The Romantic Movement

From the eighteenth century to present times everything from art, music and literature to philosophy and politics was greatly influenced by what is names the Romantic Movement, a movement so powerfully influential that even people who resisted it were prone to it. The upper class or educated French who had taste appreciated focusing on emotion, particularly that of sympathy. They had pity on the poor and aimed to live quiet simple lives themselves rather than be involved with the 'corruption of courts' (Russell 1946, p . 543).

Rousseau was a pure democratic in every sense, he pleaded for sensibility. He lived a large part of his life very simply, Russell describes him as a 'vagabond'. The romantics had morals built on very different ideas from those before them. The year 1660 was a time of war between religions, intelligence was admired as were manners and 'prudence was regarded as the supreme virtue' (Russell 1964, p . 544). By the year 1815 everything was so safe that it was boring. In the nineteenth century there was a revolt against the monarchy and aristocracy and people traded the aesthetic for things that were useful instead (the philosophy of utilitarianism came about). The romantics wanted exciting individual lives rather than peace for the majority, they were interested in mystery, ghosts, pirates, haunted old buildings, and the occult. This obviously means that the realists were very much against romanticism. Jane Austen expresses her dislike of the romanticists through humour in her books Northanger Abbey and Sense and Sensibility.

The romantics were interested in exploring very remote places, in terms of Geography they found Xanadu in China and loved it because it was ancient. Although romanticism started with Rousseau, the first romanticists were German. Romanticism in England started through books, the writings of satirists, Blake, and Coleridge. Romanticism had a pause in England (because people hated the Revolution) but was revived by authors such as Byron, Shelley and Keats.

I think that there is evidence to show that the psychology of the romantics was largely focused on passionate emotion a lot of which were not constructive a lot of which was anti social. There was a lot of focus on the individual, what Russell calls 'self-interest'. This sense of self rebelled against society's 'social bounds', a political situation that sums up the Romantic period, 'self development was proclaimed as the fundamental principle of ethics' (Russell 1964, p . 448).