The Romance

Gillian Beer

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781315390147
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literatur
• Subtopic: Literaturkritik

First published in 1970, this work provides an overview of the Romance from the medieval period to the 20th century and tracks how the genre has changed with time, including its interaction with other forms of literature such as gothic novels, realism and science fiction. It explores a myriad of writers including Chaucer, Sidney, Tennyson, Shelley, Meredith and Keats and analyses key texts such as Don Quixote by Cervantes and Kubla Khan by Coleridge.

This book will be of interest to those studying Romantic literature.

1

History and Definition

SOME CHARACTERISTICS

Any history of the romance will in one sense be a record of decadence. The works now popularly called ‘romances’ are usually sub-literature, magazines like True Romances or lightweight commercial fiction deliberately written to flatter day dreams. Such ‘romances’ batten on the emotionally impoverished. Subliterary romances are not new. The circulating libraries provided a plentiful flow of wish-fulfilment literature in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and Richard Hoggart, in The Uses of Literacy (London, 1957), demonstrated the functions of such fiction in a working-class community earlier this century.

It would seem on the face of it that Chaucer had in mind a very different kind of work when in the sombre opening to The Book of the Duchess he describes himself lying awake, mysteriously grieving, and asks for ‘a romaunce’ ‘to rede, and drive the night away’:

For me thoughte it beter play

Then play either at ches or tables.

And in this bok were written fables

That clerkes had in olde tyme,

And other poets, put in rime

To rede, and for to be in minde,

While men loved the lawe of kinde.

This bok ne spak but of such thinges,

Of quenes lives, and of kinges,

And many other thinges smale.

Amonge al this I fond a tale

That me thoughte a wonder thing. (ll 50–61)

This passage characterizes very clearly some of the persisting qualities of the romance and of the relationship between romance and reader.

The tale the poet reads is in verse, re-telling a story written originally in a pre-Christian past when men loved the natural law (‘the lawe of kinde’). The figures in the book are aristocratic. He reads for entertainment and for escape from his grief (to ‘drive the night away’). ‘Amonge al this I fond a tale/That me thoughte a wonder thing’: the tale is sorrowful, harmonizing with his own grief and thus allaying it. Chaucer in fact took the ‘romance’ of Seys and Alcyone from Ovid’s Metamorphoses (xi, 410 ff) and the version he suggests he is reading is in Guillaume Machaut’s Dit de la Fontaine.

Romance invokes the past or the socially remote; here it is the pagan world of noble antiquity, a world already separate from that of the ‘clerkes’ who ‘in olde tyme’ had put in rhyme its stories – a world even more separate from Chaucer himself who approaches it through a double literary distance of translation and re-interpretation. Ovid was the great source book for courtly love. C. S. Lewis in The Allegory of Love points out the paradox that while Ovid’s Ars Amatoria was pretending to take seriously what his society felt to be a trivial matter (sexual love), the medieval writers took over his examples and treated them with true, almost religious, seriousness. The romance tends to use and re-use well-known stories whose familiarity reassures, and permits a subtly allusive presentation. Its remote sources are domesticated and brought close to present experience primarily because they are peopled with figures whose emotions and relationships are directly registered and described with profuse sensuous detail.

The story Chaucer reads is set in an aristocratic and idealized world entirely peopled with queens and kings (the order in which queen and king appears suggests the influence of courtly love which I shall discuss in the next chapter). But in romance, as in dreams, queens and kings are our representatives. Their royalty universalizes them. They revive our sense of our own omnipotence, which, though constantly assailed by adult experience, survives in the recesses of personality even after childhood.

The story of Seys and Alcyone is a love-story; sexual love is one of the great themes of the romance. It is not, however, quite as universal as is sometimes suggested. In some romances, adventure, which commonly goes alongside love as the great theme and machinery of the work, may take over entirely. The search for treasure, whether it be grail or gold, or dragon’s horde, is engrossing enough in itself, and the object of the quest serves as the love-object. Pilgrim’s Progress, Treasure Island and The Hobbit are three romance-mutants of this sort.

Chaucer’s book spoke of queens and kings ‘And many other thinges smale’. There is probably a playful irony in that ‘and’, but leaving that question aside, it is typical of romance to be much occupied with the everyday paraphernalia of the world it creates. The descriptions of clothes and feasts, the little dogs and the clean towels, give body to its ideal world. They make it physically present. The romance, however lofty its literary and moral qualities, is written primarily to entertain (‘me thoughte it beter play/Then play either at ches or tables’). It absorbs the reader into experience which is otherwise unattainable. It frees us from our inhibitions and preoccupations by drawing us entirely into its own world – a world which is never fully equivalent to our own although it must remind us of it if we are to understand it at all. It oversteps the limits by which life is normally bounded. The world of a romance is ample and inclusive, sustained by its own inherent, often obsessive laws. It is not an entire world; it intensifies and exaggerates certain traits in human behaviour and recreates human figures out of this exaggeration. It excludes some reaches of experience in order to concentrate intently upon certain themes until they take fire and seem to be the flame of life itself.

HISTORICAL DEVELOPMENT

The romance as a literary kind is often exclusively associated with medieval literature. The medieval romances certainly established a pattern which was the dominant form for fiction until perhaps the beginning of the seventeenth century. But the romance has antecedents far back beyond twelfth-century Europe and a vitality which persisted long after the Middle Ages. The Elizabethans call heavily on Greek romances; the ‘Western’ and science fiction are frequently claimed as modern mutations. In this study I shall explore the resilience of the romance impulse and deliberately emphasize the continuity of its wildly various forms. The term ‘romance’ in the early Middle Ages meant the new vernacular languages derived from Latin, in contradistinction to the learned language, Latin itself. Enromancier, romançar, romanz meant to translate or compose books in the vernacular. The book itself was then called romanz, roman, romance, romanzo. Then the meaning of the word extended to include the qualities of the literature in these tongues, in contrast to Latin literature or works composed in Latin. Thus, in old French, romant, roman, means ‘courtly romance in verse’, but literally ‘popular book’. The characteristics associated with the vernacular literature of the time were a preoccupation with love and adventure and a peculiar vagrancy of imagination. The ‘popular’ and the ‘aristocratic’ strains in the romance are already suggested in the term; though the subject-matter of the romances was courtly, its language could be understood by all.

We need to recognize at the start that there is a distinction – but not a constant distinction – between ‘the romance’ and ‘romance’ as an element in literature. The history of the romance, like the brief history I have just given of the term ‘romance’, could almost be epitomized as a shift from form to quality. We tend to speak of ‘medieval romances’ but of ‘the Elizabethan romance’ and then of ‘romance’ in nineteenth-century novels. The word’s spectrum of meaning has to be wide to include Troilus and Criseyde, The Faerie Queene, The Mysteries of Udolpho and Lord Jim, all of which have been called romances. Keats and Hawthorne both claim the word for one of their works: Endymion: a poetic romance; The House of the Seven Gables: a romance. Perhaps we can best understand the significance of the romance by considering what kinds of experience it persists in offering the reader through its many guises.

One problem in discussing the romance is the need to limit the way the term is applied. All fiction has a way of looking like romance and in a sense this is just, since all fiction frees us into an imaginative world. But I have limited the description to works which were commonly described by other writers of the same period or by the author himself as ‘a romance’. I emphasize the first condition because the realistic novels of one age or audience have an uncanny way of becoming ‘romances’ in another setting. (Richardson’s Pamela and Trollope’s novels are examples.) This is because romance depends considerably upon a certain set distance in the relationship between its audience and its subject-matter: the legalistic intricacies of courtly love are discussed in a language open to all; criminal romances of the ‘Newgate’ type were much read by the law-abiding; novels of high life delight a middle-class audience. The past and the remote distance us all without class discriminations. In some of the finest romances, such as those of Chrétien de Troyes, the ideal world shown is excruciatingly close to the forms of his own society but its imaginative perfection can never be attained in life. To later readers those social forms themselves seem exotic and remote.

The romance is a European form and it is impossible to understand its significance in English literature without recognizing that many of the greatest romance writers wrote in other tongues and earlier than our authors. Chrétien and Ariosto are two major examples. There is an element of enromancier, of translation into the vernacular, in the achievement of Malory and even Spenser. Although I have claimed that the romance is a European form, from the time of the crusades its achievement has been affected by the culture of the East, and from the eighteenth century down to E. W. Lane’s scholarly and sociological translation (London, 1839–41), particularly by The Arabian Nights.

The romance was an important genre in English literature in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries; in the Elizabethan period; in the eighteenth century, with its gradual polarization of the romance and the novel. The Gothic romance and the romantic movement gave new significances to the form, and in the nineteenth century the romance was developed as a challenge to the deterministic French novel as well as being revived intact by the Pre-Raphaelites. I shall discuss each of these periods in some detail in the sections following the introduction.

Two major types of the romance, which for convenience we may call the aristocratic and the popular, have come down to us, sometimes converging, sometimes standing in opposition. They call on the same themes and properties but differ in scale. The aristocratic romance, such as that of Malory or Ariosto, makes clear its descent from the epic; it is a large-scale work interweaving many narrative threads. The popular romance tends towards simplicity and concentration, as in the ballad. It sets out to tell a single story. We could take Le Grand Cyrus and Havelok the Dane as typifying the two traditions, but it is not very profitable to attempt any absolute polarization. The two kinds have too much in common and in the light of history their distinctions blur.

There are two major turning-points in the history of the romance in England; they both have to do with an increasing self-consciousness about the way the form is used. The first was the publication of Shelton’s translation of Don Quixote in 1612 and 1620. (Cervantes had published the work in two parts in 1605 and 1615.) The second was the ‘romantic revival’, bringing with it the conscious antiquarianism with which writers of the Romantic period viewed the romance. In both cases the effect was to mark out the province of the romance as the remote and the impossible and to introduce an inhibiting consciousness. But whereas the immediately post-Cervantic attitude to romance tended to establish the exclusiveness of the romance world, thus increasing the danger of frivolity, writers of the Romantic period, such as Schlegel and Coleridge, recognized that the romance expressed a world permanently within all men: the world of the imagination and of dream.

Until after Spenser the romance was still very much the dominant form of fiction and it was quite as often written in verse as in prose. With the gradual rise of the novel, however, it tended to be in prose and to be in reaction. The later history of the romance is inextricable from the development of the novel. Clara Reeve, in her excellent history, The Progress of Romance (London, 1785), assumed that the romance was being replaced by the novel. She claimed that the romance went back as far as the ancient Egyptians and she urged its antiquity as evidence of its literary respectability. ‘Epic poetry is the parent of romance’ she asserted as part of her spirited defence of a form which was at the time suspect on both moral and intellectual grounds. Her own novel The Old English Baron: A Gothic Tale was among the early Gothic romances whose use of mystery, antiquarianism and emotional extremes challenged the restraints of rationalism. And that, whether deliberately or not, has been one persisting function of the romance.

In our own century the work of Freud and Jung, while making many artists and critics distrustful of self-indulgent fantasy, has also made them far more aware of the force of the subconscious. This has liberated elements of experience earlier associated with the romance and allowed the modern novel to thrive on allegory and dream, to invoke what is mythic within our own world. Patrick White’s Voss, Hermann Hesse’s Steppenwolf, Maurice Jouffroy’s Un Reve plus Longue que la Nuit, Saul Bellow’s Henderson the Rain King, perhaps even Günther Grass’s The Tin Drum – these disparate novels show how richly the ‘romance’ tradition is still yielding in recent literature. But nobody, I think, would call them ‘romances’: the term itself has an old-fashioned ring.

THE ROMANCE AND THE READER

Although some of the literary properties of romance have changed beyond recognition over the centuries, many of its imaginative functions remain constant. The relief the romance offered to the poet in The Book of the Duchess is not utterly different in kind from that offered by the commercial romances of our own time. This is not to dignify pulp literature or to debase the complex and profound experience offered by the finest romance writers. I want to emphasize, however, the extent to which the romance can be distinguished from other forms of fiction by the relationship it imposes between reader and romance-world. This relationship liberates us but it also involves unusual dependency.

The romance is essentially subjective, although the personality of the writer may be expressed only through the work itself, not as a personal presence. We have to depend entirely on the narrator of the romance: he remakes the rules of what is possible, what impossible. Our enjoyment depends upon our willing surrend...