Striving for a better, higher, ideal state of being was at the heart of the Romantic movement. Everyday life seemed dull and meaningless; it could be transcended only through the free exercise of individual will and passion. The rule of feeling, unconstrained by convention, religion, or social taboo (or anyone else’s feelings, often enough) — this became the highest good. Emotional expression became the highest artistic goal. “Bohemians,” as they were disparagingly called at the time, proclaimed romantic love, led irregular lives, and wore odd clothes. We have the Romantics to thank for this familiar image of the artist, still around today.

These attitudes may be laid at the door of Jean-Jacques Rousseau — the same Enlightenment philosopher who had spoken up in the mid-eighteenth century for “natural” human feelings, as opposed to the artificial constraints imposed by society (see page 153). Hailed as the philosophical father of the French Revolution, Rousseau provided the Romantics with the ideal of individual, as well as political, freedom and fulfillment. We have also seen Rousseau as a proponent of a “natural” music, and indeed his own music was still being played at French revolutionary rallies and pageants.

But there was more than philosophy behind the new attitudes. The Industrial Revolution had already begun its inexorable course, and increasingly as the nineteenth century went on, people felt their helplessness in the face of the factories, slag heaps, and inhumane working conditions of developing capitalism. The smokestacks of what William Blake called “these dark, Satanic mills” now loomed over the European landscape. There was an understandable element of escapism in Romantic striving.