‘Romanticism’ – and Byron (review)

This is a curious but compelling book. At first glance, it seems a bit oddly put together. We have a long introductory chapter attacking the idea of Romanticism and then thirteen unconnected chapters on people that Byron knew or, in the case of Blake, should have known. But the final effect is of coherence. Cochran has certain bees in his bonnet, a refreshingly direct way of writing and a very considerable knowledge both of Byron and of his world. As we read we are repeatedly drawn into certain tracks, habits of mind and habits of attention that enable us to see something in a certain light very powerfully and then agree or disagree with the author as to his evaluation of them.

The weakest chapter, though lively and fluent, is the first one. Cochran is good at local argument but less good at sustaining an idea stage by stage. He sees something in a certain way and then uses all of his very extensive powers of mind and allusion, fed by wide reading, in order to assert its truth as powerfully as he can. Byron said that poetry assails but does not argue. This chapter works like that. Cochran would have it that ‘Romanticism’, that fraught, over-determined and often contradictory term was the invention of academics. Yet those figures identified by Cochran as progenitors of ‘Romanticism’ in the nineteenth century – the Schlegels, Hippolyte Taine, Matthew Arnold and Edmund Gosse – were not academics. That Cochran is as prone to generalise in the forbidden way as anyone else is indicated by the following claims: ‘“The Romantics” were hopeless at writing plays because they couldn’t depict one character through the eyes of another’ and ‘the phenomenon called “romanticism” is/was interior and anti-social’. He should try telling that to Walter Scott on whom he writes extremely well.

Cochran assumes that if a word does not have a single definition or essence then it must be useless but this is manifestly not so. A word can designate a recognisable bundle of characteristics some of them contradictory. ‘Peter Cochran’ is one such and his argument does have its uses. Tim Blanning (author of the widely reviewed The Romantic Revolution: A History [2011]), who has reiterated a single view of Romanticism powerfully and, in my view, erroneously, should be made to read this sentence every day at breakfast: ‘the word “Romanticism” is a foolish, damaging, duplicitous thing, creating a lazy attitude to the study of early nineteenth-century literature’. Nevertheless, the argument from which this useful proposition emerges is, in my view, incorrect.

The other chapters are uneven, but all are interesting and most of them fascinating. They often begin with something that Cochran has noticed, or a new perspective in which he places familiar things. Thus he contrasts Robert Charles Dallas with Skinner Matthews and notes how Byron modifies his manner in dealing with each of them. This is part, argues Cochran, of Byron’s mobilité, but it also part of his creative genius, which is assimilative rather than assertive. Byron listens, notices, attends, observes, tries to enter into different perspectives and find a voice for them. It is possible, for instance, as Cochran argues, that the metrical form and absence of orientalist bric-a-brac in the later tales was prompted by Lord Holland’s casual critique of these things. Cochran notices many detailed allusions to Coleridge’s works that I had not spotted (e.g. the ‘curse of forgiveness’ in Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage comes from Remorse and the ‘little speck’ in The Vision of Judgment from ‘The Ancient Mariner’). He rubbishes Isaac Nathan’s music to the Hebrew Melodies and its alleged relation to Hebrew liturgical music but gives some good arguments for it. He is less convincing, I think, on Byron’s interest in music, which is more extensive than he allows (Edleston did more than sing popular songs after all) and more pervasive in his poetic thinking (did he not call Heaven and Earth...