constitutes a sort of artistic ritual, so that it not seldom becomes academic and even mechanical. Its products are generally marked by qualities like clarity, symmetry, restraint, repose, and a finish of detail that is as nearly as possible final.
The aim of romantic art, on the other hand, is to present some product of imagination or depiction of mood or other embodiment of personality, which is unusual in character or intensity, and the beauty of which largely inheres in the emotion felt over it by the artist and by the sympathetic observer. Works in the romantic spirit, therefore, are subjectively beautiful, impressive more or less in proportion as they are consciously felt to be personal and intimate, involving a high degree of imaginative or sensitive sympathy. The production of romantic art is distinctly impatient of rules and models, since in it individuality is always exalted. Hence its products escape all simple classification, and sometimes run to extremes of obscurity, irregularity, whimsicality, passion, and to a choice of topic or treatment that is a surprise or a challenge.
The rise of romanticism in music was undoubtedly stimulated
by literary romanticism, a movement which affected leading
countries of Europe in different ways and not exactly at the same
time, but which was at its height in Germany and France about
1830 and after. But literary romanticism made much of a choice
of topics distant from common experience—a feature inapplicable
to music except in the opera. A broader statement is that
all romanticism is an attempt to get away from the typical to the
peculiar, from the conventional to the picturesque, and is really a
phase of the modern desire to exalt the individual in his tastes,
fancies, moods and experiences. This at least is true of musical
romanticism. The movement toward a fuller recognition of individual
rights had long been gathering strength, and, beginning
with the French Revolution of 1792, it forced the progressive
reconstruction of European politics and society. The process
was most conspicuous in the manifold and severe upheavals in
government that filled the middle of the century with ferment,
disorder and war. But it declared itself as well in a novel independence
and enterprise in every domain of thought and science.
In the political world France still held the centre of the stage, though,
in the delicate balance of European affairs, more as an occasion or initiative
of disturbance than as an arbiter. The French Revolutions of 1830,
which brought in Louis Philippe as 'citizen-king,' and of 1848, which
drove him out, were signals for complicated outbreaks elsewhere, all
tending to assert the rights of the people at large, or of subject states, to
self-government. Thus, after 1830, Poland made a fierce, but unsuccessful,
effort to throw off the tyranny of Russia, while in England a series of
