Romanticism

The French Revolution, the Napoleonic Wars, and the progress of domestic reform enlarged the boundaries and enriched the content of English romanticism, ¹ but these social and political events did not initiate the movement. For its origins search must be made deep into the past, perhaps into the very nature of the human spirit. Upon that quest we cannot embark here. The word romans meant originally a vernacular descended from the Latin; then the literature written in the vernacular; and then the prevailing kind of that literature. The adjective romantic (with variants) first appeared in English in the mid-seventeenth century as a word to describe the fabulous, the extravagant, the fictitious, and the unreal. From this disrepute it was rescued during the following hundred years by being used to describe pleasing scenes and situations of the sort appearing in “romantic” fiction and poetry. ² Gradually the term Romanticism came to be applied to the resurgence of instinct and emotion which the prevalent rationalism of the eighteenth century never wholly suppressed. More or less timid and tentative manifestations of this revolt against “common sense” have been recognized in the previous section of this History. The choice of the word Romanticism was perhaps unfortunate, because it begs the question whether there is any such single cultural phenomenon in Europe; but it is too firmly fixed to be discarded. The confusion prevalent in recent discussions of the matter may be clarified in a measure if we remember that it springs from the use of the same term for different tendencies. Romantic phenomena vary in different countries, and even within the same country no two writers are necessarily romantic in the same way or to the same degree, nor is a writer necessarily romantic in all his work or throughout his life. The term sometimes implies a theory, a formulated code, a “school” but in England romanticism was informal and almost wholly unattached to any doctrinaire program. Though often used of writers in rebellion against classical rules of composition, romanticism is not merely a matter of technique. It is true that many of these writers were deficient in critical control of their material, but the technical excellencies usually praised as classical may be found in association with elements of romanticism. As a recognition of the need to discriminate among many tendencies, it has been proposed that the plural romanticisms be employed; but other scholars, rejecting this counsel of despair, pursue the quest for some underlying principle or common denominator binding together the various phenomena of this movement of thought and emotion.