The period of Romanticism is one which inspired revolutionaries as well as reactionaries, escapism and a call to action, in short, it was filled with contradictions. But despite this, there were certain characteristics shared by all Romantics. They all rejected the rationalism of the eighteenth century, were individualists, wanted to believe in something, stressed the difference between men, let nature explain the moods of their innermost person, loved the unusual or unreal, and saw the world as an organism that was growing slowly and changing constantly. Because of this they appealed to Catholicism with its mystery and splendid ritual.
At this time a new movement began at this time called Nationalism which arose in man a feeling of national pride. It was a revolutionary creed at this time and posed a threat to the status quo since it desired to free people from the domination of foreign powers or to unify them into a common state.
Parallel to nationalism, conservatism, a new political philosophy with proponents such as Edmund Burke, developed. Burke said man inherited the rights and duties that existed with society since they developed over many centuries. Because of this, no one generation had the right to destroy them. The state, he claimed, was an organism which was to be submitted to.
At the onset, these two philosophies conflicted with each other since Nationalism advocated revolution to achieve its aims while Conservatism opposed radical change. But despite this problem, they both agreed that the state was the highest social organism. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, a German philosopher, was the leading supporter of the state and said it evolved historically. A person could achieve true freedom only when he submitted to a powerful state Hegel asserted.
Romanticism influenced all the nations of Europe and the United States. It upset the balance achieved during the Enlightenment and now set many different ideas into motion. No longer was western civilization represented by one dominant philosophy, but now several took shape. Romanticism rejected the eighteenth century belief that the world was a simple machine and man just a cog in it, but asserted a more complex and truer view of this world we lived in.
In the nineteenth century a new form of art emerged that was lighter and more frivolous called rococo. In painting, French artists like Antoine Watteau, utilizing expert draftsmanship and delicate use of bright colors, and Chardin, specializing in still lives, led the way. English painter William Hogarth invented the serial-story picture and excelled in engraving and contemporary Joshua Reynolds was a fashionable portrait painter.
In music, men like Bach with his church music and development of the fuge and Handel with his sacred music and operas, carried music further at this time. Probably the greatest musician of all time, Mozart, took the classical style to its highest point. In drama, elegance and formality were characteristic and men like Beaumarchais, who wrote racy satires like the Marriage of Figaro, led the way.
The Romantic artists saw human nature as emotional and mysterious instead of rational and simple. Also, romanticism appealed to the middle class and attempted to compensate for their generally drab lives. Prominent philosophers Hume and Kant wrote during this time, John Keats, Schiller, and Herder produced romantic verse, Hugo of France focused on dramas, and the novel became well-established as the main literary form of the romantic movement. In the United States, Ralph Waldo Emerson (transcendental poet), Edgar Allen Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne (The Scarlet Letter), Herman Melville (Moby Dick), and Henry David Thoreau (Walden) were all significant in literature.
Romantic painting has many of the same characteristics as literature. It sought to avoid classical conventions, took a fresh look at nature, and emphasized emotion. John Constable used broken clusters of color interspersed with light and shadow in his landscape painting. Louis David specialized in sentimental portraiture. Prominent musicians were Ludwig van Beethoven, Franz Schubert, Frederic Chopin, Giuseppe Verdi, and Richard Wagner.
This time was characterized by a decline in the established churches and a religious revival in Western Christianity. One such group was the Society of Friends also called the Quakers. One of their most significant leaders was William Penn. Another group was the Methodists founded by John Wesley who wished to make religion an enthusiastic personal experience. His desire was to reach the masses who were disinterested with the organized religion or who had none themselves. One final group were the Evangelicals who lacked intellectual depth and had conservative social principles.
By the end of the nineteenth century people were becoming disillusioned with the idealism and Romanticism of the early part of the century and sought out science as a positive alternative. Pure science, still important, was replaced by applied science which was essentially the marriage of science and technology. This period saw the rise of Positivism as promoted by Auguste Comte. He stated that man had passed through two stages in his development, namely the theological and metaphysical. Now he was entering the third stage, the scientific or positive one. His philosophy accepted science as its only guide and sole authority.
But by far the scientific development that had the most impact on nearly every impact of western thought was that of evolution as presented by Charles Darwin. He stated this theory in his scientific treatise, On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection. He said all organisms are in a constant struggle in which only the strongest survive. This idea is explored fully in Part III. From his idea a concept called Social Darwinism developed because of a man named Herbert Spencer. Applied to states and groups, Spencer asserted the struggle for existence among living organisms is mirrored in societal institutions. Again, Part III presents this idea and utilizes it in the discussion.
Evolution had a very significant effect on religion. Despite a brief resurgence of religious belief in the time of Romanticism, the end of the nineteenth century saw a decline in religious sentiment. Now the state took over many of the social and humanitarian functions the churches had controlled earlier. As well, new scientific discoveries contradicted longly held Christian beliefs about the universe and so discredited the authority of the Church. Also, many scholars in comparative religion began to reveal striking similarities in Christianity and other religions and others learned that most of the books of the Bible were written long after the events they described had occurred.
The reaction to this scientific attack was divided. Catholics were able to make a firmer stand since their authority did not rest in the Bible solely. They were quick to denounce the evolutionary theory. A movement called modernism rose to help reconcile the differences between science and religion but was declared heretical by the Church. Protestants who relied on the Bible as the source of authority, were more significantly affected by Darwin’s discovery. They were unable to make any firm stand since the nearly 300 sects could not agree on a course of action.
Other accomplishments include Lamarck who investigated fossils, Alesandro Volta who invented the primary battery which became the main source of electricity for the next 70 years, Marie Curie who discovered radium in 1898, Dr. Horace Wells who first used laughing gas as a way to anaesthetize dental patients, Louis Pasteur who developed the theory of spontaneous generation and found a vaccination for hydrophobia, Gregor Mendel, who found the field of genetics, and Albert Einstein who postulated that time and space were not absolute and who is most famous for his equation, E=mc2.
Thinkers included Arthur Schopenhauer who found true reality in the will to live and saw the world as lacking a guiding ethic, Friedrich Nietzsche who attacked Christianity, humanitarian ideas, and the mass-man with fiery determination, Sigmund Freud who emphasized sexuality in human activity and developed the process of psychoanalysis, and Aldous Huxley who predicted many of the triumphs of human ingenuity and saw man as a slave to these technical innovations.
This time saw an emphasis on sex in man’s life which was largely written about, artists placed their innermost feelings on canvas and so were called expressionists, musicians used new scales and chords, and new building materials as steel and concrete were used in architecture.
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