II : Romanticism : A Winchester View
Washington Crossing the Delaware , by Emanuel Leutze ; licensed under Creative Commons ; photo credit : The Metropolitan Museum of Art .
Romanticism is a European cultural movement which explores the importance and rights of the individual . It has three prominent characteristics . First , in philosophical terms , it esteems the imagination as a faculty higher than reason , and transcendentalises religion by taking God or the divine as inherent in people or nature . Second , in political and revolutionary terms , in an era of world war and profound economic change , Romanticism rebels against aristocratic and bourgeois social , political and structural norms . Finally , in terms of aesthetics , Romanticism explores the self , and the relationships of self in particular to nature .
It honours poetry and the arts as the highest human creations , and espouses values and subjects which are individual , often extreme or alternative .
Romanticism is often presented as a sudden and dramatic change – and violent too . Alfred deVigny argued that the French Romantics had been “ conceived between battles , and attended school to the rolling of drums ”. This talk explores a radically different view . It sees Romanticism as earlier , quieter , and more local – the heritage of Winchester , not Philadelphia , Paris , orVienna .
Each of these Romantic constituents , Philosophy ,
Aesthetics and Revolution , play out in Winchester over a long timeframe . The philosopher Anthony Ashley-Cooper ( 1671-1713 ), Third Earl of Shaftesbury , attended Winchester between 1683 and 1686 . His ideas prefigure several aspects of Romantic philosophy . Shaftesbury connects “ seeing beauty ” with “ acting beautifully ”: the natural stimulates the moral . Next , his concept of intuition anticipates the Romantic focus on the creative imagination ; and finally , his view of human nature anticipates Rousseau : our nature produces spontaneous impulses to be generous , sociable , and helpful . These notions were preoccupying Shaftesbury as early as 1711 , when he published his Characteristics of Men .
Winchester also had a distinctive aesthetic , or , more particularly , a poetic tradition . The College traditionally had a scholarly aspect amongst the seven public schools , as well as a certain reclusiveness , unlike the city locations of Westminster and Charterhouse ; the leisured out of town wealth of Harrow ; the far removed provincial locations of Shrewsbury and Rugby ; or the courtly associations and connections of Eton . A distinctive phase in this poetic tradition commences with the poet EdwardYoung ( 1683-1765 ), who attended Winchester from 1694 . Young ’ s The Complaint , or Night-Thoughts on Life , Death and Immortality ( 1742-45 ) was for Boswell “ the grandest and richest poetry that human genius has ever produced ”, and led to the so called Graveyard School of poetry . A separate talk could very easily be devoted to it .
Maurice Ashley-Cooper ; Anthony Ashley-Cooper , 3rd Earl of Shaftesbury , by John Closterman ;
© National Portrait Gallery , London .
Winchester College Mill .
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