1. English romanticism and the first English romantists.

The previous lecture concerned the poets, whom we may call the forerunners
of Romanticism. But the real flourishing of this literary trend, the real Romantic
Age came with the 19th century.
Romanticism is opposed to the reasonable, calm and classical period of the
17 -18th centuries. This new trend is irrational, agitated, dubious and troubled. If
th

the classical literature of the 17th century likes company, this new one will love
solitude, if one side flourishes in cities, the other will want remote and the least
inhabited parts of the country – the mountains, the forests. If one side believes in a
highly civilized and artificial style of life, the other will turn away from it in
disgust and will praise all that is simple, natural, even primitive. If one side
proclaims there is no mystery left in the universe the other will see mystery
everywhere – in an tower, a tree, a cloud, a star. If the writing of one side is a kind
of public performance, the writing of the other will be intensely private.
The breakthrough was inevitable sooner or later, and it came sooner owing
to the extraordinary influence of the 18 th century man of genious, a Swiss
philosopher and writer who worked mostly in France –Jean-Jacques Rouseau. It
will not be exaggeration to say that his ideas hurried on both the French Revolution
and the whole Romantic movement.
It should be noted that Romanticism was a European movement, though it
did not succeed in all countries at the same time. It was seen first in Germany, then
in England, then in Russia and then belatedly but brilliantly, in France as late as
1830. It’s main influence on both North and South America was later still.
As a period in English literature, Romanticism can be said to extend from
about 1798 (which marks the publication of Wordsworth’s and Coleridge’s
“Lyrical Ballads”) to the mid – 1830’s, when Queen Victoria began her reign and
most of the Romantic poets had died.
There is a poet, though writing in the age of reason, but referred to Romantic
poets. William Blake. He was a religious mystic in the age of reason, a unique
creator who ignored the strict poetic rules of the classicists to follow his own
original style. Born in a poor family, Blake received practically no formal
education though he attended a drawing school. Later he illustrated not only his
own poems, but Milton’s “Paradise Lost”, Dante’s “Divine comedy” and even the
Bible. All his life Blake devoted himself to expressing his mystical faith, and his
version of a heavenly world. The delicate images and fancifulness of his earlier
poems appealed to the later Romantic poets. Compare his two poems in which the
author passes questions and speaks symbolically of the power of God and Nature.

“The lamb”, “The lamb the tiger”.

Unable to find a publisher for his further works, Blake started to engrave
his own works on copper, texts as well as illustrations, thus coming simultaneously
as poet, artist and printer. He thus remained independent of the taste of the market.
In this way he printed in 1789 his songs of Innocence, which revealed his
mysticism.
Depending his creative independence, Blake lived in poverty. he gladly
welcomed the French bourgeois revolution, devoting to it his poem “The French
Revolution”. In it he justified the overthrowing of tyranny.
The song of Innocence include the best of Blake’s lyric poems. They express
his optimism and his utopian viewpoint. There is no direct reasoning in these
songs. Blake expresses his admiration for the unselfconscious innocence of the
infant. The playful infant is presented as a model of contemporary humankind and
a symbol of its future:
In the “introduction” of the poet tells us that
“Piping down the valleys wild,
Piping songs of pleasant glee,
On a cloud he laughing said to me:
Pipe a song about a lamb!”

The child encourages the poet to sing his songs of happy cheer, and to write
them “in a book, that all may read”.
“And I made a rural pen,
And I stained the water clear,
And I wrote my happy songs
Every child may joy to hear”.

So the whole spirit of the songs of Innocence is joyfulness, light-heartedness

and innocence. In them Blake expresses utopian nature-philosophy. There is no
contradiction, no struggle and evil is altogether nonsexist. There is only the singing
of birds and the bleating of lambs, laughter and merriment:
“ … The green woods laugh with the voice of joy,
And the dimpling stream runs laughing by;
… The air does laugh with our merry wit,
And the green hill laughs with the noise of it”.

Although the true Romantic poets from Coleridge to Keats appealed to be

always writing about the past, they had not in fact the solid interest in it that Walter
Scott had, and that historians or archeologists have. This is an important point
without which Romanticism cannot be properly understood. W. Scott wrote about
the Middle Ages because he was genuinely interested in this epoch and wanted to
tell stories about it. But the real Romantic poets and story-tellers all over Europe,
who began to give their poems and stories a medieval background, were not so
much turning to the past as deliberately turning away from the present, from the
objective reality to their inner world of dream and desire, mysterious hopes and
fears. In order to separate this inner world from the ordinary outer world, to make
it all different, they used a kind of medieval dreamland. Their poems and talks are
not really about the Middle Ages, but are concerned with their own inner selves.
 The Romantics made frequent use of rather vague medieval settings just
because the Middle Ages of their imagination seemed to them simpler yet more
picturesque and, what is more important, they seemed more magical. Any setting
that was strange, remote in time or space, served this purpose. Thus, Shelley and
Keats turned to Greek mythology, giving a new significance to ancient figures of
legends. Byron made use of the people and landscapes of what we now call Near
and Middle East. Wordsworth made his home in the north of England in the heart
of the Lake District at that time not often visited and not easily accessible.
The same “strangeness”, originally, mystery concerns female characters in
Romanticism – they must be strange and mystical. Thus, Romantic love poetry is
filled with mysterious beings – nymphs, water sprites, oriental queens and
princesses, savage gypsy girls – in fact, with any beautiful feminine creature who
couldn’t possibly live next door.
Because it is itself one-sided, never moving a toward between the outer and
inner worlds, between what is real and what we feel ought to be real, Romanticism
always tends, as it loses itself in the inner dream world, to find existence less and
less satisfying. This is why the Romantic poets are always praising the last
Kingdom of the childhood, where dreams and reality are not yet separated.
So the literature of Romanticism, as we can easily discover in the poetry of
this age, is filled with melancholy and regret and hopelessly unsatisfied longing.
This mood is more characteristic of the young men, that older man, who ought to
know better and arrive at some balance. It is significant and symbolic that
Coleridge stopped writing poetry as he grew older; that Wordsworth, except for a
few occasional flashes, later wrote dull and dutiful verses; and that Keats, Shelley
and Byron all died young.

The Lake District poets. Wordsworth. Coleridge, Southey, Keats.

So called the Lake poets were eager revolutionaries in their youth. With
many other Romantics, they believed in individual liberty and the Brotherhood of
men, and sympathized with those who rebelled against injustice and tyranny. Later,
when the revolutionary France they had so much admired became Napoleon’s
empire and Britain herself seemed to be in danger, they up these early opinions.
William Wordsworth (1770-1850) in his poetry argued the enlightenment
philosophy, however, in his views we can see the idea of a natural man and that
people by nature are equal. Wordsworth is the inheritant of the ??? ideal of nature,
he believes in her good essence.
In his poetry of Nature he makes his chief originality. It doesn’t mean that
the fact of his being a poet of nature makes him so unique. There had been many
poets of nature before and more were to come after him. It is not even the minute,
precise, loving observation of her aspects that makes him prominent. Certainly, he
was one of the most truthful describers when his task was to describe. Though, for
accuracy or (subtlety of outward detail), he may have been equaled, nay,
surpassed, by other poets who, at the same time, were botanists or naturalists,
writers as different from each other as were Crabbe and Tennison. Of lowers,
insects and birds they knew more than Wordworth. His undisputed sovereignty is
not there. It lies in his extraordinary faculty of giving utterance to some of the most
elementary, and at the same time, obscure, sensations of man confronted by natural
phenomena.
In 1798 he published his famous “Lyrical Ballads” with Coleridge, a small
volume of short poems.
The preface written by Wordsworth to the edition is a kind of Manifesto of
English Romanticism. The poet speaks of the necessity of choosing matter-of-facts
events and depict them in the aspect of political imaginary, which as well depicts
them in unusual aspect.
Poetry should deal with rural life as in simple and modest life human
passions are revealed with more utterance.
His frequent use of children’s images is determined with the poet’s ideal that
only child’s conscience has the imagination which is necessary for romantic
poetry. In the childhood, in Wordsworth opinion, a human being is closer to God.
In the poem “We are seven”, the poet astonishes at a 8-year old girl’s ignorance,
who doesn’t know what life and death are. When he asks her How many they are
in the family, she innocently answers: “We are seven.” She doesn’t realize that two
of them – her brother and her sister are dead.
Coleridge’s poetry is characterized with s fantastic element, with something
dreadful and supernatural. And the most characteristic for his poetry is the poem
“The time of the Ancient mariner”. Coleridge develops the Christian idea that
suffrage makes a man wise and repentance redeems sins. The plot contains a
supernatural element; and the general atmosphere is dark, full of facts and terror.
A ship was driven by a storm, to the cold waters of the South Pole. A good
sign appeared as an Albatross. It was as if the bird had a supernatural power: and
the ship set the right course. But the old seaman killed the bird. And the killing
caused retribution: the ship stopped because of a still. The crew got dead,
outrageous marine reptiles creep onto the ship. The oldman suffers from his
solitude. He understands that he is the cause of his follows’ death. Sprites, forgive
him for his repentanel and a miracle takes place. In windless weather the ship
heads homeward. But the old seaman is to wander from one place to another and
tell his story as a punishment.
Southey “The Battle of Blenheim”.

John Keats did not take an active part in the political struggle of his time,
but the enmity of his contemporary critics, the mutual sympathy that linked him
with Byron and Shelley, and the whole tenor of his poetry allow him to be placed
among the progressive romanticists of his time.
His appearance on the literary scene met with hostile criticism in
conservative magazines, but the young poet steadily followed his path, living in
poverty and not comprising to the taste of the aristocratic and bourgeois public.
Taken ill with T.B. he traveled to Italy, but his health was completely ruined. He
died in Rome and was buried there.
 Keat’s works include a number of lyrics, sonnets and long poems of which
themost important are Endymion, Lamia, Isabella, Hyperion.
Like Byron and Shelley, Keats admired the art of ancient Greece and he
drew the subjects of many of his poems from the Greek legends and myths. The
renaissance was another source of his inspiration, and the third was nature of those
beauty. Keats was never tired of signing. His cult of beauty was a relation against
the ugliness of the life, of the aristocratic and bourgeois society from which he
sought refuge in poetry and art.
So this is an extract from his “On the grasshopper and Cricket” where he
proclaims that beauty is found in real life and nature.

George Gordon, Lord Byron and Persy B. Shelley.

Although Byron was a descendant of an ancient aristocratic family, he sided
with the progressive bourgeois democratic movements. His abhorrence of the
gloomy realities of his time made him a romanticism.
His early poems, published in a volume entitled Hours of idleness were
severely criticized by the Edinburgh Review, the leading literary magazine of that
time. Byron answered his critics with English bards and Scotch Reviewers, a satire
in verse in which he fiercely attacked the literary exponents of the political
reaction, the conservative romanticists as Wordsworth, Coleridge and Southey.
After graduating from Cambridge University, in 1809, when 21, Byron
started a tour during which he visited Portugal, Spain, Albania, Greece and Turkey.
He opposed the reactionary policy of the British government and the brutal
measures taken by it to suppress the movement of the Luddites; in a brilliant
speech delivered in the House of Lords, he vindicated these rebellious workers and
condemned the ruling classes for their oppression of the people. A few days after
this, the first two cantos of Childe Harold’s pilgrimage came off the press and the
success of the poem gave Byron every right to write in his diary: “I awoke one
morning to find myself famous”.
Childe Harold is a sort of travel journal in verse which tells us about the
disappointment and disillusions of a youth with society. For: “loathed he in his
native land to dwell, which seemed to him more lone than Eremite’s sad cell”.
He is “sore sick at heart”. And is beloved by none. Nothing cheers him in his
home and country, and he decides to travel.
His house, his home, his heritage, his lands,
The laughing dames in whom he did delight
Whose large blue eyes, fair locks, and snowy hands,
Might shake the saint ship of an anchorire
And long had fed his youthful appetite;
His goblets brimmed with every costly wine,
And all that mote to luxury invite
Without a sign he left to cross the brine
And traverse Paynim shores and pass Earth’s central line.

Then follows the beautiful and famous song, full of emotion:

 Adieu, adieu! My native shore
Fades o’er the waters blue
The night –winds sigh, the breakers roar,
And shricks the wild sea-mew.
You sun that sets upon the sea
We follow in his flight
Farewell awhile to him and thee,
My native Land-God night.

He is perfectly pleased to be alone on the sea, voyaging to other countries:

“And now I’m in the world alone,
Upon the wide wide sea:
But why should I for others groan
When none will sign for me?”
The first two cantos take us to Portugal, Spain, Albania and end with a
lament on the bondage of Greece:
“Fair Greece! Sad relic of departed worth!
Immortal, though no more; though fallen, great!
Who now shall lead thy scattered children forth
And long accustem’d bondage uncreate?”
This is a description of his first voyage, Canto III tells of the pilgrim’s
travels through Belgium, up Rhine, to the Alps and the Sura. The historical
association of each place are made the poet’s themes; the Spanish War, Waterloo
and Napoleon, and especially Rousseau. He admires Rousseau and the other
ideologists of the Enlightenment because they caused “the wreck of old opinions”.
In Canto IV the poet abandons his hero Childe Harold, and he speaks in the
first person singular, of Venice where he stayed for a long time, Argua and
Petrarch, Ferrara and Tasso, Florence and Boccaccio, Rome and its great men,
from scipio to Rienzi. Here he presents views and events of greatness in a past of
lost happiness and everywhere he shows his preference for the simple, natural
things to the current civilization.
He also laments Italian enslavement by Austria:
“Italia! Oh Italia! Thou who hast
The fatal gift of beauty, which became,
A funeral dower of present woes and past
On thy sweet brow is sorrow plough’d by shame,
And graved in characters of flame”.

Very strongly Byron expresses his love for nature and loneliness when he signs
“There is a pleasure in the pathless words,
There is a rapture on the lonely shore
There is society, where none intrudes
By the deep Sea, and music in the roar:
I love not man the less, but Nature more
From these our interviews, in which I steal
 From all I may be, or have been before
To mingle with the Universe, and feel
What I can ne’er express, yet cannot all conceal”

His inclination and admiration for the Orient and exotic lands, full of
peculiar charm and his aspiration for the simplicity of nature expressed in Childe
Harold spread into all European literature, in France, Germany, and Russia. This is
what is called Byronism in literature.

Although “Childe Harold” is full of sorrow, the hero is not a pessimist. He

admires people who fight for freedom and independence, and is realistic in his
description of the various lands he travels.
In the centre of all his nature works stands a rebel, in most cases a rogue, a
demoniacal personage who disregards all conventionalities and laws. Byron sings
of rebellion. His heroes are against tyranny, they are fighters for liberty.

Oriental Tales
In his Eastern Poems Byron also uses to a certain extent the themes, popular
at the time, of nightmares and horrors. This is done, especially in “Lara”, which is
reminiscent of the English Gothic novel, and the “Corsair”, which tells of unusual
deeds in exotic and romantic circumstances. The “Corsair” relates the story of
Conrad, a pirate chief who is a vicious man but posses a sense of chivalry. “Lara”
is a sort of continuation of this poem. There is plenty of bloodshed jealousy,
revenge and grief. There are such luxurious palaces of pashas and sultans as one
can find in the Arabian Nights. These works had great success among the English
readers. For instance, the Giaour, had eight editions in the last seven months of the
year of the publication. The tale relates about slave Leila who was thrown into the
sea for her unfaithfulness to her Turkish lord. Her lover, the Giaour, a young
Venetian, avenges her by killing Hassan.
Byron’s rejection of bourgeois reality he lived in made him turn away to the
exotic lands, heroic deeds and ultimate passions. The beginning of his poem “The
Bride of Abidos” my be read as the epigraph to all his oriental tales:
«Know ye the land where the Cypress and myrtle
are emblems of deeds that are done in their elime?
Where the rage of the vulture, the love of the turtle,
Now melt into sorrow, now madden to crime!
know ye the land of the cedar and vine
Where the flowers ever blossom, the beams ever shine
Where the light wings of Zephyr, oppres’d with perfume,
Wax faint, o’er the gardens of Gul in her bloom;
Where the citron and olive are fairest of fruit
And the voice of the nightingale never is mute…
Where the virgins are soft as the roses they twine
And all, save the spirit of a man, is devine?
Tis the clime of the East; tis the land of the sun –
 Can he smile on such deeds as his children have done»

Byron’s contemporary and friend, Pershy Bisshe Shelley. He was born at

Field Place, Sussex, the estate of his father, in 1792. Like Byron, he was descended
from an ancient aristocratic family. When a boy he rebelled against the brutal
treatment of pupils in the public school where he began his education. His juvenile
poetical works were imbued with the spirit of the struggle against tyranny and
while a student he published a pamphlet. The necessity of atheism for which he
was expelled from the university and forbidden by his father to come home.
Shelley’s first important publication was “Queen Mab”, a romantic poem
containing the essence of his social philosophy. The Revolt of Islam was directed
by Shelley against the political reaction which reigned in Europe during the early
XIX century; this poem was an expression of his hope in the rebirth of humanity
and the final victory of liberty. The same spirit we find in Shelley’s lurical drama
“Prometheus Unbound”.
The Revolt of Islam is in twelve cantos, of which Canto I is introductory and
didactic to the rest narrative.
Cythna, a heroic maiden devoted to the liberation of her sex, united with her
revolutionary brother Zoon in a common ideal, comes to her people with a call to
overthrough the tyrants and to break the fetters in which enslaved mankind is
rotting. For that purpose down rouses the spirit of revolt among the people of
Islam. They succeed in awakening in the people the instincts of love and good, in
overthrowing tyranny and establishing freedom. But the revolt is only temporarily
successful. The tyrants return with increased forces, and in revenge lay the land
desolute. The revolt is crushed by tyrants who hire foreign armies, exactly as was
done in the French Revolution.
Shelley reaches the highest point of his revolutionary poetry and returns to
the Greek theme in “Prometheus unbound”, a lyrical drama in four acts, published
in 1820. This great work is an apotheosis of the spirit of liberty.
Jupiter, king of the Gods, has determined that mankind shall perish. Man is
saved by Prometheus, who gives him two gifts – fire, the source of the technical
inventions, and hope, which prevents him from brooding upon his mortal nature.
Thus equipped and inspired, he survives and raises himself out of savagery into
civilization. Jupiter punishes Prometheus by chaining him to a rock and subjecting
him to perpetual torture. Characterized by “courage, majesty, and a firm and
patient opposition to omnipotent force, and exempt from the taints of ambition,
envy and revenge”, instinct also with the spirit of love, he remains – unlike
Eschylus’s Prometheus unyielding to the threats of Jupiter, the spirit of evil and
hate. He is supported by Earth, his mother, and the thought of Asia, his bride, the
spirit of Nature. At the appointed hour, Demogorgon, the primal power of the
world, overthrows Jupiter from his throne. Just as the triumphant Jupiter is proudly
proclaiming from his throne:
“Ye congregated powers of heaven, who share
The glory and the strength of him, ye serve,
Rejoice! Henceforth I am ompipotent.
 All else had been subdued to me”.

Demorgon descends, moving towards the throne of Jupiter, he announces

himself:
“Etrenity. Demand no direr name
Descend, and follow me down the abyss
I am thy childe, as thou wert Saturn’s child
Mighter than thee: and we must dwell together
Henceforth in darkness”.

Prometheus is unbound by Hercules. The future of humanity is assured.

The first and the second acts of “Prometheus Unbound” are full of pathos of
liberty in chains. The poet signs of the sufferings of Prometheus and the future.
The third and forth acts present the victory of Prometheus over Jupiter. He is
united with his beloved Asia, the beautiful daughter of Earth and Ocean. The love
of Asia and Prometheus is an allegory of the unity of free mankind with the ideal
of spiritual beauty.

Sir Walter Scott and Jane Austin. Romanticism in prose.

Sir Walter Scott was born in Edinburgh, at the age of 18 month he was
crippled for life by a childish ailment; and though he grew up to be a man of great
physical robustness he never lost his lameness. His independent literary work
began with the publication of “The Lay of the Last Minstrel”, a poem which made
him the most popular poet of the day. This was followed by other poems on
medieval themes, “Marmion”, “The Lady of the Lake” and etc. Beaten by Byron as
a poet, Scott turned his attention to prose and in 1814 published his first historical
novel Waverley. It was met with success, which inspired Scott to continue his
work in this new field.
Among the well-known novels, “Waverly” goes back to the 18th century for
its story, and the next two books, “Guy Mannering” and “The Antiquary” are laid
in the time of Scott’s own youth. But in “Old Mortality” he put scenes at the end of
the 17th century. Among other novels about early times, he wrote “Ivanhoe”
(1819), “Kenilworth”, “Durward”, “The Talisman” and etc.
Scott is rather difficult to read, especially in those places where his characters
speak dialect. Though the stories themselves are good, the books are long for the
modern reader. His hard work and his knowledge of history continually astonish
the reader; yet the love interest in the stories often lacks depth, and his heroes and
heroines, especially the heroines – are weak when compared with the violent
scenes in which they live. Scott’s style is sometimes heary and much influenced by
the old and flowery ways of speech.
As a master of historical novel he never had rivals and is second to none. His
contribution to the development of historical novel is very great indeed. To it he
brought a knowledge that was not pedantically exact, but manageable, wide and
bountiful. To the sum of this knowledge he added a life-giving, a vitalizing energy,
an insight and a genial dexterity that made the historical novel an entirely new
species.
Earlier historical novels (Clara Reeves’s Old Baron or Miss Porter’s The
Scottish Chiefs) had been lifeless productions, but in the hands of Scott the
historical novel became of the first importance.
Scott builds his plots freely, enriching them with plenty of events, introducing
a good deal of characters. Several themes crossing in a novel make a vivid bright
picture. His achievement to combine descriptions of private life with historic
events is great. He masterfully describes portraits, interiors. He skillfully
introduces elements of unexpectedness, turns to fantastic elements connecting
them with folk superstitions and peculiarities of the folk world vision.
Though Jane Austin wrote her books in troubled years which included
French revolution, her novels are calm pictures of society life. She understood the
importance of the family in human affairs and though two of her brothers were in
navy, she paid little attention to the violence of nations.
The title given to her first novel was “Elinor and Marianne” but was later
rewritten and published as “Sense and Sensibility”. In 1796 she started “First
Impressions” which was later published as “Pride and Prejudice”. “Mansfield
Park” appeared in 1814 and “Emma” in 1816. “Northanger Abby” was begun as a
satire on Mrs. Radcliffe’s Mysteries of Udoepho and to show that real life is very
different. “Persuasion” was published in the same year. It is her last novel, and
there is a belief that her own love affairs are reflected in those of Anne Elliot.
Jane Austin brought the novel of family life to its highest point of perfection.
Her works were untouched by the ugliness of the outside world; she kept the
action to scenes familiar to her through her own experience. Her first novels were
refused by publishers and she had to wait before her novels were accepted.
Her knowledge, within her own limits, was deep and true, but her
performance in writing these novels was astonishing. She manages her characters
with a master’s touch. Miss Bates in “Emma”, though herself uninteresting, is not
allowed to destroy the reader’s interest. Elizabeth Bennet in “Pride and Prejudice”
is quite as delightful as Jane Austin called her. Mr. Bennet is nearly as delightful
and most of the other leading characters in this novel are first-class literary
creations. A general remark is the amusing first sentence of the book.
“It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single man in possession of a
good fortune must be in want of a wife”.
Her skillfully plots are severely unromantic. As her art develops, even the
slight casualties of common life – such an incident, for example, as the elopement
that appears in “Pride and Prejudice” – become rarer; the result that the later
novels, such as “Emma”, are the pictures of everyday existence. Life in her novels
is governed by an easy decorum and moments at fierce passion or even deep
emotion never occur. Only the highest art can make such plots attractive, and Jane
Austin’s does so.

Lecture 12. Victorian Age and Victorian novel.