The Dilemma of Romanticism

REVIEWS lliE DILEMMA OF ROMANTICISM" For a while the debate on Romanticism seemed to be over. The cosmopolitan authority of Rene Wellek's scholarship displaced the pluralistic skepticism of A.O. Lovejoy's intellectual historicism,' providing the student of comparative literature with seemingly irrefutable evidence that the tenn could be used, at least for heuristic purposes, to indicate a period in European literary history which really did exist. A full quarter century has now passed since Wellek's epoch-making essay first appeared, and much important work has intervened, providing at first confident expectations that a history of Romanticism from a European perspective might indeed be achieved. To a large extent, if not exclusively1 this work has been done at North American universities on an axis extending from Johns Hopkins to Toronto, constituting what might be called a new school of Romanticism . The leading contributors to such expectations are easy to name: Meyer Abrams, Earl Wassennan, Northrop Frye. And the most provocative theoretical proponents of this Romanticism have gathered their forces at Yale, associated in part with Wellek's Department of Comparative Literature: Harold Bloom, Geoffrey Hartman, Paul de Man, 1. Hillis Miller. The sense of a centre is further enhanced by recent collections of critical essays on the subject of Romanticism, edited respectively by Harold Bloom and by David Thorburn and Geoffrey Hartman.2 But appearances can deceive, even in academic criticism. There is more uncertainty today concerning the validity of the term Romanticism than Lovejoy ever intended with his discriminations. A dialectical conflict between generations of criticism has intensified a process of radical deconstruction. The critics of Romanticism who first established a sense of a new school - each of them working in relative solitude, without any such scholastic intentions - departed conspicuously from Wellek's comparatist model by defining Romanticism through the intensive vision of poets, in terms of mental structures of the imagination, symbols or archetypes, which do not lend themselves readily to international exchange. Wellek himself had emphasized the importance of such poetic vision in his own definitions of Romanticism, but only the arguments of Frye on Blake, Abrams on Wordsworth or Coleridge, and Wasserman on Shelley or Keats made fully apparent how unsuitable such vision can be for an international history of literature. But the problem of Romanticism for literary history goes even deeper, as the Yale critics have come to assert, each in very particular, often personal ways. What they share, however, often in direct opposition to the·Hans Eichner, editor,'Romantic' and Its Cognates: The European History of a Word. Toronto: University of Toronto Press 1972. Pp vi, 536. $12.50 THE DILEMMA OF ROMANTICISM 67 work of their own mentors (as their comments on Frye, Abrams, and Wasserman make clear) is the conviction that Romanticism is itself a movement in the history of literature which works against all continuity of cultural and even experiential time. Romantic poetry orients itself to transcendence; or at least it tries to do so. In this regard it is a paradox that the triumph of historicism in literary studies during the nineteenth century, in company with the emergence of a strictly national consciousness and academic departments of literature, was in large measure the product of Romanticism as it made its way across Europe and ultimately to North America as well. The student of comparative literature may thus feel some perplexity about the validity ofRomanticism as a period concept at aU, especially since that concept itself is an outgrowth of Romanticism. It is thus auspicious to attempt a careful and thorough reassessment of the term romantic as it developed historically and came to be applied to literature. This is provided by the collection of essays edited by Hans Eichner, which includes a comprehensive survey of aU the major European literatures. Eichner's volume purposefully ignores developments in the criticism of Romanticism during the past two decades and returns to the method of lexicography advocated and, in large part, demonstrated by Wellek in the first half of his essay. The yield of insight must thus be measured by quantity. Very little is said about the history of the term which contradicts the thrust ofWellek's argument or requires significant revision...