Draft 2 PhD Introduction - ResearchSpace@Auckland

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was understood to stand for an emotive and intuitive outlook, as against the controlled
and rational approach that was designated ‘classical’”. 83 It can also be seen as a “new
state of sensibility”. 84 Morse Peckham defines Romanticism in terms of particular
modes of thought: “Whether philosophic, theologic, or aesthetic, it is the revolution in
the European mind against thinking in terms of static mechanism and the redirection of
the mind to thinking in terms of dynamic organicism. Its values are change,
imperfection, growth, diversity, the creative imagination, the unconscious”. 85 He goes
on to argue that the Romantic period began when “a small number of cultural leaders
throughout Europe […] began to feel that they had arrived at a way of viewing the
world which was profoundly different from any world-view that had ever appeared
before. And they also felt that this new Weltanschauung […] forced them to see
everything – philosophy, religion, the arts, history, politics, society – down an entirely
new perspective”. 86
Romanticism is an aesthetic with social as well as intellectual dimensions. It has been
strongly linked to social changes in the late eighteenth century. According to Arnold
Hauser: “Romanticism was the ideology of the new society and the expression of the
world-view of a generation which no longer believed in absolute values, and could no
longer believe in any values without thinking of their relativity, their historical
limitations”. 87 He argues that: “Romanticism was essentially a middle-class
movement”, and the world-view most suited to a middle-class public “was expressed
most clearly of all in the idea of the autonomy of the mind and the immanence of the
individual spheres of culture, which had predominated in German philosophy since
Kant and which would have been unthinkable without the emancipation of the middle
class”. 88 As M.H. Abrams puts it, “the Romantic period was eminently an age obsessed
with the fact of violent and inclusive change, and Romantic poetry cannot be
understood, historically, without awareness of the degree to which this preoccupation
83
The Encyclopedia of Visual Art, vol. 5 (London: The Encyclopaedia Britannica International Ltd,
1968) 746.
84
Mario Praz, The Romantic Agony, trans. Angus Davidson, 2nd ed. (London: Oxford University Press,
1970) 11.
85
Morse Peckham, Romanticism: The Culture of the Nineteenth Century (New York: Ambassador
Books, 1965) 14.
86
Peckham, Romanticism: The Culture of the Nineteenth Century 15.
87
Hauser, The Social History of Art 662.
88
Hauser, The Social History of Art 667.