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| Wandering and Wandern in Poetry Are the words "Wandern" and "wandering" synonymous - in poetry? | | by: | This item has no ratings. |
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Created: 3:48pm on 12-19-2001
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GOETHE'S DIE LEIDEN DES JUNGEN WERTHER
Ich kehre in mich selbst zurück und finde eine Welt.
I turn back into myself and find a world.
Do these words testify to a complete withdrawal into the inner self in accord with a process Harold Bloom and others have termed 'interiorisation' with its supposed result that all references the author makes to biographical and historical facts or religious truth have only a psychological and aesthetic validity? However, what are we to make of the many references in the novel to the Biblical motifs, such as the meeting a young woman at a well or the words and deeds of Christ? Indeed the idea of an interior word cited above has a Biblical precedent in the principle that the Kingdom of Heaven is within the human soul. In this article attention will also be drawn to the notion that self-induced death promises the resolution of conflicts that remain unresolved here on earth.
This article looks at Goethe's famous novel in the light of a then current theosophic theory in which the taking of one's life offers the chance to place a Trojan horse in Heaven. Ultimately a glorified Gretchen will open Heaven's Door to Faust at the end of his turbulent earthly life.
Johann Wolfgang Goethe at only 25 years of age experienced one of the world’s greatest literary sensations, albeit a very controversial one, when his novel Die Leiden des jungen Werthers (“The Sorrows of Young Werther”) was published in 1774. Its composition during the same year had taken only three months of intense concentration and self-isolation. Goethe thus became a European celebrity overnight, but to the detriment of many a young man who emulated Werther’s example by committing suicide, often dressed like him in a blue coat and yellow waistcoat. Some have seen in this tragic outcome a reason to reproach Goethe for irresponsibly exciting destructive passions among the impressionable young ‘Romantics’ of his day, but few would admit that he could have foreseen the wave of suicides that his novel provoked. In writing a story that sprang from Goethe’s concern with his personal emotional predicament at a certain time in his life, he happened to strike a chord that would resonate throughout Europe on the eve of revolution, a revolution that released the pent-up discontent and longing for change of the entire previous century.
The reactions to the novel collectively reflected the range of attitude and opinion that prevailed among the educated sections of society. The question of suicide was particularly problematic for many who upheld the philosophy of the Enlightenment. While they rejected the opprobrium of suicide incurred by Church doctrines, they were horrified by suicidal acts in view of their extreme defiance of reason and good sense. In the affair Callas, had not Voltaire taken up the case of a father afflicted and persecuted after the suicide of his son? Friedrich Nicolai thoroughly condemned Werther for taking his own life but sympathized with young men in his situation sufficiently to write an alternative, a happy, ending of the story, showing how the application of reason could overcome extreme psychological disorders. In England the tragic death of the youthful poet Chatterton in 1770 had already set in train a widespread preoccupation with the issue of suicide, particularly when committed by the young and artistically inclined. In 1774 another notable suicide took place when Clive of India took his life. If an earlier attempt of his had succeeded, the history of the British Empire might well have turned out very differently.
In terms of literary history the story of Werther is a milestone marking the highpoint of an epoch that has come to be labeled ‘Storm and Stress’ (Sturm und Drang originally being the title of a drama depicting an episode in the American War of Independence). Appropriately enough, the Werther meets Lotte, quite literally his femme fatale, at a ball at which the noise of storm and thunder outside produces an ominous atmospheric effect. Significant also is the exclamation "Klopstock" that coincided with the blast of the raging storm, for Klopstock had introduced in German poetry a form of verbal expression that at times broke the bounds of grammar and syntax to reach a higher emotional and spiritual pitch.
The novel was more than an expression of discontent with prevailing political and social conditions, a discontent shared even by many defenders of the rationalism that typified the age of Enlightenment. It presented the experience of a young man at once burdened and exhilarated by a super-charged self-consciousness characterized by introversion (see Book 1, May 22 ) and hypersensitivity. In the realm of prose fiction Laurence Sterne, the author of Tristram Shandy and A Sentimental Journey, reveled in a new-found authorial freedom bordering of total sovereignty in dealing with subject matter irrespective of literary conventions. In his ‘Speech on Shakespeare Day’ (1771) Goethe had, for his part, placed himself, the “Wanderer”, at the head of a new form of literature, and in Die Leiden des jungen Werthers the word ‘Wanderer’ continues to possess a high degree of significance. On one level it evokes the image of a pilgrim journeying through life towards his heavenly home but it also betokens the Poet/Artist as one who inhabits his own world of the imagination and who cannot correlate this with the real and imperfect world around him
The sense given to ‘Wanderer’ is but one indication of a strong religious and mystical element in the novel. The very title may be construed in religious terms as ‘Leiden’ can mean ’the Passion’ as well as ‘suffering’. The superabundant references and allusions to biblical motifs found in the novel raise the question as to whether the novel is imbued with genuine religious sentiments or simply betrays the effects of spilt religion, to use a term with which a critic once censured the Romantics. .
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Cast in the epistolary style adopted by Richardson, Rousseau and others, the novel tells of Werther’s descent from the initial bliss he experiences as a newcomer to a rural paradise (of the kind recently evoked by Rousseau). His letters are addressed to a certain Wilhelm (the name recalled Goethe’s mentor Shakespeare in later works), whose answers are never revealed. Werther falls in love with Lotte (Charlotte), a young woman who has the charge of her many siblings after her mother’s death. In a certain sense she is an archetypal mother figure, as captured in the powerful impression she made on Werther in a scene where she slices a loaf to feed her brothers and sisters as though dispensing a sacrament (see Thackeray’s parody). Elsewhere Werther explicitly interprets her action of washing a small girl’s face as one analogous to the rite of baptism.
Lotte holds Werther in deep affection but unfortunately for him. she remains faithful to Albert, a young man of integrity and amiable character. Werther and Albert respect each other deeply though they have antithetic views on many subjects, including, significantly enough, that of suicide. While Albert shows compassion for the mentally distraught, he firmly holds to conservative values and thus rejects any argument justifying suicide. Werther lends undivided moral support to all who end their lives because of the unbearable suffering they have endured, and does so invoking the compassion of Christ for common humanity. Werther's depiction of the tragic life and self-induced death of a young woman forsaken in love (see Book 1, 12. August) anticipates Gretchen in Goethe's Faust. Werther’s initial euphoria turns to despair, induced or perhaps only aggravated by his disappointment in love. His sensitive mind is afflicted by emotional swings oscillations between extreme elation and extreme fits of dejection in one of which experiences a nightmare vision of Nature as an all-devouring and regurgitating monster (see Book 1, 18. August). He feels anguish at the thought that he might inadvertently crush a worm on one of his country walks. He becomes increasing frustrated by the pettiness and class-bound injustices of court society. Even his reading matter reflects a fundamental change in mood when he abandons the works of Homer for the Gothic Ossian. As Goethe much later in life observed to Henry Crabb Robinson, his change of reading matter coincided with the turning point in the novel after which Werther began down the slippery slope to his ultimate demise. The nadir of his emotions is revealed in the letter dated November 15, the so-called "Gethsemane Letter", in which he implicitly compared himself to Christ in the Garden of Gethsemane when anguished by the prospect of death and to Hamlet when uttering "to be or not to be" (see Book 2, 15. November). In preparation for his act Werther experiences a strange sense of euphoria and uplift for in a final climax of emotional outpouring Werther makes a desperate last-ditch attempt to impress Lotte by his dramatic reading of passages from Ossian, supposedly a Celtic epic (purportedly an ancient Gaelic epic translated into English by James Macpherson but later exposed as a forgery) with their bloodcurdling battles and forsaken lovers about to perish surrounded by an unmitigated storm-laden gloom beside a shore and waves raging against perilous crags. The reading serves Werther as a kind of aphrodisiac working up his and her emotions to such a pitch that he and she are locked in a firm and passionate embrace despite Lotte’s ineffectual and perhaps not totally resolute resistance. He steals a rapturous embrace from a traumatized but despite it all passionate Lotte, before she escapes his clutches and runs away. If only he had taken her earlier advice and kept away until Christmas Eve when nothing could have gone wrong!
Goethe’s setting of Werther's death a few days before Christmas might indicate Goethe's deliberate inversion of the birth-death cycle, a return to the womb, expressing he libidinal urge to be united with the anima, the archetypal female. In his article “The Image of "the Wanderer" and "the Hut" in Goethe’s Poetry’ (in Etudes Germaniques, Dec., 1951). Professor L.A. Willoughby interprets the image or figure of ‘the Wanderer’ in Goethe’s works in the light of C. G. Jung’s theory of the collective unconscious, according to which the primary male urge or ‘libido’ seeks to achieve harmony and union with the ‘anima’ or ‘eternally female’ principle. As the ‘anima’ conflates the maternal and conjugal aspects of womanhood it arouses the largely unconscious Oedipal fear of committing incest. Lotte, for her part, seems to have suffered from a ‘mother complex’ in view of the vow she made to her mother's ghost that she never forsake her many brothers and sisters. The fact that Lotte defers to Werther's final request to be handed Albert's pistols convinces Werther that she is a willing party to his project of ‘going on before’ into eternity. She is seen by him to dispense a means of grace analogous to the Holy Chalice. Earlier, in Werther’s mind, she had administered the sacrament of baptism when washing the face of a little girl whom Werther had frightened by an impulsive, though doubtless innocent, kiss. This kiss forebodes Werther’s and Lotte’s final fateful embrace. Of course, a more cynical explanation of Lotte's willingness to hand over the instrument of his destruction is that she had a shrewd idea of his intention and would be somewhat relieved by his demise. Werther, who has already contemplated suicide as a way of resolving his inner conflicts, now feels assured that Lotte approves of his design to take his life so as to enter heaven and like Christ in St John's Gospel prepare the way that others, though Werther had only Lotte and himself in mind for an entry into the celestial sphere. This strange notion was not Goethe’s invention as will become clear in due course. An editor reports on Werther's final days and the circumstances his death. Many significant details, such as the finding of a copy of Lessing's drama Emilia Galotti, were not inventions of Goethe either.
The novel has deep roots in Goethe’s own experiences in 1772 at Wetzlar (an important seat of the Imperial Chamber of Justice and one relatively close to Goethe’s native Frankfurt am Main) to round off his legal studies. There he fell in love nineteen-year-old Lotte Buff, but she, like Werther’s Lotte with regard to Albert, remained faithful the young man she had chosen to marry, Christian Kestner. Not only did Goethe suffer the gentle but firm rejection of his amorous advances but also reacted against what he felt to be the ultraconservative and petty environment of provincial Wetzlar. Having resigned his position, the frustrated and deeply hurt young Goethe toured the Lahn valley and paid a visit to the family of Sophie von la Roche, considered the first woman novelist writing in the German language. As though he had not had enough emotional punishment that year, he became enamored with Maximiliane, a daughter of his hostess, but the sixteen-year-old was soon to marry a wealthy middle-aged Italian businessman Pietro (Peter) Brentano, who subsequently made it very clear to Goethe that he would no longer be welcome as a visitor to his household. Incidentally two of their children Bettina and Clemens became celebrated writers of the Romantic school. It was a consolation of sorts that Maximiliane and Brentano provided material for Goethe’s famous novel. Maximiliane lent Lotte her dark eyes and Brentano’s abrasive nature re-emerges in the character of Albert. After returning to Frankfurt, Goethe learnt of the suicide of Karl Wilhelm Jerusalem, a young man from Wolfenbüttel whom Goethe knew in Wetzlar as a companion of his own age with similar literary and philosophical interests. Jerusalem served as secretary in a legation from Braunschweig (Brunswick) at the Imperial Chamber of Justice. His self-inflicted death immediately followed his failure to induce a married woman to yield to his protestation of love and leave her husband. Furthermore, he was frustrated in his profession, being on very bad terms with his superior. In November 1744 Goethe received a detailed and perceptive account of the final crisis in Jerusalem’s life from Kestner, with whom he remained on friendly terms despite their earlier rivalry. This report contains significant details which Goethe incorporated into Werther. Chief among them was the fact reported by Kestner that a copy of Emilia Galotti was found beside Jerusalem’s body. Goethe also included the laconic final remark in Kestner’s report. No clergyman attended the funeral. The report clearly indicated that Jerusalem’s suicide resulted from a belief that his death would prepare the way for a blissful reunion with his loved one in the hereafter. The very same conviction was the basis of Werther’s resolve to commit suicide. Differences between the account and the novel are also revealing. Jerusalem's death occurred at the end of October, while that of Werther is placed just before Christmas Eve, which again indicates Goethe's free use of symbols derived from Christian traditions
One can hardly mention Jerusalem without making a reference to Ephraim Lessing and his relevance to the question of Jerusalem's suicide, and Werther's in view of the fact a copy of Emilia Galotti was found beside Jerusalem's body. A short reflection on relevant aspects of the drama may prove enlightening.
Lessing, that powerful advocate of tolerance and social emancipation, had recently caused a sensation through his drama Emilia Galotti, in which the heroine incites her father to kill her to save her from ‘a fate worse than death’, sexual enslavement to a corrupt noble The play derives its theme partly from the story of Virginia as told by Livy in his history of early Rome and partly from the story of Saint Ursula and the eleven thousand virgins who accepted death in ancient Cologne rather than lose their virginity. Here the borderline between suicide and self-induced martyrdom is not altogether clear, nor is it in Werther’s case, at least with reference to his own subjective perspective.
Lessing was involved in the events associated with Jerusalem's death in a direct and personal way. He served as the chief librarian of Wolfenbüttel, Jerusalem's home town, circle of acquaintances including Jerusalem's father. Jerusalem himself and Moses Mendelssohn, a Jewish scholar whose ambition it was to reconcile traditional Jewish philosophy with mainstream European thought and the rationalism of the Enlightenment. The view is commonly maintained that Werther had fully "interiorized" religious symbols so that they were simply ciphers indicating a purely mental state without a claim to any assertion about external realities. In fact such a transition was not completed in a brief instant. The writers and philosophers of the time sought a higher truth combining religious faith and psychological theories intimating the collective unconscious.
In some ways Lessing showed more understanding than Goethe himself for the unfortunate Jerusalem and his extreme act, and as to counteract the impression that he was merely a befuddled eccentric, Lessing published some of the young man’s philosophical essays. According to Kestner’s report, Jerusalem had assured himself that the soul was imperishable after reading Moses Mendelssohn’s 'Phaeton,' a philosophical treatise on the immortality of the soul. Mendelssohn had exerted a great influence on his close friend Lessing in the latter’s quest to throw a favourable light on Jews and their traditions in a development that culminated in the drama Nathan der Weise great plea for tolerance and mutual appreciation among Christians, Jews and Moslems. It would make good reading for many politicians today.
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On the basis of evaluating the data presented above can we reach a clearer perception of the novel’s importance in the context of developments in literature and Goethe's own progress? We might focus on the question. Is Werther the first Romantic novel? In different terms. does the novel endorse a total rejection of society and convention? Further: How does the novel fit into the picture of Goethe’s development as a poet and writer?
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The words 'romantisch’ appears several times in the novel. The original meaning of the word being derived from 'Roman', it simply meant 'corresponding to the spirit or nature of a novel' with reference to its themes involving stories of love and adventure. It certainly did not refer to the Romantic movement, which came into existence about twenty years later. It was predicated on Friederich Schiller's distinction between the "naive" poetry and art of the Ancients, which was the product of unselfconscious impulses and emotions, and the 'sentimental' art of the modern period in which poets and artists were, often painfully, aware of the processes involved in the creation of art. Werther, as we have noted, was acutely self-conscious almost to the point of having a severe mental condition, and this was expressly related to his having an artistic talent without the ability to translate his inner vision into an adequate vehicle of artistic expression. However, the German Romantic movement came into existence as a reaction to Goethe’s insistence that the artist-poets is responsible to society as a citizen committed to the well-being of humanity. The controversy came to a head after Goethe's publication of Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre. the main character Wilhelm is a member of an itinerant or "wandering' troupe of actors staging Hamlet among other dramatic works. A divide between Wilhelm and the more erratic and unstable members of the troupe gapes open. Those of the erratic group, notably the patriarchal harp-player and a high-spirited but unstable young Italian tomboy, Mignon. While Mignon and the harp-player fall by the wayside and die, Wilhelm survives and discovers his true vocation as a surgeon, a very practical and socially acceptable alternative to being a vagrant actor. Those who came to form the Romantic movement strongly objected to Goethe’s utilitarian leanings as the title of a romantic novel by Josef Eichendorff, Aus dem Leben eines Taugenichts ("From the Life of a Good-for-Nothing"), makes clear. But might we then say that Werther was a piece of Romantic fiction which Goethe would come to disavow in later as an excusable youthful aberration.. Here we ought to consider whether Goethe, even as a young man, advocated or condoned suicide in the first place. Werther's altercations with Albert have the quality of a debate in which Albert has the better arguments. We should not confuse an empathetic portrayal of a person suffering from a grave malady with an endorsement of this person’s actions. If he had been that convinced of Werther's attitudes Goethe would have presumably taken his life too. In any case one should be wary of treating Werther in isolation from Goethe's works and the trends and forces underlying them.
It is important to take account of a fundamental dualistic structure that will constantly resurface in Goethe's works, particularly those that encompass two classes of persons, non-survivors like Werther and survivors like Albert. The same contrast is found in the drama Torquato Tasso in which the distraught poets earns our sympathy though Antonio, his robust and successful counterpart, earns our respect at least. In the case of Wilhelm Meister it is the survivor Wilhelm who engages our chief interest while Mignon and the harp-player are shown to be tragically doomed. Perhaps even here we should be wary of a judgmental disapproval of the non-survivors as if we might say it served them right to perish before their time. The coupling of antithetic characters is arguably rooted in a dichotomy residing in the human mind itself. here. This view was upheld by Friedrich Gundorf, one of Germany's most authoritative experts on Goethe before the nightfall of free intellectual life in Germany in 1933 (see Note).
When we consider Goethe's final great work Faust Part II we see how many of the unresolved tensions and contradictions in Goethe's personality at the time of his writing Werther yield to an overwhelming sense of harmony and reconciliation. In the final scenes of the play Faust must prepare for the inevitable, his death and the verdict of divine judgment on his eternal state. He receives forgiveness through the mediation of Gretchen transfigured into a figure like Mary Magdalene, the penitent sinner whose greatest and decisive attribute is love. In a sense she fulfills a role that Werther claimed for himself as one who would go beyond to prepare for a reconciliation with Lotte in the hereafter. We should not forget that the image of the forsaken maiden, in which critics detect an embryonic Ur-Gretchen, makes its debut in Werther's defense of those who commit suicide when unable to further endure their unrelieved suffering. In the context of the Faust dramas Gretchen chose to face death by execution rather than avail herself of the opportunity to escape from prison with the help of Mephistopheles and Faust. Thus, while she did not actively commit suicide, she chose to face death rather than to seize a chance to flee from it. Ultimately Faust is redeemed, but the nature of his redemption in any literal or theological sense is open to question. Perhaps the key to unlocking the enigma it poses it is to be found in the recognition that the completion of Faust Part II fell close to the completion of Goethe's life. As the marginal references in the last scene of the drama disclose to a reader if not to a spectator, Faust is identified as 'the Wanderer' returning to his final place of rest. We have noted that the term 'Wanderer' designates Werther negatively as a homeless wayfarer through the wilderness of life. To use modern colloquialism, Werther gatecrashed his way into the afterlife. Faust returns there too, but in better grace, only after exploring every avenue open to him in this life.
Note:
Mignon und der Harfner stammen aus einer andren Schicht von Goethes Wesen und Leben als alle andren Figuren des Meister.
Friedrich Gundorf, “Wilhelm Meisters Theatralische Sendung“, Goethe, Berlin, 1916, p. 345
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Reflections and Notes on the question: Does English Romantic Poetry amount to anything more than ‘Spilt Religion*?
Did T. E. Hume, when dismissing the English Romanticism as ‘spilt religion’, take full account of the Romantic poets’ constant use of religious symbols and terms? Did religion merely offer the Romantics a convenient vocabulary of words derived from the Bible and other religious sources with which they might address purely secular concerns? We could of course attempt to pigeon-hole the Romantics according to their philosophical views. We could call William Blake a heretical crank, Wordsworth and Coleridge, in their creative heydays at least, ditherers on the borderline between pantheism and Christian belief, Byron a reprobate with a Calvinist sense of human depravity and Shelley as well as Keats agnostics if not atheists. Such categories help little to illuminate the question of the Romantics’ reliance on religious concepts and aspirations.
Let us suppose that a triangle represents the traditional religious view of the relationship between the subjective domain of any individual’s mind, the domain of objective nature, and the realm of divinity. How should we picture the Romantics’ world-view if we agree with Hulme’s assertion that the Romantics created spilt religion, which, translated into the imagery of a triangle, would mean that the point of the triangle corresponding to a God’s position in the universe is missing. (Triadic or triangular parallels can arise elsewhere in literary criticism concerned with English Romanticism: Geoffrey H. Hartman sees the transition from a basic religious supposition to a secular one in triadic terms, for he writes: “the traditional scheme of Eden, fall, and redemption merges with the new triad of nature, self-consciousness, imagination, while the last term in both involves a kind of return to the first” *). Are we not then left with a bipolar tension without the influence of a stabilizing third force to hold together and reconcile the realm of mind and externality, a tension that Descartes had attempted to resolve in his dictum cogito ergo sum? Indeed, the demon of isolated subjectivity that so exercised Descartes himself returned to haunt the Ancient Mariner and rendered Wordsworth’s visual perceptions of natural objects disturbing and problematic, a fact obscured by his almost hysterical joy on seeing a host (an invading army?) of daffodils.
Let us not take it as given that the Romantics abandoned altogether a triangular model resembling that which informs a traditional religious mentality. If they could not bring themselves to place God at the third apex of whatever should replace the former triangle informing mainstream European thought before the advent of modern secularism, then they found it convenient, even necessary, to allow a surrogate for God to occupy the vacated third apex, be this ‘the Primary Imagination’, ‘the One Mind’ or the Unconscious. Terminology of this kind will vary from poet to poet, yet none of the poets so far mentioned denied the existence of some universal sustaining power occupying the throne of an assumed absentee Monarch.
Perhaps Keats came closest to denying the relevance of belief in a hereafter, yet he substituted this by positing the existence of a timeless dimension in which the beauty of perceived objects is deemed imperishable. Even this supposition poses a certain leap of faith. Are we dealing here with the poets’ central concern with ontological verities or just their subjection to a mental and emotional need to rifle religion’s store for symbols and allegories?
Arguably the Romantic stance of the inspired prophet reflects the Romantic poet’s need to affirm his authority vis-à-vis mankind, or more precisely his possible readership, to bolster his own morale in the face of a generally indifferent world. The realm of the transcendental and divine could otherwise be regarded as a part of the poet’s unconscious as opposed to deliberate design of disburdening himself of his selfhood or perhaps his the sense of isolation endured by a self-conscious being when confronted by the awesome vastness of all else in the universe. Shelley may convince us of the authenticity of his prophetic mission by his ‘Ode to the West Wind’, but does this impression result from an astounding poetic tour de force or from some enhanced awareness of the poet’s essential character?
There is another side to this question. With the exception of Blake and possibly Byron the Romantics suffered in varying degrees from the fear that their powers of poetic creativity would desert them. In the case of Keats it is probably more apt to speak of the fear that illness would deny him to fulfill his poetic life mission. It seems to have been fear itself rather that any object of such fear that foreshortened the truly productive poetic creativity of Wordsworth and Coleridge. Particularly in the latter case the intensity of poetic effort was not rewarded by feelings of pleasure. All in all we can well understand the need of Romantic poets to enlist the aid of a power greater than themselves that might sustain their poetic creativity.
Blake, according to J. Bronowski created his personal and obscure mythological framework for reasons that had more to do with a defensive strategy than with his essential statement. Only so, it is argued, could he express his revolutionary vision without falling victim to censorship. Though this analysis may well contain an element of truth it surely falls short of supplying a full explanation of Blake’s poetry, in which such figures as Orc, Urizen and Los are inseparable from Blake’s spiritual vision of reality, history and Man. In identifying Jesus with the Imagination, that most essential of all Romantic concepts, Blake asserted the element of continuity in the context of religious tradition, which also characterizes the Blakean universe besides all else that seems unorthodox and ‘heretical’.
Byron is in some ways atypical of the Romantic poets as a group in that his aristocratic bearing, his immense popularity and his affinity with Pope and the Augustan poets in some points at least lessened, though never removed, his sense of social and existential isolation from mainstream English society. It has been argued that his religiosity such as it is has something of an Old Testament stamp and that the pilgrimages of Childe Harold and Don Juan are indeed ultimately religious in nature.
Keats confronts us with a paradox. His poetry concerns the relevance of ‘Beauty’ in the immediately perceptible world of natural objects as that which is inseparable from ‘Truth’.
As Keats put it so effectively in the closing lines of ‘Ode to a Grecian Urn’, ’that is all ye know on earth and all ye need to know’. On the other hand the antithesis between scientific rationalism and the Romantics’ stress on the intuitive is nowhere more keenly and poignantly felt than in Keats’ poetry showing that the poet sees himself confronted by an either-or dilemma. This expresses itself so: Either the scientific or the intuitive mode of perception is valid and demonstrably so at that. The sense of anticlimax, even nausea and despair, that so often follows a dream or an evocation of sensual indulgence in Keats’ poems such as ‘La Belle Dame sans Merci’, and ‘Lamia’ exposes a sense of triumphant evil, and evil is a term that belongs to the vocabulary of those with a religious rather than secular outlook.
As J.H. van den Berg argues in ‘The Subject and his Landscape’, the Romantic’s quest for individual freedom and his quest for union with whatever is taken to constitute the sustaining force of the universe or the ground of all being lies in a direct line of descent from Luther and other Protestant reformers in that the latter asserted that the individual had no need of a mediating and hierarchically structured organization like the Roman Catholic Church in his personal dealings with God.
In the eighteenth century not only religious but also secular hierarchies had been disparaged or overthrown. In Protestant circles ‘the Word’, the divine authority of the Bible, was widely seen as no longer being an essential connecting factor between God and the believer and thus the believer was left very much to his own devices when it came to maintaining a line of communication with his Maker. In some ways purely religious and theological issues had lost their place in the forum of major intellectual trends within Europe and America. Such concepts as liberty and the Kingdom of God had become secularized. Down-to-earth Tories such as Dr. Johnson and the conservative-minded such as Oliver Goldsmith had come to recognize in ‘liberty’ a mere catchword with which sectional groups could assert their interests to the detriment of the aristocracy, In general, though, the prestigious word ‘liberty’ owed much to its appeal to religious sentiments, so with the advent of the French Revolution many leading minds accepted that the millennium, basically a religious concept, had dawned.
When the Revolution turned into a fratricidal bloodbath, however, not only secular ideals but also deep religious aspirations were cruelly betrayed. The tragic events that took place in France during la Terreur induced William Blake to modify but not renounce his positive appraisal of revolutionary developments. William Wordsworth records in The Prelude how tourists from England were enthusiastically welcomed by the French population as those who hailed from a nation whose Glorious Revolution had a century beforehand anticipated the French Revolution. The prestigious Revolution Society in 1789 was founded to celebrate the centenary of the Glorious Revolution, not the contemporaneous French Revolution.
It was only after the outbreak of war between Britain and France that Wordsworth forswore allegiance to what the French Revolution stood for and with it all hope of the imminent coming of an era when justice and peace would reign on earth. The mental depression into which Wordsworth descended in 1796, though precipitated by political events in the world at large, found a resolution of an essentially religious nature, as M. H. Abrams persuasively argues in English Romanticism. The Spirit of the Age. + This resolution, according to Abrams, derives from the notion of a divine “condescension” or “accommodation” in God’s dealings with humanity. So far-reaching was Wordsworth’s attachment to this idea that he was induced to embrace the ordinary language of men as the most effective and sanctified mode of poetic expression. This departure from the decorum of poetic convention proved so radical that even fellow Romantics failed to understand its justification. Probably the pre-Romantic poet who most clearly anticipated Wordsworth in his depiction of country walks and encounters with natural scenery was William Cowper, an Augustan poet of the Evangelical persuasion. The Evangelical movement in the eighteenth century was greatly influenced by the Methodist revival which accomplished a non-violent revolution particularly in regard to the rise of a new social conscience in broad segments of English society, and it is only with this background in mind that one can appreciate a great deal of Romantic poetry, particularly that written by Blake and Wordsworth.
In Milton Blake singled out the evangelists “Wesley and Whitefield” as witnesses to the truths suppressed by the staid religious establishment (Milton, Plate 22, l. 55). In stressing the importance of personal experience and by dissociating themselves from narrow Calvinist doctrines and the violence of rebellion the Methodists and many Evangelicals played a decisive role in British political life by obviating the equivalent of the French Revolution and laying the groundwork for the Victorian social compromise.
Wordsworth’s commitment to using the ordinary language of men, his reevaluation of personal childhood experience and concern for the well-being of children and fate of those forsaken and those of lowly social status all find their common foundation in Wordsworth’s notion that the divine is expressed in the humility of the poor and needy. For this reason and for others I cannot accept Bernard Blackstone’s view that Wordsworth finds a place in what he sees as the non-Christian camp among the English Romantic poets.
Wordsworth certainly resonated the words of Jesus affirming that little children bore witness to the nature of the Kingdom of God. While all the Romantics in their various ways treated images of childhood and youth positively, Wordsworth took a uniquely personal and concrete approach to the theme of childhood. In ‘We are seven’ the apparent naivety of a small child challenges the presumption and worldly wisdom of its adult interlocutor.
The objects of common and personal experience also take on a fresh significance as symbols intimating a domain corresponding to eternity in religious teaching. Such object-symbols are to be found in a breeze in lieu of the influence of the Holy Spirit, the threatening aspect of a lakeside hill, a vista created by a cluster daffodils, even the flame produced by a piece of coal in a domestic fireplace.
If we consider these objects as mediators, we impinge on questions arising from the very nature of mediation with its philosophical and religious ramifications. The Romantics rejected theories proposed by Hartley and others according to which the faculties of the mind are primarily based on mechanical processes of combining and reorganizing fixed sense impressions and associated memories so as to produce new configurations of given constants but nothing of a thoroughly original or creative nature. In whatever terms the Romantics chose to couch their thoughts, the Romantics agreed that the operations of the mind and imagination needed something beyond the subjective consciousness to correlate the world of perceived objects with some greater mind imbuing all with the unity and meaning.
In terms of earlier poetic tradition Milton looms as a dominant, almost daunting, figure in the Romantic period. His influence on Blake, Wordsworth, Byron, Keats and Shelley
was pervasive both in his supplying the matrix of the heroic epic form and in establishing an ambivalent duality encompassing God and Satan as the antipodes of authority and rebellion. Milton’s God, rightly or wrongly understood, served as a figure representing outmoded and rejected bearers of authority while Satan becomes almost a righteous rebel (analogous to Prometheus in poems and essays by Goethe and Shelley) against injustice in A Defence of Poetry. This work, incidentally, exemplifies the attachment of the Romantics to the concept of the divinely inspired prophet that they themselves should occupy despite their lack of clarity about the identity or nature of the source of their authority. Shelley tried to reverse the respectively positive or negative associations of the high and the low, Heaven and Hell, in Prometheus Unbound. It is arguable whether he succeeded for even in his terms Demogorgon, the denizen of the Earth’s interior, is depicted as the essentially amoral or concealed potentiality while the Sun remains as ever the symbol of divine illumination.
Milton was an innovator in literary tradition in unifying Biblical and Classical symbolism by turning classical gods into fallen angels and by associating the Holy Ghost with the Muse of Horeb. This symbiosis of cultural references is carried further by Shelley in the very title of his elegy upon the death of Keats for Adonais conflates the Hebrew name of the LORD with the classical figure of Adonis. The downscaling of Biblical and Classical imagery and symbols to the objects and experiences of common life is apparent in the opening passage of The Prelude for here a ‘breeze’ implicitly assumes the inspirational role ascribed to the Muse of Horeb (the Holy Spirit) in the opening lines of Paradise Lost.
It is a general feature in Romantic poetry that such religious motifs are commonly freed from their origins context to suit the needs of poetic expression. This is particularly evident in such wandering figures as Cain, Ahasuerus and the archetypal pilgrim, with which the poets identified themselves and features of their poetry, and the resultant ambivalence or even confusion proved psychologically burdensome, hence the urgent quest to seek a support and guide found earlier in a muse or divine spirit. This force received new appellations in the romantic period, one of them being the Universal Mind.
When we compare the poetry of Blake with that of Wordsworth, a stark contrast emerges. While Wordsworth extolled nature as a source of inspiration and wonder, Blake decried nature as the creation of Satan and chided Wordsworth for his preoccupation with natural scenes (though he evidently much enjoyed reading Wordsworth’s poetry). Blake claimed to see the underlying spiritual realities of the cosmos directly by a faculty he once named ‘double vision’ in verses quoted in a letter Blake wrote to Thomas Butts (November 22, 1802). º Keats and Shelley presented mythological figures and supernatural beings into their poetry, often importing these from classical and medieval sources, without meaning them to be understood literally as evidence of an objective domain beyond the physical world. Byron could empathize with the suffering of the Jews Hebrew Melodies , and a sustained metaphor shapes Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage lending this work a progressive movement absent from Don Juan informed by the circular structure of Dante’s Divine Comedy. With Wordsworth’s the overtly miraculous and supernatural is absent while the motions and influence of God or the universal spirit are revealed by the implications of coincidences and the working of the imagination, which for Wordsworth, indeed for all the Romantics, was miraculous in itself.
*Geoffrey H. Hartman, “Romanticism and ‘Anti-Self-Consciousness’”, in Romanticism and Consciousness Essays in Criticism, ed. Harold Bloom (New York, 1940), p. 52. see also reference to a triadic “wanderer pattern’ in Romantic poetry in:
Bernard Blackstone, The Travellers Lost, (Norwich, 1962). P.20. The author begins his study by emphasising that the primary metaphors in Romantic poetry are based on references to motion and journeys. He discerns a "true wanderer pattern" in Romantic poetry based on acceptance of Christian belief in "a Fall, an Original: or Radical Sin, and a Redemption". Coleridge, Blake and Byron supposedly fulfil this condition, and are "Christians". Wordsworth, Keats and Shelley do not fulfil it, and are not "Christians". While the former group journey from Eden to Heavenly Jerusalem, the latter's journey is "from a slum to a garden". (P. 10) Wordsworth, in particular, is the object of severe criticism. His journey is "circuitous" and lacks true progression.
+M. H. Abrams, “English Romanticism: The Spirit of the Age”, in in Romanticism and Consciousness Essays in Criticism, ed. Harold Bloom (New York, 1940), pp. 114-116.
ºWhat to others a trifle appears / Fills me full of smiles or tears, / For double the vision my Eyes do see / And a double vision is always with me: / With my inward Eye ‘tis an old Man grey, / With my outward, a thistle across my way. (25-30)
See: Blake’s Poetry and Designs, ed. By Mary Lynn Johnson and John E. Grant, Norton Critical Edition (New York), p.461.
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| William Blake's "London" and Wilhelm Müller's "Das Wandern ist des Müllers Lust" Genres: Writing.Com :: Arts :: Educational |
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