Romanticism 

(also known as the Romantic era) was an artistic, literary, musical 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 1850. Romanticism was characterized by its emphasis
on emotion and individualism as well as glorification of all the past and nature, preferring the
medieval rather than the classical. It was partly a reaction to the Industrial Revolution,[1] the
aristocratic social and political norms of the Age of Enlightenment, and the scientific rationalization of
nature—all components of modernity.[2] It was embodied most strongly in the visual arts, music, and
literature, but had a major impact on historiography,[3] education,[4] the social sciences, and
the natural sciences.[5][not in citation given] It had a significant and complex effect on politics, with romantic
thinkers influencing liberalism, radicalism, conservatism and nationalism.[6]
The movement emphasized intense emotion as an authentic source of aesthetic experience, placing
new emphasis on such emotions as apprehension, horror and terror, and awe—especially that
experienced in confronting the new aesthetic categories of the sublimity and beauty of nature. It
elevated folk art and ancient custom to something noble, but also spontaneity as a desirable
characteristic (as in the musical impromptu). In contrast to the Rationalism and Classicism of
the Enlightenment, Romanticism revived medievalism[7] and elements of art and narrative perceived
as authentically medieval in an attempt to escape population growth, early urban sprawl,
and industrialism.
Although the movement was rooted in the German Sturm und Drang movement, which preferred
intuition and emotion to the rationalism of the Enlightenment, the events and ideologies of
the French Revolution were also proximate factors. Romanticism assigned a high value to the
achievements of "heroic" individualists and artists, whose examples, it maintained, would raise the
quality of society. It also promoted the individual imagination as a critical authority allowed of
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. In the second half of the 19th
century, Realism was offered as a polar opposite to Romanticism.[8] The decline of Romanticism
during this time was associated with multiple processes, including social and political changes and
the spread of nationalism.[9]

Basic characteristics[edit]
The nature of Romanticism may be approached from the primary importance of the free expression
of the feelings of the artist. The importance the Romantics placed on emotion is summed up in the
remark of the German painter Caspar David Friedrich, "the artist's feeling is his law".[10] To William
Wordsworth, poetry should begin as "the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings", which the poet
then "recollect[s] in tranquility", evoking a new but corresponding emotion the poet can then mould
into art.[11]
To express these feelings, it was considered the content of art had to come from the imagination of
the artist, with as little interference as possible from "artificial" rules dictating what a work should
consist of. Samuel Taylor Coleridge and others believed there were natural laws the imagination—at
least of a good creative artist—would unconsciously follow through artistic inspiration if left alone.
[12]
 As well as rules, the influence of models from other works was considered to impede the creator's
own imagination, so that originality was 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.[13][14][15] This idea is often called "romantic
originality."[16] Translator and prominent Romantic August Wilhelm Schlegel argued in his Lectures on
Dramatic Arts and Letters that the most phenomenal power of human nature is its capacity to divide
and diverge into opposite directions.[17]

William Blake, The Little Girl Found, from Songs of Innocence and Experience, 1794
Not essential to Romanticism, but so widespread as to be normative, was a strong belief and interest
in the importance of nature. This 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 a close connection with nature
was mentally and morally healthy. Romantic art addressed its audiences 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".[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

Context and place in history[edit]

The more precise characterization and specific definition of Romanticism has been the subject of
debate in the fields of intellectual history and literary history throughout the 20th century, without any
great measure of consensus emerging. That it was part of the Counter-Enlightenment, a reaction
against the Age of Enlightenment, is generally accepted in current scholarship. Its relationship to
the French Revolution, which began in 1789 in the very early stages of the period, is clearly
important, but highly variable depending on geography and individual reactions. Most Romantics can
be said to be broadly progressive in their views, but a considerable number always had, or
developed, a wide range of conservative views,[31] and nationalism was in many countries strongly
associated with Romanticism, as discussed in detail below.
In philosophy and the history of ideas, Romanticism was seen by Isaiah Berlin as disrupting for over
a century the classic Western traditions of rationality and the idea of moral absolutes and agreed
values, leading "to something like the melting away of the very notion of objective truth",[32] and hence
not only to nationalism, but also fascism and totalitarianism, with a gradual recovery coming only
after World War II.[33] For the Romantics, Berlin says,
in the realm of ethics, politics, aesthetics it was the authenticity and sincerity of the pursuit of inner
goals that mattered; this applied equally to individuals and groups – states, nations, movements.
This is most evident in the aesthetics of romanticism, where the notion of eternal models, a Platonic
vision of ideal beauty, which the artist seeks to convey, however imperfectly, on canvas or in sound,
is replaced by a passionate belief in spiritual freedom, individual creativity. The painter, the poet, the
composer do not hold up a mirror to nature, however ideal, but invent; they do not imitate (the
doctrine of mimesis), but create not merely the means but the goals that they pursue; these goals
represent the self-expression of the artist's own unique, inner vision, to set aside which in response
to the demands of some "external" voice – church, state, public opinion, family friends, arbiters of
taste – is an act of betrayal of what alone justifies their existence for those who are in any sense
creative.[34]
John William Waterhouse, The Lady of Shalott, 1888, after a poem by Tennyson; like many Victorianpaintings,
romantic but not Romantic[clarification needed]

Arthur Lovejoy attempted to demonstrate the difficulty of defining Romanticism in his seminal article
"On The Discrimination of Romanticisms" in his Essays in the History of Ideas (1948); some scholars
see Romanticism as essentially continuous with the present, some like Robert Hughes see in it the
inaugural moment of modernity,[35] and some like Chateaubriand, Novalis and Samuel Taylor
Coleridge see it as the beginning of a tradition of resistance to Enlightenment rationalism—a
"Counter-Enlightenment"— [36][37] to be associated most closely with German Romanticism. An earlier
definition comes from Charles Baudelaire: "Romanticism is precisely situated neither in choice of
subject nor exact truth, but in the way of feeling."[38]
The end of the Romantic era is marked in some areas by a new style of Realism, which affected
literature, especially the novel and drama, painting, and even music, through Verismo opera. This
movement was led by France, with Balzac and Flaubert in literature and Courbet in
painting; Stendhal and Goya were important precursors of Realism in their respective media.
However, Romantic styles, now often representing the established and safe style against which
Realists rebelled, continued to flourish in many fields for the rest of the century and beyond. In music
such works from after about 1850 are referred to by some writers as "Late Romantic" and by others
as "Neoromantic" or "Postromantic", but other fields do not usually use these terms; in English
literature and painting the convenient term "Victorian" avoids having to characterise the period
further.
In northern Europe, the Early Romantic visionary optimism and belief that the world was in the
process of great change and improvement had largely vanished, and some art became more
conventionally political and polemical as its creators engaged polemically with the world as it was.
Elsewhere, including in very different ways the United States and Russia, feelings that great change
was underway or just about to come were still possible. Displays of intense emotion in art remained
prominent, as did the exotic and historical settings pioneered by the Romantics, but experimentation
with form and technique was generally reduced, often replaced with meticulous technique, as in the
poems of Tennyson or many paintings. If not realist, late 19th-century art was often extremely
detailed, and pride was taken in adding authentic details in a way that earlier Romantics did not
trouble with. Many Romantic ideas about the nature and purpose of art, above all the pre-eminent
importance of originality, remained important for later generations, and often underlie modern views,
despite opposition from theorists

Romanticism is a philosophical movement during the Age of

Enlightenment which emphasizes emotional self-
awareness as a necessary pre-condition to improving
society and bettering the human condition. Like
the German Idealism and Kantianism with which it is usually
linked in a philosophical context, Romanticism was largely
centered in Germany during the late 18th and early 19th
Century. It stands in opposition to
the Rationalism and Empiricism of the preceding Age of
Reason, representing a shift from the objective to
the subjective.
Romanticism in general was a reaction against
the scientific rationalization of Nature during the Age of
Reason, which left little room for
the freedom and creativity of the human spirit, and it
stressed strong emotion as a source of aesthetic
experience. It was embodied most strongly in the visual
arts, music, and literature, but it also had
a counterpart in philosophical thought.
Philosophical Romanticism holds that the universe is
a single unified and interconnected whole, and full
of values, tendencies and life, not merely objective lifeless
matter. The Romantic view is that reason, objectivity and
analysis radically falsify reality by breaking it up into
disconnected lifeless entities, and the best way of perceiving
reality is through some subjective feeling or intuition,
through which we participate in the subject of our knowledge,
instead of viewing it from the outside. Nature is an
experience, and not an object for manipulation and study, and,
once experienced, the individual becomes in tune with
his feelings and this is what helps him to create moral
values.
The roots of Philosophical Romanticism can be found in the
work of Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Immanuel
Kant. Rousseau, (who is credited with the idea of the "noble
savage", uncorrupted by artifice and society), thought
that civilization fills Man with unnatural wants and
seduces him away from his true nature and original
freedom. Kant's theory of Transcendental Idealism (see the
section on Idealism) posited that we do not directly
see "things-in-themselves"; we only understand the world
through our human point of view, an idea developed by the
American Transcendentalism of the mid-19th Century.
The German Idealists who followed on
from Kant and adapted and expanded his work with their
own interpretations of Idealism, can all be considered
Romanticists in their outlook. Among these the most
important were Johann Gottlieb Fichte, Friedrich
Schelling, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel and
(arguably) Arthur Schopenhauer. Hegel was perhaps the most
influential of the German Idealistphilosophers, and his idea
that each person's individual consciousness or mind is really
part of the Absolute Mind (Absolute Idealism) had far-
reaching effects. After his death, however, the Hegelians were
split between the "Old Hegelians" who uncritically
accepted Hegel's Romantic views, and the "Young
Hegelians" who wanted to continue the revolution of ideas
using his concept of dialectics.
Their ideas influenced a generation of Romantic writers,
such as Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749 -
1832), William Blake (1757 - 1827), Samuel
Coleridge (1772 - 1834), William Wordsworth (1770 -
1850), Lord Byron (1788 - 1824), John Keats (1795 -
1821), Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792 - 1822) and Victor
Hugo (1802 - 1885); artists such as John Constable (1776
- 1837), Joseph Mallord William Turner (1775 -
1851), Théodore Géricault ( 1791 - 1824) and Eugène
Delacroix(1798 - 1863); and composers such as Ludwig
van Beethoven (1770 - 1827), Franz Schubert (1797 -
1828), Hector Berlioz (1803 - 1869), Frédéric
Chopin(1810 - 1849), Robert Schumann (1810 -
1856), Franz Liszt (1811 - 1886), and Pyotr Ilyich
Tchaikovsky (1840 - 1893).
https://www.britannica.com/art/Romanticism

Romanticism
BackgroundReaction to earlier ageMain featuresWho were the Romantics?

Background
Romanticism is the name given to a dominant movement in literature and the other arts – particularly
music and painting – in the the period from the 1770s to the mid-nineteenth century:
 It is regarded as having transformed artistic styles and practices
 Like many other terms applied to movements in the arts, the word covers a wide and varied
range of artists and practices
 It is a retrospective term, applied by later literary, art and musical historians. None of the artists
we refer to as Romantics would have so described themselves
 It was a European phenomenon, particularly powerful in Britain, France and Germany, but also
affecting countries such as Italy, Spain and Poland. There was also, to some extent, an American
version of the movement.

Reaction to earlier age

Like many other literary movements, it developed in reaction to the dominant style of the preceding
period:
 The eighteenth century is often described by literary historians as the Augustan Agebecause it
sought to emulate the culture of the reign of the Roman Emperor Augustus(27 BCE – 14 CE)
 Classical standards of order, harmony, proportion and objectivity were preferred – the period
saw a revival of interest in classical architecture, for instance
 In literature, Greek and Roman authors were taken as models and many eighteenth century
writers either translated or produced imitations of poetry in classical forms
 In its early years, Romanticism was associated with radical and revolutionary political
ideologies, again in reaction against the generally conservative mood of European society.

Main features
Central features of Romanticism include:

 An emphasis on emotional and imaginative spontaneity

 The importance of self-expression and individual feeling. Romantic poetry is one of the heart
and the emotions, exploring the ‘truth of the imagination' rather than scientific truth. The ‘I' voice is
central; it is the poet's perceptions and feelings that matter.
 An almost religious response to nature. They were concerned that Nature should not just be
seen scientifically but as a living force, either made by a Creator, or as in some way divine, to be
 neglected at humankind's peril. Some of them were no longer Christianin their beliefs. Shelley
was an atheist, and for a while Wordsworth was apantheist (the belief that god is in everything).
Much of their poetry celebrated the beauty of nature, or protested the ugliness of the growing
industrialization of the century: the machines, factories, slum conditions, pollution and so on.
 A capacity for wonder and consequently a reverence for the freshness and innocence of
the vision of childhood. See The world of the Romantics: Attitudes to childhood
 Emphasis on the imagination as a positive and creative faculty
 An interest in ‘primitive' forms of art – for instance in the work of early poets (bards), in ancient
ballads and folksongs. Some of the Romantics turned back to past times to find inspiration, either
to the medieval period, or to Greek and Roman mythology. See Aspects of the Gothic: Gothic and
the medieval revival
 An interest in and concern for the outcasts of society: tramps, beggars, obsessive characters
and the poor and disregarded are especially evident in Romantic poetry
 An idea of the poet as a visionary figure, with an important role to play as prophet (in both
political and religious terms).

Who were the Romantics?

Some authors have been regarded as pre-Romantic:
 William Blake (1757-1827) a visionary poet who was also an artist and engraver, with a particular
interest in childhood and a strong hatred of mechanical reason and industrialization;
 Robert Burns (1759-1796) who worked as a ploughman and farm labourer but who had received
a good education and was interested in early Scots ballads and folk-song;
 Walter Scott (1771-1832), another Scot, who developed his interest in old tales of the Border and
early European poetry into a career as poet and novelist.
The first generation of Romantics is also known as the Lake Poets because of their attachment to the
Lake District in the north-west of England:
 William Wordsworth (1770-1850) who came from the Lake District and was the leading poet of
the group, whose work was especially associated with the centrality of the self and the love of
nature;
 Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834) was Wordsworth's closest colleague and collaborator, a
powerful intellectual whose work was often influenced by contemporary ideas about science and
philosophy;
 Robert Southey (1774-1843), a prolific writer of poetry and prose who settled in the Lake District
and became Poet Laureate in 1813; his work was later mocked by Byron;
 Charles Lamb (1775-1834) was a poet but is best-known for his essays and literary criticism; a
Londoner, he was especially close to Coleridge;
 Thomas de Quincey (1785-1859) the youngest member of the group, best known as an essayist
and critic, who wrote a series of memories of the Lake Poets.
The second generation of Romantic poets included:
 George Gordon, Lord Byron (1788-1824); 
 Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822) was one of the leading poets;
 John Keats (1795-1821) was a London poet, especially known for his odes and sonnets and for
his letters, which contain many reflections on poetry and the work of the imagination.
The poets named so far are those who, for many years, dominated the Romantic canon – that group of
writers whose works were most commonly republished, read, anthologised, written about and taught in
schools, colleges and universities.
More recently, however, a revised Romantic canon has begun to emerge, which lays more emphasis
on women, working-class and politically radical writers of the period:
  Work by these writers can be found in two anthologies, both with useful introductions discussing
the justification for extending the canon in this way:
o Duncan Wu. Romanticism: an Anthology. 3rd edition. Oxford: Blackwell, 2005;
o Jerome J. McGann. The New Oxford Book of Romantic Period Verse. Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1993.

https://prezi.com/u3025hy3czrw/culture-of-the-romantic-period-1798-1832/

he Context

The Romantic Period (1776-1837)
CHRONOLOGICAL TABLE OF THE MAIN HISTORICAL FACTS

1776              The American Declaration of Independence is signed in Philadelphia.

1798 T            The French Revolution breaks out

1793              Britain begins wars against Revolutionary and Napoleonic France.

1804              Napoleon crowns himself Emperor of France.

1811-12         Textile workers attack new mills and machinery in the Luddite Riots

1815              The Duke of Wellington defeats Napoleon at the Battle of Waterloo and ends the war against the French

1819              Peterloo Massacre: a meeting for Parliamentary Reform is dispersed in Manchester.

1832              The First Reform Bill extends the right to vote to middle-class men.

1837              Queen Victoria comes to the throne.

The Historical Context

Historians refer to this period as the `Age of Revolution'. It opens with the American
Declaration of Independence and the loss of the American colonies and is
characterised by the effects of the political revolution in France and the Industrial
Revolution at home.

The French Revolution (1789-94) destroyed the old social order in the name of
liberty, equality and fraternity and marked the beginning of the rise of the middle
class. It was followed by the ascent of Napoleon who became Emperor in 1804. His
armies dominated Europe and involved Britain in several wars from 1793 till 1815
when the Duke of Wellington defeated him at the Battle of Waterloo.
Meanwhile England was being radically transformed by the Industrial Revolution
which caused great social unrest among the working class. It generated violent class
conflict between employers and workers, most notably in the Luddite Riots of 1811-
12 when textile workers in the North of England attacked the new mills and
machinery which had put them out of work.

Radicalism on the French model flourished in the early part of the period. British
Radicalism focused on the demand for `radical' reforms of the electoral system and
for universal suffrage. Radicals believed that Parliament should represent the people
and not the property-owners as the Tories claimed. The Tory government, which held
power for most of the period, combated radicalism through restrictions on freedom of
speech and association and through the use of secret agents and the armed forces. A
clash between government and reformers was inevitable. It came with the Peterloo
Massacre of 1819 in which 15 people were killed and many were wounded when
mounted troops charged a crowd of 60,000 people who had gathered in Manchester
for a meeting on the need for electoral reform.

By the 1820s radicalism was a spent force, partly because of the success of
Government tactics, partly because of disillusionment over the violent and
unsuccessful course French republicanism had taken and partly because of the
improvement in the economic situation. The demand for parliamentary reform was
however partially met in the First Reform Act of 1832 which extended the right to
vote to thr middle-class men and undermined the great power of the landed
aristocracy.

The pace of territorial expansion slowed down in the Romantic period. The loss of the
13 American colonies gave the British a distaste for colonies. But as the Industrial
Revolution required the development of more overseas markets, the country - was soon
to acquire new territories in the interests of her commerce.

FOCUS ON  The Industrial Revolution

The Industrial Revolution is a convenient phrase to describe the change from an agrarian or maritime
economy to an industrialised (factory-based) economy which gathered force in the Romantic period and
radically transformed ' England (the Midlands and the North) and the Scottish Lowlands.

The origin of the term

The term `Industrial Revolution' first appeared in the 1830s but it came into general use after the lectures
given by '; the English historian Arnold Toynbee (see D1, p. 125). He felt that Britain had undergone such
an industrial ; upheaval that the term `revolution' was a convenient label. The term could however be
misleading because it ' suggests a sudden and violent event. On the contrary, changes began to be felt in
Britain around 1780 and ' developed over a number of decades and as a continuing process for which
dates cannot be given. Several factors interacted to facilitate the industrial transformation of Britain which
first affected the textile and ' metal industries.

Technological innovations

The most important factors were the technological innovations that made industrialization possible. The
old sources of energy like water-and wind-power were replaced by steam-power. Steam engines
(invented in 1698 but improved by James Watt in 1769) needed fuel in vast quantities, which was
provided by coal.

Other British technical innovations included processes for producing wrought iron, Hargreaves's spinning-
jenny (1768) and Cartwright's power loom (1785) which transformed the Lancashire cotton industry and
later the Yorkshire woollen industry.

Coal mining

Coal was at the heart of the Industrial Revolution. Industries like iron-making were based on coal mines
and the growth of the textile industry was linked to the coalfields of Lancashire and Yorkshire. Coal mines
grew from small pits to large mines employing a great number of colliers and coal production doubled
between 1750 and 1800. 'The spread of canals and railways cut the cost of transporting coal from mines
to factories which were sited near coalfields.

Large- scale-manufacturing or "the factory system"

The use of iron instead of wood as a raw material for buildings and machines, the use of large steam
engines, new mass-production methods to get cheaper goods were responsible for the development of
large-scale factory manufacturing. The cotton and woollen industries which had been spread throughout
the land in small units became concentrated in huge factories in Lancashire and Yorkshire. Similarly,
small-scale iron foundries disappeared and huge new works appeared in South Wales and in the Scottish
Lowlands.

The factory became the main new unit of the system: it concentrated production in one place and
imposed a new discipline on the workers among whom women and children were prominent and badly
treated. By the 1820s and 1830s the factory system was an established reality of the Industrial
Revolution.

The Social Context

English history in this period is largely the story of England's involvement with the
Revolution. The event was greeted with general enthusiasm. Poets like Blake, the
young Wordsworth and Coleridge all had the sense of being present at some
apocalyptic momentous event in history.

Approval of what was happening in France was characteristic of much British

opinion. The great exception was Edmund Burke, a statesman and thinker and a
great prose writer. In his Reflections on the Revolution in France, published in 1790,
he described the French Revolution as a plunge back into savagery and advocated
reform rather than revolution. He glorified the positive aspects of the social contract,
paying little attention to the human misery which was caused by an unfair and
uncaring society.

The establishment became really alarmed by the reply of the Anglo-American

radical Tom Paine, The Rights of Man (1791). Paine saw the established institutions
as corrupt and malign, just as Blake did in his Songs of Experience. He contrasted
England unfavourably with revolutionary France and independent America and hoped
that a democratic movement might soon affect the whole of Europe.

While the Reflections sold 19,000 copies in six months, The Rights of Man sold

200,000, an incredible total for the society of the time.

Britain's Industrial Revolution began around 1780 and brought about a radical change
from an economy based on farms to one that relies on factories. Before the revolution
Britain's main industries were carried on in small units and workshops: for example,
the woollen industry was based on families spinning and weaving wool in their
homes (cottage or domestic system). The factory system brought about a real
transformation of the country.

Several factors interacted to produce the Industrial Revolution, like demographic

changes due mainly to population growth. The Industrial Revolution relied upon a
rapidly growing population which provided increasing numbers of consumers and
workers for factories. More people looking for work helped keep down wages and led
to low prices and higher profits.

The expansion in the industrial population brought with it the rise of the factory
town especially in northern areas. Many people moved to towns to find work in the
mills and factories. Several factory owners built houses for their workers near their
works - they were badly built with no water supply or sanitation. Living conditions
were in general very poor and working conditions in factories and mines very
dangerous.

The increasing industrial system required more and better roads and a network of
canals to bring raw materials to factories and send finished goods to market. The
phenomenon is often described as the Transport Revolution - its size is really huge:
3,000 miles of canals were built between 1760 and 1820.

A deep transformation affected also the rural areas. The spread of enclosures and
technical innovations caused an Agricultural Revolution which went on at the same
time as the Industrial Revolution and was linked to it. Land was bought by great
landowners, enclosed with fences and farmed on a bigger scale through the new
machines which helped change the face of farming into a more mechanised activity.
Many peasants moved into towns to join the class of industrial workers.

Before the Indusn-ial Revolution the urban working class did not exist in British
society. The consciousness of being part of a working class originated in a number of
different organisations and groups which laid the foundations of the Trade-Union
Movement.

In the late 18th century the owners started to resent the state's interference in wages
and contracts. In addition, the growing population was putting great pressure on
industries to increase output. As business became larger, the master-employee
relationship deteriorated and became more impersonal.

The workers began to form trade clubs or associations to look after their interests. By
the end of the 18th century trade clubs were joining together into larger
`combinations'. Their aim was to achieve improved working conditions and higher
wages, thus taking on the role of a trade union. But the ruling classes associated
`combinations' with revolutionary activity and forced Parliament to declare them
illegal in 1799-1800. They continued to exist, often in secret, and were finally
legalised in 1824.

The Cultural Context.

Romanticism affected the whole of European culture in different ways and at different
times. The three main branches of the Romantic Movement were German, English
and French. Each had its individual development and quality and each was
interrelated with the others. German Romanticism had a preparatory stage in
the Sturm und Drang movement of the 1770s and was essentially
philosophical. English Romanticism started in the 1780s and is best represented by
its poetry. French Romanticism developed mainly in drama and literary criticism; its
way was prepared by the general influence of Rousseau on French culture. Rousseau
was immensely influential throughout Europe, particularly in his claim that man is
good by nature but corrupted by society and in his conception of nature as a life-
giving force. In Italy the Romantic Movement officially started in 1816; it had a
strong nationalistic component and found its best expression in poetry and in the
novel.

There is a close relation between the cultural aspects of Romanticism and the socio-
historical context in which it developed. We will confine ourselves to two events only
- the French Revolution and the Industrial Revolution. As you have seen, the political
attitudes of many Romantic writers were responses to the issues and changes brought
about by the French Revolution.
The remarkable expansion of industry and the economy made its effects felt in the
field of economic theory which greatly flourished in the period. Adam Smith's
The Wealth of Nations (1776) was a seminal book in the development of laissez
faire policies. It advocated no interference from the government in economic activities
and supported the idea that efficiency and profit are absolute goods.

The precise meaning of Romanticism and of several of its key concepts are matters

for disagreement. But the four central elements were perhaps:

- the stress on imagination and on individual experience;

- the conception of the artist as an original creator free from any neo-classical control
by models and rules;

- the notion of nature as a living organic structure and as a medium for conveying
fundamental spiritual truths as well as the importance attached to natural scenery.

- a distinctive style which in literature included widespread use of imagery,symbolism

and myth.

The definition of these leading concepts has caused much debate in the critical world.
Romantic imagination, for example, is not a single phenomenon, but takes on different
m,:anings in the works of different Romantic writers. There are basically two views of what it is.

First, it is "the capacity to see - to see more deeply into the life of things". Second, it can be
considered, in the words of a critic, as

"a peculiar faculty of the mind for the apprehension of that kind of truth which is beyond
the power of reason, the senses or common experience to apprehend. The poet leads the
reader into a world -~vhich in character is profound, religious, ultimate, and which, but
for the poet's imagination, must have remained inaccessible. According to this view, the
imagination yields insight into a world that is transcendental or supersensible in its
nature. The implication is that there are two worlds, the one available to ordinary people
in possession of the usual senses, and the other open only to those who have the
imaginaton or genius to see it."

The idea of the 'sublime' first formulated in English by Burke had an important influence on

Romantic poetry and art as well as on the Gothic vogue which characterised the period. Burke
had divided beauty into the beautiful (for things which were regular, delicate, harmonious) and
the sublime (for things which were gigantic, violent and gloomy and aroused terror). The second
category included picturesque views, mountainous landscapes, waterfalls, volcanoes, wild
countryside. The Lake District was said to be `sublime' in its scenery and enjoyed great
popularity throughout the age.
The interest in non-rational experience, which was part of the Romantic reaction against
eighteenth-century rationalism, took many forms. One was the world
of horror and sentiment and of picturesquescenery which come alive in the Gothic novels of
the period. The apogee of the genre was Mrs Radcliffe's The Mysteries of Udolpbo (1794) which
was highly praised when it appeared and continued to be influential till in the 1830s Dickens and
Thackeray started a new phase of novel-writing based on immediate social experience. The
Gothic vogue affected Byron, Shelley and Mary Shelley; Coleridge's The Rime of the Ancient
Mariner, Keats's The Eve of St Agnes and also Scott's Scottish Novels draw upon the world of the
Gothic.

The Story of English

At the end of the 18th century, regional differences in English within the British Isles were still
very distinct. But the Industrial Revolution changed that. Industrial towns mushroomed
attracting rural people from the countryside; the level of common people's literacy improved;
people travelled more. These factors helped to disseminate widely a standard English which
was increasingly identified with the language spoken in London.

In the literature of this period, writers, especially Romantic poets, reacted against the use of a
formal and dignified `poetic diction'. It was felt that the greatest beauty lay in the vocabulary
of `common speech'.

English literature became more and more popular with the Scots and was imitated by the local
writers. Going against this trend, the Scottish poet Robert Burns revived the despised Scottish
tradition and wrote most of his songs and poems in Scots. Sir Walter Scott's novels and poetry
also tapped into the Scottish tongue and gave new life to Scottish nationalism.

In Ireland, after the Act of Union in 1803, the local Gaelic went into a steady decline. Education,
now in the hands of English administrators, meant learning the English language. Irish and
English languages interbred more and more until Irish English was felt to be an indigenous
language.

The Story of British Art

Echoes of the sublime and of the Gothic fashion at the end of the 18th century are to be found in
the paintings of Johan Heinrich Fuseli (1741-1825),, a Swiss-born artist who spent several years
in London. He shows a liking for the strange, the violent and the dreamlike and for scenes of
fantasy or horror as in The Nightmare, the picture that made him famous. This work as well as
the horrific scenc of Lady Macbeth Seizing the Daggers are able to produce in the spectator "the
strongest emotions which the mind is capable of feeling", to use Burke's words.

William Blake, who was both a poet and a painter, was linked with Fuseli through friendship
and in the visionary quality of his production. His paintings often embody his personal beliefs
and his own mythology: for example, the large colour-print Newton expresses his criticism of the
limited vision of the rational man who is not inspired by imagination, while Elohim Creating
Adam gives visual form to his pessimistic view of the creation.
The major trend of the period was, however, landscape painting which ceased to be regarded as a
poor relation of history painting and became the most important branch of art for artists and the
picture-buying public. The earlier subjects of Joseph M. W. Turner (1775-1851) contain most
of the characteristics of a sublime work: the elemental fury of snowstorms and avalanches,
awesome scenes of precipice and chasms in the Alps, the destructive power of nature in
shipwrecks, etc., all have the power to amaze and shock the spectator. Paintings like Snowstorm:
Hannibal and His Army Crossing the Alps or The Burning of the Houses of Parliament convey
the overwhelming power of natural forces and the helplessness of man by means of a revolving
vortex-like composition, the use of colour and contrasted effects of light. Turner’s later
landscapes have a dream-like quality achieved through the dissolution of forms into bright rich
colours.

Like Turner, John Constable (1776 – 1837) also started from a close observation of natural
phenomena, but his subjects are mainly scenes from his native Suffolk with a keen eye for the
weather which constantly alters the appearance of the landscape. The pictures record his own
emotional response to nature and express his wish for identification with natural scenery.

The love of exotic style and the Gothic vogue could also account for romantic trends
in architecture as exemplified by the Brighton Pavilion (1816-20), a flamboyant mixture of
Indian and Chinese styles.

I LOVE YOU JOHN MICHAEL NAPIRI GRAGEDA