Introduction
As an attitude or intellectual attitude that began in England and Germany and spawned over in Europe and America in the 19th century, Romanticism (1800-1850) can be viewed “as a rejection of the precepts of order, calm, harmony, balance, idealization, and rationality that typified Classicism in general and late 18th-century Neoclassicism in particular”. Also, romanticism is considered “to some extent a reaction against the Enlightenment and 18th-century rationalism and physical materialism in general”. As “it emphasized the individual, the subjective, the irrational, the imaginative, the personal, the spontaneous, the emotional, the visionary, and the transcendental”, the Romanticism period inspired many artists in the field of literature, painting, music, architecture, criticism, and historiography by rooting artistic vision in spontaneity and endorsing a concept of creativity based on the supremacy of human freedom (Encyclopædia Britannica Online, 2007).
A common view of the world
Despite variations, romantics shared similar beliefs and a common view of the world. Among the first romantics were the English poets William Wordsworth (1770-1850) and Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834), whose collaborative Lyrical Ballads (1798) exemplified the iconoclastic romantic idea that poetry was the result of “the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings”, rather than a formal and highly disciplined intellectual exercise. Romantics, in general, rebelled against the confinement of classical forms and refused to accept the supremacy of reason over emotions.
As the common attitude in Romanticism was supremacy over emotions and supremacy over human freedom, every artistic venture was valued in a new way as a genius through whose insight and intuition great art was created. Intuition, as opposed to scientific learning, was endorsed as a valid means of knowing. Building on the work of the eighteenth-century philosopher Immanuel Kant (1724-1804), romanticism embraced subjective knowledge. Inspiration and intuition took the place of reason and science in the values of Romantic artists.
Beauty and freedom
In literature, many poets and writers emerged where different writers sought beauty and freedom from the shackles of industrialization and even nationalism. Writers and poets delved on issues that promote the creative perception of meaning in the world. Wellek (1963) pointed out that if we examine the characteristics of the actual literature which called were “romantic”, all of the writings during those times has “the same conceptions of poetry and the workings and nature of poetic imagination, the same conception of nature and its relation to man; and the same poetic style, with a use of imagery, symbolism, and myth which is distinct from that of eighteenth-century neoclassicism”. According to Wellek (1963), these Romantic poets and writer “all see the implication of imagination, symbol, myth, and organic nature, and see it as part of the great endeavor to overcome the split between subject and object, the self and the world, the conscious and the unconscious. This is the central creed of the great romantic poets in England, Germany, and France. It is a closely coherent body of thought and feeling” (p. 160-162). For instance, Madame Germaine de StaĂ«l (1766-1817), whose writings influenced French political theory after 1815, is often hailed as the founder of French romanticism. She wrote histories, novels, literary criticism, and political tracts that opposed the tyranny of Napoleonic rule. Like many other romantics, she was greatly influenced by the writings of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and through him, she discovered that “the soul’s elevation is born of self-consciousness.” The recognition of the subjective meant for De StaĂ«l that women’s vision was as essential as men’s for the flowering of European culture. Other writers who gained prominence in the Romantic Era were William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge in England, Victor Hugo in France, and Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Edgar Allan Poe in the United States.
Visual arts
In visual arts, artists usually used themes of landscapes that seem like visions of a fairyland far removed from reality, such as J. M. W. Turner (1775-1851), an English landscape painter who applied expressive technique in depicting his view of the natural world in his masterpieces. Also, most painters tackled tragic themes and some took interest in themes that pictured classical history and mythology to medieval subjects. Visual artists like Salvator Rosa gained fame in the Romantic Era because he initiated romantic painting with his “Enchanted Castle”. Then, in the 18th century, the romantic sense of life was embodied in the glades and gardens of Jean-Antoine Watteau and Jean-HonorĂ© Fragonard, haunts of happy lovers, and in the sensuous figures of Prud’hon, “French Correggio”. Next, Francisco Goya came on the scene, and in his “Caprichos”, where he was the first to dwell with passionate intensity on the pre-eminently romantic themes of love, insanity, and violent death. With the revival of Shakespeare, plays like The Tempest and A Midsummer Night’s Dream proved particularly congenial to the romantic imagination, while unsophisticated readers of Bernardin de Saint-Pierre were thrilled by his word-pictures of the tropics, and François-RenĂ© de Chateaubriand’s public took the “noble savage” to their hearts (Courthion, 1961, p. 7). More French painters gained prominence like Eugène Delacroix and the German Philipp Otto Runge, who both explored the implications of musical analogies and applying them on visual terms via their paintings.
A field of music
In the field of music, the political and social changes which were a part of the Romantic Movement found expression in the growing tendency of composers to free themselves from the bonds of patronage, to take a more independent place in society and a more conscious part in the assertion of national individuality. When Romanticism set the attitude of the supremacy of emotions over reason, the composer found their way into producing works that made them the great romantic composers of the age: Louis Hector Berlioz (1803-1869), the French composer who set Faust’s damnation to music; Polish virtuoso Frédéric Chopin (1810-1849); and Hungarian concert pianist Franz Liszt (1811-1886).
Conclusion
However, after 1850, Romanticism was dubbed as no more than an aesthetic stance in art, letters, and music, a posture that had no particular political intent. Yet, its validation of the individual, as opposed to the social status or the country, was a revolutionary doctrine that helped to define a unique political consciousness of its own.
References
Courthion, Pierre. Romanticism. Geneva: Skira, 1961.
Encyclopædia Britannica. “Romanticism.” 2007. Encyclopædia Britannica Online. Web.
Wellek, René. “The Concept of Romanticism in Literary History”, in Nichols, Stephen G. (Ed.), Concepts of Criticism, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1963.