The
Romantic Movement:
Just
as it is difficult to lend a date to the birth of the Romantic Movement, so it is
vain to ascribe the precise time of its demise; though scholars place its span
roughly between the years 1760 and 1850. The problem of what it came to
represent, which is not at all in the choice of subject or in exact truth but
rather in a way of feeling, is probably responsible for any uncertainty, and it
is believed that, far from dying out any given date, the Movement lived on,
feeding artistic streams that would have been inconceivable without it.
(From Mad, Bad and Dangerous to Know by Seán
Manchester, current edition)
Romanticism:
A movement of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries which marked the reaction
in literature, philosophy, art, religion, and politics from the neo-classicism
and formal orthodoxy of the preceding period. Romanticism arose so gradually
and exhibited so many phases that a satisfactory definition is not possible.
The aspect most stressed in France is reflected in Victor Hugo's phrase
"liberalism in literature," meaning especially the freeing of the
artist and writer from the restraints and rules of the classicists and
suggesting that phase of individualism marked by the encouragement of
revolutionary political ideas. The poet Heine noted the chief aspect of German
romanticism in calling it the revival of medievalism in art, letters, and life.
A late nineteenth-century English critic, Walter Pater, thought the addition of
strangeness to beauty (the neo-classicists having insisted upon order in
beauty) constituted the romantic temper. An American transcendentalist, Dr. F.
H. Hedge, thought the essence of romanticism was aspiration, having its origin
in wonder and mystery. An interesting schematic explanation calls romanticism
the predominance of imagination over reason and formal rules (classicism) and
over the sense of fact or the actual (realism), a formula which recalls
Hazlitt's statement (1816) that the classic beauty of a Greek temple resided
chiefly in its actual form and its obvious connotations, while the
"romantic" beauty of a gothic building or ruin arose from associated
ideas which the imagination was stimulated to conjure up. The term is used in
many senses, a favourite recent one being that which sees in the romantic mood
a psychological desire to escape from unpleasant realities.
Perhaps more useful
to the student than definitions will be a list of romantic characteristics or
"earmarks," though romanticism was not a clearly conceived system.
Among the aspects of the "romantic" movement in England may be
listed: sensibility; primitivism; love of nature; sympathetic interest in the
past, especially the medieval; mysticism; individualism; and a reaction against
whatever characterized neoclassicism. Among the specific characteristics
embraced by these general attitudes are: the abandonment of the heroic couplet
in favour of blank verse, the sonnet, the Spenserian stanza, and many
experimental verse forms; the dropping of the conventional diction in favour of
fresher language and bolder figures; the idealization of rural life
(Goldsmith); enthusiasm for the wild, irregular, or grotesque in nature and
art; unrestrained imagination; enthusiasm for the uncivilized or
"natural"; interest in human rights (Burns, Byron); sympathy with
animal life (Cowper); sentimental melancholy (Gray); emotional psychology in
fiction (Richardson); collection and imitation of popular ballads (Percy,
Scott); interest in ancient Celtic and Scandinavian mythology and literature;
renewed interest in Spenser, Shakespeare, and Milton. Typical literary forms of
the romantic writers include the lyric, especially the love lyric, the
reflective lyric, the nature lyric, and the lyric of morbid melancholy.
Although the romantic
movement in English literature had its beginnings or anticipations in the
earlier eighteenth century (Shaftesbury, Thomson, Dyer, Lady Winchilsea), it
was not till the middle of the century that its characteristics became
prominent and self-conscious (Blair, Akenside, Joseph and Thomas Warton, Gray,
Richardson, Sterne, Walpole, Goldsmith, and somewhat later Cowper, Burns, and
Blake), while its complete triumph was reserved for the early years of the
nineteenth century (Wordsworth, Coleridge, Scott, Southey, Byron, Shelley,
Keats). A little later in the nineteenth century came the great romantic period
in American literature (Bryant, Emerson, Lowell, Thoreau, Whittier, Hawthorne,
Melville).
The last third of the
nineteenth century witnessed the substitution of a soberer mood than prevailed
earlier in the century, and although the late nineteenth century and the early
twentieth century, in both England and America, have been marked by a sharp
reaction against the romantic, especially the sentimental, spirit in
literature, it is to be remembered that much late Victorian literature was
romantic and that the vitality of romanticism is evidenced by the great volume
of romantic writing being produced in the twentieth century.
By way of caution it
may be said that such descriptions of romanticism as this one probably
overstress the distinction between romanticism and classicism or
neo-classicism, and cannot hope to resolve that confusion over what
"romantic" means which Professor A. 0. Lovejoy asserts has "for
a century been the scandal" of literary history and criticism. As early as
1824 an effort to discover what the authorities meant by the term proved
disappointing, and the succeeding century has increased the number of
divergent, often contradictory, senses in which the term is employed. Some writers,
like Professor Walter Raleigh and Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch, have even urged the
desirability of abandoning the terms "romantic" and
"classic," pointing out that their use adds to the critical confusion
and tends to distort the facts of literary history and divert attention away
from the natural processes of literary composition. Several have noted that
Homer's Odyssey, for example, is cited by some as the very essence of the
romantic, by others as a true exemplar of classicism. Professor Lovejoy, noting
that the "romantic" movement has meant different things in different
countries and that even in single country "romantic" is often used in
conflicting senses, proposes that term be employed in the plural only, as a
recognition of the various romanticisms. Even if the term "romantic"
were always employed in the se sense and its characteristics could be safely
and comprehensively enumerated, it would still be true that one could not use a
single characteristic, like the love of wild scenery or the use of blank verse,
as a "key" for classifying as romantic any single poem or poet.
Yet, viewed in
philosophical terms, romanticism does have a definite meaning for the student
of literature. The term designates a literary and philosophical theory which
tends to see the individual at the very centre of all life and all experience,
and it places the individual, therefore, at the centre of art, making
literature most valuable as an expression of his or her unique feelings and
particular attitudes (the expressive theory of art) and valuing its accuracy in
portraying the individual's experiences, however fragmentary and incomplete,
more than it values its adherence to completeness, unity, or the demands of
genre. It places a high premium upon the creative function of the Imagination,
seeing art as a formulation of intuitive imaginative perceptions that tend to
speak a nobler truth than that of fact, logic, or the here and now. It sees in
Nature a revelation of Truth, the "living garment of God," and often,
pantheistically, a sensate portion of deity itself, and certainly a more
suitable subject for true art than those aspects of the world sullied by human
artifice (cultural primitivism). It differs significantly from the literary
movements which were to follow it, realism and naturalism, in where it finds
its values. Employing the commonplace, the natural, the simple as its
materials, it seeks always to find the Absolute, the Ideal, by transcending the
actual, whereas realism finds its values in the actual and naturalism in the
scientific laws which undergird the actual.
Ultimately, it must
be admitted that the conflict of ideas and attitudes which occurred in the
eighteenth century and which saw the triumph of romanticism over classicism,
however much exaggerated in standard literary histories, did go a very long way
toward the establishment of our modem democratic world, and where realism and
naturalism are significantly different from romanticism, they are closer to it
than they are to the classicism with which it broke. Wherever faith in the
individual and in freedom from rules, systems, or even from rationalism
appears, there one aspect of romanticism speaks. Contradictory as its
attributes are and however true Professor Lovejoy's assertion that it should be
spoken of always in the plural, romanticisms shape the controlling
attitudes of the democratic world.
(From A Handbook to Literature by C. Hugh Holman, 4th edition)