Neoclassi(~ism and Romanticism

ESTERN literature from about 1650 to about 1850 was domi­nated by two impulses: Neoclassicism until about 1760, Romanticism thereafter. The impulses were international,

although the typical masterpieces of Neoclassicism were written in French and English. The two labels (imposed, for the most part, after the fact by historians of literature) are not adequate to describe either period compre­hensively; many writers and works, novels especially, resist such classifica­tion. The term Neoclassicism and other related terms into which it blends are applied somewhat differently to different parts of Europe. In France, for example, the purest form of Neoclassicism precedes 1700; the form of aggressive secular French rationalism that dominated the eighteenth cen­tury is more properly called the Enlightenment. The entire period from the philosopher Rene Descartes' Discourse on Method (1637) to the outbreak of the French Revolution in 1789 can also be called the Age of Reason, in France and outside it. It is this constellation of roughly allied trends that for the sake of simplicity is called Neoclassicism in the present essay. As for Romanticism, the problem has been almost the opposite: not rivalry between competing labels but a proliferation of meanings for the single label Ro­manticism, some of them so wildly unrelated or contradictory that certain historians of literature a few decades ago came to consider the word use­less. Attempts at definition since then have produced some hard thinking on the subject. The result has been, if not a generally accepted definition, at least a better understanding of the complex phenomena the word is meant to reflect.

The terms Neoclassic and Romantic, despite their limitations, are useful in identifying the basic models various artists conformed to or reacted against, each in his or her different way. The periods described by the two terms are generally considered not only as distinct-with some blurring along their mid-eighteenth-century border-but as antithetical. For that very reason, and also because the contrast between the two manners was pressed belligerently by Romantics rebelling against their forebears, it seems useful to consider both together. Another reason for doing so is that the two terms describe not merely historical epochs in the arts and general culture but also recurrent types that have existed in every epoch. A "ro­mantic" person is impulsive (or irresponsible), idealistic (or impractical), imaginative (or unbalanced), and so on. We do not ordinarily apply the word classic to persons, but it is widely applied to things, not only books and pieces of music but also automobile designs, sweaters, athletic events (the "Fall Classic"), and almost anything whose appeal is stable, perennial, im­mune to the whims of fashion. One of the more interesting questions about

literary history is how closely the historical senses of the two words corre­spond to their popular usages.

One feasible way to examine Neoclassicism and Romanticism in litera­ture is to state as baldly as possible the general formulas commonly used to distinguish them and then modify the formulas. as necessary, so as to re­flect the truth more closely, if still in a general way. Three such formulas have to do with order. emotion, and nature. As one might expect, the cliches describe the third-rate talents better than the greatest ones. but that does not mean the cliches are useless. All wars are fought partly with slo­gans. and slogans tell us something. if not the whole truth.

Formula One: Neoclassicism values thf orderly, social, and general; Romanticism values the exceptional, individual, and particular.

The Neoclassic age did value order, and it had good reason to do so. The early and middle seventeenth century witnessed an apocalyptic out­pouring of hatred. in the form of religious civil wars fought not only be­tween Catholics and Protestants but between factions within Protestantism. The prototype is the great English civil war of the 1640S and 1650S between the Calvinist Puritans, who were both political and religious radicals. and their Anglican-Royalist enemies. In the course of this war King Charles I was beheaded. Theological doctrines and the political philosophies tied up with them were literally fighting words in the hands of partisan pamphlet­eers such as John Milton. The unrest continued in England even after the Restoration of the monarchy in 1660, culminating in the Glorious Revolu­tion of 1688-89. This reorientation of political power. reducing the stature of the king and elevating the parliament and merchants. cost some people, notably Catholics. civil liberties. But for most people it enlarged these liber­ties. and it opened the way to a more settled era. Political strife was far from over. but the relative calm was welcomed with relief. (An analogy exists with the 1950S in the United States, when, after two decades when people stood in breadlines and then slept in muddy foxholes. the normal and tranquil seemed to many people heaven itself.) The English began to think of themselves as "Augustans."living in a time like that of Caesar Augustus. Virgil, and Horace after Augustus ended decades of Roman civil war and made civilized life-and civilized art-possible.

Something similar was happening on the European continent. The Ger­man states had the terrible Thirty Years War (1618-1648) in their recent past; the French. the bitterly divided period of the Fronde (1648-1653). Political order in the English manner was not possible in Germany. still divided into separate states. In France, the new order meant the triumph of the monarchy. especially under the resplendent "Sun King" Louis XIV and his satellite aristocracy. The middle class. ascendant in England after 1688, had to wait a century to assert itself politically in France. When it did so in the revolution of 1789. which within a few years took a more radical turn toward democracy. the nation and all Europe witnessed the end of eighteenth-century versions of order. A new apocalypse had begun.

Civil disorder in the seventeenth century synchronized ironically with the achievement of a new scientific order. the product of an international synthesis of the kind that ever since has been the rule in scientific advance­ment. Developing from the discoveries and theories of such astronomer­

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physicists as ~Galileo (1564-1642). an Italian, and Johannes .1.'SVler (157 1­1fl:~o), a (;erman. the Scientific Revolution culminated in the Englishnn..n Isaac ~_~ton's (1642-1727) forll1ul,llion of the laws of motion and of uni­

-versa! gravitation. describable in terms of a new branch of mathematics. calculus, that Newton himself and the German mathematician Goufried Wilhelm Leibnitz (164()-17lfl) invented at about the same time- i':ewton's astounding achievement, probably the greatest in the history of science. had a historically dramatic timing: his Principia was published in 1687. a year before the Glorious Revolution. It was as though the cosmos itself. as revealed in the orderly minds of men intent on natural truth rather than the chimeras of religious "enthusiasm," were giving humankind a broad hint: put your political and cultural house in order too. The ruling model. for govel-nment, art. and even human nature. became an inorganic one­sometimes a machine. sometimes an architectural edifice, but at any rate a model articulated by reason. understandable by secular good sense, and governed by widely recognizable rules_

The relationship between the art and science of any period is always a chicken-and-egg problem. The "rules" that came to govern literature and literary theory (especially in France. with its Latinate tradition of the abso­lute) may have been conditioned by the new science. or it may be that the great seventeenth-century scientific revolution was conditioned by the humanities, specifically the Renaissance adulation of balanced rationality as manifested in ancient literature. At any rate, the Neoclassicists tried to subsume literature under strict rules. infusing rigorous method into the Renaissance version of classicism. As one might expect. the most insistent of the rules governed the most public of the literary genres, the drama. in the form of the three "unities" of action. time. and place. (The first two of these are inferrable from Aristotle's Poetics; the third. apparently dictated by pure logic. is found nowhere in his works.) A tragedy had to deal with a single action, its plot had to unfold within twelve (or sometimes twenty­four) hours. and it had to be set in a single place. The most effortlessly perfect realizations of these dramatic rules were the tragedies of Racine, such as his Phaedra. Similar rules defined and governed many other genres. A carefully graded scale of diction was elaborated, the loftiest language being reserved for tragedy and the lowest for satire. These rules were to remain in force for a long time. When Victor Hugo's experimental Roman­tic drama H ernani was first staged in 1830, a grand commotion was stirred among Parisian partisans of the old and new by the play's daring opening lines: Hugo had displaced the caesura. or pause. in the twelve-syllable French line from its regular place after the sixth syllable and had actually put in the mouth of a high-born lady the word escalier, "stairs."

In doctrinaire Romantics the rules stirred anger; to most people today they seem merely absurd. To keep things in perspective. however. we should stop to consider how many rules still operate. in behavior and the arts-in the popular arts most of all. People dress differently for funerals and for cookouts. One can scan the shelves of a bookstore for a long time before finding on a dust jacket a picture of a novelist who would dare wear a suit and tie. No one would score Dixieland jazz for string quartet or country music for two grand pianos. Much of science fiction observes con­ventions about how freely scientifIC laws can be fantasized. and very rigid

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rules for murder mysteries were codified by the late Dorothy I.. Sayers. A more fundamental modern misunderstanding, however, arises from the inherent ambiguity of the word rule.!. Like its sihling, laws, the word can mean either prescriptive, legislated rules, like those of baseball, or rules that purport to describe the nature of reality, like the commutative rule of multiplication (3 times 2 equals 2 times 3). To most Neoclassicists the rules were descriptive, reflecting the almost unalterable conditions necessary for literature to be effective. Thus Pope could write that rules are "Nature methodised; / Nature, like liberty, is but restrained / By the same laws which first herself ordained" (Essa.~ on Criticism, 1.89-91). To depart from the rules in this sense would cause literature not to work, as on a vaster scale the solar system would not work if the planet Jupiter went its own headstrong way unbeholden to the rules of gravitation. Pope's analogy with liberty is very significant; he and other Neoclassicists wanted literature to be free to perform its proper role in the scheme of nature, as environmen­talists today want the snail darter to be free to do. (Pope believed, more­over, that there were "nameless graces" beyond the reach of precepts.) But nature is a tricky word; about it, more later.

The Romantic penchant for the exceptional and individual needs less explanation, since it accords with twentieth-century attitudes. The audi­ences for art-"high" art at least-take it for granted that a good artist or work does something not done before, and such originality usually implies novelty of subject matter or artistic method. Here again, however, we can deceive ourselves. Certain stock figures-the alienated hero, for exam­ple-can hardly be called original any more, but the alienated hero seems tolerable by modern tastes in almost limitless near-duplication, as his cousin the Byronic hero was for Romantic audiences. Goethe's Werther, that pro­totype of the misunderstood, eccentric Romantic man of genius and sensi­bility, was adopted as a blood brother by countless thousands of readers, who felt they understood him perfectly.

The fact is that the best Romantic authors, like their modern counter­parts, are not drawn to the eccentric simply for its own sake. To say, in Matthew Arnold's words , "We mortal millions live alone" is verbally a para­dox, but it is easy enough to understand. A similar paradox-that what all humans share is uniqueness-is fundamental to Romantic literature and thought. Significantly, the French Revolutionists, who in so many ways set the stage for the Romantics, were able to accommodate (along with equality) among their three watchwords both liberty and fraternity, two notions with considerable potential for incompatibility. Wordsworth, following up but modifying Rousseau's choice of "Myself alone" as the subject matter of his Confes.!ions, can single himself out in The Prelude as a Romantic epic hero exactly because he believes that somehow he can discern and reveal the essence of humanity at large by looking into himself. That is why he contin­ually moves grammatically between I and we, my and our, me and us. That is also why the American arch-Romantic, Walt Whitman, can launch Song of Myselfwith the statement "I celebrate myself" but add almost immediately, "For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you ." The exception, for many Romantics, proves the rule in the relevant sense of prove: "put to the test." When human nature is thus "proved" by the seeming uniqueness of the individuals who partake in it, we learn something about the norm of

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human nature, as the study of abnormal psychology today throws light on what normal behavior is . In a way, then, the Romantics ptll'su{,d the same objective-the understanding of the universal-that the l'<eodassicists pur­sued. But the Romantics approached this norm by the circuitous paths and side entrances of inference and surprise; the Neoclassicists made frontal assaults on the norm, through explicit generalizations such as Pope utters in almost every couplet.

Romantic individualism marks a real shift from Neoclassicism all the same, and one way to understand the shift is to ask what the alternative to individualism was in each of the two ages. When a person in the early eighteenth century felt threatened as an individual, the threat was some­thing localizable, indeed mechanical. It usually operated through the op­pressive machinery of the state (sometimes of the church). The threat came from bad laws or the perversion of good laws by identifiable authorities, from the king down, and their official agencies. This kind of mechanical threat to freedom is what the American revolutionists and founding fa­thers sensed, and against such political malfunctions their safeguard was another machine: the Constitution. It had "checks," "balances," and, one is tempted to add, gears, pulleys, and flywheels .

The Romantics, a generation or two later than the thinkers who influ­enced .lames Madison, came to fear something more insidious: the spiritu­ally pervasive, often poisoned atmosphere we have come to call "society." Like its American equivalent, the French Revolution had begun as an at­tempt to repair or replace political machinery-by reconvening the long­dormant Estates General, for example, and thus renovating the legislative process. But within a few years this daring but still limited rationalist im­pulse became a total spiritual imperative, exacting allegiance in everything from religion to manners to language to dress . A state had become a soci­ety. And the change was permanent, as Balzac's vision of post-Revolution­ary France makes clear. Ironically, it was Rousseau, himself a patron saint of the Revolution, who first clearly articulated the dangerous pressure ex­erted on the individual by society so understood. Almost all the Romantics shared this vision. Goethe's Werther, a Romantic in Rousseau's footsteps , is totally unconcerned with governments; the officialdom he tries briefly to become part of and learns to loathe is not a mechanism but a noxious moral atmosphere. It would be ludicrous to imagine Byron's misanthropic heroes voting for a bill or opposing a political party. What these protagonists reject in their environment (apart from certain metaphysical aspects of the human condition in itself) is the deadening spiritual miasma that attacks not one's circumstantial freedom but the integrity of one's psyche, a miasma both omnipresent and intangible. The eighteenth-century mode of establishing freedom was to "charter" a group or corporation , guarantee­ing or conceding specified legal rights and immunities. The American Bill of Rights is a charter in this sense. But by the end of the eighteenth century we can also hear voices like that of the speaker in Blake's "London," who almost vomits up the word chartered in disgust at the hypocritical mystifica­tion implicit in the specious order it expresses. What nauseates him is not merely commercial and other institutionalized mechanisms of oppression but a whole moral complex that, besides corporations, includes poverty, prostitution, loveless marriage, disease, war, and-at the heart of all-the

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enslavement of mind by mind. This is no longer political protest but recog­nizably Romantic-and modern-social protest.

Not incidentally, the social protest in "London" is couched in lyric po­etry, uttered by the voice of an individual speaker. The lyric poem is some­times considered the distinctive Romantic genre. Strictly speaking, this is not true; the lyric is not the form the greatest Romantics consciously chose for their most serious utterances. Goethe's most nearly definitive values are expressed in the two parts of the drama Faust. Wordsworth in The Prelude, Byron in Don Juan, and Blake in The Four Zoas, Milton, andJerumlem chose the long verse epic. Victor Hugo (1802-1885) was a great lyricist but is even better known for his novels Notre Dame de Pans and Les Miserables; Melville brought the novel and the epic together in Moby-Dick. But many of these long Romantic works are written in an intensely lyrical vein. Tenny­son's In Memoriam and Whitman's Leaves o/Grass are large edifices, but their components are separable lyrics. The quintessence of Romanticism, if not its extended rationale, is isolable in the lyrics, especially the odes, of Keats, despite his heroic attempts to write great long poems. In the last analysis, then, Romanticism is a lyrical impulse, in keeping with its veneration of the individual.

Conversely, Neoclassicism distrusted idiosyncrasy and ranked the lyric rather low in its elaborate hierarchy of literary genres. The loftiest of the genres were tragedy and epic. Theory outstripped achievement here; com­edy thrived in Restoration England, and France produced Moliere, one of the world's great comic dramatists, but the only really great tragedians were Pierre Corneille (1606-1684) and Racine. The closest approaches to important Neoclassic epic were John Dryden's translation (1697) of Virgil, Pope's of Homer (1715-26), and Voltaire's Henriade (1723), an epic that almost no one reads today. The literature of protest took the form of sat­ire, for which the lyric form and voice would have been considered inap­propriate and inadequate. Significantly, the great Neoclassic satires do not portray distinctive individuals. Characters have traits-Pope's Belinda is charming and vain, Swift's Gulliver is sturdily commonsensical and prag­matic, Voltaire's Candide is resiliently naive and his Pangloss optimistic to the point of lunacy-but they do not have persQtlalities. Although they are not allegorical figures like those in the medieval Everyman, they are none­theless generalizations: Candide's name means "open, ingenuous," Pangloss means "explainer-away of everything" (the subtitle of the book, "The Opti­mist," is itself a generalization), Gulliver puns on gull ("dupe"), Belinda puns on belle, and her misadventures are further generalized by being filtered through the conventions of classical and Miltonic epic. The typical result of such generalizing is a blend of serious purpose with hilarity, matched in Aristophanes but in scarcely anyone else in the earlier history of literature. Stereotyping can be cruel and unjust in life, but a great deal of humor depends on such reductionism, and satire thrives on it. Like other forms of comedy, comic satire distances us from the intimate personal understand­ing and empathy that render almost everything tragic or poignant or senti­mental. It thus clears the way for the savage moral indignation of a Swift and the keen intellectual indignation of a Voltaire.

Formula Two: Neoclassicism values reason; Romanticism values emotion. - ---- -~/" .

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On the face of it, this statement seems so indisputably true as to require no further comment, and it is true. But misunderstandings are possible. No one can read Racine's Phrzedra or Swift's account of the Yahoos without recognizing that the Neoclassicists considered human passion an immense­ly powerful force. Their very compulsion for order was conditioned by an awareness of its dangerous alternatives, as the seismographic vigilance of Victorian chaperones attested not their undervaluation of sex but their hyperalert awareness of its power. In general, Neoclassicists regarded pas­sion as a threat to health, in the polity and in the individual psyche. It was also an obstacle to clear understanding, an unavoidable but undesirable contaminant of reason. !'-jot all people of the time took that view, however. The optimist followers of the third Earl of Shaftesbury (1671-1713), for example, believed that benevolent feelings were an inherent part of hu­mankind at its best, and this philosophy encouraged a sentimentalizing strain in literature that grew stronger as the eighteenth century pro­gressed. (The middle to late eighteenth century is sometimes called the Age of Sensibility; its preoccu pation with tender feelings and the beauties of rustic nature is usually traced to Rousseau, but Shaftesbury was an earlier herald .) I\{oreover, even for the rationalists reason meant different things. For some of them it meant a severe, secularist intellectuality; this was the basic view of Voltaire and other philosophes of the French Enlightenment. For others (Swift, for example), it meant almost the opposite: a pragmatic common sense that rejected fine-spun theorizing as contemptible, im­moral, or even insane. This distrust of pure ratiocination harks back to the Renaissance humanists' disdain for cobweb-spinning medieval scholasti­cism.

Among the Romantics there was unquestionably a cult of-f.eding. Doubtless some of its initiates indulged their emotions for the simplest'of reasons: because feeling strongly felt good. The more one felt, the better; emotion was fine but ecstasy finer still. This deliberate luxuriating in feel­ing, largely for its own sake, is a charge brought against Goethe's Werther, for example, by readers unsympathetic to him. But it will be immediately obvious that the passion Werther feels is very different from what Pope or Racine or Swift means by passion. In Werther passion has less to do with primal appetites (though there is some evidence that he sublimates these drives) than with softness on one hand and sublimity on the other. Com­pared with the Neoclassicists' passion, his is both more domestic and more exotic, a combination typical of Romantic sensibility. In other words, the Romantics did not only give emotion a new level of value but also redefined its special quality.

They also redefined the role of emotion in understanding reality. As the philosopher Alfred North Whitehead observed in Science and the Mod­ern World, models of reality are constructed by a selective process, and what the models ignore clamors to be readmitted. This, he argued, is what hap­pened in the eighteenth century; understandably, people were so awed by the spectacular success of rationalist science that they excluded from their adopted model something vital and human . The Romantics' task, as the more thoughtful among them saw it, was to rehumanize mankind's sense of itself (and of the cosmos too; we shall get to that later). They envisaged a more comprehensive model of reality, less exclusively ruled by reason . But

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they knew their new model would be unsatisfactory if it simply substituted feeling for reason; feeling had to ally itself to what is best ill the mind, not oppose it. The literary result, especially among the great English Roman­tics, was a poetry of intense feeling that was also intellectual in an almost unprecedented degree. They were obsessed with the importance of love, for example, but except in Byron and Shelley one would be hard pressed to find many confessional English Romantic love poems, the kind of thing one could include in a letter to one's sweetheart. (Shakespeat'e, Donne, and other Elizabethan poets are a much more fertile field. The continental Romantics were also more personally amatory, even-in fact, especially­that thinking man's poet, Goethe.) For all his subjectivity. there is scarcely a more intellectual poet than Wordsworth, who wanted not only to reestab­lish the essential role of human feeling but to redeem poetry from its status as genteel adornment and make it an avenue to truth. The poetry of Blake, the most uncompromising opponent of eighteenth-century rationalism, is as intellectual as that of Dante or Milton, perhaps more so.

The centerpiece of the Romantics' endeavor was a new theory of crea­tive understanding based on the faculty of imagination. This theory, stated by Coleridge in the Biographia Literaria (1817) and urged most extrava­gantly by Blake, was essentially a reaction against John Locke (1632-1704), the philosopher who defined the basic model for eighteenth-century theo­ries of perceiving and knowing (and for much modern thought on these matters as well). Locke held that the human mind begins as a tabula rasa, or blank slate. (If he were writing today, one feels sure his metaphor would have been unexposed photographic film.) The blankness is first touched by elementary sense impressions which, subsequently modified and combined in more and more complex overlays (like multi-exposed film), result at last in what we call ideas. The process is essentially passive, positing a reality that exists most fully in material things and agencies outside the mind. What draws human beings together is that their minds respond to things they perceive in common-the same sun, the same trees, and, in well­educated readers, the same great books, poems, and plays. The term com­mon sense assumes a new meaning when we interpret it literally as implying sense impressions we have in common.

It is not hard to see how this philosophical model could generate among Neoclassicists a corresponding theory of literature, namely an updated ver­sion of the ancient theory of art as imitation, especially imitation of the basic, uneccentric experiences that all human beings share. The Neoclassic term for the creative power was wit. The term may surprise us unless we recognize that (I) it goes back to Anglo-Saxon for "reason" or "intelli­gence"-hence the surviving word half-wit; and (2) even today witticisms impress us apparently because of their novelty but basically because behind their cleverness we recognize a familiar truth. ("Punctuality"-not procras­tination, as in the proverb-"is the thief of time," says Oscar Wilde; we are startled, and then we remember how much time we have spent waiting for the habitually late.) Hence Pope's famous formula: "True wit is Nature to advantage dressed, / What oft was thought, but ne'er so well expressed" (Essay 011 en/ii-ism, 11.297-98). Implicit in this view of mind and of art is a noble ideal of human community, united by collectively endorsed realities as sensed by the best minds from antiquity to the present. The dreadful

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alternative was enthrallment by irresponsibly mutant values and quirks 01 feeling, which in turn could prodlKe a spiritual and social malaise not etl­tirely different from what today is called "the inability to cOllllllunicate."

This notion of creativity. symbolized as a mirror, was central to Neoclassic art. The alternative Romantic metaphor, as M. H. Abrams has pointed out, was the lamp, which emilS light rather than receiving and rellecting it. Wit was transformed into Imllgilwtior!, which Coleridge defined on two levels. The artist wields the "secondary imagination," becoming a fairly literal creator by shaping and (Jlllling the welter of raw experiences. which in themselves are a chaos. In order to do so, he Illust bring into play all the powers of the psyche, emotion as well as reason, for the goal is an organic integration. not the analytic dissection for which unimpassioned reason alone would suffice. Moreover. underlying the artist's secondary imagination is the primary imagination, an even more ba,ic faculty that Coleridge identities with all normal human perception. This kind of per­ception, however, is not to be understood as a receptive act; rather, it is the shaping of chaotic matter into forms such as trees and chairs, which in themselves are a welter of meaningless bits of matter. Both forms of crea­tion are echoes of the ultimate act of creation by God, w hose power is manifested less by making matter out of nothing than by giving it living form and order. Coleridge thus achieves a brilliant lour de jiJlu, asserting the sublime dignity of artistic creation by linking it to the divine, but also defending it on the Lockeans' own ground by linking it with familiar, ordi­nary sense experiences such as perfectly "unimaginative" people have hun­dreds of times every minute. Either way, the Coleridgean, Romantic model of creation is a far cry from the undisciplined indulgence of emotion. Wordsworth called imagination "another name for absolute power / And clearest insight, amplitude of mind. / And reason in her most exalted mood" (The Prelude, XIV.190-192).

This notion of imagination, and its conflict with Lockean models, is a basic theme on which the Romantics composed countless variations. Wordsworth sounds it continually, now leaning to a Lockean position that nature influences us (as in "Expostulation and Reply"), now in the opposite direction of mind's independence (as in the "Intimations" ode), now to­ward a compromise according to which we create but half-perceive (as in "Tintern Abbey"). For Blake, his contemporary, there could be no compro­mise. Oothoon, the rape victim in his Visions of the Daughten ofAlbion (1793). spits out her repeated question "With what sense ... ?" in a feminist mani­festo that is simultaneously an attack on Locke. All animals have senses, she insists, but all animals are different, fulfilling themselves as unique species, not reduced to uniformity by the natural world they experience in com­mon. Analogously, all human beings are unique, each of them being the center of his or her created world. To ignore this fact is to acquiesce in a system which defines people in terms of their sense experience (in Oothoon's case, her history of having been "defiled" by rape) and implicitly to acquiesce in a system of social classification that reduces some classes. such as women and Blacks, to slavery. All this becomes more moving when we understand that Oothoon is in some sense a version of Mary Wollstone­craft, the feminist pioneer whose message in her Villdi((lliOIl of the Rights of Woman (1792) strains uneasily, as it probably seemed to Blake, against her

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misplaced eighteenth-century faith in the reforming power of reason. Transformed into Oothoon. she sees rationalism as "Urizl'n" ("your rea­son"), the "mistaken Demon of Heaven." The explosive anger of the poem is more than a tone, then; it is an assertion of the need I()r the whole person, not just her reason but her feelings also, to engage the question of what is true and false, right and wrong. I.etting off steam is not enough either; one must also see. This need explains the poem's form, a debate, which dramatically seems so incongruous with Oothoon's personal crisis. She is the Romantic imagination incarnate, attempting to see life whole if not steadily.

Formula Three : Neoclassicism values , Romanticism values nature.

The second half of this theorem is the commonest of all generalizations on the subject, but before we go any further the reader is invited to fill in the blank for Neoclassicism by supplying the antonym for nature. If one says "indoor scenes," the contrast will make sense and will even be roughly valid~ One will search Pope in vain for the mountaintop ecstasies recorded in Wordsworth's Prelude and search Wordsworth in vain for anything like Belinda's dressing table in Pope's Rape of the Lock. When the mock-epic card game of Pope's poem is playfully recalled in Book I of The Prelude, the card players, significantly, are huddled in a cottage, sheltered precariously from the mountain rain and bitter cold. To most Neoclassicists city life did seem the normal human environment; Samuel Johnson, the last great liter­ary voice before the Romantics, equated London with life and sniffed that people who chose to live in the country deserved their fate. This prefer­ence for the urban seems to many modern readers, even some confirmed city dwellers, to be a perverse aberration, but one can make a good case for the opposite. Through most of history, cities have been the definitive em­blem of the good life, secular and sacred. Socrates envisaged a structured republic, not a pastoral commune. The Lord can be imaged as a shepherd (though even this emblem of nature is half-domesticated), but the basic Christian image of heaven is the City of God, "America the Beautiful" admires "purple mountain majesties," but its highest, futurist vision of America is one wherein "alabaster cities gleam / Undimmed by human tears ."

The word nature is not so simple, though; in fact, it is one of the most complicated in the language. The range of its meanings is illustrated in Shakespeare's King Lear, where the word refers both to the divinely sanc­tioned human order typified in the loving bond that should unite parent and child and also to the Godless brute creation, so that when Edmund says, "Thou, nature, art my goddess," he is uttering the most blood-curd­ling blasphemy. C. S. Lewis, in his Studies in Words, discusses about twenty senses of nature, and even standard collegiate dictionaries record more than a dozen. These are best discriminated by the antonyms for natural, which include artificial (synthetic vitamins), man-made (the Hoover Dam as opposed to a beaver's), pretentiously affected (baby talk by an adult), inte1fered with ("don't stunt the child's natural development"), acquired ("are males breadwinners by nature or by culture?"), legislated (unlike natural laws), wearing clothes (au naturel now usually means "nude"), not pertainillg to matter (social as opposed to natural sciences), supernatural (transcending nature, as

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God does), magic ("does demonic possession have a natural explanation?"), tmined ("did he take lessons or is he just naturally good?"), .lOrially organi:aed ("in the state of nature there was no police force"), and mally others. The most comprehensive antonym, prohably, is alien to what something, or some­one, really iI, a concept especially useful to people never perplexed by the question of wlMt is real.

All these senses are relevant to Neoclassicism and Romanticism, but to test the two impulses against each of them would take far Illore space than we have here. Let us say onl y that some of the meanings su pport our for­mula. some do not, and some are ambiguous. For example, what it means to interfere with someone's true nature, and whether or not it is good to do so, depends on one's premises. One might send children to a progressive school because one believes that their natural, good impulses should be unfettered but send them to a progressive school because one thinks that what nature has done for their minds must be improved on; whether a Neoclassicist or a Romantic would be the more likely to choose such a school is hard to say. If nature means the physical world as illuminated by science, th~S probably valued nature even more than the Romantics did. Romantics might value the beaver's dam Illore than a man-made one, but that man does and should shape his world in a metaphysical sense is a distinctive Romantic idea, as we have seen.

Similar ambiguities cloud the distinctions between Neoclassical and Romantic theories of art and literature. For the Neoclassicists, art was an act of cultivating, but the thing to be cultivated ("to advantage dressed") was nature, understood as the governing reality of the world and life. The complication, as we said earlier, lies in the way one understands reality, Dazzled by the scientifically described cosmic machine, the Neoclassicists naturally (what does the word mean here, by the way?) thought of art as having an inorganic order and regularity. As their respect for the rules implies, they saw the literary genres-epic, tragedy, elegy, pastoral, ode, lyric, satire, and so on-as having intrinsic reality as containers, apart from the content poured into them by individual authors. But as the eighteenth century drew to a close and the nineteenth ran its course, scientific models changed. The focus of investigation shifted from astronomy and physics to chemistry to geology (a blend of physical science and history) to the life sciences, culminating in Charles Darwin's (1809-1882) evolutionary theo­ries. An organic model replaced the mechanical one, a shift conditioned by science or conditioning it (another chicken-egg problem). The American founding fathers had invented a machine of government, but by 1863 Abraham Lincoln in the Gettysburg address was describing the origin of the nation in metaphors of conception and childbirth and diagnosing its mid-life crisis. Similarly, the human individual was imaged differently, not as having achieved a definitive human status in being born (natus) but as having thus embarked on the evolutionary journey called life. Every stage of life had its own reality and integrity, not excepting childhood. Indeed, childhood had its own special importance, as what Wordsworth called the "seed time" of the soul (note the organic metaphor). The Neoclassicists had internalized nature, modeling the human on an inorganic environment. Conversely, the Romantics projected the life they subjectively experienced onto the cosmos, now seen as vital instead of mechanical.

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Two implications of organicism are especially relevant to literature: vital interconnectedness and growth. Both the inorganic models of machines or buildings and the organic models of plants or animals have parts, but in organisms the parts are not discrete and separable as they are in. say. mod­ern component stereo systems. Rather. they are subordinated to a central vital principle. all the parts intimately interdependent, meaningless in isola­tion. and unable to survive alone. (The validity of this distinction, by the way. is being tested today by surgical organ transplants.) "The spirit of poetry," Coleridge wrote, "like all other living powers . .. must embody in order 10 reveal itself; but a living body is of necessity an organized one,­and what is organization. but the connection of parts to a whole, so that each part is at once end and means." This implies, first. that every work of an is unique, governed by its own internal ecology; second, that the distinc­tion between form and subject matter is annihilated, because form grows from the essential idea or inspiration of a work as a plant does from its seed; and third, that the process of creation is inseparable from the prod­uct created. Perhaps the best example of all three of these implications is Wordsworth's Prelude, generating from a literary parentage (not from rules) its unique form of epic, taking the poet's own life as its subject. and incorporating in itself an account of how it was written.

The organicist emphasis on development and growth is even more im­portant for literature. It accounts for the emergence of new forms such as the spiritual autobiography. which is less concerned with circumstances than with the evolution of the author's psyche. The fictional sibling of this form was the "apprenticeship" novel or poem. represented by The Prelude, Goethe's Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship (1795-96), and in our century by James Joyce's Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916). This genre, going today as strong as ever, is still the norm for a writer's first novel, frequently combining the autobiographical and fictional impulses. The view of litera­ture as process is reflected also in Tennyson's In Memoriam, which grows as naturally but unpredictably as a tree, by way of lyrics we are meant to take as spontaneous records of the passing months and years, from its autobio­graphical seed in the death of his friend Hallam. Growth and striving be­came themes also, in innumerable works including Goethe's Faust. The medieval romance theme of the quest was revived and adapted to modern subjects, including metaphysical quests for fulfillment. Even the texture of literature became organic for the Romantics; metaphor and symbol, used as in Keats' odes to blend idea and image inseparably, became more typical than the simile, which says only that something is like something else. Be­tween Pope's "Bright as the sun, her eyes the gazers strike, / And, like the sun, they shine on all alike" (The Rape of the Lock, 11.13-14) and Keats' "Thou stillunravished bride of quietness" ("Ode on a Grecian Urn,"line I) lies an immense difference in ways of perceiving things. The breathtaking emblems of the spirit that Henry David Thoreau finds in nature (Waldel/, 1854) are climactic expressions of this metaphorical vision.

The Romantic love of nature is more than a taste for pretty scenery; it is an attempt 10 humanize nature, to replace man's view of himself as part of a machine, however well and benignly made, with a vision of the world as essent ially an extension of soul. To call the Romantic view optimistic, as lIlany people do. seems therefore a vast understatement. To other histor­

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ians of literature and culture. though , there is a darker side to all this. Qn the simplest level. it is argued, the Romantic celebration of nature is defen­sive, a reflexive countermovement to the ominous rise of urban industriali­zation, analogous to modern environmentalist movements inspired not by security but by a sense of danger. On a spiritual level. the Romantics can be seen as claiming kinship to a humanized nature exactly because they feared that that strange phenomenon, human consciousness, is no more than a meaningless freak in a mindless cosmos. This sense of the utter strangeness of consciousness, the fear that, unconcerned with us or anything else, the stars "blindly run," is quite explicit in Tennyson's In Mem07·iam (Ill.5); com­pared with that frightening vision, the eighteenth-century deists' vision of a clockwork universe, however impersonal its Designer, seems almost cozy. That Wordsworth, the "worshipper" of nature, should even say "nature never did betray / The heart that loved her" suggests to some readers a fear on his part that she may indeed betray him ("Tintern Abbey," 152, 122­23)· Seen in this light, the Byronic hero and his many nineteenth-century progeny are not mere picturesque period types toying with gloom from the security of their spiritual confidence but rather mythic embodiments of a sense of loneliness that dwells at the heart of Romanticism.

Furthermore, it seems inevitable that the Romantics, envisioning them­selves and the world in organic terms of growth, should have seen with equal clarity the ultimate implication: that the terminus of organic process in all living things is death. The middle section of Wordsworth's "Intima­tions" ode traces the human movement toward spiritual as well as physical death; the final intimations-hints, not proofs-of immortality are found not in nature but in the mind's ability to transcend this mere "homely nurse." The implicitness of death in both our ordinary existence and our attempts to escape it is also the central theme of Keats' odes, especially the "Ode to a Nightingale," and it is not coincidental that the poem calls into question the validity of the Romantic imagination in general. Blake saw these negative implications from the beginning of the Romantic age; he may have loved the countryside as much as his brother Romantics, but toward nature as a thing in itself-mechanical or organic, dead or alive­he felt a profound hostility. As a metaphysical entity, it was "satanic," anti­thetical to the human.

Both Neoclassicists and Romantics, then, in their different ways, re­vered nature. The Romantics' reverence for it had both bright and dark sides, however. The same is true of their view of human possibilities. The theme of aspiration in their work coexists tensely with their awareness of the limitations imposed on the human spirit by the world, social organiza­tion, the mortality of the body, and even certain blocking agents in the psyche itself. These dualities help explain one of the paradoxes of twenti­eth-century literature. Modern writers rebelled against Romanticism, scorning its moonlit atmosphere, gossamer texture, and spiritual affirma­tions as unsustaining or irrelevant. On the other hand, they sometimes seem very similar to the Romantics, especially when they turn inward and face up to doubt as the Romantics did in their great crisis lyrics.

A sense of kinship to the Romantics, companionable or hostile, operates also in the many modern readers who find it easier to love or hate the Romantics than to respond in either way to the Neoclassicists. What we owe

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