'Romanticism (1780-1840)'Sections: The Dream of Liberty,
Historical Summary, Literary Characteristics.
The Dream of Liberty. The first half of the nineteenth century records the
triumph of Romanticism in literature and of democracy in government; and the
two movements are so closely associated, in so many nations and in so many
periods of history, that one must wonder if there be not some relation of cause
and effect between them. Just as we understand the tremendous energizing
influence of Puritanism in the matter of English liberty by remembering that the
common people had begin to read, and that their book was the Bible, so we
may understand this age of popular government by remembering that the chief
subject of romantic literature was the essential nobleness of common men and
the value of the individual. As we read not that brief portion of history which lies
between the Declaration of Independence (1776) and the English Reform Bill of
1832, we are in the presence of such mighty political upheavals that "the age of
revolution" is the only name by which we can adequately characterize it. Its great
historic movements become intelligible only when we read what was written in
this period; for the French Revolution and the American commonwealth, as well
as the establishment of a true democracy in England by the Reform Bill, were
the inevitable results of ideas which literature had spread rapidly through the
civilized world. Liberty is fundamentally an ideal; and that idea; - beautiful,
inspiring, compelling, as a loved banner in the wind - was kept steadily before
men's minds by a multitude of books and pamphlets as far apart as Burns'
Poems and Thomas Paine's Rights of Man, - all read eagerly by the common
people, all proclaiming the dignity of common life, and all uttering the same
passionate cry against every form of class or caste oppression.First the dream, the ideal in some human soul; then the written word which
proclaims it, and impresses other minds with its truth and beauty; then the united
and determined effort of men to make the dream a reality, - that seems to be a
fair estimate of the part that literature plays, even in our political progress.Historical Summary. The period we are considering begins in the latter half of
the reign of George III and ends with the accession of Victoria in 1837. When
on a foggy morning in November 1783, King George entered the House of
Lords and in a trembling voice recognized the independence of the United
States of America, he unconsciously proclaimed the triumph of that free
government by free men which had been the ideal of English literature for more
than a thousand years; though it was not till 1832, when the Reform Bill became
the law of the land, that England herself learned the lesson taught her by
America, and became the democracy of which her writers had always dreamed.The half century between these two events is one of great turmoil, yet of steady
advance in every department of English life. The storm center of the political
unrest was the French Revolution, that frightful uprising which proclaimed the
natural rights of man and the abolition of class distinctions. Its effect on the
whole civilized world is beyond computation. Patriotic clubs and societies
multiplied in England, all asserting the doctrine of Liberty, Equality, Fraternity,
the watchwords of the Revolution. Young England, led by Pitt the younger,
haled the new French republic and offered it friendship; old England, which
pardons no revolutions but her own, looked with horror on the turmoil in France
and, misled by Burke and the nobles of the realm, forced the two nations into
war. Even Pitt saw a blessing in this at first; because the sudden zeal for fighting
a foreign nation - which by some horrible perversion is generally called
patriotism - might turn men's thoughts from their own to their neighbors' affairs,
and so prevent a threatened revolution at home.The causes of this threatened revolution were not political but economic. By her
inventions in steel and machinery, and by her monopoly of the carrying trade,
England had become "the workshop of the world." Her wealth had increased
beyond her wildest dreams; but the unequal distribution of that wealth was
spectacle to make angels weep. The invention of machinery at first threw
thousands of skilled hand workers out of employment; in order to protect a few
agriculturists, heavy duties were imposed on corn and wheat, and bread rose to
famine prices just when laboring men had the least money to pay for it. There
followed a curious spectacle. While England increased in wealth, and spent vast
sums to support her army and subsidize her allies in Europe, and while nobles,
landowners, manufacturers, and merchants lived in increasing luxury, a multitude
of skilled laborers were clamoring for work. Fathers sent their wives and little
children into the mines and factories, where sixteen hours' labor would hardly
pay for the daily bread; and in every large city were riotous mobs made up
chiefly of hungry men and women. It was this unbearable economic condition,
and not any political theory, as Burke supposed, which occasioned the danger
of another English revolution.It is only when we remember these conditions that we can understand two
books, Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations and Thomas Paine's Rights of Man,
which can hardly be considered as literature, but which exercised an enormous
influence in England. Smith was a Scottish thinker, who wrote to uphold the
doctrine that labor is the only source of a nation's wealth, and that any attempt
to force labor into unnatural channels, or to prevent it by protective duties from
freely obtaining the raw materials for its industry, is unjust and destructive. Paine
was a curious combination of Jekyll and Hyde, shallow and untrustworthy
personally, but with a passionate devotion to popular liberty. His Rights of
Man, published in London in 1791, was like one of Burns's lyric outcries against
institutions which oppressed humanity. Coming so soon after the destruction of
the Bastille, it added fuel to the flames kindled in England by the French
Revolution. The author was driven out of the country, on the curious ground that
he endangered the English constitution, but not until his book had gained a wide
sale and influence.All these dangers, real and imaginary, passed away when England turned from
the affairs of France to remedy her own economic conditions. The long
Continental war came to and end with Napolean's overthrow at Waterloo, in
1815; and England, having gained enormously in prestige abroad, now turned to
the work of reform at home. The destruction of the African slave trade; the
mitigation of horribly unjust laws, which included poor debtors and petty
criminals in the same class; the prevention of child labor; the freedom of the
press; the extension of manhood suffrage; the abolition of restrictions against
Catholics in Parliament; the establishment of hundreds of popular schools, under
the leadership of Andrew Bell and Joseph Lancaster, - these are but a few of
the reforms which mark the progress of civilization in a single half century. When
England, in 1833, proclaimed the emancipation of all slaves in all her colonies,
she unconsciously proclaimed her final emancipation from barbarism.Literary Characteristics of the Age. It is intensely interesting to note how
literature at first reflected the political turmoil of the age; and then, when the
turmoil was over and England began her mighty work of reform, how literature
suddenly developed a new creative spirit, which shows itself in the poetry of
Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Shelley, Keats, and in the prose of Scott, Jane
Austen, Lamb, and De Quincey, - a wonderful group of writers, whose patriotic
enthusiasm suggests the Elizabethan days, and whose genius has caused their
age to be known as the second creative period of our literature. Thus in the
early days, when old institutions seemed crumbling with the Bastille, Coleridge
and Southey formed their youthful scheme of a "Pantisocracy on the banks of
the Susquehanna," - an ideal commonwealth, in which the principles of More's
Utopia should be put in practice. Even Wordsworth, fired with political
enthusiasm, could write,Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive,
But to be young was very heaven.The essence of Romanticism was, it must be remembered, that literature must
reflect all that is spontaneous and unaffected in nature and in man, and be free to
follow its own fancy in its own way. We have already noted this characteristic in
the work of the Elizabethan dramatists, who followed their own genius in
opposition to all the laws of the critics. In Coleridge we see this independence
expressed in "Kubla Khan" and "The Ancient Mariner," two dream pictures, one
of the populous Orient, the other of the lonely sea. In Wordsworth this literary
independence led him inward to the heart of common things. Following his own
instinct, as Shakespeare does, he tooFinds tongues in trees, books in the running brooks,
Sermons in stones, and good in everything.And so, more than any other writer of the age, he invests the common life of
nature, and the souls of common men and women, with glorious significance.
These two poets, Coleridge and Wordsworth, best represent the romantic
genius of the age in which they lived, though Scott had a greater literary
reputation, and Byron and Shelley had larger audiences.The second characteristic of this age is that it is emphatically an age of poetry.
The previous century, with its practical outlook on life, was largely one of prose;
but now, as in the Elizabethan Age, the young enthusiasts turned as naturally to
poetry as a happy man to singing. The glory of the age is in the poetry of Scott,
Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Shelley, Keats, Moore, and Southey. Of its
prose works, those of Scott alone have attained a very wide reading, though the
essays of Charles Lamb and the novels of Jane Austen have slowly won for their
authors a secure place in the history of our literature. Coleridge and Southey
(who with Wordsworth form the trio of so-called Lake Poets) wrote far more
prose than poetry; and Southey's prose is much better than his verse. It was
characteristic of the spirit of this age, so different from our own, that Southey
could say that, in order to earn money, he wrote verse "what would otherwise
have been better written in prose."It was during this period that woman assumed, for the first time, an important
place in our literature. Probably the chief reason for this interesting phenomenon
lies in the fact that woman was for the first time given some slight chance of
education, of entering into the intellectual life of the race; and, as is always the
case when woman is given anything like a fair opportunity, she responded
magnificently. A secondary reason may be found in the nature of the age itself,
which was intensely emotional. The French Revolution stirred all Europe to its
depths, and during the following half century every great movement in literature,
as in politics and religion, was characterized by strong emotion; which is all the
more noticeable by contrast with the cold, formal, satiric spirit of the early
eighteenth century. As woman is naturally more emotional than man, it may well
be that the spirit of this emotional age attracted her, and gave her the
opportunity to express herself in literature.As all strong emotions tend to extremes, the age produced a new type of novel
which seems rather hysterical now, but which in its own day delighted multitudes
of readers whose nerves were somewhat excited, and who revealed in "bogey"
stories of supernatural terror. Mrs. Anne Radcliffe (1764-1823) was one of the
most successful writers of this school of exaggerated romance. Her novels, with
their azure-eyed heroines, haunted castles, trapdoors, bandits, abductions,
rescues in the nick of time, and a general medley of overwrought joys and
horrors, were immensely popular, not only with the crowd of novel readers, but
also with men of unquestioned literary genius, like Scott and Byron.In marked contrast to these extravagant stories is the enduring work of Jane
Austen, with her charming descriptions of everyday life, and of Maria
Edgeworth, whose wonderful pictures of Irish life suggested to Walter Scott the
idea of writing his Scottish romances. Two other women who attained a more or
less lasting fame were Hannah More, poet, dramatist, and novelist, and Jane
Porter, whose Scottish Chiefs and Thaddeus of Warsaw are still in demand in
our libraries. Beside these were Fanny Burney (Madame D'Arblay) and several
other writers whose works, in the early part of the nineteenth century, raised
woman to the high place in literature which she has ever since maintained.In this age literary criticism became firmly established by the appearance of such
magazines as the Edinburge Review (1802), The Quarterly Review (1808),
Blackwood's Magazine (1817), the Westminster Review (1824), The
Spectator (1828), The Athenaeum (1828), and Fraser's Magazine (1830).
These magazines, edited by such men as Francis Jeffrey, John Wilson (who is
known to us as Christopher North), and John Gibson Lockhart, who gave us
the Life of Scott, exercised an immense influence on all subsequent literature. At
first their criticisms were largely destructive, as when Jeffrey hammered Scott,
Wordsworth, and Byron most unmercifully; and Lockhart could find no good in
either Keats or Tennyson; but with added wisdom, criticism assumed its true
function of construction. And when these magazines began to seek and to
publish the works of unknown writers, like Hazlitt, Lamb, and Leigh Hunt, they
discovered the chief mission of the modern magazine, which is to give every
writer of ability the opportunity to make his work known to the world.- William J. Long, English Literature, 1909, 1919 Ginn and Company, Boston.
Romanticism: Mysteries and Visions
"Romanticism." Though readily manipulated and applied by classifiers and
labellers, the term hardly admits of definition. Romanticism has been said to
consist in a passionate sense of mystery, "half veiled and half revealed," in a
disregard of cause and effect, in partial knowledge plus intense curiosity. But
there is danger of making it too definite a matter, of sharply distinguishing certain
poets and periods as "romantic" from others that are not. Perhaps all poetry is in
some measure romantic; perhaps without romanticism poetry cannot be poetry.
Beowulf, the Knight's Tale, Spenser, Marlowe, Shakespeare, Milton, are all in
important ways romantic. Even in Dryden, Pope, Johnson, not to mention
Thomson, Gray, Goldsmith, Cowper, occur moments of deep and excited sense
of mystery which are romantic. Are we not, then, wrong to distinguish between
poets who are "romantic" and poets who are not? Should we not rather remark
the differences in degree of their romantic quality?Love between men and women, with its passionate quest and adventure, is
always romantic. So is any passionate inquiry. We even talk of the romance of
Science, of Wall Street, or matters equally of fact. Inquiry and expansion raise
the romantic temperature, and all through the inquiring and expanding eighteenth
century one may feel, quickening and increasing, those impulses, interests, and
curiosities that culminate in what is commonly called the Romantic Movement.The Romantic Movement is but a part of the vast emotional transport that rose
and swept over Europe as the eighteenth century passed into the nineteenth, and
has not yet wholly spent itself. Sometimes they call it the Return to Nature. In
politics it produced the French Revolution, and democratic movements
generally; in English religion it brought about the Methodist or "enthusiastic"
revival, and such religious emotionalism within the Church of England and
without as burned down to the "evangelical" cinders of the next century. The
interest in civilized men and manners progressed to a keener sense of the mere
human being, humble, or primitive, or suffering, and gave rise to vast
humanitarian reforms, of prisons, of slavery, of slums--reforms still going
forward in full momentum.Strong and romantic curiosity about unexplored parts of the earth, about periods
of the past not hitherto understood, about the mysteries and beauties of Nature,
about man in his natural state, assert themselves from Dryden on with increasing
power. The Orient, from Collins's Persian Eclogues and Addison's Vision of
Mirza to Fitzgerald's version of the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, is romantically
exploited in literature. The wonders of America,Where wild Oswego spreads her swamps around
where Susquehanna invites Coleridge to found his utopian Pantisocracy, where
Campbell's Gertrude of Wyoming in her "deep untrodden grot" smiled or wept
over Shakespeare, were still matter of romance.Remote times even more than remote places yielded romance, and the Middle
Ages, long neglected, glowed deeper and deeper with romantic gloom and
splendor. Gray dealt with Scandinavian myth, Johnson and Walpole took
unaccustomed delight in Gothic architecture, and Gothic romance and the tale of
horror could not do without a medieval castle. Finer cases in point are
Chatterton, Coleridge's Christa,Sel, Keats's Eve of St. Agnes, or Byron's
Manfred. But the high priest of romantic medievalism is Sir Walter Scott, in
both his novels and his poems, and the Middle Ages continue "romantic" through
Tennyson to Morris, though their romance is now fading in the fierce daylight of
modern research.Poets also awoke to a new and romantic sense of ancient Greece, a sense
different from that of Petrarch, Marlowe, or Milton, romantic as that was. This
new Greece is a bright, picturesque land of Sappho, Plato, and the theatre, the
air vibrant with the music of a perfect language, a world glorious with living
sculpture that embodied the Platonic ideas of the Good, the Beautiful, and the
True, a world in which every man enjoyed perfect freedom through
self-knowledge, revelled in philosophy, and breathed the wine-like air of that
wide expanseWhich deep-browed Homer ruled as his demesne.
English poets from Caedmon down have always been sensitive to "Nature," and
in many early instances have poetized natural objects with much beauty and
insight. But they have usually dealt with Nature as in a subordinate if intimate
relation to human life. Through the eighteenth century, however, poets, like
painters, more and more view Nature as something apart and in herself. Pope,
Thomson, Collins, Cowper, Burns, Wordsworth represent a kind of succession
or development of the romantic appreciation of Nature, to its culmination in
Wordsworth, through whom the poetic worship of Nature has become a kind of
cult.But Man himself, who, in his cultivated state, had especially fascinated the
generations of Dryden and Pope, grew more and more romantically fascinating
in his natural or primitive condition. Since the early voyages of discovery and the
days of Montaigne, Spenser, and Shakespeare, literature had cherished a fond
belief in the Noble Savage, unspoiled by the vices and luxury of civilization,
instinctively aware of God, and instinctively behaving like a gentleman. And they
fell inevitably into the romantic paradox that such a state of society was happier,
freer, and essentially more civilized than ours. As Dryden says of the English,They led their wild desires to woods and caves,
From such ideas in English writers Rousseau, on French soil, compounded the
high explosive that blew up in the French Revolution.Johnson, to be sure, was not deceived by them. "No, Sir," to Boswell, who
loved to bring up the subject, "You are not to talk such paradox; let me have no
more on't." But the paradox, like any paradox with an element of truth in it,
continued to grow more fascinating, romantic, and ominous; and with it grew the
poetic fascination of man on the humbler levels of society, especially the
peasant, who naturally seemed closer to Nature, and therefore purer, freer, and
more dignified than other men. Indeed as Nature and Genius were identical in
many minds, men were always expecting a great "natural" genius to rise out of
the masses. Such expectation joyfully hailed the advent of Stephen Duck, the
thresher-poet; of Ann Yearsley, the milkmaid-poetess; of James Woodhouse,
and Bloomfield, and Blackett, poetical cobblers; and Henry Jones, the poetical
bricklayer; the tuneful pipemaker, Bryant, and the singing butler, John
Jones--pleasantly enrolled in Southey's booklet on "Uneducated Poets." Gray
crowned his great Eleg with an epitaph to a mute inglorious poet of Nature.
Faith in the "poet of Nature" persisted through many a disappointment, until at
last it triumphed in the glorious coming of the inspired peasant, Robert Burns.He it was who sang
Gie fools their silks, and knaves their wine,
A man's a man for a' that.It was only a thrilling sentiment for many, who, without thinking, have turned it
into mere cant. But many others, realizing the burdensome centuries of special
privilege, bigotry, and oppression behind them, exulted in the plain truth of man's
intrinsic worth as an individual, his natural, inherent virtue. It was the romantic
truth which was to make him free, and they wrote, reasoned, and sang it on
every hand in every key: political liberty and happiness through personal and
individual freedom.All through the eighteenth century one sees signs premonitory of these liberating
ideas. With the stout championship of Pope and Johnson literature declared its
independence from patronage, and threw itself upon public support. The writer
became free and self-dependent, and survived or perished by his intrinsic merits.But with this new freedom the man of letters almost invariably had to endure
struggle, poverty, and lonely misery of neglect, or, as Johnson said, "the hiss of
the world against him." It was perhaps the stress of this readjustment that caused
so much of the "romantic malady" or mental disturbance already observed by
Thomson. As Burns said: "There is not among all the martyrologies that ever
were penned, so rueful a narrative as Johnson's Lives of the Poets." The
weaker men, Collins, Smart, Boyse, Savage, Cowper, Chatterton, went down
under it. The stronger, Thomson, Gray, Johnson, Goldsmith, Burns, Blake,
Shelley, Byron, though singed and battered, held out by sheer force of genius
and character and conviction. In all cases it was a war between the individual
and the conventions of organized society, political, or religious, or economic, or
social, rising to highest intensity in the romantic poets. In all of their works the
issue is either latent or plainly operative.Such passion for freedom was bound to find new subjects, new forms, new
metres in vast variety. The couplet was retained, if retained, merely as one of
many possible forms, not the form, and most poets welcomed freedom from its
restraints. The old "rules" were dead letters. Greek, medieval, Renaissance lore
was ransacked for material. The sonnet, the Spenserian stanza, the ballad
measures, and other early metres were revived, and these and blank verse rose
to an infinite range of new music hitherto unimagined.Behind and beneath all this romantic revival, this return to Nature, lay a
philosophy. The philosophy of common sense, whose apostle was Locke, was
no longer adequate. By stages of scepticism men had thought or felt their way
past it to a sense of the deep and awful mysteries of man's mind, of Nature, of
whatever lies just beyond both. It was the very time for a revival of the mystic
doctrine of Plato, and for certain conceptions embodied in the philosophy of
Kant. Shelley is full of Plato, and the others often take on Platonic hue when
perhaps not wholly aware of it. This romantic movement, this revival, was after
all but one of the crises in the closer and closer scrutiny of Nature which had
been going on for some seven centuries· Thinking men, and, in consequence,
society, had been repeatedly disturbed by the discrepancy between what they
learned from tradition--Biblical, Christian, Aristotelian--and what Nature in its
largest sense, on closer and closer examination, had to tell; and the rift widened
periodically through persecution and the desperate endeavor to reconcile the
two authorities--an endeavor which has not even yet reached fulfilment. Almost
every century saw a crisis in the contest. Through the seventeenth century the
struggle between the authority of the new science or Nature and the authority of
religious tradition was especially acute. By the eighteenth, Nature and Science
seemed to have won the upper hand, but complacence now gives way to awed
and romantic sense of mystery as unsuspected depths of Nature reveal
themselves.Through remote and unfamiliar places and times ranged the passionate,
dreaming curiosity of romance. It peered into mysteries of Nature hitherto
unrealized, into mysteries of man's life and mind, his intrinsic qualities, his
primitive and elemental worth and beauty. It declared itself intensely for the
freedom of the individual spirit from all the trammels that social oppression had
woven about Man through the ages. It stirred itself thenceforth to active
humanitarian enterprise in a thousand different ways--and still stirs us--for the
physical and moral benefit of mankind.Such are various manifestations of the "romantic" spirit which is to pervade not
only the poetry of Wordsworth, Shelley, and their generation, but indeed all later
English poetry to this moment.The excitement of the Romantic Movement has betrayed us into the habit of
calling it a revolt, and sharply opposing it to an imaginary eighteenth century of
"rules," complacency, special prescriptive poetic language and style. We must
not forget that the movement called romantic was but an extension of
eighteenth-century interests and curiosities into regions which were unforeseen,
and that new discoveries, as usual, look more like revolt than they really are.The romantic poets all begin with the poetic tradition of the eighteenth century,
and in many instances carry it on with modifications, into their work. There we
may at any moment find the couplet, the personifications, the epithets, the
generali zations, the "poetic" diction, and innumerable phrases reminis. cent of
the poets from Dryden on. The odes of Coleridge are full of Gray, Scott
compiled monumental editions of Dryden and Swift, and Byron considered
Pope the "most perfect" of English poets.But new discoveries, as well as old traditions, are necessary to new poetry, and
the major prophets of these discoveries, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Scott, Byron,
Shelley, Keats, each made his own; and with such independence that they were
often at sharper variance with each other as to what constituted good poetry
than they were with their eighteenth-century predecessors. No one of them
wholly approved of another's poetry, and their disapproval was often
devastating. A poem more scathing and more entertaining than Byron's English
Bards and Scotch Reviewers, about contemporary writers, has never been
devised.- Charles Grosvenor Osgood, The Voice of England, 2nd Ed., 1935, 1952
Harper and Brothers Publishers, New York.
Romanticism: Old Ballads
Such men as Macpherson, Percy, Crabbe, Chatterton, Cowper, Burns, and
Blake -the prophets of romance - were agents through whom English poetry
was to renew its youth by a fresh infusion of native energies. Of these energies
none other was stronger or more purifying than those released with the revival of
the old ballads. At various earlier times their invigorating touch had been felt by
"polite" writers, but now for the first time they may be said to have joined the
main current of English Literature.Everyone knows what is meant by "old ballads"--those stirring, but simple
anonymous pieces associated with such names as Sir Patrick Spens, Thomas
the Rymer, Barbara Allen, Robin Hood, or with Chevy Chase and the Border.
When social conditions favored them ballads flourished not on the Border alone,
but everywhere in Europe apart from cities and sophistication; and they are still
to be heard in removed regions such as Newfoundland, the backwoods of
Maine, and the southern Appalachians. So it happens that the best known
English survivors are in the remoter dialect of the Scotch border and the North.How they originated and developed is still a matter of warm contention among
experts. The first recorded English ballad is ]udas of the thirteenth century, but
ballads must have been common before that. The sixteenth and seventeenth
centuries produced most of the finest versions that survive, perhaps because the
local language was then ripest for the form, and the nameless and inglorious
Miltons were not wanting. But some of our noblest specimens, at least in their
surviving state, date from the eighteenth century. As the common standards of
modern artificial life have reached out and overtaken the art of making ballads, it
is slowly dying. Writing and printing tend to arrest its growth. A recorded ballad
is after all but a dried specimen. For ballads are song, and live and grow only
from mouth to ear in oral circulation.In the sixteenth century with the growth of London trade, the old ballad of the
folk gave birth to an inferior offspring, the ballad of the broadside. It was quickly
made up for tbe trade, on some local or topical theme, and hawked about
London for a pittance. And though it occasionally resorted to its parent stock
for a tune or a device, it is always shallower, in narrative art, theme, and music.
At times of course it rises to a higher quality than mere cleverness, yet it bears to
its great original much the relation that the oriental rug manufactured for the
trade, in the Orient to be sure, and dispensed by the department store, bears to
the genuine Turkish or Persian antique.A genuine old ballad is at its best great poetry, even to the eye. But no one can
fully appreciate a ballad till he has heard it sung to its primitive melody with or
without primitive accompaniment. This lyric nature of the ballad is the soul of it,
as any reader with a little ear for music may discover by reading a good ballad
aloud. As he reads a tune begins to emerge from the words and suggest itself,
until he finds himself no longer reading but singing. In this fullest sense a ballad is
primarily lyric or song. Its favorite metre, among a goodly number, is what we
know in many a hymn and poem as the quatrain in four and three, or common
metre.But the ballad also tells a story. The usual theme is a domestic or semi-private
affair in local high life, though a Bible story, a fairy legend, national events, or
even a bit of old romance may serve. The moral standards are those of isolated
rural society--instinctive, black and white, generous, crude. The poet tells his
tale by a highly concentrated dramatic method. He lets his persons speak. He
keeps himself and his opinions out of sight. He flashes forth either a series of
brief, vivid scenes in dialogue, or one scene so skilfully presented that the
listener cannot fail to infer the whole affair, imagining omitted details, scenes,
motives; and the audience is thus lured into partnership with the singer.The famous Edward is a dramatic dialogue between a son who has killed his
father for the inheritance, and the mother who persuaded him to the act. With
even and formal pace of seven successive questions and answers, it advances
cautiously, ironically, but inflexibly to the son's wild, remorseful curse of his
mother at the end. Within this narrow and regular compass is concentrated
matter capable of expansion into a novel or a play. The severe art of Edward,
with necessary variations, is the art of all the best ballads.Defects of metre, melody, and motive are bound to appear in these products of
the untutored mind. As they circulated they either deteriorated or improved or
varied according to the mind and abilities of the transmitting singer. But clearly a
conscious art developed, a definite and intelligent notion of what to do and how
to do it, handed down by tradition, part professional, part amateur; and this art
seems to have been at its obscure height during the great Tudor and Stuart
periods, when the English common people were emerging into conscious life.The old ballads represent a long isolated tradition, uncolored and unwarped by
passing events in the great world and by sophisticated literary fashions. Yet long
before their chief revival by Bishop Percy they served from time to time as the
homely, healthy nurses of polite letters. The elegant Sir Philip Sidney confesses:
"I never heard the old song of Percy and Douglas that I found not my heart
moved more than with a trumpet; and yet it is sung but by some blind crowder,
[fiddler] with no rougher voice than rude style." The cadence, vigor, and beauty
of the ballads entered deep into the mind and art of Shakespeare, and of many
another country-bred poet. Even to their degenerate offspring in the broadsides
English poetry has turned for new life, as in Goldsmith's "Ballad" in the eighth
chapter of the Vicar, and in Cowper's ]ohn Gilpin; and Wordsworth was
perhaps more susceptible to the influence of the tune and manner of the
broadside ballad than to that of the genuine folk-ballad. But names like Addison,
Gray, Burns, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Scott, Keats, Tennyson, Rossetti, make
a list of imitators which is enough to prove the potential of romance and art
stored in these high examples of genuine folk-song.Collecting is a sophisticated practice, and was necessary to a general
sophisticated appreciation of the ballad. In their day John Selden and Samuel
Pepys made large collections of broadsides; but the collecting and publication of
the old ballads did not begin till the eighteenth century. The first really serious
instance was the book known as Percy's Reliques. Of all the publications of
scholars and antiquaries which were fostered by, and in turn nourished the
growing interest in the Middle Ages, none wrought an effect so deep and wide
as this.- Charles Grosvenor Osgood, The Voice of England, 2nd Ed., 1935, 1952
Harper and Brothers Publishers, New York.
Romanticism and Novel
THE AGE OF ROMANTICISM (1790-1840)
General Characteristics. During the early years of the Romantic Period the
development of the novel continued. Frances Burney, afterward Madame
d'Arblay, one of the outstanding women novelists in our literature, continued the
type which originated with Richardson in her Evelina and her Cecilia. The
romance now received further impetus in the hands of Mrs. Ann Radcliffe,
whose story, The Mysteries of Udolpho, is representative of a number of tales
of mystery and terror which now began to appear. In Caleb Williams, a third
writer, William Godwin, made use of the novel to preach social and political
reform. It was not until after the turn of the century that the two great novelists of
the period, Sir Walter Scott and Jane Austen, made their appearance.Sir Walter Scott (1771-1832). One of the delights of Walter Scott's youth had
been to wander about on foot or on horseback in his native Scotland. On these
wanderings he stored up in his mind romantic scenery and historical events,
legends and folklore, ballads and songs, which be was later to incorporate in his
own writings. His interest in native Scotch ballads led him to publish his first
book, Minstrelsy of the Scotch Border. This was so much enjoyed that it was
followed by The Lay of the Last Minstrel, Marmion, and The Lady of the
Lake.But Scott was not to continue writing all his stories in poetry form. One day,
when rummaging through a cabinet, in search of some fishing tackle, be found
the manuscript of a story which he had begun and laid aside nine years before.
He read it eagerly, enjoying it as if it had been some one else's work. In three
weeks' time, he had finished the story, and sent it out into the world, without
signing his name.This first novel, Waverley, met with instant success. Everyone wanted to know
the name of the author, and during the next four years everyone wondered and
praised more than ever, for six more books appeared. For seventeen years, Sir
Walter wrote about two books a year. At first he wrote entirely about his own
land and made Scotland and Scotcbmen known and loved throughout the
world. Then he wrote about England in Ivanhoe; about France in Quentin
Durward; about Palestine in The Talisman. He put such magic in his writing,
making the people of the past live and move again, that he was called "The
Wizard of the North."Jane Austen (1775-1817). Quite different in every respect from the books of
Scott were those of Jane Austen. She writes of quiet, uneventful English village
life, portraying it in detail with a careful realism and drawing her characters with
fidelity and accuracy. Her novels are not at all exciting, but they have never been
equaled for their faithful portrayal of the everyday life which she chose to depict.
The titles of her books are Emma, Mansfield Park, Northanger Abbey, Sense
and Sensibility, and Pride and Prejudice, which is usually considered her
masterpiece.© Copyright 1998 Christopher D. Ball
Academic year 2000/2001
© a.r.e.a./Dr.Vicente Forés López
©MªTeresa Belda Vicent
Universitat de València Press
m mbelvi@alumni.uv.es