Romanticism

Sibaprasad Dutta M.A.(English), ACIB (London)

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A.O.Lovejoy once observed that the word ‘romantic’ had come to mean so
many things that, by itself, it meant nothing at all. It is word at once
indispensable and useless. The variety of its actual and possible meanings
and connotations reflect the complexity and multiplicity of European
romanticism. In The Decline and Fall of the Romantic Ideal (1948)
F.L.Lucas counted 11396 definitions of ‘romanticism’. In Classic,
Romantic and Modern (1961), Barzun cites examples of synonymous
usage for romantic, which show that it is perhaps the most remarkable
example of a term, which can mean so many things according to personal
and individual needs. He gives ‘synonyms’ of romantic: attractive,
bombastic, conservative, emotional, exuberant, fanciful, formless, futile,
heroic, irrational, materialistic, mysterious, Nordic, ornamental, realistic,
stupid, unreal, and unselfish. To which one might add: adventurous,
daring, extraordinary, gallant, melodramatic, passionate and wild. In
England, the romantic period starts from 1798, the year in which Lyrical
Ballads by Wordsworth and Coleridge was published. According to some
critics the Romantic Age started in 1789, the year of French Revolution
with it call for liberty, fraternity and equality.

Romanticism brought in a new note in the field of English literature

different from neo-classicism. The period in English literature
covers the time from 1798 to 1832, the year in which Reforms
Bill was passed and Sir Walter Scott and Goethe died. The major
British writers in this period, apart from Coleridge, Wordsworth and Scott,
were Byron, Shelley, Keats, Jane Austen, Hazlitt and de Quincey. Abroad,
the movement was widely embracing: Goethe, Schlegel, Wackenroder,
Tieck, Schelling, Novalis, and Holderman in Germany; Chateubriand and
Madame de Stael in France; Leopardi, Manzoni and Foscolo in Italy;
Espronceda in Spain; Slowacki in Poland; Pushkin and Lermontov in
Russia; Petofi in Hungary; Oehenschlager in Denmark.

Many hold to the theory that it was in Britain that the Romantic Movement
really started. At any rate, quite early in the 18 th c. one can discern a
definite shift in sensibility and feeling, particularly in relation to the
natural order and Nature. This, of course, is hindsight. When we read
Keats, Coleridge and Wordsworth, for instance, we gradually become
aware that many their sentiments and responses are foreshadowed by what
has been described as a ‘pre-romantic’ sensibility. One should add that the
Gothic novel and a considerable revival of Shakespeare’s plays round about
the middle of the 18th c. also contributed to the movement subsequently
known as ‘romantic’.

Other aspects of romanticism in the 18th c. are : (a) an increasing interest in

Nature, and in the natural, primitive and uncivilised way of life; (b) a
growing interest in scenery, especially its more untamed and disorderly
manifestations; (c) an association of human moods with the ‘moods’ of
Nature – and thus a subjective feeling for it and interpretation of it; (d) a
considerable emphasis on natural religion; (e) emphasis on the need for
spontaneity in thought and action and in the expression of thought; (f)
increasing importance attached natural genius and the power of
imagination; (g) a tendency to exalt the individual and his needs and
emphasis on the need for a freer and more personal expression; (h) the cult
of Noble Savage.

The concept or title the noble savage which connotes the exemplar
(example, archetype, paradigm, pattern, standard, prototype) of primitive
goodness, dignity and nobility uncorrupted the evil effects of civilization.
The origins of the idea of the noble savage are obscure, but one may
suppose that they have to deal with the belief that in a primitive and ‘free’
state there existed innocent, prototypal human beings like Milton’s Adam
and Eve in Eden:

Two of far nobler shape, erect and tall,

Godlike erect, with native honour clad
In naked majesty seemed lords of all,
And worthy seemed, for their looks divine
The image of their glorious maker shone,
Truth, wisdom, sanctitude severe and pure.
(Paradise Lost, IV, 288)

We find Montaigne touching upon the idea of noble savage in his essay
Of Cannibals (1580), but it is not until well on the 17 th c. that it becomes
prominent. Dryden handsomely embodies the concept in a resonant triplet
in his heroic play The Conquest of Granada (1670):

I am as free as nature first made man,

Ere the base laws of servitude began,
When wild in woods the noble savage ran.

The idea is especially noticeable in Mrs Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko: or,

The History of the Royal Slave (c. 1688). The eponymous hero of this
‘romance’ is educated as well as a noble savage who has learnt English and
French. He is virtuous, young, beautiful, brave and a fine warrior; in short,
‘ the fair rose I’ the state’ of his native Africa. Mrs Behn dwelt upon
primitive innocence and deplored the effects of civilization and man’s
inventions. She foreshadowed the ‘return to nature’ philosophy and
doctrine, which Rousseau was to elaborate seventy years later in Emile
(1762). ‘Everything is well when it comes fresh from the hands of the
Maker’, wrote Rousseau, ‘everything degenerates in the hands of Man.’
Chateaubrand also exploited the noble-savage idea, and it proved a
particularly attractive concept to many writers in the late 18 th c. and during
the Romantic period. It was a part of the reaction against the growth of
industrialism, materialism and capitalism.

In all these Rousseau was a major figure in the 18 th c. and his influence in
the pre-romantic period was immense; especially through the following
works: Discours sur l’origine de l’inegalite parmi les hommes (1755), Du
contrat social (1762); Reveries du promeneur solitaire (1778); Les
Confessions (published after his death in 1781 and 1788), La Nouvelle
Heliose.

In Britain, romanticism was much more diffused and never really

associated with a movement, but then literary movements have been rare
in Britain. There was no British romantic campaign and the literary and
Cultural Revolution was much more gradual and informal affair than on
the continent. The main figures associated with it are primarily Coleridge,
Wordsworth, Keats, Shelley, Byron and Sir Walter Scott. The political and
social beliefs of Wordsworth, Coleridge and Shelley were quite often
expressed in their poems as well as in their prose works.

Partly because of the Revolution and partly because of the

French devotion to classicism and neoclassicism, the Romantic
Movement came considerably later to France. There the works
of Lamartine, Victor Hugo and de Vigny were the main influence
to start with; later came de Musset and Dumas.

As to the long-term after-effects of romanticism, there is scarcely more

agreement about these than there has been about what it actually was.
Greatly to simplify two opposite points of view – there are those who in
general support Goethe’s later attitude that it was a sickness of and a
disorganizing irruption (sudden and forcible incursion) of subjectivism;
others who hold that it was a kind of renaissance, a rediscovery, a wholly
beneficial upheaval, and a much needed rejection of defunct standards and
beliefs which resulted in a creative freedom of mind and spirit. No doubt
the truth, as usual, lies somewhere in between; yet only attainable in the
ideal reconciliation of opposites.

01.The romantic attitude favoured innovation over traditionalism in the

materials, forms and styles of literature. Wordsworth’s preface to the
second edition of Lyrical Ballads in 1800 was considered a poetic
manifesto in favour of a revolutionary attitude to literature. The elevated
style of the preceding age with uncommon diction and upper-class subjects
was rejected, and ordinary subjects sifted from ordinary life and the
ordinary tongue replaced it. To Wordsworth, a poet was a man speaking to
men. This feature of simple, commonplace diction is amply found in
Wordsworth and in no less measure in Keats, Byron, Blake and Shelley.
Wordsworth’s Lucy poems are the brightest examples of this mode of
poetic expression.

02. In his preface to the Lyrical Ballads, Wordsworth described poetry as

“the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings (that) takes its origin in
emotions recollected in tranquillity.” According to this view, poetry is not
primarily a mirror of men in action, but on the contrary, its essential
ingredient is the poet’ own feelings in the process of composition. Keats
has beautifully clarified the spontaneity. “ If poetry”, says Keats, comes not
as naturally as the leaves to a tree, it had better not come at all.” This
feature is the distinctive mark of romantic poetry that remains far-off from
intellectual exercise or erudition.

03.To a remarkable degree, external nature – the landscape, together with

its flora and fauna – became a subject of poetry, and was described with an
accuracy and sensuous nuance (tinge, touch) unprecedented in earlier
writers. Hence, the age is termed as “Return to Nature” by Albert. But we
must be cautious that it would be a mistake to call the poets as ‘nature
poets’, for while nature was profusely dealt with by the poets of the age,
man was also the subject of the poets – not the aristocratic man, the
subject of neoclassical poetry, but the man living as a part of nature.
Nature was not attractive to the poets for its external beauty, but worked as
a stimulus to human thinking, and often reflected the glory of God. To
consider Nature as manifestation of God and man as embodying
omnipresent God dwelling in the hearts of all beings and all objects
constituted mysticism, which forms an essential element of romanticism.

04. Neo-classical poetry was about other people, but much of romantic
poetry dealt with the poets themselves. The poems may not be
autobiographical, but they represented the actual thoughts, feelings and
emotions of the poet. Man not as a part of an organised society, but man as
an individual was the concern of the poets.

05. What seemed to a number of political liberals the infinite social

promise of French revolution in the early 1790s, prompted the writers of
the early Romantic period to feel that there was before the mankind the
possibility of a new social order based equality. They felt spurred and their
writings were surcharged with the thought that the French revolution had
signalled the birth of a new era.
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