*Just as the nineteenth century saw great changes in how people lived, worked, fought, and were governed, it also saw several different periods of art, literature, and ideals.

*The Enlightenment had empahasised reason above all other things, as well as a rejection of tradition, superstition, faith, feeling and anything that could not be logically proven and demonstrated. 

*Some people, however, were not willing to reject these things, and even in the midst of the Age of Reason, many painters, at least, softened the complex, showy, often dark-toned baroque art popular in the 1600s, into Roccoco artwork, which was softer, more sentimental, less religious (although Baroque art was already less religious than Renaissance art), lighter-hearted, and pastel. It was also often sensuous, with a new and more suggestive use of the nude in art (far more exciting than the Renaissance glorification of the perfection of the human body).  In ornamentation roccoco art and design was delicate, favouring gentle curves and frilly designs.

*Roccoco artwork and especially architecture declined during the French Revolution and Napoleonic era, as the Revolution looked back to ancient Rome as an example of a true Republic, and Napoleon looked back to the Roman Empire, and the Classical (or Neo-Classical) period was born, copying Greek and Roman architecture and statuary, and incorporating their æsthetic into paintings as well.  By this time, however, the sentimentality of roccoco art had returned to literature and popular culture.

*The austerity and then the excesses of the Age of Reason were rejected in the late 1700s and early 1800s by the Romantics.  As the name Romance suggests, this also looked back to Rome, but in this case as part of a more general interest in a sentimental version of the past—the Romantics told stories of knights in shining armour, damsels in distress, great heroes, twisted villains, and both the dark and noble sides of human existence.

*Besides exalting heroism, self-sacrifice, and true love, Romanticism also elevated nostalgia, melancholy, and introversion to respectability.  Above all,  Romanticism was about feeling and emotion; even a seemingly bad impulse, felt sincerely and deeply, was superior to the cold, calculating logic of the Enlightenment.  Early Romantic literature was sometimes described as Sturm und Drang or storm and stress.

*Romanticism also loved the sublime and the natural—anything that transcended mere human creation or human experience.  For the first time, people travelled to the countryside to see great mountains, waterfalls, and old ruins.  Something beautiful or idealistic did not have to be useful to be valuable.

*One of the greatest Romantic novelists was Sir Walter Scott, many of whose works were historical novels set in the distant English or Scottish past.  They told of chivalry, virtue, desperate struggles for freedom and love in an idealised past.  His work transformed Scotland in the English mind from a group of barbarians and Jacobite rebels into a romantic land of ancient feuding clans dating back into the mists of time.  George II had outlawed kilts in 1746 (although they were legalised again in 1781), but after reading Scott, King George IV wore one when visiting Edinburgh, and kilts went from being something warm and functional for shepherd in the highlands to a symbol of Scottish nationalism-it was not until the 1800s that different tartans for different families really became widespread.  Mark Twain said that the American Civil War was caused by southerners reading too much or Sir Walter Scott and convincing themselves that they were modern knights who had to uphold virtue and chivalry.

*Alexandre Dumas romanticised French history through The Three Musketeers and its sequals.

*In many ways, early Nationalism and Romanticism worked side-by-side, as Romantic writers and artists explored an idealised form of their nations' pasts and cultures.  The Brothers Grimm, in a way, undertook a romantic project in preserving and promoting their nation's folktales.

*Some Romantics turned to religion, admiring the glory and splendour and antiquity of the Catholic Church, while others, such as America's Transcendentalists, believed that exploring one's inner nature and the beauty of God's creation in nature could lead one to Transcend the world and old religious traditions.  To some, it did not matter what you believed, as long as you believed in something deeply and fully.

*Other writers explored the darker side of human nature.  Edgar Allan Poe was a romantic writer.  Percy Bysshe Shelley was a famous Romantic poet who wrote about nature, but his wife, Mary Shelley, became famous for her exploration of the nature of mankind in Frankenstein.

*Romantic works such as these that dwelt on the dark or conflicted aspects of human nature were sometimes known as Gothic literature, named for Gothic architecture, the style of the soaring mediæval cathedrals of Europe, which with their age, their intricate beauty, and their association with a higher and more mysterious purpose than anything man could make alone seemed to exemplify much that was Romantic.  The only thing more romantic than a Gothic cathedral would be the ruins of a Gothic abbey surrounded by trees and other natural, growing things—the beauty of the ancient works of man overcome by the sublime power of nature.

*Johann von Goethe was one of the great figures of German Romantic   literature.  His The Sorrows of Young Werther chronicled the short, unhappy life of a middle-class romantic German youth, who visits the countryside to relax, get in touch with his inner nature, and sketch in his notebook.  There he falls in love with an engaged girl, and eventually commits suicide because he feels it is the only way to be true to Lotte, himself, and Lotte's husband Albert, whom Werther also considers a friend.  A wave of suicides swept through Europe's emotional youth, to the point that the novel (and even the Werther costume) were banned in some places.  Goethe also wrote Faust, a drama about a brilliant and ambitious man who makes a deal with the Devil, whereby the Devil will serve Faust in this life, but Faust will serve him in hell.  Naturally, everything good Faust seems to get from the bargain turns bad, but others who suffer as a result are ennobled through their suffering—and important element of some Romantic works.

*Eventually, the Storm and Stress of Romanticism became too much, particularly as the romantic nationalism of the Springtime of Nations failed and the Industrial Revolution reduced the average man's life to one of utility.  Idealism seemed dead, and for many the Zeitgeist (or spirit of the age) changed to one of Realism, Materialism, or Utilitarianism.  These all suggested that only what could be proven to be real, explained through material evidence, or shown to be useful had value.  In art the ultimate tool of realism would be a new, useful, scientific tool, the camera:  what could capture more realistic images than that?

*Writings by Ricardo, Malthus, and other economists seemed so grim that economics came to be known as the dismal science.  Karl Marx defined people not by nation, religion, or history, but by class—everything else was an opiate of he masses, or false consciousness, or mystification; the lowest classes had to rise up to overthrow their oppressors, because they had nothing to lose but their chains.

*The necessity of conflict was common in the middle and late 1800s, thanks in part to Charles Darwin (and Alfred Russell Wallace).  In On the Origin of Species (1859) he laid out the basis for his theory of natural selection, often described as Survival of the Fittest.  In The Descent of Man (1871) he explained how evolution applied to humans, touching off a controversy with religious leaders that has yet to end.

*Darwin's notions of natural selection did not remain confined to science.  Soon survival of the fittest was applied to many aspects of society, often with deleterious effects for those who were not successful.  It came to be assumed that anyone who was poor or otherwise in bad circumstances deserved to be there due to bad choices, a bad heritage, or some moral failing (and the Victorian era was one with a very high set of moral standards).  This seemingly absolved the more successful from any obligation to help out the less fortunate, as it was simply a natural law that the less fit would suffer and die.  It also justified any means necessary to achieve success, because if they worked, they must have been justified, and if not, whomever tried them would deserve to fail.

*Otto von Bismarck (and many others) applied this idea to politics, what Bismarck called Realpolitk, the politics of reality, in which loyalty, morality, and other character traits traditionally considered to be virtuous could be ignored any time it was realistically beneficial to do so.

*Friedrich Nietzsche described this as the Will to Power.  He believed that the Enlightened philosophes had been partly correct—reason could improve and advance a person—but they had missed the fact that force, will, and personality mattered, too.  A man with a strong will and the unsentimental intellect to use it could achieve anything and cease to be an ordinary human and become an Übermensch, a superman.  Nietzsche rejected the need for traditional morality for such a superman who could transcend it through the force of his own personality, and said that it hardly mattered because God is dead—Europeans had already killed Him with their advances in science.  In fact, Christianity was not just outdated, it was pernicious and destructive of humanity, because compassion, caring, and humility make a man weak, indeed, they make him a slave to others.

*There were a few writers who challenged these ideas, criticising the industrial world without trying to utterly overthrow it, and certainly not casting away morality or compassion—to most Victorians, Nietzsche's statements were deplorable. 

*One of the most prolific literary critics of 19th century urban and industrial life was Charles Dickens.  Although Dickens wrote novels that often depicted the grim life of urban factory workers, he did so with humour and dignity, trying to draw people's attention to their fates in hopes that reformers might try to alleviate their misery.  Indeed, many reformers did improve people's lives in many ways, but the overall trend in society was towards an aggressive, competitive, utilitarian worldview.

*Utilitarianism, Social Darwinism, Realpolitik, and the Will to Power combined with the more aggressive nationalism of the second half of the 1800s to create an arms race that would ultimately tip the Balance of Power in Europe, but not until Europe had conquered the rest of the world.