Lecture 11

The Romantic Age

Plan:

1. “Romanticism” as a period and a concept

2. The Industrial Revolution

3. William Wordsworth

4. Samuel Taylor Coleridge

ROMANTICISM" AS A PERIOD AND A CONCEPT

The beginning of the Romantic Age in English literature is usually set in 1798, the year in which William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge published a book of their poems called Lyrical Ballads. The Romantic Age traditionally ends in 1832, with the death of Sir Walter Scott and the passage of the First Reform Bill in parliament. Of course, these beginning and ending dates are not absolute. The literary concerns characteristic of Romanticism began to emerge early in the eighteenth century, and in altered form they extend through the Victorian era and into the twentieth century. We must also remember that Romanticism is a European, not just an English, development. In Germany, Romanticism established itself during the 1790's even more strongly than in England. In France, the great developments of Romantic literature and art were delayed for; time by the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars. Yet th( French Revolution itself was the most significant historical event о the Romantic period, and a Swiss-born writer and philosopher who spent most of his life in France, Jean Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778) was the most important eighteenth-century influence on later European Romanticism.

More will be said later about these various determinants of the Romantic Age. But before looking at the main features of this period, we had better think for a moment about the words Romantic and Romanticism. The names we apply to broad periods of literary and cultural history can often be misleading, and this is especially true of the "Romantic" Age and "Romanticism." The won romance originally referred to highly imaginative medieval tales о knightly adventure written in the French derivative of the originally Roman (or romance) language, Latin. (That these tales often in involved amorous encounters between a knight and his lady is partly responsible for the modern meanings of romance and romantic. When we speak of the "Romantic Age," we are using the won romantic in this older sense. We are referring indirectly to an interest in the charming, magical world of medieval "romance," am more generally to the rich imaginative activity displayed in the world, which is deeply characteristic of late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century writers. To avoid confusion, we should re member that "romance" as "freely imaginative idealizing fiction,' and not "romance" as "love between men and women," is the true basis for the terms "Romantic Age" and "Romanticism."

The chief characteristics of the Romantic Age are usually defined by contrast with those of the eighteenth century—the Age of Swift Pope, and Johnson. Eighteenth-century writers stressed reason and judgment; Romantic writers emphasized imagination and emotion Eighteenth-century writers were characteristically concerned with the general or universal in experience; Romantic writers were concerned with the particular. Eighteenth-century writers asserted the values of society as a whole; Romantic writers championed the value of the individual human being. Eighteenth-century writer; sought to follow and to substantiate authority and the rules derived from authority; Romantic writers strove for freedom. Eighteenth century writers took their primary inspiration from classical Greek and Roman authors; Romantic writers took a revitalized interest, a: we have already seen, in medieval subjects and settings. These contrasts provide a useful way of approaching the Romantic Age, in par because most Romantic writers saw themselves as reacting against the thought and literary practice of the preceding century. Such contrasts can help put us in touch with what William Hazlitt and othe Romantic writers called "the Spirit of the Age" —a shared sense of liberated energy and fresh departure similar in some respects to what we find in the Renaissance. Hazlitt spoke of "a time of prom­ise, a renewal of the world—and of letters." Percy Bysshe Shelley claimed in his Defence of Poetry that the literature of the age "has arisen as it were from a new birth."

We must be careful, of course, not to exaggerate the generalized con­trasts between the Romantic Age and the eighteenth century, or to take too literally the more exuberant and sweeping claims of Hazlitt and Shelley at their most confident. The early nineteenth century was indeed a period of enormous literary energy in England. The size of the reading public had increased rapidly during the eighteenth century. By the beginning of the nineteenth century, the number of readers who would buy Lord Byron's most recent book of poems, or Sir Walter Scott's latest novel, was much larger than ever before. Writers like Hazlitt and Coleridge gave public lectures that were attended by large audiences. Despite this trend, most Roman­tic writers felt that they were not understood or appreciated by their readers, that their values were not those accepted by English society as a whole. The Romantic Age is diverse and complex. To appreciate fully the achievements of this period, we need to examine the main political and social realities of these years, and to look more closely at the specific ideas and practices of writers who were far too indi­vidualistic ever to subordinate themselves to anything like a Ro­mantic "school" or "movement."