One of the finest expressions of Romanticism today is Donna Tartt’s prize-winning novel The Goldfinch. Published in 2013 to critical acclaim and commercial success, it is a classic Bildungsroman in which a teenage boy, grief-stricken by the death of his mother, follows his emotions into a series of increasingly unwise decisions, complex relationships, and the criminal underworld. At the same time, it is the tale of a piece of art: a small Dutch painting of a chained goldfinch, the theft and concealment of which drive much of the plot. The book is full of quintessentially Romantic themes: childhood innocence, pity, the sublime, unrequited love, introspection, solitude, intense emotions, drug addiction, and self-discovery.

Nobody can agree on exactly what Romanticism is. Pinning it down is like nailing jelly to a wall; there have been literally thousands of definitions suggested, and many are either so narrow that they exclude important figures or so broad as to be virtually meaningless. The etymology of the word is convoluted. We move from Rome to the vernacular Roman language to popular Romance languages more generally to popular writings more generally (“romances”) to the roman or novel to the identification of poetry that is romantische (“romantic”) as opposed to klassische (“classical”) and only then to a movement called “Romanticism,” by which time the first generation of Romantics had already died. And none of this quite explains why we also use the word “romantic” to describe the mystery of love—although it is a delightful coincidence that Amor is Roma spelled backward.

The term is nebulous by design. Friedrich Schlegel, credited with coining it in something like its modern sense, wrote to his brother in 1793: “I cannot send you my explanation of the word ‘romantic’ because it would be 125 sheets long.”¹ When Isaiah Berlin delivered the Mellon Lectures on Romanticism—which he viewed as “the greatest single shift in the consciousness of the West that has occurred,”² and “a gigantic and radical transformation, after which nothing was ever the same”³—he began by saying that although people might expect him to define the term or at least explain what he meant by it, “I do not propose to walk into that particular trap.”⁴ He then demonstrated what a hopeless tangle it was by quoting a wide range of thoroughly irreconcilable definitions, drawn from many of the movement’s key thinkers, before offering an (admittedly brilliant) eight-hundred-word summary of his own.⁵

If describing Romanticism takes Isaiah Berlin eight hundred words, it is clearly foolhardy to try and outline it in just eight. Nevertheless, for the sake of clarity, here it goes:

1. Inwardness. All that is most important in life, from personal feelings to artistic creativity, comes from inside a person rather than outside. Introspection is good, and authenticity matters more than compliance with expectations. In Hegel’s oft-cited definition, Romanticism is about “absolute inwardness.”⁶

2. Infinity. There is a longing for the indescribable and inexplicable over the delineated and defined, whether in nature, art, architecture, or (especially) music. “Art is for us none other than the mystic ladder from earth to heaven,” wrote Liszt, “from the finite to the infinite, from mankind to God.”⁷

3. Imagination. Only by allowing one’s ideas to run free, unconstrained by schools, rules, or reason, is genuine creativity possible. This is why death, sex, dreams, and nightmares are such important sources of inspiration; it is why Blake desired “to cast off Bacon, Locke, and Newton from Albion’s covering, to take off his filthy garments and clothe him with imagination.”⁸

4. Individuality. What counts is the specific rather than the universal. “I am made unlike anyone I have ever met,” declared Rousseau on the opening page of his Confessions. “I will even venture to say that I am like no one in the whole world. I may be no better, but at least I am different.”⁹

5. Inspiration. Great artists began to be viewed as geniuses: inspired and inspiring figures who broke rules, transformed art, lived differently, and became iconic. The obvious example is the cult-like admiration of Beethoven, for his behavior and image as much as his music; it was of a completely different order to the admiration of the equally gifted Mozart just a generation before.¹⁰

Read More