The Romantic Movement: a force for good?

Caspar David Friedrich - Wanderer above the sea of fog, 1818

I am sitting in a conference room in the higher education college, TMC Institute, Tashkent, where I am the chairman. I am waiting to take part in some videos - mainly to promote the UK Master's and Bachelor's programmes we run here. I have finished my emails et al., and I started to think about the coming talks I will be giving: one of them will be for Adult Learning at St. Albans Cathedral. It will be on 25th May on The Romantic Vision of Art - it is the first in a series, followed by The Romantic Vision in Literature and The Romantic Vision in Music. (https://www.stalbanscathedral.org/Event/the-romantic-vision-in-art )

The question has come into my mind, "Was the Romantic Movement a force for good?" I guess I would argue that, in the end, the Romantic Movement’s legacy is rather mixed. Whether it was a “force for good” depends heavily on which aspects you emphasise and which historical or cultural outcomes you value. In short, Romanticism was a force for good in expanding human emotional depth, creativity, and resistance to dehumanising industrialisation, but a force for harm in its occasional embrace of irrational nationalism, heroic violence, and rejection of what might be called "Enlightenment reason".

On the positive side, the Romantics placed immense value on human emotion and individuality. Against the dehumanising mechanism of early industrial society and cold rational philosophy, figures like Wordsworth, Keats, and Shelley insisted that feeling, imagination, and subjective experience truly matter, helping to pave the way for modern psychology, human rights discourse, and artistic freedom. Their work also deepened appreciation for nature, reacting against the view of the natural world as a mere resource. Their awe for the sublime—wild landscapes, storms, mountains—sparked early conservation ethics. It could be argued that without Romanticism, the modern environmental movement would lack some of its moral passion.

Furthermore, the movement challenged slavery and oppression. William Blake’s “The Little Black Boy,” Wordsworth’s sonnets against colonial violence, and Shelley’s "The Mask of Anarchy", a response to the Peterloo Massacre, show Romanticism allied with abolition and reform, giving moral energy to fighting political and industrial exploitation. At the same time, Romanticism democratized art by celebrating folk traditions, common speech—Wordsworth’s “language really used by men”—and the experiences of peasants and outcasts, breaking from aristocratic classical conventions and making art accessible to ordinary people.

Yet there is a darker side to the ledger. Romanticism fuelled dangerous nationalism through its emphasis on a unique national Volksgeist, or folk spirit, feeding aggressive ethnic identity. German Romantics like Fichte and Herder helped inspire a cultural self-image that later slid into racial nationalism. While in places like Italy and Poland, Romantic nationalism could be liberating, it also taught that emotion and blood loyalty outweigh universal reason: a lesson easily corrupted into chauvinism. Nazi ideology, caught up in Wagnerian drama, was Romanticism of a hideous kind. The movement also glorified the heroic, violent outsider: the Byronic hero, brooding and rebellious, set a glamorous model for self-destructive behaviour, later contributing to cults of the violent artist, the “noble” terrorist, or even the charismatic dictator. Some Romantics praised revolutionary terror or medieval chivalric violence.

Additionally, Romanticism at times rejected reason and science in unhealthy ways. While questioning cold rationalism was valid, some Romantics embraced obscurantism, mysticism, and outright hostility to empirical method, occasionally feeding into anti-vaccination sentiment, pseudoscience, and later far-right irrationalism. Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein famously warned against science without ethics, but many Romantics went further, dismissing science as soulless.

Finally, the movement valorised suffering and failure. Romantic cults of melancholy, tuberculosis, and early death—Keats at twenty-five, Shelley at twenty-nine, Byron at thirty-six—romanticised illness and despair. This had a dark side, aestheticising suicide as in Goethe’s "The Sorrows of Young Werther" and discouraging practical problem-solving in favour of noble defeat.

It should be said that the Romantic Movement was not a single force but a many-sided one. It was good when it expanded empathy, creativity, and respect for nature, but bad when it fostered irrational nationalism, rejection of reason, and glamorised violence or despair. On balance, many would argue that its positive contributions - individual rights, environmental ethics, anti-slavery passion - outweigh its negatives, but only if we remember that its excesses needs a constant critique. The best answer might be that Romanticism was a force for good only when tempered by "Enlightenment reason", and a danger when allowed to run unchecked.