The Origins of Romanticism

there are two great moments in the history of English literature when groups of writers came together and produced poetry and prose of unprecedented range and brilliance the Shakespearean moment of the late 16th and early 17th centuries and the romantic moment of the late 18th and early 19th centuries having devoted my first series of lectures as Gresham professor of rhetoric to the former I now what to turn to the latter between now and next summer I would tell the story of the revolution in writing and sensibility that came to be called the Romantic movement this was effected by a cluster of great geniuses one man William Wordsworth is going to be at the center of my story but many other men and women will circle around him so in this sense the series will take the form of a collective biography of the men and women who lived more interesting lives than almost any British writers before or since with the possible exception of Ted Hughes through the life and work of the Wordsworth circle and those who shaped their minds and those who were subsequently shaped by the words worthy in revolution I will try to evoke what William Hazlitt a key player in the story called the spirit of the age we will meet groups of writers witness friendships and enmities encounters over the dinner table shared dreams shared literary influence companionship on the road and co-authorship in print and the writers lives will be as important to our story as their works because this was the first great age of biography autobiography and autobiographical literary creation this was the age when writers began writing above all about themselves in the words of Francoise honey the Comte de chateaubriand who occupied a central place in French romanticism as Wordsworth did in English we are convinced Chateaubriand writes that the great writers have told their own story in their works one only truly describes one's own heart by attributed it to another and the greater part of Jeanne is composed of memories each of those phrases is very helpful for great writers have told their own story in their works it was Wordsworth who was the first to do so with absolute self-consciousness in his autobiographical epic poem that came to be called the prelude one only truly describes one's own heart by attributing it to another Wordsworth pulled off an unprecedented double act in describing his own heart by simultaneously attributing it to himself the I who speaks so many of his poems and to others among them his sister Dorothy his friend Coleridge and a vast assortment of observed or invented Lakeland Shepherds vagrants discharged military personnel not to mention birds and beasts and flowers and indeed the very forms of nature lakes and mountains and clouds and Chateaubriand third phrase the greater part of genius is composed of memories and that is the key to Wordsworth and in his case the most important memories were those of childhood and of rural landscapes of which of course being the most important was the veil of grasmere seen here in a lovely english watercolor by Frances Town for more than a century literary critics and cultural historians have used as shorthand the phrase romantic revolution to go alongside the French and the American revolutions and the Industrial Revolution and I will continue in that tradition because as I'll show in my second lecture commentators at the time notably Haslett the sharpest observer of the spirit of the age saw the work of Wordsworth and Coleridge in 1798 as a translation into the literary sphere of the French Revolution of 1789 but talk of revolution should not allow us to fall into the trap of setting up a complete opposition between classic and romantic or the age of reason and the age of feeling or the John Sounion era and the words worthy in here it is true that the death in 1784 of dr. Samuel Johnson the towering literary figure of the 18th century marked the end of an era and that it coincided with a burst of new publications of strong poetic feeling or sensibility works such as the poetical sketches of William Blake his first book the elegiac sonnets of Charlotte Smith increasingly seen as a very important figure in the early Romantic movement and the task of William Cooper which in some ways anticipated Wordsworth's autobiographical project the prelude but it's equally true that the greatest of all biographies Boswell's life of Johnson belongs not to Johnson's lifetime but to the revolutionary decade that followed it was published in 1791 so an underlying argument of this lecture series will be that we are wrong to associate Romanticism only with the solitary genius alone in a garret that we have been seduced by such images as the famous pre-raphaelites or treat of the death of chattin there he is in his London Garret notice the scattered papers the open collar the swoon of death and equally by the portraits by Joseph seven of John Keats in solitary rapt contemplation there on your left you see him in his room in Hampstead his prose eiders a portrait of Shakespeare on the wall and an unseen nightingale singing through the open garden door and on the right he is alone with his thoughts there once again with a book to inspire him as in his sonnet on first looking into Chaplin's Homer much have I travelled in the realms of gold and many goodly States and kingdoms seen around many western islands have I been which bars in fealty to Apollo hold oft of one wide expanse that I've been told that deep proud homer ruled as his demean yet did I never breathe it's pure serene till I heard Chapman the translator speak out loud and bah then felt I like somewhat sure of the skies when a new planet swims into his Ken like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes he stared at the Pacific and all his men looked at each other with a wild surmise silent upon a peak in Darien there is however a double sense in which Keats is not alone for one thing we only have these portraits because of his friendship with Joseph 7 who was there at his death and who oversaw the erection of his gravestone according to the poet's own wishes here lies one whose name was ripped in water friendship is going to be very important to my series so that's sevens wonderful sketch of kids dying and then the gravestone that's in the English cemetery outside Rome of course secondly cute Keats was acutely indebted to the great poets of the past that is after all what the sonnet on reading the translation of Homer is all about just as his sonnet on sitting down to read King Lear once again is about his bond with Shakespeare yes the romantics did write in reaction against forclosed couplets and regular rhythms of Alexander Pope and still more against a slack paratus isms of later eighteenth-century writing in which a fish is a member of the Finny tribe and a sheep one of the bleating kind but their method of reacting was more often than not to return to older poetic traditions to revive the sonnet form to imitate border balance above all to write supple blank verse in the manner of Milton and Shakespeare so in this opening lecture I want to offer a lightning sketch of what has lit called the spirit of the age and then attempt to answer the question what were the principal origins of Romanticism so first then what do we mean by romanticism and why does it matter what was the intellectual historian Isaiah Berlin getting at when he wrote that the importance of romantic ism is that it is the largest recent movement to transform the lives and thoughts of the Western world it seems to me to be the greatest single shift in the consciousness of the West that has occurred and that all the other shifts which have occurred in the course of the 19th and 20th centuries appear to me in comparison less important and at any rate deeply influenced by it that's Isaiah Berlin the key word there is consciousness romanticism was above all a movement of ideas the idea of revolution and the idea of nationalism the preposterous suggestion that women slaves and even animals might have Knights reverence for nature vegetarianism and environmental consciousness the radical theory of anarchism and the conservative theory of the organic state the cult of personality in the very idea of sincerity the reinvention of poetry as the expression of the self the belief that nothing matters more to us as human beings than our sensations our feelings that individualism and an individual's ideals whatever they may be define our freedom and our modernity the practice of free love and the establishment of idealistic communes the vogue for naturalness in dress no powdered wig a figure-hugging dress resembling a chemise short half a women and long hair for men the conception of the aesthetic which is to say a philosophical theory of beauty the modern meanings of the words imagination creativity genius literature the freedom fighter on the streets and the hiker in the mountains the seaside holiday and the cult of celebrity a public appetite for sensation the vampire story on the science fiction novel the worship of Shakespeare the alarming notion that it might be glamorous to take drugs or commit suicide or the very least to live hard and die young veg smells and ennui the rebel and the outsider the egotist and the altruist these are all ideas that emerge or grew in the Romantic Age that is why the romantic revolution was the making of the modern mind let me elaborate by giving just one or two examples of some of these themes the idea of revolution for example the American Declaration of Independence was underpinned by enlightenment ideas of rights of Liberty life and the pursuit of happiness but for a rebellious poet in Britain such as William Blake it was a new dawn a harbinger of the New Jerusalem that would he believed one day be built in England's green and pleasant land this is an image from Blake's poem America welcoming the American Revolution the morning comes the might the night decays the Watchmen leave their stations the grave is burst for spices shed the linen wrapped up and next time I'll talk about how Wordsworth welcome to the French Revolution as a dawn in which it was bliss to be alive and to be young was very heaven but Wordsworth was also inspired by the the revolution in Hyatt Lee led by the slave Toussaint L'Ouverture in whose memory he wrote a glorious to little known sonnet live and take comfort now has left behind powers that will work for thee her earth and skies there's not a breathing of the common wind that will forget thee thou hast great allies thy friends are exultation 's Agony's and love and man's unconquered will mind the spirit of romanticism is nowhere better summarized than in this train of thought with his invocation first of air earth sky and inspiring wind then of exultation 'he's Agony's love and man's and conquerable mind and again all those things are seen by Wordsworth as friends that key word friend a word that was often associated with the French word fraternity fraternity reactions in favor of and indeed against the spirit of revolution we're everywhere in the literature of the 1790s the most fashionable genre of that time was the gothic novel of which mrs. Ann Radcliffe author of the best-selling mysteries of Udolpho was the queen as many of us know from Jane Austen's waspish parody of it in Northanger Abbey why what was it about this age that led to a taste for gloomy castles medievalism and villainous monks the Maquis decided an answer he thought that Matthew Louis's gothic shocker the monk which features a sex maniac rapist monk incest demonic influence the wandering jew a castle of sadistic nuns a rampaging mob and the Spanish Inquisition was the greatest novel of the age sod suggested the bloody terror of the French Revolution had rendered everyday reality so horrific that only the demonic and the supernatural was sufficient to create a greater horror in the realm of literature and Sartre himself regarded sexual libertinism as other peace with the spirit of revolution he wrote his most notorious work 100 days of Sodom whilst imprisoned in the Bastille and for a time he represented the Jacobean cause at its most radical before he was dispatched to prison by Napoleon and then transferred to a lunatic asylum for having written Justine all the misfortunes of virtue and its sequel Juliet or the prosperities of Vice in which disquisitions on theology morality aesthetics and politics jostle with extreme pornographic scenes from the happy and successful life of an amoral nymphomaniac murderess in England the anti Jacobean press attacked the monk as a sign of the decadent times deeming it blasphemous pornographic diablerie monk Lewis as the author came to be known dramatist and novelist traveller a member of parliament was also author of such gothic extravaganzas as his smash hit play for Drury Lane the castle Spectre his spectacular equestrian opera for Covent Garden Tim or the Tartar and his disastrous anthology of semi plagiarized gothic ballads tales of wonder which were variously parodied as tales of plunder and tales of terror second-rate author that he was his works did shape much of the sensibility of the age as we can see by James gillies wonderful caricature tales of wonder in which some ladies are being stimulated by a reading of Lewis C of Lewis's the monk whilst the Anna production is taking place in a picture on the wall and indeed monk Lewis was a profound influence on the two most widely read authors in Europe Sir Walter Scott and Lord Byron the idea of nationalism it all began in Germany and where it ended in Germany is a very dark place indeed in brief during the 18th century Germany was not a nation but a collection of principalities of which Prussia was the most powerful and across those principalities the language of the aristocracy of the courts of politics diplomacy and public life was French and the culture was accordingly dominated by French models French neoclassical values the French were great imitators of the classics of ancient Rome the early phase of Romanticism known as the storm and Drang storm and stress was devoted to be overthrow of those values to the espousal of a native German culture in opposition to all things French a key figure in this movement was Johann Gottfried herder it's a statue of him there in Thiemann he despised Prussian autocracy and its code of military nationalism arguing instead that the true spirit of Germany was to be found in the traditions of the folk the people in ballads and songs in the traditions of the peasantry and the land and he argued that the models for German authors to follow not the polish they'll eat French ones such as the writings of Voltaire and the tragedies of Racine but rather the raw energetic native plays and poems of Britain Shakespeare's history plays above all in which he gave the people the history of his own nation and on the Celtic fringe the poems of Ossian to which we will come at the end of this lecture how does battle cry was taken up by goethe and schiller the founders of german drama and vine our culture they wrote in German about German stories in the style of Shakespeare from herder then there is a direct line of descent through to the apex of German Romanticism in the music drama of Ricard Wagner and of course there is then a line from there to the most catastrophic form of German nationalism at the age of 12 I saw the first opera of my life Lohengrin in one instant I was addicted my youthful enthusiasm for the bioriod master knew no bounds that of course is Hitler in mine camp and I show you there the first bioriod production of Parsifal with dove descending in light and extraordinary poster from the Third Reich which is clearly imitated upon that vogner Aryan origin romanticism then a simultaneous spirit of activism and of progress of looking back and looking forward progressively a key suggestion is about rights Thomas Paine welcomes the French Revolution in the Rights of Man Mary Wollstonecraft responds with her vindication of the rights of women and the cause of slavery is taken up and abolition owes a huge debt to Wordsworth's great close friend Thomas Clarkson says Wordsworth sonnet on the final passing of the bill for the abolition and the slave trade in March 1807 Clarkson it was an obstinate hill to climb how toilsome know how dire it was by the is known by none perhaps so feelingly but thou who's starting in thy fervent prime did first lead forth that enterprise sublime has heard the constant voice its charge repeat which out of thy young hearts are ocular seat first roused thee the blood-stained writing is forever torn and thou henceforth will have a good man's calm a great man's happiness lies eel shalt find repose at length firm friend of humankind and again two key words in that sonnet feelingly and friend clarkson represented by words with not only as a personal friend but a friend of humankind because he sympathized so feelingly so empathetically as we might say with the plight of slaves think now of the idea of rights as a circle of expanding circumference the French Revolution proclaims the rights of man Wollstonecraft advocates the rights of woman Clarkson the rights of slaves then in 1791 john oswald a Scottish Jacobean and revolutionary Paris publishes the cry of nature or an appeal to mercy and justice on behalf of the persecuted animals arguing the case for the rights of nature and becoming one of the first to espouse vegetarianism that course is taken up by others such as a doctor called William lamb an unfortunate name for a vegetarian who followed a diet consisting entirely of vegetable matter accompanied by distilled water an an old harrovians anti-slavery activist called john frank newton prescribed this diet to his family and in 1811 published a book called returned to nature or a defense of the vegetable regimen and the idea of a return to nature is at the core of all with everything i'm going to be saying newton soon became friends with the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley who duly became a passionate vegetarian he was introduced to Shelley via the poets father-in-law Mary Wollstonecraft husband William Godwin another apologist for the French Revolution Godwin was the inventor of the radical theory of philosophic anarchism the idea that man is innately good but is corrupted by the institutions of society such as government education and marriage Godwin says if we strip all those things away return man to the state of nature then we are perfectible he was the mighty opposite of Edmund Burke who are attacking the French Revolution invented the conservative theory of the organic state the idea of the evolving English Constitution as a metaphoric oak tree and of society as in his powerful words a partnership not only between those who are living but between those who are living those who are dead and those who are to be born an intellectual revolution cannot be achieved without its means of dissemination and in this regard one of the Forgotten architects of Romanticism was a man called Joseph Johnson one of Godwin's publishers he did more than anything else anyone else to create romanticism in print English radical fault and Britain's favorable response to the French Revolution or above all shaped by an extraordinary circle of writers and intellectuals whose works were all brought into print by the religious dissenter johnson they regularly gathered at his house for dinner parties at 3 o'clock in the afternoon among them were Joseph Priestley Anna Barbauld William Godwin Mary Wollstonecraft her writing of the vindication of the Rights of Woman was Johnson's idea the painter Henry Fuseli and William Blake and Johnson's publishing career reveals the vital importance of religious dissent in the new ferment of ideas ultimately though romanticism was more a revolution of the self than of the state and that's why I've spoken to the cult of personality of sincerity ideas of expression of the self sensation feeling individualism listen to samuel taylor coleridge writing about himself in a letter to the aforementioned William Godwin quite a long passage but fascinating one for just following a train of thought I can't think of any body but for the time of Coleridge who would have written a letter of this kind of self-consciousness partly from ill health and partly from an unhealthy and reverie like vividness of thoughts and pardon the pedantry of the phrase a diminished impress ability from things my ideas wishes and feelings are to a diseased degree disconnected from motion and action in plain and natural English I am a dreaming and therefore an indolent man I am a starling self in caged and always in the malt and the whole note is tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow the same causes that have robbed me to so great a degree of the self impelling self directing principle have deprived me too of the due powers of resistances to impulses from without if I might say so I am as an acting man a creature of mere impact I will and I will not are phrases both of them equally of rare occurrence in my dictionary this is the truth I'll regret it and in the consciousness of this truth I lose a larger portion of self estimation than those who know me imperfectly would easily believe I evade the sentence of my own conscience by no quibbles of self adulation I ask for mercy and heed on the score of my ill health but I confess that this very ill health is as much an effect as a cause of this want of steadiness and self command and it is for mercy that I ask not for justice one can see from this why Hamlet was the Romantics favorite Shakespearean character it's the actor john philip kendall has Hamlet I think that the essence of Romanticism as I'm describing it was first crystallized by the German philosopher Friedrich Schlegel in one of the series of aphoristic fragments published in the late 1790s and I'm afraid it's another quite long quotation I'm not going to read all of it though romantic poetry is a progressive Universal poetry its aim isn't merely to reunite over separate species of poetry and poetry in touch with philosophy and rhetoric it tries to and should mix and fuse poetry and prose inspiration and criticism the poetry of art and the poetry of nature it embraces everything that is purely poetic from the greatest systems of art containing within themselves still further systems to the sigh the kiss that the poeta sizing child breathes forth in our CLIs song it alone can become like the epic and mirror of the whole circuit circum ambient world an image of the age other kinds of poetry have finished and capable of being fully analyzed the romantic kind of poetry is still in the state of becoming that in fact is its real essence so he goes on it can be exhausted by no theory it alone is infinite just as it alone is free it recognizes as its first commandment that the will of the poet can tolerate no law above itself the romantic kind of poetry is the only one that is more than a kind that is as it were poetry itself for in a certain sense all poetry is or should be romantic and that high manifesto for them a special form a sacred value of poetry would be picked up in various manifestos in English such as Percy Shelley's defense of poetry Friedrich Schlegel brother august wilhelm von Schlegel was an equally important figure in the history of German Romanticism and more influential one in England because his lectures on dramatic art and literature delivered in Vienna in 1808 were published in an English translation plagiarized by Coleridge and exercised an influence on the Shakespearean lectures of hazlit this Schlegel brother described Goethe's novel The Sorrows of young Vater as a declaration of the rights of feeling and that is as good a definition of Romanticism as one is likely to find and certainly a more concise one than that of his brother which we've just been looking at a declaration of the rights of feeling to go to the side the rights of man the mature Goethe who may reasonably be described as the creator of classical German culture renounced Romanticism once it was in full flow he said that it embodied everything that was but his own youthful thinly disguised autobiographical novel of lovesickness was one of the absolute foundational works of the movement a sorrows of young Verta is written in the popular epistolary style of letters to a friend in which the narrator pours out his heart it tells of how young that her moves into a rural community and is enchanted by the simple ways of the peasantry this return to nature motif is going to be at the center of Romanticism Verta falls in love with a girl called charlotte but she is engaged to another he tries to sustain the relationship as a mere friendship but he cannot so he blows out his brains the contestants then of Romanticism in the sense of the belief that there is nothing more glorious intense and painful than youthful unrequited love the perfect material for poetry late in his own life Goethe said that everybody has a time in their life when they feel as though Vetter was written exclusively for them that's when we first fall in love Napoleon certainly thought so he wrote a monologue inspired by Verta and carried a copy of the book in his pocket on his military campaigns and across Europe young men dressed in virtus clothes images from the novel were marketed as engravings as silhouettes on mizen pottery you could even buy a perfume called Eau de Wouter stories began to circulate of young men with broken hearts all across Europe committing suicide in imitation of their hero it is in fact hard to track down more than one or two genuine documented cases but the panic stirred by the media and this was the first age of mass media was such that in some cities such as Copenhagen and Leipzig the novel was banned psychologists still speak of the VAT effect the idea that the will to suicide can be a kind of contagion among groups of alienated or unhappy young people and in this regard romanticism has a lot to answer for of course we want our young people to rebel to find themselves to express themselves to be disgusted with or our society to feel despair and world weariness belch gnats and ennui but we probably do want them to grow out of most of those things for romanticism however there is nothing more glamorous than to live fast and die young in this sense the self-destruct button inherent in the rock star James Dean Kurt Cobain Amy Winehouse is an inheritance of Romanticism Keats Shelley and baron all made the smart career move of dying young though in that case is none of them deliberately poor old Wordsworth lived to the age of 80 and became a bore and a reactionary with the result that he's never had the glamour associated with his contemporaries who died young or indeed with other romantics who lived longer but descended into drugs Coleridge De Quincey do p-meter Baudelaire in France or into madness John Clare who spent the last 26 years of his life in lunatic asylums the counts of youth and early death together with a reaction against the polished classicism of 18th century poetry and a desire to return to the simple energies of medieval balance and the like accounts for the romantic fascination with Thomas Chatterton born in Bristol in 1752 and raised in humble circumstances he was an astonishingly precocious genius another romantic archetype he began publishing accomplished poetry at the age of 11 he passed off his work as that of an innovator of an invented 15th century bard called Thomas Rowley failing to find a patron in the provinces he moved to London and scribbled away in his Garret in dire poverty first in shortage than in Holborn there is a story that one day he was walking with a friend in some pancreas churchyard so absorbed in inward communion with his muse that he fell into a newly dug grave his companion helped him out and showed that he was glad to assist in the resurrection of genius to which shattered and replied my dear friend I have been at war with the grave for some time now three days later he took home a portion of arsenic tore up his literary remains and drank the poison though it has recently been suggested that the arsenic was bought as a cure for syphilis and that the overdose was accidental the Romantics had no reason to doubt the verdict of the inquest that the cause of death was suicide in a fit of madness after all even the supremely classical poet John Dryden had said that great wits are to madness near allied Robert Southey for now almost forgotten late poet who had with Coleridge once planned to form a utopian pantie Socratic community of free love on the banks of a Susquehanna River lamented that Chatterton's sad story is well known his life the wonder his death the disgrace of his country but a boy of 17 years should have afforded a subject for dispute to the first critics and scholars of his time is scarcely to be credited who then shall believe that this prodigy of nature should be left to pray to indigence and famine the idea espoused by Shelley and others that Keats was killed by the sheer malice of his negative reviews has its origins in this image of the neglected Chatterton all the romantics revered his memory Koller true what he called a mana D for him Keats dedicated his longest poem and Damian to his memory in France Alfred Divini dramatized his life and death in a play Henry Wallace enshrined him in pre-raphaelites art as you see there and Wordsworth in his poem resolution and independence placed him beside another tortured prematurely dead ballad writing humbly borne poetic genius Robert Burns says Wordsworth revolution and independence I thought of Chatterton the marvellous boy the sleepless soul that perished in his pride of him who walked in glory and enjoy following his plow along the mountainside by our own spirits are we defied reports in our youth begin in gladness but thereof come in the air and despondency and madness the romantics were in a sense retrospectively reinventing Chatterton as a better figure but during ravings they're one from the 1790s a version of Chatterton being found dead and a famous engraving of the muse descending upon Robbie Burns as he is at the plough the sorrows of young Goethe is one of the books read by the creature the creature created by Victor Frankenstein in the greatest of all gothic novels Mary Shelley's Frankenstein or the new Prometheus Shelley Mary Shelley was reading The Sorrows herself when in Geneva with her husband and Lord Baron in the period when Frankenstein was written she was also reading holdbacks atheistic and materialistic system of nature another vital factor in the romantic sensibility was the need to find forms of alternative religion as enlightenment rationalism put paid to the certainties of traditional theological belief in Wordsworth and others the sublimity of nature itself took on a divine role although he later denied the accusation and turned to the orthodoxes of the Anglican Church many of Wordsworth's contemporaries regarded him as a pantheist pantheism the idea that God is to be found imminent in nature not transcendent above this certainly seems to be the mood of the famous lines that Wordsworth wrote in the WHI Valley a few miles north of Tinton Abbey and I have felt a presence that disturbs me with the joy of elevated thoughts a sense sublime of something far more deeply interfused whose dwelling is the light of setting suns and the round ocean and the living air and the blue sky and in the mind of man a motion and a spirit that entails all thinking things all objects of all thought and rolls through all things therefore am I still a lover of the meadows and the woods and mountains and of all that we behold from this green earth of all the mighty world of eye and ear both what they have created and what perceive well pleased to recognize in nature and the language of the sense the anchor of my purest thoughts the nurse the guide the guardian of my heart and soul of all my moral being Mary Shelley was also reading jean-jacques Rousseau when she was in his native Geneva at the time of Frankenstein and Rousseau is indeed a key not only to that novel but the entire Romantic movement back in 1754 Rousseau had entered an essay competition set by the Academy of Dijon in which the question was what was the origin of inequality among men Marissa's answer was that inequality came with property and with the development of civil society in which differences of rank become all too apparent in contrast to the inequality of the present he posited a state of nature and the frontispiece of the published discourse there shows a figure leading us back to the state of nature a state of nature in which natural man is unconstrained by social forces though he did not use the phrase this is where the idea of the noble savage comes from Mary Shelley actually makes Frankenstein's creature into just such a man when he's out in the woods before he's corrupted by society and turns destructively against his maker Marissa's point was not so much to argue that man ever really did live in a state of nature but rather that the idea of the state of nature and man's inherent goodness and perfect ability was a heuristic tool to show what was wrong with the inequalities of the present it's a kind of thought experiment the idea of the return to nature from here you can see it's a short step to the famous opening sentence of the social contract truly one of the foundations of the French Revolution which words were Rousseau published just a few years after his discourse on it inequality man is born free and everywhere he is in Chains if man in the state of nature is one example of humankind uncorrupted by the divisive inequality of social institutions the other is of course the child the romantic child will be the theme of my third lecture and there I'll talk about Russo's book on childhood and education a meal which in its model of natural child-rearing perhaps exerted more influence on the Romantic movement than any other single text you can see the naked child there and I did the naked breasts of the women because Rousseau was a great believer in breastfeeding since I'll be returning to a meal I shan't talk about it today but I want in the last few minutes of his lecture to turn instead to a different book I want to suggest that if you want a trio of books in which he will find the origins of Romanticism they should be Goethe's Verta ruse is a meal and the poem that Vetter reads to Charlotte in their last and most romantic moment the carrot Rivera introduces this poem in a letter written to his friend as he's being seized by the madness of passion it is a poem in which an illustrious bard carries me to wander over pathless wilds surrounded by impetuous whirlwind where by the feeble light of the moon we see the spirits of our ancestors to hear from the mountaintops mid the roar of torrents their plaintive sounds issuing from deep caverns and so he goes on and he starts translating from this book and then in his final meeting with Charlotte after which he walks into a dark and stormy night to prepare himself for suicide Verta actually inserts a long passage which has caused his Goethe's own translation of the poem with eyes full of tears Berta begins to read a couple of images here from from the book to to shoot to show you what this moment would have been like star of descending night fair is thy light in the West thou lift is that unshorn head from thy cloud what does that hold the stormy winds the murmur of the torrent roaring waves what does they behold fair light about a smile and apart the waves come with joy around thee they bathe go it goes on and on and on for pages until the whole force of these words fell upon the unfortunate Verta full of despair he threw himself at Charlotte's feet seized her hands and pressed them to his eyes in his forehead her senses were bewildered she held his hands pressed them to her bosom and leaning toward him with emotions the tenderest pity her warmed she touched his they lost sight of everything the world disappeared from their eyes he clasped her in his arms strained her to his bosom and covered her trembling lips with passionate kisses that she cries turning away that with a feeble hand she pushes them from her at length she exclaims of after he resisted not for tearing himself from her arms fell on his knees before her Charlotte rose and says it is the last time that you shall never see me more than casting one last tender look upon her unfortunate mother she rushed into an adjoining room and locked the door he then walked up and down the room and left alone he went to Charlotte store and said Charlotte one last idea she returned no answer he stopped listened and entreated but all was silent at length he tore himself from the place crying idea Charlotte idea forever and off he goes to commit suicide so what is the work that has inspired him to this great fit of passion well it was the epic poetry of Ossian legendary Gaelic bard whose works were discovered and translated or were they perhaps forged invented from pure imagination by James Macpherson in the early 1760s the cult of Ossian son of Fingal and the debate over the materials authenticity would be a subject for a whole lecture in itself modern scholarship has suggested that McPherson did in fact find many frog of ancient god Gaelic poetry ballads and the like and then he got help translating them into English but the organization of his epic tales and huge swathe of the text were indeed of his own making and there's the title page of Fingal an ancient epic poem by Ossian together with a summary of one book by vine by McPherson the author in which a lot of battles go along as you can see and you have lots of very exotic names like all gomorrah and garel and : well words worth writing the poem at Glen Armand where assume was allegedly buried sensibly took the view that it didn't actually matter whether or not Ossian was authentic says what Wordsworth writes does then the bard sleep here indeed or is it but a groundless Creed what matters it I blame them not who's fancy in this lonely spot was moved and in such way expressed their notion of it's perfect rest a convent even a hermit cell would break the silence of this Dell it is not quiet it is not easy but something deeper far than these the separation that is here is of the grave and office tear yet happy feelings of the dead and therefore was it rightly said that Ossian last of all his race lies buried in this lonely place the cult of Ossian had as great an effect on tourism as on literature Fingal's cave in the Hebrides became the destination of choice for romantic travelers there's passage about a druidical cave and there is Fingal's cave on the the island of Stoffer remember Mendelssohn famously wrote a very romantic piece of music in Corning at Fingal's cave the Ossian poems embodied the spirit of primitivism they gave the north an equivalent foundational epoch to homer in the they answered to a yearning for the heroic in an increasingly domestic age my teenage is fanatical about Game of Thrones but the little I've seen of it seems to be pretty indistinguishable from Ossian with its bards its battles and its sublime landscape the figure of Ossian himself is the archetype for the romantics of the impassioned bard amidst the mighty forms of nature and paintings of this imaginary bard to illustrate the poem were produced all across Europe there's a Danish one that you've got there and an Austrian painting and the awesome became such a cult that even names began to be taken from the poem and widely used the example there Malvina which became a popular name in northern europe because it had been invented in the poem so I want to leave you tonight with the figure of the bard amidst the mighty forms of nature it's getting us ready to go to Wordsworth and the Lake District a couple of images to close on Thomas gray wrote a poem called The Bard shortly before Ossian and John Martin are highly romantic artists illustrated it I've got a circle around the bar because you can hardly see him he was so small up there on the mountaintop and that was within a year of a very famous German Romantic picture which always reminds me of the climax of Wordsworth Prelude where he climbs Mount Snowdon and looks down on a sea of mist so Ossian paving the way for both the idiosyncratic myth-making of William Blake and the sublime poetry of Solitude voiced by the character of the wanderer in William Wordsworth the excursion which I'll leave you with tonight a herdsman on the lonely mountaintops such intercourse was his and in this sort was his existence oftentimes possessed in the mountains did he feel his faith all things there breathed immortality revolving life and greatness still revolving infinite they're littleness was not the least of things seemed infinite and there his spirit shaped her prospects nor did he believe he saw what wonder if his being thus became sublime and comprehensive thank you [Applause] [Applause] you

Channel: Gresham College

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Keywords: Gresham, Gresham College, Education, Lecture, Public, London, Debate, Academia, Knowledge, origins of romanticism, romanticism, wordsworth, literature, isiah berlin, romanticism british literature, romanticism lecture, poetry, wordsworth poetry

Id: t2-EA6doUf4

Length: 48min 54sec (2934 seconds)

Published: Mon Sep 24 2018