Romanticism and Realism

Culture: Romanticism and Realism

Romanticism

            At the end of the eighteenth century, a new movement called romanticism emerged as a reaction against the Enlightenment. During that period, art and literature followed classicism. The ideals of classicism were reason, balance, and restraint in all things. Romantics went to the other extreme. They wanted the arts to express the feeling, emotion, and imagination of the individual artist or writer.

            Many romantic writers in England lived during the early Industrial Revolution, and they often expressed a horror of the conditions they saw. In his novel The Old Curiosity Shop, Charles Dickens wrote about the English mill town of Birmingham. An element of romanticism pervaded his description:

“A long suburb of red brick houses—some with patches of garden ground, where coal dust and factory smoke darkened the shrinking leaves, and coarse rank flowers; and where the struggling vegetation sickened and sank under the hot breath of kiln and furnace…--a long, flat straggling suburb passed, they came by slow degrees upon a cheerless region, where not a blade of grass was seen to grow, where not a bud put forth its promise in the spring; where nothing green could live but on the surface of the stagnant pools, which here and there lay idly sweltering by the black roadside.”

To the romantics, the inner feelings of each person were unique, even mysterious. Romantic novelists tended to create characters who were misunderstood or rejected by the society around them. Isolated, their individual feelings and ideas were their only barometer for right and wrong. They did not bow to middle-class conventions. They wore their hair long and grew beards. A woman might dress in a man’s pants and frock coat to show she was a poet.

            Romantics loved to think about past ages, especially medieval times. They felt it had a mystery and interest in the soul that their own industrial age did not. Romantic architects revived medieval styles and designed castles, cathedrals, railway stations, and city halls in a style called neo-Gothic. The Houses of Parliament in London reflect this style.

            Romantic literature was also inspired by the Middle Ages. Sir Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe, for example, a best-seller in the early 1800s, told of clashes between knights in medieval England. By focusing on their nations’ past, many romantic writers were also reflecting the nationalism that was so strong in the nineteenth century.

            The exotic and unfamiliar also attracted many romantics. This attraction gave rise to Gothic literature. Chilling examples are Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and Edgar Allan Poe’s short stories of horror. Some romantics even sought the unusual in their own lives by exploring their dreams and nightmares and seeking altered states of consciousness.

            The romantics viewed poetry as the direct expression of the soul. Romantic poetry gave expression to one of the most important characteristics of the movement—its love of nature. Romantics believed that nature served as a mirror into which humans could look to learn about themselves.

            This feeling is especially evident in the poetry of William Wordsworth, the foremost English romantic poet of nature. His experience of nature was almost mystical:

“One impulse from a vernal wood

May teach you more of man,

Of more evil and of good,

Than all the sages can.”

                  The worship of nature also caused Wordsworth and other romantic poets to be critical of eighteenth century science, which they believed had reduced nature to a cold object of study. To Wordsworth, the scientists’ dry, mathematical approach left no room for the imagination or for the human soul.

            The human soul was a source of expression for William Blake, a poet and artist connected with romanticism, though he combined imagination with reality in a way other romantics did not. In two of his collections of lyric poems and their accompanying designs, Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience, Blake uses a child’s point of view to capture basic human emotions. He also used that point of view to write, “The Chimney Sweeper,” “London,” and “The Tyger.” In these poems, he criticized the church and the state because he felt these institutions did not bring out the best in people.

            Like Blake, many romantics were convinced that industrialization would cause people to become alienated from their inner selves and from the natural world. This idea shows up in Mary Shelley’s novel Frankenstein: When science dares to try and conquer nature, a monster is created.

            Like the literary arts, the visual arts were deeply affected by romanticism. Romantic artists shared at least two features. First, to them, all art was a reflection of the artist’s inner feelings. A painting should mirror the artist’s vision of the world and be the instrument of the artist’s own imagination. Second, romantic artists abandoned classical reason for warmth and emotion.

            Eugene Delacroix was one of the most famous romantic painters from France. His paintings showed two chief characteristics: a fascination with the exotic and a passion for color. His works reflect his belief that “a painting should be a feast to the eye.”

            In music, too, romantic trends dominated the first half of the nineteenth century. One of the most famous composers of this era was Ludwig van Beethoven. Some have called him a bridge between classical and romantic music. Others argue that he was such a rare genius, he cannot be easily classified. His early work fell within the classical framework. In his Third Symphony, first performed in 1805, however, the romantic elements were in place: powerful melodies and dramatic intensity.

            In one way, Beethoven was definitely a romantic. He thought of himself as an artist, not a craftsman. He had an intense and difficult personality, but was committed to writing music that reflected his deepest feelings: “I must write, for what weighs on my heart, I must express.”

New Age of Science

            The Scientific Revolution had created a modern, rational approach to the study of the natural world. For a long time, only the educated elite understood its importance. By the 1830s, however, new discoveries in science had led to many practical benefits that affected all Europeans. In 1796, for example, the English doctor Edward Jenner had discovered a vaccine for smallpox, a widespread disease that killed mostly infants and young children.

            In biology, the Frenchman Louis Pasteur proposed the germ theory of disease, which was crucial to the development of modern scientific medical practices. In chemistry, the Russian Dmitry Mendeleyev in the 1860s classified all the material elements then known on the basis of their atomic weights. In Great Britain, Michael Faraday put together a primitive generator that laid the foundation for the use of electric current.

            Dramatic material benefits such as these led Europeans to have a growing faith in science. This faith, in turn, undermined the religious faith of many people. It is no accident that the nineteenth century was an age of increasing secularization, indifference to or rejection of religion in the affairs of the world. For many people, truth was now to be found in science and in the material existence of human beings.

            More than anyone else, it was probably Charles Darwin who created the concept of humans as beings who were part of the natural world. In 1859, Darwin published On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection. His basic theory was that each species, or kind, of plant or animal had evolved over millions of years from earlier, simpler forms of life. Darwin called this principle organic evolution.

            How did this natural process work? According to Darwin, in every species, “many more individuals of each species are born than can possibly survive.” This results in a “struggle for existence.” Darwin believed that some organisms are better able to adapt to changes in the environment than others.

            Those that are able to survive (“survival of the fittest”) reproduce and thrive, while the unfit do not. Darwin called this process natural selection. Survivors pass on the variations that allowed them to survive until a new, separate species emerges. In The Descent of Man, published in 1871, Darwin argued that human beings had animal origins and were not an exception to the rule governing other species.

            Darwin’s ideas raised a storm of controversy. Some people objected that his theory made human beings ordinary products of nature, not unique creations of God. Other people were bothered because they felt he was saying that life was a mere struggle for survival. “Is there a place in the Darwinian world for moral values?” they asked. Some believers felt Darwin had not granted God a role in creation. Gradually, however, many scientists and other intellectuals came to accept Darwinism.

Realism

The belief that the world should be viewed realistically was closely related to the scientific outlook. In politics, Bismarck had practiced the “politics of reality.” In the literary and visual arts, realism became a movement as well.

            The literary realists of the mid-nineteenth century rejected romanticism. They wanted to write about ordinary characters from actual life rather than romantic heroes in exotic settings. They also tried to avoid emotional language by using precise description. They preferred novels to poems.

            Many literary realists combined their interest in everyday life with an examination of social issues. These artists expressed their social views through their characters. Although this type of realistic writing occurred worldwide, the French led the way.

            The realist novel was perfected by the French author Gustave Flaubert, who was a leading novelist of the 1850s and 1860s. His work Madame Bovary presents a critical description of small-town life in France.

            In Great Britain, Charles Dickens became a huge success with novels that showed the realities of life for the poor in the early Industrial Age. Novels like Oliver Twist and David Copperfield created a vivid picture of the brutal life of London’s poor, as well as of their humor and humanity. In fact, his characters were so sympathetic that they helped inspire social reform.

            In art, too, realism became dominant after 1850. Realist artists sought to show the everyday life of ordinary people and the world of nature with photographic realism. The French became leaders in realist painting, just as they had become the leaders in realist writing.

            Gustave Courbet was the most famous painter of the realist school. He loved to portray scenes from everyday life. His subjects were factory workers, peasants, and the wives of saloon keepers. “I have never seen either angels or goddesses, so I am not interested in painting them,” Courbet once commented.

            One of Courbet’s famous works, “The Stonebreakers, shows two roadworkers engaged in the deadening work of breaking stones to build a road. There were those who objected to Courbet’s “cult of ugliness” and who found such scenes of human misery scandalous. To Courbet, however, no subject was too ordinary, too harsh, or too ugly.

World History

Glencoe