A History of Western Society: Printed Page 697
A History of Western Society, Value Edition: Printed Page 668
A History of Western Society, Concise Edition: Printed Page 695
Like other cultural movements, Romanticism was characterized by intellectual diversity. Nonetheless, common parameters stand out. Artists inspired by Romanticism repudiated the emphasis on reason associated with well-
Where Enlightenment thinkers applied the scientific method to social issues and cast rosy predictions for future progress, Romantics valued intuition and nostalgia for the past. Where Enlightenment thinkers embraced secularization, Romantics sought the inspiration of religious ecstasy. Where Enlightenment thinkers valued public life and civic affairs, Romantics delved into the supernatural and turned inward, to the hidden recesses of the self. As the Austrian composer Franz Schubert exclaimed in 1824:
Oh imagination, thou supreme jewel of mankind, thou inexhaustible source from which artists and scholars drink! Oh, rest with us — despite the fact that thou art recognized only by a few — so as to preserve us from that so-
Nowhere was the break with Enlightenment classicism more apparent than in Romanticism’s general conception of nature. Classicists were not particularly interested in nature. The Romantics, in contrast, were enchanted by stormy seas, untouched forests, and icy arctic wastelands. Nature could be awesome and tempestuous, a source of beauty or spiritual inspiration. Most Romantics saw the growth of modern industry as an ugly, brutal attack on their beloved nature and on venerable traditions. They sought escape — in the unspoiled Lake District of northern England, in exotic North Africa, in an imaginary and idealized Middle Ages.
The study of history became a Romantic obsession. History held the key to a universe now perceived to be organic and dynamic, not mechanical and static, as Enlightenment thinkers had believed. Historical novels like Sir Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe (1820), a passionate romance set in twelfth-
Romanticism was a lifestyle as well as an intellectual movement. Many early-