What Is Romanticism?

Source: Bulletin of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Vol. 19, No. 4 (Jan.,
1966), pp. 2-7
Published by: American Academy of Arts & Sciences
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/3822814
Accessed: 12-09-2018 05:10 UTC

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What Is Romanticism?
There is a vast literature about romanticism -
national romanticism, literary romanticism, polit-
ical, social and even economic romanticism. In
addition, much has been written about the mean-
ing of the word romantic: its analogies, its origins
and the differences between such terms as ro-
mantique, romanesque, romanig, romanzisch, ro-
manhaft, etc. To attempt a precise definition of a
subject as wide as this is obviously absurd - such
is the opinion of Sir Isaiah Berlin, Chichele Pro-
fessor of Political and Social Thought at the Uni-
versity of Oxford. Nevertheless, in his communi-
cation presented at the December Stated Meeting,
Sir Isaiah chose to dissent from the views expressed
by Professor Arthur Lovejoy on this subject, and
to set forth his own interpretation of the meaning
of the notion of romanticism.
It is Professor Lovejoy's thesis that the word
romanticism has acquired so many opposed and
incongruous meanings that all one can do is to
trace these senses and their curious combinations.
Professor Berlin said that prima facie Lovejoy
had a case: he quoted definitions by eminent au-
thorities in which romanticism had been identified
with youth, the primitive and love of the simple,
spontaneous and untutored life and also with
pallor, fever, disease, and death; with turbulence,
conflict and chaos, but also peace; with the exotic,
the mysterious, darkness, moonlight, enchanted
castles, giants, nameless terrors but also light, sun,
pastoral idylls, the sights and sounds of a healthy
country life. He quoted two dozen conflicting
definitions: he said that it was not surprising that
2

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 Professor Lovejoy felt there were several kinds
of romanticisms, all of which are quite different
and, in fact, incompatible with one another.
Nonetheless, Sir Isaiah believed that it was pos-
sible to define a certain central kernel of meaning
for this term. There is a set of beliefs about the
universe upon which the whole of Western
thought depended until the middle of the i8th
century. Broadly, these beliefs rested upon the
acceptance of three propositions - first, that to all
serious questions, answers could be found; second,
that these answers could be discovered or at least
approached by methods open to men: some said
empirical inspection, others spoke of intuition, or
metaphysical insight, or revelation or inner light or
the opinion of experts; and finally, that all these
correct answers were, in principle, compatible with
one another, for one true proposition could not
logically be in conflict with another. Therefore, if
we could discover what all the important questions
were, if we could discover means for finding the
answers, and if we could then put all the answers
together, we would - in principle - have a total
answer about the nature and purpose of the uni-
verse. These three propositions formed the gen-
eral basis of the philosophical apparatus of beliefs
which go back to the Greeks and were carried
on through the Middle Ages and into the middle
of the 8 th century. It was then, according to Sir
Isaiah, that these propositions began to fall under
a shadow of serious doubt.
If we could have visited Germany in the I820's
and talked with the avant garde young men in the
university towns, we would have discovered that
some among them cared not for truth or knowl-
edge or science or constituted authority; instead,
they yearned for exercise of the will, self-assertion,
purity of motive, the sacrifice of their life in search
of some unattainable ideal - above all, they ab-
horred any sense of compromise. Within a com-
paratively short time, say between 1760 and 1820, a
transformation of values had emerged. A symptom
of this, by the middle of the i8th century, was the
new worship of sincerity for its own sake, the
notion that the truth of a belief is less important

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 than the spirit in which one holds and practices it
as shown by the sacrifices one makes for it. The
hero was not the man who viewed, the sage, but
the committed man of action; there is no link be-
tween Voltaire and Carlyle. How did this shift
away from objective truth come about?
All kinds of culprits have been accused of fo-
menting this change, of doubting the old proposi-
tions; but, for the most part, they are innocent.
In matters of politics and ethics, Montesquieu
wrote that what was good for the Persians or
Aztecs was not necessarily good for Parisians or
Spaniards. However, Montesquieu really sup-
posed that most men in most places sought the
same ends - happiness, health, stability - but that
different circumstances often required different
means to attain them. Even the "romantic"
Rousseau, in the majority of his writings, believe
in the eternal truth which could be discovere
not by applying sophisticated scientific or me
physical techniques, but rather by acquirin
serenity and purity of character which enable
eternal truths to dawn upon the hearts of sim
peasants or uncorrupted good men. Nor w
Hume to blame, pace Carl Becker.
If the blame cannot be placed on writers lik
Rousseau and Montesquieu, who then is at faul
Sir Isaiah believed that, in this case, among th
culprits are highly rational thinkers: Immanu
Kant, for example. He was certainly one of th
two Pandoras who opened this particular b
Kant believed that an act had moral worth on
if it were a product of free choice. If a man cann
help acting as he does, e.g., by his character o
desires, then no matter how excellent the con
quences, no matter how beneficent his act, it
no moral worth. The second notion which up
Kant was the fear that the universe was a hu
determinist box or mechanism in which human
beings behaved as they did because they were in
some way conditioned by factors beyond their
control. For I8th-century thinkers, nature had
been by and large a benevolent entity, Mistress
Nature, Dame Nature, etc., but for Kant, nature
was either neutral or an enemy. If man was the

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 source of action and the source of creation, then
nature was, at best, stuff, material, something
which resisted his efforts. Man's humanity, his
creativity, his individuality and grandeur were at
their highest when he moulded nature, tortured
her, bent her to his will like a sculptor his clay.
Yet it must be recalled that Kant was still essen-
tially a child of the Enlightenment and that he too
believed in a general set of rules which could be
discovered and which could produce a natural
harmony among men. The real romantic wave
began to rise with Kant's disciple, Fichte. Fichte
went further than any previous thinker in de-
fining the world as being whatever man's will
chooses to make it. A man's philosophy springs
from his temperament; the " self " (however that
is conceived) makes choices- its world is made
by its free acts. This means the revolutionary dis-
covery that values are not found (whether outside
or within man), as had been believed for over
2000 years, but that they are made or created.
Here, noted Sir Isaiah, is a crucial moment in the
history of European thought, a concept which is
at the very heart of the romantic doctrine. The
idea of commitment, of being engage, the kind of
ideas the existentialists use today, derive from the
same root.
Berlin identified as a second strand of romanti-
cism the notion that reality is not static, that it is
a subject not an object, a perpetual creative ac-
tivity, the self-realization movement of an im-
personal power or creator. It is now said that we
cannot render motion by rest, the dynamic by the
static, what is living by what is dead, the inner by
the outer, time by space, spirit by matter. The first
aim for those who believe in this concept - from
early Christian mystics to Bergsonians and other
believers in "life forces "-is to destroy the
accepted picture of reality as something given
and static, and to do this by any means possible
- for example, by writing and acting wildly, by
paradox and revolution, anything that breaks
through the crust of convention and reveals the
savage chaos boiling beneath the alleged order,
the rerum natura which is a delusive and shallow

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 notion. One of the political by-products of this
aspect of the romantic movement is the search for
secret, underground forces in society and for
mysterious factors in history - Jesuits and Jews,
Freemasons and other conspirators; the second
half of the I8th century is filled with Rosicrucians,
Illuminists, necromancers, hydromancers, Mes-
merists, faith healers, prophets, visionaries and
charlatans of every kind; all these persons act by
will, not reason; they are in touch with strange
forces, not facts.
The whole conscious life of man is dominated
by models of one type or another - mechanistic,
organic, mathematical, legal and so on. To the
lecturer, the model which dominates the romantic
movement is aesthetic: the notion of imposing
patterns, creation as opposed to discovery, and the
notion of participation in some kind of creative
process. The interpretation of this model can take
both harmless and sinister forms. On the one
hand, we have the image of Beethoven - dirty,
rude, uneducated, yet possessed with one absolute
virtue which transcends all faults. He listens to
the voice within him and he lives by that voice:
integrity; defiance; dedication; refusal to sell out,
be realistic. However, this same model can also
take on a more sinister form: for example, the
worship of Napoleon as an artist in moulding men;
veneration for will, domination, leadership as such;
self-prostration before supermen and Fascist lead-
ers in the 2oth century.
In conclusion, Sir Isaiah emphasized his belief
that romanticism is more than a collection of in-
compatible descriptions; that there are, in fact,
two elements in romanticism which enter all the
various definitions which have been offered in its
name. The first element is the notion of ends as
invented, not discovered, as made by individuals
or groups or classes or churches or nations from
their own inner resources. Nationalism is a variety
of this: the French, the English, the Americans
are (or were) willing to die for their values be-
cause they are theirs, their own ways of life, and
not because their excellence can be verified by
some criteria that operate universally. The second
6

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 principle'is
principle'is the
theidea
ideaof
ofthe
thelimitless
limitless
process
process
of of
crea-
crea-
tion
tion which
which defies
defiesimprisonment
imprisonmentbyby any
any
technique:
technique:
the idea that science and all clear statement or
arguement is eo ipso, falsification, and that the
18th century was completely mistaken when it
sought to impose neat, but, for that very reason,
superficial and distorting patterns upon the teem-
ing variety of life (or spirit). These two strands
enter the heart of all that we correctly term
romantic.

Committee on Space
The Committee on Space, organized in I962 to
examine the impact of the space program on
American life, is pleased to announce that the
several volumes resulting from its research will be
published by the M.I.T. Press under the general
series title, Technology, Space and Society. The
first volume, scheduled to appear this month, is
entitled The Railroad and the Space Program: An
Exploration in Historical Analogy, edited by
Bruce Mazlish, Professor of History at M.I.T.

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