Man is born free but everywhere he is in chains.

– Jean-Jacques Rousseau, 1762

Whate’er its mission, the soft breeze can come
To none more grateful than to me; escaped
From the vast city, where I long had pined
A discontented sojourner: now free,
Free as a bird to settle where I will.

– William Wordsworth, 1799

Romanticism is notoriously difficult to define.

It is often described as a literary movement that took place during the age of Enlightenment – somewhere between 1770 to 1850 – but it’s not just a period in history, and it’s not just about literature.

It’s also a philosophy, a mentality, an attitude to life.

One with profound lessons for today.

There are a few key figures in the history of romanticism, and a few key movements. There were the English poets – Wordsworth, Byron, Shelley, Keats, Coleridge. The French revolutionaries, particularly Rousseau. And the German philosophical romantics, Schlegel, Schelling, Tieck, and others.

And while they’re all different, there are number of key characteristics that they share and that through which can be pieced together a romanticist manifesto.

Romanticism is in some ways part of, and in other ways a revolt against, the Enlightenment – the movement that critiqued authority and put the individual at the centre of political, social, and moral ideas.

It’s always difficult to start a genealogy, but it was Descartes who was central to changing the idea of thought itself, from the attitude that truth was revealed externally to the idea that the person – the subject – was the centre of everything.

Without Descartes, the Enlightenment would never have proceeded in the same way, if at all.

Descartes leads to Hobbes, Hobbes to Locke, to Rousseau, Voltaire, countless others, and eventually, the French Revolution.

This new way of thinking challenged the dominance of kings, the Church, and the nobility, and emphasised the inviolability of all.

Many thinkers of the Enlightenment argued that this inviolability was the product of something important that all humans possessed.

This can be seen in this important introductory statement to Rousseau’s The Social Contract, published in 1762: ‘Man is born free but everywhere he is in chains’.

Men – in a state of nature – Rousseau argued, lived in harmony with each other in natural freedom. They had two important qualities, the drive for self-preservation and a natural desire to help others. This led to a natural harmony that the modern world had corrupted – modernity made men selfish and competitive to the expense of all and so men were everywhere in chains.

Modern society alienated humans from their true selves.

Which brings us to the first thing the romantics shared – an emphasis on the individual.

Romantics privileged the experience of human life, praised what each person was capable of with their own faculties, their own imagination.

This was sacred, inviolable.

The belief in the inviolability of each individual and their thoughts and passion leads to a natural empathy – as Rousseau argued, a pity, for each – that leads to a humanitarian impulse.

The English Romantic poets all embodied this emphasis on natural man, on individuality corrupted by modern life, of Rousseau’s chains and the imagination of the French Revolution.

We can see all of this in Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s The Dungeon, published in 1798 while the French Revolution was still ongoing:

And this place our forefathers made for man!
This is the process of our love and wisdom,
To each poor brother who offends against us –
Most innocent, perhaps -and what if guilty?
Is this the only cure? Merciful God!
Each pore and natural outlet shrivelled up
By Ignorance and parching Poverty,
His energies roll back upon his heart,
And stagnate and corrupt; till changed to poison,
They break out on him, like a loathsome plague-spot;
Then we call in our pampered mountebanks –
And this is their best cure! uncomforted
And friendless solitude, groaning and tears,
And savage faces, at the clanking hour,
Seen through the steam and vapours of his dungeon,
By the lamp’s dismal twilight! So he lies
Circled with evil, till his very soul
Unmoulds its essence, hopelessly deformed
By sights of ever more deformity!

But what’s also important about the inviolability of each individual is that it is natural, and if it’s natural it is – or should be, at least – in harmony with all else that is natural.

The three main social contract theorists of the period, Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau, all reflected on the qualities man had in a state of nature. How they lived when there were no institutions affecting them.

Hobbes thought that life in a state of nature would be ‘nasty, brutish and short’, but, as we’ve seen, Rousseau idealised natural man – the noble savage.

The English Romantic poets also romanticised nature; their love of places like the Lake District is well known. Philosophically then, there is a universal, transcendent, undeniable line that runs from the natural world through man’s senses into his sentiments – man feels nature, needs to be at one with it.

Wordsworth wrote during an early spring:

I heard a thousand blended notes,

While in a grove I sate reclined,

In that sweet mood when pleasant thoughts

Bring sad thoughts to the mind.

To her fair works did Nature link

The human soul that through me ran;

And much it grieved my heart to think

What man has made of man.

Through primrose tufts, in that green bower,

The periwinkle trailed its wreaths;

And ’tis my faith that every flower

Enjoys the air it breathes.

The birds around me hopped and played,

Their thoughts I cannot measure:—

But the least motion which they made

It seemed a thrill of pleasure.

The budding twigs spread out their fan,

To catch the breezy air;

And I must think, do all I can,

That there was pleasure there.

If this belief from heaven be sent,

If such be Nature’s holy plan,

Have I not reason to lament

What man has made of man?

There is a link between each person’s consciousness and nature that’s so important that we crave its fullness – it must be complete for us to live a complete life.

The Romantics thought the answer to this question – what man has made of man – was that men were alienated from nature, themselves, and one another. And that the cold calculating reason of the Enlightenment was partly to blame for this.

Where many Enlightenment philosophes emphasised reason, the Romantics emphasised feeling.

And almost a century before, Lord Shaftsbury in Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times had criticised Hobbes’ Leviathan for arguing that the fundamental principle driving all men was calculated self-interested – reason.

Shaftsbury and, of course, Rousseau later, argued that men also had the important capacity to feel as well as think – to feel joy, sadness, fear, both for oneself and for others.

So again, when we are affected by nature it is through sensations and sentiments, we feel it before we think about it rationally. Hume had said, for example, that reason could only ever be the slave of the passions.

Literary critic M.H. Abrams has written that, ‘A work of art is essentially the internal made external, resulting from a creative process operating under the impulse of feeling, and embodying the combined product of the poet’s perceptions, thoughts, and feelings. The primary source and subject matter of a poem, therefore, are the attributes and actions of the poet’s own mind; or if aspects of the external world, then these only as they are converted from fact to poetry by the feelings and operations of the poet’s mind’.

Imagination then is fundamentally important too. We might think of it as part of the triad of past, present and future. Nature exists, precedes us, is in the past. In the present we, as individuals, feel it, sense it. And through our imaginations we project it and us into the future. How we think about this process determines our futures.

In the Romantics we see a line from nature through the individual and their senses into the imagination. Commenting on Wordsworth, R.L. Brett and A.R. Jones write that, ‘The material of consciousness is made up, firstly, of sensations or (as modern philosophers would say) sense-data; secondly, simple ideas which are copies of sensations, or sensations which remain after the objects which cause them have been removed; and thirdly, complex ideas which are compounded of simple ideas. These three stages, as we may call them, correspond roughly to sensation, memory and thought’.

Deleuze would call the relationship between the natural world, the human senses, and the imagination a line of imminence. Spinoza would emphasise how we’re all, including nature, made up of the same stuff, material that runs through everything – a pantheism.

In, This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison, Coleridge laments how this relationship is misaligned but is optimistic about the power of the imagination to correct it. The narrator is forced to stay alone while his friends go for a walk.

Well, they are gone, and here must I remain,

This lime-tree bower my prison! I have lost

Beauties and feelings, such as would have been

Most sweet to my remembrance even when age

Had dimm’d mine eyes to blindness!

He imagines his friend’s appreciation of nature and how one of them must cherish it even more because of the corrupting influence of the modern city where he has to live:

My gentle-hearted Charles! for thou hast pined

And hunger’d after Nature, many a year,

In the great City pent, winning thy way

With sad yet patient soul, through evil and pain

And strange calamity!

In the end though the poet’s own imagination saves him:

A delight

Comes sudden on my heart, and I am glad

As I myself were there! Nor in this bower,

This little lime-tree bower, have I not mark’d

Much that has sooth’d me. Pale beneath the blaze

Hung the transparent foliage; and I watch’d

Some broad and sunny leaf, and lov’d to see

The shadow of the leaf and stem above

Dappling its sunshine!

So we’ve focused on the English Romantic poets and the French revolutionaries.

But the attitudes of both can be clarified if we look briefly into the German Romantics, a group of thinkers – Schelling, Schlegel, Novalis – who, at the end of the 18th century, were part of a period referred to as Frühromantik.

They too were concerned with the corrupting influence of modern life which tended to alienate, divide, separate, and estrange people from each other and their natural condition.

The German Romantics were particularly concerned with a dilemma. If romantics emphasise their own individual feelings, then there can be no theory of what it really means to be a romantic, seeing as everyone differs in their unique perspective on the world. The term then seems useless. How can nature be both transcendental and universal, and particular and unique to each person?

They argued that Romanticism was not just an approach to poetry or literature, but an approach to life itself.

In Critical Fragments, poet and philosopher Fredrich Schlegel theorises how the romanticist philosophy applies to everything. If the romantic emphasises his own personal, sentimental view on what he senses, then why should this not be applied to the family, to politics, to shipbuilding, to cooking. All things can be romanticised.

Philosopher Frederick Beiser puts it this way: ‘For if what the artist creates is also what nature creates through him, then his activity reveals, manifests, or expresses nature itself; it is indeed the self-revelation of nature. Art thus becomes, as Schelling famously argued, the organon and criterion of truth itself’.

The German romantics argued that everyone should make their lives into a novel – a beautiful story that fits in with their place in the world and their own imaginative expression of it.

Keats wrote, ‘I am certain of nothing but the holiness of Heart’s affection and the truth of Imagination. What imagination seizes as Beauty must be truth – whether it existed before or not’.

So Romanticism, as a philosophy, is more than just poetry. It’s a way of life that emphasises living with nature, appreciating our senses, sentiments, and feelings, and projecting both, with a humanitarian impulse, into building a better future.

In this way it asserts itself in a certain tone that is meant to be convincing, is meant to move people.

And anything can be written in this tone – arguments about climate change or poverty might benefit from a certain romanticist prose today.

How we describe the world, who writes about the world, has a profound effect on what world we will produce in the future. Academic writing is notoriously dry, and the dominance of scientific discourse attaches importance to describing the world in a detached way, ignoring our feelings.

The Romantics, it has been most aptly concluded, took Descartes’ dictum, ‘I think therefore I am’, and reformulated it: I feel therefore I am.

Shelley wrote:

Poets are the hierophants of an unapprehended inspiration; the mirrors of the gigantic shadows which futurity casts upon the present; the words which express what they understand not; the trumpets which sing to battle, and feel not what they inspire; the influence which is moved not, but moves.