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Aesthetic Humanism: the Radical Romantic Vision of Blake and Byron

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Aesthetic Humanism: the Radical Romantic Vision of Blake and Byron Aesthetic Humanism: The Radical Romantic Vision of Blake and Byron By John William Davies, B.A. A Thesis Submitted to the Department of English California State University Bakersfield In Partial Fulfillment for the Degree of Master of Arts in English Spring 2013 Copyright By John William Davies 2013 Aesthetic Humanism: The Radical Romantic Vision ofBlake and Byron By John William Davies This thesis has been accepted on behalf ofthe Department ofEnglish by their supervisory committee: Dr. Susan Stafinbil Committee Chair Dr. Steven Frye Aesthetic Humanism: The Radical Romantic Vision of Blake and Byron If Shakespeare “invented the human,” a claim made rather spectacularly by the critic Harold Bloom in a 1998 book, then the six British poets who comprised what was to become known as the Romantic Period perfected the mode. Shakespeare, in Bloom’s terms, depicted interiority in a unique way, allowing his characters to “overhear” themselves, to be self-reflective and existential (or proto-existential). Existentialism proper, along with the whole modern conception of self, has been merely catching up. It is my contention that the Romantics accelerated this paradigm shift by making the figure of The Poet highly subjective in a way it had not been before. Byron is the archetype. The “Byronic Hero” inaugurated in “Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage,” and perfected in “Manfred” and “Don Juan,” is subjectivity (at least male subjectivity) personified, a titillating amalgam of ambition, weakness, androgyny, power, lust; mortality and immortality in locked combat like Jacob and the angel. Only Jacob is not an abstract, allegorical figure here. These characters are Byron, by his own admission “such a strange mélange of good and evil that it would be difficult to describe me” (qtd. in Abrams 555). We have another name for this and it is “human nature.” The American and French Revolutions brought into stark relief the arrogance of Empires and Systems versus the needs and demands of individuals. These movements, along with the general spiritual crisis concomitant to the industrialization of Europe, brought about a restlessness in the artists and artisans that eventually crystallized as “The Spirit of the Age.” Keats wrote, “Great spirits now on earth are sojourning.” The “spirits” that have made it into the generally recognized Western Canon are William Blake, William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, George Gordon (Lord Byron), Percy Bysshe Shelley, and John Keats. Not all of these 1 poets were recognized at the time, but as a collective, they represent the shift in artistic consciousness in 18th and 19th century Britain, that led to a shift in the world’s consciousness as to what humanity is and what purpose it serves in the Universe. This leads naturally to religious questions. The Romantics can rightly be described as “humanists,” in that they viewed the common human good as Ultimate. Shelley saw religion as inherently corrosive and even printed a controversial pamphlet entitled “The Necessity of Atheism.” Wordsworth and Coleridge were promiscuous in their metaphors, freely mixing nature-cult with the standard Christian idiom. Keats was a skeptic, but used God as a poetic device. William Blake was another matter entirely. Peter Ackroyd writes, in his influential biography, Blake: All the evidence of Blake’s art and writing suggests that he was imbued with a religion of Piety, enthusiasm, and vision. His older brother, who settled into a trade as a hosier, claimed to have seen Moses and Abraham. He was also reputed to ‘talk Swedenborg,’ which in the language of the period, meant that he espoused some visionary faith bearing traces of the radical mysticism of the seventeenth century and earlier. This was Blake’s inheritance, and it can be truly said that he is the last great religious poet in England (Ackroyd 18). Blake himself had a vision of God at the age of eight and never let go of his religious preoccupation, though the metaphysical system he was to later develop in his poetry, while steeped in Christian idiom, was highly idiosyncratic and even Gnostic. His overriding motif is “The Human Form Divine,” an abstract of mankind’s qualities at their most benign and at their most malevolent. “God” for Blake is very much anthropomorphic, merciful in that man is merciful, cruel in that man is cruel. 2 Blake’s humanized God and Byron’s divinized man represent two poles of Romantic vision that can help us understand the unique humanism forged in that heady Age. Though the Romantics took their inspiration from the intensely secular French Revolution, Romanticism was not an artistic basis for secular humanism (Shelley’s atheism notwithstanding). Nor was it the basis for a new religious humanism, although certainly Romantic zeal coursed through later religious movements dedicated to suffrage and the abolition of slavery. Romantic humanism preached an ideal humanity mediated by Art, an aesthetic humanism that incorporated religious and secular values in an unprecedented way. Mankind in these works is both Divine and, to borrow a phrase from Bloom, “human, all too human.” This paper will reexamine Byron, long viewed as “anti-metaphysical,” in light of new religious readings of his work and place him in conversation with Blake, a religious visionary who betrays easily as much cynicism toward the Heavenly realm as Byron does. I will begin by examining a representative work from each poet (Songs of Innocence and Experience for Blake and Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage for Byron) in a new light, looking particularly for shades of ambivalence where the authors’ views have been previously considered to be self-evident. I will argue that both poets exemplify a wily transgressiveness in relation to moral, ethical, and sexual norms (a kind of antinomianism, the heresy by which the sinner buries himself or herself so deeply in the underworld of transgression that salvation is virtually required). I will follow this by placing the poets in direct communication with one another, something they have conveniently already done in the dueling works Cain (by Byron) and The Ghost of Abel (by Blake). I will be paying close attention to the satirical nature of each poet’s work, suggesting that, especially in Byron’s case, his attitude towards the Divine is found between the lines. I intend to establish the basis of what I’ve called “aesthetic humanism” by way of a dialectic between these two seminal poets’ bodies of work. 3 The larger point to be made, in relation to the Romantics’ co-invention of the human, is that the Byronic Hero is but one incarnation of Blake’s “Human Form Divine,” and that figure is the basis for much of our understanding of the modern Western personality. The artists of the Romantic Period (1785 – 1830 is the span generally agreed upon by literary historians) were primed to reevaluate human concerns by a number of powerful, historical factors. One is the Enlightenment, which began to strip away myth and metanarrative, albeit in exchange for a new metanarrative called Progress. Terry Eagleton has written incisively on the “nausea” left by the departure of transcendence post-enlightenment. In his book Reason, Faith and Revolution he writes: A new, prestigious image of Man was born as free, controlling, agent-like, autonomous, invulnerable, dignified, self-responsible, self-possessed, contemplative, dispassionate, and disengaged. This is Man’s ‘coming of age,’ but it is a maturity that is inseparable from a certain infantile anxiety. At the peak of his assurance, Enlightenment Man finds himself threateningly alone in the universe, with nothing to authenticate himself but himself. Sovereignty proves to be inseparable from solitude (82). Add to this the social uncertainty and unrest brought about by technology and peoples’ revolutions, sketched by M.H. Abrams in his celebrated anthology, The Romantic Period: This was a turbulent period, during which England experienced the ordeal of change from a primarily agricultural society, where wealth and power had been concentrated in the landholding aristocracy, to a modern industrial nation, in which the balance of economic power shifted to large-scale employers, who found themselves ranged against an immensely enlarging and increasingly restive 4 working class. And this change occurred in the context of revolution – first the American and then the more radical French – and of wars, of economic cycles of inflation and depression, and of the constant threat of the social structure from imported revolutionary ideologies to which the ruling classes responded by the repression of traditional liberties (2). These revolutions reverberated in the literary communities of England. Foundational texts included Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France, Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Man and A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, and Thomas Paine’s Rights of Man. Poets became, in Shelley’s phrase, the “unacknowledged legislators of the world,” though Byron sought some acknowledgement in the form of an impassioned speech before the House of Lords on the rights of stocking industry workers, who had taken to criminal acts as the result of systemic mistreatment. Blake addressed world events through a series of highly esoteric epics such as London, Jerusalem, and America: A Prophecy, but it was the succinct and incisive poems of Songs of Innocence and Experience that prophesied Dickens in their gritty descriptions of London urban life. “The Chimney Sweeper” begins: When my mother died I was very young, And my father sold me while yet my tongue Could scarcely cry “’weep! ‘weep! ‘weep!” So your chimneys I sweep & in soot I sleep. (1-4) The songs, composed between 1789 and 1805, are designed to create in the reader a growing sense of dis-ease. A weeping child appears in the “Introduction” to Songs of Innocence, surrounded by the tranquil calm of nature, replaced with the all-seeing Bard of Songs of 5 Experience, a deceptive juxtaposition because the Songs of Innocence betray traces of bitter experience between the lines.
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