In the middle of the last century, a scholar attempting to reconcile various theories of Romanticism identified the ideas that were in the air at the beginning of the nineteenth century, and, if you accept this scholar’s fourth or fifth revisions of his ideas, are still in the air today. Morse Peckham, in his series of articles that began with “Toward a Theory of Romanticism,” (PMLA, 1951) and continued through many articles and books, describes how at the beginning of the nineteenth century humankind changed the way it thought and looked at the world and the universe. Peckham is far more eloquent than I, and to paraphrase severely reduces a great writer’s merit, persuasiveness, and argument, so I apologize for doing so. His prose is concise and clear, and his logic and argument are always carefully blueprinted and developed.
Essentially Peckham examines a world, the world of the Enlightenment, disillusioned by the failure of the French Revolution; a world that begins to observe that all of the wonderful discoveries and rules of the Age of Reason seem to fall short. (The Chaos Theorists of our day would provide evidence as to why this happened.) Peckham does not mention them, but Charles Lyell’s Principles of Geology and Robert Chamber’s Vestiges of Creation undermined age-old teachings that even Sir Isaac Newton thought he was verifying. Darwin was waiting in the wings.
Peckham notes that the old values of an unchanging universe, uniform and perfect, no longer matched observations. The metaphor of the Universe as a clock set in motion by the perfect clock maker and allowed to run by universal rules, suddenly seemed sterile and, quite frankly, wrong. We must acknowledge that he also points out that the desire for finding perfection coming out of change kept many Romantic artists from ultimately understanding what they were doing, exploring, and producing, and probably led to the Social Darwinism of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century.
Ultimately, the line of German philosophers from Kant, Richter, Hegel, Shelling, Fichte to Schopenhauer provided a more appropriate world view. Wordsworth and Coleridge and those who followed them provided works that expressed the ideas these Germans explicated. Peckham says the Romantics saw an organic world, diverse and changing. Imperfection was a value because it allowed for change (even though, as we noted, many found that the ideal of reaching perfection was hard to let go). Imagination, which lives in the unconscious, the seat of creativity, replaced reason as the most valued faculty; and the artist, the poet-philosopher revealed more of the Universe than the scientist. Consider how Wordsworth’s inner eye allows the artist to create the world anew, to give it existence through experience and reflection. Existentialism (the world exists because we define it in our experience) thus becomes a Romantic concept and as we will see, so do Impressionism and Surrealism, at least that is Peckham’s contention. In his first essay, Peckham defines “Dynamic and diverse organicism.” He later backed away from this concept, but as we will see, it was in the air and influences us today.
Thinking humankind, Peckham points out, finds itself disillusioned by the collapse of the old. The individual feels lost, swallowed up. To escape this despondency, he enters a phase of supreme egotism. But this too is empty, and the feelings of oppression are replaced by feelings of loneliness and emptiness or corruption and dissipation. Each then faces a “leap of faith,” in which the ego is sacrificed through unselfish love and service. We must recall Carlyle’s dictum, “Find the duty nearest to you and do it.” Only then has the individual found his/her place in the universe. Peckham describes this journey as one from the “not me” to the “me” to the “not me,” and freely identifies it with the journey of Carlyle’s Teufelsdrock from the Everlasting No to the Center of Indifference to the Everlasting Yea.
During the rest of the twentieth century, Peckham refined, moderated, and adulterated these ideas, but when pushed, he always sought to defend them. While he was trying to define historical Romanticism, he fairly depicted ideas that were in the air to be breathed in by any writer, composer, or artist of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. However, whether he viewed himself as a mainstream scholar or simply as a reasonable person, he never identified the shadowy reflection between the qualities he was defining and the esoteric movements beginning in the heart of the Enlightenment and continuing well into the twentieth century nor with the Gnostic tradition in which the individual looks within himself for an understanding of the universe. When Peckham identifies the tree as the metaphor of the Romantics’ universe, did he even think of the Cabala’s Tree of Life, the parts of which closely resemble the Romantic Journey described by Peckham. It seems every road has two sides. Even when we examine the breakdown of reasonable systems, we may not be willing to totally depart from the logical and rational.
Examining the changes in thought of the early 1800s, we begin to understand what Peckham saw. From the Deism of the eighteenth century, many artists seemed to move to a dislike and distrust of organized religion in the nineteenth century. It is not the slate-cleaning dislike exhibited by Rousseau; rather it is a dislike bred from organized religion falling short of its promise or being usurped by selfish individuals who use it as a source of power. Consider the disillusionment of Matthew Arnold with his father’s muscular Christianity or Emerson’s withdrawal from his Unitarian ministry, the belief which itself withdrew from fundamental Protestantism. Only Dostoevsky of the great nineteenth-century writers is comfortable with organized religion (this is not to say that there are not others, only that Dostoevsky is the first to come to mind). Dostoevsky’s great contemporary, Tolstoy, is an interesting mirror image seeking a more personal, fundamental source of faith. Yet, because the audience of the writers, composers, and artists shared a religious background, many of the ideas in the air during the nineteenth century are encapsulated in a Christian setting, but not the Christianity of the Medieval morality plays or that flaunted by the Chansons de geste, or Courtly Romances, although if we follow the other Gnostic and esoteric track, we will find the heretical ideas of the Grail Romances returning. For many artists the ethics of Christianity are fine; they have trouble with the metaphysics and the ontology. David Strauss, Emmanual Feuerbach and Friedrich Nietzsche provided the escape from the quandary. Strauss’ Life of Christ examined the history of Jesus and the essential mythological nature of the story. Feuerbach pointed out that man created God rather than the other way about. Nietzsche told the world that “God was dead, because we no longer needed him to understand things.”
To be continued
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