The term "the Romantic Movement" embracing some but by no means all of the writers published in the last years of the 18^th century and the first half of the 19^th, is somewhat misleading: it was hardly a "movement", and the word "romantic" is so vague, general and meaningless. The great writers of the period differed both in the nature of their work and in their critical aptitude. They did not call themselves "Romantics", and the definition they met with, both from the general public and from the critics, was slow; as J. R. Sutherland has put it, "the notion of a parched and thirsty nation waiting eagerly for the prophet Wordsworth to smite the rock and let forth the living water is at variance with the facts. Wordsworth had first to persuade the public that it was thirsty before he could get it to drink his pure mountain streams at all."

    With these reservations in mind, it may be possible to isolate some of the distinguishing features of English Romanticism. These can best be seen in the poetic theory and practice, and have obvious correspondences with the political and social upheavals of the time: such movements as the American and the French revolution, with their emphasis on natural rights and the importance of the individual, are reflected in the attitudes of writers, particularly William Blake, and are implicit in many of their statements about poetry. Where the main trend of 18^th-century poetics had been to praise the general, to see the poet as a spokesman of society, addressing a cultivated and homogeneous audience, and having as his end the conveyance of "Truth", the Romantics found the source of poetry in the particular, unique experience. Blake's marginal comment on Sir Joshua Reynolds' Discourses expresses the position with characteristic vehemence: "to generalise is to be an idiot; to particularise is the alone distinction of merit." The poet was seen as an individual distinguished from his fellows by the intensity of his perceptions, taking as his basic subject-matter the working of his own mind. The implied attitude to an audience varied accordingly: although Wordsworth maintained that a poet did not write "for Poets alone, but for Men", for Shelley the poet was a "nightingale who sits in darkness and sings to cheer its own solitude with sweet sounds," and Keats declared "I never wrote one single line of Poetry with the least Shadow of public thought." As for the purpose of what was written: poetry was regarded as conveying its own truth; sincerity was the criterion by which it was to be judged. Provided the feeling behind it was genuine, the resultant creation must be valuable.

    The emphasis on feeling -seen perhaps at its finest in the poems of Burns- is in some ways a continuation of the earlier "cult of sensibility"; and it is worth remembering that Pope praised his father as having known no language but the language of the heart. But it now receives particular stress, and is found in most of the Romantic definitions of poetry. Wordsworth called it "the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings," and in 1833 John Stuart Mill defined "natural poetry" as "Feeling itself, employing Thought only as the medium of its utterance." It followed that the best poetry was that in which the greatest intensity of feeling was expressed, and hence a new importance was attached to the lyric. The degree of intensity was affected by the extent to which the poet's imagination had been at work; as Coleridge saw it, the imagination was the supreme poetic quality, a quasi-divine creative force which made the poet a godlike being. Romantic theory thus differs from the neoclassic in the relative importance it allotted to the imagination: Samuel Johnson had seen the components of poetry as "invention, imagination and judgement" but William Blake wrote: "One Power alone makes a Poet: Imagination, the Divine Vision." The judgement, or conscious control, was felt to be secondary; the poets of this period accordingly lay great emphasis on the workings of the unconscious mind, on dreams and reveries, on the supernatural, and on the childlike or primitive view of the world, this last being regarded as valuable because its clarity and intensity had not been overlaid by the restrictions of civilised "reason." Rousseau's sentimental conception of the "noble savage" was often invoked, and often by those who were ignorant that the phrase is Dryden's, or that the type is adumbrated in the "poor Indian" of Pope's Essay on Man. A further sign of the diminished stress placed on judgement is the Romantic attitude to form: if poetry must be spontaneous, sincere, intense, it should be fashioned primarily according to the dictates of the creative imagination. Wordsworth advised a young poet, "You feel strongly; trust to those feelings, and your poem will take its shape and proportions as a tree does from the vital principle that actuates it." This organic view of poetry is opposed to the classical theory of "genres", each with its own linguistic decorum; and it led to the feeling that poetic sublimity was unattainable except in short passages -a view also expressed by Edgar Allan Poe in his statement that "The absolute effect of even the best epic under the sun is a nullity."

    Hand in hand with the new conception of poetry and the insistence on a new subject-matter went a demand for a new diction. Wordsworth and his followers, particularly Keats, found the prevailing poetic diction of the later 18^th century stale and stilted, or "gaudy and inane," and totally unsuited to the expression of their perceptions. It could not be, for them, the language of feeling, and Wordsworth accordingly sought to bring the language of poetry back to that of common speech. His theories of diction have been allowed to loom too large in critical discussion: his own best practice very often differs from his theory, and he should have realised that, as Coleridge was to point out, it applies only to certain kinds of poem, and that the great poets have always departed from "the real language of men" when they chose. Nevertheless, when Wordsworth published his preface to Lyrical Ballads in 1800, the time was ripe for a change: the flexible diction of earlier 18^th-century poetry had hardened into a merely conventional language and, with the notable exception of Blake and Burns, little first-rate poetry had been produced (as distinct from published) in Britain since the 1740s.

    The insistence on the importance of the individual led to an extension, in some directions, of literary sympathies. Most prominent and characteristic was the concern with external nature, which may be connected with the social changes being brought about by the Industrial Revolution -especially with the movement of the population from rural areas into rapidly expanding, ugly cities. In the presence of Nature, man considered himself closer to God; in a simple environment, spontaneous feeling was still possible. In that condition, said Wordsworth, "our elementary feelings co-exist in a state of greater simplicity... the passions of men are incorporated with the beautiful and permanent forms of nature." Furthermore, Nature was felt to possess a mystical significance, to be a kind to divine hieroglyph. Communion with, an understanding of, Nature led the poet toward an understanding of his own soul. A further area for the exploration of working of the human mind was the supernatural and marvellous. The strange and mysterious was a prime source of sublimity, and the remote, whether in time or space, formed the subject-matter or the setting of much Romantic writing.

    Neither the suddenness nor the novelty of Romanticism should be exaggerated. All the critical theories put forward are to be found in the 18^th century and earlier -most important, perhaps, being the 18^th-century interest in Longinus and the concept of sublimity- but the main difference lies in the shift of emphasis: what had been marginal in earlier theory become central, and vice versa. It must be emphasised, moreover, that many of the writers of this period -Jane Austen, for example, or George Crabbe or Thomas Love Peacock- can hardly, by any stretch of the word, be called Romantic, while much of what seems to be most enduring in the novels of Scott is non-romantic. Again, the great Romantics differed among themselves: Byron was eloquent in his praise of 18^th-century poetry; and at times vehement in his attacks on Wordsworth and Keats; Shelley found Wordsworth lacking in imagination; and Blake disagreed sharply with many of Wordsworth's critical theories.

    At the turn of the century the cult of sensibility, manifested in the novel of feeling and of terror, dominated prose fiction. The Gothic novel, with its elements of German Romanticism, lingered on in such writers as Mary Shelley (the daughter of William Godwin), whose Frankenstein (1818) deals, among its scientific horrors, with themes of social injustice and the "noble savage"; and Charles Maturin, whose Melmoth (1820) has, with all its absurdity, a striking intensity. But the novelists dealt with the supernatural far less adequately than did the poets and their works were ripe for deflation. The spirit of parody, indeed, formed a starting point for the writing of Jane Austen, one of the greatest of English novelists. She early perceived the falsity of the novel based on a carefully cultivated emotional response, and set out to demolish its pretensions by burlesque and irony. Northanger Abbey (begun 1797, published 1818) satirises the Gothic novel, among other things, with complex irony, and Sense and Sensibility (also begun 1797, published 1811) examines the qualities indicated by its title with sympathy and understanding. As her novels grow in depth, so do her moral perceptions; her art is perhaps seen at its finest in Emma (published 1815). She is the spokesman for sanity and intelligence, and, like every good satirist, she builds up positive values against which the objects of her attack can be judged. She is by no means a simple novelist: the limitation suggested by her narrow range of setting and characters is illusory; working within these chosen limits, she observes and describes very closely all the subtleties of the relationships between people. She continually analyses, seeking to discover the principles of conduct that animate us; but her analysis is predominantly sympathetic, her vision basically comic. She is a master of dialogue, and writes with great economy, hardly ever wasting a word.

    The same cannot be said of the sprawling talent of Sir Walter Scott. His earlier literary career is as a successful poet, with such narrative historical romances as The Lay of the Last Minstrel (1805), Marmion (1808), and The Lady of the Lake (1810); then he turned to prose with Waverley (1814), a tale of the Jacobites. In the next 15 years he wrote more than 20 novels; taken all together, they are a great achievement, and perhaps are best judged by their cumulative effect. He is at his best when dealing with recent Scottish history, as in Guy Mannering (1815) or his masterpiece, The Heart of Mid-Lothian (1818), but there are good things in all his novels. At times, as in Ivanhoe (1819; dated 1820), the reader must struggle through a pseudo-antique diction that stands in marked contrast with the assured handling of the vernacular that constitutes one of his finest achievements. In adopting the manner and speech of "the lower orders" Scott was conscious of his affinity with his friend Wordsworth. His great dramatic gifts and his power of characterisation often find their most vivid expression in dialogue, but they are offset (as he was aware) by a deficient sense of form; he admitted in his journal that he could never manage a well-contrived story because "Woe's me, the ideas rise up as I write." The ideas vary in quality and maturity, and the reader is often conscious of the lack of discipline, but Scott has many touches of greatness.

    An entirely different approach to the novel is that of Thomas Love Peacock, a satirist for whom plot meant practically nothing: all his novels are conversation pieces, in which many of the pretensions of the day are laid bare in the course of witty, animated, and genial talk. Nightmare Abbey (1818) exposes the tawdriness of many of the trappings of Romanticism with great good humour and, by including as characters, under thin disguises, such writers as Coleridge, Byron, and his intimate friend Shelley, Peacock is able to poke fun at some elements of Romantic poetry. The more serious side of his satire is shown in such passages as Mr. Cranium's lecture on phrenology in Headlong Hall (1816). His seven novels have a lasting freshness and vitality. Among lesser novelists may be mentioned Maria Edgeworth, whose realistic didactic novels of the Irish scene inspired Scott; Susan Ferrier, a Scot with her own vein of racy humour; and another Scot, John Galt, whose Annals of the Parish (1821) is a minor classic, as is James Hogg's remarkable Confessions of a Justified Sinner (1824), a powerful story of Calvinism and the supernatural.