Before embarking along this twisting, confusing, and sometimes annoying journey into the meaning and historical importance of the Romantic Revolution, a term which no doubt will set some emotions on fire, for instance was there a Romantic Revolution? I would like to take time out to set the lines of discourse out now. This is an Prelude to an introduction. In all latter articles I will reference and index all articles. I make no apologies in highlighting the truth that this "prelude" is simply an opener to a more rigorous assement of the importance of understanding the "Romantics" I will be drawing our attention to the fact that it was the ideals embedded in Romantic explorations of the Sublime and the Senses which led to the undermining of the pre industrial societies of Europe, during the late 17th century.

Lets leave this assumption to one side for a moment. Infact, just for a while I would like to take readers on a small walk around various ideas and suggestions. This is not yet a introduction, an introduction will come latter. In many ways, this is a welcome into a form of experimentation. Its an opportunity to open up a discussion," What is History?. I would suggest Europe is in a state of crises. Its place on and in the world is under threat. Its identity confused . Old certainties no longer apply. Globalisation is a fact of life. The present economic disruption, some would argue "collapse" is undermining the fabric of civil society. No matter what the Banking World would have us believe this is a a crisis brought about by historic circumstances., which they augmented. But the historical circumstances which allowed the crises to unfold have been shifted away from hard empirical analysis. So what is the value of history? Again this is an will be an ongoing discussion. Never the less, I will be highlighting the problems we have with historical truth.

Of course one problem which always intrigues me is "whose history is it" What role does memory play in our interpretation of the past. By memory Im thinking about a sense of national identy.Whose identity? Is my history your history? What is memory? Events cloud our own memory. Our own memory is domiminated and contaminated by events which which are outside of our volatile identity. Is our understanding of history now governed by a new cultural ideology? One that embraces the powerful medium of popular culture and the rise of mass culture. Is history in the early stages of having to redefine itself in the Meta cultures and interdisciplinary frameworks which embraces complex arrangements of "other" disciplines, disciplines which question the fragile foundations of our preconceived acceptance of the value and meaning of academic inquiry. Is /was history some mystical entrance into the cave of kept, secrets and knowledge. A knowledge which shaped the way we see ourselves in opposition to the wider non English speaking world. What is the true meaning of historical investigation? Indeed is history concerned with investigation or is concercerned with reproducing events which may or, may not, have informed our sense of collective identity. It could also be suggested that history became a kind of quest, one which was thought to throw a light into the recesses of an unknown past, thereby opening out into some vast organic interpretation of who we where, who we are now, and ,importantly, how we arrived at "now". If so, does this knowledge inform an absolutists grasp of living in the present?.

For the sake of argument, I would like to high the changing landscape and influence of the entertainment industry and the perception being given in relation to historical interpretation. Are we in the first stages of being seduced by T.V history? T.V history is now part of an agressive campaign to capture an audience who appear to be enthralled in a seemingly endless desire to find gratification in the pleasure of remote environments plus the desire to gaze upon the ruins of past civilisations. In the companionship of photo genic personalities the past is brought to us as if we are watching a travel programme with intellectual late thrown into help satisfy the quenchable taste of adventure. To my mind these programmes high light the the devalued problematic of orientalism and post colonial conceptions within Eurocentric ideologies without confronting the historical/cultural difficulties which must be examamined within the construct of a changing media landscape. The term "cultural diversity's" is a troublesome abstraction. But history is a troublesome quest. History must take as its starting point the values, habits, dreams, myths, political structures, economic trading patterns of past societies and cultures even, before we enter into the dramatic exploration of the high octane drama of armies, battles, political intrigues and the fall of civilisations. TV history's first task is to capture an audience. Then, in the format of "serious" Hollywood Epics the passive audiences/consumer will be indulged in a series of assumptions concerning the dominance of Western expansion into that other world of good people bad people A fantasy world of preconceived, academic natinalistic,entertainment, prejudices which appease appetites of a post modern quest for desire and instant gratification. These are my prejudices' I make no apologies for highlighting where my journey is coming from. We cannot escape the importance of TV history. Likewise we cannot undervalue the importance of the Hollywood factory and corporate interpretations of historical story telling and false histories on the popular imagination. When the proximity of entertainment and historical story telling collides we internalised the past to gratify the present. If this is the case what is T.V history? My own take on T.V history is we are watching a form of travel programming with a sense of pleasure in ruins. I don't really have a sense of historical significance when I watch TV history. I'm always aware of a very Eurocentric gaze on the perception of the past.

But the pleasure in ruins is not new. It formed part of the Romantic sensibility. We love ruins, there is a pleasure in observing great cities that once stood proud and indestructible but are now reduced to ruins. They have gradually submitted to history caught in the grip of nature and the passing of time, their cultures lost in mythic memories and folk legends, time leaves its scares on the history of the past. In the present what we observe is the unfolding of nature and haunted shadows, the ruins inform and desert us with the sensibility of lose and sadness. We conjure up the spectre of ghosts and shadows in our memories. We forget or refuse to understand, most ruins have been cruelly laid waste and stripped of the embellishments which helped define the meaning of the city to the actual people who once lived,loved,played, died, within the confines of the city walls. Most Cities where walled, even Rome had to build gigantic walls to protect itself from the peoples it had once subjected to its rule. Most ruins are the remnants of the desire of man will to plunder. Some great cities vanish; those that have remained, give us a glimpse of ruins that are more majestic to our sense of wonder than they might have been in their original state. Ruins are deceivers. They are often more majestic and paradoxically, more human in a state of decayed granduar.Palaces of Persian kings, Roman and Byzantine emperors,Sassanian caliphs' and Haitian usurpers; Cistercian abbeys Doric temples, tombs, Norman towers, Mogul domes and Gothic spires all suffer the same torment. Never the less, in their deserted state in the shadows of the creeping jungles-some slowly melting back into the desert, others slowly dissolving under water-the mystery of their vanished past fills the observer with awe and respect.

This is the opinion of the passionate sightseer. The Romantic explorer who gazed in wonder at the past and like Shelly visualised an epic moral in the decline of ancient empires. The pleasure in ruins is a new phenomenon. Shelley's "Ozymandias"captures the Romantic idealisation of ruins wonderfully. Whilst at the same time exploring the social injustice and violent class structures being exploited by the late Regency Regime of an England about to experience the onslaught of the agricultural and industrial revolutions. Kings, queens, aristocrats.wars and tortures-Shelley loathed them all. He was throughout his life an uncompromising republican, and a wild child of the Romantic Revolution. Referring to Byron and Shelley, Karl Marx declared that those who loved and understood those two poets must consider it fortunate that Bryon died at the age of thirty six, for had he lived out his full span he would undoubtedly have become a reactionary bourgeois, while regretting on the other that Shelley died at the age of twenty nine, for Shelley was a thorough revolutionary and would have remained in the van of socialism throughout his life. Ozymandias is a powerful exploration of despotic power gone rotten. Shelley's Romantic inclinations penetrated to the source of the social evils which were reshaping, not only the social fabric of society, but also the very way the English landscape would would be viewed. The wild landscapes would be ploughed and buried under the creeping grip of "Blake's" satanic mills. In England the conflict between town and country was about to be turned on its head and become a conflict between City and everything else. The rise of the English City was about to explode into history. Let us steep back and take in the well known words once again.

I meet a traveller from an antique land
Who said:" Two vast and trunk less legs of stone
Stand in the desert...Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive,stamprd on those lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed:
And on the pedestal these words appear:
"My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty and despair!"
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away." Shelley 1817

Shelley saw that there were darker and more dangerous forces at work to exploit and injure humanity. But it as the barbarism of the monarchs and those who served them which inspired Shelley's wonderful sonnet. In Ozymandias we have the first joining of Oriental debauchery and the barbarism of the European monarchy coming together to express the sentiments of the human spirit heading into the wilderness of empty dreams and grandiose delusions.

The tensions between the City, the Town, and the Country side is a continues struggle which highlights a Romantic idealisation of identity and romance. Hostile associations have developed between the rural ideal and the onslaught of the City upon our understanding of "Who We Are" The City is a place of noise, worldliness and ambition, the country side is a place backwardness,ignorance,and limitations, and innonence.In the City we live a life abandoned. In the City we each for a lost innonence.Confusion abounds. We seek to return to a way of life which the City turned its back on. There is a "history" involved in these confusing relationships. The real history of this conflict has been one of varied misunderstandings and Romantic bewilderments. The country" way of life" is indulged in the representation and practices of country people who are seen to posses an insight into a long forgotten pre Christian knowledge, whilst the city becomes the repository of the state, adminstation, povety, religous centres and general lose of innocence. but there is another side to this image of the ideal state of the the country side.

In England the country side embraced two constructs, both informing the "English" sense of being, the mystical belief in its own self importance. The two stand for the English condition. In English the "country" is both a nation and part of the " land"; the "country" can be the whole society or its rural idealisation. Outside the English interpretation of the country side, "landscape" became another place. A place where nature and all its untamed spirits offered difference, violence, deserts, the supernatural and hostile forces, this "other" landscape offered up nature in its most intractable, barbaric, state. Agriculturally redundant, this foreign panorama was aesthetically repellent, the existent of these untamed areas upset the natural spirit level of the mind. The idea of nature being part of the historical reshaping of European attitudes to how it recognised itself may seem an odd introduction into the discourse of the Romantic of the Revolution. Its worth noting that the Landscape impacted on the sensibilities of scientific investigation. will explore this concept latter in in this series but let me simply highlight one observation which turned the theological world upside down.

Tamed landscapes, those landscapes which where attractive; landscapes with a planned order of human control imposed on them were deemed to represent Gods ordered world. Attractive landscapes gave credence to the biblical ordering of "mans"exile from the state of nature. And it was in the Mountains that the idea of "natures" roughest productions helped to refocus the attitudes of science and the church toward the realisation that the earth was much older than originally believed.Moutains possessed the ability to destroy at the whim of a butter flieswing,or the foot of a beetle, a simple cough could bring about a destructive avalanche, one might come across a demi god. a monster on whose turf you have accidently wondered, Mountains where" boils" on the tender surface of Earths skin. For the enquiring But, the mountains held the secrets of earths birth and ever changing capacity for destruction and permant change. The ordered state of nature was thrown into chaos and the role of Gods hand on the creation of the world open the gates to a realisation that, God did not make the world. This revolutionary reordering of knowledge and the accompanying theological unravelling was in no part due to the sensibilities of the Romantic quest to seek out the sublime experience with in and with out the the" indescribable".

Part of my journey will be about uncovering other interpretations other cultures, other genres, other voices songs ,poetry, paintings, myths and walking yes the pleasure of walking and historical self discovery. My gaze might will be different from your gaze. My perception of class,race,gender,might be different from your perceptions of class, race gender. How we view things, objects events are dictated by who we are and what we seek. And this simply opens up another argument "Who Are We". This notion "Who Are we" in relation to history this is a perplexing. What influences govern how we exist in the world. We come into this world without having any say in how the world exists. History has shaped our present, yet we don't know history. We assume History. We assume History to be a site in the past where events outside our experience occurred. But History is convulsive. What happen in the past impacts on how we order our societies, civilisations, civil societies in the present. We live in an age of mass civilisations and mass culture. This change in emphasise on mass civilisation and mass culture does have historical roots. And those roots have their home in Europe of 1914 The convolutions of the revolutionary ideologies which occurred during the years after the killing factories of the Great War 1914/18,did not run on blood alone, the civilisation and cultures of Europe under went a cultural agitation which in turn led into the mechanised mass murder of World War Two.

The Europe of the 19th century had been washed away, or was it simply blown away by its internal civil wars and dynastic ambitions. Antiquated social orders and traditions no longer held currency in the age of Post Empire. and anti colonial liberation. Europe had unleashed a murderous civil war on its own traditions the foundations of its certainty, its sense of a civilising destiny lay exposed in the death camps of an ideology which was completely grounded in European history,philosphy, science and sense of Romantic mythologizing of national identies and Enlighten certainties. The totalising philosophies, political ideologies and economic rationalities which dominated the inter war years were European in origin. Europe had created its own all devouring monster under the guise of Enlightened progress. The destructive impulses which dominated the political revolutionary movements of the inter war years can be traced back to one great European movement. The Romantic Movements which gripped the minds of all Revolutionary Ideals of Europe from the 17th century onwards, played itself out in the fractured collapsed of identity. All the old certainties were thrown into a chaotic maelstrom of destructive nationalism, and racialists idealism. How was it possible that Romanticism could give birth to passionate individualism and chauvinistic nationalism at the same time? How did Romantic thinking prefigure the totalitarian movements of the 20th century.?

But where do we separate The Romantic Idealism from that of The Enlightenment? Is it correct to argue that when we envisage Romanticism we think of flamboyant figures such as Byron or Shelly. Poets who lived life at the extremes of human tensions and fallibility. Do we foreget those other towering Romantic individauls, Napoleon, or Hegal,Turner or Blake,Wagner,Beethovan or Marx.? Do romantics the Romantics? Those individuals I have mentioned represent only the tip of one extremely titanic ice berg which was underling the foundations of the old order. Old certainties were already order under siege from the principles of the Enlighten Project. I have already made the sugestion,without clarifying the argument, that Romanticism is crucial to an understanding of Modern Western culture. Philophy, art, literature, music and politics where all transformed in the turbulent period between the French Revolution of 1789 and the Communist Manifesto of 1848.I will suggest that this was the age of "romantic Revolution" when modern attitudes to politics and artistic freedoms where born. I would like to welcome readers to the journey. Just one word of warning, I love the idea of exploration and improvisation. Walking for me is far more the a keep fit hobby. Like Walter Benjamin I prefer to see myself as a "FLANEUR" of the mind. The figure of the Flaneur prefigures that of the dective.The Flaneur should find social legitimation for his behavour.It suits him perfectly to see his indolence presented as a façade behind which he hides the sustained attention of an observer never letting his eyes off the unsuspecting criminal" The Flaneur becomes the inverse of a stranger who becomes a native, The Flaneur is a native who becomes a foreigner. "Never the less, to be stranger in ones time and home is most properly a virtue. More than this, it is a state of melancholic grace opening up the vistas on the human lot" Stefan Morawski.