A Little History of Literature (15 page)

CHAPTER
15

Romantic Revolutionaries

Literary lives do not generally make interesting films. There is nothing dramatic in scribbling – which is what most writers do most of the working day. John Keats (1795–1821) is an exception. His short life was the subject of a fine film in 2010,
Bright Star
. The title was taken from one of Keats's sonnets – ‘Bright star, would I were steadfast as thou art’ – addressed in 1819 to the woman he loved, Fanny Brawne. In it the poet longs to be

Sad to say, he would never be so happily ‘pillow'd’. Fanny's mother considered her too young to marry (Keats was twenty-five, Fanny nineteen). She was a class or two higher than John and would have to marry ‘below herself’ if she took the plunge. He was poor – the
son of a stable-hand, a failed medical student, not yet famous, and, most worryingly, a poet with ‘radical’ friends of dangerous political opinions. Fanny's widowed mother urged caution. It was further advisable since John was ‘consumptive’ – he had symptoms of tuberculosis. His brother Tom had recently died of the disease and his mother before that. Keats went to Rome with hopes of repairing his lungs, but – as predicted in the poem – ‘swooned to death’ in the eternal city, ever faithful to the woman he loved. Why did Keats weave his love for Fanny around a ‘bright star’ (Polaris)? He was alluding to the ‘star-crossed lovers’, Romeo and Juliet. He had somehow anticipated a similarly tragic end to his own love.

I've summarised Keats's life because it's a wonderfully
romantic
story, and makes a romantic film. It can still move us. But when we call Keats, Wordsworth, Byron, Coleridge or Shelley ‘Romantic’ poets (the capital ‘R’ is important here), we think of something other than their love lives (most of which were tangled to the point of chaos). We allude to a school of poetry that has very distinctive properties and which represents an evolutionary moment in Western literature.

At its simplest, ‘Romantic’ is simply a convenient date-range for literature written, roughly, between 1789 and 1832. It's common, for example, to find Jane Austen lumped together with other writers of the Romantic Period despite the fact that, in terms of what she wrote, the author of
Pride and Prejudice
is on a different literary planet from, say, Shelley, who deserted a pregnant wife (who later committed suicide) to elope with the sixteen-year-old Mary Shelley who would, a couple of years later, write
Frankenstein
.

Why take 1789 as a starting point? Because Romanticism coincided with a world historical event: the French Revolution. Romanticism was the first literary movement to have, at its core, ‘ideology’ – the set of beliefs by which people, and peoples, live their lives. There had always been literature which was political: John Dryden's poems on ‘affairs of state’, for example, or Jonathan Swift's sniping at the Whigs in
Gulliver's Travels
. Shakespeare's
Coriolanus
can be read as a political play. Politics is concerned with running the state (it originates in the Ancient Greek word
for ‘city’). Ideology aims to change the world. Romanticism has that impulse at its heart.

What's meant by ‘ideological’, as opposed to ‘political’, can be neatly demonstrated by the deaths in war of two great poets, Sir Philip Sidney and Lord Byron. Sidney died in 1586 of wounds incurred fighting the Spanish in Holland. While dying he is famously supposed to have passed the water bottle offered him to another wounded man with the words, ‘Thy need is greater than mine’. The act has become legendary. He was thirty-two years old. What was Sir Philip dying for so gallantly and so young? ‘Queen and Country,’ he would have responded. ‘England.’

Lord Byron (1788–1824) died at Missolonghi in Greece, having volunteered to fight for the Greeks in their war of independence against their Turkish occupiers. He was thirty-six years old. What was Byron dying for? A ‘cause’. That cause was ‘liberty’. He was not giving up his life in the service of his country – which in Byron's view was woefully unliberated. Liberty was what the Americans were fighting for when they made their Declaration of Independence in 1776, it was what the Parisian masses had risen up against the Bastille for in 1789, it was what the Greeks were fighting for in 1824. And that is what Byron gave his life for.

Byron did not, like Sidney, ‘die for England’. The poet was an exile from a country that found his doctrines of sexual liberty, as celebrated in his longest and finest poem,
Don Juan
, wholly scandalous. In Byron's analysis Juan is not the sexual predator of legend (and of Mozart's opera
Don Giovanni
) but a sexually liberated man – as Byron believed himself to be. A hero in Greece (there is no city that does not have a street named after him and a statue), England would have a ‘Byron problem’ for over a century. It was not until 1969 that the authorities saw fit to lay a stone to his memory in Westminster Abbey's Poets' Corner. The poet himself, one fancies, would rather have liked the swinging sixties.

Put at its simplest, Sidney's sacrifice was patriotically motivated, Byron's sacrifice was ideologically motivated. When we read him and other Romantics we must tune in to the ideological positions (the ‘cause’) they are adopting, advocating, probing, opposing or
questioning. Where, as the current idiom puts it, is their work coming from?

The leading Scottish Romantics, for example, were Robert Burns (1759–96) and Sir Walter Scott (1771–1832). One of Burns' s best-known poems is ‘To a Mouse’. It opens:

Burns, a farmer, had cut into a field-mouse's nest with his plough. Looking down on the life he has wrecked he reflects:

The ‘beastie’ is not just a little rodent, but, like Burns himself, a fellow victim of ‘social’ injustice – ‘me, thy poor, earth-born companion /An' fellow-mortal!’ And Burns's use of Lowland Scottish dialect makes the added point that the language of the people, not the ‘King's English’, represents the heart of the Scottish nation.

Walter Scott's first and most influential novel is
Waverley
(1814). At its centre is the 1745 uprising in which an army of Highland rebels, under the ‘Young Pretender’, Charles Edward Stuart, swept down victoriously through Scotland into the north of England, intent on reclaiming the British throne. If they had succeeded, they would have wholly changed the history of the United Kingdom. Scott himself was staunchly Unionist, believing in the partnership of Scotland and England, and he had mixed feelings about ‘Bonnie Prince Charlie’. He was, the novelist said, in his head a Hanoverian (a supporter of the English king, George II) and in his heart a Jacobite (a supporter of the Scottish Pretender). But what is significant in
Waverley
is that Scott portrayed ‘the '45’ as less a war of failed conquest – between two powers of more or less equal standing – than a failed revolution. Or, put another way, a clash of ideologies.

The most powerful revolutionary statement among the British Romantics is Wordsworth and Coleridge's
Lyrical Ballads
(1798) with the long argumentative preface later added by Wordsworth. In it he proclaims:

The contents were called ‘ballads’ in honour of those poems that are passed down orally by communities, not individual writers. The traditional ballad represents a kind of literary togetherness – although Wordsworth would have used the word ‘radicalism’ (in the literal sense of going back to roots) or, if pushed, the French slogan ‘fraternity’.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772–1834) made a majestic contribution to the project in the form of his long ballad, in pseudomedieval diction,
The Rime of the Ancyent Marinere
. In it he sets out to demonstrate that the complex issues of life and death – the meaning of it all – can be expressed in a literary form as simple as a tum-te-tum nursery rhyme. A ballad.

It wasn't all ideology. The Romantics were fascinated by human psychology and the emotions that condition our lives. Wordsworth loved, as he said, to be ‘surprised by joy’ – and joy is an important word in all his major poetry. But at the same time the Romantics were fascinated by joy's opposite emotion, ‘melancholy’. Keats wrote one of his great odes to it. Other Romantics, famously Coleridge and Thomas De Quincey (author of
Confessions of an English Opium Eater
), investigated emotional states with the aid of drugs. Opium and its derivatives (for poets later on, morphine) allowed a voyage of exploration into the self as daring as any undertaken by the Ancient Mariner. The drugs themselves needed no great exploration to come by. They were on sale, for pennies, in every apothecary's shop and even in some bookshops. You could buy a pint of laudanum (morphine dissolved in alcohol, and used as a painkiller) together with your copy of
Lyrical Ballads
.

The danger was that if you followed that route (as, most
dramatically, did De Quincey), you entered the realm of what has been called ‘Romantic agony’. The writers who experimented with opium took huge risks with their creativity and lives. Coleridge wrote, it is generally agreed, three wonderful poems. Two of them are tantalisingly unfinished. Most frustrating is what promised to be his great work, ‘Kubla Khan’. The whole poem was being inscribed on his mind, as he tells us, in an opium-induced dream. Then there came a knock at the door. He woke up. The poem was lost – only a tiny fragment remains.

William Wordsworth (1770–1850) thought a lot about how the poet should cultivate himself. He had a lot of time to do so. Unlike the other leading Romantic poets he lived a long, abstemious, well-regulated life in the Lake District, and was the movement's most eminent author. Some would say he sold out in his later years, when he became Queen Victoria's poet laureate (see Chapter 22). By general agreement he wrote his best works early in life. As a young man he had been in France at the time of the Revolution. Looking back, he wrote of those turbulent months, in
The Prelude
:

There is something inherently ‘glamorous’ about the young Romantics. It is only at this period of life, it is suggested, that a person really lives. Shelley died, aged twenty-nine, sailing in a sudden storm, whipped up by the same wind he had adressed in his famous ‘Ode to the West Wind’ of 1819. Before Keats died in Rome, aged only twenty-five, he instructed that his name should not be on his tombstone – only the description ‘A young English poet’. ‘An old Romantic’ is something of a contradiction in terms. Like sportsmen, the best of them had a short career – or wrote their greatest work while young.

We talk about the Romantics as if they were somehow a group, allied in a collective literary endeavour. They weren't. There were, of course, alliances. But Byron, for instance, despised and satirised the ‘Lakers’, as he called Wordsworth, Coleridge, Southey and their
disciples. Not for him mooning over the damp northern English hills. Scott, and his Edinburgh clique, hated the ‘Cockney Poet’ Keats and his patron, Leigh Hunt. None of the poets of the time seem to have registered the existence of (as we now think) one of the greatest of their number, William Blake (1757–1827). Some of Blake's magnificently illustrated volumes – made and written by himself – sold barely in double figures in his lifetime. His
Songs of Innocence and of Experience
, infused as they are with his idiosyncratic views on life and religion, are now everywhere read, studied and enjoyed. No other writer, of any period, so effectively combined the visual with the textual. Blake's poems (like ‘The Tyger’) are things we ‘look at’ as much as read.

Despite these personal differences, rivalries and blind spots, the Romantics joined their creative force in a massive redefinition of what literature was and what it could do outside its merely literary environment – how it could change society and even, as the more optimistic of the Romantics thought, the world. ‘Revolution’ is not an overstatement. The movement burned too hot to last long. Effectively it was burned out in Britain by the time of Scott's death in 1832 and the country's own ‘quiet’ political revolution, the First Reform Bill. But Romanticism changed, forever, the ways in which literature was written and read. It bequeathed to the writers who came after, and who cared to use it, a new power. Not bright stars, but burning stars.