Similarity and Dissimilarity

The eighteenth century was known, among other possessions, as the neo-Classical Age of Reason. Thinkers admired all things Classical, from architecture to literature, and logical thinking was highly prized. Broadly speaking, Romanticism was a reaction against neo-Classicism. Writers and artists of the Romantic period considered that reason and logical thinking were all very well, but that these things did not value the emotional side of human responses highly enough. In modern terms, they might have said that the importance of the right hand-side of the brain, which deals with emotions, had been ignored. For instance, the writer, printer and painter William Blake (1757-1827) despised the clinical Classicism which was filling the new Royal Academy under the auspices of its founder, Sir Joshua Reynolds (1723-92), finding there no place for the imagination. In a famous painting of Sir Isaac Newton, Blake shows the great scientist absorbed in a calculation but apparently unaware both of his own natural nakedness and of the beauty of the world symbolized by the wonderfully colored rock upon which he is sitting. The second generation of Romantic poets, Keats, Shelley and Lord Byron were also revolutionaries. All grew up under a repressive, reactionary Tory government which had been quick to point out what ‘power to the people’ had led to in France. Shelley’s crusade in the name of liberty led him to fall out with his father, an MP and minor baronet, and to be expelled from Oxford University for writing The Necessity of Atheism (1811), a deliberately provocative pamphlet given that in those days most dons were churchmen. In 1818 he exiled himself for good, settling in Italy. From there, upon hearing of the Peterloo Massacre of 1819 when troops attacked a gathering of 60,000 Manchester civilians meeting to hear speeches advocating parliamentary reform, he wrote ‘The Mask of Anarchy’, arguably the most vicious satirical poem ever written. No publisher dared to print it