Romanticism (also the Romantic era or the Romantic 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 1850. Partly a reaction to the Industrial Revolution it was also a revolt against the aristocratic social and political norms of the Age of Enlightenment and a reaction against the scientific rationalization of nature it was embodied most strongly in the visual arts, music and literature but had a major impact on historiography, education and the natural sciences. Its effect on politics was considerable and complex while for much of the peak Romantic period it was associated with liberalism and radicalism its long-term effect on the growth of nationalism was probably more significant. 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 raise 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. Romanticism embraced the exotic the unfamiliar and the distant in modes more authentic than Rococo chinoiserie harnessing the power of the imagination to envision and escape. Although the movement was rooted in the German movement which prized intuition and emotion over the rationalism of the Enlightenment the events of and ideologies that led to the French Revolution planted the seeds from which both Romanticism and the Counter-Enlightenment sprouted. 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. Romanticism assigned a high value to the achievements of heroic individualists and artists whose pioneering examples it maintained would raise the quality of society. It also vouched for 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. 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 untrammeled feeling is summed up in the remark of the German painter Casper David Friedrich that the artist’s feeling is his law. To William Wordsworth poetry should be the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings. 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 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. This idea is often called romantic originality. 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 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 conscious 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. The group of words with the root Roman in the various European language such as romance and Romanesque has a complicated history but by the middle of the 18th century romantic in English and romantique in French were both in common use as adjective of praise for natural phenomena such as views and sunsets in a sense close to modern English usage but without the implied sexual element The application of the term to literature first became common in Germany, where the circle around the Schlegel brothers, critics August and Friedrich, began to speak of romantische Poesie ("romantic poetry") in the 1790s, contrasting it with "classic" but in terms of spirit rather than merely dating. Friedrich Schlegel wrote in his Dialogue on Poetry (1800), "I seek and find the romantic among the older moderns, in Shakespeare, in Cervantes, in Italian poetry, in that age of chivalry, love and fable, from which the phenomenon and the word itself are derived."[17] In both French and German the closeness of the adjective to roman, meaning the fairly new literary form of the novel, had some effect on the sense of the word in those languages. The use of the word did not become general very quickly, and was probably spread more widely in France by its persistent use by Madame de Staël in her De L'Allemagne (1813), recounting her travels in Germany.[18] In England Wordsworth wrote in a preface to his poems of 1815 of the "romantic harp" and "classic lyre",[18] but in 1820 Byron could still write, perhaps slightly disingenuously, "I perceive that in Germany, as well as in Italy, there is a great struggle about what they call 'Classical' and 'Romantic', terms which were not subjects of classification in England, at least when I left it four or five years ago". It is only from the 1820s that Romanticism certainly knew itself by its name, and in 1824 the Académie française took the wholly ineffective step of issuing a decree condemning it in literature.
Unsurprisingly, given its rejection on principle of rules, Romanticism is not easily defined, and the period typically called Romantic varies greatly between different countries and different artistic media or areas of thought. Margaret Drabble described it in literature as taking place "roughly between 1770 and 1848",[21] and few dates much earlier than 1770 will be found. In English literature, M. H. Abrams placed it between 1789, or 1798, this latter a very typical view, and about 1830, perhaps a little later than some other critics.[22] In other fields and other countries the period denominated as Romantic can be considerably different; musical Romanticism, for example, is generally regarded as only having ceased as a major artistic force as late as 1910, but in an extreme extension the Four Last Songs of Richard Strauss are described stylistically as "Late Romantic" and were composed in 1946–48.[23] However in most fields the Romantic Period is said to be over by about 1850, or earlier.
The early period of the Romantic Era was a time of war, with the French Revolution (1789–1799) followed by the Napoleonic Wars until 1815. These wars, along with the political and social turmoil that went along with them, served as the background for Romanticism.[24] The key generation of French Romantics born between 1795–1805 had, in the words of one of their number, Alfred de Vigny, been "conceived between battles, attended school to the rolling of drums".
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. 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,[26] 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 very idea of moral absolutes and agreed values, leading "to something like the melting away of the very notion of objective truth",and hence not only to nationalism, but also fascism and totalitarianism, with a gradual recovery coming only after the catharsis of World War II.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. 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, continued to be important for later generations, and often underlie modern views, despite opposition from theorists.
In literature, Romanticism found recurrent themes in the evocation or criticism of the past, the cult of "sensibility" with its emphasis on women and children, the heroic isolation of the artist or narrator, and respect for a new, wilder, untrammeled and "pure" nature. Furthermore, several romantic authors, such as Edgar Allan Poe and Nathaniel Hawthorne, based their writings on the supernatural/occult and human psychology. Romanticism tended to regard satire as something unworthy of serious attention, a prejudice still influential today.
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