pre romanticism o
TRANSCRIPT
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.