Halleck's New English Literature Part 40

CHANGE IN LITERARY STANDARDS: ROMANTICISM

What is Romanticism?--In order to comprehend the dominating spirit of the next age, it is important to understand the meaning of the romantic movement. Between 1740 and 1780 certain romantic influences were at work in opposition to the teaching of the great cla.s.sical writer, Dr. Samuel Johnson, who was almost the literary dictator of the age.

The best short definition of romanticism is that of Victor Hugo, who calls it "liberalism in literature." This has the merit of covering all kinds of romantic movements. "Liberalism" here means toleration of departures from fixed standards, such as the cla.s.sical couplet and didactic and satiric subjects. Romanticism is characterized by less regard for form than for matter, by a return to nature, and by encouragement of deep emotion. Romanticism says: "Be liberal enough not to sneer at authors when they discard narrow rules. Welcome a change and see if variety and feeling will not add more interest to literature."

In this period and the far more glorious one that followed, romanticism made its influence felt for the better in four different ways. An understanding of each of these will make us more intelligent critics.

In the first place, the romantic spirit is opposed to the prosaic. The romantic yearns for the light that never was on sea or land and longs to attain the unfulfilled ambitions of the soul, even when these in full measure are not possible. Sometimes these ambitions are so unrelated to the possible that the romantic has in certain usage become synonymous with the impractical or the absurd; but this is not its meaning in literature. The romantic may not always be "of imagination all compact," but it has a tendency in that direction. To the romanticists a reality of the imagination is as satisfying as a reality of the prosaic reason; hence, unlike the cla.s.sicists, the romanticists can enjoy _The Tempest_ and _A Midsummer Night's Dream_.

The imagination is the only power that can grasp the unseen. Any movements that stimulate imaginative activity must give the individual more points of contact with the part of the world that does not obtrude itself on the physical senses, and especially with many facts of existence that cold intellectual activity can never comprehend.

Hence, romanticism leads to greater breadth of view.

In the second place, the romantic is the opposite of the hackneyed.

Hence, too much repet.i.tion may take away a necessary quality from what was once considered romantic. The epithets "ivory" and "raven," when applied to "brow" and to "tresses," respectively, were at first romantic; but much repet.i.tion has deprived them of this quality. If an age is to be considered romantic, it must look at things from a point of view somewhat different from that of the age immediately preceding.

This change may be either in the character of the thought or in the manner of its presentation, or in both. An example of the formal element of change which appeared, consists in the subst.i.tution of blank verse and the Spenserian stanza for the cla.s.sical couplets of the French school. In the next age, we shall find that the subject matter is no longer chiefly of the satiric or the didactic type.

In the third place, the highest type of romanticism encourages each author to express himself in an individual way, to color the world according to his own moods. This individual element often appears in the ideals that we fas.h.i.+on and in our characteristic conceptions of the spiritual significance of the world and its deepest realities. Two writers of this period by investing nature with a spirit of melancholy ill.u.s.trate one of the many ways in which romantic thought seeks individuality of expression.

In the fourth place, the romantic movement encouraged the portrayal of broader experiences and especially the expression of deeper feeling.

The mid-eighteenth century novels of Richardson and Fielding were strong agencies in this direction; and they were followed in the next age by the even more intense appeal of the great romantic poets to those thoughts and feelings that lie too deep for tears.

The cla.s.sic school shunned as vulgar all exhibitions of enthusiasm and strong emotion, such as the love of Juliet and the jealousy of Oth.e.l.lo; but the romanticists, knowing that the feelings had as much value and power as the intellect, encouraged their expression.

Sometimes this tendency was carried to an extreme, both in fiction and in the sentimental drama; but it was necessary for romanticism to call attention to the fact that great literature cannot neglect the world of feeling.

Early Romantic Influences.--The reader and imitators of the great romantic poet, Edmund Spenser, were growing in number. Previous to 1750, there was only one eighteenth-century edition of Spenser's works published in England. In 1758 three editions of the _Faerie Queene_ appeared and charmed readers with the romantic enchantment of bowers, streams, dark forests, and adventures of heroic knights.

James Thomson (1700-1748), a Scotch poet, used the characteristic Spenserian form and subject matter for his romantic poem, _The Castle of Indolence_ (1748). He placed his castle in "Spenser land":--

"A pleasing land of drowsy-head it was, Of dreams that wave before the half-shut eye; And of gay castles in the clouds that pa.s.s, Forever flus.h.i.+ng round a summer sky."

The influence of Shakespeare increased. In 1741 the great actor David Garrick captivated London by his presentation of Shakespeare's plays.

Milton's poetry, especially his _Il Penseroso_, with its individual expression of melancholy, its studious spirit, "commercing with the skies and bringing all Heaven before the eyes," left a strong impress on the romantic spirit of the age. The subject matter of his _Paradise Lost_ satisfied the romantic requirement for strangeness and strong feeling. In the form of his verse, James Thomson shows the influence of Milton as well as of Spencer. Thomson's greatest achievement is _The Seasons_ (1730), a romantic poem, written in Miltonic blank verse. He takes us where--

"The hawthorn whitens; and the juicy groves Put forth their buds."

He was one of the earliest poets to place Nature in the foreground, to make her the chief actor. He reverses what had been the usual poetic att.i.tude and makes his lovers, shepherds, and harvesters serve largely as a background for the reflection of her moods instead of their own.

The spring shower, the gusts sweeping over fields of corn, the sky saddened with the gathering storm of snow, are the very fabric of his verse. Unlike Wordsworth, Thomson had not sufficient genius to invest Nature with an intelligent, loving, companionable soul; but his pictures of her were sufficiently novel and attractive to cause such a cla.s.sicist and lover of the town as Dr. Samuel Johnson to say:--

"The reader of _The Seasons_ wonders that he never saw before what Thomson shows him, and that he never yet has felt what Thomson impresses."

Ossian and "The Castle of Otranto."--Two contemporary works proved a romantic influence out of all proportion to the worth of their subject matter.

Between 1760 and 1764 James Macpherson, a Highland schoolmaster, published a series of poems, which he claimed to have translated from an old ma.n.u.script, the work of Ossian, a Gaelic poet of the third century. This so-called translation in prose may have been forged either in whole or in part; but the weirdness, strange imagery, melancholy, and "other-world talk of ghosts riding on the tempest at nightfall," had a p.r.o.nounced effect on romantic literature.

[Ill.u.s.tration: HORACE WALPOLE.]

_The Castle of Otranto: A Gothic Romance_ (1765) by Horace Walpole (1717-1797) tells a story of a Gothic castle where mysterious labyrinths and trap doors lead to the strangest adventures. The term "Gothic" had been contemptuously applied to whatever was medieval or out of date, whether in architecture, literature, or any form of art.

The unusual improbabilities of this Gothic romance were welcomed by readers weary of commonplace works where nothing ever happens. The influence of _The Castle of Otranto_ was even felt across the Atlantic, by Charles Brockden Brown (1771-1810), the early American novelist. Some less p.r.o.nounced traces of such influence are discernible also in the work of Edgar Allan Poe and Nathaniel Hawthorne.

Mrs. Anne Radcliffe (1764-1823) was a successor of Walpole in the field of Gothic romance. Her stories, _The Romance of the Forest_ and _The Mysteries of Udolpho_, have their castle and their thrilling, unnatural episodes. Lack of portrayal of character and excess of supernatural incident were causing fiction to suffer severe deterioration.

Percy's Reliques and Translation of Mallet's Northern Antiquities.--In 1765 Thomas Percy (1729-1811) published _The Reliques of Ancient English Poetry_, an epoch-making work in the history of the romantic movement. The _Reliques_ is a collection of old English ballads and songs, many of which have a romantic story to tell. Scott drew inspiration from them, and Wordsworth acknowledged his indebtedness to their influence. So important was this collection that it has been called "the Bible of the Romantic Reformation."

In 1770 appeared Percy's translation of Mallet's _Northern Antiquities_. For the first time the English world was given an easily accessible volume which disclosed the Norse mythology in all its strength and weirdness. As cla.s.sical mythology had become hackneyed, poets like Gray rejoiced that there was a new fountain to which they could turn. Thor and his invincible hammer, the Frost Giants, Bifrost or the Rainbow Bridge, Odin, the Valkyries, Valhal, the sad story of Baldur, and the Twilight of the G.o.ds, have appealed strongly to a race which takes pride in its own mythology, to a race which today loves to hear Wagner's translation of these myths into the music of _Die Walkure, Siegfried_, and _Gotterdammerung_.

Thomas Chatterton, 1772-1770.--This Bristol boy was early in his teens impressed with Percy's _Reliques_ and with the fact that Macpherson's claim to having discovered _Ossian_ in old ma.n.u.scripts had made him famous. Chatterton spent much time in the interesting old church of St.

Mary Redcliffe, of which his ancestors had been s.e.xtons for several generations. He studied the ma.n.u.scripts in an old chest and began to write a series of poems, which he claimed to have discovered among the parchments left by Thomas Rowley, a fifteenth-century monk.

Chatterton was unsuccessful in finding a publisher, and he determined to go to London, where he thought that, like other authors, he could live by his pen. In April, 1770, at the age of seventeen, he left Bristol for London, where he took poison in August of the same year to escape a slower death by starvation.

His romantic poetry and pathetic end appealed to all the great poets.

Wordsworth spoke of him as "the marvelous boy"; Coleridge called him "young-eyed Poesy"; Sh.e.l.ley honored him in _Adonais_; and Keats inscribed _Endymion_ to his memory. Traces of his influence may be found in Coleridge and Keats.

The greatest charm of Chatterton's verse appears in unusual epithets and unexpected poetic turns, such, for instance, as may be noted in these lines from his best "Rowley" poem, _Aella, a Tragycal Enterlude_:--

"Sweet his tongue as the throstle's note; Quick in dance as thought can be."

"Hark! the raven flaps his wing In the briar'd dell below; Hark! the death-owl loud doth sing, To the night-mares as they go."

While Chatterton did not leave enough verse of surpa.s.sing merit to rank him as a great poet, his work nevertheless ent.i.tles him to be chosen from among all his boyish peers to receive the laurel wreath for song.

The Literature of Melancholy.--The choice of subjects in which the emotion of melancholy was given full sway shows one direction taken by the romantic movement. Here, the influence of Milton's _Il Penseroso_ can often be traced. The exquisite _Ode to Evening_, by William Collins (1721-1759), shows the love for nature's solitudes where this emotion may be nursed. Lines like these:--

"...be mine the hut, That, from the mountain's side, Views wilds and swelling floods, And hamlets brown, and dim-discovered spires; And hears their simple bell; and marks o'er all Thy dewy fingers draw The gradual dusky veil,"

caused Swinburne to say: "Corot on canvas might have signed his _Ode to Evening_."

[Ill.u.s.tration: THOMAS GRAY.]

The high-water mark of the poetry of melancholy of this period was reached in Thomas Gray's (1716-1771) _Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard_ (1751). The poet with great art selected those natural phenomena which cast additional gloom upon the scene. We may notice in the very first stanza that the images were chosen with this end in view:--

"The curfew tolls the knell of parting day, The lowing herd winds slowly o'er the lea, The plowman homeward plods his weary way, And leaves the world to darkness and to me"

Then we listen to the droning flight of the beetle, to the drowsy tinklings from a distant fold, to the moping owl in an ivy-mantled tower. Each natural object, either directly or by contrast, reflects the mind of man. Nature serves as a background for the display of emotion.

Gosse says in his _Life of Gray_: "The _Elegy_ has exercised an influence on all the poetry of Europe, from Denmark to Italy, from France to Russia. With the exception of certain works of Byron and Shakespeare, no English poem has been so widely admired and imitated abroad."

[Ill.u.s.tration: STOKE POGES CHURCHYARD (SCENE OF GRAY'S ELEGY).]

The Conflict between Romanticism and Cla.s.sicism.--The influences of this period were not entirely in the direction of romanticism. Samuel Johnson, the literary dictator of the age, was unsparing in his condemnation of the movement. The weight of his opinion kept many romantic tendencies in check. Even authors like Gray were afraid to adopt the new creed in its entirety. In one stanza of his _Hymn to Adversity_ we find four capitalized abstractions, after the manner of the cla.s.sical school: Folly, Noise, Laughter, Prosperity; and the following two lay figures, little better than abstractions:--

"The summer Friend, the flattering Foe."

These abstractions have little warmth or human interest. After Gray had studied the Norse mythology, we find him using such strong expressions as "iron-sleet of arrowy shower." Collins's ode on _The Pa.s.sions_ contains seventeen personified abstractions, from "pale Melancholy" to "brown Exercise."

The conflict between these two schools continues; and many people still think that any poetry which shows polished regularity must be excellent. To prove this statement, we have only to turn to the magazines and glance at the current poetry, which often consists of words rather artificially strung together without the soul of feeling or of thought.