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Toward a Theory of Romanticism

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 December 2020

Morse Peckham
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Can We Hope for a theory of romanticism? The answer, I believe, is, Yes. But before proceeding further, I must make quite clear what it is that I propose to discuss.

Type
Editorial
Information
PMLA , Volume 66 , Issue 2 , March 1951 , pp. 5 - 23
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1951

References

1 Romanticism and the Modern Ego (New York, 1943).

2 “Romanticism: Definition of a Period”, Magazine of Art, xiii (Nov. 1949), 243.

3 PMLA, xxxix, 229–253; republished in his Essays in the History of Ideas (Baltimore, 1948).

4 JEI, ii, 237–278.

5 Wellek's confusion, or apparent confusion, lies in his implication that the “Romanticisms” Lovejoy discussed in 1924 are the same as the “romantic ideas” which in 1941 he called “heterogeneous, logically independent, and sometimes essentially antithetic to one another in their implications.” As I read the 1941 article, I interpret the latter as these three: organicism, dynamism, and diversitarianism. (See below, Section ii of this paper.) These are not the “Romanticisms” of 1924. (See the first paragraph of Wellek's article, “The Concept of ‘Romanticism’ in Literary History”, CL, i, 1.)

6 See n. 12, below.

7 I am alarmed at finding myself in disagreement with Lovejoy. Although I think his three ideas are not heterogeneous, but homogeneous or at least derived from a common root-metaphor, the possibility that they really are heterogeneous does not deprive them in the least of their value in understanding romanticism, nor does their possible heterogeneity have any effect on my proposal which follows.

8 An extremely interesting parallel, although later in time than the period I am immediately concerned with, is Wiener's demonstration that American pragmatism came out of the union of Mill's diversitarian and dynamic dialectic with Darwin's theory of evolution. See Philip P. Wiener, Evolution and the Founders of Pragmatism (Cambridge, U. S., 1949).

9 Wellek, for instance, says that Byron “does not share the romantic conception of imagination”, or does so “only fitfully.” He quotes Childe Harold, Canto in, written and published in 1816, when Byron was temporarily under Wordsworth's influence through Shelley. Byron's romantic view of nature as an organism with which man is unified organically by the imagination is equally fitful and limited to the period of Shelleyan influence. Wellek's suggestion that Byron is a symbolist, depending as it does on Wilson Knight's The Burning Oracle, is not very convincing. Knight strikes me as a weak reed to lean upon, and Wellek himself calls Knight “extravagant”, certainly an understatement. In short, I think Wellek's three categories of romanticism are useless, or only very rarely useful, when they are applied to Byron. So are Lovejoy's three romantic ideas; for the same reasons, of course. (See Wellek's second article, CL, I, 165 and 168.) To be sure, Byron uses symbols; but he uses them compulsively, as everyone else does, not as a conscious principle of literary organization and creation.

10 In what follows I shall offer an interpretation of The Ancient Mariner which I worked out some years ago, but which is substantially that developed from different points of view by Stallknecht, Maud Bodkin, and various other critics. I shall also suggest that all three works are about the same subjective experience. Stallknecht, so far as I know, is the only commentator who has pointed out—in his Strange Seas of Thought—that The Prelude and The Ancient Mariner are about the same thing; and so far as I know, no one has suggested that Sartor Resartus is concerned with the same subject.

11 See, for example, n. 9, above.

12 This is perhaps the place to insert a word about pre-romanticism, a term which I would wholly abandon. Apparently it arose in the first place from a naive application of Darwinian evolution to literary history. If the great romantics liked nature, any eighteenth-century enjoyment or praise of nature became pre-romanticism, in spite of the Horatian tradition of neo-classicism. If the romanticists liked emotion, any praise of emotion in the eighteenth century was pre-romantic, as if any age, including “The Age of Reason”, could be without emotional expression. In their youth Wordsworth and Coleridge were sentimentalists; therefore sentimentalism is romantic. And so on. James R. Foster, in his recent History of the Pre-Romantic Novel in England (New York: MLA, 1949), has shown that sensibility was the emotional expression of Deism, just as Lovejoy has demonstrated in various books and articles that Deism and Neo-Classicism were parallel. If it seems odd that sentimentalism, “cosmic Toryism”, and Deism are all expressions of the same basic attitudes, it must be remembered that the eighteenth century was the period when the mechanistic and static theodicy broke down from its own inconsistencies. Romanticism did not destroy its predecessor. It came into existence to fill a void. As an example of the difficulties eighteenth-century figures experienced in trying to hold their world together, consider the problem of understanding how Pope's Essay on Man could possibly be the foundation for his satires. Yet he was working on both at the same time and apparently thought the Essay gave him exactly the foundation and justification for satire that he needed. But if whatever is, is right, why is it wrong that there should be such people and such behavior as Pope satirizes in the Moral Essays, the imitated and original satires, and The Dunciad? It is the old problem of accounting for evil in a world created by a perfect, omnipotent, and benevolent deity. I would recommend the total abandonment of the term “pre-romantic”, and the substitution for it of some term such as “neo-classic disintegration.” For instance, to refer to Wellek once more, on the first page of his second article he has this to say: “There was the ‘Storm and Stress’ movement in the seventies which exactly parallels what today is elsewhere called ‘pre-romanticism.‘ ” In a widely used anthology, The Literature of England, by G. B. Woods, H. A. Watt, and G. K. Anderson, first published in 1936, the section called “The Approach to Romanticism” includes Thomson, Gray, Collins, Cowper, Burns, and Blake; and in Ernest Bernbaum's Guide through the Romantic Movement, another widely known and used work (I refer to the first edition, published in 1930), the “Pre-Romantic Movement” includes the following, among others: Shaftesbury, Winchilsea, Dyer, Thomson, Richardson, Young, Blair, Akenside, Collins, the Wartons, Hartley, Gray, Goldsmith, MacKenzie, Burns, Darwin, Blake, Godwin, and Radcliffe. Some of these are “Storm and Stress”; others are quite plainly not. To lump all of them together, as a great many teachers and writers do, is to obliterate many highly important distinctions. To my mind, for some individuals neo-classicism disintegrated; thereupon what I call “negative romanticism”, of which Storm and Stress is a very important expression, for some individuals ensued. Then some individuals, initially a very few, moved into the attitudes which I call “positive romanticism.” As it is now used, “pre-romanticism” confuses the first two of these three stages, just as “romanticism” as it is now generally used confuses the second two and often all three.

13 Raven is both biologist and theologian. See his Science, Religion, and the Future (Cambridge and N. Y., 1943).

14 The romantic metaphysic does not necessarily involve optimism. That is, although the world is growing in a better direction, the sum of evil may still outweigh the sum of good. Nor does it necessarily involve progressivism. That is, the development from the simple to the complex may mean development towards the better, or it may mean development towards the worse, or it may simply mean development without either improvement or de-generation. However, in the early part of the nineteenth century and generally since then, it usually implies both optimism and progressivism. There have been exceptions, however, of whom Eduard von Hartmann is one of the most thoroughgoing, both in his pessimism and in his positive romanticism. It must be noted that he has a technique of acceptance in the sense that he discerns cosmic order and meaning, though he doesn't like it.