PRE-ROMANTICISMO

ETYMOLOGIE / etymology ETUDE SEMANTIQUE / Definitions COMMENTAIRE / Analysis The term Romantic and its derivatives have been used in literary history since Madame de Stael's analysis De la posie classique et de la posie romantique in her De l'Allemagne (1810). Literary historians since the beginning of the present century have recognised that certain aspects of Romantic literature had been manifest prior to the so-called Romantic Revolution at the beginning of the nineteenth century: for example, E. Abry and his colleagues in their popular school-text, Histoire Illustre de la Littrature Franaise (1912) write of les Precurseurs du Romantisme, and in his study of eighteenth-century English literature, The Peace of the Augustans (1916), George Saintsbury discusses the earlier Romantic pioneers. Henry A. Beers published in 1898 A History of English Romanticism in the Eighteenth Century which, starting from his rather narrow definition of Romanticism as the reproduction in modern art or literature of the life and thought of the Middle Ages, provides a

detailed comment on eighteenth-century imitations of Spenser and Milton, and on the Gothic Revival in fiction and poetry, showing their close affinity to early nineteenthcentury literature. The specific term pre-romanticism enters the critical vocabulary with P. Van Tieghem's influential study, Le Prromantisme (Vol. I, 1924); he stressed the influence of Rousseau's La Nouvelle Hlose in developing a sensibility that focusses on personal emotions and the melancholy isolation of the delicate-souled hero. Pre-romantic has been regularly used in academic writing in England since the appearance of Emile Legouis and Louis Cazamian's A History of English Literature (1927). Book IV of their survey is titled The Pre-Romantic Period (1770 - 98): their thesis is that after about 1760 a number of symptoms and signs of a change tend to group themselves into an imposing whole. Like Beers, they stress the rediscovery of the mediaeval world, marked in Bishop Percy's collection of old ballads, and, more disreputably, the forgeries of James Macpherson (Ossian) and Thomas Chatterton, and show how mediaevalism led to an increased interest in the mysterious -what could not fully be explained or understood. This in turn stimulated the appetite for the hallucinatory and supernatural which was satisfied by the Gothic novel of terror. In addition, Legouis and Cazamian note the growing influence of Methodism. Its focus on the experience of the individual and its social consciousness helped to develop an increased

respect for human feelings and an increased interest in charting their precise dynamics, particularly in lyric poetry. Critics in the mid-twentieth century tended to avoid the term pre-romantic, recognising that the validity of labels such as Classical and Romantic was doubtful, and that transitional labels derived from them, such as neoclassical and pre-romantic, were even more problematic, implying an unfashionable concept of process and development in literature. John Butt's authoritative contribution to the Oxford History of English Literature, The Mid-Eighteenth Century (1979), avoids using preromantic, and indeed rather pointedly bases its description of poetry from 1760 to 1789 on the continuing Augustan tradition of satirical verse. In recent years, critics have revived the concept of a preromantic literature. Pierre Arnaud and Jean Raimond stress the intellectual, social and political ferment of the later eighteenth century, and recognise that writers responded by seeking new modes of expression. Marshall Brown describes the crisis of expression in late-eighteenth-century Britain, and uses recent critical theory to trace the pre-romanticism of its poetry, drama and fiction. Certainly, the sensibilities of Wordsworth and Coleridge differ from those of Dryden and Pope, and it is possible to chart a movement from the one to the other through the eighteenth century. Poetry of natural description, which in Pope is mainly a derivative of the

classical pastoral, becomes, from Thomson's Winter (1726) onwards, more concerned with catching the reality of experience, and the impact that this experience has on the observer. So Collins, in his Ode to Evening (1746), musing slow, hails the genial lov'd return of evening: Now air is hushed, save where the weak-eyed bat, With short shrill shriek flits by on leathern wing, Or where the beetle winds His small but sullen horn. Just as nature is valorised by its contrast with the corrupt world of modern, urban sophistication, Thomson's Vile, licentious crowd, so writers valorise those societies they deem to be interestingly primitive: the mediaeval, the Celtic, the Oriental and the barbarian. Pope patronisingly uses the poor American Indian as his model of human instinct in the dull-witted. But in 1783 Edward Thompson describes The Indian Maid: A beauteous bronze she stands confessed, Venus nor Hebe more complete... And when she moves, her mien and grace

Prove her the goddess of the place ! (Roger Lonsdale, The New Oxford Book of Eighteenth Century Verse, 1984, p. 669.) Collins writes Persian Eclogues (1742) to show the universality of simple human emotions, and Gray and others laud the factitious sublimity of ancient Wales and Scotland. A growing belief in human benevolence and the power of positive goodness is marked as early as Richardson's Pamela (1740-41), where the servant-girl's inflexible innocence converts the rakish Mr B., and Fielding's Joseph Andrews (1742), where Parson Adams is a triumphant example of militant virtue. Such perfectibility in humanity, further developed in Laurence Sterne's Tristram Shandy (1760-67), Henry Mackenzie's Man of Feeling (1771) and the sentimental drama of the later part of the century, points away from the embittered spleen of the Restoration satirists to the revolutionary hopefulness of Shelley. The topic is most obviously addressed in narrative genres, but implicit in much contemporary poetry is the voice of the sensitive and good-natured poet. The relocation of the source of powerful feelings -- from external impressions to an internal responses -- can be traced in the movement from the political involvement of Dryden to the willing isolation of William Cowper:

Oh for a lodge in some vast wilderness, Some boundless contiguity of shade, Where rumour of oppression and deceit, Of unsuccessful or successful war, May never reach me more. (1785) In his 1801 Essay Supplement to the Preface to the Lyrical Ballads, the 1789 collection of poems that is normally seen as the birth of Romantic poetry in England, Wordsworth comments on Thomson's Winter that it is a work of inspiration; much of it is written from himself, and nobly from himself. He is recognising the reliance on emotions engendered by the contemplation of the natural world which is so characteristic of his own best poetry. The same comment might be made of other poets from the later eighteenth century, such as Edward Young, William Shenstone, Mark Akenside and Oliver Goldsmith. But these writers cannot be called unrecognised Romantics: two major distinctions separate them from the first generation of Romantic poets. Their work is not marked by spontaneity or the appearance of spontaneity, and their language is consciously, and conventionally, poetic rather than the plain language of men that Wordsworth sought.

They tend to follow the patterns of expository poetry developed on the model of Vergil's Georgics, carefully segregating the descriptive and the moral parts of their poems. They tend to use and amplify the vocabulary of poetic diction that Wordsworth criticised so roundly, as well as the rhetorical flourishes and the devices of personification that mark the self-consciousness of a Classical literature. In the pre-romantic writers the sensibility of benevolence, emotionalism and cultural primitivism may be developed, but an appropriate discourse has not yet been determined. John Butt shrewdly notes that Chatterton and Macpherson were conscious of this new sensibility but, unable to address it in their own voices, were forced into pastiche and forgery. Their more reputable contemporaries may similarly lack voices of their own to articulate their feelings as powerfully as their successors in the early nineteenth century. Still awaiting resolution is the problem of whether we should read these writers as prophetic voices of a new universe of poetry, as pallid descendants of a robust earlier age, or as individual writers of varying talents and genius resisting classification and wishing to be heard as themselves. Richard Morton McMaster University

BIBLIOGRAPHIE / Bibliographie
Henry A. Beers.- A History of English Romanticism in the Eighteenth Century.- New York: Holt, 1898. Minski, Alexander.- Le prromantisme.- Armand Colin, 1998. Paul Van Tieghem.- Le prromantisme, tude d'histoire littraire europene.- Paris: F. Rieder, 1924-47, 3 vols. Paul Van Tieghem.- Le sentiment de la nature dans le prromantisme europen.- Paris: Nizet, 1960. Pierre Arnaud; Jean Raimond.- Le prromantisme anglais.Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1980. Marshall Brown.- Preromanticism.- Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1991.