Part I

The first part of the 18th century had radiated with intellect and optimism. Educated men had faith in the power of Reason. But as the century wore on, Reason proved not enough. Man's eyes, ears, and imagination told him that there was a side to life beyond the intellect and Reason. Reason did not explain his longings or his passions, his dreams or his nightmares.

During the “enlightened” 18th century Reason gradually gave way to the passions and frenzy of emotion. The dreams of Reason beget monsters. By the end of the 18th century, out of the Enlightenment, Romanticism was born! The Romantic Age was a time of turbulent emotions. Men were fascinated by the fantastic and the sublime. They yearned for the distant past and distant lands. Even in religious scenes, the calm Reason of earlier periods gave way to frenzied emotion. Here we see Christ and his disciples on the Sea of Galilee.

Reason gave way to storm and stress. It gave way to a strong sense of the mysterious and the power of the imagination. Above all, Romanticism was the overflow of emotions. Even madmen became subjects of portraiture. The political ideals of the Enlightenment had been Unity and Indivisibil­ity, Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity. By the late 18th century, these ideals stirred men to an emotional fervour. It drove them to action.

First, political action. Then, physical action. And finally, on July 14, 1789, an angry mob stormed the Bastille! This was Revolution! This was Romanticism in action! With the French Revolution and the downfall of the aristocracy, the common man emerged. With the downfall of the aristocracy, nations emerged with patriotic fervour. Here is a detail from Liberty Leading the People by Delacroix.

Liberty is represented as a Roman goddess. Violence! The people storm the barricades in the streets – and Delacroix used a violent technique. His paint flows with passion across the canvas. His very style was emotional – impassioned and Romantic.

A child of the French Revolution, Napoleon proclaimed himself savior of the ideals of the Revolution and of France. He was the Romantic hero – brilliant and bold, brooding, temperamental, precocious, and misunderstood by the world he tried to save. Here he fearlessly touches a man consumed by the plague, much as Christ laid healing hands upon the lepers. But the stormy young general soon displayed imperial ambitions. His official court painter, Jacques-Louis David, painted this immense coronation scene. Now, the Emperor, Napoleon, is himself placing the crown upon the head of his empress, Josephine. The ideals of the French Republic were quickly exchanged for those of the court of the new Napoleonic Empire. Napoleon soon plunged Europe into a bloodbath, which washed away many of the constructive consequences of the French Revolution.

His Spanish conquests were recorded by the painter Goya. Here we see the horror and hopelessness as a faceless firing-squad shot down patriotic Spanish citizens. In the arts, as in the times, the emotion-laden Romantic spirit was in full force. Just as political revolution was an expression of Romanticism so in a sense, was the Industrial Revolution. The new growth of industry stemmed originally from the scientific interests of the Enlightenment. But it was further fertilized by a profound faith in progress on the part of the Romantics.

Scientific experiments were converted into spooky melodrama by the Romantic artists – Benjamin Franklin discovering electricity, for example, an early experiment in flying, or the excavation of a prehistoric monster. During the 19th century, industrial developments spread their smoking chimneys across the face of every nation. This was melodrama of a more serious kind, frequently dramatized by the Romantic artist.

For although a few men benefited from this new wealth, to many industry brought slums and suffering. To many of the Romantics, the Industrial Revolution defiled the beauties of the natural landscape. With more optimism the British painter Turner integrated aspects of the new technology into his Romantic art. A locomotive hurtles across a bridge in the swirling mist of a rainstorm. Because of its mood of melancholy, this Turner painting is particularly Romantic. The fighting Temeraire, towed to her last resting place, contrasts the old with the new. The man-of-war, from an earlier and more Romantic era, is being towed to her destruction by a symbol of the new age, a small black tugboat belching smoke.

Both the industrial age and political revolutions created a crowded urban environment which caused the poets to say: “The world is too much with us!” From such a world, they escaped into Nature. Many men, such as Thoreau in America, longed for the simple rustic life. There, among the pastoral beauties of nature, they could escape all revolutions, political and industrial. The poets who “wandered lonely as a cloud” communed with the wisdom of Nature, which was for them far greater than the book learning of the Enlightenment. Said Wordsworth: “Enough of Science and of Art. Close up those barren leaves...” – meaning books. And elsewhere he wrote: “Books! ‘Tis a dull and endless strife. Come, hear the woodland linnet. How sweet his music! On my life there's more of wisdom in it.” For the Romantic poet or artist, alone in Nature, it was not the intellect, which mattered. The important things were feelings and emotions. Wordsworth defined poetry as “the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings” and “emotion recollected in tranquility”. That same sense of Nature, which seems to overwhelm mere man, fills Beethoven's “Pastoral” symphony. Listen as you look at these Romantic landscapes. Do you sense the painter's emotional response to nature – the “spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings” – to which Wordsworth referred?

Part II

The yearning for other times and other places sent the imaginations of the Romantics to exotic lands – to the mountains of Arabia, to Turkish baths, to the Algerian casbah, to ancient Assyrian orgies. Some built Chinese pagodas. This English resort pavilion, with its exotic Indian architecture, was built by the Prince Regent of England in 1815. It aptly fits the description of the Romantic poet Coleridge:

In Xanadu did Kubla Khan a stately pleasure dome decree,

Where Alph, the sacred river, ran

Through caverns measureless to man

Down to a sunless sea?

Further along in this same poem, Coleridge describes:

That deep romantic chasm which slanted

Down the green hill athwart a cedarn cover!

A savage place: … And from this chasm,

With ceaseless turmoil seeth­ing...

A mighty fountain momently was forced.

It was in such terms that the Romantics created imaginative and exotic worlds of fancy. And if it was not the faraway, such as the war then going on in Greece, then the long-ago served as well. The artist charges this imaginary scene of classical antiquity with the drama of a stormy primordial sky.

Architecture of bygone eras was often imitated during the 18th and 19th centuries and was a favorite theme of painters. They concocted romantic scenes of classical antiquity and the Gothic Age. Even Baroque architecture was copied and enlarged upon – the 19th-century Opera in Paris, for example. And since the Romantics loved ruins, this Gothic church was purposely left in a crumbled state. This garden house was actually built to resemble a broken, ancient column. Here, a classical temple was set into an artificial rustic cave. The Romantics delighted in craggy ruins. Here the imagination could generate a fantasy life endlessly rich and dream-like.

Although he affirmed the brotherhood of all mankind, the acutely sensi­tive Romantic man felt himself to be alone in a vast and measureless world. He glorified sunsets and moonlight!

What kind of men were the Romantics? Mysterious, highly sensitive and misunderstood men. Like Napoleon – brooding and brilliant, like Chopin – passionate and creative, Paganini – the demon virtuoso – who enthralled audiences with his violin pyrotechnics, Baudelaire – himself a legend – as fabulous as his famous “Flowers of Evil”, Victor Hugo – the intense creator of The Hunchback of Notre Dame, and William Blake – mystic poet who illustrated many of his works himself.

The Romantic artists were usually lonely, self-conscious geniuses, who frequently lived outside the standards of a society, which did not under­stand them. They identified themselves with tormented heroes like Romeo and Juliet and like Hamlet. They brooded over death and lost love. They lived by faith in intuition and imagination, lonely and introspective. The Romantic hero was pensive and melancholy. He responded willingly to the dictates of his emotions. Often, these emotions were turbulent and stormy. To express such feelings, the artist painted violent scenes of struggle and conflict, such as stormy scenes of shipwrecks and ocean tempests.

In summary, the Romantic Age was an age of many conflicting reac­tions – a violent reaction to Reason, which resulted in Revolution. In reaction to the rapid industrialization of many Western Nations the artist dramatized the exploitation of the common man or else he escaped into Nature, or turned for inspiration to the exotic East or the distant past. In reaction to the emerging tide of nationalism, the cult of the individual flourished. Above all, Romanticism was the overflow of the emotions, expressed in scenes of storm and stress, mystery and imagination, the fantastic and the sublime.

Artists exalted the peaks of emotion from impassioned frenzy to tragic grief. But in his quest for scenes of excessive emotion, such as this frenzied allegory of death, the Romantic artist moved further and further away from everyday reality. This finally led to a reaction against Romanticism itself! A new concern for the sober, unemotional facts of life became apparent by the mid-nineteenth century – in this matter-of-fact treatment of death, for example. Note the gravedigger, still in shirt-sleeves, and the stray dog in the foreground. Thus, as the artist turned away from the Romantic, Realism was born!