Character 2: Emotionalism

The elevation of emotion to the level of a religion in the Romantic era is something of a truism; a very un-aristocratic displaying of the emotions was more and more considered a measure of sensitivity and sensibility and characterised the arts in the period. It was even extended to animals, and many painters of the early nineteenth century moved from more-or-less distanced, symbolic imputation of such attributes as nobility and pride — intended, of course, to reflect on the animal's owners or subjugators — to more directly emotional, even 'human' ones such as sorrow and fear. The hare in Wordsworth's 'Resolution and Independence' (1802) ¹ is a case in point; this first reference is one of three — each with the same sentiments — in the poem: ...on the moors The Hare is running races in her mirth; And with her feet she from the plashy earth Raises a mist which, glittering in the sun, Runs with her all the way, wherever she doth run. ² This shift towards emotionalism is particularly clear when one examines the enormously popular depiction of horses (or horses and their grooms or owners), such as many of those of the master horse-painter, George Stubbs. His A Grey Hunter [Hack] with a Groom and a Greyhound at Creswell Crags (c. 1762–4, see Pl. 33), in which the horse and its pose are modelled on Greek friezes, is a paean to possession: the groom, the dogs, as well as the rocky setting which frames the prize commodity, the horse, all belong to the local landowner. Even Stubbs' several pictures of horses frightened by lions never quite lose their objectivity, excellent though they are. The contrast with, on the one hand, Napoleon's Horse, Marengo, at Waterloo (1824, Pl. 34) by James Ward, in which the Emperor's favourite charger is shown alone on the deserted battlefield in the evening after the defeat of his master's forces, watched by a raven, symbol of death, in a bloody sunset; and, on the other hand, Géricault's Horse frightened by lightning (1835, Pl. 35), in which the magnificent piebald is transfixed in terror, with muscles knotted, in a baleful and almost featureless landscape, shows the trend clearly. As it happens, Ward's paintings were greatly admired by Géricault and generally in France, as were those of Landseer, whose later more reflective work, 138exemplified in the famous The Monarch of the Glen (1851), betrayed a salutary change of heart from his earlier glorying in the blood and thunder of the hunt.