A Utopian Project

Political Economy: the Dismal Science

Owen’s Social(ist) Utopianism

The Second Generation of English Romantics

Shelley the Infidel

The Defence of Poetry

Prometheus, or the Doomed Romantic Genius

Frankenstein

Electricity and the Vitalist Debate

Faraday and Electromagnetism

Pathological Science

Women and Romanticism

Keats: the Real and the Ideal

Beauty is Truth

The Cockney School

Byron: the Romantic Archetype?

The Sceptical Pilgrim

Don Juan – Is it Postmodern?

The Appeal of Byronism

The Restoration in Europe

Revolutionary Secret Societies

Russia: the Decembrists

Pushkin: a Russian Byron

Other Russian Romantics

Italy: the Carbonari

Opera: Public Romanticism

The Age of the Virtuoso

Berlioz – Autobiography in Music

Classical or Romantic?

Romantic Song

Wagner: Unified Art Work, Unified Germany

French Romanticism

Neo-classical Romanticism

Victor Hugo: Painful Rebirth

Stendhal: Romantic Realism

Balzac: Scientist of the Novel

Early Romantic Painters

Géricault: the Romantic Apocalypse

Orientalism

From Republicanism to Socialism

Utopian Socialism in France: Saint-Simon

Fourier and Harmonian Man

Other Socialists

Proudhon’s Anarchism

Karl Marx: the Last Romantic?

The Revolutions of 1848

A Bourgeois Revolution

American Romanticism

The Romance of the Frontier

Hawthorne and Puritanism

The Great American Novel

Transcendentalism

Thoreau’s Anarchism

Whitman: Poet of Democracy

The Postmodern Romantics …

Recurring Romanticism

Further Reading

Author’s Acknowledgements

Artist’s Acknowledgements

About the Authors

Index

What is “Romanticism”?

The word “Romantic” derives from the Old French romanz, meaning the vernacular “romance” languages that developed from Latin – Italian, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Catalan and Provengçal.

The medieval romance or romaunt came to mean a tale of chivalry written in one of these romance languages, usually in verse, and often taking the form of a quest.

Medieval romances are fanciful, heroic, extravagant tales. Chivalric notions of honour, gallantry and devotion to women are predominant.

Our colloquial use of “romance” and “romantic” to describe intense emotional experiences can be traced back to this medieval sense of the word, and so can the 18th and 19th century concept of “Romanticism” as an intellectual experience, which is the subject of this book.

“Romantick”

The word “romantic” came into common usage in English in the 18th century, by which time the connotations of the medieval romance had expanded to encompass a wide-ranging taste for the picturesque and the fanciful: the cult of sensibility (or sentiment) of the mid-18th century. The classically-minded Samuel Johnson (1709–84), sceptical of the new tendency, defined “Romantick” in his Dictionary of 1755:

Resembling the tales or romances; wild, improbable; false; fanciful; full of wild scenery.

“Romantic” had in fact been used since the Renaissance to suggest free expression of the imagination in the arts, but mainly in a negative sense. Romantic imaginings were thought to interfere with the clarity of the art form, and so lay beyond the bounds of proper subject-matter. The emerging Romantic spirit of 18th century England was seen by some as a revival of Elizabethan literature and its “Gothic” tendencies. English Romanticism has been described as a “renaissance of the Renaissance”.

Thanks to the influence of late 18th century German cultural theorists, “Romanticism” was adopted across Europe and the New World as a convenient description for distinctively contemporary modes of thought, losing in the process many of its negative connotations.

Johnson, a man of the 18th century Enlightenment, had defined the word in terms of its past…

But with a sense of its current debasement in fashionable excesses of sensibility. The age of “High Romanticism” made the word a focus for hopes of revolution and social change in the future. It became a political term.

Instead of “improbable” notions and “false” sensibility, Romanticism came to stand for authenticity, integrity and spontaneity. It was seen as a positive artistic and intellectual assertion of the extremes in the human psyche, the areas of experience beyond logic and reason which could only be expressed in a direct and heartfelt way. These new concerns were seen as a valid response to the extremes of change and uncertainty which the age itself displayed.

“Romantisch”

In 1798, the German critic and philosopher Friedrich von Schlegel (1772–1829) used the term romantisch to describe contemporary forms of artistic expression, relating it particularly to what he called “progressive universal poetry”.

A new term is needed to define qualities in the arts which have never been given such prominence before … the free expression of imagination and association.

But what had happened in the forty years between Johnson and Schlegel to make such a difference in their attitudes? The Western world had been shaken by two political revolutions, in America (1776) and France (1789), and by an industrial revolution which was beginning to erode the traditionally agrarian lives of many people.

New ways of living had to be reflected in new ways of thinking. Romanticism, for want of any better word, came to stand for this new experience of the world. The true Romantic was not an over-sensitive dreamer, but a heroic figure facing head-on the painful realities of his time – a figure of genius.

The Problem Child of the Enlightenment

To understand Romanticism, it is necessary first to understand the Enlightenment. As the “problem child” of this great movement, Romanticism shows many of the characteristics of its parent, but equally some radical differences.

The Enlightenment affected most of the Western world during the late 17th and 18th centuries. It was above all a movement which sought to emancipate mankind, regardless of political frontiers, from the triple tyranny of despotism, bigotry and superstition. What were the weapons in this fight?

The great advancement in learning which marks this age … The possibility of a concerted intellectual movement… Rationalism as the common language of science, philosophy and literature.

Momentous advances occurred in science, philosophy and politics. The discoveries of Sir Isaac Newton (1642–1727) confirmed the regular and ordered nature of the universe. The philosopher John Locke (1632–1704) asserted that only the information of the senses, experience and observation could provide true understanding of the external world. Scientific knowledge could banish superstition.

Universal Enlightenment

The aim of intellectuals was to cosmopolitanize their work and make inquiry an international activity which would shed light on the universal collective condition of man. The American and French Revolutions were given their intellectual basis by the common struggle for secular humanistic ideals which, in spite of their differences of opinion, united intellectuals across the Western world. The German philosopher Immanuel Kant was in no doubt about this …

It is time to cast off man’s immaturity through the action of the inquiring mind, even if the limits of possible knowledge are revealed in the process.

Philosophers, satirists, scientists, artists, politicians and intellectuals attempted to banish man’s dependence on received wisdom and the authority of the Church in favour of a theory of existence in which man could stand unaided at the centre of his own rational universe.

Intellectual inquiry across the Western world was marked by a spirit of unity and self-confidence. The colossal Encyclopédie supervised by Denis Diderot (1713–84), a work which attempted to bring together the accumulated wisdom of the age using the talents of its foremost intellects, was the definitive product of the Enlightenment ethos.

Rationalism (the theory that reason is the foundation of certainty in knowledge) Materialism (the theory that nothing exists but matter, and that its movements govern consciousness and will)

Empiricism (the theory that observation and experiment are the foundation for knowledge)

Determinism (the theory that human action is not free, but determined by motives regarded as external forces acting on the will)

Utilitarianism (the theory that the moral dimension of human actions is determined by their capacity to produce happiness)

These were some of the philosophical approaches of the age. Man was potentially perfectible, and the universe potentially discoverable, through the action of the intellect.

Reason and Feeling

But it would be misleading to suppose that the Enlightenment was a coherent programme that privileged reason exclusively. The passions and “affections” were also recognized in both personal and political terms. The “Age of Sensibility” of the 18th century was as much a part of the Enlightenment as was the rigorous empiricism of Locke. This is made clear in a remark by the French philosophe Diderot.

It is only the passions, and the great passions, that can raise the soul to great things.

The Enlightenment was diverse enough to encourage both the reasoned criticism of existing authorities and the appeal to human feelings to achieve the same fundamental aim – personal and political freedom. It was therefore seen as rational for feelings to be invoked, such was the emotional importance of the objective.

The English novelist of manners and society Jane Austen (1775–1817), a writer sensitive to both the rationalism and the emotionality of the age, dramatized the conflict in her novel Sense and Sensibility (1811).

Blurred Edges

Romanticism is often taken as the polar opposite of Enlightenment thinking. It is more accurate to see it as a critique of the excessive rationalism on which the Enlightenment came to rely. The reforming spirit of the Enlightenment had an undoubted liberating effect on Western man, intellectually and politically, and most Romantic artists and thinkers remained in uneasy sympathy with it.

The problem for us was the French Revolution. Was it a culmination or a travesty of Enlightenment ideals? The revolution made us into “problem children”.

The boundaries between the Enlightenment and Romanticism are blurred. Both were reforming movements, characterized by intense seriousness of purpose. The liberation of the inner man was as much the aim of the Romantics as the Enlightenment thinkers, and they both shared a sense of the absolute concepts of truth and justice being within mankind’s reach.

Romanticism is an essentially encompassing movement which does not exclude the rationalist aims that preceded it. Romanticism was the continuation of the Enlightenment by other means.

England, America and Revolution

America was already a symbol of hope for Europeans labouring under absolutist monarchs. The American Rebellion of 1775–6 signalled the first stirrings of the worldwide spirit of revolution that was to galvanize the Romantic age. It was a change conceived as fully compatible with the rationalist and commonsense principles of the Enlightenment, and was significantly less radical than the French Revolution.

The word “revolution”, in the late 18th century, had not fully acquired its modern sense of destroying established order.

It was used mainly to describe the movement of the heavens. But in a related sense, it also indicated a turning back – a movement towards a previous state.

Although the English radical thinker Thomas Paine (1737–1809) popularized the word with regard to the American rebellion, “revolution” was still not universally linked with the forces of radical change. The founders of American independence were not the dispossessed poor, but bourgeois or even patrician landowners in New England seeking parity with their English cousins.

The northeastern area of America founded by dissident English Puritans was effectively an extension of England, and the climate of thought at the time of the Rebellion was inspired by the great English prototypes of Enlightenment empiricism – philosophers Francis Bacon and John Locke, and scientist Isaac Newton. Empiricism, the science of observation, provided the moral and philosophical groundwork for the aspirations of the American colonists. The Declaration of Independence (1776) combines an empirical observation on mankind with a moral and political conclusion.

We hold these Truths to be self-evident, that all Men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness.

The style of art and architecture which the American rebels adopted for the expression of these beliefs was the one to which the French revolutionaries would also turn in the following decade: Neo-classicism.

Enlightenment Neo-classicism

The movement from which Romanticism distanced itself was not the Enlightenment itself, but the style of art in which the Enlightenment ethos was embodied – Neo-classicism. This was the expression in artistic terms of the 18th century’s search for the founding principles of humanity, stripping away the rotten layers of superstition to reveal universal morally-based truths. Neo-classicism flowered earlier in literature (from the late 17th to the early 18th centuries) than it did in art and architecture (late 18th to early 19th centuries).

Art, like the new society which rational inquiry will bring into being, must be founded on clear principles. Regularity of form and beauty of proportion, as we see in the art of classical antiquity.

With Enlightenment certainty, the artists of the late 18th century saw their style as a “true style” which brought timeless truths into the light of rational scrutiny. Neo-classicism was opposed to the wild embellishments of the earlier Baroque, and particularly the decadent Rococo style associated with the corrupt ancien régime in France.

Rococo artist François Boucher (1703–70), reflecting the artifice of the French court, had complained that nature was “too green and badly lit”. For Neo-classical thinkers, “nature” became the yardstick by which art, philosophy, morality and politics were to be judged. Just as the Enlightenment philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau advocated the regeneration of humanity by starting afresh from “natural” states of existence, so Neo-classicism sought the improvement of mankind through the example of “primitive” purity of line and simple grandeur of form. The paganism of classical antiquity also recommended itself to the Enlightenment philosophes in their fight against Christian dogma.

The pagan philosophers of classical times are our models. They are uncluttered by the dogma which has followed in their wake.

An objective, timeless “truth” was “out there” waiting to be revealed, and art, by valuing order, could show all the parts of this reality as a coherent set of relations. Classical art was admired because it was executed with the aim of imposing order onto chaos.

More Blurred Edges

Recent criticism has tended to de-simplify Neo-classicism, as it has Romanticism, and to see many trends within the movement. A good example is the archetypal Neo-classicist and founder of art history, Johann Joachim Winckelmann (1717–68), a crucial figure in promoting what has been called “the subjectivization of antiquity”. He responded to the art of ancient Greece with a proto-Romantic passion which was unheard of in the work of previous antiquarians. By giving free rein to his sensibility in judging works of art, Winckelmann anticipated Romantic aesthetics.

One can see in ancient classical sculpture the organic forms of forests and waterfalls.

As Hugh Honour has suggested: “It is with Winckelmann that art begins to replace religion and the aesthetic experience the mystical revelation.” Winckelmann inspired a peculiar hybrid of “romanticized classicism”.

The Gothic Revival

Neo-classicism was opposed by another trend in 18th century northern Europe – the revival of medieval Gothic architecture and a widespread popular taste for the “Gothic” in literature. Both movements were neatly encapsulated in England by Horace Walpole (1717–97), who not only built the first major monument to the revival in the form of his Gothic house, Strawberry Hill (1748), but also wrote the first great “Gothic novel”, The Castle of Otranto (1764).

One must have taste to be sensible of the beauties of Grecian architecture, one only wants passions to feel Gothic.

The adoption of the term “Gothic” signified a rather arbitrary borrowing of motifs from what was perceived as a desirable medieval and feudal way of life. This held enormous appeal for nascent Romantics. “Gothick” was initially seen as an eccentric and unfocused movement, but, like Neo-classicism, it appealed to the taste for the “primitive”, and its archaic “gloomth” addressed the new interest in extremes of sensibility.

Gothic Architecture

Gothic architecture was construed as a naturalistic, “organic”, Christian idiom more attuned to the traditions of northern European culture than the “pagan” classicism then in vogue. The English poet Coleridge recognized this: “A Gothic cathedral is the petrification of our religion.”

Gothic was also a link with a northern European mythical past, as J.H. Fuseli (1741–1825), painter of the Gothic sublime and friend of William Blake, pointed out.