PRE-ROMANTICISMO

ETYMOLOGIE / etymology

ETUDE SEMANTIQUE / Definitions

COMMENTAIRE / Analysis

The term Romantic and its derivatives have been used in

literary history since Madame de Stael's analysis «De la

poésie classique et de la poésie romantique» in her De

l'Allemagne (1810). Literary historians since the beginning

of the present century have recognised that certain aspects of

Romantic literature had been manifest prior to the so-called

Romantic Revolution at the beginning of the nineteenth

century: for example, E. Abry and his colleagues in their

popular school-text, Histoire Illustrée de la Littérature

Française (1912) write of «les Precurseurs du Romantisme,»

and in his study of eighteenth-century English literature, The

Peace of the Augustans (1916), George Saintsbury discusses

the «earlier Romantic pioneers». Henry A. Beers published

in 1898 A History of English Romanticism in the Eighteenth

Century which, starting from his rather narrow definition of

Romanticism as the «reproduction in modern art or literature

of the life and thought of the Middle Ages,» provides a

detailed comment on eighteenth-century imitations of

Spenser and Milton, and on the Gothic Revival in fiction and

poetry, showing their close affinity to early nineteenth-

century literature.

The specific term «pre-romanticism» enters the critical

vocabulary with P. Van Tieghem's influential study, Le

Préromantisme (Vol. I, 1924); he stressed the influence of

Rousseau's La Nouvelle Héloïse in developing a sensibility

that focusses on personal emotions and the melancholy

isolation of the delicate-souled hero. «Pre-romantic» has

been regularly used in academic writing in England since the

appearance of Emile Legouis and Louis Cazamian's A

History of English Literature (1927). Book IV of their

survey is titled «The Pre-Romantic Period (1770 - 98)»: their

thesis is that after about 1760 a number of «symptoms and

signs of a change tend to group themselves into an imposing

whole». Like Beers, they stress the rediscovery of the

mediaeval world, marked in Bishop Percy's collection of old

ballads, and, more disreputably, the forgeries of James

Macpherson (Ossian) and Thomas Chatterton, and show how

mediaevalism led to an increased interest in the mysterious --

what could not fully be explained or understood. This in turn

stimulated the appetite for the hallucinatory and supernatural

which was satisfied by the Gothic novel of terror. In

addition, Legouis and Cazamian note the growing influence

of Methodism. Its focus on the experience of the individual

and its social consciousness helped to develop an increased

respect for human feelings and an increased interest in

charting their precise dynamics, particularly in lyric poetry.

Critics in the mid-twentieth century tended to avoid the term

«pre-romantic,» recognising that the validity of labels such

as «Classical» and «Romantic» was doubtful, and that

transitional labels derived from them, such as «neo-

classical» and «pre-romantic,» were even more problematic,

implying an unfashionable concept of process and

development in literature. John Butt's authoritative

contribution to the Oxford History of English Literature, The

Mid-Eighteenth Century (1979), avoids using «pre-

romantic,» and indeed rather pointedly bases its description

of poetry from 1760 to 1789 on the continuing Augustan

tradition of satirical verse.

In recent years, critics have revived the concept of a «pre-

romantic» literature. Pierre Arnaud and Jean Raimond stress

the intellectual, social and political ferment of the later

eighteenth century, and recognise that writers responded by

seeking new modes of expression. Marshall Brown describes

the «crisis of expression» in late-eighteenth-century Britain,

and uses recent critical theory to trace the pre-romanticism

of its poetry, drama and fiction. Certainly, the sensibilities of

Wordsworth and Coleridge differ from those of Dryden and

Pope, and it is possible to chart a movement from the one to

the other through the eighteenth century. Poetry of natural

description, which in Pope is mainly a derivative of the

classical pastoral, becomes, from Thomson's Winter (1726)

onwards, more concerned with catching the reality of

experience, and the impact that this experience has on the

observer. So Collins, in his Ode to Evening (1746), «musing

slow,» hails the «genial lov'd return» of evening:

Now air is hushed, save where the weak-eyed bat,

With short shrill shriek flits by on leathern wing,

Or where the beetle winds

His small but sullen horn.

Just as nature is valorised by its contrast with the corrupt

world of modern, urban sophistication, Thomson's «Vile,

licentious crowd,» so writers valorise those societies they

deem to be interestingly primitive: the mediaeval, the Celtic,

the Oriental and the barbarian. Pope patronisingly uses the

«poor» American Indian as his model of human instinct in

the dull-witted. But in 1783 Edward Thompson describes

The Indian Maid:

A beauteous bronze she stands confessed,

Venus nor Hebe more complete...

And when she moves, her mien and grace

Prove her the goddess of the place !

(Roger Lonsdale, The New Oxford Book of Eighteenth

Century Verse, 1984, p. 669.) Collins writes Persian

Eclogues (1742) to show the universality of simple human

emotions, and Gray and others laud the factitious sublimity

of ancient Wales and Scotland.

A growing belief in human benevolence and the power of

positive goodness is marked as early as Richardson's Pamela

(1740-41), where the servant-girl's inflexible innocence

converts the rakish Mr B., and Fielding's Joseph Andrews

(1742), where Parson Adams is a triumphant example of

militant virtue. Such perfectibility in humanity, further

developed in Laurence Sterne's Tristram Shandy (1760-67),

Henry Mackenzie's Man of Feeling (1771) and the

sentimental drama of the later part of the century, points

away from the embittered spleen of the Restoration satirists

to the revolutionary hopefulness of Shelley. The topic is

most obviously addressed in narrative genres, but implicit in

much contemporary poetry is the voice of the sensitive and

good-natured poet.

The relocation of the source of powerful feelings -- from

external impressions to an internal responses -- can be traced

in the movement from the political involvement of Dryden to

the willing isolation of William Cowper:

Oh for a lodge in some vast wilderness,

Some boundless contiguity of shade,

Where rumour of oppression and deceit,

Of unsuccessful or successful war,

May never reach me more. (1785)

In his 1801 «Essay Supplement to the Preface to the Lyrical

Ballads», the 1789 collection of poems that is normally seen

as the birth of Romantic poetry in England, Wordsworth

comments on Thomson's Winter that it is a «work of

inspiration; much of it is written from himself, and nobly

from himself». He is recognising the reliance on emotions

engendered by the contemplation of the natural world which

is so characteristic of his own best poetry. The same

comment might be made of other poets from the later

eighteenth century, such as Edward Young, William

Shenstone, Mark Akenside and Oliver Goldsmith.

But these writers cannot be called unrecognised Romantics:

two major distinctions separate them from the first

generation of Romantic poets. Their work is not marked by

spontaneity or the appearance of spontaneity, and their

language is consciously, and conventionally, poetic rather

than the plain «language of men» that Wordsworth sought.

They tend to follow the patterns of expository poetry

developed on the model of Vergil's Georgics, carefully

segregating the descriptive and the moral parts of their

poems. They tend to use and amplify the vocabulary of

poetic diction that Wordsworth criticised so roundly, as well

as the rhetorical flourishes and the devices of personification

that mark the self-consciousness of a Classical literature.

In the «pre-romantic» writers the sensibility of benevolence,

emotionalism and cultural primitivism may be developed,

but an appropriate discourse has not yet been determined.

John Butt shrewdly notes that Chatterton and Macpherson

were conscious of this new sensibility but, unable to address

it in their own voices, were forced into pastiche and forgery.

Their more reputable contemporaries may similarly lack

voices of their own to articulate their feelings as powerfully

as their successors in the early nineteenth century. Still

awaiting resolution is the problem of whether we should read

these writers as prophetic voices of a new universe of poetry,

as pallid descendants of a robust earlier age, or as individual

writers of varying talents and genius resisting classification

and wishing to be heard as themselves.

Richard Morton

McMaster University

BIBLIOGRAPHIE / Bibliographie

Henry A. Beers.- A History of English Romanticism in the

Eighteenth Century.- New York: Holt, 1898.

Minski, Alexander.- Le préromantisme.- Armand Colin,

1998.

Paul Van Tieghem.- Le préromantisme, étude d'histoire

littéraire européene.- Paris: F. Rieder, 1924-47, 3 vols.

Paul Van Tieghem.- Le sentiment de la nature dans le

préromantisme européen.- Paris: Nizet, 1960.

Pierre Arnaud; Jean Raimond.- Le préromantisme anglais.-

Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1980.

Marshall Brown.- Preromanticism.- Stanford: Stanford

University Press, 1991.