Romanticism as an artistic movement is above all defined in terms of its clear commitment to the emotive dimensions of the human being and the world around her. In this sense, the Romanticists attempted to capture the raw feelings of the individual and the relation to the world. This means that Romanticists do not attempt to capture in their art some type of objective structure of the world, such as in movements inspired by modern or Enlightenment thinking. Rather, they confer a worth to how individuals perceive the world around them and create an entire concept of beauty around precisely these moments: for example, how one feels in a certain situation or how one reacts to a beautiful landscape. The world of the Romanticists is therefore not something that can be reduced to science or mathematics. Instead, nature is in one sense alive for the Romanticists, expressing the same emotions that the human being feels. They form their entire aesthetic around precisely this awe-inspiring beauty which existence in the world creates for the human being.
Thus, in romantic literature and poetry, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, in his text, Reveries of the Solitary Walker, takes the individual, subjective standpoint to the phenomenon of nature, to a world that is in constant change. Rousseau finds the Romantic insight in looking for moments of subjective serenity and peace in this world of constant change, moments which reveal the true, inner beauty of the natural world and therefore of the human world, since the human is an integral part of nature. Rousseau is a Romantic because he links the subjective experience of the human being to a greater environment and seeks out the aesthetic magnificence of this situation. In one sense, Rousseau is stating that the human must move away from the urbanized world, the hustle and bustle, and return to nature and the solitude of nature so as to discover the true beauty of not only human existence, but existence as a whole.Samuel Taylor Coleridge, in a poem such as “Rime of the Ancient Mariner”, tries to capture the adventure of the individual at sea, the awesome forces of nature, which surrounds the human being, which become moments of beauty and inspiration for the literary imagination. The sea in Coleridge’s poem also appears to be alive and the Mariner is actively caught in the overwhelming majesty of existence.
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In Romantic painting, the same themes are apparent, for example in John Constable’s “The Hay Way.” A countryside is portrayed as an idyllic setting, almost dreamlike in its qualities, which shows the high respect the Romanticists held for nature. Instead of portraying a realist landscape with exact replications of the surrounding world, Constable’s painting attempts to inject an almost otherworldly and ghost-like existence into his landscape. He therefore tries to show that there is more to nature than what merely meets the eye. Caspar Friedrich, the German romanticist painter, takes much the same approach in “Monk by the sea”, where he contrasts the individual monk against the backdrop of a massive seascape. Nature is something to be revered and respected. It is not just something that exists for the use of the human being. Rather, nature makes the human being in this painting literally “small” and even insignificant from one perspective. However, and even though the human being is only a fragment of nature, the human perspective should also be revered since it is part of this same natural world and therefore Friedrich also includes the monk in his painting. The human being, in other words, must re-discover his place in nature and the sublimity of the natural world.
