HISTORY OF IDEAS - Romanticism — Transcript

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1. 0:08Romanticism is one of the most important historical events of all time.
2. 0:13Unlike a lot of what gets called history,
3. 0:15romanticism isn't a war or a piece of technology or a political event.
4. 0:20It refers to the birth of a new set of ideas. It is about a mindset and a way of feeling.
5. 0:27Romanticism began in Western Europe in the mid-18 century, in the work of artists, poets and philosophers.
6. 0:33And it subsequently spread all over the world.
7. 0:36Changing how millions of people look at nature, children, love, sex, money and work.
8. 0:42We are all now more or less in some aspect of our sensibilities romantics.
9. 0:47Romanticism is best understood as a reaction to the birth of the modern world
10. 0:52and some of its key features: industrialization, urbanization, secularization and consumerism.
11. 0:59What follows, are some of the central moments in the history of romanticism:
12. 1:04The Marais, Paris, May 1762.
13. 1:07The Swiss philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau publishes a book about the raising of children: "Emile" or "On Education".
14. 1:14It contains diatribes against the oppressive world of adults.
15. 1:17And praises the natural goodness, spontaneity and wisdom of little children.
16. 1:22It is at points extremely anxious to get mothers to breast-feed their offspring.
17. 1:26The first sustained argument for this practice in western civilization.
18. 1:30The world around Rousseau is growing ever more, rational, scientific and technologically based.
19. 1:35It is increasingly sensible, planned, sterile and bureaucratic. Against all of these, Rousseau emphasizes the child,
20. 1:42the original rebel, the representative of everything that is pure, unschooled and outside of adult discipline.
21. 1:49It is the seat of creativity and genius.
22. 1:51For the first time in Western history, glamour is directed not at the attainment of reason and adult self control,
23. 1:58But at the freedom from tradition and the natural, innocence and the sweetness of the child.
24. 2:04Brook Street, London, August 1770
25. 2:07A precocious 17 year old poet called Thomas Chatterton
26. 2:11downs some arsenic and ends his life in a tiny attic apartment.
27. 2:14He kills himself because no one wants to publish his poetry
28. 2:18which is concerned with beauty and wisdom.
29. 2:20And because his uncomprehending family are applying pressure for him to become a lawyer.
30. 2:24A cult soon grows up around the young beautiful poet
31. 2:28with shoulder length chestnut hair.
32. 2:29He becomes an emblem of something that will become very important for romantics:
33. 2:34the idea of the sensitive, doomed person often an artist rejected by a cruel, vulgar world.
34. 2:41Chatterton stands at the head of a long line of romantic heroes that will stretch from Byron to Keiths to Van Gogh,
35. 2:47and eventually all the way to Jim Morris and Amy Winehouse.
36. 2:50Romanticism borrows from Christianity.
37. 2:53The romantic hero is a secularized Christ like figure.
38. 2:57The loser who is in truth deeply noble in the eyes of the few who understand.
39. 3:03Leipzig, Germany, 1774
40. 3:05The German author Goethe publishes the quintessential romantic love story:
41. 3:11The Sorrows of Young Werther.
42. 3:13It tells the story of a passionate doomed love affair between a young poet called Werther and a beautiful clever young woman called Charlotte.
43. 3:21Unfortunately for Werther, Charlotte is married. So the love is impossible from
44. 3:25the very start but that doesn't stop Werther, a dreamy and practical young man
45. 3:30who loves the arts above all else. Like chatterton, Werther is under pressure to
46. 3:34have a sensible career and join bourgeois life but he can think of only
47. 3:38one thing:
48. 3:39The impulses of his heart. Eventually Werther can't take it anymore and
49. 3:43kills himself but rather than condemning him as a lunatic and a hothead,
50. 3:47Goethe one of the founding fathers of Romanticism directs all our sympathies
51. 3:51towards Werther.
52. 3:52We are supposed to be on his side admiring his passionate and entirely impractical
53. 3:57attitude to love. The book becomes the most popular novel of a generation. Three
54. 4:02million copies are printed.
55. 4:03Napoleon declares it the greatest work of European literature and it
56. 4:07dramatically changes how many people think of love, privileging dramatic
57. 4:11outpourings of feeling over more traditional rational concerns for class
58. 4:15lineage and money. For a romantic
59. 4:18it's always right and Noble
60. 4:20to follow your heart. The disastrous results that follow aren't any argument that
61. 4:25just proof of how desiccated and heartless the so-called adult sensible world can be.
62. 4:31Madrid, spain, 1798
63. 4:33The artist Francisco Goya produces one of his most iconic images titled "The Sleep of Reason Brings out Monsters".
64. 4:40It captures a quintessential romantic interest in the limits of reason and the
65. 4:45power of the irrational over humans fragile minds. To be romantic is to have
66. 4:50sympathy for madness and to hold an almost vengeful attitude towards
67. 4:54bombastic claims as to the triumph of rationality, science and logic.
68. 5:01The Lake District, England, December 1799
69. 5:04A young English poet called William Wordsworth and his sister Dorothy move into what set to become one of the most famous
70. 5:10residences in the history of English literature: Dove cottage in Grasmere on the
71. 5:14edge of The Lake District.
72. 5:17Here they will spend the next nine years and Wordsworth will write some of the greatest poetry in english language,
73. 5:22celebrating something that's very under threat: the natural world.
74. 5:26He will write about daffodils, oak trees, clouds, butterflies and rivers and his
75. 5:31work will charm and seduce Europe. Within a generation their will in Wordsworth
76. 5:35own estimation be more tourists than sheep in The Lake District.
77. 5:39Most importantly, running through Wordsworth poetry is an abiding hatred
78. 5:43for everything mechanical and industrial. When many years later a railway line
79. 5:48threatens to pass through the Lake District Wordsworth and his followers do
80. 5:51everything they can to have the train, a symbol of Wordsworth hated technology rerouted.
81. 5:58To be a romantic is to take the side of nature against industry.
82. 6:02It is to prefer a daffodil to a viaduct, to a tree to a factory. At the moment when
83. 6:06huge swaths of Britain are being covered in the often monstrous new cities that
84. 6:10are making Europe rich, Wordsworth the quintessential romantic speaks up for
85. 6:15the natural and a simple life.
86. 6:17Niagara, United States, September 1829
87. 6:21The American painter Thomas Cole paints one of his most characteristic images of the mighty Niagara Falls with a couple of
88. 6:27Native Americans in the foreground.
89. 6:28Cole makes his name as a painter of sublime scenes, vast landscapes of the
90. 6:33American interior showing nature at its most dignified and impressive. Man looks
91. 6:39lost and puny by comparison. This too is a typical romantic attitude, for
92. 6:44romantics don't believe in God but they go in search of the emotions
93. 6:48one might once have had around religion and locate them in a big
94. 6:51wide-open spaces of nature. To be a romantic is to find relief from the
95. 6:55pressures of competitive city life in the sort of natural grandeur that
96. 6:59transcends all human achievements and concerns.
97. 7:03Westminster, London, April 1847
98. 7:0614 years after some fairly incompetent officials destroy the British parliament with fire, a new building reopens designed by a
99. 7:12rising star architect: Augustus Pugin.
100. 7:15Oddly even though the building is new
101. 7:17It is made to look old, very very old, medieval in fact. It is full of suits of
102. 7:22armor and seated angels. When the architect Pugin defends the building
103. 7:26he argues that is building is Noble because it harks back to his country's
104. 7:29pre-industrial past, before it grew obsessed, he is careful to add with money
105. 7:34or technology.
106. 7:35It begins a cult of the Middle Ages, a big theme and romanticism which
107. 7:39identifies in the world of knights and castles, a nobility that is thought missing
108. 7:43from the factories and shopping arcades of the modern world.
109. 7:47Saint-Germain, Paris, May 1863
110. 7:50The French poet Charles Baudelaire writes a prose poem celebrating an unusual character whom he calls a flâneur, a stroller or loafer.
111. 8:00A casual wanderer who has no particular job to go to
112. 8:03and just spend this time observing busy street life of a modern city,
113. 8:07threading his way through the crowds, strolling instead of rushing, sampling
114. 8:11people's conversations and creating narratives for others lives.
115. 8:14Baudelaire, a typical romantic admires the flâneur's playfulness and lack of practicality.
116. 8:20This person isn't a waste of time.
117. 8:22It doesn't matter that he doesn't have a job for Baudelaire he is a prince,
118. 8:27unlike the boring wage slaves rushing to the new offices of capitalism.
119. 8:32Le Havre, April 1891
120. 8:35The french painter Paul Gauguin set sail for Tahiti, hoping to escape everything that is artificial and conventional.
121. 8:41He lives in the Pacific South Seas on and off for the rest of his life, drawing young Native women
122. 8:45looking relaxed and natural without anything on.
123. 8:48They are in his eyes evidence that civilization is what has made a sick,
124. 8:53A core romantic belief.
125. 8:55The Romantic movement has permanently changed our sensibilities
126. 8:59as the world has grown ever more technological and rational romanticism
127. 9:02has come to stick up for the irrational, the untrained, the exotic, the childlike
128. 9:07and the naive.
129. 9:08There is naturally something a bit adolescent and immature within Romanticism.
130. 9:12But then again it can be something rather heartless, cold, dogmatic and
131. 9:17arrogant in many aspects of modernity.
132. 9:20one hopes this isn't going to be the end of the story that we may in the future
133. 9:23learn to soften the worst side of modernity through the best sides of
134. 9:27romanticism, in order to create a more evolved alternative,
135. 9:31what one might term: an age of maturity.