Romanticism

Cynthia Chase

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• eBook ISBN: 9781317900078
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

The essays in this volume have all been carefully chosen by Cynthia Chase to exemplify the most important strands in contemporary critical thought on Romantic literature, in particular the best of recent feminist, deconstructive, and new historicist writing. They include contributions from critics such as Paul de Man, Mary Jacobus, Marjorie Levinson and Jerome Christensen. The collection, with its substantial introduction and judicious selection of key work, explains the significance of recent critical debate by relating it to fundamental critical questions that define Romanticism. Through the course of their analyses the essays offer answers to perhaps the most essential question posed by the Romantic period: what is the role of language in history?

1 Romanticism and Anti-Self-Consciousness*

GEOFFREY HARTMAN

Geoffrey Hartman’s work concerns the aspirations of modern poetry, the idea of literary history, and the history of interpretation, as well as the poetry of Wordsworth. He has tried to grasp and characterize a distinctively literary kind of ‘mediation’, of deliberately produced relation to the real. What resources enable Wordsworth or Marvell or Rilke – or Freud or Derrida – to temporize with the inescapable ‘wish to put ourselves into an unmediated relation to whatever “really is” is’? Hartman’s first book, The Unmediated Vision: An Interpretation of Wordsworth, Hopkins, Rilke, and Valery (1954), examined the effects of the gesture which for him defined poetry (including Romantic poetry) as ‘modern’: doing without the role of mediator of received religion or of a unified authoritative literary tradition and making ‘the attempt to find and represent things immediately significant, aesthetic things, signs of the creative nature of perception’ (p. 163). ‘The unmediated vision’ names both a desire and a particularly desired, properly aesthetic kind of mediation: the immediate or intuitive conveying, through forms and images, of the fact of mediation, of self-reflexive subjectivity or consciousness. Hartman finds a dialectic of this sort in Romanticism, in the essay included here. In asserting the ‘precarious-ness’ of ‘the transition from self-consciousness to imagination’, he indicates difficulties and disruptions of aesthetic mediation through language which are traced in detail in close readings such as Andrzej Warminski’s ‘Missed Crossing: Wordsworth’s Apocalypses’ (see Further Reading) or de Man’s ‘Time and History in Wordsworth’ (in this volume).

Taking ‘imagination’ and ‘self-consciousness’ as fundamental terms and concerns, Hartman has himself mediated between Romanticism and modern criticism. Wordsworth’s Poetry: 1798–1814 (1964) deeply influenced a generation of critics through its description of a dialectic between nature and consciousness but also its attentiveness to the nuances of Wordsworth’s text. Equally important in pinpointing aspects of Wordsworth that seem both to epitomize English Romantic poetry and to convey aspirations inseparable from the activity of writing are essays published in The Unremarkable Wordsworth (1987), especially those on the genius loci, or spirit of place, and on inscriptions and Romantic nature poetry. Among several important essays on Romanticism (among them the one printed below), Beyond Formalism (1970) includes ‘Poem and Ideology’, an essay on Keats’s ode ‘To Autumn’ examining its ideas of Englishness and of the movement of literary history. Hartman’s critical writing draws power from his ear for the play of meanings in a given word and his flair for the idioms of more than one language. He treats the texts he reads, even those which are perhaps essentially religious (like midrash or scripture) and those which are philosophical (Derrida), as essentially literary – trying to save, rather than translate, their ‘veiled but irreducible terms’.

The dejection afflicting John Stuart Mill in his twentieth year was alleviated by two important events. He read Wordsworth, and he discovered for himself a view of life resembling the ‘anti-self-consciousness theory’ of Carlyle. Mill describes this strangely named theory in his Autobiography: ‘Ask yourself whether you are happy, and you cease to be so. The only chance is to treat, not happiness, but some end external to it as the purpose of life. Let your self-consciousness, your scrutiny, your self-interrogation exhaust themselves on that.’¹

It is not surprising that Wordsworth’s poetry should also have served to protect Mill from the morbidity of his intellect. Like many Romantics, Wordsworth had passed through a depression clearly linked to the ravage of self-consciousness and the ‘strong disease’ of self-analysis.² Book XI of The Prelude, Chapter 5 of Mill’s Autobiography, Carlyle’s Sartor Resartus, and other great confessional works of the Romantic period show how crucial these maladies are for the adolescent mind. Endemic, perhaps, to every stage of life, they especially affect the transition from adolescence to maturity; and it is interesting to observe how man’s attention has shifted from the fact of death and its rites of passage, to these trials in what Keats called ‘the Chamber of Maiden-Thought’ and, more recently still, to the perils of childhood. We can say, taking a metaphor from Donne, that ‘streights, and none but streights’ are ways to whatever changes the mind must undergo, and that it is the Romantics who first explored the dangerous passageways of maturation.

Two trials or perils of the soul deserve special mention. We learn that every increase in consciousness is accompanied by an increase in self-consciousness, and that analysis can easily become a passion that ‘murders to dissect’.³ These difficulties of thought in its strength question the ideal of absolute lucidity. The issue is raised of whether there exist what might be called remedia intellectus: remedies for the corrosive power of analysis and the fixated self-consciousness.

There is one remedy of great importance which is almost conterminous with art itself in the Romantic period. This remedy differs from certain traditional proposals linked to the religious control of the intellect – the wild, living intellect of man, as Newman calls it in his Apologia.⁴ A particularly Romantic remedy, it is nonlimiting with respect to the mind. It seeks to draw the antidote to self-consciousness from consciousness itself. A way is to be found not to escape from or limit knowledge, but to convert it into an energy finer than intellectual. It is some such thought which makes Wordsworth in the preface to Lyrical Ballads describe poetry as the ‘breath and finer spirit of all knowledge’, able to carry sensation into the midst of the most abstract or remotest objects of science. A more absolute figure for this cure, which is, strictly speaking, less a cure than a paradoxical faith, is given by Kleist: ‘Paradise is locked … yet to return to the state of innocence we must eat once more of the tree of knowledge.’ It is not by accident that Kleist is quoted by Adrian at a significant point in Mann’s Doktor Faustus, which is the novel about self-consciousness and its relation to art.

This idea of a return, via knowledge, to naïveté – to a second naïveté – is a commonplace among the German Romantics. Yet its presence is perhaps more exciting, because suitably oblique, among the English and French Romantics. A.O. Lovejoy, of course, in his famous essay ‘On the Discrimination of Romanticisms’ (1924), questions the possibility of unifying the various national movements. He rightly points out that the German Romantics insist on an art that rises from the plenitude of consciousness to absorb progressively the most sophisticated as well as the most naïve experience. But his claim that English Romanticism is marked by a more primitivistic ‘return to nature’ is weakened by his use of second-rate poetry and isolated passages. One can show that the practice of the greater English Romantics is involved with a problematical self-consciousness similar to that of the Germans and that, in the main, no primitivism or ‘sacrifice of intellect’ is found. I do not mean to deny the obvious, that there are primitivistic passages in Chateaubriand and even Wordsworth, but the primary tendency should be distinguished from errors and epiphenomena. The desire of the Romantics is perhaps for what Blake calls ‘organized innocence’, but never for a mere return to the state of nature. The German Romantics, however, for a reason mentioned later and because of the contemporaneous philsophical tradition which centered on the relations between consciousness and consciousness of self (Fichte, Schelling, Hegel), gained in some respects a clearer though not more fruitful understanding of the problem. I cannot consider in detail the case of French Romanticism. But Shelley’s visionary despair, Keats’s understanding of the poetical character, and Blake’s doctrine of the contraries reveal that self-consciousness cannot be overcome; and the very desire to overcome it, which poetry and imagination encourage, is part of a vital, dialectical movement of soul-making.

The link between consciousness and self-consciousness, or knowledge and guilt, is already expressed in the story of the expulsion from Eden. Having tasted knowledge, man realizes his nakedness, his sheer separateness of self. I have quoted Kleist’s reflection; and Hegel, in his interpretation of the Fall, argues that the way back to Eden is via contraries: the naïvely sensuous mind must pass through separation and selfhood to become spiritually perfect. It is the destiny of consciousness or, as the English Romantics would have said, of imagination, to separate from nature so that it can finally transcend not only nature but also its own lesser forms. Hegel in his Logic puts it as follows:

The first Reflection of awakened consciousness in men told them they were naked … The hour that man leaves the path of mere natural being marks the difference between him, a self-conscious agent, and the natural world. The spiritual is distinguished from the natural … in that it does not continue a mere stream of tendency, but sunders itself to self-realization. But this position of severed life has in its turn to be overcome, and the spirit must, by its own act, achieve concord once more …. The principle of restoration is found in thought, and thought only: the hand that inflicts the wound is also the hand that heals it.⁵

The last sentence states unequivocally where the remedy lies. Hegel, however, does not honor the fact that the meaning he derives from the Fall was originally in the form of myth. And the attempt to think mythically is itself part of a crucial defense against the self-conscious intellect. Bergson in The Two Sources of Morality and Religion sees both myth and religion as products of an intellectual instinct created by nature itself to oppose the analytic intellect, to preserve human spontaneities despite the hesitant and complicated mind.⁶ Whether myth-making is still possible, whether the mind can find an unselfconscious medium for itself or maintain something of the interacting unity of self and life, is a central concern of the Romantic poets.

Romantic art as myth-making has been discussed convincingly in recent years, and Friedrich Schlegel’s call in ‘Rede über die Mythologie’ (1800) for a modern mythology is well known. The question of the renewal of myth is, nevertheless, a rather special response to the larger perplexities of reflective thought. ‘The poet’, says Wallace Stevens in ‘Adagia’, ‘represents the mind in the act of defending us against itself.’ Starting with the Romantics, this act is clearly focused, and poetry begins to be valued in contra-distinction to directly analytic or purely conceptual modes of thought. The intelligence is seen as a perverse though necessary specialization of the whole soul of man, and art as a means to resist the intelligence intelligently.

It must be admitted, at the same time, that the Romantics themselves do not give (in their conceptual moments) an adequate definition of the function of art. Their criterion of pleasure or expressive emotion leads to some kind of art for art’s sake formula, or to the sentimentalism which Mill still shared and which marks the shift in sensibility from Neoclassic to Romantic. That Mill wept over the memoirs of Marmontel and felt his selfhood lightened by this evidence of his ability to feel, or that Lamartine saw the life of the poet as ‘tears and love’, suggests that the larmoyant vein of the later eighteenth century persisted for some time but also helped, when tears or even joy were translated into theory, to falsify the Romantic achievement and make Irving Babbitt’s criticism possible.

The art of the Romantics, on the other hand, is often in advance of even their best thoughts. Neither a mere increase in sensibility nor a mere widening of self-knowledge constitutes its purpose. The Romantic poets do not exalt consciousness per se. They have recognized it as a kind of death-in-life, as the product of a division in the self. The mind which acknowledges the existence or past existence of immediate life knows that its present strength is based on a separation from that life. A creative mind desires not mere increase of knowledge, but ‘knowledge not purchased by the loss of power’ (Prelude, V). Life, says Ruskin, is the only wealth; yet childhood, or certain irrevocable moments, confront the poet sharply and give him the sense of having purchased with death the life of the mind. Constructing what Yeats calls an anti-self, or recovering deeply buried experience, the poet seeks a return to ‘Unity of Being’. Consciousness is only a middle term, the strait through which everything must pass; and the artist plots to have everything pass through whole, without sacrifice to abstraction.

One of the themes which best expresses this perilous nature of consciousness and which has haunted literature since the Romantic period is that of the Solitary, or Wandering Jew. He may appear as Cain, Ahasuerus, Ancient Mariner, and even Faust. He also resembles the later (and more static) figures of Tithonus, Gerontion, and poète maudit. These solitaries are separated from life in the midst of life, yet cannot die. They are doomed to live a middle or purgatorial existence which is neither life nor death, and as their knowledge increases so does their solitude.⁷ It is, ultimately, consciousness that alienates them from life and imposes the burden of a self which religion or death or a return to the state of nature might dissolve. Yet their heroism, or else their doom, is not to obtain this release. Rebels against God, like Cain, and men of God, like Vigny’s Moses, are equally denied ‘le sommeil de la terre’ and are shown to suffer the same despair, namely, ‘the self … whose worm dieth not, and whose fire is not quenched’ (Kierkegaard). And in Coleridge’s Mariner, as in Conrad’s Marlow, the figure of the wanderer approaches that of the poet. Both are storytellers who resubmit themselves to temporality and are compelled to repeat their experiences in the purgatorial form of words. Yeats, deeply affected by the theme of the Wandering Jew, records a marvelous comment of Mme Blavatsky’s: ‘I write, write, write, as the Wanderin...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• General Editors’ Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Geoffrey Hartman Romanticism and Anti-Self-Consciousness
• 2 Paul De Man Time and History in Wordsworth
• 3 Neil Hertz The Notion of Blockage in the Literature of the Sublime
• 4 Cathy Caruth Past Recognition: Narrative Origins in Wordsworth and Freud
• 5 Mary Jacobus ‘Splitting the Race of Man in Twain’: Prostitution, Personification and The Prelude
• 6 Karen Swann Literary Gentlemen and Lovely Ladies: The Debate on the Character of Christabel
• 7 Margaret Homans Bearing Demons: Frankenstein and the Circumvention of Maternity
• 8 Marjorie Levinson Introduction to Keats’s Life of Allegory
• 9 Jerome Christensen Byron’s Sardanapalus and the Triumph of Liberalism
• 10 Carol Jacobs Unbinding Words: Prometheus Unbound
• Notes on Authors
• Further Reading
• Index