essay on romanticism and classicism

Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History Essays

Romanticism

Théodore Gericault

Evening: Landscape with an Aqueduct

Alfred Dedreux (1810–1860) as a Child

The Start of the Race of the Riderless Horses

Horace Vernet

Jean-Louis-André-Théodore Gericault (1791–1824)

Inundated Ruins of a Monastery

Karl Blechen

Salisbury Cathedral from the Bishop's Grounds

John Constable

Eugène Delacroix

Royal Tiger

Stormy Coast Scene after a Shipwreck

French Painter

Mother and Child by the Sea

Johan Christian Dahl

The Natchez

Wanderer in the Storm

Julius von Leypold

The Abduction of Rebecca

Jewish Woman of Algiers Seated on the Ground

Théodore Chassériau

The Virgin Adoring the Host

Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres

Ovid among the Scythians

Kathryn Calley Galitz Department of European Paintings, The Metropolitan Museum of Art

October 2004

Romanticism, first defined as an aesthetic in literary criticism around 1800, gained momentum as an artistic movement in France and Britain in the early decades of the nineteenth century and flourished until mid-century. With its emphasis on the imagination and emotion, Romanticism emerged as a response to the disillusionment with the Enlightenment values of reason and order in the aftermath of the French Revolution of 1789. Though often posited in opposition to Neoclassicism , early Romanticism was shaped largely by artists trained in Jacques Louis David’s studio, including Baron Antoine Jean Gros, Anne Louis Girodet-Trioson, and Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres. This blurring of stylistic boundaries is best expressed in Ingres’ Apotheosis of Homer and Eugène Delacroix’s Death of Sardanapalus (both Museé du Louvre, Paris), which polarized the public at the Salon of 1827 in Paris. While Ingres’ work seemingly embodied the ordered classicism of David in contrast to the disorder and tumult of Delacroix, in fact both works draw from the Davidian tradition but each ultimately subverts that model, asserting the originality of the artist—a central notion of Romanticism.

In Romantic art, nature—with its uncontrollable power, unpredictability, and potential for cataclysmic extremes—offered an alternative to the ordered world of Enlightenment thought. The violent and terrifying images of nature conjured by Romantic artists recall the eighteenth-century aesthetic of the Sublime. As articulated by the British statesman Edmund Burke in a 1757 treatise and echoed by the French philosopher Denis Diderot a decade later, “all that stuns the soul, all that imprints a feeling of terror, leads to the sublime.” In French and British painting of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the recurrence of images of shipwrecks ( 2003.42.56 ) and other representations of man’s struggle against the awesome power of nature manifest this sensibility. Scenes of shipwrecks culminated in 1819 with Théodore Gericault’s strikingly original Raft of the Medusa (Louvre), based on a contemporary event. In its horrifying explicitness, emotional intensity, and conspicuous lack of a hero, The Raft of the Medusa became an icon of the emerging Romantic style. Similarly, J. M. W. Turner’s 1812 depiction of Hannibal and his army crossing the Alps (Tate, London), in which the general and his troops are dwarfed by the overwhelming scale of the landscape and engulfed in the swirling vortex of snow, embodies the Romantic sensibility in landscape painting. Gericault also explored the Romantic landscape in a series of views representing different times of day; in Evening: Landscape with an Aqueduct ( 1989.183 ), the dramatic sky, blasted tree, and classical ruins evoke a sense of melancholic reverie.

Another facet of the Romantic attitude toward nature emerges in the landscapes of John Constable , whose art expresses his response to his native English countryside. For his major paintings, Constable executed full-scale sketches, as in a view of Salisbury Cathedral ( 50.145.8 ); he wrote that a sketch represents “nothing but one state of mind—that which you were in at the time.” When his landscapes were exhibited in Paris at the Salon of 1824, critics and artists embraced his art as “nature itself.” Constable’s subjective, highly personal view of nature accords with the individuality that is a central tenet of Romanticism.

This interest in the individual and subjective—at odds with eighteenth-century rationalism—is mirrored in the Romantic approach to portraiture. Traditionally, records of individual likeness, portraits became vehicles for expressing a range of psychological and emotional states in the hands of Romantic painters. Gericault probed the extremes of mental illness in his portraits of psychiatric patients, as well as the darker side of childhood in his unconventional portrayals of children. In his portrait of Alfred Dedreux ( 41.17 ), a young boy of about five or six, the child appears intensely serious, more adult than childlike, while the dark clouds in the background convey an unsettling, ominous quality.

Such explorations of emotional states extended into the animal kingdom, marking the Romantic fascination with animals as both forces of nature and metaphors for human behavior. This curiosity is manifest in the sketches of wild animals done in the menageries of Paris and London in the 1820s by artists such as Delacroix, Antoine-Louis Barye, and Edwin Landseer. Gericault depicted horses of all breeds—from workhorses to racehorses—in his work. Lord Byron’s 1819 tale of Mazeppa tied to a wild horse captivated Romantic artists from Delacroix to Théodore Chassériau, who exploited the violence and passion inherent in the story. Similarly, Horace Vernet, who exhibited two scenes from Mazeppa in the Salon of 1827 (both Musée Calvet, Avignon), also painted the riderless horse race that marked the end of the Roman Carnival, which he witnessed during his 1820 visit to Rome. His oil sketch ( 87.15.47 ) captures the frenetic energy of the spectacle, just before the start of the race. Images of wild, unbridled animals evoked primal states that stirred the Romantic imagination.

Along with plumbing emotional and behavioral extremes, Romantic artists expanded the repertoire of subject matter, rejecting the didacticism of Neoclassical history painting in favor of imaginary and exotic subjects. Orientalism and the worlds of literature stimulated new dialogues with the past as well as the present. Ingres’ sinuous odalisques ( 38.65 ) reflect the contemporary fascination with the exoticism of the harem, albeit a purely imagined Orient, as he never traveled beyond Italy. In 1832, Delacroix journeyed to Morocco, and his trip to North Africa prompted other artists to follow. In 1846, Chassériau documented his visit to Algeria in notebooks filled with watercolors and drawings, which later served as models for paintings done in his Paris studio ( 64.188 ). Literature offered an alternative form of escapism. The novels of Sir Walter Scott, the poetry of Lord Byron, and the drama of Shakespeare transported art to other worlds and eras. Medieval England is the setting of Delacroix’s tumultuous Abduction of Rebecca ( 03.30 ), which illustrates an episode from Sir Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe .

In its stylistic diversity and range of subjects, Romanticism defies simple categorization. As the poet and critic Charles Baudelaire wrote in 1846, “Romanticism is precisely situated neither in choice of subject nor in exact truth, but in a way of feeling.”

Galitz, Kathryn Calley. “Romanticism.” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History . New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2000–. http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/roma/hd_roma.htm (October 2004)

Additional Essays by Kathryn Calley Galitz

Galitz, Kathryn Calley. “ The Legacy of Jacques Louis David (1748–1825) .” (October 2004)
Galitz, Kathryn Calley. “ Gustave Courbet (1819–1877) .” (May 2009)
Galitz, Kathryn Calley. “ The French Academy in Rome .” (October 2003)

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T. E. Hulme

(1883—1917) philosopher and poet

Quick Reference

(1883–1917),

poet, essayist, and (in his own phrase) ‘philosophic amateur’, whose reaction against Romanticism and advocacy of the ‘hard dry image’ influenced Imagism. His essay ‘Romanticism and Classicism’ defines Romanticism as ‘spilt religion’, and predicts a new ‘cheerful, dry and sophisticated’ poetry. Only six of his poems were published in his lifetime, five in Orage's New Age, 1912, as ‘The Complete Poetical Works of T. E. Hulme’. Hulme also contributed to the New Age his essays on Bergson, whom he also translated. He was killed in action, and much of his work survived only in notebooks. Speculations: Essays on Humanism and the Philosophy of Art (1924) and Notes on Language and Style (1929) were edited by Read. Hulme's double role as conservative and Modernist had considerable influence on the development of 20th‐cent. taste; T. S. Eliot described him in 1924 as ‘classical, reactionary and revolutionary’.

From: Hulme, T. E. in The Concise Oxford Companion to English Literature »

Subjects: Literature

Romanticism and Classicism

A short analysis of t. e. hulme’s ‘romanticism and classicism’.

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)

‘Romanticism and Classicism’ by T. E. Hulme (1883-1917) was posthumously published as part of the 1924 collection Speculations but probably written in 1911-12. It’s an important attack on romanticism in art and poetry, and was an influential defence of the ‘philosophy’ (though that may be too grand a word for it) underpinning much modernist poetry in English.

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“Romanticism versus Classicism in 1910: T. E. Hulme, Edward Storer, and The Commentator”. Literature & History. 22.1 (2013): 25-41.

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Despite sustained scholarly interest in the politics of modernism, astonishingly little attention has been paid to its relationship to Conservatism. Yet modernist writing was imbricated with Tory rhetoric and ideology from when it emerged in the Edwardian era. By investigating the many intersections between Anglophone modernism and Tory politics, Conservative Modernists offers new ways to read major figures such as T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, T. E. Hulme, and Ford Madox Ford. It also highlights the contribution to modernism of lesser-known writers, including Edward Storer, J. M. Kennedy, and A. M. Ludovici. These are the figures to whom it most frequently returns, but, cutting through disciplinary delineations, the book simultaneously reveals the input to modernism of a broad range of political writers, philosophers, art historians, and crowd psychologists: from Pascal, Burke, and Disraeli, to Nietzsche, Le Bon, Wallas, Worringer, Ribot, Bergson, and Scheler. Read more at http://www.cambridge.org/us/academic/subjects/literature/english-literature-1900-1945/conservative-modernists-literature-and-tory-politics-britain-19001920#kfO4Ca1gbgl8qDOh.99

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What Is the Difference between Classicism and Romanticism?

Classicism and Romanticism are artistic movements that have influenced the literature, visual art , music, and architecture of the Western world over many centuries. With its origins in the ancient Greek and Roman societies, Classicism defines beauty as that which demonstrates balance and order. Romanticism developed in the 18th century — partially as a reaction against the ideals of Classicism — and expresses beauty through imagination and powerful emotions. Although the characteristics of these movements are frequently at odds, both schools of thought continued to influence Western art into the 21st century.

The name "Classical" was given to the Greeks and Romans retroactively by Renaissance writers. Artists and thinkers of the Renaissance, which literally means "rebirth," saw themselves as the heirs of that world following the Middle Ages. Its ideals continued to exert strong influence into the Age of Enlightenment in the 17th and 18th centuries.

In literature, Classicism values traditional forms and structures. According to legend, the Roman poet Virgil left orders for his masterpiece The Aeneid to be burned at his death, because a few of its lines were still metrically imperfect. This rather extreme example demonstrates the importance placed on excellence in formal execution. Such attention to detail can also be seen in the work of the Italian poet Dante Alighieri, whose Divine Comedy contains over 14,000 lines written in a strict rhyming pattern known as terza rima . Other characteristics of the movement include balance, order, and emotional restraint.

Romanticism may be a somewhat confusing term, since modern English speakers tend to associate the word "romance" with a particular variety of love. As an artistic movement, however, it celebrates all strong emotions, not just feelings of love. In addition to emotion, Romantic artists valued the search for beauty and meaning in all aspects of life. They saw imagination, rather than reason, as the route to truth.

The treatment of emotion is one of the primary ways in which Classicism and Romanticism differ. The Romantics placed a higher value on the expression of strong emotion than on technical perfection. Classicists did not shy away from describing emotionally charged scenes, but typically did so in a more distant manner. Romantics, however, were more likely to indulge in effusive emotional statements, as John Keats did in "Ode on a Grecian Urn": "More love! More happy, happy love!"

Furthermore, these movements have different attitudes toward the grotesque. William Shakespeare , writing before the onset of Romanticism, occasionally used deformed characters in his plays, such as Caliban in The Tempest ; they are used primarily for comedic effect or as a foil to the physical perfections of another character. Romantics, however, celebrated the grotesque and the outcast through the form of a Byronic hero, named after the English poet Lord Byron . One well-known example of this character type is Edward Rochester, the love interest in Charlotte Brontë's novel Jane Eyre , who reaches spiritual perfection only after undergoing physical deformation.

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By: Freesurf Classicism originated in ancient Greek and Roman societies.
By: Jasmin Romanticism writers celebrated outcast and the unlikely hero in their literature.
By: Georgios Kollidas A romantic character named Edward Rochester was Jane Eyre’s love interest in Charlotte Bronte's novel "Jane Eyre."
By: Georgios Kollidas While Classicism emphasized the beauty in order, Romantic poets like Wordsworth sought the beauty of untamed emotions.
By: Books18 Romantics were more likely to indulge in effusive emotional statements, as John Keats did in "Ode on a Grecian Urn": "More love! More happy, happy love!"

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The Quest of the Absolute: What Was and What Is Romanticism?

by Louis Dupré September 22, 2023

1900px Caspar David Friedrich The Wanderer

B ecause of the overwhelming variety of form and content in a multiplicity of artistic, poetic, religious, and philosophical expressions, often conflicting with one another, some scholars have concluded that it is vain to search for a definition of Romanticism. Nevertheless, despite their irreducible differences, all Romantics shared an awareness of living at the start of a new cultural epoch.

Provisional Description

In a series of lectures posthumously published under the title The Roots of Romanticism , Isaiah Berlin called Romanticism the largest recent movement to transform the lives and thoughts of the West. Indeed, it acted as a catalyst of all earlier changes of the modern epoch. The Enlightenment has reached later generations through the critical mediation of Romanticism. The French Revolution derived most of its ideas from the Enlightenment. Yet its explosive power blew fresh air into those ideas and transmitted them to us with a new emphasis. The Enlightenment owes much of its appeal to its practical impact on the French Revolution and the post-revolutionary period. Without the Revolution, the Enlightenment’s promise of progress would have remained unfulfilled. Remarkably enough, France, which had occasioned the awakening of European Romanticism, had its “Romantic Movement” well after those of Germany and England. The rapid succession of political events in France had left no time for reflection.

The Revolution intimated that history had taken a decisive turn. The high expectations built on that event, however, rapidly declined after the massacres of 1792. The hope for a social emancipation only briefly revived when Napoleon converted certain revolutionary ideals into political realities. Great Britain, France’s natural rival in the struggle for hegemony over Europe, had not shared the initial outburst of sympathy for the Revolution. Having watched events with growing concern, in 1792 she declared war on France. The English showed little taste for a similar break with tradition. They had experienced their own political emancipation in 1688. At first, only a few educated Englishmen, such as Wordsworth (who had visited France at the outbreak of the Revolution) and Coleridge, regarded the French Revolution as the dawn of a more liberal political system, and they found little sympathy among their neighbors. Thomas De Quincey, who lived in the same area as Wordsworth for a time, reports that his famous neighbor was probably the most hated inhabitant of the Lake District. In England, the political situation sheds little light on what critics later came to call English Romanticism.

The Germans had originally nourished great hopes for the achievement of their own emancipatory ideals, particularly when Napoleon started exporting his political ideas across Europe. But once he occupied Prussia, they learned that little good was to be expected from an invader. A movement of national liberation, which the French Revolution had awakened and encouraged, turned into a front of opposition to the French occupier. During the occupation of Berlin, Fichte delivered his fiery Addresses to the German Nation ( Reden an die deutsche Nation ) (1807–8), while Schleiermacher’s weekly sermons exhorted his congregation to seek a spiritual German identity. A factor that thereby played a major role in the movement of national liberation was the philosophy of Kant, the very thinker who had given the moral ideas of the Enlightenment their final form in his Critique of Practical Reason . There, he had described freedom as real only when it is unencumbered by external influences. This was a personal as well as a social ideal in a divided and politically impotent Germany.

Some Romantics, impatient to implement the modern ideal of freedom, turned to distant places where they saw an opportunity to realize it. Greece, the country where that ideal had originated, had risen to defend it against the Turkish occupation. Byron joined the war, only to discover that modern Greece was no longer ancient Hellas. Hölderlin expressed the hopes and disappointments caused by that war in his novel Hyperion . Others turned their eyes to the one country where a revolution had succeeded, the United States. Chateaubriand’s Romantic travel reports created a mirage of America as a Promised Land, which had preserved freedom, innocence, and simplicity. Yet others, disappointed by political events in Europe, cultivated nostalgic dreams of a return to nature and the quiet, traditional life that Goethe had depicted in Hermann und Dorothea , or to a memory of the past, as Walter Scott had done in his Waverley novels. For Goethe, Schiller, and Hölderlin, the utopian dream included an idealized version of ancient Greece. In various ways, all early Romantic poets experienced a desire, a Sehnsucht , for an unreachable ideal. The term infinite, so often used as a predicate of the unattainable object of those aspirations, betrays both its surpassing and its indefinite nature.

What justifies the inclusion of a variety of literary styles and artistic expressions as well as different philosophies and ethical, political, and religious beliefs under a common denominator? A number of answers have been given to this question, most of them insufficiently comprehensive. Michael Löwy and Robert Sayre have described Romanticism as a worldview , born out of modernity yet protesting against it. The inclusive term worldview or world picture captures a typically modern conception of reality. It implies that the world receives its meaning entirely from the viewer: the human subject is the source as well as the limit of its reality. The term worldview itself, with its strong assertion of the primacy of the subject, was introduced in reaction to the rationalist objectivism of the eighteenth century.

Unfortunately, Löwy and Sayre shrink the comprehensiveness inherent in the term worldview by narrowing it down to an alleged opposition to the modern capitalist system, understood in the Hegelian-Marxist sense. Romanticism obviously involved more than the question of the existence of a particular economic system. In the following pages, I treat it as an essentially positive worldview that, moving beyond the limits of a rational culture, inspired a relentless and obviously impossible drive to overcome the finitude of the human condition. Its reach for an absolute appears in poetry, in art, in politics, in philosophy, and in religion.

Some scholars dismiss Romanticism altogether, as no more than a temporary deviation from the course of intellectual and practical progress taken at the beginning of the modern age. They conceive of the Enlightenment as the “true” destiny of modernity, and of Romanticism as a negligible interruption of an essentially rational development. This interruption may have been inevitable, perhaps even beneficial, but now that it has passed, they argue, we may continue what the Enlightenment had so auspiciously begun. Contrary to the view that Romanticism was a minor obstruction, however, I regard it as an important conclusion that follows from earlier premises. Romanticism incorporates what the Enlightenment had acquired while also transforming its meaning. The desire for political, social, and religious emancipation, to which it gave voice, had existed through most of the eighteenth century, but the Romantics extended it to a vision of an ideal that beckoned but remained forever beyond reach.

Modern culture had begun with a linguistic-philological movement. Humanism had aimed at restoring the classical languages, primarily Latin, to their ancient purity. Under the influence of this classicism, later writers attempted to fit their unruly vernacular tongues within a tight-fitting form, patterned after an ancient grammar. This attention to language led to more profound investigations of the nature of speech and writing. A number of essays appeared on the origin of language; among the most influential were those written by Rousseau and Herder. Herder in particular, reacting against the paralyzing effect of the dominant French influence on German literature, achieved a renewal of German letters, which contributed to the rise of a nationalist movement. Herder, Hamann, and Goethe expected that a literature liberated from classicist French rules would introduce a national awareness among the politically divided Germans. Other nations were to follow. In an address to the Prussian Academy, Jacob Grimm (1785–1863), a philologist who had studied the formation of Germanic languages, showed that the language one speaks defines one’s cultural identity: “Our language is our history.” Romantic poets considered the use of the indigenous language indispensable to authentic expression. Novalis, in a fragment posthumously published as “Monolog,” wrote: “One cannot help but be astonished at the absurd, wholly erroneous assumption people make, that their talk is about things. No one knows what is most distinctive about language, namely, that it is concerned solely with itself.” Novalis, as well as all other major Romantic poets, understood that words constitute a universe by themselves. Poetry discloses some of this mystery without fully revealing it. Even the poet is unable fully to “explain” the text that he or she has written. The more deeply a poet descends into the mystery of language, the richer the content of his words will be. Friedrich Schlegel wrote: “A classical text must never be entirely comprehensible. But those who are cultivated and who cultivate themselves must always want to learn from it” (Fr. 169).

The Romantic revaluation of vernacular languages led to a restoration of ancient forms of poetry, such as ballads and romances. The publication of “Leonore” by Gottfried August Bürger revived the use of the ballad in German poetry. In England, the language, a mixture of the Gallic tongue of the Norman nobility with the older Germanic speech of the Saxons and the Danes, had never been threatened or oppressed. As a result, the concern for saving the ancestral speech was less intense than the aesthetic and historical desire to explore ancient poetic traditions. Bishop Lowth’s Lectures on the Sacred Poetry of the Hebrews appeared in 1753, and Thomas Percy’s The Reliques of Ancient English Poetry in 1765. During the 1740s poets had again begun to write odes , an ancient form that would become increasingly popular with the English Romantics.

The development of the term Romantic is a particularly confusing story, and I do not intend to repeat it here. The adjective, derived from Romance , the Latin vulgate spoken in southern France, referred in seventeenth-century England to compositions written in that language. Later it came to be applied more generically, first to ballads and then to all fictional literature. In German and in French a roman is still a prose work of fiction. Originally, the “fictional” quality had a pejorative connotation. It meant untrue, “unnatural,” or “disorderly.” Later the term assumed a neutral meaning, as referring to a particular literary genre. Two studies influenced this shift: Bishop Richard Hurd’s Letters on Chivalry and Romance (1759) and Thomas Warton’s On the Origin of Romantic Fiction in Europe (1774). Much earlier, English writers had also begun to apply the adjective romantic to a scenic prospect or landscape, as a slightly more subjective equivalent of picturesque . Thus, in 1666 Samuel Pepys describes Windsor Castle as “the most romantique castle that is in the world.” Shaftesbury made this subjective use of the term popular, and he stretched its meaning to include any vision or creation ruled by the imagination. Via Rousseau and Diderot, this denotation also began to color the French usage of the term. Thus, nineteenth-century French critics described James Thomson’s The Seasons (1730) and Edward Young’s meditations on the transitoriness of human life as romantic. They also applied the term to such painters as Claude Lorrain and Salvator Rosa, without reference to a particular period. The term continued to shift until, shortly before the turn of the nineteenth century, Friedrich Schlegel and his older brother August Wilhelm linked it to a particular literary style .

Even if we restrict Romanticism to the sensitivity, ideas, and attitudes typical of the Romantic Movement, it would be difficult to set a precise starting date, for all these characteristics had existed before. Rousseau, who so profoundly influenced the French Revolution and inspired all later Romantic thought, died well before any Romantic Movement existed. Diderot, the editor of the Encyclopédie , the Bible of the French Enlightenment, felt, wrote, and often acted like a Romantic. Goethe and Schiller created Romantic dramas years before the beginning of the Romantic Movement in Germany. In England, time limits are even looser: Edward Young and Thomas Gray, poets with a distinctly Romantic sensitivity, wrote in the middle of the eighteenth century.

Still, the date 1789 holds a unique significance as a formal beginning. Friedrich Schlegel, who was responsible for shaping a vague term into a well-defined movement, wrote: “The French Revolution, Fichte’s Theory of Knowledge , and Goethe’s Meister [ Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre ] were the principal tendencies of the epoch” (Fr. 216, in Athenäum , 1798). A more pertinent question about the beginning would be: At what time did the so-called Romantic writers and artists begin to consider their epoch a distinct and relatively independent stage of modern culture?

An early effort to distinguish the new style from the older one was Schiller’s essay Über naïve und sentimentalische Dichtung (On Naïve and Sentimental Poetry) (1795). The term Romantic never appears in it. Naïve poetry, for Schiller, includes most of the ancient Greek poetry, of which Homer was the prototype. It differs from modern poetry, which he calls sentimental. In his On the Aesthetic Education of Man in a Series of Letters (also published in 1795, but completed in 1793), Schiller had opposed the “natural” attitude of the ancients to the “reflective” one of the moderns. In the former, the mind remains united with nature; in the latter, it stands at a distance from nature and refers to the mind’s ideals. Schiller’s description does not further define Romantic art.

Schiller’s Über naïve und sentimentalische Dichtung laid the groundwork for what August Wilhelm Schlegel was to describe as distinctive of Romantic aesthetics. He felt that Schiller’s use of the term sentimental largely coincides with that of Romantic, except that, for him, sentimental is not bound to any historical period, as Romantic soon came to be. In the older poet’s view, there have been sentimental poets at every period of Western literature, even among the ancients, such as Euripides and Horace, while some of Schiller’s contemporaries still wrote in a naïve style, as Goethe did in Hermann und Dorothea . Still, Schiller recognized some link between literary qualities and a particular stage of culture. Naïve poetry directly responds to the immediate impressions of nature, which Schiller regards as typical of humans still at one with nature, as he thought most were even in the classical epoch. Sentimental poetry, then, shows how things ideally ought to be.

The sentimental poet is no longer exclusively absorbed by the subject of his poem, as was Homer, but rather mainly by his own feelings about it. For Friedrich Schlegel, that meant that Romantic poetry knows itself to be poetry. The naïve poet simply imitates nature, because he never moves beyond it. The sentimental poet creates an ideal world that surpasses nature. Greek poetry was plastic , that is, related to Greek sculpture and architecture. Modern poetry is primarily musical: it surpasses nature in sound. Romantic poets and artists live in a broken world, where the ideal is separated from the real. Through the creative imagination, the poet attempts to reunite them. Yet since the moral ideal is unlimited, he never fully succeeds in this goal. Sentimental art remains one of endless longing and striving. The artist never overcomes the discrepancy that separates him from his ideal. He is forced to raise an earthly image of a beloved woman into a spiritual ideal, far beyond the actual nature of Beatrice, Laura, or Lotte (Werther’s beloved). To the artist, the ideal seems more real, because it displays the essence of things—the way they ought to be. The notion of sentimental beauty, then, always has a utopian content: it projects what freedom aims at realizing, though will never attain.

Classical and Romantic

What was later called the Romantic Movement began in Jena around the journal Athenäum , founded in 1798 by the Schlegel brothers. A small group of like-minded intellectuals assembled with them and with August’s lively wife, Carolina. These included Friedrich Schelling, the brilliant young philosopher, and Moses Mendelssohn’s daughter Dorothea, who eventually came to live with Friedrich Schlegel. Other members of the original group were the gifted mine inspector and poet Friedrich von Hardenberg (better known by his pen name Novalis), Ludwig Tieck, a prolific writer of novels, fairy tales, and literary criticism, and the young theologian Friedrich Schleiermacher, Friedrich Schlegel’s housemate and a future translator of Plato. Their intention was not to start a new literary movement but to read and criticize existing literature (primarily Lessing, Goethe, and Schiller). In the beginning, it all seemed no more than a youthful reaction against the domination of French culture in German literature. Under the Napoleonic occupation, Germans expanded this literary nationalism into a political one, advocating a social and political emancipation and linking it to an ancient past. Eventually the discussions of the Jena group resulted in a new literary theory and increasingly moved in a philosophical direction.

Even before the founding of Athenäum , Friedrich Schlegel had been publishing his thoughts in the form of “Critical Fragments” in the Lycée des Beaux Arts (1797). In France this aphoristic style had been popular since Pascal’s Pensées and the eighteenth-century moralistes La Rochefoucauld, Chamfort, and Vauvenargues. The French thereby continued an ancient moral tradition that had begun with the Stoics, Epicureans, and the Neoplatonist Plutarch. Schlegel’s aphorisms, however, served a different purpose: he considered them the appropriate medium for conveying his theory that truth, being infinite by nature, can be communicated only in partial form. Under his impulse, several members of the Jena group anonymously published a series of fragments in Athenäum (1798). One of them defended the new literary form as follows: “A fragment, like a small work of art, must be isolated from the surrounding world and be complete in itself like a hedgehog” (Fr. 206).

A “fragment” is by definition broken off from a greater work. Yet without pretending to be exhaustive, it is nevertheless able to stand by itself. Its broken, incomplete character discloses the unfinished nature of thinking, as the Jena group understood it: essentially progressing toward a goal that forever remains beyond achievement. Unfinishable as the project of finding truth is, each fragment nevertheless possesses an organic completeness of its own. Even the heterogeneous character of a collection written by different authors, from different points of view, is an organic expression of an intrinsically coherent infinite truth. This Romantic striving for the unlimited has been marvelously analyzed by Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy in their L’absolu littéraire: Théorie de la littérature du romantisme allemand. Although they have limited their work to the literary theory of early German Romanticism, their thesis concerning the search for the absolute holds for all Romantic literature.

Hitherto, the discussion in Athenäum had mainly turned around the distinction between ancient and modern literature. That changed with the final two issues (the fifth and sixth), both of which appeared in 1800. In the fifth issue, Friedrich Schlegel published more aphorisms under the title Ideen . Members of the group who earlier had published Fragmente (including Friedrich’s brother August) now objected to the loose format of aphoristic writings. In the Ideen , Friedrich, writing in his own name, attempted to overcome the formlessness of the Fragmente while still preserving the unsystematic character of his Romantic thinking. The term Ideen indicates a philosophical deepening of his thought.

In the “Discourse on Poetry,” published in the fifth and sixth issues of Athenäum , Friedrich Schlegel describes a series of debates and lectures that took place at meetings of the Jena group. In a first lecture, August addressed the group, stressing the inexhaustible, indeed absolute, character of genuine poetry, which defies any effort to define it. Nonetheless, August still attempted to impose some order on this limitless development by showing how literary genres “naturally” emerge from a prepoetic origin. As the “Discourse” recounts, none of the auditors were satisfied with August’s answer to the question, What is poetry?—least of all “Amalia” (the group’s name for Carolina), at the time still August’s wife. How could an artificial construction ever be an appropriate response to it? According to Carolina, August always wants to separate and divide, where only the undivided power of the whole satisfies.

Schelling’s lecture, as described in the “Discourse,” appears to address the very question that Carolina had raised. The real content of poetry, he argues, is mythology. The thesis made some sense to a group prepared to accept that poetry, whatever else it was, consisted in a symbolic raising of finite representations to an infinite meaning. Moreover, Schelling avoided reducing poetry to a theoretical source. Its content is indeed spiritual, he argues, but it is neither intellectual nor open to purely intellectual concepts. Poetry and religion have a common origin. To understand this origin, we must first turn to the remnants of ancient polytheistic mythology. Schelling still discerns a strong resemblance between Romantic, that is, all-embracing poetry and ancient myth in such poets as Cervantes and Shakespeare. Both display “an artfully ordered confusion, an exciting symmetry of contradictions, a wonderful constant alternative of enthusiasm and irony.” Unfortunately, he states, Christians no longer share a common mythology. Their religion has become based on historical claims rather than on mythical images. Great poets, such as Dante, succeed in creating their own mythology. Others, such as Tasso, continue to draw on classical mythology. Yet the content is becoming ever thinner. Our epoch is badly in need of a mythology. To assist us in finding one, Schelling concludes, we must explore other mythologies than the classical, the only one we know.

In his response, “Lothario” (the group’s name for Novalis) made a further move. Since all arts and sciences originated in poetic language, to fully understand them we need to refer them back to their source. Schelling argued, going even further, that poetry must reabsorb the arts and sciences that originated from it. In his Philosophy of Nature he singles out physics because here the universality of all sciences appears most clearly.

Friedrich Schlegel began his contribution to the “Discourse on Poetry” with a sharp response to Carolina (Amalia), who had objected that in August Schlegel’s theory, everything becomes poetry. Indeed, according to Schlegel, poetry consists in an overall symbolic vision of the world in which all things point at the absolute. Yet poetry is Romantic only when it presents a sentimental matter in a fantastic form. The term sentimental thereby refers to a subject in which feeling dominates. It distinguishes Romantic literature from classical literature but also from most modern poetry, which merely expresses affections caused by sensuous emotions. Lessing’s drama Emilia Galotti is modern, Schlegel claims, but not in the least Romantic. Great Romantic literature in the past was written only by great writers such as Shakespeare, Cervantes, Ariosto, and some authors of medieval chivalry novels. Indeed, Romanticism was never wholly absent from the best post-classical writing. The stronger its presence, the less significant becomes the literary genre. Novel and drama, apparently so distinct, have often become mixed in Romantic writing: the best novels contain dramatic elements.

The Jena group of friends must have left their meetings in a state of great confusion. The questions stated at the beginning—What is poetry? How does Romantic poetry differ from classical poetry?—had received no clear answer. Yet one would soon be forthcoming. In a series of public lectures delivered from 1801 through 1803 to a large audience in Berlin, August Schlegel argued that the difference between modern and classical had resulted from the changes caused by the historical event of Christianity. “Ludoviko” (Schelling), in his lecture on mythology as reported in the “Discourse on Poetry,” had implied much of this distinction when he claimed that the essential difference between ancient literature and later, Christian literature is that the former was based on mythology and the latter on historical claims. Christianity had introduced a new world-view, next to which other cultural factors became insignificant. A perspective on the infinite had appeared, which determined both form and content. The Christian poet, explicitly or implicitly, aims at a goal that lies beyond a finite world.

At the same time, the Incarnation occurring in a single individual at a particular time had conveyed a new significance to the individual. Johann Paul Friedrich Richter, generally known by his pen name Jean Paul, in his Vorschule der Ästhetik (Preschool of Aesthetics) (1804), also draws a firm line between classical and Christian art. Ancient art was object-oriented and universal in meaning. The Greek gods, who are clearly defined and presented in serene dignity, display few individual characteristics. By contrast, in Christian art the individual dominates. At the same time, because of the presence of the idea of the infinite, the work of art appears less circumscribed by limits of space or time. The wide-open landscapes of Claude Lorrain obviously originated in a different climate than the ones portrayed in the frescoes of Pompeii.

Yet Jean Paul’s aesthetics labors under the same ambiguity as that of the Schlegels. At times, he mentions Christianity as the factor that distinguishes Romantic from classical art. At other times, however, he attributes that distinction to the general difference between ancient and modern art. Christian aesthetics, however, is restricted neither to the “modern” age nor to Romantic art. Still, August Schlegel had not simply equated Romantic with Christian . Medieval Christian art is pre-Romantic and premodern. Moreover, not all Romantic art is Christian or even religious, as is obvious from the poems of Byron, Shelley, and Heine. What Schlegel meant was that Christianity had made Romantic thought possible: only the Romantics and certain great writers of the early modern age had become fully conscious of the significance of the Christian ethos.

Victor Hugo, in the preface to his early drama Cromwell (1827), adopted August Wilhelm Schlegel’s distinction between classical and Christian poetry, which had become known in France through Madame de Staël’s De l’Allemagne (1813). Yet he interpreted this distinction as if Christianity had brought “truthfulness” to art. By separating God from nature, he argued, Christianity had secularized nature as neither ideal nor imperishable. This insight, dogmatically formulated as original sin, had opened the eyes of Christian artists and poets to evil and imperfection. Their work thereby acquired an unprecedented complexity of light and darkness, of the sublime and the grotesque. The monstrous gargoyles in medieval cathedrals, the quaint figures in the stained glass windows, the devils and the damned in Last Judgment portals—all these reminded visitors of the oddness of the universe. Yet French dramas of the seventeenth century remained bound by “classical” rules and displayed less “truthfulness” than the Greek ones. Not until the appearance of Romantic drama did French theater overcome the classicist tradition and dare to display the oppositions inherent in life. Hugo added that, in order to stay closer to life, dramatic works should be written in prose rather than in verse. Whatever merits Hugo’s manifesto may possess, and they are many, its view of Romanticism is severely limited. The introduction of the grotesque and the deformed, typical of his own plays and novels, did indeed violate the rules of classicism, but was by no means an exclusive quality of Romantic art.

In France the distinction between classical and Romantic always retained a polemical edge. During the Restoration, critics disaffected by poetry associated with the excesses of the French Revolution advocated a return to the “classics.” Romanticism, in their judgment, had led to disorder and was responsible for social disturbances and moral confusion, while “classicism” had established, in seventeenth-century France, a canon of good taste and safe doctrine. The ancient classics whom the writers of that era claimed to follow had not been Greek but Latin. France considered herself the true successor of Roman culture, the center of civilized living, which had succeeded in imposing its norms on the rest of Europe. The seventeenth-century French dispute between the ancients and the moderns, in the end, had favored the moderns. Nevertheless, the ancients continued to serve as models to imitate, as the French claimed to have done in their own classicism. Yet the terms classicism and classics , as used in France, were unfit to serve as defining characteristics of any particular period or style. Instead, they referred to the style and form of the great writers of the seventeenth century— Corneille, Racine, Bossuet, Molière, and La Fontaine. The cult of those “classics” had remained an essential part of general education. Through them, the schools educated the young on “how to become French.” The nineteenth-century literary critic Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve was one of the first to loosen this necessary link between ancient and French classicism. For strictly literary purposes, he defined a classique as “un au-teur ancien, déjà consacré dans l’admiration et qui fait autorité dans son genre.” By this broad definition, the works of Romantic writers also could become “classics” after having been tested by time.

In Germany, Romanticism reacted against the domination of those French models. Its writers associated French “classicism” with a rigid formalism that had nothing in common with Greek art or literature. In contrast, German classicists of the late eighteenth century—Lessing, Herder, Goethe, and Schiller—had been inspired by Greek rather than by Roman sources. The excavations of Pompeii and Herculaneum, as well as Johann Winckelmann’s writings on Greek architecture and sculpture, had aroused considerable interest in Greek art and literature. In addition, the excellent departments of “philology” at the new German universities and Protestant theological seminaries had spurred a revival of the study of ancient Greek, a language that, since the Renaissance, had lain dormant in Europe. In this rediscovery of Hellenic culture, the Romantics saw a means to define their own distinct identity. Whereas French classicism had been static, opposed to change, and hostile to Romanticism, German classicism claimed to be dynamic and in no way opposed to the new poetry. In a conversation with Eckermann shortly before his death, Goethe returned for one last time to the question of the distinction between classical and Romantic, which had stirred up so much controversy:

The distinction between classical and Romantic poetry, which is now spread over the whole world and occasions so many quarrels and divisions, came originally from Schiller and me. I laid down the maxim that the literary content ought to be treated objectively and allowed no other. But Schiller, who worked in a quite subjective way, deemed his own fashion right and, to defend himself against me, wrote his treatise on Naïve and Sentimental Poetry . He proved to me that I, against my will, had been a Romantic and that my Iphigenie , through the predominance of sentiment, was by no means so classical and so much in the ancient spirit as some people supposed. The Schlegels took up this idea and carried it further, so that it has now been diffused over the whole world; and everybody talks about classicism and Romanticism—of which nobody thought fifty years ago.

In another conversation with Eckermann a few months earlier, Goethe had conceded that classical and Romantic elements appear side by side in the Helena episode of his Faust II and that both styles were equally good. In his early years Goethe had gone through a “classicist” period. During his first Italian journey (1786–88) he had written Iphigenie and Römische Elegien (published in 1795). Yet in contrast to British and French artists and poets traveling to Italy, Goethe mentions no ancient sites or classical events. “His elegies describe the effect of Italy on his own life, his intoxication by the happiness conveyed by the beautiful sky. He reports his pleasures, even the more vulgar ones, after the manner of Propertius.” For Goethe, as for Schiller, classical culture provided ideals and models for their thoroughly modern project of self-building . It was not an end in itself but rather formed an integral part of a new humanism. In this modern perspective, the terms classical and Romantic lost much of their former opposition: they become universal terms, where each classical period of balance is followed by a Romantic one of rebellion. The present study will not pursue this generalization. For me, the term Romantic refers to a historical period, as indicated at the beginning of this chapter.

The Romantic Idea

An atmosphere of existential unrest hangs over Romantic literature, which contrasts with the Enlightenment’s ideal of rational harmony. A strange, eschatological anxiety appears to keep the Romantic mind constantly on edge. Sensitive men and women, who felt that they were living at the end of an era, were weariedly waiting for the next. In The Romantic Agony (1933), Mario Praz describes melancholy as a typical Romantic mood. Yet had an undefined sadness not been a frequent theme since Tasso or even Petrarch? The real question is why and how this mood was different at the end of the eighteenth century. Praz fails to distinguish similar experiences at different times, an error against which he had cautioned in the introduction to his own study. Nor should a critic rely on what artists and poets say about their own work, since they often lack the perspective needed for a balanced assessment.

The French poet Alfred de Musset captured the downcast Romantic mood when he wrote, “L’homme est un dieu tombé qui se souvient des cieux” (Man is a fallen god who remembers heaven). What caused it? A loss of the past? Or of the unity with nature? Or of the presence of God? All these causes appear in Romantic literature, and all point at the loss of an original, ideal state of being. Occasionally, in dreams or dreamlike states, flashes of recognition seem to restore these privileged times to the mind. Romantic poets and artists tried, through legends and fairy tales, to recapture what they lost and to return to a never actually experienced happiness. Imagination bridged the separate moments and construed them into a new virtual world. German poets and artists went the furthest in conveying a transcendent meaning to those flashes of light. Early German Romantics, such as the poets Novalis and Hölderlin, the philosopher Schelling, and the theologian Schleiermacher, interpreted them as revelations from a divine source.

Most remarkably, even those French Romantics who had been prejudiced against the religious opponents of the Revolution often surrounded their radical secularization project with a religious halo. Jules Michelet, the fiercely anti-clerical historian, interpreted the Revolution as an event of more radically religious significance than traditional Christianity had ever been, namely, one that would at last implement the Christian principles of social justice so long neglected by the Catholic Church. Heinrich Heine, who had immigrated to France, wrote satirically: “The French are the chosen people of the new religion, its first gospels and dogmas have been drawn up in their language; Paris is the New Jerusalem, and the Rhine is the Jordan which divides the consecrated land of freedom from the land of the Philistines.”

Nevertheless, whatever the differences among schools, for all Romantic writers, former images and symbols had become inadequate for expressing the anxieties and expectations of the epoch. They found new ones in such previously neglected experiences as presentiments, or emotional encounters with the unexpected, the deformed, or the excessive. The preternatural and the fantastic, common in the tales of E. T. A. Hoffmann and Théophile Gautier and appealing to unconscious fears, exuded a poetic intensity that the “Gothic novels” of Ann Radcliffe and Horace Walpole had never attained. What in the eighteenth-century canon had been at the margins of the aesthetic consciousness now moved to the center, as we see in poems such as “The Ancient Mariner” and “Kubla Khan.” Romantic painters, such as John Martin, Théodore Géricault, and Joseph Turner, aimed at the sublime rather than at the pleasing or the beautiful.

In Heinrich Heine’s Die romantische Schule (1833) we hear the voice of a very critical observer of his former fellow Romantics. The author of this polemical writing shows great admiration for the German classics, Goethe and Schiller, some respect for those who fought the drab reality of German political life, and little more than contempt for those who had initiated the Romantic Movement, such as Novalis, Ludwig Tieck, and, as the worst of the lot, the Schlegel brothers. He dismisses the turn of Clemens Brentano, Joseph Goerres, and Joseph von Eichendorff toward medieval subjects as social conservatism. Although he admired the popular ballads and folk songs collected in Brentano’s and Achim von Arnim’s Des Knaben Wunderhorn , he despised what he considered to be efforts to revive the medieval piety that had inspired them. He regarded the conversions to Catholicism of a number of German Romantics as misguided attempts to reverse history. He remembers how in his youth he had loved the Romantic songs of Ludwig Uhland, which he later came to dislike. He still admired the minor poet, but this was primarily because Uhland had abandoned literature to devote himself to political action.

British Romantics, suspicious of general categories, wrote no “manifestoes,” and for a long time they altogether avoided the use of the term Romantic to refer to a style or a literary movement. Later, it retrospectively came to denote poets who had written around the turn of the nineteenth century, and even eighteenth-century writers, such as Gray, Young, and William Collins. In the preface to the second edition of his and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads , Wordsworth describes what they had attempted to achieve in their poems. Without mentioning any movement or establishing any formal rules, he simply explains the principles that had guided them. Yet this modest preface teaches more about the nature of Romantic writing than the German or French manifestoes. As a primary characteristic of his poetry, Wordsworth mentions his habit of describing incidents and situations taken from ordinary life “in a language really used by men” yet colored by the imagination. The feeling expressed in these poems differs from that of popular poetry in that “it gives importance to the action and situation and not the action and situation to the feeling.” Most memorably, he defined poetry as “emotion recollected in tranquillity,” whereby tranquillity in turn excites new emotion. Others in England cast their net wider than Wordsworth, but none, except occasionally Coleridge, attained greater depth or precision. Thomas De Quincey wrote his Recollections of the Lake Poets in 1848, years after he had lived in the vicinity of these two poets, yet little in his memoir contributes to a better understanding of English Romanticism. Nor is much to be learned from William Hazlitt’s essays on these poets in his The Spirit of the Age (1825).

In Germany, philosophy strongly influenced Romantic poetry. Kant’s idea of freedom, further developed by Fichte and Schelling, became a seminal concept. But no philosophy played a more decisive role in early Romanticism than Johann Gottlieb Fichte’s idealist interpretation of Kant’s theory. In his view, Kant had failed to draw the necessary conclusions from his idealist intuition when he continued to accept the existence of external objects as an indispensable external cause of knowledge. For Fichte, the mind itself must find the source of knowledge entirely within itself. The young Schelling extended Fichte’s Idealism to include nature. The mind was merely the culminating point of a development that had begun on the inorganic, geological level. Most significant in that process is the aesthetic experience, in which the mind recognizes itself in the objective beauty of nature. Schelling was the Romantic philosopher par excellence, who had participated in the early discussions with Friedrich Schlegel, Schleiermacher, and Tieck.

Through Schelling, Romanticism also affected the young Hegel (1770–1831), although he never actively participated in the Romantic Movement and later turned against it. His early Phänomenologie des Geistes ( Phenomenology of Spirit ) (1807) contains a profound philosophical assessment of Romantic thought as well as a gigantic attempt to overcome its tensions and contradictions. With Schelling and Hölderlin, his roommates at the Tübinger Stift, Hegel had welcomed the French Revolution as the dawn of a long-expected political and spiritual liberation from outdated political structures and modes of thinking. Like his friends, he had been horrified by the Terreur of 1793. Napoleon had briefly revived Hegel’s faith in the ideals of the Revolution, until the emperor defeated Prussia and occupied parts of its territory. Hegel brought his overdue manuscript of the Phenomenology to the printer during the very month, October 1806, of the decisive battle in the conquest of Prussia that took place near his own city of Jena. The bulky, opaque, and strangely structured study was not quite ready to be printed. Even so, it was the work of a genius. Josiah Royce read it as an intellectual Bildungsroman in the tradition of Goethe’s Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre , one of the founding texts of German Romanticism. Some have recognized in it various key figures of Romantic literature, or at least critical encounters with their ideas. The Phenomenology was a Romantic voyage of homecoming, a homecoming of the mind in the Spirit.

EDITORIAL NOTE: This essay is excerpted from The Quest of the Absolute: Birth and Decline of European Romanticism . It is part of an ongoing collaboration with the University of Notre Dame Press . You can read our excerpts from this collaboration here . All rights reserved.

Featured Image: Caspar David Friedrich, The Wanderer Above a Sea of Fog, 1817; Source: Wikimedia Commons, PD-Old-100.

Louis Dupré

Louis Dupré (1925-2022) was the T. Lawrason Riggs Professor Emeritus in the Philosophy of Religion at Yale University and a leading philosopher of religion.

The Polish Romantic Messianism of Saint John Paul II

June 12, 2018 | Paweł Rojek

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Romanticism vs Classicism

Jonathan Vaughan

13th October 2009

Romanticism v. Classicism

Romanticism and Classicism are two very contrasting movements that focus largely on philosophy, art, and literature. The two styles dwell on very similar subjects but offer alternate perspectives. Romanticism was a revolutionary movement in which humanity’s view toward art, nature, and themselves were re-thought. Romanists focus very much on the individual upon this Earth and glorify our path towards spiritual and moral development. Within this magnificent journey, nature and intuition are glorified above reason. In contrast, the philosophy of Classicism is very restrained and generally does not delve into the unknown. Classicism strictly sticks to the given ideals of society not going beyond the norms of a culture. These two ideologies rub off substantially on their surrounding cultures and, as a result, the dissimilarities within these philosophies are present within society today. Art forms such as painting and architecture perfectly accentuate these differences.

Paintings are an extremely popular form of both Romanticism and Classicism and brilliantly emphasize the differences between the two. Within Romantic art, the subjects are often spiritual, idealistic, and, at times, fictional. A typical painting would be that of a heavenly beauty surrounded by a lavish and tranquil landscape. The edges of objects in such paintings are soft and undefined. The techniques are often very gentle and free flowing, like that of a natural brushstroke. Artists commonly employ natural yet vibrant colors giving the paintings a warm glow. Such traits reflect the Romantic view of life in which the individual is always the focus surrounded by a harmonic environment. Frequently, this environment is over embellished; it is portrayed as a welcoming, and magnificent Eden rather than the unforgiving environment it can so often be. In contrast, Classical painting does not delve into fantasy but sticks strictly to the harsh realities of life. Subjects are much more reserved and serious. Images can be brutal and uninspiring, yet realistic and pleasant. Objects are defined by ridged, straight lines and are frequently dull in color. The surroundings are not flattering but remain accurate interpretations of common society. Again, all qualities associated with Classical thinking are heavily reflected within Classical painting. Unlike Romantic painting, Classical painting follows a very conservative depiction of life where no image or technique is out of the ordinary.

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Contrasting appearances and techniques between Romanticism and Classicism are resoundingly evident in architecture. Architecture during the Romantic era primarily takes the form of gothic style, which is very elaborate and unique. This eye-catching style began in twelfth century France but died out soon after. In the mid eighteenth century England, however, Gothic architecture re-emerged when artists sought an alternative to the current repetitive Classical architecture. The gothic style prides itself on many unusual shapes such as the ribbed vault and the pointed arch, and is covered with many flying buttresses. Furthermore, the gothic style goes against the grain and what would be considered the norms of architecture giving it its lavish and complex appearance. Elaborate, spiralling towers and intricate windows decorate this striking form of architecture. Gothic architecture was a very large step out of the ordinary at its time. The Gothic movement was a way of breaking the mould of the boring and monotonous architecture that had dominated history. Classical architecture, however, is simple and consistent. It has stuck by sound architectural methods throughout its long history. This architecture is very straight, formal, and easy on the eye. Classical architectural design borrows much of its techniques from Roman and Greek buildings. Specifically, features such as pillars and arches can be accredited back to the Roman and Greek era. Many straight lines and other un-complex shapes give Classical architecture its plain yet elegant look. As with Classical thinking, Classic architecture is very mainstream and conventional.

Romanticism and Classicism are two contrasting movements that have had major influential effects on human culture. The way in which we think can even be defined as either Romantic or Classical. Those who think rationally and logically are generally considered Classic-minded. People who do things more impulsively, however, are more Romantic-minded. Each philosophy offers its own unique characteristics. Romanticism generally idealises individuals and nature emphasizing their spiritual and moral values. It explores new concepts in life searching for what other beauties life may hold. Additionally, Romanticism adopts alien concepts and techniques to create groundbreaking, eye-catching art. Classicism, however, is quite the opposite and remains simple using trustworthy techniques. The movement follows strict values evident in life and does not dwell much beyond reality. Both beliefs have had major influences in art, within painting and architecture particularly. Through the contrasting techniques and physical appearances, the many differences of the two movements are evident. Through our artwork, we can learn much about the different philosophies of humanity.

Works Cited

"Romanticism -- Britannica Online Encyclopedia." Encyclopedia - Britannica Online Encyclopedia . 16 Jan. 2009 <http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/508675/Romanticism>.

"WebMuseum: Classicism." animals @ ibiblio . 16 Jan. 2009 <http://ibiblio.org/wm/paint/glo/classicism/>.

"classicism — Infoplease.com." Infoplease: Encyclopedia, Almanac, Atlas, Biographies, Dictionary, Thesaurus. Free online reference, research & homework help. — Infoplease.com . 16 Jan. 2009 <http://www.infoplease.com/ce6/ent/A0812448.html>.

"romanticism: Definition from Answers.com." Answers.com - Online Dictionary, Encyclopedia and much more . 16 Jan. 2009 <http://www.answers.com/topic/romanticism>.

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Word Count 856
Subject Art

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The architecture of the eighteenth century is extremely complex and diverse. Moreover, the architecture of this century has given the world several significant styles and magnificent works of art. Thus, in the second half of the eighteenth century, the neoclassical style was widely popular in Europe (Gontar, 2003). The effects of the Renaissance prompted a renewed interest in concepts such as antiquity, harmony, and simplicity. In this context, it becomes important to note the traditional architectural works of this style. The Church of Saint-Geneviève is a prime example of an eighteenth-century neoclassical building. In this style, its simplicity and a certain flatness are important. Thus, the Church of Saint-Geneviève and all the other works of this time are extremely simple. The projections, bas-reliefs, and forms are made more flatly than in the other styles of this century.

If neoclassicism in its works refers to the origins of ancient art, Romanticism reinterprets it. Romanticism in architecture meant the reinterpretation of medieval and ancient styles and their expression in new forms (Galitz, 2003). However, initially romanticism arose within the framework of the literature. Only closer to the 19th century, Romanticism began to manifest itself in architecture, continuing to refer to romantic poems and novels (Harris et al., 2015).

In this vein, it becomes important to note the Royal Pavilion in Brighton, England, created by John Nash (Partington, 2015). It is this work of architecture that expresses the whole meaning of the Romanticism of England of that era. Finally, the Brighton Pavilion has found its inspiration in the literary works of such writers as Samuel Taylor Coleridge, William Beckford, and many others.

Finally, the Rococo style is some late variation of the Borocco and is similar in some details to it. The Rococo architectural style appeared in Europe in the eighteenth century, beginning in France during the regency of Philip of Orleans. This style contradicted the coldness and simplicity of neoclassicism. Moreover, Rococo tries to combine playfulness, lightness, and elegance in architecture. Finally, for Rococo, correctness and clarity of forms are unprincipled, as well as expediency and symmetry. Thus, despite the fact that Rococo is considered to be a continuation of Borocco, it still managed to become an independent style.

Works Cited

Harris, Dr. Beth, and Zucker, Dr. Steven. “ A beginner’s guide to Romanticism. ” Smarthistory , 2015. Web.

Galitz, Kathryn Calley. “ Romanticism .” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art , 2004. Web.

Gontar, Cybele. “Neoclassicism.” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2003. Web.

Partington, Michael, J. “John Nash, Royal Pavilion, Brighton.” Smarthistory , 2015. Web.

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Neoclassicism vs Romanticism – What’s the Difference?

During the early to mid-18th century, two different art movements emerged in Europe and would run parallel to one another for a number of years, shaping the course of artistic expression.

Neoclassicism was defined by its very close adherence to the ideals and practices of Greek and Roman traditions while Romanticism was a genre that was centered around the varying degrees of human emotion, as well as individuality.

While the Romantic era is believed to have started in France, the Neoclassicism period began in Italy around 1750. The two movements were often at odds with one another in the same areas of Europe, but represented very different ideals.

Both styles of art were mostly reactionary to the time periods that either immediately preceded them, or had already begun to emerge in Europe.

Cornelia Mother of the Gracchi Pointing to her Children as Her Treasures

The Neoclassicism movement was based more on the common Greek and Roman focus of viewing everything through a somewhat objective lens, as well as working to appeal to the human intellect and methods of reasoning.

Romanticism, as the name indicates, was largely centered on raw human emotion that was the driving factor behind the creative, aspirational nature of humans.

A more in depth study on both the Neoclassicism vs Romanticism reveals how artists from each movement used their different ideals and motivations to create some of the most stunning artwork in history.

Neoclassicism vs Romanticism

Neoclassicism and Romanticism were two contrasting cultural movements in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. Neoclassicism, prevalent from the mid-18th to late 18th century, emphasized reason, classical themes, and clean aesthetics. On the other hand, Romanticism, spanning the late 18th to mid-19th century, celebrated emotion, imagination, and individualism.

Neoclassicism Origins

The Neoclassicism era was heavily influenced by a wide range of visual arts and means of expression that had been captured many years prior.

Many Neoclassicism artists sought to differentiate themselves from the Renaissance movement that had dominated Europe and every form of artistic expression for well over a century before.

Many young artists traveled to various parts of Europe, including the regions that were most heavily-influenced by Greek and Roman thinking and artwork.

These artists returned to their home countries of France, Spain and other areas with a newfound appreciation for the artwork that was created by masterful painters and sculptures during the height of the Greek and Roman culture many years prior.

Achilles Receiving the Ambassadors of Agamemnon

Instead of focusing intently on religious themes as the painters of the Renaissance period had done, many artists were captivated by the beliefs and stories that were passed down in Roman and Greek culture for centuries before the Renaissance movement began.

The Neoclassicism era was very much a response and clear departure from the Rococo movement that had also emerged around the same time period.

The Neoclassicism movement began to taper down in the early 19th century and finally had been passed by in the latter half of the 1800’s.

Many artists developed stunning paintings that harkened back to the time when Greek and Roman philosophy was praised for its element of enlightened thinking. According to art historians and critics, the art movement is credited with having a lasting effect on the styles of art that would come after it.

Romanticism Origins

While Europe was being inundated with artistic styles that were based on past cultures or various ideals, Romanticism sprang out in the late 18th century and quickly caught on with young, aspiring artists as it was inherently new in many ways.

Compared to the art genres that had been present in Europe up until the early 1700’s, Romanticism brought a fresh, new perspective that explored the many different emotions of humankind.

Many of the earliest paintings of the Romanticism movement showed a stark difference from the overtly religious works that had been the focus of the highest levels of European society.

The influences of both the Catholic church and the Protestant Reformation reached deep into every corner of the everyday life of Europeans up until the 1700s, but after the middle of the 18th century , artists began to seek out new and exciting elements that would drive them to develop some of the greatest works from what we now know as the Romanticism era.

Characteristics of Neoclassicism Art

When it started in the mid-1700’s, Neoclassicism closely resembled the Renaissance period on the surface. Many works from both periods might appear to be similar in nature as they have relatively the same level of depth and coloration, as well as composition.

The true differences start to show when one examines the paintings of the Neoclassicism era more closely to gain a better understanding of the underlying message that each work had.

Many Neoclassicism paintings were centered around stories and ideas that could trace their origins in ancient Greek or Roman culture.

As the 18th century closed and another one began, artists increasingly focused their efforts on promoting ideas that focused on order and balance, as well as the principles of reason. These were all areas of art that had largely been ignored during the periods that came before Neoclassicism.

Characteristics of Romanticism Art

The Romanticism era was filled with life and passion as many painters embraced the idea of depicting humankind in its true, unfiltered form.

Painters focused on a variety of different ideals, stories, and historical events in their Romanticism paintings. They painted many different works that were all related to the deepest, most basic elements of human emotion that dealt with love, war, beauty, exploration, and many other ideals.

Many art historians and critics have noted that the Romanticism movement brought new focus on human characteristics that had largely been either ignored or dampened throughout the other movements leading up to the Romanticism period.

As the Industrial Revolution began to take the world by storm in many developed countries, artists sought to paint images that reminded people of their own sense of individualism.

Nature was a very prominent focus of Romanticism painters during the early phases of the movement, as well as when the era reached its peak.

Artists would commonly paint people in a natural setting that portrayed both humans and nature in a way that highlighted their own intrinsic beauty. In fact, artists that were from the regions of Germany and Russia developed their own certain style of Romantic painting that solely focused on nature.

In addition to works depicting the mystical properties of nature, Romantic paintings also painted in ways that left visible brushstrokes which were often used to intensify certain elements of the work.

Romanticism paintings typically featured bold colors and light and dark differences that sometimes created a ‘glowing’ sense of reality. Throughout the movement as a whole, Romanticism was a period that centered around depicting the many different human emotions in their most pure form.

Main Differences in Neoclassicism and Romanticism

According to the most respected art critics and historians, Neoclassicism differed from Romanticism on a very basic level.

Neoclassicism paintings were done in a way that focused more on things like reason and objective thinking. Artists of the Neoclassicism era portrayed different scenes and figures with very clear structure and composition.

It was intended as a clear departure from the highly ornamental nature of Rococo painting , which was popular at the same time the Neoclassicism period began to form and reach its peak.

Neoclassicism paintings were very much focused on historical figures and events that existed many years before the actual art period took place. Artists worked to portray various scenes from famous Greek plays or theatrical stories that were popular during the Roman Empire.

The works of the Neoclassicism movement portrayed these stories and figures in a very clear manner that displayed everything in the exact shape and size as the viewer would naturally perceive them.

Romanticism paintings consisted of more bold colors that were often brighter or even darker than they naturally appeared.

Many notable art historians and critics believe that this was done in such a manner so as to portray the underlying sense of emotions that the figures in each painting were experiencing. Romanticism artists often portrayed events or stories in ways that captured the climax of the specific subject matter in a way that communicated a deep level of raw emotion with the viewer.

Instead of the more natural, realistic depictions of the Neoclassicism period, Romanticism artists painted works that were highly subjective.

Some of the most famous Romanticism paintings were more inspirational and aimed toward evoking certain emotions from the viewer, or communicating the emotional state of the figures portrayed in the paintings to the viewer. It was very much a movement that embraced human creativity in relation to the natural world around them.

The Romanticism movement took place at the same relative time frame Neoclassicism did in many parts of Europe.

Various artists of the Romanticism style sought to differentiate themselves from their colleagues by appealing to the more passionate aspects of human existence rather than stories or historical events.

Both art movements represent two methods of presenting artwork and artistic expression that still endures into the modern era.

Romanticism and Classicism

Romanticism and classicism (1912).

I want to maintain that after a hundred years of romanticism, we are in for a classical revival, and that the particular weapon of this new classical spirit, when it works in verse, will be fancy. And in this I imply the superiority of fancy—not superior generally or absolutely, for that would be obvious nonsense, but superior in the sense that we use the word good in empirical ethics—good for something, superior for something. I shall have to prove then two things, first that a classical revival is coming, and, secondly, for its particular purposes, fancy will be superior to imagination.

So banal have the terms Imagination and Fancy become that we imagine they must have always been in the language. (1) Their history as two differing terms in the vocabulary of criticism is comparatively short. Originally, of course, they both mean the same thing; they first began to be differentiated by the German writers on aesthetics in the eighteenth century.

I know that in using the words “classic” and “romantic” I am doing a dangerous thing. They represent five or six different kinds of antitheses, and while I may be using them in one sense you may be interpreting them in another. In this present connection I am using them in a perfectly precise and limited sense. I ought really to have coined a couple of new words, but I prefer to use the ones I have used, as I then conform to the practice of the group of polemical writers who make most use of them at the present day, and have almost succeeded in making them political catchwords. I mean Maurras, Lasserre and all the group connected with L’Action Française. (2)

At the present time this is the particular group with which the distinction is most vital. Because it has become a party symbol. If you asked a man of a certain set whether he preferred the classics or the romantics, you could deduce from that what his politics were.

The best way of gliding into a proper definition of my terms would be to start with a set of people who are prepared to fight about it—for in them you will have no vagueness. (Other people take the infamous attitude of the person with catholic tastes who says he likes both.)

About a year ago, a man whose name I think was Fauchois gave a lecture at the Odéon on Racine, in the course of which he made some disparaging remarks about his dullness, lack of invention and the rest of it. This caused an immediate riot: fights took place all over the house; several people were arrested and imprisoned, and the rest of the series of lectures took place with hundreds of gendarmes and detectives scattered all over the place. These people interrupted because the classical ideal is a living thing to them and Racine is the great classic. That is what I call a real vital interest in literature. They regard romanticism as an awful disease from which France had just recovered.

The thing is complicated in their case by the fact that it was romanticism that made the revolution. They hate the revolution, so they hate romanticism.

I make no apology for dragging in politics here; romanticism both in England and France is associated with certain political views, and it is in taking a concrete example of the working out of a principle in action that you can get its best definition.

What was the positive principle behind all the other principles of ’89? I am talking here of the revolution in as far as it was an idea; I leave out material causes—they only produce the forces. The barriers which could easily have resisted or guided these forces had been previously rotted away by ideas. This always seems to be the case in successful changes; the privileged class is beaten only when it has lost faith in itself, when it has itself been penetrated with the ideas which are working against it.

It was not the rights of man—that was a good solid practical war-cry. The thing which created enthusiasm, which made the revolution practically a new religion, was something more positive than that. People of all classes, people who stood to lose by it, were in a positive ferment about the idea of liberty. There must have been some idea which enabled them to think that something positive could come out of so essentially negative a thing. There was, and here I get my definition of romanticism. They had been taught by Rousseau that man was by nature good, that it was only bad laws and customs that had suppressed him. Remove all these and the infinite possibilities of man would have a chance. This is what made them think that something positive could come out of disorder, this is what created the religious enthusiasm. Here is the root of all romanticism: that man, the individual, is an infinite reservoir of possibilities; and if you can so rearrange society by the destruction of oppressive order then these possibilities will have a chance and you will get Progress.

One can define the classical quite clearly as the exact opposite to this. Man is an extraordinarily fixed and limited animal whose nature is absolutely constant. It is only by tradition and organisation that anything decent can be got out of him.

This view was a little shaken at the time of Darwin. You remember his particular hypothesis, that new species came into existence by the cumulative effect of small variations—this seems to admit the possibility of future progress. But at the present day the contrary hypothesis makes headway in the shape of De Vries’s mutation theory, that each new species comes into existence, not gradually by the accumulation of small steps, but suddenly in a jump, a kind of sport, and that once in existence it remains absolutely fixed. This enables me to keep the classical view with an appearance of scientific backing.

Put shortly, these are the two views, then. One, that man is intrinsically good, spoilt by circumstance; and the other that he is intrinsically limited, but disciplined by order and tradition to something fairly decent. To the one party man’s nature is like a well, to the other like a bucket. The view which regards man as a well, a reservoir full of possibilities, I call the romantic; the one which regards him as a very finite and fixed creature, I call the classical.

One may note here that the Church has always taken the classical view since the defeat of the Pelagian heresy and the adoption of the sane classical dogma of original sin.

It would be a mistake to identify the classical view with that of materialism. On the contrary it is absolutely identical with the normal religious attitude. I should put it in this way: That part of the fixed nature of man is the belief in the Deity. This should be as fixed and true for every man as belief in the existence of matter and in the objective world. It is parallel to appetite, the instinct of sex, and all the other fixed qualities. Now at certain times, by the use of either force or rhetoric, these instincts have been suppressed—in Florence under Savonarola, in Geneva under Calvin, and here under the Roundheads. The inevitable result of such a process is that the repressed instinct bursts out in some abnormal direction. So with religion. By the perverted rhetoric of Rationalism, your natural instincts are suppressed and you are converted into an agnostic. Just as in the case of the other instincts, Nature has her revenge. The instincts that find their right and proper outlet in religion must come out in some other way. You don’t believe in a God, so you begin to believe that man is a god. You don’t believe in Heaven, so you begin to believe in a heaven on earth. In other words, you get romanticism. The concepts that are right and proper in their own sphere are spread over, and so mess up, falsify and blur the clear outlines of human experience. It is like pouring a pot of treacle over the dinner table. Romanticism then, and this is the best definition I can give of it, is spilt religion.

I must now shirk the difficulty of saying exactly what I mean by romantic and classical in verse. I can only say that it means the result of these two attitudes towards the cosmos, towards man, in so far as it gets reflected in verse. The romantic, because he thinks man infinite, must always be talking about the infinite; and as there is always the bitter contrast between what you think you ought to be able to do and what man actually can, it always tends, in its later stages at any rate, to be gloomy. I really can’t go any further than to say it is the reflection of these two temperaments, and point out examples of the different spirits. On the one hand I would take such diverse people as Horace, most of the Elizabethans and the writers of the Augustan age, and on the other side Lamartine, Hugo, parts of Keats, Coleridge, Byron, Shelley and Swinburne.

I know quite well that when people think of classical and romantic in verse, the contrast at once comes into their mind between, say, Racine and Shakespeare. I don’t mean this; the dividing line that I intend is here misplaced a little from the true middle. That Racine is on the extreme classical side I agree, but if you call Shakespeare romantic, you are using a different definition to the one I give. You are thinking of the difference between classic and romantic as being merely one between restraint and exuberance. I should say with Nietzsche that there are two kinds of classicism, the static and the dynamic. Shakespeare is the classic of motion.

What I mean by classical in verse, then, is this. That even in the most imaginative flights there is always a holding back, a reservation. The classical poet never forgets this finiteness, this limit of man. He remembers always that he is mixed up with earth. He may jump, but he always returns back; he never flies away into the circumambient gas. You might say if you wished that the whole of the romantic attitude seems to crystallise in verse round metaphors of flight. Hugo is always flying, flying over abysses, flying up into the eternal gases. The word infinite in every other line.

In the classical attitude you never seem to swing right along to the infinite nothing. If you say an extravagant thing which does exceed the limits inside which you know man to be fastened, yet there is always conveyed in some way at the end an impression of yourself standing outside it, and not quite believing it, or consciously putting it forward as a flourish. You never go blindly into an atmosphere more than the truth, an atmosphere too rarefied for man to breathe for long. You are always faithful to the conception of a limit. It is a question of pitch; in romantic verse you move at a certain pitch of rhetoric which you know, man being what he is, to be a little high-falutin. The kind of thing you get in Hugo or Swinburne. In the coming classical reaction that will feel just wrong. For an example of the opposite thing, a verse written in the proper classical spirit, I can take the song from Cymbeline beginning with “Fear no more the heat of the sun”. I am just using this as a parable. I don’t quite mean what I say here. Take the last two lines:

“Golden lads and girls all must, Like chimney sweepers come to dust.” (3)

Now, no romantic would have ever written that. Indeed, so ingrained in romanticism, so objectionable is this to it, that people have asserted that these were not part of the original song. Apart from the pun, the thing that I think quite classical is the word lad. Your modern romantic could never write that. He would have to write golden youth, and take up the thing at least a couple of notes in pitch.

I want now to give the reasons which make me think that we are nearing the end of the romantic movement.

The first lies in the nature of any convention or tradition in art. A particular convention or attitude in art has a strict analogy to the phenomena of organic life. It grows old and decays. It has a definite period of life and must die. All the possible tunes get played on it and then it is exhausted; moreover its best period is its youngest. Take the case of the extraordinary efflorescence of verse in the Elizabethan period. All kinds of reasons have been given for this—the discovery of the new world and all the rest of it. There is a much simpler one. A new medium had been given them to play with—namely, blank verse. It was new and so it was easy to play new tunes on it.

The same law holds in other arts. All the masters of painting are born into the world at a time when the particular tradition from which they start is imperfect. The Florentine tradition was just short of full ripeness when Raphael came to Florence, the Bellinesque was still young when Titian was born in Venice. Landscape was still a toy or an appanage of figure-painting when Turner and Constable arose to reveal its independent power. When Turner and Constable had done with landscape they left little or nothing for their successors to do on the same lines. Each field of artistic activity is exhausted by the first great artist who gathers a full harvest from it.

This period of exhaustion seems to me to have been reached in romanticism. We shall not get any new efflorescence of verse until we get a new technique, a new convention, to turn ourselves loose in.

Objection might be taken to this. It might be said that a century as an organic unity doesn’t exist, that I am being deluded by a wrong metaphor, that I am treating a collection of literary people as if they were an organism or state department. Whatever we may be in other things, an objector might urge, in literature in as far as we are anything at all—in as far as we are worth considering—we are individuals, we are persons, and as distinct persons we cannot be subordinated to any general treatment. At any period at any time, an individual poet may be a classic or a romantic just as he feels like it. You at any particular moment may think that you can stand outside a movement. You may think that as an individual you observe both the classic and the romantic spirit and decide from a purely detached point of view that one is superior to the other.

The answer to this is that no one, in a matter of judgment of beauty, can take a detached standpoint in this way. Just as physically you are not born that abstract entity, man, but the child of particular parents, so you are in matters of literary judgment. Your opinion is almost entirely of the literary history that came just before you, and you are governed by that whatever you may think. Take Spinoza’s example of a stone falling to the ground. If it had a conscious mind it would, he said, think it was going to the ground because it wanted to. So you with your pretended free judgment about what is and what is not beautiful. The amount of freedom in man is much exaggerated. That we are free on certain rare occasions, both my religion and the views I get from metaphysics convince me. But many acts which we habitually label free are in reality automatic. It is quite possible for a man to write a book almost automatically. I have read several such products. Some observations were recorded more than twenty years ago by Robertson on reflex speech, and he found that in certain cases of dementia, where the people were quite unconscious so far as the exercise of reasoning went, that very intelligent answers were given to a succession of questions on politics and such matters. The meaning of these questions could not possibly have been understood. Language here acted after the manner of a reflex. So that certain extremely complex mechanisms, subtle enough to imitate beauty, can work by themselves—I certainly think that this is the case with judgments about beauty.

I can put the same thing in slightly different form. Here is a question of a conflict of two attitudes, as it might be of two techniques. The critic, while he has to admit that changes from one to the other occur, persists in regarding them as mere variations to a certain fixed normal, just as a pendulum might swing. I admit the analogy of the pendulum as far as movement, but I deny the further consequence of the analogy, the existence of the point of rest, the normal point.

When I say that I dislike the romantics, I dissociate two things: the part of them in which they resemble all the great poets, and the part in which they differ and which gives them their character as romantics. It is this minor element which constitutes the particular note of a century, and which, while it excites contemporaries, annoys the next generation. It was precisely that quality in Pope which pleased his friends, which we detest. Now, anyone just before the romantics who felt that, could have predicted that a change was coming. It seems to me that we stand just in the same position now. I think that there is an increasing proportion of people who simply can’t stand Swinburne.

When I say that there will be another classical revival I don’t necessarily anticipate a return to Pope. I say merely that now is the time for such a revival. Given people of the necessary capacity, it may be a vital thing; without them we may get a formalism something like Pope. When it does come we may not even recognise it as classical. Although it will be classical it will be different because it has passed through a romantic period. To take a parallel example: I remember being very surprised, after seeing the Post Impressionists, to find in Maurice Denis’s account of the matter that they consider themselves classical in the sense that they were trying to impose the same order on the mere flux of new material provided by the impressionist movement, that existed in the more limited materials of the painting before.

There is something now to be cleared away before I get on with my argument, which is that while romanticism is dead in reality, yet the critical attitude appropriate to it still continues to exist. To make this a littler clearer: For every kind of verse, there is a corresponding receptive attitude. In a romantic period we demand from verse certain qualities. In a classical period we demand others. At the present time I should say that this receptive attitude has outlasted the thing from which it was formed. But while the romantic tradition has run dry, yet the critical attitude of mind, which demands romantic qualities from verse, still survives. So that if good classical verse were to be written tomorrow very few people would be able to stand it. I object even to the best of the romantics. I object still more to the receptive attitude. I object to the sloppiness which doesn’t consider that a poem is a poem unless it is moaning or whining about something or other. I always think in this connection of the last line of a poem of John Webster’s which ends with a request I cordially endorse:

“End your moan and come away.” (4)

The thing has got so bad now that a poem which is all dry and hard, a properly classical poem, would not be considered poetry at all. How many people now can lay their hands on their hearts and say they like either Horace or Pope? They feel a kind of chill when they read them.

The dry hardness which you get in the classics is absolutely repugnant to them. Poetry that isn’t damp isn’t poetry at all. They cannot see that accurate description is a legitimate object of verse. Verse to them always means a bringing in of some of the emotions that are grouped round the word infinite.

The essence of poetry to most people is that it must lead them to a beyond of some kind. Verse strictly confined to the earthly and the definite (Keats is full of it) might seem to them to be excellent writing, excellent craftsmanship, but not poetry. So much has romanticism debauched us, that, without some form of vagueness, we deny the highest.

In the classic it is always the light of ordinary day, never the light that never was on land or sea. It is always perfectly human and never exaggerated: man is always man and never a god. But the awful result of romanticism is that, accustomed to this strange light, you can never live without it. Its effect on you is that of a drug.

There is a general tendency to think that verse means little else than the expression of unsatisfied emotion. People say: “But how can you have verse without sentiment?” You see what it is: the prospect alarms them. A classical revival to them would mean the prospect of an arid desert and the death of poetry as they understand it, and could only come to fill the gap caused by that death. Exactly why this dry classical spirit should have a positive and legitimate necessity to express itself in poetry is utterly inconceivable to them. What this positive need is, I shall show later. It follows from the fact that there is another quality, not the emotion produced, which is at the root of excellence in verse. Before I get to this I am concerned with a negative thing, a theoretical point, a prejudice that stands in the way and is really at the bottom of this reluctance to understand classical verse.

It is an objection which ultimately I believe comes from a bad metaphysic of art. You are unable to admit the existence of beauty without the infinite being in some way or another dragged in.

I may quote for purposes of argument, as a typical example of this kind of attitude made vocal, the famous chapters in Ruskin’s Modern Painters, Vol. II, on the imagination. I must say here, parenthetically, that I use this word without prejudice to the other discussion with which I shall end the paper. I only use the word here because it is Ruskin’s word. All that I am concerned with just now is the attitude behind it, which I take to be the romantic.

Imagination cannot but be serious; she sees too far, too darkly, too solemnly, too earnestly, ever to smile. There is something in the heart of everything, if we can reach it, that we shall not be inclined to laugh at . . . Those who have so pierced and seen the melancholy deeps of things, are filled with intense passion and gentleness of sympathy. (Part III, Chap. III, § 9) There is in every word set down by the imaginative mind an awful undercurrent of meaning, and evidence and shadow upon it of the deep places out of which it has come. It is often obscure, often half-told; for he who wrote it, in his clear seeing of the things beneath, may have been impatient of detailed interpretations; for if we choose to dwell upon it and trace it, it will lead us always securely back to that metropolis of the soul’s dominion from which we may follow out all the ways and tracks to its farthest coasts. (Part III, Chap. III, § 5) (5)

Really in all these matters the act of judgment is an instinct, an absolutely unstateable thing akin to the art of the tea taster. But you must talk, and the only language you can use in this matter is that of analogy. I have no material clay to mould to the given shape; the only thing which one has for the purpose, and which acts as a substitute for it, a kind of mental clay, are certain metaphors modified into theories of aesthetic and rhetoric. A combination of these, while it cannot state the essentially unstateable intuition, can yet give you a sufficient analogy to enable you to see what it was and to recognise it on condition that you yourself have been in a similar state. Now these phrases of Ruskin’s convey quite clearly to me his taste in the matter.

I see quite clearly that he thinks the best verse must be serious. That is a natural attitude for a man in the romantic period. But he is not content with saying that he prefers this kind of verse. He wants to deduce his opinion like his master, Coleridge, from some fixed principle which can be found by metaphysic.

Here is the last refuge of this romantic attitude. It proves itself to be not an attitude but a deduction from a fixed principle of the cosmos.

One of the main reasons for the existence of philosophy is not that it enables you to find truth (it can never do that) but that it does provide you a refuge for definitions. The usual idea of the thing is that it provides you with a fixed basis from which you can deduce the things you want in esthetics. The process is the exact contrary. You start in the confusion of the fighting line, you retire from that just a little to the rear to recover, to get your weapons right. Quite plainly, without metaphor this—it provides you with an elaborate and precise language in which you really can explain definitely what you mean, but what you want to say is decided by other things. The ultimate reality is the hurly-burly, the struggle; the metaphysics is an adjunct to clear-headedness in it.

To get back to Ruskin and his objection to all that is not serious. It seems to me that involved in this is a bad metaphysical aesthetic. You have the metaphysic which in defining beauty or the nature of art always drags in the infinite. Particularly in Germany, the land where theories of aesthetics were first created, the romantic aesthetes collated all beauty to an impression of the infinite involved in the identification of our being in absolute spirit. In the least element of beauty we have a total intuition of the whole world. Every artist is a kind of pantheist. Now it is quite obvious to anyone who holds this kind of theory that any poetry which confines itself to the finite can never be of the highest kind. It seems a contradiction in terms to them. And as in metaphysics you get the last refuge of a prejudice, so it is now necessary for me to refute this.

Here follows a tedious piece of dialectic, but it is necessary for my purpose. I must avoid two pitfalls in discussing the idea of beauty. On the one hand there is the old classical view which is supposed to define it as lying in conformity to certain standard fixed forms; and on the other hand there is the romantic view which drags in the infinite. I have got to find a metaphysic between these two which will enable me to hold consistently that a neo-classic verse of the type I have indicated involves no contradiction in terms. It is essential to prove that beauty may be in small, dry things.

The great aim is accurate, precise and definite description. The first thing is to recognise how extraordinarily difficult this is. It is no mere matter of carefulness; you have to use language, and language is by its very nature a communal thing; that is, it expresses never the exact thing but a compromise—that which is common to you, me and everybody. But each man sees a little differently, and to get out clearly and exactly what he does see, he must have a terrific struggle with language, whether it be with words or the technique of other arts. Language has its own special nature, its own conventions and communal ideas. It is only by a concentrated effort of the mind that you can hold it fixed to your own purpose. I always think that the fundamental process at the back of all the arts might be represented by the following metaphor. You know what I call architect’s curves—flat pieces of wood with all different kinds of curvature. By a suitable selection from these you can draw approximately any curve you like. The artist I take to be the man who simply can’t bear the idea of that “approximately”. He will get the exact curve of what he sees whether it be an object or an idea in the mind. I shall here have to change my metaphor a little to get the process in his mind. Suppose that instead of your curved pieces of wood you have a springy piece of steel of the same types of curvature as the wood. Now the state of tension or concentration of mind, if he is doing anything really good in this struggle against the ingrained habit of the technique, may be represented by a man employing all his fingers to bend the steel out of its own curve and into the exact curve which you want. Something different to what it would assume naturally.

There are then two things to distinguish, first the particular faculty of mind to see things as they really are, and apart from the conventional ways in which you have been trained to see them. This is itself rare enough in all consciousness. Second, the concentrated state of mind, the grip over oneself which is necessary in the actual expression of what one sees. To prevent one falling into the conventional curves of ingrained technique, to hold on through infinite detail and trouble to the exact curve you want. Wherever you get this sincerity, you get the fundamental quality of good art without dragging in infinite or serious.

I can now get at that positive fundamental quality of verse which constitutes excellence, which has nothing to do with infinity, with mystery or with emotions. This is the point I aim at, then, in my argument. I prophesy that a period of dry, hard, classical verse is coming. I have met the preliminary objection founded on the bad romantic aesthetic that is such verse, from which the infinite is excluded, you cannot have the essence of poetry at all.

After attempting to sketch out what this positive quality is, I cannot get on to the end of my paper in this way: That where you get this quality exhibited in the realm of the emotions you get imagination, and that where you get this quality exhibited in the contemplation of finite things you get fancy.

In prose as in algebra concrete things are embodied in signs or counters which are moved about according to rules, without being visualised at all in the process. There are in prose certain type situations and arrangements of words, which move as automatically into certain other arrangements as do functions in algebra. One only changes the X’s and the Y’s back into physical things at the end of the process. Poetry, in one aspect at any rate, may be considered as an effort to avoid this characteristic of prose. It is not a counter language, but a visual concrete one. It is a compromise for a language of intuition which would hand over sensations bodily. It always endeavours to arrest you, and to make you continuously see a physical thing, to prevent you gliding through an abstract process. It chooses fresh epithets and fresh metaphors, not so much because they are new, and we are tired of the old, but because the old cease to convey a physical thing and become abstract counters. A poet says a ship “coursed the seas” to get a physical image, instead of the counter word “sailed”. Visual meanings can only be transferred by the new bowl of metaphor; prose is an old pot that lets them leak out. Images in verse are not mere decoration, but the very essence of an intuitive language. Verse is a pedestrian taking you over the ground, prose—a train which delivers you at a destination.

I can now get on to a discussion of two words often used in this connection, “fresh” and “unexpected”. You praise a thing for being “fresh”. I understand what you mean, but the word besides conveying the truth conveys a secondary something which is certainly false. When you say a poem or drawing is fresh, and so good, the impression is somehow conveyed that the essential element of goodness is freshness, that it is good because it is fresh. Now this is certainly wrong, there is nothing particularly desirable about freshness per se. Works of art aren’t eggs. Rather the contrary. It is simply an unfortunate necessity due to the nature of the language and technique that the only way the element which does constitute goodness, the only way in which its presence can be detected externally, is by freshness. Freshness convinces you, you feel at once that the artist was in an actual physical state. You feel that for a minute. Real communication is so very rare, for plain speech is unconvincing. It is in this rare fact of communication that you get the root of aesthetic pleasure.

I shall maintain that wherever you get an extraordinary interest in a thing, a great zest in its contemplation which carries on the contemplator to accurate description in the sense of the word accurate I have just analysed, there you have sufficient justification for poetry. It must be an intense zest which heightens a thing out of the level of prose. I am using contemplation here just in the same way that Plato used it, only applied to a different subject; it is a detached interest. “The object of aesthetic contemplation is something framed apart by itself and regarded without memory or expectation, simply as being itself, as end not means, as individual not universal.”

To take a concrete example. I am taking an extreme case. If you are walking behind a woman in the street, you notice the curious way in which the skirt rebounds from her heels. If that peculiar kind of motion becomes of such interest to you that you will search about until you can get the exact epithet which hits it off, there you have a properly aesthetic emotion. But it is the zest with which you look at the thing which decides you to make the effort. In this sense the feeling that was in Herrick’s mind when he wrote “the tempestuous petticoat” was exactly the same as that which in bigger and vaguer matters makes the best romantic verse. It doesn’t matter an atom that the emotion produced is not of dignified vagueness, but on the contrary amusing; the point is that exactly the same activity is at work as in the highest verse. That is the avoidance of conventional language in order to get the exact curve of the thing.

I have still to show that in the verse which is to come, fancy will be the necessary weapon of the classical school. The positive quality I have talked about can be manifested in ballad verse by extreme directness and simplicity, such as you get in “On Fair Kirkconnel Lea”. But the particular verse we are going to get will be cheerful, dry and sophisticated, and here the necessary weapon of the positive quality must be fancy.

Subject doesn’t matter; the quality in it is the same as you get in the more romantic people.

It isn’t the scale or kind of emotion produced that decides, but this one fact: Is there any real zest in it? Did the poet have an actually realised visual object before him in which he delighted? It doesn’t matter if it were a lady’s shoe or the starry heavens.

Fancy is not mere decoration added on to plain speech. Plain speech is essentially inaccurate. It is only by new metaphors, that is, by fancy, that it can be made precise. When the analogy has not enough connection with the thing described to be quite parallel with it, where it overlays the thing it described and there is a certain excess, there you have the play of fancy—that I grant is inferior to imagination.

But where the analogy is every bit of it necessary for accurate description in the sense of the word accurate I have previously described, and your only objection to this kind of fancy is that it is not serious in the effect it produces, then I think the objection to be entirely invalid. If it is sincere in the accurate sense, when the whole of the analogy is necessary to get out the exact curve of the feeling or thing you want to express—there you seem to me to have the highest verse, even though the subject be trivial and the emotions of the infinite far away.

It is very difficult to use any terminology at all for this kind of thing. For whatever word you use is at once sentimentalised. Take Coleridge’s word “vital”. It is used loosely by all kinds of people who talk about art, to mean something vaguely and mysteriously significant. In fact, vital and mechanical is to them exactly the same antithesis as between good and bad.

Nothing of the kind; Coleridge uses it in a perfectly definite and what I call dry sense. It is just this: A mechanical complexity is the sum of its parts. Put them side by side and you get the whole. Now vital or organic is merely a convenient metaphor for a complexity of a different kind, that in which the parts cannot be said to be elements as each one is modified by the other’s presence, and each one to a certain extent is the whole. The leg of a chair by itself is still a leg. My leg by itself wouldn’t be.

Now the characteristic of the intellect is that it can only represent complexities of the mechanical kind. It can only make diagrams, and diagrams are essentially things whose parts are separate one from another. The intellect always analyses—when there is a synthesis it is baffled. That is why the artist’s work seems mysterious. The intellect can’t represent it. This is a necessary consequence of the particular nature of the intellect and the purposes for which it is formed. It doesn’t mean that your synthesis is ineffable, simply that it can’t be definitely stated.

Now this is all worked out in Bergson, the central feature of his whole philosophy. It is all based on the clear conception of these vital complexities which he calls “intensive” as opposed to the other kind which he calls “extensive”, and the recognition of the fact that the intellect can only deal with the extensive multiplicity. To deal with the intensive you must use intuition. Now, as I said before, Ruskin was perfectly aware of all this, but he had no such metaphysical background which would enable him to state definitely what he meant. The result is that he has to flounder about in a series of metaphors. A powerfully imaginative mind seizes and combines at the same instant all the important ideas of its poem or picture, and while it works with one of them, it is at the same instant working with and modifying all in their relation to it and never losing sight of their bearings on each other—as the motion of a snake’s body goes through all parts at once and its volition acts at the same instant in coils which go contrary ways.

A romantic movement must have an end of the very nature of the thing. It may be deplored, but it can’t be helped—wonder must cease to be wonder.

I guard myself here from all the consequences of the analogy, but it expresses at any rate the inevitableness of the process. A literature of wonder must have an end as inevitably as a strange land loses its strangeness when one lives in it. Think of the lost ecstasy of the Elizabethans. “Oh my America, my new found land,” (6) think of what it meant to them and of what it means to us. Wonder can only be the attitude of a man passing from one stage to another, it can never be a permanently fixed thing.

1. This distinction, between Imagination and Fancy, was made by Coleridge in Biographia Litteraria (1817).

2. Charles Maurras (1868-1952) and Pierre Lasserre (1867-1930) were leading figures in the French reactionary political movement Action Française, which was founded in the wake of the Dreyfus affair (a scandal in which a French officer was convicted of treason, with deeply polarising effects in French society). Lasserre’s literary works influenced Hulme deeply. Lasserre argued that Rousseau and Romanticism were responsible for the intellectual and political decadence of the late nineteenth century, and advocated, like Hulme, a return to “Classicism’” Hulme met Lasserre in 1911, around the time of writing “Romanticism and Classicism”.

3. This is in fact a misquotation of Shakespeare. The text should read: ‘Golden lads and girls all must, / As chimney-sweepers, come to dust’ (Cymbeline, 4.2.263).

4. Another misquotation, this time from Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi, IV, 2. The line should read: ‘End your groan and come away.’

5. John Ruskin (1819-1900), the Victorian art and social critic, published Modern Painters from 1843 to 1860.

6. From John Donne, ‘Elegie: To his Mistris Going to Bed’.

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Inviting Presences: Intratextual Subjectivities in Early Modern Women’s Writing

Surveying the absence on her shelf where Elizabethan women’s writing ought to be, Virginia Woolf (in)famously dismissed the possibility of Shakespeare’s sister ever finding “a room of her own” to develop her voice. Recent decades of literary scholarship have shown the invention with which early modern women built out their own textual “rooms,” finding voice in surprising places and forms (even in silence, as Christina Luckyj heard [2002]), in visions of new political subjectivities (in a radically equal imaginary, as seen by Mihiko Suzuki [2003]), and through networks of overlooked community (in coteries and in letters, as traced by James Daybell [2006]). Even more, we have become attuned to the way that early modern women’s texts are not merely “rooms,” blank potentials for an author to inscribe her subjectivity, but rich multivocal chambers whose voices rebound on their author.

We invite proposals for papers to be presented at the Sixteenth Century Society Conference in Toronto, ON, October 31 to November 2, 2024, which pursue questions concerning alternate textual presences in early modern European women’s writing. Often writing from the margins of political or social community, women writers play with absence and desire to invite presence, of all kinds. How do paradoxes of absence/presence and monologue/dialogue manifest in writing by early modern women? How do women writers craft texts which entreat, invite, or summon other presences – be they interlocutors or friends, human or divine?

Suitable topics will focus on early modern (c. 1500-1660) literary texts written by women and might include:

How presence is summoned/evoked, including in the substitution of objects for subjects

Substantiation of longing and desire

Intertextuality and authorial identity

Anonymity, paratext, and book material culture

Gaps in the archive

Please send paper abstracts (250w) and brief biographical notes (150w) to Dr. Jantina Ellens [email protected] and Dr. Joel Faber [email protected] by Friday, April 12, 2024.

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Romanticism and Classicism by T. E. Hulme
Hulme joined the British army in 1914 and was killed in 1917. Dissatisfied with the state of English poetry, Hulme puts forth a rousing argument proposing a new direction for poetry in "Romanticism and Classicism.". The essay is logical, detailed, and sometimes funny as he dispenses with Romanticism and looks forward to a classical revival ...
A Short Analysis of T. E. Hulme's 'Romanticism and Classicism'
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University) 'Romanticism and Classicism' by T. E. Hulme (1883-1917) was posthumously published as part of the 1924 collection Speculations but probably written in 1911-12. It's an important attack on romanticism in art and poetry, and was an influential defence of the 'philosophy' (though that may be too grand a word…
What are the differences between Romanticism and Classicism?
Romanticism and Classicism exist on two very different poles within literary movements. Many new periods came about as a reaction to the previous period, and the contrasts between these periods ...
The Meaning of Hulme's 'Romanticism is Spilt Religion'
This essay is an important attack on romanticism in art and poetry, and was an influential defence of the 'philosophy' (though that may be too grand a word for it) underpinning much modernist poetry in English. In 'Romanticism and Classicism', Hulme states that there are two basic positions to adopt in relation to humanity: the romantic ...
Romanticism
Romanticism. Romanticism, first defined as an aesthetic in literary criticism around 1800, gained momentum as an artistic movement in France and Britain in the early decades of the nineteenth century and flourished until mid-century. With its emphasis on the imagination and emotion, Romanticism emerged as a response to the disillusionment with ...
T. E. Hulme
His essay 'Romanticism and Classicism' defines Romanticism as 'spilt religion', and predicts a new 'cheerful, dry and sophisticated' poetry. Only six of his poems were published in his lifetime, five in Orage's New Age, 1912, as 'The Complete Poetical Works of T. E. Hulme'. Hulme also contributed to the New Age his essays on ...
Romanticism
Romanticism is the attitude that characterized works of literature, painting, music, architecture, criticism, and historiography in the West from the late 18th to the mid-19th century. It emphasized the individual, the subjective, the irrational, the imaginative, the personal, the emotional, and the visionary.
Romanticism and Classicism
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University) 'Romanticism and Classicism' by T. E. Hulme (1883-1917) was posthumously published as part of the 1924 collection Speculations but probably written in 1911-12. It's an important attack on romanticism in art and poetry, and was an influential defence of the 'philosophy' (though that may be too grand a word for it) underpinning much ...
(PDF) "Romanticism versus Classicism in 1910: T. E. Hulme, Edward
Romanticism versus Classicism in 1910: T. E. Hulme, Edward Storer and The Commentator Christos Hadjiyiannis Wolfson College, Oxford Introduction The distinction between 'romanticism' and 'classicism' is best known to students of literary modernism through the critical writings of T. S. Eliot, where the antithesis captures an absolute difference between 'the complete and the ...
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Summary. Broadly conceived, European Romanticism designates a period of 100 years extending from Rousseau to Baudelaire, and in painting and music it follows Classicism. German literary history not only uses the term more narrowly, as this volume demonstrates, but it also distinguishes between contemporaneous movements called Romanticism and ...
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While classicism and Romanticism are often understood as being diametrically opposed, some literary scholars and art historians insist that classicism and Romanticism maintain an important cultural balance between overly expressive impulses and aesthetic control. Modernism. Once more, a surge of classicist activity took place in modernity.
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A romantic character named Edward Rochester was Jane Eyre's love interest in Charlotte Bronte's novel "Jane Eyre." The treatment of emotion is one of the primary ways in which Classicism and Romanticism differ. The Romantics placed a higher value on the expression of strong emotion than on technical perfection.
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They perceive classical objects as dull, unemotional, ordinary, cold, and conservative while romantic objects are exciting, imaginative, bold, artistic. This is a good point which to discuss the value judgments implicit. their descriptions of each category and to words/descriptions that reverse or modify. judgments.
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Whereas French classicism had been static, opposed to change, and hostile to Romanticism, German classicism claimed to be dynamic and in no way opposed to the new poetry. In a conversation with Eckermann shortly before his death, Goethe returned for one last time to the question of the distinction between classical and Romantic, which had ...
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Romanticism v. Classicism. Romanticism and Classicism are two very contrasting movements that focus largely on philosophy, art, and literature. The two styles dwell on very similar subjects but offer alternate perspectives. Romanticism was a revolutionary movement in which humanity's view toward art, nature, and themselves were re-thought.
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Broadly conceived, European Romanticism designates a period of 100 years extending from Rousseau to Baudelaire, and in painting and music it follows Classicism. German literary history not only uses the term more narrowly, as this volume demonstrates, but it also distinguishes between contemporaneous movements called Romanticism and Classicism. In the context of European comparative ...
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The Church of Saint-Geneviève is a prime example of an eighteenth-century neoclassical building. In this style, its simplicity and a certain flatness are important. Thus, the Church of Saint-Geneviève and all the other works of this time are extremely simple. The projections, bas-reliefs, and forms are made more flatly than in the other ...
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Ancient Mariner Assessment - Short Essay. Romanticisms actually began in the mid- 18th century and reached its peak in the 19th century. Romantic literature in the 19th century withholds the ideals of the time period, emotion, nature etc. The actual definition of romanticism is a movement of literature and the fine arts.
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Lasserre's literary works influenced Hulme deeply. Lasserre argued that Rousseau and Romanticism were responsible for the intellectual and political decadence of the late nineteenth century, and advocated, like Hulme, a return to "Classicism'" Hulme met Lasserre in 1911, around the time of writing "Romanticism and Classicism". 3.
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The Romanticism session seeks papers that examine any aspect of Romanticism, whether German, French, English, or in other languages (although we ask that papers and proposals be primarily in English). We are particularly interested in papers attuned to some facet of the conference theme, "Translation in Action."
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121st Annual PAMLA Conference Romanticism Session. updated: Wednesday, April 10, 2024 - 10:41am. ... Call for Papers: ... classical studies; cultural studies and historical approaches; ecocriticism and environmental studies; eighteenth century; english-education;
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We invite proposals for papers to be presented at the Sixteenth Century Society Conference in Toronto, ON, October 31 to November 2, 2024, which pursue questions concerning alternate textual presences in early modern European women's writing.

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