Romanticism
The term Romanticism describes a profound change of
sensibility - of ways of thought
and feeling - that took place in
Again, ‘revolution’ is a key word. Romanticism in part drew its impetus from the
political revolutions in
Therefore, although the ideological
foundations of Romanticism may
be confused - and indeed became
increasingly contradictory – certain concepts were at its core and
found their most significant
expression in a new kind
of literature that focused on concepts
such as:
·
liberty
(the equivalent at a personal
level of the political
revolutions taking place in
·
the
primacy of authentic individual
experience (the ‘self)
·
an emphasis on intense feeling (including terror)
·
the
creative imagination (for Blake,
the God-like power in humanity)
·
the
Importance of nature (as a source
of vital power and as a moral guide)
Developments in a number of fields and
some influential texts should be noted
in the formation of these ideas.
Literature
The literature of Romanticism comprised a reaction against the
so-called ‘Augustan’ writers earlier in
the eighteenth century, such as Alexander Pope, Jonathan Swift and
Samuel Johnson, whose themes and
style were shaped by the Enlightenment.
A famous poem by Samuel Johnson
starts like this:
Let observation with extensive view,
Survey mankind from
Remark each anxious toil, each eager strife.
And watch the busy scenes of crowded life;
Then say how hope and fear, desire and hate,
O’erspread with snares the clouded maze of
fate,
Where wav’ring man, betray’d
by vent’rous pride,
To tread the dreary paths without a guide;
As treach’rous phantoms in the mist delude,
Shuns fancied ills, or chases airy
good.
How rarely reason guides the
stubborn choice,
Rules the bold hand, or prompts
the suppliant voice,
How nations sink, by darling schemes oppress’d,
When vengeance listens to the fools
request.
The Vanity of Human Wishes (1749)
It is worthwhile considering the ways in which, writing like
this differs from that of the Romantics and of William Blake in
particular. Adopting a tone of
lofty detachment and moral
righteousness, Johnson sets out
to reveal the varieties of human folly
when pride and ambition
triumph over reason, restraint
and moderation ‘How rarely reason guides the stubborn choice.’ This was characteristic of the Augustans.
Their concern was with the behaviour
of men and women in society (‘the busy
scenes of crowded life’) and the rules of
moral conduct. Consequently satire
was their favourite mode - a literary means of exposing and attacking ‘vetu’rous
pride’ and human egotism.
The agenda of the Romantic writers was to be quite
different. Instead of reason, they celebrated emotion. Indeed, they
wished to put mystery and the
irrational, back into a universe they felt to have been devalued by a
mechanistic Newtonian world view. Instead of rules, they celebrated freedom in
life and art. Where the Augustans put the emphasis on humans as social beings,
the Romantics celebrated the
individual. For the Augustans, nature was human nature (seen largely in
urban settings) whereas for the
Romantics it denoted the countryside as a source of inspiration and moral
guidance (although this is probably less true of Blake than, say, William
Wordsworth). For the Augustans, the imagination - which for Blake was the
God-like power in human beings
and the fount of wisdom and insight – was a source of delusion (the ‘treach’rous phantoms’ in Johnson’s poem). Unlike the
Romantics, therefore, self-expression and the exploration of new areas of
experience were not priorities for these writers. On the contrary, they concentrated
an expressing what they saw as timeless
and universal truths - ‘What oft was thought, but ne’er so well expressed’ as Pope put it in An Essay on Man.
In the light of Pope’s
remark, it is clear that the Augustans placed great emphasis on the craftsmanship
of the poet. The skill of the writer lay in the successful manipulation of
existing poetic forms (usually the heroic couplet, as In The Vanity of Human Wishes) to communicate the theme. This explains the vogue for imitation by
the Augustan writers of past
masters of the art (The Vanity of
Human Wishes is an
imitation of the Tenth Satire
of the Roman writer Juvenal) The
pleasure for a sophisticated
reader derived from the perception
of how the writer had exploited figurative
language and the couplet form to
‘dress up’ a thought. By contrast,
the Romantics were much more
experimental in finding ways of
expressing their authentic feelings and developed
the notion of ‘organic form.’ By this they meant that the form of the
poem was to be dictated by the emotion, the subject and treatment, and not by
pre-existing conventions. This accounts for Blake’s deliberately simple, even child-like, style in Songs of Innocence - and
it is also a conscious reaction to writing like that of Johnson.
Thus, the Romantic writers switched attention from subject, form and audience,
which were uppermost for the Augustans, to the poet’s own mind, feelings
and ideas. Inspiration and
genius were valued above decorum and
the poet assumed the role of
prophet and visionary.
This is especially true of William Blake. But it would be mistake to assume that
he appeared out of the blue. From the mid-eighteenth
century the emergence of the Romantic sensibility, which his work so
confidently expressed was evinced by
the appearance of new themes and emphases in both poetry and fiction.
Themes such as:
·
Descriptions
of natural scenes and meditative style; nature as moral teaches
·
Medieval
past, the ballad form and the figure of the hero
·
The
cult of the primitive
·
The
inspired poet as social prophet / visionary in a sublime and savage landscape
·
Solitary
meditations on the human condition
·
Foregrounding
of those on the margins of society – the rural poor, children, servants, criminals, women
·
Gothic
horror, the terrors of the imagination and
the supernatural, ‘dreams and fairy
tales
The coming of age of this new literary movement was
confirmed by the publication
of Blake’s Songs of Innocence
and Experience in 1794
and Wordsworth and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads in 1797-8. In fiction, the vogue for the Gothic novel reached its
height with Ann Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794)
and M. C. Lewis’ The Meek (1796).
Politics
The two most influential writers here are Edmund Burke (1729-97) and Thomas Paine (1737 - 1809) whose writings highlight
the fundamental ideological divisions of the period and the contradictions at the heart of Romanticism itself.
Edmund Burke: Reflections
on the Revolution in
This was an assault
on the Ideas which had inspired
the Revolution. Burke rejected the idea
that reason could bring about a
complete break with the
past (i.e. the ‘end of history’) and thereby fashion an ideal society. He Considered
the notion of the perfectibility of man to be an illusion and argued that equality was unnatural
because he believed that property
and rank were fundamental to a
Christian kingdom. He said that the revolutionaries had lurched back into savagery undoing centuries of progress and development of civilization. His thinking was underpinned by fear of the mob. He lamented
the destruction of the ancien regime and
said that now ‘the age of chivalry is gone ... the glory
of
Thomas Paine: The Rights of Man
Part I (1791)
Paine was a republican who refuted Burke’s ideas. An Enlightenment thinker, he vigorously
asserted the power of reason and common sense to counter the injustice and
privilege perpetrated by aristocracy and monarchy. He argued that such hierarchical social organization was in itself
fraudulent, as men were created equal. Like Blake, who was a close friend, Paine wished to
emphasize the real miseries suffered by
ordinary people in the social structure defended by Burke. He was alerted by Blake to the government’s intention to
prosecute him for this
publication and he fled to
Philosophy
Jean-Jacques Rousseau : Discourses
(1710,1754). The Social Contract (1762)
Rousseau believed that
feelings were more important than reason in human affairs. Unlike the philosopher Thomas Hobbes, who
believed that human beings were naturally wicked, Rousseau argued that they were naturally good. He claimed that civilisation with its emphasis on property and
power, corrupted human beings, in contrast to earlier philosophers who had claimed the civilising influence of society. Rousseau promoted the idea
of the Noble Savage. He stressed
the importance of nature, which fostered natural
instincts, as opposed to book-learning. Once separated from nature, human
beings cease to be happy or
virtuous. His view of
the state of man in society is
summed up in the famous sentence
‘Man is born free, and everywhere
he is in chains’ (The Social
Contract). Rousseau did not
deny the need for government, but said that it should always reflect the will of
the people - a position endorsed
by the American Declaration of Independence.
He opposed tyrannical government and called for justice for the
underprivileged. Rousseau’s emphasis on freedom, the self, feelings, nature, and the primacy of childhood clearly
had an enormous influence on the Romantic
and revolutionary movement. However, Blake attacked him as an irreligious freethinker.
William Godwin: As. Essay Concerning Political Justice (1793)
In fact, Rousseau did
influence Blake, through Blake’s close friend
William Godwin who was himself a follower
of Rousseau. Godwin was a radical and idealist with an almost impossibly high conception
of the nobility of human beings and a
total Enlightenment faith in reason. He
attacked monarchy, aristocracy and social inequities of all kinds. Godwin believed that the rational human being was necessarily also benevolent and a lover of justice.
The evil in the world, he
thought, derived from property which promoted exploitation and inequality. Therefore, the abolition of property, together with law, government, institutions and even marriage, would lead to human and social perfection. But Godwin could not support revolutionary action to achieve these
ends as this would have involved the overthrow of reason. This explains why radicals as well as
conservatives criticized his text. Godwin
had a considerable impact on all the Romantic poets (especially Shelley). He also wrote a
powerful novel, Caleb Williams (1794),
which was both a vehicle for his ideas and an indictment of social oppression.
Religion
John Wesley (1703-91)
was the founder of Methodism, an
evangelical movement within the Church of England, which became a separate body
in 1795. Wesley’s ministry began about 1740 and was notable for his prodigious
energy. During his lifetime he preached some 40,000 sermons, many delivered in
the open air. Methodism stressed feeling as a route to God, and it is here that
it made its contribution to the emergent Romantic movement, by contrast with
the Augustans, for whom reason was the
way to God: ‘God said ‘Let Newton be!’ and all was light’ (Pope). The
singing of hymns (many of them
written of course by Wesley himself) by the
whole congregation was a new
practice and helped characterise the fervent Methodist spirit. It seems likely that the vigorous
uplifting rhythms of Wesley’s hymns
are echoed in some of Blake’s poems.
Wesley particularly attracted the working class but Methodism spoke also to many middle-class people who felt excluded from the Established
Church.
A footnote: utilitarianism and laissez-faire economics.
In making their assault on the old hegemony of aristocracy
and Established Church the commercial and professional middle classes enlisted powerful new
theories devised by their intellectual allies in the light of the emerging social and economic conditions. These
theories too were the product of Enlightenment thinking and were to help shape the ideologies of the emerging urban, industrial
Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832) is the father-figure of utilitarianism. Bentham, a lawyer, set out to rationalize society’s business arrangements. Starting from
the assumption that human beings
are fundamentally selfish. He proposed
the idea of ‘the greatest happiness of the greatest number’ as
the touchstone for social policy. He argued that less law
meant more liberty, and that if the state left people alone, they would, by the pursuit of their own interests, automatically
promote the greatest happiness of the greatest number. Initially, then, the
theory was strongly non-interventionist but in the long run it led
to far-reaching legal, social, political
and economic reform later in the nineteenth century. In the period when
Blake was writing, it was the
source of much hardship and resentment.
The darker aide to this theory is perhaps confirmed by the ideas of Thomas Malthus (1766-1834).
His Essay on the Principle of
Population (as it affects the future improvement
of society) (1798) provided
justification for a non interventionist
utilitarianism. He declared that population growth always outstrips the means
of subsistence, therefore governments should let poverty - and the disease and
starvation which inevitably
follows from it - take its natural course to reduce numbers in society.
Utilitarians embraced wholesale the economic
theories of Adam Smith
(1723-90). His The Wealth of
Nations (1776) endorsed tree
trade and competition in the market place and revolutionised the
economic theories of the day.