You’re Romantic Whether You Know It or Not
How and When We Became Romantic
Nobody can agree on exactly what Romanticism is. Pinning it down is like nailing jelly to a wall; there have been literally thousands of definitions suggested, and many are either so narrow that they exclude important figures or so broad as to be virtually meaningless. The etymology of the word is convoluted. We move from Rome to the vernacular Roman language to popular Romance languages more generally to popular writings more generally (“romances”) to the roman or novel to the identification of poetry that is romantische (“romantic”) as opposed to klassische (“classical”) and only then to a movement called “Romanticism,” by which time the first generation of Romantics had already died. And none of this quite explains why we also use the word “romantic” to describe the mystery of love—although it is a delightful coincidence that Amor is Roma spelled backward.
The term is nebulous by design. Friedrich Schlegel, credited with coining it in something like its modern sense, wrote to his brother in 1793: “I cannot send you my explanation of the word ‘romantic’ because it would be 125 sheets long.”1 When Isaiah Berlin delivered the Mellon Lectures on Romanticism—which he viewed as “the greatest single shift in the consciousness of the West that has occurred,”2 and “a gigantic and radical transformation, after which nothing was ever the same”3—he began by saying that although people might expect him to define the term or at least explain what he meant by it, “I do not propose to walk into that particular trap.”4 He then demonstrated what a hopeless tangle it was by quoting a wide range of thoroughly irreconcilable definitions, drawn from many of the movement’s key thinkers, before offering an (admittedly brilliant) eight-hundred-word summary of his own.5
Remaking the World
Andrew Wilson
In this skillfully researched book, Andrew Wilson explains how 7 historic events in 1776 shaped today’s post-Christian West and equips believers to share God’s truth in the current social landscape.
If describing Romanticism takes Isaiah Berlin eight hundred words, it is clearly foolhardy to try and outline it in just eight. Nevertheless, for the sake of clarity, here it goes:
1. Inwardness. All that is most important in life, from personal feelings to artistic creativity, comes from inside a person rather than outside. Introspection is good, and authenticity matters more than compliance with expectations. In Hegel’s oft-cited definition, Romanticism is about “absolute inwardness.”6
2. Infinity. There is a longing for the indescribable and inexplicable over the delineated and defined, whether in nature, art, architecture, or (especially) music. “Art is for us none other than the mystic ladder from earth to heaven,” wrote Liszt, “from the finite to the infinite, from mankind to God.”7
3. Imagination. Only by allowing one’s ideas to run free, unconstrained by schools, rules, or reason, is genuine creativity possible. This is why death, sex, dreams, and nightmares are such important sources of inspiration; it is why Blake desired “to cast off Bacon, Locke, and Newton from Albion’s covering, to take off his filthy garments and clothe him with imagination.”8
4. Individuality. What counts is the specific rather than the universal. “I am made unlike anyone I have ever met,” declared Rousseau on the opening page of his Confessions. “I will even venture to say that I am like no one in the whole world. I may be no better, but at least I am different.”9
5. Inspiration. Great artists began to be viewed as geniuses: inspired and inspiring figures who broke rules, transformed art, lived differently, and became iconic. The obvious example is the cult-like admiration of Beethoven, for his behavior and image as much as his music; it was of a completely different order to the admiration of the equally gifted Mozart just a generation before.10
6. Intensity. There is an emphasis on deep, vivid, and visceral emotional experiences, whether paroxysms of rapturous joy, furious rage, or suicidal melancholy. In Wordsworth’s famous preface to the Lyrical Ballads, it was made explicit: “All good poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings.”11
7. Innocence. Many leading Romantics were fascinated by childhood, by rustic idylls, and by “noble savages,” all three of which pointed to the purity of a former time, an Eden uncorrupted by society, war, or industrialization. Rousseau, Wordsworth, and Blake are classic examples, especially the latter’s Songs of Innocence and Experience (1789).
8. Ineffability. Some Enlighteners talked as if everything in the world could be categorized, analyzed, and understood by the use of reason. The Romantics protested against this, often fiercely. Some realities, they insisted—passion, art, poetry, sex, feeling, music, the soul, God—were beyond words and could not be dissected like physical laws. (The idea of defining Romanticism in eight alliterated bullet points, for instance, would no doubt have made many of them physically nauseous.)
Some of these seem quite alien to us today. The focus on innocence, deep emotions, wild and remote landscapes, Gothic architecture, and indescribable experiences strikes us as very nineteenth century, evoking images of foppish, ruffle-haired, misty-eyed young white men staring wistfully into the middle distance.
Others, by contrast, seem thoroughly natural to us, to the extent that we do not even notice them. Inwardness and individuality, in particular, are so central to our understanding of identity and the self that we cannot fathom how people in previous centuries could possibly have thought about personhood differently. We find it thoroughly unintelligible that the English Puritan John Owen (1616–1683), to take just one example, could lose his wife and all eleven of his children, yet say nothing about it or his personal response to it in any of his works; we just assume that a person’s inner journey of pain, love, and transformation is pretty much the most interesting thing about them, and the main reason other people would listen to what they had to say.12 Owen, for whom the meaning of Scripture and the work of Christ were far more important than his own personal anguish, would have found our obsession with authenticity, identity, and self-discovery equally incomprehensible.
These eight words hopefully serve as an answer, however simplistic, to the question of what Romanticism is.13
The Goldfinch
One of the finest expressions of Romanticism today is Donna Tartt’s prize-winning novel The Goldfinch. Published in 2013 to critical acclaim and commercial success, it is a classic Bildungsroman in which a teenage boy, grief-stricken by the death of his mother, follows his emotions into a series of increasingly unwise decisions, complex relationships, and the criminal underworld. At the same time, it is the tale of a piece of art: a small Dutch painting of a chained goldfinch, the theft and concealment of which drive much of the plot.
The book is full of quintessentially Romantic themes: childhood innocence, pity, the sublime, unrequited love, introspection, solitude, intense emotions, drug addiction, and self-discovery. The characters remind you of the people in Dickens or Victor Hugo. The descriptions of paintings and antiques, in which one work of art examines another, sound like Keats on the Grecian Urn or Shelley on Leonardo’s Medusa. And the novel also raises some profoundly Romantic questions. Do aesthetics trump ethics? Does our attachment to beauty necessarily ennoble us, or might it lead us into moral squalor? Is our enjoyment of art essentially about self-discovery, and if so, is that a problem? Will reaching for perfection, or trying to hold onto it, make us miserable?
The richest questions come in the novel’s final few pages. These are the ones that most clearly show the influence of the things people were saying and doing in Venice, Weimar, London, and Paris in the 1770s: the inwardness, the solitude and self-discovery, the art and emotion, the storm and stress. “I watch the clouds reflected on sliding panes and marvel how even my sadness can make me happy,” explains Theo, our protagonist. “I’ve been thinking a lot about what Hobie said: about those images that strike the heart and set it blooming like a flower, images that open up some much, much larger beauty that you can spend your whole life looking for and never find. And it’s been good for me, my time alone on the road. A year is how long it’s taken me to quietly wander round on my own.”14 You could be reading Rousseau or Wordsworth.
Yet in the midst of this introspective monologue comes the most direct challenge to WEIRDER15 morality that I have seen in contemporary literature:
From William Blake to Lady Gaga, from Rousseau to Rumi to Tosca to Mister Rogers, it’s a curiously uniform message, accepted from high to low: when in doubt, what to do? How do we know what’s right for us? Every shrink, every career counsellor, every Disney princess knows the answer: “Be yourself.” “Follow your heart.”
Only here’s what I really, really want someone to explain to me. What if one happens to be possessed of a heart that can’t be trusted? What if the heart, for its own unfathomable reasons, leads one wilfully and in a cloud of unspeakable radiance away from health, domesticity, civic responsibility and strong social connections and all the blandly-held common virtues and instead straight towards a beautiful flare of ruin, self-immolation, disaster? Is Kitsey right? If your deepest self is singing and coaxing you straight toward the bonfire, is it better to turn away?16
Notes:
- Frederick C. Beiser, Enlightenment, Revolution and Romanticism: The Genesis of Modern German Political Thought 1790–1800 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992), 410.
- Isaiah Berlin, The Roots of Romanticism: The A. W. Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts 1965, ed. Henry Hardy (London: Pimlico, 2000), 5.
- Berlin, The Roots of Romanticism, 1.
- Berlin, The Roots of Romanticism, 1.
- Berlin, The Roots of Romanticism, 16–18.
- G. W. F. Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, trans. T. M. Knox, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1975), 1:519.
- Adrian Williams, Portrait of Liszt: By Himself and His Contemporaries (Oxford: Clarendon, 1990), 351.
- William Blake, Milton: A Poem (London: Blake, 1811), 44.
- Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Confessions of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, trans. J. M. Cohen (London: Penguin, 1953), 17.
- See Tim Blanning, Romantic Revolution (London: Phoenix, 2010), 31–36.
- William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Lyrical Ballads: 1798 and 1802 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 98.
- I owe this point to Carl Trueman, speaking at Westminster Theological Seminary in 2014.
- For more on the origins of Romanticism in 1776, see Andrew Wilson, Remaking the World: How 1776 Created the Post-Christian West (Wheaton: Crossway, 2023), 187-211.
- Donna Tartt, The Goldfinch (London: Little, Brown, 2013), 852.
- Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, Democratic, Ex-Christian, and Romantic. The acronym WEIRD was first coined by Joseph Henrich, Steven Heine, and Ara Norenzayan, “The Weirdest People in the World?,” Behavioral and Brain Sciences 33 (2010), 61–83. There are numerous other ways of referring to this world, but all of them suffer from significant limitations. Some—the First World or the civilized world or the free world—are patronizing and inaccurate. Geographical descriptors like the Western hemisphere make little or no sense to anyone who has consulted a globe and seen where “Western” countries actually are. Chronological terms like modern, late modern, or postmodern are complicated by heated disagreements over what exactly “modernity” is and whether we are still in it. Some terms highlight ideas and values (secular, liberal, or pluralist), or institutions and systems (capitalist, democratic), to the exclusion of material circumstances. Others do the reverse and focus on material or technological development, like industrialized, rich, developed, urban, bourgeois, postindustrial, or digital, although these terms are too broad to stand on their own, since they apply just as much to Shanghai and Dubai as they do to Paris or Chicago. By contrast the term WEIRDER, in bundling seven adjectives into one, combines geographical, material, ideological, historical, and even emotional features of the world it describes, which gives it a range and nuance that other terms lack.
- Tartt, The Goldfinch, 852–53; emphasis added.
This article is adapted from Remaking the World: How 1776 Created the Post-Christian West by Andrew Wilson.
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