Romantics made feeling the law—and mistrusted the industrial city
Romanticism rose in Europe near the end of the eighteenth century against Enlightenment rationalism and Industrial Revolution materialism. Advocates put subjectivity, imagination, and nature first. German painter Caspar David Friedrich put it bluntly: the artist’s feeling is his law.
Consensus dates the peak about 1800–1850, with Late Romantic and Neoromantic afterlives resisting abstract modernism and the breakup of tonal harmony until World War I scattered the climate; figures such as Rachmaninoff still upheld the ideal into the 1940s yet looked anachronistic. Roots include the German Counter-Enlightenment Sturm und Drang and Goethe’s 1774 Sorrows of Young Werther; many early Romantics also sympathized with French Revolutionary ideals. Decline in the mid-nineteenth century tracked Realism and Naturalism, Darwin’s Origin of Species, conservative politics after revolutions, and focus on technology’s hit to workers. Legacy still shapes conservation rhetoric, Golden Age Hollywood orchestral scores, speculative fiction, and strands of liberal and conservative political thought—even when everyday "romanticizing" means little related to the historical movement.
Themes cluster around reverence for nature and the supernatural, a nobler past (especially a chivalric Middle Ages critics said soft-pedaled medieval hardship), the exotic and mysterious, and the heroic sublime. Passion and intuition beat social convention; beauty was what stirred strong emotion, not mere form. Artists’ unique imagination outranked classical rules. Wordsworth wanted poetry to start from a spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings later recollected in tranquillity; Coleridge and others trusted "natural laws" of imagination and "romantic originality"—genius seeming to create ex nihilo. Shelley called poets the unacknowledged legislators of the world. Isaiah Berlin summarized a restless drive to burst old forms, chase unbounded change, and yearn for unreachable goals. Folk art and medievalism sat beside radical politics and unconventional behavior.
The word trail is tangled. By the eighteenth century, "Roman" in several languages meant popular narrative fiction—the novel—via Romance vernaculars versus Latin, often chivalric adventure. Jena critics August Wilhelm and Friedrich Schlegel spoke of romantische Poesie in the 1790s; Friedrich’s 1800 Dialogue on Poetry found the romantic in Shakespeare, Cervantes, Italian poetry, and the age of chivalry. Germaine de Staël’s De l’Allemagne (1813) spread the sense in France; Byron still joked in 1820 that Classical versus Romantic was not yet an English classification. Only in the 1820s did the movement clearly know itself by name—and in 1824 the Académie française futilely decreed against it in literature. Emotion as authentic aesthetic fuel remains the through-line.
Source: Romanticism
