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As the eighteenth century turned into the nineteenth,
a movement of thought swept intellectual Western Europe;
people started thinking about themselves and their world
in a new--a Romantic--way.
In Denmark Romanticism is traditionally positioned
between 1800 and 1870. And HCA belongs squarely in that
period. He is a Romantic writer. He is that, and
he is more than that. Wait and see.
We use the term romantic all the time: we may
say she is not romantic enough, or we may say
that he is too romantic. Since one can be too romantic or
not romantic enough, it seem that the term Romantic can
be used both positively or negatively. We shall get back
to that, but let us first put Romanticism in its
historical context:
Romanticism is often defined by contrasting it
with the age that preceded it, i.e. the Age of Reason.
The Age of Reason stressed a the human being ought to
understand life by using his or her god-given gift of
the intellect. A human being must think--think reasonably--in
order to understand and improve the world. That bright
ideal could become a bit pedestrian by its putting too
much emphasis on the brain and leaving out the heart.
You will meet dull characters in Andersen's tales, people
who live by dry reason alone, and who detest the imaginative
flights of the mind, and those people are Andersen's
caricatures of the Age od Reason's rationalists.
Romanticism remedies that situation by restoring
authority to emotion, imagination, and intuition--and
to dreaming (day-dreaming of a better world). If we want
to understand the world, we should use reason, but that
is not enough--emotion, imagination, dreaming, and intuition,
all of which transcend rational thinking, must be employed
as well.
The Romanticist prefers nature to culture--the
city is deemed a place of corruption, whereas nature
is the place for those who are in touch with their natural
instincts. Of course, folklore appeals to the Romantic
mind, for through those age-old tales the voice of
the people, unspoiled by civilization, expressed the
wisdom of the past.
The past, rather than the present, appeals to the Romanticist,
for the present is a product of culture, of civilization,
and is, thus, removed from nature. In folklore the pure,
untainted mind of the people--the folk--reveals age-old
truths.
Enough: that was a first glimpse of Romanticism.
More is to follow.
N. Ingwersen |
