CHAPTER I

ROMANTICISM IN ENGLISH LITERATURE

The spirit of romance is as old as human language. There have been times when the current of romance was feeble, as in the ascendancy of Rome. There have been times when the frame of the world rested not on facts, but on wonders, when life was hardly counted by days, when the mace of barbarism, beating on the rock of Roman civilisation, called forth a spring of romance which still freshens all the literature of modern Europe. Literary history is a spiritual tide whose ebb and flow are the refluence and the resurgence of romance.

The term romance was first used to denote the vernacular language of France, as opposed to Latin. In later use it was extended to related forms of speech, such as Provençal and Spanish, until it became a collective name for the whole group of languages descended from Latin. Thus in Edward Brerewood's "Enquiries touching the Diversities of Languages and Religions through the chief parts of the world" (1614): "The Italian, French and Spanish, all which in a barbarous word have been called Romance, as you would say, Roman".

In England the word romance was first applied to a book in the fourteenth century. From denoting a composition in vernacular French, Spanish, and so forth, as contrasted with works in Latin, the meaning of the word narrowed down to signify a tale in verse or prose, embodying the adventures of some hero of chivalry. This meaning continued to be the only one in the Middle Ages and was,

of course, well-known in the eighteenth century. The old heroic romances were still quite popular in the age of Pope and afterwards. An interesting illustration of this is to be found in Thomas Warton's copy of Spenser's Works (1617), which is full of the most significant annotations. The copy is in the British Museum and is signed and dated "T. Warton 1744". The last page of Canto I, Book I, has the following footnote:

"Magicians, in Romances, are often feign'd to raise Personages on purpose to deceive. There is a fine Passage of this kind in the Seven Champions C. 8. P. 2. The Magician caused by his Art a spirit in the likeness of a Lady of a marvellous and fair Beauty to look through an iron gate, who seem'd to lean her fair face upon her white hand very pensively and distilled from her crystal Eyes great Abundance of Tears, etc., etc. Spenser here makes a beautifull use of that Expedient."

Bishop Percy, too, wrote of the old romances in the "Reliques of Ancient English Poetry" (Vol. iii, 1765):

"The old metrical Romances throw light on our old writers in prose."

The second outburst of the spirit of romance in the adolescence of English literature, the flamboyant age of Queen Elizabeth, applied the word in a new sense. It now denoted a fictitious narrative in prose of which the incidents are very remote from those of ordinary life. In the eighteenth century Samuel Johnson used it in this sense when he wrote:

"In romance, when the wide field of possibility lies open to invention, the incidents may easily be made more numerous." 1)

Since the beginning of the nineteenth century the adjective "romantic" has been contrasted with "classic"

1) The Idler, No. 84, 1759.

in England. Though useful and necessary, the terms are fraught with danger when applied to literature. They may give and frequently have given rise to confusion. They have been used to include so many different characteristics that, as soon as they are applied to men or books, it is quite certain that some of their connotations will not exactly apply to the author or work in question. But they are most unsatisfactory of all when applied to literary periods. It will not suffice to say that the eighteenth century was "classical" and the nineteenth "romantic". No period belongs exclusively to the one category or to the other. Indeed, it may be doubted whether any single author can be relegated wholly to one or other of these categories. Both elements persist at all times and in all places .The struggle for predominance between these opposing forces is everlasting in the human soul and in literature. In both the struggle is regulated by the spirit of the age, the spirit that rules both men and books. It is true to say Pope and Johnson were classic, Thomson and Goldsmith romantic. But this should not be taken in the sense that Thomson and Goldsmith are free from classic traits, - that the author of the "Epistle from Eloisa to Abelard" (1717) is never romantic and that the writer of "London" (1730) and "The Vanity of Human Wishes" (1749) has no emotional fervour. The very basis of these two poems is the impassioned discontent and unrest which are the essential mark of the romantic element in literature. It is true that Johnson tries to make his meaning as clear as possible, that he has sanity, that he is refined, that he writes neat, melodious verse; but each of these qualities is true of Shakespeare as well. Nor was there an impassable gulf between Pope and Thomson, or between Johnson and Goldsmith.

Yet a distinction between the terms classic and romantic is inevitable, since they are rooted in the human mind.

4

DISTINCTION INEVITABLE; DEFINITION IMPOSSIBLE

and represent powerful mental processes. But let us beware of taking "wide and wider sweeps". We apply the distinction that classic poets have a feeling for the value of form and that romantic poets care not for form, but content. Can these however be separated? Do we ever read a poem with attention to content alone? Or is classicism intellectual, romanticism emotional? Are these not equally and at the same time characteristics of all great poets? Do we not find both heart and head, both passion and intellect in all? Sincerity, indignation, satire, too, belong to all schools. They are not distinctive marks of romanticism or classicism. Is a romantic poet personal, a classic impersonal? But how should we fit Pope and Scott into this distinction? Pope certainly was nothing if not personal; while Scott had throughout life an unconquerable dislike of exhibiting his own feelings. If anybody, he was impersonal.

We cannot carry these criticisms to their conclusion, since a final and satisfactory definition is impossible. To define in literature is practically little more than to give a nickname. Only in the exact sciences can we have absolute definitions, because here the definition can be comprehensive. But literature is a living organism; books are as hard to be known as persons and any definition of a living organism must always be based on subjective impressions, on opinions and feelings. The poets of the modern romantic movement, which reached its height in Wordsworth, Coleridge, Scott, Byron, Shelley and Keats, were conscious of their own romanticism. They were sure of it, but they did not define it; and they were right.

However, when we approach the words classic and romantic from a historical standpoint, we are on safe ground. After we have seen when and how they were first used, how their connotations developed and were

HISTORICAL REVIEW; EARLY USE OF THE WORD "ROMANTIC" 5

finally contrasted, we shall perhaps be able to hazard an enumeration of some of the main characteristics of the "classic" and the "romantic".

The earliest known use of the adjective romantic appears to have been in 1659. Henry More, who belonged to the little band of Christian Platonists which was formed at Cambridge in the middle of the seventeenth century, used the term in "The Immortality of the Soul, so farre forth as it is demonstrable from the Knowledge of Nature and the Light of Reason" (1659). More says: "I speak especially of that Imagination which is most free, such as we use in Romantick Invention" 1).

Other early references prove that from the beginning the word signified: “Of the nature of romance, of a fabulous or fictitious character, fantastic, extravagant". But the modern, more aesthetic sense: "Invested with imaginative appeal, appealing to the imagination and feelings", is found at an early date, as the following references will show:

1666. Pepys' Diary, 13 June: "There happened this extraordinary case, One of the most romantique that ever I heard in my life, and could not have believed, but that I did see it; which was this: About a dozen able, lusty, proper men came to the coach-side with tears in their eyes, and one of them that spoke for the rest begun and says to Sir W. Coventry, "We are here a dozen of us that have long known and loved and served our dead commander, Sir Christopher Ming, and have now done the last office of laying him in the ground. We would be glad we had any other to offer after him, and in revenge of him. All we have is our lives; if you will please to get his Royal Highness to give us a fireship among us all, here is a dozen of us, out of all which choose 1) Vol. II. xi.