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What Romanticism Has Wrought
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13813 |
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THE ARTS
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| Issue
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12 / 1988 |
7,003 Words |
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Edward Lucie-Smith
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First, a few images. Lord Byron limping into a London drawing room—his deformed foot reminding spectators of Satan's cloven hoof. Turner lashing himself to a ship's mast in order to experience the full force of the storm. Gericault painting still lifes of dismembered human limbs. One could multiply such things a hundredfold as instances of the phenomenon we call Romanticism. It is possible to choose quite different images as well: the hushed and holy quietude of Caspar David Friedrich's seashore scenes; the gentle rapture of Schubert's song "An die Musik," each verse sung on one continuous breath.
Though all the examples I have just given are recognizably Romantic, Romanticism itself remains tantalizingly difficult to define. Perhaps the best one can do is to give some sort of historical description, while at the same time trying to indicate various categories of romantic thought and activity.
The eighteenth century is often spoken of as the Age of Reason, but during its second half there was increasing restlessness with attitudes that seemed dry as dust, prosaic, and confining. Under the influence of Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778) there grew up a cult of simplicity and "naturalness," and emotions of whatever kind—but particularly feelings of tenderness and pity on the one hand, and awe and agreeable terror on the other—began to be strenuously cultivated. Rousseau's real originality, understood at first by only a few, was to propose a radical antithesis between contemporary society and the true nature of man. He inverted the Christian doctrine of Original Sin, declaring that man's nature was in essence good, but had been corrupted by society—"vice and error, alien to man's constitution, are introduced into it from outside." Where society itself was concerned, Rousseau put great stress upon the notion of liberty: "To give up freedom is to give up one's human quality: to remove freedom from one's will is to remove all morality from one's actions.
To this was added another doctrine, which came not from France but from England, and which was in fact propagated by one of the chief opponents of Rousseau's political stance—the man who formulated it most clearly was the English philosopher and politician Edmund Burke (1729-1797). In 1756 Burke published his Philosophical Enquiry into the Nature of our Ideas on the Sublime and the Beautiful, where he discusses most of the aesthetic ideas that were to be fundamental to the Romantic Movement in the arts. Supporters of the classical ideal, deriving their ideas from ancient Greek and Roman writers, had always argued that what was most beautiful must also be clear and distinct. Turning this doctrine on its head, just as Rousseau had inverted the doctrine of Original Sin, Burke argued that it is in fact the infinite that is greatest and noblest—and this, by definition, must lack both clarity and distinctness. He added that we all know from experience that our imaginations are in fact most strongly affected by things that are only suggested, or half-revealed. His conclusion was that it is obscurity, at least to a certain degree, and not clarity, that hallmark of the most moving art.
These ideas were the foundation stones of all Romantic thinking, though others were to be added in due course. The first stirrings of the new attitude toward nature and the natural were in fact felt in England sometime before the publication of Burke's treatise or any of Rousseau's major writings. They manifested themselves not in painting, nor even in poetry, but in the shaping of
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