E-text prepared by Jeanette Hayward and Al Haines. Dedicated to the memory
of James Hayward.
A HISTORY OF ENGLISH ROMANTICISM IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY
by
HENRY A. BEERS
Author of _A Suburban Pastoral_, _The Ways of Vale_, etc.
"Was unsterblich im Gesang soll leben Muss im Leben untergehen."
--Schiller
PREFACE
Historians of French and German literature are accustomed to set off a
period, or a division of their subject, and entitle 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 fashion in England.
There is, therefore, nothing in English corresponding to Heine's
fascinating sketch "Die Romantische Schule," or to Théophile 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
repetitions 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 associate 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 entitle 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 passed 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._
CONTENTS
Chapter
I. The Subject Defined
II. The Augustans
III. The Spenserians
IV. The Landscape Poets
V. The Miltonic Group
VI. The School of Warton
VII. The Gothic Revival
VIII. Percy and the Ballads
IX. Ossian
X. Thomas Chatterton
XI. The German Tributary
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 anticipate 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 documents, 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, classic, but will serve
our turn till we are ready to substitute 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 Classic. 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 passage 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 classic; 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 classic. 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
classical; 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
illustration of Homer are classic; that Alfieri's tragedies, Goethe's
"Iphigenie auf Tauris" Landor's "Hellenics," Gibson's statues, David's
paintings, and the church of the Madeleine in Paris are classical, at
least in intentions and in the models which they follow; while Victor
Hugo's "Notre Dame de Paris," Scott's "Ivanhoe," Fouqué'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 classic
and romantic. They have discerned, or imagined, certain qualities,
attitudes of mind, ways of thinking and feeling, traits of style which
distinguish classic 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 assumed, 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 noble plainness and
severity, of harmony in construction, economy of means and clear,
definite outline, are often spoken of as classical, 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 classical, or that Goethe's
"Hermann and Dorothea" is classical; 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 asserted 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 Shelly classified 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 embarrassments of the literary historian that nearly
every word which he uses has two meanings, a critical and a popular
meaning. In common speech, classic 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." "Classic, _n._ A work of acknowledged excellence and authority."
In this sense of the word, "Robinson Crusoe" is a classic; the "Pilgrim's
Progress" is a classic; every piece of literature which is customarily
recommended as a safe pattern for young writers to form their style upon
is a classic.[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 classical 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 classical Latin. And as the
favorite kind of writing in Provençal, 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
Calprenède, Scudéri, Gomberville, and D'Urfé--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 entitles, 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
_classic_ and _romantic_, and some of the analyses that have been
attempted of the qualities that make one work of art classical 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 classical art and literature, he thought, to
take care of the qualities of measure, purity, temperance. "What is
classical 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 classical literature of Greece and Rome, as in
the classics of the last century, the essentially classical element is
that quality of order in beauty which they possess, indeed, in a
pre-eminent degree."[6] "The charm, then, of what is classical 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 constitutes the romantic
temper." This critic, then, would not confine the terms _classic_ and
_classicism_ 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 classical 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 _Siècle 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 Provençal 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 classical poetry."
In Pater's use of the terms, then, classic 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 classical writings in the Middle
Ages; nay, there are classical and romantic traits in the same author.
If there is any poet who may safely be described as a classic, 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: classicism, 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; classicism,
for conservatism, authority, imitation, the spirit of the past.
According to him, every good piece of romantic art is a classic in the
making. Decried by the classicists of to-day, for its failure to observe
traditions, it will be used by the classicists 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 classic and romantic "as
equivalent to [that between] healthy and morbid. Schiller proposed
'naïve 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 distinguishing
feature of romantic art. Later in the same article, Dr. Hedge asserts
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 classic 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 classic style is reserve,
self-suppression of the writer"; while "the romantic is self-reflecting."
"Clear, unimpassioned, impartial presentation of the subject . . . is the
prominent feature of the classic 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
classic and romantic style. This contrast the essayist develops at some
length, dwelling upon "the cold reserve and colorless simplicity of the
classic 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 distinguishing 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 classic 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 classic and romantic poetry"; and he names Homer and
Milton as examples of the former, and Scott and Shelley 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 shifting 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 classic work, but which we find it hard to
describe by any single term. It is open to any analyst of our critical
vocabulary to draw out the fullest meanings that he can, from such pairs
of related words as classic and romantic, fancy and imagination, wit and
humor, reason and understanding, passion and sentiment. Let us, for
instance, develop briefly this proposition that the ideal of classic 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
illustrate the distinction between classic 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
passionate 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 classic 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 classic 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 classic, 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 classic 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 Ass' 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 classic
subjects . . . can make a writer that which we understand by the word
classical 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 classical 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 classical 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
illustrate this contrast between the "accurate and firm definition of
things" in classical 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 classic manner, with its composed and
measured preciseness of statement. . . But on the other hand the
romantic manner lends itself, as the true classical 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, pass as first-rate. Whereas about true
classical 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
passages from "The Ancient Mariner" and Keats' "Ode to a Nightingale,"
with passages, 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 classical content; or by a
comparison of Tennyson's "Ulysses" and "The Lotus Eaters," in which
Homeric subjects are treated respectively in the classic and the romantic
manner.
Alfred de Musset, himself in early life a prominent figure among the
French romanticists, wrote some capital satire upon the baffling and
contradictory definitions of the word _romantisme_ that were current in
the third and fourth decades of this century.[18] Two worthy provincials
write from the little town of La Ferté-sous-Jouarre to the editor of the
"Revue des Deux Mondes," appealing to him to tell them what romanticism
means. For two years Dupuis and his friend Cotonet had supposed that the
term applied only to the theater, and signified the disregard of the
unities. "Shakspere, for example makes people travel from Rome to
London, and from Athens to Alexandria in a quarter of an hour. His
heroes live ten or twenty years between two acts. His heroines, angels
of virtue during a whole scene, have only to pass into the _coulisses_,
to reappear as wives, adulteresses, widows, and grandmothers. There, we
said to ourselves, is the romantic. Contrariwise, Sophocles makes
Oedipus sit on a rock, even at the cost of great personal inconvenience,
from the very beginning of his tragedy. All the characters come there to
find him, one after the other. Perhaps he stands up occasionally, though
I doubt it; unless, it may be, out of respect for Theseus, who, during
the entire play, obligingly walks on the high-way, coming in or going out
continually. . . There, we said to ourselves, is the classic."
But about 1828, continues the letter, "we learned that there were
romantic poetry and classical poetry, romantic novels and classical
novels, romantic odes and classical odes; nay, a single line, my dear
sir, a sole and solitary line of verse might be romantic or classic,
according as the humor took it. When we received this intelligence, we
could not close our eyes all night. Two years of peaceful conviction had
vanished like a dream. All our ideas were turned topsy-turvy; for it the
rules of Aristotle were no longer the line of demarcation which separated
the literary camps, where was one to find himself, and what was he to
depend upon? How was one to know, in reading a book, which school it
belonged to? . . . Luckily in the same year there appeared a famous
preface, which we devoured straightway[19]. . . This said very
distinctly that romanticism was nothing else than the alliance of the
playful and the serious, of the grotesque and the terrible, of the jocose
and the horrible, or in other words, if you prefer, of comedy and
tragedy."
This definition the anxious inquirers accepted for the space of a year,
until it was borne in upon them that Aristophanes--not to speak of other
ancients--had mixed tragedy and comedy in his drama. Once again the
friends were plunged in darkness, and their perplexity was deepened when
they were taking a walk one evening and overheard a remark made by the
niece of the _sous-prefet_. This young lady had fallen in love with
English ways, as was--somewhat strangely--evidenced by her wearing a
green veil, orange-colored gloves, and silver-rimmed spectacles. As she
passed the promenaders, she turned to look at a water-mill near the ford,
where there were bags of grain, geese, and an ox in harness, and she
exclaimed to her governess, "_Voilà un site romantique_."
This mysterious sentence roused the flagging curiosity of MM. Dupuis and
Contonet, and they renewed their investigations. A passage in a
newspaper led them to believe for a time that romanticism was the
imitation of the Germans, with, perhaps, the addition of the English and
Spanish. Then they were tempted to fancy that it might be merely a
matter of literary form, possibly this _vers brisé_ (run-over lines,
_enjambement_) that they are making so much noise about. "From 1830 to
1831 we were persuaded that romanticism was the historic style (_genre
historique_) or, if you please, this mania which has lately seized our
authors for calling the characters of their novels and melodramas
Charlemagne, Francis I., or Henry IV., instead of Amadis, Oronte, or
saint-Albin. . . From 1831 to the year following we thought it was the
_genre intime,_ about which there was much talk. But with all the pains
that we took we never could discover what the _genre intime_ was. The
'intimate' novels are just like the others. They are in two volume
octavo, with a great deal of margin. . . They have yellow covers and
they cost fifteen francs." From 1832 to 1833 they conjectured that
romanticism might be a system of philosophy and political economy. From
1833 to 1834 they believed that it consisted in not shaving one's self,
and in wearing a waistcoat with wide facings very much starched.
At last they bethink themselves of a certain lawyer's clerk, who had
first imported these literary disputes into the village, in 1824. To
him, they expose their difficulties and ask for an answer to the
question, What is romanticism? After a long conversation, they receive
this final definition. "Romanticism, my dear sir! No, of a surety, it
is neither the disregard of the unities, nor the alliance of the comic
and tragic, nor anything in the world expressible by words. In vain you
grasp the butterfly's wing; the dust which gives it its color is left
upon your fingers. Romanticism is the star that weeps, it is the wind
that wails, it is the night that shudders, the bird that flies and the
flower that breathes perfume: it is the sudden gush, the ecstasy grown
faint, the cistern beneath the palms, rosy hope with her thousand loves,
the angel and the pearl, the white robe of the willows. It is the
infinite and the starry," etc., etc.
Then M. Ducoudray, a magistrate of the department, gives his theory of
romanticism, which he considers to be an effect of the religious and
political reaction under the restored Bourbon monarchy of Louis XVIII,
and Charles X. "The mania for ballads, arriving from Germany, met the
legitimist poetry one fine day at Ladvocat's bookshop; and the two of
them, pickax in hand, went at nightfall to a churchyard, to dig up the
Middle Ages." The taste for medievalism, M. Ducoudray adds, has survived
the revolution of 1830, and romanticism has even entered into the service
of liberty and progress, where it is a manifest anachronism, "employing
the style of Ronsard to celebrate railroads, and imitating Dante when it
chants the praises of Washington and Lafayette." Dupuis was tempted to
embrace M. Ducoudray's explanation, but Cotonet was not satisfied. He
shut himself in, for four months, at the end of which he announced his
discovery that the true and only difference between the classic and the
romantic is that the latter uses a good many adjectives. He illustrates
his principle by giving passages from "Paul and Virginia" and the
"Portuguese Letters," written in the romantic style.
Thus Musset pricks a critical bubble with the point of his satire; and
yet the bubble declines to vanish. There must really be some more
substantial difference than this between classic and romantic, for the
terms persist and are found useful. It may be true that the romantic
temper, being subjective and excited, tends to an excess in adjectives;
the adjective being that part of speech which attributes qualities, and
is therefore most freely used by emotional persons. Still it would be
possible to cut out all the adjectives, not strictly necessary, from one
of Tieck's _Märchen_ without in the slightest degree disturbing its
romantic character.
It remains to add that romanticism is a word which faces in two
directions. It is now opposed to realism, as it was once opposed to
classicism. As, in one way, its freedom and lawlessness, its love of
novelty, experiment, "strangeness added to beauty," contrast with the
classical respect for rules, models, formulae, precedents, conventions;
so, in another way, its discontent with things as they are, its idealism,
aspiration, mysticism contrast with the realist's conscientious adherence
to fact. "Ivanhoe" is one kind of romance; "The Marble Faun" is
another.[20]
[1] Les définitions ne se posent pas _a priori_, si ce n'est peutêtre en
mathématiques. En histoire, c'est de l'étude patiente de is la réalité
qu'elles se dégagent insensiblement. Si M. Deschanel ne nous a pas donné
du _romantisme_ la définition que nous réclamions tout à l'heure, c'est,
à vrai dire, que son enseignement a pour objet de préparer cette
définition même. Nous la trouverons où elle doit être, à la fin du cours
et non pas à début.--_F. Brunetière: "Classiques et Romantiques, Études
Critiques," _Tome III, p. 296.
[2] Was war aber dis romantische Schule in Deutschland? Sie war nichts
anders als die Wiedererweckung der Poesie des Mittelalters, wie sie sich
in dessen Liedern, Bild- und Bauwerken, in Kunst und Leben, manifestiert
hatte.--_Die romanticsche Schule (Cotta edition)_, p. 158.
[3] "The Romantic School" (Fleishman's translation), p. 13.
[4] Un classique est tout artiste à l'ecole de qui nous pouvons nous
mettre sans craindre que ses leçons on ses exemples nous fourvoient. Ou
encore, c'est celui qui possède . . . des qualités dont l'imitation, si
elle ne peut pas faire de bien, ne peut pas non plus faire de mal.--_F.
Brunetière, "Études Critiques,"_ Tome III, p. 300.
[5] Mr. Perry thinks that one of the first instances of the use of the
word _romantic _is by the diarist Evelyn in 1654: "There is also, on the
side of this horrid alp, a very romantic seat."--_English Literature in
the Eighteenth Century, by Thomas Sergeant Perry, _p. 148, _note_.
[6] "Romanticism," _Macmillan's Magazine_, Vol. XXXV.
[7] The Odyssey has been explained throughout in an allegorical sense.
The episode of Circe, at least, lends itself obviously to such
interpretation. Circe's cup has become a metaphor for sensual
intoxication, transforming men into beasts; Milton, in "Comus," regards
himself as Homer's continuator, enforcing a lesson of temperance in
Puritan times hardly more consciously than the old Ionian Greek in times
which have no other record than his poem.
[8] "Racine et Shakespeare, Études en Romantisme" (1823), p. 32, ed. of
Michel Lévy Frères, 1954. Such would also seem to be the view maintained
by M. Émile Deschanel, whose book "Le Romantisme des Classiques" (Paris,
1883) is reviewed by M. Brunetière in an article already several times
quoted. "Tous les classiques," according to M. Deschanel--at least, so
says his reviewer--"ont jadis commencé par être des romantiques." And
again: "Un _romantique_ seraut tout simplement un classique en route pour
parvenir; et, réciproquement, un classique ne serait de plus qu'un
romantique arrivé."
[9] "Classic and Romantic," Vol. LVII.
[10] See Schiller's "Ueber naive and sentimentalische Dichtung."
[11] Le mot de romantisme, après cinquante ans et plus de discussions
passionnées, ne laisse pas d'être encore aujourd'hui bien vague et bien
flottant.--_Brunetière, ibid._
[12] Ce qui constitue proprement un classique, c'est l'équilibre en lui de
toutes les facultés qui concourent à la perfection de l'oeuvre
d'art.--_Brunetière, ibid._
[13] "Vorlesungen über dramatische Kunst und Litteratur."
[14] Far to the west the long, long vale withdrawn,
Where twilight loves to linger for a while.
--_Beattie's "Minstrel."_
[15] The modernness of this "latest born of the myths" resides partly in
its spiritual, almost Christian conception of love, partly in its
allegorical theme, the soul's attainment of immortality through love.
The Catholic idea of penance is suggested, too, in Psyche's "wandering
labors long." This apologue has been a favorite with platonizing poets,
like Spenser and Milton. See "The Faïrie Queene," book iii. canto vi.
stanza 1., and "Comus," lines 1002-11
[16] "Selections from Walter Savage Landor," Preface, p. vii.
[17] See also Walter Bagehot's essay on "Pure, Ornate, and Grotesque Art,"
"Literary Studies, Works" (Hartford, 1889), Vol I. p. 200.
[18] Lettres de Dupuis et Cotonet (1836), "Oeuvres Complètes" (Charpentier
edition, 1881), Tome IX. p. 194.
[19] Preface to Victor Hugo's "Cromwell," dated October, 1827. The play
was printed, but not acted, in 1828.
[20] In modern times romanticism, typifying a permanent tendency of the
human mind, has been placed in opposition to what is called realism. . .
[But] there is, as it appears to us, but one fundamental note which all
romanticism . . . has in common, and that is a deep disgust with the
world as it is and a desire to depict in literature something that is
claimed to be nobler and better.--_Essays on German Literature, by H. H.
Boyesen_, pp. 358 and 356.