Chapter 14: 17th – 18 thCentury

Pre-reading

A. Skim and scan the following passage and answer the following questions.

1. How does the term “classic” differ from the term “classical” ?

2. What is classicism by definition?

3. What were the most important periods in which classicism prevailed in Europe ？

4. What are the origins and inspiration of Romanticism in literature ?

5. What are the great romantic themes in literature?

6. What were the historical backgrounds of Romanticism in art ？

7. What is the significant influence of Romanticism in art?

Reading

Classic, Classical, and Classicism are terms describing the style, historical period, or quality of a work of art, literature, or music; the terms originally were associated with the aesthetic achievements of the ancient Greek and Roman civilizations. However, they have come to have much broader meanings and applications.

Classic is a term used primarily to denote and characterize a type and style or period of creative work. Strictly speaking, a classic is any ancient Greek or Roman literary work of the first or highest quality— for example, the works of the Greek dramatist Sophocles and the Roman poet Virgil. In a broad sense, the term classic is applied to anything accepted either as a model of excellence or as a work of enduring cultural relevance and value.

In the strictest sense, classical is a term used to characterize the art, literature, and aesthetics created by the ancient Greeks and Romans. Broadly speaking, the term classical may be used to characterize any style or period of creative work distinguished by qualities that are mainly suggestive of, or derived from, classical Greek or Roman art, literature, and aesthetics. Chief among these qualities are a sense of conscious restraint in the handling of themes and a sense of rational ordering and proportioning of forms. In architecture, the classical orders are the three Greek orders—the Doric, Ionic, and Corinthian—and the two Roman additions to them—the Composite and the Tuscan.

In an even broader sense, the term classical may be applied to all art and music, to a specific historical period in art and music (about 1750 to 1820), to historically significant systems of thought, and to traditional concepts of form. Thus, the three laws of motion formulated by the English mathematician, physicist, and astronomer Sir Isaac Newton are part of a classical system of celestial mechanics, and a ballet presented in a traditional mode is characterized as a classical ballet.

Classicism refers to the imitation or use primarily of the style and aesthetic principles of ancient Greek and Roman classical art and literature; in modern times, it also refers to the adoption of such principles in music. The most important periods during which classicism was the prevailing movement in Western thought and creative art were the Renaissance, the late 17th and early 18th centuries—especially in England and France—and the late 18th and 19th centuries. The term neoclassicism is often used in referring to revivals of classicism.

Age of Enlightenment is a term used to describe the trends in thought and letters in Europe and the American colonies during the 18th century prior to the French Revolution. The phrase was frequently employed by writers of the period itself, convinced that they were emerging from centuries of darkness and ignorance into a new age enlightened by reason, science, and a respect for humanity. The precursors of the Enlightenment can be traced to the 17th century and earlier. They include the philosophical rationalists René Descartes and Baruch Spinoza, the political philosophers Thomas Hobbes and John Locke, and various skeptical thinkers in France such as Pierre Bayle. Equally important, however, were the self-confidence engendered by new discoveries in science and the spirit of cultural relativism encouraged by the exploration of the non-European world.

Of the basic assumptions and beliefs common to philosophers and intellectuals of this period, perhaps the most important was an abiding faith in the power of human reason. The age was enormously impressed by Isaac Newton's discovery of universal gravitation. If humanity could so unlock the laws of the universe, God's own laws, why could it not also discover the laws underlying all of nature and society? People came to assume that through a judicious use of reason, an unending progress would be possible—progress in knowledge, in technical achievement, and even in moral values. Following the philosophy of Locke, the 18th-century writers believed that knowledge is not innate, but comes only from experience and observation guided by reason. Through proper education, humanity itself could be altered, its nature changed for the better. A great premium was placed on the discovery of truth through the observation of nature, rather than through the study of authoritative sources, such as Aristotle and the Bible. Although they saw the church—especially the Roman Catholic church—as the principal force that had enslaved the human mind in the past, most Enlightenment thinkers did not renounce religion altogether. They opted rather for a form of Deism, accepting the existence of God and of a hereafter, but rejecting the intricacies of Christian theology. Human aspirations, they believed, should not be centered on the next life, but rather on the means of improving this life. Worldly happiness was placed before religious salvation. Nothing was attacked with more intensity and ferocity than the church, with all its wealth, political power, and suppression of the free exercise of reason.

More than a set of fixed ideas, the Enlightenment implied an attitude, a method of thought. According to the German philosopher Immanuel Kant, the motto of the age should be “Dare to know.” A desire arose to reexamine and question all received ideas and values, to explore new ideas in many different directions—hence the inconsistencies and contradictions that often appear in the writings of 18th-century thinkers. Many proponents of the Enlightenment were not philosophers in the commonly accepted sense of the word; they were populizers engaged in a self-conscious effort to win converts. They liked to refer to themselves as the “party of humanity,” and in an attempt to mold public opinion in their favor, they made full use of pamphlets, anonymous tracts, and the large numbers of new journals and newspapers being created. Because they were journalists and propagandists as much as true philosophers, historians often refer to them by the French word philosophes.

In many respects, the homeland of the philosophes was France . It was there that the political philosopher and jurist Charles de Montesquieu, one of the earliest representatives of the movement, had begun publishing various satirical works against existing institutions, as well as his monumental study of political institutions, The Spirit of Laws (1748; trans. 1750). It was in Paris that Denis Diderot, the author of numerous philosophical tracts, began the publication of the Encyclopédie (1751-1772). This work, on which numerous philosophes collaborated, was intended both as a compendium of all knowledge and as a polemical weapon, presenting the positions of the Enlightenment and attacking its opponents. The single most influential and representative of the French writers was undoubtedly Voltaire. Beginning his career as a playwright and poet, he is best known today for his prolific pamphlets, essays, satires, and short novels, in which he popularized the science and philosophy of his age, and for his immense correspondence with writers and monarchs throughout Europe . Far more original were the works of Jean Jacques Rousseau, whose Social Contract (1762; trans. 1797), émile (1762; trans. 1763), and Confessions (1782; trans. 1783) were to have a profound influence on later political and educational theory and were to serve as an impulse to 19th-century romanticism. The Enlightenment was also a profoundly cosmopolitan and antinationalistic movement with representatives in numerous other countries. Kant in Germany, David Hume in England, Cesare Beccaria in Italy, and Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson in the American colonies all maintained close contacts with the French philosophes but were important contributors to the movement in their own right.

During the first half of the 18th century, the leaders of the Enlightenment waged an uphill struggle against considerable odds. Several were imprisoned for their writings, and most were hampered by government censorship and attacks by the church. In many respects, however, the later decades of the century marked a triumph of the movement in Europe and America . By the 1770s, second-generation philosophes were receiving government pensions and taking control of established intellectual academies. The enormous increase in the publication of newspapers and books ensured a wide diffusion of their ideas. Scientific experiments and philosophical writing became fashionable among wide groups in society, including members of the nobility and the clergy. A number of European monarchs also adopted certain of the ideas or at least the vocabulary of the Enlightenment. Voltaire and other philosophes, who relished the concept of a philosopher-king enlightening the people from above, eagerly welcomed the emergence of the so-called enlightened despots, of whom Frederick II of Prussia, Catherine II of Russia, and Joseph II of Austria were the most celebrated examples. In retrospect, however, it appears that most of these monarchs used the movement in large part for propaganda purposes and were far more despotic than enlightened.

During the later 18th century certain changes in emphasis emerged in Enlightenment thought. Under the influence of Rousseau, sentiment and emotion became as respectable as reason. In the 1770s writers broadened their field of criticism to include political and economic issues. Of seminal importance in this regard was the experience of the American Revolution. In the eyes of Europeans, the Declaration of Independence and the Revolutionary War signaled that, for the first time, some individuals were going beyond the mere discussion of enlightened ideas and were actually putting them into practice. The American Revolution probably encouraged attacks and criticisms against existing European regimes. The Age of Enlightenment is usually said to have ended with the French Revolution of 1789. Indeed, some see the social and political ferment of this period as being responsible for the Revolution. While embodying many of the ideals of the philosophes, the Revolution in its more violent stages (1792-94) served to discredit these ideals temporarily in the eyes of many European contemporaries. Yet the Enlightenment left a lasting heritage for the 19th and 20th centuries. It marked a key stage in the decline of the church and the growth of modern secularism. It served as the model for political and economic liberalism and for humanitarian reform throughout the 19th-century Western world. It was the watershed for the pervasive belief in the possibility and the necessity of progress that survived, if only in attenuated form, into the 20th century.

Romanticism in literature refers to a movement in the literature of virtually every country of Europe, the United States , and Latin America that lasted from about 1750 to about 1870, characterized by reliance on the imagination and subjectivity of approach, freedom of thought and expression, and an idealization of nature. The term romantic first appeared in 18th-century English and originally meant “romancelike”—that is: resembling the fanciful character of medieval romances .

By the late 18th century in France and Germany , literary taste began to turn from classical and neoclassical conventions. Inspiration for the romantic approach initially came from two great shapers of thought, French philosopher Jean Jacques Rousseau and German writer Johann Wolfgang von Goethe.

Rousseau established the cult of the individual and championed the freedom of the human spirit; his famous announcement was “I felt before I thought.” Goethe and his compatriots, philosopher and critic Johann Gottfried von Herder and historian Justus M?ser, provided more formal precepts and collaborated on a group of essays entitled Von deutscher Art und Kunst (Of German Style and Art, 1773). In this work the authors extolled the romantic spirit as manifested in German folk songs, Gothic architecture, and the plays of English playwright William Shakespeare. Goethe sought to imitate Shakespeare's free and untrammeled style in his G?tz von Berlichingen (1773; translated 1799), a historical drama about a 16th-century robber knight. The play, which justifies revolt against political authority, inaugurated the Sturm und Drang (storm and stress) movement, a forerunner of German romanticism. Goethe's novel The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774; translated 1779) was also in this tradition. One of the great influential documents of romanticism, this work exalts sentiment, even to the point of justifying committing suicide because of unrequited love. The book set a tone and mood much copied by the romantics in their works and often in their personal lives: a fashionable tendency to frenzy, melancholy, world-weariness, and even self-destruction.

The preface to the second edition of Lyrical Ballads (1800), by English poets William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge was also of prime importance as a manifesto of literary romanticism. Here, the two poets affirmed the importance of feeling and imagination to poetic creation and disclaimed conventional literary forms and subjects. Thus, as romantic literature everywhere developed, imagination was praised over reason, emotions over logic, and intuition over science—making way for a vast body of literature of great sensibility and passion. This literature emphasized a new flexibility of form adapted to varying content, encouraged the development of complex and fast-moving plots, and allowed mixed genres (tragicomedy and the mingling of the grotesque and the sublime) and freer style.

No longer tolerated, for example, were the fixed classical conventions, such as the famous three unities (time, place, and action) of tragedy. An increasing demand for spontaneity and lyricism—qualities that the adherents of romanticism found in folk poetry and in medieval romance—led to a rejection of regular meters, strict forms, and other conventions of the classical tradition. In English poetry, for example, blank verse largely superseded the rhymed couplet that dominated 18th-century poetry. The opening lines of the swashbuckling melodrama Hernani (1830; translated 1830), by the great French romantic writer Victor Hugo, are a departure from the conventional 18th-century rules of French versification; and in the preface to his drama Cromwell (1827; translated 1896), a famous critical document in its own right, Hugo not only defended his break from traditional dramatic structure but also justified the introduction of the grotesque into art. In their choice of heroes, also, the romantic writers replaced the static universal types of classical 18th-century literature with more complex, idiosyncratic characters; and a great deal of drama, fiction, and poetry was devoted to a celebration of Rousseau's “common man.”

As the romantic movement spread from France and Germany to England and then to the rest of Europe and across to the western hemisphere, certain themes and moods, often intertwined, became the concern of almost all 19th-century writers.

Many of the libertarian and abolitionist ( 废奴主义的 ) movements of the late 18th and early 19th centuries were engendered by the romantic philosophy—the desire to be free of convention and tyranny, and the new emphasis on the rights and dignity of the individual. Just as the insistence on rational, formal, and conventional subject matter that had typified neoclassicism was reversed, the authoritarian regimes that had encouraged and sustained neoclassicism in the arts were inevitably subjected to popular revolutions. Political and social causes became dominant themes in romantic poetry and prose throughout the Western world, producing many vital human documents that are still pertinent. The year 1848, in which Europe was wracked by political upheaval, marked the flood tide of romanticism in Italy , Austria , Germany , and France .

In  William Tell  (1804; translated 1825), by German dramatist Friedrich von Schiller, an obscure medieval mountaineer becomes an immortal symbol of opposition to tyranny and foreign rule. In the novel The Betrothed (1825-1827; translated 1834), by Italian writer Alessandro Manzoni, a peasant couple become instruments in the final crushing of feudalism in northern Italy . Lord Byron and Percy Bysshe Shelley, who for some most typify the romantic poet (in their personal lives as well as in their work), wrote resoundingly in protest against social and political wrongs and in defense of the struggles for liberty in Italy and Greece. Russian poet Aleksandr Sergeyevich Pushkin, whose admiration for the work of Byron is clearly manifested, attracted notoriety for his “Ode to Liberty ” (1820); like many other romanticists, he was persecuted for political subversion.

The general romantic dissatisfaction with the organization of society was often channeled into specific criticism of urban society. La maison du berger (The Shepherd's Hut, 1844), by French poet Alfred Victor de Vigny, expresses the view that such an abode has more nobility than a palace. Earlier, Rousseau had written that people were born free but that everywhere civilization put them in chains. This feeling of oppression was frequently expressed in poetry—for example, in the work of English visionary William Blake, writing in the poem “Milton” (about 1804-1808) of the “dark Satanic mills” that were beginning to deface the English countryside; or in Wordsworth's long poem The Prelude (1850), which speaks of “... the close and overcrowded haunts/Of cities, where the human heart is sick.”

Basic to such sentiments, was the concern with nature and natural surroundings, an interest central to the Romantic Movement. Delight in unspoiled scenery and in the (presumably) innocent life of rural dwellers is perhaps first recognizable as a literary theme in such a work as “The Seasons” (1726-1730), by Scottish poet James Thomson. The work is commonly cited as a formative influence on later English romantic poetry and on the nature tradition represented in English literature, most notably by Wordsworth. Often combined with this feeling for rural life is a generalized romantic melancholy, a sense that change is imminent and that a way of life is being threatened. Such intimations were early evinced in “Ode to Evening” (1747) by William Collins, “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard” (1751) by Thomas Gray, and The Borough (1810) by George Crabbe. The melancholic strain later developed as a separate theme, as in “Ode on Melancholy” (1820) by John Keats, or—in a different time and place—in the works of American writers: the novels and tales of Nathaniel Hawthorne, which probe the depths of human nature in puritanical New England , or the macabre tales and melancholy poetry of Edgar Allan Poe.

In another vein in American literature, the romantic interest in untrammeled nature is found in such writers as Washington Irving, whose Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent . (1819-1820), a collection of descriptive stories about the Hudson River valley, reflects the author's knowledge of European folktales as well as contemporary romantic poetry and the Gothic novel. The Leather-Stocking Tales by James Fenimore Cooper celebrate the beauty of the American wilderness and the simple frontier life; in romantic fashion they also idealize the Native American as (in Rousseau's phrase) the “noble savage.” By the middle of the 19th century the nature tradition was absorbed by American literary transcendentalism, chiefly expressed in the essays of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau.

In the spirit of their new freedom, romantic writers in all cultures expanded their imaginary horizons spatially and chronologically. They turned back to the Middle Ages (5th century to 15th century) for themes and settings and chose locales ranging from the awesome Hebrides of the Ossianic tradition, as in the work of Scottish poet James MacPherson ( see Ossian and Ossianic Ballads), to the Asian setting of Xanadu evoked by Coleridge in his unfinished lyric “Kubla Khan” (1797?). The compilation of old English and Scottish ballads by English poet Thomas Percy was a seminal work; his Reliques of Ancient English Poetry (1765) exerted a significant influence on the form and content of later romantic poetry. The nostalgia for the Gothic past mingled with the tendency to the melancholic and produced a fondness for ruins, graveyards, and the supernatural as themes. In English literature, representative works include Keats's “The Eve of St. Agnes,” the Gothic novels of Matthew Gregory Lewis, and The Castle of Otranto (1764) by Horace Walpole. The Lay of the Last Minstrel (1805), by Scottish writer Sir Walter Scott, and his historical novels, the Waverley series (1814-1825), combine these concerns: love of the picturesque, preoccupation with the heroic past, and delight in mystery and superstition.

The trend toward the irrational and the supernatural was an important component of English and German romantic literature. It was reinforced on the one hand by disillusion with 18th-century rationalism and on the other by the rediscovery of a body of older literature—folktales and ballads—collected by Percy and by German scholars Jacob and Wilhelm Karl Grimm ( see Grimm Brothers) and Danish writer Hans Christian Andersen. From such material comes, for example, the motif of the doppelg?nger (German for “double”). Many romantic writers, especially in Germany , were fascinated with this concept, perhaps because of the general romantic concern with self-identity. Poet Heinrich Heine wrote a lyric apocryphally titled “Der Doppelg?nger” (1827; translated 1846); The Devil's Elixir (1815-1816; translated 1824), a short novel by E. T. A. Hoffmann, is about a double; and Peter Schlemihl's Remarkable Story (1814; translated 1927), by Adelbert von Chamisso, the tale of a man who sells his shadow to the devil, can be considered a variation on the theme. Later, Russian master Fyodor Mikhaylovich Dostoyevsky wrote his famous novel The Double (1846), an analysis of paranoia in a humble clerk.

By about the middle of the 19th century, romanticism began to give way to new literary movements: the Parnassians and the symbolist movement in poetry, and realism and naturalism in prose.

Romanticism in art refers to the European and American movement extending from about 1800 to 1850. Romanticism cannot be identified with a single style, technique, or attitude, but romantic painting is generally characterized by a highly imaginative and subjective approach, emotional intensity, and a dreamlike or visionary quality. Whereas classical and neoclassical art is calm and restrained in feeling and clear and complete in expression, romantic art characteristically strives to express by suggestion states of feeling too intense, mystical, or elusive to be clearly defined. Thus, the German writer E. T. A. Hoffmann declared “infinite longing” to be the essence of romanticism. In their choice of subject matter, the romantics showed an affinity for nature, especially its wild and mysterious aspects, and for exotic, melancholic, and melodramatic subjects likely to evoke awe or passion.

The word  romantic ,  current in 18th-century English, came to be associated with the emerging taste for wild scenery, “sublime” prospects, and ruins, a tendency reflected in the increasing emphasis in aesthetic theory on the sublime as opposed to the beautiful. The British writer and statesman Edmund Burke, for instance, identified beauty with delicacy and harmony and the sublime with vastness, obscurity, and a capacity to inspire terror. Also during the 18th century, feeling began to be considered more important than reason both in literature and in ethics, an attitude epitomized by the work of the French novelist and philosopher Jean Jacques Rousseau. English and German romantic poetry appeared in the 1790s, and by the end of the century the shift away from reason toward feeling and imagination began to be reflected in the visual arts, for instance in the visionary illustrations of the English poet and painter William Blake, in the brooding, sometimes nightmarish pictures of his friend, the Swiss-English painter Henry Fuseli, and in the somber etchings of monsters and demons by the Spanish artist Francisco de Goya.

In  France  the formative stage of romanticism coincided with the Napoleonic Wars (1799-1815), and the first French romantic painters found their inspiration in contemporary events. Antoine Jean Gros began the transition from neoclassicism to romanticism by moving away from the sober style of his teacher, Jacques-Louis David, to a more colorful and emotional style, influenced by the Flemish Baroque painter Peter Paul Rubens, which he developed in a series of battle paintings glorifying Napoleon. The main figure for French romanticism was Théodore Géricault, who carried further the dramatic, coloristic tendencies of Gros's style and who shifted the emphasis of battle paintings from heroism to suffering and endurance. In his Wounded Cuirassier (1814) a soldier limps off the field as rising smoke and descending clouds seem to impinge on his figure. The powerful brushstrokes and conflicting light and dark tones heighten the sense of his isolation and vulnerability, which for Géricault and many other romantics constituted the essential human condition.

Géricault's masterpiece, Raft of the Medusa (1818-1819), portrays on a heroic scale the suffering of ordinary humanity, a theme echoed by the greatest French romantic painter, Eugène Delacroix, in his Massacre at Chios (1824). Delacroix often took his subjects from literature, but he aimed at transcending literary or didactic significance by using color to create an effect of pure energy and emotion that he compared to music. Rejecting the neoclassical emphasis on form and outline, he used halftones derived not from darkening a color but from juxtaposing the color's complement. The resulting effect of energetic vibration was intensified by his long, nervous brushstrokes. His Death of Sardanapalus (1827), inspired by a work of the English romantic poet Lord Byron, is precisely detailed, but the action is so violent and the composition so dynamic that the effect is of chaos engulfing the immobile and indifferent figure of the dying king.

German romantic painting, like German romantic poetry and philosophy, was inspired by a conception of nature as a manifestation of the divine. This led to a school of symbolic landscape, initiated by the mystical and allegorical paintings of Philipp Otto Runge. Its greatest exponent, and the greatest German romantic painter, was Caspar David Friedrich, whose meditative landscapes, painted in a lucid and meticulous style, hover between a subtle mystical feeling and a sense of melancholy solitude and estrangement. In the Polar Sea (1824), his romantic pessimism is most directly expressed; the remains of a wrecked ship are barely visible beneath a pyramid of ice slabs that seems a monument to the triumph of nature over human aspiration. Another  school  of  German romantic painting was formed by the group called the Nazarenes, who attempted to recover the style and spirit of medieval religious art; its leading figure was Johann Friedrich Overbeck. Notable among later artists in the German romantic tradition was the Austrian Moritz von Schwind, whose subjects were drawn from Germanic mythology and fairy tales.

Landscapes suffused with romantic feeling became the chief expression of romantic painting in England , as in Germany , but the English artists were more innovative in style and technique. Samuel Palmer painted landscapes distinguished by an innocent simplicity of style and a visionary religious feeling derived from Blake. John Constable, turning away from the wild natural scenery associated with many romantic poets and painters, infused quiet English landscapes with profound feeling. The first major artist to work in the open air, he achieved a freshness of vision through the use of luminous colors and bold, thick brushwork. J. M. W. Turner achieved the most radical pictorial vision of any romantic artist. Beginning with landscapes reminiscent of the 17th-century French painter Claude Lorrain, he became, in such later works as Snow Storm: Steam Boat Off a Harbor's Mouth (1842), almost entirely concerned with atmospheric effects of light and color, mixing clouds, mist, snow, and sea into a vortex in which all distinct objects are dissolved.

The major manifestation of American romantic painting was the Hudson River School , which found its inspiration in the rugged wilderness of the northeastern United States . Washington Allston, the first American landscapist, introduced romanticism to the United States by filling his poetic landscapes with subjective feeling. The leading figure of the Hudson River School was the English-born Thomas Cole, whose depictions of primeval forests and towering peaks convey a sense of moral grandeur. Cole's pupil Frederick Church adapted the Hudson River style to South American, European, and Palestinian landscapes.

Toward the middle of the 19th century, romantic painting began to move away from the intensity of the original movement. Among the outstanding achievements of late romanticism are the quiet, atmospheric landscapes of the French Barbizon school, which included Camille Corot and Théodore Rousseau. In England , after 1850, the Pre-Raphaelites revived the medievalizing mission of the German Nazarenes.

The influence of romanticism on subsequent painting has been pervasive. A line can be traced from Constable through the Barbizon school to impressionism, but a more direct descendant of romanticism was symbolism ( see Symbolist Movement), which in various ways intensified or refined the romantic characteristics of subjectivity, imagination, and strange, dreamlike imagery. In the 20th century expressionism and surrealism have carried these tendencies still further. In a sense, however, virtually all modern art can be said to derive from romanticism, for the modern assumptions about the primacy of artistic freedom, originality, and self-expression in art were originally conceived by the romantics in opposition to the traditional classical principles of art.

Test yourself

Fill the blanks each by referring to the question given:

1. What does the Age of Enlightenment refer to? What were the basic assumptions and beliefs common to philosophers of this period?

"Age of Enlightenment" is used __ describe the trends in thought __ letters in Europe and the __ colonies during the 18th century __ the French Revolution. The phrase __ employed by writers of the __ , convinced that they were emerging __ centuries of darkness and ignorance __ a new age enlightened by __ , science, and a respect for __ . According to the German philosopher __ Kant, the motto of the __ should be "Dare to know." __ desire arose to reexamine and __ all received ideas and values, __ explore new ideas in many __ directions.

Of the __ assumptions and beliefs of this __ , the most important was an __ faith in the power of __ reason. The age was enormously __ by Isaac Newton's discovery of __ gravitation. If humanity could so __ the laws of the universe, __ 's own laws, why could it __ also discover the laws underlying __ of nature and society? People __ to assume that through a __ use of reason, an unending __ would be possible in knowledge, __ technical achievement, and even in __ values. They believed that knowledge __ truth comes only from experience __ observation guided by reason. Proper __ could alter humanity, changing its __ for the better. While they __ the church as the principal __ that had enslaved the human __ , most Enlightenment thinkers accepted the __ of God, but rejected the __ of Christian theology. They believed __ aspirations should not be centered __ the next life, but rather __ the means of improving this __ .

2. How is the Age of Enlightenment supposedly related to the American Revolution and the French Revolution?

During the later 18th century __ changes in emphasis emerged in __ thought. Under the influence of __ , sentiment and emotion became as __ as reason. In the 1770s __ broadened their field of criticism __ include political and economic issues. __ seminal importance in this regard __ the experience of the American __ . In the eyes of Europeans, __ Declaration of Independence and the __ War signaled that, for the __ time, some individuals were going __ the mere discussion of enlightened __ and were actually putting them __ practice. The American Revolution probably __ attacks and criticisms against existing __ regimes.

The Age __ Enlightenment is said to have __ with the French Revolution of __ . Indeed, some see the social __ political ferment of this period __ being responsible for the Revolution. __ embodying many of the ideals __ the philosophes, the Revolution in __ more violent stages (1792-94) served __ discredit these ideals temporarily in __ eyes of many European contemporaries. __ the Enlightenment left a lasting __ for the 19th and 20th __ . It marked a key stage __ the decline of the church __ the growth of modern secularism. __ served as the model for __ and economic liberalism and for __ reform throughout the 19th-century Western __ .

3. What are the great romantic themes in literature?

Romantic philosophy expressed the desire __ be free of convention and __ , and the new emphasis on __ rights and dignity of the __ . Political and social causes became __ themes in romantic poetry and __ throughout the Western world, producing __ vital human documents that are __ pertinent. The year 1848, in __ Europe was wracked by political __ , marked the flood tide of __ in Italy , Austria , Germany , and __ . The general romantic dissatisfaction with __ organization of society often turned __ specific criticism of urban society. __ concern with nature __ natural surroundings was an interest __ to the romantic movement. Delight __ unspoiled scenery and in the __ life of rural dwellers is __ first recognizable as a literary __ in such a work as " __ Seasons" by Scottish poet James __ . The work is commonly cited __ a formative influence on the __ tradition in English literature represented __ Wordsworth. Often combined with __ feeling for rural life is __ romantic melancholy that change is __ and that a way of __ is being threatened.

In __ spirit of their new freedom, __ writers in all cultures expanded __ imaginary horizons in space and __ , turning back to the Middle __ for themes and settings. The __ toward the irrational and the __ was an important component of __ and German romantic literature, reinforced __ by disillusion with 18th-century rationalism __ by the rediscovery of a __

4. What were the historical backgrounds of Romanticism in art ？ What is the significant influence of Romanticism in art?

The word romantic first became __ in 18th-century English and originally __ "romancelike," that is, resembling the __ and fanciful character of medieval __ . The word came to be __ with the emerging taste for __ scenery, "sublime" prospects, and ruins, __ tendency reflected in the increasing __ in aesthetic theory on the __ as opposed to the beautiful. __ British writer and statesman Edmund __ , for instance, identified beauty with __ and harmony and the sublime __ vastness, obscurity, and a capacity __ inspire terror. Also during the __ century, feeling began to be __ more important than reason both __ literature and in ethics. By __ end of the century the __ away from reason toward feeling __ imagination began to be reflected __ the visual arts. __ influence of romanticism on painting __ be traced to impressionism, but __ more direct descendant of romanticism __ symbolism, which refined the romantic __ of subjectivity, imagination, and strange, __ imagery. The 20th-century expressionism and __ have carried these tendencies still __ . Virtually all modern art can __ said to derive from romanticism, __ the modern assumptions about the __ of artistic freedom, originality, and __ in art were originally conceived __ the romantics in opposition to __ traditional classical principles of art.

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