Romanticism: A Theory

Of Algebra and Its Discontents

Dear Republic,

I don’t think there’s anybody on Substack with the gift of so consistently making you feel stupid — but also being quite nice about it — as Nik Prassas. He closes out this round of the Romanticism exchange.

-ROL

ROMANTICISM: A THEORY

“It is the large generalisation, limited by a happy particularity, which is the fruitful conception.” For the historian of ideas these words of Alfred North Whitehead’s represent a sort of holy grail. And yet when it comes to the study of Romanticism, our generalisations have been large but, for the most part, barren. Indeed, finding something interesting to say about Wordsworth that is equally true of Blake, and not obviously false of Shelley, feels like one of those ancient mathematical obsessions, such as the quadrature of the circle or trisecting an angle, ending always in failure and, not infrequently, madness.

There are many reasons for such pessimism. I have already alluded to the most obvious one; few writers are as diverse, in terms of style and sensibility, as the poets we sort under the Romantic label. They did not regard themselves as forming a coherent movement, their political opinions were haywire, and they spent much of their time denouncing one another. Friendships had a short half-life and often ended in spectacular collapse, as was the case with Wordsworth and Coleridge. Assuming English Lit does not disappear from universities entirely, there is a great PhD thesis to be written on the complicated geometry of their mutual antipathies.

Starting with Blake, his play The Ghost of Abel (1822) was dedicated to “Lord Byron in the wilderness,” who is cast in the exordium as a latter-day Elijah, only one who draws his prophecies from the eternal human imagination instead of some alien “Jehovah.” Wordsworth, on the other hand, was upbraided by Blake for his absurd pieties about “Nature” and the way it is “fitted” to the human mind, writing in the margins to his copy of The Excursion (1814) that “you shall not bring me down to believe such fitting & fitted.” Shelley was a devoted Wordsworthian, comparing the poet to a “lone star” who guided the “frail bark” of his youth through the storms of history. On learning of the reactionary shift in the later poems he wrote that his former hero had “ceased to be.” Wordsworth’s great friend Robert Southey, meanwhile, was busy fighting the influence of Byron and his “satanic school” of poetry which was putting loathsome images and depraved imaginations into the heads of young Englishmen, including Shelley. Byron in turn obliterated Southey in one of the most withering pieces of invective in the English language. More significantly, he wrote what is still the best critique of Wordsworth in the Preface to Don Juan. While we are at it, here is what he had to say about Coleridge:

And Coleridge, too, has lately taken wing,

But like a hawk encumber’d with his hood,

Explaining Metaphysics to the nation—

I wish he would explain his Explanation.

Does this mean we are condemned to “Random Studies in the Romantic Chaos,” the title of a long-forgotten book by a minor 20th century litterateur? That seems to be the tacit consensus. But then is there not something intellectually sordid about carrying on using a word that we all agree is effectively meaningless? Must we stop searching for the elusive idea that will bring order to that sudden flowering of poetic genius which, finally, is as solid a fact as any in the history of ideas? Squaring the circle may have been the preferred hobby-horse of cranks and lunatics down the centuries; but, after all, it also led to the discovery of the transcendental nature of π.

What I want to argue here is that the key to Romanticism was already found, albeit quite unconsciously, by Wallace Stevens in the most enigmatic of his Adagia, the name he gave to the critical-philosophical maxims he wrote continuously across the 1930s and 40s:

If the mind is the most terrible force in the world, it is also the only force that defends us against terror. The mind is the most terrible force in the world principally in this, that it is the only force that can defend us against itself. [...] The poem represents the mind in the act of defending us against itself.

It is my sober opinion that these three sentences contain the whole of Romanticism in a nutshell. If that sounds too outlandish, let me start with the marginally less provocative claim that they are a near-perfect summary of William Blake’s Romantic mythology, as expressed in the major prophetic poems from the Book of Urizen (1794) through to Jerusalem (1820). It is Urizen (whose name is a contraction of ‘your’ and ‘reason’) that represents the mind’s terrible force in these works. He is the great disturber of the peace in the Blakean cosmos. We all know Blake’s famous line about Milton being ‘of the devil’s party without knowing it’. While Blake certainly was not of Urizen’s party, there can be no question that much of his finest art was poured out in making this terrific sky-god:

Lo, a shadow of horror is risen

In Eternity! Unknown, unprolific!

Self-closd, all-repelling: what Demon

Hath form’d this abominable void

This soul-shudd’ring vacuum?—Some said

“It is Urizen”, But unknown, abstracted

Brooding secret, the dark power hid.

Times on times he divided, & measur’d

Space by space in his ninefold darkness

Unseen, unknown!...

Ever since Northrop Frye published Fearful Symmetry in 1947 the old libel that Blake was an unsystematic thinker has been insupportable. While we do not have to go all the way with that other great Blake scholar S. Foster Damon in saying that he “never fell into contradiction,” the underlying ideas and symbols in the prophecy poems are remarkably consistent. “Abstraction” is the great original sin in his system and Urizen is the poetic embodiment of this sin and its evils. It is the act of setting up a fiction in the place of substantial reality, and then treating the mental artifact as if it were reality itself. From this follows materialism, determinism, natural theology and all the other “mind-forged manacles” that have kept the human race from coming into its unbounded patrimony. This is why Urizen’s deputies in the history of mankind are Locke, Newton and Bacon, the preeminent abstracters in the English language:

Thus the terrible race of Los & Enitharmon gave

Laws & Religions to the sons of Har binding them more

And more to Earth: closing and restraining:

Till a Philosophy of Five Senses was complete

Urizen wept & gave it into the hands of Newton & Locke

Put another way, Urizen is algebra. His power comes from his complete indifference to the world. His laws are set down in rigorous chains; but they are laws which neither flesh nor spirit could keep for “one moment.” Somewhere in Science and Method (1914), Henri Poincaré imagines an algebraic machine which he likens to a great slaughter house where axioms go in like pigs and theorems come out like sausages. Blake would have been delighted with this analogy. Not only does it express the mechanical nature of abstract reason, it also conveys the violence it does to whatever it touches. Moreover, it is suggestive of what Blake took to be the very direct connection between reason and the many bloody atrocities of modern history. Urizen is always out of his wits with sorrow and is usually depicted “in weeping & pain & woe” for he inevitably kills or maims the things he loves. His engines of deceit, the “dark satanic mills” that grind our imaginations into powder, are also the terrible apparatus of war:

And Urizen gave life & sense by his immortal power
To all his Engines of deceit that linked chains might run
Thro ranks of war spontaneous & that hooks & boring screws
Might act according to their forms by innate cruelty
He formed also harsh instruments of sound
To grate the soul into destruction or to inflame with fury
The spirits of life to pervert all the faculties of sense
Into their own destruction if perhaps he might avert
His own despair even at the cost of every thing that breathes

In Blake’s unfinished epic poem The Four Zoas (1796-1807), the “fall into division” of the human mind is provoked by Urizen, after Enitharmon, the spirit of inspiration, is scorned by her consort Los, the spirit of poetry. This brings about a sort of Götterdämmerung played out over nine nights in the “circling nerves” of the human brain. The whole drama culminates in the final destruction of Urizen’s material universe after the long-awaited reconciliation of poetry and inspiration, and the founding of their new Jerusalem. Its fragments are then turned into the bread and wine of the imagination, and the “sweet science”—poetry—“reigns” over the mind.

Frye believed The Four Zoas to be the “greatest abortive masterpiece in the English language.” If we accept his valuation, then the second abortive masterpiece is Wordsworth’s The Recluse, a much larger structure but one which in its surviving state is more disarrayed than Blake’s epic. Wordsworth likened The Recluse to a cathedral, with his two longs poems The Prelude and The Excursion acting as a “portico” or anti-chapel, and all the smaller lyrics connecting to the rest of the edifice like so many “cells, Oratories and sepulchral recesses.” Nothing of the main building was ever finished, but we have some sense of what it should have looked like: a larger and more philosophical version of Wordsworth’s great early poem The Ruined Cottage, and a continuation of The Excursion.

It would be difficult to conceive of anything with less obvious affinity to Blake’s prophetic writings. And yet when Wordsworth wrote to Catherine Clarkson in 1815, he explained his main objective in writing The Recluse in terms that would have reminded Blake of his own “great task.” After a long defense of his other poems, he stated that his whole poetic output, given final form in The Recluse, was intended “to reduce the calculating understanding to its proper level among the human faculties.” Coleridge, who by this time was largely estranged from Wordsworth and his family in the Lake District, puts it more strongly in a letter from the same year:

[The Recluse was meant to effect a] general revolution in the modes of developing & disciplining the human mind by the substitution of Life, and Intelligence… For the philosophy of mechanism which in everything that is most worthy of the human intellect strikes Death.

We have abundant evidence that Wordsworth’s poetry did cause such a revolution in the mind of John Stuart Mill, whose life is a sort of parable of Romanticism, on my reading. Mill’s education, famously, started at the age of three when his father, a historian and Benthamite political economist, began teaching him the rudiments of ancient Greek. This was the first step in a vast program of learning designed to turn the young Mill into the perfect utilitarian. Judged by Mill’s own testimony his father succeeded. By the time he was a teenager writing “propaganda” for the Westminster Review, he had become, to use his own words, a “mere reasoning machine.” However, within a matter of years that machine started to collapse, bringing him to the verge of suicide. What rescued him was the refuge he found in those little “cells” and “sepulchral recesses” of Wordsworth’s Poems, in Two Volumes (1807). “I seemed to draw from a source of inward joy, of sympathetic and imaginative pleasure,” he wrote, adding that he learned from Wordsworth “what would be the perennial sources of happiness.” This is not to say that Mill himself is a Romantic. With respect to poetry, he barely graduated beyond the views of his erstwhile master, Jeremy Bentham, who felt poetry to be nothing but “misrepresentation” and that, the quantity of pleasure being equal, “push-pin is as good as poetry.” But nonetheless, I see his life as recapitulating what at the level of “objective spirit,” to borrow some Hegelian jargon, is the essential drama of Romanticism.

What is true of Wordsworth and Blake is not obviously false of Shelley either. This may be surprising as Shelley lacked their natural aversion to science and technology. Indeed, he had a profound sensitivity to what he called the “poetry in these systems of thought.” But he was not blind to the self-depredations of the rational mind; and just as with Blake, Wordsworth and Coleridge, he saw “our calculations” as having outrun our minds, leaving us in a state close to dementia. Indeed this is the principle argument in The Defence of Poetry, his rejoinder to his friend Thomas Love Peacock’s claim that poetry is no longer needed now that science had come into its maturity. For Shelley this represented a grave error:

The cultivation of those sciences which have enlarged the limits of the empire of man over the external world, has, for want of the poetical faculty, proportionally circumscribed those of the internal world; and man, having enslaved the elements, remains himself a slave.

He goes on to add that poetry is never more wanted than in an age characterised by an “excess of the selfish and calculating principle.” This goes some way to explain the current clamour for a neo-Romantic revival here on Substack, which may yet leak out into real life. Increasingly, the world resembles the sixth night of The Four Zoas, when the “dens of Urizen” are built and the “vortexes” of science set over the heads of a brutalised humanity. However, in our time the calculating principle has even separated off from our animal selfishness and is busying itself in raising up a machine more terrible than the grating wheels of Urizen’s artificial heaven. I have written elsewhere that I am sceptical about the prospects for the new Romanticism, and indeed for any effort to draw “Mind” back from the brink of its seemingly inevitable suicide. However, they — the believers, the new Romantics — have Blake on their side, who prophesied that in the end tiger will lie down with lamb, mind will be reconciled to mind, and Urizen, restored to his original form as the prince of light, will lead his sons and daughters into a new age:

This sickle Urizen took, the scythe his sons embracd

And went forth & began to reap & all his joyful sons

Reapd the wide Universe & bound in Sheaves a wondrous harvest

They took them into the wide barns with loud rejoicings & triumph

Of flute & harp & drum & trumpet horn & clarion

The feast was spread in the bright South & the Regenerate Man

Sat at the feast rejoicing…

Nik Prassas is an omnium-botherum shilling-scavenger.

Illustration of Urizen by William Blake