Romanticism was an artistic, intellectual and cultural movement that emerged in Europe in the late 18th century. It was in part a response to the intensely rationalist approach to life that had been championed by the Enlightenment. The nature of Romanticism took on distinct forms in different countries, although there were unifying features – most notably the privileging of subjectivity, inspiration and individualism over pure reason. In addition, whereas Enlightenment thinkers sought to establish universal truths, the Romantics were more interested in the relativist nature of personal truth.
In Great Britain, Romanticism was also seen as a response to the Industrial Revolution. Leading figures of the English Romantic movement – legendary names such as Byron and Keats, Shelley and Wordsworth – idealized the natural world and raised up the medieval period (a trend also reflected in Gothic Revival architecture that became popular from around the 1830s) that had been reviled by Enlightenment thinkers as ‘the Dark Ages’. Industrialized, enlightened modernity, the Romantics suggested, was not the earthly paradise some had hoped for.
In both Britain and Germany, Romanticism served as something of an antidote to the cultural and military imperialism of Napoleonic France. Moreover, it proved highly influential in the evolution of America, where its individualist philosophy was warmly embraced. However, Romanticism had largely run its course by 1848, when a succession of failed revolutions across Europe extinguished the flame of Romantic nationalism, while exciting new artistic movements jostled to capture the public imagination.
The Storm and Stress movement
German Romanticism, meanwhile, could trace a path back to the Sturm und Drang (‘Storm and Stress’) movement that roughly stretched from the 1760s to the 1780s. Emotion and personal subjectivity were given free rein in the face of Enlightenment rationalism and reason, with figures including Friedrich Schiller, Karl Friedrich Schinkel, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and G. W. F. Hegel contributing to the development of a powerful sense of national spirit. Romanticism thus came to have disparate political impacts in different countries. In Britain, it came to be seen as deeply conservative, yearning for a bygone past in which individuals wandered lonely as a cloud and factories did not chug out fumes and irreversibly scar the countryside. In Germany, though, it became a conduit for radical nationalist demands, and remained a potent cultural force even during the rise of Hitler almost a century after Romanticism had ceased to be a vital movement.