Part Six The Nineteenth Century
I. The Romantic Period
At the turn of the 18th and 19th centuries romanticism appeared in England as a new trend in literature. It rose and grew under the impetus of the Industrial Revolution and French Revolution. It prevailed during the period 1798--1832.
General features of romantic movement in England: sensibility primitivism; love of Nature; interest in the past,especially the medieval; mysticism; individualism; a reaction against whatever characterized with Neo-classicism; poetry is the best form romantic literature.
The English romanticists split into two schools. (1).The elder generation of romanticists, Worthwords, Coleridge and Southy, who turned to the feudal past--\"merry old England or turned to nature for protection, so they were sometimes called passive romanticists, or the Lake Poets because they had lived in the Lake District in the northwest of England and shared a community of literary and social outlook in their work. (2).The younger generation, Byron, Shelley and Keats,who held out an ideal of a future society free from oppression and exploitation, so they were sometimes called active romanticists.
1. William Wordsworth
He was born in a small village in the Lake Disrict. He was educated at
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Cambridge. In 1790 he took a walking tour on the Continent, when the French Revolution was in progress. France seemed to him to be \" standing on the top of golden hours\" and pointing to a new bith of human nature.
Wordsworth as a Poet of Nature: His revolutionary feavour did not last long. By 1795 he had turned from the \"world of man\" to the \" the world of nature\". Gradually he took sides with English conservatism.
In 1798 Wordsworth and his friend S. T. Coleridge produced the Lyrical Ballads, which marked the beginning of the Romantic revival in England. In the
Preface to the Lyrical Ballads, Wordsworth set forth his principles of poetry, \"all good poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feeling.\ the poet should deal with materials from \"common life\" in \"a selection of language really used by men\". The Preface to the lyrical ballads served as the manifesto of the English Romantic Movement in poetry.
His short lyrics on love for nature: \"Lines Written in Early Spring\ \"o th Cockoo\Tintern Abbey\". The last is called his \"lyrical hymn of thanks to nature\": ...The
sounding cataract
Haunted me like passion;the tall rock,
The mountain, and the deep and gloomy wood,
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Their colours and their forms, were then to me
An appetite;a feeling and a love,
...
His lyrics drawing pathetic pictures of the labouring people: \"The solitary Reaper\ \"We Are Seven\and \"Lucy Poems\" which are on the theme of
harmony between humanity and nature:
She dwelt among the untrodden ways
Beside the spring of Dove,
A maid whom there were none to praise
And very few to love.
A violet by a mossy stone
Half hidden from the eye!
--Fair as a star, when only one
Is shining in the sky.
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She live unknown, and few could know
When Lucy ceased to be;
But she is in her grave, and, oh,
The difference to me!
...
Wordsworth's \"decline and fall\" has become a topic of criticism. Shelley wrote thus:
In honoured poverty thy voice did weave
Songs consecrate to truth and liberty---
Desertibg these,thou leavest me to grieve,
Thus having been, that thou shouldest cease to be.
2. Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Like Wordsworth, S.T. Coleridge had for a time high enthusiasm for the French Revolution. But soon he and his friend Robert Southey drifted away from the progressive movement.
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Coleridge is a dreamer. He represents one trend of romanticism--the escapist trend. His representative poems \"The Ancient Mariner\ and \"Kubla Khan\" are poetic dreams, and the fragmentary\"Kubla Khan\" was actually composed in a dream, fi we accept the author's statement. These are poems of escape--escape to the far-away and long ago, escape to the realm of medieval romance. \"The Ancient mariner\" lures us to the demon-infested seas, nobody knows where they are. \"Chritabel\" describes a vampire-haunted castle, and \"Kubla khan\" presents an enchanting palace of the Mongol conqueror:
In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
A stately pleasure-dome decree:
Where Alph, the sacred river,ran
Through caverns measureless to man
Down to a sunless sea.
3. George Gordon Byron
The boy was lame from birth,in an impoverished noble family. He was made Lord Byron by the death of a granduncle. He made his maiden speech in the House of Lords,speaking in defence of the English Proletariat. He gave powerful counter attack on the Scotch Reviewers who attacked him. He made
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a grand tour on the Continent. He gave active help to the Italian revolutionaries. He joined the Greek insurgents who had risen against the Turks, and died of marsh fever.
Childe Harold's Pilgrimage: a largely autobiographical poem,its hero is an
English young aristocrat whose world-weariness reveals his loathing for English high society.His experience and adventures in various European countries show his pursuit of freedom, his sympathy with people's liberation,his attack on capitalist rules, and his pessimism. Solitary and melancholy,he seeks companionship of mountains and seas;
Where rose the mountains, there to him were friends;
Where roll'd the ocean, thereon was his home;
Where a blue sky, and glowing clime, extends,
He had the passion and the power to roam;
The desert,forest,cavern, breaker's foam,
Were onto him companionship; they spake
A mutual language,clearer than the tome
Of his land's tongue, which he would oft forsake
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For nature's pages glass'd by sunbeams on the lake.
He supported the Spanish poeple's struggle against foreign aggression:
Awake,ye sons of Spain, awake! Advance!
Lo,chivalry,your ancient goddess,cries.
He encourages the Greeks to strive for liberty with their own arms:
Hereditary bondsmen! know ye not
Who would be free themselves must strike the blow?
By their right arms the conquest must be wrought?
Will Gaul or Muscovite redress ye? No!
But not for you will freedom's altar flame.
Byron exposes the reactionary rulers of Europe, especially the Holy Alliance. His love of liberty and his belief in people's final victory are clearly shown in these lines:
Yet, Freedom! Yet thy banner,torn but flying,
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Stream like the thunder-storm against the wind;
Thy trumpet voice, though broken now and dying,
The loudest still the tempest leaves behind;
Thy tree has its blossoms, and the rind,
Chopped by the axe,lookss rough and little worth,
But the sap lasts, and still the seed we find
Shown deep, even in the bosom of the North:
So shall a better spring less bitter fruit bring forth.
Don Juan: Byron's masterpiece,on a Spanish noble youth,who strives for
liberty and supports people's liberation, whose life experience and adventures reflect the whole picture of social life in Europe. It attacks the reactionary rules of Europe. His aim in writing it was \" to remove the cloake which the manners and maxims of high society throw over their secret sins,and show them to the world as they really are.\" He called this poem an \"epic satire\". It is Byron's ironic panorama of all modern European civilization.
On a Greek island,Don Juan was saved by the Greek girl Haidee, then their love scenes are described with great lyric beauty:
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And thus they wandered forth, and hand in hand,
Over the shining pebbles and the shells,
Glided along the smooth and hardened sand,
And in the worn and wide receptacles
Worked by the storms,yet worked as it were planned,
In hallow halls, with sparry roofs and cells,
They turned to rest; and each clasped by an arm,
Yielded to the deep twilight's purple charm.
She loved, and was beloved---she adored,
And she was worshipped;after nature's fashion,
Their intense souls, into each other poured,
If souls could die, had perished in that passion---
But by degrees their senses were restored
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Again to be overcome, again to dash on;
Beating 'gainst his bosom, Haidee's heart
Felt as if never more to beat apart.
On the brutality of the war,the poet remarks:
He wrote this Polar melody, and set it,
Duly accompanied by shrieks and groans,
Which few will sing,I trust, but none forget it---
For I will teach, if possible, the stones
To rise against earth's tyrants. Never let it
Be said that we still truckle unto thrones;---
But ye,our children's children! Think how we
Show'd what things were before the world was free!
The last cantos of the long poem are a satirical description of the English ruling classes,whose reactionary policy has aroused the hatred of other
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nations:
Alas! Could she (England) but fully,truly know
How her great name is now throughout abhorr'd;
How eager all the earth is for the blow
Which shall bare her bosom to the sword;
How all the nations deem her their worst foe,
That worst than worst of foe, the once adored,
False friend, who held out freedom to mankind,
And now would chain them, to the very mind.
Would she be proud, or boast herself the free,
Who is but first of slaves? The nations are
In prison,---but the gaoler,what is he?
No less a victim to the bolt and the bar.
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Is the poor privilege to turn the key
Upon the captive, freedom? He's as far
From the enjoyment of the earth and air
Who watches o'er the chain, as they who wear.
Finally let's hear how Byron voiced the revolutionary indignation of the oppressed Europe:
And I will war, at least in words(and--should
My chance so happen--deeds), with all who war
With thought;-- and of Thought's foes by far nost rude,
Tyrants and sycophants have been and are
I know not who may conquer: If I could
Have such a prescience,it should be no bar
To this my plain,sworn,downright detestation
Of every despotism in every nation.
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On the Continent Byron had a far-reaching influence both as the creator of the \"Byronic heroes\" and as the champion of political liberty. \"Byronic heroes\": heroes appearing in Byron's works. They are men with fiery passion and unbending will and express the poet's own ideal of freedom. These heroes rise against tyranny and injustice, but they are merely lone fighters striving for personal freedom and some individualistic ends.
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