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Since the nineteen-thirties and forties, when the late Sir Herbert Read, author of Reason and Romanticism, was an influential figure in literary England, Romanticism as an avowed literary attitude has suffered an eclipse, even if vulgarized forms of Romanticism are more prevalent in society at large than ever before. Less prominent than Read was the equally Romantic critic and moralist, J. Middleton Murry. Among Murry’s younger associates was F. A.Lea, the author of several studies of Romantic writers including Shelley, Carlyle and Nietzsche. Now Mr Lea has come forward with a book of literary studies which again raises the Romantic banner. Voices in the Wilderness, studies of six “prophetic” writers of the modem age, Blake, Wordsworth, Carlyle, D H Lawrence, Middleton Murry and Arthur Koestler, is the second volume of a dual work the first volume of which, The Ethics of Reason, is a philosophical examination of attempts from Socrates onwards to define “the good man”. Voices in the Wilderness, however, is complete in itself, and constitutes a very revealing exposition of the Romantic viewpoint.
Like most people whose thoughts and feelings are not limited to their own immediate circumstances, Mr Lea is appalled by the joyless collectivism towards which human societies seem inevitably to be progressing. He diagnoses the root of our trouble to lie in the Utilitarian philosophy born, he believes, out of eighteenth-century materialism with its seductive creed of “happiness here”, confused pragmatically and illogically with an abstract Christian altruism based on contradictory expectations of “happiness hereafter”. One of the consequences of this pervasive Utilitarianism is a widespread present inability to achieve originality, i.e. to penetrate beyond general concepts fixed by language into the truth of particular perceptions: to see things as they miraculously are.
1 Lea, F. A.: Voices in the Wilderness. London, The Brentham Press, 1975Google Scholar.
2 Misunderstanding Blake as a typical Romantic, rather than as one who had transcended Romanticism and formulated his own version of apocalyptic Christianity, Mr. Lea speaks on one page of Blake's ‘seeing man as part of nature’, which Blake emphatically never did. For him, however incomprehensibly to the positivist and naturalist, nature was part of man, and (regenerate) man part of Jesus, i.e., the cosmic Christ.
3 But as to this, a pointed remark of Mr. E.W.F. Tomlin from his Living and Knowing (1955), comes to mind: ‘It is difficult to believe that the preoccupation of D.H. Lawrence in his last Death Poems with ‘alienation from God’ or ‘falling out of the hand of God’ does not represent a genuine dilemma of the naturalist.’
4 Cast into prophetical form, Murry's message, for what it is worth (circa 1934, and quoted by Mr. Lea) emerges like this. ‐ ‘For a man's deep desire is to be used for what Keats called ‘a great human purpose’. That sounds high‐falutin; unless we see, quite simply, that the only great human purpose is all‐inclusive. It is creation: making some‐thing, letting the manifold creativity of Life create itself anew. From a goodly turnip to a comely child, from a new indistrial process to a new vision of the world ‐ all is creation. And man's only satisfying reason for maintaining himself alive is to maintain himself as an instrument of creation. Not that man has to have a satisfying reason for maintaining himself alive. He does that, or tries to, by instinct; but the purpose of the instinct is that he may be an instrument of creation. And this, however unconscious of it he may be, is his deepest desire: so deep, so primal, that if it is thwarted he goes mad. Mad, not in the sense of being conventionally insane: for what passes for sanity in a world so sick as this is itself a madness: but mad, in the deeper sense, that his instinct for creation is turned in upon itself and becomes a frenzy of life‐destruction.' The operative words here are desire, life, instinct and unconscious. The order of Creation is stressed to the neglect of the order of Redemption ‐ and, even so, creation is confused with procreation. As with Lawrence and his “great Source”, Romantic man appears to be driven by a deep, primal, unconscious desire to participate in the organically creative processes of deified Nature. The final perception indicates, to me, something unhealthy in this exaggerated preoccupation with “health” and “sanity”.
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