A History of English Romanticism in the Eighteenth Century Part 1

A History of English Romanticism in the Eighteenth Century.

by Henry A. Beers.

PREFACE

Historians of French and German literature are accustomed to set off a period, or a division of their subject, and ent.i.tle it "Romanticism" or "the Romantic School." Writers of English literary history, while recognizing the importance of England's share in this great movement in European letters, have not generally accorded it a place by itself in the arrangement of their subject-matter, but have treated it cursively, as a tendency present in the work of individual authors; and have maintained a simple chronological division of eras into the "Georgian,", the "Victorian," etc. The reason of this is perhaps to be found in the fact that, although Romanticism began earlier in England than on the Continent and lent quite as much as it borrowed in the international exchange of literary commodities, the native movement was more gradual and scattered.

It never reached so compact a shape, or came so definitely to a head, as in Germany or France. There never was precisely a "romantic school" or an all-pervading romantic fas.h.i.+on in England.

There is, therefore, nothing in English corresponding to Heine's fascinating sketch "Die Romantische Schule," or to Theophile Gautier's almost equally fascinating and far more sympathetic "Histoire du Romantisme." If we can imagine a composite personality of Byron and De Quincey, putting on record his half affectionate and half satirical reminiscences of the contemporary literary movement, we might have something nearly equivalent. For Byron, like Heine, was a repentant romanticist, with "radical notions under his cap," and a critical theory at odds with his practice; while De Quincey was an early disciple of Wordsworth and Coleridge,--as Gautier was of Victor Hugo,--and at the same time a clever and slightly mischievous sketcher of personal traits.

The present volume consists, in substance, of a series of lectures given in elective courses in Yale College. In revising it for publication I have striven to rid it of the air of the lecture room, but a few repet.i.tions and didacticisms of manner may have inadvertently been left in. Some of the methods and results of these studies have already been given to the public in "The Beginnings of the English Romantic Movement,"

by my present a.s.sociate and former scholar, Professor William Lyon Phelps. Professor Phelps' little book (originally a doctorate thesis) follows, in the main, the selection and arrangement of topics in my lectures. _En revanche_ I have had the advantage of availing myself of his independent researches on points which I have touched but slightly; and particularly of his very full treatment of the Spenserian imitations.

I had at first intended to ent.i.tle the book "Chapters toward a History of English Romanticism, etc."; for, though fairly complete in treatment, it makes no claim to being exhaustive. By no means every eighteenth-century writer whose work exhibits romantic motives is here pa.s.sed in review.

That very singular genius William Blake, _e.g._, in whom the influence of "Ossian," among other things, is so strongly apparent, I leave untouched; because his writings--partly by reason of their strange manner of publication--were without effect upon their generation and do not form a link in the chain of literary tendency.

If this volume should be favorably received, I hope before very long to publish a companion study of English romanticism in the nineteenth century.

H.A.B.

_October, 1898._

A HISTORY OF ENGLISH ROMANTICISM

CHAPTER I.

The Subject Defined

To attempt at the outset a rigid definition of the word _romanticism_ would be to antic.i.p.ate the substance of this volume. To furnish an answer to the question--What is, or was, romanticism? or, at least, What is, or was English romanticism?--is one of my main purposes herein, and the reader will be invited to examine a good many literary doc.u.ments, and to do a certain amount of thinking, before he can form for himself any full and clear notion of the thing. Even then he will hardly find himself prepared to give a dictionary definition or romanticism. There are words which connote so much, which take up into themselves so much of the history of the human mind, that any compendious explanation of their meaning--any definition which is not, at the same time, a rather extended description--must serve little other end than to supply a convenient mark of identification. How can we define in a sentence words like renaissance, philistine, sentimentalism, transcendental, Bohemia, pre-Raphaelite, impressionist, realistic? _Definitio est negatio_. It may be possible to hit upon a form of words which will mark romanticism off from everything else--tell in a clause what it is _not_; but to add a positive content to the definition--to tell what romanticism _is_, will require a very different and more gradual process.[1]

Nevertheless a rough, working definition may be useful to start with.

Romanticism, then, in the sense in which I shall commonly employ the word, means the reproduction in modern art or literature of the life and thought of the Middle Ages. Some other elements will have to be added to this definition, and some modifications of it will suggest themselves from time to time. It is provisional, tentative, cla.s.sic, but will serve our turn till we are ready to subst.i.tute a better. It is the definition which Heine gives in his brilliant little book on the Romantic School in Germany.[2] "All the poetry of the Middle Ages," he adds, "has a certain definite character, through which it differs from the poetry of the Greeks and Romans. In reference to this difference, the former is called Romantic, the latter Cla.s.sic. These names, however, are misleading, and have hitherto caused the most vexatious confusion."[3]

Some of the sources of this confusion will be considered presently.

Meanwhile the pa.s.sage recalls the fact that _romantic_, when used as a term in literary nomenclature, is not an independent, but a referential word. It implies its opposite, the cla.s.sic; and the ingenuity of critics has been taxed to its uttermost to explain and develop the numerous points of contrast. To form a thorough conception of the romantic, therefore, we must also form some conception of the cla.s.sic. Now there is an obvious unlikeness between the thought and art of the nations of pagan antiquity and the thought and art of the peoples of Christian, feudal Europe. Everyone will agree to call the Parthenon, the "Diana" of the Louvre, the "Oedipus" of Sophocles, the orations of Demosthenes cla.s.sical; and to call the cathedral of Chartres, the walls of Nuremberg--_die Perle des Mittelalters_--the "Legenda Aurea" of Jacobus de Voragine, the "Tristan und Isolde" of Gottfried of Strasburg, and the illuminations in a Catholic missal of the thirteenth century romantic.

The same unlikeness is found between modern works conceived in the spirit, or executed in direct imitation, of ancient and medieval art respectively. It is easy to decide that Flaxman's outline drawings in ill.u.s.tration of Homer are cla.s.sic; that Alfieri's tragedies, Goethe's "Iphigenie auf Tauris" Landor's "h.e.l.lenics," Gibson's statues, David's paintings, and the church of the Madeleine in Paris are cla.s.sical, at least in intentions and in the models which they follow; while Victor Hugo's "Notre Dame de Paris," Scott's "Ivanhoe," Fouque's "Der Zauberring," and Rossetti's painting, "The Girlhood of Mary," are no less certainly romantic in their inspiration.

But critics have given a wider extension than this to the terms cla.s.sic and romantic. They have discerned, or imagined, certain qualities, att.i.tudes of mind, ways of thinking and feeling, traits of style which distinguish cla.s.sic from romantic art; and they have applied the words accordingly to work which is not necessarily either antique or medieval in subject. Thus it is a.s.sumed, for example, that the productions of Greek and Roman genius were characterized by clearness, simplicity, restraint, unity of design, subordination of the part to the whole; and therefore modern works which make this impression of n.o.ble plainness and severity, of harmony in construction, economy of means and clear, definite outline, are often spoken of as cla.s.sical, quite irrespective of the historical period which they have to do with. In this sense, it is usual to say that Wordsworth's "Michael" is cla.s.sical, or that Goethe's "Hermann and Dorothea" is cla.s.sical; though Wordsworth may be celebrating the virtues of a Westmoreland shepherd, and Goethe telling the story of two rustic lovers on the German border at the time of the Napoleonic wars.

On the other hand, it is a.s.serted that the work of mediaeval poets and artists is marked by an excess of sentiment, by over-lavish decoration, a strong sense of color and a feeble sense of form, an attention to detail, at the cost of the main impression, and a consequent tendency to run into the exaggerated, the fantastic, and the grotesque. It is not uncommon, therefore, to find poets like Byron and Sh.e.l.ly cla.s.sified as romanticists, by virtue of their possession of these, or similar, characteristics, although no one could be more remote from medieval habits of thought than the author of "Don Juan" or the author of "The Revolt of Islam."

But the extension of these opposing terms to the work of writers who have so little in common with either the antique or the medieval as Wordsworth, on the one hand, and Byron, on the other, does not stop here.

It is one of the embarra.s.sments of the literary historian that nearly every word which he uses has two meanings, a critical and a popular meaning. In common speech, cla.s.sic has come to signify almost anything that is good. If we look in our dictionaries we find it defined somewhat in this way: "Conforming to the best authority in literature and art; pure; chaste; refined; originally and chiefly used of the best Greek and Roman writers, but also applied to the best modern authors, or their works." "Cla.s.sic, _n._ A work of acknowledged excellence and authority."

In this sense of the word, "Robinson Crusoe" is a cla.s.sic; the "Pilgrim's Progress" is a cla.s.sic; every piece of literature which is customarily recommended as a safe pattern for young writers to form their style upon is a cla.s.sic.[4]

Contrariwise the word _romantic_, as popularly employed, expresses a shade of disapprobation. The dictionaries make it a synonym for _sentimental, fanciful_, _wild_, _extravagant_, _chimerical_, all evident derivatives from their more critical definition, "pertaining or appropriate to the style of the Christian and popular literature of the Middle Ages, as opposed to the cla.s.sical antique." The etymology of _romance_ is familiar. The various dialects which sprang from the corruption of the Latin were called by the common name of _romans_. The name was then applied to any piece of literature composed in this vernacular instead of in the ancient cla.s.sical Latin. And as the favorite kind of writing in Provencal, Old French, and Spanish was the tale of chivalrous adventure that was called _par excellence_, _a roman_, _romans_, or_ romance_. The adjective _romantic_ is much later, implying, as it does, a certain degree of critical attention to the species of fiction which it describes in order to a generalizing of its peculiarities. It first came into general use in the latter half of the seventeenth century and the early years of the eighteenth; and naturally, was marked from birth with that shade of disapproval which has been noticed in popular usage.

The feature that struck the critics most in the romances of the Middle Ages, and in that very different variety of romance which was cultivated during the seventeenth century--the prolix, sentimental fictions of La Calprenede, Scuderi, Gomberville, and D'Urfe--was the fantastic improbability of their adventures. Hence the common acceptation of the word _romantic_ in such phrases as "a romantic notion," "a romantic elopement," "an act of romantic generosity." The application of the adjective to scenery was somewhat later,[5] and the abstract _romanticism_ was, of course, very much later; as the literary movement, or the revolution in taste, which it ent.i.tles, was not enough developed to call for a name until the opening of the nineteenth century. Indeed, it was never so compact, conscious, and definite a movement in England as in Germany and France; and its baptism doubtless came from abroad, from the polemical literature which attended the career of the German _romanticismus _and the French _romantisme_.

While accepting provisionally Heine's definition, it will be useful to examine some of the wider meanings that have been attached to the words _cla.s.sic_ and _romantic_, and some of the a.n.a.lyses that have been attempted of the qualities that make one work of art cla.s.sical and another romantic. Walter Pater took them to indicate opposite tendencies or elements which are present in varying proportions in all good art. It is the essential function of cla.s.sical art and literature, he thought, to take care of the qualities of measure, purity, temperance. "What is cla.s.sical comes to us out of the cool and quiet of other times, as a measure of what a long experience has shown us will, at least, never displease us. And in the cla.s.sical literature of Greece and Rome, as in the cla.s.sics of the last century, the essentially cla.s.sical element is that quality of order in beauty which they possess, indeed, in a pre-eminent degree."[6] "The charm, then, of what is cla.s.sical in art or literature is that of the well-known tale, to which we can nevertheless listen over and over again, because it is told so well. To the absolute beauty of its form is added the accidental, tranquil charm of familiarity."

On the other hand, he defines the romantic characteristics in art as consisting in "the addition of strangeness to beauty"--a definition which recalls Bacon's saying, "There is no excellent beauty that hath not some strangeness in the proportion." "The desire of beauty," continues Pater, "being a fixed element in every artistic organization, it is the addition of curiosity to this desire of beauty that const.i.tutes the romantic temper." This critic, then, would not confine the terms _cla.s.sic_ and _cla.s.sicism_ to the literature of Greece and Rome and to modern works conceived in the same spirit, although he acknowledges that there are certain ages of the world in which the cla.s.sical tradition predominates, _i.e._, in which the respect for authority, the love of order and decorum, the disposition to follow rules and models, the acceptance of academic and conventional standards overbalance the desire for strangeness and novelty. Such epochs are, _e.g._, the Augustan age of Rome, the _Siecle de Louis XIV_, in France, the times of Pope and Johnson in England--indeed, the whole of the eighteenth century in all parts of Europe.

Neither would he limit the word _romantic_ to work conceived in the spirit of the Middle Ages. "The essential elements," he says, "of the romantic spirit are curiosity and the love of beauty; and it is as the accidental effect of these qualities only, that it seeks the Middle Ages; because in the overcharged atmosphere of the Middle Age there are unworked sources of romantic effect, of a strange beauty to be won by strong imagination out of things unlikely or remote." "The sense in which Scott is to be called a romantic writer is chiefly that, in opposition to the literary tradition of the last century, he loved strange adventure and sought it in the Middle Age."

Here again the essayist is careful to explain that there are certain epochs which are predominately romantic. "Outbreaks of this spirit come naturally with particular periods: times when . . . men come to art and poetry with a deep thirst for intellectual excitement, after a long _ennui_." He instances, as periods naturally romantic, the time of the early Provencal troubadour poetry: the years following the Bourbon Restoration in France (say, 1815-30); and "the later Middle Age; so that the medieval poetry, centering in Dante, is often opposed to Greek or Roman poetry, as romantic to cla.s.sical poetry."

In Pater's use of the terms, then, cla.s.sic and romantic do not describe particular literature, or particular periods in literary history, so much as certain counterbalancing qualities and tendencies which run through the literatures of all times and countries. There were romantic writings among the Greeks and Romans; there were cla.s.sical writings in the Middle Ages; nay, there are cla.s.sical and romantic traits in the same author.

If there is any poet who may safely be described as a cla.s.sic, it is Sophocles; and yet Pater declares that the "Philoctetes" of Sophocles, if issued to-day, would be called romantic. And he points out--what indeed has been often pointed out--that the "Odyssey"[7] is more romantic than the "Iliad:" is, in fact, rather a romance than a hero-epic. The adventures of the wandering Ulysses, the visit to the land of the lotus-eaters, the encounter with the Laestrygonians, the experiences in the cave of Polyphemus, if allowance be made for the difference in sentiments and manners, remind the reader constantly of the medieval _romans d'aventure_. Pater quotes De Stendhal's saying that all good art was romantic in its day. "Romanticism," says De Stendhal, "is the art of presenting to the nations the literary works which, in the actual state of their habits and beliefs, are capable of giving them the greatest possible pleasure: cla.s.sicism, on the contrary, presents them with what gave the greatest possible pleasure to their great grand-fathers"--a definition which is epigrammatic, if not convincing.[8] De Stendhal (Henri Beyle) was a pioneer and a special pleader in the cause of French romanticism, and, in his use of the terms, romanticism stands for progress, liberty, originality, and the spirit of the future; cla.s.sicism, for conservatism, authority, imitation, the spirit of the past.

According to him, every good piece of romantic art is a cla.s.sic in the making. Decried by the cla.s.sicists of to-day, for its failure to observe traditions, it will be used by the cla.s.sicists of the future as a pattern to which new artists must conform.

It may be worth while to round out the conception of the term by considering a few other definitions of _romantic_ which have been proposed. Dr. F. H. Hedge, in an article in the _Atlantic Monthly_[9]

for March, 1886, inquired, "What do we mean by romantic?" Goethe, he says, characterized the difference between cla.s.sic and romantic "as equivalent to [that between] healthy and morbid. Schiller proposed 'nave and sentimental.'[10] The greater part [of the German critics]

regarded it as identical with the difference between ancient and modern, which was partly true, but explained nothing. None of the definitions given could be accepted as quite satisfactory."[11]

Dr. Hedge himself finds the origin of romantic feeling in wonder and the sense of mystery. "The essence of romance," he writes, "is mystery"; and he enforces the point by noting the application of the word to scenery.

"The woody dell, the leafy glen, the forest path which leads, one knows not whither, are romantic: the public highway is not." "The winding secret brook . . . is romantic, as compared with the broad river."

"Moonlight is romantic, as contrasted with daylight." Dr. Hedge attributes this fondness for the mysterious to "the influence of the Christian religion, which deepened immensely the mystery of life, suggesting something beyond and behind the world of sense."

This charm of wonder or mystery is perhaps only another name for that "strangeness added to beauty" which Pater takes to be the distinguis.h.i.+ng feature of romantic art. Later in the same article, Dr. Hedge a.s.serts that "the essence of romanticism is aspiration." Much might be said in defense of this position. It has often been pointed out, _e.g._, that a Gothic cathedral expresses aspiration, and a Greek temple satisfied completeness. Indeed if we agree that, in a general way, the cla.s.sic is equivalent to the antique, and the romantic to the medieval, it will be strange if we do not discover many differences between the two that can hardly be covered by any single phrase. Dr. Hedge himself enumerates several qualities of romantic art which it would be difficult to bring under his essential and defining category of wonder or aspiration. Thus he announces that "the peculiarity of the cla.s.sic style is reserve, self-suppression of the writer"; while "the romantic is self-reflecting."

"Clear, unimpa.s.sioned, impartial presentation of the subject . . . is the prominent feature of the cla.s.sic style. The modern writer gives you not so much the things themselves as his impression of them." Here then is the familiar critical distinction between the objective and subjective methods--Schiller's _naiv and sentimentalisch_--applied as a criterion of cla.s.sic and romantic style. This contrast the essayist develops at some length, dwelling upon "the cold reserve and colorless simplicity of the cla.s.sic style, where the medium is lost in the object"; and "on the other hand, the inwardness, the sentimental intensity, the subjective coloring of the romantic style."

A further distinguis.h.i.+ng mark of the romantic spirit, mentioned by Dr.

Hedge in common with many other critics, is the indefiniteness or incompleteness of its creations. This is a consequence, of course, of its sense of mystery and aspiration. Schopenbauer said that music was the characteristic modern art, because of its subjective, indefinite character. Pursuing this line of thought, Dr. Hedge affirms that "romantic relates to cla.s.sic somewhat as music relates to plastic art. . . It [music] presents no finished ideal, but suggests ideals beyond the capacity of canvas or stone. Plastic art acts on the intellect, music on the feelings; the one affects us by what it presents, the other by what it suggests. This, it seems to me, is essentially the difference between cla.s.sic and romantic poetry"; and he names Homer and Milton as examples of the former, and Scott and Sh.e.l.ley of the latter school.

Here then we have a third criterion proposed for determining the essential _differentia_ of romantic art. First it was mystery, then aspiration; now it is the appeal to the emotions by the method of suggestion. And yet there is, perhaps, no inconsistency on the critic's part in this continual s.h.i.+fting of his ground. He is apparently presenting different facets of the same truth; he means one thing by this mystery, aspiration, indefiniteness, incompleteness, emotion suggestiveness: that quality or effect which we all feel to be present in romantic and absent from cla.s.sic work, but which we find it hard to describe by any single term. It is open to any a.n.a.lyst of our critical vocabulary to draw out the fullest meanings that he can, from such pairs of related words as cla.s.sic and romantic, fancy and imagination, wit and humor, reason and understanding, pa.s.sion and sentiment. Let us, for instance, develop briefly this proposition that the ideal of cla.s.sic art is completeness[12] and the ideal of romantic art indefiniteness, or suggestiveness.

A.W. Schlegel[13] had already made use of two of the arts of design, to ill.u.s.trate the distinction between cla.s.sic and romantic, just as Dr.

Hedge uses plastic art and music. I refer to Schlegel's famous saying that the genius of the antique drama was statuesque, and that of the romantic drama picturesque. A Greek temple, statue, or poem has no imperfection and offers no further promise, indicates nothing beyond what it expresses. It fills the sense, it leaves nothing to the imagination.

It stands correct, symmetric, sharp in outline, in the clear light of day. There is nothing more to be done to it; there is no concealment about it. But in romantic art there is seldom this completeness. The workman lingers, he would fain add another touch, his ideal eludes him.

Is a Gothic cathedral ever really finished? Is "Faust" finished? Is "Hamlet" explained? The modern spirit is mystical; its architecture, painting, poetry employ shadow to produce their highest effects: shadow and color rather than contour. On the Greek heroic stage there were a few figures, two or three at most, grouped like statuary and thrown out in bold relief at the apex of the scene: in Greek architecture a few clean, simple lines: in Greek poetry clear conceptions easily expressible in language and mostly describable in sensuous images.

The modern theater is crowded with figures and colors, and the distance recedes in the middle of the scene. This love of perspective is repeated in cathedral aisles,[14] the love of color in cathedral windows, and obscurity hovers in the shadows of the vault. In our poetry, in our religion these twilight thoughts prevail. We seek no completeness here.

What is beyond, what is inexpressible attracts us. Hence the greater spirituality of romantic literature, its deeper emotion, its more pa.s.sionate tenderness. But hence likewise its sentimentality, its melancholy and, in particular, the morbid fascination which the thought of death has had for the Gothic mind. The cla.s.sic nations concentrated their attention on life and light, and spent few thoughts upon darkness and the tomb. Death was to them neither sacred nor beautiful. Their decent rites of sepulture or cremation seem designed to hide its deformities rather than to prolong its reminders. The presence of the corpse was pollution. No Greek could have conceived such a book as the "Hydriotaphia" or the "Anatomy of Melancholy."

It is observable that Dr. Hedge is at one with Pater, in desiring some more philosophical statement of the difference between cla.s.sic and romantic than the common one which makes it simply the difference between the antique and the medieval. He says: "It must not be supposed that ancient and cla.s.sic, on one side, and modern and romantic, on the other, are inseparably one; so that nothing approaching to romantic shall be found in any Greek or Roman author, nor any cla.s.sic page in the literature of modern Europe. . . The literary line of demarcation is not identical with the chronological one." And just as Pater says that the Odyssey is more romantic than the Iliad, so Dr. Hedge says that "the story of Cupid and Psyche,[15] in the 'Golden a.s.s' of Apuleius, is as much a romance as any composition of the seventeenth or eighteenth century." Medievalism he regards as merely an accident of romance: Scott, as most romantic in his themes, but Byron, in his mood.

So, too, Mr. Sidney Colvin[16] denies that "a predilection for cla.s.sic subjects . . . can make a writer that which we understand by the word cla.s.sical as distinguished from that which we understand by the word romantic. The distinction lies deeper, and is a distinction much less of subject than of treatment. . . In cla.s.sical writing every idea is called up to the mind as nakedly as possible, and at the same time as distinctly; it is exhibited in white light, and left to produce its effect by its own unaided power.[17] In romantic writing, on the other hand, all objects are exhibited, as it were, through a colored and iridescent atmosphere. Round about every central idea the romantic writer summons up a cloud of accessory and subordinate ideas for the sake of enhancing its effect, if at the risk of confusing its outlines. The temper, again, of the romantic writer is one of excitement, while the temper of the cla.s.sical writer is one of self-possession. . . On the one hand there is calm, on the other hand enthusiasm. The virtues of the one style are strength of grasp, with clearness and justice of presentment; the virtues of the other style are glow of the spirit, with magic and richness of suggestion." Mr. Colvin then goes on to enforce and ill.u.s.trate this contrast between the "accurate and firm definition of things" in cla.s.sical writers and the "thrilling vagueness and uncertainty," the tremulous, coruscating, vibrating or colored light--the "halo"--with which the romantic writer invests his theme. "The romantic manner, . . . with its thrilling uncertainties and its rich suggestions, may be more attractive than the cla.s.sic manner, with its composed and measured preciseness of statement. . . But on the other hand the romantic manner lends itself, as the true cla.s.sical does not, to inferior work. Second-rate conceptions excitedly and approximately put into words derive from it an illusive attraction which may make them for a time, and with all but the coolest judges, pa.s.s as first-rate. Whereas about true cla.s.sical writing there can be no illusion. It presents to us conceptions calmly realized in words that exactly define them, conceptions depending for their attraction, not on their halo, but on themselves."

As examples of these contrasting styles, Mr. Colvin puts side by side pa.s.sages from "The Ancient Mariner" and Keats' "Ode to a Nightingale,"

with pa.s.sages, treating similar themes, from Landor's "Gebir" and "Imaginary Conversations." The contrast might be even more clearly established by a study of such a piece as Keats' "Ode on a Grecian Urn,"

where the romantic form is applied to cla.s.sical content; or by a comparison of Tennyson's "Ulysses" and "The Lotus Eaters," in which Homeric subjects are treated respectively in the cla.s.sic and the romantic manner.