Romantic prose Belles lettres

Romantic poetry invites a reverence which Romantic prose essayists, for all their ‘fine writing’, rarely show. In the year in which Keats addressed the nightingale as a ‘light-winged Dryad of the trees’ on Hampstead Heath, Thomas Love Peacock wrote that `We know ... that there are no Dryads in Hyde-park nor Naiads in the Regent’s-canal. But barbaric manners and supernatural interventions are essential to poetry. Either in the scene, or in the time, or in both, it must be remote from our ordinary perceptions.’ This last is an 18th-century judgement on Romantic poetry, to be read with Wordsworth’s Preface and Shelley’s Defence.

Charles Lamb Charles Lamb (1775-1834) was indifferent to ideas, to politics and to the Lake District. His anthology of the older dramatists was a contribution to later Romantic tastes. Although his comments are often shrewd, Lamb treated Renaissance plays as cabinets of poetic gems and curiosities. His preference for reading plays rather than seeing them is only partly due to the low state of the theatre. Playwrights were for him ‘dramatic poets’, whereas the Romantics were specimens of humanity who lived about the time of Lamb. The purpose of his own familiar essays is to display his idiosyncratic sensibility. The charm valued by his friends lingers in Old China and in The Two Races of Men - these are ‘the men who borrow’ and ‘the men who lend’. Coleridge appears as ‘Comberbatch, matchless in his depredations’; those books that he returns are ‘enriched with annotations’.
William Hazlitt A humorous phrase was not the highest ambition of the lifelong radical, William Hazlitt (1778-1830). His literary and theatrical criticism consists of random lively ‘impressions’. He wrote one wonderful essay, My First Acquaintance with Poets (1823), an unforgettable account of his meeting with his heroes of twenty-five years earlier. Wordsworth ‘sat down and talked very naturally and freely, with a mixture of clear gushing accents in his voice, a deep guttural intonation, and a strong tincture of the northern burr, like the crust on wine. He instantly began to make havoc of the half of a Cheshire cheese on the table ...’. STC’s ‘forehead was broad and high, light as if built of ivory, with large projecting eyebrows, and his eyes rolling beneath them, like a sea with darkened lustre ... His mouth was gross, voluptuous, open, eloquent; his chin good-humoured and round: but his nose, the rudder of the face, the index of the will, was small, feeble, nothing - like what he has done.’ Vigorous caricature made Hazlitt an effective journalist and public speaker, but his politics overrode his critical judgement. The premium which Romanticism gave to sincerity leaves a criticism which is merely autobiographical at the mercy of whim and prejudice. Lamb, for example, so ‘gentle’, so fond of old books, old China and his old schoolfriend Coleridge, had a philistine contempt for the music of Mozart and Handel. Leigh Hunt (1784-1859) was a benign exponent of descriptive-cumappreciative criticism, a man of letters of liberal energy and sympathy. He will be remembered less for his own writing than as the editor who published Keats, Shelley, Byron, Hazlitt, Hogg and Tennyson.

Thomas De Quincey Thomas De Quincey (1785-1859) is best remembered for the elaborate prose of Confessions of an English Opium-Eater, an autobiography full of hallucinatory dreams, notably one of an Easter Sunday when he recognizes the face of Ann, a 17-yearold prostitute who had helped him when he was down and out in London. The psychological configuration given by De Quincey to his compelling memories is reminiscent of those in Frost at Midnight and in Wordsworth’s ‘spots of time’. It prefigures the imaginative use of the Gothic made by the Brontës.

Fiction

Thomas Love Peacock Thomas Love Peacock (1785-1864), who worked beside Lamb in the East India Office under John Mill, was a fine satirist. Like the gifted poet Walter Savage Landor, Peacock was a long-lived 18th-century gentleman Radical. Both wrote imaginary conversations between writers, but Landor’s historical conversations have none of the quickness of Peacock’s ironic countryhouse dialogues between ‘perfectibilians, deteriorationists, status-quo-ites ... transcendentalists, political economists, theorists in all sciences ... lovers of the picturesque, and lovers of good dinners.’ The Misfortunes of Elphin (1829), set in 6th-century Wales, contains ‘The War Song of Dinas Vawr’, a parody of the darkage battle-poem idealized by the Romantics: ‘The mountain sheep are sweeter/But the valley sheep are fatter;/We therefore deemed it meeter/To carry off the latter.’
Mary Shelley If Peacock’s dialogues are modelled upon Plato’s, Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus by Mary Shelley (1797-1851) is a cross between the Gothic tale and the fable of ideas; neither is realistic. Frankenstein began as a literary experiment within a social experiment - as a ‘ghost story’ in a game proposed by Byron at the Villa Diodati on Lac Leman, Switzerland, in 1816, while Mary’s half-sister Claire Clairmont was having an affair with Byron. Two years earlier Mary, aged 16, had eloped with Shelley from the home of her father, the philosopher-novelist William Godwin. Her mother, the feminist Mary Wollstonecraft, had died after her birth in 1797. Mary herself lost a daughter at 17, bore a son at 18, and, after the suicides of another of her half-sisters and of Shelley’s wife, married the poet at 19. She had lost another child before she was widowed at 24. She dedicated Frankenstein to Godwin. Shelley wrote a preface, supposedly by Mary, and also a disingenuous pre-publication review in which he refers to the author as male and as showing the influence of Godwin. Men were the midwives of this mythbreeding text. Frankenstein is an epistolary narrative with three narrators, the English Arctic explorer Capt. Walton, the German scientist Victor Frankenstein, and the nameless ‘man’ which Frankenstein ‘creates’ out of human body-parts by electrical experiment. The Creature wants a mate, which Frankenstein assembles but destroys. It then kills its creator’s brother, his friend and his wife; he tries to kill it, but it escapes into the Arctic. The sensational contents and moral ideas of Frankenstein are conveyed in a mechanical style. Its interest is cultural, moral, philosophical and psychological: it is a nightmare of alienation; a sentimental critique of the victorious intellect to which Shelley and Godwin trusted; and a negative critique of a Faustian overconfidence in natural science.

Maria Edgeworth Women make a notable contribution to fiction from early in the 19th century. The historical novel was perfected by Scott, but he did not invent it. In Waverley he wrote ‘so as in some distant degree to emulate the admirable portraits drawn by Miss Edgeworth’. He refers to the anonymous Castle Rackrent: An Hibernian tale taken from facts and from the manners of the Irish squires before the year 1782, an edited oral memoir of the steward of the Rackrent estate.

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Grado Iconos Culturales y Literarios de Inglaterra Apunte sobre Romantic Poetry and Fiction , creado por s b el 09/01/2014.

Romantic Poetry and Fiction