... de force; elle ne songe pas même à persuader; elle ne soupçonne pas qu'on puisse douter d'elle. Quand elle dit ce qu'elle sent, c'est moins pour l'exposer aux autres que pour se soulager une lettre que l'Amour a réellement dictée ; une lettre d'un amant vraiment passionné, sera lâche, diffuse, toute en longueurs, en désordre, en répétitions. Son cœur, plein d'un sentiment qui déborde, redit toujours la même chose, et n'a jamais achevé de dire; comme une source vive qui coule sans cesse et s'épuise jamais. Rien de saillant, rien de remarquable; on ne retient ni mots, ni tours, ni phrases; on n'admire rien, l'on n'est frappé de rien. Cependant on se sent l'âme attendrie. The romantic attitude may be further illustrated by contrast with a poet who has much in common with the romantics-Tennyson. He was constitutionally subject to just that type of abnormal experience which the romantic idealized; in virtue of it, rather than of his speculations, he shared their mystical faith. But he did not identify such experience with the poetic genius. That, for Tennyson, was the creation of forms and expressions; he was essentially "classical," devoted not to the formation of rare moods but to the perfect expression of the normal. Carlyle describes him as a man "carrying a bit of Chaos about him . . . which he is manufacturing into Cosmos." Saint-Evrémond expressed the classical point of view when he said that the word "vast" could be used only as a term of reproach, because "vast" means unformed, uncontrolled human activity. But Coleridge, when he said "My mind had been habituated to the vast," referred to what he thought a good point in his education. The true romantic loves best the scenery whose individual form is scarcely distinguishable, because he wants to express the mysterious, the infinite, not the limited things of daily life. For example, mist has for the romantic (notably for Wordsworth) infinite powers of suggestion and wonder. Tennyson gives to it just its own delicate beauty and nothing beyond: The swimming vapour slopes athwart the glen, Tennyson loved the real, warm bodies of things and expressed them in their individual beauty. It would have been no comfort to him that Hallam should become a portion of the loveliness which once he made more lovely," if "in dear forms of human speech we two communicate no more. He wanted the real Hallam, in 66 his own familiar body, And I shall know him when we meet. The contrast in mental attitude only becomes more marked when Tennyson treats a typically romantic subject. What a re-creation of visionary experience would Coleridge have made out of The Lotus Eaters! Tennyson takes an experience well within his grasp and produces, not a magic fragment, but a formed and finished work. He does not want to "rarify ecstasy." Even in Maud, where he sets out to present emotions which overpass the limits set by self-respect, he is more often creating songs than studying emotions; and even at its shrillest the feeling is objectified in dramatic character, the words of confused passion are a perfect dramatic expression. When he touches the mystical, he gives it clearly formed into picture or argument, he does not write out of luminous twilights, but looking back after emergence into the clear day. Very rarely is he willing to re-create feeling in all its turmoil, for its own sake and at the expense of "vague words." a The visions of the knights who seek for the Grail, if they represent strange spiritual experiences, are given as clearly formed pictures. Like his own Arthur, though he had known visions, they seemed to him a part of life which should not interfere with practical duties. The mystical ascetic, in S. Simeon Stylites, he treats with definite 2 In Memoriam, 94. 1 Enone. sarcasm. He tested a man by conduct, not by rare experience, and where he turned from the strait way of poetry it was for the Victorian's purposefulness, not for the romantic's vision. His comment on the quest of the Grail is perhaps not unlike that of the old monk Ambrosius : Came ye on none but phantoms in your quest, No man, no woman? And for reasons like these it may be said of Tennyson, but perhaps of no one of the romantics, that he wrote the best poetry of which he was capable. III Romanticism is a mental attitude which appears not only in art, but also in philosophy. The development of English romantic art in the nineteenth century is shaped by a similar romanticism of thought, that is, a theoretical exaltation of feeling. The characteristics of romantic poetry, the high value set on human experience, on occult experience, and on the vision of the infinite; the exaltation of content above form, the desire for a form shadowy and suggestive; all these fall into their place as part of a single movement, when viewed in connection with contemporary thought. The late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries represent in philosophy a determination to think clearly and to sacrifice all things which hamper that aim. Prejudices, professions, traditions; dreams, fancies and all states of mind which cannot give a clear account of their basis, or which belong rather to the individual temperament than to the rational mind which all men have in common-these were the things against which the thinker must guard himself in forming his conclusions. The respectable part of the mind was the power to observe, to reason and to "methodize." Individual emotional experiences were to be controlled as far as 66 possible, in life and in thought; for literature they were a wholly unworthy subject. To Dr. Johnson the right < subjects for literature were morals and the doings of men, something from which "a hermit may estimate the transactions of the world." Where he met with the expression of individual emotion which seemed unusual, he censured it. Collins, "by indulging some peculiar habits of thought, was eminently delighted with those flights of imagination which pass the bounds of nature, and to which the mind is reconciled only by a passive acquiescence in popular traditions.”1 The cant of sensibility" which was just beginning to be heard, was to Johnson merely contemptible. The poet Gray, for example, “had a notion not very peculiar, that he could not write but at certain times, or at happy moments—a fantastic foppery to which my kindness for a man of< learning and virtue wishes him to have been superior."2 So, when Boswell wrote the life of Johnson, he did not attempt to re-create the individual emotions, the inward experiences, behind the incidents; he confined himself to the public Johnson. He did not, for example, explore the private morbidity of Johnson, his overpowering moods of depression; nor did Johnson ever think of giving literary expression to these; it did not occur to him that they were interesting. But, for a romantic, this, in all the experience of Johnson, would have been the fittest subject for literature, because it was an irresistible feeling, springing from his nature. James Thomson made, from something like it, The City of Dreadful Night. Johnson's depth of feeling finds expression not in direct self-revelation, but in forcible criticism of life. His prose style is born, not of rare subtleties of emotion, but of the logical subtlety of his reason. But despite the verdicts of the Great Cham, reaction was on foot. Hume and the philosophers of the Enlight2 Life of Gray. Life of Collins. 7 1. enment had themselves concentrated attention upon experience as against authority, and so upon those more obscure forms of experience called feeling. Attempts to define the concept of "feeling" occupied the contemporaries of Kant; and the gospel of Rousseau, on account of its wide popularity, gave the subject importance in the lives of men. Through the long march of civilization, the life of man, as Rousseau saw it, has become muffled in systems of knowledge, systems of government, conventions of society. He lives mechanically, among artificially created customs, and the real man seldom breaks through to find expression. Rousseau bids us strip off these lifeless encumbrances which the ages have accumulated and get back to what is elemental, natural and therefore essential in man. Similarly Wordsworth: "Humble and rustic life was generally chosen, because, in that condition, the essential passions of the heart find a better soil in which they can attain their maturity, are less under restraint, and speak a plainer and more emphatic language; because in that condition of life our elementary feelings coexist in a state of greater simplicity, and, consequently, may be more accurately contemplated, and more forcibly communicated." 1 These words, written in 1800, represent a complete reversal of the position of Johnson. Not the control of the reason and the will, but feeling, impulse, instinct, form the essential character of humanity. In a world of opinions shaped by convention a man, if he is to live fully, must treasure and act upon the individual and unique feeling which arises spontaneously. Hence the virtue of the man who feels on every occasion, and develops in new directions his power of feeling: for feeling is nearer to reality and the true nature of man than are his deliberate activities. The reaction from the philosophy of mechanism gave 1 1800 Preface. |