ELEMENTS OF ROMANTICISM
PART III:
THE IMPORTANCE OF FEELINGS AND THE EMOTIONS
The Romantics developed a veritable cult of feeling. Doubtless, some of them indulged their emotions for the simplest of reasons: because feeling strongly felt good. The more one felt, the better: emotion was fine, but ecstacy was finer still.
Emotion had a role in understanding reality. The Romantic's task, as the more thoughtful of them saw it, was to rehumanize mankind's sense of itself and the cosmos. They envisaged a more comprehensive model of reality, less exclusively ruled by reason. The result was intellectual understanding of human experience and the cosmos (reason) that is, therefore, intensely felt. Literature, then, especially poetry, conveyed that combination (marriage/unity) of reason (the masculine principle) and feeling (the feminine principle).
Faith in the absolute uniqueness of every consciousness was prevalent. No longer did universality of human nature supply comfort to individuals: Now, they might seek reassurance instead of their own uniqueness. Before, public life was assumed to be the measure of human capacities and was to provide meaningful forms of experience. Now, psychic experience could provide the proper measure of an individual's emotional capacity. To place value there opened the possibility of taking women as seriously as men, children as seriously as (if not more so) adults, savages as seriously as civilized beings. Indeed, women, children, and savages were often thought to exceed cultivated adult males in their capacity both to feel and express their feelings spontaneously, and in their openness, their receptivity without questioning, to the infinite.
With the central emphasis on feelings, new kinds of feeling drew literary attention:
Pushkin in "Queen of Spades," imagines the evolving feelings of a young man eager to make his fortune at any cost.
Heine glorifies emotions associated with morphine and the longing for death, as others do for wine.
Hugo evokes Satan's internal experiences as he falls from heaven.
The examples indicate that painful as well as pleasurable emotions interested readers and writers. The presence of emotional intensity (sometimes spooky) of whatever kind became a hallmark of excellence.