Romanticism Explained: Principles, History, and Catholic Insights
This is the second article in the series “The -Isms Encyclopedia: Historical and Philosophical Ideas Explained” by Mr. Phillip Campbell. Previously covered: Communism.
The words “romance” and “romantic” have gotten a lot of mileage in the English language. They seem to have so many meanings that they are difficult to pin down. Sometimes, it refers to romantic love, while other times, it refers to a language group and the countries where these languages are spoken. (The so-called “Romance” countries are places where derivatives of Latin are spoken.) It can also refer to a genre of medieval literature characterized by tales of adventure, chivalry, and courtly love.
During my year of art school in college, I was introduced to the terms Romantic and Romanticism in the context of a 19th-century artistic style. All I seemed to pick up during my art history studies was that the Romantics seemed to like painting stormy weather, and for many years, Romanticism remained a mystery to me, a gap in my historical knowledge. It was not until I started studying philosophy that I realized the true scope and import of the Romantic movement.
If you, too, have heard the words Romantic and Romanticism thrown around but aren’t sure what they mean, then this article is for you!
Wanderer in the Storm by Julius von Leypold, 1825
Principles of Romanticism
The first thing we must understand when discussing Romanticism is that it was a movement that spanned multiple elements of European-American culture from the late 18th through the mid-19th century. I was introduced to it as an artistic genre, but it was so much more. Romanticism was a movement that encompassed art, philosophy, and literature. Its impact was profound, and historians generally credit it with influencing the political upheavals that rocked Europe in 1848.
It will regrettably not be possible to exhaustively cover every aspect of Romanticism in a simple blog article, but we can trace out its fundamental principles:
Emotionalism
The Romantic movement is best understood as a reaction against the neo-classical rationalism of the preceding century. The Enlightenment of the 17th and 18th centuries elevated human reason as the ultimate determinant of value in every human endeavor. Things were seen to be better to the degree that they were “reasonable,” which generally meant demonstrable according to the principles of pure mathematics and logic. The rationalists of the 18th century tended to view reality as governed by a set of eternally unchanging principles that were discernible primarily through reason and mathematics.
The 19th-century Romantics reacted against this view of the world, which they saw as too mechanistic, impersonal, and dehumanizing. They argued that Enlightenment rationalism left little space for the intensity of feeling that made human existence interesting. The movement, therefore, stressed the role of emotions in human experience as a counterbalance to the rationalism of the previous generation. Romantic art and literature tried to capture the intensity of human passion, stressing the role emotions play in our thoughts and actions.
Sturm und Drang
In the literary world, Romanticism was especially prominent in the so-called Sturm und Drang movement (German for “storm and stress,” but we might loosely translate it as “turmoil”). Sturm und Drang was a style of literature that celebrated passion, freedom, and spontaneity. These works were often dramatic, exploring themes of rebellion, personal freedom, and the conflict between society and the individual. Many Sturm und Drang authors were deeply influenced by the philosophy of Jean-Jacuqes Rousseau, who had argued that society was a stultifying constraint on human freedom and that a person needed to discover his or her individuality through rebellion against society.
In a sense, the Sturm und Drang genre gave us the concept of the “anti-hero,” the literary protagonist characterized by defiance of social norms. Though there were many works in this mold, the most famous is undoubtedly the 1774 novel The Sorrows of Young Werther by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, a story of a love triangle and unrequited affection. The tragic tale ends with the protagonist shooting himself to resolve his conflicted emotions.
Sturm und Drang is sometimes considered a form of proto-Romanticism because it preceded the latter elements of Romanticism by several decades.
Conflict
Conflict is a fundamental idea of the Romantic vision. Whereas the previous generation had conceived of the world as progressing according to immutable principles of reason that operated with Newtonian precision, the Romantics held up the idea of conflict as the fundamental driver of development. The Romantics loved the notion of powerful forces clashing against one another, with new creations emerging as a result of the conflict. Romantic paintings demonstrate this tendency with their storm-tossed seas, blustering clouds, and turbulent landscapes.
One of the most influential philosophers of the Romantic era was Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770-1831), whose philosophy of dialectical change held that progress arises through the resolution of conflicting forces. As mentioned above, the period’s literature explored themes of emotional turmoil. It is no coincidence that the theory of Darwinian evolution took off during this era. Darwin’s emphasis on species clashing against one another in a fight for survival, which only the fittest would endure, suited the zeitgeist of the age.
Nature
The Romantics tended to follow the Rousseauean view of human society as a corrupting influence on mankind. They thus idealized natural settings, the wilderness, country life, and agrarianism. Wildernesses untouched by the hand of man were a favorite theme of Romantic painters; Romantic authors often set their novels in small country towns or even withdrew to such country retreats to write them. The Romantic era also saw a burst of interest in the Middle Ages, which spawned notable works such as Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe and Alfred Lord Tennyson’s Idylls of the King.
The Middle Ages were so enthralling because they represented an agrarian, pre-industrial society, which the Romantics considered more in tune with the individualist nature of mankind. For the Romantics, nature is an experience, not an object for manipulation and study. Once experienced, the individual becomes in tune with his feelings, which in turn helps him “discover himself” and find his moral values. The Romantic authors are responsible for the “Noble Savage” trope, the idealization of man in the state of nature.
The Sublime
Finally, we must mention the sublime. While philosophy had consistently recognized beauty, the Romantic era brought the observation of something called the sublime, which was distinct from beauty. The sublime is the quality of greatness. The term especially refers to greatness beyond all possibility of calculation, measurement, or imitation—this experience of the sublime fascinated philosophers and artists. The experience of the sublime in the face of the wonders of nature was held to be the ultimate aesthetic experience. An example of the sublime would be the feelings one has standing before the immensity of the ocean or gazing upon a majestic mountain peak.
Who’s Who
Because the Romantic movement was so broad, it is difficult to comprehensively list its adherents. We must suffice with a very brief sketch of the most notable figures across the different elements of the movement.
Romanticism is well-represented among 19th-century English-language poets and includes such figures as William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, John Keats, Lord Byron, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and William Blake. In German, the litterateur Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832) stand preeminent (though Goethe later repudiated Romanticism), along with the poet Heinrich Heine. Notable French Romantic authors were Victor Hugo, Lamartine, and Baudelaire.
In music, the Romantics boast some of the most notable composers of the 19th century, including Frédéric Chopin, Felix Mendelssohn, Franz Liszt, Schubert, Schumann, Brahms, Tchaikovsky, and Richard Wagner, whose “Ring cycle” of is considered the operatic exemplification of the Romantic spirit.
In the field of art, Eugene Delacroix, Francisco Goya, and William Blake are notable examples. In the United States, an excellent representative of Romantic painting is Frederic Edwin Church (1826-1900), part of the so-called Hudson River School of Painting, a school of artists who focused on dramatic landscapes on large canvases.
The two fathers of Romantic philosophy are Hegel and Rousseau, both of whom influenced an entire generation of thinkers, including Friedrich Schiller, Friedrich Schlegel, Johann Fichte, Thomas Carlyle, and many others. The influence of Hegel and Rousseau on 19th-century philosophy is difficult to overstate; even Karl Marx was heavily influenced by Hegel and the Romantics.
Frederic Edwin Church’s 1862 “Cotapaxi” depicts the eruption of the volcano of the same name in Ecuador
From a Catholic Perspective
Romanticism can be challenging to assess from a Catholic perspective because we can find in it things both admirable and erroneous. On the one hand, the Romantics produced great works of art. Chopin and Liszt’s piano nocturnes are some of the most beautiful pieces of music ever penned. At the same time, I’ve yet to meet anyone who doesn’t appreciate the beautiful, often fantastical landscapes created by painters like Frederic Church and Thomas Cole.
Furthermore, Catholics may see the Romantics as allies against the cold rationalism of the atheists and Deists of the 18th century, the same people whose commitment to “reason” led them to stick nuns in the guillotine during the French Revolution. We may also sympathize with the Romantics’ conviction that the human experience is transcendent and cannot be reduced to mere material considerations. It also reintroduced the concept of the beautiful into Western philosophy, which had been diminished by the rationalism of the 18th century.
That being said, we must be careful because Romanticism is prone to its own extremes. Goethe, the author of The Sorrows of Young Werther, later repudiated Romanticism and said it was “everything that is sick.” Ideas tend to move like a pendulum, and if Enlightenment rationalism was too coldly reductivist, Romanticism could veer too far towards emotionalism, elevating passionate experience into an idol that becomes an end in itself. The Romantic worldview is fundamentally subjective, excessively emphasizing what the subject feels and experiences rather than what is true or good. The Romantics strongly glorified the “rugged individual,” the one who finds his own way by rejecting the pressures of society and doing what “feels right” in pursuit of the experience of the sublime.
In the Homeschool Connections Catalog
There are several Homeschool Connections high school courses that cover Romanticism, directly or indirectly:
Monsters of Romanticism: Frankenstein and Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde with Dr. Henry Russell
Revolution: The Progress of Liberalism with Phillip Campbell
Modern European History 1789-1990 with Phillip Campbell
Dracula by Bram Stoker with Eleanor Nicholson
Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë with Eleanor Nicholson
The Bronte Sisters with Eleanor Nicholson
The Victorian Detective with Eleanor Nicholson
Gothic Book Club with Eleanor Nicholson
Conclusion
While we may admire certain aspects of Romanticism, its tendencies of Romanticism to exalt emotions, reject social norms, and ground moral values in subjective personal experience are incompatible with Catholic notions of virtue, community, and the objective nature of the moral good. Catholics have thus tended to respond well to Romanticism as in its artistic and literary aspects while rejecting the philosophical basis of the movement. The emergence of Romanticism in the aftermath of the Enlightenment testifies to the pendulum nature of human ideals—that the excesses of one generation tend to produce opposite excesses in the next. Moderation requires us to avoid getting carried away with the zeitgeist of any generation.
What are your thoughts on this topic? Join me and other homeschooling parents at our Homeschool Connections Community or our Facebook group to continue the discussion.
Editor’s Note: This is the second in a series, “The -Isms Encyclopedia: Historical and Philosophical Ideas Explained” by Mr. Phillip Campbell. Next up will be Utilitarianism.
