romantisicm ... essay

Romanticism is the primitive, the untutored, it is youth, life, the exuberant sense of life of the natural man, but it is also pallor, fever, disease, decadence, the maladie de siecle, la belle dame sans merci, the dance of the death, indeed death itself. It is Shelley’s dome of many-coloured glass, and it is also his white radiance of eternity. It is the confused teeming fullness and richness of life, Fulle des Lebens, inexhaustible multiplicity, turbulence, violence, conflict, chaos, but also it is peace, oneness with the great ‘i am’, harmony with the natural order, the music of the spheres, dissolution in the eternal all containing spirit, It is the stance, the exotic, the enchanted castles, hunting horns, elves, giants, griffins, falling water, the old mill on the floss, darkness and the powers of darkness, phantoms, vampires, nameless terror, the irrational the tradition, joy in the smiling aspect of everyday nature and the accustomed sights and sounds of contented, simple, rural folk- the stance and happy wisdom of rosy cheeked sons of soil, It is the ancient roots and the old order with its unanalysable qualitites, its profound but inexpressible loyalties, the impalpable, the imponderable. Also it is the pursuit of novelty, revolutionary change, concern with the fleeting present, desire to live in the moment, rejection of knowledge, past and future, the pastoral idyll of happy nostalgia, it is reverie, it is intoxicating dreams, it is sweet melancholy and bitter melancholy, solitude, the sufferings of exile, the sense of alienation, roaming in remote places, especially the east, and in remote times, especially the middle ages. But also it is happy co-operation in common in a common creative effort, the sense of forming part of a church, a class, a party a tradition, a great and all containing symmetrical hierarchy, knights and retainers, the ranks of the church, organic social ties, mystic unity, one faith, one land, one blood, ‘ la Terre et les mort’s’, as Barres said, the great society of the dead and the living and yet unborn. It is the toryism of Scott and Southey and Wordsworth, and it is the radicalism of Shelley, Buchnes and Stendhal. It is Chateaubriands aesthetic medievalism and it is Michelet’s loathing of the middle ages. It is carlyles worship of authority, and hugos hatred of authority, It is extreme nature mysticism and extreme anti-naturalist aestheticism. It is energy, force, will, youth, life, etalage du moi; it is also self-torture, self annihilation, suicide. It is the primitive, the unsophisticated, the bosom of nature, green fields, cow-bells, murmuring brooks, the infinite blue sky. No less, however, it is also dandyism, the desire to dress up, red waistcoats, green wigs, blue hair, which the followers of people like Gerade de Nervals wore in Paris at a certain period. It is the lobster which Nerval led about on a string in the streets of Paris. It is wild exhibitionism, ... it is the golden hearted courtesans and the noble hearted convicts of nineteenth century fiction. It is beauty and ugliness. It is art for arts sake, and art as an instrument for social salvation. It is strength and weakness individualism and collectivism, purity and corruption, revolution and reaction, peace and war, love of life and love of death.

“In search of definition” - from Isaiah Berlin ‘the roots of romanticism’.