What is the Romantic Imagination?

It's time to take a look at the Romantic movement

“Liberty Leading the People” (1830) by French Romantic painter Ferdinand Victor Eugène Delacroix.

If you look around at the culture and, like Miss Clavel, say, something is not right, then read on. Whether it be the gender-bending or political crusading abroad or the rampant mental illness among young people or the Leviathan welfare state, if you’re reading this Substack, at least one of these cultural and political maladies has probably struck you as problematic.

Blame is often laid at the feet of Karl Marx and communism, and rightfully so. But Romanticism often escapes notice. If anything, many people who know anything at all about the Romantic movement, look back on it fondly. American academics are especially rabid defenders of everything Romantic (and romantic). Irving Babbitt, a Harvard professor in the early 20th century, took Romanticism and its standard-bearer Jean-Jacques Rousseau to task, and he was loathed by the academy for it.

Given the pervasive influence of this movement in modern Western culture, it is worth examining it and understanding its moral-spiritual ethos, for this ethos has largely replaced the Christian moral ethos. More, it has subverted Christianity by convincing a great many people, Christian and non-Christian, that sentimental humanitarianism is Christianity.

Before I get to Romanticism’s legacy of sentimental humanitarianism and its influence on the culture, including children’s books, it is necessary to take a brief look at the Romantic movement. What was it? What were its defining characteristics? I focus especially on its imaginative dimension. The Romantic aesthetic reveals a great deal about its moral-spiritual core.

What is romanticism?

The Romantic movement (I use a capital “R” for the movement proper and a lower-case “r” for those who have been influenced by this movement) began in 18^th century Europe as a reaction against neoclassicism and Enlightenment rationalism. Weary of the constricting formalism of neoclassicism and also of the deadening effects of Cartesian rationalism and Hobbesian materialism, artists, composers, and literary figures as well as philosophers and other cultural elites began to explore new ideas that emphasized the role of feeling and emotion over rational calculation; of the strange and supernatural over a world dissected by the scientist; of spontaneity over social convention; of communion with nature over traditional religion; of the goodness of the people over corrupt authority. These were only some of the ideas and emphases of a movement that extended across Europe and to America and was composed of many currents and cross-currents and different tendencies within different places and time periods.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778) is one of the major figures of the Romantic movement and his literary and political writings can be considered representative. Called the father of the French Revolution, Rousseau has arguably set the tone for modernity. His political ideas about democracy have been so influential that even today we conceive of democracy not as our Athenian predecessors conceived of it, as actual rule by the people, but as Rousseau conceived of it, a hypothetical ideal toward which we must strive—albeit with the generous assistance of an enlightened elite. Robespierre acted as such a midwife of democracy for the French Revolution. (If you’re interested in this idea, check out my book).

Rousseau’s novel political ideas were rooted in his philosophical beliefs about the nature of man and society. Comparing his experience to that of Paul on the road to Damascus, Rousseau said that he was blinded by a singular great insight that changed everything for him: man is not fallen. If human beings are naturally good, then it is not human sinfulness that is to blame for social and political woes. Rather, a corrupt system is the problem.

Escaping from social convention and traditional religious practices can help restore a more “natural” socio-political order for humanity, Rousseau reasoned. Rigid social and religious conventions that only serve to hinder the spirit of man ought to be dismantled so that the free and spontaneous individual can live his/her/their best life. It’s not difficult to see how we went from Rousseau to mandatory pronouns.

But before we go on, let’s take a look at some of the artistic expression of the Romantics. Romanticism, in fact, furnished the Western world with some magnificent works of art and poetry and musical composition (political philosophies, less so). In a society in which originality was frowned upon and mimetic recreation of the classics was held as the only acceptable form of art, a rebellion against this ossification was not altogether uncalled for.

The Romantic movement can boast of having brought us Beethoven, Franz Schubert, Chopin, Mendelssohn, Tchaikovsky, Wagner, Goethe, Victor Hugo, Alexandre Dumas (The Count of Monte Cristo), Alessandro Manzoni (The Betrothed), Thomas Cole, Aleksandr Pushkin, J. M. W. Turner, Caspar David Friedrich, and Gothic Revival architecture. This is only a short list of some of the most well-known names and accomplishments. The period, without a doubt, was a great burst of imaginative activity, and it produced works of art and musical composition, architecture and literature of incredible beauty and originality.

In my own home, prints of Thomas Cole’s Voyage of Life (1842) hang in our hallway. I fell in love with the paintings on a visit to the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC when I was in my teens. My parents had them professionally framed and I’ve kept them ever since. It’s interesting to reflect on them and to recall how they made me feel when I was young. When I still had the twinkle of unjaded youth in my eyes, I looked at them and thought, yes! This is what life is like! So pure and beautiful, with limitless possibilities before our eyes. And old age, yikes, how dark and depressing! Or my thinking went something like that.

These paintings occupy their own little room in the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC.

In these paintings Cole lays bare the soul of Romanticism.

Man is set against a sweeping and dramatic landscape. The emphasis is less on the man than on the natural world as it relates to his life. A verdant and inviting scene opens the series, and it closes with near-darkness. Cole illustrates the range of nature’s possibilities, as man floats along the river of life.

It is interesting to read the four stages of life as Cole aesthetically interprets them.

In the first painting, an infant emerges from a totally dark unknown and into a lush Eden-like place. The sun is just peaking over the horizon. An angel holds out her arms before the child, who is reaching out, as if to seize life. Still, behind nature’s blossoms and beauty there rises a dark precipice, lit on one side by the rising sun but nearly dark and under gathering clouds on the other side. We are reminded of nature’s unpredictability even in the midst of her overwhelming beauty.

The Voyage of Life: Childhood (1842) by Thomas Cole.

In the next painting the youth is gazing up as he gestures toward a far-off heavenly kingdom in the clouds. The Earth is in full-bloom and the trees dwarf the boy and the angel, who bids the distracted lad farewell.

The Voyage of Life: Youth

“Manhood” depicts the man in what should be his prime, but his pleading gesture as he looks upward toward an ominous sky suggests the low point of his life. His little boat is now floating helplessly toward rapids and dry, tangled tree limbs. The composition mirrors the first painting, with darkness behind and above him, only this time, he is not drifting serenely into nature’s beauty but down treacherous waters. In the background lies the vast expanse of a wine-dark sea.

The Voyage of Life: Manhood.

The final painting shows the man facing the angel for the first time. He reaches upward as the angel gestures toward Heaven. Far above, in the light, is a tiny figure of an angel. Amidst the darkness, a light shines from heaven.

The Voyage of Life: Old Age

Cole’s paintings illustrate one of Romanticism’s defining characteristics: the wild swings between idyll and despair.

There is an angel present throughout, giving a certain spiritual dimension to the work, but the focus seems to be rather on the plight of man, as Cole interprets it. The figure is solitary, in a kind of paradise, yet he is given no opportunity to exert his will. As if to emphasize this point, Cole removes the boat’s tiller in the third painting. The man is shown merely emoting, reaching, longing, pleading. He is at the radical mercy of nature and Heaven.

The man never labors or seems to be working out his salvation. He experiences life as a sort of tourist, alienated from it. His skiff simply floats along. This is characteristic of Romantic sentiment. Percy Byssche Shelley, the famous Romantic poet, laments in “Stanzas Written in Dejection, near Naples” his fate as an outsider, alienated from joy by his depressed feelings. He wonders, “did any heart now share in my emotion,” watching the happiness of others and the natural beauty of the sea around him. “[S]miling they live, and call life pleasure;/ To me that cup has been dealt in another measure.”

Rousseau echoes this Romantic feeling in his Reveries of the Solitary Walker. “So now I am alone in the world, with no brother, neighbor or friend, nor any company left me but my own,” opens the First Walk. “The most sociable and loving of men has with one accord been cast out by all the rest.”

The Romantic indulges in his desire to be “cast out,” imagining that he is alone in his emotions and exalted feelings among the whole lot of humanity. Often, this is born of a feeling that the Romantic is an original genius, misunderstood by humanity. “I was not made for this world,” Rousseau says. This belief is typical of the Romantics.

In Cole’s paintings, we see a man set apart entirely from society and civilization. The uncultivated natural world serves as the backdrop not only for Cole and Rousseau’s Reveries, which Rousseau wrote on the lonely island of St. Pierre, but also for a great many works of Romantic art and literature. Nature was seen as a refuge from the destructive, dehumanizing tendencies of modern scientific rationalism and also a place for the misunderstood melancholic to retreat.

Nature served as a form of escape for the Romantic. To be sure, an escape into nature can be a good thing, refreshing, beautiful, calling to mind God’s goodness and the beauty of His creation. But for the Romantics, nature is a place in which to lament the evils of civilization and to wish that we could just “return to nature.” It is escapism that projects onto nature a fantasy about pre-civilized man, and that in this fictional antediluvian state, human beings lived together as brothers (without God, of course). This understanding and worship of Nature is not compatible with the Christian understanding of man, nature, and society.

Look at that smug look. So typical of Rousseau!

Rousseau cherished his escape away from the society of men. His solitary walks were much more enjoyable than putting up with neighbors whose company he found “tedious and even burdensome” (hey, no one said living in community was easy!). “Precious far niente [“to do nothing”] was my first and greatest pleasure,” Rousseau exclaimed. To sit idle and to dream, Rousseau said, was much easier than “subordinating [his] inclinations to the call of duty.”

This is what I refer to when I say that Rousseau set the tone for modernity. This is the Rousseau who moved the world.

Rousseau vacillated between idle longing and despair at the feeling that he was “a victim and a martyr to an empty illusion.” One gets the sense that the man in the boat in Cole’s paintings felt something similar. In every painting he is depicted as experiencing pure longing. From first to last, he is reaching up, looking skyward, dreaming, pleading. The man is surrounded by a landscape as dramatic and opposed as is the Romantic imagination itself. Vacillating between pristine, unadulterated beauty and dark foreboding, the scenes perfectly capture the psychic dynamic of Romantic thought.

Nature, in Romantic art in general and in Cole’s paintings in particular, tends to mirror the inward psychology of romantics who swing between utopian dreaming and despair. When the romantic realizes that life is not like the kingdom in the sky, he is overcome with anxiety and existential dread. This is evident in Cole’s third painting, the man kneeling in supplication in a boat without a till.

Romanticism goes a long way toward explaining the mental health crisis among young people, who are brought up on the idea that they can “be anything.” When this is exposed as a lie, these young people must reorient their thinking entirely. It is very unsettling, and like the man in Cole’s painting, they go from exuberance to despair.

Romanticism, to be sure, produced much beauty and reopened the door to creative originality. Its reflections on the extremes of human joy and suffering are, on one level, alluring. This movement helped to focus our attention on aspects of our humanity that, at least in the wider culture, had been neglected or under appreciated in the cold calculations of Enlightenment philosophy and industrial technology.

However, the legacy that the Romantic movement has bequeathed to modernity is not its corrective of a dehumanizing rationalism and materialism but its moral-spiritual ethos, which turns out to be toxic. I mentioned its bipolar tendencies in this post, but I will delve into other aspects of the romantic imagination, including sentimental humanitarianism, in the next post, so stay tuned!

PS - I should add why I have these paintings hanging in my home. I already mentioned the beauty of Romantic art and the salutary effects of escape into nature. Because our home is colored with a great deal of Christian art, images, and icons as well as other decor, I consider the addition of these Romantic paintings to be overshadowed or balanced out by the rest. And I do not consider it a bad thing to have some Romantic art (we also have a print of Monet in one room). It seems to be about balance and proportion.