Romanticism
11
When I heard the learn’d astronomer,
When the proofs, the figures, were ranged in columns before me,
When I was shown the charts and diagrams, to add, divide, and measure them,
When I sitting heard the astronomer where he lectured with much applause in the lecture-room,
How soon unaccountable I became tired and sick,
Till rising and gliding out I wander’d off by myself,
In the mystical moist night-air, and from time to time,
Look’d up in perfect silence at the stars. -- Walt Whitman
Eternity! thou pleasing, dreadful thought!
Through what variety of untried being,
Through what new scenes and changes must we pass?
The wide, the unbounded prospect lies before me;
But shadows, clouds, and darkness, rest upon it.
Joseph Addison, Cato
Thy mind, O man! if thou wilt lead a soul unto salvation, must stretch as high as the utmost heavens, and search into and contemplate the darkest abyss, and the broad expanse of eternity—thou must commune with God. —Joseph Smith
Romanticism
4
NOT: "book of nature"
NOT: source of data
NOT: source of symbols or moral lessons
Dr. Gideon Burton
Nature
Brigham Young University
artistic creativity
personal feeling
pastoral ideal
Continuity / Discontinuity
with past periods
source of authentic personal experience:
Romanticism
The Renaissance
“I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.... I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life...” --Henry David Thoreau, Walden
medieval period, not antiquity
Back to the sources
Humanism
universal rights / less language
political revolution
Brave New Worlds
popular press
The Printing Press
yes: spontaneity
Sprezzatura / Courtly Ideal
no! anti-aristocratic
Pascal and paradox:
self-contradictory and paradoxical
infinite / finite
1
Romanticism
The Reformation
"What is man in nature? A Nothing in comparison with the Infinite, an All in comparison with the Nothing, a mean between nothing and everything. ... he is equally incapable of seeing the Nothing from which he was made, and the Inifinte in which he is swallowed up."
epistemological frustration:
we cannot know well either nature, or God, or ourselves
adds political reform, resisting systems
Reform
"I know neither my condition nor my duty."
"We sail within a vast sphere, ever drifting in uncertainty, driven from end to end ... Nothing stays for us.... we burn with desire to find solid ground and an ultimate sure foundation...but our whole groundwork cracks, and the earth opens to abysses."
"It is incomprehensible that God should exist, and it is incomprehensible that he should not exist."
no: political action
By Faith Alone
yes: individualism, spirituality
a morally centered, wondering self
be a seeking doubter
"The heart has its reasons, which reason does not know."
"It is an indispensable duty to seek when we are in doubt; the doubter who does not seek is altogether unhappy and wrong"
"Let man lose himself in wonders. ... as his curiosity changes into admiration, he will be more disposed to contemplate them in silence than to examine them with presumption."
no: religious authority
God's Word
yes: univerality
3
Protest & Persecution
rebellion, propaganda, nationalism
personal response to art, to nature
Piety & Devotion
education as democratizing
Christian Humanism
Romanticism
The Enlightenment
Romanticism
freedom, social contract
Authority & Liberty
no! feelings, not systems
A Rational World
Individualism
yes! universal human rights
Enlightenment Values
no: empiricism too objective
Nature
physical nature as spiritual
The Public Sphere
yes, and less elite
as Reaction
heroes
romantic
"Byronic"
against Enlightenment rationalism
more individualism
against industrialization
[against the universal]
suffering
solitude
7
[against the social]
[
The Gothic
2
psychology
sense
sensibility
empathy
horror / the macabre
ruins
the occult
Feeling &
Imagination
6
5
The Faraway
The Arts &
& Fantastic
the Artist
orientalism
medieval romances
lost civlizations
- expressive of individual insight, psyche,
- emotional and experiential,
- aesthetics / art for art's sake
- artist as creator or genius