Logan Pearsall Smith
Four
romantic words
From Words and Idioms: Studies in the English Language, Constable
and Co. Limited, London 1925.
Author’s NOTES to this essay
Note: This essay by
Lloyd Logan Pearsall Smith (1865–1946) is here presented in a website
devoted to C. S. Lewis. It is an essay that can be seen and enjoyed as one
kind of thing that Lewis might have written had he lived longer – as witness his Studies in Words (1960), or the account he gave of his
own private variety of ‘Romanticism’ in the 1943 preface to The
Pilgrim’s Regress. Meanwhile,
Pearsall Smith’s piece is a first-class ‘study in words’ its own right which
all visitors are of course welcome to enjoy for their own good reasons.
Arend Smilde, Utrecht, The Netherlands
I
I mentioned in the previous chapter, among the English words borrowed into
foreign languages, one adjective, the word romantic,
which has been added to all the vocabularies of Europe. This is a word of such
prime importance that, to give an account of its origin, and its adventures,
both in England and abroad, a separate study will be necessary. There is no
word in our language which has a more “romantic” history; much in its
signification, both as we employ it now and as we find it employed in our elder
literature, is the result of what it has been through; and a knowledge of all
this will be of assistance in enabling us to understand the various thoughts
and ways of feeling which it has come to express, and which still deeply colour
its meaning. But the emergence of the word romantic
is not an isolated phenomenon; its history is closely connected with the
history of several other terms of modern aesthetic criticism – terms which came
into use at about the same time, and shared the same adventures. This cluster
of romantic words is the product of one of the most important movements of
modern thought, and the history of that movement is curiously mirrored in their
usage. They are, both in formation and meaning, very largely of English origin;
from English they made their way into foreign languages; and the new
conceptions they express form one of the most notable of English contributions
to European thought.
Of this cluster of new terms, or of old terms endowed with new meanings,
the earliest to make its appearance is the adjective romantic, of which the first instance is given in the Oxford Dictionary under the date of
1658.1 It is apparently a word of English origin,2 formed
from the English word romant or romaunt – a word which was borrowed in
the sixteenth century from the French romaunt,
and which, used as a variant of romance
in the seventeenth century, was revived as an archaism in the nineteenth.
Before, however, romantic became a
current term, a number of other attempts were made, as the oxford Dictionary shows us, to form adjectives with the same
meaning. In 1653 Dorothy Osborne writes of a romance squire, and in the following year of a romance story; in 1656 the Duchess of Newcastle speaks of her “Romanticall Tales”; and we also find the
adjectives romancial (1653) and romancy (1654). The fact that all these
adjectives crop up in the seven years between 1653 and 1659, and that romantic soon becomes a current term, is
certainly curious. Why just at this time was there a need felt for this adjective
which had never been felt before?
The emergence of a new term to describe a certain phenomenon, of a new
adjective to designate a certain quality, is always of interest, both
linguistically and from the point of view of the history of human thought. That
history would be a much simpler matter (and language, too, a much more precise
instrument) if new thoughts on their appearance, and new facts at their
discovery, could at once be analysed and explained and named with scientific
precision. But even in science this seldom happens; we find rather that a whole
complex group of facts, like those for instance of gas or electricity, are at
first somewhat vaguely noticed, and are given, more or less by chance, a name
like that of gas, which is an arbitrary
formation, or that of electricity,
which is derived from the attractive power of electrum or amber when rubbed – the first electric phenomenon to be
noticed. Gas, electric, and electricity are what Dr. Bradley called
“identifying” words3; sometimes, however, a new discovery is given a
“descriptive” name like gravitation;
or again, as with oxygen, an
explanatory word may be formed which attempts more adequately to account for
the new phenomenon. But comprehension is reached, if indeed it is ever reached,
long after recognition; analytic and explanatory terms for half-understood
phenomena often imply, like oxygen
(“generator of acids”), a false explanation; the usual, and much the safest
way, is to give a non-committal, designating, or at most a descriptive name to
a new experience, which then, gradually, and in the course of time, can be more
accurately defined and perhaps at last explained. In the even more elusive
phenomena of aesthetic perceptions, this process of identification, denotation,
and suggested explanation is still more tentative and slow; new aspects of
thought and feeling come to be designated by names which are at first little
more than the chance names of vague impressions – obscure perceptions of some
quality for which a label of some kind would be convenient. This label then
forms a centre of attraction for other vague perceptions which group themselves about it; and it is only by a long and tentative process
of collective thought that the various aspects of the phenomena described
become more apparent, and the label or name acquires more definite meanings.
Our word romantic is a conspicuous
instance of this process. Its appearance in the middle of the seventeenth
century is an indication of a change in human thought, and marks the moment when
that change had become obvious enough to need a term to express it. Romantic, like romancy and romancical,
simply meant “like the old romances,” and shows that men at this time were
becoming aware of certain qualities in these romances for which they needed a
name – that they were becoming critical of them, and had begun to view them
with a certain detachment. These romances were of two kinds: there were the
medieval tales of chivalry and knights-errants, of “The Palmerins of England
and the Amadises of Gaul” who, as Hazlitt describes them, “made their way to
their mistresses’ hearts by slaying giants and taming dragons”; and there were
also those prolix French romances of intrigue and gallantry, which succeeded
the earlier tales. The special characteristic of all these romances, for which
a name was now needed, was their falseness and unreality, all that was
imaginary and impossible in them, al that was contrary to the more rational
view of life which was beginning to dominate men’s minds. The growth of this
conception of “order” and “nature,” this “dawn of reason,” as an
eighteenth-century writer called it, threw into relief certain groups of
irrational elements which were opposed to it. The phenomena of religious
fanaticism were branded as enthusiasm,
and the fictions and imaginations of the old romances were labelled by the word
romantic. The meaning of “false”,
“fictitious,” “imaginary,” implied by romantic
was applied both to the supernatural elements in the medieval romances, their
giants, magicians, and enchanted castles; and also to the false, impossible,
high-flown sentiments of the later romances; those “wild romantic tales,” as a
seventeenth-century writer described them, “wherein they strain love and honour
to that ridiculous height that it becomes burlesque.”4
Both these elements, the supernatural and what we now call the sentimental,
were falling into disrepute at the time when the word romantic appeared to describe them. In 1650 Hobbes, in that famous
answer to Davenant, which formed the basis of neo-classical criticism in
England, protested against the use of the supernatural, against fiction that
exceeded the possibility of “Nature,” “impenetrable armour, Inchanted Castles,
invulnerable bodies, Iron Men, Flying horses”5; and his protest was
echoed by the critics who followed after him; while Sir William Temple6
pointed out how Cervantes had turned into ridicule “the Romantick Honour and
Love”7 of the romances of chivalry.
In the course of the next hundred and fifty years the word romantic, as a description of false and
fictitious beings and feelings, without real existence in fact or in human
nature, fell more and more into disrepute and disestimation. The particular
shade of meaning given to a word, the special nuance of feeling it expresses,
can often be best seen by the company it keeps; and in the writings of this
period we find the word romantic coupled
with terms like “chimerical,” “ridiculous,” “unnatural,” “bombast”; while we
read of “childish and romantic poems,” of “romantic absurdities and incredible
fictions”: “can anything,” Bishop South asks, “be imagined more profane and
impious, absurd and indeed romantic”? and Psalmanazar confesses to the “vile
and romantic” deception of his pretence to be a native of Formosa.
It was the need, therefore, to mark the contrast between the truth of
nature and the falsehood of romance which first brought into use this famous
adjective. It makes its appearance at the moment when as an eighteenth-century
writer puts it, “reason was but dawning, as we may say, and just about to gain
the ascendant over the portentous spectres of the imagination. Its growing
splendour, in the end, put them all to flight.”8 Bishop Hurd is
writing of what he calls the “romantic” literature of the Elizabethan age, which,
according to him, was haunted by these spectres: the growing splendour which
banished them was that of the Age of Reason, the Éclaircissement, the Aufklärung
– that conception of order and truth, of the whole universe governed by law,
which rose in the latter half of the seventeenth century like a sunrise of
reason over the spectre-haunted Europe, with its romantic literature, its
superstitions, its fanaticisms, and its religious wars.
Of all periods in the history of poetry perhaps the one which is most
external to our sympathies, opaque and impenetrable to our imaginations, is
precisely this period which lies so near us in the point of time, this Age of
Reason, with its bewigged platitudes, its shallow criticism, and its
intolerably didactic verse. How can the most practised amateur of historical
emotions read Pope’s Essay on Man
with the enthusiasm which carried that sententious poem over Europe, or feel
the disgust which was aroused, as Evelyn noted,9 in that “refined
age,” by plays like Hamlet? To recapture
that mood, to bathe again in the freshness of that dawn, is not permitted to
us; but perhaps, in the architecture of the period, in the severe beauty of
some classical church or mansion, with its ornaments adorning, like noble
rhetoric, its perfect proportions and ordered forms, we can best realize the
charm of the qualities of order and reason and correctness, which were then
prized and sought for, not only in architecture, but in poetry as well.
The literary revolution of this period was well summed up by Thomas Warton,
when he said that a poetry succeeded the elder poetry in which “imagination
gave way to correctness.”10 The connexion between poetry and
Imagination or Fancy (the distinction between these two terms was not
established till much later) was often alluded to by sixteenth-century writers;
but is would be vain to seek in the psychology and criticism of that time any
clear definition of the meaning of the term imagination,
which had been introduced into Latin as a translation of the Greek phantasia, and which the Renaissance had
inherited from Scholastic philosophy. Notions, however, which are now more
definite to our minds were then held as it were in solution; Bacon divided the
human understanding into three faculties, referring history to Memory,
philosophy to Reason, and poesy to Imagination11; and Shakespeare
expressed this connexion in words which have a strangely modern sound, when he
wrote:
The lunatic, the lover, and the poet
Are of imagination all compact ...
And, as imagination bodies forth
The forms of things unknown, the poet’s pen
Turns them to shapes, and gives to airy nothing
A local habitation and a name.12
But with the growth of neo-classical criticism this large and indefinite
meaning of imagination was narrowed and confined.
Hobbes’s psychology, as Professor Spingarn has pointed out, became the
groundwork of Restoration criticism, and to Hobbes the essential element in
poetry was Reason. “Judgement,” he wrote, “begets the strength and structure,
and Fancy begets the ornaments of a Poem.”13 The imagination came to
be regarded as la folle du logis, in
Descartes’ phrase, or, in Dryden’s words, as a wild, lawless faculty, which was
the begetter of madness, dreams, and fever, but which, held strictly
subordinate to Reason, could be usefully employed in finding, in the field of
memory, illustrations, metaphors, and other useful ornaments for the sound
structure of Reason. Or, at the most, following what Longinus had said of phantasia, the power was attributed to
the imagination of making the poet seem to behold the very things he is
describing, and thus enabling him to display them to the life before the
reader’s eyes. But, as Dryden wrote, quoting from the famous French critic
Rapin, “if this fancy be not regulated, it is a mere caprice, and utterly
incapable to produce a reasonable and judicious poem.”14
The qualities designated by these critics as romantic were therefore the mere product of unregulated imagination15;
they were not reasonable, they did not imitate Nature, and they were therefore
condemned as Gothic, unnatural, ridiculous and childish. We can therefore
understand Pope’s boast:
That not in Fancy’s maze he wander’d long,
But stoop’d to Truth, and moraliz’d his song.16
This theory of poetry was logical, consistent, and worthy of serious and
judicious men, who, weary of wild conceits and ornaments and fantastic dreams,
welcomed it with an enthusiasm which is difficult for us to share. But, like
other theories of poetry, it did not correspond to the facts, and even in its
heyday of triumph it began to collapse and crumble. A new way of looking at
things began to grow up alongside it, based upon a greater appreciation of the
value and importance of the imagination in works of art. With this gradual and
only half-conscious shift of feeling, which began early in the eighteenth
century in England, and flowered at last in the so-called Romantic Movement,
the word romantic itself began to
acquire fresh values and new meanings. It is no longer always used as a term of
depreciation; Addison describes Milton’s account of Thammuz as “finely
Romantic,”17 and Thomson speaks of a “fine, romantic kind of
melancholy.” The Gothic and romantic periods of history, the Middle Ages and
the Elizabethan (for both these were regarded as Gothic and romantic), began to
interest students; the old “romantic” poet Spenser, and the old tales of
adventure and magic, came again into favour, and romantic began to mean something which, though absurd, was
captivating to the imagination.18 Horace Walpole confessed that he
preferred the “romantic” scenes of the past,19 and the Vicar of
Wakefield tells how, owing to his wife’s reading of romances, two “romantic” names were given to his daughters.
In these usages of the English word romantic,
the corresponding French adjective romanesque
was a more of less exact equivalent, and is to be found in the early French
translation of Pope’s line:
If Folly grow romantic, I must paint it.20
But already, before the eighteenth century, another use had been found for
the English word which romanesque did
not translate. Along with its depreciatory use for the incidents and sentiments
of the old romances, it was also used as an adjective of half-conscious
appreciation for scenes and places like those which they describe. The
adjective romancy or romantic was applied very early to the
scenery of the neighbourhood of Wilton, where Sidney’s Arcadia was composed.
“The Arcadia,” Aubrey wrote, “is about Vernditch and Wilton, and these romancy
plaines and boscages did no doubt conduce to the heightening of Sir Philip
Sidney’s phancie.”21 In another place he speaks of his rides through
this “romantick country,” with its
flocks of sheep and nut-brown shepherdesses22; and earlier, under
the date of 1654, Evelyn notes in his Diary, “Salisbury Plain reminded me of
the pleasant lives of the shepherds we read of in romances.”23 But
the word is also used for buildings: in 1666 Pepys called Windsor Castle “the
most romantique castle that is in the world”24; and even earlier, in
1654, Evelyn writes of a “very romantic” country-seat on the side of a “horrid
Alp” near Bristol;25 and under the date of 1679 he says, speaking of
the Duke of Buckingham’s country house at Clifden, “The grotts in the chalky
rock are pretty: ’tis a romantic object, and the place altogether answers the
most poetical description that can be made of solitude, precipice, prospect, or
whatever can contribute to a thing so very like their [the romancer’s]
imaginations.”26 Sir William Temple wrote in his Essay on Gardening (1685) of the
“romantic palace” of Alcinous described by Homer; and Addison in his Remarks on Italy (1705) says that on his
journey between Marseilles and Genoa he was shown in the distance “The Deserts,
which have been rendered so famous by the penance of Mary Magdalene who ... is
said to have wept away the rest of her life among these solitary rocks and
mountains. It is so romantic a scene, that it has always probably given
occasion to such chimerical relations.”27 This use of the adjective,
in the description of places, meaning, as the Oxford Dictionary defines it, “redolent or suggestive of romance;
appealing to the imaginations and feelings,” became more current after 1711,
when Addison, in his famous essay on the ballad of Chevy Chase in the Spectator, spoke of “The fine romantic
situation” of that battle.28 Thomson writes in his Seasons of “oaks romantic,” of a
“romantic” mountain, of the “romantic” Caledonian landscape. Mason writes of
“an old romantic forest”29; and even Dr. Johnson, who is not thought
of as a romantic writer, and who almost invariably uses the word with its
depreciatory meaning (“romantic and superfluous,” “ridiculous and romantic,”
“romantic absurdities or incredible fictions,” etc.), was so influenced by the
prevalent fashion as to try his unwieldy hand at a landscape of this kind.
“When night overshadows a romantick scene, all is stillness, silence, and
quiet; the poets of the grove cease their melody, the moon towers over the
World in gentle majesty, men forget their labours and their cares, and every
passion and pursuit is for a while suspended.”30
The word romantic then, from the
general meaning of “like the old romances,” came to be used as a descriptive
term for the scenes which they describe, old castles, mountains and forests,
pastoral plains, waste and solitary places. In the earlier instances of the
adjective the literary reference is more or less explicit; but by the
eighteenth century it had come to express more generally the newly awakened,
but as yet half-conscious, love for wild nature, for mountains and moors, for
“the Woods, the Rivers, or Sea-shores,”
which Shaftesbury mentions as sought by those “who are deep in this romantick way.”31
When English books of this period were translated into French, the
translators either avoided the adjective in this usage, or rendered it by romanesque or pittoresque. Romantick or
romantique is, however, found occasionally as a loan word from English32;
about 1776 two French authors, one of them Letourneur, the translator of
Shakespeare, and the other the Marquis de Girardin, the author of a book on
landscape, made deliberate use of the word, giving in notes their reasons for
borrowing this mot Anglois as they
called it. Monsieur A. François, in his brilliant essay on Romantique33 – an essay from which much of my information
about the French history of the word is derived – reprints these notes, and
they are of great importance, proving, as they do, the English origin of the
word, and explaining its meaning. It meant more, they said, than romanesque or pittoresque: romanesque
meant “chimerical,” or “fabulous,” while pittoresque
describes a scene that strikes the eye and arouses admiration. But romantic implies an appeal as well to
the feelings and the imagination: it not only describes the scene, but “the
touching impression we receive from it.” Both authors enumerate the scenes that
in the eighteenth century were considered romantic, the heaths, the sea, the
clouds of the “Caledonian landscape,” mountains, torrents and waterfalls, and le “lovely moon” des Anglois. The word,
M. François suggests, was probably brought to the notice of Rousseau by one of
these authors, his friend Girardin; and it was finally given full rights of
citizenship in the French language by Rousseau, when, in that incomparable
masterpiece of his prose, his famous fifth Rêverie
du promeneur solitaire, he wrote les
rives du Lac de Bienne sont plus sauvages & romantiques que celles du Lac
de Geneve.34 The word soon became fashionable in France, and was
included in the Dictionary of the French Academy in 1798, with the definition Il se dit ordinairement des lieux, des
paysages, qui rappellent à l’imagination les descriptions des poëmes et des
romans.
These French definitions of romantique
help us to a clear understanding of this special use of the word. Two points
stand out clearly. In the first place romantic
is, like interesting, charming, exciting, and many other adjectives, one of those modern words
which describe, not so much the objective qualities of things, as our repsonse
to them, the feelings they arouse in the susceptible spectator. And secondly,
if we examine the special subjective feeling described by romantic, we see that it is a literary emotion (as indeed the
derivation of the word from romant
implies); it is Nature seen through the medium of literature, through a mist of
associations and sentiments derived from poetry and fiction. It is curious also
to note the appearance and popularity of the word picturesque at the same time as romantic;
for just as romantic means Nature
seen through a literary medium, so picturesque
was used to describe scenes that were like pictures, and were seen through the
medium of another art, that of painting. Painting and literature had been from
ancient times judged and criticized by their relation to Nature; but this
curious reversal of the process, the projection of art into Nature, the
contemplation of Nature through the coloured glass of art, and from a
consciously literary or pictorial point of view, is an element that must not be
neglected in any definition of the word we are discussing. It is a nice
instance of those subtle changes in men’s feelings, and in their ways of
looking at the world, which are so important and yet so elusive, and which can
perhaps be most definitely traced in the emergence of new terms, or in a change
in the meaning of old ones.
Picturesque came by way of France to England from the country of painting, from Italy;
but romantic is a word, as our Swiss
critic remarks, deposited on French soil by those currents of English thought and
feeling which had reached it in the eighteenth century. Growing out of the
heart of old romance, the word had absorbed into its meaning the glamour and
newly-discovered beauty of moonlight and moors and mountains; it had then
travelled with the fashion for English gardens and the fame of Shakespeare to
France, where, welcomed by the great apostle of Nature, Rousseau, it enriched
the French language with a definite term for the feeling of which Frenchmen had
already become conscious in the presence of wild nature, and which they had
hitherto expressed by the vague term je
ne sais quoi.35
I have quoted the definition of romantique
given by the Dictionary of the French Academy when the word was formally
admitted into the French language: Littré in his dictionary of a later date
(1869), after repeating this definition, adds to the word quite another
meaning. “It is used,” he says, “of writers who emancipate themselves from the
rules of composition and style established by the classical authors.” To explain
how the word acquired this additional sense, it is necessary to follow its
adventures in Germany, for it was in Germany that this meaning was added to it,
and it only became current in France as a borrowing from German sources.
The English word romantic was
borrowed into German, as into French, late in the seventeenth century, romanhaft being (like romanesque) an older term in that
language. Romantisch appears in a
translation of Thomson’s Seasons; it
was used by Herder to describe wild and uncultivated landscape, and also by
Wieland in his famous line:
Zum Ritt ins alte Romantische Land.36
But the word was applied not only to the scenes and landscapes described in
the romances, but also, following certain precedents which can be found in
English criticism,37 to the literature itself which describes these
scenes. Romantic literature and poetry, the literature and poetry of the Middle
Ages, were, in contrast with those of the classical times, called romantisch; and from this comparison and
contrast the German philosophers and critics, as they pondered over it in their
Teutonic cogitations, evolved that great bugbear of modern criticism, the
famous opposition between “classical and romantic.” Goethe took upon Schiller
and himself the responsibility of having added to the world’s woes this famous
subject of debate;38 “the idea,” he told Eckermann, “of the
distinction between classical and romantic poetry, which is now spread over the
whole world, and occasions so many quarrels and divisions, came originally from
Schiller and myself. ... The Schlegels took up this idea, and carried it
further, so that it has now been diffused over the whole world; and every one
talks about classicism and romanticism – of which nobody thought fifty years
ago.”39
The word romantic, thus brought
in Germany into opposition with the antagonistic term “classical,” became at
the end of the eighteenth century the battle-cry of a school of wild poets and
Catholic reactionaries. This war spread from Germany to France, the seeds of it
being carried thither by that adventurous literary lady, Madame de Staël. It
was her famous book De l’Allemagne
(written with the assistance of A. W. Schlegel, who had done much to elucidate
– or darken – the meaning of these terms) which brought to France the new
meanings which the word romantic40 had acquired in Germany; and there, inscribed once more on the banners of
young poets, it waved in the van of those still more famous battles of French Romanticism
about which the world has heard so much. From France the word returned to the
home of its pastoral youth,41 curiously changed and transformed by
its foreign experiences, its adventures in the company of German Jesuits,
German philosophers, and French radicals, and loaded with a whole new world of
meanings.
In the antithesis between romanticism and classicism, worked out by German
thinkers, there was thus an explosive element, which made the word romantic into a famous battle-cry; the
term coming to designate, as we see by Littré’s definition, those writers who
were in rebellion against the classical rules of composition. The romantic
poets, first in Germany and then in France, were the poets who, scorning and
rejecting the models of the past and the received rules of composition, prided
themselves on their freedom from law, and on their own artistic spontaneity.
The origin and history of this aspect of Romanticism is of considerable
interest, and has attracted much critical attention. It has not, however, been
treated as yet from the point of view of lexicography, although the
lexicographer can, I think, do something to elucidate that history. For this
movement was already in possession of three other battle-cries before Romantic was inscribed upon its banners;
and it will be necessary to give some account of these three terms in order to
make clear its full meaning.
II
The first of these terms which I shall treat of
is the great modern word originality.
This word is derived of course from the adjective original, a word which has certain religious associations, since it
is first found in English in the phrase “original sin,” but which , as a term
of literary criticism, comes from the vocabulary of painting. It was easy to
borrow from painting the distinction between an original picture and a copy;
this distinction is found in literary criticism in the middle of the
seventeenth century;42 it was adopted by Dryden, who speaks of
Shakespeare’s Juliet and Desdemona as “originals”;43 and it soon became
a current term, especially with reference to Shakespeare, being authorized by
Pope’s famous sentence in his preface to Shakespeare’s works, “If ever any
Author deserved the name of an Original, it was Shakespear. Homer himself drew
not his art so immediately from the fountains of Nature.” From the word original in its use as an adjective, a
noun was formed, the abstract term originality,44
to designate the quality of first-handedness in a work of art. All art, the
early critics agreed, was imitation; but there were two kinds of imitation –
the imitation of Nature (by Nature they meant very much what we mean by
“life”), and the imitation of other works of art. The imitation of Nature was
original imitation: the writer who drew his materials from the observation of
Nature was an original writer. The imitation of other artists was, as a critic
of the earlier part of the eighteenth century said, “the bane of writing,” “for
Poetry, in this respect, resembles Painting; no Performance in it can be
valuable, which is not an Original.”45 Primary and original copying
was called invention,46 or finding (heuresis); without invention, as Dryden said, “a painter is but a
copier, and a poet but a plagiary of others”47; invention in respect
of the matter of a work of art was simply observation; though in respect to the
form, the disposition and embellishing of the work were also called
“invention.” Originality was simply newness and truth of observation or
invention. The great original poets, like Homer and Shakespeare, were those who
had most directly imitated Nature, and given the richest and most profound
renderings of what they found.
The term invention, which criticism had inherited
from classical rhetoric, served for a long time as a name for that finding in Nature
of something new to copy which was called originality.
Invention was defined by Temple as “the mother of poetry.” “The first happiness
of the poet’s imagination,” Dryden wrote, “is properly invention, or finding of
the thought”48; and, in his life of Milton, Dr. Johnson declared
“the highest praise of genius is original invention.”
This notion of primary
copying, or “invention,” seems to have been regarded for some time as a
satisfactory explanation of originality, and is repeated as late as Hazlitt,
who said that “Originality consists in seeing Nature for yourself.”49
But even the earlier critics seem to have become vaguely aware that there were
certain aspects of poetry for which the word invention was not quite an adequate description. For invention by its etymology meant
“finding”; it was primarily a process of observing and copying Nature – and yet
was all poetry nothing more than an imitation and an adornment of Nature? Was
there nothing more in an original author than fresh and primary observation?
The date at which this imitation-theory fist began to break down can be neatly
fixed by the appearance of another term which was destined to replace the word invention in many of its uses. In the
works of Shakespeare, who, it was agreed, was the most original writer of
modern times, there was one element which, however much they might stretch the
meaning of the word, could hardly be called an imitation of Nature. This
element was the supernatural, the “magical World of Spirits,” the fairies, the
witches and midnight ghosts, which seemed as living and real as the human
beings in his plays. Dryden, faced with this difficulty, tried to justify the
description of “fairies, pigmies, and the extraordinary effects of magic,” by
saying that the poet was allowed the liberty of describing things which existed
in popular belief (popular belief being part of “Nature”), and thus
Shakespeare’s tempest and his Midsummer Night’s Dream were to be
defended.50 When, however, Dryden came to write of the character of
Caliban, he seems to have felt that the imitation-theory, the theory that, as
he put it, “the poet dresses truth and adorns Nature, but does not alter them,”
was stretched almost to the breaking-point. There was, he seems to have felt, a
difference between “drawing” characters which had existed, or might have
existed in Nature – or which others had believed to exist – and representing a
being like Caliban, “a species of himself, begotten by an incubus on a witch,”
and yet with a person and a character of his own, and with a “language as
hobgoblin as his person.”
III
I put some emphasis on this passage in Dryden
because it marks, however vaguely, a real turning-point in English criticism;
and also because there slipped into Dryden’s vocabulary in this passage about
Caliban an alternative word for “invented” which was destined to be echoed and
repeated, and to acquire, in the process of time, a very great importance.
“Shakespeare,” he says, “seems there to have created a person which was not in
Nature, a boldness which, at first sight, would appear intolerable.”51
Dryden was not the first writer to employ in literary criticism the word create, with its solemn religious
associations,52 but its use in this connexion, before he gave it
currency, was sporadic and unusual.53 We find it, after Dryden, in
the writings of Sir William Temple;54 and Addison, who echoes much
of Dryden’s criticism, popularized in the Spectator this use of the word, when
writing of “fairies, witches, magicians, demons, and departed spirits” (in
which “fairy way of writing” Shakespeare “has incomparably excelled all
others”), he says, “we are led as it were into a new creation,” and “cannot
forbear thinking them natural, though we have no rule by which to judge of
them.”55 In speaking of the power of affecting the imagination,
which “is the very life and highest perfection of poetry,” he says, in a phrase
which became famous: “It has something in it like creation. It bestows a kind
of existence, and draws up to the reader’s view several objects which are not
to be found in being.”56 Shaftesbury, in his Characteristicks (1711), joins together the notion of originality
and creation, when he somewhat ironically compares the new and free way of
writing with the manufacture of silks and stuffs; each new pattern, he says,
must be “an original,” and the designer must “work Originally, and in a manner create
each time anew.”57
Originality thus acquired a new signification; it came to mean, in
the critical parlance of the time, not only the direct observation of Nature,
but also the invention or creation of things (for the most part supernatural
beings)58 which did not exist in Nature. This notion of “creation,”
and of the artist as a “creator,” soon became current, and before long it began
to beget a group of other terms which were needed for its adequate expression.
Among these we may not the important adjective creative, which, first appearing in the seventeenth century,59
became, towards the end of the third decade of the eighteenth century, a common
adjective in literary criticism. We find it usually in connexion with the words
“imagination” or “fancy,” for it was to the imagination that this power of
creation was ascribed. David Mallet begins his Excursion (1728) with the invocation:
Companion
of the Muse, Creative Power, Imagination!
Thomson in his Summer writes of Shakespeare’s “creative fancy,” and Joseph Warton
of his “lively creative imagination,” and calls the Tempest “the most striking
instance of his creative power. He has thus given the reins to his boundless
imagination, and has carried the romantic, the wonderful, the wild to the most
pleasing extravagance.”60 Thomas Warton, in his History of Poetry, speaks of “the romantic and creative genius of
the Arabs,”61 and in Duff’s Essay on Original Genius (1767) we come
on a phrase which has a very modern sound, when he calls “creative Imagination
the distinguishing characteristic of true Genius.”62
In phrases such as the
above we can see to what extent the imagination has been reinstated as the
faculty to which poetry was addressed, and by which it was produced. But if
poetry was the product of the imagination; if the imagination was “creative,”
and “originality” was the mark of its “creations,” then a word was needed to
describe this special kind of poetic imagination, and the poet who possessed
it. Fortunately for the critics of the time there was a word already current
which was found capable of absorbing into itself these new conceptions. This
was the word Genius, the last of the
four terms which form the subject of my essay.
IV
To recount in detail the history of the
portentous word Genius would exhaust
my own patience, and still more that of my readers63; the briefest summary
must suffice for us here. In classical Latin the word Genius meant primarily a person’s tutelary god or attendant spirit;
and this meaning still survives in our phrase, some one’s “good or evil
genius.” It was also used, but rarely in Latin, as more or less a synonym for ingenium, “natural bent and
disposition”. In this latter sense the word frequently appears in English in
the seventeenth century, meaning both the endowment of natural ability or
capacity, and also, occasionally, the person so endowed. Dr. Johnson (who in
his Dictionary did not recognize our modern use of the word) defined the “true
Genius” as a “mind of large general powers, accidentally determined to some
particular direction.”64 But long before Dr. Johnson’s time the word
had begun to acquire other meanings and associations. The first of these
(inherited from the Latin ingenium)
was that of those special endowments and abilities which fitted a person for
some special task. “A Poet,” Sidney
wrote in his Apology for Poetry, “no
industry can make, if his owne Genius
bee not carried unto it”; 65 and Dryden’s phrase, “a happy genius is
the gift of nature,” is well known.66 The word in these uses is
equivalent to talent, and Dryden uses
the two words as synonymous when he says that the description of “humours” was
the particular “genius and talent” of Ben Jonson.67 The word came to
be tinged also with religious associations, for Genius was the name of a god or spiritual being; and later on in
the eighteenth century it was used to translate the Arabic word Jinn, the good or evil spirits of
Arabian mythology. Before, however, this infusion of oriental mystery, the word
came to be connected with the ancient term inspiration,
which, with its half-evaporated classical and religious associations, lingered
on in the poetical vocabulary, with the meaning, as Dr. Johnson gave it, of
“infusion into the mind by a superior power.” This notion of inspiration, of
enthusiasm or daemonic possession, of the “divine madness” of the poet, is a
bit of almost prehistoric psychology, which, embedded in Greek poetry,
elaborated and echoed by Aristotle, had bequeathed to the critics of the
Renaissance a set of phrases and ideas quite inconsistent with their theory
that art was a product of reason, and a copying of Nature. Nor did they attempt
to reconcile the two; but the rationalists of the seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries, to whom such words as enthusiasm
and inspiration were, from their use
by religious fanatics, especially repugnant, became more conscious of this
difficulty, which they tried to solve by dismissing the notions these words
expressed as impostures or delusions. Hobbes called the invocation of the Muses
the reasonless imitation of a foolish custom, “by which a man, enabled to speak
wisely from the principles of Nature and his own meditation, loves rather to be
thought to speak by inspiration, like a Bagpipe.”68 Sir William
Davenant declared that the word inspiration was a “dangerous word,” inherited
from the dominion-loving poets of the pagan times, who were also priests, and
who acquired reverence for themselves by their pretence to inspiration;69
and Dryden, after saying of Aeschylus that he was “always in a rapture, ... the
inspiration was still upon him, he was ever tearing it upon the tripos,” goes
on to confute those who would justify the madness of poetry from the authority
of Aristotle, by suggesting that the text was corrupt; Aristotle had not
written that poetry had always something in it either of a man of happy
endowments or of a madman; the passage should read “that it belongs to a witty
man, but not to a madman.”70
“Every Ass that’s Romantick believes he’s
inspired,” a seventeenth century critic wrote71; and the notion that
the pretence to inspiration was either a delusion, or more probably an
imposture of poets, devised to give worth to their poetry in vulgar minds,
recurs not infrequently in the criticism of the time. But no ridicule could
banish this idea of inspiration, based as it was on real experience; for poets,
finding that their ideas came to them in special moments of excitement, and
from some source as it were outside themselves, would by a natural symbolism
still call the poetic impulse a gift from the gods.
The conception, moreover,
of a person’s genius as his natural bent or disposition, would naturally lead
to the notion of this prompting or guiding genius being itself a kind of
inspiration; and as early as 1634 we find Sir William Alexander declaring his
opinion “That every Author hath his own Genius, directing him by a secret
Inspiration to that wherein he may most excel.”72 This inborn and,
as it were, inspired element in the conception of genius was emphasized by the
distinction which was early drawn in English criticism between two kinds of
writers, the writers whose talent or genius was the product of study and
imitation, and those who were indebted to their natural endowments alone. This
distinction, which had been inherited from classical times, and had become a
commonplace of Renaissance criticism, was much elaborated in England, and often
dwelt on with reference to Shakespeare. It was in fact the tremendous
achievement of Shakespeare, his “originality,” his miraculous power of
“creating” supernatural beings, as well as his unprecedented and untutored
genius, as they conceived it, which did more than anything else to disintegrate
the neo-classical theory of poetry, and replace it by the notions that are
expressed in the terms which are the subject of this chapter. For Shakespeare,
who “wanted Art” as Ben Jonson put it, who was, in Milton’s phrase, “Fancy’s
child,” and whose strains were “native woodnotes wild,” came more and more to
be regarded as the great example of the “natural” genius, who by the power of
his inborn gifts alone, quite unassisted by art of learning, reached the most
sublime levels of artistic achievement. “The Poetry of Shakespear was
Inspiration indeed,” as Pope expressed it in his famous preface; and although
some critics regretted his ignorance (“what would he not have been if he had
had learning!”),73 there were others, even in the seventeenth
century, who, like Sir William Temple, suggested that learning might perhaps
weaken invention, and lessen the force and growth of genius.74
Addison, indeed, who had proclaimed Shakespeare as a “natural” genius, did not
claim for him any superiority on this account; but others were more bold, and
by the middle of the eighteenth century the glorification of unlearned genius
had reached such a point that Dr. Johnson felt constrained to denounce the
tendency to rely upon it as “the mental disease of the present generation,”75
and Sir Joshua Reynolds’s Discourses
were written for the purpose of warning art-students against what he called
“the phantom of Inspiration,” the false opinion, “too prevalent among artists,
of the imaginary powers of native genius, and its sufficiency in great works.”76
We have thus seen how the
notions of Originality, and those of Creation and Inspiration, with the ancient
and august religious associations of these terms, contributed to deepen the
word genius with mysterious
significations, although we still find it used at the same time – and often by
the same writers – with its older and more commonplace meaning, as when we read
of a “polite,” an “ordinary,” a “plodding,” and even a “low and grovelling
genius.”
In the twenty-five years
which followed the middle of the eighteenth century, a number of Essays, Reflections, and Dissertations
were published, in which the problems connected with Shakespeare, with
Originality, and Genius were discussed.77 Most of these volumes have
been long forgotten; to the lexicographer they are still of interest, but to
others their perusal would be indeed a penitential task, for of all the dusty
Saharas and Dead Seas of literature, there are none, save perhaps those of old
theology, which are more desolate than the arid wastes of obsolete aesthetic
speculation.
But these old essays and
speculations had their date of eager interest; they represent, no doubt, an
immense amount of thinking under the large wigs of that period, and echo a
great deal of enthusiastic eighteenth-century discussion. And among them there
is one little book which has become famous abroad, and is still dimly
remembered in England, where it has been reprinted in recent years. This is the
Conjectures on Original Composition,
published anonymously in 1759, but written by Edward Young, the author of the
famous Night Thoughts, then in his
seventy-seventh year. The book was mainly written, he tells his readers, with
the purpose of preserving and giving publicity to an anecdote about Addison;
how, when he was on his death-bed, he summoned his stepson in order that he
might “see in what peace a Christian can die”; and there is much pious writing,
such as we might expect from an elderly clergyman, in the little volume. But
somewhat incongruously infused into this old bottle we find much of the new and
intoxicating wine of the Romantic Movement, the glorification of Genius, the
praise of originality, the scorn of imitation, and of obedience to the old
rules of classical composition, and a buoyant and almost boyish belief in
progress, in the future possibilities of great achievement for the emancipated
spirit of mankind. The best way, however, to give an impression of these
aspects of Young’s Conjectures will
be to quote some of the sentences which are found in it, and which, as we shall
see, exploded almost as bombs abroad:
“Imitations are of two kinds; one of Nature, one of Authors; The first
we call Originalls, and confine the
term Imitation to the second.” (p.
9.)
“An Original, tho’ but
indifferent (its Originality being
set aside), yet has something to boast.” (p. 11.)
“An Original may be said to be of
a vegetable nature; it rises spontaneously
from the vital root of Genius; it grows,
it is not made: Imitations are often
a sort of Manufacture wrought up by
those Mechanics, Art, and Labour, out of
pre-existent materials not their own.” (p. 12.)
“Originals can arise from Genius only.”
(p. 34.)
“What, for the most part, mean we by Genius, but the Power of accomplishing
great things without the means generally reputed necessary to that end? A Genius differs from a good Understanding, as a Magician from a
good Architect; That raises his
structure by means invisible; This by
the skilful use of common tools. Hence Genius has ever been supposed to partake
of something Divine.” (p. 26–7.)
“Sacer nobis inest Deus, says
Seneca. With regard to the Moral world, conscience,
and with regard to the Intellectual, Genius,
is that God within.” (p. 30–1.)
“In the Fairyland of Fancy, Genius may wander wild; there it has creative
power, and may reign arbitrarily over its own empire of Chimeras.” (p. 37.)
“So boundless are the bold excursions of the human mind, that in the vast
void beyond real existence, it can call forth shadowy beings, and unknown
worlds, as numerous, as bright, and, perhaps, as lasting, as the stars; such
quite-original beauties we may call Paradisaical, Natos sine semine flores, Ovid.” (p. 70.)
“Many a Genius, probably, there has been, which could neither write, nor
read.” (p. 35.)
“Learning we thank, Genius we revere; That gives us pleasure, This gives us
rapture; That informs, This inspires; and is itself inspired.” (p. 36.)
“To the neglect of Learning, Genius sometimes owes its greater Glory.” (p.
29.)
“Genius is from Heaven, Learning from man.” (p. 36.)
“A Star of the first magnitude
among the Moderns was Shakespeare;
among the Ancients, Pindar; who (as
Vossius tells us) boasted of his No-learning, calling himself the Eagle, for
his Flight above it.” (p. 30.)
“An Adult Genius comes out of Nature’s hand, as Pallas out of Jove’s
head, at full growth, and mature: Shakespeare’s Genius was this kind.” (p. 31.)
“Shakespeare mingled no water
with his wine, lower’d his Genius by no vapid Imitation.” (p. 78.)
“Who knows if Shakespeare might
not have thought less, if he had read more?” (p. 81.)
“Born Originals, how comes it to
pass that we die Copies?” (p. 42.)
“The less we copy the renowned Antients, we shall resemble them the more.”
(p. 21.)
“Let us build our Compositions with the Spirit, and in the Taste, of the
Antients; but not with their Materials.”78 (p. 22.)
Phrases
with meanings similar to these, if not so pointedly expressed, might be
collected from the other treatises I have mentioned; but Young’s little book
has a much greater importance in the history of culture owing to the fact that
it was almost immediately translated into German, where it created, as Herder
wrote, an “electrical” effect, and kindled a blaze of fire in German hearts.
Already, before this date,
the ideas of the new criticism had begun to spread in Germany, through the
influence of translations from English, and especially, through the writings of
the German-Swiss critic Bodmer, who had translated Addison’s Essays on Milton, and made famous his
phrase about the imagination, “It has something in it like creation.” This idea
of the “creative imagination,” suggested but not elaborated by Addison, had
become familiar in Germany, and the word creative,
translated by schöpferisch, had
aroused the indignation of the pious, one of them describing it as a punishable
and blasphemous expression, since the attribute of creation belonged alone to
God, and should not be attributed to his creatures.79
But in 1760, when Young’s
book was translated, the time was ripe for a wider and more enthusiastic
reception of this new doctrine. The new generation of Germans were eager to
free themselves from the tyranny of French classicism; and in the book of
Young, and the notions he promulgated, they found the faith, the gospel, and
the watchwords which they needed. Young boldly proclaimed the superiority of
the original genius, who went direct to Nature, who performed great things by
the force of his own inborn powers, untaught by rules and precedents and
models; and he declared that Shakespeare was the great original genius of
modern times.
In England the popular
conception of Shakespeare as a wild, irregular, untutored genius was generally
stated apologetically; he had, it was admitted, great faults, but these were
condoned by his great and original merits. Above all things he was regarded as
inimitable; but Young, on the contrary, declared that he must be imitated;
writers should try to be original like Shakespeare, should imitate, not his
works, but his methods; they should, like him, disregard all rules and
traditions, and go direct to Nature.
It was on this conception
of Shakespeare and Shakespeare’s methods, and on Young’s belief that they could
and should be imitated, that the Germans seized with propagandist zeal. The
duty of every artist to rely upon his own gifts and inspiration became the
fashionable doctrine; and in that wild period, which was called at the time the
Genieperiode, but has since acquired
the name of Sturm und Drang, the
great watchwords Genius, Originality, and Creative acquired a resonance, an aggressive and propagandist
momentum, which they had certainly never possessed in England.80 And
these terms acquired moreover in Germany a much greater profundity of
philosophical meaning, and became the foundation-stones of a metaphysical
aesthetic; when we read in Kant that “creative imagination is the true source
of genius and the basis of originality”; that Genius makes rules instead of
receiving them; that it embodies in art aesthetic ideas which are creations of
the imagination, and suggest more than can be exhausted by any definite
concept, we become aware that our home-bred English words have indeed undergone
a strange sea-change by being so deeply immersed in the vast and bottomless
ocean of Teutonic thought.
What we now call the
English Romantic Movement of the eighteenth century hardly deserves indeed, as
Professor Beers has pointed out, to be called a movement, since it had “no
leader, no programme, no organ, no theory of art, and very little coherence.”81
The dilettante bachelors and Church of England clergymen, Gray and Horace
Walpole, the Rev. Edward Young, the Rev. Thomas82 and the Rev.
Joseph Warton, Bishop Hurd, and Bishop Percy, were most of them hardly
“Romantics” at all, but rather amateurs of novelties which amused them; and
although in the course of their mild speculations they may have written – and
indeed did write – some of these very phrases, they had attached no
metaphysical meanings of dark profundity to their casual expressions.
When we now use the word genius, the contrasted term talent comes into our minds, but this
differentiation and contrast, like that of romantic
and classical, is the product of
German – or perhaps of French – and not of English cogitation. The Oxford Dictionary says:
“It was by German writers of the eighteenth
century that the distinction between ‘genius’ and ‘talent,’ which had some foundation
in French usage,83 was sharpened into the strong antithesis which is
now universally current, so that the one term is hardly ever defined without
reference to the other.”
Like the antithesis of romanticism and
classicism, that between genius and talent was suggested now and then by
English writers, without, however, any emphasis being laid upon it, or any
clear distinction drawn; and the word genius,
with its pagan, and talent, with its
biblical suggestions, were practically synonymous until the words came back
again from Germany. But, as the Oxford
Dictionary point out, “when ‘genius,’ as native endowment, came to be
contrasted with the aptitudes that can be acquired by study, the approach to
the modern sense was often very close.”
This distinction indeed
grew naturally, and indeed inevitably, out of the conceptions of originality
and creation which we have been studying. Genius was, as Kant defined it, Originalgeist, Originality was its
special mark, it was a Creative Talent. The difference was a difference, not of
degree, but of kind; Talent could be acquired; it achieved its effects by
imitation and the obedience to rules; Genius was a gift; it was of a nature
which obeyed no laws, was a law to itself, and could not be acquired.84
The fire which was kindled in German hearts by these watchwords, and the
revolutionary ideas they embodied, flamed up in Germany again at the end of the
eighteenth century, when a new revolt blazed out in that literary movement
which adopted the word Romantisch as
its battle-cry and title. This title, and the doctrines and propaganda it stood
for, was, as we have seen, brought from her German visit by Madame de Staël to
set literary France ablaze; and thus the word romantique, first borrowed as an epithet for landscape, became in
France a literary term to describe those emancipated and revolutionary French
writers whom Littré describes.
First from Germany, and
then later from France, the echoes and influence of the German and French
Romantic Movements began to cross the Channel, bringing with them as their
great watchword the English vocable whose adventures and transformations abroad
I have briefly recounted. The deeper meanings which had been added to the word romantic by German thinkers, and by the
opposition they had elaborated between romanticism
and classicism, were made current in
England by the writings of Madame de Staël, and also no doubt by the talk of
that inexhaustible conversationalist when she came to these shores in 1813.85
But before the date of
Madame de Staël’s English visit we find Jeffrey writing in the Edinburgh Review in 1802 of that sect of
poets “who boast much of their originality, and seem to value themselves very
highly for having broken loose from the bondage of antient authority, and reasserted
the independence of genius.” Though this sect, which had been established in
England, Jeffrey said, for ten or twelve years, laid claim to a creed and a
revelation of its own, there could be little doubt that their doctrines were
“of German origin, and had been derived from some of the great modern reformers
of that country.”86
This sect of poets was the
School which afterwards was baptized, apparently by Jeffrey, as the “Lake
School,”87 and which in quite recent years we have come to group
along with Scott, Byron, Shelley, and Keats as the Romantic Poets of the early
nineteenth century.88 It was to these poets, especially to
Coleridge, that we owe our modern familiarity with the great watchwords of
modern criticism as we now use, or misuse, them, originality, creative, imagination, and genius, as contrasted with talent,89
etc., and from Coleridge the terms were borrowed by Jeffrey and Hazlitt and the
other critics of the time.
In more recent times the
meanings of all these terms have been much enriched by the modern conception of
the unconscious self. Although many psychologists would not now accept, without
considerable qualifications, the earlier notion of the Unconscious as the
abiding-place of genius, and the source of inspiration, yet they would probably
all agree that something analogous to the conscious processes of thought, which
may go on beneath awareness, and reveal itself to it in a sudden uprush,
probably plays an important, and possibly a dominant, role in what we call
inspiration and the creative activity of genius. Although the exact nature of
these processes is still a matter of dispute, yet the notion of subconscious
thought, taken simply as an unexplained fact of experience, has helped in some
degree to make more definite the meanings of the terms we have been discussing.90
These meanings have been moreover enriched in another way by the addition, namely, to aesthetic
theory, and the facts it considers, of the non-representative arts of
architecture and especially of music. It is curious to note, in the bewigged
speculations of the eighteenth century, that music, which was the most living
art of that time, and especially so in the German home of aesthetic
speculation, is barely so much as mentioned. The slightest consideration of the
form and content of music would have most effectually shattered the
“imitation-of-nature” theory against which the Germans were in revolt; but in
their search for something which transcended Nature, they turned, not to the
musical creations of Mozart and Gluck and the other composers of the time, but
to the supernatural world which they found in the writings of Shakespeare and
Milton and Dante. When precisely the phenomena of music began to exert an
influence on German aesthetic theory, I am not learned enough to say,91
but certainly in English criticism of the time music was only referred to in
the briefest and most casual manner.92
V
My task has been so far merely the task of the
archaeologist of words: I have simply attempted to trace the origins and
transformations of a few of our commonest and most hackneyed terms of
criticism. But one cannot go on repeating these old battle-cries in cold blood
and with complete impunity; the fire still latent in them is contagious; they
are ancestral voices which still prophesy of war. Since the aesthetic conflict
is by no means ended, and its important issues are a long way from being yet
decided, upon the lexicographer also descends the divine fury; the temptation
to take up the cudgels and rush, if but for a moment, into the never-ending
combat, requires more self-control than I at least can boast of. I must be
allowed, therefore, to qualify my narrative with a certain liberty of criticism
and comment; and as a preliminary step to joining the speculative war-dance, I
shall take this opportunity to point out again how much the origins and
adventures of the words we use influence their meaning, and how rich they are
in overtones of half-conscious suggestion which confuse us, and which we can
only half-comprehend, unless we know their history. That our word romantic, for instance, acquired its
literary meaning, first of all from the contemptuous attitude of the Age of
Reason towards the old romances, and afterwards from its use as an adjective
for landscape, for wild and desolate views and ancient castles, seen through
the medium of old poems and romances, helps us to understand why, when it was
used anew as the name for a certain kind of literature, it came to imply the
contemplation of nature, not directly, but through a mist of associated ideas
and literary memories, and thus suggested, and indeed still suggests, that
element of subjectivity, of vague and reminiscential feeling, which has been
generally regarded as a characteristic of romantic, as opposed to classical,
literature. The foreign adventures, too, of the words we have been studying,
the fact that they have been to the wars, and have become, as I have said,
battle-cries in foreign countries, have also loaded them with propagandist
doctrine, with revolutionary and explosive meanings, which are still potent in
them. This is especially true, I think, of the great watchwords Genius and Originality; the Genie-periode
in Germany, the Romantic Movements, both in Germany and in France, were times
of angry enthusiasm and of wild revolt; the ecstatic emphasis laid upon the
freedom, the spontaneity, and the originality of the creative genius, the
attribution to that genius of miraculous and daemonic powers, invested the cult
of genius and the worship of Originality with an exaggerated and mystical
importance. The artists of earlier days had been regarded – and had
regarded themselves – as craftsmen; the new conception of the artist
as a genius, as a creature of passion and fire, above the law, and the popular
deification of this ideal, tended to produce the beings thus imagined and
adored – the wild spirits of lawless lives and strange fits of passion,
And mighty Poets in their
misery dead.
The emphasis, too, on originality, on the expression
of the artist’s unique personality, on the never-ceasing creation of something
new and strange and never before heard of, has not only tended to inflame the
vanity of the artist, but also to suggest standards of comparison and valuation
in which the elements of novelty, of newness for its own sake, are somewhat
unduly overprized. The work of a great artist always, or almost always, has in
it an element of newness, and is always, or almost always (though without
conscious purpose), coloured by his own personality. But these are surely more
accidental than essential characteristics of his work; for newness and the
expression of unique personalities are of no great artistic importance in
themselves. This is especially true in the arts which we call the fine arts,
where technique and tradition are of prime importance; and it would not perhaps
be too fantastic to attribute, in part at least, the downfall of painting,
architecture, and the handicrafts in the earlier decades of the nineteenth
century – perhaps the greatest artistic disaster the world has ever suffered –
to this modern enthusiasm for the originality of creative genius, and the
desire on the part of every artist and architect and handicraftsman to display
as conspicuously as possible his own personality and peculiar gifts. Ever since
then the history of art has been the history of conscious and violent
revolutions and reactions, instead of that gradual and unconscious modification
of an inherited tradition which characterized its development in previous ages.
How far the antithesis,
developed abroad, in our conceptions of classical and romantic art has been an
advantage or disadvantage to criticism it would be difficult to say; but most
of us would agree, I think, that this antithesis has been greatly
over-emphasized. The words romanticism and classicism are used like hatchets to
chop us materials of the most delicate and subtle weaving and intertexture; and
indeed the variety of meanings attributed to them shows that they are employed without
any precise and accepted understanding of what their signification really is.
For what after all is romanticism as contrasted with classicism? Is it, as
Pater said, the addition of strangeness to beauty; is it disease as opposed to
health, as Goethe defined it; or an appeal to the feelings as against an appeal
to reason; or as Schlegel said, the picturesque contrasted with the statuesque;
or self-abandonment versus self-control; individualism as opposed to the ideals
of organized society; associated ideas and subjectivity as contrasted with
objectivity and formal beauty; the exotic, the bizarre, and the magical and
mysterious moment, rather than the typical, the usual, the general? Or shall we
define it as suggestiveness, incompleteness, aspiration, and a preoccupation
with the infinite, as opposed to definiteness, completeness, and precision of
statement?
It is perhaps all these
things; but if this is so, there are both romantic and classical elements in
almost every work of art; and the exaggerated opposition between the two makes
it necessary to distort the facts, if we are to place poems and plays and
pictures each separately by itself in one or the other of these categories. The
facts are really too complex to be summed up in any one formula; and indeed,
all the terms we have been discussing tend to distort and caricature the
phenomena they attempt to account for; it would have been better, perhaps, for
English criticism of they had remained at home, and by half-conscious
adjustments, adapted themselves, in the practical, empirical, muddle-headed
English way, to the new facts of aesthetic appreciation as they spontaneously
arose. However, we must take them as they come to our hands; if they are
ploughshares which have been beaten into swords, tools which have been made
into battle-axes, they are tools nevertheless for which we have no substitutes,
and we cannot, if we wish to write of the aesthetic problems which face us, do
without them. These problems are of two kinds: there are those connected with
the work or art itself, and those which are more intimately concerned with the
artist who produces it. In every representative of Nature which is a work of
art, there is to be found, as Prof. Courthope has said, something which is not
to be found in the aspect of Nature which it represents; and what that
something is has been a matter of dispute from the earliest days of criticism.
This is the aspect of the problem which has most interested the neo-classical
critics; those of what we call romantic tendencies have paid more attention to
its subjective aspect,93 the power or faculty in the artist which
has enabled him to add this unknown something to his representation of Nature.
What is it, they have asked, which differentiates the artistic imagination from
the mere fancy, or from the imagination which produces dreams or the illusions
of illness or madness? If we call it the “plastic” or the “creative”
imagination, we can then perhaps call its product a “creation,” rather than a
“finding” or “invention”; and the power of the creative artist we may designate
as genius, as opposed to talent. Thus the artist himself becomes a genius, and
we are fitted out with a makeshift vocabulary of terms for our critical
discriminations. But these terms are, as we have seen, the product of much
confused and over-excited thinking; and they denote rather than they define and
explain the phenomena they describe. If, however, we are unable to use them
scientifically, a knowledge of their history may perhaps, as I have suggested,
help to put us on our guard against them when they patently distort the facts.
If we keep in mind the revolutionary origin of our modern theory of genius, we
may discount some of the more overwhelming reverberations of this portentous
word, and more clearly perceive the element of truth which it certainly does
express. Now there can be no doubt that the spontaneous, inspired daemonic
genius – or at least, since it is more a matter of degree than of absolute
distinction – that the genius who possesses more conspicuously than others this
character, has existed in all the arts; El Greco in painting, Michael Angelo in
sculpture, Wagner in music, are analogues of original poets like Shelley,
Blake, or Walt Whitman; but the emphasis laid upon the type of genius possessed
by these great originators, and the depreciatory contrast with mere talent, has
tended, I think, to make us forget that the daemonic genius is not the only
kind of genius, and indeed not by any means always the greatest kind.
We tend to relegate the
undaemonic artists to the category of talent; and if the antithesis between
genius and talent is, as no doubt it is, a useful one, it might be well to
restore to our vocabulary the other and older antithesis between the “natural”
and the “learned” genius. For there are poets and artists of the first rank who
are endowed with no daemonic qualities. If Aeschylus was, as Dryden said, a
great genius, and always “tearing it
upon the tripos,” we cannot deny the appellation of genius to Sophocles, who
indulged in no such contortions. So in every age of art we find the same
contrast. It would be absurd to refuse the name of genius to Milton or to
Leopardi, and yet there were never more conscious authors; and, to take another
instance, Charlotte Brontë is regarded by her admirers as a more inspired
genius than Jane Austen, but would they maintain that she is therefore a
greater writer? Is the inspired Blake a more important figure in English art
than the laborious learned, conscientious Sir Joshua Reynolds? One of the great
defects of our critical vocabulary is the lack of a neutral, non-derogatory
name for these great artificers, these artists who derive their inspiration
more from the formal than the emotional aspects of their art, and who are more
interested in the masterly control of their material, than in the expression of
their own feelings, or the prophetic aspects of their calling.
For this kind of genius,
and for the quality which distinguishes it, I should like to suggest an
adjective and a noun which will at first certainly surprise, and perhaps shock,
my readers, but which, both from their etymology and their earlier use, fit
most exquisitely the meaning for which we so much need them. These are the
words erudite and erudition, which are derived from erudire (e, “out of,” and rudis,
“rude,” “rough,” or “raw”), a verb meaning in classical Latin to bring out of
the rough, to form by means of art, to polish, to instruct. Eruditus has in Latin the meaning of
“accomplished,” “skilled”; and in its earlier English use it kept its classical
meaning. So also erudition was used
for the process of training or instruction, “the erudition of young children”;
and also for the instruction thus imparted, and for the state of being trained
or instructed; and it was thus used by Shakespeare.94 It was also
used of the perfect workmanship or finish of a coin, Addison for instance
writing that “the intrinsic value of an old coin does not consist in its metal
but its erudition.”95
If, then, we could restore
erudite and erudition to their old meanings (they are now merely superfluous
synonyms for “learned” and “learning”), we should have fitting appellations for
our great artificers, and for that quality of conscious artistry, of acquired
technical accomplishment, which cannot, when carried, as by Horace, to
exquisite perfection, be called mere talent. A name for this noble kind of
genius, which would explicate and make clear and emphasize its nature and its
methods, would I think be of special advantage in two ways. It would, in the
first place, recall attention to the imitable qualities in high artistic
achievement; for the erudite genius, with his acquired mastery of his material,
can be most profitably imitated; while, as Sir Joshua Reynolds pointed out,
the imitation of the daemonic genius and his reliance on his inborn and
untutored powers, is (save for other daemonic geniuses like himself) the worst
possible precedent and example. Then also the fact that the daemonic genius is
often a prophet as well, and is generally thought to have a mission (though
what exactly were Shakespeare’s or Keats’s missions it might be difficult to
say), has given rise to the notion that the true genius comes, like Wordsworth
or Shelley or Browning or Walt Whitman, with a message for his age; and thus
the genius who has no gospel, no scheme of salvation for the world, but simply
a genius for pure art, suffers disparagement from others, and perhaps
discouragement in himself.
It would perhaps be better
for our criticism if we were to use the word genius to describe the gift and endowment, rather than the person
thus gifted and endowed; or even, as a critic has suggested,96for us
to avoid using the term as far as possible, and to rehabilitate and restore the
term inspiration. For inspiration, and
the notion it suggests, is perhaps a better description than genius for the
phenomena of artistic achievement. The word genius implies the permanent
possession of magical power; and all the works of a genius, being regarded as
the products of this power, are accepted in a spirit of worship and without
discrimination. Thus criticism is blurred, and the genius himself, believing in
the unfailing potency of his gift, tends to work in a slovenly manner, and is
tempted also to exaggerate and exploit the wonder-working personality to which
are attributed such miraculous results. But artists even of the greatest genius
are, as we all know, quite capable of producing work of the most deplorable and
unblest description; their genius is at best but an intermittent energy, and
the greatest artist or poet is simply the artist or poet who is most subject to
the visitation of what we call inspiration – who is more frequently and more
powerfully inspired than other men. Shelley, who was perhaps as richly endowed
with what we call genius as any poet who ever existed, has well described the
coming and going of the inspiration upon which, as he tells us, the poet must
depend.
“Poetry is not like reasoning, a power to be
exerted according to the determination of the will. A man cannot say, ‘I will
compose Poetry.’ The greatest poet even cannot say it; for the mind in creation
is as a fading coal, which some invisible influence, like an inconstant wind,
awakens to transitory brightness; this power arises from within, like the
colour of a flower which fades and changes as it is developed, and the
conscious portions of our natures are unprophetic either of its approach or
its departure.”97
In
the intervals of inspiration, the poet, Shelley adds, “becomes a man, and is abandoned
to the sudden reflux of the influences under which others habitually live.”
If our attention were more
habitually directed to the visits of inspiration, rather than to the genius it
visits, although a clear conception of what inspiration is might elude us, yet
we could more accurately discriminate its traces, finding them not only in the
works of the erudite as well as the daemonic genius, but also, now and then, in
the productions of mere men of talent, to whom the name of genius, with its modern
meaning, can hardly be applied.
The advance of modern
psychology has, moreover, removed one difficulty which to the older critics was
involved in the theory of inspiration. If poetry, they asked, was a product of
inspiration, if it was something which was given from without, how could it be
regarded as an art which required – as poetry obviously did require – labour,
apprenticeship, preparation, study? This difficulty is met for us by the modern
theory of the unconscious, and all the real, if loosely defined, notions which
are associated with that concept.98 Inspiration, as we conceive it,
does not come to us from without. It is not a gift of the stars or the Muses,
but an impulse from sources that are inside ourselves. The Pierian spring, the
Fountain of Castalia, are still flowing, but their streams murmur deep within
us; and although our conscious intelligence has no direct control over these
springs of power, yet by labour and study it can clarify and enrich them; and
can form standards and ideals which, long brooded over, may then sink down from
the conscious into the unconscious strata of our mental existence, and mould
and elaborate the unknown stores of energy which exist there, amorphous and
concealed.
The modern cult of Genius,
and the heated atmosphere of revolution that gave it birth, have also tended to
over-emphasize and endow with exaggerated importance the word originality, and the quality it denotes
in works of art. Originality has no doubt its importance, but that importance
is more historical than purely aesthetic; for not only in the absence of
documents are we unable to say how much originality is possessed by the works
of ancient writers like Homer or Lucretius or Catullus,99 but also, when
we do possess the documents, we often find that the greatest innovators in the
arts, those who have done most to create new forms and utilize new material,
are not by any means always those of the highest and most permanent
achievement. Donne was a greater innovator than Shakespeare, and had much more
powerful influence upon the succeeding generation, but he was not a greater
poet; Caravaggio was one of the most original of Italian painters, and has been
called the first modern artist, the inventor of realism, the begetter of
Velasquez and Manet; but his work has for us little pure artistic interest.
Rossetti was a painter of immense originality, but of small artistic
achievement; Philipp Emanuel Bach, musicians tell us, was a greater originator,
and a much more powerful influence on the development of music, than his
father John Sebastian; while Jean-Jacques Rousseau is by no means the greatest
writer of that world of modern thought and feeling which he did more than any
one to discover and create. The sense of original discovery, of turning up new
soil, is more of value as an incentive and encouragement to the artist, than as
an approved ingredient in, or characteristic of, his work.
Besides the word inspiration, there is another rather
old-fashioned term which we might do well to furbish up and restore to our
critical vocabulary. This is the painter’s term invention, which describes a quality of real, if subordinate,
importance, not only in painting but in literature as well. Johnson declared
that the highest praise of poetry was invention, “such invention as, by
producing something unexpected, surprises and delights.”100 It was
by invention, he said, that “new trains of events are formed, and new scenes of
imagery displayed”;101 and this power not only of inventing new
scenes and incidents and displaying new images, but also of contriving new
moulds and shapes, metrical and other, for the purposes of new expression –
this gift of invention, which Keats called “the Polar Star of Poetry,”102
has been somewhat overshadowed and eclipsed by the use of the portentous word creation, with which I shall conclude my
remarks. The words create, creation, creator, creative, have
become so vulgarized, and are so indiscriminately used – even in fashion-papers
we read of “creations” in millinery – that careful writers try to avoid them,
although they find that they cannot banish them altogether from their
vocabulary. For the conception they embody is, of all the ideas expressed by
the watchwords we have been studying, in fact the primary one; it lies at the
root of all the rest, and is the origin and source of the great change in our
modern theory of aesthetics. The word invention
was a word of compromise, an attempt to reconcile, by the idea of original
copying, the old imitation-theory with the notorious need for something more
than the repetition of the same effects in art. As this imitation-theory
gradually broke down, the notion of invention began to be replaced by that of
creation – the creation, in the first place, of “fairy worlds” by Shakespeare
and Milton, but especially by Shakespeare. This conception was then enlarged to
include the creation in drama and fiction of living characters, and afterwards
with the inclusion of music, to that of whole new and spontaneous worlds of
feeling and relation, which have little or no correspondence with the given
world of fact.
This idea, like the other
ideas we have been studying, was immensely emphasized in the romantic revolts
of Germany and France: to sanctify and deify art as the second creator was,
Theophile Gautier tells us, one of the ideals of the French romantics, and he
quotes the famous lines:
Dans la création d’un bonheur sans mélange
Etre plus artiste que Dieu.103
This reverent and religious, or, as others thought it, irreligious,
conception of the divine power of the artistic creator returned across the
Channel, and is often found in the works of Coleridge, as when, for instance,
he describes the imagination of the artist as an echo of what he calls the
primary imagination, which is itself an analogue of creation, and its activity
“a repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of creation in the infinite
I AM.”104 In other writers of this period, in Wordsworth and Keats
and Shelley and Hazlitt, we find an almost equal glorification of the poet’s
creative faculty, the notion that the artist, and above all the poet, has the
power of creating a new heaven and a new earth, a world more real perhaps than
the actual one, a universe of the mind, concrete, autonomous, independent, and
peopled by living beings, created before they are represented – as Coleridge
said of Shakespeare’s characters – out of the depths of the poet’s own mind,
and, in Shelley’s words,
Forms
more real than living man,
Nurslings of immortality.
There is something mystical in this doctrine,
this faith, as of Keats, that “what the Imagination seizes as Beauty must be
Truth – whether it existed before or not.” And yet the notion that art is
creative, that, in Pater’s words, it “adds a new presence to the world,” or as
Wordsworth puts it, “Genius is the introduction of a new element into the
intellectual universe … an advance, or a conquest, made by the soul of the
poet,” is a notion which deeply permeates all our criticism; and what we have
come to value most in art is not the imitation of Nature, but the unprecedented
and undreamed of harmonies it creates, the surprise and strangeness of those
authentic and yet unforeseeable visions – those worlds of beauty and truth and wonder
– which it opens to the imagination.
Even in a phrase like:
Tiger!
Tiger! burning bright
In the forests of the
Night,
we seem to recognize the character of something inevitable, something that
has a veracity of its own, that must exist, and has always existed, and from
which we cannot withhold the name of reality.
And as often happens in
the history of thought, our notion of this mystery of artistic creation has
been made somewhat clearer by the method of antithesis. Just as romanticism has
been more clearly defined by its opposition to classicism, genius by the
contrast with talent, and imagination by that of fancy, so the notion of
creation has been sometimes contrasted with that of invention, as when for
instance a recent critic wrote that “Shakespeare of all men seems to have been
in comparison with his strength in Creation, the weakest in Invention.”105
VI
In their human and most happy manner the ancient
Greeks embodied in appropriate symbols their awareness of aesthetic facts and
of the experience of the poet. These symbols of Apollo, the lyre of the God,
and the piercing song of the Muses, their haunts of Helicon and Parnassus,
their sacred springs of Hippocrene and Castalia; the visits of these Immortals
to the mortals who invoke them, and the divine fury and enthusiasm they
inspire, have lived on in our literature, not only as hallowed and beautiful
ornaments, but as true, though symbolic, expressions of the circumstances which
give rise to poetry, and of the nature of the poet’s sensibilities and gifts.
To this inherited vocabulary the Romantic Movement has added, partly from
biblical sources, the terms which have been occupying our attention. The whole
body of these words, ancient and modern, represents and expresses the aesthetic
experience of the human spirit; an experience which, though very real and
profound, has been as yet very partially clarified into speculative theory. But
these words have come to be so indiscriminately employed, and are now so
blurred in outline, that there is a great need to make definite, and préciser – or why not say in purer
English “to precise” – their meaning; to bring into more clear-cut relief the
phenomena they designate; and by means of a nicer and more accurate use of this
inherited vocabulary, to discriminate for instance in works of art their
originality, their romantic or their classical ingredients; or, in the
endowments of the artist who produces them, their gifts of talent and
erudition, or of unconscious and daemonic genius. And if, becoming aware of
other qualities for which we have no names, we may be tempted to suggest new
appellations, we would do well to follow, in this matter, the tradition of our
older nomenclature, and be content, for the most part, like our predecessors,
with designating or merely descriptive words. There is a tendency in the human
mind to be impatient of anything it cannot understand, and to deny, if
possible, the existence of phenomena for which it can find no explanation.
Thus, as we have seen, the neo-classical critics denied the existence of
inspiration, and the more mysterious powers of the imagination. This tendency
leads men of science to prefer analytic and explanatory terms; but in matters
like the phenomena of aesthetics, names which may suggest over-hasty
explanations tend to falsify and distort the things they designate, and become
premature and petrified definitions, which cannot readily grow and deepen with
the growth and deepening of our knowledge. A chance appellation like romantic, for instance, or a metaphor
like inspiration, are much more
convenient names than a term like Coleridge’s “esemplastic power” for the
imagination, which attempts to explain its working.
The truth is that the
phenomena of artistic production are still so obscure, so baffling, we are
still so far from an accurate scientific and psychological knowledge of their
genesis or meaning, that we are forced to accept them as empirical facts; and
empirical and non-explanatory names are the names that suit them best. The
complete explanation of any fact is the very last step in human thought; and it
is reached, as I have said, if indeed it is ever reached, by the preliminary
processes of recognition, designation, and definition. It is with these
preliminary processes that our aesthetic criticism is still occupied. We have
recognized, and we have named, the mysterious creative power of the
imagination, the genius of the poet or artist who possesses it, and the
inspiration by which he is himself possessed. But what, stated in terms of scientific
psychology, these powers really are, and what are the conditions which favour
or impede their activity, though they are problems whose solution is of the
utmost importance for civilization, they are problems nevertheless about which
we are still almost completely in the dark. Perhaps the most profitable thing
we can do at present is, leaving their ultimate analysis in suspense, to
discriminate their manifestations in the immense wealth of concrete examples to
which our attention is being now so multifariously directed. The more adequate
solution of these problems is a task which will no doubt profoundly concern the
critics, the psychologists, and even the sociologists and metaphysicians of the
future; it is not, however, a task which can rightly be imposed upon the
lexicographer, whose peaceful role I now resume, and in which role I will
complete my essay by a few relevant quotations from some of our contemporary
writers who have touched upon these problems. Thus Mr. A. C. Bradley says of
poetry, “its nature is to be not a part, nor yet a copy, of the real world (as
we commonly understand that phrase), but to be a world by itself, independent,
complete, autonomous.” And again, of life and poetry, he says, “the two may be
called different forms of the same thing; one of them having (in the usual
sense) reality, but seldom fully satisfying imagination; while the other offers
something which satisfies imagination, but has not full ‘reality’.”106
In writing of Byron, Dr.
Herford says:
“Byron lacks supreme imagination. With boundless
resources of invention, rhetoric, passion, wit, fancy, he has not the quality
which creates out of sensation, or thought, or language, or all together, an
action, a vision, an image, or a phrase, which, penetrated with the poet’s
individuality, has the air of a discovery, not an invention, and no sooner
exists than it seems to have always existed. A creator in the highest sense
Byron is not.”107
In the writings of the least romantic of modern critics,
Mr. Santayana, we can perhaps find the most rational statement of this modern
theory of artistic creation.
“a spontaneous creation of the mind can be more
striking and living than any reality, or any abstraction from realities. The
artist can invent a form which, by its adaptation to the imagination, lodges
there, and becomes a point of reference for all observations, and a standard of
naturalness and beauty … This method of
originating types is what we ordinarily describe as artistic creation. The name
indicates the suddenness, originality, and individuality of the conception thus
attained.”108
In another place Mr. Santayana says of the
higher arts:
“When the world is shattered to bits they can
come and ‘build it nearer to the heart’s desire.’ The great function of poetry
… is precisely this: to repair to the material of experience, seizing hold of
the reality of sensation and fancy beneath the surface of conventional ideas,
and then out of that living but indefinite material to build new structures,
richer, finer, fitter to the primary tendencies of our nature, truer to the
ultimate possibilities of the soul.”109
I will end with a relevant quotation from a
living poet:
For
beauty being the best of all we know
Sums up the unsearchable and
secret aims
Of nature, and on joys
whose earthly names
Were never told can form
and sense bestow;
and man hath sped his
instinct to outgo
The step of science; and
against her shames
Imagination stakes out
heavenly claims
Building a tower above the
head of woe.110