A shift in thought almost unrivaled in the development of European civilisation, Romanticism spread its way through every form of culture – sometimes like a delicate mist, seeping into the psyche, other times bursting forth with volcanic vigour. Today we still live in the hangover of this revolution of thought and, with its developments incorporated into our quotidian existence, it is easy to overlook the seismic influence it had and has on the way we think, act, and create.
Romanticism’s origins can be found in the latter half of the eighteenth century, growing from the burgeoning quest for liberty, egality, and fraternity found across Europe and an embryonic United States. Before this time, such ideas as climbing a mountain to appreciate the sublime beauty of its scenery, or that every individual should be politically represented regardless of status, would have seemed preposterous – the Alps were nothing but an inconvenience and peasants only a cheap source of labour.
Only a handful of proto-Romantics thought otherwise. Leonardo, whilst working in Milan, was no stranger to the Lombard Alpine foothills and is thought to have scaled Monte Rosa whilst in his fifties for no reason other than to draw the view. Indeed, dramatic landscapes more akin to Caspar David Friedrich can be found in the background of many of his most famous works.
But even before Leonardo’s alpine wanderings, his compatriot, the poet Petrarch, had made an ascent of Mont Ventoux, in Provence, in 1336, claiming later to be the first man since antiquity to climb a mountain purely for the view. The Dutch master of painting peasant life, Bruegel the Elder, travelled through the Alps on his way to Italy and was captivated by a landscape totally alien to a lowlander such as he was. The craggy peaks pop up in his 1563 work Landscape with the Flight into Egypt.
However, these extraordinary gentlemen aside, the world of nature spent most of this time being seen as nothing more than a threat to everyday survival. Most of the population were victims to the whims of nature.
The grand old philosopher of the French Revolution, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, lived from many years away from civilisation in a remote corner of Lake Geneva. In him the two great precepts of Romanticism came together; the wish to live within nature and to appreciate the sublime qualities of its beauty with the belief that all men are born equal and it is their inalienable right to seek freedom. It is the clashing and fusing of these two great philosophies that stirs up the sturm und drang that gives us Beethoven and Goethe, Turner and Byron.
At the same time the inconvenient sting of nature that had plagued man’s relationship with it in the past, was being neutralised by the industrial revolution. Now people were less likely to be killed by a harsh winter and more likely to be chewed up in an enormous cotton jig – an issue that the political side of Romanticism would grapple with in the years to come. The dawn of the railways allowed for easy and affordable travel out to the most rugged and remote landscapes, now even the most destitute Parisian bohemian could appreciate the countryside, Ruskin could visit the Swiss Alps, and Turner could go to Venice.
The greatest generation of poets England ever produced equated the landscapes of nature with landscapes of human emotion. For some, this did not even require continental travel, Wordsworth found inspiration enough in his native Lake District, whilst, for possibly the greatest of them, John Keats, the heights of Hampstead Heath offered him all the nightingales and mellow fruitfulness he needed to produce some of the most beautiful Romantic poetry ever written.
For a movement without a codified manifesto or definitive leader, there is remarkable coherence between works produced in this school. Consider, for example, how Caspar David Friedrich’s Wanderer Above a Sea of Fog seems to almost play Richard Wagner’s prelude to Act 1 of Lohengrin. One can easily pair Romantic works like this throughout the movement’s ongoing two hundred and fifty year history.
No movement in thought has managed to absorb itself into society as totally and effectively as Romanticism. Its egalitarian politics in the basis of the ruling liberal democratic order and its philosophy of nature is the reason why going for a walk in the countryside is considered a worthy pursuit. Its cultural language still dominated our literature, films, television, music, and art without us even realising.
Deciding to sit in a garden to enjoy the weather, or taking a stroll along the cliffs, or climbing a mountain purely for the view, places us in a centuries old, radical tradition of seeking the sublime and yearning for liberty.
Morgan Haigh 