Hey, I'm Mr. Sato with a quick explanation of Romanticism.
But before I do, let me give you a microexplanation of what came
before Romanticism. It'll give you some context.
Romanticism came after an intellectual movement called The Age of Enlightenment, which happened
in the 1700s, what we call the 18th century. During the Enlightenment, people met in European
salons to talk about being against superstition and absolute monarchies. They believed in the
power of reason, science, and the Classical traditions of Ancient Rome and Greece. The US
Constitution and Declaration of Independence were produced by this thinking. If we would
only employ our intellect and our best minds, they thought, we could create a perfect, free society.
Romanticism was a reaction to the Enlightenment.
Now, don't get confused-- when we say the word romance today,
we're usually talking about love and infatuation,
valentines and bad romantic comedies.
That's not what Romanticism is.
Romanticism was an artistic movement in Europe and the US in the 1800s,
what we call the 19th century, that prized feelings over intellectual thoughts,
the personal over the public, the purity of childhood over the corruption of adulthood,
the country over the city, the natural world over the man-made.
Romanticism lives on today in sentiments like "follow your heart" and "escape the rat race,
move out to the country, and breathe some fresh air."
The Romantics believed that real truth wasn't found through the cool serenity of the intellect,
but through the tortured and turbulent heart. Writers like William Wordsworth,
Lord Byron, John Keats, Charlotte Brontë, most famous for her passionate novel, Jane Eyre,
Victor Hugo in France wrote The Hunchback of Notre Dame, and Walt Whitman in the United States wrote
Leaves of Grass. The movement included painters like J.M.W. Turner, Francisco Goya, and Théodore
Géricault who painted this in 1819, The Raft of the Medusa, which depicted the desperate
survivors of a shipwreck, as well as composers like Hector Berlioz and Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky.
This clip you're hearing is from Tchaikovsky's Sleeping Beauty. (pause). Passion was the thing,
intense, even desperate feelings, not neat and orderly design. All the Enlightenment
had produced, thought the Romantics, was a society with a lot of arbitrary rules that
ignored what people really wanted, as opposed what reason said they should want, that ignored
the ways people actually felt as opposed to the orderly social behavior the Enlightenment
idealized. Incidentally, a lot of Romantics were horrified at the idea of enslaving Black Africans
and held it up as an example of the evils of exploitation, oppression and the worship of money.
That's all great, but Romanticism had its blind spots too. The people thinking these ideas were
mostly men who were rich and privileged by today's standards who lived in or near intellectual
centers, like London, Paris, and Berlin, where people could afford to have interesting new ideas
like these. They thought that poor people who lived in the countryside were truly happier than
they were because they were more primitive, closer to nature, farther from our grubby,
man-made rules and society. You know--poor but happy. They thought that life in the Medieval
times before the technological advances of the Enlightenment was better than what they now had in
the 1800s. That, of course, ignored the fact that poor people even in the country, in Medieval times
as well as the current day--- lived shorter, more difficult lives than the wealthy and privileged.
So, Romanticism was rebellion of the heart against the intellect.
A movement called Realism came next, but that's a topic for another video.