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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 December 2020
In any brief consideration of the implications for English romanticism of the five papers just presented, it is necessary to choose one method of treatment. I must disregard, therefore, international influences, a subject full of danger unless one has time to bolster each statement, and also comparisons and contrasts as such between individual writers or even, to any extent, between nations. I confine myself to a suggestion of the complexity of English romanticism, which seems to share in all the manifold characteristics of romanticism as a general European literary phenomenon and to manifest and combine them in ways of its own. But first I must say what I understand by romanticism.
1 H. A. Beers, A History of English Romanticism in the Nineteenth Century (New York, 1918), p. 14.
2 H. N. Fairchild, The Romantic Quest (New York, 1931), p. 251: “Romanticism is the endeavor, in the face of growing factual obstacles, to achieve, to retain, or to justify that illusioned view of the universe and of human life which is produced by an imaginative fusion of the familiar and the strange, the known and the unknown, the real and the ideal, the finite and the infinite, the material and the spiritual, the natural and the supernatural.”
3 A. O. Lovejoy, “On the Discrimination of Romanticisms,” PMLA, xxxix (1924), 229–253.
4 Ibid., p. 237.
5 Ibid., p. 249. The foregoing surveys seem valuable if not essential as a basis for such an analysis. In accordance with a suggestion made later, a careful codification might be made, by this Group or by a committee of it, of the characteristics or interests of European romanticism. The group might then proceed to carry out the detailed analysis and study of which Professor Lovejoy spoke and which the present writer, following him, but at how great a distance and non passibus aequis, has ventured to illustrate—in outline only and only for English literature—in the concluding paragraphs.
6 See p. 27.
7 The Age of Wordsworth (London, 1914), p. xiv.
8 See Note 2.
9 See F. L. Lucas, The Decline and Fall of the Romantic Ideal (Cambridge and New York, 1936), pp. 132–134.
10 See p. 19.
11 E. B. O. Borgerhoff, “Réalisme and Kindred Words: Their Use as a Term of Literary Criticism in the First Half of the Nineteenth Century,” PMLA, liii (1938), 837–843, especially p. 839.
12 Op. cit., pp. 13–15.
13 See, e.g., The New Laokoon (Boston and New York, 1910), Chap, vii, and Rousseau and Romanticism (Boston and New York, 1919), especially Chap. v.
14 Op. cit., p. 139.
15 Loc. cit., p. 237.
16 See, e.g., H. N. Fairchild, The Noble Savage; a Study in Romantic Naturalism (New York, 1928); Eino Railo, The Haunted Castle; a Study of the Elements of English Romanticism (London and New York, 1927); Lois Whitney, Primitivism and the Idea of Progress in English Popular Literature of the Eighteenth Century (Baltimore, 1934). Note the subtitle of the second book.
17 Loc. cit., p. 253.
18 It is clear that love of the exotic and picturesque is also involved.