Modernity's Mist

British Romanticism and the Poetics of Anticipation

Emily Rohrbach

• Publisher: Fordham University Press
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9780823267972, 9780823267965
• eBook ISBN: 9780823267989
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Historiography
• Index: Literature

Modernity's Mist explores an understudied aspect of Romanticism: its future-oriented poetics. Whereas Romanticism is well known for its relation to the past, Emily Rohrbach situates Romantic epistemological uncertainties in relation to historiographical debates that opened up a radically unpredictable and fast- approaching future. As the rise of periodization made the project of defining the "spirit of the age" increasingly urgent, the changing sense of futurity rendered the historical dimensions of the present deeply elusive. While historicist critics often are interested in what Romantic writers and their readers would have known, Rohrbach draws attention to moments when these writers felt they could not know the historical dimensions of their own age. Illuminating the poetic strategies Keats, Austen, Byron, and Hazlitt used to convey that sense of mystery, Rohrbach describes a poetic grammar of future anteriority—of uncertainty concerning what will have been. Romantic writers, she shows, do not simply reflect the history of their time; their works make imaginable a new way of thinking the historical present when faced with the temporalities of modernity.

1. From Precedents to the Unpredictable: Historiographical Futurities

It is perhaps unsurprising that very little criticism has accrued on the somewhat counterintuitive topic of how historiography conceives futurity. Reinhart Koselleck’s Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time is a significant exception, perhaps the significant book-length exception, which makes the case that an eighteenth-century idea of historical progress ushered in the temporality of modernity. He defines that modernity, in part, as the conception of an unknown and unforeseeable future, which historically displaces other kinds of previously dominant futures—futures shaped by eschatological and rational prediction, for example, as well as those tied to a circular model of time that introduces diagnoses of the past into the future. Describing eighteenth-century philosophical notions of historical progress as introducing a “horizon of expectations” involving an unknown future, Koselleck asserts that it is the idea of progress that divorced the present from patterns of previous experience in the course of the eighteenth century.1 For historians and philosophers began to imagine in the eighteenth century that a temporal future (i.e., not an eschatological one) could be paradigmatically different from the present; at the same time, what that difference would look like was wholly unforeseeable.

In this chapter, I aim to focus in a nuanced way on concepts of time and progress in historical writing from around 1750 until 1830 in order to show how the idea of a predictable futurity, based on a linear sense of time and causal relations, persisted in many eighteenth-century British historiographies—specifically those historical narratives most powerfully governed by a philosophy of progress. In view of that persistence, I argue that it is the narratives that most overtly sidestep the philosophical assumptions of linear progress and formally stand at odds with linear narration that leave room for an unpredictable futurity. In this way, I revise Koselleck’s story about the advent of modernity to suggest that historical narratives that assume alternatives to linear time, both formally and conceptually, better accommodate modernity’s unpredictable futurity and its potential to disrupt expectations than do narratives of progress.2

Not until the end of the century does predictability become radically questioned in a way that generates altogether alternative temporalities to linear progress, regress, or circularity. In the 1790s, for instance, however much Helen Maria Williams maintains her faith in the principles of equality and liberty and refers to the overall progress of the French Revolution, in the pages of her Letters Written in France the present age appears increasingly like an experiment in historical change with an unpredictable outcome. Her epistolary narrative is less progressive than revisionary, as she is compelled by political events to rethink previously stated assumptions. In William Hazlitt’s The Spirit of the Age with which this chapter concludes, a full-fledged lateral sense of time accommodates a present of proliferating simultaneities.3 It does so while wholly sidelining the linear chronological development and narratives of cultural progress that crucially organize so much eighteenth-century historical writing. In the majority of eighteenth-century historiography, historians assumed that the patterns established in a historical narrative of past—as in the way a narrative characterized the causal relations between one event and another event that came after it—served also as patterns for understanding the present (and future). In Hazlitt’s historiography, however, what I call a lateral temporality unmoors the present from established patterns by not tracing any genealogy whatsoever for the spirit of the age. In The Spirit of the Age, the absence of any set of past patterns combined with the proliferation of heterogeneous ways in which the spirit of the present age becomes visible, by implication, leaves the imagination relatively free to contemplate wholly new patterns for the future; given the heterogeneity of Hazlitt’s present, one can see the future open up in multiple possible ways. In this respect, Hazlitt does not develop but displaces the structures of eighteenth-century philosophical histories: largely unified genealogies that narrate British identity in a chronologically linear fashion from its origins in Greco-Roman culture to modern British commercial society.

Since around the time of J. G. A. Pocock’s Barbarism and Religion, there has been a critical tendency in eighteenth-century studies to refer not to The Enlightenment but to multiple Enlightenments, suggesting that the period witnessed a number of disparate intellectual movements that do not easily or fully cohere. Pocock wrote, “I have no quarrel with the concept of Enlightenment; I merely contend that it occurred in too many forms to be comprised within a single definition and history, and that we do better to refer to a family of Enlightenments, displaying both family resemblances and family quarrels (some of them bitter and even bloody).”4 Although that critique evokes a historical sensibility similar to the heterogeneity of multiple spirits of the age we find in Hazlitt’s historiography, the rhetoric and formal accommodation of multiplicity are restricted to Pocock’s critical lens, appearing largely absent from eighteenth-century historical texts, whose authors, as we shall see, stress the systematic unity of their subject matter and composition. This is not to say that Pocock’s historical perspective is at all incorrect but to emphasize that Hazlitt’s historiographical sensibility is distinct from that of his eighteenth-century precursors because of his foregoing of the rhetoric of unity for a historical heterogeneity.

In the eighteenth century, with the publication of such historiographical works as The Age of Louis XIV and The Age of Louis XV, Voltaire (followed by Scottish Enlightenment historiographers, among others) made the present and the very recent past into the stuff of history. This shift to modern historiography intensified the question of how historiographers were to understand the future. As a historical context potentially different from the present and one in relation to which the present would be reevaluated, ideas of the historical future started to affect how writers thought about, and structured, their historical writings. Put another way, the dramatically increased proximity of the future to the historical period that formed the subject of a historical writing put pressure on that relation between historiography and the future. If one were writing about the twelfth century in 1780, the events of the next fifty years would seem relatively inconsequential compared to a situation in which one were writing in 1780 about only a generation or so prior to the present.

This chapter tells a story of how historical writing in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries began to encounter and accommodate futurity in order to establish the intellectual context of a historiographical dilemma to which the literary works in the following chapters offer a response. With the historiographical question of how to imagine futurity in view, Keats’s, Austen’s, and Byron’s poetics of anticipation appear more readily, as I shall claim, as historiographical aesthetics in that they address the same question. I begin with the most popular kind of history of the mid- to late eighteenth century: Scottish Enlightenment philosophical history. Despite its pervasive commitment to the idea of linear progress, significant formal tensions with linear temporality persistently mark that historiography, straining or interrupting the idea of progress. These formal tensions with linear narration distinguish Enlightenment philosophical histories from the still highly respected humanist or classical historiographical traditions, which observed a strict sense of linearity both in the chronology of what happened (by which I mean what narrative theorists sometimes call histoire) and in the way they presented what happened (the narrative discourse or récit).5 Classical historical narratives move steadily forward in step with the chronology of the stories they tell. As we have seen in the example from Keats with which this study began, the idea of a dark futurity tends to disrupt a linear sense of time. Although mid-eighteenth-century historical writings by and large do not include a sense of the future explicitly in their imagination of history, their disturbances of linear narrative discourse accompany formal innovations in some respects akin to those in Romantic-period writing. Along those lines, this chapter concludes with a comparison of Robert Henry’s (mid-eighteenth-century) formal innovations with William Hazlitt’s. But whereas Romantic writers explicitly departed from linear conceptions of time, the high sense of decorum guiding eighteenth-century historiography led Enlightenment historians to negotiate—and whenever possible to gloss over—narrative tensions with linear time (at the level of récit). This historiographical tension between formal innovations and linear temporality (between récit and histoire) was brought into new—more glaring and self-conscious—light at the end of the century with the events of the French Revolution.

In my analyses of historical writings, I attend both to the history of ideas, especially ideas related to time and cultural development, and to the formal dimensions of historical narratives. In this double approach to historiographical analysis, I follow the work of Mark Salber Phillips, who observed (about a decade ago) that

for nearly a generation now students of historiography have effectively divided themselves into two camps. On one side stand those who approach the subject primarily as a problem in intellectual history; on the other we find those for whom historical writing is at bottom an act of imagination to be understood in literary (and especially narratological) terms. Valuable work has been done on both sides of this methodological divide, but it has not proven easy to marry the two approaches.6

Beautifully modeling this marriage, Phillips’s study Society and Sentiment: Genres of Historical Writing in Britain, 1740–1820 illuminated how the narrative innovations of eighteenth-century writers helped accommodate a greater range of social experience than historiography hitherto had done in order to appeal to the growing readership of an increasingly literate, commercial society. This chapter aims to bring Phillips’s double methodology to questions of temporality, thereby helping us ask more nuanced questions about the relationship between Enlightenment and Romantic historiographies than the comparison typically has received.7

While historiography took many new forms and came in an increasing range of genres especially toward the end of the eighteenth century, this first section of this chapter will focus primarily on two philosophical histories, Robert Henry’s History of Great Britain and William Robertson’s History of the Reign of the Emperor Charles V. In a fashion exemplary of midcentury philosophical histories, these texts present a range of formal innovations that display, even as they attempt to conceal, significant tensions between, on the one hand, a commitment to linear narration (récit) that would formally reinforce the story of forward cultural progress and, on the other, the desire to expand what constitutes history in order to accommodate the new desires and needs of eighteenth-century British readers.8 I show that eighteenth-century philosophical historiography presented more complex narrative temporalities than critics sometimes acknowledge and suggest that we might see that complexity as a formal destabilization (at the level of récit), however subtle, of the philosophy of linear cultural progress (the histoire) that these same texts typically espouse.

The subtleties of those destabilizations were largely lost, however, on Romantic-period critics of Enlightenment historiography. In his essay “Of History and Romance,” William Godwin reassesses the stakes of historiography when he summarizes the prevailing principles of Enlightenment historiography as offering us only precedents to repeat. He subsequently makes an impassioned call for history, instead, to disclose to us “new and untrodden paths”:

General history will furnish us with precedents in abundance, will show us how that which has happened in one country has been repeated in another, and may perhaps even instruct us how that which has occurred in the annals of mankind, may under similar circumstances be produced again. But, if the energy of our minds should lead us to aspire to something more animated and noble than dull repetition, if we love the happiness of mankind enough to feel ourselves impelled to explore new and untrodden paths, we must then not rest contented with considering society in a mass, but must analyse the materials of which it is composed. It will be necessary for us to scrutinize the nature of man, before we can pronounce what it is of which social man is capable.9

Although Godwin expresses dissatisfaction with the aims of Enlightenment historiography, the areas of analysis he identifies appear not altogether different from those we can find in Enlightenment thought: “society in a mass” and “the nature of man.” Godwin emphasizes the relative importance of the latter, but the categories come from his Enlightenment precursors, who circulate in their histories’ “dull repetition.” Godwin, however, aspires to draw from historical analysis of the individual “man” a genuinely new knowledge: to imagine and “to explore new and untrodden paths.” Cultural and social development in the Romantic period need not be a repetition of predictable behaviors. Rather, at the end of the eighteenth century, the future Godwin desires for “social man” involves a hitherto unknown and thus unpredictable future, which nevertheless developed out of some of the categories and concerns rigorously defined by his Enlightenment precursors.

The idea of cultural progress that dominated eighteenth-century British historiography, sometimes called the “four-stage theory,” envisioned a “culture” (such as English culture) changing and becoming progressively refined and civilized in four distinct stages. These stages, assumed to occur in the same order in every culture, were defined above all by the predominant mode of subsistence. Ronald Meek summarizes it thus:

In its most specific form, the theory was that society “naturally” or “normally” progressed over time through four more or less distinct and consecutive stages, each corresponding to a different mode of subsistence, these stages being defined as hunting, pasturage, agriculture, and commerce. To each of these modes of subsistence, it came to be argued, there corresponded different sets of ideas and institutions relating to law, property, and government, and also different sets of customs, manners, and morals.10

According to this stadial theory, one could encounter a new society in another region, such as the Native Americans, and make assumptions about their degree of cultural development based mostly on observing their modes of subsistence. Not all societies progressed at the same rate, and not even all individuals within the same nation did. Hence the focus of James Chandler’s England in 1819 on the concept of “uneven development”11 that came out of the Scottish Enlightenment and the “new conception of anachronism, now [by the Romantic period] understood as a measurable form of dislocation.”12 Unevenness refers less commonly to the development within one society or nation than to the comparison, say, between life in England and in Indonesia. The theory holds that no matter how undeveloped at present, all societies are progressing in a forward linear march toward the same end: commercial, civilized society. Certainly, that was not the only story told. Notably, for instance, Adam Ferguson’s An Essay on the History of Civil Society (1767) departed from the assumption that moral improvement necessarily attends economic progress.13 Furthermore, Ferguson did not trust that the effects of social refinement in civil society were irreversible but worried that the peace secured by legal and military advances would lead to a slackening of civic virtue.14 However, notwithstanding the antiprogressive threat of moral regression and decline of civil society, Ferguson measured society conceptually in a linear fashion, whether he observed progress, regress, or stagnation.

From the perspective of intellectual and cultural history, the aim of a commercial, polite society defines the Scottish Enlightenment idea of time and progress—one model of progress that applies universally. Based on that assumption, Hugh Blair determines the superiority of modern historiography over ancient:

For instance, in History, there is certainly more political knowledge in several European nations at present, than there was in antient Greece and Rome. We are better acquainted with the nature of government, because we have seen it under a greater variety of forms and revolutions. The world is more laid open than it was in former times; commerce is greatly enlarged; more countries are civilized; posts are every where established; int...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: On Being in a Mist
• 1. From Precedents to the Unpredictable:Historiographical Futurities
• 2. Dizzy Anticipations: Sonnets by Keats (and Shelley)
• 3. Accommodating Surprise: Keats’s Odes
• 4. Contingencies of the Future Anterior: Austen’s Persuasion
• 5. The “Double Nature” of Presentness: Byron’s Don Juan
• Notes
• Index