Chapter 8. English Romanticism

As we have stated in the previous chapter, the last period of Enlightenment drew very little from the Age of Reason, inclining itself towards the irrational and the unbalanced. The last decades of the eighteenth century were shaken by great political changes: America broke away from England, and in 1789 the French Revolution took place. English thinkers and politicians were much agitated, taking sides, preaching for and against the new violent movements, and a good deal of the prose of this last period of Enlightenment is concerned with such watchwords as Liberty, Anarchy, and Justice. William Godwin (1756 - 1836) wrote a book about Political Justice, preaching a kind of anarchy, extolling the light of pure reason as it comes to the individual soul, denouncing law and marriage and property because these interfere with individual freedom. His book had a great influence on Romantic poets like Shelley. Tom Paine (1737 - 1800) had previously defended, in his Rights of Man, the Revolution in France. Edmund Burke (1729 - 97), despite his Liberalism, attacked this same Revolution, and stated that tradition was more important than rational political theories - society was like a plant or a human body, growing, working out its salvation according to laws of its own, and it was dangerous to interfere with that process.

Romanticism as a term indicates the theory and practice of the romantic art, music, and literature in particular that indulge the sway of romance which stands opposite either to the rational thinking or to the commonplace of life. Already in the definition we have provided above quite tentatively we feel the challenge - the quality that we find inherent in the rebellious spirit of the Romantics. The spirit focused on the dissatisfaction that impregnated the post-revolution Europe. The results of the French Revolution were more discouraging than promising any progressive change in the state of things in France: the people did not get more freedom, nor did they witness any social justice.

Among the writers of the movement there were those whose work was revolutionary with an appeal to struggle for the world's improvement. Their heroes were rebels, who questioned the society of relative liberty and injustice. Some other writers preferred another world in the medium of their work: that which was full of their vague dreams, including those of miracle and mystique. A romantic poet is not satisfied with the harshness of reality, he feels disappointed in it and, craving for improvement, creates images and characters, which correspond to his ideals. The poet depicts exceptional, particular, at times mysterious, characters, who are surrounded by corresponding exceptionality of the situations and circumstances. Namely in such circumstances a disappointed romantic hero is able to expose his unusual traits and particularities. Very often romantic poets looked back at the past: they looked for eccentric people who were active and enthusiastic, and did their legendary deeds in the name of freedom. Nonetheless, they did not describe historically authentic characters, but endowed them with all those characteristics that they strove to have a sight of in their present. However, their heroes, in most cases, act outside the social and political surrounding.

In contrast to classicist poets, romantics required full freedom of creative writing, as well the use of various literary forms and genres. In romantic literature prevailed a lyric motive, which became a substantial peculiarity. Another peculiarity was a passionate confession that made a literary work sound elated and emotional. A romantic work was usually built on unusual, sometimes fantastic events, which made the foundation of the plot. The composition is always characterised by sharp contrasts and oppositions. Nature, making the background of the story development, is presented in quaint, contrasting, bright colours; and the action takes place in far-off countries with unusual and strange environment. Romanticism was entirely based on the relationship between the individual and society. Romanticism was in many ways a reaction to the outcome of the French Bourgeois Revolution. Whatever that reaction could be: either revolutionary or not too, it was romantic based on the challenge of the romance to the commonplace of life. It was the challenge to the reason proclaimed by Enlightenment. The transition from the Augustan age to the age of Romantics was marked by the writing of Robert Burns - a distinguished Scottish poet whose rebellious spirit permeated through his works.

Robert Burns (1759 - 96), became a precursor of Romanticism in Great Britain. He appeared to be the first real poetic rebel of the century. He revolted, in his personal life, against the restraints of conventional morality and the repressive Presbyterian religion of Scotland. He shows himself capable of writing masterfully in two distinct styles - the polite style of England, using heroic couplets and Spenserian stanza and the idiom of Pope; the rougher and more earthy style of his own land, with a dialect that is almost unintelligible to many Englishmen, but is brisk and vigorous and refreshing. He sings about the things he likes - including drink and women - with gusto and without shame. He has a strong sense of humour (seen at its best in Tam O'Shanter), and a sympathy with the downtrodden, whether man or beast, which enables him to write a perfectly serious Ode to a mouse:

But, mousie, thou art no thy lane

In proving foresight may be vain:

The best-laid schemes o'mice and men

Gang aft a-gley,

An' lea'e us nought but grief an' pain

For promised joy.

The Romantic movement is generally believed to start at the time of the French Revolution, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712 - 78) - one of the prophets of the Revolution - was one of the forerunners of Romanticism. He was by nature a rebel - against the existing conceptions of religion, art, education, marriage, government, and book after book he propounded his own theories on these subjects. Rousseau advocated a return to nature. In the natural state , he held, man is happy and good, and it is only society that, by making life artificial, produces evil. His Emile, a treatise on education, advocated that children should be brought up in an atmosphere of truth, and it condemned the elaborate lies that society imposed on the average child - including myths and fairy-stories. It was Rousseau's doctrine of the noble 'natural man', and his attack on the corrupting power of civilisation, that produced novels, such as the one written by William Godwin - Caleb Williams, in which the spirit of revolt is expressed through the central character, who has no religion or morality, who is a living witness to the corruption of a society in which the evil flourish and the good are victimised.

At that same period there were novels of 'mystery and imagination' by writers like Mrs. Ann Radcliffe (1764 - 1822) and Matthew Gregory Lewis (1775 - 1818), who followed the example set in 1764 by The Castle of Otranto - a 'Gothic' story by Horace Walpole (1717 - 97). The term 'Gothic' is primarily an architectural one, denoting that kind of European building which flourished in the Middle Ages and showed the influence of neither the Greeks nor the Romans. Gothic architecture, with its pointed arches, began to come back to England in the middle of the eighteenth century - Walpole himself built a 'little Gothic castle' at Strawberry hill, London. That kind of building suggested mystery, romance, revolt against classical order, wildness, through its associations with medieval ruins - ivy-covered, haunted by owls, washed by moonlight, shadowy, mysterious, etc. The Castle of Otranto is a melodramatic curiosity; Mrs. Radcliffe's The Romance of the Forest, The Mysteries of Udolpho, and The Italian are skilfully written, her mysterioes always have a rational explanation at the end, and she never offends conventional morality. Lewis's The Monk - with its devils, horror, torture, perversions, magic, and murder - is very different: its lack of taste does not compensate for its undoubted power.

We ought to mention in this context a work produced a good deal later - Frankenstein by Mary Shelley (1797 - 1851). This was written during a wet summer in Switzerland, when her husband and Lord Byron were amusing themselves by writing ghost-stories in prose, and she herself was asked to compose one. She could never have guessed that her story of the scientist who makes an artificial man - by which he is eventually destroyed - would give a new word to the language, and become so well known among even the near-illiterate (thanks chiefly to Hollywood) that its subject would rise from humble fiction to a universal myth.

We have said a bit earlier that we tend to associate the term 'Romanticism' with the French Revolution, its outcomes to be more exact. The parturition of Romanticism began with the storming of the Bastille in Paris and the first spilling of blood in the Revolution. But as we have recently seen, Romanticism was trying to to stir all the way through the Age of Reason: the eighteenth century had a number of rebels, individualists, obsessed men - often unsuccessfully because of the difficulty of language - worked at a literature of instinct, emotion, enthusiasm, tried to return to the old way of the Elizabethans and even to the medieval poets. Only when the philosophies of men like Rousseau, Locke, and Hume began to be translated into revolutionary action did feeling stir sufficiently to make the new kind of literature seem natural. What had been unorthodox became orthodox. Romanticism developed its own rules and standards, and the rebels became the lawful government.

The period of Romanticism in England had its peculiarities. During the second half of the eighteenth century economic and social changes took place in the country. England came through the so-called Industrial revolution that gave birth to a new class - working class (proletariat in Marx's terminology). The Industrial revolution began with the invention of a weaving-machine which could do the work of seventeen people. The weavers that were left without work thought that the machines were to blame for their misery. They began to destroy these machines, or frames as they were called. This frame-breaking movement was called the Luddite movement after the name of the first man to break a frame - Ned Ludd. The further introduction of machinery instead of manual labour in different branches of manufacture left far more people jobless. At the same time English bourgeoisie reacted very severely. Their reaction took a form of 'white terror'. Some progressively minded people were persecuted and forced into exile, as in the case of Thomas Paine (1737 - 1809), the author of the Rights of Man, who had to flee to France. These things had a great influence on the cultural life of the country. In addition to the problems that the European writers of the period had to find answers to those that arose in their own country - the growth of industry, the rising working class movement, and the final disappearance of the class of peasantry.

Some of the writers were definitely revolutionary (George Gordon Byron (1788 - 1824) and Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792 - 1822)). Nevertheless, as we have stated that earlier in this chapter, there were still old conservatives to contend with, Wordsworth had to fight almost incessantly against those who still clung to the standards of the past; Keats was soundly trounced by the critics; Shelley was roundly condemned. But the very fact that, by about 1830, all the literary men of talent can be classified roughly as members of one movement, is a sign that they represent the new orthodoxy.

A group of conservative poets - William Wordsworth (1770 - 1850), Samuel T. Coleridge (1772 - 1834), and Robert Southey (1774 - 1843) - formed the 'Lake School', called so because they all lived for a time in the beautiful Lake District in the north-west of England. They dedicated much of what they wrote at the time to Nature. The 'Lake' poets resorted to the popular forms of verse, that were known and could be understood by all. One of the first works, published by Wordsworth and Coleridge in 1798, was a distinguished collection of collection of poems under the title of Lyrical Ballads. The creations of the two poets were full of deep feelings, those feelings being expressed in the language of the honest common name. The spiritual life of man got its prime at the time of Romantics. This was reflected in an abundance of lyrical verse. The description got very rich in form and many-sided in contents. The writers resorted to symbolism, fantasy, and grotesque. The forms of a legend, a tale, a song, and a ballad, became of paramount imprtance in Romanticism.

To some critics, influenced by Wordsworth's famous preface to the second edition of the Lyrical Ballads, the essential thing about Romanticism was the return to nature, both in style and content. Wordsworth complained that with slight exceptions, no English poets introduced into their work images drawn directly from nature. He implied that the poetry of that period was too imitative, too bookish, too much concerned with society, too intellectualised. It is seen quite clearly here that Wordsworth was unduly prejudiced by the style in which eighteenth century poets expressed their appreciation of nature. It could even be maintained that there was more nature poetry written in the eighteenth century than ever before.

It is not a return to nature that constitutes Romanticism, declare other critics, but a return to the past, displayed not merely in the revival of interest in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, but also in an imitation of the genres and forms of those periods. Byron, Shelley, and Keats, for example, used the Spenserian stanza, sometimes using archaic language, and sometimes imitating medieval poetry. Some other critics have argued that the chief distinguishing mark of romantic literature is 'sensibility'. The eighteenth century, with the sentimental comedies of Kelly and Cumberland, and the still greater popularity of the sentimental novel, culminating in Sterne's A Sentimental Journey, is the real age of sensibility. It is felt that the difference between classical and romantic is related to the difference between objectivity and subjectivity. Classicism was more oriented on the thinking ability of the human subject and therefore on its ability to grasp the universe and to subject it to its own means. For Classicism the reality was as objective as its writing. Romanticism was centred on subjectivism - all the universe was modified by the senses of the human subject, felt through by it. Literature, the whole world in general, comes from energy of feelings rather than from reason. Romanticism is an overflow of powerful feelings.

When we consider that the Romantics were really returning to the old way of writing (the way of the Elizabethans and even of the ballad-poets), we see the classical age in a true perspective. It was Dryden and Pope who broke away from the great English tradition and joined, for a brief age of stability, the classical tradition of France. Now, as revolutionary France became less the home of 'Liberty, Equality, Fraternity' and more the home of tyranny, the country that has inspired classicism and fired the Romantic spirit ceased to have any influence on English literature. Poets like Coleridge, Wordsworth, Southey, Scott, Byron, and Shelley learned more from Germany than from the nearer neighbour, and Germany helped to sustain English Romanticism for a long time (we must bear in mind that 'Gothic' implies Teutonic culture).

The key year for English Romanticism is not 1789, but 1798. 1789 saw the fall of the Bastille, but 1798 saw the publication of the Lyrical Ballads by William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. In the Preface to the second and the third editions of this book, Wordsworth laid down the principles on which he thought the composition of poetry should be founded. He was insistent that the language of poetry should be the language of ordinary men and women, found at its unspoilt in the speech of rural people. He was against 'poetic diction'. He was also against the rationalist content of the Augustan poets; he wanted a return to imagination; he wanted a return to imagination, legend, the human heart. He also coceived of poetry - as did all the Romantics - as more than the mere correct versification of philosophical truths: the poet was a prophet, not the transcriber of other men's truths but the initiator of truth itself. To be a poet meant a tremendous responsibilty - the poet had the key to the hidden mysteries of the heart, of life itself; the poet was not a mere embellisher of everyday life, but the man who gave life its meaning. With the Romantics poetry became a vocation. Shelley made the following claim: ' Poets are the trumpets which sing to battle; poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.' In 1798, with the publication of his - and Coleridge's - manifesto, he knew that his way lay not in rationalism, but in intuition, in a kind of mysticism, and that Nature meant more to him than all the systems. Wordsworth's attitude to Nature is original and remarkable. Nature is a great teacher of morals, and the prime bringer of happiness, but Nature is much more than all that: in Nature resides God. Wordsworth is aware, in contact with the woods and mountains and lakes and trees of his own northern county of Cumberland, or of less rugged regions, of -

A presence that disturbs me with the joy

Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime

Of something far more deeply interfused,

Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,

And the round ocean and the living air,

And the blue sky, and in the mind of man.

( Tintern Abbey: lines 94-9)

Wordsworth is neither Christian, deist, nor rationalist. He is best described as a Pantheist, one who identifies the natural universe with God, and thus denies that God is over everything or possesses a distinct 'personality'. Rarely in Wordsworth will you catch any hint or echo of eighteenth-century thought or technique. His language is his own, his natural descriptions are fresh and immediate; he is a poet of the particular scene, not the general abstract image. Technically, his range is very wide: the blank verse of The Prelude and The Excursion (the two long autobiographical poems), though originally owing something to Milton, emerges as recognisably Wordsworth's own; the Italian sonnet-form is exploited in a quite individual way; a variety stanza-forms and the free Pindaric metre are used with mastery. His success in writing poetry is as triumphant as anything else in Shakespeare.

Coleridge's contribution to the Romantic movement lay in a return to the magical and mysterious. His three great poems - The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Christabel, and Kubla Khan - are coloured with the mysterious and the supernatural. Coleridge turns to the past for mystery and wonder - unlike Wordsworth, who takes the present and the everyday.

Both Wordsworth and Coleridge lived long enough to regard their early enthusiasm, especially for the French Revolution ('Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive', says Wordsworth, 'but to be young was very heaven'), as vaguely discreditable. The Romantic spirit , it seemed, had to be associated with youth, and indeed it was in the work of men who died when they were still young - Lord Byron (1788 - 1824), Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792 - 1822), and John Keats (1795 - 1821) - that the peculiar 'immaturity' of Romanticism found its voice.

Byron became a legend - the cynic who was the great lover, the debauchee and atheist, the hero who eventually lost his life dying for the cause of Greek independence. His poetry is essentially self-centred - he is the hero of Childe Harold, of the remarkable anti-religious drama Cain, of The Corsair and The Siege of Corinth. Exiled from England because of the scandal surrounding his private life, in his later days he became the great sneerer at the laws and conventions of his country, and a spirit of satire which allies him to Pope (whom he admired) came out strongly in his masterpiece Don Juan. Don Juan is perhaps not strictly a Romantic poem at all: there is too much laughter in it, too much of the sharp edge of social criticism:

This is the patent age of new inventions

For killing bodies, and for saving souls,

All propagated with the best intentions;

Sir Humphry Davy's lantern, by which coals

Are safely mined for in the mode he mentions,

Tombuctoo travels, voyages to the Poles,

Are ways to benefit mankind, as true,

Perhaps, as shooting them at Waterloo.

But occasionally the Romantic voice comes out in such lyrics as that beginning:

The isles of Greece, the isles of Greece!

Where burning Sappho loved and sung,

Where grew the arts of war and peace,

Where Delos rose, and Phoebus sprung!

Eternal summer gilds them yet,

But all, except their sun, is set.

And yet both the satire and the pouring forth of feeling seem reconcilable to each other. Byron is not a satirist of the true Augustan order, chiefly because he refuses to take trouble with his poetic technique: Pope, approving some of the humour, would have been appaled at the carelessness of much of the writing. Byron is the young spoilt darling who sulks and sneers if he cannot have his own way. He died heroically after writing one of his finest lyrics - 'My days are in the yellow leaf' - but his fighting for Greece against the Turks was an adolescent attempt at making himself a Homeric hero - it was the ancient epic Greece that was in his imagination, not the real resurgent modern Greece.

Shelley was another revolt - a revolt against all existing laws, customs, religion. Revolt was in his nature (he was lucky to be able to afford to indulge it: his family was aristocratic, he himself financially independent). At twenty-one he wrote Queen Mab, a long philosophical poem with notes, in which he professes himself an atheist, a vegeterian, an opponent of existing marriage-laws, a republican, an advocate of universal love. His longer poems all take up the theme of revolt, of suffering humanity in chains: The Revolt of Islam, Prometheus Unbound, Hellas (which hymns the Greek rising against Turkish rule). But he also presents his positive philosophy of the indestructibility of beauty (The Sensitive Plant) and of the power of love, as in Epipsychidion. He has considerable dramatic power, which makes his The Cenci one of the few actable plays of the Romantic period, but it is as the lyrical poet of Nature that Shelley makes the greatest appeal. He has the same sensitivity as Wordsworth, and perhaps a far greater melodic power, revealed at its best in the Ode to the West Wind:

O thou

Who chariotest to their dark wintry bed

The winged seeds, where they lie cold and low,

Each like a corpse within its grave, until

Thine azure sister of the Spring shall blow

Her clarion o'er the dreaming earth and fill

(Driving sweet buds like flocks to feed in air)

With living hues and odours plain and hill.

It is a kind of spirit, self-pitying, over-intense, similar to a rash of religious mania. Although Shelley was influenced by classicists and neo-classic writers (Spenser, Shakespeare, Dryden, and Donne), he sounded more classical and sentimental. At his time he was thought of as an 'ineffectual angel beating in the void his luminous wings in vain' (Arnold). But that is not the whole of Shelley. In poems like Adonais (an elegy on the death of Keats) we meet a mature mysticism, a serene philosophy of life which denies death and affirms the immortality of the human spirit, and throughout his work we find a technical mastery of traditional verse-forms - Spenserian stanza, couplets, blank verse, terza rima (the form Dante used in his Divine Comedy) - and an eloquence and music unmatched among English poets of the time.

Perhaps John Keats, had he lived beyond his mere twenty-six years, would have become one of the great poets of all time. The poems of Keats are models of the purely sensuous aspect of the Romantic movement. His themes are simple enough: beauty in art and nature; the wish to die; happy and unhappy love; the glamour of the classical past. He is a pagan, and the gods of anciant Greece are enough for him. The Miltonic epic he left unfinished - Hyperion - was to tell of the downfall of the old gods and the rising of the new gods of strength and beauty. But for the most part he is content with the pleasures of the senses - wine, love, and the sights and sounds of nature:

Thou shalt, at one glance, behold

The daisy and the marigold;

White-plumed lilies, and the first

Hedhe-grown primrose that hath burst,

Shaded hyatcinth, alway

Sapphire queen of the mid-May ...

And full-grown lambs loud bleat from hilly bourn;

Hedge-crickets sing; and now with treble soft

The redbreast whistles from a garden-croft;

And gathering swallows twitter in the skies.

The strangest thing is that we feel the heartache that abounds in his poems, which comes from their awareness that beauty dies. It is there in the Ode to a Nightingale and the Ode on Melancholy and in the wistful Ode on a Grecian Urn, where the figures on the urn are addressed as eternal types of beauty - they are caight forever in certain attitudes, they cannot change or decay, their beauty is truth in the sense that truth is eternal.It is the 'simple, sensuous, and passionate' poet that stands out above all, in love with the world of senses.

Minor poets of the age are many. Robert Southey, William Blake, Thomas Moore, and Thomas Hood to name but a few most renowned for their Romantic undertakings in poetry.

Sir Walter Scott (1771 - 1832) was both poet and novelist. He first established himself as a great writer of narrative verse. Poems which glorified Scotland's scenery and history - The Lay of the Last Minstrel, Marmion, The Lady of the Lake - made him wealthy and famous, but the poetical gift does not seem able to stay with the Romantics for long. Scott seems to have realised, at the age of fourty-three, that his poetic genius was exhausted, and he turned then to the writing of novels. Nowadays we feel that he wrote too many novels, and wrote them too carelessly. Scott's themes are historical. They deal with European history - sometimes French, as in Quentin Durward, but more often English or Scottish. the novels about Scotland's past include Waverley, Old Mortality, Rob Roy, The Heart of Midlothian, The Bride of Lammermoor; England in the time of the Tudors and Stuarts is the theme of The Fortunes of Nigel, Kenilworth, Peveril of the Peak, and so on. What interests him most are the great political and religious conflicts of the past - the Puritans and the Jacobites (the followers of the exiled Stuarts) fascinate him especially, and against a big tapestry of historical events he tells his stories of personal hate, of revenge, of love, of the hard lives of the common people and their earthy humour. Scott has a scholar's approach to history: he is accurate and, for the most part, unbiased. His Toryism led him to choose periods when the old values flourished - chivalry, honour, courtly manners, fealty to the king - and this affects his attitude to his invented characters: the women are often too good to be true, the men too honourable or chivalrous. His style is not too distinguished, and his dialogue is sometimes absurdly stilted. This kind of writing though became a standard for writers of historical novels.

Jane Austen (1775 - 1817) has not dated: her novels have freshness and humour sadly lacking in Scott. The first important woman novelist, she stands above both the classical and romantic movements; in a sense she bridges the gap between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, but she can be assigned to no group - she is unique. In her novels - Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice, Mansfield Park, Emma, Northanger Abbey, and Persuasion - she attempts no more than to show a small corner of England society as it was in her day - the sedate little world of the moderately well-to-do county families. This world provides her with all her material; the great historical movements rumbling outside mean little to her, and the Napoleonic Wars are hardly mentioned. Jane Austen's primary interest is people, not ideas, and her achievement lies in the meticulously exact presentation of human situations, the delineation of characters who are really living creatures, with faults and virtues mixed as they are in real life. Her plots are strightforward; there is little action. In this, and in her preoccupation with character as opposed to 'types' (the static hero and heroine and villain, beloved of Victorian novelists) she shows herself closer to our own day than any other novelist of the period. Her prose flows easily and naturally, and her dialogue is admirably true to life.

Thomas Love Peacock (1785 - 1866) - known also as a poet - wrote a new kind of novel, anti-romantic, satirical, full of sly digs at Wordsworth and Shelley, at the aspirations of all the new writers of 'feeling'. 'Novel' is perhaps not quite the right term, for Nightmare Abbey, Headlong Hall, Crotchet Castle, and the rest are mostly collections of dialogues with little character-interest and hardly any plot. They have attained a new popularity in our own day, and they certainly influenced the early novels of Aldous Huxley.

The most significant prose of the Romantic writers is not to be found in fiction. Four important writers normally grouped together are Charles Lamb (1775 - 1834), William Hazlitt (1778 - 1830), Leigh Hunt (1784 - 1859), and Thomas De Quincey (1785 - 1859). These specialised in literary criticism, in attempts to popularise the new poets (Hunt is associated wth Keats, the others with Wordsworth), and in the personal literary form called the Essay.