The Humanistic Tradition, Book 5 Romanticism, Realism, and the Nineteenth-Century World

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LOOKING AHEAD

The Progress of Industrialization

Early Nineteenth-Century Thought

2 CHAPTER 27 The Romantic View of Nature

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The nineteenth century is often called “the Romantic era.” The

term “Romanticism” describes a movement in the history of cul-

ture, an aesthetic style, and an attitude of mind. As a cultural

movement, Romanticism reacted against the rationalism of the

Enlightenment and the depersonalizing effects of Western indus-

trialization. Spanning the late eighteenth century and continuing

well into the twentieth, the Romantic movement revolted against

academic convention, and authority, and opposed the limitations

to freedom in personal, political, and artistic life.

As a style, Romanticism provided an alternative to the

Enlightenment values of order, clarity, and rational restraint. In

place of Neoclassical formality and the objective exercise of the

intellect, Romanticism celebrated spontaneity and the subjective

exercise of the imagination. In all of the arts, the Romantics aban-

doned traditional formal constraints to explore new, imaginative

avenues of expression.

As an attitude of mind, Romanticism may be seen as an

assertion of intuitive individualism and the primacy of feeling.

Romantics did not reject the value of reason as such, but they

regarded emotions (and the role of the senses) as equally impor-

tant to human experience—and as essential to creativity. They

looked to nature as a source of divine inspiration and seized on

the tumultuous events of their time: the exotic, the catastrophic,

and the fantastic. They often indulged in acts of nonconformity

that alienated them from conventional society.

The lives and works of the Romantics were marked by deep

subjectivity—even self-indulgence. If their perceptions and

passions were intense, their desire to devise a language adequate

to that intensity of feeling often drove them to frustration, melan-

choly, despair, and early death: the poets Shelley, Keats, and

Byron; the composers Chopin and Schubert; and the painters Gros

and Géricault, all died before the age of forty.

During the nineteenth century, the population of Europe

doubled in size. At the same time, material culture

changed more radically than it had in the previous 1000

years. The application of science to practical invention,

begun in the eighteenth century, had already sparked the

beginnings of the Industrial Revolution—the mass produc-

tion of material goods by machine (see chapter 25). The

first phase of industrialization occurred in mid-eighteenth-

century England, with the development of the steam

engine and the machinery for spinning and weaving tex-

tiles (see chapter 25). Monopolized by the English for a

half-century, the Industrial Revolution spread to the rest of

Europe and to the United States by the 1830s. As increas-

ing production of coal, iron, and steel encouraged the fur-

ther expansion of industry and commerce, the West was

transformed from an agrarian to an industrially based soci-

ety. Goods that had been hand-produced in homes and

workshops were increasingly manufactured in newly con-

structed factories, mills, and mines. Industrialization

demanded enormous investments of capital and the efforts

of a large labor force; it stimulated growth in Europe’s

urban centers. And ultimately, it provided the basis for the

West’s controlling influence over the rest of the world (see

chapter 30).

Romanticism found its formal

philosophers largely among nine-

teenth-century German intellec-

tuals. Gottlieb Fichte (1762–

1814), Friedrich Schisler (1775–

1854), and Arthur Schopenhauer (1788–1860) followed

the philosophic idealism of Immanuel Kant, who exalted

the role of the human mind in constructing an idea of the

world (see chapter 25). According to the German idealists,

the truths of empirical experience were not self-evident, as

Locke had argued, and the truths of the mind were not clear

and distinct, as Descartes had held. Much like Rousseau

(see chapter 25) and the Romantic poets (discussed later in

this chapter), the idealists prized the powers of human

instinct and viewed nature in deeply subjective terms.

Schopenhauer defended the existence of a “life-will,” a

blind and striving impersonal force whose operations are

without purpose or design, and whose activities give rise to

disorder and delusion. In Schopenhauer’s view, the only

escape from malignant reality was selfless contemplation of

the kind described in Hindu literature and the mystical

treatises of Johannes Eckhart (see chapter 15). Welcoming

the influence of Indian religious philosophy, Schopenhauer

wrote, “Sanskrit literature will be no less influential for our

time than Greek literature was in the fifteenth century for

the Renaissance.”

While Schopenhauer perceived existence as devoid

of reason and burdened by constant suffering, others

moved in the direction of mysticism. Some allied with

notable visionaries, such as Friedrich von Hardenberg, bet-

ter known as Novalis (1772–1801). Novalis shaped the

German Romantic movement through poems and essays

that expressed longing for the lost mythic past and a spiri-

tually inspired future. “If God could become man,” wrote

Novalis, “then He can also become stone, plant, animal,

and element and perhaps in this way there is redemption in

Nature.” The Romantic reawakening of religion embraced

the doctrines of mysticism, confessional emotionalism, and

pantheism, the last of which stressed the unity of God,

man, and nature. According to the foremost German