~ The Aesthetics of English Romanticism ~

Consider these ideas offered by a few influential 19th Century English Romantic writers and critics--

Matthew Arnold

"...culture...a study of perfection, and of harmonious perfection, general perfection, and perfection which consists in becoming something rather than in having something, in an inward condition of the mind and spirit, not in an outward set of circumstances..."

"...the necessary first stage to a harmonious perfection...the subduing of the great obvious faults of our animality..."
"Oxford, the Oxford of the past, has many faults; and she has heavily paid for them in defeat, in isolation, in want of hold upon the modern world. yet we in Oxford, brought up amidst the beauty and sweetness of that beautiful place, have not failed to seize one truth:--the truth that beauty and sweetness are essential characters of a complete human perfection."

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

1. In a work of art the universal dwells in the particular; the particular does not simply stand for the universal.
2. The symbol joins things held apart in discursive thought. It is the vehicle of the beautiful, in that the beautiful joins multeity and unity.
3. The artist joins subject and object in an act analogous to God's creative act. Thus man reconciles himself with nature.
4. The work of art must grow organically from within itself. Its principles of order are finally internal and not imposed from without.

Thomas Carlyle

"A musical thought is one spoken by a mind that has penetrated into the inmost heart of the thing; detected the inmost mystery of it; namely the melody that lies hidden in it; the inward harmony of coherence which is its soul, whereby it exists, and has a right to be, here in the world. All inmost things, we may say, are melodious, naturally utter themselves in song."