In the mid-1960s, Nhất Hạnh co-founded the School of Youth for Social Services and created the Order of Interbeing. He was exiled from South Vietnam in 1966 after expressing opposition to the war and refusing to take sides. In 1967, Martin Luther King, Jr. nominated him for a Nobel Peace Prize.Nhất Hạnh established dozens of monasteries and practice centers and spent many years living at the Plum Village Monastery, which he founded in 1982 in southwest France near Thénac, traveling internationally to give retreats and talks. Nhất Hạnh
promoted deep listening as a nonviolent solution to conflict and sought
to raise awareness of the interconnectedness of environments that
sustain and promote peace. He coined the term "engaged Buddhism" in his book Vietnam: Lotus in a Sea of Fire.
After a 39-year exile, Nhất Hạnh was permitted to visit Vietnam in 2005. In 2018, he returned to Vietnam to his "root temple", Từ Hiếu Temple, near Huế, where he lived until his death in 2022, at the age of 95.
Early life
Nhất Hạnh was born Nguyễn Xuân Bảo on 11 October 1926, in the ancient capital of Huế in central Vietnam. He is 15th generation Nguyễn Đình; the poet Nguyễn Đình Chiểu, author of Lục Vân Tiên, was his ancestor. His father, Nguyễn Đình Phúc, from Thành Trung village in Thừa Thiên, Huế, was an official with the French administration. His mother, Trần Thị Dĩ, was a homemaker from Gio Linh district. Nhất Hạnh was the fifth of their six children. Until he was age five, he lived with his large extended family at his grandmother's home. He recalled feeling joy at age seven or eight after he saw a drawing of a peaceful Buddha, sitting on the grass. On a school trip, he visited a mountain where a hermit lived who was
said to sit quietly day and night to become peaceful like the Buddha.
They explored the area, and he found a natural well, which he drank from
and felt completely satisfied. It was this experience that led him to
want to become a Buddhist monk. At age 12, he expressed an interest in training to become a monk, which
his parents, cautious at first, eventually let him pursue at age 16.
Names applied to him
Nhất Hạnh had many names in his lifetime. As a boy, he received a
formal family name (Nguyễn Đình Lang) to register for school, but was
known by his nickname (Bé Em). He received a spiritual name (Điệu Sung)
as an aspirant for the monkhood; a lineage name (Trừng Quang) when he
formally became a lay Buddhist; and a Dharma name (Phùng Xuân) when he was ordained as a monk. He took the Dharma title Nhất Hạnh when he moved to Saigon in 1949.
The Vietnamese nameThích (釋) is from "Thích Ca" or "Thích Già" (釋迦, "of the Shakya clan"). All Buddhist monastics in East Asian Buddhism
adopt this name as their surname, implying that their first family is
the Buddhist community. In many Buddhist traditions, a person can
receive a progression of names. The lineage name is given first when a
person takes refuge in the Three Jewels.
Nhất Hạnh's lineage name is Trừng Quang (澄光, "Clear, Reflective
Light"). The second is a dharma name, given when a person takes vows or
is ordained as a monastic. Nhất Hạnh's dharma name is Phùng Xuân (逢春,
"Meeting Spring") and his dharma title is Nhất Hạnh.
Neither Nhất (一) nor Hạnh (行), which approximate the roles of middle name and given name, was part of his name at birth. Nhất means "one", implying "first-class", or "of best quality"; Hạnh means "action", implying "right conduct",
"good nature", or "virtue". He translated his Dharma names as "One"
(Nhất) and "Action" (Hạnh). Vietnamese names follow this convention,
placing the family name first, then the middle name, which often refers
to the person's position in the family or generation, followed by the
given name.
Nhất Hạnh's followers called him Thầy ("master; teacher"), or Thầy Nhất Hạnh. Any Vietnamese monk in the Mahayana tradition can be addressed as "thầy", with monks addressed as thầy tu ("monk") and nuns addressed as sư cô ("sister") or sư bà ("elder sister"). He is also known as Thiền Sư Nhất Hạnh ("Zen Master Nhất Hạnh").
Education
Buddha hall of the Từ Hiếu Temple
At age 16, Nhất Hạnh entered the monastery at Từ Hiếu Temple, where his primary teacher was Zen Master
Thanh Quý Chân Thật, who was from the 43rd generation of the Lâm Tế Zen
school and the ninth generation of the Liễu Quán school.He studied as a novice for three years and received training in Vietnamese traditions of Mahayana and Theravada Buddhism. He also learned Chinese, English, and French. Nhất Hạnh attended Báo Quốc Buddhist Academy. Dissatisfied with the academy, which he found lacking in philosophy, literature, and foreign languages, Nhất Hạnh left in 1950 and took up residence in the Ấn Quang Pagoda in Saigon, where he was ordained as a monk in 1951. He supported himself by selling books and poetry while attending Saigon University, where he studied literature, philosophy, psychology, and science and received a degree in French and Vietnamese Literature.
In 1955, Nhất Hạnh returned to Huế and served as the editor of Phật Giáo Việt Nam (Vietnamese Buddhism), the official publication of the General Association of Vietnamese Buddhists (Tổng Hội Phật Giáo Việt Nam)
for two years before the publication was suspended as higher-ranking
monks disapproved of his writing. He believed that this was due to his
opinion that South Vietnam's various Buddhist organisations should
unite. In 1956, while he was away teaching in Đà Lạt,
his name was expunged from the records of Ấn Quang, effectively
disowning him from the temple. In late 1957, Nhất Hạnh decided to go on
retreat, and established a monastic "community of resistance" named
Phương Bôi, in Đại Lao Forest near Đà Lạt. During this period, he taught
at a nearby high school and continued to write, promoting the idea of a
humanistic, unified Buddhism.
From 1959 to 1961, Nhất Hạnh taught several short courses on Buddhism at various Saigon temples, including the large Xá Lợi Pagoda,
where his class was cancelled mid-session and he was removed due to
disapproval of his teachings. Facing further opposition from Vietnamese
religious and secular authorities, Nhất Hạnh accepted a Fulbright Fellowship in 1960 to study comparative religion at Princeton University. He studied at the Princeton Theological Seminary in 1961.In 1962 he was appointed lecturer in Buddhism at Columbia University and also taught as a lecturer at Cornell University. By then he had gained fluency in French, Classical Chinese, Sanskrit, Pali and English, in addition to his native Vietnamese.
Career
Activism in Vietnam 1963–1966
In 1963, after the military overthrow of the minority Catholic regime of President Ngo Dinh Diem, Nhất Hạnh returned to South Vietnam on 16 December 1963, at the request of Thich Tri Quang, the monk most prominent in protesting the religious discrimination of Diem, to help restructure the administration of Vietnamese Buddhism. As a result of a congress, the General Association of Buddhists and other groups merged to form the Unified Buddhist Church of Vietnam (UBCV) in January 1964, and Nhất Hạnh proposed that the executive publicly call for an end to the Vietnam War,
help establish an institute for the study of Buddhism to train future
leaders, and create a centre to train pacifist social workers based on
Buddhist teaching.
In 1964, two of Nhất Hạnh's students founded La Boi Press with a
grant from Mrs. Ngo Van Hieu. Within two years, the press published 12
books, but by 1966, the publishers risked arrest and jail because the
word "peace" was taken to mean communism. Nhất Hạnh also edited the weekly journal Hải Triều Âm (Sound of the Rising Tide),
the UBCV's official publication. He continually advocated peace and
reconciliation, notably calling in September 1964, soon after the Gulf of Tonkin incident, for a peace settlement, and referring to the Viet Cong as brothers. The South Vietnamese government subsequently closed the journal.
On 1 May 1966, at Từ Hiếu Temple, Nhất Hạnh received the "lamp
transmission" from Zen Master Chân Thật, making him a dharmacharya
(teacher) and the spiritual head of Từ Hiếu and associated monasteries.
Vạn Hạnh Buddhist University
On 13 March 1964, Nhất Hạnh and the monks at An Quang Pagoda founded the Institute of Higher Buddhist Studies (Học Viện Phật Giáo Việt Nam), with the UBCV's support and endorsement. Renamed Vạn Hạnh
Buddhist University, it was a private institution that taught Buddhist
studies, Vietnamese culture, and languages, in Saigon. Nhất Hạnh taught Buddhist psychology and prajnaparamita literature there, and helped finance the university by fundraising from supporters.
In 1964, Nhất Hạnh co-founded the School of Youth for Social Service (SYSS), a neutral corps of
Buddhist peace workers who went into rural areas to establish schools,
build healthcare clinics, and help rebuild villages. The SYSS consisted of 10,000 volunteers and social workers who aided
war-torn villages, rebuilt schools and established medical centers. He left for the U.S. shortly afterwards and was not allowed to return, leaving Sister Chân Không
in charge of the SYSS. Chân Không was central to the foundation and
many of the activities of the SYSS, which organized medical, educational
and agricultural facilities in rural Vietnam during the war. Nhất Hạnh was initially given substantial autonomy to run the SYSS,
which was initially part of Vạn Hạnh University. In April 1966, the Vạn
Hạnh Students' Union under the presidency of Phượng issued a "Call for
Peace". Vice Chancellor Thích Minh Châu dissolved the students' union
and removed the SYSS from the university's auspices.
Nhất Hạnh created the Order of Interbeing (Vietnamese: Tiếp Hiện), a monastic and lay group, between 1964 and 1966. He headed this group, basing it on the philosophical concept of interbeing and teaching it through the Five Mindfulness Trainings and the Fourteen Mindfulness Trainings. The trainings were a modern adaptation of the traditional bodhisattva vows designed to support efforts to promote peace and rebuild war-torn villages. Nhất Hạnh established the Order of Interbeing from a selection of six
SYSS board members, three men and three women, who took a vow to
practice the Fourteen Precepts of Engaged Buddhism. He added a seventh member in 1981.
In 1967, Nhat Chi Mai,
one of the first six Order of Interbeing members, set fire to herself
and burned to death in front of the Tu Nghiem Pagoda in Saigon as a
peace protest after calling for an end to the Vietnam War. On several occasions, Nhất Hạnh explained to Westerners that Thích Quảng Đức
and other Vietnamese Buddhist monks who self-immolated during the
Vietnam war did not perform acts of suicide; rather, their acts were, in
his words, aimed "at moving the hearts of the oppressors, and at
calling the attention of the world to the suffering endured then by the
Vietnamese."
The Order of Interbeing expanded into an international community
of laypeople and monastics focused on "mindfulness practice, ethical
behavior, and compassionate action in society." By 2017, the group had grown to include thousands known to recite the Fourteen Precepts.
During the Vietnam War
Vạn Hạnh University was taken over by one of the chancellors, who
wished to sever ties with Nhất Hạnh and the SYSS, accusing Chân Không of
being a communist. Thereafter the SYSS struggled to raise funds and
faced attacks on its members. It persisted in its relief efforts without
taking sides in the conflict.
Nhất Hạnh returned to the U.S. in 1966 to lead a symposium in Vietnamese Buddhism at Cornell University and continue his work for peace. He was invited by Professor George McTurnan Kahin,
also of Cornell and a U.S. government foreign policy consultant, to
participate on a forum on U.S. policy in Vietnam. On 1 June, Nhất Hạnh
released a five-point proposal addressed to the U.S. government,
recommending that (1) the U.S. make a clear statement of its desire to
help the Vietnamese people form a government "truly responsive to
Vietnamese aspirations"; (2) the U.S. and South Vietnam cease air
strikes throughout Vietnam; (3) all anti-communist military operations
be purely defensive; (4) the U.S. demonstrate a willingness to withdraw
within a few months; and (5) the U.S. offer to pay for reconstruction. In 1967 he wrote Vietnam — The Lotus in the Sea of Fire, about his proposals. The South Vietnamese military junta responded by accusing him of treason and being a communist.
While in the U.S., Nhất Hạnh visited Gethsemani Abbey to speak with the Trappist monk Thomas Merton. When the South Vietnamese regime threatened to block Nhất Hạnh's
reentry to the country, Merton wrote an essay of solidarity, "Nhat Hanh
is my Brother". Between June and October 1963, Nhất Hạnh conducted numerous interviews
with newspapers and television networks to rally support for the peace
movement. During this time, he also undertook a widely publicized five-day fast.
Additionally, he translated reports of human rights violations from
Vietnamese into English and compiled them into a document he presented
to the United Nations. In 1964, after the publication of his poem "whoever is listening, be my witness: I cannot accept this war...", the American press called Nhất Hạnh an "antiwar poet" and a "pro-Communist propagandist". In 1965 he wrote Martin Luther King Jr. a letter titled "In Search of the Enemy of Man". During his 1966 stay in the U.S., Nhất Hạnh met King and urged him to publicly denounce the Vietnam War. In 1967, due in large part to Nhất Hạnh, King gave the speech "Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence" at Riverside Church in New York City, his first to publicly question U.S. involvement in Vietnam. Later that year, King nominated Nhất Hạnh for the 1967 Nobel Peace Prize.
In his nomination, King said, "I do not personally know of anyone more
worthy of the Nobel Peace Prize than this gentle monk from Vietnam. His
ideas for peace, if applied, would build a monument to ecumenism, to
world brotherhood, to humanity". King also called Nhất Hạnh "an apostle of peace and nonviolence". King named the candidate he had chosen to nominate with a "strong
request" to the prize committee, in sharp violation of Nobel traditions
and protocol.The committee did not make an award that year.
Refuge in France
Nhất Hạnh moved to Paris in 1966 and became the chair of the Vietnamese Buddhist Peace Delegation, a group involved with the Paris Peace Accords, which ultimately ended American involvement in the Vietnam War. For refusing to take sides in the war, Nhất Hạnh was exiled by both the North and South Vietnamese governments. He received asylum in France and moved to the Paris suburbs, living with other Vietnamese refugees.
In 1969, Nhất Hạnh established the Unified Buddhist Church (Église Bouddhique Unifiée) in France (not a part of the Unified Buddhist Church of Vietnam). In 1975, he formed the Sweet Potatoes Meditation Centre at Fontvannes, in the Foret d'Othe, near Troyes in Aube province southeast of Paris. For the next seven years, he focused on writing, and completed The Miracle of Mindfulness, The Moon Bamboo, and The Sun My Heart.
Nhất Hạnh began teaching mindfulness in the mid-1970s with his books, particularly The Miracle of Mindfulness (1975), serving as the main vehicle for his early teachings. In an interview for On Being, he said that The Miracle of Mindfulness
was "written for our social workers, first, in Vietnam, because they
were living in a situation where the danger of dying was there every
day. So out of compassion, out of a willingness to help them to continue
their work, The Miracle of Mindfulness was written as a practice
manual. And after that, many friends in the West, they think that it is
helpful for them, so we allow it to be translated into English." The book was originally titled The Miracle of Being Awake, as in 1975 "mindfulness" was barely recognized in English. Its focus on integrating mindfulness into daily life, rather than
confining it to meditation, emphasized that living mindfully could
foster personal growth, enlightenment, and even global peace.
Campaign to help boat people and expulsion from Singapore
When the North Vietnamese army took control of the south in 1975, Nhất Hạnh was denied permission to return to Vietnam, and the communist government banned his publications. He soon began to lead efforts to help rescue Vietnamese boat people in the Gulf of Siam, eventually stopping under pressure from the governments of Thailand and Singapore.
Recounting his experience years later, Nhất Hạnh said he was in
Singapore attending a conference on religion and peace when he
discovered the plight of the suffering of the boat people:
So
many boat people were dying in the ocean, and Singapore had a very
harsh policy on the boat people… The policy of Singapore at that time
was to reject the boat people; Malaysia, also. They preferred to have
the boat people die in the ocean rather than to bring them to land and
make them into prisoners. Every time there was a boat with the boat
people [that came] to the shore, they tried to push them [back] out into
the sea in order [for them] to die. They didn't want to host [them].
And those fishermen who had compassion, who were able to save the boat
people from drowning in the sea, were punished. They had to pay a very
huge sum of money so that next time they won't have the courage to save
the boat people.
He stayed on in Singapore to
organise a secret rescue operation. Aided by concerned individuals from
France, the Netherlands, and other European countries, he hired a boat
to bring food, water and medicine to refugees in the sea. Sympathetic
fishermen who had rescued boat people would call up his team, and they
shuttled the refugees to the French embassy in the middle of the night
and helped them climb into the compound, before they were discovered by
staff in the morning and handed over to the police where they were
placed in the relative safety of detention. Please Call Me by My True Names, Nhất Hạnh's best-known poem, was written in 1978 during his efforts to assist the boat people.
When the Singapore government discovered the clandestine network,
the police surrounded its office and impounded the passports of both
Nhất Hạnh and Chân Không, giving them 24 hours to leave the country. It
was only with the intervention of the then-French ambassador to
Singapore Jacques Gasseau that they were given 10 days to wind down
their rescue operations.
By 1982, Sweet Potatoes was too small to accommodate the growing number of people who wanted to visit for retreats. In 1982, Nhất Hạnh and Chân Không established the Plum Village Monastery, a vihara in the Dordogne near Bordeaux in southern France. Plum Village is the largest Buddhist monastery in Europe and America, with over 200 monastics and over 10,000 visitors a year.
The Plum Village Community of Engaged Buddhism (formerly the Unified Buddhist Church) and its sister organization in
France, the Congrégation Bouddhique Zen Village des Pruniers, are the
legally recognized governing bodies of Plum Village in France.
By 2019, Nhất Hạnh had built a network of monasteries and retreat centres in several countries, including France, the U.S., Australia, Thailand, Vietnam, and Hong Kong. Additional practice centres and associated organizations Nhất Hạnh and the Order of Interbeing established in the US include Blue Cliff Monastery in Pine Bush, New York; the Community of Mindful Living in Berkeley, California; Parallax Press; Deer Park Monastery (Tu Viện Lộc Uyển), established in 2000 in Escondido, California; Magnolia Grove Monastery (Đạo Tràng Mộc Lan) in Batesville, Mississippi; and the European Institute of Applied Buddhism in Waldbröl, Germany. (The Maple Forest Monastery (Tu Viện Rừng Phong) and Green Mountain Dharma Center (Ðạo Tràng Thanh Sơn) in Vermont
closed in 2007 and moved to the Blue Cliff Monastery in Pine Bush.) The
monasteries, open to the public during much of the year, provide
ongoing retreats for laypeople, while the Order of Interbeing holds
retreats for specific groups of laypeople, such as families, teenagers,
military veterans, the entertainment industry, members of Congress, law
enforcement officers and people of colour.
According to the Thích Nhất Hạnh Foundation, the charitable
organization that serves as the Plum Village Community of Engaged
Buddhism's fundraising arm, as of 2017 the monastic order Nhất Hạnh
established comprises over 750 monastics in 9 monasteries worldwide.
Nhất Hạnh established two monasteries in Vietnam, at the original Từ Hiếu Temple near Huế and at Prajna Temple in the central highlands.
Writings
Nhất Hạnh has published over 130 books, including more than 100 in
English, which as of January 2019 had sold over five million copies
worldwide. His books, which cover topics including spiritual guides and Buddhist
texts, teachings on mindfulness, poetry, story collections, a biography
of the Buddha, and scholarly essays on Zen practice, have been translated into more than 40 languages as of January 2022. In 1986 Nhất Hạnh founded Parallax Press, a nonprofitbook publisher and part of the Plum Village Community of Engaged Buddhism.
During his long exile, Nhất Hạnh's books were often smuggled into Vietnam, where they had been banned.
Later activism
In 2014, major Jewish, Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist, Anglican, Catholic
and Orthodox Christian leaders met to sign a shared commitment against
modern-day slavery; the declaration they signed called for the
elimination of slavery and human trafficking by 2020. Nhất Hạnh was
represented by Chân Không.
Nhất Hạnh's relationship with the government of Vietnam varied over
the years. He stayed away from politics, but did not support the South
Vietnamese government's policies of Catholicization. He questioned
American involvement, putting him at odds with the Saigon leadership, which banned him from returning to South Vietnam while he was abroad in 1966.
His relationship with the communist government ruling Vietnam was
tense due to its anti-religious stance. The communist government viewed
him with skepticism, distrusted his work with the overseas Vietnamese population, and restricted his praying requiem on several occasions.
In 2005, after lengthy negotiations, the Vietnamese government
allowed Nhất Hạnh to return for a visit. He was also allowed to teach
there, publish four of his books in Vietnamese, and travel the country
with monastic and lay members of his Order, including a return to his
root temple, Tu Hieu Temple in Huế. Nhất Hạnh arrived on 12 January after 39 years in exile. The trip was not without controversy. Thich Vien Dinh, writing on behalf of the banned Unified Buddhist Church of Vietnam
(UBCV), called for Nhất Hạnh to make a statement against the Vietnamese
government's poor record on religious freedom. Vien Dinh feared that
the government would use the trip as propaganda, suggesting that
religious freedom is improving there, while abuses continue.
Thích Nhất Hạnh during his 2007 trip to Vietnam
Despite the controversy, Nhất Hạnh returned to Vietnam in 2007, while the heads of the UBCV, Thich Huyen Quang and Thich Quang Do,
remained under house arrest. The UBCV called his visit a betrayal,
symbolizing his willingness to work with his co-religionists'
oppressors. Võ Văn Ái, a UBCV spokesman, said, "I believe Thích Nhất
Hạnh's trip is manipulated by the Hanoi government to hide its
repression of the Unified Buddhist Church and create a false impression
of religious freedom in Vietnam." The Plum Village website listed three goals for his 2007 trip to
Vietnam: to support new monastics in his Order; to organize and conduct
"Great Chanting Ceremonies" intended to help heal remaining wounds from
the Vietnam War; and to lead retreats for monastics and laypeople. The
chanting ceremonies were originally called "Grand Requiem for Praying Equally for All to Untie the Knots of Unjust Suffering",
but Vietnamese officials objected, calling it unacceptable for the
government to "equally" pray for South Vietnamese and U.S. soldiers.
Nhất Hạnh agreed to change the name to "Grand Requiem For Praying". During the 2007 visit, Nhất Hạnh suggested ending government control of religion to President Nguyen Minh Triet. A provincial police officer later spoke to a reporter about this incident, accusing Nhất Hạnh of breaking Vietnamese law. The officer said, "[Nhất Hạnh] should focus on Buddhism and keep out of politics."
During the 2005 visit, Nhất Hạnh 's followers were invited by Abbot Duc Nghi, a member of the official Buddhist Sangha of Vietnam, to occupy Bat Nha monastery and continue their practice there. Nhất Hạnh's followers say that during a sacred ceremony at Plum Village Monastery in 2006, Nghi received a transmission from Nhất Hạnh and agreed to let them occupy Bat Nha. Nhất Hạnh's followers spent $1 million developing the monastery, building a meditation hall for 1,800 people. The government support initially given to his supporters is now believed to have been a ploy to get Vietnam off the US State Department's Religious Freedomblacklist, improve chances of entry into the World Trade Organization, and increase foreign investment. During this time, thousands of people came to the center to practice,
and Nhất Hạnh ordained more than 500 monks and nuns at the monastery.
In 2008, during an interview in Italian television, Nhất Hạnh made some statements regarding the Dalai Lama
that his followers claim upset Chinese officials, who in turn put
pressure on the Vietnamese government. The chairman of Vietnam's
national Committee on Religious Affairs sent a letter that accused Nhat
Hanh's organization of publishing false information about Vietnam on its
website. It was written that the posted information misrepresented
Vietnam's policies on religion and could undermine national unity. The
chairman requested that Nhất Hạnh's followers leave Bat Nha. The letter
also stated that Abbot Duc Nghi wanted them to leave. "Duc Nghi is breaking a vow that he made to us... We have videotapes of
him inviting us to turn the monastery into a place for worship in the
Plum Village tradition, even after he dies — life after life. Nobody can
go against that wish," said Brother Phap Kham. In September and October 2009, a standoff developed, which ended when
authorities cut the power, and followed up with police raids augmented
by mobs assembled through gang contacts. The attackers used sticks and
hammers to break in and dragged off hundreds of monks and nuns."Senior monks were dragged like animals out of their rooms, then left
sitting in the rain until police dragged them to the taxis where 'black
society' bad guys pushed them into cars," a villager said in a phone
interview. Two senior monks had their IDs taken and were put under house arrest without charges in their home towns. Monastics responded with chanting, but continued to be persecuted by the government.
Nhất Hạnh has also been a leader in the Engaged Buddhism movement (he is credited with coining the term), promoting the individual's active role in creating change. He credited the 13th-century Vietnamese Emperor Trần Nhân Tông
with originating the concept. Trần Nhân Tông abdicated his throne to
become a monk and founded the Vietnamese Buddhist school of the Bamboo
Forest tradition. He also called it Applied Buddhism in later years to emphasize its practical nature.
Mindfulness trainings
Nhất Hạnh rephrased the five precepts
for lay Buddhists as "mindfulness trainings", which were traditionally
written in terms of refraining from negative activities, such as
committing to taking positive action to prevent or minimize others'
negative actions. For example, instead of merely refraining from
stealing, Nhất Hạnh wrote, "prevent others from profiting from human
suffering or the suffering of other species on Earth" by, for example,
taking action against unfair practices or unsafe workplaces.
According to Plum Village, Manifesto 2000, introduced by UNESCO, was largely inspired by their five mindfulness trainings. In keeping with the northern tradition of Bodhisattva precepts, Nhất
Hạnh wrote the fourteen mindfulness trainings for the Order of
Interbeing based on the ten deeds. He also updated the Dharmaguptaka Vinaya for Plum Village monastics while keeping its number of rules, 250 for monks and 348 for nuns.
Interbeing
Nhất Hạnh developed the English term "interbeing" by combining the prefix "inter-" with the verb "to be" to denote the interconnection of all phenomena. This was inspired by the Chinese word 相即 in Master Fa Zang's "Golden Lion Chapter", a Huayan summary of the Avatamsaka Sutra. Some scholars believed it was a presentation of the Prajnaparamita, which "is often said to provide a philosophical foundation" for Zen. Nhất Hạnh was also known for expressing deep teachings through simple
phrases or parables. "The sun my heart", for instance, was an insight of
meditation on the interdependence of all things. He used "no mud no
lotus" to illustrate the interrelationship between awakening and
afflictions, well-being and ill-being. "A cloud never dies", on the
other hand, is a contemplation of phenomena beyond birth and death. To
teach non-duality, he often told the story of his left and right hand.
His meditation on aimlessness (apranihita) was told through the
story of a river. The relationship between waves and water explained the
Dharma Realm of Unobstructed Interpenetration of Truth and Phenomena.
New translations of the Heart Sutra
Nhất Hạnh completed new English and Vietnamese translations of the Heart Sutra in September 2014. In a letter to his students, he said he wrote these new translations because he thought that poor
word choices in the original text had resulted in significant
misunderstandings of these teachings for almost 2,000 years.
Manifestation-Only Teaching
Continuing the Yogācāra
and Dharmalaksana school, Nhất Hạnh composed the "fifty verses on the
nature of consciousness". He preferred calling the teaching
manifestation-only (vijnapti-matrata) rather than consciousness-only
(vijnana-matrata) to avoid misintepretation into a kind of idealism.
Called "the Father of Mindfulness", Nhất Hạnh has been credited as one of the main figures in bringing
Buddhism to the West, and especially for making mindfulness well known
in the West. According to James Shaheen, the editor of the American Buddhist magazine Tricycle: The Buddhist Review, "In the West, he's an icon. I can't think of a Western Buddhist who does not know of Thich Nhất Hạnh." His 1975 book The Miracle of Mindfulness
was credited with helping to "lay the foundations" for the use of
mindfulness in treating depression through "mindfulness-based cognitive
therapy", influencing the work of University of Washington psychology
professor Marsha M. Linehan, the originator of dialectical behavior therapy (DBT). J. Mark G. Williams
of Oxford University and the Oxford Mindfulness Centre has said, "What
he was able to do was to communicate the essentials of Buddhist wisdom
and make it accessible to people all over the world, and build that
bridge between the modern world of psychological science and the modern
healthcare system and these ancient wisdom practices – and then he
continued to do that in his teaching." One of Nhất Hạnh's students, Jon Kabat-Zinn, developed the mindfulness-based stress reduction course that is available at hospitals and medical centres across the world, and as of 2015, around 80% of medical schools are reported to have offered mindfulness training. As of 2019, it was reported that mindfulness as espoused by Nhất Hạnh had become the theoretical underpinning of a $1.1 billion industry in
the U.S. One survey determined that 35% of employers used mindfulness in
practices in the workplace.
Interfaith dialogue
Nhất Hạnh was known for his involvement in interfaith dialogue, which was not common when he began. He was noted for his friendships with Martin Luther King Jr. and Thomas Merton,
and King wrote in his Nobel nomination for Nhất Hạnh, "His ideas for
peace, if applied, would build a monument to ecumenism, to world
brotherhood, to humanity". Merton wrote an essay for Jubilee
in August 1966 titled "Nhất Hạnh Is My Brother", in which he said, "I
have far more in common with Nhất Hạnh than I have with many Americans,
and I do not hesitate to say it. It is vitally important that such bonds
be admitted. They are the bonds of a new solidarity ... which is
beginning to be evident on all five continents and which cuts across all
political, religious and cultural lines to unite young men and women in
every country in something that is more concrete than an ideal and more
alive than a program." The same year, Nhất Hạnh met with Pope Paul VI and the pair called on Catholics and Buddhists to help bring about world peace, especially relating to the conflict in Vietnam. According to Buddhism scholar Sallie B. King, Nhất Hạnh was "extremely
skilled at expressing their teachings in the language of a kind of
universal spirituality rather than a specifically Buddhist terminology.
The language of this universal spirituality is the same as the basic
values that they see expressed in other religions as well".
Final years
In November 2014, Nhất Hạnh experienced a severe brain hemorrhage and was hospitalized. After months of rehabilitation, he was released from the stroke rehabilitation clinic at Bordeaux Segalen University. In July 2015, he flew to San Francisco to speed his recovery with an aggressive rehabilitation program at UCSF Medical Center. He returned to France in January 2016. After spending 2016 in France, Nhất Hạnh travelled to the Thai Plum Village. He continued to see both Eastern and Western specialists while in Thailand, but was unable to verbally communicate for the remainder of his life.
In November 2018, a press release from the Plum Village community
confirmed that Nhất Hạnh, then 92, had returned to Vietnam a final time
and would live at Từ Hiếu Temple for "his remaining days". In a meeting
with senior disciples, he had "clearly communicated his wish to return
to Vietnam using gestures, nodding and shaking his head in response to
questions". In January 2019, a representative of Plum Village, Sister True Dedication, wrote:
Thầy's health has been remarkably
stable, and he is continuing to receive Eastern treatment and
acupuncture. When there's a break in the rains, Thay comes outside to
enjoy visiting the Root Temple's ponds and stupas, in his wheelchair,
joined by his disciples. Many practitioners, lay and monastic, are
coming to visit Tu Hieu, and there is a beautiful, light atmosphere of
serenity and peace, as the community enjoys practicing together there in
Thay's presence.
While it was clear Nhất Hạnh could no longer speak, Vietnamese
authorities assigned plainclothes police to monitor his activities at
the temple.
Nhất Hạnh died at his residence in Từ Hiếu Temple on 22 January 2022, at age 95, as a result of complications from his stroke seven years earlier. His death was widely mourned by various Buddhist groups in and outside Vietnam. The Dalai Lama, South Korean President Moon Jae-in and the U.S. State Department also issued words of condolence.
His five-day funeral, which began on the day of his death, had a seven-day wake that culminated with his cremation on 29 January. In a 2015 book, Nhất
Hạnh described what he wanted for the disposition of his remains, in
part to illustrate how he believes that he "continues" on in his
teachings:
I have a disciple in Vietnam who
wants to build a stupa for my ashes when I die. He and others want to
put a plaque with the words, "Here lies my beloved teacher." I told them
not to waste the temple land...I suggested that, if they still insist
on building a stupa, they have the plaque say, I am not in here. But in case people don't get it, they could add a second plaque, I am not out there either. If still people don't understand, then you can write on the third and last plaque, I may be found in your way of breathing and walking.
At the conclusion of the 49-day mourning period, Nhất Hạnh's ashes
were portioned and scattered in Từ Hiếu Temple and temples associated
with Plum Village.
Underground culture, or simply underground, is a term to describe various alternative cultures which either consider themselves different from the mainstream of society and culture, or are considered so by others. The word "underground" is used because there is a history of resistance movements under harsh regimes where the term underground was employed to refer to the necessary secrecy of the resisters.
In the Esquire magazine (1958), Jack Kerouac stated:
The same thing was almost going on
in the postwar France of Sartre and Genet and what's more we knew about
it—But as to the actual existence of a Beat Generation, chances are it
was really just an idea in our minds—We'd stay up 24 hours drinking cup
after cup of black coffee, playing record after record of Wardell Gray, Lester Young, Dexter Gordon, Willie Jackson, Lennie Tristano
and all the rest, talking madly about that holy new feeling out there
in the streets—We'd write stories about some strange beatific Negro
hepcat saint with goatee hitchhiking across Iowa with taped up horn
bringing the secret message of blowing to other coasts, other cities,
like a veritable Walter the Penniless leading an invisible First Crusade—We
had our mystic heroes and wrote, nay sung novels about them, erected
long poems celebrating the new 'angels' of the American underground—In
actuality there was only a handful of real hip swinging cats and what
there was vanished mightily swiftly during the Korean War
when (and after) a sinister new kind of efficiency appeared in America,
maybe it was the result of the universalization of Television and
nothing else (the Polite Total Police Control of Dragnet's 'peace'
officers) but the beat characters after 1950 vanished into jails and
madhouses, or were shamed into silent conformity, the generation itself was shortlived and small in number.
Moreover, the ease of access to cultural products online has
blurred the lines between underground and mainstream. Consequently, what
was once considered "underground" is now often integrated into popular culture, resulting in a loss of the exclusivity and community that originally defined these movements.
Romanticism (also known as the Romantic movement or Romantic era) was an artistic and intellectual movement that originated in Europe towards the end of the 18th century. The purpose of the movement was to advocate for the importance of subjectivity, imagination, and appreciation of nature in society and culture in response to the Age of Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution.
Romanticists rejected the social conventions of the time in favour of a moral outlook known as individualism. They argued that passion and intuition were crucial to understanding the world, and that beauty is more than merely an affair of form,
but rather something that evokes a strong emotional response. With this
philosophical foundation, the Romanticists elevated several key themes
to which they were deeply committed: a reverence for nature and the supernatural, an idealization of the past as a nobler era, a fascination with the exotic and the mysterious, and a celebration of the heroic and the sublime.
The Romanticist movement had a particular fondness for the Middle Ages, which to them represented an era of chivalry,
heroism, and a more organic relationship between humans and their
environment. This idealization contrasted sharply with the values of
their contemporary industrial society, which they considered alienating
for its economic materialism and environmental degradation.
The movement's illustration of the Middle Ages was a central theme in
debates, with allegations that Romanticist portrayals often overlooked
the downsides of medieval life.
The consensus is that Romanticism peaked from 1800 until 1850. However, a "Late Romantic" period and "Neoromantic" revivals are also discussed. These extensions of the movement are characterized by a resistance to the increasingly experimental and abstract forms that culminated in modern art, and the deconstruction of traditional tonal harmony
in music. They continued the Romantic ideal, stressing depth of emotion
in art and music while showcasing technical mastery in a mature
Romantic style. By the time of World War I,
though, the cultural and artistic climate had changed to such a degree
that Romanticism essentially dispersed into subsequent movements. The
final Late Romanticist figures to maintain the Romantic ideals died in
the 1940s. Though they were still widely respected, they were seen as anachronisms at that point.
Romanticism was a complex movement with a variety of viewpoints that permeated Western civilization
across the globe. The movement and its opposing ideologies mutually
shaped each other over time. After its end, Romantic thought and art
exerted a sweeping influence on art and music, speculative fiction, philosophy, politics, and environmentalism that has endured to the present day, although the modern notion of "romanticization" and the act of "romanticizing" something often has little to do with the historical movement.
Overview
Time line
For most of the Western world, Romanticism was at its peak from
approximately 1800 to 1850. The first Romantic ideas arose from an
earlier German Counter-Enlightenment movement called Sturm und Drang
(German: "Storm and Stress"). This movement directly criticized the
Enlightenment's position that humans can fully comprehend the world
through rationality alone, suggesting that intuition and emotion are key components of insight and understanding. Published in 1774, The Sorrows of Young Werther by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe began to shape the Romanticist movement and its ideals. The events and ideologies of the French Revolution
were also direct influences on the movement; many early Romantics
throughout Europe sympathized with the ideals and achievements of French
revolutionaries.
A confluence of circumstances led to Romanticism's decline in the mid-19th century, including (but not limited to) the rise of Realism and Naturalism, Charles Darwin's publishing of the Origin of Species, the transition from widespread revolution in Europe to a more conservative climate, and a shift in public consciousness to the immediate impact of technology and urbanization on the working class. By World War I, Romanticism was overshadowed by new cultural, social, and political movements, many of them hostile to the perceived illusions and preoccupations of the Romantics.
However, Romanticism has had a lasting impact on Western
civilization, and many works of art, music, and literature that embody
the Romantic ideals have been made after the end of the Romantic era.
The movement's advocacy for nature appreciation is cited as an influence
for current nature conservation efforts. The majority of film scores from the Golden Age of Hollywood were written in the lush orchestral
Romantic style, and this genre of orchestral cinematic music is still
often seen in films of the 21st century. The philosophical underpinnings
of the movement have influenced modern political theory, both among liberals and conservatives.
Purpose
Romanticism was characterized by its emphasis on emotion and individualism
as well as the glorification of the past and nature, preferring the
medieval over the classical. Romanticism was partly a reaction to the Industrial Revolution, and the prevailing ideology of the Age of Enlightenment, especially the scientific rationalization of Nature.
The movement's ideals were embodied most strongly in the visual arts, music, and literature; it also had an impact on historiography, education, chess, and the social sciences.
Romanticism prioritized the artist's unique, individual
imagination above the strictures of classical form. The movement
emphasized intense emotion as an authentic source of aesthetic experience. It granted a new importance to experiences of sympathy, awe, wonder, and terror, in part by naturalizing such emotions as responses to the "beautiful" and the "sublime".
Romantics stressed the nobility of folk art and ancient cultural practices, but also championed radical politics, unconventional behavior, and authentic spontaneity. In contrast to the rationalism and classicism of the Enlightenment, Romanticism revived medievalism and juxtaposed a pastoral conception of a more "authentic" European past with a highly critical view of recent social changes, including urbanization, brought about by the Industrial Revolution.
Romanticism lionized the achievements of "heroic"
individuals—especially artists, who began to be represented as cultural
leaders (one Romantic luminary, Percy Bysshe Shelley, described poets as the "unacknowledged legislators of the world" in his "Defence of Poetry").
Defining Romanticism
Basic characteristics
Romanticism placed the highest importance on the freedom of the artists to authentically express their sentiments and ideas. Romantics like the German painter Caspar David Friedrich
believed that an artist's emotions should dictate their formal
approach; Friedrich went as far as declaring that "the artist's feeling
is his law". The Romantic poet William Wordsworth,
thinking along similar lines, wrote that poetry should begin with "the
spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings", which the poet then
"recollect[s] in tranquility", enabling the poet to find a suitably
unique form for representing such feelings.
The Romantics never doubted that emotionally motivated art would
find suitable, harmonious modes for expressing its vital content—if,
that is, the artist steered clear of moribund conventions and
distracting precedents. Samuel Taylor Coleridge
and others thought there were natural laws the imagination of born
artists followed instinctively when these individuals were, so to speak,
"left alone" during the creative process. These "natural laws" could support a wide range of different formal
approaches: as many, perhaps, as there were individuals making
personally meaningful works of art. Many Romantics believed that works
of artistic genius were created "ex nihilo", "from nothing", without recourse to existing models. This idea is often called "romantic originality". The translator and prominent Romantic August Wilhelm Schlegel argued in his Lectures on Dramatic Arts and Letters that the most valuable quality of human nature is its tendency to diverge and diversify.
According to Isaiah Berlin,
Romanticism embodied "a new and restless spirit, seeking violently to
burst through old and cramping forms, a nervous preoccupation with
perpetually changing inner states of consciousness, a longing for the
unbounded and the indefinable, for perpetual movement and change, an
effort to return to the forgotten sources of life, a passionate effort
at self-assertion both individual and collective, a search after means
of expressing an unappeasable yearning for unattainable goals".
Romantic artists also shared a strong belief in the importance
and inspirational qualities of Nature. Romantics were distrustful of
cities and social conventions. They deplored Restoration and Enlightenment Era
artists who were largely concerned with depicting and critiquing social
relations, thereby neglecting the relationship between people and
Nature. Romantics generally believed a close connection with Nature was
beneficial for human beings, especially for individuals who broke off
from society in order to encounter the natural world by themselves.
Romantic literature was frequently written in a distinctive, personal "voice". As critic M. H. Abrams has observed, "much of romantic poetry invited the reader to identify the protagonists with the poets themselves." This quality in Romantic literature, in turn, influenced the approach
and reception of works in other media; it has seeped into everything
from critical evaluations of individual style in painting, fashion, and
music, to the auteur movement in modern filmmaking.
Etymology
The group of words with the root "Roman" in the various European
languages, such as "romance" and "Romanesque", has a complicated
history. By the 18th century, European languages—notably German, French
and Slavic languages—were using the term "Roman" in the sense of the
English word "novel", i.e. a work of popular narrative fiction. This usage derived from the term "Romance languages", which referred to vernacular (or popular) language in contrast to formal Latin. Most such novels took the form of "chivalric romance", tales of adventure, devotion and honour.
The founders of Romanticism, critics (and brothers) August Wilhelm Schlegel and Friedrich Schlegel, began to speak of romantische Poesie
("romantic poetry") in the 1790s, contrasting it with "classic" but in
terms of spirit rather than merely dating. Friedrich Schlegel wrote in
his 1800 essay Gespräch über die Poesie ("Dialogue on Poetry"):
I seek and find the romantic among
the older moderns, in Shakespeare, in Cervantes, in Italian poetry, in
that age of chivalry, love and fable, from which the phenomenon and the
word itself are derived.
The modern sense of the term spread more widely in France by its persistent use by Germaine de Staël in her De l'Allemagne (1813), recounting her travels in Germany. In England Wordsworth wrote in a preface to his poems of 1815 of the "romantic harp" and "classic lyre", but in 1820 Byron could still write, perhaps slightly disingenuously,
I perceive that in Germany, as well
as in Italy, there is a great struggle about what they call 'Classical'
and 'Romantic', terms which were not subjects of classification in
England, at least when I left it four or five years ago.
It is only from the 1820s that Romanticism certainly knew itself by its name, and in 1824 the Académie française took the wholly ineffective step of issuing a decree condemning it in literature.
Period
The period typically called Romantic varies greatly between different
countries and different artistic media or areas of thought. Margaret Drabble described it in literature as taking place "roughly between 1770 and 1848", and few dates much earlier than 1770 will be found. In English literature, M. H. Abrams
placed it between 1789, or 1798, the latter a very typical view, and
about 1830, perhaps a little later than some other critics. Others have proposed 1780–1830. In other fields and other countries the period denominated as Romantic can be considerably different; musical Romanticism,
for example, is generally regarded as only having ceased as a major
artistic force as late as 1910, but in an extreme extension the Four Last Songs of Richard Strauss are described stylistically as "Late Romantic" and were composed in 1946–1948. However, in most fields the Romantic period is said to be over by about 1850, or earlier.
The early period of the Romantic era was a time of war, with the French Revolution (1789–1799) followed by the Napoleonic Wars
until 1815. These wars, along with the political and social turmoil
that went along with them, served as the background for Romanticism. The key generation of French Romantics born between 1795 and 1805 had, in the words of one of their number, Alfred de Vigny, been "conceived between battles, attended school to the rolling of drums". According to Jacques Barzun,
there were three generations of Romantic artists. The first emerged in
the 1790s and 1800s, the second in the 1820s, and the third later in the
century.
Context and place in history
The precise characterization and specific definition of Romanticism has been the subject of debate in the fields of intellectual history and literary history throughout the 20th century, without any great measure of consensus emerging. That it was part of the Counter-Enlightenment, a reaction against the Age of Enlightenment, is generally accepted in current scholarship. Its relationship to the French Revolution,
which began in 1789 in the very early stages of the period, is clearly
important, but highly variable depending on geography and individual
reactions. Most Romantics can be said to be broadly progressive in their
views, but a considerable number always had, or developed, a wide range
of conservative views, and nationalism was in many countries strongly associated with Romanticism, as discussed in detail below.
In philosophy and the history of ideas, Romanticism was seen by Isaiah
Berlin as disrupting for over a century the classic Western traditions
of rationality and the idea of moral absolutes and agreed values,
leading "to something like the melting away of the very notion of
objective truth", and hence not only to nationalism, but also fascism and totalitarianism, with a gradual recovery coming only after World War II. For the Romantics, Berlin says,
in
the realm of ethics, politics, aesthetics it was the authenticity and
sincerity of the pursuit of inner goals that mattered; this applied
equally to individuals and groups—states, nations, movements. This is
most evident in the aesthetics of romanticism, where the notion of
eternal models, a Platonic vision of ideal beauty, which the artist
seeks to convey, however imperfectly, on canvas or in sound, is replaced
by a passionate belief in spiritual freedom, individual creativity. The
painter, the poet, the composer do not hold up a mirror to nature,
however ideal, but invent; they do not imitate (the doctrine of
mimesis), but create not merely the means but the goals that they
pursue; these goals represent the self-expression of the artist's own
unique, inner vision, to set aside which in response to the demands of
some "external" voice—church, state, public opinion, family friends,
arbiters of taste—is an act of betrayal of what alone justifies their
existence for those who are in any sense creative.
Arthur Lovejoy
attempted to demonstrate the difficulty of defining Romanticism in his
seminal article "On the Discrimination of Romanticisms" in his Essays in the History of Ideas (1948); some scholars see Romanticism as essentially continuous with the present, some like Robert Hughes see in it the inaugural moment of modernity, while writers of the 19th Century such as Chateaubriand, Novalis and Samuel Taylor Coleridge saw it as the beginning of a tradition of resistance to Enlightenment rationalism—a "Counter-Enlightenment"—to be associated most closely with German Romanticism. Another early definition comes from Charles Baudelaire: "Romanticism is precisely situated neither in choice of subject nor exact truth, but in the way of feeling."
The end of the Romantic era is marked in some areas by a new style of Realism, which affected literature, especially the novel and drama, painting, and even music, through Verismo opera. This movement was led by France, with Balzac and Flaubert in literature and Courbet in painting; Stendhal and Goya
were important precursors of Realism in their respective media.
However, Romantic styles, now often representing the established and
safe style against which Realists rebelled, continued to flourish in
many fields for the rest of the century and beyond. In music such works
from after about 1850 are referred to by some writers as "Late Romantic"
and by others as "Neoromantic" or "Postromantic", but other fields do
not usually use these terms; in English literature and painting the
convenient term "Victorian" avoids having to characterise the period
further.
In northern Europe, the Early Romantic visionary optimism and
belief that the world was in the process of great change and improvement
had largely vanished, and some art became more conventionally political
and polemical as its creators engaged polemically with the world as it
was. Elsewhere, including in very different ways the United States and
Russia, feelings that great change was underway or just about to come
were still possible. Displays of intense emotion in art remained
prominent, as did the exotic and historical settings pioneered by the
Romantics, but experimentation with form and technique was generally
reduced, often replaced with meticulous technique, as in the poems of
Tennyson or many paintings. If not realist, late 19th-century art was
often extremely detailed, and pride was taken in adding authentic
details in a way that earlier Romantics did not trouble with. Many
Romantic ideas about the nature and purpose of art, above all the
pre-eminent importance of originality, remained important for later
generations, and often underlie modern views, despite opposition from
theorists.
In literature, Romanticism found recurrent themes in the evocation or criticism of the past, the cult of "sensibility"
with its emphasis on women and children, the isolation of the artist or
narrator, and respect for nature. Furthermore, several romantic
authors, such as Edgar Allan Poe, Charles Maturin and Nathaniel Hawthorne, based their writings on the supernatural/occult and human psychology. Romanticism tended to regard satire as something unworthy of serious attention, a view still influential today. The Romantic movement in literature was preceded by the Enlightenment and succeeded by Realism.
The precursors of Romanticism in English poetry go back to the middle of the 18th century, including figures such as Joseph Warton (headmaster at Winchester College) and his brother Thomas Warton, Professor of Poetry at Oxford University. Joseph maintained that invention and imagination were the chief qualities of a poet. The Scottish poet James Macpherson influenced the early development of Romanticism with the international success of his Ossian cycle of poems published in 1762, inspiring both Goethe and the young Walter Scott. Thomas Chatterton is generally considered the first Romantic poet in English. Both Chatterton and Macpherson's work involved elements of fraud, as
what they claimed was earlier literature that they had discovered or
compiled was, in fact, entirely their own work. The Gothic novel, beginning with Horace Walpole's The Castle of Otranto
(1764), was an important precursor of one strain of Romanticism, with a
delight in horror and threat, and exotic picturesque settings, matched
in Walpole's case by his role in the early revival of Gothic architecture. Tristram Shandy, a novel by Laurence Sterne (1759–1767), introduced a whimsical version of the anti-rational sentimental novel to the English literary public.
Important motifs in German Romanticism are travelling, nature, for example the German Forest, and Germanic myths. The later German Romanticism of, for example E. T. A. Hoffmann's Der Sandmann (The Sandman), 1817, and Joseph Freiherr von Eichendorff's Das Marmorbild (The Marble Statue), 1819, was darker in its motifs and has gothic
elements. The significance to Romanticism of childhood innocence, the
importance of imagination, and racial theories all combined to give an
unprecedented importance to folk literature, non-classical mythology and children's literature, above all in Germany. Brentano and von Arnim were significant literary figures who together published Des Knaben Wunderhorn ("The Boy's Magic Horn" or cornucopia), a collection of versified folk tales, in 1806–1808. The first collection of Grimms' Fairy Tales by the Brothers Grimm was published in 1812.[48] Unlike the much later work of Hans Christian Andersen, who was publishing his invented tales in Danish from 1835, these German works were at least mainly based on collected folk tales,
and the Grimms remained true to the style of the telling in their early
editions, though later rewriting some parts. One of the brothers, Jacob, published in 1835 Deutsche Mythologie, a long academic work on Germanic mythology. Another strain is exemplified by Schiller's highly emotional language and the depiction of physical violence in his play The Robbers of 1781.
In English literature, the key figures of the Romantic movement are considered to be the group of poets including William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, John Keats, Lord Byron, Percy Bysshe Shelley and the much older William Blake, followed later by the isolated figure of John Clare; also such novelists as Walter Scott from Scotland and Mary Shelley, and the essayists William Hazlitt and Charles Lamb. The publication in 1798 of Lyrical Ballads, with many of the finest poems by Wordsworth and Coleridge, is often held to mark the start of the movement.[50].The majority of the poems in Lyrical Ballards were by Wordsworth, and many dealt with the lives of the poor in his native Lake District, or his feelings about nature—which he more fully developed in his long poem The Prelude, never published in his lifetime. The longest poem in the Lyrical Ballads was Coleridge's The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,
which showed the Gothic side of English Romanticism, and the exotic
settings that many works featured. In the period when the two were
writing, the Lake Poets were widely regarded as a marginal group of radicals, though they were supported by the critic and writer William Hazlitt and others.
In contrast, Lord Byron and Walter Scott
achieved enormous fame and influence throughout Europe with works
exploiting the violence and drama of their exotic and historical
settings; Goethe called Byron "undoubtedly the greatest genius of our century". Scott achieved immediate success with his long narrative poem The Lay of the Last Minstrel in 1805, followed by the full epic poemMarmion in 1808. Both were set in the distant Scottish past, already evoked in Ossian; Romanticism and Scotland were to have a long and fruitful partnership. Byron had equal success with the first part of Childe Harold's Pilgrimage in 1812, followed by four "Turkish tales", all in the form of long poems, starting with The Giaour in 1813, drawing from his Grand Tour, which had reached Ottoman Europe, and orientalizing the themes of the Gothic novel in verse. These featured different variations of the "Byronic hero", and his own life contributed a further version. Scott meanwhile was effectively inventing the historical novel, beginning in 1814 with Waverley, set in the 1745 Jacobite rising, which was a highly profitable success, followed by over 20 further Waverley Novels over the next 17 years, with settings going back to the Crusades that he had researched to a degree that was new in literature.
In contrast to Germany, Romanticism in English literature had
little connection with nationalism, and the Romantics were often
regarded with suspicion for the sympathy many felt for the ideals of the
French Revolution,
whose collapse and replacement with the dictatorship of Napoleon was,
as elsewhere in Europe, a shock to the movement. Though his novels
celebrated Scottish identity and history, Scott was politically a firm
Unionist, but admitted to Jacobite sympathies. Several Romantics spent
much time abroad, and a famous stay on Lake Geneva with Byron and Shelley in 1816 produced the hugely influential novel Frankenstein by Shelley's wife-to-be Mary Shelley and the novellaThe Vampyre by Byron's doctor John William Polidori. The lyrics of Robert Burns in Scotland, and Thomas Moore
from Ireland, reflected in different ways their countries and the
Romantic interest in folk literature, but neither had a fully Romantic
approach to life or their work.
Though they have modern critical champions such as György Lukács,
Scott's novels are today more likely to be experienced in the form of
the many operas that composers continued to base on them over the
following decades, such as Donizetti's Lucia di Lammermoor and Vincenzo Bellini's I puritani
(both 1835). Byron is now most highly regarded for his short lyrics and
his generally unromantic prose writings, especially his letters, and
his unfinished satireDon Juan. Unlike many Romantics, Byron's widely publicised personal life appeared
to match his work, and his death at 36 in 1824 from disease when
helping the Greek War of Independence appeared from a distance to be a suitably Romantic end, entrenching his legend. Keats in 1821 and Shelley in 1822 both died in Italy, Blake (at almost
70) in 1827, and Coleridge largely ceased to write in the 1820s.
Wordsworth was by 1820 respectable and highly regarded, holding a
government sinecure,
but wrote relatively little. In the discussion of English literature,
the Romantic period is often regarded as finishing around the 1820s, or
sometimes even earlier, although many authors of the succeeding decades
were no less committed to Romantic values.
The most significant novelist in English during the peak Romantic period, other than Walter Scott, was Jane Austen,
whose essentially conservative world-view had little in common with her
Romantic contemporaries, retaining a strong belief in decorum and
social rules, though critics such as Claudia L. Johnson have detected tremors under the surface of many works, such as Northanger Abbey (1817), Mansfield Park (1814) and Persuasion (1817). But around the mid-century the undoubtedly Romantic novels of the Yorkshire-based Brontë family appeared, most notably Charlotte's Jane Eyre and Emily's Wuthering Heights,
both published in 1847, which also introduced more Gothic themes. While
these two novels were written and published after the Romantic period
is said to have ended, their novels were heavily influenced by Romantic
literature they had read as children.
Byron, Keats, and Shelley all wrote for the stage, but with little success in England, with Shelley's The Cenci
perhaps the best work produced, though that was not played in a public
theatre in England until a century after his death. Byron's plays, along
with dramatizations of his poems and Scott's novels, were much more
popular on the Continent, and especially in France, and through these
versions several were turned into operas, many still performed today. If
contemporary poets had little success on the stage, the period was a
legendary one for performances of Shakespeare,
and went some way to restoring his original texts and removing the
Augustan "improvements" to them. The greatest actor of the period, Edmund Kean, restored the tragic ending to King Lear; Coleridge said that "Seeing him act was like reading Shakespeare by flashes of lightning."
Although after union with England
in 1707 Scotland increasingly adopted English language and wider
cultural norms, its literature developed a distinct national identity
and began to enjoy an international reputation. Allan Ramsay
(1686–1758) laid the foundations of a reawakening of interest in older
Scottish literature, as well as leading the trend for pastoral poetry,
helping to develop the Habbie stanza as a poetic form. James Macpherson
(1736–1796) was the first Scottish poet to gain an international
reputation. Claiming to have found poetry written by the ancient bard Ossian, he published translations that acquired international popularity, being proclaimed as a Celtic equivalent of the Classicalepics. Fingal,
written in 1762, was speedily translated into many European languages,
and its appreciation of natural beauty and treatment of the ancient
legend has been credited more than any single work with bringing about
the Romantic movement in European, and especially in German literature,
through its influence on Johann Gottfried von Herder and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. It was also popularised in France by figures that included Napoleon.[61] Eventually it became clear that the poems were not direct translations from Scottish Gaelic, but flowery adaptations made to suit the aesthetic expectations of his audience.
Robert Burns (1759–96) and Walter Scott (1771–1832) were highly influenced by the Ossian cycle. Burns, an Ayrshire poet and lyricist, is widely regarded as the national poet of Scotland and a major influence on the Romantic movement. His poem (and song) "Auld Lang Syne" is often sung at Hogmanay (the last day of the year), and "Scots Wha Hae" served for a long time as an unofficial national anthem of the country. Scott began as a poet and also collected and published Scottish ballads. His first prose work, Waverley in 1814, is often called the first historical novel. It launched a highly successful career, with other historical novels such as Rob Roy (1817), The Heart of Midlothian (1818) and Ivanhoe
(1820). Scott probably did more than any other figure to define and
popularise Scottish cultural identity in the nineteenth century. Other major literary figures connected with Romanticism include the poets and novelists James Hogg (1770–1835), Allan Cunningham (1784–1842) and John Galt (1779–1839).
Scotland was also the location of two of the most important literary magazines of the era, The Edinburgh Review (founded in 1802) and Blackwood's Magazine (founded in 1817), which had a major impact on the development of British literature and drama in the era of Romanticism. Ian Duncan and Alex Benchimol suggest that publications like the novels
of Scott and these magazines were part of a highly dynamic Scottish
Romanticism that by the early nineteenth century, caused Edinburgh to
emerge as the cultural capital of Britain and become central to a wider
formation of a "British Isles nationalism".
Scottish "national drama" emerged in the early 1800s, as plays
with specifically Scottish themes began to dominate the Scottish stage.
Theatres had been discouraged by the Church of Scotland
and fears of Jacobite assemblies. In the later eighteenth century, many
plays were written for and performed by small amateur companies and
were not published and so most have been lost. Towards the end of the
century there were "closet dramas", primarily designed to be read, rather than performed, including work by Scott, Hogg, Galt and Joanna Baillie (1762–1851), often influenced by the ballad tradition and Gothic Romanticism.
Romanticism was relatively late in developing in French literature,
more so than in the visual arts. The 18th-century precursor to
Romanticism, the cult of sensibility, had become associated with the Ancien Régime,
and the French Revolution had been more of an inspiration to foreign
writers than those experiencing it at first-hand. The first major figure
was François-René de Chateaubriand,
an aristocrat who had remained a royalist throughout the Revolution,
and returned to France from exile in England and America under Napoleon,
with whose regime he had an uneasy relationship. His writings, all in
prose, included some fiction, such as his influential novella of exile René
(1802), which anticipated Byron in its alienated hero, but mostly
contemporary history and politics, his travels, a defence of religion
and the medieval spirit (Génie du christianisme, 1802), and finally in the 1830s and 1840s his enormous autobiographyMémoires d'Outre-Tombe ("Memoirs from beyond the grave").
The "battle of Hernani" was fought nightly at the theatre in 1830: lithograph, by J. J. Grandville
After the Bourbon Restoration, French Romanticism developed in the lively world of Parisian theatre, with productions of Shakespeare,
Schiller (in France a key Romantic author), and adaptations of Scott
and Byron alongside French authors, several of whom began to write in
the late 1820s. Cliques of pro- and anti-Romantics developed, and
productions were often accompanied by raucous vocalizing by the two
sides, including the shouted assertion by one theatregoer in 1822 that
"Shakespeare, c'est l'aide-de-camp de Wellington" ("Shakespeare is Wellington's aide-de-camp"). Alexandre Dumas began as a dramatist, with a series of successes beginning with Henri III et sa cour (1829) before turning to novels that were mostly historical adventures somewhat in the manner of Scott, most famously The Three Musketeers and The Count of Monte Cristo, both of 1844. Victor Hugo published as a poet in the 1820s before achieving success on the stage with Hernani—a historical drama in a quasi-Shakespearean style that had famously riotous performances on its first run in 1830. Like Dumas, Hugo is best known for his novels, and was already writing The Hunchback of Notre-Dame
(1831), one of the best known works, which became a paradigm of the
French Romantic movement. The preface to his unperformed play Cromwell gives an important manifesto of French Romanticism, stating that "there are no rules, or models". The career of Prosper Mérimée followed a similar pattern; he is now best known as the originator of the story of Carmen,
with his novella published 1845. Alfred de Vigny remains best known as a
dramatist, with his play on the life of the English poet Chatterton (1835) perhaps his best work. George Sand was a central figure of the Parisian literary scene, famous both for her novels and criticism and her affairs with Chopin and several others; she too was inspired by the theatre, and wrote works to be staged at her private estate.
Stendhal
is today probably the most highly regarded French novelist of the
period, but he stands in a complex relation with Romanticism, and is
notable for his penetrating psychological insight into his characters
and his realism, qualities rarely prominent in Romantic fiction. As a
survivor of the French retreat from Moscow
in 1812, fantasies of heroism and adventure had little appeal for him,
and like Goya he is often seen as a forerunner of Realism. His most
important works are Le Rouge et le Noir (The Red and the Black, 1830) and La Chartreuse de Parme (The Charterhouse of Parma, 1839).
Romanticism in Poland is often taken to begin with the publication of Adam Mickiewicz's first poems in 1822, and end with the crushing of the January Uprising of 1863 against the Russians. It was strongly marked by interest in Polish history. Polish Romanticism revived the old "Sarmatism" traditions of the szlachta
or Polish nobility. Old traditions and customs were revived and
portrayed in a positive light in the Polish messianic movement and in
works of great Polish poets such as Adam Mickiewicz (Pan Tadeusz), Juliusz Słowacki and Zygmunt Krasiński. This close connection between Polish Romanticism and Polish history became one of the defining qualities of the literature of Polish Romanticism
period, differentiating it from that of other countries. They had not
suffered the loss of national statehood as was the case with Poland. Influenced by the general spirit and main ideas of European
Romanticism, the literature of Polish Romanticism is unique, as many
scholars have pointed out, in having developed largely outside of Poland
and in its emphatic focus upon the issue of Polish nationalism.
The Polish intelligentsia, along with leading members of its
government, left Poland in the early 1830s, during what is referred to
as the "Great Emigration", resettling in France, Germany, Great Britain, Turkey, and the United States.
Their art featured emotionalism and irrationality, fantasy and imagination, personality cults, folklore and country life, and the propagation of ideals of freedom. In the second period, many of the Polish Romantics
worked abroad, often banished from Poland by the occupying powers due
to their politically subversive ideas. Their work became increasingly
dominated by the ideals of political struggle for freedom and their
country's sovereignty. Elements of mysticism became more prominent. There developed the idea of the poeta wieszcz (the prophet). The wieszcz (bard) functioned as spiritual leader to the nation fighting for its independence. The most notable poet so recognized was Adam Mickiewicz.
Zygmunt Krasiński
also wrote to inspire political and religious hope in his countrymen.
Unlike his predecessors, who called for victory at whatever price in
Poland's struggle against Russia, Krasinski emphasized Poland's spiritual
role in its fight for independence, advocating an intellectual rather
than a military superiority. His works best exemplify the Messianic movement in Poland: in two early dramas, Nie-boska komedia (1835; The Undivine Comedy) and Irydion (1836; Iridion), as well as in the later Psalmy przyszłości (1845), he asserted that Poland was the Christ of Europe: specifically chosen by God to carry the world's burdens, to suffer, and eventually be resurrected.
Influenced heavily by Lord Byron, Lermontov sought to explore the
Romantic emphasis on metaphysical discontent with society and self,
while Tyutchev's poems often described scenes of nature or passions of
love. Tyutchev commonly operated with such categories as night and day,
north and south, dream and reality, cosmos and chaos, and the still
world of winter and spring teeming with life. Baratynsky's style was
fairly classical in nature, dwelling on the models of the previous
century.
There are scholars who consider Spanish Romanticism to be
Proto-Existentialism because it is more anguished than the movement in
other European countries. Foster et al., for example, say that the work
of Spain's writers such as Espronceda, Larra, and other writers in the
19th century demonstrated a "metaphysical crisis". These observers put more weight on the link between the 19th-century
Spanish writers with the existentialist movement that emerged
immediately after. According to Richard Caldwell, the writers that we
now identify with Spain's romanticism were actually precursors to those
who galvanized the literary movement that emerged in the 1920s. This notion is the subject of debate for there are authors who stress
that Spain's romanticism is one of the earliest in Europe, while some assert that Spain really had no period of literary romanticism. This controversy underscores a certain uniqueness to Spanish Romanticism in comparison to its European counterparts.
Portugal
Portuguese poet, novelist, politician and playwright Almeida Garrett (1799–1854)
Romanticism began in Portugal with the publication of the poem Camões (1825), by Almeida Garrett, who was raised by his uncle D. Alexandre, bishop of Angra, in the precepts of Neoclassicism, which can be observed in his early work. The author himself confesses (in Camões' preface) that he voluntarily refused to follow the principles of epic poetry enunciated by Aristotle in his Poetics, as he did the same to Horace's Ars Poetica. Almeida Garrett had participated in the 1820 Liberal Revolution, which caused him to exile himself in England in 1823 and then in France, after the Vila-Francada. While living in Great Britain, he had contacts with the Romantic movement and read authors such as Shakespeare, Scott, Ossian, Byron, Hugo, Lamartine and de Staël, at the same time visiting feudal castles and ruins of Gothic churches and abbeys, which would be reflected in his writings. In 1838, he presented Um Auto de Gil Vicente ("A Play by Gil Vicente"), in an attempt to create a new national theatre, free of Greco-Roman and foreign influence. But his masterpiece would be Frei Luís de Sousa
(1843), named by himself as a "Romantic drama" and it was acclaimed as
an exceptional work, dealing with themes as national independence,
faith, justice and love. He was also deeply interested in Portuguese
folkloric verse, which resulted in the publication of Romanceiro
("Traditional Portuguese Ballads") (1843), that recollect a great number
of ancient popular ballads, known as "romances" or "rimances", in redondilha maior verse form, that contained stories of chivalry, life of saints, crusades, courtly love, etc. He wrote the novels Viagens na Minha Terra, O Arco de Sant'Ana and Helena.
Alexandre Herculano
is, alongside Almeida Garrett, one of the founders of Portuguese
Romanticism. He too was forced to exile to Great Britain and France
because of his liberal ideals. All of his poetry and prose are (unlike Almeida Garrett's) entirely Romantic, rejecting Greco-Roman myth and history. He sought inspiration in medieval Portuguese poems and chronicles as in the Bible.
His output is vast and covers many different genres, such as historical
essays, poetry, novels, opuscules and theatre, where he brings back a
whole world of Portuguese legends, tradition and history, especially in Eurico, o Presbítero ("Eurico, the Priest") and Lendas e Narrativas ("Legends and Narratives"). His work was influenced by Chateaubriand, Schiller, Klopstock, Walter Scott and the Old Testament Psalms.
António Feliciano de Castilho made the case for Ultra-Romanticism, publishing the poems A Noite no Castelo ("Night in the Castle") and Os Ciúmes do Bardo ("The Jealousy of the Bard"), both in 1836, and the drama Camões.
He became an unquestionable master for successive Ultra-Romantic
generations, whose influence would not be challenged until the famous
Coimbra Question. He also created polemics by translating Goethe's Faust
without knowing German, but using French versions of the play. Other
notable figures of Portuguese Romanticism are the famous novelists Camilo Castelo Branco and Júlio Dinis, and Soares de Passos, Bulhão Pato and Pinheiro Chagas.
Romanticism in Italian literature was initially a minor movement although some important works were later produced; it began officially in 1816 when Germaine de Staël wrote an article in the journal Biblioteca italiana called "On the manner and usefulness of translations", inviting Italian people to reject Neoclassicism and to study new authors from other countries.
A
print exemplifying the contrast between neoclassical vs. romantic
styles of landscape and architecture (or the "Grecian" and the "Gothic"
as they are termed here), 1816La vuelta del malón by Ángel Della Valle (1892)
Another important milestone in Argentine Romantic literature is Amalia by José Mármol, which is a love story set in the context of the Rosas' dictatorial regime.
Brazilian Romanticism is characterized and divided in three
different periods. The first period is focused on the creation of a
sense of national identity, using the ideal of the heroic Indian. Some
examples include José de Alencar, who wrote Iracema and O Guarani, and Gonçalves Dias, renowned by the poem "Canção do Exílio" (Song of the Exile). The second period, sometimes called Ultra-Romanticism,
is marked by a profound influence of European themes and traditions,
involving the melancholy, sadness and despair related to unobtainable
love. Goethe and Lord Byron are commonly quoted in these works. Some of
the most notable authors of this phase are Álvares de Azevedo, Casimiro de Abreu, Fagundes Varela and Junqueira Freire. The third period is marked by social poetry, especially the abolitionist movement, and it includes Castro Alves, Tobias Barreto and Pedro Luís Pereira de Sousa.
Dennis Malone Carter, Decatur Boarding the Tripolitan Gunboat, 1878. Romanticist vision of the Battle of Tripoli, during the First Barbary War. It represents the moment when the American war hero Stephen Decatur was fighting hand-to-hand against the Muslim pirate captain.
Influence of European Romanticism on American writers
The European Romantic movement reached America in the early 19th
century. American Romanticism was just as multifaceted and
individualistic as it was in Europe. Like the Europeans, the American
Romantics demonstrated a high level of moral enthusiasm, commitment to
individualism and the unfolding of the self, an emphasis on intuitive
perception, and the assumption that the natural world was inherently
good, while human society was filled with corruption.
Romanticism became popular in American politics, philosophy and
art. The movement appealed to the revolutionary spirit of America as
well as to those longing to break free of the strict religious
traditions of early settlement. The Romantics rejected rationalism and
religious intellect. It appealed to those in opposition of Calvinism,
which includes the belief that the destiny of each individual is
preordained. The Romantic movement gave rise to New EnglandTranscendentalism,
which portrayed a less restrictive relationship between God and
Universe. The new philosophy presented the individual with a more
personal relationship with God. Transcendentalism and Romanticism
appealed to Americans in a similar fashion, for both privileged feeling
over reason, individual freedom of expression over the restraints of
tradition and custom. It often involved a rapturous response to nature.
It encouraged the rejection of harsh, rigid Calvinism, and promised a
new blossoming of American culture.
American Romanticism embraced the individual and rebelled against
the confinement of neoclassicism and religious tradition. The Romantic
movement in America created a new literary genre that continues to
influence American writers. Novels, short stories, and poems replaced
the sermons and manifestos of yore. Romantic literature was personal,
intense, and portrayed more emotion than ever seen in neoclassical
literature. America's preoccupation with freedom became a great source
of motivation for Romantic writers as many were delighted in free
expression and emotion without so much fear of ridicule and controversy.
They also put more effort into the psychological development of their
characters, and the main characters typically displayed extremes of
sensitivity and excitement.
The works of the Romantic era also differed from preceding works
in that they spoke to a wider audience, partly reflecting the greater
distribution of books as costs came down during the period.
Romantic architecture appeared in the late 18th century in a reaction against the rigid forms of neoclassical architecture.
Romantic architecture reached its peak in the mid-19th century, and
continued to appear until the end of the 19th century. It was designed
to evoke an emotional reaction, either respect for tradition or
nostalgia for a bucolic past. It was frequently inspired by the
architecture of the Middle Ages, especially Gothic architecture, it was strongly influenced by romanticism in literature, particularly the historical novels of Victor Hugo and Walter Scott. It sometimes moved into the domain of eclecticism, with features assembled from different historic periods and regions of the world.
Gothic Revival architecture
was a popular variant of the romantic style, particularly in the
construction of churches, Cathedrals, and university buildings. Notable
examples include the completion of Cologne Cathedral in Germany, by Karl Friedrich Schinkel.
The cathedral's construction began in 1248, but was halted in 1473. The
original plans for the façade were discovered in 1840, and it was
decided to recommence. Schinkel followed the original design as much as
possible, but he also used modern construction technology, including an
iron frame for the roof. The building was finished in 1880.
In France, one of the earliest examples of romantic architecture is the Hameau de la Reine, the small rustic hamlet created at the Palace of Versailles for Queen Marie Antoinette between 1783 and 1785 by the royal architect Richard Mique with the help of the romantic painter Hubert Robert. It consisted of twelve structures, ten of which still exist, in the style of villages in Normandy.
It was designed for the Queen and her friends to amuse themselves by
playing at being peasants, and included a farmhouse with a dairy, a
mill, a boudoir, a pigeon loft, a tower in the form of a lighthouse from
which one could fish in the pond, a belvedere, a cascade and grotto,
and a luxuriously furnished cottage with a billiard room for the Queen.
French romantic architecture in the 19th century was strongly influenced by two writers; Victor Hugo, whose novel The Hunchback of Notre Dame inspired a resurgence in interest in the Middle Ages; and Prosper Mérimée,
who wrote celebrated romantic novels and short stories and was also the
first head of the commission of Historic Monuments in France,
responsible for publicizing and restoring (and sometimes romanticizing)
many French cathedrals and monuments desecrated and ruined after the French Revolution. His projects were carried out by the architect Eugène Viollet-le-Duc. These included the restoration (sometimes creative) of the Cathedral of Notre Dame de Paris, the fortified city of Carcassonne, and the unfinished medieval Château de Pierrefonds.
The romantic style continued in the second half of the 19th century. The Palais Garnier, the Paris opera house designed by Charles Garnier
was a highly romantic and eclectic combination of artistic styles.
Another notable example of late 19th century romanticism is the Basilica of Sacré-Cœur by Paul Abadie, who drew upon the model of Byzantine architecture for his elongated domes (1875–1914).
Thomas Jones, The Bard, 1774, a prophetic combination of Romanticism and nationalism by the Welsh artist
In the visual arts, Romanticism first showed itself in landscape painting, where from as early as the 1760s British artists began to turn to wilder landscapes and storms, and Gothic architecture. One of the most well known paintings of the era; The Bard by Thomas Jones uses Wales as a setting. Caspar David Friedrich and J. M. W. Turner
were born less than a year apart in 1774 and 1775 respectively and were
to take German and English landscape painting to their extremes of
Romanticism, but both their artistic sensibilities were formed when
forms of Romanticism was already strongly present in art. John Constable,
born in 1776, stayed closer to the English landscape tradition, but in
his largest "six-footers" insisted on the heroic status of a patch of
the working countryside where he had grown up—challenging the
traditional hierarchy of genres,
which relegated landscape painting to a low status. Turner also painted
very large landscapes, and above all, seascapes. Some of these large
paintings had contemporary settings and staffage, but others had small figures that turned the work into history painting in the manner of Claude Lorrain, like Salvator Rosa, a late Baroque
artist whose landscapes had elements that Romantic painters repeatedly
turned to. Friedrich often used single figures, or features like
crosses, set alone amidst a huge landscape, "making them images of the
transitoriness of human life and the premonition of death".
Other groups of artists expressed feelings that verged on the
mystical, many largely abandoning classical drawing and proportions.
These included William Blake and Samuel Palmer and the other members of the Ancients in England, and in Germany Philipp Otto Runge.
Like Friedrich, none of these artists had significant influence after
their deaths for the rest of the 19th century, and were 20th-century
rediscoveries from obscurity, though Blake was always known as a poet,
and Norway's leading painter Johan Christian Dahl was heavily influenced by Friedrich. The Rome-based Nazarene movement
of German artists, active from 1810, took a very different path,
concentrating on medievalizing history paintings with religious and
nationalist themes.
The arrival of Romanticism in French art was delayed by the strong hold of Neoclassicism on the academies, but from the Napoleonic period it became increasingly popular, initially in the form of history paintings propagandising for the new regime, of which Girodet's Ossian receiving the Ghosts of the French Heroes, for Napoleon's Château de Malmaison, was one of the earliest. Girodet's old teacher David
was puzzled and disappointed by his pupil's direction, saying: "Either
Girodet is mad or I no longer know anything of the art of painting". A new generation of the French school, developed personal Romantic styles, though still concentrating on history painting with a political message. Théodore Géricault (1791–1824) had his first success with The Charging Chasseur, a heroic military figure derived from Rubens, at the Paris Salon of 1812 in the years of the Empire, but his next major completed work, The Raft of the Medusa
of 1818–19, remains the greatest achievement of the Romantic history
painting, which in its day had a powerful anti-government message.
Eugène Delacroix (1798–1863) made his first Salon hits with The Barque of Dante (1822), The Massacre at Chios (1824) and Death of Sardanapalus
(1827). The second was a scene from the Greek War of Independence,
completed the year Byron died there, and the last was a scene from one
of Byron's plays. With Shakespeare, Byron was to provide the subject
matter for many other works of Delacroix, who also spent long periods in
North Africa, painting colourful scenes of mounted Arab warriors. His Liberty Leading the People (1830) remains, with the Medusa, one of the best-known works of French Romantic painting. Both reflected current events, and increasingly "history painting",
literally "story painting", a phrase dating back to the Italian
Renaissance meaning the painting of subjects with groups of figures,
long considered the highest and most difficult form of art, did indeed
become the painting of historical scenes, rather than those from
religion or mythology.
Francisco Goya was called "the last great painter in whose art thought and observation were balanced and combined to form a faultless unity". But the extent to which he was a Romantic is a complex question. In
Spain, there was still a struggle to introduce the values of the Enlightenment,
in which Goya saw himself as a participant. The demonic and
anti-rational monsters thrown up by his imagination are only
superficially similar to those of the Gothic fantasies of northern
Europe, and in many ways he remained wedded to the classicism and
realism of his training, as well as looking forward to the Realism of
the later 19th century. But he, more than any other artist of the period, exemplified the
Romantic values of the expression of the artist's feelings and his
personal imaginative world. He also shared with many of the Romantic painters a more free handling
of paint, emphasized in the new prominence of the brushstroke and impasto, which tended to be repressed in neoclassicism under a self-effacing finish.
Sculpture
remained largely impervious to Romanticism, probably partly for
technical reasons, as the most prestigious material of the day, marble,
does not lend itself to expansive gestures. The leading sculptors in
Europe, Antonio Canova and Bertel Thorvaldsen,
were both based in Rome and firm Neoclassicists, not at all tempted to
allow influence from medieval sculpture, which would have been one
possible approach to Romantic sculpture. When it did develop, true
Romantic sculpture—with the exception of a few artists such as Rudolf Maison—rather oddly was missing in Germany, and mainly found in France, with François Rude, best known from his group of the 1830s from the Arc de Triomphe in Paris, David d'Angers, and Auguste Préault. Préault's plaster relief entitled Slaughter, which represented the horrors of wars with exacerbated passion, caused so much scandal at the Salon of 1834 that Préault was banned from this official annual exhibition for nearly twenty years. In Italy, the most important Romantic sculptor was Lorenzo Bartolini.
George Stubbs, A Lion Attacking a Horse (1770), oil on canvas, 38 in. x 49 1/2in., Yale Center for British Art
In France, historical painting on idealized medieval and Renaissance themes is known as the style Troubadour, a term with no equivalent for other countries, though the same trends occurred there. Delacroix, Ingres and Richard Parkes Bonington all worked in this style, as did lesser specialists such as Pierre-Henri Révoil (1776–1842) and Fleury-François Richard
(1777–1852). Their pictures are often small, and feature intimate
private and anecdotal moments, as well as those of high drama. The lives
of great artists such as Raphael were commemorated on equal terms with those of rulers, and fictional characters were also depicted. Fleury-Richard's Valentine of Milan weeping for the death of her husband, shown in the Paris Salon of 1802,
marked the arrival of the style, which lasted until the mid-century,
before being subsumed into the increasingly academic history painting of
artists like Paul Delaroche.
Another trend was for very large apocalyptic history paintings, often
combining extreme natural events, or divine wrath, with human disaster,
attempting to outdo The Raft of the Medusa, and now often drawing comparisons with effects from Hollywood. The leading English artist in the style was John Martin,
whose tiny figures were dwarfed by enormous earthquakes and storms, and
worked his way through the biblical disasters, and those to come in the
final days. Other works such as Delacroix's Death of Sardanapalus included larger figures, and these often drew heavily on earlier artists, especially Poussin and Rubens, with extra emotionalism and special effects.
Elsewhere in Europe, leading artists adopted Romantic styles: in Russia there were the portraitists Orest Kiprensky and Vasily Tropinin, with Ivan Aivazovsky specializing in marine painting, and in Norway Hans Gude painted scenes of fjords. In Poland, Piotr Michałowski (1800–1855) used a Romantic style in paintings particularly relating to the history of Napoleonic Wars. In Italy Francesco Hayez (1791–1882) was the leading artist of Romanticism in mid-19th-century Milan.
His long, prolific and extremely successful career saw him begin as a
Neoclassical painter, pass right through the Romantic period, and emerge
at the other end as a sentimental painter of young women. His Romantic
period included many historical pieces of "Troubadour" tendencies, but
on a very large scale, that are heavily influenced by Gian Battista Tiepolo and other late Baroque Italian masters.
Literary Romanticism had its counterpart in the American visual arts, most especially in the exaltation of an untamed American landscape found in the paintings of the Hudson River School. Painters like Thomas Cole, Albert Bierstadt and Frederic Edwin Church
and others often expressed Romantic themes in their paintings. They
sometimes depicted ancient ruins of the old world, such as in Fredric
Edwin Church's piece Sunrise in Syria. These works reflected the
Gothic feelings of death and decay. They also show the Romantic ideal
that Nature is powerful and will eventually overcome the transient
creations of men. More often, they worked to distinguish themselves from
their European counterparts by depicting uniquely American scenes and
landscapes. This idea of an American identity in the art world is
reflected in W. C. Bryant's poem To Cole, the Painter, Departing for Europe, where Bryant encourages Cole to remember the powerful scenes that can only be found in America.
Some American paintings (such as Albert Bierstadt's The Rocky Mountains, Lander's Peak) promote the literary idea of the "noble savage" by portraying idealized Native Americans living in harmony with the natural world. Thomas Cole's paintings tend towards allegory, explicit in The Voyage of Life series painted in the early 1840s, showing the stages of life set amidst an awesome and immense nature.
The term "Romanticism" when applied to music has come to imply the
period roughly from 1800 until 1850, or else until around 1900. Musical
Romanticism is predominantly a German phenomenon—so much so that one
respected French reference work defines it entirely in terms of "The
role of music in the aesthetics of German romanticism". Another French encyclopedia holds that the German temperament generally
"can be described as the deep and diverse action of romanticism on
German musicians", and that there is only one true representative of
Romanticism in French music, Hector Berlioz, while in Italy, the sole great name of musical Romanticism is Giuseppe Verdi, "a sort of [Victor] Hugo
of opera, gifted with a real genius for dramatic effect". Similarly, in
his analysis of Romanticism and its pursuit of harmony, Henri Lefebvre
posits that, "But of course, German romanticism was more closely linked
to music than French romanticism was, so it is there we should look for
the direct expression of harmony as the central romantic idea. Nevertheless, the huge popularity of German Romantic music led,
"whether by imitation or by reaction", to an often nationalistically
inspired vogue amongst Polish, Hungarian, Russian, Czech, and
Scandinavian musicians, successful "perhaps more because of its
extra-musical traits than for the actual value of musical works by its
masters".
In the contemporary music culture, the romantic musician followed
a public career depending on sensitive middle-class audiences rather
than on a courtly patron, as had been the case with earlier musicians
and composers. Public persona characterized a new generation of virtuosi
who made their way as soloists, epitomized in the concert tours of Paganini and Liszt,
and the conductor began to emerge as an important figure, on whose
skill the interpretation of the increasingly complex music depended.
Although the term "Romanticism" when applied to music has come to
imply the period roughly from 1800 until 1850, or else until around
1900, the contemporary application of "romantic" to music did not
coincide with this modern interpretation. Indeed, one of the earliest
sustained applications of the term to music occurs in 1789, in the Mémoires of André Grétry. This is of particular interest because it is a French source on a
subject mainly dominated by Germans, but also because it explicitly
acknowledges its debt to Jean-Jacques Rousseau
(himself a composer, amongst other things) and, by so doing,
establishes a link to one of the major influences on the Romantic
movement generally. In 1810 E. T. A. Hoffmann named Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven
as "the three masters of instrumental compositions" who "breathe one
and the same romantic spirit". He justified his view on the basis of
these composers' depth of evocative expression and their marked
individuality. In Haydn's music, according to Hoffmann, "a child-like,
serene disposition prevails", while Mozart (in the late E-flat major Symphony,
for example) "leads us into the depths of the spiritual world", with
elements of fear, love, and sorrow, "a presentiment of the infinite ...
in the eternal dance of the spheres". Beethoven's music, on the other
hand, conveys a sense of "the monstrous and immeasurable", with the pain
of an endless longing that "will burst our breasts in a fully coherent
concord of all the passions". This elevation in the valuation of pure emotion resulted in the
promotion of music from the subordinate position it had held in relation
to the verbal and plastic arts during the Enlightenment. Because music
was considered to be free of the constraints of reason, imagery, or any
other precise concept, it came to be regarded, first in the writings of Wackenroder and Tieck and later by writers such as Schelling and Wagner,
as preeminent among the arts, the one best able to express the secrets
of the universe, to evoke the spirit world, infinity, and the absolute.
This chronologic agreement of musical and literary Romanticism continued as far as the middle of the 19th century, when Richard Wagner denigrated the music of Meyerbeer and Berlioz as "neoromantic":
"The Opera, to which we shall now return, has swallowed down the
Neoromanticism of Berlioz, too, as a plump, fine-flavoured oyster, whose
digestion has conferred on it anew a brisk and well-to-do appearance."
It was only toward the end of the 19th century that the newly emergent discipline of Musikwissenschaft (musicology)—itself a product of the historicizing proclivity of the age—attempted a more scientific periodization of music history, and a distinction between Viennese Classical and Romantic periods was proposed. The key figure in this trend was Guido Adler, who viewed Beethoven and Franz Schubert
as transitional but essentially Classical composers, with Romanticism
achieving full maturity only in the post-Beethoven generation of
Frédéric Chopin, Felix Mendelssohn, Robert Schumann, Hector Berlioz and Franz Liszt. From Adler's viewpoint, found in books like Der Stil in der Musik (1911), composers of the New German School and various late-19th-century nationalist
composers were not Romantics but "moderns" or "realists" (by analogy
with the fields of painting and literature), and this schema remained
prevalent through the first decades of the 20th century.
By the second quarter of the 20th century, an awareness that
radical changes in musical syntax had occurred during the early 1900s
caused another shift in historical viewpoint, and the change of century
came to be seen as marking a decisive break with the musical past. This
in turn led historians such as Alfred Einstein to extend the musical "Romantic era"
throughout the 19th century and into the first decade of the 20th. It
has continued to be referred to as such in some of the standard music
references such as The Oxford Companion to Music and Grout's History of Western Music but was not unchallenged. For example, the prominent German musicologist Friedrich Blume, the chief editor of the first edition of Die Musik in Geschichte und Gegenwart
(1949–86), accepted the earlier position that Classicism and
Romanticism together constitute a single period beginning in the middle
of the 18th century, but at the same time held that it continued into
the 20th century, including such pre-World War II developments as expressionism and neoclassicism. This is reflected in some notable recent reference works such as the New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians and the new edition of Musik in Geschichte und Gegenwart.
Outside the arts
Akseli Gallen-Kallela, The Forging of the Sampo, 1893. An artist from Finland deriving inspiration from the Finnish "national epic", the Kalevala.
The Romantic movement affected most aspects of intellectual life, and Romanticism and science had a powerful connection, especially in the period 1800–1840. Many scientists were influenced by versions of the Naturphilosophie of Johann Gottlieb Fichte, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von Schelling and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel and others, and without abandoning empiricism, sought in their work to uncover what they tended to believe was a unified and organic Nature. The English scientist Sir Humphry Davy,
a prominent Romantic thinker, said that understanding nature required
"an attitude of admiration, love and worship, [...] a personal
response". He believed that knowledge was only attainable by those who truly
appreciated and respected nature. Self-understanding was an important
aspect of Romanticism. It had less to do with proving that man was
capable of understanding nature (through his budding intellect) and
therefore controlling it, and more to do with the emotional appeal of
connecting himself with nature and understanding it through a harmonious
co-existence.
Historiography
History writing was very strongly, and many would say harmfully, influenced by Romanticism. In England, Thomas Carlyle was a highly influential essayist who turned historian; he both invented and exemplified the phrase "hero-worship", lavishing largely uncritical praise on strong leaders such as Oliver Cromwell, Frederick the Great and Napoleon. Romantic nationalism had a largely negative effect on the writing of history in the 19th century, as each nation tended to produce its own version of history,
and the critical attitude, even cynicism, of earlier historians was
often replaced by a tendency to create romantic stories with clearly
distinguished heroes and villains. Nationalist ideology of the period placed great emphasis on racial
coherence, and the antiquity of peoples, and tended to vastly
overemphasize the continuity between past periods and the present,
leading to national mysticism. Much historical effort in the 20th century was devoted to combating the romantic historical myths created in the 19th century.
Theology
To insulate theology from scientism or reductionism in science, 19th-century post-Enlightenment German theologians developed a modernist or so-called liberal conception of Christianity, led by Friedrich Schleiermacher and Albrecht Ritschl.
They took the Romantic approach of rooting religion in the inner world
of the human spirit, so that it is a person's feeling or sensibility
about spiritual matters that comprises religion.
Romantic chess was the style of chess
which emphasized quick, tactical maneuvers characterized by aesthetic
beauty rather than long-term strategic planning, which was considered to
be of secondary importance. The Romantic era in chess is generally considered to have begun around
the 18th century (although a primarily tactical style of chess was
predominant even earlier), and to have reached its peak with Joseph MacDonnell and Pierre
LaBourdonnais, the two dominant chess players in the 1830s. The 1840s
were dominated by Howard Staunton, and other leading players of the era included Adolf Anderssen, Daniel Harrwitz, Henry Bird, Louis Paulsen, and Paul Morphy. The "Immortal Game", played by Anderssen and Lionel Kieseritzky on 21 June 1851 in London—where Anderssen made bold sacrifices to secure victory, giving up both rooks and a bishop, then his queen, and then checkmating his opponent with his three remaining minor pieces—is considered a supreme example of Romantic chess. The end of the Romantic era in chess is considered to be the 1873 Vienna Tournament where Wilhelm Steinitz popularized positional play and the closed game.
One of Romanticism's key ideas and most enduring legacies is the
assertion of nationalism, which became a central theme of Romantic art
and political philosophy. From the earliest parts of the movement, with
their focus on development of national languages and folklore,
and the importance of local customs and traditions, to the movements
that would redraw the map of Europe and lead to calls for self-determination
of nationalities, nationalism was one of the key vehicles of
Romanticism, its role, expression and meaning. One of the most important
functions of medieval references in the 19th century was nationalist.
Popular and epic poetry were its workhorses. This is visible in Germany
and Ireland, where underlying Germanic or Celtic linguistic substrates dating from before the Romanization-Latinization were sought out.
Early Romantic nationalism was strongly inspired by Rousseau, and by the ideas of Johann Gottfried von Herder, who in 1784 argued that the geography formed the natural economy of a people, and shaped their customs and society.
The nature of nationalism changed dramatically, however, after the French Revolution with the rise of Napoleon,
and the reactions in other nations. Napoleonic nationalism and
republicanism were, at first, inspirational to movements in other
nations: self-determination and a consciousness of national unity were
held to be two of the reasons why France was able to defeat other
countries in battle. But as the French Republic became Napoleon's Empire, Napoleon became not the inspiration for nationalism, but the object of its struggle. In Prussia, the development of spiritual renewal as a means to engage in the struggle against Napoleon was argued by, among others, Johann Gottlieb Fichte, a disciple of Kant. The word Volkstum,
or nationality, was coined in German as part of this resistance to the
now conquering emperor. Fichte expressed the unity of language and
nation in his address "To the German Nation" in 1806:
Those who speak the same language are joined to each
other by a multitude of invisible bonds by nature herself, long before
any human art begins; they understand each other and have the power of
continuing to make themselves understood more and more clearly; they
belong together and are by nature one and an inseparable whole. ...Only
when each people, left to itself, develops and forms itself in
accordance with its own peculiar quality, and only when in every people
each individual develops himself in accordance with that common quality,
as well as in accordance with his own peculiar quality—then, and then
only, does the manifestation of divinity appear in its true mirror as it
ought to be.
This view of nationalism inspired the collection of folklore by such people as the Brothers Grimm, the revival of old epics as national, and the construction of new epics as if they were old, as in the Kalevala, compiled from Finnish tales and folklore, or Ossian,
where the claimed ancient roots were invented. The view that fairy
tales, unless contaminated from outside literary sources, were preserved
in the same form over thousands of years, was not exclusive to Romantic
Nationalists, but fit in well with their views that such tales
expressed the primordial nature of a people. For instance, the Brothers
Grimm rejected many tales they collected because of their similarity to
tales by Charles Perrault, which they thought proved they were not truly German tales; Sleeping Beauty survived in their collection because the tale of Brynhildr convinced them that the figure of the sleeping princess was authentically German. Vuk Karadžić contributed to Serbian
folk literature, using peasant culture as the foundation. He regarded
the oral literature of the peasants as an integral part of Serbian
culture, compiling it to use in his collections of folk songs, tales and
proverbs, as well as the first dictionary of vernacular Serbian. Similar projects were undertaken by the Russian Alexander Afanasyev, the Norwegians Peter Christen Asbjørnsen and Jørgen Moe, and the Englishman Joseph Jacobs.
Romanticism played an essential role in the national awakening of
many Central European peoples lacking their own national states, not
least in Poland, which had recently failed to restore its independence
when Russia's army crushed the Polish Uprising under Nicholas I.
Revival and reinterpretation of ancient myths, customs and traditions
by Romantic poets and painters helped to distinguish their indigenous
cultures from those of the dominant nations and crystallise the
mythography of Romantic nationalism.
Patriotism, nationalism, revolution and armed struggle for independence
also became popular themes in the arts of this period. Arguably, the
most distinguished Romantic poet of this part of Europe was Adam Mickiewicz, who developed an idea that Poland was the Messiah of Nations, predestined to suffer just as Jesus had suffered to save all the people. The Polish self-image as a "Christ among nations" or the martyr of Europe can be traced back to its history of Christendom
and suffering under invasions. During the periods of foreign
occupation, the Catholic Church served as bastion of Poland's national
identity and language, and the major promoter of Polish culture. The partitions came to be seen in Poland as a Polish sacrifice for the security for Western civilization. Adam Mickiewicz wrote the patriotic drama Dziady
(directed against the Russians), where he depicts Poland as the Christ
of Nations. He also wrote "Verily I say unto you, it is not for you to
learn civilization from foreigners, but it is you who are to teach them
civilization ... You are among the foreigners like the Apostles among
the idolaters". In Books of the Polish Nation and Polish Pilgrimage
Mickiewicz detailed his vision of Poland as a Messias and a Christ of
Nations that would save mankind. Dziady is known for its various
interpretations. The most known ones are the moral aspect of part II,
the individualist
and romantic message of part IV, as well as the deeply patriotic,
messianistic and Christian vision in part III of the poem. Zdzisław
Kępiński, however, focuses his interpretation on Slavic pagan and occult elements found in the drama. In his book Mickiewicz hermetyczny he writes about hermetic, theosophic and alchemical philosophy in the work as well as Masonic symbols.
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