Romanticism

ROMANTICISMO. – By Romanticism (R.) is understood that movement of a literary, artistic, philosophical, political, and social character which emerged in Europe in the second half of the 18th century and spread throughout the first half of the 19th century. Reacting against the spirit of the Enlightenment, it established a new mode of feeling, with the predominance of imagination and sentiment over reason, of inspiration over rule, of the popular appeal of the work over aristocratic isolation. It drew from the sources of medieval Christian civilization and promoted, in opposition 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 one aspect of European Romanticism: a complex movement of the German spirit that encompasses religion, literature, music, visual arts, philosophy, sciences, and the conception of life in general. From 1796 (G. Wackenroder, Herzensergiessungen eines kunstliebenden Klosterbruders) until around 1830, it dominates almost all fields of spiritual life in Germany and influences other peoples, especially through poetry, music, philosophy, and the sciences. It develops from premises existing in Hemsterhuis, Bodmer, and Breitinger, as well as in Sturm und Drang (Heinse, Herder, the young Goethe) and the French Revolution; its religious lyricism is based on Pietism. Critically, it is antithetical to the Enlightenment, to the classicism of Weimar, and, in part, to Protestantism and neo-humanism. The word romantisch already appears in Wieland and Herder, who use it to refer particularly to medieval chivalric poetry in the Romance languages; in the Schlegel brothers, it initially retains this meaning, but later, in opposition to the ancient, it is extended by them to the modern sphere and to their theory of art. Criticism considers Goethe’s novel Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre (1795-96) as a typically "Romantic" work for its interpenetration of the poetic element in real life.

Romanticism arose from the speculations of the generation born around 1770 (first Romanticism). Starting from Kant, Fichte elaborates the doctrine of the "absolute I," whose essence consists in incessantly free moral action: Romanticism deduces from this absolute formal freedom and, in part, moral libertinage. Schleiermacher liberates religion from rational-dogmatic-historical bonds; he defines it as "sense and taste for the infinite," a feeling of "absolute dependence" on God: this corresponds to the free religiosity and the longing for the infinite of Romanticism. Schelling considers nature and history as manifestations of the same reality, which he synthesizes poetically: thus, for Romantic poetry, the animation of nature and the synthesis of all spiritual activities are justified.

Consequently, poetry, painting, and music are intimately connected: "Sound, color, and form"; color, fragrance, and song are "siblings" (Tieck). In Runge appears the idea of the total work of art, an aspiration later pursued by Wagner. Conversely, 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 separated genres of poetry and to connect poetry with philosophy and rhetoric; it also wants, and must, sometimes mix, sometimes fuse poetry and prose, genius and criticism, art poetry and popular poetry; make poetry lively and social, poeticize life and society..." Nevertheless, Wackenroder, Tieck, Brentano, and later Hoffmann, Grillparzer, and Mörike forge intimate relationships between their poetry and music: thus arise, alongside novels about the lives of painters (Tieck, Franz Sternbalds Wanderungen), dramas about the lives of poets (Grillparzer, Sappho), and novellas 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 dissolve; somnambulism, like, in general, all the "nocturnal elements of nature," attract the Romantics into their orbit. Lyricism propels the soul toward an atmosphere entirely stretched toward a mysterious infinite, which man eternally yearns for: the symbol of this Sehnsucht is the "blue flower" (F. Novalis, Heinrich von Ofterdingen). Simultaneously, however, Romanticism feels the contrast between the longed-for infinite and the limited reality, representing it either through a fragmentary-aphoristic form (F. Schlegel, later Nietzsche), or a fusion of forms and styles (Tieck’s dramas), or 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 expression is lost. Thus, the path is opened to mere intellectualism and cold exercises.

At the same time, Romantic Sehnsucht turns to what is distant in time and space: the sense of history arises. During the spread of Protestantism in Germany, literature had gained predominance over the other arts; the spirit had become anti-figurative; large Catholic strata had remained alien to the Protestant-humanistic cultural world. Now, Novalis attempts to resolve the religious and cultural schisms in Germany, deriving from Protestantism the much-contested Enlightenment and setting as a goal the medieval unity of faith and culture (Die Christenheit oder Europa, 1799; published only in 1826): "The initially personal hatred of the Catholic faith gradually transformed into hatred of the Bible, of the Christian faith, and, finally, of religion. Moreover, hatred of religion extended very naturally and logically to all objects of enthusiasm: it declared imagination and feeling, morality and love of art, future and past heretical, placed man barely at the head of the series of natural beings, and reduced the infinitely creative music of the universe to the monotonous noise of a gigantic mill..." Europe must be reconstituted through a "regeneration"; no longer antiquity, but the Christian Middle Ages serve as a model.

This return to the Middle Ages corresponds to the revaluation 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 revives German popular books; Tieck, the Brothers Grimm, and Uhland reprint 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 Kinder- und Hausmärchen and Deutsche Sagen; finally, early Italian art is discovered (the Riepenhausen brothers provide notes on Giotto and Cimabue). The poetry of other peoples, especially Latin, is translated into German with unparalleled Romantic sensitivity: A. W. Schlegel: Shakespeare from 1797; Schleiermacher: Plato; Gries: Tasso, Ariosto, Calderón; as well as Dante, Petrarch, and Portuguese poets. Simultaneously, modern literary history (A. W. Schlegel, Vorlesungen), German studies (Görres, the Brothers Grimm, V. d. Hagen, Uhland), Romance philology (Diez), comparative linguistics (the Schlegel brothers, W. V. Humboldt), and myth research (Creuzer, Görres, later Bachofen) arise. Alongside those already mentioned, other great philosophical systems are developed (Hegel, Schopenhauer). Natural sciences (A. V. Humboldt, Carus) and natural philosophy (G. H. Schubert, Baader, Steffens) receive a decisive impulse. 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 ultimately ends in reactionary practice. The historiography of the "historical school" (Savigny, Niebuhr, Raumer, Luden, later Ranke) is effectively influenced for an entire century by the Romantic tendency toward the past and its artistic representational gifts.

Early Romanticism produced only two significant poets: Tieck as a writer of artistic fairy tales, and Novalis as

Romanticism (R.) refers to that literary movement which, in Germany, also profoundly influenced other areas of culture. The historical school (Savigny, Niebuhr, Raumer, Luden, and later Ranke) was effectively shaped for an entire century by the Romantic tendency toward the past and by its artistic representational gifts. Early Romanticism produced only two significant poets: Tieck as a writer of artistic fairy tales, and Novalis as a lyricist and novelist; the attempts by the Schlegel brothers to transform their theories into poetic practice were unsuccessful. Late Romanticism, however, distanced itself from speculation while achieving valid realizations in many fields of art. A true flourishing manifested in every literary genre: Brentano, Günderode, Eichendorff, Uhland, Kerner, and Heine as lyricists; Brentano, Arnim, Kleist, Fouqué, Hoffmann, Eichendorff, and Chamisso as narrators; Kleist, Werner, the young Grillparzer, and, in part, Raimund as dramatists. Napoleonic domination and the Wars of Liberation inspired dramatists (Kleist, Körner) and patriotic lyricists (Arndt, Körner, Schenkendorf), as well as important political prose writers (Kleist, Arndt, Görres). Many 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, adopted Romantic stylistic elements despite remaining hostile to the "neo-German religious-patriotic art" and to the Romantic worldview ("I call the classical healthy and the Romantic sick," 1829); the fourth part of Faust would be inconceivable without the Romantic premise. Hauff, Grillparzer, Lenau, Mörike, Stifter, and Droste preserved the Romantic legacy into the Biedermeier and Realist eras. In Wagner's music dramas, in Nietzsche's philosophy and lyric poetry, and in fin-de-siècle Neo-Romanticism, Romanticism experienced its final flourishing.

Romantic music in the strict sense came after poetry. Schubert created the Romantic lied as a genre that achieved further development in his spirit (Schumann, Silcher, Brahms, Wolf, up to Reger, Pfitzner, and R. Strauss). Just as Mozart and Beethoven influenced the formation of Romantic art and poetry theory, so Romantic poetry, in turn, inspired popular opera (Weber, Marschner) and popular melodrama (Lortzing). The Romantic symphony (Schubert, Schumann, and later Bruckner, Brahms) adhered more closely than poetry to classical expressive forms; harmony and melody were its primary means of expression, while rhythm was increasingly refined artistically.

The break from the closed form determined by antiquity hindered the development of Romantic architecture and sculpture; attempts were exhausted in the sterile imitation of past styles: Schinkel remained more closely tied to Classicism. Conversely, the Romantic spirit spoke through two painters: Friedrich depicted religious motifs and discovered the boundlessness of the North and Central German landscape, rendering the intensity of light and air with delicately nuanced colors. Runge achieved the most animated portraits of the era; in drawings and sketches, he fulfilled the theoretical demand that "the symbolic meaning of divine mysteries and the allusion to them" constituted the true purpose of art. Thus, he paved the way for the circle of "Nazarene" painters 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 V. Carolsfeld, Fohr, the Veit brothers). They drew from Italian Renaissance painting, took inspiration from themes of classical Italian poetry, imbued painting with a Christian spirit, and renewed mural painting through collaborative works (Casa Bartholdy, Villa Massimo at the Lateran). Schwind and Richter kept Romantic painting alive beyond the mid-century.

Finally, Romanticism considerably influenced social life in Germany. In its centers—Jena, Berlin, Dresden, and Heidelberg—literary circles often animated by the deep friendship of their members formed, disseminating the Romantic intellectual heritage through journals (the Schlegel brothers, Athenäum; Arnim and Brentano, Zeitung für Einsiedler; Kleist and A. Müller, Phöbus, Berliner Abendblätter). In salons, women—who were generally also writers—played a leading role (Karoline and Dorothea Schlegel, Karoline Günderode, Sophie Mereau, Dorothea Tieck, Rahel Levin, Bettina V. ARIMAN, Klara 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. V. Haller, Karl—Novalis's brother—Sophie—Tieck's sister—and others).

The poets who hail from the north (the "Lake Poets" Wordsworth and Coleridge, as well as the Scot Walter Scott, who does not belong to their school) represent the primitive aspect, that is, the more elementary and immediate, more spontaneous and popular, even if one must presuppose in them a long study of old and new language, a careful distinction between fancy and imagination, and a lively knowledge of history and legend. The poets from the south (Byron, Shelley, and Keats), on the other hand, reveal 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 any less certainty.

Nature, in its everyday aspects, in the humility of the particular, is the constant inspiration of William Wordsworth’s (1770-1850) lyric poetry, who sets forth the first Romantic manifesto in the preface to the second edition (1800) of the collection entitled Lyrical Ballads (1st ed. 1798). Such simplicity of content, according to Wordsworth, must be clothed in a similar simplicity of language, as far removed as possible from the artificial form into which the poetry of the preceding period had long been constrained. His predecessors in this field had been the pre-Romantics who, from James Thomson (1700-47) to Thomas Gray (1716-71) to Robert Burns (1759-96), had preferred the lives of the humble and the simple description of nature.

Alongside Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834) draws his finest inspiration not so much from nature as from the supernatural, if by this term we understand the sense of the mysterious and the fascinating. Coleridge makes more than one reservation regarding his friend’s theories, where the latter argues that the language of the lower classes is more sincere and truer, and thus more poetic than any other. Coleridge’s most successful verses aim to make extraordinary experiences comprehensible and common, rather than to describe the contemplation and narration of ordinary things. If the poetic wonder of the one can be called the contemplation of the common and the usual (albeit under an unusual light), that of the other is a startle and enchantment at the sudden appearance of the unusual in a magical panorama. He had been preceded, with different content, by William Blake (1757-1827), who indulges in every suggestion and excess of the imagination. As a poet, Walter Scott (1771-1832) presents himself almost as a combination of Wordsworth and Coleridge, insofar as his interest in history and legend intertwines the natural and the fantastical motifs.

Scott thus authoritatively continues that taste for the primitive which had manifested itself in the second half of the eighteenth century with the search for popular poetic expressions, a taste of which Thomas Percy’s (1729-1811) collection, Reliques of ancient English poetry (1st ed. 1765), remains the model.

With George Gordon Byron (1788-1824), we are dealing with a different kind of contemplation. He is the most restless of the Romantics, and the heroic ideal is embodied in him in the two pilgrims named Harold and Don Juan. His gaze lingers on the perpetually agitated sea, on horrid and grandiose landscapes, on ruins that evoke the destructive waves of time, and the contemplation of his spirit delights or torments itself—at any rate, it sings—before the problems to which the names of titanism, predestination, and mystery recur. The contradictions of his spirit, and perhaps also his aristocratic origin and education, place him on a plane quite different from that of the other Romantics with respect to the classicist poets, and Pope is his master, while 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 knew himself the most unfit / To herd with Man, with whom he held little in common; / ... still he would not yield, / To souls for whom his own did feel disdain, / The empire of his mind, proud in its loneliness; / Of his mind, which could find within itself a life / To live apart from all humanity.»

Pervaded instead by a desire for universal liberation, by a will for communion not only with things but also with men, is the work of Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822). The liberation of which he becomes the herald must come through reason (Queen Mab), or by means of love (The Revolt of Islam), whose second name is beauty (Epipsychidion). Shelley feels himself profoundly 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 the dance, and architecture, and statuary, and painting; they are the institutors of laws, and the founders of civil society, and the inventors of the arts of life, and the teachers, who draw into a certain propinquity with the beautiful and the true that partial apprehension of the agencies of the invisible world which is called religion.» Setting aside the certainly inadequate concept that Shelley had of religion, he felt above all else the vocation of the poet. «Poets, according to the circumstances of the age and nation in which they appeared, were called, in the earlier epochs of the world, legislators or prophets: a poet essentially comprises and unites both these characters... The poet participates in the eternal, the infinite, and the one.» In these words, as in the other assertion: «A poem is the very image of life expressed in its eternal truth», there seems to be enclosed the conclusion of John Keats’s Ode on a Grecian Urn: «Beauty is truth, truth beauty,—that is all / Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.» The Romanticism of John Keats (1795-1821) feeds, more than that of his contemporaries, on the sources of ancient classicism; he was educated in the school of the English classics from Spenser to Milton, while, on the other hand, the very young poet does not conceal his admiration for the one he considered the first Romantic poet, William Wordsworth.

Alberto Castelli

III. ROMANTICISM IN FRANCE

The Romantic movement burst into the momentarily stagnant literary environment of Napoleonic France like a disruptive gust of foreign origin. Yet Romanticism by no means marked a retreat from the positions of intellectual hegemony over Europe that France had held throughout the 18th century: the Paris of the Restoration and later of the July Monarchy reasserted its role as the world’s foremost cultural center, even as it definitively renounced political hegemony. It waged the Romantic battle and transposed it into properly literary terms in its own way, with a keen and immediate awareness of the historical forces at work in contemporary reality, and with an exceptional capacity to sense the great upheaval—political, spiritual, religious—that had its roots in the rich and multifaceted legacy of 18th-century France and in the problems that emerged from it, sharpened 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 Mme de Staël’s Allemagne and De la littérature, preceded by Sismondi’s De la littérature du midi de l'Europe and A. G. Schlegel’s Cours de littérature dramatique (1813), and the conquest of the stage of the Théâtre français, bastion of classicist resistance (1820-30), mark the chronological boundaries of the first phase, characterized by polemics far more clamorous and fierce than in any other country. The years between 1830 and the mid-century offered the new school the opportunity to develop fully and to demonstrate its worth; toward the end of that period, the impetus of spiritual liberation and the very creative drive of Romanticism waned, while the demands of realism and the aspirations toward art pour l’art began to take shape and assert themselves, dominating the literary landscape of the Napoleonic era.

Interest in and debates over the principles already doctrinally elaborated by German Romanticism flared up almost suddenly in 1813, when the forced compression of the Empire in favor of tradition and spiritual autarky came to an end. The two opposing parties took shape, and their respective aesthetic positions were clarified (not always successfully) with a particular vehemence, destined to be echoed soon after in Italy. The need for art to correspond fully to the spirituality and questions of the modern soul was explicitly affirmed. A new historical consciousness, refined by faith in the creative power of the spirit and even in the subversive will to "start anew" that had asserted itself in the 18th century, drove the recognition of the relativity of aesthetic values and canons, and the understanding of the vital and creative impulse of civilizations previously ignored or dismissed as uncultured and barbaric. In the political and social situation of Restoration France, the religious and mystical awakening, the assertion of the postulates of constitutional liberalism, and the still obscure emergence of new protagonists in modern life—thirsty for social and economic equality in the now irrevocable collapse of the traditional state order—converged and weighed heavily on discussions about the new literary and artistic program, conceived in function of life and enriched by the awareness of the supreme spiritual reality of the self before uncorrupted nature.

Alongside the literary salon, which for two centuries had been the principal venue for the preparation and diffusion of new currents (and those of Deschamps, Délecluze, Jules de Rességuier, and especially those of Charles Nodier, librarian of the Arsenal, Victor Hugo, and Ste-Beuve remain famous), journals emerged and overlapped, with their far broader resonance: Lettres normandes, La Minerve française (both founded in 1818 and suppressed by censorship in 1820), La Minerve littéraire (1820-22), Lettres champenoises (1817-25), Le Conservateur littéraire (1819-21), La Muse française (1823-24), Annales de la littérature et des arts (1820-29), Revue encyclopédique (1819-33), Le Mercure du XIXe siècle (1823-32). Alongside these, political newspapers played a significant role, particularly in the theoretical elaborations and presentation of the principles of "doctrinaire" liberalism: Censeur européen (1817-20), Courrier français (1819-31), Archives philosophiques, politiques et littéraires (1817-18), Le Lycée français (1819-20), Tablettes universelles (1820-1824), and above all Le Globe (1824-30). On their pages, or in separate writings—mostly of no great depth (Racine et Shakespeare by Stendhal, anticipated in articles in the Monthly Review between 1823 and 1824; Victor Hugo’s preface to Cromwell, 1827; Émile Deschamps’ preface to Études françaises et étrangères, 1828)—the new postulates were proclaimed: "Away with theories, poetics, and systems, away with the artificial façade imposed on art! There are no models or rules other than the general laws of nature, which extend even to artistic manifestations, and the special laws arising from the peculiar conditions of individual themes. The former are eternal and immutable; the latter extrinsic, subject to change, and serve but once." Poetic creation, for two centuries subordinated to rigid rationalistic control, must instead correspond entirely to what is intimate, personal, and immediate in inspiration. The lyrical impulse poured forth with hitherto unknown violence in the most successful collections of the Romantic generation: Lamartine’s Méditations poétiques (1820), Victor Hugo’s Odes et ballades (1822-28), Alfred de Musset’s Contes d'Espagne et d'Italie (1830); the images dear to the artist’s heart were evoked in more subdued tones, yet always with genuine individuality, in the verse of Alfred de Vigny, Marceline Desbordes-Valmore, Maurice de Guérin, Charles-Augustin de Ste-Beuve, and Gérard de Nerval.

A resurgence of religiosity also characterizes the years of the Restoration; the depth of the Christian message is rediscovered, and after so many upheavals, the benefit of the Catholic Church's spiritual discipline is fully understood. In 1819, the two volumes of Du Pape are published; in 1821, posthumously, Joseph de Maistre's Soirées de St-Pétersbourg ou Entretiens sur le gouvernement temporel de la Providence; between 1817 and 1823, Lamennais's Essai sur l'indifférence en matière de religion; in 1825, Saint-Simon's Nouveau Christianisme; in 1827, the Prolégomènes to Ballanche's Palingéniste sociale. However, with the second Romanticism, everything seems to resolve into a generic theism, a pure cult of the values of the spirit (the "religion of liberty"). After submitting to the condemnation of L'Avenir (1830-32) pronounced by Mirari vos, Lamennais bursts forth with Paroles d'un croyant (1834) and the republican Livre du peuple, marking his definitive break from the Church; the thinkers of the new generation are named Victor Cousin, Théodore Jeoffroy, Edgar Quinet; the historians, after Guizot and before Tocqueville, Thierry and Michelet; poets and novelists, after the battle against absolutism, fight for the emancipation of the people from the yoke of the old social order, of man from the bonds of traditional morality, pushing to the extreme the proclaimed rights of sentiment, nature, and passion (Hugo, Lamartine, Musset, Dumas, G. Sand, Stendhal). Catholics remain apart, though they strenuously continue their effort not to separate, but rather to strengthen their orthodoxy with a close adherence to the political and social postulates of the modern world (Montalembert, Ozanam, Ravignan, Lacordaire).

The spark of the polemic between Romantics and Classicists was the publication of an article by Mme de Staël (On the Manner and Utility of Translations) in the Biblioteca italiana of January 1816, in which Italians were urged 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 classicizing tradition and regarded Staël’s invitation as an incitement to betray the fatherland, and those who saw in the broadening of knowledge and the acquaintance with the thought and art of other peoples the possibility of reinvigorating an exhausted culture and thus regaining substantial originality. The latter called themselves Romantics, and their earliest writings—On the Injustice of Certain Italian Literary Judgments by L. Di Breme (June 1816); Literary Adventures of a Day by P. Borsieri (19 September 1816); On The Wild Huntsman and on Eleonora by G. A. Bürger: A Half-Serious Letter from Grisostomo to His Son by G. Berchet (December 1816)—are considered the manifestos of Italian Romanticism. Subsequently, the defenders of the new ideas gathered around the journal Il Conciliatore, while the Classicists had their main organ in the Biblioteca italiana. The polemic, gradually expanding from its initial nationalist motive to other issues (mythology, dramatic rules, imitation of nature, etc.), raged until around 1820, then waned, and by 1823 Manzoni could summarize its conclusions in his letter On Romanticism to Marquis Cesare d'Azeglio. A brief revival occurred after the publication of Monti’s sermon On Mythology in 1825.

The fundamental principles upheld by Italian Romantics are: 1) there is no single type of beauty: art varies according to peoples and epochs; therefore, modern literature, if it is to be alive, must abandon the exclusive imitation of Greek and Latin classics and draw inspiration from national traditions (Christian religion, chivalry, medieval history, etc.), in particular banning the use of mythology, which reflects a dead mentality; 2) the object of art is truth, but historical truth, not the typical or ideal truth sought by Classicists; 3) the faithful representation of truth requires the artist to be free from any external constraint: hence all arbitrary rules must be abolished, particularly those of the three dramatic unities of time, place, and action; 4) literature does not aim at the mere pleasure of a few literati but at the education of the entire people: therefore, it must be moral and popular; 5) a living, educational, and popular literature must adopt a living and simple language (on this point Manzoni insisted more than anyone, proclaiming the necessity of using the spoken Florentine in writing). All these assertions can be traced back to a single principle, that "literature is the expression of society," understood both as a canon of interpretation and judgment and as an inspirational criterion for literary activity. Italian Romantics derived this conception of literature primarily from the works of Mme de Staël, which, particularly De l'Allemagne, together with De la littérature du Midi de l'Europe by Sismondi and Cours de littérature dramatique by G. Schlegel, constituted the group of foreign texts that exerted the greatest influence on their cultural formation; but it was already alive in the criticism and teaching of Foscolo. Following Foscolo, they proposed the restoration of literature as a premise for the ethical re-education and political resurgence of the Italian people, and believed this possible only through alignment with contemporary European culture. Hence the simultaneously nationalistic and European spirit and the more or less openly political tone of Italian Romanticism. From this perspective, it appears as an essential aspect of the Risorgimento, with the freedom proclaimed in art as the symbol and foreshadowing of political freedom. Moreover, the representatives of the first and most notable Romantic group were animated by a sincerely Christian inspiration, combined with an ideal of spiritual and practical balance, of sentimental and expressive moderation: an inspiration and ideal most evident in the work of the greatest among them and their model, Manzoni (to whom, in this respect, Pellico in My Prisons and The Duties of Man comes closest). This sets them apart from Foscolo, whose dramatic and rebellious passion influenced rather some writers of Classicist principles or others, though Romantic, outside the Manzonian circle, such as Mazzini, Guerrazzi, and others, who also felt the influence of foreign writers of temperament akin in certain respects to Foscolo’s, particularly Byron.

This moderate and reasonable character, by which, within certain limits, it seems to continue and develop the work of the Enlightenment, particularly that of the writers of Il Caffè (v.), also distinguishes the first Italian Romanticism not only from the Northern but also from the French. While the tendency toward individualistic assertion and autobiographical effusion appears very weak, with certain aspects of Tommaso’s personality representing an exception in this regard, the fundamental motive is that of fidelity to truth, which makes a historical foundation necessary for every literary work. Hence the great flourishing of historical tragedies (Adelchi and The Count of Carmagnola by Manzoni, Francesca da Rimini by Pellico, etc.), historical novels (The Betrothed by Manzoni, Nicolò de' Lapi and Ettore Fieramosca by D'Azeglio, Marco Visconti by T. Grossi, etc.), historical lyrics (Berchet’s Fantasies, etc.), etc. This production drew inspiration mainly from the models of the Englishman W. Scott and the Germans Goethe, Schiller, and Bürger, though usually known through French translations. In it, apart from Manzoni, in whose work, particularly in The Betrothed, the spiritual demands and literary tendencies of Italian Romanticism found their most complete and perfect expression, historical fidelity is generally interpreted in a superficial and conventional manner, as the reproduction of certain characteristic aspects of customs and settings (especially medieval), and history often becomes a pretext for picturesque descriptions and sentimental digressions, in which, more than an interest in truth, a dreamy "nostalgia for the past" manifests itself. Furthermore, the contrast between precision and the

The languidly sentimental and melancholic vein, which already flows in Manzoni’s direct disciples, inspiring especially the genre of the verse novella (cf. La Fuggitiva and L’Illegonda by T. Grossi, Algiso by C. Cantù, La Torre di Capua by G. Torti, etc.), later becomes predominant, partly also due to the painful national events, and will ultimately constitute, along with a taste for a certain musically vaporous expressiveness, the distinctive character of what was called the second "Romanticism," whose major representatives were Prati and Aleardi. On the other hand, the realistic tendency of the first Romanticism does not delay in logically developing from itself an interest no longer solely in the past, but in contemporary life and psychology; an interest of which two almost contemporary works provide significant evidence: Fede e bellezza by N. Tommaseo (1840) and Edmenegarda by G. Prati (1841). Along this path, verismo will later unfold. In the second Romanticism, that tendency toward individualistic assertion in life and art—which was almost nonexistent in the first—is already quite pronounced, and will later dominate the Scapigliatura movement, in connection with a more direct and intense influence from both the early German Romantics and the French Decadents (v. DECADENTISMO).

On the theoretical-critical plane and that of artistic creation, Italian Romanticism achieved relatively modest outcomes, if one excludes, on the one hand, the work of De Sanctis, which is largely the natural development of principles it had established, and, on the other, that of Manzoni. Nevertheless, it marked a profound cultural renewal, bringing Italian culture back into beneficial contact with the highest expressions of European culture and freeing it from the now formalistic and sterile deference to tradition without renouncing what in tradition was perpetually alive and fruitful; a renewal in content and style whose effects were felt, to varying degrees, by all subsequent literary movements, including those that asserted themselves in opposition to Romanticism, such as Carducci’s Neo-Classicism, in which, for example, the Romantic cult of history revived in a new form.

Simultaneously, the spread of novels and sentimental adventures or stories had created an environment in which a debased Romanticism would easily take hold. Indeed, after a vain attempt to reconnect the movement to its German sources, English models and, above all, French ones imposed themselves, followed in their most evident 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: a controversy renewed, 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 orienting it toward Germany; the books of Chateaubriand and Mme de Staël, rapidly disseminated, redirected all of Spain’s interest toward France.

The most important moments of this diffusion are represented by the publication of several journals: El Europeo (1823), directed by Carlos Arribau and Ramón López Soler (its theories were validated in 1828 by Agustín Durán with his Discurso sobre el teatro antiguo español); and then, in 1835-36, El Artista, for which Eugenio de Ochoa and Federico de Madrazo secured the collaboration of the best Spanish Romantics, including Espronceda, Zorrilla, Pastor Díaz, Escosura, Ventura de la Vega, and Salas y Quiroga, and which, upon its demise, was continued by other periodicals (Semanario pintoresco español; El Liceo; Observatorio pintoresco; No me olvides). Several literary tertulias also formed, among them El Parnasillo and, more famously, El Ateneo of Madrid, established in 1835 under the presidency of the Duque de Rivas, and El Liceo.

Influenced also by W. Scott, Spanish Romanticism produced numerous novels of national subject matter, such as Doña Isabel de Solís by Martínez de la Rosa and El Señor de Bembibre by Gil y Carrasco, the best of this lacklustre output. More significant is El Moro Exposito by A. de Saavedra, Duque de Rivas (Paris, 1834). Meanwhile, the performances of La conjuración de Venecia by Martínez de la Rosa and Macías by Larra triumphed over the many controversies surrounding the theatre. In 1836, Don Álvaro o la fuerza del sino by the Duque de Rivas and El Trovador by A. García Gutiérrez appeared. These were followed, the next year, by Los Amantes de Teruel by Hartzenbusch and, in 1844, Don Juan Tenorio by Zorrilla.

The aforementioned works of Rivas, Zorrilla, and the poetry of Espronceda constitute the greatest expressions of Spanish Romanticism, though none achieves artistic completeness. The defect is common to all Spanish Romantic production, which vainly attempts to draw upon the memories of the Golden Age without reclaiming its essential sentiments and, above all, its religious dimension. Traditional forms thus appear emptied of their inner content and are exhausted in a merely ostentatious elaboration.

In Poland, the insurrection of Kościuszko and the participation of Poles in the Napoleonic wars are considered Romantic; 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 first defined the essence of the two currents in relation to Polish poetry, which Brodziński wished to firmly tie to national life and to reflect the conditions of Poland, an agricultural country and the setting of rural idylls. In harmony with his theories, he wrote Pieśni rolników ("Songs of the Farmers") and Wiesław, a delicate idyll in the manner of Goethe's Hermann und Dorothea. Belonging to this current are the works of the poets of the Ukrainian school: Marja by Antoni Malczewski (1783-1826); Zamek Kaniosski ("The Castle of Kaniow") by Severino Goszczyński (1801-76); Rusałki ("The Rusalkas") by Bohdan Zaleski (1802-86), and other works by various poets and prose writers. However, the Romantic school might not have been able to compete with the classical one, which had a flourishing center in Warsaw, had not Adam Mickiewicz brought to it from Vilna the warm and impetuous adherence of his genius; and after him, Juljusz Słowacki and Zygmunt Krasiński (v.), the three greatest poets of the time; H. Rzewuski and M. Czajkowski among the prose writers; the historian J. Lelewel, and others. The spiritual values of Romanticism—prevalence of sentiment over reason, enthusiasm, heroism as duty, indeed as a necessity of life—created a new current that reverberated not only in the theories of some philosophers but in the very essence of literary and artistic productions: that is, 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 fraternity of men and peoples under the sun of religion; the defense of faith and civilization against Eastern barbarism. For these qualities, the people who had chosen the Virgin Mary as their queen were sacrificed, partitioned, and horribly oppressed. Yet even in the present tragic conditions, they continue their work as antenurale christianitatis, opposing, as in the past, their breast to the Eastern invasion; they do not yield, they continue their struggle.

From this, the concept that the suffering homeland was the Christ of Nations was but a short step. The philosophers known as Messianists—Brzozowski, Trentowski, the obscure Wroński, the mystic Towiński—developed the concept of Messianism in various ways; and August Cieszkowski (1814-94), a Hegelian, interpreting the history of humanity, explained it by following one by one the seven petitions of the Pater. But even outside the influence of philosophers, Polish Romanticism fused in works of great beauty the concepts of faith and moral elevation with those of a patriotism that transcends earthly boundaries and expands into love for all humanity. Romanticism in Poland lasted until the revolution of 1863; its failure was followed by the spread of positivist reaction.

This literature exalted the humble, turned its gaze to "nature," and vaguely intertwined the ideals of a so-called "primitive Christianity"—poorly defined—with the "humanitarian" tendencies of Masonic lodges. The sentimental and pre-romantic currents in Russia did not culminate in a Romanticism with well-defined features. The fact remains that Russian literature experienced a sudden maturation and great flourishing in the first decades of the nineteenth century. Puškin, Lermontov, and Gogol' were in some way romantic, but they gave Western romantic motifs an unmistakably Russian tone and color, resolving—more or less—in "realism" the most vivid and modern traits of the Romantic school itself. In Lermontov, who died very young, the influences of fashionable Byronism are sometimes strongly felt, but in his clearest and most vigorous moments, he breaks and surpasses those schemes. Puškin only seemingly yielded to the tastes of the time and instead anticipated, with his tales, an entire orientation characteristic of the great Russian narrative prose of the nineteenth century. Gogol' freed himself quite early from his youthful fantastical-romantic inspirations, capturing the deepest traits of Russian life through "local" episodes that, in their framework, rise to epic grandeur. Deprived, in the nineteenth century, of a "Romanticism" comparable to that of European literatures, Russian literature and Russian social life itself nevertheless experienced, in the early twentieth century within an environment dominated by Symbolism, a curious resurgence of medieval ideals, Pre-Raphaelite ethos, the cult of "accursed poets," and a revaluation of Romantic aesthetics, while a political terrorism emerged from the "underground" of a country on the brink of revolution, with extravagant intertwinings of different eras.

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, superstructures. The Czechs had only one great Romantic poet, K. H. Mácha: Czechoslovak Romanticism had predominantly folkloric and erudite characteristics and passionately studied "Slavic archaeology," later evoking with sentimental notes the Slavic tribes that disappeared during the Middle Ages. In the climate of Czechoslovak Romanticism, the study of Slavic philology received considerable impetus, and Prague exerted a certain influence on the Slovenian and Croatian cultural worlds as well.

II. ROMANTICISM IN PHILOSOPHY.

Philosophical Romanticism, which had a European influence, is almost exclusively German. In England, the term romantic, used since the seventeenth century and derived from the word romance, meant "old French" and specifically an invented tale in verse and later an invented narrative in prose; thus, it signified "medieval," "Gothic," the rediscovery of the Middle Ages, and in this sense was opposed to "classical" or "ancient." In France, until the end of the last century, its use was solely artistic-literary.

From a philosophical standpoint, Romanticism can be defined (though imperfectly) as the resurgence of the "philosophy of life" against the Enlightenment "philosophy of reason." It is evident that, so defined, Romanticism is not merely a historical moment of an epoch but an attitude proper to the human spirit in every age, and thus one can speak of a Greek Romanticism, as well as a Romanticism subsequent (the many "philosophies of life" from the end of the nineteenth century to today) to that movement commonly indicated by this name, which spans from the end of the eighteenth century to the first half of the nineteenth century. It is characterized by a reaction (sometimes polemical) to the spirit and methods of the Enlightenment (v. ILLUMINISMO), although its recent origins are to be sought precisely within the Enlightenment itself.

The transcendentalism of Kant (v. KANT) is, in essence, a powerful sense of subjectivity: the autonomous dominion of man over the world (science), the autonomy of the will (morality), 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 Galilei and Newton. Therefore, Kant's influence must be considered alongside other, no longer Kantian, influences, whose germs are to be found precisely in some internal motives of the Enlightenment, expressed, for example, in France by Voltaire (v. VOLTAIRE) and Rousseau (v. ROUSSEAU), in Italy by P. Verri, as well as by the so-called sensiblerie of the eighteenth century; even German Enlightenment itself (Lessing, Herder, etc.) is a movement that connects to Romanticism proper.

Even from a purely philosophical standpoint, Romanticism is a complex movement, varying from nation to nation and from one Romantic to another. Its complexity is such that, if one considers its aspects in the abstract, its profound unity seems to dissolve into many contradictory assertions. Indeed, Romanticism is, at the same time, individualism (v. INDIVIDUALISMO) or anarchy and a quasi-sacred sense of national unity; the consecration of the irrational forces of life or the arbitrariness of the "genius" and the celebration of the inner freedom of the spirit; "irony," which destroys with laughter that conceals tears, and the exaltation of existence as an infinite conquest; the vindication of the imagination that creates and destroys with free play, and the affirmation of a higher 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 a profound systematic exigency; a return to the Catholic Middle Ages and the affirmation of pantheism and "confessionalism," 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, is surpassed. Not abstract "humanity," but the individual; not trust in the providential natural laws that govern men and things according to an order perfect in its mechanical rationality, but the exaltation of life rich in initiatives; not leveling cosmopolitanism, but the life of the spirit that characterizes and realizes itself in individual peoples through the perpetual movement of their history.

Romanticism has a religious sense of values (aesthetic, moral, religious, etc.), of history and nature, of the past; but at the same time, it has an indefinite sense of everything, almost a perception that loses itself in unfathomable obscurity, in mystery or in dream. Attempting to gather all its essential elements, its characteristics can be thus outlined: the deepening of the Kantian principle of the synthetic activity of the spirit; the revaluation of religion; sensitivity to the beauty and charm of tradition and thus interest in the past (for the classical world, a model of serenity and harmony, realizing—especially for Goethe [V. GOETHE] and Schiller [V. SCHILLER]—the ideal of humanitas; and for the medieval world—the "barbaric" 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 youthful age and thus of great poetry) and the vindication of the value of history (historicism); the exaltation of the irrational and immediate in the spirit and the affirmation of the person (v. PERSONA); consciousness of nationality (the nineteenth century was called the "century of nations"); criticism of the mechanistic conception of nature, whose life is instead the manifestation of a living principle of inexhaustible creative power of infinite forms.

Undoubtedly present in the Romantic is a heroic generosity (when it is not mere posturing), which takes concrete form in the sentiments of "sacrifice" for the great ideals of political freedom, the fatherland, artistic and moral beauty (Schiller synthesizes the two moments of sensibility and morality in the "beautiful soul"); a disdain 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 (even moral) of small things that express great sentiments: the accentuation of personality is not sought from the side of humility and heroic charity (Manzoni is an exception). Hence the lack of proportion, the excessive, the exaggerated, and all that is redundant and oratorical, morbid and contradictory in Romanticism. Hence, too, the tendency to absolutize human values and man himself, a free and creative spirit, the "little god," who "constructs" reality through philosophy and science; who creates morality (freedom and good); who "invents" life, his own and that of nature, 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 a pantheistic cult 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 era that nonetheless felt most strongly the fascination of 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 Romantic "person"

is no longer the Christian one: it is not a creature, but a creative principle of itself; it is not freedom in relation to a transcendent law that disciplines it, but "freedom of nature" or spontaneity. Similarly, the Romantic interiority is not Christian; it is the subjectivity of truth, the immanence of truth to the subject, who "creates everything"; it is a development and also an "interpretation" of Kant's "Copernican revolution." And thus interiority is lost either in exacerbated subjectivism (Novalis [v.]) or in Schelling's philosophy of panlogism (v.). Not life as being, but as becoming; as perennial aspiration and dynamic tension (all spiritual attitudes included in the term Sehnsucht).

idealism (v.), which is what is called philosophical Romanticism, is radically immanentist: it resolves all reality in the idea and the idea in thought: thought (v.) is all reality, human (history) and physical (nature), and all reality is thought. Transcendental idealism is a circle: monism (v.) immanence (v.). Kant's criticism is profoundly and critically elaborated in contact Spinoza (v.), the philosopher "drunk with the divine," the "impious" mystic of pantheism, the HEBER (v.). Criticism and Spinozism, as has been noted, become, "in their profound contrast, the two poles of Romantic-idealistic philosophical thought" (W. Windelband, Storia della filosofia, II, Italian trans., Palermo 1948, p. 257). Within these poles, Plotinus (v.), the Italian Renaissance, and the mysticism of previous centuries should not be overlooked. In this complex, philosophical Romanticism presents itself now as theist and now as pantheist, when oriented toward a conception of the world reason (v.), when toward the revaluation of intuition and the irrational, now religious and now worldly. On the one hand, Jacobi (v.) sentiment (v.), which is the immediate apprehension of the true, the source of faith, which has its principle and its term in God, an object not of knowledge or thought, but of the indissoluble certainty of faith itself; on the other, Hegel contemptuously calls "edifying philosophies" that of Jacobi and that of Schelling and contrasts them with true philosophy, which is logical thought, mediated or reflected knowledge. This bipolarity of Romantic-idealistic thought, which is not only initial, should not be overlooked. The same main current of transcendental idealism develops into four systems that must be kept distinct, though without losing sight of their common metaphysical principle (the I posits itself and the other from itself and conquers itself through becoming as self-consciousness, in which the process concludes): the ethical idealism of Fichte (v.), Schelling (v.), Hegel (v.), Schleiermacher (v.).

Fichte's idealism grapples with a dual exigency: that of science, which is mediation and objectification, and that of unobjectifiable individuality. Fichte never overcame this antinomy, which is, moreover, internal to all forms of transcendental idealism; thus he can be considered both a pure rationalist, Spinozian, and even an irrationalist. His thought and the German Romantic milieu connect with Schelling, the most Romantic of all the idealists. Nature is depotentiated spiritual life, "petrified intelligence," in which the Absolute Principle immanently resides, which then manifests itself as conscious I in the life of the spirit. Of this, the undifferentiated unity of nature and spirit (pantheism), there is no knowledge but "conceptual intuition" ("intellektuelle Anschauung"; System des transzendentalen Idealismus, 3rd sect.); in the intuitive moment of art lies the model of the original unity of nature and spirit. Art is therefore the "organ of philosophy." For Hegel, on the other hand, philosophy is only logical thought, Absolute (v.). Moreover, Hegel's reason is historical, indeed it identifies with history, which is its history: it is restless reason, dialectic of opposites, which compose themselves in dynamic synthesis, always moving forward. The world is the development of the absolute, of the divine Spirit self-determining and self-developing. 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 strictly logical character: it is science, indeed the science: it justifies itself by and from itself. It is evident that the Romantic philosophical milieu must have appeared vague and obscure to him: "true philosophy, in which truth consists, can be nothing but the scientific system of the same" (The Science of Logic, intro.; cf. bk. I, "With what must science begin?").

Besides the German one, there is an English philosophical Romanticism, influenced by the former, which has its writers in Coleridge, whose Neoplatonism absorbs motifs from Kant and Schelling, Carlyle (v.), close to Jacobi and Schiller. One cannot speak of a French or even Italian philosophical Romanticism, ROSMINIANI (v.) above all, Gioberti (v.), are on a line of thought essentially different.

BIBL.:
W. Windelband, Storia della filosofia, II, trad. it., Palermo 1948; E. Troeltsch, Il Cristianesimo e la storia del pensiero moderno, trad. it., Bari 1929; G. De Ruggiero, Storia della filosofia, parte IV, L'età del Romanticismo, Bari 1934; B. Croce, La filosofia di G. B. Vico, Bari 1911; id., Saggio sullo Hegel, Bari 1912; id., Aesthetica in nuce, in Nuovi saggi di estetica, Bari 1920; G. Gentile, Le origini della filosofia contemporanea in Italia, Messina 1917-1923; id., Il tramonto della cultura siciliana, Firenze 1919; F. De Sanctis, Storia della letteratura italiana, Napoli 1870-1871; G. Mazzini, Scritti letterari, Imola 1906-1943; A. Omodeo, L'età del Risorgimento italiano, Napoli 1931; G. Saitta, Il pensiero italiano nell'Umanesimo e nel Rinascimento, Bologna 1949-1951; C. Antoni, Dallo storicismo alla sociologia, Firenze 1940; L. Stefanini, Il problema della conoscenza in Cartesio e Kant, Padova 1936; id., Metafisica della persona, Padova 1950; A. Carlini, La religiosità dell'idealismo, Firenze 1934; G. Solari, Studi storici di filosofia del diritto, Torino 1949; F. Olgiati, L'anima dell'Umanesimo e del Rinascimento, Milano 1924; id., Il concetto di giuridicità in S. Tommaso d'Aquino, Milano 1943; E. Garin, L'illuminismo inglese, Roma 1941; id., L'umanesimo italiano, Bari 1952.

M. F. SCIACCA

Romanticism, not only in its literary-artistic form but also in its philosophical guise (and even that of Hegel), is fundamentally the "desire for the impossible," the escape from reality, the soaring into dream, into the free play of fantasy, the pursuit of a pure freedom that is possible only if one wills 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 especially in man, where the Absolute itself acquires consciousness. Thus, morality, art, and philosophy are progressively assumed as the forms in which this realization is achieved. It is an illusion, a utopia, of which even the Romantic philosophers are partly aware. Yet for them, illusion or dream holds more value than reality; indeed, their truth is the dream itself. Therefore, philosophical Romanticism also presents itself in the form of escapism, the spiritual category typical of Romanticism as such. However, the escape from the real, attempted in all its forms, leaves Romantics dissatisfied, restless, and unsatisfied (hence the "irony," the "unhappy consciousness" of Hegel, the noluntas of Schopenhauer [v.], etc.); and the main reason is to be found in the essential pantheism that underlies not only philosophical Romanticism but all German Romanticism. Indeed, given the pantheistic conception, the Romantic "infinite," which is more properly the indefinite and the indeterminate, is always a "naturalistic" and not spiritual infinite, spatial and temporal, a worldly "historical" infinite and thus always a real finite, even if a finite that expands infinitely. Consequently, both "dream" and "freedom," "spirit" or "nature," despite their infinity, always remain at the level of the finite real; that is, given immanentism and pantheism, if nature conforms to spirit, spirit also conforms to nature. With transcendence denied, however immense the "dream" may be, its content can only be a finite, even if it encompasses the entire human and physical universe. This explains the escape into a fictitious or artificial "paradise," whatever it may be. The Romantic "escapes," "goes beyond" reality, of which he is dissatisfied, without ever succeeding in "remaining outside," which is the condition of "ecstasy," proper to the theist, whereas escapism belongs to the pantheist and the dynamic pantheism characteristic of philosophical Romanticism. Romantic escapism is typical of one who is no longer Christian and can no longer even be man; and he who can no longer be man wants to be God himself, to place himself beyond the human. Indeed, Nietzsche (v.), a Romantic of a no longer Romantic generation, translates the Romantic yearning for absoluteness and totality into the myth of the "superman."

### III. ROMANTICISM IN ART.

In the field of the figurative arts of the 19th century, it is customary to define as Romantic, almost in opposition to Neoclassical and Purist manifestations, those expressions that emerged in the period following them and which, in turn, preceded the first verist manifestations in sculpture and painting and eclecticism in architecture.

In these manifestations, defined as Romantic and which unfolded for much of the first half of the 19th century, particular emphasis is placed on the expression of certain themes typical of Romanticism in all eras: such as the theme of death as relief from earthly ills, the theme of love that brings intoxication and the sense of transcending, the theme of fleeing from truth because truth destroys illusions and thus accentuates the tedium of life; the taste for travel, for adventures in distant lands, and so on. That is, the need to escape, both in time and space, is underscored, determined by dissatisfaction with one's condition and thus by the aspiration to transcend the limits imposed by norms, customs, and traditions. Now, it should be recalled that such a need for escapism in space and time had already urged Neoclassicists and Purists to accept as current the expressive forms and languages of the past, attempting—with a distinctly Romantic spiritual attitude—to make them express new sentiments. The men of the subsequent generation, the Romantics proper, setting aside classical and Renaissance forms, oriented themselves predominantly toward the Middle Ages. Toward the mysterious and, at the time, almost unexplored Middle Ages, which still appeared to most in the first half of the 19th century as a world of extraordinary adventures in which the same heroic aspirations that then inflamed consciences could be reflected, as if in a mirror turned toward the past. The change in the figurative arts is clearly identifiable first in a shift in subjects. These now predominantly treat themes derived from medieval or Oriental histories or legends or insist on describing particularly pathetic scenes and sentiments. Meanwhile, in architecture, Gothic, Romanesque, or Moorish forms are preferred over classical ones, whether of Greco-Roman or Renaissance tradition. But in a second phase, while architects explore new paths and forms, also utilizing new constructive means, painters and sculptors, dissatisfied with the old academic forms, themselves seek new expressive freedoms better suited to the new ideas to be expressed. Hence eclecticism and subsequently functionalism in architecture, verism, impressionism, and so on in painting and sculpture.