The Romantic Age (1798-1832)
the Romantic Movement / 341
THE ROMANTIC MOVEMENT AS A REVOLT v Q. 54. To what extent was the Romantic Movement in English poetry a revolt aganist tradition and social authority ? (Himachal 1991, Punjab 1963) Or
Q. How was the Romantic Movement in English poetry a
revolt against tradition and social authority ?
(Rohilkhand 1984 & 1988)
Introduction :-
It must be pointed out at the very outset that ”romanticism” is a thoroughly controversial term, and to define it is as hopeless a task as ever.F. L. Lucas in The Decline and Fall of the Romantic Ideal (1948) counted as many as 11,3% definitions of romanticism. And none of them is completely oft the target. A few of the most important definitions may be glanced at here. According to Theodore Watts-Dunton, the Romantic Revival was equivalent to the ”Renascence of Wonder.” According to Walter Pater, romanticism means the addition of strangeness to beauty (whereas classicism is order in beauty). Herford points out that the Romant’C Movement was primarily ”an extraordinary development of imaginative sensibility. ”Cazamain observes:” The Romantic spirit can be defined as an accentuated predominance of emotional life, provoked or directed by the exercise of imaginative vision, and in its turn stimulating or directing such exercise.” The bewildering mass of such definitions has led some critics to recommend the very abolition of terms like ”romanticism” acd ”classicism” altogether. Let us quote one of such critics :”I ask you to distrust the familiar labels,–’classical,’ ’neo-classical,’ ’pseudo classical’, ’prsromantic’ and all the others. I sometimes doubt if we shall ever understand the poetry of this century [the eighteenth] [ill we get rid of the terms ’classical’ and ’romantic’ in one and all of their forms. Johnson, Coleridge, and Hazlitt-perhaps our three greatest critics-did not find the need of them; nor should we.”1 Likewise, F L. Lucas finds romanticism a wholly woolly term fit only for slaughter. Nevertheless, these terms have been retained in criticism because they are useful, even if not very accurately definable.
A Reaction :-
The Romantic Movement was a European, not only an English, phenomenon. Its repercussions were felt towards the end of the
1. David Nicol Smith, Some Observations on Eighteenth Century Poetry (University of Toronto Press, 1964), p.56
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eighteenth century, but its efflorescence came at different times in different countries and in different ways. Germany was perhaps the first country to manifest a marked change in its sensibility which affected its philosophical thought more than literature. England turned romantic about the beginning of the nineteenth century, and France-, the witness to the famous French Revolution (1789), manifested the influence of romanticism around 1830, when the Romantic Movement was already starting to decline in England. Romanticism meant different things in different countries, and even in the same country it implied different things with different writers. Thus in England it is customary to herd Wordsworth, Shelley, Coleridge, Keats, and Byron all as romantics. But how different, say, Byron and Wordsworth are ! A critic recommends the use of the term ”romanticisms” rather than ”romanticism” in consideration of the variety of its fundamental features. Whatever be the interpretation of the term ”romanticism,” it is clear that it was essentially of the nature of a reaction. In England the , Romantic Movement implies a reaction against the school of Dryden, Pope, and Dr. Johnson. However greatly may Wordsworth and Byron differ in their conception and practice of poetry, it is indisputable that both of them reacted against the set conventions and rules of poetry formulated and traditionalised over .the decades by the poets of the neoclassic school. The Romantic Movement was thus a revolt against literary tradition. But it was more; it is also a revolt against social authority. It was perhaps Schlegel who first defined romanticism as ”liberalism in literature.” Most of the romantic poets were for the liberation of the individual spirit .from the shackles of social authority as well as literary tradition. This emphasis on individual predilection, which in philosophical terms approar1 »s subjectivism, renders the romantic output somewhat chaotic. When there is no tradition or uniting authority, it is not surprising that the romantic poets take widely divergent paths. Thus, even if we may accept that there was a classical or neoclassical school of poetry, it is difficult to conceive of the existence of a romantic ”school”.
The Nature of the Revolt :-
’The romantic movement,” says William J. Long, ”was marked, and is always marked, by a strong reaction and protest against the bondage of rule and custom which in science and theology as well as literature, generally tend to fetter the free human spirit” It is of interest to note that just as the romantics revoked against the literary traditions of the eighteenth century, Dryden and Pope themselves had revoked in their turn against the traditions of the previous age. The romantics
<rT The Romantic Age 7343
looked for inspiration and guidance to Spenser and Milton, whereas Dryden and Pope had looked to the Roman poets of antiquity. Thus both the neoclassicists and romantics, while breaking away from the traditions existing immediately before them, respected a more ancient tradition. Let us consider in what respects the romantics parted witr. the neoclassic tradition.
Reaction against Reason :- .
Cazamian observes: ”The literary transition from the Renascence to the Restoration is nothing more or less than the progress of a spirit of liberty, at once fanciful, brilliant, and adventurous, towards a rule and discipline both in inspiration and in form.’The transition from neo-dassicism to romanticism is just the reverse of this. The neoclassicists were champions of common sense and reason, and were in favour of normal generalities against- the whims and eccentricities of individual genius. ”Nature” and reason were glorified. Much of the satire of the eighteenth century was directed against fancy and unreason. Swift in the fourth book of Gulliver Travels, to consider an example, chastises Yahoos for being creatures of impulse and devoid of reason or common sense. On the other hand, Houyhnhnms are glorified for being endowed with ”right reason.” The romantics starting with Blake rebelled against the curbing influence of reason which could variously manifest itself as good sense, intellect, or just dry logic-chopping. Most of the romantic poets believed in a kind of transcendentalism, intuition, or mysticism, and none believed in the dictum thai poetry is an intellectual exercise whose worth is entirely dependent on effective expression. Pope said:
True Wit is Nature to advantage dress’d, What oft was thought but ne’er so well express’d. The romantics discredited wit as against real poetic inspiration. Poetry to them did not mean just a set of smart gnomes but something inner and spiritually enlightening.”Poetry”, wrote Wordsworth in the? Preface to the second edition of Lyrical Ballads, ”is the breath and finer spirit of all knowledge: it is the impassioned expression which is in the countenance of aU science.” He advised the student of Chemistry to lay aside his books and turn to poetry for true learning. The romantic conception of a poet and poetry was thus entirely different from the classical one. Dryden and Pope had believed that a poet was a ”civilised” man of the world but much wittier and more talented than other civilised men. To the romantics, a poet became a seer*, a clairvoyant, a philosopher, and,in the words of Shelley, an unacknowledged legislator of mankind. Neoclassic poetry was mainly a product of
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intellect, and it was to intellect that it chiefly appealed. The attitude of most romantics was, however, keenly anti-intellectual. Thus, Wordsworth strongly denounced ”that false secondary power by which we multiply distinctions”. Blake represented reason as clipping the wings of love, and Keats declared that ”Philosophy will clip an angel’s wings.” Thus anti-intellectualism”, avers Samuel C. Chew, ”was no suddeamanifestation of a spirit of revolt; it had been swelling in volume for many years. In the thought of the predecessors of the great romantic poets there had been a tendency to view learning with suspicion as allied to vice and to commend ignorance as concomitant with virtue.”
Imagination, Feeling, and Emotion :-
The romantics revolted against the neoclassical exaltation of wit. They gave the place of wit to imagination and that of intellect to feeling and emotion. Wordsworth emphasised the role of feeling and emotion in all poetry. These are his famous words : ”I have said that poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings : it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquillity : the emotion is contemplated till, by a species of reaction, the tranquillity gradually disappears, and an emotion kindred to that which was before the subject of contemplation, Is gradually produced, and does itself actually exist in the mind.” Cazamian observes: ”Intense emotion coupled with an intense display of imagery, such is the frame of mind which supports and feeds the new literature.” Feeling and imagination came to have a supreme importance with the romantics. In the Preface to Lyrical Ballads Wordsworth wrote : ”…each of these poems has a purpose : the feeling therein developed gives importance to action and situation, and not the action and situation to the feeling.” The neoclassicists had held imagination suspect. They had admitted fancy now and then but the true imagination of Coleridge’s conception was almost non-existing. They had neglected love as a theme of poetry, their poetry was mostly didactic, and this didacticism quite often took the shape of satire. Even when some romantics now and then become didactic, they are not just being intellectual or rhetorical; they rather appeal primarily to our emotions and take a generous help from imagination. Consider, in this context, Shelley’s sonnet Ozymandtas or Wordsworth’s Ode to Duty.
This special stress on imagination sometimes led the romantics away from the humdrum world of actuality and its pressing problems to make them citizens of their own respective worlds of imagination and to gloat in imaginary
casements, opening on the’^am
Of perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn.
The Romantic Movement / 345
The exaltation of imagination sometimes almost took the form of a revolt against realism, amounting to escapism. All neo-classical poets were hard-boiled realists, men of the world, and sometimes men of affairs. Blake is the most notorious example of a romantic moving in the world of visions. He went so far as to assert that the ”vegetable world of phenomena” is only a shadow of ”the real world which is the Imagination.” Swift, from what we gather from Section IX of A Tale of a Tub, would have certainly put such a man as Blake behind the bars of a bedlam ! ”The romanticist”, according to Samuel C. Chew,”is amorous of the far’. He seeks to escape from familiar experience and from the limitations of ’that shadow-show called reality’ which is presented to him by his intelligence. He delights in the marvellous and abnormal”. This escape from actuality assumes many forms. In Coleridge it takes the form of love of the supernatural; in Shelley, of that of the dream of a golden age to come; in Keats, a striving after ideal beauty and the effort to recall the ancient Hellenic glory; in Scott it is manifested by his escape to the hoary Middle Ages; in Byron it takes the form of a haughty disdain of all humanity and absorption in his own self, amounting almost to a kind of egotheism, and, lastly, in Wordsworth it appears in his insistence on giving up the mechanical and spirit-throttling civilization and escaping into the untainted company of nature.
This condemnation of civilization is incidentally a basic tenet of European romanticism. Walter Jackson Bate observes : ”It also encouraged the common romantic emphasis on the virtues of simple and rural life and in its extremer form ….found outlet in continuing the cult •of the ’noble savage’ who is unspoiled by contact with civilization. It lent a kind of sanction to the vogue of the untutored and ’original genius, and the frequent dilating on the natural innocence and goodness of childhood is an equally common expression of it.” The neoclassicists had expected a child to be a little gentleman, but most romantics, like Blake and Wordsworth, gave him a spiritual importance for being full of the ”intimations of immortality.” Rousseau, the French thinker, was chiefly responsible for this vital change of conception. Diction and Metre :-
The Rqmantic Movement was a revolt not only against the concept of poetry held by the neoclassicists, it was also a revolt against traditional poetic measures and diction. About this pan of the romantic revolt, Legouis observes :”To express their fervent passions they sought a more supple and more lyrical form than that of Pope, .. language less dulled by convention, metres unlike the prevailing couplet. They renounced the poetical associations of words, and dreto upon unusual images and varied verse forms for which they found models in the
L
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Renaissance and the old English poetry.” Some of these verse forms were personal inventions of the new poets. They sounded the deathknell of the heroic couplet which had reigned supreme upwards of a century. Revolt against Social Authority :-
The romantic revolt against social authority took as many shapes as the one against literary tradition. Most of the romantics were radical in their political views and crusaders for the emancipation of the individual. The French Revolution affected all the romantic poets, though in different ways. The young Wordsworth and Coleridge were thrilled with joy at the fall of the Bastille, which signified for them the cracking of the tyrannic chains which had kept in bondage the human spirit for so long. Later, however, with the Reiga of Terror, the Lake Poets (Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Southey) turned conservative, and Wordsworth earned the censure of Browning as ”the lost leader.” The later romantics-Shelley, Keats., and Byron-were stronger and more consistent radicals than the earlier ones. All of them devoted themselves to the cause of freedom in all lands. Byron upheld the cause of Greek freedom in his poetry and his person-not only financially and morally. But to conclude, the Romantic Movement was much less a political than a poetic movement.
The revolt against social authority did not only mean condemnation of political tyranny and support for democracy, it also meant, sometimes, an open rebellion against long-standing social taboos on free love and even incest. Shelley was an arch rebel against all such curbs. Incest provides the theme of his play The Cenci. The Revolt of Islam is, likewise, a call for rebellion against tyranny and social authority alike. Shelley revolted against even God and earned his dismissal from Oxford with his pamphlet The Necessity of Atheism. His too insistent and serious belief in free love compelled his first wife to take her own Me. On account of their rebellious notions, most romantics proved misfits in society and some were dubbed insane by it. Samuel C. Chew observes: ”Emphasising the abnormal element, some scholars have singled out the morbidly erode aad deranged as distinguishing marks of romanticism, interpreting this as evidence of the part played by the/ less conscious impulses of the mind and nothing that a large number of English writers of the period approached the borders of insanity or went beyond, than can be accounted for on the ground of mere coincidence.’1 This aspect of romanticism is what exactly prompted T. E. Hulme to observe that classicism is ”healthy” and romaneicssm’sicklv*.
”Renascence of Wonder” / 347
«\/ THE ROMANTIC MOVEMENT AS THE t/^ ”RENASCENCE OF WONDER” Q. 55 Write a note on the ’Renaissance of Wonder1, illustrating your answer. (Agra 1966)
Introduction :-
Various definilions of romanticism and various interpretations of the Romantic Movement in England and the Continent have been given. F. L. Lucas in The Decline and Fall of the Romantic Ideal (1948) lists as many as 11,396 such definitions ! Bewildered by the enormous number of such attempts to define romanticism, some critics have counselled that such terms as l”romanticisra”and ”classicism” should be given up altogether. F. L. Lucas calls ”romanticism” a ”wholly woolly term fit only for slaughter.” But we should not accept this counsel of despair as, in spite of their vagueness, most modern critics have accepted these terms on the strength of their utility to criticism.
The Romantic Movement in England was directed against the traditions of the neoclassical poetry of the school of Dryden, Pope, and Dr. Johnson. There was politics, too, which was involved, but essentially, this Movement was not political but poetic. Neoclassical poetry was intellectual, correct, reasonable, and traditional in its selection of themes and metre-which was invariably the heroic couplet. At the end of the eighteenth century ( more specifically, with the publication of the Lyrical Ballads in 1798) the coup de grace was given to the already decadent poetry which had followed from the footsteps of Pope. In the later part of the eighteenth century could already be felt a kind of reaction against the Popean school of poetry. Poets like Thomson, Gray, Cowper, Collins, Burns, and Blake had already broken away at various points from the time-honouied traditions of the Augustan or neoclassical school. But it was Wordsworth and Coleridge who in their joint work, the Lyrical Ballads, produced, as it were, the Magna Carta of English poetry. According to a critic, Chatterton and Gray had been the early birds, Cowper was the dawn, and Wordsworth the broad day-light of Romanticism.
Wonder and Intellectual Curiosity :•
All poetic works of all the romantic poets do not follow the same pattern. Romanticism emphasized the liberty of the individual genius from the deadening weight of tradition and rules, thereby encouraging a kind of chaotic tendency. The only bond of union among the romantic
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poets was their impatience of tradition and their craving for novelty. They looked at everything anew and were struck by the spirit of wonder while exploring the new Americas of feeling, emotion, and spirit, and many of them built their spiritual homes in the imaginary worlds of their own making. According to Pater, classicism signifies ”order in beauty”, whereas romanticism stands for the addition of ”strangeness to beauty.” Pater was the reluctant leader of the Aesthetic Movement. He stressed beauty as the end of all art. Classicism and romanticism, to him, differed in that whereas the former stood for tradition, sameness, and well-defined patterns, the latter put a special premium on intellectual curiosity and departure from the ordinary and the normal. Theodore Watts-Dunton, likewise, interpreted the Romantic Movement as the ”Renascence of Wonder.” He meant that in their perception of life and people the neoclassicists, being devotees of set patterns and traditions, had been covered by the dulling film of familiarity which they never tried to see through. The romantics scraped this film and draped the world in the light of their own imagination; and therefore, everything struck them with iridescent, prismatic effects. They were struck with the newness of things, which bred the sense of wonder. The neoclassicists projected only the cold light of reason on every object, but the romantics looked at everything with the eyes of the imagination. Consequently the classicists were more realistic than the romantics, in the ordinary sense. But the romantic poets lived in the world of Forms more real than living man, Nurslings of immortality. The Role of Imagination :-
According to Herford, romanticism was primarily ”an extraordinary development of imaginative sensibility.” This imaginative sensibility opened up new vistas which were to be the wonder of both the poet and the reader alike. Samuel C. Chew observes1: ”The romanticist is’ amorous of the far’. He seeks to escape from familiar experience and from the limitation of ’that shadow-show called reality* which is presented to him by his intelligence. He delights in the marvellous and abnormal. To be sure, loving realistic detail and associating the remote with the familiar, he is often ’true to the kindred points of heaven and home.’ But he is urged on by an instinct to escape from actuality: and in this escape he may range from the most trivial literary fantasy to the most exalted mysticism. His effort is to live constantly in the world of the imagination above and beyond the sensuous, phenomenal world.
”Renascence of Wonder” / 349
For him the creations of the imagination arc ’forms more real than living man.’ He practises willingly that ’suspension of disbelief which ’constitutes poetic faith.’ In its most uncompromising form this dominance of the intuitive and the irrational over sense experience becomes mysticism-’thc life which professes direct intuition of the pure truth of being, wholly independent of the faculties by which it takes hold of the illusory contaminations of this present world.’ Wordsworth described this experience as/that serene and blessed mood in which the burden of the mystery’ being lighted,he sees into ’the life of things’. Blake, who seems to have lived almost continuously in this visionary ecstasy, affirmed that the ’vegetable universe’ of phenomena is but a shadow of that real world which is the Imagination.”
This ”escape from actuality” was attempted by different romantic poets .in different ways. Each invented an interesting and wondrous world of his own. Coleridge escaped to the world of the supernatural which was to him curiously exciting as well as satisfying. Scott threw a romantic veil over the Middle Ages in which he-found his spiritual home. Keats was lost in the world of ancient Hellenic beauty. Byron twitched his nose at the whole world and lived in the make-believe world of his own egocentric creation. Moore was interested in the world of Oriental splendour and gorgepusness. The contemplation of all these ”worlds” was productive of the feelings of wonder as they were all imaginary worlds having little to do with the world of gnawing, humdrum reality. Of all the important romantic poets.it was only Wordsworth who kept his feet firmly planted on the real world. But even he looked at this world through the spectacles of romance, with the result that it excited his wonder in the same measure as the various imaginary worlds did.that of the other romantic poets. Coleridge and the Supernatural :•
Coleridge, perhaps the most romantic of all the romantic poets, always lived in the wonderful world of his dreams and imagination. Though Keats, Scotland Coleridge were all fascinated by the world of the supernatural, yet for the last named it meant something like a natural habitat. Coleridge’s most outstanding poems,nameiy, The Ancient Mariner, Kubla Khan, and Christabel have all a strong tincture of the supernatural. In dealing with the supernatural in his works Coleridge was by no means the pioneer. Not to speak of Shakespeare, even in the eighteenth century many writers had taken up the super-
350 / A History of English Literature
natural as almost their cult. The spate of ”Gothic” novels was an outcome of this cult. To name only a few, Horace Walpble, Mrs. Ann Radcliffe, ”Monk” Lewis, and Willam Beckford had introduced a lot of supernatural characters and incidents in their novels. However, their work is singularly free from any artistic merit. They only catered for the ordinary people who had long been bored by the literature of reason and common sense and were then craving for cheap thrills. They candidly and crudely produced. blood-curdling and spine-curling concoctions emanating from a ghoulish fancy. There is something morbid in their works which are so abundantly peopled with ”death-pale spectres and clanking chains.” To naive readers, they cause terror; to the knowing they cause disgust; but they cause wonder to none. The supernaturalism of the writers of the novel of terror is as counterfeit as their Gothicism.
Coleridge’s supernaturalism, however, is neither shocking nor disgusting. It excited his wonder, and he conveyed this feeling of wonder to his readers. His treatment of supernaturalism is suggestive, delicate, refined, elegant, and eminently psychological. He altogether differed from the sensation-mongering of the exponents of Gothicism. As he himself pointed out in Biographia Literaria, his subject and approach in the Lyrical Ballads were to be different from those of Wordsworth. His own endeavours were to be directed to persons and incidents supernatural, yet was he to make them look natural and credible by dint of his subtle, psychological approach. The supernatural is, generally, terrifying; but ”naturalised supernatural” is not terrifying but conducive to the feeling of wonder. Even when Coleridge is describing something ordinary, he makes it suggestive of the supernatural. Lines like the following represent Coleridge at his best and are perhaps unrivalled for their suggestiveness in the whole range of English poetry:
A savage place ; as hofy and enchanted As ever beneath a waning moon was haunted By woman wailing for her demon lover. A ’critic asserts that this is magic pure and simple; the rest is poetry.
Scott’s treatment of the supernatural is somewhat crude, but Keats gives a good account of himself in his ballad La Belle Dame Sans Merci which is delicately tinctured with the supernatural. Medievalism and Hellenism :-
Many romantic poets, while they did not feed their curiosity on the world of the Supernatural, yet transported themselves to the remote in
”Renancence of Wonder” /351
time and space to create a similar effect of wonder. Almost all of them looked at the Middle Ages as the period of chivalry,adventure, action, and art. In doing so, however, they conveniently forgot the seamy facets of that period-squalor, pestilence, superstition, and fanaticism. Keats viewed ancient Greece as the abode of art and unexampled beauty, so much so that Shelley said that Keats was ”a Greek.” With the exception of Wordsworth and Shelley-who was always lost in the world of his own vision and dreams of the golden age to come-all the romantic poets loved the Middle Ages. The Middle Ages, according to Walter Pater, ”are unworked sources of romantic effect, of a strange beauty to be won by strong imagination out .of things unlikely or remote.” The enthusiasm for the Middle Ages satisfied the emotional sense of wonder as also the intellectual sense of curiosity. Nature-Wordsworth and Others :•
Wordsworth, who is generally recognised to be the greatest of all the romantic poets, has not much to do with supernaturalism, medievalism,or Hellenism. Nor is he ensconced in the world of his own imagination. Nevertheless, he shows a strong tendency towards wonder and curiosity even while keeping his gaze fixed on the ordinary world. He was the greatest poet of Nature, as also her greatest priest. He brings a fresh curiosity and wonder to bear upon his study of Nature. His creed is strongly pantheistic, as Nature for him becomes something like a ubiquitous goddess. In the writing of the Lyrical Ballads it was mutually agreed upon by Coleridge and him that the endeavours of the former would be directed to persons and characters supernatural or at least ”romantic,” whereas he himself was to propose to himself as his subjects familiar, everyday things, and to excite a feeling analogous to the supernatural by awakening the mind’s attention from the ”lethargy” of custom and directing it to the loveliness and wonder of the world before us-an inexhaustible treasure which because of its film of familiarity we have eyes but see .not, ears but hear not, add hearts that neither feel nor understand.
So when Wordsworth is dealing with familiar objects his intention is not to present them photographically-as, for as instance, Crabbe does. Crabbe, an uncompromising realist and a kind of ”Pope in worsted stockings”, had nothing of the romantic in him. He looked at the miseries of rural life without batting his eyelids. His claim was:
I paint the Cot
As Truth would paint it, and as Bards will not. We read his descriptions of people, natural phenomena, and the sights and sounds of Nature with the boredom of recognition rather than the wonder of strangeness. When we read about the grave of a child: / have measured it from side to side;
” ii,
-•\\
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It is time feet fang and two feet wide
it does not excite wonder or curiosity. There is indeed no romance in giving the exact measurement of a meadow or the exact height of an oak. Wordsworth, it must be admitted, docs also sometimes succumb to such prosaic realism; however, it is his definite aim to sketch objects not as they are, but after removing from their surfaces the dull film of familiarity and then projecting over them a certain colouring pf the imagination. Coleridge, by virtue of his subtle imagination, gives realistic touches to things otherwise strange; Wordsworth, on the other hand, gives subtle, exalting touches to things otherwise real and common. Coleridge naturalises the supernatural and Wordsworth ”supernaturalises” the natural. Thus both meet at the same via media of romance which is realistic as well as wonderful. Such common objects as a leech-gatherer, a solitary reaper, and a cuckoo become in Wordsworth poetry objects of wonder and curiosity. It is easy to excite wonder in strange or supernatural things, but to do so in ordinary objects requires the artistic imagination of a real poet. Wordsworth transforms plain reality into beautiful romance. Led by Wordsworth almost all the romantic poets took interest in Nature and loved to dwell on her multifarious moods and aspects. Shelley looked at the West Wind, the skylark, and the clouds not as dull and never-changing objects of never-changing Nature, but as objects of wonderful freshness and perennial interest. Keats, Coleridge, and Byron had each his own conception of Nature, but all of them evinced much interest in the world of Nature and studied and described her with infectious wonder and curiosity, as if she by herself were an unexplored world waiting to be discovered and studied with fresh attention and virgin wonder.
/ THEROMANTICMOVEMENTASA j
/ ”RETURN TO NATURE”
\^
Q. 56 To what extent can the Romantic movement of English poetry be described as a return to nature ?
(Punjab 1962) What is ”Nature”? –
First follow Nature, and your judgement frame By her just standard which is still the same: Unerring Nature, still divinely bright, One clear unchang’d and universal light, Life, force, and beauty must to all impart, At once tlie source, and end, and test of Art.
•Return to Nature* / 353
This is the famous counsel which Pope in his Essay on Criticism gave to writers. In fact, Drydon, Popc,and all the thejr followers reverenced ”Nature” alike, but their Nature was not the same as the Nature of the romantics. The Romantic Movement in English poetry is generally described as a ”Return to Nature.” Nature for Pope stood for normal reality or something like the universal laws of reason. It was something internal and moral. Dr. Johnson characteristically asserted: ”Nothing can please many, and please long, but just representations of general nature. The Augustans were against indulgence in personal whims, eccentricities, and abnormalities because they were ”unnatural”. Thus, their slogan,”Fin;t follow Nature,” has to be interpreted in this light. When the romantics shouted ”Return to Nature”, they meant that the people should return to the external world of sights and sounds, such as trees, mountains, peasants, and the sounds of storms, birds, animals etc., as also to primitive simplicity untainted’by the fingers of refinement, or even ”civilisation.” Lovcjoy in ”Nature as Aesthetic Norm”, in Essays in Uu History of Ideas (1948), dwells upon the complexity of the interpretation of the very inclusive term”Nature” and discusses a galaxy of meanings which have been attached to the word from time to lime. But ignoring all semantic subtleties we may say that the slogan ”Return to Nature” in relation to and as an important aspect of the Romantic Movement in English poetry has mainly two facets. It implies:.
(i) Something like a political and philosophical primitivism, a general love of simplicity and corresponding distrust of sophistication.
(ii) Return to the sights and sounds of external Nature-the world of the sun, stars, trees, plants, flowers, birds, meadows, forests, etc.
Eighteenth-century poetry was urban or ”drawing-rodm” poetry as h did not concern itself with the beauties of Nature. The romantics, without any important exception, stood for love of the sights and sounds of Nature, and some even went to the extent of finding a bond of kinship between Nature and man. To Wordsworth Nature became a guide, teacher, and friend. To others also Nature came to have a deeper than physical significance. ’ .
”Return to Nature” as Glorification of Primitivism :•
The second point does not need much clarification as it is quite obvious. But we may discuss at some length the first one. ”Return to Nature” in this sense meant a return to natural simplicity. Reason, common sense, and good breeding were the qualities commended and recommended in the eighteenth century. The weight of etiquette and superficial gentility appeared to the romantics to be curbing the spirit
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of natural goodness in man. Man had, as it were, willingly accepted to wear chains of his own making. The first man to react against the curbing influences of the so-called civilisation and to give a clarion call for liberation of the inner natural .man was the French philospher Rousseau who played an important part in bringing in ’the French Revolution. He galvanised Europe by announcing: ’Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains”, and ”God made all things good: man meddles with them and they become evil”. Rousseau’s slogan ”Return to Nature” was necessarily a political and philosophical dictum intended to revive the concept of the ”noble savage” and to glorify primitivism in living and behaving. His teachings found a ready acceptance in England as in most other countries of Europe. The romantic poets can often be seen glorifying in their work Rousseauistic simplicity. Their idealisation of peasantry, childhood, and the residents of moors and heaths, for instance, is a logical ramification of the Rousseauistic creed. Their reaction against the dominance of intellect and ”philosophy” (used mostly in the sense of physical science) is also to be studied in this light. Wordsworth strongly denounced ”that false secondary power by which we multiply distinctions”. Blake represented Reason as clipping the wings of Love, and Keats declared that .. ”Philosophy will clip an angels wings”. This anti-intellectualism,” avers ’ Samuel C. Chew, ”was no sudden manifestation of a spirit of revolt; it had been swelling in volume for many years. In the thought of the predecessors of the great romantic poets there had been a tendency to view learning with suspicion as allied to vice and to commend ignorance as concomitant with virtue.” While not overlooking the historical background of the romantic anti-intellectual, revolt, we must give due importance to the impact of Rousseau. In his Descriptive Sketches (mostly written on the banks of the Loire in 1791-92) Wordsworth gives a faithful, albeit a little rhetorical, utterance to Rousseau’s idea of the innate goodness of man:
Once Man entirely free, alone and wild, Was bless’d as free, for he was Nature’s child’, He; all superior but his Goddisdain’d Walk’d none restraining, end by none restrain’d, Confessed no law but by reason taught, Did all he wish’d andwish’dbut what he ought. Blake also found man in ”chains”, as for instace in London, In every cry of every Man, In every Infant’s cry of fear,
•+*
••*>•••• ”Return to Nature” 355
In every voice, in every ban, The mind-forged manacles 1 hear.
”Return to Nature” thus signified a return to natural liberty by snapping these”mind-forged manacles” or ”man-made chains”. Wordsworth hailed the French Revolution as it was for him a step forward towards Nature. Later, however, when he .realised that the Revolution was not Nature-made but man-made, he turned against it to seek comfort b the lap of real Nature.
Now let us consider the place of Nature in the works of different romantic poets.
Wordsworth :-
It is extremely appropriate to begin with Wordsworth both because he is the ”senionnost” of all romantics and is also the ”high priest of Nature” to whom Nature means more than she does to any other English poet. Nature to Wordsworth was everything. After his disillusionment with the French Revolution, he sought the ”healing power” of Nature. His increased interest in Nature was thus partly caused by his political frustration. The Reign of Terror in France sent him reeling into the lap of Nature. His desire to seek comfort in Nature was not something unprecedented; it was unique, however, in its intensity and sincerity. Basil Willey observes in this connexion: ”There was nothing new, it may be remarked, nothing very startling in the discovery that one can find peace and contentment in run] retirement; from Horace to Cowper (to go no further afield) there had seldom lacked poets, satirists, and moralists to recommend plain living and high thinking But the ’Nature* of Wordsworth and Coleridge was apprehended with a new kind of intensity.” He further maintains that their passion to mingle themselves with landscape arose ”primarily from Uutdeflection into imaginative channels of their thwarted political ardours.”
Wordsworth’s attitude to Nature continued changing throughout his life. It started with animal and sensuous pleasures and ended on a mystic note. God and Nature became one for him. Nature became the Universal Spirit-ready for guiding anyone who would care to be guided by Her. Most of the rural characters he paints in his poetry are shown to be simple and uncorrupted mainly because of their close communion with Nature. We are told about Michael that When others heeded not, he heard the South Make subterraneous music.
Michael’s son Luke becomes dissolute when he starts living in a city-away from Nature. The reason Peter Bell was monstrous was that
356 / A History of English Literature
At noon, when by the forest’s edge . He lay beneath the branches high, Vie soft blue sky did never melt Into his heart; lie never felt The witchery of the soft blue sky!
We are unhappy in spite of all material advancement because ”the world is too much with us ” and the objects of Nature do n ~)t touch our heart. Nature should be accepted as a guide and teacher because One impluse from tlie vernal wood Can teach you more of man, Of moral evil and of good Than all the sages can. And
.. .she can so inform Tlie mind that is within us, so impress With quietness and beauty, and so feed With lofty thoughts, tltat neither evil tongues, Rash judgements, nor the sneers of selfish men, Nor greetings where no kindness is, nor all The dreary intercourse of daily life, Shall e’er prevail against us, or disturb Our cheerful faith, tliat all which we behold Is full of blessings. Wordsworth believes that
Nature never did betray The heart that loved her. His advice to his sister is:
Therefore let the moon . Shine on thee in thy solitary walk; And let the misty mountain winds be Jree . To blow against thee.
Lucy grew for three years ”in sun and shower” and became (for Wordsworth) a model child. The highest joy offered by Nature to the minds in perfect communion with her is of a mystic nature. It comes only rarely and lasts just a few moments. During such moments of supreme bliss
The breath of this corporeal frame
And even the motion of our human blood
•*!.-,<
”Return to Nature” / 357
Almost suspended, we are laid asleep In body, and become a living soul: While with an eye made quiet by the power Of harmony, and the deep power of joy We see into the life of tilings.
From what has been said it is clear that so far as Nature is concerned Wordsworth, to quote an opinion, ”was concerned far less with the sensuous manifestations that delight most of our Nature poets than with the spiritual that he finds underlying these manifestations.” Coleridge :-
Coleridge’s attitude to Nature, more particularly in the early phase of Ki5~poetic career, was similar to Wordsworth’s . Very like Wordsworth he felt disillusioned at the consequences of the French Revolution and sought solace inNature.He wrote to his brother from Alfoxdcn that he had ”snapped his squeaking baby-trumpet of sedition*’ and had broken all ties with not only the slogans of the French ’ Revolution, but everything French– ”French metaphysics, French l politics, French ethics, and French theology”- in order to meditate ’ upon the causae caiisaruni>” At what Basil Willey calls ”his most ’ Wordsworthian stage,” Coleridge felt Nature to be a guiding spirit and teacher. In Frost at Midnight he expresses his desire to entrust the instruction of his infant son to Nature.
But thou, my babe I shall wander like a breeze ;’
By lakes and sandy shores, beneath the crags – -V
Of ancient mountains, and clouds,
… so shalt tliou see and hear :,
The lovety shapes and sounds inteBigible 4
Of that eternal language, which thy Cod
Utters, who from eternity doth teach *
Himself in all, end all things in himself.
In Tlie Nightingale he describes how he once made his weeping infant smile by treating him to the beauty of the moon:
Once, when he awoke
In most distressful mood,
I hurried with him to our orchard-plot
And he beheld the moon, and hushed at rmce,
Suspends, and lau&is man sitemfy ” …….
While his fair eyes, swam with uudmpped tears,
Did gfittir in the yellow moon beam f
358 / A History of English Literature
In the beginning Coleridge believed with Wordsworth that Nature leads one ”from joy to joy” and thatshe never betrays the heart that loves her. Later, however, he became more ”realistic” .and came to realise that joy came from within,not from external Nature. This view he voiced in Dejection, an Ode:
I may not hope from outward forms to win Tlie passion and the life, whose fountains are within. O Lady we receive but what we give, And in our life alone does nature live ! Ours is herwedding-garment, ours her shroud! This was a significant departure from the Wordsworthian concept of Nature.
Shelley :•
Nature occupies a place of distinction in Shelley’s poetry, too. But as a poet of Nature he is a class by himself. It is his deeply philosophical bent of mind, perhaps, which does not let him give clearcut pictures of landcape. Seldom does he portray a landscape with recognisable details. The whole thing is so misty and illusive. Most of his Nature pictures are idealised groups of scattered fragments flowing from his memory rather than portraits of what he has actually seen and enjoyed.
Shelley, like Wordsworth, believed that Nature was a living being. He, however, did not think of Nature as the Supreme Spirit meant to delight and teach human beings, but as a spirit full of the principle of love to which he did not assign any particular function.
Again, sometimes, like Wordsworth, Shelley stressed the presence of a mystic bond of union between Nature and man. In Stanzas Written in Dejection Near Naples, for example, he makes Nature reflect his own mood. But at other times, as in The Cloud, he drives a sharp wedge between Nature and the world of man.
An important feature of Shelley’s Nature poetry is the persistent mythopoeic element. He often suggests that the various aspects and objects of Nature are not just different parts of the One Being (as Wordswoth believed), but are separate entities each one independent of the rest. The West Wind becomes with Shelley a mighty destroyer and preserver, the doud becomes the daughter of earth and water, the Mediterranean, a king; Night becomes the sister of Death and the mother of the ”filmy-eyed” Sleep; and so forth. Shelley’s myth-makta* power is at hi luxuriant best in Hyperion,
-us-<-”•••-• ”Return to Nature” / 359
Shelley, like Wordsworth, found ”healing power” in Nature, it is a different thing that sometimes he found himself too sad to be consoled even by her. But she is always happy and lovable. Even when she is turbulent and wild at times, she is not treated by Shelley as an alien force, but something amiable and glorious even in her tantrums.
Keats :-
Keats was also a great lover of Nature. He loved Nature not for her spiritual significance or deep messages conveyed by her, but for the sensuous pleasures which she offered. Compton-Rickctt observes :”Whercas Wordsworth spiritualises and Shelley intcllcctualises Nature, Keats is content to express her through the senses: the colour, the scent, the touch, the pulsating music; these are the things that stir him to his depths; there is not a mood of Earth he docs not love, not a season that will not cheer and inspire him.” Another critic observes :”Keats seeks to know Nature perfectly and to enjoy her fully, with no ulterior thought than to give her complete expression. With him no considerations of theology, humanity or metaphysics mingle with Nature.”
Keats’s odes about Autumn and the Nightingale are very rich in sensuous appeal. They show Keats as a delicate and thorough observer of Nature. Like Wordsworth (who complained that ”we murder to dissect”) he protests against the interference of scientific studies in the sensuous wealth of Nature. He wails:
There was an awful rainbow once in heaven,
We know her woof and texture; she is given
In the dull catalogue of common things Byron :•
Byron was different in most respects from the rest of the romantic poets. He shared their love of Nature, though his love is of its own kind. ”In this love’; says a critic ,”he has his own particular way, there is no meditative musing, little sense of mystery, but a very lively sense of wonder and delight in the energising glories of Nature.” Byron’s love of Nature was partly a by-product of his contempt of man. He took* a particular delight in envisioning and describing wild and terrifying Objects and aspects of Nature which seem to be mocking, as it were, the insignificance of man. He did not deny, however,the healing power of Nature.
Then is a pleasure in the pathless woods; Then is a rapture on the lonety shore;
360 / A History of English Literature
TJiere is a society where none intrudes, ^
By the deep sea and music in its roar 1 ’
He realised the companionableness of Nature, as the following autobiographic lines show:
Wliere rose the mountains, there to him were friends:
Wliere rolled the ocean, thereon was his home;
Wliere a blue sky and glowing clime extends,
He had the passion and the power to roam.
>4
^<^ ROMANTIC MELANCHOLY
Q. §7. Account for the prevalence of melancholy in romantic poetry. (Punjab 1962)
Or
Q. How do you account for the prevalence of melancholy in romanticism? * * (Agra 1952)
Or
Q. Write a short essay on any one of the following :- (c) The melancholy note in the Romantic poetry, (and three more topics) (Punjab 1966)
Introduction :-
Ay, in the very temple of delight
Veil’d melancholy has her sovran shrine,
Though seen of none, save him whose strenuous tongue
Can burst Joy’s grape against his palate fine; *
His soul shall taste the sadness of her might,
And be among her cloudy trophies hung.
-Keats.
Melancholy is one of the inevitable products of the typical romantic temper. Apart from such personal factors as ill-health, aa unhappy marriage or social ostracisation, most romantic poets were led to occasional fits of melancholia by the inherent quality of their creed Their romantic approach to life shuttlecocked them between hope and despair. All of, them, fundamentally considered, were optimists; and like all optimists they fell into moments of despair. Romantic melancholy (or what Mario Praz terms ”romantic agony”) is essentially different from other kinds of melancholy such as the melancholy we associate with Hardy or the melancholy of Sir Thomas Browne. Hardy’s melancholy is the natural product of feis profound pessimism which hinges mainly on his deterministic conception of the universe.
Romantic Melancholy / 361
Browne’s melancholy has an essentially subjective origin; it arises from his persistent interest in the themes of decay and fatality and their appurtenances. His is a macabre imagination exulting in the contemplation, of these .themes which always inspire him to give his best. The eighteenth-century poetry of the ”graveryard schoo” is also instinct with the same kind of melancholy.
Romantic melancholy, however, is of its own kind. It is the product of moments of depression inherent in almost every optimistic philosophy or attitude towards life. Few poets can remain always balanced on the crest of a euphoric certainty that
God is in his Heaven: All is riglM with the world.
A man like Hardy can be a firm pessimist,but few can be firm optimists. Almost all the romantic poets were, essentially speaking, optimists. Their fits of melancholy were due mainly to two factors:
(i) Their occasional (and very painful) awareness of the unbridgeable gulf between the world of reality and ine world of their imagination.
(ii) Their recognition of the impossibility of the materialisation of their visionary projects. Melancholy is natural during moments when the infeasibility of pet imaginations conies to be realised.
Thus romantic melancholy is, pre-eminently, the outcome of a basic dichotomy which at times gives rise to the feelings of disillusionment. Samuel C. Chew observes in this very context: The attempt to find some correspondence between actuality and desire results in joy when for fleeting moments the vision is approximated but in despondency of despair the realization comes that such reconciliations are impossible. Thus Byron’s Lucifer tempts Cain to revolt by forcing upon him an awareness of ’the inadequacy of bis state to his conceptions.’ A sense of this contrast is expressed by Shelley in those poems in which there is a sudden fall from ecstasy into disillusionment The same sense adds a new poignancy to the melancholy strain inherited by the romantic poets from their predecessors.”
Disillusionment resulting in melancholy is also evident in the political befief Of some romantic poets. Further, as most romantic poets were turbulent characters unable to adjust themselves in society they ventilated melancholy feeling. They thought the world to be out of step, but the world threw the opposite charge into their teeth. The feeling of being solitary, especially in the case of Shelley, found melancholy expression.
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After these general observations let us consider individually the most important romantic poets with respect to the question in hand.
Wordsworth :~
Wordsworth was the least melancholy of all the romantic poets. It was mainly due to the fact that he seldom felt himself to be in a state of utter solitariness. There was his sister and there was the ever-consoling Nature always at his elbow. He believed, and actually felt, that Nature leads one from joy to joy. He was an incorrigible optimist though he was aware, like Crabbe, of the miseries of. magers who lived, unlike townsmen, right in the heart of Nature. When Michael finds his son lost in the ignominious ways of the town, he is shocked. Wordsworth points out that love sustained Michael, for
TJiere is a comfort in the strength of love
Wiich makes a tiling endurable, which else
Will overset (he brain or break the heart.
Wordsworth’s optimism finds its way even in the midst of elegiac sentiments. Consider, for instance, the last of his Elegiac Stanzas (Suggested by a picture ofPeele Castle, in a storm, painted by Sir George Beaumont) :
But welcome fortitude,and patient cheer,
And frequent siglits, of what is to be borne f
Such sights or worse, as are before me here,
• Not without hope we suffer and we mourn. In spite of his normal optimism Wordsworth often expresses himself on the misfortunes inevitable to the human predicament. In his years of maturity he was particularly aware of them. For-example, he says in Tintem Abbey:
For I have learned
To look on Nature, not as in the hour
Of thoughtless youth; but hearing oftentimes
The still, sad music of humanity.
Thus even his mysticism is not without a chastening element of melancholy.
Wordsworth’s political disillusionment was also responsible for some utterances of melancholy. The French Revolution (1789) fired him as it did a large number of young hearts throughout Europe, with new hopes of the deliverance of humanity from the shackles t>f age-old tyranny. The fall of the Bastille was for them .an incident to rave over. Recalling the days of the Revolution, Wordsworth writes:
; Romantic Melancholy /363
•*’•.. Bliss was it in tliat dawn to be alive,
But to be young was very heaven!
Later on, however, with the Reign of Terror and the rise of Napoleon, his enthusiani for the slogan ”liberty, fraternity, and equality” declined steeply. He felt that the Revolution was not Nature- but man-made. The ensuing melancholy feelings drove him straight away to the lap of Nature who nursed his wounds and heated’them up. Momentary moods of depression, however, continued visting him as ever. In Resolution and Independence be describes one such moment in the following lines where he represents himself as absorbed .in ”untoward thoughts” :
We poets in ottryoutli begin in gladness : But thereof come in the end despondency and madness. This mood does not, however, continue for long, for study of the fortitude of an extremely old leech-gatherer comes to him with the message of a new hope.
Wordsworth’s emotional career was calculated to arouse melancholy feelings. His ill-fated alliance with a French girl sent him brooding; but his poetry is surprisingly free from the expression of melancholy bred purely by subjective causes.
Coleridge :• ,
Coleridge went through the same vicissitudes of political feelings ^ * as Wordsworth. He and his poetry are, however, much more melancho-’ ly than Wordsworth and his poetry because he could not find the same ”healing power” in Nature as Wordsworth did. No doubt, to start with, i Coleridge felt identically with Wordsworth that ”Nature did never’ betray the heart that loved her.” But later on, this Wordsworthian panacea stopped working for Coleridge’s peculiar ailment. In the Ode to Dejection Coleridge sets forth his contradictory view of Nature which he regards not as a spirit capable of leading even the most cheerless man to a haven of joy, but as something essentially external, which only mirrors a man’s mood, be it of joy or sorrow. Says Jie:
O Lady I we receive but what we give,
And in our life alone does Nature live;
Ours is her wedding garment, ours her shround. What makes Nature look cheerful is the inner joy peculiar to every man, present in some, absent in most He says, accordingly:
/ nuy not hope from outward forms to win
The passion and the life whose fountains are within.
364 / A History of English Literature
This ”passion and the life” are internal, having nothing to do vviA Nature or anything external. ..?•
We in ourselves rejoice.’
And thence flows all that charms our ear or sigfil;
All melodies the echoes of that voice,
All colours a suffusion from that light.
U nlikc Wordsworth, Coleridge was a victim of protracted spells of the darkest melancholy arising from a feeling of guilt and from the gnawing consciousness of the approaching demise of his always uncertain poetic inspiration. Coleridge was an opium addict living alternately in the Arabian Nights world of gorgeous splendours (Sec his Kubla Kfian) and the Weak world of utter despair fast approaching with its monstrous jaws wide open. His Ode to Dejection is a soul-rending dirge on the death of his poetic talent. What distinguishes it as a poem of melancholy is its overwhelming sincerity. With this ode the Coleridge of Kubla Khan, Christabcl, and Vie Ancient Mariner was dead and only a mental wreckremainedbehind.
Shelley :-
Shelley was, essentially, an optimistic dreamer. He was used to visualising and giving expression to the golden age which he believed was always round the corner. All of his long poems, like Queen Mab, Prometlieus Unbound and Tlie Revolt of Islamite permeated with a remarkable spirit of optimism which makes light of ail conceivable hurdles. Nowhere in them does he strike a note of pessimism, melancholy, or disillusioning scepticism. However, his lyrics are almost invariably melancholy in their predominant (one. Therein we find him always lamenting and complaining,
0 world tO life !O time! On whose last steps I climb.
Trembling at that where I had stood before;
WJien will return the glory of your prime ? ,
No more-Oh, never more !
And listen to the ”lyric cry” in the following lines from Ode to the West Wind: . *
Oh, lift me as a wave, a leaf, a cloud !
1 fall upon the thorns of life! I bleed I
A heavy weight of hours has chain’d and bow’d One too like thce: tameless, and swift, and proud.
Romantic Melancholy /365
According to Ian Jack ”Shelley’s lyrics are the utterance of a solitary”. They, he further says, ”are soliloquies, not dramatic monologues.” Tlje longer poems and lyrics are reflections of the two opposite moods-the moods, respectively, of optimism and pessimism.. According to Ian Jack, there in no basic contradiction between these two moods. ”Shelley,” says this critic, ”was optimistic about the future of the human race, pessimistic (almost always)’ about his own future as an individual.” Being the most directly personal of all his poems, his short lyrics are naturally the most melancholy. Religion has been described as what man makes of his solitude : the same description might he applied to Shelley’s lyrics. As Mary Shelley pointed out, ”it is the nature of that poetry… which overflows from the soul ofterfer to express sorrow, and regret than joy, for it is when oppressed by the weight of life, and away from those he loves that the poet has recourse to the solace of expression in verse.”
At times Shelley’s melancholy arises from objective’ observation rather than personal feelings. A good example in to be found in To a Skylark :
We look before and after,
And pine for^fltai is not;
Our sincerest laughter
With some pain is fraught;
Our sweetest songs are those that tell of saddest thought. Keats :-
Without mincing matters it may be said that more than any other romantic, Keats was an escapist. He built up his spiritual home in the romance-draped Middle Ages and the Greece of yore which he considered to be a land of ideal beauty. Any intimate contact with the harsh world of reality was abhorrent to him. He was a patient of tuberculosis which ultimately cut him down in the flower of youth. By turns he feared and courted death. His sonnet ”When I have fears that I may cease to be” is quite typical of him. In the Ode to a Nightingale he gives vent to really poignant feelings. He is in love with ”easeful Death.” He desires
To cease upon the midnight with no pain.
The nigntingale is a denizen of some other immortal and romantic world, unaware of the misery of this world in which human beings are destined to live.
The weariness, the fever, and the fret
366 / A History of English Literature . ^^1
Here, where men sit and hear each other groan, ?”^^l
Wliere palsy shakes a few, sad, last grey hairs, ^^1
Wl\ere youth grows pale, and spectre-thin, and dies f ^H
Wliere but to think is to be full of sorrow u^^^l
And leaden-eyed despairs; l^^^l
Wliere Beauty cannot keep her lustrous eyes, i^^^H
Or new Love pine at them beyond tomorrow. ^^^^|
Byron :•
Byron shared very little of the true romantic melancholy. However, he *vas the most cynical and misanthropic of all the major romantic poets. He was a megalomaniac who regarded himself to be superior to the entire world which he openly and persistently despised. What we are aware of in him are not exactly spells of melancholy but of withering scorn and scarifying contempt which often lead him to. a kind of all-denying cynicism not free from depression. Well does Joseph Warren Beach describe Byron as ”the elevated soul tortured by his own perversities and doomed by his superiority to a life of lonely pride.” But whereas Shelley’s loneliness led him to melancholy, Byron’s led him to I spells of gross ill-temper. ’a
j . I’J
y MEDIEVALISM IN ROMANTIC POETRY ^ Q. 58. Write a note a medievalism in Romantic poetry.
(Agra 1957) Or
Q. Write a short essay on medievalism in romantic poetry.
(Punjab 1961,1972) Introduction :-
The generation of a new interest in the Middle Ages was one of the hallmarks of the Romantic Movement in England, as in the rest of Europe. Heine went so far as to define romanticism as the reawakening of the Middle Ages. H. A. Beers in A History of English Romanticism (1902) was also mainly concerned with the revival of medievalism. It is, however, too lop-sided an interpretation of romanticism which was, in fact, a very complex and composite phenomenon.
Why were most romantic poets interested in the Middle Ages ? The answer to this question is not far to seek. The romantics were, essentially, critical of intellectualism, sophisticated civilisation, and
Medievalism in Romantic Poetry / 367
harsh and humdrum reality. The desire to ged rid of them made them ”amorous of the far.” They sought an escape into regions and states of being as far removed in time and space as possible. It is this love of the remote, the strange, and the mysterious which induced in them an interest in the Middle Ages. The romantic poet is impatient of the real and the earth-bound. He is often discontented with the state of things as they are. Keats, Shelley, Coleridge, and Scott are notably so. Being dissatisfied with oppressive reality they either sing of the glorious past or project their imagination into the womb of furturity to raise a shape that answers their own desire. Thus Keats sings of the glory that was Greece; Scott endeavours to recapture the splendour of the past ages, particularly, the Middle Ages; Shelley sings’ of the golden age to come; and Coleridge is lost in a world of his own making. Says Shelley :
We look before and after
And pine for wliat is not.
Samuel C. Chew observes about/he romantics’ interest in the Middle Ages: ”With such currents of thought and feeling flowing, it was natural that the Middle Ages were regarded with a fresh sympathy, though not, be it said, with accurate understanding. It is true that there were those who-, like Shelley, seeking to reshape the present in accordance with desire, did not revert to the past but pursued their ideal into a Utopian future. But to others the Middle Ages offered a spiritual home, remote and vague and mysterious. The typical romanticist does not ’reconstruct’ the past from the substantial evidence provided by research, but fashions it anew, not as it was but as it ought to have been. The more the writer insists upon the historical accuracy of his reconstruction the less romantic is he.” Thus some romantics who love the Middle Ages not only try to escape from the real and present world but from the real medieval world too; they fashion it anew as it ought to have been, ignoring its unpalatable features known to all historians. They glorify its splendour and chivalry and forget its dirt, disease, squalor, superstition, and social oppression.
Pater’s Explanation :–
As to what led most romantic poets to make their spiritual home in the Middle Ages is explained by Walter Pater in the following words: The essential elements 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 Ages there are unworked sources of romantic effect, of a strange beauty to be won by strong imagination out of things
368’/ A History of English Literature
unlikely or remote.” Romanticism is interpreted by Pater as the addition of the sense of strangeness to beauty. ”Strangeness” implies the combination of the emotional sense of wonder and the intellectual sense of curiosity. Both these senses are gratified by the romance-dad, remote, and mysterious Middle Ages.
Not All Romantic Poets Are Medievalists :-
In spite of the views of Heine and Beers already referred to, medievalism is not an essential feature of all romantic poetry, even though it be one of the hallmarks of the Romantic Movement in England. Many important poets did not, for different reasons, evince much interest in the Middle Ages; but they were ”romantics” all the same. Among such poets must be mentioned the names of Wordsworth, Shelley, and Byron. Wordsworth found a constant spiritual anchor in Nature. He was as keenly dissatisfied with the world of humdrum reality as any other romantic poet. But whereas others escaped to the remote in time and space, Wordsworth found in the healing power of Nature a balm for all his pains and frustrations. Why should he have looked to the Middle Ages when the panacea for all his ills was present right in front of him ? There is not any strong element of romantic agony and yearning in Wordsworth’s poetry as Nature led him ”from joy to joy”. Medievalism for Wordsworth, then, was an utter irrelevancy. As regards Shelley, the absence of interest in the Middle Ages may be explained by his persistent ”futurism.” He found his spiritual home not in the supposedly near-jdeal bygone ages but in the golden age to come. He looked ”after” rather than ”before”; the unborn tomorrow appealed to him as more real than the dead yesterday. He, however, did love to dwell upon mystery, spirit, foreign lands, and remote times. At any rate, the love of the Middle Ages does not manifest itself as a specific and noteworthy element in his poetry. Byron’s temper and approach were in many respects quite different from those of most romantic poets. But the love of the remote was equally shared by him with others. However, he was much more interested in the Orient than in medieval Europe. His ”Oriental Tales”–77i« Giaour, The Bride ofAbydos (both
1813) and The Corsair (1817) have for their background the world of Oriental romance; however, their interest resides not in the romantic atmosphere but the personality of the hero in each case. Only in Lara (1814) do we find Byron employing, to quote-Samuel C. Chew, ”the Gothic mode for the delineation of the Byronic hero.” Thus, on the whole, Byron manifests little interest in medievalism.
*
* ft
9 )
3
H I
Medievalism in Romantic Poetry / 369
Difference from the Gothic Romancers :-
The medievalism of romantic poets was quite different from that of the Gothic romancers who had earlier shown in their crude Gothic stories new interest in the Middle Ages. Horace Walpote and Mrs. Ann Radcliffe were the most important among them. Walpolc, like some other dilettanti of the second half of the eighteenth century, did something practically Gothic by erecting an actual castle (not one in the air) after the Gothic style–at least, what he thought was the Gothic style. Critics are forward enough to dub his Gothidsm-both that of his architecture and his Castle ofOlranto-as sham. These Gothic novelists had little real knowledge of the Middle Ages. They were crude sensation-mongers who found the Middle Ages a convenient repository in which all supernatural and blood-curdling events and characters could be dumped with impunity. Their approach to the Middle Ages was neither sincere nor psychological, nor artistic. For one thing, none of them really believed in all that he, wrote about. Walpole was an enervated intellectual who cultivated the creed of Gothitism just to kill boredom. Mrs. Radcliffe, wife of a journalist, wrote her stories just to keep herself occupied during the frequent hours of leisure. None of the Gothicists made the Middle Ages his or her spiritual home. Coleridge, Scott, and Keats on the other hand, dealt with the Middle Ages with extreme sensitiveness and psychological integrity. Coleridge and Keats, at least, believed in their own ”romanticised” versions of the Middle Ages. They breathed the very air of that period and made themselves quite at home in that atmosphere. Their approach to the Middle Ages was not the approach of a painstaking historian or cold dilettante. They transported themselves into the spirit of those times though without bothering about fidelity to historical details. Their interest lay in living rather than describing the Middle Ages. Coleridge :-
Coleridge was the pioneer in the psychological and artistic handling of the Middle Ages. His medievalism .and supernaturalism go hand in hand. The Middle Ages for him provide a very appropriate period for his poem&which contain supernatural and mysterious events rich in romance. HisT greatest pocms-Otristobel and The Ancient Mariner-luvc both for their backdrop the England of the Middle Ages. In the former we have the usual medieval accoutrements such as an old-fashioned castle, a feudal lord, mystery^uperstition, magic, and terror. The castle is surrounded by a moat and is •ironed within
370 / A History of English Literature
and without.” There is the witch woman Geraldine who easts her evil spell on the chaste Christabel who is every inch the beautiful and young heroine of a typical medieval romance. The medieval atmosphere, • along with Coleridge’s subtle and imaginative handling of his subject, gives the poem a colour of credibility. It also enables him to dispense with any elaborate machinery for the generation of eerie and remote terror. As is usual with him, Coleridge works in Ovistabel through subtle suggestion rather than explicit description. It must be noted that Coleridge values the Middle Ages not for their own sake but for their capacity to provide a suitable setting for the supernatural which it is his purpose to hint at or to display openly. Only once does he go beyond this-while describing the shadowy picture in Ovistabel of The charm carved so curiously Carved with figures strange and sweet For the Lady’s chamber meet.
Otherwise, the medieval atmosphere is kept vague rather than concretely depicted, though it permeates everything. Even when he alludes to the trials by combat in Part II of Christabel he does not give precise details. Contrast his approach with Keats’s description of Madeline’s chamber in The Eve of St. Agnes and we will find the difference between Coleridge and other romantic poets in this particular.
The Rime of the Ancient Mariner is, likewise, provided by Coleridge wih a medieval setting. The references to the crossbow, the vesper bell, the shriving hermit, the prayer to Mary-all point to the medieval setting of the poem. The deliberate archaisms like ”eftsoons”, ”countree,” and ”swound” serve the same purpose. The supernatural events in the poem find a befitting backdrop in this medieval setting.
Scott :-
In his medievalism and supernaturalism Scott followed in the footsteps of Coleridge and found a tumultuous response from the reading public. Scott was a very copious and versatile writer, better known as a novelist than a poet. As a historical novelist he covered in his novels the history of England and Scotland from the Dark Ages to the then recent eighteenth century. He was at home in the past, particularly the Middle Ages in which he created an unprecedented interest and even enthusiasm.
The Lay of the Last Minstrel (1805), Scott’s first important original . work, has for its setting the England – Scotland border of the mid-six-
The Influence of the French Revolution /I 371
teenth century with all its feuds and suggestions’ of magic and mystery. A Tale ofFlodden Field Marmion (1808) is, likewise, set in the year 1513 and is based on some historical incidents generously peppered with many others of the poet’s own Creadon. TheLady of the Lake (1810), which like the two above-mentioned works is a poem in six cantos, also like them transports the reader to England and Scotland of the Middle Ages and has for characters chivalrous knights who participate in numerous feuds for the hand of a beautiful maiden. Scott’s treatment of the Middle Ages is somewhat less artistic and delicate than Coleridge’s. He is much more interested in action-and vigorous narration than in subtle and psychological suggestions. Keats :-
Keats, like most romantic poets, revelled in the past. He was most pleased with the Middle Ages and the ancient Greece with all its glory, splendour, and beauty. His most important poems conceived in the medievel setting are the incomparable The Eve of St. Agnes and the ballad La Belle Dame Sans Merci. The former is based on the medieval legend of St. Agnes. ”Tlie Eve of St. Ames,” says a critic,”is a glorious record of the fondness of Keats for all that is understood by the phrase ’medieval accessories’.” There are very obvious ”medieval accessories” such as an old castle, an adventurous, love-struck knight, a young lady who looks like the typical heroine of a medieval romance, the beadsman, and family feuds and enmity. All this is certainly medieval. ”But,” observes a critic, ”it is medievalism seen through the magical mist of the imagination of Keats.” Keats’s approach to the Middle Ages is conditioned by his sensuous temper. He loves this period for its romance and mystery, no doubt, but also for its picturesqueness and its appeal to the senses. His treatment lacks the subtlety and psychological veracity of Coleridge’s. ”The reliance,” says SamuelC. Chew, ”upon elaborate and vivid presentation rather than upon suggestion differentiates the quality of Keats’s romanticism from Coleridge’s”.
The setting of La Belle Dame Sans Merci is also medieval and is equally charged with the spirit of chivalry and the supernatural. The love-lorn knight -at-arms who is smitten by the sight of the femme fatale~”& faery’s child– the ”elfin grot”, and the mysterious incidents are all abundantly suggestive of the Middle Ages. The whole poem has, unlike The Eve of St. Agnes, the naivete of a medieval lay.
yn\ A History of English Literature
* x>
•pirf-.
Q.59. THE INFLUENCE OF THE FRENCH REVOLUTION ON ENGLISH LITERATURE
Trace the influence of the French Revolution on English literature. (Gorakhpurl980)
Or
Q. Attempt an essay on the influence of the French Revolution on English poets. (Rohilkhand 1994)
Or
. Q. Describe the influence of the French Revolution on English literature. (Punjab 1975)
Or
Q. How did the French Revolution influence the major poets of the Romantic Revival? (Punjab 1977)
Or
Q. How did the French Revolution influence the major poets of the Romantic Movement in England?
(Punjab Sept 1986)
Or
Q. Assess the extent and value of the influence of the French Revolution on English poetry. (Rohilkhand 1983)
Or
Q. Discuss the impact of the French Revolution on early nineteenth century literature. (Gorakhpur 1982)
Or
Q. Trace the influence of the French Revolution on the poets of the Romantic Revival. (Agra 1972)
Or
Q. Evaluate the extent of the influence of the French Revolution on English literature towards the close of the eighteenth century and beginning of the nineteenth.
(Agra 1981)
Or
Q. Trace the impact of French Revolution on the Romantic poetry. (GNDU 1994)
Or
Q. Diccuss the impact of the French Revolution on the early
19th century ’poetry. (Rohilkhand 1988)
Introduction:-
It would be peremptory to treat the French Revolution as just another historical incident having political significance alone. -The French Revolution exerted a profound influence not only on the pol ideal destiny of a European nation but also impinged forcefully on The Influence of the French Revolution / 373
the intellectual, literary, and political fields throughout Europe. It signalised the arrival of a new era of fresh thinking and introspection. The conditions prevailing in England at that time made her particularly receptive to the new ideas generated by the Revolution. Jn literature the French Revolution was instrumental in the creation of a new interest in nature and the elemental simplicities of life. It accelerated the approach of the romantic era and the close of the Augustan school of poetry which was already moribund in the age of Wordsworth..
Poetry and Politics :-
The age of Wordsworth was an age of revolution in the field of poetry as well as of politics. In both these fields the age had started expressing its impatience of set formulas and traditions, the tyranny of rules and the bondage of convention. From the French Revolution die age imbibed a spirit of revolt asserting the dignity of the individual spirit and hollowness of the time-honoured conventions which kept it in check. Thus both in the political and the poetic fields the age learnt from the Revolution the necessity of emancipation-in the politicial field, from tyranny and social oppression; and in the poetic, from die bondage of rules and authority. The French Revolution, in a word, exerted a democratising influence bom on politics and poetry. Inspired by the French Revolution, poets and politicians alike were poised for an onslaught on old, time-rusted values. It was only here and there mat some conservative critics stuck to their guns and eyed all zeal for change and liberation with suspicion and distrust. (Thus, for instance, Lord Jeffrey wrote in the Edinburgh Review that poetry had something common with religion in that its standards had been fixed long ago by certain inspired writers whose authority it would be ever unlawful to question.) But such views did not represent the spirit of the age which had come under the liberating influence of the French Revolution.
It is perhaps quite relevant to point out here the folly of the belief that the new literary and political tendencies, which had a common origin and were almost contemporaneous with each other, always influenced a given person equally strongly, that a person could not be a revolutionary in politics without beingjt revolutionary in literature, and vice versa. Scott, for example, was a romantic, but a Tory. Hazlitt, on the contrary, was a chartist in politics but was pleased to call himself an •aristocrat” in literature. Keats did not bother about tine French Revolution even politics, at all Wordsworth and Coleridge, the two real pioneers of the Romantic Movement ia EnglandjSfarted as radicals and ended as tenacious Tories.
The Three Phases of the French Revolution :•
It is wrong to think of the French Revolution as a sudden coup unrelated to what had gone before it. In fact* the seeds of the RcwiatkMt had been sown long before they sprouted in 1789, We «m fetingmii
374 / A History of English Literature ’
three clear phases of the French Revolution, which according to Compton-Rickett, are as follows:
”(1) The Doctrinaire phase-the age of Rousseau;
(2) the Political phase-the age of Robespierre and Danton;
(3) the Military phase-the age of Napoleon.”
All these three phases considerably influenced the Romantic Movement in England. The Influence of the Doctrinaire Phase :•
The doctrinaire phase of the French Revolution was dominated by the French thinker Rousseau. His teachings and philosophic doctrines were the germs that brought about an intellectual and literary revolution all over England. He was, fundamentally considered, a naturalist who gave the slogan ”Return to Nature.” He expressed his faith in the elemental simplicities of life and his distrust of the sophistication of civilisation which, according to him, had been curbing the natural (and good) man. He revived the cult of the ”noble savage” untainted by the so-called culture. Social institutions were all condemned by him as so many chains. He raised his powerful voice against social and political tyranny and exhorted the downtrodden people to rise for emancipation from virtual slavery and almost hereditary poverty imposed upon them by an unnatural political system which benefited only a few. Rousseau’s primitivism, sentimentalism, and individualism had their influence on English thought and literature. In France they prepared the climate for the Revolution.
Rousseau’s sentimental belief in the essential goodness of natural man and the excellence of simplicity and even ignorance found a ready echo in Blake and, later, Wordsworth and Coleridge. The love of nature and the simplicities of village life and unsophisticated folk found ample expression in their poetic works. Wordsworth’s love of nature was partly due to Rousseau’s influence. Rousseau’s intellectual influence touched first Godwin and, through him, Shelley. Godwin in Political Justice embodied a considerable part of Rousseauistic thought. Like him he raised his voice for justice and equality and expressed his belief in the essential goodness of man. Referring reverently to PoliticalJustice, Shelley wrote that he had learnt ”all that was valuable in knowledge and virtue from that book.” The Influence of the Political Phase and the Military Phase :•
The political phase of the Revolution, which started with the fall of the Bastille, sent a wave of thrill to evei, young heart in Europe. Wordsworth became crazy for joy, and along with him, Southey and Coleridge caught the general contagion. All of them expressed themselves in pulsating words. But such enthusiasm and rapture were not destined to continue forlong. The Reign of Terror and the emergence
The Influence of the French Revolution / 375
of Napoleon as an undisputed tyrant dashed the enthusiasm of romantic poets to pieces. The beginning of the war between France and England completed their disillusionment, and Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Southey, who had started as wild radicals, ended as well-domesticated Tories. The latter romantics dubbed them as renegades who had let down the cause of the Revolution. Wordsworth, in particular, had to suffer much criticism down to Uic days of Robert Browning who wrote a pejorative poem on him describing him as ”(he lost leader.”
Let us now consider briefly the influence of the French Revolution on the important romantic poets one by one.
Wordsworth :•
•
As we have already said, Wordsworth’s theory and work as a poet ’were much influenced by the teachings of Rousseau. It was under this powerful influence that he came out with his epoch-making work (in. collaboration with Coleridge), the Lyrical Ballads (1798), which, in the words of Palgrave, ”was a trumpet that heralded the dawn of a new era by making the prophecy that poetry, an unlimited and unlimitable art of expressing man’s inner and deep-seated joys and sorrows, would not be fettered by the narrow and rigid bonds of artificial conventions and make-believe formalism.” The Lyrica’ Ballads led a revolt against the artificial sentiment and equally artificial and mechanical poetic style of the eighteenth century, as also established the truth that poetry, if at all it is to remain poetry, must express the feelings and joys and fears of common men and women close to the soil, and interpret their day-to-day activities of life. Thus the sense of mystery which led many persons to a remote past was believed by Wordsworth to be capable of satisfaction closer at hand. Wordsworth found it–mstead of the Middle Ages and Greek art–in the simplicities of everyday life–an ordinary sunset, the fleecy clouds, a morning walk over the hills, a cottage girl, the song of the nightingale and so forth. He turned for the subjects of his poetry to the life of the unsophisticated village folk who lived away from the recognised centres of culture..
At the time of the Revolution (l 789) Wordsworth was a young man of only nineteen. In 77ie Prelude he describes how thrilled he was by the occasion. He felt that Europe itself was thrilled with joy,
France standing at the top of golden hours,
And human nature seeming bom again. And Further:
Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive.
’»
376 / A History of English Literature
But to be young was very heaven. He believed that in front of the Frenchmen shone a glorious world,
fresh as a banner bri^U unfurled
To music suddenly.
He visited the land of his dreams twice–in 1790 and 1791. But his youthful rapture came to an end with the Reign of Terror and the emergence of Napoleon. This rude blow sent him reeling into the arms of his first love-Nature. Thus Wordsworth passed through a mental and spiritual crisis, and though he recovered himself finally yet the influence of the Revolution remained as vital impression on his mind. Though he ultimately became a Tory yet he continues believing in the dignity of man, and consequently, applying his poetic faculty to the commonest objects and the lowest people. It is a noteworthy point that the best poetic work of Wordsworth was done during the period of his revolutionary fervour. Coleridge and Southey :•
The impact of the French Revolution on Coleridge and Southey was of the same-pattern as in the case of Wordsworth-youthful exuberance at the rising of the masses ending in despair and disillusionment with the Reign of Terror. But afier this disillusionment Wordsworth and Coleridge followed different paths in search of an. anodyne. Whereas Wordsworth found consolation in Nature, Coleridge sought to burke his discontent with abstract philosophy and intellectual idealism. Coleridge failed to receive from Nature the joy which he was wont to. Metaphysics) Interested him and claimed his almost full attention. His poetic spirit ”so declined with the decline of his revolutionary fervour. By 18lf he had become not only an ”afitsrevolution” Tory but also an incorrigible ”anti-Gallican,” Byron :-
On Byron the French Revolution exerted no direct influence. But he was a revolutionary in his own right. He was against almost all social conventions and institutions, and felt an almost morbid pleasure in violating and condemning them with the greatest abandon. In his poetry he most vigorously championed the cause of social and political liberty and died almost as a martyr in the cause of Greek independence. A critic observes: ”Byron excelled most other poets of England in his being one of the supreme poets of Revolution and Liberty. His poetry voices the many moods of the spirit of Revolution which captured the
f The Influence of the French Revolution / 377
imagination of Europe in the early years or the last century. A rebel against society but also against the very conditions of human life, Byron is our one supreme exponent of some distinctive forces of the Revolution. Of its constructive energy, its social ardour, its utopianism,thcre is no trace in his work.” Byron was excited by the imposing personality of Napoleon who appealed to him as a ”Byronic” hero.
Shdky :-
When Shelley started writing, the French Revolution had already become, as-a historical incident, a thing of the past. However>the spirit of the Revolution breathes vigorously in his poetry. After his characteristic way he overlooked physical realities, and was attracted by abstractions only. Says ComptonRickett : ” Ideas inspired him, not episodes; so he drank in the doctrines of Godwin, and ignored the tragic perplexities of the actual situation.” To Shelley the Revolution* to quote the same critic, appealed ”as an idea, not as a concrete historical fact.” In all his important poems, such as The Revolt of Islam, Queen Mob, Prometheus Unbound, and the incomparable Ode to the West Wind, breathes a revolutionary spirit impatient of all curbs and keenly desirous of the emancipation qf man from all kinds of shackles-political, social, and even moral. Love and liberty are the two ruling deities in Shelley’s hierarchy of values, and in his exaltation of them both he comes very near the RoussCauistic creed. The French Revolution had failed miserably in the implementation of its three slogans ”Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity.” But Shelley always envisioned ahead a real Revolution which would rectify all wrongs once and for alii This hope for the mflleniiun is the central theme of much of his poetry.
Keats :-
Keats was almost entirely untouched by the French Revolution, as by everything earthly. A critic observes :”In the judgment of Keats, philosophy, politics and ethics were not suitable subjects for verse. While, therefore, Wordsworth and Coleridge were reflecting upon the moral law of the universe, while Byron was voicing the political ideas of Europe in the poetry of revolt, and Shelley was writing of an enfranchised humanity, the musk of Keats luxuriated in classical myths and medieval legends, and was inspired by an insatiable love of Beauty.” From a study of Keats’s poetry it is hard to believe that such an incident as the French Revolution ever took place at all!
378 / A History of English Literature
Conclusion :-
From what has gone before it is clear how powerful an influence the French Revolution exerted on English literature. The ideas that awoke the youthful passion of Wordsworth and Coleridge, that stirred the wrath of Scott, that worked like leaven on Byron and brought forth new matter, that Shelley reclothed and made into a prophecy of the future, the excitement, the turmoil, and the tife-and-death struggle which gathered round the Revolution were ignored by few poets of England. Henceforth their poetry spoke of man, of his destiny, and his wrongs, his rights, duties, and hopes, and particularly, the gyved and fettered humanity. One is tempted to endorse G. K. Chesterton’s paradoxical remark that the greatest event of English history occurred outside England!
COLERIDGE AS THE
”MOST COMPLETE REPRESENTATIVE” OF ENGLISH ROMANTIC POETRY
Q.60. Consider Coleridge as the ”most complete representative” of English poetry of the early nineteenth century. (Punjab 1957)
introduction :-
If not the greatest Coleridge is at least the most representative of all English romantic poets. He represents in his work almost all the triumphs and perils of the romantic spirit. He is the ”most complete representative” of the English romantic poetry of the early nineteenth century as he captures, unlike any other romantic poet, almost all the salient traits of romanticism. A teeming imagination, love of the Middle Ages, supernaturalism, humanitarianism, love of nature, metrical artistry, and a peculiar agony and melancholy-all these romantic features find ample expression in his work. His really good poetry does not extend beyond twenty pages, but in them breathes the romantic spirit in all its fullness. He wrote very little, but whatever he wrote well should be engraved in letters of gold and bound in titles of silver. The least prolific of the English romantic poets, he was the most representative of all. According to Bowra, Coleridge’s poems ”of all English Romantic masterpieces are the most unusual and the most Romantic,” Says Vaughan : ”Of all that is the purest and most ethereal in the
Coleridge as the ”Most Complete Representative” / 379
romantic spirit, his poetry is the most finished, the supreme embodiment.” No doubt, there are a few (but very few) elements in the romantic spirit which appear in his work rather faintly yet considered as a whole his works are the most exquisite products and representatives of the spirit of the age. Well does Saintsbury call him ”the high priest of Romanticism.”
Coleridge’s Imagination :•
The Romantic Movement can be correctly interpreted as the revolt of imagination against reason, intellect, and prosaic realism. The romantics believed, as Bowra puts it, that the creative imagination should be closely connected with a peculiar insight into an unseen order behind visible things. Their effort Was, in Samuel C. Chew’s words, ”to live constantly in the world of the imagination above and beyond the sensuous, phenomenal world.” For them the creations of. imagination were ”forms more real than living men.” The part that imagination plays in the poetry of Coleridge is too obvious to need any elaboration. The writer of Kubla KJian, The Ancient Mariner, and Oiristabel answered well his own description of the ideal poet:
His flashing eyes, his floating hair I
Weave a circle round him thrice,
And close your eyes with holy dread,
For he on honey-dew hath fed,
And drunk the milk of Paradise.
Shelley himself would have been envious of such a romantic poet! Dorothy Wordsworth wrote about Coleridge : ”He has more of ’the poetic eye in fine frenzy rolling’ than I ever witnessed.” Swinburne compared him to those ”footless birds of paradise” which spend all their lives in perpetual flight and subsist only on falling dew.
While in his creative work Coleridge worked with his teeming but delicate imagination tempered by an unerring artistic sense, in his criticism he made a strong plea for the imaginative freedom of the poet. In his Biographia Literaria he gave an authoritative definition of the nature and function of imagination. In putting a special stress on imagination as against dry rationalism, Coleridge emerged as a true representative of the Romantic Movement in England.
Love of the Far :-
The poet who lives constantly in a world of pure imagination naturally becomes amorous of the far, both in point of time and space.
380’ A History of English Literature
He seeks an escape from the humdrum realities of familiar experience and from the limitations of ”that shadow-show called reality.” Coleridge, loo, more than most romantic poets, loves to treat of the unreal or the unusual. The unreal (which is generally the highly imaginative, or the supernatural) is what is never experienced, arid’the unusual Is that which is not often experienced. According to a critic, the most characteristic feature of romantic poetry is, its description or suggestion of the unreal-”the light that never was on sea or land.” It will be admitted that in such descriptions and suggestions Coleridge particularly excels. How extraordinary and extraordinarily well-wrought the picture of Kubla Khan’s ”pleasure dome” is!
It was a miracle of strange device, A sunny pleasure-dome with caves oficet
How unusual the scenes at the Pole and the Equator are in The Ancient . Mariner \ This is the picture of the Pole: The ice was here, the ice was there. The ice was all around:
It cracked and growled, and roared and howled, Like noise in a swound I And this of a terrific tempest:
Like waters shot from some high crag The lightning fell with never a jag, A river steep and wide. »
In Kubla Khan Coleridge makes mention of an Abyssinian maid and Mount Abora, etc. Thus Coleridge is a very representative romantic poet in that he loves the remote, the strange, and the mysterious, rather than the immediate, .the commonplace, and the probable. A critic observes in this connexion: ”His peoribr quality as a poet lay ia his power of visualising scenes of which neither he nor another had actual experience.” As such, Coleridge’s poetry fits well Pater’s interpretation of romanticism as the ”addition of strangeness to beauty* and Theodore Watts^Dunton’s interpretation of the same as the ”Renascence of Wonder’. Supenatarmlism >
The love of the unreal and the remote take* Coleridge too often to the faery realm of the supernatural. He too often sings of the Magic casements opening on the foam • Of perilous seat infaay lands forlorn.
Coleridge as the ”Most Complete Representative” / 381
His contribution to the ”Renascence of Wonder” is the most substantial of all the English romantic poets. In his company we visit the enchanted palace of Kubla Khan, the vampire-haunted castle of Christabel, and the demon-infested seas of The Ancient Mariner. His supernatural, however, is not the crude ”Gothicism” of some of his predecessors, which was nothing more than the product of a ghoulish fancy. His treatment of the supernatural is all his own-delicate, refined, suggestive, and psychologically convincing. Wordsworth sought to save nature from the crudity and insipidity of Crabbe by touching reality with imagination; Coleridge redeemed romance from the crudity of Gothic sensationalists by Unking it with reality. Whereas Wordsworth tried to ”supernaturalise” naturalism, Coleridge endeavoured quite admirably to ”naturalise” supernaturalism. Such lines as the following are unmatched in the whole range of English literature for their richly ”romantic” connotations:
A savage place, as hoty and enchanted
As ever beneath a waning moon was haunted ’
By woman wailing for her demon lover.
Truly does a critic say about these lines that they are magic pure and simple; the rest is poetry. The romantic poets like Scott and Keats also dealt with the supernatural, but the supernatural is, according to a critic, ”the main region of his [Coleridge’s] song.” Moreover, his delicate,psychological, and artistic treatment also distinguishes him from other romantic poets. His aim was always to produce ”that willing suspension of disbelief for the moment which constitutes poetic faith.” In The Ancient Mariner he achieved this aim quite creditably by focusing the attention of the reader on the shifting states of the mariner’s psyche, rather than any supernatural claptrap of the Gothic kind. The theme in Otristabel is of the same nature as in The Ancient Mariner, but k is handled with more artistry. Here the touches of the supernatural are more subtle and less explicit. The indirectness with which these touches are made to work their cumulative effect may be contrasted with the directness of the method employed by Keats in his treatment of a like theme-the transformation of a fdrpent into a woman (in Lamia).
MedievaltsB :-
Goleiidge’s love of the remote, the mysterious, the strange, and the supernatural induced in him an interest in the Middle Ages. The romantic poet, as we have already said, is impatient of the real and the earth-bound. He is very oftea dissatisfied with the present set-up of
382 / A History ol tnglish Literature
things. Shelley, Keats, and Scott arc notably so. The romantic poet cither sings of the glorious past or projects his imagination into the womb of futurity to raise a shape that answers his own desire. Thus Keats sings of the glory that was Greece, Scott endeavours to recapture the splendour of the Middle Ages, and Shelley sings of the golden age to come. Indeed the romantic poets
look before and after And pine for what is not.
Thus to some romantics the Middle Ages provide a comfortable spiritual home-remote and vague and mysterious. They glorify their splendour and chivalry but forget their dirt, disease, ignorance, and socL! repression. They escape not only from the real world but also from the real Middle Ages.
The Middle Ages do not provide a spiritual home for Coleridge as they do for Scott. He values them not because of themselves but because of the excellent setting they provide for his supernatural poems. He keeps the medieval atmosphere quite vague and, unlike Keats, docs not come down to the description of details. He recreates not .indeed the body but the authentic spirit of the Middle Ages.
Anti-inteltectualism and Love of Nature :-
Coleridge, like most other romantics, was influenced by the Rousseauistic creed embodied in the slogan ”Return to Nature.” He was also appreciably influenced by Wordsworth, the high priest of nature. Early eighteenth-century poetry had been ”drawing-room poetry” having little to do with the sights and sounds of nature. Wordsworth and Coleridge demolished this age-old prejudice and brought nature to the fore. Like Wordsworth, Coleridge had a keen eye and a a clear ear for the sights and sounds of nature. He brought to his study of nature that minuteness of analysis which is surpassed in English literature only by Keats. As Vaughan points out, ”Coleridge had the faculty of minute and subtle observation, which he may have learned, in the first instance from Wordsworth but which he fostered to a degree of delicacy to which neither Wordsworth himself nor perhaps any other Vorshipper of Nature’, Keats excepted, ever quite attained.. This faculty, however, did not bar the way to an equal mastery of broad, general effects.”
In his early poems, such as Frost at Midnitfit, Coleridge shared Wordsworth’s attitude to nature. He regarded nature as a sentient spirit and believed in its moral and educative influence on man. But
I Coleridge as the ”Most Complete Representative” / 383
later he modified this attitude and came to believe that we interpret the moods of nature according to our own moods (the ”pathetic fallacy” of Ruskin). Nature, he came to hold, has no intrinsic moods or life of her own. She only gives us back what we give her in the first instance.
I O Lady ! we receive but what we give,
TWrj; B
\.Y And in our life alone does Nature live :
I Our is her wedding garment, ours her shroud!
’•• Humanitarianism :•
Like Wordsworth, again, Coleridge came under the influence of the French Revolution. Like him he went wild over the fall of the Bastille, which signalised for him the ushering in of a new era of emancipation from all political tyranny and the establishment of social justice. However, the Reign of Terror and the emergence of Napoleon after the political phase of the Revolution filled both Wordsworth and Coleridge with despair and disillusionment and brought them reeling into the fold of Toryism. Whereas Wordsworth sought refuge and consolation in nature, Coleridge went to abstruse philosophy. Nevertheless; the note of the love of humanity sounds as clearly in Coleridge’s poetry as in does it Wordsworth’s. In this humanitarianism and enthusiasm (though temporary) for the spirit of the French Revolution Coleridge is a pretty representative poet of the romantic age. His Metrical Art :-
In his rejection of the heroic couplet also Coleridge represents the body of the romantic poets all of whom reverted to the verse measures
, before Dryden as also invented some of their own. Vie Ancient Manner
is couched in ballad stanzas. In Christabel he felt he had used an entirely ”new principle” of prosody. The metre in this poem.according to him, ”is not, properly speaking, irregular, though it may seem so from its being founded on a new principle: namely, that of counting in each line the accents, not the syllables.” What is true of Christabel is also true of Kitbla Klian. The ”principle” was definitely not new. However,
» Coleridge’s masterful employment of it is very striking.
Mention must also be made of Coleridge’s skill at creating exquisite music. ”He”, says a critic, ”is a singer always, as Wordsworth is not always, and Byron never almost.” He h.as been rightly called an ”epicure in sound.” Symons says: ”Coleridge shows a greater sensitiveness to music than any bther English poet except Milton….Shelley, you feel, sings like a bird, Blake, like a child or an angel, but Coleridge centainly writes music.” Romantic poetry has an edge over neoclassical
m
384 / A History of English Literature
poetry in its creation of variegated musical effects. It did not content itself with the singsong of the heroic couplet. Thus Coleridge is here, too, a representative romantic poet The Defects of Romanticism :•
Coleridge represents not only all the excellent features of romanticism, but also its perils, which are chiefly three. First, he runs the constant danger of losing contact with life and reality and getting lost in the pretty-pretty world of his own making. Thus his poetry does not always remain a serious ”criticism of life.” Secondly, eschewing all tradition, he, like Wordsworth, saw a decline in his poetic faculty after he had written his masterpieces. The romantic poet .depends entirely on his own inspiration-which is notoriously untrustworthy. When that goes, he cannot borrow strengh from the established tradition which he has disowned. This happened with Coleridge. Thirdly, he often incurs the charge of vagueness. He is too fond of colour and sweet sound and sometimes sacrifices sense to them. Words like dulcimer honey-dew, and Abyssinian maid have-musical or exotic sounds, but their real meaning is not so pleasant.
THE HISTORICAL NOVEL
Q.61. Write a short essay on the Historical Novel In England.
(Punjab 1958)
Or Q. Write a short essay on any one of the following :-
(b) Historical Novel in England (and two more topics).
(Punjab 1970)
Or
Q. Write an essay on any one of the following :- (b) Historical Novel (and four more topics).
(Punjab 1968)
Or Q. Write a short note on the historical novel. (Agra 1968)
Or
Q. Write a short essay on one of the foilowtaf:- (b) The historical novel In English literature (and four more topics). (Agra 19*3)
Or
*
K t
\
t
H
The Historical Novel / 385
Q. Write a shot t essay on the development of the historical
novel. (Agra 1966)
(Companion Questions). Write a note on the historical
• novel in the nineteenth century with special reference to
Scott (Punjab 1963)
Discuss the contribution of Sir Walter Scott to the development of the Historical Novel. (Rohilkhand 1991) Introduction :-
Considered analytically, the term ”historical flction” is altogether anamolous for whereas history deals with facts, fiction deals with imaginary persons and incidents. Fact and fiction are considered to be normal antonyms. Trying to combine them is apparently like trying to yoke the ox and the unicorn together. A historical work can be changed into a novel only by making it depart from facts, and a novel can be changed into history by retrenching all fiction. Today fact and flction are looked upon as altogether irreconcilable, but the setting up of a rigid distinction between the two is a comparably modern procedure. The ancient Greece and Rome and the medieval Europe recognised no such distinction. What they gave as literature was often a homogeneous and irresoluble mixture of truth and flction. Ulysses, Helen of Troy, and King Arthur and his Round Table, for instance, are semi-historical and semi-legendary or even mythical figures, and so are their adventures. It was left for the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries to give history its true shape and function. Camden, Clarendon, Hume, Gibbon,and others progressively established a distinct Jine of demarcation separating the regions of history and fiction (including myth, hearsay, and all rationally indefensible particulars). Henceforward the mixing of the two was not to go unindicted. Historical Novelists before Scott :-
But a new species of fiction was destined to become popular even after this rigid demarcation had been effected, apparently for good. Scott was the greatest of all those who attempted this genre known as the historical novel. Far from distorting or wantonly tinkering with the historical truth, he vitalised the past by breathing into its dry bones a new spirit. We will consider the method and achievement of Scott at some length a little later; first, let us have a look at the writers who attempted the historical, novel before Scott.
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OOV I «-» . 1 _
In general, the historical novelists before Scott were thoroughly unequipped and uninspired for their peculiar art. What they offered was not historical fiction but fictitious history. Their novels were, in many a case, hysterical rather than historical. Crudity, lack of knowledge and inspiration, and deficient artistry were their chief drawbacks. In fact, none of them was fit for the task. As Raleigh observes, the novels produced by them constitute the silliest, feeblest body of work to be found in the annals of prose fiction. Horace Walpole and Mrs. Radcliffe had aimed at the illusion of antiquity with fair success, but had avoided explicit historical allusions and refrained from introducing well-known historical personages. or, in fact any personages known to history at all. Some others who did so violated all sense of history. To-takc some instances. Miss Sophia Lee’s Recess and Harriet and Sophia Lee’s Canterbury Tales outraged history by introducing fantastic concoctions in the garb of true historical events. In the first-named novel, for ”example, there is celebrated a secret marriage-altogether unknown to and unsuspected by historians-betweeri Mary Queen of Scots and the Duke of Norfolk. In the same novel, even Queen Elizabeth is hauled on to the stage and is made to show herself as a typical eighteenth-century dowager with all her manneristic bow-wow and copia verborum (=excessive talking). This vandalistic perversion of history comes nowhere near the true genius of a historical novelist, who may, indeed, change some minor details, select and reject, compress or dilate events, but can by no means be granted the licence to strike at the very foundations of history. Jane Porter’s The Scottish Chiefs cannot be indicted in a like manner, as it was a genuine historical novel in most respects. Even then, it did not approach the , novels of Scott, mainly because it failed to catch the genuine spirit of the past, not to speak of vitalising it. Now, to fail in recapturing the spirit of the past is a serious defect in a historical novel, for that is its very ration d’etre. Witness E. A. Baker’s statement that ”to summon up a past epoch, to show men and women alive in it and behaving as they must have behaved in the circumstances is the labour and joy of the genuine historical novelist.”
There are two prerequisites of a historical novelist: (i) a sound academic knowledge of the period of history sought to
be treated by him; and (ii) an intuition into the manners and morals prevalent in that
period.
t
, The Historical Novel /3Q7
A mere smattering of the historical primer will not do; nor will even an erudite study, if the historical imagination and intuition are lacking. Hilare Belloc, however, discounts all learning and puts his faith on ”some strange process of intuition.” But we cannot reasonably despise aU-ltfarning and research. We would rather agree with Arthur Clarke who says : ”It is not the question of research or no research but of managing the products of research.” As to how mere learning and perfect historical accuracy are not enough for a historical novel is apparent from the failure of Queenhoo Hall (1808) written by Joseph Strutt, which, after the author’s death, Scott was to complete. This novel has the first of the two pre requisites listed above, but completely lacks the second, with obvious results. Persons such as Sophia Lee and. the Gothic romancers of the eighteenth century completely violated history, and Joseph Strutt completely conformed to it, but none of them wrote a genuine historical novel.
Sir Walter Scott:-
Scott was the first and last great historical novelist of England. He avoided the pitfalls of his predecessors and set about the all-important task of actualising the past so as to show its manners and morals in a proper perspective to his contemporaries. He had both the qualities of a good historical novelist-deep study and an amazing intuition. Compton-Rickett observes in A History of English Literature: ”He compels our interest by.no literary trick, but by making us feel that men and womea of a past age were real live human beings.” With his historical novels Scott proved, to quote Carlyle ”that the bygone ages of the world were actually filled by living men, not by state papers, controversies, and abstractions of men…It is a great service, fertile in consequence, this that Scott has done; a great truth laid open by him.” Scott vitalised the prat and converted the monstrosities of his predecessors into the pure gold of creative imagination. Diana Neill observes in this connexion : ”What Richardson, Fielding and Smollett had done in holding a mirror up to the eighteenth-century way of life, Scott did for the remote centuries of which his contemporaries knew nothing.” He took names and dates from the history primer and transformed them into imaginative literature. He assembled the dry bones of the past and quickened them with a vigorous life. History, like the picture in Walpole’s Castle ofOtranto, steps out of its moveless frame and talks. He walked through the tombs of time and, like an enchanter, brought to life their ghostly denizens. In calling forward the past, he resembles Prospero who controlled many spirits:
…. ’v ;•’ T”
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Spirits which by mine art Ih * from their confines call’dfo enact My present fancies.
Scott was the firstnovelist who was really qualified for his peculiar
• job. He was a historical novelist not by mere endeavour but by his very temperament. Charles Reade reconstructed the past with the art of a brilliant journalist; Thackeray refashioned it as a sympathetic critic; George Eliot treated it as a scholar; Scott simply breathed the past as a part and parcel of his thinking life. According to Baker, he was ”a born romancer”. As a boy he had been ”a ’glutton of books”. In his maturity he diligently applied himself to the study of old romances, chronicles, and histories concerning, particularly,the Scotland of yore. He was indeed quite confident of possessing a wide and intimate grasp of that knowledge which is the important qualification of a historical novelist. Added to this was a wonderful intuition which enabled him to evoke lifelike pictures of the past with a remarkable accuracy and an
engaging fidelity.
Scott avoided the pitfall of his predecessors who either altogether excluded important historical events and persons, or else gave them a central importance. Scott did admit them but gave them, unlike the historian, a subordinate or, sometimes, a peripheral importance. For Scott their main importance lay in their capacity to influence the minor characters whom he gave a conspicuous position. His heroes and heroines are, with a few exceptions, historically unknown nonentities. More, often it is a historical period (not a person or some persons) which occupies his central interest. A critic observes: ”We see Papists and Puritans, Cavaliers and Roundheads, Jews, Jacobites and freebooters, all living the sort of life which the reader feels that in their circumstances and under the same conditions of time and place he might have lived too.”
Scott’s range as a historical novelist is really amaring. Not only does he deal with different countries but also with different centuries. • We never find him at the same point more than once. Some of his novels like Guy Mannering (1815), Old Mortality (1816), and The Heart of Midlothian (1818) deal with Scotland; there are others, like Ivanhoe (1819), Kenilworth (1821), and TheFortunesofNigel (1822), which are concerned with English history, still some others, like Quentin Dunvard (1823) and The Talisman (1825), take us out of England to the Continent. Everywhere there is the same fidelity to essential historical facts and an imaginative and lively recreation of the spirit of the past. No other English novelist has a broader canvas or a surer brush. And there is the same fidelity in his representation of the bygone ages as there is in Dickens’ or Fielding’s representation of his own.
The Historical Novel /389
Some ”limitations” of Scott as a novelist may here be taken cognizance of. The most important of them is his deficiency as a psychologist He cannot, or at least does not, bring out shades and grades of passions. His characters are devoid of psychological subtleties. It they are virtuous they are virtuous throufeh-and-thro gh; if they are villains, their villainy is unconcealed and incorrigible. What Goethe said of Byron can be said of Scott-”the moment he reflects he is a child.” He thought of life not as a problem but as a colourful pageant. Here is Carlyle’s gibe at his characterisation : ”Your Shakespeare fashions his characters from the heart outwards; your Scott fashions them from skin inwards, never etting near the heart of them.” His heroes are sticks and his heroines walking gowns. They merely respond to situations and do not create them. Scott himself admitted his contempt for some of his own heroes. He said of Edward Waverley, for instance, that he was a ”sneaking piece of imbecility.”
Along with his deficient psychological equipment may be mentioned his lack of the architectonic skill. He did not give plot-construction much importance. He was given to saying: ”It is no use having a plot; you cannot keep to it” His plots resemble a sprawling Gothic cathedral without any symmetry. He followed and quoted Dryden’s remark too often: ”What the devil does the plot signify, except to bring in good things?” What he aimed at was telling a good, interesting story. And he succeeded pretty well. ”Scott”, observes Leslie Stephen, ”is the most perfectly delightful story-teller natural by the fire-side.” After Scott :-
Scott began the vogue of the historical novel not only in England But other countries like Germany and France. In England Mrs. Anna Eliza Bray was the first of his successors to come into prominence. Her important work is The Protestant (1828) which deals with the persecution of the Protestants under Queen Mary Tudor. G. E R. James-wrote about a hundred historical novels bewecn 1825 and 1850. They were popular, but without much merit. William Harrison Ainswoith also enjoyed much popularity for twenty years beginning with Rockwood (1834): Of the five historical romances by Bulwcr Lytton the most popular is The Last Days of Pompeii (1834). He gave importance to didacticism and historical fidelity even in minor details. ”Countless details”, says Cross, ”which Scott would have cast aside, Bulwer put bodily into narrative. The result was more history, less imagination, and a slower movement.11 Some Victorian writers used the historical novel for sectarian propaganda. Consider, for instance, Charles Kiogsley’s Hypatia (1853) with the subtitle New Foes with an Old Face in which he attacked the Roman Catholics, and Newman’s counterblast Callista : A Sketch of the Third Century. Thackeray’s Henry Esmond
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(1852) sought to recreate the life of eighteenth-century England, and did so indeed with much plausibility. Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities and Bamaby Rudge may also be considered’as historical novels. George Eliot’s Romola aimed at representing the life of Italy during the period of the Renaissance. Among twentieth-century historical novelists may be mentioned Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch (Hetty Wesley and The Splendid Spur), Jacob Wassermann (The Triumph of Youth), Ford Madox Hueffer (Vie Fifth Queen), Miss Phoebe Gay (Vivandiere), and quite a few more. Indeed, it seems that the historical novel, a comparatively ’ late dish in the banquet of literature, has come to please the palate for all times to come.
JANE AUSTEN’S ACHIEVEMENT Q. 62, Evaluate the achievement of Jane Austen as a novelist
(Punjab 1959)
Introduction :-
The correct evaluation of Jane Austen as a novelist has come only recently. Her genius was not recognised by her contemporaries or even her successors. None of her books saw a second edition in her lifetime. The collected edition of her works which’ was brought out in 1833 could not be sold for about half a century. Her first biographer humbly wished her to be placed beside such novelists as Fanny Burney and Maria Edgeworth and no more. But about 1890 the tide of appreciation and popularity markedly turned in her favour, and, correspondingly, against her contemporary, Sir Walter Scott. Today she needs no advocate as she has made a secure niche in the temple of fame from where she cannot possibly be dislodged~at least for many years to come. In the twentieth century she has been made the object of numerous biographies and appreciations. Almost every piece of her writing has been carefully and lovingly edited and commented upon; almost every aspect of her singularly uneventful life has been brought out and sympathetically examined. Her works in their entirety have been vastly read and extolled, and she has been characterised as the greatest female novelist of England and one of the best of all novelists. F. R. Leavis gives her a sort of five-star rating by including her in the ”Great Tradition.” Let us quote here a modern representative opinion-that of David Daiches: ”The greatests of all the novelists of manners of this or any other period and one who raised the whole genre to a new level of art was Jane Austen (1775-1817). With no exhibitionist critical ap-
Jane Austen’s Achievement / 391
paratus, such as Fielding’s theory of the comic epic, no pretentiously moral purpose such as Richardson kept repeating, and indeed wkh nto apparent awareness that she was doing more thaivcssaying some novels in an established social mode, this unpretentious daughter of a Hampshire rector, with her quietly penetrating vision of man as a social animal, her ironic awareness of the tensions between spontaneity an«d convention and between the claims of personal morality and those oof social and economic propriety, her polished and controlled wit, an«d beneath all her steady moral apprehension of the human relationships, produced some of the greatest novels in English.” Jane Austan wrote no more than six” novels, but each of them is a masterpiece in its own right.
Artistic Concern :-
Considered strictly as an artist, Jane Austen is superior to most o»f her predecessors as also successors. Most English novelists have had uW fault of carelessness. Scott, for example, never revised a line of his owns, simply because he had no time for it. In the novels of Dickens also w«e come across passages which could have been easily improved with sa little care. Jane Austen was, by contrast, extremely careful and painstaking. For months together, after finishing a novel, she would go on revising it till she found it incapable of further improvement Her meticulous artistic concern for form, presentation, and style cannot be exaggerated;. ”It is”, observes Diana Neill, ”not, therefore, surprising that the fina 1 versions of he.r novels had a formal perfection-no loose ends, no pad- ’ ding, no characterization for its own sake, and a flawlessly consistent idiom suited to the person who used it” What is remarkable about Janes Austen, therefore, is the flawlessness of her art. Everything in hennovels is carefully conceived and exquisitely executed.
Her Range and Themes :-
Jane Austen’s art as a novelist has stringently set limits which shes seldom oversteps. She was anwingly aware which side her genius lav* and she exploited it accordingly without any false notions of her capabilities or limitations. As Lord David Cecil points out, she very* wisely staved ”within the range of her imaginative inspiration.” Her ”imaginative inspiration” was as severely limited as, -for example. Hardy’s or Arnold Bennett’s. Her themes, her characters, her moral vision, her observation-everything has a well-etched range within which she works, and works most exquisitely. Let us now glance at the territories of her art and achievement
(i) All her novels have for their scene of action South England
392 / A History of English Literature
where she lived and which she knew so well. However, her novels cannot be called ”regional novels” in a category with, say, Hardy’s Wessex novels, because she does not particularly concern herself with the landscape and other peculiar features of the region she deals with. She is, as has been said by Robert Liddell, a ”pure novelist” whose concern and study are ”human beings and their mutual relations.” Regionalism as such is unknown to her.
(ii) She deals only with one peculiar mode of existence. Her novels are all about the upper middle classes and their (mostly trivial) activities’. Moody and Lovett observe : The chief business of these people, as Miss Austen saw them, was attention to social duties^ their chief interest was matrimony. This world Miss Austen represents in her novels; outside of which «he never steps.” The same critics observe : ”Unlike Maria Edgeworth, whose novejs represented.a considerable range of social experience, Miss Austen exploited with unrivalled expertness the potentialities of a seemingly narrow mode of existence.” .(hi) Jane Austen had an eye for the minutiae of life. Theatricals, tea parties,and balls were the most important events in the placid life of her own family and her neighbourhood. These very things are given the pride of place in her novels. The most ”thrilling” events are nothing more than an elopement or a runaway marriage. In her novels there are no storms-except those in tea cups.
(iv) There is thus no adventure, no passion, and no ”romance” in her novels. There are no deeply stirring tempests either literal or psychic, such as we find, for example, in the novels of the Bronte sisters. Charlotte Bronte herself was constrained to observe about Jane Austen : ”She ruffles her reader by nothing vehement, disturbs him by nothing profound. The passions aic perfectly unknown to her : she rejects even a speaking acquaintance with that stormy sisterhood.”
(v) She was not a romantic novelist of the kind of either the Brontes or Scott. Temperamentally she belonged more to the eighteenth century than her own age which was then being swept over by a strong current of the Romantic Revival. Once when she was invited to write a romance of the kind of Scott’s novels, her reply was perfectly clear: ”I am fully sensible that [such a romance] might be more to the purpose, profit or popularity than such pictures of domestic life in country villages as I deal in. But I could no more write a romance than an epic poem… No, I must keep to my own style and go on in my own way: and though I may never succeed again in that, I am convinced that I should totally fail in any other.”
Jane Austen’s Achievement / 393
(vi) Jane Austen limits herself strictly to the depiction of personal relations. Wow a man can be considered with reference to several kinds of relation; such as:
(a) His relation to himself.
(b) His relation to other men and to his social environment.
(c) His relation to his country.
(d) His relation to Nature, (c) His relation to God.
Except the second listed, Jane Austen neglects all other kinds of relations. David Cecil observes in this connection: ”Man in relation to God, to politics^ to abstract ideas, passed by-her: it was only when she saw him with his family and his neighbours that her creative impulse began to stir to activity.”
(vii) Jane Austen refuses to deal with the seamy aspects of life. There are no murders or gory crimes in her novels. She shuts her eye even on financial matters, which are a major driving force in real life. Samuel C. Chew rightly complains that she ”knew nothing about finance.”
Her Realism and Depiction of Social Manners :-
These limitations of range should not be treated as so many imperfections. On the contrary, her awareness of these limitations is what exactly makes her a great novelist. Within her voluntarily demarcated range she never bungles. Her essentially anti-romantic temper made her a realist. She did what Scott did not. Cross observes: ”She was a realist. She gave anew to the novel an art and a style, which it once had, particularly in Fielding, but which it had since lost.” She did not have Fielding’s range, and she also eschewed his masculine coarseness. She feminized Fielding. Even Scott admitted Jane Austen’s excellence-in her own field. He wrote in his diary about her : That young lady had a talent for describing the involvements, feelings and characters of ordinary life which is to me the most wonderful I have ever met with. The big bow-wow I can do myself sets any one going, but the exquisite touch which renders commonplace things and characters interesting from the truth of description and the sentiments is denied me.” Whether you consider Fanny’s visit to her parents’ home after an absence of more than ten years, or Darc/s proposal to Elizabeth and its rejection, or the union of Emma with her lover after many many years, or such trivial incidents as a tea party, an evening-walk, a ball or a theatricaL/ou are always struck by Jane Austen’s fidelity to life. For a novelist to be realistic what is required is not only a sense of intuition
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but also a very minute and searching observation. And this Jane Austen has as her forte. It is not surprising that her favourite poet happened to be Crabbe-that unswerving realist. Her range is limited, but within that she never fails. From a study of her novels^we can easily build up an authentic picture of the life of middle classes of South England in the early nineteenth century.
Her Characterisation and Plot-construction :•
Jane Austen is one of those novelists in whose works characters cannot be considered apart from plot. Characterisation and the building of plot go hand in hand in them, and quite often the two are interchangeable too. Her psychological insight into her characters, like her minute observation, needs no elaboration. Most of them are ”round” characters and have,an organic development In most cases, from self-deception to self-knowledge and self-realisation. Her female characters are certainly more complex and engaging than her men who have a certain softness about them. Her characters are all highly individualised and yet they have something of the universal about them. They reveal themselves not in moments of crisis but during their engagement in the trivial activities of social life. Jane Austen herself was so convinced of the reality of her fictivc characters that, as Chew . puts it, ”she would narrate to her family incidents in their lives which do not occur in the book.”
One of Jane Austen’s achievements and merits is her excellence at plot-construction. Very few English novelists have given as well integrated plots as she has. All the characters in a Jane Austen novel are essential to its plot; even the very minor ones cannot be justifiably separated from it on the ground of being superfluous or supernumerary. She has something like the architectonic ability of a dramatist Numerous of her novels have been split by critics into so many acts of a drama. About the structure of Pride and Prejudice Cross observes : ”The marriage of Elizabeth and Darcy is not merely a possible solution of the plot, it is as inevitable as the conclusion of a properly contracted syllogism or geometrical demonstration. For a parallel to workmanship of this high order one can only’ look to Shakespeare, to such a comedy as ’Much Ado about Nothing.’* Mostly, Jane Austen keeps herself, like a dramatist, behind the stage, and lets her characters unfold themselves through their own action and dialogue. She rarely introduces them like Fielding, Meredith, or Thackeray, or offers to comment upon what they are doing. Her own impressions and opinions are delivered not as regular interpottttoili but in the record of action and dialogue.
»!i Jane Austen’s Achievement/ 5*^.,
Humour, Satire, and Irony :•
This detachement from her characters is, mostly, ironic in nature. Her irony, like her humour and comedy, is of the quiet, unobtrusive kind. As Cecil puts it, ”humour was an integral part of her -creative: process.” She laughs at die social aberrations and irrationalities of her characters. She is a satirist but shows no evidence of holding a lash in readiness. She paints more the follies of manners than morals. ”Her province,” says Samuel C. Chew, ”is not that of sombre delinquency but of venial error. The faults in her characters are mostly due to bad training or want of training in youth. In older people these are often beyond repair; but in young, especially the young lovers, they.are purged and done away through tribulations which are nonetheless poignant for being generally misunderstandings. Each book is thus a history of self-education and self-correction”. ”Jane Austen”, observes Compton-Rickett, ”never lashed our follies, she faintly arched her eyebrows and passed on.” She constantly considered decorum, grace, tolerance, sympathy and self-respect with their opposites like ill-breeding, coarseness, intolerance, selfishness, and self-humiliation. However, she is never harsh, and she never arrogates to herself any pontifical dignity. She is convinced of the ordinariness of life and all its appurtenances. Her tolerance as a moralist places her beside Chaucer, Shakespeare, and Fielding. HerSiyie :•
A word now about her style which is a monument of grace, lucidity, intelligence, perception,and a kind of ”feminine” charm. There are,” says Samuel C. Chew, ”qualities of Miss Austen’s style-the delicate precision, the nice balance, die seeming simplicity-which remind many readers of Congreve’s comedies.11 As examples of her typical ironic wit consider the following sentences:
(a) It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife.
-Pride and Prejudice
(b) Her father was a clergyman without being neglected or poor, and a very respectable man though his name was Richard and he had never been handsome.
-NorthangerAbbey
(c) When Mrs. Bennett in Pride and Prejudice laments that after her husband’s death she will become destitute, he consoles her:
”My dear,” (says her husband] ”do not give way to such gloomy thoughts. Let us hope for better things. Let us flatter ourselves that I may be the survivor.”
•«f l^tory of English Literature
THE ESSAY FROM BACON TO LAMB
63. Write a note on the development of the essay from Bacon
to Lamb. (Agra 1959)
(Companion Questions)..Ifrace the development of the
essay from Bacon to Addison. (Agra 1967)
What are the main lines of development of the English essay from Addison to Lamb ? (Punjab 1970)
What is an Essay ? –
Essays have Protean shapes and, therefore, it is understandable that though numerous attempts have been made to give a definition of the essay yet none has met with complete success. Most of such attempts succeed in covering only a part of die compositions which commonly go. under the label of essays. A comprehensive definition which would cover essays as different as those of Bacon, Addison, Lamb, Macaulay and E.V. Lucas is yet to come. Here is Dr. Johnson’s famous definition: ”The essay is a loose sally of the mind, an irregular, indigested piece, not a regular and orderly composition.” This description or definition touches upon only one aspect-though a very important aspect-of the essay. J.B. Priestly, himself a noted essayist, defines the essay as ”a genuine expression of an original personality-an artful and enduring kind of talk.” In ’ A.C. Benson’s words, the essay is ”a reverie, the frame of mind in which a man says in the words of an old song ’says I to myself, says I.’ J.H. Lobban defines the essay as ”a short, discursive article on any literary, philosophical, or social subject, viewed from a personal or historical standpoint.” Murray’s Dictionary defines the essay as ”a composition of moderate length on any particular subject….originally implying want of finish, but now said of a composition more or less elaborate in style, though limited in range.”
This plethora of definitions does not contain one which may be called omnibus. A working definition of the essay may, however, be given as follows: An essay is a short, incomplete, informal, light, subjective literary composition in prose. This definition is not rigid but pragmatic and has the advantage of being applicable to a vast proportion of essays. Bacon:-
The essay was,in the words of Douglas Bush, ”one of the late courses b the banquet of literature.’ Bacon was undoubtedly the father of the essay in England. A glance, however, may be cast at the rudiments of the essay which may be found in the works of some prose
The Essay from Bacon to Lamb / 397
writers before Bacon. Philip Sidney’s Defence ofPoesie anticipates the regular critical essay. Caxton’s prefaces are also more or less of the nature of essays. Gascoigne’s Mating of Verse consists of critical essays. Gosson’s School of Abuse is remarkably likewise.
However, the first real essayist who employed the term ”essay” for his compositions and who had more or less a clear conception of what he was about, was Francis Bacon. He published a collection of ten essays in 1597 which he enlarged and revised in the subsequent editions of 1612 and 1625. Bacon borrowed the general.conception of the essay from the French writer Montaigne whose Essais had appeared in 1580, seventeen years before the first of his own. Bacon must have perceived that the new genre was a fit vehicle for th’e expression of many ideas of his own. The word ”essay”, etymologically speaking, means a trial or an attempt-something tentative, unorganised, lacking thoroughness. Bacon called his own essays ”dispersed meditations,” indicating thereby their lack of method and organisation. They are, according to him, ”certain brief notes set down rather significantly than curiously.” With the publication of these ”notes” Bacon emerged as the first of English essayists and jn the words of Hugh Walker, he remains, ”for sheer mass and weight of genius the greatest” Bacon followed by succeeding essayists is compared by Douglas Bush to ”a whale followed by a school of porpoises.” In a word, Bacon’s greatness as an essayist is due not only to his precedence, but also excellence.
Some peculiar features of Bacon’s essays may now be referred to. One of their distinct features is their ”impersonalness”. We do not find in them the same warmth of personality and subjectivity as we find in the essays of, say, Lamb-the essayist par excellence. Bacon is always stately and magnificent and disdains to mix with his readers or to talk familiarly to them. He is a teacher rather than a companion. Well did he call his essays ”Counsels Civil and Moral”. His constant effort is to train the reader in the ways of the world. He was himself an out-andout careerist, and his approach’to the affairs of the world as well as in the bulk of his ”counsels” is that of a careerist. He keeps himself aloof from moral and emotional considerations, and often looks like an English cousin of Machiavelli.
A word about his style. As regards his use of language, Bacon is an anti-Ciceronian. He excels in giving short, pregnant, and pithy aphorisms packed with the worldly wisdom and experience of a lifetime. His English Achieves a high degree of compression, thanks to
(1) the use of the weightiest and simplest words and
(2) a persistent avoidance of superfluous words and, very often, even connectives.
f
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As Will Ourant puts it in The Story of Philosophy, ”Bacon abhors padding, and disdains to waste a word; he offers us infinite riches in a little phrase.” The laconic quality of Bacon’s style suffers a little in the second and third editions of his essays, when he adds a little colour and mellowness to his English. Even then, he remains a stringent adherent of brevity and a sworn enemy of all wbolliness of expression. His importance in the history of English prose lies not only in his naturalisation of the essay in England but also in the evolution of a pliant model of English prose. His immediate predecessors and contemporaries like Ascham, Hooker, Sidney, Lyly, and Raleigh wrote a prolix, involved, highly Latinised, excessively decorated, and unwieldly prose which could never become a model of utilitarian, workaday prose suited to topics both-high and low. As Hugh Walker observes, in his Essays Bik on provided such a modcl~for all his successors to follow, though, of course, with a few changes.
The Characters Writers :-
If Bacon was the father of the English essay, he had tew real ”sons”–as none of-hts followers resembled him. Among his successors may be mentioned Ben Jonson and a comparatively unknown writer Sir William Cornwallis who, in his own way, set the tone of honest selfexamination and unassuming communication. Ben Jonson’s forceful personality continually breaks through his Discoveries, a collection of notes on contemporary men of letters and affairs.
In the first half of the seventeenth century the essay took the form of what is called the ”character”. The most important character writers were Joseph Hall* Sir Thomas Ovcrbury, and John Earle. All of them modelled their characters on the first character writer-the ancient Greek writer Theophrastus. A character generally speaking is a formalised character-sketch of a typical figure such as a merchant, a fanatic Puritan, a milkmaid,or a drunkard. The characterisation was often touched with satire and a didactic tendency. Some of the characters drawn by seventeenth-century character writers are just wooden types but a few are alive and somewhat individualised. The character by its nature did not lend itself to self-portrayaL Nor did it resemble Baconian essay-on- account of its humour and witty and satiric touches making for social criticism. Towards the Restoration the character died, having outlived its utility. Other Essayists of the Seventeenth Century :-
Among the essayists of the seventeenth century other than the dmrn*er writers maybe mentioned Sir Thomas Browne, Abraham C>^, Halifax, Sir Wiuiamlemple, and John I>ryden.
Browne did not write an essay ina strict sense, but his most famous work Rdiffo Media can be treated as a personal essay, provided we
The Essay from Bacon to Lamb / 399
overlook its length. Browne was a delightful egotist and, as has been said, it is the perfect egotist who is the perfect essayist. Montaigne, the first essayist in world literature, had said about his collection of essays: ”I myself am the subject of my book”. That is the approach of a typical essayist; but Bacon in his performance had struck a sharp note of contrast with his model. Browne, however, in words reminiscent of Montaigne, observed : ”The world that I regard is myself. It is the microcosm of my own frame that I cast mine eye on.” His rambling, informal,and highly personal approach give him the true temper of a genuine essayist such as Lamb or Hazlitt.
Abraham Cowley wrote a charmingly fresh prose and revealed himself in quite a few intimately personal essays such as ”Of Myself.” ”I confess,” writes he, ”I love littleness almost in all things. A little convenient estate, a little cheerful house, a little company and very little feast; and if I were ever to fall in love again (which is a great passion, and therefore I hope I have done with it) it would be, I think, with prettiness rather than with majestical beauty.” Though in some of his essays he assumes a markedly didactic tone, yet we can justly treat him as a connecting link between Bacon and the romantic essayists.
Halifax wrote a few essays-which are discursive but couched in a pleasant style. Sir William Temple also wrote some good essays but he treated his topics rather academically, so that his essays come close to being ”popular lectures.”
Dryden was a versatile man of letters, being essayist, poet, critic and dramatist. In every department of literature he has much to his credit. Modern prose, it is said, begins with Dryden. Many of his prose writings are of the nature of critical essays, hut his most ambitious work, the Essay of Dramatic Poesy, is in dialogue form and looks more like a treatise than an essay.
The Essay in the Eighteenth Century :-
The eighteenthcentury is known in the history of P”gl*sh literature for its creadon and development of the periodical essay which was ”invented” by Steele in the beginning of the century and .which expired near its end. Defoe was a busy journalist and some of his prose writings came very near the essay form. However, it is Steele who has the pride •of place as the originator of the periodical essay. His periodical paper The Taller first appeared in 1709. It was taken out thrice weekly and every issue contained an essay, mostly on ”the various flaws of dress and morals.’ Steele was first assisted and then overshadowed by his friend Addison. The Taller ran to 271 numbers most of which came from the pen of Steele himself. After The Taller, The Spectator sorted its
400 / A History of English Literature
memorable career of 555 numbers, most of which were written by Addison. As Addison put it, the aim of The Spectator was to attack those vices which were ”too trivial for the chastisement of the law and too fantastical for the cognizance of the pulpit.” Steeleand Addison gave particular attention to women, especially their tendency to indulge in French fopperies, follies, and frivolities. Their head-dresses, ”party patches”, hooped petticoats, and other sartorial extravagances found in Steele and Addison enthusiastic critics, who recommended ihe virtues of chastity, domesticity, and modesty, and also, what may seem a little prudish, ”discretion.” Addison and Steele became also the •noral censors of the age, and did some really good work with their jatire’and sense of comedy wedded to a very serious aim. Their papers reconstruct before us England of the age of Queen Anne with its coffee-houses, theatres, stock-exchange, merchants, and commercial activity, street cries, and the ships and traffic of the Thames. They also did well in giving a pretty vast, if not an intimate, glimpse of the rural life and manners. The peculiar nature of the periodical essay as practised by Addison and Steele was accepted with very fewmodifications, by all the subsequent periodical essayists.
Some differentiation between Steele and Addisoa may here be made. They were quke different in nature and this diffennce percolated down to their style. Steele was warm-hearted, lazy, careless and rambling. Macaulay calls him ”a scholar among rakes and a rake among scholars-.” Addison, on the other hand, was very ”correct,” weil-mannered, very calculating, and exact. Dr. Johnson’s famous tribute to Addison’s prose style is worth quoting: ”Whosoever wishes to attain an English style, familiar but not coarse, elegant but not ostentatious, must give his days and nights to the volumes of Addison.’ However, many modern critics have turned their approval to Steele, at the cost of Addison. Even in the nineteenth century, Leigh Hunt could write: ”I prefer Steele with all his faults to Addison with all bis essays.”
Pope and Swift also wrote some periodical essays. Pope was the
greatest poet and Swift, the greatest prose writer, of the first half of die
eighteenth century. But the most important name after Addison, in the
list of periodical essayists, is that of Dr. Johnson whose essays appeared
twice a week in The Rambler and also every Saturdayin a newspaper.
The latter group goes under the title of the Idler essays. In loth of them
Dr. Johnson showed himself in the mantle of a very serious moralist
without the humour and sense of comedy which characterised Steele
and Addison. His style^oo, lacked the sprightline&s aid lucidity of that
of his predecessors.
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The Essay from Bacor/
7
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Oliver Goldsmith contributed to many periodic
odical The Bee ran to only eight weekly numbers World, Goldsmith’s best work, is a collection of es appeared in Tlie Public Ledger as ”Chinese Letters.” Go., are rich in human details, a quivering sentimentaiism, and Ca^ of spirit. His prose style is, likewise, quite attractive. He avoids bilu. ness, coarseness, pedantry, and stiff wit. His style, in the words of George Sherburn, ”lacks the coldness of the aristocratic manner, and it escapes the tendency of his generation to follow Johnson into excessive heaviness of diction and balanced formality of sentence structure-It is precisely for this lack of formality and for his graceful and sensitive ease, fluency, and vividness that we value his style.”
The Romantic Essayists-Leigh Hunt, Hazlitt, De Quince^ and Lamb :-
The early nineteenth century saw in England the emergence of the romantic spirit both in verse and prose. The romantic essayists, like Leigh Hunt, Hazlitt, De Quincey, and Charles Lamb, had many traits in common; for instance, their tendency of self-revelation, their subjective approach, their button holing familiarity, their congenial and tolerant humour, their occasional pathos, their inspiration as stylists from the writers of the past, and their visionary and somewhat extravagant nature. Of course, it is wrong to assume that all of them wrote according to a formula. All had their own individual views and predilections though the conception of the essay was the same in each case. Their essays entirely agree with the tentative definition of the essay we have given at the outset. Lamb has well been called ”the prince of the English essayists” and ”the essayist par excellence.” Hazlitt and Lamb, with Coleridge, are the most eminent of all the romantic literary critics. As a critic, Hazlitt is sometimes equal to Lamb but as an essayist, he yields the palm to Lamb.
LAMB AS AN ESSAYIST
Q. 64. Discuss the salient features of Lamb as an essayist
n-
Q.
Or Write . short essay on one of the following :-
tonic?* PrinCe * EngUsh «»**’«««» four more ’OP|CS>- (Agra 1969)
Or
400
/
// A History of English Literature Q. What do you consider to be the main contribution of L*mb~to the devetopment of the essay in the nineteenth century? (Punjab 1963)
Introduction :-
Montaigne, a French writer, was the father of the essay, and k was Francis Bacon who naturalised the new form in English. However, there is much difference between bis essays and the essays of his model. Montaigne’s essays are marked by bis tendency towards self-revelation, a light-hearted sense of humour, and tolerance. But Bacon in his essay is more an adviser than a companion : he is serious., objective, and didactic. It has well been said that the essay took a wrong turn in the hands of Bacon. For two centuries after Bacon the essay in England went on gravitating towards the original conception held by Montaigne, but it was only in the hands of the romantic essayists of the early nineteenth century that it became wholly personal, Hght,and lyrical in nature. From then onwards it has seen Ho essential change. The position of Lamb among these romantic essayists is the most eminent. In fact, he has often been called the prince of all the essayists England has so far produced. Hugh Walker calls him the essayist par excellence who should be taken as a model. It is from the essays of Lamb that we often derive our very definition of the essay, and it is with reference to his essays as a criterion of excellence that we evaluate the achievement and merit of a given essayist. Familiarity with Lamb as a man enhances for a reader the charm of his essays. And he is certainly the most charming of all English essayists. We may not find in him the massive genius of Bacon, or the ethereal flights (Q altitude) of Thomas Browne, or the brilliant lucidity of Addison, or the ponderous energy of Dr. Johnson, but none excels him in the ability to charm the reader or to catch him in the plexus of his own personality. His Self-revelation :-
What strikes one particularly about Lamb as an essayist is his persistent readiness to reveal his everything to the reader. The evolution of the essay from Bacon to Lamb lies primarily in its shift from (i) objectivity to subjectivity, and (ii) from formality to familiarity.
Of all the esayists it is perhaps Lamb who is the most autobiographic. His own life is for him ”such stuff as essays are made on.” He could easily say what Montaigne had said before him-”I
Lamb as an Essayist / 403
myself am the subject of my book.” The change from objectivity to subjectivity in the English essay was, by and large, initiated by Abraham Cowlcy who wrote such essays as the one entitled. ”Of Myself.” Lamb with other romantic essayists completed this change. Walter Pater observes m Appreciations; ”With him, as with Montaigne, the desire of self-portraiture is below all mere superficial tendencies, the real motive in writing at all, desire closely connected with intimacy, ihat modern subjectivity which may be called the Montaigncsque element in literature. In his each and every essay we feel the vein of his subjectivity.” His essays are, as it were, so many bits of autobiography by piecing which together we can arrive at a pretty authentic picture of his life, both external and internal. It is really impossible to think of an essayist who is more personal than Lamb. His essays reveal him fully-in all his whims, prejudices, past associations, and experiences. ”Night Fears” shows us Lamb as a timid, superstitious boy. ”Christ’s Hospital” reveals his unpalatable experiences as a schoolboy. We are introduced to the various members of his family in numerous essays like ”My Relations,” The Old Benchers of the Inner Temple,” and ”Poor Relations.” We read of the days of his adolescence in”Macker yEnd in Hertfordshire.” His tenderness towards his sister Mary is revealed by ”Mrs. Battle’s Opinions on Whist.” His professional life is recalled in The South-Sea House” and The Superannuated Man.” His sentimental memories full of pathos find expression in ”Dream Children.” His prejudices come to the fore in ”Imperfect Sympathies” and The Confessions of a Drunkard.” His gourmandise finds a humorous utterencc in ”A Dissertation upon Roast Pig,” ”Grace before Meat,” and elsewhere. What else is left then? Very little, except an indulgence in self-pity at the stark tragedy of his life. Nowhere does he seem to be shedding tears at the fits of madness to which his sister Mary Bridget of the essays) was often subject and in one of which she knifed his mother to death. The frustration of his erotic career (Lamb remained in a state of lifelong bachelorhood imposed by himself to enable him to nurse his demented sister), however, is touched upon here and there. In ”Dream Children,” for instance, his unfruitful attachment with Ann Simmons is referred to. She got married and her children had to ”call Bartrum father.” Lamb is engaged in a reverie ^ut ”his children” who would have possibly been born bad he been f^aried to Alice W-n (Ann Simmons). When the reverie is gone this ** «hat he finds: ”• -and immediately awaking. I found myself quietly ^ted in my bachelor arm-chair where I had fallen asleep, with the
I
40* / A History of English Literature
faithful Bridget [his sister Mary] unchanged by my side….but John L [his brother John Lamb] was gone for ever.” How touching!
Lamb’s excessive occupation with himself may lead one to assume that he is too selfish or egocentric, or that he is vulgar or inartistic. Far from that. Egotism with Lamb sheds its usual offensive accoutrements. • The following specific points may be noted in this connexion:
(i) His egotism is free from vulgarity. Well does Compton-Rickett observe : There is no touch of vulgarity in these intimacies; for all their frank unreserve we feel the delicate refinement of the man’s spiritual nature. Lamb omits no essential, he does not sentimentalist;, and does not brutalise his memories. He poetises them, preserving them for us in art that can differentiate between genuine reality and crude realism.”
(ii) His artistic sense of discrimination-selection and rejectionhas also to be taken into account. David Daiches maintains : ”The writer’s own character is always there, flaunted before the reader, but it is carefully prepared and controlled before it is exhibited.”
(iii) Though Lamb is an egotist yet he is not self-assertive. He talks about himself not because he thinks himself to be important but because he thinks himself to be the only object he knows intimately. Thus his egotism is bom of a sense of humility rather than hauteur. Samuel C. Chew observes: ”Like all the romantics he is self-revelatory, but there is nothing in him of the ’egotistical-sublime.’ Experience had made him too clear-sighted to take any individual, least of all himself, too seriously. The admissions of his own weaknesses, follies, and’ prejudices are so many humorous warnings to his readers.” The Note of Familiarity :-
Lamb’s contribution to the English essay also lies in his changing
the general tone from formality to familiarity. This change was to be
accepted by all the essayists to follow. ”Never”, says Compton-Rickett,
”was any man more intimate in print than he. He has made of chatter ^
a fine art.” Lamb disarms the reader at once with his buttonholing
familiarity. He plays with him in a puckish manner, no doubt, but he is
always ready to take him into confidence and to exchange heart-beats
with him. In the essays of the writers before him we are aware of a well
marked distance between the writer and ourselves. Bacon and Addiso”
perch themselves, as it were, on a pedestal, and cast pearls before &
readers standing below. In Cowky, the distance between the rea<^
and writer narrows down-but it is there still. It was left for Lambtc
Lamb as an Essayist / 405
! – ’
f abolish this distance altogether. He often addresses the reader (”dear
’ reader”) as if he were addressing a bosom friend. He makes nonsense of the proverbial English insularity and ”talks” to the reader as ”a friend and man” (as Thackeray said he did in his novels). This note of intimacy
’ is quite pleasing, for Lamb is the best of friends.
( No Didacticism :-
He is a friend, and not a teacher. Lamb shed once and for all the didactic approach which characterises the work of most essayists before him. Bacon called his essays ”counsels civil and moral.’ His didacticism is too palpable to need a comment. Cowley was somewhat less didactic, but early in the eighteenth century Steele and Addisonthe founders of the periodical essay-set in their papers the moralistic, mentor-like tone for all the periodical essayists to come. Even such ”a rake among scholars and a scholar among rakes” as Steele arrogated to himself the air of a teacher and reformer. This didactic tendency I reached almost its culmination in Dr. Johnson who in the Idler and Rambler papers gave ponderous sermons rather than what may be called essays. Lamb is too modest to pretend to proffer moral counsels. He never argues, dictates, or coerces. We do not find any ”philosophy of life” in his essays, though there are some personal views and opinions flung about here and there not for examination and adoption, but just to serve as so many ventilators to let us have a peep into his mind. ”Lamb”, says Cazamian, ”is not a moralist nor a psychologist, his object is not research, analysis, or confession; he is, above all, an artist. He has no aim save the reader’s pleasure, and his own.” But though Lamb is not a downright pedagogue, he is yet full of sound wisdom which he hides under a cloak of frivolity and tolerant good nature. He sometimes looks like the Fool in King Lear whose weird and funny words are impregnated with a hard core of surprising sanity. As a critic avers, ’though Lamb frequently donned the cap and bells, he was more than a jester, even his jokes had kernels of wisdom.” In his ”Character of the Late Elia” in which he himself gives a character-sketch of the supposedly dead Elia, he truly observes : ”He .would interrupt the gravest discussion with some light jest; and yet, perhaps not quite irrelevant in ears that could understand it”.
The Rambling Nature of His Essays and His Lightness of Track :-
The rambling nature of his essays and his lightness of touch are some other distinguishing features of Lamb as an essayist. He never ’’others about keeping to the point. Too often do we find him %iag off
”•**« / J-fc IllaWBJ V* –O–,
at a tangent and ending at a point which we could never have foreseen. Every road with him seems to lead to the world’s end. We often reproach Bacon for the ”dispersed” nature of his ”meditations”, but . Lamb beats everybody in his monstrous discursiveness. To consider some examples, first take up his essay The Old and the New Schoolmaster”. In this essay which apparently is written for comparing the old and new schoolmaster, the first two pages or thereabouts contain a very humorous and exaggerated description of the author’s own ignorance. Now, we may ask, what has Lamb’s ignorance to do with the subject in hand ? Then, the greater part of the essay ”Oxford in the Vacation” is devoted to the description of his friend Dyer. Lamb’s essays are seldom artistic, well-patterned wholes. They have no beginning, middle,and end. Lamb himself described his essays as ”a son of unlicked incondite things.” However, what these essays lose in artistic design they gain in the touch of spontaneity. This is what lends them what is called ”the lyrical quality.” Lamb’s Humour, Pathos, and Humanity :-
Lamb’s humour, humanity.and the sense of pathos are all his own; and it is mainly these qualities which differentiate his essays from those of his contemporaries. His essays are rich alike in wit, bumour,and fun. Hallward and Hill observe in the Introduction to their edition of the Essays ofElia : The terms Wit, Humour and Fun are often confused but they are really different in meaning. The first is based on intellect, the second on insight and sympathy, the third on vigour and freshness of mind and body. Lamb’s writings show all the three qualities, but what most distinguishes him is Humour, for his sympathy is ever strong and active.* Humour in Lamb’s essays constitutes very like an atmosphere ”with linked sweetness long drawn out.” Its Protean shapes range from frivolous puns, impish attempts at mystification, grotesque buffoonery, and Rabelaisian verbosity (see, for example, the description of a ”poor relation”)to the subtlest ironical stroke which pierces down to the very heart of life. J. B. Priestley observes in English Humour : ”English humour at its deepest and tenderest seems in him [Lamb] incarnate. He did not merely create it, he lived in it. His humour is not an idle thing, but the white flower, plucked from » most dangerous nettle.” What particularly distinguishes Lamb’s humour is its close alliance with pathos. While laughing he is always aware of the tragedy of life-not only his life, but life in general. Th&> « why he often laughs through his tears. Witness his treatment of the hard life of chimney sweepers and Christ’s Hospital boys. The descriptions are touching
*
enough, but Lamb’s treatment provides us with a humorous medium of perception rich in prismatic effects,, which bathes the tragedy of actual life in the iridescence of mellow comedy. The total effect is very complex, and strikes our sensibility in a bizarre way, puzzling us as to what is comic and what is tragic.
Style :-
A word, lastly, about Lamb’s peculiar style which is all his own and yet not his, as he is a tremendous borrower. He was extremely influenced by some ”old-world” writers like Fuller and Sir Thomas Browne. It is natural, then, that his style is archaic. His sentences are long and rambling, after the seventeenth-century fashiqn. He uses words many of which are obsolescent, if not ebsolete. But though he ”struts in borrowed plumes”, these ”borrowed plumes” seem to be all his own. Well does a critic say: The blossoms are culled from other men’s gardens, but their blending is all Lamb’s own. Passing through Lamb’s imagination they become something fresh and individual. His style is a mixture certainly of many styles, but a chemical not a mechanical mixture.” His inspiration from old writers gives his style a romantic colouring which is certainly intensified by his vigorous imagination. Very like Wordsworth he throws a fanciful veil on the common objects of life and converts them into interesting and ”romantic” shapes. His peculiar style is thus an asset in the process of ”romanticising” everyday affairs and objects which otherwise would strike one with a strong feeling of ennui. He is certainly a romantic essayist. What is more, he is a poet.
HAZLITT AS AN ESSAYIST Q. 64. Discuss Hazlitt as an essayist
Or
Q. What do you consider to be the mala contribution of …..Hazlitt to the development of the essay la the nineteenth century ? (Pvajab 19(3)
Or
Q. Compare Lamb and Hazlitt as essayists. introduction :-
Though we are mighty fine fellows now-a-days we cannot write uke Hazlitt,” thus spoke R. L. Stevenson who himself aped Hazl^t most sedulously-with advantage to himself. Hazlitt’s place among English essayists is very high, though few critics have placed him above Lamb. In some respect in fact, Haziitt easily beats Lamb into the second P’ace. His catholicity, zest for Gfe, and-vivid and copious expression full
4’J8 / A History pi tnglish Literature
of Blowing images are Ms asscls. Whereas Lamb has certainly a more romantic imagination, Ha/litt combines his imagination with a searching intellect. As Hugh Walker points out, ”for wealth of intellect and imagination and for nervous English he [Ha/.liltj is the rival of the greatest”.
The Variety of His Interests :-
However hard piay we avoid it, a comparion between Lamb and Hazlilt becomes inevitable on numerous occasions. Take the variety of their interests. David Daiches observes in this context: The range of subjects in Hazlitt’s e&says is greater than in Lamb’s: he could write on painting as well as literaturcpn a prize fight, on natural landscape, on going a journey, on ’coffee-house politician’ as well as on more formal topics such as Milton’s sonnets, Sir Joshua Reynold’s Discourses, and the fear of death”. Like a bee he sucks playfully the nectar of all the flowers that nature proffers him. He is full of gusto and t,he;o/> de vivre as no-other writer is. Socks, nature, society and the affairs of men-all enchant him. Lamb also loves to live and be merry (in spite of the stark tragedy of his life), but Hazlitt, like Chaucer’s Franklin, is ”Epicurus’ own son.” He loves books as a connoisseur, but he refuses to pour all his love and attention upon them. Towards his last years he, in fact, grew extremely critical of all books and the bookish attitude which they often give rise to. At a place he remarks that ”he must be a poor creature indeed whose practical convictions do not in almost all cases outrun his deliberate understanding.”
Though Hazlitt h^s an abundant zest for life and what it has to offer him yet by no means c^n he be consid’ -ed as devoid of a keen sense of discrimination. He ha^s no patience with the mediocre and the middling but has an almost instinctive judgement to choose the best from the second-best. His literary criticism is nothing but the product of the practical application o»f this sense of judgement to the field of literature. He has strong likes a«r»d dislikes, and though he often offends against taste and is swayed bv prejudices and personal covictions yet, on »he Whole, his basic sanity and perpecption as a critic of life and literature cannot be gainsaid. For once he showed bad taste-when he fell in love with a trav*ern jilt whose trickery led him to pour out his heart in Liber Amorif, which was rightly condemned by his contemporaries as ”kitchen st^iff. Well did he sum up the activity of his life and the variety of his interests in these words: ”So have I loitered my life away, reading books, Looking at pictures, going to play, hearing, think-
I *.,…’. > Ha/litt as an Essayist / 409
ing, or writing on what pleased me best. I have wanted only one thing to make me happy; but wanting that have wanted everything.” Hazlitt’s Philosophic Kent :- The inclusion of ”thinking” among (he activities of his life by Hazlitt, as we find in the words ju.st quoted, is quite apt. He was a thinker as Lamb was not. Lamb made essays mostly out of his own reminiscences, of ”emotions recollected in tranquillity.” But Hazlitt, in spite of his occasional extravagant verbal sprees, thought hard like a philosopher. He himself once observed : ”I endeavour to recollect all I have ever observed or thought upon a subject and to express it as nearly as I can.” If not a philosopher, Lamb at least was not a fool, though often he pretended to he one. ”But,” as a critic puts it, ”though Lamb frequently donned (he cap and the bells, he was more than u jester; even’his jokes had kernels of wisdom.” Embedded in Lamb’s whim-whams and capricious buffoonery lay a very sound core of wisdom. Even then, Lamb was not given to philosophical speculation. On the other hand, Hazlill’s essays, to quote Ian Jack, ”arc the work of a man trained in philosophical speculation.” Hazlitt was well read in all ” the important philosophers such as Bacon, Locke and Hume, all of whom influenced his thought quite considerably. Ian Jack maintains : ”He moves among abstract ideas with an case and familiarity that contrast oddiy with Lamb. Lamb wrote on chimney-sweepers, the South Sea House, weddings, and whist: Hazlitt wrote ’On Reason and ^ imagination, ’On Egotism,’ ’On the Past and Future.’ His essays are ’ more serious than Lamb’s or serious in a different sense. Interested as ’ he is in the essay as a form he is more interested in the truth which he / is pursuing. He was a man of letters in the comprehensive sense in which Johnson and Coleridge were men of letters.” With his philosophical bent of mind Hazlitt is to Lamb as Shelley is to Keats. Self-revelation :-
As an essayist Hazlitt is not of the school of Addison or Dr. Johnson but of such writers as Montaigne (”the father of the essay”) and his own contemporary Lamb who used the essay as a vehicle for self-revelation. It is said that the perfect egotist is the perfect essayist. After reading an essay our knowledge about the life and pe/sonality °f the writer is expected to increase. What Montaigne said about the collection of his essays could be justly said by Lamb or Hazlitt about s-l myself am the subject of my book.” In the history of English ”twature the strongly personal note was struck by Wordsworth whose
magnum opus, The Prelude, offered to the reader the story of the development of his own mind. It can be said that Wordsworth made himself the hero of his epic-like poem. Hazlitt indeed learnt a lot from Wordsworth and his French idol Rousseau who in his Confessions came out with the story of his own life with rank sentimentalism combined with aggressive garrulousness of self-assertiveness. It 4s really paradoxical that a peremptory egotist like Hazlitt should criticise Wordsworth and Byron for their egotism ! His own Liber Amoris is a tasteless record if his erotomania, something worse than is conceivable.
But in his essay his indulgence in autobiography is always for the better, as it adds to them an intimate colour. ”His habit,” says a critic, ”of introducing personal matter into his essays gives frequently a pleasant and intimate flavour to his writing, and the reader’s interest in the written matter is nonetheless because of the interesting glimpses afforded of the writer’s personality.* Many of Hazlitt’s essays-like Lamb’s–are so many bits of autobiography by piecing which together we can arrive at a fairly authentic and fairly complete picture of his life and personality. Even as a literary critic he reveals himself. Such essays as ”My First Acquaintance with Poets,” ”On the Pleasures of Painting,” ”On the Feeling of Immortality in Youth,” ”On a Sun Dial”, ”Of Persons One would Wish to have Seen,” and ”Farewell to Essay-Writing” are like so many chapters from his unwritten autobiography. He stands fully revealed in his essays. He tells us frankly about his father, his love of painting, his enjoyment of walking, his literary taste, his appreciation of nature, his political affiliations, and his epicureanism. No facet of his personality remains obscure. He does not mystify the reader like Lamb nor does he wear any impenetrable mask. What he puts forward in his essays is his real self, for whatever it is worth.
Quite a few of his essays are built around reminiscences not, however, without the mortar of hard philosophic thinking. As a typical romantic he casts a wistful glance on the realm of the past and illuminates many of its demesnes with the glow of his retrospective imagination. ”Like Lamb”, maintains Samuel C. Chew, ”he relied upon the impressions of former years. Passionate retrospection is prevalent note in his essays.” H azlitt himself observes in his essay ”On the Feeling of Immortality in Youth” that he has ”turned for consolation to the past, gathering up the fragments of my early recollections and putting them into a form that might five.”
it is interesting to see how Hazlitt makes every subject a peg to hang his personality on. Consider his essay ”Indian Jugglers”. He starts, as expected, with a vivid description of some of the juggler’s usual feats, such as swallowing a sword and keeping six wooden balls in the air at the same time. But that is all. After it Haziitt himself occupies the stage, shoving the juggler aside. He compares his own intellectual dexterity with the juggler’s physical one and awards him the palm. It is all selfexamination. We do not find the juggler anywhere near the conclusion which is smothered in self-pity and despair. Self-pity and Bitterness :-
This recurrent note of self-pity is a feature which distinguishes Lamb from Hazlitt. Lamb’s life was as pathetic a jeremiad as Hazlitt’s. Frustrated ambitions and an unenviable emotional career marked Lamb’s life as they did Hazlitt’s. But Hazlitt grew coarse, peevish, and bitter, as Lamb never did. Hazlitt is, according to Moody and Lovett, ”indeed in many ways quite the opposite of Charles Lamb, being somewhat coarse and boisterous where Lamb is refined and subtle: often harsh and repellent where Lamb is gentle and winning.” One after another Hazlitt quarrelled and broke with all his intimates including Lamb himself. In his essay ”Pleasure of Hating” he truly remarks : ”I have quarrelled with almost all of my old friends”. Presumably owing to his suspicious and touchy temperament he could not get along with either of the women he married. His last words are, however, quite unjike him~”Well, I’ve had a happy life.” He was not a Spartan or a Stoic, nor like Lamb did he smile away his blues. He was quite often in tantrums. Comparing Lamb and Hazlitt in this respect, Joseph Warren Beach observes in A History of English Literature edited by Hardin Craig: ”Lamb is a writer for old .and young; Hazlitt for those whom life has saddened, and sobered, and who do not mind a touch of cynicism.” Style:-
In considering the style of Hazlitt’s essays, once again a reference to Lamb will be rewarding. Whereas Lamb’s style is individual, Hazlitt’s is representative. Hazlitt has a manner but no mannerisms. Lamb, on the other hand, had his idiosyncrasies the chief of which was to mystify the reader. Lamb wrote a deliberately archaic English reminiscent of the seventeenth-century prose writers like Fuller and Sir Thomas Browne, We, of course, agree with Compton-Rickett that Lamb’s style was not a physical but a chemical mixture, and that though he took the elements of his style from others yet the ”blending” was his own. Even then it has to be admitted that Lamb as a stylist is no model. His English falls outside the natural tradition of English
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prose. Lamb, as Ian Jack puis U, ”is the worst of models,” whereas Ha/lilt ”is an admirable model.” Ha/lilt himself was critical of Lamb’s archaisms and frequent lack of lucidity. Of all the essays of Lamb he quite characteristically singled out ”Mrs. Battle’s Opinions on Whist” as the best, because, as he put it, it wus ”the most free from obsolete allusions and turns of expression.” His own style is a real model of what is often called the ”familiar style.” He is seldom sublime or high-strung, hut he is as seldom vulgar or commonplace. Naturalness, gusto, vividncss,and a certain copiousness arc the hallmarks of his style. He hates padding and circumlocution, but quite often in his characteristic way he indulges in repeating over and over again the same idea by constantly varying the figure. All the blows strike the same spot, but the last blow goes home. Describing this tendency a critic says: ”For a time the thought seems not to move. U is thrown into the air like balls by a juggler, and we watch reflections of it, and are thrilled and excited to pleasure in watching.”
According to Samuel C. Chew, Hazlilt stands between the eighteenth century (for ”terse clarity”) and Macaulay (for ”force and conciseness”). ”Yet,” says the same critic, ”as a stylist he commands a wider range. My First Acquaintance with Poets is as lyrically reminiscent as anything of Lamb’s; On the Feeling of Immortality in Youth is imposingly ornate without dependence upon archaisms; On Going to a Fig/it, a theme which invited the use of slang, is loyal to pure English, yet nonetheless viriie for its purity, the Farewell to Essay Writing is charged with romantic emotionality. Whatever the style or subject, it is Hazlitt’s own. Like his favourite Montaigne he could assure the reader that his was un livre de bonne foi*. Ian Jack also points out that Hazlitt ”varied his style (like any writer worth his salt) according to the demands of the subject and the occasion.” The same critic observes: ”Sometimes he reminds us of the ’character writers’ of the seventeenth century, sometimes of Locke, sometimes of Burke. Even within a single essay there may be a marked contrast of style as there is between thematter-of-fact opening and the lyrical climax of ’On My First Acquaintance with Poet£”
A word in the end about Hazlitt’s plethoric use of quotations. Lamb is also very fond of quoting snatches from writers (mostly poets), but Hazlitt outdoes Lamb many times over. We cannot say that he was in the habit of ”thinking within inverted commas,” but certainly his over use of quotations cannot be defended. For one thing ?most of his quotations are misquotations. He quotes generally from memory, and quite often wrenches what ie quotes off its context. Some of these
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quotations are happy no doubt, but as many, or even more, strike one as standing out too much. We may conclude with a quotation oursclves-lhc last sentence of Ian Jack’s very admirable discussion of Ha/Jitt in Entfish Literature IS 15-1832 (Oxford History of English Literature)- ”One of his few faults is that he makes rather too much use of quotation.”
f
A CRITICS OF THE ROMANTIC AGE
^Q. 66. Assess the contribution of the romantics to criticism.
(Agra 1952) Or Q. Write a brief essay on one of the following :-
(a) Criticism in the Romantic period (and four more topics). , (Agra 1958)
Introduction :- *’
The romantic age in England was not only an age of glorious poetry but also of glorious literary criticism. In fact, most of I he eminent men of letters of the age were critics as well as creative writers. Wordsworth, Coleridge, Southcy, Byron, Hazlitt, Lamb, Leigh Hunt,and De Quincey-all contributed to critical literature. But the main critics who gave a direction to the current of literary criticism were Coleridge, Lamb, Hazlitt,and DC Quinccy, and it will be with them that we will concern ourselves here. All of them together have often been categorised as ”Romantic critics”; but there are easily discernible in them some very important mutual differences of approach as well as opinion, though they share some important features, too. AH of them reacted sharply against the neoclassic tradition of Dr. Johnson, the cham of the realm of letters. Further, unlike him, they do not indulge in what is called judicial or legislative criticism, the like of which is embodied in his rather pontifical pronouncements. Their criticism is, with some exceptions, interpretative or appreciative. They get into the mind of the writer whose work they are examining and thus grasp psychologically the nature of his creative activity which gets ultimately crystallised into his work. None of the romantic critics harps upon the mechanical and tinat-honoured rules and regulations which the neo-Aristotelian critics of yOr> from the reign of Elizabeth to the eighteenth century had exalted into a fetish. And lastly, most of the romantic critics, particularly Hazlitt, give critical judgements which are eminently of, what may be called, the ”impressionistic” kind: in other words, while dealing with works of literature, they depend on their personal impressions rather
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than a persistent reference to any wcll-cvoivcd or well-set body of rules or criteria of judgement. It is these common features, which justify their classification into a group, in spite of some important, and many peripheral, heterogeneities. Wordsworth and Coleridge :•
Wordsworth and Coleridge pioneered the Romantic Movement in England with their joint work Lyrical Ballads (1798) which has justly been called the Magna Carta of Romanticism. Wordsworth thought it appropriate to append to the first edition of the work an ”Advertisement” embodying his radical views regarding the nature and function of poetry. These views were elaborated and sone observations added in the ”Preface” tothe 1800 edition of the work. Wordsworth said some nice things about poetry and poets, but his observations on ”poetic diction” met with little approval and were contradicted by none other than his best friend Coleridge himself.
It was,lo a large extent, under the wave of democratic enthusiasm generated by the then recent French Revolution that Wordsworth recommended as subjects of poetry incidents and characters from humble and rustic life. He insisted that poetry was in the ”countenance of all science”. He gave the poet a high and important office. And here is his well-known description of poetry : ”Poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquillity: the emotion is contemplated till, by a species of reaction, the tranquillity gradually disappears, and an emotion, kindred to that which was before the subject of contemplation, is gradually produced, and does itself actually exist in the mind.”
So much, so well. But when Wordsworth goes forward with his theory of poetic diction be is on a really treacherous ground. He writes in the ”Preface”: The principal object then proposed in these poems was to choose incidents and situations from common life, and to relate or describe them throughout, as far as was possible, in a selection of language really used by men.” And further: ”It maybe safely affirmed that there neither is, nor can be, any essential difference between the language of prose and metrical composition.” There was a point in Wordsworth’s condemnation of the’vgaudy and bane phraseology” of many of his predecessors and even contemporaries; but he broke too many windows in his desire for fresh air. Tfcat Wordsworth’s conceptk» about the language of poetry was tmsound is beat exemplified by bkownpractk^Someofhisbe^poetryiisesaUnguagefarrenKiw^ Cram the language of ordinary people.
Critics of the Romantic Age / 415
Wordsworth’s status in the history of English criticism is, then, not exceedingly high. Coleridge,as we have said, took upon himself to expose the hollowncss of Wordsworth’s notions. In Chapters 17-20 of his Biogrophia Literaria he pursues to the end the critical hares started by Wordsworth’s ”Preface”.
That Coleridge was a great critic has been acknowledged by almost everybody who has written about his criticism. In fact most critics give him the first rank among the hierarchy of English critics. As Symons observes in Vie Romantic Movement in English Poetry, Coleridge had ”imagination, insight, logic, learning, almost every critical quality united in one; and he was a poet who allowed himself to be a critic”. As a critic, Coleridge was a pioneer in many res’pects. For instance, he gave a new conception of the very function of a critic which according to him should be to appreciate and interpret and not to judge. He condemned the contemporary ”reviews” ”because they teach people rather to judge than to consider, to decide than to reflect.” According to George Watson, ”his own method presupposed a delicate and enquiring reverence for all of man’s creation, and a passionate curiosity to explore its depth.”
Coleridge’s conception of the poetic process needs some elucidation. He believes that for the existence of truth there must be a knower and a known, a subject and an object, or the Self and Nature. Out of the interaction and fusion of the two arises a creative work. This work is neither Self nor Nature but a different entity altogether-fc/riu/n quid-havinglaws of its own. Poetry, thus, is a ”counter-action” offerees and has ”a logic of its own as severe as that of science and more difficult, because more subtle, more complex, and dependent on more and more fugitive causes.”
Coleridge’s Shakespearean criticism should be studied in the light of his conception of the creative process. The neoclassical critics like Dr. Johnson considered Shakespeare to be a great dramatist on the ground that ”Shakespeare is, above all writers… the poet of nature; the . poet that holds up to his readers a faithful mirror of manners and of life.” To mirror nature is, according to Coleridge, none of the functions of a poet. Poetry is neither Nature nor Self but the outcome of the counteraction of the two, and, therefore, an independent entity with laws which it is the function of a true critic to explore and explain. A genius works organically,not mechanically. A poem is not just created by a poet; it grows within him like a plant from a seed. ”Shakespeare*, observes Coleridge, ”goes on creating and evolving B out of A and C out of B and so on, just as a serpent moves, which makes a fulcrum of
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its own body and seems for ever twisting and untwisting its own strength.”
Coleridge’s distinction between fancy and imagination may also be here referred to as an example of his critical profundity. Fancy, says he, ”has no other counters to play with but fixities and defmites” and is only a ”mode of memory.” But the true imagination is esemplastic and given to ”re-create, idealize, unify.”
Coleridge’s literary criticism seems to be part of a comprehensive system of aesthetics which he ought have contemplated to proffer at some later stage of his life. It is also near enough the metaphysics of the German philosophers like Lcssing, Schlegel and Kant who seem to have influenced Coleridge quite considerably. A point of interest to note is that though Coleridge was a really great critic-and was acknowledged as one by most of his contemporaries-he did not create a ”school” of criticism. He was revered by a large number of poets and scholars. ”The young men,” says George Watson ”who crowded to his house in Highgate in the last years of his life, among whom (according to Carlyle) he enjoyed the reputation of a sage, sought wisdom of a kind too generalized and too occult to turn them into good critics-indeed, into any kind of critic.” Charles Lamb :-
Lamb had neither the profundity nor the philosophic training of Coleridge-his friend since their schooldays at Christ’s Hospital. His approach to criticism in particular and literature in general was amateurish, not professional like Hazlitt’s. The bulk of his total critical work is very slight-about fifty thousand words, but it includes some of the most perceptive criticisms ever made by an English writer. Lamb did not have any elaborate critical theories to guide him, nor did he ever turn to ”authorities” whom he could have invoked to his aid. He depended on his own taste, which, for all that we know was quite selective and quite sound in its essentials. He did not, unlike Coleridge, bring to bear a system of aesthetics on the study of literature. Almost the whole of his critical work, is descriptive and may be termed ”applied criticism.” Tillyard observes in Introduction to Lamb’t Criticism: ”Of English masters of theoretical criticism Coleridge ’a the greatest, of applied, in a sense, Lamb.”
Lamb was a great revivalist His antholopcal work. Specimen* of English Dramatic Poets, with his critical comments, helped much to revive contemporary interest in the then forgotten dramatists of yore. His enthusiasm and genuine enjoyment off ttte worics of the duster of
Critics of (foe Romantic Age / 417
lesser dramatists contemporaneous with Shakespeare and Jacobean dramatists did not go .neffcclive. The book,” s.ay Moody and Lovclt, ”did much to revive the almost extinguishcid fame of the lesser dramatists grouped about Shakespeare. It is one of the earliest as well as the most significant products of the new romantic criticism.” Apart from these dramatists, Lamb was interested in such out-of-the-way writers as Browne, Jeremy Taylor, Fuller, and Walton. He read and rgrcad their works, and while he did not read he brooded over what he had read. In his own words, he extremely enjoyed ”hanging over (for the thousandth time) some passage in old Burton, or one of his strange contemporaries.” One of the results of the persistent ”hanging over” was, of course, the archaisation of his ownprose: sty|e
Lamb’s criticism of Shakespeare has the strength and weakness of his own taste. His remarks on Lear (as also on ”Webster’s Duchess of Malfi) have rightly become an indispensable Piut of tne English critical heritage. To quote Tillyard, ”he succeeded in penetrating so near the truth.” His contention about the lack of stage.worthiness of Lear and other Shakespeare tragedies, is, of course, not to be accepted today. His defence of the comedy of manners is interesting even now. Like Dr. Johnson he is swayed by moral considerations (even of the Victorian type) though he can make bold togjve them an occasional holiday. He admits that this kind of comedy is morally unsound. The business of their dramatic characters will not strand the moral test.” Even then: ”I am glad for a season to take anairing beyond the diocese of strict conscience–! come back to my cageand restraint, the fresher and more healthy for it. I wear my shackles more contentedly for having respired the breath of an imaginary freedom,11 William Haulltt :-
been placed Witness, for > measure of
m
_-.„«., %»» wwus 01 ixmipcon-Kickett: ”With a large measure of Dryden’s freshness and acumen he combines the romantic fervour of Coleridge.” And : ”As a critic of Elizabethan literature he is more reliable but less eclectic than Lamb.” And so forth. But George Watson in his recent book the The Literary Critics has toppled his positionpresumably for good. Hazlitt’s critical work vvas Of the nature of a pot-boiler. In his own words his self-appointed task as a critic was ”to fed what is good and give reasons for the faith that is in me*. On Urn George Watson comments: To fed well, however, implies a wide and delicate sensitivity, and to give reasons that matter, «*Hf for analytic gifts. Hazlitt’s criticism has enjoyed a sizeable reputation for more than a century but it is doubtful if it wiD bear exuuQafoa „, either count. For sensitivity, he possesses only a famffiarchitcaa/ajwfoff notions of
• romantic radical born a little too late; andsincc he never pursues
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analysis beyond a few phrases, we are not entitled to suppose that he was capable of it.”
Watson points to Hazlitt’s deficiency of reading which he himself admitted and which earned him the rebuke of Leslie Stephen : To claim to have learnt nothing from 1792 to 1830 is almost to write yourself down as hopelessly impenetrable.” Much is made of Hazlitt’s criticism of Shakespeare (particularly his characters); but, as Watson says, ”he commits the elementary offence of detaching figures from their contexts, as Schlegel and Coleridge rarely do.” Much is also made of Hazlitt’s so-called ”gusto” and his ”nervous,” ”vivid” and ”copious” style. But this is what Watson has to say: ”And yet, when all is said, what are the merits of it all beyond a few telling phrases ? Hazlitt’s language has at times a certain splendour, but a splendour flyblown and empty of significance, like a schoolboy in a hurry with his homework anxious to impress a master with a taste for rhetoric. His language abuses meaning… Hazlitt, as usual, is not saying anything, he is simply making a noise to suggest to us that he is, or has been, excited about something..^ is the father of our Sunday journalism… His criticism is void of scholarship even in the most elementary sense-Unless one looks to criticism for a few portable phrases-such phrases as those concerning Dryden’s ’magnanimity of abuse,’ or Scott’s ’pleasing superficiality’ as a poet-Hazlitt is not even of pass quality as a critic of English.”
De Quincey :-
De Quincey’s criticism is more perceptive and much less ”airy* than Hazlitt’s. In spite of its sporadic and fragmentary nature it is interesting as the embodiment of the reactions of a sensitive and responsive mind. He has his faults. Waston observes : ”His faults are not the faults of the doctrinaire, but simply those of a good man in a hurry, anxious to be fair, remarkably judicious, but too eager for his monthly cheque to be careful of fact and detail.” De Quincey excels in the analysis of his own emotional reactions, but unlike Hazlitt’s his reactions grow out of a depth of reading. ”On the Knocking of the Gate in Macbeth” is the most penetrating attempt of its kind.
De Quincey’s perverse criticism of Keats, however, is in rank bad taste. Let us conclude with Watson’s words: There is an underlying austerity in De Quincey’s criticism (notwithstanding the gorgeous exuberance of his prose), a faculty for reasoning at length of which Wordsworth and Hazlitt were utterly innocent, and a conscientious determinadon to get the right answer which Hazlitt did not share at all.”