Romanticism, understood as a new set of ideas, a mindset, and a way of feeling, emerged in Western Europe around the mid-18th century and subsequently spread globally, profoundly influencing perspectives on nature, children, love, sex, money, and work.
It is best seen as a reaction against the birth of the modern world, characterised by industrialisation, urbanisation, secularisation, and Consumerism. This movement is part of a "high ideal of love elaborated in Western Europe," stretching from 12th-century courtly love to 19th-century romanticism.
Key Aspects of Romanticism and its Origins:
- ##### Emphasis on Natural Goodness and Emotion:
Romanticism elevated the natural goodness, spontaneity, and wisdom of children, as exemplified by Jean-Jacques Rousseau's book Emile (published in May 1762), which argued against the oppressive adult world and for practices like maternal breast-feeding, a first sustained argument for this in Western civilisation.
Against an increasingly rational, scientific, and bureaucratic world, Rousseau championed the child as a "seat of creativity and genius," representing purity and freedom from adult discipline. This marked a shift in Western history, directing "glamour" towards innocence and natural freedom rather than reason and adult self-control.
- ##### The Sensitive, Doomed Hero:
The cult that grew around the young poet Thomas Chatterton, who ended his life in August 1770 because his poetry was rejected and his family pressured him to become a lawyer, became an important emblem for romantics.
He personified the "sensitive, doomed person often an artist rejected by a cruel, vulgar world," a figure that influenced later romantic heroes such as Byron, Keats, Van Gogh, and even later figures like Jim Morrison and Amy Winehouse.
- ##### Passionate Love over Rationality:
Goethe's The Sorrows of Young Werther, published in 1774, became a quintessential romantic love story. It depicted Werther's passionate, impossible love for a married woman, Charlotte, and his eventual suicide due to the "impulses of his heart".
Goethe, a "founding father of Romanticism," encouraged sympathy for Werther, privileging dramatic emotional outpouring over traditional concerns like class or money. This work, a generation's most popular novel, championed the idea that following one's heart is always "right and noble," with disastrous outcomes merely proving the heartlessness of the "sensible world".
- ##### The Irrational and Limits of Reason:
Francisco Goya's 1798 image, "The Sleep of Reason Brings out Monsters," captured the romantic interest in the "limits of reason and the power of the irrational" over the human mind.
Romanticism expressed sympathy for madness and a "vengeful attitude towards bombastic claims as to the triumph of rationality, science and logic". This aligns with the overall romantic defence of "the irrational, the untrained, the exotic, the childlike and the naive" as the world became more technological and rational.
- ##### Nature Against Industry:
William Wordsworth, who moved into Dove Cottage in the Lake District in December 1799, wrote poetry celebrating the natural world – daffodils, oak trees, clouds, butterflies, and rivers – that charmed Europe.
His work contained an "abiding hatred for everything mechanical and industrial," leading him and his followers to oppose a railway line through the Lake District, seeing it as a symbol of "hated technology". Romantics like Wordsworth spoke for the natural and a simple life at a time when Britain was being covered in new, monstrous industrial cities.
- ##### Sublime Nature and Spirituality:
American painter Thomas Cole, in September 1829, depicted majestic scenes like Niagara Falls, where man appears "lost and puny by comparison". Romantics, while they may not necessarily believe in God, sought to find the emotions once associated with religion in the "big wide-open spaces of nature," finding relief from city life in natural grandeur that "transcends all human achievements and concerns".
- ##### Return to the Past:
The rebuilding of the British Parliament in April 1847, designed by Augustus Pugin, deliberately mimicked a medieval style, with suits of armour and angels. Pugin argued its nobility came from harking back to a "pre-industrial past," before the country became "obsessed... with money or technology".
This began a "cult of the Middle Ages" within romanticism, identifying nobility in a world of knights and castles, contrasting it with modern factories and shopping arcades.
- ##### The _Flâneur_ and Lack of Practicality:
Charles Baudelaire's 1863 prose poem celebrated the flâneur – a casual wanderer observing city life without a job – admiring his "playfulness and lack of practicality". For Baudelaire, this figure was a "prince" compared to the "boring wage slaves" of capitalism.
- ##### Escape from Civilisation:
Paul Gauguin's 1891 journey to Tahiti, seeking to escape the artificial and conventional, symbolised a core romantic belief that "civilisation is what has made us sick".
The Clash of Cultures: Romanticism vs. Hebrew Tradition:
The romantic ideal of love as a "mystical encounter with the eternal feminine" had a profound influence on European culture. However, this ideal is foreign to Jewish culture, primarily due to the absence of faith in the "immortality of the soul" and a Materialistic Jewish anthropology.
Romanticism fostered a deep appreciation for the irrational, nature, individual emotion, and an idealised form of feminine love, linking back to ancient Goddess worship and medieval courtly traditions, it faced opposition from a specific cultural viewpoint, particularly within certain Jewish intellectual circles, which, influenced by figures like Sigmund Freud, saw the romantic ideal as alien and sought to undermine it.