Romanticism

Abstract

For most historians, “Romanticism” describes several coterminous movements, not always in agreement, in England and much of Europe between the early 1780s and the late 1830s (with American variations coming somewhat later) that encompassed literature, the visual arts, music, philosophy, criticism, and even political reform. These movements shared a renewed “faith” in the transformative and emotional power of the individual and collective imaginations generally reminiscent of “the marvelous, the imaginative, and the unashamedly fictitious” in the old narrative “romances” of “the Middle Ages and the Renaissance” (Eichner 1972: 11). Since Cervantes' Don Quixote (1605, 1615) had parodied the conventions of medieval quest romance, the adjective “romantic,” first used in the West around 1650, was often employed pejoratively and connected with the “improbability of the world of romance,” given the latter's penchant for supernatural interventions into earthly endeavors and the exaggerations of “normal” human behavior in its idyllic adventures (Eichner 1972: 4–5). But certain positive associations connected with “romantic” (such as “extravagantly devoted, chivalrous, [faithfully] naïve”) never really died out, and these became linked quite positively, in the course of the eighteenth century, with the “picturesque” of the landscape painters of France and Italy – for many the “regions of romance” from which the old quests came – ranging from Nicholas Poussin (1594–1665) to Claude Lorrain (1600–82) and Salvator Rosa (1615–73) (Eichner 1972: 5–8). This sort of “picturesque,” in which ruins and figures from legend often appeared in intensifications of the current natural world, combined a “sense of the past” always lingering nostalgically with “intimations of the infinite” that lent “spiritual” suggestions to an already idealized physicality (Eichner 1972: 8). By 1749–50, then, the poet William Collins in England could describe as explicitly “romantic” the scenes he previews for a fellow poet from Scotland as the latter journeys home: “‘Tis Fancy's land to which thou sett'st thy feet; / Where still, ‘tis said, the faery people meet / Beneath each birken shade on mead and hill” and “Such airy beings awe the untutored swain” that “thy sweet muse [can] the rural faith sustain” (Collins, “Ode on the Popular Superstitions of the Highlands of Scotland” in Clery and Miles 2000: 41–6).