THE ROMANTIC THEORY OF POETRY CHAPTER I THE ROMANTIC IDEAL I Croce's broad distinction between romantic and classical will serve to explain the sense in which these overworked terms are understood in the present book: "If the classical phase of perfect representation or expression is necessary to the work of art, no less necessary is the romantic phase of emotion; poetry. cannot be exclusively either ingenuous or emotional, it must be both ingenuous and emotional." The romantic artist, then, is one who values content more than form. He usually has a practical as well as an artistic interest in his matter: he prizes emotional experience for its own sake, and aims at enlarging men's power to experience. The classic cares first for form and scarcely knows what he forms until it emerges in the completed work. Hence he is "ingenuous" rather than "emotional." Although his art is, like all art, subjective in the sense that it gives expression to the individual experience of the artist, the classic desires an expression which shall be "dramatic and objective rather than intimate."2 He does not care to burrow in the recesses of his own psychological or physiological 1 Problemi, p. 20. R.T.P. 66 2 ... structure. He likes the image, vivid, definite in its outline. His most fantastic visions are solid and highly coloured and have hard edges." The romantic, x on the other hand, shrinks from hard edges. Such form as he uses is suggestive rather than representative; he prizes aught that for its grace may be Dear, and yet dearer for its mystery.2 He seeks to reproduce for us the feeling as it lives within himself; and for the sake of a feeling which he thinks interesting or important he will insert passages which contribute nothing to the effect of the work as a whole. Croce claims to resolve the antithesis between classic and romantic, for a great poet is both classic and romantic. The distinction can be seen quite clearly only in the minor authors of either type. For example, both motives were at work in the formation of the Elizabethan drama. Robert Greene, with his desire to feel every kind of feeling, to meet with every sort of human experience, helped to enlarge the human content of the drama, to make it able to express new things in place of conventional stage sentiment. On the other hand, Lyly, the classicist, with no pressing feeling, no great mass of experience to handle, and with a real fancy for style, played a part in the development of the form. His style is not the servant of his emotion. His often subtle thought is clearly defined, the structure both of his plot and of his sentence controlled by a logic as yet unknown to English prose. And, whatever his material, absolute unity of effect is gained by the print of one dainty fastidious personality upon his whole play-its sentiment, eharacter, mythology, style. 1 J. C. Squire, Introduction to Flecker's poems. II 1 The poet, writes Wordsworth in his second preface to the Lyrical Ballads, "is a man speaking to men: a < man, it is true, endowed with more lively sensibility, more enthusiasm and tenderness, who has a greater knowledge of human nature, and a more comprehensive soul, than are supposed to be common among mankind." The "more comprehensive soul" is the root of the matter. The test of the poet, for the English romantics, is his power to feel on occasions when other men remain untouched, to feel things in a sphere beyond the scope of other men. He can re-create a Promethean world or the experience of a bird in a cage. He lives “a life of < 4 sensations rather than of thoughts ""; his sensuous experience is so intense that he is borne by it into a kind of ecstasy, dies a "death of luxury": Feel we these things? that moment have we stept Is like a floating spirit's.3 History, "swart planet in the universe of deeds," is rejected in favour of feeling: the silver flow Of Hero's tears, the swoon of Imogen, Fair Pastorella in the bandit's den, Are things to brood on with more ardency Than the death-day of empires.4 Poets are the men of the widest human sympathies, 5 Those to whom the miseries of the world But, above all, they are men of rare and strange experi- ences. 1 Quoted by Wordsworth from Dryden, Essay of Dramatic 8 Endymion, I, 795. 4 Ibid., II, 30. hold in the kingdom of his moon goddess. They make men "feel vividly, and with a vital consciousness, emotions which ordinary life rarely or never supplies occasions for exciting, and which had previously lain unawakened, and hardly within the dawn of consciousness-as myriads of modes of feeling are at this moment in every human mind for want of a poet to organize them." And of all experiences, the greatest and the nearest to the desire of the romantics was to "behold X and know something great, something one and indivisible," the warrant of a supersensible reality one yet infinite, the meaning and ground of the universe. These romantic critics give little consideration to the fact that the artist makes emotion into something which other people are incapable of making. Carlyle "cannot understand how a Mirabeau, with that great glowing heart, with the fire that was in it, with the bursting tears that were in it, could not have written verses, tragedies, poems." Shelley classes as poets all "who draw into a certain propinquity with the beautiful and the true," "the institutors of laws, and the founders of civil society, and the inventors of the arts of life, and the teachers."4 De Quincey's definition was made in conversation with Wordsworth "expressly to provide for the case where, though the poem was not good from defect in the composition, or from other causes, the stamina and matériel of good poetry as fine thinking and passionate conceptions, could not be denied to exist." 5 The highest moment of inspiration is the moment of passionate conception," of transcendent experience: 66 1 De Quincey, Letter III to a Young Man whose Education has been Neglected. 2 Coleridge, Letters, p. 228, ed. Hartley Coleridge. 3 On Heroes, Lecture III. 4 Shelley, Defence of Poetry. 5 Letter III to a Young Man whose Education has been Neglected (Note). "The mind in creation is as a fading coal, which some invisible influence, like an inconstant wind, awakens to transitory brightness; . . . when composition begins, inspiration is already on the decline, and the most glorious poetry that has ever been communicated to the world is probably a feeble shadow of the original conceptions of the poet." "" 1 The romantic wants to re-create a moment of his own 7 spiritual experience, and in doing so he is afraid to use the very forms of real things, lest they suggest the objects of a material world. He seeks to rarify form, to create x shadowy images, swaying and atmospheric, composed of faint intangible suggestions, not moulded into clear outlines. Such expression, while it is sometimes only vague, at other times really creates a new kind of form, expressing, with exquisite sensibility, a state of the soul hidden and intimate. But in other instances this cult of "feeling" makes the poet fear to elaborate, believing that the nearer he keeps to experience and to the actual words of experience, the nearer he will be to the reality he wants to explore. So Wordsworth takes as his model and ideal the utterance which passion wrings from life in the living: "But whatever portion of this faculty we may suppose even the greatest Poet to possess, there cannot be a doubt that the language which it will suggest to him, must often, in liveliness and truth, fall short of that which is uttered by men in real life, under the actual pressure of those passions, certain shadows of which the Poet thus produces, or feels to be produced, in himself.” 2 This is, almost, the ideal of style which Rousseau put forward in the second Preface to La Nouvelle Héloïse : "Croyez-vous que les gens vraiment passionnés ayent ces manières de parler vives, fortes, coloriées que vous admirez dans vos Drames et dans vos Romans? Non; la passion, pleine d'elle-même, s'exprime avec plus d'abondance que 1 Shelley, Defence of Poetry. 2 1800 Preface. |