The Drift of Romanticism: Shelburne Essays, Eighth Series

Front matter

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Preface

Dear Matheii, — When the essay on Pater, now in this volume, was first printed in the iViatiant you, who have been in general so kindly a reader of my work, were honest enough to tell me you did not like it at all. What profit was it, you asked, to take an author whose writing is filled with the subtlest appreciation of the world's beauty, and stretch him on the rack of a harsh ethical formula? Why not follow the lure and enjoy the spell of romance wherever it meets the eye? Pater was a lover and confessor of strange souls; should not, then, a true critic come to him in the same receptive spirit? Well, I dare say you were right. I dare say other readers of the essay were right, who, in print and in speech, objected to its severity with less friendly intention. My preface, you see, is a sort of apology for what may seem a lack of sympathetic taste, even of understanding.

Yet if it is an apology, it is not altogether an admission of wrong-doing. There is a kind of criticism that limits itself to looking at the thing in itself, or at the parts of a thing as they successively strike the mind. This is properly the way of sympathy, and those who choose this way are viii PREFACE

right in saying that it is absurd or merely ill-tempered to dwell on what is ugly in a work of art, or false, or incomplete. But there is a place also for another kind of criticism, which is not so much directed to the individual thing as to its relation with other things, and to its place as cause or effect in a whole group of tendencies. No criticism, to be sure, can follow one or the other of these methods exclusively, as no product of art can ever be entirely isolated in its genesis or altogether merged in the current of the day. The highest criticism would contrive to balance these methods in such manner that neither the occasional merits of a work nor its general influence would be unduly subordinated, and in so far as these essays fail to strike such a balance — I wish this were their only failure — they err sadly from the best model. Yet there are times, are there not? when the genera] drift of ideas is so dominant that a critic may at least be pardoned if, with his eye on these larger relations, he does not bring out quite so clearly as he might the distinguishing marks of the writer or book with which he is immediately dealing. And if to his mind this general trend appears to be carrying the world towards the desolation of what he holds very dear, you will at least understand how he may come to slight the sounder aspects of any work which as a whole belongs to the dangerous influences of the age. Now, the romantic movement, beneath all

PREFACE ix

its show of expansion and vitality, seems to me at its heart to be just such a drift towards disintegration and disease. In that conviction I have here treated certain great names more for what is typical in them of their age than for what each may have created of peculiar excellence.

Yet I would not have you suppose that I am insensible to the beauty of much that these men have written or to the magic that is conunonly connected with the term romanticism. Indeed, from one point of view, to admit such insensibility would be to place one's self outside of the appeal of what is highest and purest in all poetry. For it must be observed that the word romanticism is used in two quite different ways, and that the ignorance or neglect of this ambiguity has led to endless confusion of standau'ds. On the one hand, by romantic we often mean, whether rightly or wrongly, certain attributes of poetry of every age when it rises from the common] level to the climaxes of inspiration — the moments in it when we are thrilled by the indefinable spell of strangeness wedded to beauty, when we £U'e startled by the unexpected vision of mystery beyond the circle of appearances that wrap us in the dull commonplace of daily usage, and suddenly "the immeasurable heavens break open to their highest." In that absolute sense of the word there are passages in the poets of antiquity which are as romantic as any to be found in the literature of the z PREFACE

nineteenth century. The Odyssey in particular is shot through and through with the sheer won^ der of beauty. You will recall, for instance, the three lines of the tenth book when Eurylochus and his band, having left their weeping comrades and penetrated the thick woods of ^Eaea, reach the lonely house of Circe in the clearing :

Soon at her vestibule they pause, and hear

A voice of singing from a lovely place,

Where Circe weaves her great web year by year.^

And in the drama you will remember the report of the marvellous end of the errors and sufferings of (Edipus, when warned by the celestial voice he and Theseus, having bade farewell for a while to their companions, go alone into the grove of Colonus to await the mystic translation:

We beheld The man — nay, we beheld him not again, But Theseus only, with one hand upraised As if to shade his eyes before some fear. Fallen strangely, seen, and not to be endured.

This wonder joined with beauty and this suddenly appearing awe of the other world are thoroughly characteristic of the great moments of Greek poetry, and we shall find as pure romance of this sort in the literature historically classic as in the literature historically romantic. The mind closed to this poetic ecstasy may feel itself at home with the so-called pseudo-classical writers,

* Ftom the tranabtion by P. S. Woxseley.

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but it shall never be free of the society of Tennyson or Shakespeare or Homer. This is so plain that I cannot see how we gain much critically by insisting on the absolute use of the word romantic, even if, as I much doubt, it has any etymological justification. But there is another use of the word, as it is associated with a definite historical movement of modern Europe, which is freighted with lessons for the critic of letters and life. No age, of course, can be entirely isolated. Germs and anticipations of what we call more precisely historical romanticism are easily found here and there before Rousseau and Blake and the German Schlegels, as they all but developed into a complete literature in ancient Alexandria. In particular no little part of Virgil's appeal to our ears is probably due to his anticipations of modern sentiment. If any one passage may be singled out as containing the quintessential charm of his genuis, it would be those haunting lines that describe the first voyage of iEneas up the Italian river :

Soft slide the boats along the Tiber stream: While the waves wonder, and in wonder dream The forests, at the flash of unknown shields, And painted prows that swim the liquid fields. The men, still rowing, tire the night and day; And up the lengthening reaches make their way, Covered by various trees; and as they glide. Cut the green woods upon the placid tide.

Virgil is the most impossible of all poets to xii PREFACE

translate, but it is owing to no treachery on my part that you will detect in this scene hints of that peculiar sentiment which predominates in modern verse — the wonder and strangeness that go with the dissolving together of the human soul and nature, the vague revery that takes the place of insight, the pantheism that has forgotten the true surprise of the supernatural. Nevertheless, at bottom the age of Augustus remained loyal to the classic tradition, and the Mneid was more inspired by the imperial growth of Rome than by the coming dissolution of society. Even those passages in which, as in the lines just quoted, the Alexandrian influence is unmistakable, affect us in the end somehow differently from the same sort of thing in the poets of our own time. The history of that other civilization is closed and its problems are solved ; it lies so far back in the past that we may savour the sweetness of its flowers with no disturbing thought of the decay which they concealed. Since Virgil wrote, a great hope and a great despair have traversed the world.

You will see, then, that in these essays I use the word romantic, not exactly in a narrow sense, for I include much more than the work of the group of literary men who appropriated the name, but in a strictly historical sense, as a convenient term for what I take to be the dominant tendency and admitted ideal of the modern world. Often, indeed, the note of absolute romance breaks

PREFACE xiii

through the more characteristic music of the day, and there is a great deal in the nineteenth century which otherwise oversteps the bounds of my definition — that need scarcely be said; but the more deeply we penetrate into the various practical and intellectual currents of the age, the more clearly do we discern, beneath all their apparent divergency, the overmastering force of a common origin and a common direction. If I had to designate very briefly this underlying principle which gives to historic romance a character radically different from the mystery and wonder of classic art, I should define it as that expansive conceit of the emotions which goes with the illusion of beholding the infinite within the stream of nature itself instead of apart from the stream. The question raised finally is thus one of dualism : Is there, or is there not, some element of man's being superior to instinct and reason, some power that acts as a stay upon the flowing impulses of nature, without whose authoritative check reason herself must in the end be swept away in the dissolution of the everlasting flux? In the Defini^ tions of Dualism at the close of this volume I have sought to unfold the consequences of the only answer to this question that comes to me when I listen to the still voice of consciousness. If my language here appears perhaps to be dogmatic and to show disrespect for the terminology of the present-day schools, you will remember that I ziv PREFACE

have put down merely a series of definitions and have not purposed to write a treatise. And above all you will absolve me from the presumption of attempting to construct a new system of philosophy, and from the folly of aiming to be original where originaUty would undermine the very basis on which I stand. If I have hearkened to the voice, it is because with this key alone I have been able to find any meaning in my own e3q)erience of life, and still more because its admonition seems to me to correspond with the inner core of truth which, however diversified in terms and overlaid with extraneous matter, has been handed down unchanged by that long line of seers and sages, from Plato and Aristotle to the present day, who form what may be called the church universal of the spirit. SU anima mea cum phUosophis.

You have my apology, my dear Mather, which you will not, I trust, regard as a mere s^gravation of the o£Fence it is meant to condone. At any rate, you will be ready to congratulate me on the vow, here recorded, to abjure disputation for a while and to return in the next volume of these essays to the less provocative aspects of litera** ture,

P. E. M.

New York, September i, 191a.