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Romanticism
Southey on the French Revolution: "Nothing was dreamt of but the regeneration of the Human Race."
William Wordsworth: Nature’s self is the breath of God
William Hazlitt: a puddle is filled with preternatural faces
Samuel Coleridge: the one life within us and abroad
Definitions:
Professor Ker: Romanticism was the fairy way of writing, and it is based in a love of reminiscence
Mr. Geoffrey Scott: R is the “cult of the extinct” and Ker, the “romantic schools have always depended on the past.”
Paul Elmer More: R is the illusion of beholding the infinite within the stream of nature itself, instead of apart from that stream—in short, as an apotheosis of the cosmic flux
Anon: Romanticism spells anarchy in every domain…a systematic hostility to everyone invested with any particle of social authority—husband, policeman or magistrate, priest of Cabinet minister
Monsier Selliere: R is an “imperialistic mood, whether in individuals or nations—a too confident assertion of the will-to-power, arising from ‘the mystic feeling that one’activities have the advantages of a celestial alliance.”
1971 M.H. Abrams
Romanticism an enterprise trying to save traditional values after God taken out of equation. God/Nature/Man [God x'd]
To shore up humanistic values:
Joy: What man is born for.
Hope: Triumph of other three. A Duty.
Liberty: Political/mental deliverance from Custom.
Life: The highest good.
Love: confraternity of man.
Saving morals, meaning, and life without God, law, and love.
1982 McGann
Romanticism retreats from difficult work of politically changing their society by setting up a comfortable system of belief.
Ideas: at heart of emotional structure--an illusion.
Fundamental truths are poppycock.
Philosophic Foundations
Rousseau’s Naturalism
Scientific Development—Newtonian Physics
Philosophic Development—Kantian Metaphysics
Historical Foundations
The French Revolution
The American Revolution
The English Response to Revolution
Literary Foundations
Naturalist tradition of reading meaning into nature as opposed to in civilization—spiritualized nature
Bowyer’s Nature poetry
Gothicism
Fancy and Imagination as opposed to 18th Century Reason
Philosophy
Jean Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778)
Monsier Lassere: Rousseau the father of Romanticism
Belief in the Inherent Equality of Humankind
Belief that Government should reflect the GENERAL WILL
Belief that pure Human Nature corrupted and degraded by CIVILIZATION
Rousseau’s Emile—On Education
Primitive versus civilized man
The need for mothers to breast feed their children, raise them in countryside, because country life pure.
John Locke (1632-1704)
1. The mind knows nothing but its own states
2. What we experience are not the things themselves, but our ideas of them.
3. Suppose you are having an experience of a piece of paper with printing on it. This is your experience, a state of mind.
The idea of anything in our mind no more proves the existence of that thing that the picture of a man evidences his being the world, or the vision of a dream makes thereby a true history.
Our perception of this paper makes it highly probable there is something external from us, but we only know what it is to the degree of actual sensation, which degree suits our needs.
Such an assurance of external things is sufficient to direct us in attaining the good and avoiding the evil, which is caused by them; which is the important concernment we have of being made acquainted with them.
Knowledge of external existence only applies when connected to senses. The man that left does not necessarily exist, though he probably does.
If is possible for me to do many things upon the confidence that there are men now in the world, but this is but probability, not knowledge.
Bodies out there cause two kinds of Ideas in us:
Ideas that truly resemble them:
a. Solidity c. figure │ Primary Qualities of
b. Extension d. mobility │ Bodies
Ideas that do not resemble them:
a. Sweet
b. Red
Concludes all objects have a Real Internal but Unknown Constitution whereon its discernable qualities depend. All the properties flow from this essence. If only was could discover IT, we could deduce these properties.
Further
Only knowledge of the agreement and disagreement of ideas.
No compounding,
Just a bringing together, so as to take a view of them as once:
Blue is not Yellow [1. identity and diversity]
Iron susceptible to magnetic attraction [2. Coexistence]
But what we know of iron is not true iron, but a collection of coexisting simple ideas of vision, touch, and so forth. Among these is the perception of movement toward a magnet.
Experience shows that a set of secondary qualities [qualitative ideas] [i.e. iron turns brown in presence of oxygen] accompanies the Ideas of the movement of certain minute and visible parts of iron and oxygen.
Conclusion
Our understandings were not fitted to deal with the metaphysical inquiries that had consumed so much energy of earlier philoso0phers. Metaphysics useless and harmful because it distracts Men and results in skepticism.
Immanuel Kant
Critique of Pure Reason pub 1780
Salvages human epistemology
Man has certain innate categories to synthesize: Organizational qualities: sound, sense, etc.
Mind determines and describes objective feature of world.
Numenal world: of spirit
Phenomenal world: of senses [can be known through faculty of
understanding/innate categories]
Numenal world of Absolute Values [truth, beauty, morality] can be intuited through Reason.
Kant gets to Romantics from Germany through Coleridge.
1. Thus, concept of mind creating world comes to fore
Or
2. Mind and world each half create
Hence Wordsworth’s interfusion: that process whereby, through interaction of his mind and nature, a modified, heightened sense of awareness, of reality, comes about. In this process, the mind half-creates, and nature half creates the modification. A mind that is sincere has the sensitivity for such an act of enthusiasm. A mind thus sensitized is said to have a sympathetic imagination. The sympathetic imagination for Wordsworth has a healing quality. For others, it has a destructive one.
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History
Quotes Napoleon:
Had there been no Rousseau, no revolution, I would have been impossible."
1790’s turbulent times
1789 French Revolution reign of terror
1792 England at war with France.
1795 Bread riots [3] result of war with France.
1798 Riots on war taxes.
By end of decade, however,
Government machine perfected.
Machinery of oppression in place.
Romantics abstain from political action.
1811. Regency started [George III mad/syphilis, son takes over]
1820 George IV
How and Why?
Social Shifts:
1. England in 17th goes industrial
a. 50% increase in pop between 1801-1850—population explosion--Malthusianism
b. 50% shift from country to city. Dislocation of poor. Closure of cottage industries.
c. Invention of the power loom. Fear in people. Luddite Rebellions
d. 18th Century Danger in cities.
2. 1780 "Society for Constitutional Information Demanded:
a. Political rights for dissenters [only Anglicans could hold office.]
b. Repeal of Corporation and Test Acts [39 Articles of Faith]
c. Begin Annual Parliaments.
d. Better Representation of middle class.
Hence
William Wordsworth describes a city as “a monstrous anthill on the plain”
William Wordsworth on the Industrial Condition: “for a multitude of causes, unknown to former times are now acting with a combined force to blunt the discriminating powers of the mind, and, unfitting it for all voluntary exertion, to reduce it to a state of almost savage torpor.”
All slow in England, but
By 1789, all changed because of France
1789 French Revolution
Rethinking touched all points. In England, the effect:
Reform to the Left
Oligarchy to the right.
Reform to the Left:
Low: moderate Whigs wanted Constitutional Monarchy with some middle class representation.
Middle ground: Godwin, Wollenstonecraft.
Advocated gradualism, literacy and cultural change of consciousness to alter institutions. Thought that if all did fair share, all work only two hours a day. Though Leisure class necessary for growth [18th cent Enlightenment notion]
Premise: humanity basically good
Reason comes from cultivation of knowledge
For Godwin: True Justice: a disinterested way of looking at the world, with sympathy and empathy.
Advocated feminism, socialism, end of private property, hope for social change through education, and ultimately, Philosophical Anarchism. Gov't function is to safeguard us from ourselves. Enlightened don’t' need such safeguards.
Godwin against violent revolution but offers no plan.
Reform to the Middle
Burke [used to be a leftist] Reflections On The Revolution in France.
People were reading like mad, especially this by Burke.
Burke’s message:
1. Family affections...Hearth and home
England the "Greater National Family" [Great chain of being ideology]
2. Call for continuity with past, especially with religious creed.
3. No changes while France Revolutionary.
Oligarchy to the Right
Church and King Mobs: locals whipped into frenzy of patriotism by Priests, conservatives. They Burned Priestly house. Radicals given Jacobin label.
1792: England at War with France.
Radicals torn by nationalism and high ideals.
France's Reign of Terror disaffected many.
1794—Gagging Acts eliminated free speech…habeas corpus suspended
1795—Bread riots because of high taxes for war with France
1798—Countrywide riots on war taxes, and radicals writing, people reading
Will Godwin saved from hanging because his book too expensive
1815—Napolean defeated at Waterloo by Wellington—Europe re-throned. England acts to suppress all dissent:
1. all dissenting acts treason
2. all meetings seditious
3. freedom of press greatly curtailed
4. Curtailed freedom of the press, no trade unions
5. Habeas corpus dismissed
Radical poets and thinkers (Coleridge and Lamb) plan to leave to form a Utopian community on the banks of the Susequhanna river, but instead, stay, become conservative, and turn inward to find paradise.
Literary Foundations
I. Joseph Warton’s “The Enthusiast: the Lover of Nature” 1740
Theme: superiority of nature [not man-made] to art
Some pine-topt precipice
Abrupt and shaggy…[Warton’s complaint that]
That luxury and pomp…
Should proudly banish Nature’s simple charms…
….
To dwell in palaces and high-roof’d halls,
Than in God’s forests, architect supreme?
Can Kent design like nature? [Sir William Temple, Pope, Horace Walpole, Batty Langley, Kent, Brown, Bridgeman—horticulturists and schetch artists]
II. Gothic Influence: Horace Walpole/Frankenstein/Dracula [a reaction to logical, reasonable 18th century Neo-classicists interested in Humankind]
Supernatural influence
Sinister, mysterious
Dramatic settings of power and darkness
III German Idealism of 1790s (Wild Christian model versus Classical Pagan) Kantean Metaphysics, a Belief in Revolution and Social Rebirth, a Distrust of all Authority but one’s own, a melancholy sense of loss, of nostalgia, of acceptance of social oppression, of disdain for the common herds, and perversion of ideals.