9
The qualities and defects of Romanticism, English and Continental - the Romantic pointer to a new poetry of the Spirit
"If we wish to distinguish a single characteristic which differentiates the English Romantics from the poets of the eighteenth century," writes Bowra,1 "it is to be found in the importance which they attached to the imagination and in the special view which they held of it... Blake, Coleridge, Wordsworth, Shelley and Keats, despite many differences, agreed on one vital point: that the creative imagination is closely connected with a peculiar insight into an unseen order behind visible things... They brought to poetry not merely surprise and wonder and vision, which after all may be found in much great poetry, but something else which was more characteristically their own and may perhaps be regarded as the central quality of their art. In their vivid perception of visible things, they were almost in the same moment to have a vision of another world, and this illuminates and gives significance to sensible things in such a way that we can hardly distinguish them from the mysteries which they have opened and with which they are inextricably connected... The Romantics believed that what matters most is this interpenetration of the familiar scene by some everlasting presence which illuminates and explains it. It is this which makes Romantic poetry what it is, and this above all is due to the Romantic trust in the imagination, which works through the senses to something beyond and above... Unlike their German contemporaries, who were content with the thrills of Sehnsucht, or longing,and did not care much what the Jenseits, or 'beyond', might be, so long as it was sufficiently mysterious, the English Romantics pursued their lines of imaginative enquiry until they found answers which satisfied them. Their aim was to convey the mystery of things through individual manifestations and
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thereby to show what it means... The unseen world is more vividly present because it is displayed in a single actual case... The powers which Wordsworth saw in Nature or Shelley in love are so enormous that we begin to understand them only when they are manifested in single, concrete examples... The essence of the Romantic imagination is that it fashions shapes which display these unseen forces at work, and there is no other way to display them, since they resist analysis and description and cannot be presented except in particular instances... In them we see examples of what cannot be expressed directly in words and can be conveyed only by hint and suggestion."
One wonders how a Movement which Bowra has thus distinguished with admirable accuracy in the sentences we have strung together from him can ever be adequately described by Lucas's formula about Romanticism. We may recall some of his labels: "spontaneous feeling", "the release of the Unconscious", and some of his definitions: "The essential difference between Classicism and Romanticism is that the control exerted by the conscious mind, particularly by the sense of reality and the sense of society, is strict in the first - while in the second it is relaxed, somewhat as in drunkenness or dream",2 or again: "The eighteenth century had always had at its ear two voices, like the warning Daemon of Socrates; one whispering'That is not intelligent', the other 'That is not done'. Romanticism seems to me, essentially, an attempt to drown these two voices and liberate the unconscious life from their tyrannical repressions. Like the accom-panying French Revolution, it is the insurrection of a submerged population; but this time, a population of the mind." 3 Even when Lucas concedes that "the description of Romantic literature as simply 'dream-work' does not quite suffice" and that" except in an extreme form, it does usually retain a superego, an ideal of conduct, often a highly quixotic one" and that the "dream-life" he has in view is what we have a feeling of in poems like Keats's La Belle Dame Sans Merci or Coleridge's The Ancient Mariner or Morris's The Haystack in the Floods4 - even
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when he opines that "health, both in life and in literature, lies between excess of self-consciousness and excess of impulsiveness, between too much self-control and too little"5 and that "the Romantic intoxication of the imagination suspends the over-rigid censorship exerted by our sense of what is fact and our sense of what is fitting",6 he is too far out in tracing to the Freudian Subconscious or Unconscious the Movement in English poetry which began in 1789 with Blake's Songs of Innocence and ended in its typical characteristics with the deaths of Keats and Shelley.
Doubtless, the Freudian "impulses and drives" had a say in certain parts of this Movement and a much greater one in the Romanticism of the Continent which it shares as well as exceeds. Sri Aurobindo7 has called the general Romantic literature of the period "brilliant and confusedly complex, but often crude and unfinished" and he has further said: "Much of it we can now see to have been ill-grasped, superficial and tentative; much, as in Chateaubriand and in Byron, was artificial, a pose and affectation; much, as in the French Romanticists, merely bizarre, overstrained and overcoloured; a later criticism condemned in it a tendency to inartistic excitement, looseness of form, an unintellectual shallowness or emptiness, an ill-balanced imagination. It laid itself open certainly in some of its more exaggerated turns to the reproach, - not justly to be alleged against the true romantic element in poetry, - that the stumbling-block of romanticism is falsity."
But in his summing-up, Sri Aurobindo8 has not only said: "Nevertheless, behind this often defective frontage was the activity of a considerable force of new truth and power, much exceedingly great work was done, the view of the imagination was immensely widened and an extraordinary number of new motives brought in which the later nineteenth century developed with a greater care and finish and conscientious accuracy, but with crudities of its own and perhaps with a less fine gust of self-confident genius and large inspiration." Sri Aurobindo9 has also said, marking the distinction of the
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English Romantics: "The superiority of the English poets who lead the way into the modern age is that sudden almost unaccountable spiritual impulse, insistent but vague in some, strong but limited in one or two, splendid and supreme in its rare moments of vision and clarity, which breaks out from their normal poetic mentality and strives constantly to lift their thought and imagination to its own heights, a spirit or Daemon who does not seem to trouble at all with his voice or his oestrus the contemporary poets of continental Europe." And, further, Sri Aurobindo10 brings a keen ear to distinguish the several shades of the English Romantic speech: "We find the tongue of this period floating between various possibilities. On its lower levels it is weighted down by some remnant of the character of the eighteenth century and proceeds by a stream of eloquence, no longer artificial, but facile, fluid, helped by a greater force of thought and imagination. This turn sometimes rises to a higher level of inspired and imginative poetic eloquence. But beyond this pitch we have a fuller and richer style packed with thought and imaginative substance, the substitute of this new intel-lectualised poetic mind for the more spontaneous Elizabethan richness and curiosity; but imaginative thought is the secret of its power, no longer the exuberance of the life-soul in its vision. On the other side we have a quite different note, a sheer poetical directness, which sometimes sinks below itself to poverty and insufficiency or at least to thinness, as in much of the work of Wordsworth and Byron, but, when better supported and rhythmed, rises to quite new authenticities of great or perfect utterance, and out of this there comes in so.me absolute moments a native voice of the spirit..."
Sri Aurobindo is not blind to the defects of these pioneers of a new poetry in the history of the West. About the tendencies that suddenly developed in them out of Rousseauistic Romanticism, he11 writes: "Insufficiently supported by any adequate spiritual knowledge, unable to find securely the right and native word of their own meaning, these greater tendencies faded away or were lost by the premature end of the poets who might, had they lived, have given them a supreme utterance."
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The poets of the spiritual dawn had no clearly seen or no firmly based constant idea of the kind of work which the Light in them demanded: "they get at its best only in an inspiration over which they have not artistic control, and they have only an occasional or uncertain glimpse of its self-motives. Thus they give to it often a form of speech and movement which is borrowed from their intellect, normal temperament or culture rather than wells up as the native voice and rhythm of the spirit within, and they fall away easily to a lower kind of work. They have a greater thing to reveal than the Elizabethan poets, but they do not express it with that constant fullness of native utterance or that more perfect correspondence between substance and form which is the greatness of Shakespeare and Spenser."12
With a critical grip Sri Aurobindo13 sets in proper psychological relation to its immediate past and to the succeeding age the English Romantics' "brilliant and beautiful attempt to get through Nature and thought and the mentality in life and Nature and their profounder aesthetic suggestion to certain spiritual truths behind them." "This attempt," he explains, "could not come to perfect fruition, partly because there had not been the right intellectual preparation or a sufficient basis of spiritual knowledge and experience and only so much could be given as the solitary individual intuition of the poet could by a sovereign effort attain, partly because after the lapse into an age of reason the spontaneous or the intenser language of spiritual poetry could not always be found or, if found, could not be securely kept. So we get a deviation into another age of intellectual, artistic or reflective poetry with a much wider range, but less profound in its roots, less high in its growth; and partly out of this, partly by a recoil from it has come the tum of recent and contemporary poetry which seems at last to be . approaching the secret of the utterance of profounder truth with its right magic of speech and rhythm."*
* This was written in the middle of 1918, when Whitman, Meredith and Stephen Phillips were recent and Carpenter, AE and Yeats were contemporary.
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Yes, Sri Aurobindo has eyes wide-open to the defects of the English Romantics who were singers of a complex Pantheism, but his criticism proceeds from above and not below: he gives no quarter to any disposition to minimise these poets or to see their highest inspiration as other than genuinely revelatory of a divine Reality. Apropos of the reason why they could not live wholly up to the Light in them he14 writes: "This failure to grasp the conditions of a perfect intuitive and spiritual poetry has not yet been noted, because the attempt itself has not been understood..." The first gap in understanding lay in the critical mind of the nineteenth century. "That mind was heavily intellectualised, sometimes lucid, reasonable and acute, sometimes cloudily or fierily romantic, sometimes scientific, minutely delving, analytic, psychological, but in none of these moods and from none of these outlooks capable of understanding the tones of this light which for a moment flushed the dawning skies of its own age or tracing it to the deep and luminous fountains from which it welled."15 What is here said about the nineteenth century in general applies equally to obtuse or unsympathetic critics of our own day, particularly those who tend to read Freudian forces in the entire Romantic Movement and do not discern in its greatest manifestation what Wordsworth called
The feeling of life endless, the great thought
By which we live, infinity and God,
and the presence of - in Wordsworth's lines again -
that serene and blessed mood
In which the affections gently lead us on, -
Until the breath of this corporeal frame
And even the motions of the human blood
Almost suspended, we are laid asleep
In body, and become a living soul:
While with an eye made quiet by the power
Of harmony, and the deep power of joy,
We see into the life of things -
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the mystic mood in which the
Wisdom and Spirit of the universe
is directly touched and in which, on the one side, it is felt as an "everlasting motion" and, on the other,
Our noisy years seem moments in the being
Of the eternal silence.
Perhaps it may be urged that certain statements by the Romantics themselves point, in a broad sense, Freudward. Has not Wordsworth declared: "All good poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings"? Certainly, but the declaration was meant to condemn the literary artifice of the eighteenth century and make poetry natural and sincere, true to the heart. All poetry has to express feeling - but also more than feeling. Has not Wordsworth defined it further as "Emotion recollected in tranquillity"? According to him, the powerful feelings which find a spontaneous overflow are not the immediate ones which an object or occasion arouses: they are what a tranquil recollection resuscitates by looking upon that object or occasion with an inward eye. The poetry that is "emotion recollected in tranquillity" is at the same time tranquillity supporting and enveloping emotion, and the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings is engendered by a calm and deep and brooding gaze of the visionary mind. Has not Wordsworth warned us against taking spontaneity to be that of a careless or thoughtless person? He says: "Poems to which any value can be attached were never produced on any variety of subjects but by a man who, being possessed of more than usual organic sensibility, had also thought long and deeply." He condemned the abstractions of both the dry intellect divorced from life and of the merely pragmatic "prudential understanding", but what he wanted was always "a supreme comprehensiveness of intellect and passion" and his ideal was always to be
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he whose soul hath risen
Up to the height of feeling intellect.
It is the "feeling intellect" to which, according to him, the master faculty of poetic creation becomes possible: Imagination, the visionary insight whose activity he believed with Coleridge to resemble the workings of the "Infinite Mind".
To forget that the Romantic Movement was an imaginative soar from the basis of the feeling intellect is to misconstrue its entire genius. To forget this was also the folly of several practitioners of the new Romanticism. Sri Aurobindo, regarding that Romanticism as the early child of "modern intellec-tualism"16 which differs from the Classical mind, pierces to the essence of its genius and puts his finger too on the mistakes of some of the Romantics. The whole passage17 - from which we have already made an extract when dealing with the Miltonic mind and the modern - is worth close attention:
"The poetry which arises from this mentality is full of a teeming many-sided poetic ideation which takes up the external and life motives not for their own sake, but to make them food for the poetic intelligence, blends the classical and romantic motives, adds to them the realistic, aesthetic, impressionist, idealistic ways of seeing and thinking, makes many experiments and combinations, passes through many phases. The true classic form is then no longer possible; if it is tried, it is not quite genuine, for what informs it is no longer the classic spirit; it is too crowded with subtle thought-matter, too brooding, sensitive, responsive to many things; no new parthenon can be built whether in the white marble subdued to the hand or in the pure and lucid spacings of the idea and the word: the mind of man has become too full, complex, pregnant with subtle and not easily expressible things to be capable of that earlier type of perfection. The romantic strain is a part of this wider intelligence, but the pure and genuine romanticism of the life-spirit which cares nothing for thought except as it enriches its own being, is also no longer possible. If it tries to get back to that, it falls into an affectation, an intellectual pose
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and, whatever genius may be expended upon it, this kind cannot remain long alive. That is the secret of the failure of modem romanticism in Germany and France. In Germany, Goethe and Heine alone got away from this falsity and were able to use this strain in its proper way as one enriching chord serving the complex harmonic purpose of the intelligence; the rest of German literary creation of the time is interesting and suggestive in its way, but very little of it is intimately alive and true, and afterwards Germany failed to keep up a sustained poetic impulse; she turned aside to music on the one side and on the other to philosophy and science for her field. The French mind got away very soon from romanticism and, though greatly enriched by its outbreak into that phase, went on to a more genuine intellectual and intellectually aesthetic form of creation. In England with the greater spontaneity of its poetic spirit the mistake never went so far. The poetry of the time of Wordsworth and Shelley is sometimes called romantic poetry, but it was not so in its essence, but only in certain of its moods and motives. It lives really by its greater and more characteristic element, by its half spiritual turn... Only in drama was there, owing to the prestige of Shakespeare, an attempt at pure romanticism, and therefore in this domain nothing great and living could be done, but only a record of failures.
"The"pure romanticism" of which Sri Aurobindo speaks is, as we have already expounded at an early stage, of two sorts, both of them arising from the creative Life-force: "the external Teutonic kind sensational and outward, appealing to the life and the senses" and "the delicate and beautiful, the imaginative and spiritual Celtic romanticism".18 The two are mixed up, according to the composite English genius, in the Elizabethan Romanticism, the first preparing "the ground-type of the Elizabethan drama", while the second "throws its... beauty and force and fire and its greater depth of passion across the drama and makes it something more than a tumultuous external action and heavily powerful character-drawing".19 In the new Romantic Age of English poetry, which is founded not on the Life-force but on the creative Intelligence, we have three
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elements at work. One is the Teutonic - "much poetical thinking or even poetical philosophy of a rather obvious kind, sedate, or vigorous, prompt and direct, or robustly powerful, but not the finer and subtler poetical thought which comes easily to the clear Latin intellect".20 This element we find in "Wordsworth in his more outward moments", in "Byron without his Titanism and unrest".21 Next is something of the "fine, calm and measured poetical thinking of the Greeks and the Latin races which deals sovereignly with life within the limits of the intellect and the inspired reason" .22 This occurs in the more elevated Wordsworthian passages as well as in parts of Shelley's Alastor, Julian and Maddalo, Prometheus Unbound, Adonais and of his fragment, The Triumph of Life; also in sections of Keats's Hyperion, here and there in the famous Odes and almost wholly in the fragment of an Ode ending with the line,
Leaving great verse unto a little clan.
But neither of these elements creates the typical new Romantic Age whose birth is from a Celticism of the Intelligence, "an excitement of thought seeking for something beyond itself and behind life through the intensities of poetical sight" and brings in "a look upon Nature which pierces beyond the outsides and her external spirit and lays its touch on the mysteries of her inner life and sometimes on that in her which is most intimately spiritual"23 At its intensest this Celticism "fitrives to rise beyond the English mould, seems about to disengage itself and reveal through poetry the Spirit in things".24
The Celtic intensity of the new Romanticism is sometimes sought to be affined to the temper of the Middle Ages. Lucas25 says that the mediaeval is no essential part of the Romantic, but what he means is that the essence of the Romantic is the mind taking a holiday from the rational and the restrained and letting loose the Unconscious and that this need not always take a mediaeval form. Mediaevalism, however, he does regard as a main affinity of the Romantic, for, as he26 says, the Middle Ages, besides idealising passion, were "mystical,
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mysterious, and remote". But these adjectives connote for him27 the Mediaeval man's abeyance of the critical faculty, inordinate love of wonders, sense of fay and goblin and devil about him in endless anarchy: for Mediaeval man always anything might happen. Surely this has some relation to certain moods of a poem like The Ancient Mariner or Christabel: what relation has it to the larger sweep of the supernatural that the Celtic intensity brings? And even in The Ancient Mariner Coleridge goes far beyond mediaeval superstition and fantasy, the haunting horrors in Gothic settings that in his time were being revived by several writers who wanted to be "Romantic": his poem broke into "a boundless sea", as Bowra28 remarks, "with days of pitiless sun and soft nights lit by a moon and attendant stars", a spaciousness and grandeur and loveliness of Nature are here, a delighted dwelling on seascape and skyscape and on creatures of the deep and the air, a shaking of the human soul to vague inner recesses, a sinking of it to subtle agonies and a soaring of it to secret ecstasies, a sense of the unity of all creation in a strange universal love, a complex spiritual symbolism woven into primitive gestures. We are no longer in the Mediaeval mind, but only in a mediaevalised version of the new Celtic intensity. Mediaeval-ism was one of the strands in the Romantic imagination, but even as such it was seldom left uncoloured through and through by a vision more magical, more profound.
In Keats's La Belle Dame sans Merci too we have a mediaeval setting - "knight-at-arms", "pacing steed", "an elfin grot", "a lady in the meads" who was "a faery's child" - but again we are in the light of a Celtic vision, a vast and intense subtlety is hinted in the dream which the ailing knight speaks of at the end:
I saw pale kings and princes too,
Pale warriors, death-pale were they all;
They cried - 'La Belle Dame sans Merci
Hath thee in thrall!'
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We are in the presence of some perilous World-Witchery, some alluring Maya of the life of the senses and the passions, a reverse side to the obverse which feels the Divine in the heart's affections and in the imagination's truth-revealing embrace of the beautiful on earth. Shelley is tinged by the Mediaeval also: witness, among other things, his "high-born maiden in a palace-tower". The Romantic attitude in general towards love was, as Sri Aurobindo29 has written, "sentimental and emotional, attempting to lift it out of the coarseness of life into a vital-mental idealism", and it tried "to resuscitate the attitude of chivalry and the troubadours". But there was much more in it for Shelley. Epipsychidion, that apostrophe to Emilia Viviani which, together with Prometheus Unbound and Adonais, is considered by Sri Aurobindo30 as the most typical work of Shelley's of long breath, is not just a rhapsody of Mediaeval love: at its most blazing it seeks to kindle to a kind of cosmic soul-emotion through the sensuous and sentimental, through the enamoured heart's response to
All that is insupportable in thee
Of light and love and immortality!
Sweet benediction in the eternal Curse!
Veiled glory of the lampless Universe!
Even the religious consciousness of the Middle Ages cannot be said to reincarnate in the spirituality that shines through Wordsworth and Shelley. Shelley had to deny the Christian God in order to reach the Divine. Wordsworth, like Coleridge, conformed to the Christian faith in later life, but at the crest of their poetic creativity they subscribed to what we have called a complex Pantheism. Blake too stood outside the Christian conventions: though he spoke constantly of Christ and identified the supreme fact of both poetic experience and spiritual life as "Jesus the Imagination", he poured scorn on the religion of the churches no less than on the Christian Deism which the scientific eighteenth century invented for its convenience. And Jesus the Imagination is fundamentally a tran-
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scendental truth, the realm of Eternity whose reflection or shadow is the world of Time:31 eternally He is both One and Many, for he is an infinite Being and Body of "flexible senses" which, when contracted at will, behold multitude and, when expanded, see "as One Man all the Universal Family" .32 Jesus the Imagination is also called the Universal or Eternal Man, and our whole world is really this Universal Man broken up in a false vision and striving towards self-completion:
. ..Man looks out in tree & herb & fish & bird & beast
Collecting up the scatter'd portions of his immortal body
Into the Elemental Forms of every thing that grows...
In pain he sighs, in pain he labours in his universe
Sorrowing in birds over the deep, & in the wolf
Over the slain, and moaning in the cattle, & in the winds,...
And in the cries of birth & in the groans of death his voice
Is heard throughout the Universe; wherever a grass grows
Or a leaf buds, The Eternal Man is seen, is heard, is felt,
And all his sorrows, till he reassumes his ancient bliss.33
With the whole world a state of the Eternal or Universal Man, each of us holds the Divine Imagination in ourselves and even the universe seen without is really within.34 An infinite Presence whose multiple centres are in our own bosoms, an All-God or Pantheos who is All-Man or Pananthropos, a Divine Humanity secretly perfect and waiting to be realised in an inner vision which embraces all outer things and holds them in an eternity of Jesus: such is Blake's Christianity and this Christianity is essentially at little variance with Wordsworth. A certain Gnostic element in Blake lacks in the unfettered Nature-love which is intrinsic to Wordsworthian spirituality, yet there are passages of exquisite or sublime Nature-responses in Blake because of his sense of what is within or beyond Nature and shining out through everything for the man of developed imaginative sight. Just as Wordsworth finds divine blessings everywhere, so too does Blake see all things alive as holy35 and believes that if the doors of perception were
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cleansed each natural object would appear to man as it is, infinite.36
All the great Romantics, though differing in particulars, stand together in their mysticism and, with whatever roots in the past, shoot beyond the religious consciousness of the Middle Ages and orthodox Christianity. Indeed, remarks Sri Aurobindo,37 the drift of the modern mind in the spiritual direction "is too large in its aim and varied in its approach to be satisfied by any definite or any fixed symbolic or hieratic method, it cannot rest within the special experience and figures of a given religion. There has been too universal a departure from all specialised forms and too general a breaking down of the old cut channels; in place of their intensive narrowness we have a straining through all that has been experienced by an age of wide intellectual curiosity to the ultimate sense of that experience." If there is any affinity to things past, it is most to the many-sided monistic, monotheistic, pantheistic, polytheistic synthesis of the occult, the mystical, the spiritual we come upon in the Indian Upanishads and Bhagavad Gita.
References
1.C. M. Bowra, op. cit, pp. 1, 271, 289-290, 290, 10, 291, 10, 10, 10.
2.Lucas, op. cit., p. 35.
3.Ibid., p. 42.
4.Ibid., p. 55.
5.Ibid., p. 233.
6.Ibid.
7.The Future Poetry, p. 100.
8.Ibid.
9.Ibid., p. 111.
10.Ibid, pp. 115-116.
11.Ibid., p. 91.
12.Ibid., p. 111.
13.Ibid., p. 59.
14.The Future Poetry, p. 111.
15.Ibid.
16.Ibid., p. 191.
17.Ibid, pp. 191-192.
18.Ibid, p. 50.
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19.Ibid., p. 51.
20.Ibid, p. 50.
21.Ibid., p. 51.
22.Ibid.
23.Ibid.
24.Ibid.
25.Lucas, op. cit., p. 47.
26.Ibid, p. 46.
27.Ibid., pp. 71-73.
28.Bowra, op. cit., p. 55.
29.Life, Literature, Yoga, p. 88.
30.The Future Poetry, p. 127.
31.Op. cit., pp. 605-606 (A Vision of the Last Judgment).
32.Ibid., p. 664 (Jerusalem, Ch. 2, plate 38, II. 17-20).
33.Ibid, p. 355-356 (Vala, or The Four Zoas, Night the Eighth,LL. 561-563, 576578,580-583).
34.Ibid, p. 709 (Jerusalem, Ch. 3, pL. 71,LL.15-19).
35.Ibid., p. 160 (The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, A Song of Liberty, Chorus).
36.Ibid., p. 154 (ibid., pi. 14).
37.The Future Poetry, p. 114.
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