ROMANTICISM. - By Romanticism is meant that movement of a literary, artistic, philosophical, political, and social character which took shape in Europe in the second half of the 18th century and spread in the first half of the 19th, reacting against the spirit of the Enlightenment and establishing a new way of feeling, with a predominance of imagination and sentiment over reason, of inspiration over rule, and of the popularity of the work over aristocratic isolation. It draws upon the sources of Christian medieval civilization and promotes, in antithesis to formal classicism, a new civilization of letters founded on the freedom and truth of art.
I. LITERARY ROMANTICISM.
I. ROMANTICISM IN GERMANY
German Romanticism is an aspect of European Romanticism: a complex movement of the German spirit that encompasses religion, literature, music, the figurative arts, philosophy, the sciences, and the general conception of life. From 1796 (G. Wackenroder, *Heartfelt Events of an Art-Loving Monk*) until about 1830, it dominated almost all fields of spiritual life in Germany and influenced other peoples, especially through poetry, music, philosophy, and the sciences. It developed from premises found in Hemsterhuis, Bodmer, and Breitinger as well as in the *Sturm und Drang* (Heinse, Herder, young Goethe) and the French Revolution; its religious lyricism is based on Pietism. Critically, it is antithetical to the Enlightenment, to Weimar classicism, and in part to Protestantism and Neo-Humanism. The word *romantisch* already appears in Wieland and Herder, who use it particularly to denote medieval chivalric poetry in the Romance languages; the Schlegel brothers initially maintain this meaning, but then extend it in opposition to the ancient and apply it to the modern sphere and to their theory of art. Criticism considers Goethe’s novel *Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship* (1795–96) as a typically “Romantic” work due to its interpenetration of the poetic element with real life.Romanticism arose from the speculations of the generation born around 1770 (early Romanticism). Starting from Kant, Fichte elaborated the doctrine of the “I” as isolated, whose essence consists in incessantly free moral action: Romanticism deduced from this absolute formal freedom and, in part, moral libertinism. Schleiermacher freed religion from rational, dogmatic, and historical constraints; he defined it as “sense and taste for the infinite,” a feeling of “absolute dependence” on God: this corresponds to the free religiosity and the yearning for the infinite characteristic of Romanticism. Schelling regarded nature and history as manifestations of the same reality, synthesized by him in a poetic manner: thus, for Romantic poetry, the animation of nature and the synthesis of all spiritual activities are justified.
Consequently, poetry, painting, and music stand in intimate relation: “Color and form resound”; color, fragrance, and song are “brothers” (Tieck). In Runge, the idea of the total work of art appears, an aspiration later taken up by Wagner. Meanwhile, F. Schlegel, moving from classicism, does not yet include music in his definition of poetry: “Romantic poetry is universal-progressive poetry. Its intention is not only to reunite all the separate genres of poetry and to link poetry with philosophy and rhetoric; it also wishes, and must, now mingle, now fuse poetry and prose, genius and criticism, artistic poetry and popular poetry; to make poetry alive and social, and to poeticize life and society...” However, Wackenroder, Tieck, Brentano, and later Hoffmann, Grillparzer, and Mörike forge intimate ties between their poetry and music: alongside novels about the lives of painters (Tieck, *Franz Sternbald’s Wanderings*), dramas about the lives of poets (Grillparzer, *Sappho*), there arises the novella about musicians (Heinse as a precursor; Hoffmann, Mörike). The realization of the Romantic artistic program is based on the creative power of the imagination; the fairy tale is valued as the purest expression of poetry. The fantastic merges with the mysterious; the boundaries between waking and sleep are lost; somnambulism, like, in general, all “nocturnal elements of nature,” draws the Romantics into its orbit. Lyric poetry impels the soul toward an atmosphere entirely tense with a mysterious infinity, which man eternally aspires to: the symbol of this *Sehnsucht* is the “blue flower” (F. Novalis, *Heinrich von Ofterdingen*). At the same time, however, Romanticism feels the contrast between the yearned-for infinite and limited reality, representing it either through a fragmentary, aphoristic form (F. Schlegel, later Nietzsche), or through a fusion of forms and styles (Tieck’s dramas), or through the disenchantment of the atmosphere (Heine) in ironic distance. The irony of early Romanticism takes nothing entirely seriously and begins to play with the spirit; the difference between confidential conversation and public manifestation is lost. Thus, the path is opened to mere cerebralism and cold exercises.
At the same time, Romantic *Sehnsucht* turns to what is distant in time and space: a sense of history arises. During the spread of Protestantism in Germany, literature had gained preeminence over the other arts; the spirit had become anti-figurative, and large Catholic strata remained estranged from the Protestant-humanist cultural world. Now, Novalis attempts to resolve the religious and cultural schisms in Germany, deducing from Protestantism the much-contested Enlightenment and setting as its goal the medieval unity of faith and culture (*Christianity or Europe*, 1799; published only in 1826): “Initially personal hatred of the Catholic faith gradually turned into hatred of the Bible, of Christian faith, and finally of religion. Moreover, hatred of religion naturally and logically extended to all objects of ‘enthusiasm’: it proclaimed fantasy and sentiment, morality and love of art, the future and the past, heretical; it barely placed man at the head of the series of natural beings and reduced the infinitely creative music of the universe to the noisy moment of a giant mill...” Europe must be reconstituted through a “regeneration”; no longer antiquity, but Christian medieval civilization serves as the model.
This return to the Middle Ages corresponds to a reevaluation of the past. Romanticism “discovers” ancient German art (Wackenroder, Tieck), the philosophy of the mystics and of Böhme (F. Schlegel, Tieck, Baader, Werner), and ancient German poetry: Tieck renews popular German books; Tieck, the brothers Grimm, and Uhland republish ancient German poems; Tieck, A. W. Schlegel, V. d. Hagen, and Lachmann publish and translate the Nibelungenlied; Arnim and Brentano collect folk songs: Des Knaben Wunderhorn; the brothers Grimm publish Kinder- und Hausmärchen and Deutsche Sagen; finally, primitive Italian art is discovered (the Riepenhausen brothers provide accounts of Giotto and Cimabue). The poetry of other peoples, especially the Latin, is translated into German with unsurpassable Romantic sensitivity: A. W. Schlegel: Shakespeare from 1797; Schleiermacher: Plato; Gries: Tasso, Ariosto, Calderón; as well as Dante, Petrarch, and Portuguese poets. At the same time, modern literary history arises (A. W. Schlegel, Vorlesungen), Germanistics (Görres, the brothers Grimm, V. d. Hagen, Uhland), Romance philology (Diez), comparative linguistics (the Schlegel brothers, W. V. Humboldt), and mythological research (Creuzer, Görres, later Bachofen). Alongside those already mentioned, other major philosophical systems are developed (Hegel, Schopenhauer). The natural sciences (A. V. Humboldt, Carus) and natural philosophy (G. H. Schubert, Baader, Steffens) receive decisive impetus. Just as the idea of the organic dominates the consideration of nature, so too in political science (Fichte, A. Müller, Gentz, K. L. V. Haller); this seeks to overcome, through the corporate state, the contrast between the individual and the community, but in practice ends in reactionary stances. The historiography of the “historical school” (Savigny, Niebuhr, Raumer, Ludens, later Ranke) is effectively influenced for an entire century by the tendency toward the past and the artistic representational qualities of Romanticism.
The first Romanticism produced only two important poets: Tieck as a writer of artistic fairy tales, Novalis as a lyricist and novelist; the attempts of the Schlegel brothers to put their theories into poetic practice did not succeed. Late Romanticism, however, distances itself from speculation while achieving valid accomplishments in many fields of art. In every literary genre, a true flourishing is manifested: Brentano, the Günderode, Eichendorff, Uhland, Kerner, Heine as lyricists; Brentano, Arnim, Kleist, Fouqué, Hoffmann, Eichendorff, Chamisso as narrators; Kleist, Werner, the young Grillparzer, and in part Raimund as dramatists. Napoleonic domination and the wars of liberation give rise to patriotic dramatists (Kleist, Körner) and lyricists (Arndt, Körner, Schenkendorf), as well as important political prose writers (Kleist, Arndt, Görres). Several works by the great isolated spirits of the era—Jean Paul, Hölderlin, Grabbe, and Büchner—are imbued with Romantic thought. Goethe, in his later works, accepts Romantic movements, despite remaining hostile to the neo-German religious-patriotic art and the worldview of Romanticism (he defined the classical as healthy and the Romantic as sick, 1829); the second part of Faust would be inconceivable without the Romantic premise. Hauff, Grillparzer, Lenau, Mörike, Stifter, and Droste preserve the Romantic legacy into the Biedermeier and Realist eras. In Wagner’s musical dramas, in Nietzsche’s philosophy and lyricism, and in fin-de-siècle Neo-Romanticism, Romanticism experiences its final flourishing.
Romantic music in the strict sense comes after Romantic poetry. Schubert creates the Romantic lied as a genre that reaches further development in his spirit (Schumann, Silcher, Brahms, Wolf up to Reger, Pfitzner, and R. Strauss). Just as Mozart and Beethoven influence the formation of Romantic art and poetry theory, so too Romantic poetry gives rise to popular opera (Weber, Marschner) and popular melodrama (Lortzing). Romantic symphonies (Schubert, Schumann, later Bruckner, Brahms) are more closely tied to classical expressive forms than poetry; harmony and melody are their principal means of expression, while rhythm is increasingly refined artistically.
The detachment from the closed forms determined by antiquity prevents the development of Romantic architecture and sculpture; attempts exhaust themselves in sterile imitation of past styles: Schinkel remains more closely tied to Classicism. In contrast, Romantic spirit speaks through two painters: Friedrich paints religious motifs and discovers the boundlessness of the North and Central German landscape, rendering its intensity of light and air with subtly shaded colors. Runge achieves the most animated portraits of the era; in drawings and sketches he fulfills the theoretical demand that “the symbolic meaning of divine mysteries and their hinting at them” constitutes the true purpose of art. In so doing, he paves the way for the circle of painters known as the “Nazarenes,” who between 1810 and 1830 worked in Rome in a monastic community (Confraternity of the Cloister, Confraternity of St. Luke; Koch, Pforr, Overbeck, Cornelius, Schnorr von Carolsfeld, Fohr, the Veit brothers). They draw from Italian Renaissance painting, take inspiration from subjects of classical Italian poetry, imbue painting with Christian spirit, and renew mural painting in collaborative works (Casa Bartholdy, Villa Massimo on the Lateran). Schwind and Richter keep Romantic painting alive beyond the mid-century.
Finally, Romanticism exerted considerable influence on social life in Germany. In its centers—Jena, Berlin, Dresden, and Heidelberg—literary circles often animated by intimate friendships among members formed and spread Romantic thought through journals (the Schlegel brothers, Athenäum; Arnim and Brentano, Zeitung für Einsiedler; Kleist and A. Müller, Phöbus, Berliner Abendblatt). In salons, women—many of whom were also writers—played a leading role (Karoline and Dorothea Schlegel, Karoline Günderrode, Sophie Mereau, Dorothea Tieck, Rahel Levin, Bettina von Arnim, Clara Schumann). Some of them fought for the emancipation of women and Jews, or were the driving forces behind the conversion of numerous Romantics to the Catholic Church (the first “Romantic” conversion under the influence of ancient Christian art: the painter Maria Alberti; also F. and Dorothea Schlegel, the Veit brothers, A. Müller, Overbeck, Werner, K. L. von Haller, Karl—Novalis’s brother—and Sophie—Tieck’s sister—among others).
II.
I. ROMANTICISM IN ENGLAND
In each of the major poets of the first and second Romantic generations, one or another of the various, sometimes contradictory, aspects that make up the fabric of Romanticism in England is exemplified.The poets who come from the north (the “lake poets” Wordsworth and Coleridge, and the Scotsman Walter Scott, who does not belong to their school) represent the primitive aspect, that is to say the most elementary and immediate, the most spontaneous and popular aspect, even though in them one must presuppose a long study of the old and new language, a careful distinction between fancy and imagination, and a lively knowledge of history and legend. The poets who come from the south (Byron, Shelley, and Keats), on the other hand, betray a more openly reflective aspect, more deliberately thought out in relation to values that are more practical and less intrinsically poetic. This is not to say that poetic expression was achieved with less certainty.
Nature, in its everyday aspects, in the humility of the particular, is the constant inspiration of the lyric poetry of William Wordsworth (1770–1830), who sets forth the first Romantic manifesto in the preface to the second edition (1800) of the collection entitled *Lyrical Ballads* (1st ed. 1798). According to Wordsworth, such simplicity of content must be clothed in a similar simplicity of language, as far removed as possible from the artificial forms in which poetry had long been constrained in the preceding period. His predecessors in this field had been the pre-Romantics, from James Thomson (1700–1770) to Thomas Gray (1716–1771) and Robert Burns (1759–1796), who had preferred the life of the humble and the simple description of nature.
Alongside Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772–1834) draws his best inspiration not so much from nature as from the supernatural, if by this term we mean the sense of the mysterious and the fascinating. Coleridge makes more than one reservation regarding the theories of his friend, who maintains that the language of the lower classes is more sincere and more true, and therefore more poetic than any other. The best verses of Coleridge aim to render extraordinary experiences comprehensible and commonplace, rather than to describe the contemplation and narration of ordinary things. If the poetic wonder of the one may be called the contemplation of the common and the usual (albeit under an unusual light), that of the other is a startlement and enchantment at the sudden appearance of the unusual in a magical landscape. He had been preceded, though with different content, by William Blake (1757–1827), who indulges every suggestion and excess of fancy. Walter Scott (1771–1832), as a poet, presents himself almost as a combination of Wordsworth and Coleridge, inasmuch as his interest in history and legend intertwines the natural motif with the fantastic motif.
In this way, Scott continues with authority that taste for the primitive which had manifested itself in the second half of the eighteenth century with the search for popular poetic expressions, of which Thomas Percy’s (1729–1811) collection *Reliques of Ancient English Poetry* (1st ed. 1765) remains a model.
With George Gordon Byron (1788–1824), we are dealing with a different kind of contemplation altogether. He is the most restless Romantic, and the heroic ideal is enclosed in him in the two pilgrims named Harold and Don Juan. The contemplation of his eyes lingers on the perpetually agitated sea, on the horrid and grandiose landscapes, on the ruins that evoke the destructive waves of time, and the contemplation of his spirit rejoices or agonizes, in any case sings, before the problems for which the names of titanism, predestination, and mystery recur. The contradictions of his spirit, and perhaps also his aristocratic birth and upbringing, place him on a plane quite different from that of the other Romantics in relation to the classicist poets, and Pope is his master, whereas on the other hand the “lake poets” do not inspire his sympathy. His eternal wandering has as its goal more the search for solitude than communion with other men. Of Harold, with whom he identifies himself, he sings: “... soon he recognized himself as the man least suited to join the flock of men, with whom he had little in common; ... still he would not yield to the minds against which his rebelled, the dominion of his mind, proud in its solitude; of his mind that could find in itself a life to live outside humanity.”
Filled instead with a desire for universal liberation, with a will to commune not only with things but also with men, is the work of Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792–1822). The liberation he proclaims must come through reason (*Queen Mab*), or through love (*The Revolt of Islam*), whose second name is beauty (*Epipsychidion*). Shelley feels deeply that he is a poet, that is, of the company of those great ones who, as he writes in *A Defence of Poetry*, “are not only the authors of language and of music, of dance, of architecture, of sculpture, and of painting; but they are the builders of laws, the founders of civil society, and the inventors of the arts of life, and the teachers who draw men into a certain proximity to the beautiful and the true, that partial apprehension of the agents of the invisible world which is called religion.” Prescinding from the certainly inadequate concept that Shelley had of religion, he felt above all things the vocation of the poet. “Poets, according to the circumstances of the age and nation in which they appeared, were called in the early ages of the world, lawgivers, statesmen, or prophets: a poet essentially comprehends and unites both these characters... The poet participates in the eternal, the infinite, and the one.” In these, as in the other statement, “A poem is the very image of life expressed in its eternal truth,” it seems that the conclusion of Keats’s *Ode on a Grecian Urn* is contained: “Beauty is truth, truth beauty — that is all — Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.” The poetry of John Keats (1795–1821) draws more than that of his contemporaries from the sources of ancient classicism; he was educated in the school of English classics from Spenser to Milton, while on the other hand the very young poet does not hide his admiration for the man whom he considered the first Romantic poet, William Wordsworth.
Alberto Castelli
III. ROMANTICISM IN FRANCE
The Romantic movement burst into the temporarily stagnant environment of French literature under Napoleon like a devastating gust of foreign origin. And yet Romanticism does not at all mark a retreat from the positions of intellectual hegemony over Europe held by France throughout the eighteenth century: the Paris of the Restoration and then of the July Monarchy reasserts instead its own function as the world’s leading cultural center, even while definitively renouncing political hegemony. It lives through the Romantic battle and transposes it into properly literary terms in a manner all its own, with a vivid and immediate consciousness of the historical forces at work on contemporary reality, with an exceptional capacity to feel the great travail—political, spiritual, religious—that has its roots in the rich and multifarious heritage of the French eighteenth century and in the problems that flow from it, acute rather than resolved by the Revolution.Two distinct phases have been identified (Baldensperger) in the evolution of French Romanticism, spanning the two decades between the First and Second Empires. The publication in Paris of *Allemagne* and *De la littérature du Midi de l'Europe* by Madame de Staël, preceded by Sismondi’s *De la littérature du midi de l'Europe* and A. W. Schlegel’s *Cours de littérature dramatique* (1813), along with the conquest of the stage of the *Théâtre français*—a bastion of classicist resistance (1820–30)—mark the chronological limits of the first phase, distinguished by controversies far more vehement and bitter than those in any other country. The years between 1830 and the mid-century provided the new school with the opportunity to develop fully and demonstrate its worth; toward the end of this period, the spiritual impulse of liberation and the creative drive of Romanticism began to wane, while the demands of realism and the aspirations of *l’art pour l’art* emerged, dominating the literary landscape of the Second Empire.
Interest and debate surrounding the principles already formulated by German Romanticism flared up almost suddenly in 1813, when the forced suppression of the Empire gave way to tradition and the ideal of "spiritual autarchy." Two opposing factions emerged, their aesthetic positions clarified (though not always successfully) with a particular intensity that would soon be echoed in Italy. The explicit demand arose for art to fully correspond to the spirituality and questions of the modern soul. A new historical consciousness, sharpened by faith in the creative power of the spirit and even by the subversive will to "start anew"—ideas that had taken root in the 18th century—drove recognition of the relativity of aesthetic values and canons, and fostered an appreciation for the vital and creative impulses of civilizations previously dismissed as uncultured or barbaric. In the political and social climate of Restoration France, the religious and mystical awakening, the assertion of constitutional liberalism, and the still vague emergence of new protagonists of modern life—eager for social and economic equality in the face of the irreversible collapse of the traditional state order—all converged to weigh heavily on discussions surrounding the new literary and artistic program. This program was framed in terms of life itself and enriched by an awareness of the supreme spiritual reality of the "gold" in contrast to the flawed nature of the world.
Alongside the literary salon—long the principal breeding ground for the preparation and dissemination of new currents (and famed among them were those of Deschamps, Délécluze, Jules de Rességuier, and especially Charles Nodier, librarian of the Arsenal, Victor Hugo, and Sainte-Beuve)—journals emerged with far greater resonance: *Lettres normandes* and *La Minerve française* (both founded in 1818 and suppressed
*la littérature européenne*, ibid. 1948. For individual authors, a complete bibliography is provided in the entries of the *Bibliographie* (in alphabetical order) of modern French-language authors by H. Talvar and J. Place, begun in
1928. Collections of documents on Romantic controversies in France: Ch
M. Des Granges, *La presse littéraire en France*, I, 1873–16, ibid. 1933; general monographs: Th. Gautier, *Histoire du rom.*, 2nd ed., ibid. 1874; M. Souriau, *Histoire du rom. en France*, and J. Giraud, *L'école romantique française*, ibid. 1927; R. Bray, *Chronologie du rom.*, ibid. 1932; P. Jourda, *L'exotisme dans la littérature française depuis Chateaubriand*, ibid. 1938; N. Clément, *Romanticism in France*, New York 1939. Polemical in tone are the writings of P. Lasserre, *Le rom. français*, Paris 1907, and E. Selle, *Le mal romantique. Pour le centenaire du rom. La religion romantique et ses conquêtes*, ibid. 1908, 1927, 1930. Enzo Bottasso.IV. ROMANTICISM IN ITALY
As a self-aware literary movement with an explicit program of renewal, Italian Romanticism arose more than a decade later than its foreign counterparts, particularly German Romanticism. Though it responded to ethical and intellectual needs already alive in the mid-18th century, it was externally stimulated and often adopted as its theoretical principles and polemical tools the extreme or partial results of a spiritual movement not fully grasped in its total and organic reality. Hence the coexistence within it of diverse and sometimes contradictory impulses, the limited originality of its aims and achievements, and its elusive character—so much so that some doubted whether an Italian Romanticism had ever truly existed. Others sought its purest expressions in the works of writers officially outside or opposed to the movement, such as Foscolo and Leopardi, or even in those who flourished much later, like Pascoli and D’Annunzio.The spark for the polemic between Romantics and Classicists was the publication in the *Biblioteca italiana* (January 1816) of an article by Madame de Staël (*On the Manner and Utility of Translations*), which urged Italians to acquaint themselves with and translate foreign literatures as a means of renewing their own. Italian men of letters divided into two camps: those who defended, with varying degrees of intransigence, fidelity to the classical tradition and saw Madame de Staël’s invitation not as an incitement to betray their homeland, and those who viewed the broadening of knowledge, the acquaintance with the thought and art of other peoples, as a means to revitalize a culture now exhausted and thus regain a substantial originality. The latter styled themselves Romantics, and their earliest writings—*On the Injustice of Certain Italian Literary Judgments* by L. Di Bremme (June 1816); *Literary Adventures of a Day* by P. Borsieri (19 September 1816); *On the Fierce Huntsman and Eleonora by G. A. Bürger: A Half-Serious Letter from Grisostomo to His Son* by G. Berchet (December 1816)—are regarded as the manifestos of Italian Romanticism. Subsequently, the advocates of the new ideas gathered around the journal *Il Conciliatore*, while the Classicists had their principal organ in the *Biblioteca italiana*. The controversy, which expanded from its initial nationalistic focus to other issues (mythology, dramatic rules, imitation of nature, etc.), raged until around 1820, then gradually subsided, and by 1823 Manzoni could summarize its conclusions in his *Letter on Romanticism* to Marquis Cesare d’Azeglio. A brief revival followed the publication of Monti’s sermon *On Mythology* in 1825.
The fundamental principles upheld by the Italian Romantics were: 1) there is no single type of beauty; art varies according to peoples and epochs. Hence, modern literature, if it is to be a living thing, must abandon the exclusive imitation of Greek and Latin classics and draw instead from national traditions (Christian religion, chivalry, medieval history, etc.), particularly rejecting the use of mythology, which reflects a now-dead mentality; 2) the object of art is truth, but historical truth, not the typical or ideal truth sought by Classicists; 3) the
The sentimental and melancholic vein, which already flowed gently in the direct disciples of Manzoni, inspiring above all the genre of verse novellas (cf. *La Fuggitiva* and *Ildegonda* by T. Grossi, *Agliso* by C. Cantù, *La Torre di Capua* by G. Torti, etc.), later became prevalent, partly as a result of the nation’s painful vicissitudes, and would eventually form, together with a taste for a certain musical vaporous expressiveness, the distinctive character of what was called the second “r.” Its major representatives were Prati and Aleardi. On the other hand, the realistic tendency of the first “r.” soon logically developed an interest not only in the past but in contemporary life and psychology; two almost contemporary works are significant documents of this: *Fede e bellezza* by N. Tommaseo (1840) and *Elmenegunda* by G. Prati (1841). Later, verismo would follow this path. In the second “r.” there is already a marked tendency toward individualistic affirmation in life and art, which, almost absent in the first, would later dominate the *scapigliatura* movement, influenced more directly and intensely by the first German Romantics and the French decadents (v. DECADENTISMO).
On the theoretical-critical and artistic-creative levels, Italian Romanticism achieved relatively modest results, except for the work of De Sanctis, which largely represents the natural development of principles it had established, and that of Manzoni. It did, however, bring about a profound cultural renewal, restoring Italian culture to fruitful contact with the highest expressions of European culture and freeing it from the now formalistic and sterile obeisance to tradition without renouncing what in tradition was permanently alive and fruitful. This renewal in content and style influenced, more or less, all subsequent literary movements, including those that arose in opposition to Romanticism, such as Carducci’s Neoclassicism, in which, for example, the Romantic cult of history lived on in a new form.
V. ROMANTICISM IN SPAIN
The atmosphere favorable to Romanticism had been prepared by Jovellanos, Meléndez Valdés, Cienfuegos, and Quintana.At the same time, the spread of novels and sentimental adventures or stories had created an environment in which inferior Romanticism would easily take root. Indeed, after a vain attempt to reconnect the movement to its German sources, English models—and above all French ones—imposed themselves and were followed in their most obvious and facile aesthetic principles. In 1814, Nicolás Böhl de Faber translated fragments of Schlegel’s *Vorlesungen*, sparking a brief polemic with the classicist José Joaquín de Mora; this polemic was resumed with greater violence in 1817 by another classicist, Galiano. Though their opposition failed to prevent the advent of Romanticism, neither did Böhl’s work succeed in steering it toward Germany: the rapid dissemination of Chateaubriand’s and Mme de Staël’s books redirected all Spanish interest toward France.
The most important moments in this diffusion were marked by the publication of certain journals: *El Europeo* (1823), edited by Carlos Arribau and Ramón López Soler (its theories were endorsed in 1828 by Agustín Durán in his *Discurso sobre el teatro antiguo español*); then, in 1835-36, *El artista*, through which Eugenio de Ochoa and Federico de Madrazo secured the collaboration of Spain’s best Romantics, including Espronceda, Zorrilla, Pastor Díaz, Escosura, Ventura de la Vega, Salas y Quiroga; upon its demise, it was succeeded by other periodicals (*Semanario pintoresco español; El Liceo; Observatorio pintoresco; No me olvides*). Literary tertulias also formed, including the Parnasillo and, more famous, the Ateneo of Madrid, established in 1835 under the presidency of the Duque de Rivas, and the Liceo.
Influenced also by Walter Scott, Spanish Romanticism produced numerous novels on national themes, such as *Doña Isabel de Solís* by Martínez de la Rosa and *El Señor de Bembibre* by Gil y Carrasco, the best of a lackluster production. Of greater significance is *El Moro Expósito* by A. de Saavedra, Duke of Rivas (Paris, 1834). Meanwhile, performances of Martínez de la Rosa’s *La conjuración de Venecia* and Larra’s *Macías* triumphed amid the many controversies surrounding the theater. In 1836 came the Duque de Rivas’s *Don Alvaro o la fuerza del sino* and A. García Gutiérrez’s *El Trovador*. The following year saw Hartzenbusch’s *Los Amantes de Teruel*, and in 1844, Zorrilla’s *Don Juan Tenorio*.
The works already mentioned by the Duque de Rivas, Zorrilla, and Espronceda’s poetry constitute the major expressions of Spanish Romanticism, yet none achieves artistic completeness. This defect is common to all Spanish Romantic production, which vainly seeks to revive the glories of the Golden Age without recapturing its essential sentiments, above all its religious dimension. Traditional forms thus appear emptied of their inner content and exhaust themselves in merely superficial elaboration.
VI. ROMANTICISM IN POLAND
Polish Romanticism was shaped by the particular characteristics of the national spirit and historical conditions. Unlike in England, France, and Germany, it was not primarily a literary and philosophical phenomenon; rather, like in Italy, it coincided with national aspirations and the struggle against foreign oppression.In Poland, the Kościuszko Insurrection and the participation of Poles in the Napoleonic Wars are considered Romantic phenomena. In 1818, Kazimierz Brodziński (1791–1815) published an essay: *O klasyczności i romantyczności tudzież o duchu poezji polskiej* (“On Classicism, Romanticism, and the Spirit of Polish Poetry”), in which he for the first time clarified the essence of the two currents in relation to Polish poetry, which he wished to be firmly tied to national life and reflective of the conditions of Poland, an agricultural country, a backdrop for idyllic rural scenes. In harmony with his theories, he wrote the *Pieśni rolników* (“Songs of the Peasants”) and *Wiesław*, a delicate idyll in the manner of Goethe’s *Hermann und Dorothea*. The works of the poets of the Ukrainian school belong to this current: *Maria* by Antoni Malczewski (1783–1826); *Zamek Kaniowski* (1828) by Józef Bohdan Zaleski (1802–1886); *Rusałki* (“The Nymphs”) and other works by various poets and prose writers.
However, the Romantic school might not have been able to contend with the Classical school, which had a flourishing center in Warsaw, had Adam Mickiewicz not brought from Vilnius the warm and impetuous adherence of his genius; and after him, Juliusz Słowacki and Zygmunt Krasiński (v.), the three greatest poets of the time; H. Rzewuski and M. Czajkowski among prose writers; the historian J. Lelewel and others. The spiritual values of Romanticism—preeminence of feeling over reason, enthusiasm, heroism as duty, indeed as a necessity of life—created a new current that would be reflected not only in the theories of some philosophers but in the very essence of literary and artistic productions: namely, messianism.
In 1831, Brodziński himself delivered a *Discourse on the Nationality of the Poles*, in which he analyzed the characteristics of Polish history: the sacred fire for freedom, kept alight amid storms; the brotherhood of men and peoples under the sun of religion; the defense of faith and civilization against Eastern barbarism. For these two qualities, the people who had chosen the Virgin Mary as their queen was sacrificed, partitioned, and cruelly oppressed. Yet even in these tragic conditions, it continues its work as the *antemurale christianitatis*, opposing, as in the past, its breast to Eastern invasion; it does not yield, it continues its struggle.
From this to the concept that the suffering fatherland was the Christ of Nations was but a step. The philosophers known as the messianists—Brzozowski, Trentowski, the obscure Wroński, the mystic Towiański—developed the concept of messianism in different ways; and August Cieszkowski (1814–1894), a Hegelian, interpreting the history of humanity, explained it by following one by one the seven petitions of the *Pater*. But even outside the philosophers and their influence, Polish Romanticism fused in works of great beauty the concepts of faith, moral elevation with those of a patriotism that transcends earthly boundaries and expands into love for all humanity. Romanticism lasted in Poland until the revolution of 1863; after its failure, the tide of positivist reaction swept in.
Marina Bersano Begeny
VII. ROMANTICISM IN RUSSIA AND AMONG THE SLAVIC PEOPLES
The Romantic taste in Russia was prepared by “sentimental” literature, by the imitation of fashionable English novels, and by the influence of Rousseau.This literature exalted the humble, turned its gaze to “nature,” vaguely intertwined the ideals of a so-called “primitive Christianity” (not clearly defined) with the “humanitarian” tendencies of Masonic lodges. The sentimental and preromantic currents did not culminate in Russia in a Romanticism with well-defined features. The fact remains that in the first decades of the nineteenth century, Russian literature experienced its sudden maturation and great flowering. Pushkin, Lermontov, and Gogol were in a certain sense Romantics, but they gave to Romantic impulses of Western provenance a tone and coloring unmistakably Russian, resolving—more or less—in “realism” the liveliest and most modern traits of the Romantic school itself. In Lermontov, who died young, the influences of a fashionable Byronism are sometimes strongly felt, but in his clearest and most vigorous moments he shatters and surpasses those schemes. Pushkin, superficially yielding to the tastes of the time, in fact anticipated with his tales an entire orientation characteristic of the great narrative prose of nineteenth-century Russia. Gogol soon freed himself from his youthful fantastic-Romantic inspirations, grasping the deepest traits of Russian life through “local” episodes that, in their interpretation, rise to epic grandeur. Devoid, in the nineteenth century, of a Romanticism comparable to that of the European literatures, Russian literature and Russian social life, however, experienced in the early twentieth century, in an environment dominated by symbolism, a curious revival of medieval ideals, of a preference for rhythm, of the poets damned, of a revaluation of Romantic aesthetics, while political terrorism surged forth from the “underground” of a country on the brink of revolution, with extravagant intertwinings of different epochs.
Among the smaller Slavic peoples, Romanticism merely continued the aspirations and efforts of the Enlightenment period toward cultural emancipation (of a national character) from foreign, predominantly German, overlays. The Czechs had only one great Romantic poet, K. H. Mácha; Czechoslovak Romanticism had predominantly folkloric and erudite traits and passionately studied “Slavic archaeology,” later recalling with sentimental tones the Slavic lineages that had disappeared in the course of the Middle Ages. In the climate of Czechoslovak Romanticism, the study of Slavic philology received notable impetus, and Prague exerted a certain influence even on the cultural world of the Slovenes and Croats.
II. ROMANTICISM IN PHILOSOPHY.
The Romantic philosophy, which had European influence, is almost exclusively German. In England, the term “romantic,” used since the seventeenth century and derived from the word *romance*, meant “ancient French” and precisely an invented tale in verse and later a narrative in prose; hence it meant “medieval,” “Gothic,” a rediscovery of the Middle Ages, and in this sense it was opposed to “classical” or “ancient.” In France, until the end of the last century, its use was only artistic-literary.
From a philosophical point of view, Romanticism can be defined (though imperfectly) as the resurgence of the “philosophy of life” against the Enlightenment’s “philosophy of reason.” It is evident that, thus defined, Romanticism is not merely a historical moment of an era but an attitude proper to the human spirit at all times, and thus one can speak of a Greek Romanticism, just as of a later Romanticism (the manifold “philosophies of life” from the late nineteenth century to the present) distinct from that movement commonly indicated by this name and which extends from the late eighteenth century to the first half of the nineteenth century. It is characterized by a reaction (sometimes polemical) against the spirit and methods of the Enlightenment (v.), although its recent origins are to be sought precisely within the Enlightenment itself.
Kant’s transcendence (v.): is, in the end, a powerful sense of subjectivity: the autonomous dominion of man over the world (science), the autonomy of the will (morale) and of the development of humanity (history); in this sense Kant strongly influenced Romanticism. But Kantian subjectivity is still, in an Enlightenment manner, “rationality,” and his conception of nature is the mechanistic one of Galileo and Newton. Hence the influence of Kant must be considered alongside that of others who were no longer Kantian, whose seeds are to be sought precisely in certain internal motifs of the Enlightenment, expressed, for example, in France by Voltaire (v.) Rousseau (v.), in Italy by P. Verri, as well as by the so-called *sensibilité* of the 18th century; even German Enlightenment itself (Lessing, Herder, etc.) is a movement that is linked to Romanticism: a genuine one.
Even from the merely philosophical point of view, Romanticism is a complex movement, different from nation to nation, from one Romantic to another. Its complexity is such that, if one considers its aspects abstractly, one loses its profound unity, which seems to dissolve into so many contradictory assertions. Indeed, Romanticism is, at the same time, individualism (v.): or anarchy and a quasi-sacred sense of national unity; the consecration of the irrational forces of life or of the arbitrariness of the “genius” and the celebration of the inner freedom of the spirit; “irony,” which destroys with laughter that conceals weeping, and the exaltation of existence as an infinite conquest; the vindication of fantasy that creates and uncreates with free play, and the affirmation of a superior plane of rationality; the exaltation of the perpetual becoming of the spirit and the contemplation of the eternity of being; the primacy of subjective feeling and the deep demand for system; the return to medieval Catholicism and the affirmation of pantheism and of aconfessionalism, etc. With Romanticism, the ideal of a universal “humanity” and that of an “eternal nature,” which eternally flows within immutable and unchanging laws, the “rational dream” of the Enlightenment, are surpassed. Not abstract “humanity,” but the individual; not confidence in providential natural laws that govern men and things according to a perfect order in its mechanical rationality, but the exaltation of life rich in initiatives; not leveling cosmopolitanism, but the life of the spirit that in individual peoples is characterized and realized through the perpetual movement of their history.
Romanticism has a religious sense of values (aesthetic, moral, religious, etc.), of history and of nature, of the past; but of all these things, at the same time, it has an indefinite sense, almost a perception that is lost in unfathomable darkness, in mystery or in dream. If one wishes to gather all its essential elements, one may thus specify its characteristics: the deepening of Kant’s principle of the synthetic activity of the spirit; the revaluation of religion; sensitivity to the beauty and charm of tradition and hence interest in the past (for the classical world, model of serenity and harmony, realized—especially in Goethe [v.] and Schiller [v.]—in the ideal of *humanitas*; and for the medieval world—the “barbarous” age of the Enlightenment—, the epoch in which peoples began to differentiate and nations to form; which was the expression of Catholicism, unifier of all forms of spiritual life; the primitive and childlike age and hence of great poetry); and the vindication of the value of history (historicism); the exaltation of whatever is irrational and immediate in the spirit and the affirmation of the person (v.); the consciousness of rationality (the 19th century was called the “century of nations”); the critique of the mechanistic conception of nature, whose life is, instead, the manifestation of a living principle of inexhaustible creative power of infinite forms.
There is in the Romantic, undeniably, a heroic generosity (when it is not mere posing), which is concretized in the sentiments of “sacrifice” for the great ideals of political freedom, of the fatherland, of artistic and moral beauty (Schiller synthesizes the two moments of sensibility and morality in the “beautiful soul”); a contempt for mediocre, banal, habitual life, the exaltation of the exceptional, of the qualified man, strongly characterized. Many Romantics lack the sensitivity to grasp the beauty (moral as well) of small things that express great feelings: the accentuation of personality is not sought from the standpoint of heroic humility and charity (Manzoni is an exception). Hence the lack of proportion, the excessive, the exaggerated, and whatever is redundant and oratorical, morbid and contradictory in Romanticism. Hence, too, the tendency to absolutize human values and man himself, free and creative spirit, the “little god” who “constructs” reality through philosophy and science; who creates morality (freedom and the good); who “invents” life, his own and that of nature, through art (v.), expression of beauty and harmony, of the divine that, immanent in the world, makes its exuberant and manifold life gush forth. This serves to clarify the concepts of religion and Christianity as understood by philosophical and non-philosophical Romanticism: religion is often pantheistic worship of nature and the exaltation of man, religiosity without dogmas and mysticism that is egocentrism and idolatry of the person. It is the fundamental irreligion of an age that nonetheless felt the strongest fascination for religious values, especially Christian ones; but it is an aesthetic fascination, of a Christianity reduced to its historical and human dimensions, more an artistic and historical valorization of it than a religious one. The “person” of the Romantic is no longer the Christian one: it is not a creature, it is the creative principle of itself; it is not freedom in relation to a transcendent law that disciplines it, but “freedom of nature” or spontaneity. Similarly, Romantic interiority is not Christian: it is the subjectivity of truth, the immanence of truth to the subject, which “creates all”; it is a development and even an “interpretation” of Kant’s “Copernican revolution.” And thus interiority is lost either in exacerbated subjectivism (Novalis [v.]) or in the philosophy of nature of Schelling or in the dialectical panagism of Hegel. Not life as being, but as becoming; as perpetual aspiration and dynamic tension (all spiritual attitudes included in the term *Sehnsucht*).
Transcendental idealism (v.), which is what is commonly called philosophical Romanticism, is radically immanentist: it resolves all reality into the idea and the idea into thought; thought (v.) is all reality, both human (history) and physical (nature), and all reality is thought. Transcendental idealism is a circle: monism (v.) and immanence (v.). Kant’s (v.) criticism is profoundly and critically developed in contact Spinoza (v.), the “divinely inebriated” philosopher, the “godless” mystic of pantheism, Goethe’s and Herder’s (v.) favorite author. Criticism is Spinozism, as has been noted, and together they have become, “in their profound contrast, the two poles of Romantic-idealist philosophical thought” (W. Windelband, *Storia della filosofia*, II, Italian trans., Palermo 1948, p. 257). Within these poles, one must not overlook the influence of Plotinus (v.), of the Italian Renaissance, and of the mysticism of the preceding centuries. Within this complex, philosophical Romanticism presents itself now theistic and now pantheistic, when oriented toward a conception of the world as the very system of reason (v.), and when oriented toward the reevaluation of intuition and the irrational, now religious and now worldly.
On the one hand, GIACOBBI (v.) vindicates the cognitive validity of feeling (v.), which is the immediate apprehension of the true, the source of faith, which has its principle and its end in God, an object not of knowledge or thought, but of the indemonstrable certainty of faith itself; on the other hand, Hegel dismisses as “edifying philosophies” both Jacobi’s and Schelling’s, and contrasts them with true philosophy, which is logical thought, mediated or reflected knowledge. This bipolarity of Romantic-idealist thought must not be overlooked, nor is it merely initial. The very master current of transcendental idealism develops into four systems that must be kept distinct, without losing sight of their common metaphysical principle (the “I” is posited outside itself and is achieved through becoming as self-consciousness, in which the process concludes): Fichte’s (v.) ethical idealism, Schelling’s (v.) aesthetic idealism, Hegel’s (v.) logical idealism, and Schleiermacher’s (v.) religious idealism.
Fichte’s idealism is torn between a twofold exigency: that of science, which is mediation and objectification, and that of the unobjectifiable individuality. Fichte never overcame this antinomy, which, moreover, is internal to all forms of transcendental idealism; hence he can be considered both a pure rationalist, Spinozian in character, and an irrationalist. To his thought and to the German Romantic milieu is connected Schelling, the most Romantic of all the idealists. Nature is depotentiated spiritual life, “petrified intelligence,” in which the absolute Principle lurks, only to manifest itself as conscious ego in the life of spirit. Of this absolute Principle, the undifferentiated unity of nature and spirit (pantheism), there is no knowledge but “conceptual intuition” (“intellektuale Anschauung”; *Stetsma* of transcendental idealism, sect. 3); in the intuitive moment of art is the model of the original unity of nature and spirit. Art is therefore the “organ of philosophy.” For Hegel, by contrast, philosophy is solely logical thought, the science of the Absolute (v.). Moreover, Hegelian reason is historical, indeed it identifies with history, which is its own history: it is restless reason, the dialectic of opposites that are composed in the dynamic synthesis, which is always moving forward. The world is the development of the absolute, of the divine Spirit that determines and unfolds itself. There is no distinction between absolute thought and absolute being: thought is nothing but the thought of being, and being is nothing but thought. This is the fundamental metaphysical principle of Hegelian philosophy, which unfolds architectonically as “philosophy of nature” and “philosophy of spirit,” always with the dialectical rhythm of thesis, antithesis, and synthesis, up to the three moments (art, religion, philosophy) of the absolute Spirit. For Hegel, philosophy has a rigorously logical character: it is science, indeed the science par excellence; it justifies itself and from itself. It is evident that the Romantic philosophical milieu must have seemed to him vague and obscure: “true philosophy, in which truth consists, can only be the scientific system of the same” (*The Science of Logic*, Introduction, ch. 1, “With what must science begin?”).
Besides the German variety, there is an English philosophical Romanticism influenced by the former, whose writers include Coleridge, whose Neoplatonism absorbs motifs from Kant and Schelling, Carlyle (v.), close to Jacobi and Schiller. There can be no talk of a French or even an Italian philosophical Romanticism, ROSMINIANI (v.) Gioberti (v.) follow a line of thought essentially different.
Not only literary-artistic Romanticism but also philosophical Romanticism (and even Hegel’s) is, in the end, the “desire for the impossible,” the stepping outside of reality, the hovering in dream, in the free play of fantasy, the seeking of a pure freedom that is possible only if one desires nothing determinate and remains in indefinite possibility. The three idealisms of Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel tend toward the impossible: the total realization of the absolute in the world and above all in man, where the Absolute itself gains consciousness. Thus, morality, art, and philosophy successively take on the forms in which this realization is achieved. It is an illusion, a utopia, of which the Romantic philosophers themselves are partly aware. But for them, illusion or dream counts for more than reality; indeed, their truth is the dream itself. Hence, the philosopher too appears in the form of evasion, the typical spiritual category of Romanticism as such. But the evasion from reality attempted in all its forms leaves the Romantics dissatisfied, restless, and unsatisfied (hence Hegel’s “irony,” his “unhappy consciousness,” Schopenhauer’s (v.) *noluntas*, etc.); and the main reason is to be sought in the essential pantheism that underlies not only philosophical Romanticism but all German Romanticism. Given the pantheistic conception, the Romantic “infinite,” which is more properly the “infinite” of the “indeterminate,” is always a naturalistic infinite, not a spiritual one, spatial and temporal, worldly and “historical,” and hence always a real finite, even if a finite that expands to the “infinite.” Consequently, whether “dream” or “freedom,” “spirit” or “nature,” even in their infinitude, they remain at the level of real finitude; that is, once the immense, once the “infinite” is posited, so that nature conforms to spirit, spirit too conforms to nature. With transcendence denied, however immense the “dream” may be, its content cannot but be finite, albeit the entire human and physical universe. This explains the Romantic “evasion into a fictitious or artificial ‘paradise,’” whatever it may be. The Romantic “evasively steps outside” reality, of which he is dissatisfied, without ever succeeding in “standing outside,” which is the condition of “ecstasy,” which belongs to the theist, whereas the “evasion” of the pantheist and of the dynamic pantheism proper to philosophical Romanticism. The typical Romantic “evasion” is that of one who is not Christian and no longer knows how to be a man; and whoever no longer knows how to be a man wants to be God himself, to place himself beyond the “human.” Indeed, Nietzsche (v.), Romantic in his own way though of a generation no longer Romantic, translates the “human” into the “superhuman.”
The Romantic “human” absolutizes and totalizes itself in the myth of the “Superman.”
III. [ROMANTICISM IN ART]
It is customary, in the field of the figurative arts of the 19th century, to define as Romantic those manifestations which, almost in opposition to Neoclassical and Purist ones, occur in the period following these and which, in turn, precede the first realistic manifestations in the fields of sculpture and painting and eclecticism in that of architecture.
In these manifestations, defined as Romantic and which unfold for a good part of the first half of the 19th century, particular emphasis is placed on the expression of certain themes typical of Romanticism of all times: such as the theme of death as an alleviation of earthly ills, the theme of love that gives the “breeze” the sense of transmutation, as well as the aversion to reality, since reality destroys illusions and thus heightens the tedium of life; likewise, the taste for travel, for adventures in distant lands, and so on. In other words, the need to escape, both in time and space, is emphasized, determined by dissatisfaction with one’s own condition and thus by the “aspiration” to transcend the limits imposed by norms, customs, and traditions. It should be recalled how such a need for escape in space and time had already led Neoclassicists and Purists to adopt as current expressive forms and languages of the past, and had attempted—with a markedly Romantic spiritual attitude—to make them express new sentiments. The men of the subsequent generation, however, the Romantics properly so called, setting aside Classical and Renaissance forms, turned predominantly toward the Middle Ages. Toward the mysterious and, at that time, almost unexplored Middle Ages, which appeared to most people even in the first half of the 19th century as a world of extraordinary adventures in which the very heroic aspirations that then inflamed consciences could be reflected, as in a mirror turned toward the past. The change in the figurative arts is clearly individual at first in a shift of subjects. They now predominantly treat themes derived from stories or legends of the Middle Ages or the Orient, or insist on depicting scenes and sentiments that are particularly pathetic. While in architecture, Classical forms—whether of Greco-Roman or Renaissance tradition—are now replaced by those of “Romantic Gothic” or Moorish architecture. But in a second phase, as architects sought new paths and forms, availing themselves also of new construction methods, painters and sculptors, dissatisfied with the old academic forms, sought new expressive freedoms better suited to the new ideas they wished to express. Hence eclecticism and, consequently, functionalism in architecture, realism, and “Impressionism,” among others, in painting and sculpture.