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“Nothing was dreamt of but the regeneration of the Human Race”

Southey on the French Revolution of 1789

History of the times:

  1. England in 17th goes industrial—50% increase in pop between 1801-1850, 50% shift from country to city. Dislocation of poor. Closure of cottage industries. Invention of the power loom. Fear in people. Danger in cities.

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.”

2. 1789—French Revolution, and English watch closely.

Edmund Burke: Reflections on the Revolution in France (French irrational. We should watch and wait). Family, hearth and home worth more than a revolution. Calls for continuity with the past. No changes while France revolutionary.

But England enflamed with ideas

Church and King mobs burn houses of liberals (Priestly—Blake’s hero)

  1. !792—England declares war on Revolutionary France
  2. 1794—Gagging Acts eliminated free speech…habeas corpus suspended
  3. 1795—Bread riots because of high taxes for war with France
  4. 1798—Countrywide riots on war taxes, and radicals writing, people reading

Will Godwin saved from hanging because his book too expensive

  1. 1815—Napolean defeated at Waterloo by Wellington—Europe re-throned. England acts to suppress all dissent:
  2. all dissenting acts treason
  3. all meetings seditious
  4. freedom of press greatly curtailed

8. 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.

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.”

Abrams, 1971: Romanticism is an enterprise trying to save traditional values after God is taken out of the equation. An Attempt to shore up human values: joy, hope, liberty, life, love.

McGann, 1982: Romanticism retreats from difficult work of politically changing their society by setting up a confortable system of belief. At the heart of the romantic emotional structure that is an illusions.

Monsier Lassere: Rousseau the father of Romanticism

Primitive versus civilized man [Emile—On Education]

The need for mothers to breast feed their children, raise them in pure countryside

Russell and Santayana: Immanuel Kant the father of Romanticism

Lockian Metaphysics: the tabula rasa—we are born blank slates, and know nothing but our own states of being.

  1. What we experience are not the things themselves, but our ideas of them.
  2. you experience a piece of paper with writing on it—this is your experience, a state of mind. Nothing more can be proven. The idea of anything in our mind no more proves the existence of that thing than the picture of a man proves he exists in the world, or than the vision or the dream makes a true history.
  3. Our perceptions of the paper with writing makes it highly probable there is something external from us, but we only know what it is to the degree of actual sensation—and sensation is felt only to the degree that it suits our needs.
  4. The sensation of things external to us is sufficient to direct us in the attaining of the good and in the avoiding of the evil which is sometimes caused by them. This is why we have sensations, and we can only know what our sensations tell us. Therefore, when a man leaves the room, we have no idea whether or not he any longer exists—even though he probably does. We can act on this probability, but who knows what is going on, really.
  5. Locke’s Conclusion: Our understandings of not equipped to deal with the metaphysical enquiries that have consumed so much of our time and thought. Metaphysics is useless and harmful because it distracts Men and results in skepticism.
Immanuel Kant

Critique of Pure Reason (pub 1780) SALVAGES HUMAN UNDERSTANDING

  1. Man has certain Innate Categoriesthat can be Synthesized: sound, sense, motions, et cetera…
  2. Using Innate Categories, Mind determines and describes objective features of the world.
  3. There are two worlds that the mind determines:
  4. Numenal World: world of the spirit, soul, et cetera. This is the world of Absolute Values: Truth, Beauty, Morality.
  5. Phenomenal World: world of the senses—known through faculty of innate categories

The Numenal World Understood or Intuited through

Reason mixed with Observation

Hence, human beings

Half create, and

Half receive

Reality.

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.

English Romanticism (begins 1740s)

I. 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

II. 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

Can Kent design like nature? [Sir William Temple, Pope, Horace Walpole, Batty Langley, Kent, Brown, Bridgeman—horticulturists and schetch artists]

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?

Add—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..and bingo….

But also, a melancholy sense of loss, of nostalgia, of acceptance of social oppression, of disdain for the common herds, and perversion of ideals.

Romantic Associations

Early Romanticism: Gothicism

Early Romanticism: Naturalism—reading meaning into nature as opposed to civilization

WW: Nature’s self is the breath of God

Early Romanticism: Pantheism, Universality of nature

Hazlitt: a puddle is filled with preternatural faces

Coleridge: the one life within us and abroad

Early Romanticism: Revolutionary—political, poetical, sensical

Early Romanticism: Classical and Pagan versus Modern and Christian sensibility

Didactic and direct philosophical subrational, suffusive

statement, indirect, abstract

logical, emotional and sensory

formal informal, wild

humanist otherworldly, just beyond sight,

internal, meditative

Romanticism: The Esemplastic (molded) Imagination or Fancy