Okay, we've done modernism, so let's start dabbling over time in some other historical –isms. Today we'll take a look at Romanticism. It's interesting to me that just as I started to type that word, the screen saver on my desktop, which I can see around the edges of this Word document, suddenly shifted from one image to another, producing two vertical shafts of light resembling the intense rays of sunshine that one often sees in Romantic landscape painting. Make of it what you will.
As I noted before, I have always been keener on more modern things myself, because of the complexity and contradiction: things just get a lot more interesting to me once mankind has to struggle with the Industrial Revolution, the assembly line, doubt about the existence of God. At the same time, I think we'd all agree that Goethe and Beethoven were no slouches, so Romanticism must have something going for it.
Besides which, when I think about it, it reminds me a bit of my dear mother, who was the first person to try to explain to me that Romance with a capital-R was not the same thing as love, or having a crush on whoever it was I had a crush on at the time, maybe S.H. I couldn't quite wrap my head around it for a while: why would they call it the Romantic movement, when romance so obviously meant something else? Couldn't they come up with a less confusing name? Come to think of it, I still don't really know the answer to that one.
As with the modernism quiz, this one will cross various disciplines, so maybe there's a little something for everybody. Let's find out.
1. First of all, which of the following statements best describes Romanticism's relationship to the Enlightenment era that preceded it?
a. It was a logical extension of the Enlightenment, with the same kind of faith in reason
b. It was a reaction to and rejection of the Enlightenment, placing emphasis on human emotion rather than reason
c. It really had little to do with the Enlightenment at all, because Romantic ideas originated in Germany, which hadn't been touched by Enlightenment in the same way France and England had
2. Who among those below is the German philosopher most closely associated with romantic nationalism, and was called by Isaiah Berlin one of the key founders of Romanticism; with his emphasis on folk culture and geography, he is in some sense a father of modern concepts of diversity, but some scholars have argued that he planted the intellectual seeds that grew into Nazism.
a. Johann Gottfreid von Herder
b. Johann Georg Hamann
c. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
3. Which Romantic poet wrote these words, on the occasion of what?:
Peace, peace! he is not dead, he doth not sleep-
He hath awakened from the dream of life-
'Tis we, who lost in stormy visions, keep
With phantoms an unprofitable strife,
And in mad trance, strike with our spirit's knife
Invulnerable nothings.-We decay
Like corpses in a charnel; fear and grief
Convulse us and consume us day by day,
And cold hopes swarm like worms within our living clay.
a. Percy Bysshe Shelley, after learning of John Keats' death
b. Lord Byron, after learning of Shelley's death
c. John Keats, after learning of George Canning's death
4. Beethoven had originally intended to dedicate his "Eroica" to whom, but changed the dedication after this person did what?
a. Frederick William III of Prussia, lost the Battle of Jena
b. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, turned on the French Revolution
c. Napoleon Bonaparte, declared himself emperor
5. His most famous painting was purchased by the French government but not displayed for some 20 years because it was thought to be too frank a glorification of the concept of liberty.
a. Jacques-Louis David
b. Eugene Delacroix
c. Jean-Baptiste Camille Corot
6. This writer, called the father of Russian literature, really took the Romantic ideal of emotion over reason to heart when he challenged an alleged lover of his wife to a duel, in which he was killed.
a. Nikolai Gogol
b. Alexander Pushkin
c. Fyodor Dostoyevsky
7. Mark Twain said of this writer – not an American – the following:
"He did measureless harm; more real and lasting harm, perhaps, than any other individual that ever wrote. Most of the world has now outlived good part of these harms, though by no means all of them; but in our South they flourish pretty forcefully still. Not so forcefully as half a generation ago, perhaps, but still forcefully. There, the genuine and wholesome civilization of the nineteenth century is curiously confused and commingled with the [author's name appeared here as an adjective] Middle-Age sham civilization; and so you have practical, common-sense, progressive ideas, and progressive works; mixed up with the duel, the inflated speech, and the jejune romanticism of an absurd past that is dead, and out of charity ought to be buried...[He] had so large a hand in making Southern character, as it existed before the war, that he is in great measure responsible for the [US Civil] War."
a. Sir Walter Scott
b. Victor Hugo
c. Robert Southey
8. Though best known as a Romantic poet, this Briton was also an accomplished artist, known perhaps especially for the series of "Great Red Dragon" (i.e., Satan) paintings:
a. William Wordsworth
b. William Blake
c. Mary Shelley
9. Thomas Cole, Albert Bierstadt and Frederic Edwin Church were exponents of what American artistic movement that glorified natural beauty?
a. The Biedermeier School
b. The American Barbizon School
c. The Hudson River School
10. This composer is arguably the father of popular song – in addition to his (better-known) symphonies and choral works, he wrote some 600 "lieder" in his short life, including a cycle he called "Songs from Sir Walter Scott."
a. Felix Mendelssohn
b. Franz Liszt
c. Franz Schubert
11. What tumultuous year brought revolutions in Paris, Vienna, Berlin, Budapest and several other European cities?
a. 1830
b. 1848
c. 1858
12. Where did Byron die?
a. England
b. Italy
c. Greece
Okay, let's go look.
Answers: 1-b; 2-a- 3-a; 4-c; 5-b; 6-b; 7-a; 8-b; 9-c; 10-c; 11-b; 12-c.
Notes:
1. If you didn't know this one, you should have stopped there.
2. A bit of an unfair rap, the Nazi thing, although the connection is understandable.
3. The poem is "Adonais," and I first encountered it as a kid because...why...some of you should know this...Mick Jagger read this passage in Brian Jones' memory at the 1969 Hyde Park concert. Did Canning's death move anyone to write verse?
4. Should have been a logical guess at least.
5. It's Delacroix's "Liberty Leading the People" of course, which you can see here. Obviously, John Ashcroft wouldn't have hung it either!
6. I love "Eugene Onegin." How do you pronounce that, by the way? Oh-NYAY-gun?
7. This I wouldn't have known and just tripped across while researching possible questions. I set it up so you could guess Scott, though, because Hugo got cranked up a bit later and Southey just wasn't important enough. In any case I found this really fascinating.
8. I saw some drawings of Blake's at the Tate once. Intense. He was not a happy-go-lucky type.
9. Visited Frederic Edwin Church's weirdly beautiful house once, overlooking the (duh) Hudson.
10. Again, reading all those books that I did when I was little about my youthful rock'n'roll heroes taught me a lot. It was in reviewing Sgt. Pepper that some critic called Lennon and McCartney the greatest songwriters since Schubert, which made me curious about Schubert. In terms of range of subject matter, it seems to me that Lennon-McCartney are infinitely more interesting.
11. Basic history.
12. Should have been fairly easy, especially to the Brits. Trying to help you all finish strong!
Tell us how you did, of course, and do you have any poems, novels, paintings or other things from this era that you love that the rest of us should know about? Brits: Are you taught in school to commit long passages of Byron and Shelley to memory? Americans, I'm sorry to say, are no more taught to memorize poetry than we are the collected works of Enver Hoxha. Okay, the podium is yours.
