Romanticism in world culture

At the beginning of the nineteenth century the Enlightenment gave way to a new cultural movement called Romanticism.

The Enlightenment itself was a reaction to medieval culture with its heavy emphasis on faith. Faith stifles reason said the rational thinkers of the Enlightenment. Romantics in their turn criticized rationalists for the suffocation of natural emotions and transformation of human beings into soulless thinking machines. The rationalists considered feelings as an obstacle for clear thinking. For the romantics feelings were the essence of human nature. They held that reason was unable to perceive the complexity of human nature as it was too cold. Reason undermines inspiration and crashes creativity stressed they.

The road to truth for the romantics was emotional spontaneity, not cold reason. People must live by feelings, “to bathe in the waters of life.”

The romantics believed that poets could better understand life than rational philosophers. Poetry speaks directly to the heart, penetrates to the depths of human nature.

The Enlightenment stressed fixed aesthetic standards, for example: 23 rules for comedy, 26 – for tragedy, 24 – for epos, and so on. The Romantics, on the contrary, opposed such rules. Victor Hugo (1802-1885), the dominant figure among French romantics, urged: “Freedom in art!” They claimed that the inner voice of the artist gives value to his creation.

The rationalists had viewed nature as a lifeless machine, a giant clock, all of whose parts worked together in perfect precision and harmony. The romantics rejected this impersonal, mechanical model. Inspired and awed by nature’s beauty and majesty, they responded emotionally to nature, and sought a mystical union with it. To the romantics, nature was alive and filled with God’s presence. Nature stimulated the creative energies of the imagination; it taught human beings a higher form of knowledge. Interaction with nature fostered self-discovery.

The rationalists regarded God as a detached observer of a self-operating mechanical universe. Many romantics, on the contrary, viewed God as a spiritual force that inspired people and enriched life, and they deplored the decline of Christianity. The cathedrals and ceremonies, poetic and mysterious, satisfied the esthetic impulse; Christian moral commands, compassionate and just, elevated human behavior to a higher level. Consequently, the romantics condemned the rationalists for weakening Christianity by submitting its dogmas to the test of reason.

The Middle Ages, too, appeared as a very different era to the rationalists and the romantics. To the former, that period was a time of darkness, when superstition and fanaticism reigned; surviving medieval institutions and traditions served only to bar progress. The romantics, on the other hand, revered the Middle Ages. To the romantic imagination, the Middle Ages, steeped in religious faith, had nurtured social harmony and abounded with heroic and chivalrous deeds as well as colorful rituals.

Searching for universal principles, the rationalists had dismissed folk traditions as peasant superstitions and impediments to progress. The romantics, on the other hand, rebelling against the standardization of culture saw native languages, songs and legends as the unique creations of a people and the deepest expression of national feelings. The romantics regarded the legends, myths, and folk traditions of a people as the wellspring of poetry and art and as the spiritual source of that people’s cultural vitality, creativity, and identity. Hence, they examined these earliest cultural expressions with awe and reverence. In this way, romanticism helped shape modern nationalism.