The
Romantic Age
1798
– 1832
I.
“Romance” and “Romanticism”
II.
Historical and political background
a.
American Revolution
b.
French Revolution
i.
Reign of Terror
ii.
Napoleon
c.
Industrial Revolution
i.
“Two Nations:
ii.
“Laissez –
faire”
III.
The five major poets
a.
Wordsworth
b.
Coleridge
c.
Byron
d.
Shelley
e.
Keats
IV.
Poetic theory and poetic practice
a.
Spontaneity
b.
Nature poetry
c.
The commonplace
d.
The supernatural
e.
Individualism, infinite striving, and nonconformity
V.
The familiar essay, drama, and the novel
Restoration
decorum
level
of diction
conservative
respect
for order
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Romanticism
enthusiasm
revolution
x3
language
of the common man
democrative
sympathies
Epic
Tragedy
Comedy
Satire
Pastoral
Lyric
The
Romantic Period
1798
– 1832
Introduction
Following the
common usage of historians of English literature, we shall denote by the
Romantic Period the span between the year 1798, in which William Wordsworth and
Samuel Taylor Coleridge published their Lyrical
Ballads, and in 1832, when Sir Walter Scott died, and when the passage of
the first Reform bill set in motion the Victorian era of cautious readjustment
of political power to the economic and social realities of a new industrial
age.
Before we look at the main features
of this period, we need to thing about the words Romantic and Romanticism. The
names we apply to broad periods of literary and cultural history can often be
misleading, and this is especially true of the “Romantic” Age and
“Romanticism.” The word romance (French roman)
was a broad term in origin and was applied indiscriminately to any long
narrative in French verse – for example, the Roman du Rou, a chronicle of Normandy; the Roman de la Rose, an allegory of aristocratic courtship; the Roman d’Alexandre, the history of
Alexander the Great. By the end of the Middle Ages, however, the word roman, or romance, had become restricted to something like its modern
meaning: a tale of knightly prowess, usually set in remote times or places and
involving elements of the fantastic or supernatural.
Therefore,
the word romance originally referred
to the highly imaginative medieval tales of knightly adventure written in the
French derivative of the original Roman (or
romance) language, Latin. (That these
tales often involved amorous encounters between a knight and his lady is partly
responsible for the modern meanings of romance
and romantic.) When we speak of the
Romantic Period, we are using the word romantic
in this older sense. We are referring indirectly to an interest in the
charming, magical world of medieval “romance,” and more generally to the rich
imaginative activity displayed in that world, which is deeply characteristic of
the late eighteenth and early nineteenth-century writers. To avoid confusion,
we should remember that “romance” as “freely imaginative perfection-seeking fiction,”
not “romance” as “love between men and women,” is the true basis for the terms
“Romantic Age” and “Romanticism.”
II.
Historical and Political Background
The
eighteenth century was a time of great prosperity and confidence for the upper
and middle class in England, but toward the end of the century two major
political revolutions disturbed the established sense of security and
well-being in the country. Although both revolutions occurred outside England,
they nevertheless affected the late eighteenth and early nineteenth-century
thinking.
First,
there was the revolt of the English colonies in America against the uncaring
and unjust economic policies of the mother country under the blundering
leadership of George III. The victory of the American movement for independence
was certainly a blow to English confidence, but practically and philosophically
it was less threatening than the second revolution, which took place in France
in 1789.
Unlike
the American Revolution, which was merely a rejection of authority and control
by a distant and unorganized group of colonies, the French Revolution was a
complete overthrow of the government of a great European power from within.
This seeming change in the balance of power sparked the feeling in English
liberal and radicals that, in the spirit of the Declaration of the Rights of
Man and the storming of the Bastille to liberate political prisoners, England
was now primed for a triumph of popular democracy. (Historical accounts suggest
that the Bastille liberation was more symbolic than actual.)
Later,
however, English sympathizers dropped off as the revolution followed its
increasingly grim and violent course. When revolutionary extremists gained
control of the government in 1792, they executed hundreds of imprisoned nobility
in what became known as the September Massacres. The year 1793 saw the
execution of King Louis XVI and the establishment under Robespierre of the
Reign of Terror, during which thousands of those associated with the old regime
were guillotined. Most disturbing of all to the English mind was, perhaps, the
invasion of the Rhineland and the Netherlands by the army of the French
Republic, and the French offer of armed resistance to all countries desiring to
overthrow their present governments. This threat of internal rebellion spurred the
existing conservative parliament into war against France, which after savage
reprisals against those who had held power during the Reign of Terror, produced
Napoleon as dictator and eventually as emperor of France. Once a champion of
the Revolution, Napoleon became a tyrannical despot who strove to conquer
Europe and establish a hew dynasty.
The
reaction of the supporters of the Revolution was on of disillusionment and
hopelessness in France as well as England. In England, the government and
ruling classes, in reaction to the fear that the early democratic principles of
the revolution might spread to their own country, introduced severe measures.
Public meetings were prohibited, habeas corpus was suspended for the first time
in over a hundred years, and advocated of even modest political change were
charged with high treason. The disillusionment of the liberal and democratic
thinkers seemed to reach its deepest when Napoleon, still regarded by some as a
song of the Revolution, was defeated by British forces as Waterloo in 1815.
This defeat by on despotic power over another, rather than showing democratic
progress and reform, seemed to have consolidated the power of the wealthy and
reactionary ruling classes.
Though
less sudden and obvious in its consequences that the political revolutions in
America and France, the Industrial Revolution was ultimately more important in
transforming European society, and its own way more violent in its impact of
human life.
This
was a turbulent period, during which England experienced the ordeal of change
from a primarily agricultural society, where wealth and power had been
concentrated in the landholding aristocracy, to a modernized industrial nation,
in which the balance of economic power shifted to large scale employers, who
found themselves ranged against an immensely enlarging and increasingly
resistive working class. The result of this industrialization of Britain’s
cities was to depopulate the countryside by forcing workers to seek employment
in the various city mills. Working and living conditions in these cities were
terrible; women and children as well as men labored for long hours under
intolerable conditions. More than ever before the population was becoming
increasingly polarized into what Prime Minister Disraeli called the “Two
nations”- the two classes of capitol and labor, the large owner or trader, and
the possessionless wageworker, the rich and the poor.
No
attempt was made to regulate the shift from the old economic world to the new
because of the pervasive social philosophy of laissez- faire. This theory of “let alone” allowed corrupt, or at
least insensitive, employers to abuse their employee’s rights without
government interference. Subsequent reports done on the conditions of the
mining industry where five to ten years old children were forced to pull carts
on their hands and knees read like passengers from Dante’s Inferno.
In
summary, the Romantic Age was a time of vast and largely unguided political and
economic change. Most of the writers of this period were deeply affected by the
promise of subsequent disappointment of the French revolution, and by the
contorting effects of the Industrial revolution. In many ways, both direct and
indirect, we can see the historical issues we have just been surveying
reflected in the main literary concerns of romantic writers.
Much
as the French Revolution signaled an attempt to break with the old order and to
establish a new and revitalized social system, romanticism sought to free
itself from the rules and standards of eighteenth-century literature and to
open up new areas of vision and expression. The democratic and insistence on
the rights of the individual, which characterized the early states of the
French revolution, have their parallel in the Romantic writer’s interest in the
language and experience of the common people, and in the belief that writers
and artists must be free to explore their own imaginative worlds. The main
consequences of the industrial revolution – the urbanization of English life
and landscape, and the exploitation of the working class – underline the
Romantic writer’s love of the unspoiled natural world or remote settings devoid
of urban complexity, and his passionate concern for the downtrodden and
oppressed.
III.
The Five
Major Poets of the Romantic Age
William Wordsworth (1770 - 1850)
Although
Wordsworth is the least colorful of the major Romantic poets, he is recognized
by many as the greatest. Wordsworth’s reputation is based on his collaborative
efforts in Lyrical Ballads and his
autobiographical masterpiece the Prelude,
the greatest and most original long poem since Milton’s Paradise Lost. Wordsworth is remembered
as the poet of the remembrance of things past, or as he himself put it, “of
emotion recollected in tranquility.” Where an object or event in the present
triggers a sudden renewal of feelings he has experienced in youth; the result
is poetry that exhibits a discrepancy between who he is aat the present and who
he once was.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772 - 1834)
Coleridge,
Wordsworth’s co-collaborator on Lyrical
Ballads, is most famous for his mysterious and demonic poetry, including The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Kubla Khan,
and Christabel. Coleridge was regarded by his friends as one of the
greatest intellectual minds of the day; albeit, a mind that should have
produced more, and one that suffered the dehabilitating effects of opium
addiction.
George Gordon, Lord Byron (1788 - 1824)
Byron
cuts one of the most fascinating personalities of the Romantic Age. He Achieved
great fame during his lifetime and was rated as one of the greatest poets
through the nineteenth century, but is now viewed as the least consequential of
the major Romantic poets. Interestingly, none of the major poets, bar Shelley,
thought highly of Byron or his work; while Byron spoke slightingly of all the
major poets except Shelley. Byron felt that all his contemporaries were focused
on the wrong subject matter he chose the favorite of the neoclassicists, satire
against modern civilization, in his masterpiece Don Juan. Byron’s chief
claim to be considered an arch-Romantic is with the personage of the “Byronic
hero.” This persistent character is that of a moody, passionate, remorse-torn,
but unrepentant wanderer; in essence, a reflection of himself. The literary
descendants of this Byronic hero are Heathcliff in Wuthering Heights, Rochester in
Jane Eyre, and Captain Ahab in Moby
Dick. Byron died at the age of thirty-six in Greece, where he is regarded
today as a national hero for his efforts in training Greek soldiers during the
Greek/Turkish wars.
Percy
Bysshe Shelley (1792 - 1822)
Shelley’s
writing is the most passionate and intense of all the romantics. Eccentric in
manners and in religious and political beliefs, “mad Shelley” was expelled from
Oxford for the publication of an article called The Necessity of Atheism. Like Byron, Shelley felt himself to be an
alien and outcast from his own country and society; subsequently, Shelley lived
out the latter years of his life in Italy. Shelley’s greatness as a poet is
seen in hi philosophical masterpiece Prometheus
Unbound, and for his great “Ode to the West Wind,” among others. Shelley,
like Byron and Keats, died at a young age. Only twenty-nine, Shelley was killed
in a boating accident in 1822. Shelley’s body was thereby cremated by a group
of friends, including Byron, and his ashes buried in the Protestant cemetery in
Rome.
Mary
Shelley (wife) – Frankenstein; daughter
of Mary Wollstonecraft- A Vindication of
the Rights of Women
John
Keats (1795-1821)
The
brevity and intensity of Keats’ career are unmatched in English poetry. At the
age of twenty-three, Keats had achieved the culmination of his brief career.
Within five years of first trying his hand at poetry, Keats had written The Eve of St. Agnes, La Belle Dame sans
Merci, Lamia, all of the “great odes,” as a sufficient number of the
sonnets to make him, like Wordsworth, a major Romantic craftsman in that form.
To
put Keats’s potential in comparison, it should be remembered that Wordsworth
did not start writing in earnest until he was twenty-seven, and on his death at
the age of twenty-five, Keats’ achievements greatly exceeded that of Chaucer,
Shakespeare, or Milton.
IV.
Poetic
Theory and Poetic Practice
Although no
writer during William Wordsworth’s time considered himself a “Romantic,” a word
not applied until half a century later by English historians, many of then did
feel there was a pervasive intellectual and imaginative climate, which some of
them called “the spirit of the age.” The Revolution left the feeling that this
was a great age of new beginnings when, by discarding inherited procedures and
outworn customs, everything was possible, not only in the political and social
realm but in intellectual and literary enterprises as well. Remember, the major
writers of the day including Robert Burns, William Blake, Wordsworth, and
Coleridge were all fervent supporters of the early Revolution. Even after its
collapse, writers such as Shelley and Byron felt when purged of its errors, the
Revolution’s example still comprised humanity’s best hope.
As
was mentioned, the Romantic Age in England began with perhaps the greatest act
of collaboration in all of English Literature; the publishing of William
Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s Lyrical
Ballads. In excited daily communions these two men set out to revolutionize
the theory and practice of poetry. Wordsworth undertook to justify the new
poetry in the Preface to Lyrical Ballads.
In it he set himself in opposition to the literary ancien regime, those writers of the preceding century – Dryden,
Pope, and Johnson- who, in this view, had imposed on poetry artificial
conventions that distorted its free and natural development. Although Coleridge
did not agree wholeheartedly with all of Wordsworth’s assumptions, he did see
the necessity of overturning the reigning tradition. This preface, therefore,
deserves its reputation as 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 achievements as a poet.
a.
Spontaneity
Wordsworth
described all good poetry as, at the moment of composition, “the spontaneous
overflow of powerful feelings.” Although there existed varied theories of what
Romantic poetry was, all concurred on the crucial point that it was the mind,
emotions and the imagination of the poet that were the defining attributes of a
poem. The emphasis in this period on the free activity of the imagination is
related to an insistence on the essential role of instinct, intuition and the
feelings of “the heart” to supplement the judgments of the purely logical
faculty, “the head,” whether in the province of artistic beauty, philosophical
or religious truth, or moral goodness.
b. Nature Poetry
Because of the prominence of
landscape in this period, ‘Romantic poetry” has to the popular mind almost
become synonymous with “nature poetry.” Romantic “nature poems” are in fact
meditative poems, in which the presented scene usually serves to raise an
emotional problem or personal crisis whose development and resolution
constitutes the organizing principle of the poem. Restate: Nature causes the
poet to meditate over a problem and resolve it.
c. The Commonplace
Another characteristic of
Romantic poetry was the glorification of the common man and rustic life; or
according to Wordsworth, “to choose incidents and situations from common life”
and to use a “selection of language really spoken by men,” for which the model
is “humble and rustic life.” Byron maintained allegiance to both aristocratic
proprieties and traditional poetic decorum: “Peddlers,” and “Boats,” and
“Wagers’! Oh! ye shades Of Pope and Dryden, are we come to this?
d. The Supernatural
Also characteristic of this poetry
was an interest in the realm of mystery and magic, in which materials from
ancient folklore, superstition, and demonology are employed in the distant past
or far away locations. Coleridge’s The
Rime of the Ancient Mariner and Kubla
Khan, and Keats’ La Belle Dan sans
Merci fit this character.
e. Individualism, Infinite Striving, and
Nonconformity
Through the greater part of the
eighteenth century, men and women had for the most part been viewed as limited
beings in a strictly ordered and unchanging world. The opposite was true in the
Romantic period, where a higher estimate was put in human powers. Now a radical
individualism surfaced that argued that the human being should refuse to submit
to limitations and pursue infinite and inaccessible goals. For example,
Goethe’s Faust, unlike Marlowe’s Faustus, wins salvation through his
persistent striving for more. Also apparent in Romantic poetry is the isolation
of the individual, (contrast views of the Restoration). Many of the poets of the day employed a protagonist
with an individual vision that was achieved outside of an ordered society.
Finally, the theme of exile, of the disinherited mind that cannot find a
spiritual home in its native land or society is introduced. This solitary
Romantic nonconformist was sometimes also a great sinner, therefore the
fascination with Cain, Satan, and Faust—or in Coleridge’s case, his outcast Mariner.
V.
The Familiar Essay, Drama, and the Novel
The
“familiar essay” – a commentary on a non-technical subject written in a relaxed
and impersonal manner – flourished in a fashion that paralleled the Romantic
poetry. Essayists such as Charles Lamb, William Hazlitt, and Thomas De Quincey
wrote autobiographical, personal essays that sympathized with the lower classes
and employed a style that broke free from their neoclassical predecessors.
Because
of rigid moral and political censorship the drama was virtually non-existent
during the Romantic period.
Two
new types of fiction were prominent in the late eighteenth century; the Gothic
novel and the novel of purpose. The term “Gothic” derives from the frequent
setting of these tales in a gloomy castle in the Middle ages, but has been
extended to include a lager group of novels that include stories of decaying
mansions with dark dungeons, secret passages, and stealthy ghosts; chilling
supernatural phenomena; and, often, persecution of a beautiful maiden by an
obsessed and haggard villain.
The
second fictional mode popular at the turn of the century was the novel of
purpose that was written to give light to new social and political theories
current in the period of the French Revolution.
The
Romantic period produced two major novelists, Jane Austen and Sir Walter Scott.
Austen is one of England’s greatest novelists. She wrote Sense and Sensibility
and Northanger Abbey, two novels that poked fun at popular Gothic tales. She
also wrote Pride and Prejudice and Emma – novels that dealt with various
heroines and their capacity to demonstrate grace under social and financial
pressure.
Sir Walter
Scott, a contemporary of Austen who admired her work greatly, wrote in fiction
that was an extreme from hers. He wrote his fiction in the rich and lively
realm of history with characters that represented the middle and lower classes.
Scott’s most famous works include Rob
Roy, The Heart of Midlothian, and, Ivanhoe.
With the death
of Sir Walter Scott in 1832, and the passage of the First Reform Bill in that
same year followed by Queen Victoria’s accession to the throne in 1837, England
entered a new phase in its cultural and literary history. The Romantic concern
with the dignity, freedom, and creative potential of the human mind in a world
that was becoming increasingly complicated, an alien, continued to be a major
concern of Victorian writers – the next era of British literature.
