The eighteenth century had made reason, order and industry its gods, and by the 1770s a generation was tired of them. Rousseau had already said that civilisation corrupts and the heart knows better. Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774) made all of Europe weep over a suicide for love and, reportedly, dress like him. Edmund Burke and then Kant had described the sublime: the mix of awe and terror in front of a storm or a mountain, and why we go looking for it.
In 1798 two young Englishmen, Wordsworth and Coleridge, published Lyrical Ballads, and the same year a circle of friends in Jena launched a journal called Athenaeum. Neither group knew the other. Both said the same thing: feeling and imagination are ways of knowing, nature is the teacher, and the individual, not the rulebook, is where art begins.
Feeling is a way of knowing. Imagination reaches what calculation cannot, and a poem can be truer than a proof.
Nature is alive. Not scenery but a teacher, and sometimes a terror. The sublime is worth seeking out.
The genius creates. The artist does not copy the world or follow the rules. The artist makes something that was not there.
The child sees clearly. Innocence is not ignorance. Adults have had their sight trained out of them.
The past holds what progress threw away. Ruins, folk songs, the medieval. The fragment and the unfinished are more honest than the polished whole.
Germaine de Staël did more to spread Romanticism than most of the poets: Napoleon had her book On Germany pulped in 1810, and when it finally appeared in 1813 it introduced France to the whole Jena circle. Dorothy Wordsworth’s journals supplied her brother with the daffodils. Mary Shelley wrote the movement’s most durable novel before she was twenty. Elizabeth Barrett Browning was the most famous poet in England in the 1840s, more famous than the man she married.
The movement also looked east from the start. Goethe’s West-East Divan (1819) is a conversation with the fourteenth-century Persian poet Hafez, and FitzGerald’s Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam (1859) became the Victorian age’s favourite poem. Khalil Gibran, born in Lebanon, wrote The Prophet in 1923 and is Romanticism’s last great voice.
The Romantics were the direct reaction against the Rationalist century and against the Aristotelian rules of art. They took their idea of the artist glimpsing a higher world from Neoplatonism. Transcendentalism is the movement’s American child, and Existentialism its grandchild by way of Kierkegaard, who kept the Romantic individual and threw out the optimism.
Environmentalism begins in Wordsworth’s Lake District. “Follow your passion”, the tortured artist, and the belief that a wild landscape is beautiful rather than dangerous are all Romantic inventions. Before 1750, nobody climbed a mountain for the view.