Romanticism (through the adjective romantic, from romant or romant, ‘romance’; see ROMANCES), a movement in feeling and thought that has transformed the literature and art of most nations, has been defined by Mr Theodore Watts as ‘the renaissance of the spirit of wonder in poetry and art.’ It was a revolt against pseudo-classicism; a return from the monotonous commonplace of everyday life to the quaint and unfamiliar world of old romance; a craving for the novel, original, and adventurous; an emphasising of the interesting, the picturesque, the ‘romantic,’ at the expense, if need be, of correctness and elegance, and the current canons of ‘good taste.’ Deep humour, strong pathos, profound pity are amongst its notes. Romanticism is not necessarily limited to any one period; there are romantic elements in Homer, Æschylus, Sophocles; the poetry of Dante is eminently romantic when contrasted with ancient classical poetry as a whole; but though what is romantic for one generation tends to become classic—and so tame, though not really insipid—for a later one, and though the romantic is almost inevitably one side of a truly artistic temperament, there are certain epochs that are specially romantic, and certain writers in those epochs more romantic than their fellows. The 18th century was notoriously classic in ideal, or pseudo-classic—conventional, pedantic, academic; and the revolt against spiritual ennui which followed is the romantic movement par excellence. The movement arose under various conditions in the several countries, had a somewhat varying character and course, and sometimes tended towards the merely crude and grotesque. In England, the fountainhead of the movement which culminated in the beginning of the 19th century, it may be traced from the Percy Ballads and Chatterton, from Cowper and Blake and Burns, to Scott and Byron, Wordsworth and Coleridge, Keats and Rossetti. In Germany there were tendencies in that direction in Lessing, in Schiller, in Goethe, as well as in the philosophy of Schelling, and the ‘Sturm und Drang’ period was largely romantic in its temper; but it was Novalis who was the prophet of ‘romanticism,’ and among the other representatives of the school were the Schlegels, Tieck, Kleist, Fouqué, and Hoffmann. In France beginnings are found in Rousseau, in Chateaubriand, and others; but the great chief of French romanticism is Victor Hugo. Other French romantics are Lamartine, Dumas, Gautier, George Sand, Flaubert,
Mürger. The romantic movement in the three countries is discussed in the articles on the literature of each (ENGLISH LITERATURE, Vol. IV. p. 375; GERMANY, Vol. V. p. 188; FRANCE, Vol. IV. p. 789). The other countries were more or less moved by the same spirit; see also the articles on the literatures of the principal countries. The influence of Percy's Reliques is traced in the article BALLADS. In Germany romanticism included with the love of the mediæval an affection for the oriental; in religion it led some of its notable representatives to Catholic ideals and into the Catholic Church; and in politics it was associated with reactionary conservatism. The aims of the romantics in painting are defined at PAINTING, Vol. VII. p. 700; see also PRE-RAPHAELITISM. In music Weber has been called the 'creator of romantic opera;' but see OPERA, Vol. VII. p. 608. Berlioz is regarded as the type of French romanticism in music.
See the article IDEALISM, REALISM; Pater in Macmillan's Magazine, vol. xxxv.; for Germany, the works by Julian Schmidt (1848), Haym (1871), Brandes (1873); for France, Stendhal, Racine et Shakespeare (1823); Gautier, Histoire du Romantisme (4th ed. 1884); and many essays by Sainte-Beuve and Schérer.