Was ist Romantik?

I'd like to elaborate a bit further on my concept of romanticism in regards to the relationship between artist and subject, beginning with an elucidation my definition of the term, which I believe remained particularly oblique in my last post.

Charles Baudelaire wrote (as recorded on Wikipedia) that "romanticism is precisely situated neither in choice of subject nor exact truth, but in a way of feeling," which I interpret to refer to the counter-enlightenment character of the movement. Where the works of the earlier era were primarily concerned with the rational investigation of the nature of the universe and the absolute ability of human perception to find rational explanation, romanticism often rejects these principles in favor of portraying the world as mysterious and unknowable.

Through this definition of the romantic movement, I have derived a term to refer to the action that one takes in using this sort of perception: "romanticize." This contrasts with the perception involved in Enlightenment perception, which I refer to simply as perception. Of course, my nomenclature implies a hierarchy between the two; romanticism being an additional step in the process of perceiving, which may expose my bias on the matter. To me, emotion is a product of perception, not a rival; thus, when we find heightened emotions of the romantic movement, there must be some occurrence of imperfect reporting.

At this point, I would like to remind the reader that I am speaking in terms of the relationship between the author and subject, and not in the terms of the quality of the literature that results from this relationship. I think it is important for literary criticism to theorize on the hierarchies and presuppositions of these relationships to better understand the work in question, not necessarily to judge the work.

To return, I find it important that Baudelaire uses the word "feeling" as a contrast to "truth." This implies to the reader that to "feel" a subject one must suppress what one knows about that subject, or perhaps to prevent perception of the subject. Or perhaps this is best understood through the phenomenon of social transference--the process by which one "fills in" one's understanding of another person with the aspects of a third person of whom the second person is reminiscent. Perhaps the process of romanticization can be understood as partial understanding of the subject coming from the artist's perception of the subject, with certain scripts and schemata added from preexisting sources, most often from a store of cultural stereotypes and ideals of lower-class agrarian lifestyles. The question then becomes, in what proportion is the subject perceived, and in what proportion does the subject act as a cipher for the ideas of the subject.

My theory is largely negated by its many presuppositions. The author must be directly perceiving some object and consciously attempting to recreate it in the work. Also, I have failed to take into account an instance where the author may consciously create a speaker who initiates a process of romanticization on his perceptions, let alone an instance such as Emma, where the speaker, a disembodied narrator, seems to often fall prey to the preexisting schemata of the characters which it describes.