Romanticism

Historians of English literature define as the “Romantic period” the span between 1798 and 1837. Within this period England experienced the ordeal of change from a primary agricultural society to a modern industrial nation. This change occurred in a context of the American Revolution and of the much more radical French Revolution. The early period of the French Revolution, marked by the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the storming of the Bastille to release imprisoned political offenders, evoked enthusiastic support from English liberals and radical alike. Later, however, English sympathies dropped off after the accession to power of Jacobin extremists; the “September Massacres” of the imprisoned nobility; the execution of the Royal family; the invasion by the French Republic of Netherlands; the guillotining of thousands in the Reign of Terror under Robespierre; the emergence of Napoleon first as dictator and then as emperor of France.

Apart from a brief interlude in 1802-1803, England remained at war with France from 1793 to 1815. The primary objective of William Pitt’s government in financing a costly war (covered by heave tax increases and the introduction of an income tax) was not the overthrowing of the Revolutionary government or Napoleon, but the preservation of the balance of power in Europe and the protection of the interests of British trade. In England this was a period of harsh repressive measures. Public meetings were prohibited, habeas corpus was suspended for the first time in over a hundred years, freedom of association was severely restricted by the Combination Acts in 1799, and advocates of even moderate political changes were charged with high treason in time of war. The Napoleonic wars put an end to reform, and to almost all genuine political life in England, for nearly three decades.

Admiral Nelson destroyed combined French and Spanish naval forces at Trafalgar in 1805, and the worldwide hegemony of the British navy was not called into question again until after the First World War. The superiority of the French land forces crumbled with the defeat at the hands of the Russians, and in 1815 Wellington hammered home the final nail in the coffin of revolutionary despotism at Waterloo in Belgium.

Although her trading interests had been safeguarded Britain gained relatively little from this long and exhausting war. Britain’s post-war economy was in crisis: severe unemployment, stemming from the sudden fall in demand for British goods, combined with static wages and rising prices. The Industrial Revolution had caused the replacement of hand labour with machines and the accumulation of a new labouring population in mill-towns in central and northern England. The population was becoming polarized into “Two Nations” – the two classes of capital and labour, the rich and the poor. The dominant social philosophy was that of laissez-faire (“let alone”) which meant that the government maintained the policy of non-interference. For the working class it resulted in inadequate wages, long hours of work under harsh discipline in sordid conditions, the large-scale employment of women and children for tasks which destroyed both the body and the spirit. In addition the introduction of new machines resulted in additional unemployment, and this provoked attempts to destroy the machines. After one such outbreak the House of Lords – despite Lord Byron’s eloquent protest – passed a Bill (1812) making death the penalty for destroying the frames. The load of economic hardships fell on the labouring classes, and social unrest became increasingly acute. In 1819 meetings of workers were organized to demand parliamentary reform. At St. Peter’s Fields, Manchester, the meeting was attacked by troops, who killed nine and wounded more than 400 (“Peterloo Massacre”). This incited Shelley to write his great poems for the working class: England in 1819 and Men of England.

The accompanying agricultural revolution was changing the countryside. Small farms gradually disappeared as larger, and more efficient, farms took their place. The number of farmers fell and the “organic” nature of rural society, so dear to many poets of the period, was dealt yet another blow. From 1811 to 1816, dispossessed agricultural labourers came together to destroy the machines which were threatening their livelihood in what were known as the “Luddite” riots (after Nedd Ludd, chief instigator of the disturbances). The Captain Swing riots of 1830-1831 in southern rural areas also constituted a violent protest against property, landlords and the mechanization of agriculture. Repressive measures – including deportation and even the death penalty for destroying machines – were passed.

Britain’s rapidly changing society in the throes of the industrial and agricultural revolutions required some form of political realignment. 1830 proved to be a turning point in British domestic politics. The aristocratic Whig, Earl Grey, formed a government which represented a decisive break with the Tory-dominated governments which had been in power almost uninterruptedly since the 1780s. Grey and his colleagues were committed to some measure of political reform. The Reform Bill of 1832 constituted a formal recognition on the part of the political establishment that British society had changed. It extended the franchise (the right to vote) to some members of the middle classes –for example, large-scale employers such as factory owners. The Reform Bill was the first step to the universal suffrage, but for the next fifty years Parliament continued to reflect the interests of property rather than labour. The Whig –or Liberal as it was coming to be known – government was returned at the next General Election and passed a series of other reforms. Among them are the Factory Acts (1833) which forbade the employment of children under the age if nine and implied investigations into the working conditions of women and children; the Poor Law (1834) providing workhouses for the homeless; the Municipal Corporations Act (1835) in consequence of which old oligarchies were replaced by elected councils responsible for the running of local government (Dissenters were also given the chance to participate in government).

The Romantic movement. The social and political turmoil in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth-century Europe was accompanied by an equally astonishing upheaval in the world of literary activity, especially in England. The political revolutions in America and France and the industrial and economic revolution in Great Britain represented a challenge to the earlier political, social, religious, philosophical and artistic ideals. In France, Rousseau called into question the civilizing influence of “reason” and placed a new emphasis on man’s emotional capacities and imaginative powers. In Germany, the Sturm und Drang movement of the 1770s united writers whose rebellion against the rationalism of the Enlightenment led them to focus on the individual and reject any form of organized creed: political, social and literary systems were seen to represent facets of an undesirable status quo.

English Romanticism had been prepared by Pre-Romanticism that developed in the second half of the 18th century as a reaction to the Enlightenment. The novels of Richardson and Sterne were, in their explicit sentimentalism, an early indication of a shift in taste: the expression of feelings and emotions was no longer to be dismissed as inappropriate. Pre-Romanticism singled out new artistic notions within the vast sphere of the “beautiful”: “picturesque”, “Gothic”, “romantic”. Thus, picturesque, could be a shipwreck and ruins as pictures of despair and destruction. The word “romantic” originated from the word “romance” that denoted medieval chivalric novels. “Romantic” could be adventures, feelings, scenery. The word “Gothic” in the age of Enlightenment was synonymous to “barbaric”, “barbarous”, “false”, “resulting from the meagre inheritance of the chivalry”. But already Pope compared the art of Shakespeare with a Gothic cathedral.

An increase in the number of circulating libraries around the end of the eighteenth century ensured that a growing reading public could satisfy its thirst for prose but relatively little fiction of lasting worth was written in this period. With its concentration on terror, solitude and mystery, the so-called Gothic novel, inaugurated in 1764 by Horace Walpole (1717-1797) with the publication of the Castle of Otranto, opened up new and unexpected vistas for the novel form. It was a kind of polemics with the principles of the novel of the Enlightenment. The familiar England of the eighteenth century was replaced by The Medieval Italy, Spain or France, sometimes even the Orient. Common people were substituted by characters of extraordinary virtues and vices. Of special significance became the themes of incest and unnatural hatred. A romantic tale of villainy and horror, shrouded in distant medieval darkness, these novels rejoiced in picturesque horror, magic, superstition, murder and love, against a background of sinister forests and gloomy castles. They were an interesting prelude to the mid-nineteenth-century exploration of man’s more irrational nature, and Walpole had many followers like Ann Radcliffe, and “Monk” Lewis. Ann Radcliffe’s Mysteries of Udolpho (1794) was translated into French and proved the most popular of the Gothic novels. It deals with a despotic guardian, a robber band, romantic love against the background of a sombre castle and all the apparatus of sliding panels, secret passages, abductions, and a suggestion of the supernatural, dark dealings carried on. Radcliffe had a peculiar art of exciting terror and impatient curiosity by the invention of incidents apparently supernatural, but eventually receiving a rational explanation. Besides to this day Ann Radcliff has had few superiors in the art of poetic landscape, which she may be said to have introduced into the modern novel. But perhaps the only novel of this kind to pass the test of the time is Frankenstein, written by Mary Shelley (1797-1851) in the nineteenth century.The idea of the novel was prompted by the experiments of Dr. Darwin, the grandfather of Charles Darwin, bringing to life pieces of little worms.

However, it is poetry that is pre-eminently associated with Pre-Romanticism and Romanticism. In poetry, alongside Pope and Samuel Johnson, there was a range of Pre-Romantic poets whose works, while failing to break completely with the eighteenth-century literary canons, succeeded in paving the way for the late eighteenth-century Romantic rebellion. Pre-Romantic verse contained much that was considered new and unacceptable to the literati of the day. There was the so-called graveyard poetry of poets like Edward Young (1683-1765) and Robert Blair (1699-1746) and that of the “elegiac poets”, James Thomson (1700-1748) and William Collins (1721-1759), suggested a greater concern with individual feelings and emotions. The approach to nature was changing. The poetry of Thomas Gray (1716-1771) displays a more pronounced sentimentalism and subjective feeling for nature, which differed greatly from more objective descriptions of neoclassical poets. New sources of inspiration were found in the mysterious pagan traditions of Nordic and Celtic culture, and there was a new interest in the Middle Ages, as the publication of Reliques of Ancient English Poetry by Percy in 1765 showed. English Romantics were to value Thomas Chatterton (1752-1770), call him a “wonderful boy”, a “sleepless soul that died in its pride” and consider him their nearest precursor.

The greatest poets among the English Pre-Romantics were Robert Burns (1758-1796) and William Blake (1757-1827). The success of Poems, Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect by Burns was yet another indication of the change in literary taste. Written mostly in simple Ayrshire dialect, these lyrics took up the oral tradition and represented a real departure from the decaying conventions of English neoclassicism. Blake was both a poet and an artist. In both his drawings and his poetry he shows a patent disregard for what he considers a defective eighteenth-century literary philosophical tradition, and is often heralded as the first truly important Romantic poet.

While some poets of the first decades of the nineteenth century have been grouped together as members of a Romantic movement, it does not mean that there was a single literary “school” to which all ascribed. The writers, who are called the Romantics now, didn’t define themselves so. The term was applied to them by English historians only half a century later. Contemporary critics treated them as independent individuals, or else grouped them into a number of separate schools: “the Lake School” of Wordsworth, Coleridge and Southy; “the Cockney School”, a derogatory term for the Londoners Hunt, Hazlitt and Keats; and “the Satanic School” of Byron, Shelley and their followers. More often they are distinguished as passive Romantics and revolutionary Romantics

Not considering themselves members of the Romantic school, many of the major writers of the period, however, felt that there was something distinctive about their time. In his Defence of Poetry Shelley said that the literature of the age “has arisen as it were from a new birth” and that “an electric life burns” within the words of its best writers which is “less their spirit than the spirit of the age”. Shelley explained this literary spirit as an accompaniment of political and social revolution.

The imagination of many Romantic writers was indeed preoccupied with the idea of revolution. The younger writers felt that the example of the French Revolution, when purged of its errors, still constituted humanity’s best hope. The revolution generated a feeling that this age was an age of new beginnings when, by discarding inherited procedures and outworn customs, everything was possible, and not only in the political and social life but in intellectual and literary enterprises as well.

Principles of Romantic poetry. The main principles of Romantic poetry were proclaimed by Wordsworth in the form of an extended Preface to the second edition of Lyrical Ballads in 1800, which he enlarged still further in the third edition of 1802. His work is a turning point in English literature, for Wordsworth gathered up isolated ideas, organized them into a coherent theory based on explicit critical principles, and made them the rationale for his own massive achievement as a poet.

The Romantics differed from their predecessors on a number of points:

1. They believed in the importance of individual feelings and thoughts. The poet was no longer seen as the spokesman of society, addressing a cultivated and homogeneous audience and having as the object the conveyance of “truth”. The source of poetry became the particular, unique experience. Blake stated: “to generalize is to be an idiot; to particularize is the alone distinction of merit”.

2. In the eighteenth-century poetry was seen as an imitation of human life, “a mirror held up to nature”. For the Romantics the source of a poem was not in the outer world, but in the individual poet. The essential materials of a poem were not external people and events, but the inner feelings of the author, or external objects only after these have been transformed by the author’s feelings. For the Romantics nature became a primary poetic subject though the description of a natural scene often served only as a stimulus to the most characteristic human activity, that of thinking. In larger Romantic “nature poems” the presented scene is used to raise an emotional problem or personal crisis. Besides the Romantic poets habitually endowed the landscape with human life believing that natural objects correspond to an inner or spiritual world. This viewpoint underlay a tendency, especially in Blake and Shelley, to write a symbolic poetry in which a rose, a sunflower, a mountain, a cloud is presented as an object with a significance beyond itself.

3. The Romantics rejected the eighteenth-century idea of the poet as a skilled craftsman versed in the dictates of socially acceptable artistic canons. They considered the poet to be different from his fellows by intensity of his perception, taking as the major subject matter the workings of his own mind. For Shelley the poet was “a nightingale who sits in darkness and sings to cheer his own solitude with sweet sounds”. Keats declared: “I never wrote one single line of poetry with the least shadow of public thought”. Romantic poets often presented themselves as “a chosen son” or “Bard”, a poet-prophet, a spokesman for traditional Western civilization at a time of a profound crisis.

4. They made a special emphasis on feeling, and for them the best poetry was that in which the greatest intensity of feelings was expressed.

5. The Romantics attached a special attention to the lyric. In accord with the view that poetry expresses the poet’s own feelings and temperament, the lyric poem written in the first person became a major Romantic form and was often described as the most essentially poetic of all genres. The “I” of the Romantic lyric is often not a conventionally typical lyric speaker, but has recognizable traits of the poet in his own person and circumstances.

6. They considered imagination the supreme poetic quality, a creative force that made the poet a god-like being.

7. The Romantics placed a great emphasis on the workings of unconscious mind, on dreams and reveries, on the supernatural, on the childlike or primitive view of the world.

8. In traditional aesthetic theory, poetry had been regarded as an art based on definite rules. The Romantics insisted that the immediate act of composition must arise from impulse and be free from all rules and artful manipulations. For Wordsworth it was, at the moment of composition, “the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings”. Wordsworth advised a young poet: “You feel strongly; trust to those feelings, and your poem will take its shape and proportions as a tree does from the vital principle that actuates it”. The surviving manuscripts of the Romantic poets, however, as well as the testimony of observers, show that they reworked their texts after the impetus of first conception no less arduously than the poets of earlier ages.

9. They rejected the classical theory of “genres”, each with its own linguistic decorum and demanded new ways of writing. They found the poetic language of the later 18th century stale and stilted, unsuited for the expression of their perceptions. Wordsworth sought to bring the language of poetry back to that of common speech, to “language really used by man”, which meant that “poetic diction” with its artful figures of speech and elevated tone was to be avoided.

10. They were preoccupied with the hero, the genius and the exceptional figure in general with his passions and struggles.

Prose and drama in the Romantic period. Sir Walter Scott (1771-1832) started with poetry, but is best remembered as the founder of the historic novel, the author of romantic and highly coloured fiction with a Scottish historical setting.The richness of his natural and historical settings can be best appreciated in novels like Guy Mannering, Rob Roy, Ivanhoe and Redgaunted.

The other important novelist of the period was Jane Austen (1775-1817), England’s first truly important female novelist, renowned for her expertise in the handling of the “novel of manners”. Her works dealt with a limited social circle of the provincial gentry and the upper classes. She explored their relationships, values and shortcomings with detachment and irony, and in her restrained satire was nearer to the classical-minded moralizing spirit of the eighteenth century than to the new age of Romantic rebellion and potential sentimentalism.

In the field of non-fiction, accomplished writers like Charles Lamb (1775-1834) and William Hazlitt (1778-1830) contributed much to an increasingly popular form of essay writing: literary criticism. Their essays tended to be more introspective and self-analytical, and thus reflected the more subjective yearnings of Romantic poetry.

Theatrical writings were few and far between. The Licensing Act was repealed only in 1843, and only two theatres could stage spoken drama in the meanwhile. Most of the Romantic poets attempted to write drama, but were unsuccessful on the whole: the essential subjectivity of their visions combined with a distinct lack of experience.