English Romanticism in the 1790s

English Romanticism in the 1790s

If a supernatural power deprived all the human beings of their entire spiritual values, but let them their imagination, they could still be able to re-create all the other lost values. The spirit of creation is the wealthiest of all the human beings' virtues. It creates all the treasures of the spirit and builds all the universes of the Self. Imagination cannot be but free. As the dainty flight of a bird dies in a cage of bars, the sublime flight of imagination dies inside a cage of rules and conditions.

Free imagination is the root of art and the root of imagination is the human Self and nature. There is a bond among imagination, self, and nature, which ultimately leads to art. Man creates the art as the art creates the man. Art and people are inseparable living entities and live after the same rules of creation. Try to break them apart and you will find nothing but a set of barren rules stuck between untruth and non-art. Nevertheless, art and imagination are acts of will and are born out of the free and creative human spirit. They are part of the plan of creation one needs in order to feed the spirit.

There have been various plans of creation along the history of humankind. Each of them has derived from a certain spirit of epoque, and has usually been born as a reaction to the previous one. These plans of creation have been called Movements and they color the artistic eras of history.

Romanticism is the artistic Movement that appeared as a reaction against the Rationalism, in the last decades of the 18th century in Western Europe. It placed emotions and feelings on the highest levels of the human spirit. Even though at the beginning it was just an attitude and a mood, later, Romanticism took the shape of a Movement. The Romantic authors began to write more and more about their own feelings, underlying the human drama, the tragic love, utopist ideas, etc.

If the 18th century had been marked by objectivity and rationalism, the beginning of the 19th century was marked by subjectivity, emotion, and inner Self. According to Charles Baudelaire: "Romanticism is precisely situated neither in choice of subject, nor exact truth, but in a way of feeling." (Baudelaire, Charles. Selected Writings on Art and Literature. London: Penguin, 1992.)

Romanticism manifested in different forms of art and marked especially literature and music. When Romanticism reached the schools, it was criticized for its idealized sense of reality. This criticism brought the Realism Movement. According to some critics, Romanticism and Neoclassicism represent only two faces of the same coin. Whereas Neoclassicism searches for the ideal sublime under an objective form, Romanticism searches the same values from a subjective point-of-view. Thus, the two Movements, are linked by the idealization of the reality.

Many critics place the beginning of the English Literary Romanticism on the date of the publication of Wordsworth and Coleridge's Lyrical Ballads (1798). This work of art is considered decisive for the Romantic era. In its preface, William Wordsworth states that poetry in general results from "the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings." (http://www.uoregon.edu/~rbear/ballads.html).Likewise, Coleridge stresses the importance of the imagination. Both of them underline the importance of human spontaneity and free spirit in the process of creation. These are, nonetheless, romantic ideas and clearly shape the aspect of the most powerful literary genre of literature, which is, without any doubt, Romanticism.

The romantic poets always focus on the individual and on the self-reaction to existence. Such English romantic poets are Byron,

Keats,

Shelley, William Blake, etc. Their poems are highly symbolic, based on imagination, and have roots into the treasures of the spirit. "The imagination was elevated to a position as the supreme faculty of the mind. (...) the Romantics tended to define and to present the imagination as our ultimate "shaping" or creative power, the approximate human equivalent of the creative powers of nature or even deity." (Enscoe, Gerald E. And Gleckner, Robert F. Romanticism: Points-of-View. New Jersey: Prentice Hall, 1962).

As Wordsworth suggests in the preface of "Lyrical Ballads," imagination is an active force and has more functions. The most important of all in the process of creation is imagination as an art creator. Moreover, it is a reality creator. In Wordsworth's opinion, people do not simply view and analyze the world around them, but also create it (or re-create it in another dimension, this time artistic). The essence of William Wordsworth's ideas about poetry is romantic; it views the soul torments, the nature, the feelings, and the life philosophies as the muse of the poet. In his opinion, the poet's connection with these values is imperative. Wordsworth states, "Poetry is the image of man and nature" (http://www.uoregon.edu/~rbear/ballads.html).He considers that the role of nature is vital in people's life because they unite them with the creator and connects them both to the past and to the future.

Like Wordsworth, Coleridge considers imagination as the most important human value, which, in his opinion, is able to discover and "reconcile" the opposites and differences. He uses the term "intellectual intuition" to call imagination and considers that it is able to decipher nature as a set of metaphors.

Lyrical Ballads, the volume that "opened" the Romantic Movement was composed by a series of poems with strong romantic features, based on reflections about the Self and about nature. It opens with the Rime of the Ancient Mariner, a splendid poem about life, death, punishment, and self-relief, scattered with plenty of symbols and metaphors. The volume ends with another valuable long poem, Tintern Abbey, which is again a poem full of strong Romantic values.

Tintern Abbey may be considered a journey that reveals the essence of Romanticism. The poem draws an imaginary line from the height of a mountain towards the valley where the poet admires the view under a sycamore tree. This introduction places the poet in the middle of the landscape and mingles his spirit with that of the nature. He becomes an isolated, dreamful man who values the splendors of the eternal nature. The fact that nature can have a profound "influence on that best portion of a good man's life, his acts of kindness and of love" This proves once again the romantic origin of the poem, as romanticism was "a reaction against the rationalization of nature [...] in art and literature it stressed strong emotion as a source of aesthetic experience, placing new emphasis on such emotions as trepidation, horror, and the awe experienced in confronting the sublimity of nature" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RomanticismNature)

Nature is untouched in Wordsworth's poetry. The only living being, who dwell here, is the hermit. Nevertheless, he does not blot the landscape; he completes it, as part of the natural view of the countryside. "Once again I see

These hedge-rows, hardly hedge-rows, little lines / of sportive wood run wild: these pastoral farms, / Green to the very door; and wreaths of smoke / Sent up, in silence, from among the trees! / With some uncertain notice, as might seem / of vagrant dwellers in the houseless woods, / or of some Hermit's cave, where by his fire / the Hermit sits alone." (http://www.uoregon.edu/~rbear/ballads.html)

Apart from nature, which is the main romantic element, there is also the time. As a romantic coordinate, time is placed into the past. The poet connects nature to the past. He remembers the magic moments that he spent in the Wye Valley, during his holidays. These places remind him of the soul peace that nature gave him when he was sitting in the middle of nature. These memories bring him the old comfort he used to feel there. Nevertheless, it is not only memories that bring him peace; it is also the present natural setting which take him from the noisy city and bring him where his soul belongs. Nature helps him escape from."..the heavy and weary weight/of all this unintelligible world" (http://www.uoregon.edu/~rbear/ballads.html) because it is only nature that can keep his memories in a clear place. This idea of nature preserving the memories of the past is also purely Romantic and it is used by many Romantic poets in their work of art.

Wordsworth's nature also has the role of a mentor as it guides the poet along his life stages, from childhood to adulthood. "Wordsworth's Tintern Abbey takes you on a series of emotional states by trying to sway readers and himself, that the loss of innocence and intensity over time is compensated by an accumulation of knowledge and insight." (Eilenberg, Susan. Strange power of Speech: Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Literary Possession. New York: Oxford University Press, 1992). The poet stresses the idea that nature will continue to provide silence and width for as long as he lives.

In the last refrain, the poet leaves the past and turns back into the present. The symbol of both his present and his future is his sister, Dorothy, whom he sees in the Sylvan Valley. "O Sylvan Wye! thou wanderer thro' the woods, / How often has my spirit turned to thee!" (http://www.uoregon.edu/~rbear/ballads.html) Now, the poet wishes to "transfer" the healing powers of nature that he himself has experienced to his sister. By stating."..Nature never did betray / the heart that loved her" (http://www.uoregon.edu/~rbear/ballads.html) Wordsworth assures his sister that she will also find peace in the middle of nature if she believes in the communion with nature. This prediction is an artifice of the poem and is not simple. "Wordsworth's ability to look to the future to predict memories of events that are happening in the present is ingenious and complicated. But Wordsworth beautifully clarifies this concept by using nature as the ideal link between recollection, foresight, and his relationship with another."(Eilenberg, Susan. Strange power of Speech: Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Literary Possession. New York: Oxford University Press, 1992).

Moreover, by imagining the future of his sister, Wordsworth feels that only by a common connection with nature, he and his sister can be tied together even after death, because nature makes them one soul that can read the same book of nature. "My dear, dear Friend; and in thy voice I catch / the language of my former heart, and read / My former pleasures in the shooting lights / of thy wild eyes." (http://www.uoregon.edu/~rbear/ballads.html)

Like "Tintern Abbey," there are also other poems that underline the Romantic features, stressing the importance of nature, loneliness, past and others in the act of creation. William Blake (who was also a painter) is the most viable example of the Romantic track in Britain. The central idea of his poetical creation is: "I must create a system or be enslaved by another man's." (Abrams, M.H. English Romanticism: The Spirit of the Age. Romanticism Reconsidered. Ed. Northrop Frye. New York: Columbia University Press, 1963. 26-72)

John Keats, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Mary Shelley, Lord Byron, are also good example of representatives of Romanticism in Britain and they are influenced by the Medieval Era. They place the Romantic hero in the centre of their artistic creation. He is a complex character, made of opposites. He may be strong and sensitive, melancholical and choleric, tender and harsh. He is a mixture of gothic and romantic, leaving deep traces in the readers' mind. After the poets above mentioned, there was also William Butler Yeats, born in 1865, who decided to place his generation in the cathegory of "the last romantics."

In the countries which were mostly Roman Catholic, Romanticism was less pronounced than in Britain and Germany. It flourished only later, after the rise of Napoleon. The founder of Romanticism in France is considered to be "Francois-Rene de Chateaubriand" Francois-Rene de Chateaubriand. Historically speaking, in France, Romanticism is associated with the French revolution which brought not only a political change, but also an artistic one. The poems and novels of Victor Hugo with his valuable and well-known novels Les Miserables and Ninety-Three and Stendhal with his Le Rouge et Le Noir, the works of Hector Berlioz prove that. The charcaters of their novels have strong romantic features. They are thoughtful and meditative characters, have strong personalities and can make a change. They are creators and dystroyers of universes.

In Russia, the main representatives of the Romantic Movement are the novelists Alexander Pushkin, Mikhail Lermontov and the Fyodor Tyutchev. In their writings they depict the characters unable to adapt in a harsh society which cannot possibly house their dreems. They are very much influenced by Lord Byron, who is considered the creator of the Romantic Hero.

The Romantic hero is often met in the literature of Britain also. In England, for example, Bronte Sisters' Victorian novels reveal strong heroes with many Romantic traits. In Wuthering Heights, Emily Bront's only novel, one of the main characters is Heathcliff, a very complex character who may be very well considered one of the symbols of Gothic Literature (after Mary Shelley's classic Gothic character Frankenstein).

Gothic is a very important Romantic element, creating gloomy, harsh, helplessly in-love characters. Heathcliff, as his name shows it, is a complex gothic character, who acts by his impulse. He is an aggressive man, unable to recover after the loss of his love, Catherine. His love is, after her beloved's death, a lake of tears. The memory of Catherine haunts him. He is cursed to meet her ghost and stay stuck somewhere between life and death, where he can never find peace.

Another romantic and gothic male character is the enigmatic Edward Rochester, one of the main figures of Charlotte Bronte's, novel, Jane Eyre. Like Heathcliff, he is a complex character, hateful and selfish, whose love for Jane is not dystroying like that of Heathcliff in Wuthering Heights. His love is tender, but strange. When he faces his handicap, he is on the bound to give up hope and disappear from Jane's life. Eventually, Jane stops him from his act of despair and helps him reconcile with himself. Exactly like his mirror character in Wuthering Heights, Rochester is a purely romantic with deep gothic treats. His power as a character makes him once again an example of the attitude expressed at the beginning of the 19th century in the Romantic literature.

Romantic literature is very often mixed with music. This peculiar, yet full of significance combination creates the symphonic poem. Being a mixture of art forms, it has a double impact towards the art receiver, creating feelings. Sensivity, emotion, freedom of form are expressed in both literature and in music, during the romantic period.

Romanticism in music was best recognized in the works of German composers, but it was present also at Schubert,

Beethoven, Weber, Chopin, Liszt and Wagner. The music of Grieg,

Brahms,

Dvo-ak, and Tchaikovsky, Puccini, Strauss appeared at the end of Romanticism and it had less romantic features.

Romantic music has flexible forms, and transmits a mixture of feelings and moods, most of the time contradictory. It is like a journey into the deepest realms of nature where the hero is a solitary, dreamful man and sings his sadness, joy, despair, or glory. His voice (mostly solo) is usually accompanied by the piano.

If we drew the history of Romanticism in Music, we should first start with the first decades of the 19 century when the classical style was still most widely recognized and appreciated. Composers like Mozart, Haydn, and Beethoven prevailed throughout Europe. Their music line was the inspiration of all the other classic composers and it did not break the music standards of that time. "This style provided so satisfactory a means for achieving the musical goals of the time that almost every composer wrote in some variation of it." (Longyear, Rey M. Nineteenth-Century Romanticism in Music. Ed. H. Wiley Hitchcock. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1969).

When the classic style ceased to transmit enough feelings and emotions, experimenting composers started to create a new kind of music. Their style was more aggressive and impulsive. They ceased to respect the classic frames imposed by the previous composers. The new musicians were more adventurous, and they did not feel the need to respect the clear form of the musicals. Instead of clarity, they used disrupted tones of music. They even had the courage to introduce long solo passages for an instrument in the middle of a symphony. They also surprised the audience through peculiar progression of chords even if it disrupted the harmony of the composition.

By expressing their new ways of approaching music, the new composers of the 19th-century created a new movement, opposed to the old classic one. The aesthetic values of Romanticism were highly appreciated in Germany and in central Europe. Therefore, the works of Franz Schubert and Carl Maria von Weber were the first romantic manifestations of the Romantic Movement in music, at the beginning of the 19th century.

The romantic musicians found their muse of inspiration in literary works, paintings, and other art sources. Therefore, they believed in the same art values, like freedom of form, peculiar vibration of feelings, impulsive reactions, uniqueness, etc. As literary works reveal solitary characters to bear the imprint of emotional experience, music reveals instruments that have exactly the same role as characters in literature. They create the emotional values. The French composer