2015-08-21
1542
Historical Background. Romanticism, which was the leading literary movement in England for more than half a century, was caused by great social and economic changes.
The industrial Revolution, which had begun in the middle of the 18th century, was no sudden change from home manufacturing to large-scale factory production. Enclosing common land had begun as early as the 16th century, but it was only in the second half of the 18th century that the process became rapid and spread all over Britain. The peasants, completely deprived of their lands, were forced to go to work in factories. Mines and factories had changed the face of the country. Where flowing rivers and green meadows lay, towns sprang up, because water-power was the best available force to drive the new machines. But mechanization did not improve the life of the common people. It only meant a new form of slavery. Now the economic and social ills were clearly seen by the people: the diseases of industrial towns, the misery of child labour, the crowds of underpaid workers, the tyranny of the factory bell that had turned human beings into parts of a machine and made them desperate at the loss of personal freedom. The suffering of the new class, the proletariat, led to the first strikes, and workers took to destroying machines. This was a movement directed against industrial slavery. Workers, who called themselves Luddites after a certain Ned Ludd who in a fit of fury broke two textile frames, naively believed that machines were the chief cause of their sufferings. These actions led to severe repression by the authorities.
The Great French Revolution was accepted as progressive by many in Britain, but when it involved all sections of the French population, it gave a shock to the ruling classes. Under the influence of the Revolution the Irish peasants plotted a rebellion against English landlordism. It broke out in 1798 but was cruelly drowned in blood. The British government took the lead in the counter-revolutionary wars against France.
Now the belief of progressive-minded people in the ideal nature of the bourgeois system fell to pieces. As a result, a new humanist movement, that of Romanticism, sprang up towards the close of the 18th century.
Romanticism, Its Passive and Its Revolutionary Trend. Romanticism was a movement against the progress of bourgeois civilization, which had driven whole sections of the population to poverty and enslaved their personal freedom. It was an effort to do away with the injustice that comes into being within the capitalist formation of society, that is to say, the exploitation of man by man. But no one as yet knew what was to be done to achieve equality and freedom.
New themes for writing arose: no longer were writers attracted to the domestic epic which had been the chief subject of the novel. Protesting against the bourgeois system that crushed human individuality to insignificance, they longed to depict strong individuals, endowed with grand, tempestuous and even demonic passions. The romanticists made emotion, and not reason, the chief force of their works. This emotion found its expression chiefly in poetry.
The problem of what was to become of man stirred the hearts of all men of letters.
Some poets were seized with panic and an irresistible desire to get away from the present. They wished to call back "the good old days", the time long before the mines and factories came, when people worked on "England's green and pleasant land". These poets are called the Passive Romanticists. They spoke for the English farmers and Scottish peasants who were ruined by the Industrial Revolution. They idealized the patriarchal way of life during the Middle Ages, a period that seemed to them harmonious and peaceful Their motto was: "Close to Nature and from Nature to God", because they believed that religion put man at peace with the world.
The poets William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and Robert Southey belonged to this group. They were also called the Lake Poets after the Lake District in the north-west of England where they lived. The Lake District attracted the poets because industry had not yet invaded this part of the country.
Another group of poets distinguished themselves for the revolutionary spirit which they brought into poetry. The Revolutionary Romanticists tried to look ahead and see the future. They spoke up for the new working class and believed in their right to active struggle for liberty. They kept an eye on all political events and sympathized with the national liberation movement in all oppressed countries. The poets believed that the people of the world would gain freedom, and imagined that the states of the future would be somewhat like the republics of ancient Greece and Rome. Nevertheless, great pessimism is felt in the works of all these poets, because they did not understand that the struggle for freedom was led at that time by the class of the bourgeoisie and therefor could not give freedom to the workers.
The outstanding Revolutionary Romanticists were George Gordon Byron and Percy Bysshe Shelly.
