CHAPTER ONE Coleridge, Austen, and the Two Romanticisms
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CHAPTER ONE Coleridge, Austen, and the Two Romanticisms [W]e should learn to use the word ‘Romanticism’ in the plural. This, of course, is already the practice of the more cautious and observant literary historians, in so far as they recognize that the ‘Romanticism’ of one country may have little in common with that of another, and at all events ought to be defined in distinctive terms. But the discrimination of Romanticisms which I have in mind is not solely or chiefly a division upon lines of nationality or language. What is needed is that any study of the subject should begin with a recognition of a prima facie plurality of Romanticisms, of possibly quite distinct thought-complexes, a number of which may appear in one country. There is no hope of clear thinking on the part of the student of modern literature, if—as, alas! has been repeatedly done by eminent writers—he vaguely hypostasizes the term, and starts with the presumption that ‘Romanticism’ is the heaven-appointed designation of some single entity, or type of entities, to be found in nature. (Lovejoy 1978: 235) Thus Arthur O. Lovejoy, in an article written as long ago as 1924 but which has operated as the conscience of Romantic studies ever since, and is still cited or quoted as a warning against the sin of reductiveness when dealing with ideas in literary history – as I am quoting it now. What I have to offer, however, would hardly have satisfied Lovejoy, for whom the meanings of the word ‘Romanticism’ in current usage in the 1920s were so many and various, and at times so mutually incompatible, as effectively to render it meaningless. I, too, want to use the term in the plural, but I am only interested in two romanticisms, two uses of the epithet ‘romantic’, which I can distinguish easily enough in print by leaving one in lower case – ‘romantic’ – while capitalising the other (as Lovejoy does): ‘Romantic’. I What I mean by small ‘r’ romantic is what the period itself meant when it used the term: exotic, remote in time or place, strange, fabulous, extravagant, improbable, unrealistic – a meaning or meanings never far away from our own usage today. Movements, motifs, or styles subsequently identified as small ‘r’ romantic all make their (re)appearance in the eighteenth century and will be exploited by major Romantic poets in a variety of expressive ways: the Gothic; graveyard poetry; bardism and Druidism and Celtism; medievalism; orientalism. What William Beckford’s orientalist Vathek, Ann Radcliffe’s Gothic novels, and Sir Walter Scott’s verse tales of knights, goblins, and fair damsels (not to mention his “Celtified pageantry” [Lockhart 1839: VII, 50]) all have in common is that they are all romantic, actively dislocating and alienating their settings and landscapes and 2 conjuring either with patently fantastic incidents and characters, or with what Freud has taught us to call the uncanny: the familiar turned unfamiliar, strange. The word ‘romantic’ (or ‘romantick’) as it was used in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries still foregrounded its etymological derivation from the Medieval poetic romance, chivalric tales of adventure and love featuring heroic knights and virtuous maidens overcoming often thinly disguised allegorical obstacles in their quest for the ideal. Depending on your point of view – or, as I will suggest later of Jane Austen, depending on your temperament – a romance was either a fabulous narrative in verse or prose taking place in exotic settings and marked by extraordinary subject matter, improbable events, and larger-than-life characters, or it was an unrealistic narrative in verse or prose taking place in unlikely settings and marked by extravagant subject matter, silly events, and two-dimensional, stereotypical characters. Dr Johnson made this genealogy and his own position on the issue clear in his famous Dictionary when he defined ‘Romantick’ as ‘Resembling the tales or romances; wild, improbable; false; fanciful; full of wild scenery’. Willfully strange and deliberately estranging, Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s ‘Kubla Khan’, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, and Christabel are archetypal romantic poems in the sense that Coleridge’s contemporaries used the word – bizarre and otherworldly, ‘supernatural’. ‘Kubla Khan’ and Christabel remained unpublished for nearly twenty years, when they were finally published at the behest of Lord Byron, but The Rime of the Ancient Mariner – or, more accurately, The Rime of the Ancyent Marinere – made its first appearance not long after its composition as the lead poem in Coleridge and William Wordsworth’s celebrated joint publication, Lyrical Ballads, with a Few Other Poems (1798): During the first year that Mr Wordsworth and I were neighbours, our conversations turned frequently on the two cardinal points of poetry: the power of exciting the sympathy of the reader by a faithful adherence to the truth of nature, and the power of giving the interest of novelty by the modifying colours of the imagination. The sudden charm which accidents of light and shade, which moonlight or sunset diffused over a known or familiar landscape, appeared to represent the practicability of combining both. These are the poetry of nature. The thought suggested itself (to which of us I do not recollect) that a species of poems might be composed of two sorts. In the one, the incidents and agents were to be (in part at least) supernatural— . For the second class, subjects were to be chosen from ordinary life. In this idea originated the plan of the Lyrical Ballads, in which it was agreed that my endeavours were to be directed to persons and characters supernatural, or at least romantic; yet so far as to transfer from our inward nature a human interest and semblance of truth sufficient to procure for these shadows of imagination that willing suspension of disbelief for the moment, which constitutes poetic faith. (Coleridge 1983: II, 5-6) ‘Persons or characters supernatural’, note, ‘or at least romantic’. The phenomenology of reading the romantic that Coleridge outlines here – the ‘willing suspension of disbelief’ – is one that criticism 3 has subsequently adopted to characterise the act of reading literature generally, but Coleridge’s surely accurate account of how we voluntarily collaborate with the fantastic, imaginatively accommodating the improbable, was especially designed to explain and justify his own poetic experiments with the fantastic and the improbable. That some such explanation as Coleridge offers here in the Biographia was required at the time becomes immediately apparent when we look at the reception of The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, one example of which – from Charles Burney, the musicologist and father of the novelist Fanny Burney – will have to suffice: The author’s first piece, the ‘Rime of the ancyent Marinere’, in imitation of the style as well as the spirit of our elder poets, is the strangest story of a cock and a bull that we ever saw on paper: yet, though it seems a rhapsody of unintelligible wildness and incoherence, (of which we do not perceive the drift, unless the joke lies in depriving the wedding guest of his share of the feast) there are in it poetical touches of an exquisite kind. (Jackson 1970: 56) The suggestion that the existential ‘joke’ of the poem lies in alienating the wedding guest from the symbolic society and harmony of the wedding seems inspired, but if we look at the points Burney makes they all turn on a revulsion from what I am calling the romantic elements of the poem, which come with its self-conscious literary heritage. As Burney himself points out, the poem was written ‘in imitation of the style as well as the spirit of our elder poets’. This was especially true of the first version of the poem, in which an antiquarian impulse is unmistakable from the spelling of its title, but the same impulse is manifest in all the later versions in occasional spellings and locutions that are used by Coleridge to imitate medieval poetry: ‘quoth he’, ‘I wist’, ‘eftsones’. The Rime of the Ancient Mariner was fashioned to look old, remote and Medieval, and not just in odd words and phrases but also and more importantly in its imaginative seascape, a projection of the Ancient Mariner’s outdated superstition and religiosity. Coleridge was capitalising on the taste for antiquarianism that had made Thomas Percy’s Reliques of Ancient English Poetry (1765) a favourite with the late eighteenth century, and using it to ask questions about ways of seeing and understanding that we will look at more closely in chapter 5. II From images and incidents drawn from ancient and exotic travel literature (see Lowes 1930: passim), The Rime slides effortlessly into the bizarre and threatening world of nightmare, creating an allegory of alienation and isolation of uniquely compelling power. As so often with the fairy or folk 4 tale that Coleridge is exploiting here, along with Medieval romance and romantic travelogue, the fantastic setting and events suggest a journey inside the mind: We were the first that ever burst Into that silent sea. (The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, ll. 105-6)1 But no less than the Ancient Mariner and his companions we have crossed over (a rhetorical and imagistic strategy of which, as we will see in chapter 4, Coleridge was especially fond); we are in another mental world where the capital ‘r’ Romantic has supervened upon the small ‘r’ romantic, as infection supervenes upon a wound. What we mean by capital ‘r’ Romantic when we apply the term to the period, and to the literature of the period, alludes to no one particular idea or style – indeed, if we confine ourselves to the major poets from Blake and Wordsworth to Keats and Clare, it is hard to imagine more philosophical and stylistic variety emerging from so comparatively brief a period (1790-1830).