Romanticism

“ Romanticism was something more, then, than a new literary mode; a taste cultivated by dilettante virtuosos, like Horace Walpole, college recluses like Gray, and antiquarian scholars like Joseph and Thomas Warton. It was the effort of the poetic imagination to create for itself a richer environment ”

“ Romanticism, the name of the reactionary movement in literature and art at the close of last century and at the beginning of this against the cold and spiritless formalism and pseudo-classicism that then prevailed, and was more regardful of correctness of expression than truth of feeling and the claims of the emotional nature; has been defined as the "reproduction in modern art and literature of the life and thought of the Middle Ages." ”

“ What is Romanticism?—It will be remembered perhaps, at least among my friends, that at first I assailed the modern world with some gross errors and exaggerations, but at any rate with hope in my heart. ”

“ Should you wish to dally with the mooted question of the difference between realism and romanticism—in the perplexing mazes of which many a fine little talent has been snuffed out like a flickering taper in a gust of wind—there are a score or more volumes that you will find in any large library, in which the whole matter is thrashed out unsatisfactorily. ”

“ Giving the general definition, here convenient, and setting aside minor and accidental definitions, romanticism asks of art, above all, the spontaneous and violent effusion of the affections, of love and hate, of anguish and joy, of despair and elation ”

“ Romanticism, as a freshening up of all the sources of life, a general rejuvenescence of the soul, a ubiquitous visiting of the spirit of delight and wonder, could not confine itself to the fields of mediaeval romance. Even the records of the Greek and Roman thought assumed a new beauty; the classical sense was let free from its antiquarian trammels, and the perennial fanes resounded to the songs of a more impassioned worship.
The change, however, took some time. And it must be admitted that in England, especially, the Romantic movement was slow to go back to classical themes. ”

“ Romanticism, then, although it has its epochs, [257] is in its essential characteristics rather a spirit which shows itself at all times, in various degrees, in individual workmen and their work, and the amount of which criticism has to estimate in them taken one by one, than the peculiarity of a time or a school. Depending on the varying proportion of curiosity and the desire of beauty, natural tendencies of the artistic spirit at all times, it must always be partly a matter of individual temperament. ”

“ Only after having left a town are we in a position to judge the height of its church steeple, only as exiles do we begin to see the right relation in which our country stands to the rest of the world, and only a poet who had bidden farewell to his party and school, who had freed himself from Romanticism, could give us the last, the truest, the most beautiful poem of Romanticism. ”

“ Even then he will hardly find himself prepared to give a dictionary definition or romanticism. There are words which connote so much, which take up into themselves so much of the history of the human mind, that any compendious explanation of their meaning—any definition which is not, at the same time, a rather extended description—must serve little other end than to supply a convenient mark of identification. How can we define in a sentence words like renaissance, philistine, sentimentalism, transcendental, Bohemia, pre-Raphaelite, impressionist, realistic? ”

“ The history of romanticism, after the impulse had once been given, is little else than a record or the steps by which, one after another, new features of that vast and complicated scheme of things which we loosely call the Middle Ages were brought to light and made available as literary material. ”

“ Romanticism was essentially conciliatory in its tendencies, that is to say, it aimed at a reconciliation of poetry with other provinces of social and intellectual life; the hard and fast boundaries which the older critics had set up as to what poetry might and might not do, were put aside, and the domain of literature was regarded as co-extensive with life itself; painting and music, philosophy and ethics, were all accepted as constituent elements of or aids to Romantic poetry. ”

“ This yearning was common to all those manifestations which are summarized under the term Romanticism. Men sought a place to which they could escape from the cold, glaring light of emancipation and from the war-torn present. ”

“ Realism, Romanticism, Naturalism, even the unofficial sentimentalism (which, like the poor, is exceedingly difficult to get rid of) , all these gods must, after a short period of fellowship, abandon him—even on the very threshold of the temple—to the stammerings of his conscience and to the outspoken consciousness of the difficulties of his work. In that uneasy solitude the supreme cry of Art for Art, itself, loses the exciting ring of its apparent immorality. ”

“ Now, come to stalwart manhood, that mighty generation, eager to speed the coming of red-blooded Romanticism and the going of cold and correct Classicism, showed itself alert in many directions, notably prolific in literature and the arts, after the sterility of so many years. ”

“ Romanticism in France displays three main tendencies:
1. The endeavour to reproduce faithfully either some real piece of past history or some phase of modern life—the tendency towards the true.
2. The endeavour after perfection of form, whether apprehended as plasticity and picturesqueness of expression, as severe metrical harmony, or as a prose style imperishable from its concise simplicity—the tendency towards the beautiful.
3. Enthusiasm for great religious or social reformatory ideas, an ethic aim in art—the tendency towards the good. ”

“ Continental scenes and customs are described with freeness and perspicuity, and the varied and eventful adventures of the principal characters—pleasingly typical, it may be mentioned, of the romanticism invariably associated with 'love's young dream,' when, as in the present instance, there is a combination of youth and beauty—are recorded with a poetical fervour and gracefulness of diction which are certain to be generally admired."—Western Daily Press, June 2, 1886. ”

“ In this fictitious character there are already developed those qualities which we find later in real characters, such as Friedrich Schlegel and Gentz; and in this one man's habit of mind we have all that, which, transferred to art, became the notorious irony of Romanticism. ”

“ A reaction against these romatic horrors is now in sight. Many are feeling that romanticism, having given us its best, has had its day; and that “as the Nineteenth Century put man into nature, so it will be the business of the Twentieth to take him out.” ”

“ And Romanticism for more than half a century has been affecting the religious, the social, the intellectual life of Great Britain and America in a thousand ways, and with, on the whole, positive and beneficial results. ”

“ The poets of the Romantic period were condemned by the critics brought up on the rigid classic models. The so-called Romantic movements in the arts are, at their best, departures from old forms, not into formlessness, but into new, various, and more fruitful forms. Romanticism at its worst dissolves into mere formlessness and inarticulate ecstacies. Infinite variety of forms the world of experience may be made to wear, but sensations, Page 350 emotions, and ideas must be given some form, if they are to pass from a fruitless yearning after beauty into its positive incarnation in objects of art. ”

“ Romanticism, of which the seventeenth-century baroque style is a queer sub-species, makes violent gestures; it relies on violent 221contrasts of light and shade, on stage effects; it is ambitious to present you with emotion in the raw and palpitating form. ”

“ The creed of Romanticism was so thoroughly established that there was nothing left to make any fuss about, with the natural consequence that its early extravagances had fallen out of fashion and there was no further need to be satanic or profess excessive sensibility. ”

“ In less than twenty years we have seen wonderful changes in public taste and in the efforts of writers to meet it or to create it. We saw the everlastingly revived conflict between realism and romanticism. ”

“ As the men of this time looked about them, love looked through their eyes a love which refashioned, transfigured, reinterpreted all tilings according to the dictates of their yearning. And since the characteristics and con- ditions of the men and the peoples who sought fulfilment and peace in the past and in the spiritually strange were different, the fruits of Romanticism were not of one kind. ”

“ These circumstances variously explain the richness of his vocabulary, and joined to an ardent patriotism they fitted him to become the herald of the literary revival known as Romanticism, which was inaugurated by his distinguished follower Almeida Garrett. ”

“ The impotent feelings of romance, so singularly characteristic of this century, may indeed gild, but never save the remains of those mightier ages to which they are attached like climbing flowers, and they must be torn away from the magnificent fragments, if we would see them as they stood in their own strength. ”

“ Emotional stress, sensitiveness to the picturesque, love of natural scenery, interest in distant times and places, curiosity of the wonderful and mysterious, subjectivity, lyricism, intrusion of the ego, impatience of the limits of the genres, eager experiment with new forms of art—these and the like marks of the romantic spirit are as common in the verse literature of the nineteenth century as they are rare in that of the eighteenth. The same is true of imaginative prose, particularly during the first half of the century, the late Georgian and early Victorian period. ”

“ From the first dawn of history till quite modern times, art, which nature meant to solace all, fulfilled its purpose; all men shared in it; that was what made life romantic, as people call it, in those days ”

“ But there is this difference, that, while the renaissance writers fell short of their pattern, the modern schools of romance have outgone their masters—not perhaps in the intellectual—but certainly in the artistic value of their product. ”

“ Round about every central idea the romantic writer summons up a cloud of accessory and subordinate ideas for the sake of enhancing its effect, if at the risk of confusing its outlines. The temper, again, of the romantic writer is one of excitement, while the temper of the classical writer is one of self-possession. ”

“ They were the stuff out of which romance is made, and if I had been a storyteller like our great Standish O'Grady I might have made without questioning a wonder tale of the air, legendary or futurist, but I have always had as much of the philosophic as the artistic interest in what people call imagination, and I have thought that many artists and poets gave to art or romance what would have had an equal if not a greater interest as psychology. ”

“ In this idea lies the germ of the notorious Romantic irony in art, the treating of everything as both jest and earnest, the eternal self-parody, the disturbing play with illusions alternately summoned up and banished, which destroys all directness of effect in many of the favourite works of the Romanticists.
The Romanticist's theory of art and life thus owes its existence to a mingling of poetry with philosophy, a coupling of the poet's dreams with the student's theories; it is a production of purely intellectual powers, not of any relation between these powers and real life. ”

“ It produced no typical forms; the character of its literature is musical rather than plastic; its impulse is not a clear perception or creation, but an infinite and ineffable aspiration.
35 An intenser spiritual life was at once the impulse and the goal of the Romanticists, in whom wonder and infinite desire are born again. A sympathetic interest in the fairy tale and the legend, in the face of Nature and in her creatures, in history, institutions and law, and a keener emotional sensitiveness in poetry, were the result of this refreshed interior life. ”

“ Of the origin and essence of the romantic I treated in my first Lecture, and I shall here, therefore, merely briefly mention the subject. The ancient art and poetry rigorously separate things which are dissimilar; the romantic delights in indissoluble mixtures; all contrarieties: nature and art, poetry and prose, seriousness and mirth, recollection and anticipation, spirituality and sensuality, terrestrial and celestial, life and death, are by it blended together in the most intimate combination. ”

“ What was the form of verse but an exotic curiously trained and tended, in which an artificial sentiment imported from Italy gave perfume and colour to the flower?
And yet, in this as in other forms, the poetry of the time, which possesses an enduring vitality, was not commonly caught out of the air, but—however large the conventional element in it may have been—was born of the union of heart and imagination; in it real feelings and real experience, submitting to the poetical fashions of the day, were raised to an ideal expression. ”

“ For the true judge in the art, nothing? Here and there we distinguish an evanescent bubble, as it were, of some little melodic beginning, which just proves that, as in the most obdurate being, the spark of what is good is not totally extinct,—so in the most perverted taste, and in a state of its greatest degeneracy, there will still lurk some remains of the feeling for the beautiful inherent in our nature. Of this kind are the Romance, however supported by the most clumsy harmony—the funeral dirge of the young maidens, &c. ”