RomanticismThe Free Heart

• Influences• The Sublime

The Free and Independent Individual

• “I am a citizen of the world; I am not at the service of the emperor, nor of the king of France, but simply at the service of truth, who is my sole queen; I have taken no oath but of obedience to her; I am her devoted knight. (Pierre Bayle, Huguenot, 1697; qtd. in “Bayle on the Chronicler’s Duty”).

• “I write as a citizen of the world who serves no prince. I lost my fatherland to exchange it for the great world” (Friedrich Schiller, 1784; qtd. in Catlin 475).

Rooted in Pascal and Rousseau

• Pascal: “The heart has its reasons of which reason knows nothing”

• Rousseau: “Man is born free; and everywhere he is in chains. One thinks himself the master of others, and still remains a greater slave than they” (The Social Contract, 1762)

Major influences on Romanticism

• Jean-Jacque Rousseau: The unique, naturally free individual

• Edmund Burke: The Sublime

• Johann Wolfgang von Goethe: Passion over reason

Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778; Swiss)• The Confessions: points toward Romanticism

(intense personal expression):

“I am commencing an undertaking, hitherto without precedent, and which will never find an imitator. I desire to set before my fellows the likeness of a man in all the truth of nature, and that man myself.

Myself alone! I know the feelings of my heart, and I know men. I am not made like any of those I have seen; I venture to believe that I am not made like any of those who are in existence. If I am not better, at least I am different” (qtd. in Benton and DiYanni 293).

– In the first sentence Rousseau pronounces his uniqueness. So also did Descartes. Descartes hoped to establish truth, Rousseau only to establish himself.

“The summer of that year [1749] was excessively hot. Vincennes is some six miles from Paris. In no condition to pay for cabs, I walked there at two in the afternoon when I was alone, and I went fast so as to arrive early. The trees along the road, always lopped according to the custom of the country, hardly gave any shade; and often I was so prostrated with heat and weariness that I lay down on the ground, unable to go further. One day I took the Mercure de France and, glancing through it as I walked, I came upon the question propounded by the Dijon Academy for the next year’s prize: Has the progress of the sciences and arts done more to corrupt morals or improve them? The moment I read this I beheld another universe and became another man.”Rousseau’s Confessions, quoted in Blanning 515

Edmund Burke and the Sublime(1729-1797)

• Burke today is the historical figurehead of conservatism (in the US).

• He is noted for his Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790). – Yet in his political ideas, he did not bow to grand-sweeping theories of

“what ought to be” • “It is precisely abstract political theory and attempts to impose analytic

and systematic projections on the essentially irrational, instinctual, contingent flux of human affairs which the counter revolutionary scorns and repudiates” (Steiner, cited in Introduction to Burke, Philosophical Inquiry ix).

– Burke relied on the virtue of prudence, the application of which is indicative of a certain healthy skepticism. Indeed, this disposition revealed itself in his early work on the Sublime, the “terrible uncertainty” . . .

Edmund Burke and the Sublime• Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and

Beautiful (1757): insight by means of feeling. – “It is an experience of intolerable but inescapable scepticism, what Burke calls ‘terrible

uncertainty’” (Phillips’ Introduction to Burke’s Philosophical Inquiry xxii).

• Manifestations of the sublime:– “Astonishment”– “Terror”– “Obscurity”– “Power”– “Privation” – “Vacuity, Darkness, Solitude and Silence”– “Vastness”– “Infinity”– “Suddenness” (incl. violent storms)– “Cries of animals”– “Sound and loudness”

• Pain and pleasure can both be positive and are not necessarily opposites; he notes the way dramatic tragedy affects people

“I think there are reasons in nature why the obscure idea, when properly conveyed, should be more affecting than the clear. It is our ignorance of things that causes all our admiration, and chiefly excites our passions. Knowledge and acquaintance make the most striking causes affect but little. . . . The ideas of eternity, and infinity, are among the most affecting we have, and yet perhaps there is nothing of which we really understand so little, as of infinity and eternity” (Burke 57).

Recall Pascal: “The eternal silence of these infinite spaces fills me with dread” (Pensée 201).

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832): The Reaction of the Sturm und Drang (Storm and Stress)

• The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774)– Against religion and reason, Werther commits suicide

• Influenced by Burke’s On the Sublime• Goethe was also greatly influenced by Gottfried Herder,

who dispensed with Enlightenment standards, and instead “found nature in folklore as the voice of the people, in Gothic architecture with its myriad imaginative forms, in Shakespeare's plays and in the sublime” (Fleming 476).

• Faust (Part 1, 1808; a play): The one who sold his soul in the pursuit of knowledge. Faust is torn between reason and romance. Faust ruins himself through the pursuit of knowledge. He finds that “only by seeking for the unattainable can the divine spark ignite and illuminate the course of human existence” (Fleming 476).

Romanticism = heightened Enlightenment individualism and freedom

• Emerges with the Renaissance – e.g., Michelangelo secretly inscribed his name on the Pieta when he heard it

ascribed to someone else.• And with the Reformation

– What must I do to be saved?• Finds a place in the history of Enlightenment philosophy

– e.g., Descartes, Locke, Hume, Kant • Finds a place in the development of Baroque music

– The concerto form as a play between structure and innovation/invention (cf. later jazz music)

• The ensemble and the soloist; unison vs. individual expression• Looking forward:

– Compliance vs. self-expression– Form vs. freedom

• Order vs. chaos– Form without freedom = a prison– Freedom without form = chaos

– Leads back to the issue of the One and the Many• How is a person to be distinguished from the rest of the Many?• The “Many” itself has become an enormous “One.”• Is there a place for the individual any longer?

Characteristics of Romanticism• A reaction against Neoclassicism/Enlightenment as artificial and unfeeling.• Celebrated the “unbounded and untamed” (Matthews and Platt 461); promoted

the sublime, feeling, emotion, imagination and intuition; there are some things Reason cannot reveal (Pascal)

• Characteristics of Romanticism:– An attitude rather than a style.– Not just merely the importance of the individual (Renaissance), but the triumph of

the individual.– Originality, not virtuosity (Renaissance), is important; “The true original”;

Imagination.– Freedom over form; freedom of form. Individual importance in the ever-increasing

universe.– A reaction to the precision, even desire, for certainty:

“The aesthetic faculty is . . . [no longer] the prisoner of the ‘clear and distinct.’ Allowed for indeterminacy . . .The aesthetic imagination takes fire and develops only in the presence of something that is not yet fully defined or thought” (Cassirer, qtd. in Benton and DiYanni 256).

– Emphasis on, even glorification of, the self (Rousseau), but not in a Cartesian sense.– The artist/writer as the new visionary; universal genius/prophet (cf. Beethoven)– Democratic spirit. Often reflected the values of the French Revolution. Anti-

institutional; desires social and political change.• As a reaction to Enlightenment optimism, artists noted “man’s

inhumanity to man.”

Romanticism and Nature• Emphasis on, and reverence of, nature, but not in a Newtonian sense. This

emphasis on nature includes a study of the sublime: Untamed and even terrifying aspects of nature:– “wild and awesome aspects of nature – tempests and torrents [storms and

rough seas], impenetrable forests, mountain avalanches, and Alpine scenery” (Fleming 476).

• Prized the “irrational” and “idiosyncratic” (Swafford 196). Walter Pater noted Romanticism involves “the addition of strangeness to beauty” (qtd. in ibid. 197)

• The Folk, Folklore Nationalism later on• As a reaction against Enlightenment optimism, art portrayed man’s

inhumanity to man (e.g., Goya, Gericault, Delacroix), and the corrupting nature of reason (Blake)

• A reaction to the Industrial Revolution• Championed heroism, especially on the part of the downtrodden: “The

bohemians identified with others they saw as victims of the bourgeois order: the poor, the criminals, the ethnic and racial outcasts” (Brooks, Bobos in Paradise 68)

• Fleeting Joy; clouds often symbolize this, and Chopin’s etudes reflect the floating-about nature of existence.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Gothic• Gothic was the name given to certain medieval architecture considered

barbaric• But Goethe was aesthetically moved by Strasbourg Cathedral• He wrote “Concerning German Architecture”

– “Any idea that beauty could be found by joining schools, adopting principles or following rules was emphatically rejected: they were so many chains enslaving insight and energy. The ghastly good taste, harmony and purity demanded by classical aesthetics did violence to nature’s untamed spontaneity” (qtd. in Blanning).

– Goethe: “The only true art is characteristic art. If its influence arises from deep, harmonious independent feeling, from feeling peculiar to itself, oblivious, yes, ignorant of everything foreign, then it is whole and living, whether it be born from crude savagery or cultured sentiment” (qtd. in Blanning).

– Writes Blanning, “The crucial adjective is ‘characteristic’ (karakteristische), by which he meant art which grows naturally and spontaneously from the culture within which it is produced, not something that has been imitated. . . . [Strasbourg Cathedral] had been produced on German soil ‘in authentically German times’.”

Blanning 517-8

William Blake(1757-1827)

• Artist and poet; the poet as prophet• A reaction to the Enlightenment

– Attacks Natural Religion (i.e., Deism), Newton’s mechanistic universe, and Urizen.

• In There is No Natural Religion, Blake’s target was Deism:“If it were not for the Poetic or Prophetic character the Philosophic & Experimental would soon be at the ratio of all things, & stand still, unable to do other than repeat the same dull round over again. He who sees the Infinite in all things sees God. He who sees the Ratio only sees himself only.”

• Sublime view of nature: “I can look at the knot in a piece of wood until it frightens me” (qtd. in Johnson, Birth of the Modern 591).

• Emphasis on the individual. The painter Joshua Reynolds had said that generalizing was the key to good art; Blake countered, saying, “to particularize is the only merit” (qtd. in EB).

• Songs of Innocence (1789) and [vs.] Songs of Experience (1794): Focuses on two contrary states of the human soul.

• Champion of human rights and met Thomas Paine; Reacted against the Industrial Revolution and “man’s inhumanity to man.”

• He also believed in the beatific state of consciousness in childhood.

Urizenby William Blake

Urizen = Your Reason

(Gnostic cosmology in the background)

Immanuel Kant and German Idealism• Kant attempted to save religion from science, but for Kant religion was

ethics, which is in the realm of intuition Romanticism

“Though it disabled the rationalism and empiricism of the eighteenth century, the Kantian revolution did not [undo] the self that had moved under the power of Enlightenment philosophy and science. After Kant, that self would soar with new wings – those of the recently discovered faculty of the imagination. It is important, however, to remember that, at least for Kant, this active, creative self was not an isolated ‘I’ but the ‘transcendental ego’ of humanity imposing its forms upon the random facts of experience . . . [quoting Behler] ‘It was not until Kant that the realm of aesthetics assumed its own right . . . Romanticism brought about a new appreciation of artistic creation – a glorification of creative imagination – and made the artist a spokesman for the godhead, an orphic seer, and prophetic priest’” (qtd. in Lundin, The Culture of Interpretation 50).

Art is becoming personally expressive, not just mimetic.

Schiller’s “Ode to Joy”translation by Aaron Green

• “O friends, no more these sounds! Let us sing more cheerful songs, more full of joy!”– In Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony

Interests of Romanticism• The Sublime• Nature (especially its unpredictable aspects)• Gothic architecture• Childhood

– Critical of the effects of civilization• Compares favorably with later lyric:

– “A child is born with a heart of gold; the way of the world makes his heart grow cold” (Earth, Wind and Fire, “That’s the Way of the World”)

• The Heroic– The heroic individual– Promethean people admired

• See C. S. Lewis and Promethean nature of evolution: “The Funeral of a Great Myth” in Christian Reflections: Most of the essay can now be found here: http://fpb.livejournal.com/297710.html

• To end tragically is to end heroically

– Often the artist or the outcast is heroic• Nationalism

– Nazis and romanticism

Kant’s scheme (simplified and abbreviated)

Noumenal realm(God, the self, and the Ding an sich;

beyond the senses and reason = non-empirical and non-rational)

_____________________________

Phenomenal realm(world of experience; known through the reason with the mind’s a priori

transcendental forms (e.g., space and time) and transcendental categories (e.g., quantity, quality,

and relation, which incl. causality)

G. F. W. Hegel: a philosophy for Romantics

• Hegel collapsed Kant’s upper story into Kant’s lower story.– The divine (spirit) marches progressively to its ultimate

realization in the realm of the phenomenal world.– The process involves an ongoing dialectic: a thesis is acted

upon by its antithesis, resulting in a new synthesis.• This process continues within the continuous unfolding of the

divine within the world; strife and conflict are a part of the divine unfolding

• It would later be secularized within the economic theory of Karl Marx

Early English Romantic Poets• The Lake Poets: The language of poetry should be

natural (democratic impulse); utilized folk idioms.– William Wordsworth (1770-1850)

• “I wondered lonely as a cloud”• “My heart leaps up when I behold / A rainbow in the sky; / So

was it when my life began / So is it now I am a man / So be it when I shall grow old, / Or let me die! / The child is father of the man” – Wordsworth, “My Heart Leaps Up”

– Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834)• With Wordsworth, wrote Lyrical Ballads (1798)• Rime of the Ancient Mariner (1798)• Outstanding mind that suffered at one time from opium addition

(overcome by 1815). Believed in the individual and society. Despised slavery and the neglect of the working poor.

• John Keats (1795-1820)

Two radical English poets• Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822)

– Husband of Mary Shelley– The “Eton atheist.” Against oppression and injustice.– “Ode to the West Wind”: the poet as “unacknowledged legislator of

the world”• Likened himself to the wind

– Growing up, his family feared him (proclivity to violence)– Sexually liberated – First wife (Harriet) committed suicide– His second wife, Mary Godwin Shelley, wrote Frankenstein

• Lord Byron (1788-1824; fig. 28.1)– Like Shelley, overturned certain values– Rebellious

Women Romantic authors• George Sand (1804-1876):

– Dressed in male attire. Romantic as social activist (1848 uprising)– Indiana (1832) – Lélia (1833)– One-time lover of Chopin, the composer

• The Brontë sisters (Emily, Charlotte, Anne): – Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights: Byronic Heathcliff; Gothic – Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre. Overall, no move toward social action

• Mary Godwin Shelley (1797-1851): Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus (1818). – Published when she was about 19 years old; classic Gothic novel – The pursuit of knowledge regardless of cost; compares favorably to

Goethe’s Faust– Owed much to Wordsworth and Coleridge (Rime of the Ancient

Mariner) for descriptions of nature (OCEL 372).

American Transcendentalism• American literary expression of Romanticism that revolves

around Concord, Mass.– Influenced by European Romanticism, Swedenborg, Boehme, and

eastern religious literature, as well as Kant and Plato. – Religion is part of the picture. – Descendants of the New England puritans who had not given up the

City on a Hill vision, but jettisoned the underlying doctrinal foundation.

– Nature vs. industrial economy. – Tremendous influence. – More devoted to the simple life and nature than the European

Romantics (also less nihilistic).

American Transcendentalism• Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882)

– Rejected puritan roots; former Unitarian minister. Considered himself a poet.

• Went to Europe in 1832, meeting Wordsworth (who influenced him in reverence for nature), Coleridge, and Thomas Carlyle (who became a life-long friend).

• Influenced by Coleridge and Herder, he was a romantic who espoused social action, including anti-slavery, cessation of the relocation of the Cherokee nation, and women’s rights.

• Democratic ideals permeated his thinking.– Believed in unmediated access and apprehension of divinity

(Transcendentalism), and espoused self-emancipation through self-trust and self-acceptance

– Emersonian individualism stands against social conformity. – Walden Pond was on his property.– Writings include Nature (1936), “Self-Reliance,” and the famous

Harvard Divinity School address. – Circle of friends included Thoreau, Carlyle, Margaret Fuller, Bronson

Alcott, and Whitman.

American Transcendentalism

• Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862):Walden and On the Duty of Civil Disobedience– America’s best and best-known prose essayist. – Described himself as “a mystic, a transcendentalist, and a natural

philosopher to boot.” Famous for his “experiment in self-sufficiency” (OCEL 990).

• Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804-1864)– Good friend of Melville. Half-willing follower of Transcendentalists;

questioned Emersonian optimism. Called Melville’s symbolic novel “Romance.”

• Bronson Alcott: Father of Louisa May Alcott

Walt Whitman(1819-1892)

• Influenced by Emerson. • Volunteered as a hospital worker during the Civil

War. • Wrote Leaves of Grass (1855), containing the famous

poem “Song of Myself.”

Works Cited

• “Bayle on the Chronicler’s Duty.” Harper’s Magazine. The Harper’s Magazine Foundation, 23 Aug. 2008. Web. 3 June 2012. <http://harpers.org/archive/2008/08/hbc-90003271>.

• Barzun, Jacques. From Dawn to Decadence, 1500 to the Present: 500 Years of Western Cultural Life. New York: HarperCollins, 2000. Print.

• Benton, Janetta, and Robert DiYanni. Arts and Culture: An Introduction to the Humanities. Volume II. Upper Saddle River: Prentice Hall, 1998. Print.

• Blanning, Tim. The Pursuit of Glory: Europe, 1648-1815. New York: Penguin, 2008. Print.

• Brooks, David. Bobos in Paradise: The New Upper Class and How They Got There. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2000. Print.

• Burke, Edmund. A Philosophical Inquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful. Ed. Adam Phillips. Oxford: Oxford

University Press, 1990. Print.

Works Cited (continued)

• Blake, William. The Ancient of Days [Urizen]. 1794. Europe: A Prophecy. In Blake’s Poetry and Designs. By Mary Lynn Johnson and John E. Grant, eds. New York: Norton Critical Editions, 1979. Plate 17.

Print.• Catlin, George. The Story of the Political Philosophers. New York: McGraw-

Hill, 1939. Whitefish: Kessinger, 2005. Google Books. Web. 3 June 2012.

• Encyclopedia Britannica. 15th ed. 1991. All formats.• Fleming, William. Arts & Ideas. 9th ed. Fort Worth: Harcourt Brace College

Publishers, 1995. Print.• Johnson, Paul. Birth of the Modern: World Society 1815-1830. New York:

HarperCollins, 1991. Print.• Lundin, Roger. The Culture of Interpretation: Christian Faith and the

Postmodern World. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1993. Print.• Matthews, Roy T., and F. DeWitt Platt. The Western Humanities. 4th ed.

Mountain View: Mayfield, 2001. Print.

Works Cited (continued)

• Oxford Companion to English Literature, The [OCEL]. Ed. Margaret Drabble. Rev. ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995. Print.

• Rousseau, Jean-Jacques. The Social Contract. Book 1. Constitution Society. Constitution Society, 1995-2011. Web. 20 May 2012.

<http://www.constitution.org/jjr/socon_01.htm• Swafford, Jan. The Vintage Guide to Classical Music. New York: Vintage,

1992. Print.• Wordsworth, William. “My Heart Leaps Up.” POETS.org. American

Academy of Poets, 1997-2012. Web. 3 June 2012. <http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/16084>.