Draft 2 PhD Introduction - ResearchSpace@Auckland

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affected its substance and form”. 89 Raymond Williams spoke of Romantic thought as
initially a compensatory reaction to the new social ills of a society in the wake of the
Industrial Revolution, which “was coming to think of man as merely a specialized
instrument of production”. 90 Hauser argues similarly that the “uncompromising
humanism” of the younger generation of Romantics, Shelley, Keats and Byron, was
“their protest against the policy of exploitation and oppression. Their unconventional
way of life, their aggressive atheism and their lack of moral bias are the different modes
of their struggle against the class that controls the means of exploitation and
suppression”. 91
There can be little doubt that Romanticism left an important legacy in its attitudes to art
and society. In Hauser’s view:
It represented one of the most decisive turning points in the history of the
European mind. Since the Gothic, the development of sensibility had received
no stronger impulse and the artist’s right to follow the call of his feelings and
individual disposition had probably never been emphasized with such
absoluteness […]. Rationalism, as a principle of science and practical affairs,
soon recovered from the romantic onslaught, but European art has remained
‘romantic’. 92
The alienation and desire of the Romantics to remain separate from society had a
significant effect on subsequent cultural activity. According to William Vaughan:
“When the Romantic movement dispersed, the habit of separateness remained. The
Primitifs, Nazarenes and Ancients were the ancestors of a permanent avant-garde that
became established in Paris during the 1830s in the disaffected world of the Bohemians.
Alienation is one of Romanticism’s most lasting legacies”. 93 In addition, “The
[Romantic] movement left a more permanent legacy in its expressiveness and
exploration of the irrational, which have been an inspiration to such movements as
Symbolism, Expressionism, and Surrealism. The image of the artist as an independent,
89
M.H. Abrams, The Correspondent Breeze: Essays on English Romanticism (New York; London:
W.W.Norton & Co., 1984) 46.
90
Raymond Williams, Culture and Society 1780-1950 (New York: Harper & Row, 1958) 59.
91
Hauser, The Social History of Art 696.
92
Hauser, The Social History of Art 655.
93
William Vaughan, Romantic Art (London: Thames & Hudson Ltd, 1978) 266.