A History of Modern Europe - From the Renaissance to the Present

Romanticism 583

and identity in a common history, culture, and above all, language as part of
a Volk, or living and evolving “national community.” Herder thus helped
invent the idea of a national culture. At the same time, his insistence on the
existence of different racial types, shaped by climate, history, and cultural
traditions, would influence the evolution of racism later in the century. In
Central ;and Eastern Europe, which was constituted in many areas by a
patchwork of nationalities, romanticism celebrated the historical authentic­
ity of the cultural traditions and languages of ethnic peoples. From there it
would be a short step to argue that nationalities should have their own inde­
pendent state.

Romantic Literature and Painting

Romantics defined freedom as the unleashing of the senses and passion of
the soul. They searched for the “heroic genius” who fulfills himself in spite
of constraints placed on him by the state, religion, or societal convention.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832) evoked the impassioned battle
raging in the mind of the heroic individual. Goethe’s hero in Faust (1790)
struggles to make his way against a society that fails to understand him.
Like Faust, romantic writers and artists were, at least at the beginning, lit­
erary and academic outsiders. Many were loners, without established profes­
sional positions, overwhelmed by what they considered the tragedy of their
unrequited search for individual fulfillment because less-gifted people did
not comprehend their brilliance. Romantics bared the suffering of their
souls. The English poet Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822) penned his lofti­
est tribute to the poet (and, thus, himself) in “Hymn of Apollo”:

I am the eye with which the Universe

Beholds itself and knows itself divine;

All harmony of instrument or verse,

All prophecy, all medicine is mine,

All light of art or nature;—to my song

Victory and praise in its own right belong.

Romantic painters sought to convey feeling through the depiction of the

helplessness of the individual confronted by the power of nature—gathering

storms, surging seas, and immense, dark forests, portrayed with deep, rich

colors. In France, Theodore Gericault (1791-1824) reached the public eye

with his Officer of the Chasseurs Commanding a Charge (1812), p. 584,

an almost worshipful painting of a Napoleonic officer in the heat of battle.

Gericault became obsessed with shipwrecks, a subject that reflected his

volatile personality. He sought out real-life survivors of such tragedies in

order to paint his powerful The Raft of the Medusa (1818-1819), depicting

a shipwreck off the West African coast.