God is nothing but the individual to the highest power. Friedrich Schlegel in Kritische Ausgabe, 1797
A world of Pains and troubles is to school an Intelligence and make it a soul.
John Keats, letter to his brother Feb 14th – May 3rd 1819
Mit innigster Empfindung: With the sincerest feeling.
Beethoven, note for playing the final variation of the third movement of String Quartet in A minor opus 132 (1824)
A word nudging to the centre of German thought towards the end of the eighteenth century is crucial for any understanding of the Romantic self. That word is Bildung. Like a number of German philosophical concep- tions, it does not have an equivalent counterpart in the English language. Linked to the activity of forming and giving shape, the word referred to education as a slow process of inner growth within a living culture. It gave birth to Bildungsroman, coined in 1819, to characterise a novel portraying the gradual self-realization of the main protagonist. A Bildungsroman was a kind of automythography in the tradition of Dante’s La Divina Commedia and Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress, but it was more open-ended, less alle- gorical and more historical, less metaphysical and more psychological. The Bildungsroman was a literary form expressing a heightened self-reflexivity exploding within the revolutionary context of Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité. It was the supreme novel of individuation: of self-reflection, of self-fashioning, of self-realization.
Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship (1795) telling the story of the eponymous hero’s journey from alienation, to experimentation (playing Hamlet in a drama society), to fulfilment in the mysterious Tower Society was hailed as the first novel of its kind. Goethe himself, who later came to regard all his writings as fragments of one vast confession, called it a ‘pseudo-confession’ by which he meant a personal declaration through the use of a fictional persona. Wilhelm Meister was a dramatic representation of himself, and the story he told was essentially his own. Goethe’s close friend, the philosopher Friedrich Schiller, hailed it as a timely masterpiece, declaring it to be, in the story of reflexive consciousness, of equal impor- tance to the French Revolution. He revered it as the inner expression of the outer political eruption, suggesting a poetics of the self for a new phase of western culture.
But Bildung had a previous history, dating back to sixteenth-century mysti- cal theology. There it referred to the cultivation of a person’s talents in rela- tionship to the God-image within the individual soul. The Kingdom of God is within. As in the theology of Paul and Augustine, it was a question of releasing the divine pattern which existed in each person. In the eighteenth century this sense of a personal salvation remained but, as in the many autobiographical writings of Rousseau, it became secularised. It shifted into another frame of understanding, transcending both the church and the hierarchical pyramid of European society still partly under the yoke of feu- dalism. Slowly and erratically, divine law became natural law, the after- life became this-life – the immediate trembling moment with its agitated swarm of subjective hopes, impressions, passions, phantasies, thoughts and memories – and salvation became individuation.
Around the same time, the prior religious eschatology – all human life lead- ing inexorably to the final Day of Judgement – sublated into a belief in progress, a slow (or abrupt or erratic) historical unfolding of which the self was an inevitable expression and prime vehicle. In 1784 in his essay Was ist Aufklarung?: What is Enlightenment? Kant saluted the arrival of a rational age, free from superstition and ignorance, a new dispensation of historic time. He wrote: When we ask: Are we living in an enlightened age? The answer is No, but we live in an age of enlightenment. With high optimism and an acute awareness of the historicity of the moment, he claimed: If it
is only given freedom, enlightenment is almost inevitable. The challenge thrown before all religious and political authorities was Sapere aude: Dare to know. And an essential aspect of that was: Know thyself. The old Socratic challenge still lay at the heart of the agenda, but in radically different political and psychological circumstances it accrued new meanings, assumptions and associations.
The dramatic change in the word Bildung in the eighteenth century marked a decisive shift in the story of the self. In this conversion even the second- ary meaning of the term had altered beyond recognition. In sixteenth cen- tury Bildung was also current in natural philosophy to describe the devel- opment of potentialities in a living organism. In Goethe’s philosophy this Aristotelian idea had been given a new velocity and frame which, in many ways, prefigured Darwin’s theory of evolution. For Goethe, nature was not an enclosed system with eternally fixed species, but a continuous, forward movement of vital energy. Life came from an unknown centre and moved to an unknowable boundary: an eternal process of formation and deformation.
Goethe’s Faust does not settle for the dull satisfaction of the five senses; he seeks to follow a deep inner impulse for wholeness and understanding, always changing, always evolving. In fact, Goethe conceived individual lives as being lived in complex configurations of landscapes and towns and relationships, expressions not only of large historic forces but also of distant planetary synergies. His autobiography Poetry and Truth opens with the precise time of his birth – 28th August 1749, at midday as the clock struck – and continues by depicting the auspicious configuration of the various planets. The traditional idea of Bildung had become dynamic, personal and transforming. Hegel in his Phenomenology of the Spirit (com- pleted in 1806) was later to hazard the term Bildungsweg: Life-journey to capture the frisson of personal adventure and risk; the self slowly spiralling upwards through the crucifixion of self-division and the philosopher’s tools of dialectical thinking. In the revolutionary matrix of America and France, Bildung suggested an emergent model of the self, grounded in its historical period, continuously educating itself through inner reflection on its own multitudinious experiences. For early and late Romantics alike, there was one consistent literary icon: the anguished and questing Hamlet.
Indeed, by the last decade of the eighteenth century the philosophical and aesthetic idea of individuals consciously shaping their lives was becoming a universal ethical axiom: the principle of Ausbildung, full self-develop- ment. In 1791, Wilhelm von Humboldt claimed: The true end of man, that which is prescribed by the eternal and immutable dictates of reason, and not suggested by vague and transient desires, is the highest and most har- monious development of his powers to a complete and consistent whole. Like moist yeast, this revolutionary notion, close to the thinking of Kant and Voltaire, of Diderot and Rousseau, began to work through the rough dough of society.
It eventually found political expression in The Declaration of the Rights of Man and of Citizens passed at the French Assembly in Paris on August 26th 1789: Men are born and remain free and equal in rights … Liberty consists in the freedom to do everything which injures no-one else …. the free communication of ideas and opinions is one of the most precious of the rights of man. The sovereignty of the individual citizen, having deep roots in both classical civilisation and Judeo-Christian religion, and poetically prefigured in the essays of Montaigne and the orations of Pico della Miran- dola, had finally reached critical mass. To echo the utopian words of Pico, it now seemed possible for individuals to ordain for themselves the scope and limits of their own nature. Our common phrase ‘human rights’ had its origin here, although at this stage it largely excluded women. The wording ‘rights of man’ was more revealing than ever acknowledged by the men first drafting the revolutionary precepts. Women, for the most part, were still born unfree and unequal, as Mary Wollstonecraft declared in her Vin- dication of the Rights of Woman, first published to acclaim (and acrimony) in 1792. Yet, as her book demonstrated, the seeds of freedom, the right to self-expression and self-determination, had been cast. In the course of time, they were destined to germinate and spread across all political, ethnic and religious boundaries.
For the young, it seemed like a rebirth through an apocalypse of fire. Euro- pean Romanticism was, in the beginning, a generational matter; it was the yell of triumphant youth turning its back on sullen subjection and passive
subordination. In 1794 William Blake wrote: Youth of delight come hither/ And see the opening morn/ Image of truth new born. Two years later, he created the image Glad Day in which a naked angelic youth soared up, freeing himself from the shackles of materialism, the three colours of the French revolutionary flag (adopted in 1794) illuminating the background behind him. William Wordsworth, looking back to the same period in the Prelude, told how in his pride of youthful strength he had felt benevolence and blessedness spread like a fragrance everywhere. The exuberance of youth; the perfume of freedom; the glory of a new dawn.
The political revolution was real enough, but it ignited deep archetypes; the transgressive thief, Prometheus, rose up in the aroused adolescent psy- che. A new generation was ready to undergo any punishment meted out by archaic father figures, so that fire and freedom – the very secrets of a full creative existence – could be brought to the whole of humanity, without discrimination, without inherited bias. At the beginning of the revolution, during the Sturm und Drang movement, one of the most defiant and influ- ential poems by the young Goethe was titled Prometheus; and towards the end of the romantic period it was left to Shelley, in 1819, to write his ro- mantic version of the lost play of Aeschylus, Prometheus Unbound, ending with the clinching, if hugely rhetorical, couplet rhyming the utopian ‘free’ with the triumphant ‘victory’: Good, great and joyous, beautiful and free/ This is alone Life, Joy, Empire and Victory.
For other English Romantics working, often, in the nonconformist biblical tradition – Blake especially – the dramatic figure of Jesus returned as a smiling revolutionary to end the rule of Empire by ushering in the egalitar- ian millennium, an Eden regained, where the wolf and the lamb lay down together. As Robert Southey explained in a letter written in 1824 to his friend, Caroline Bowles: Few persons but those who have lived in it can conceive or comprehend what the meaning of the French Revolution was, nor what a visionary world seemed to open up upon those who were just entering it. Old things seemed passing away, and nothing was dreamt of but the regeneration of the human race. It was as fundamental as that.
The year 1770 saw the birth of Beethoven, Hölderlin, Wordsworth and He- gel – four of the most remarkable prodigies of Romanticism. They would be nineteen when The Declaration of the Rights of Man and of Citizens was proclaimed at the Assembly in Paris. The next five years registered the birth of Coleridge (1772), Novalis (1772), Southey (1774), Caspar Da- vid Friedrich (1774), and Turner (1775). As young impressionable men, they were all inspired by a sublime vision of a Promethean or apocalyptic revolution. At first they embraced the insurrection with an erotic ardour, a supreme adolescent passion, then subsequently struggled to hack their own individual paths through the cataclysm of the Terror and its aftermath.
Romanticism as a movement across the whole of Europe is so broad, so intricate, so multi-faceted, so rich and contradictory that no account can accurately encompass it, no map definitively mark it. Yet it remains an indispensable concept in the story of the self. It captures a certain way of being in the world, an abiding form of selfhood flowing into the modern age. Following in the wake of the primary movement, a number of poets cast themselves, or were cast, as ‘Last Romantics’. But that is misleading. Once established historically the idea of the Romantic can never die. Do we not talk, even now, of modern and postmodern Romantics?
In England, Romanticism ran its dramatic course through two overlapping phases. In its first movement, running from around 1750 to 1800, the dissonant spirit of Romanticism broke out most tangibly in the poetry and anguished lives of a number of poets: in William Cowper (who attempted suicide, experienced periodic fits of insanity and felt himself to be eternally damned), Christopher Smart (who was subject to fits of religious mania and wrote in one of his states of manic possession Jubilate Dei, a daring ‘free verse’ poem emulating Biblical cadences), the poet Thomas Chatterton (who, in 1770, at the age of seventeen, committed suicide to become the idolised figure of misunderstood genius and maligned youth) and the poet and engraver William Blake (who as a child saw angels gathered in a tree in Peckham Rye and published Songs of Innocence in 1789, the same year as the Declaration of Rights in Paris). Something of the exploratory gen- re-exploding élan of Romanticism is expressed in the surreal, mannered,
nightmarish paintings of Henry Fuseli and in Tristram Shandy, a symphon- ic novel written between 1759 and 1767 by Laurence Sterne, which, using blank pages, asterisks, dashes and squiggles, wildly experimented with time and typography, with digression and meaning, with reader and text. Even the evangelical mission of John and Charles Wesley to reform the established Anglican church gave voice to the yearning impulse of Roman- ticism with its accent on ardour, immediacy of expression and an emotional engagement of the whole person. One of John Wesley’s hymns, translated from the German, rang out: Give to my eyes refreshing tears,/Give to my heart chaste, hallowed fires/ Give to my soul with filial fears/ The love that all Heaven’s host inspires. It might have been composed by William Blake.
The second phase of Romanticism ran from around 1800, the year in which Wordsworth published his preface to the Lyrical Ballads, to 1834, the year in which Coleridge died – for Coleridge was, in so many ways, the great English mage of Romanticism, at once the tireless philosopher, the pro- lific (if uneven) poet and the most perspicacious psychologist of the whole movement. In the first three and a half decades of the nineteenth century, all the work of the young romantics – the canonical poets of the movement – had been written; the work of John Keats who died at the age of twenty -six, of Percy Bysshe Shelley who died at twenty-nine and Lord Byron who died at thirty-six. They were the poets not only of their poetry, but of their intense and harshly abbreviated lives. This period of high Romanti- cism gave a definitive expression to romantic identity and saw that it was forever coupled with the idea of youth haunted by passing beauty and the inexorability of death, as in Keats’s Ode to a Nightingale: Here…/Where youth grows pale, and spectre thin, and dies;/ Where but to think is to be full of sorrow/ And leaden-eyed despairs,/ Where Beauty cannot keep her lustrous eyes,/ Or new Love pine at them beyond tomorrow.
After the death of Coleridge, the fading Romantic embers were rekindled in America in the work of Emerson, Whitman and Thoreau. There it contin- ued to burn incandescent, almost to the end of the century.
One of the most profound changes in the understanding of the self can be glimpsed in one key word ‘sensibility’. By the middle of the eighteenth century it had come to mean a refinement, an acuteness of intuitive ap- prehension, a pitched susceptibility to impressions. One of the earliest re- corded uses of the new meaning was that of the poet, William Cowper, who in 1762 coined the compound ‘sweet sensibility’. Six years later Lawrence Sterne claimed it was: The source unexhausted of all that’s precious in our joys and costly in our sorrows. The word is always connected to the realm of affect, rather than reason, to a heightened emotional disposition, a vulnerable openness to experience. In fact, it came to characterise not just a mode of feeling, but a particular kind of person. It registered a way of being-in-the- world, invariably linked to the arts (especially music), to aesthetic and sublime experience (especially before the wilderness), and to immediate ethical action: a ‘natural’ goodness. Rousseau’s autobiographi- cal novel La Nouvelle Héloïse cast a spell over the last half of the century, influencing poets like Hannah More who, in a poem titled Sensibility, de- scribed it as that condition in which The feeling is diffused through every part/ Thrills each nerve, and lives in all the heart. But, at the same time, she equates sensibility with moral goodness: Perception exquisite, fair vir- tue’s seed/ Thou quick precursor of the liberal deed. The concept became an essential part of the emerging romantic zeitgeist which, as it developed, added the further powers of imagination and solitude. It is symptomatic that when Leigh Hunt offered a description of the young John Keats, he wrote he possessed a face in which energy and sensibility were remarkably mixed up.
Under Romanticism, the Enlightenment’s challenge: sapere audere, dare to know, had been converted into sentire audere: dare to feel. Dare to release those affective impulses which the rational mind could easily repress or ignore or in some way malign. Tellingly, at the time of the French Revolu- tion, the word ‘sentimental’ had an entirely positive meaning. Like ‘sensi- bility’, it affirmed feeling, sensitivity, taste, refinement. In 1749 Lady Brad- shaugh wrote: everything clever and agreeable is comprehended in that word … a sentimental man … a sentimental party … a sentimental walk. As the Romantic epoch declined, the connotations of the word plunged into the negative. A sentimental man became a maudlin fellow; a sentimental woman a gushing bore. By 1837, Carlyle was able to refer dismissively to that rosepink vapour of sentimentalism. The word came to denote an over- indulged or trivial feeling; a corrupt emotion. The inversion of meaning in less than a hundred years tells its own story.
The various changes in linguistic usage point to another mutation in the understanding of the self. A process of bildung, of self-formation and self- enlargement, was at work. Under the general psychic shift created by the Romantic philosophers and artists, what kind of self was being cultivated? What were the characteristics of the new Abelard and the new Héloïse? How did they envisage their lives? How did they a forge a poetics of identity?
In her novel Sense and Sensibility Jane Austen gave one critical answer. In fact, the work may have played its part in deflating the currency of ‘sensi- bility’ and turning the word ‘sentiment’ into a term of disapprobation. In no way a Romantic herself, Jane Austen was a shrewd observer of herself, and the fashions of her time. In this early novel, published in 1811, but first drafted as an epistolary novel around 1795, she placed the notions of sensibility and romantic under her clean moral lens and cast judgement.
If the two contrasted qualities of ‘sense’ (embodied in the character of Elinor) and ‘sensibility’ (embodied in the character of Marianne) are seen as two vying parts of the author’s personality then the work might be read, like Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister, as an early Bildungsroman: an exploration of the writer’s psyche through the creative process of imaginative splitting and projection. It is pertinent that, like Marianne, Jane Austen was the sec- ond in her family, had a penchant for playing pianoforte and loved poetry, particularly the melancholy work of Cowper; and pertinent that her elder sister, Cassandra, like Elinor in the novel, was more convergent in mind and practical in orientation. At first sight, it might seem as if Jane Austen was scrutinizing a family dynamic at work within herself: a piece of intro- spective analysis in the name of self-understanding and self-development.
The younger sister, Marianne, is sketched as if she were a female reincar- nation of Rousseau. She is all animation and agitation; she speaks through quick dashes and exclamation marks; she acts from impulse and believes in the holiness of the heart’s affections, resisting any passive conformity to the dominant society. Elinor, in contrast, is self-contained and self-possessed; she speaks lucidly (like her author ) in classically balanced antitheses and believes in the abiding values of prudence and endurance as ways of ad- justing to the status quo. Elinor is all subtle concealment under the sign of Civilisation; Marianne all quivering openness under the sign of Nature. Elinor stays inside on inclement days; Marianne rushes out to embrace the storm. Elinor is ready to play a hand of whist, the social round; Marianne is disdainful and refuses to participate.
Even their names dramatise their contrasting natures. At the time, the word ‘Marianne’ evoked the turbulent energies of revolution. It signalled alarm. In France, the legendary Marianne had been transformed into an icon of revolutionary change. She made her first appearance as an effigy stamped on a medal celebrating the storming of the Bastille. As the goddess of lib- erty, equality and fraternity, she continued her allegorical life in endless paintings, drawings and public statues. In a stormy painting by Delacroix, Liberty Leading the People, she fearlessly climbs the barricades, bare- breasted, to take the tripartite flag into the fray. In contrast, Elinor’s name suggests calmness and lucidity. Etymologically, the word derives from the Greek ellas, meaning light. She stands for rational clarity. Her name repre- sents that part of the Enlightenment which advocated working reasonably inside the sophisticated codes of a civilised society.
A set of binaries hold the sisters together. The contending opposites could be tabulated as follows:
Prudence: Recklessness
Concealment: Openness
Thought: Feeling
Observation: Reverie
Fancy: Imagination
Sociability: Solitude
Outer: Inner
Collective: Individual
Throughout the novel, Elinor represents the qualities on the left hand side; while Marianne represents those on the right. On one side, Classicism and Stoicism; on the other, Naturalism and Romanticism. ‘Sense’ and ‘Sensibility.’
In a Bildungsroman one would expect such an exploration of conflict be- tween two dispositions to usher in a complex development and higher fu- sion. And yet, strangely, in the novel there is no inward identification with Marianne; nor is there any positive development of her sensibility, no ex- pansion of her intrinsic nature into a higher, more differentiated being. She is invariably perceived from a satirical distance and always from outside. She is judged before she is allowed to exist. The narrative is skewed from the very beginning and conspires at every point against her growth. She has to die or conform. What, one wonders, would the outcome have been if the impressionable Marianne had met, not the libertine, Mr. Willoughby, but Mr. John Keats, man of sensibility, with integrity and intelligence? How would Marianne’s sensibility have evolved under the influence of such an encounter? Keeping faith with her own innate disposition, what might have become of her? We have no idea. We never experience Marianne from within or see the flowering of her sensibility. We do sense that when she recovers from her long illness and looks at Elinor with a rational though languid gaze, she has lost her animal vitality forever.
From the very first chapter, Elinor perceives the excess of her sister’s sen- sibility and is set to reform it. By the end of the novel the taming of the tiger is complete: Marianne Dashwood was born to an extraordinary fate. She was born to discover the falsehood of her own opinions… She found herself, at nineteen, submitting to new attachments, entering in new duties, placed in a new home, a wife, the mistress of a family, and the patroness of a village. ‘Submitting’ is the key participle in that passage. Finally, Mari- anne has become subjugated. A good member of society, she has become a clone of Elinor. A true ferment of dialectical energies has not been resolved or transformed, but cunningly evaded by the devious strategies open to a novelist.
The novel is not an inner exploration but more an ethical parable, a me- dieval morality play in which one side of the binary line is consistently extolled, as the other is damned. The ‘and’ between sense and sensibility is made of iron and incapable of dissolution. It is the classical grammar of separation and division, not empathy or fusion. The novel, in brief, is a casualty of the over-moral mind. If there is an element of autobiography in the novel ( as there has to be ) then it is a story of the author’s unconscious denial of part of her own nature: a harsh repression of imaginative and emotional elements deep inside her own being. Why, one wonders, was the author so terrified of her own romantic creation that she had either to murder her or turn her into a smiling marionette? The work is the antithesis of the Bildungsroman. In a disturbing way, it is about the disfigurement and sacrifice of sensibility in the name of sense: the loss of self in the collective spin.
Enquiring into self and sensibility we have stumbled upon a negative por- trait of Romanticism. Written in the immediate wake of the French Revolu- tion and at the height of the Romantic movement, the novel suggests how threatening many of the new ideas must have been to the dominant social classes, to the aristocracy and the landed gentry. In Sense and Sensibility, Romanticism is wilfully caricatured. It is unjustly stapled to promiscuous sexuality, narcissistic withdrawal – and thunder-storms. In so many ways, it is a facile view; a one-dimensional picture, resembling earlier versions sketched in Jane Austen’s juvenilia. What would the best of the Romantics have set against it? How might they have revised and re-envisioned the story of Marianne so that her fate might have been different? What form of higher being did their best energies and insights point towards? In my next foray I will attempt to answer these pressing existential questions.
In his next essay Peter Abbs will look at the work of William Blake and its relationship to the shaping of the Romantic self. For further details of the story of the self see: wwwpeterabbs.org