EDITED BY SOPHIE LANIEL-MUSITELLI AND CÉLINE SABIRON
LANIEL-MUSITELLI AND SABIRON (EDS) ROMANTICISM AND TIME
Romanticism and Time
Literary Temporalities
OBP
EDITED BY SOPHIE LANIEL-MUSITELLI AND CÉLINE SABIRON
Romanticism and Time
This brilliantly conceived, exhilarating, and wide-ranging collection of essays is essential
reading for all those interested in taking the long view of the historical, literary, and
philosophical times of British Romanticism.
Pamela Clemitt, Queen Mary, University of London
Romanticism and Time is a remarkable affirmation of border-crossings and international
exchanges in many ways. This major collection of essays represents the work of eminent
scholars from France, Germany, Switzerland, Czechoslovakia, the United Kingdom, and the
United States, as they in turn represent the Romanticisms that emerged not only from the
“four nations” of England, Scotland, Wales, and Ireland but also from Continental Europe
and America. With their commitment to diversity, to change, and to exchange, and because
of their awareness of the romanticism of periodization itself, the authors in this volume
produce, as Wordsworth might say, a “timely utterance.”
Kevis Goodman, University of California, Berkeley
This volume considers Romantic poetry as embedded in and reflecting on the march
of time, regarding it not merely as a reaction to the course of events between the late-
eighteenth and mid-nineteenth centuries, but also as a form of creative engagement with
history in the making. Revising current thinking about periodisation, these essays survey
the Romantic canon’s evolution over time and approach Romanticism as a phenomenon
unfolding across national borders.
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Romanticism and Time
Literary Temporalities
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Sophie Laniel-Musitelli and Céline Sabiron
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Contents
Acknowledgements
vii
Introduction: The Times of Romanticism
Sophie Laniel-Musitelli and Céline Sabiron
ix
Section I: Restoration, Revival, and Revolution across
Romantic Europe
1
1. ‘Future Restoration’
Paul Hamilton
3
2. ‘Anthropocene Temporalities and British Romantic
Poetry’
Evan Gottlieb
25
3. ‘Beethoven: Revolutionary Transformations’
Gregory Dart
49
Section II: Romantic Conceptions of Time
75
4. ‘The Temporality of the Soul: Immanent Conceptions of
Time in Wordsworth and Byron’
Ralf Haekel
77
5. ‘“Footing slow across a silent plain”: Time and Walking
in Keatsian Poetics’
Oriane Monthéard
97
Section III: The Poetics of Time
119
6.
‘Contracting Time: John Clare’s The Shepherd’s Calendar’
Lily Dessau
121
7. ‘Book-Time in Charles Lamb and Washington Irving’
Matthew Redmond
145
8. ‘“a disciple of Albertus Magnus [...] in the eighteenth
century”:Anachronism and Anachrony inFrankenstein’
Anne Rouhette
163
vi Romanticism and Time
Section IV: Persistence and Afterlives
181
9. ‘Heaps of Time in Beckett and Shelley’
Laura Quinney
183
10. ‘“Thy Wreck a Glory”: Venice, Subjectivity, and
Temporality in Byron and Shelley and the Post-Romantic
Imagination’
Mark Sandy
205
Section V: Romanticism and Periodisation
225
‘Romanticism and Periodisation: A Roundtable’
David Du, Nicholas Halmi, Laurent Folliot, Martin Procházka, and
Fiona Staord
227
List of Contributors
273
List of Figures
279
Index
281
Acknowledgements
This book originates from an international conference on ‘Romanticism
and Time’ held at the Université de Lille in November 2018 and organised
jointly by the French Society for the Study of British Romanticism (SERA)
and the Universités de Lille and Lorraine. Our warm thanks go to the
SERA, who set this project in motion, and to the scientic committee of
the Romanticism and Time conference, Caroline Bertonèche, Mathieu
Duplay, Thomas Dutoit, Jean-Marie Fournier, and Marc Porée, for their
guidance. We are grateful to our institutions, the Université de Lille and
the Université de Lorraine, and, in particular, to our research centres
CÉCILLE
1
and IDEA
2
, who supported the project from the start. We
are particularly thankful to Marie-France Pilarski and Bruno Legrand
(Université de Lille) for their invaluable help throughout the project
and to Isabelle Gaudy-Campbell (Université de Lorraine) for welcoming
this project, as well as for her trust and support.
We are also grateful to Nicholas Roe and Ann Winnicombe for
granting us permission to reprint a revised version of section II from
Mark Sandy’s article in the Romanticism online issue on ‘Light’ (22. 3.
2016: https://doi.org/10.3366/rom.2016.0287). We would also like to
thank Sarah Wootton for permission to reprint revised parts of Mark
Sandy’s chapter from Venice and the Cultural Imagination (Abingdon and
New York: Pickering & Chatto, 2012) as well as Kostas Boyiopoulos and
Michael Shallcross for permission to reprint revised sections of Mark
Sandy’s essay in Aphoristic Modernity: 1880 to the Present (Leiden and
Boston: Brill, 2020). The research for Martin Procházka’s contribution
was supported by the European Regional Development Fund Project
1 Univ. Lille, ULR 4074 – CECILLE – Centre d’Études en Civilisations, Langues et
Lettres Étrangères, F-59000 Lille, France.
2 Univ. Lorraine, UR 2338 – IDEA – Interdisciplinarité Dans les Études Anglophones,
F-54000 Nancy, France.
viii Romanticism and Time
‘Creativity and Adaptability as Conditions of the Success of Europe in an
Interrelated World’ (No. CZ.02.1.01/0.0/0.0/16_019/ 0000734). We are
deeply thankful to the Institut Universitaire de France who supported
the Romanticism and Time conference and this publication.
Finally, we would like to express our sincerest thanks and gratitude
to our contributors for committing their considerable talent, energy, and
enthusiasm to this project.
Introduction:
The Times of Romanticism
Sophie Laniel-Musitelli
1
and Céline Sabiron
2
‘Eternity is in love with the productions of time’.
3
In this volume, we have decided to take Blake’s aphorism as an
invitation to see Romantic writing as a ‘production of time’; to look for
the work of time within Romantic literature. One of the aims of this
collection is to understand Romanticism as the product of its own time,
in its ability to reect history and in the emergence of its specic poetics
through time. Blake’s words can also be read as a meditation on poetics
unfolding ‘in time’: on poetic form as the product of rhyme and rhythm.
Yet, if we attend to the reversibility that characterises Blake’s ‘Proverbs
of Hell’, this aphorism also oers a vision of Romanticism as an active
‘production of time’, not only registering the passing of time but also
shaping conceptions of time and making history. Romantic writing then
also appears as an art of time, creating new representations of temporal
phenomena and generating new modes of time-consciousness. The
contributions in this collection, which includes a selection of revised
papers from the ‘Romanticism and Time’ conference as well as specially
1 Université de Lille and Institut Universitaire de France. Univ. Lille, ULR 4074—
CECILLE—Centre d’Études en Civilisations Langues et Lettres Etrangères, F-59000
Lille, France and Institut Universitaire de France (IUF).
2 Université de Lorraine. Univ. Lorraine, UR 2338—IDEA—Interdisciplinarité Dans
les Études Anglophones, F-54000 Nancy.
3 William Blake, ‘Proverbs of Hell’, l. 10, in The Complete Poetry & Prose of William Blake,
ed. by David Erdman (New York: Random House, 1988), p. 36.
© Sophie Laniel-Musitelli and Céline Sabiron, CC BY 4.0 https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0232.12
x Romanticism and Time
commissioned essays,
4
are thus held together by the common ambition
to study Romantic writing as ‘authentically temporal’:
5
as a process in
time that displays a form of agency over time.
This collection explores the ways in which British Romantic literature
creates its own sense of time, from the end of the eighteenth century to
the mid-nineteenth century, from William Blake, William Wordsworth,
John Keats, Lord Byron, and Percy Shelley, to John Clare and Samuel
Rogers, raising the question of the evolution of the Romantic canon
over time. The presence of poets such as Clare and Rogers, who eluded
academia’s eld of vision for so long, exposes our own temporal
locatedness as academics. It gestures towards the writers who still elude
that eld of vision and towards those who are surreptitiously drifting
out of it. The essays are bound by a common approach to the creative
relations Romanticism entertains with the notion of time, with an
emphasis on poetry.
6
It aims at oering a reection on the role of poetic
writing as a mode of perception of time. The Romantics explored the
possibilities opened up by poetry as a form of time, as experiences of
time were reected but also took shape within poetic forms.
Nevertheless, the scope of this collection is not limited to the realm
of poetry. The anities between temporality and narrative, but also
between temporality and the order of reason in essay-writing manifest
themselves in the multiple temporalities of prose.
7
This is why this
volume also looks into the temporalities of Romantic novels and essays,
from Mary Shelley to Charles Lamb and William Hazlitt. Furthermore,
some of our contributors were particularly sensitive to the Romantics’
eager exploration of other forms of artistic manipulation of time, and
4 The conference was held in November 2018 and organised jointly by the French
Society for the Study of British Romanticism and by the Universités de Lille and
Lorraine, with the support of the Institut Universitaire de France.
5 Paul De Man, Blindness and Insight: Essays in the Rhetoric of Contemporary Criticism,
2nd ed. (London: Routledge, 1983), p. 206.
6 For a wide-ranging, and yet very detailed, introduction to Romantic poetry analysed
in its larger social, cultural, geographical and political contexts, see Fiona Staord,
Reading Romantic Poetry (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012), https://onlinelibrary.
wiley.com/doi/book/10.1002/9781118228104
7 See for instance Paul Ricœur, Temps et récit, I. L’intrigue et le récit historique (Paris:
Seuil, 1983) and Jacques Rancière, Les mots de l’histoire: Essai de poétique du savoir
(Paris: Seuil, 1992).
xi
Introduction: The Times of Romanticism
to their tropism towards music in particular, hence the place given to
Beethoven’s Fidelio in Section I.
Few have attempted to consider the various temporalities of
Romanticism as a form of cross-fertilisation between nations, with
the notable exception of Martin Procházka, Nicholas Halmi and Paul
Hamilton,
8
also contributors to this volume. We share their ambition
to study the Romantic poetics of history as a European phenomenon.
As ‘a literature that represents its own uid conditions of becoming’,
9
Romanticism is also a process in time, constructed by various generations
of artists and critics in a complex dynamic of transience and persistence.
With the aim of confronting British Romanticism with some of its later
European counterparts, some chapters explore the dialogues between
Byron and Nietzsche, and between Shelley and Beckett. Challenging
the linearity of deterministic conceptions of inuence, Romantic texts
experiment with creative modes of intertextuality, inventing their
origins and imagining their legacies. This volume thus oers a vision of
Romanticism as a moment of ‘obstinate questionings’ of the temporalities
of literature,
10
as its uncanny persistence into later literary movements
generates turbulence in the course of traditional literary history.
In its various instantiations in time and across borders, Romanticism
‘denes itself through a process of self-dissemination which leaves each
moment of its instantiation characteristically fragmentary’,
11
raising
epistemological questions for the eld of literary studies and its reliance
on periodisation. The proceedings of the roundtable ‘Romanticism and
Periodisation’, edited by David Du, interrogate our critical practices,
8 See in particular Martin Procházka’s 2005 comparative studies of European,
American and Czech Romanticism in Romantismus a romantismy (Romanticism
and Romanticisms), ed. by Martin Procházka and Zdeněk Hrbata (Nakladatel:
Karolinum, 2005); Nicholas Halmi’s The Genealogy of the Romantic Symbol
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), https://doi.org/10.1093/acprof:
oso/9780199212415.001.0001, in which he pointed at the interrelation between
German philosophically-minded Romanticists and English poets like Wordsworth
or Shelley in their wish to re-enchant the world; and Paul Hamilton, Realpoetik:
European Romanticism and Literary Politics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013),
https://doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199686179.001.0001
9 Christopher Miller, The Invention of Evening: Perception and Time in Romantic Poetry
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), p. 3, https://doi.org/10.1017/
cbo9780511720031
10 Percy Shelley, ‘Alastor’, l. 26, in Shelley’s Poetry and Prose, ed. by Donald Reiman and
Neil Fraistat, 2nd ed. (New York: Norton, 2002), p. 74.
11 Hamilton, Realpoetik, p. 7.
xii Romanticism and Time
and fascination for Romantic presences, persistence, and legacies.
12
In
its ability to bend the course of literary chronologies, Romanticism thus
appears as essentially untimely.
This volume looks for Romanticism as a movement out of time:
generated by and precipitating the acceleration of history. The close
readings here trace the ways in which Romantic ‘time disseminates
itself’
13
into widely varying scales, paces, and planes, in an age of
political, industrial, and epistemological revolutions. Such a ‘vertiginous
temporality’
14
manifests itself in scalar discrepancies, from the span
of a lifetime to unfathomable geological and astronomical sequences,
especially in the passage from the timeless and tabular representation
of a Linnean nature to the more arrow-like conception of time in pre-
evolutionist theories. The emergence of Romanticism corresponds
to the moment when geological time and human time collide, ‘as the
Anthropocene simultaneously forces human and planetary timescales
together and undoes our longstanding belief in the priority of the
former over the latter’ (Evan Gottlieb). The experience of time takes
varying paces: from the time of agricultural labour embedded in the
cycles of nature to the capitalist time of feverish production and constant
consumption. The epistemology of time is fragmented into competing
paradigms and elds of knowledge, between the poles of Kantian time
as an a priori intuition and Newtonian time, with its undierentiated
ow and homogenous course.
The Romantic poetics of time reects that dissemination. It bears
witness to ‘a disconnection and out-of-jointness’ at work within
12 Several recent publications oer a vision of ‘Romanticism as a mode rather than
a genre of writing’ (The Legacies of Romanticism: Literature, Culture, Aesthetics, ed.
by Carmen Casaliggi and Paul March-Russell (New York: Routledge, 2012), p. 1,
https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203110096), thus partly freeing Romanticism from
periodisation. See also Michael O’Neill, The All-Sustaining Air: Romantic Legacies and
Renewals in British, American, and Irish Poetry since 1900 (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2007), https://doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199299287.001.0001, Romantic
Presences in the Twentieth Century, ed. by Mark Sandy (Burlington: Ashgate, 2012),
https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315606958, and Romantic Echoes in the Victorian Era,
ed. by Andrew Radford and Mark Sandy (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008), https://doi.
org/10.4324/9781315243917
13 Georges Didi-Huberman, Devant le temps: Histoire de l’art et anachronisme des images
(Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 2000), p. 43, our translation.
14 Joel Faak, ed., Marking Time: Romanticism and Evolution (Toronto and Bualo:
University of Toronto Press, 2017), p. 14, https://doi.org/10.3138/9781442699595
xiii
Introduction: The Times of Romanticism
chronological time.
15
Contained in Shelley’s ‘We look before and
after, /And pine for what is not—’
16
is that sense of an elusive present
caught in the constant tension between past and future, between the
poles of anamnesis and prophecy. Romantic temporality thus lies
in the ‘co-existence of distinct timelines’ (Anne Rouhette) upsetting
what Rancière calls ‘the self-coincidence of time’.
17
It emerges within
the discrepancy between a ‘transformational instant’ (Gregory Dart)
and the longue durée of history, within a ‘multiplicity of temporal lines,
[with] several senses of time experienced at the “same” time’.
18
This
multilinear experience takes shape in the tension between the sense of
time rooted in ‘the manifold quirks and variations of lived experience’
(Matthew Redmond) and the otherness of non-subjective temporalities.
Romantic texts allow for embodied experiences of time to emerge:
time eshes itself out within the ‘body as a temporal medium’ (Oriane
Monthéard). Poetic time encounters biological time: the opaque, often
undecipherable temporality at work within the human body, its vital
rhythms and its course towards ageing and death.
Blake’s meditation, ‘Eternity is in love with the productions of
time’, challenges the mutual exclusion of the transient and the timeless.
Romantic literature has sometimes been seen as cultivating the belief
‘that poetry by its nature can transcend the conicts and transiences
of this time and that place’,
19
trying to avoid the wounds of time’s
arrow in a tropism towards timelessness. Yet, in the words of Giorgio
Agamben, ‘Those who are truly contemporary, who truly belong to
their time, are those who neither perfectly coincide with it nor adjust
themselves to its demands. [...] But precisely because of this condition,
precisely through this disconnection and this anachronism, they are
more capable than others of perceiving and grasping their own time’.
20
Romantic writers endeavour to bring about a new distribution of the
15 Giorgio Agamben, ‘What is the Contemporary?’, in What is an Apparatus? and other
Essays, ed. and trans. by David Kishik and Stefan Pedatella (Stanford: Stanford
University Press, 2009), pp. 39–54 (p. 40), https://doi.org/10.1515/9781503600041-004
16 Percy Shelley, ‘To a Sky-Lark’, lines 86–87, in Poetry and Prose, p. 306.
17 Jacques Rancière, ‘Le concept d’anachronisme et la vérité de l’historien’, L’Inactuel, 6
(Fall 1996), 53–68 (p. 67), our translation.
18 Ibid.
19 Jerome McGann, The Romantic Ideology: A Critical Investigation (Chicago and
London: The University of Chicago Press, 1983), p. 69.
20 Agamben, ‘What is the Contemporary?’, p. 40.
xiv Romanticism and Time
transient and the timeless by conferring on poetry a temporality that
sees beyond current events and that bears the responsibility of political
change. This collection considers the Romantic poetics of time less as a
drive towards atemporal transcendence than as the record of a ‘falling
into time’ (Ralf Haekel).
21
It has chosen to look at Romanticism in time:
embedded in time and reecting on history. The close readings in this
volume explore less the historiographical ambitions than the poetics
of history in Romantic writing, ‘envisioning anew the role that poetic
forms and stylistic techniques play […] in the way Romantic literature
engages with history’.
22
Our aim is not to see Romantic poems as merely
reactive to the course of events, but as creative engagements with
history in the making. Romanticism was immersed in its own time, yet
not passively so, inventing ‘new modes of historical consciousness’ and
making history.
23
Rather than investigating the Romantic poetics of history as a
memorial art, this volume focuses on what ‘permits the private space
of the self entrance into those monumental moments recorded by, and
for, history’ (Mark Sandy). In the same way, the Romantic ambition to
attend to the ‘shadows which futurity casts upon the present’
24
is seen
in this book as part of an endeavour to change the course of events. In
the words of Ian Balfour, ‘Prophecy is a call and a claim much more than
it is a prediction, a call oriented toward a present that is not present’.
25
In the politics of Romanticism, prophecy is part of the will to shape the
present: to liberate the ecacy of poetry and set the forces of history in
motion.
That ability to envision futurity takes place in a moment of latency, as
it awakens new political aspirations. According to Richard Eldridge, that
moment, in between the promise of advent and indenite deferral, is the
temporality of political freedom: ‘This sense of simultaneous direction
toward and deferral of the achievement of freedom accounts for the
21 No page number is indicated for references to the chapters in this volume.
22 Emily Rohrbach, Modernity’s Mist: British Romanticism and the Poetics of Anticipation
(New York: Fordham University Press, 2016), p. 15, https://doi.org/10.2307/j.
ctt175x2fs
23 Ernst Behler, German Romantic Literary Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1993), p. 4, https://doi.org/10.1017/cbo9780511519437
24 Percy Shelley, ‘A Defence of Poetry’, in Poetry and Prose, p. 535.
25 Ian Balfour, The Rhetoric of Romantic Prophecy (Stanford: Stanford University Press,
2002), p. 18.
xv
Introduction: The Times of Romanticism
predominance in Romantic writing of remembrance and anticipation
rather than of present statement of the features of things’,
26
revealing
the political import of the Romantic poetics of time. The Romantics’
conception of futurity involves their commitment to envision the future
in a dark present. In the words of Paul Hamilton, Romantic writing
reveals ‘the interwoven quality of the future in past and present’.
The Romantic poetics of time thus transforms time from the inside,
upsetting chronologies, introducing loops and detours, shaking the
foundations of a ‘temporal economy […] of the sort implied in the
concept of linear time’ (Laura Quinney). Taking an active part in the
‘essential dishomogeneity’ of its times,
27
Romanticism refracts rather
than merely reects time. The Romantic poetics of time also redistributes
origins and aftermaths when posterity becomes a driving force and a
process of origination: ‘For the Romantics, […] posterity is not so much
what comes after poetry as its necessary prerequisite—the judgement of
future generations becomes the necessary condition of the act of writing
itself’.
28
Romantic poetics thus open up various lines of time, disjointing
and combining temporal layers within the play of literary language:
‘dividing and interpolating time, [the poet] is capable of transforming
it and putting it in relation with other times’.
29
In order to attend to time
in the making in Romantic texts, this volume looks into their ability to
interweave various lines of time.
Romanticism is sometimes seen as dismissive of a clockwork
conception of time that divides the continuum of temporal experience
into a series of discrete units. Romantic poetics consists less in the
rejection of quantiable and linear time than in the subversion of its
homogeneity based on the return of identical units. The Romantic
poetics of time introduces dierence within patterns of repetition, when
poetic rhythm creates other forms of periodicity. Hence the swirling
movement guiding the breath of the Spirit of the Hour in Prometheus
Unbound: ‘Thou breathe into the many-folded Shell,/Loosening its
26 Richard Eldridge, The Persistence of Romanticism, Essays in Philosophy and Literature
(Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001), p. 21.
27 Agamben, ‘What is the Contemporary?’, p. 52.
28 Andrew Bennett, Romantic Poets and the Culture of Posterity (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1999), p. 4, https://doi.org/10.1017/cbo9780511484100
29 Agamben, ‘What is the Contemporary?’, p. 53.
xvi Romanticism and Time
mighty music’.
30
The breath of the Spirit of the Hour turns into a melody
within the spiral structure of the conch. In Shelley’s spiral vision of
time, poetry emerges at the exact same time as the advent of a swerve or
swirl, as the emergence of an open circular movement within the shell.
That spiral motion manifests itself as a strain between reminiscence and
prophecy:
PROMETHEUS […]
[Turning to the Spirit of the Hour.]
For thee, fair Spirit, one toil remains. Ione,
Give her that curved shell, which Proteus old
Made Asia’s nuptial boon, breathing within it
A voice to be accomplished, and which thou
Didst hide in grass under the hollow rock.
31
The shell, given long ago by ‘Proteus old’, is a convoluted form bearing
within itself the depths of time. The trochaic inversions at the onsets
of the segments ‘Give her that curved shell’ and ‘breathing within it’
seem to invert the stress pattern for a spell of time before the iambic
rhythm reasserts itself. They introduce a form of reversibility within the
ow, oering a synthesis of linear and circular lines of time, a movement
embodied by the motif of the spiral. As a remembrance and a promise
intricately weaved into the rhythms of poetry, the voice contained
within the shell points to the Romantic art of subverting the course
of representation. It tells of the way Romantic poetics complicates the
temporality of mimesis, in which the model is supposed to come before
the work. In Shelley’s temporal spiral, poetry is mimetic of the future it
envisions.
Poetry comes rst, and intimates the advent of what it longs for: the
anticipation contained within a distant memory. In the Romantic poetics
of intimation, the future is contained within the past and the past will
blossom in the future. Romantic poetics reveals its apprehension of
30 Shelley, ‘Prometheus Unbound’, Act III, scene iii, lines 80–81, in Poetry and Prose, p.
261.
31 Ibid.
xvii
Introduction: The Times of Romanticism
the delicate fabric of time in transformative moments. Indeed, these
involutes
32
can be traced in the political concepts of revolution and
restoration which, in the words of Paul Hamilton, oer ‘this future-
rich understanding of the past in the present’. The collision of several
temporalities ‘compose rhythms whose tempi are out of joint’.
33
It
consists in an act of composition in the musical sense. The Romantic
poetics of time introduces a swerve in the structure of time, generating
ripples and lapses. It derives its specic rhythm from the constant
disjointing and interweaving of several temporal threads. The Romantic
art of incipience, when the shell is about to ‘loos[en] its mighty music’,
reawakens the force of the potential. It gestures toward that inchoate
moment when the pen is about to touch the page. That moment of
temporisation is an act of composition that interweaves actuality and
potentiality. At that instant, textual potentialities—all the poems that
might have been—dissolve before the poem that emerges. And yet, they
somehow survive the moment of writing, vibrating in the background
of the actual poem, generating alternative strata of time, embracing all
its pasts, presents and futures.
Section I, ‘Restoration, Revival, and Revolution across Romantic
Europe’, studies the way Romanticism developed at dierent moments
and within dierent cultures in Europe. Paul Hamilton’s chapter, ‘Future
Restoration’, lays the stress on the crucial importance of ‘restoration’,
rather than ‘revolution’ (and its French historical representation, which
has already been the subject of many a critical study), for English
Romantics, in particular Blake and Wordsworth. They resorted to it
creatively in their quest for a continuum between past, present and
future, and through their grasp of both temporality and literature across
Europe. The Romantics’ skill at unearthing a political imagery matching
their perception of time is further developed in Evan Gottlieb’s essay
on ‘Anthropocene Temporalities and British Romantic Poetry’. In
the Romantic era, this sense of a human temporal continuity—partly
based on the impression of a permanent imperishable natural world on
which humanity relies and as conveyed by Wordsworth’s poetry—is yet
32
This is a reference to De Quincey’s ‘involutes’ in Suspiria de Profundis, in Lindop,
Grevel, ed., Thomas De Quincey: Confessions of an English-Opium Eater and Other
Writings (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), p. 104.
33 Didi-Huberman, Devant le temps, p. 39, our translation.
xviii Romanticism and Time
questioned by the rapid technological and industrial transformations
and the geopolitical disturbances induced by the Napoleonic Wars.
Wordsworth’s younger British contemporaries, especially Keats, P.B.
Shelley and Byron, thus came up with alternative temporalities, four of
which are traced back in the chapter. The Romantics’ self-reexivity on
their own historicity is eventually examined through a close-up on lyrical
art and the way classical music, and particularly Beethoven’s operatic
paean to freedom, Fidelio, interacts with and has an impact on the history
of the period. Gregory Dart’s piece reects on the various versions of
the opera as ‘instances of a shifting political-historical consciousness’
and as a string of distinct but related “spots of time”, an allegory of
history. He shows how music is gradually subjected to the pressures of
real and historical times, and how timing becomes the political virtue of
the future. The rst section, dealing with the way poetry and the arts,
especially music, are progressively shaped by historical events in the
Romantic period, leads to a more subjective and intimate approach to
time.
Section II focuses on the ‘Romantic Conceptions of Time’ as it is felt
and experienced. Taking his cue from Walter Benjamin’s philosophy of
time as developed in his Theses on the Philosophy of History, Ralf Haekel
investigates the temporality of the soul in William Wordsworth’s ‘Ode.
Intimations of Immortality’ and Lord Byron’s Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage.
To him they both convey a much bleaker vision and even disillusioned
picture of the nature of time and history than is usually agreed upon
by critics like Helen Vendler, Michael O’Neill, James Chandler, and
Jerome McGann, to quote but a few recent examples. Longing for an
eternity that seems forever gone, the poets yet depict time as eeting
and transient. This perception of time coincides with the shift from an
essentially eternal conception to a temporal and thereby nite concept
of human nature. Byron’s epic, mirroring the hero’s walking in a
disenchanted world echoes Keats’s perception of time as discussed by
Oriane Monthéard in the following chapter. Taking a walking tour of
Scotland in the summer of 1818, the poet got the chance to harmoniously
connect with temporality. Wishing to break away from the constraints of
the ordinary measurement of time, as he recorded in his letters, Keats
ended up experiencing a ctionalised temporality through picturesque
tourism when he visited the landscape with a literary gaze, thus
xix
Introduction: The Times of Romanticism
following the tracks of other poets. Past and present merged through
the poet’s physical act of walking on a ground pervaded with memories,
while he also felt much more anchored in his own time. This redenition
of a more personal take on time needs studying and theorising; hence
the following section dedicated to the poetics of time.
Section III, entitled ‘The Poetics of Time’, considers the work of time
and the uneasy tension, in Lily Dessau’s chapter, between natural-
and man-made time (the mechanical church clock), simultaneously
tracked across the cyclical recurring of seasons and the daily schedule
of a farm labourer busy with various agricultural tasks in John Clare’s
extended work The Shepherd’s Calendar (1827). Dessau contrasts these
temporal variations and progressions with what happens in the ‘May’
poem in which, she says, ‘Clare keeps us perpetually trapped in the
present, denying access to the narrated past of custom and tradition’.
Through a close-reading analysis of the poem, she underlines the
cuts in the published version when compared to the manuscript, thus
metactionally questioning the role played by both editors and patrons
in these compressions and contractions. The acceleration of time,
as also enabled by the development of print and the accompanying
industrialisation, is further discussed by Matthew Henry Redmond in
his chapter on two landmark essayists, the British Charles Lamb and the
American Washington Irving, presented as combative antiquarians in a
world of machines and breakneck speed. They both advocate reading
as a way to exercise one’s critical judgment and to escape from their
age’s most pressing and irrational controversies. If promoting reading
and antiquarianism may at rst sound anachronistic in the Romantic
era, so do Victor’s alchemical pursuits in Frankenstein. In her chapter
dedicated to Mary Shelley’s novel, Anne Rouhette shows how the book
brings forward at least two approaches to time: historical and mythical.
Yet, instead of contrasting them, it tries to superimpose or even merge
them through the precarious, uneasy cohabitation of the linear and
the cyclical, thereby demonstrating that chronological disorder and
anachronism can be used to poetical ends. This creative handling of
time in literature and its eect on both the diegesis and the reader raises
questions pertaining to the eld of reception studies.
Section IV, ‘Persistence and Afterlives’ turns to Romantic legacies
and the way Romantics, like Shelley and his last poem ‘The Triumph of
xx Romanticism and Time
Life’, have paradoxically served as a source of inspiration for
twentieth-
century authors like Beckett, as demonstrated by Laura Quinney in her
comparative study of the two writers. Her chapter, entitled ‘Heaps of
Time in Beckett and Shelley’, undoes the dierence between speed—
as seemingly conceptualised in Shelley’s poem that stages the Chariot
of Life hurtling forward on its destructive course and guring the
overwhelming momentum of time—and vacancy, as embodied by
Beckett’s characters who feel entrapped in a time that never runs out, but
perpetually runs on and in slow motion, up to the point when it becomes
static, as if they had become prisoners of a purgatorial temporality. Mark
Sandy eventually spirits the readers of this volume away to Venice, a
place presented as both real, through its distinctive architecture and
key historical sites, all rooted in time, but also mythical, thanks to
the juxtaposition of several timelines and the creative intertwining of
personal memories. This fanciful and yet genuine Italian cityscape is
central to the poetics of atemporality in Byron and Shelley. It seems to
be a welcome and just allegory of the way Romantic writing creates its
own sense of time, in its own terms. Like the city that is a perpetually
charmed spot and broken spell for Byron and Shelley, the movement
appears as essentially untimely through its ability to bend the course of
time and to persist beyond the so-called Romantic period.
Co-written by David Du, Nicholas Halmi, Fiona Staord,
Martin Procházka, and Laurent Folliot, the closing section, entitled
‘Romanticism and Periodisation: A Roundtable’, explores the problem of
literary periodisation in Romanticism. It is a vast, and yet little-studied
issue in the literary eld that becomes the specic focus of this forum,
whose formal dierence results from its dynamic interplay of voices
and standpoints. It oers a qualied overview of the various attempts at
dening the period by both contemporaries and later generations, and
stresses the main characteristics of Romanticism in terms of keywords,
timelines and perspectives, whose dierences are induced by a new
historical awareness at the turn of the eighteenth century. While it
reopens the methodological issue of periodisation in literary history,
it also broadens it by subtly highlighting cross-border dierences, be
they regional or transnational, with a reference to European or even
Transatlantic Romanticism. This concluding debate, edited by David
Du, questions the eectiveness of the concept of the ‘Romantic period’
xxi
Introduction: The Times of Romanticism
to approach literary history, and its aptness to reect the multiple
distinctions and nuances within Romantic literature.
Works Cited
Agamben, Giorgio, ‘What is the Contemporary?’, in What is an Apparatus?
and other Essays, ed. and trans. by David Kishik and Stefan Pedatella
(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009), pp. 39–54, https://doi.
org/10.1515/9781503600041-004
Balfour, Ian, The Rhetoric of Romantic Prophecy (Stanford: Stanford University
Press, 2002), https://doi.org/10.7202/009264ar
Behler, Ernst, German Romantic Literary Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1993), https://doi.org/10.1017/cbo9780511519437
Bennett, Andrew, Romantic Poets and the Culture of Posterity (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1999), https://doi.org/10.1017/
CBO9780511484100
Casaliggi, Carmen and Paul March-Russell, eds, The Legacies of Romanticism:
Literature, Culture, Aesthetics (New York and London: Routledge, 2013),
https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203110096
Chandler, James, ‘Wordsworth’s Great Ode: Romanticism and the Progress of
Poetry’, in The Cambridge Companion to British Romantic Poetry, ed. by James
Chandler and Maureen N. McLane (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2008), pp. 136–54, https://doi.org/10.1017/ccol9780521862356.008
De Man, Paul, Blindness and Insight: Essays in the Rhetoric of Contemporary Criticism,
2nd ed. (London: Routledge, 1983), https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203713716
Didi-Huberman, Georges, Devant le temps: Histoire de l’art et anachronisme des
images (Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 2000).
Eldridge, Richard, The Persistence of Romanticism, Essays in Philosophy and
Literature (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001).
Erdman, David, ed., The Complete Poetry & Prose of William Blake (New York:
Random House, 1988).
Faflak, Joel, ed., Marking Time: Romanticism and Evolution (Toronto and
Buffalo: University of Toronto Press, 2017), https://doi.org/10.1007/
s40656-018-0237-7
Halmi, Nicholas, The Genealogy of the Romantic Symbol (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2007), https://doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199212415.001.0001
Hamilton, Paul, Realpoetik: European Romanticism and Literary Politics
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), https://doi.org/10.1093/acprof:
oso/9780199686179.001.0001
xxii Romanticism and Time
Lindop, Grevel, ed., Thomas De Quincey: Confessions of an English-Opium Eater and
Other Writings (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996).
McGann, Jerome, The Romantic Ideology: A Critical Investigation (Chicago and
London: The University of Chicago Press, 1983).
Miller, Christopher, The Invention of Evening: Perception and Time in Romantic Poetry
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), https://doi.org/10.1017/
CBO9780511720031
O’Neill, Michael, The All-Sustaining Air: Romantic Legacies and Renewals in British,
American, and Irish Poetry since 1900 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012),
https://doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199299287.001.0001
——, Romanticism and the Self-Conscious Poem (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997),
https://doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198122852.001.0001
Procházka, Martin and Zdeněk Hrbata, eds, Romantismus a romantismy:Pojmy,
proudy, kontexty (Romanticism and Romanticisms) (Nakladatel: Karolinum,
2005).
Rancière, Jacques, ‘Le concept d’anachronisme et la vérité de l’historien’,
L’Inactuel, 6 (Fall 1996), 53–68.
——, Les mots de l’histoire: Essai de poétique du savoir (Paris: Seuil, 1992).
Reiman, Donald and Neil Fraistat, ed., Shelley’s Poetry and Prose, 2nd ed. (New
York: Norton, 2002).
Ricœur, Paul, Temps et récit, I. L’intrigue et le récit historique (Paris: Seuil, 1983).
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Anticipation (New York: Fordham University Press, 2016), https://doi.
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Ashgate, 2012), https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315606958
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(Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008), https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315243917
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https://doi.org/10.1002/9781118228104
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(Spring 1978), 65–85.
SECTION I
RESTORATION, REVIVAL, AND
REVOLUTION ACROSS ROMANTIC
EUROPE
1. Future Restoration
Paul Hamilton
For the Romantics, the idea of Restoration could signify
simultaneously historical events and moments of consciousness.
Historically, Restoration during the Romantic period followed the French
Revolution and the ensuing Napoleonic imperium. What was restored
at the Congress of Vienna and its successors was the sovereignty of
European nations, although of course what was to count as a nation was
in the gift of the ruling powers—especially England, Austria, Russia
and Prussia. Literature written at the same time, though, questioned and
experimented with what could count as a restorative experience. This
paper examines current images of a restored Europe running counter to the
ocial political outcome of the Congresses. These drew on the Romantic
interest in the way in which future and past could be interrelated in a
creative way, so that the restoration of lost values could be as radically
revisionary as any model of revolution, with conicting opportunities
for imagining new forms of integration or confusion.
Time restored, le temps retrouvé, is a topic that lends itself both to
philosophical and to historical treatments: we can either consider it as
raising questions about time, and what time is; or it can make us wonder
about dierences in the way time was experienced at a particular period
of history. Proust does both. Romanticism, constantly investigating
interiority alongside our consciousness of things, was preoccupied
with the extent to which one could be mapped on to the other, the
inner on to the outer, the ow of consciousness on to history. Romantic
writers and thinkers tried to nd common structures in what Reinhart
Kosellek neatly calls ‘history in the singular and histories in the plural’.
1
1 Reinhart Koselleck, Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time (Cambridge, MA:
MIT Press, 1985), p. 94.
© Paul Hamilton, CC BY 4.0 https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0232.01
4 Romanticism and Time
I am dened by my history, you by yours; but our dierent trajectories
inhabit a common temporal dimension sharing a single chronology.
Time appeared to Kant to be the framework in which we experienced
ourselves, the ‘form of inner sense’. Nevertheless, the vocabulary of this
durée, as Bergson called it, or inner time, was often spatial. Past events
appeared to inhabit greater or lesser distances from us. Sometimes
time passed quickly, sometimes slowly, as the future approached us
at dierent rates of acceleration. Time could drag, or y. The future
could be imminent or far away. And, less obviously, the future could be
visible in the past, located embryonically, a secret code to be deciphered.
Returning the compliment, the future could full the past, or just repeat
it. For Wordsworth, famously, to discover the presence of the past in the
present meant that the future was always potentially restorative. The
inherence of the future in the past meant that to think of the past now
could deliver an experience
Felt in the blood, and felt along the heart;
And passing even into my purer mind
With tranquil restoration…
2
Such restoration, though, also meant that only now could we understand
the true signicance of the past—that is what it pregured, what it is
doing to me now, its sometime future. This interaction of past and future
dening history could be fraught; we might, like The Prelude’s narrator,
overinvest in the future with damaging consequences. But the remedy
is still the restoration of Books 11 and 12: ‘Imagination: How impaired
and restored’.
3
The imagining of the future in the Romantic period in Europe lays
claim to two epochal moments. The rst cataclysm was the French
Revolution, no surprises there; but, secondly, came the Congress of
Vienna and its successors which together composed the European
Restoration. The Revolution immediately appears more conducive
to the exercise of imagination. The Revolutionary calendar of the
2 William Wordsworth, ‘Lines written a few miles above Tintern Abbey’, lines 29–31,
in William Wordsworth (The Oxford Authors), ed. by Stephen Gill (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1984), p. 132.
3 Ibid., p. 559.
5
1. Future Restoration
Jacobins even re-invented time – or how we record it. Its re-naming
of the months captured the durée of the seasons: Germinal, Floréal,
Prairial, Messidor, Fructidor and so on. Restoration is a less obvious
candidate as the bearer of imagination. But the shuttling back and forth
in time required to understand it is more akin to the displacements
and over-determinations of internal events that so gripped Romantic
introspection. The immanent dynamic of memory and desire suggested
to Romantics that the future was not to be apprehended independently
of its prophetic character; ‘the mind overowed the intellect’, as Bergson
put it.
4
The future was to be found inscribed in the past and realised in
the present. Marx’s genuine revolution, as he tells us in The Eighteenth
Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, would produce ‘a new language […]
without reference to the old’.
5
Failing that, however, all conjurations
of the future are inherently literary, restorative of old meanings in
new forms, metaphorical, deplorably so for a revolutionary purist but
encouragingly so for radicals who, falling short of Marx’s standards, still
considered themselves revolutionary, and for whom, as Percy Shelley
put it, poets were ‘mirrors of the gigantic shadows which futurity
casts upon the present’. Or in Friedrich Schlegel’s even more involved
formulation, the historian is ‘a prophet looking backwards’, and so a
bardic gure who destabilises the self-suciency of any time-period,
making each—past, present and future—dependent on the other.
6
The
present makes us reinterpret the past, but in a way so as to produce the
prophecy of what might happen, the future, which at present is hard
to see. Kierkegaard attacks Romanticism for envisaging a repetition of
the past in which nothing is restored: one lives the same life but as if
born again, as if for the rst time. Comparably, Nietzsche, in his idea
of the eternal return of the same, pointedly criticises Romanticism by
4 Henri Bergson, Creative Evolution, trans. by Arthur Mitchell (London: Macmillan,
1964).
5 Karl Marx, ‘The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte’, in Surveys from Exile:
Political Writings, ed. by David Fernbach, trans. by Ben Fowkes (Harmondsworth:
Penguin, 1973), p. 147.
6 Percy Shelley, ‘A Defence of Poetry’, in Shelley’s Poetry and Prose, ed. by Donald
H. Reiman and Sharon B. Powers (New York and London: Norton, 1977), p. 508;
Friedrich Schlegel, ‘Athenaeum Fragment’, no. 80, in Philosophical Fragments, trans.
by Peter Firchow (Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 1991), p. 27.
6 Romanticism and Time
accepting a fate unproductive of change. Romanticism becomes what it
is, ‘a self-realizing ideal’.
7
To what degree was Europe reinvented after Napoleon? The
Congress of Vienna, you will remember, followed the rst conclusive
defeat of Napoleon and was convened in 1814. When Napoleon’s defeat
turned out to be premature, and Napoleon enjoyed his hundred days
after escaping Elba in March 1815, the Congress was suspended in
some embarrassment, to be re-convened after Waterloo. Subsequently,
a ‘congress system’ was set up. The Congress of Vienna was based on
earlier dealings at the Treaties of Chaumont and Paris, but was also
coloured by a host of less well-known assemblies whose goings-on were
far from transparent to all concerned with the later Congress. The most
notorious of those precursors was the Treaty of Kallisch of February
1813 in which Russia and Prussia agreed on a carve-up: Russia could
have Poland, and Prussia Saxony. This deal would have been anathema
to other main players like Britain and Austria, who, respectively, feared
too much territorial inuence going to the unpredictable and ambitious
Czar Alexander I’s Russia and to Frederick William III’s Prussia.
All such agreements simultaneously take up positions towards
the Ottoman Empire, and therefore towards the possibility of a free
Greece, which might create a buer-zone between Turkey, Russia and
the more Western countries. Also at issue are the political principles
on which the new Europe would be constructed, and these could range
from the ‘Legitimacy’ formulated by Talleyrand, trying to do his best
for a defeated France, and the strange political Christianity concocted
by Alexander and the Baroness von Krüdener, consecrated in the
Holy Alliance, momentarily echoing earlier religious imaginings by
Chateaubriand and Novalis of an ultra-generous political communion
and anticipating those to come, like that of Lamennais. The dominant
idea, though, apart from the ‘Legitimacy’ or conservative theodicy
into which the Holy Alliance would collapse by the 1820 Congress
of Troppau, was the ‘balance of power’ pragmatically espoused by
Britain’s Lord Castlereagh, which perhaps most consistently guided the
collective actions of the Congress. The Congress, then, had a complicated
pre-history but also an extended afterlife in a ‘system’ of congresses
7 Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power, trans. by Walter Kaufmann and R.J.
Hollingdale (New York: Random House, 1968), sec. 253, p. 147.
7
1. Future Restoration
held subsequent to Vienna at Aix-La-Chapelle, Troppau, Laibach
(Ljubljana), Verona and St Petersburg. The ‘balance of power’, as soon
as one begins to describe it, becomes a thing of innite intricacy and
convoluted selshness. Castlereagh famously opposed the slave trade at
the Congress, and got a sub-committee to devote its time to it. While he
no doubt felt the pressure of the ethical arguments of British abolitionists
(Thomas Clarkson, William Wilberforce and many others), negotiations
actually come down to an economic argument: Britain has already done
so well out of the slave trade it should pay strategic compensation in
cash or colonies to Spain, Portugal and the Dutch; countries supposed
to be understandably reluctant to give up the slave trade until they
had gained economic parity with British prots from past slavery. The
liberal political imagination here balances powers by book-keeping in
putative human lives. Like Gogol’s dead souls, the reparation costs are a
tracking in imaginary slaves. Contemporary critiques of Castlereagh’s
language, his ‘set trash or phrase’, as Byron called it, responds to this
kind of moral incoherence with poetic performances whose contrasting
articulacy and clarity must automatically gain oppositional political
force.
8
My point is that the usual conclusion—that if this was the Restoration
of Europe after Napoleon’s imperium, you can see how Restoration got a
bad name in liberal circles—needs to be supplemented by the recognition
that Restoration implies an imaginative opportunity for political change
more comparable with Revolution than we usually acknowledge.
Other writers grabbed that opportunity, and their indignation with the
Congress was that it spoiled the chance of a better future. In fact, the idea
of a proper Restoration, as opposed to a reactionary settlement, is often
embedded in the idea of Revolution. Maybe restoration can be revolution
by other means, and maybe it should be? Schlegel thought that the
French Revolution was a ‘tendency’ (Tendenz) rather than an achieved
event. Even the Tory Thomas De Quincey called it a ‘legacy’ answering
to some basic human discontent. Mary Wollstonecraft believed that
8 See Nikolai Gogol, Dead Souls, trans. by David Magarshack (Harmondsworth:
Penguin, 1961); Don Juan, ‘Dedication’, in Lord Byron, The Complete Poetical Works,
ed. by Jerome J. McGann (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986), vol. V, p. 7.
8 Romanticism and Time
revolution might better begin at home, in the home in fact.
9
Certainly
when one looks more closely at British polemics written against the
Congress of Vienna one nds that what is primarily deplored is a failure
to use the political imagination. What we do not nd are arguments
more familiar recently, miming Marx’s polemic in The German Ideology
(four years after Dead Souls, in 1846): that to introduce imagination
into the political sphere is bound to sublimate or disguise the fact that
any imaginary resolutions are simply ways of giving up on nding real
political solutions. Literary resolutions are substituted for ones in the
actual, historical world of practical politics. These large, redemptive
schemes, which M.H. Abrams thought described the Romantic project
of imagination in Natural Supernaturalism, were the dening target for
new historicist criticism.
Historicism can cut both ways, and throw up all sorts of alternatives
to binaries we often use to navigate cultural history. So, the French
Revolution can scarcely be understood if we only contrast it to the
preceding ancien régime. The Girondin liberal period was followed by
the extraordinary Jacobin freedoms, then a contradictory safeguarding
of the Revolution by the Committees of Public Safety, the Terror,
makeshift stages like the Directory and eventually Napoleonic
dictatorship. Far from being discredited as an idea, though, revolution
continued to be reconceived and reconstructed, sometimes still as
revolution, sometimes as a strategic revisionism, and sometimes maybe
as Restoration. Metternich’s Congress of Vienna certainly could appear
as a reactionary counter to all this creative re-shaping of Revolution.
Ruled by Legitimacy, it used the hereditary principle to guarantee
authority, and so settled into a defence of Church and State and King.
But the strange Holy Alliance, initiated by Czar Alexander at Aix-La-
Chapelle and strategically espoused by Austria and Prussia, once more
echoes Romantic ideas of a recovery of Christendom in order to be able
to think a more eective European franchise, the sort of hope we nd
guiding Burke, Chateaubriand, Novalis and Friedrich Schlegel. That it
declines into the Troppau Protocol, even more in hock to Legitimacy
than its competitor, the Quadruple Alliance, cannot erase this initial,
embarrassing continuum with all sorts of counter-images of a restored
9 Schlegel, ‘Athenaeum Fragment’, no. 216, in Philosophical Fragments, trans. by Peter
Firchow, p. 46.
9
1. Future Restoration
Europe, prevalent at the time and surprisingly prominent once one
begins to search for them. I would like to look at how Restoration might
gure in a British Romantic-period sensibility extremely interested in
the future shape of a new Europe.
Byron, again in the ‘Dedication’ to Don Juan, saw that ‘Europe’ could
be ‘sung’ in various ways: according to the hymn sheet oered by the
‘congress’ or ‘conspiracy’ of Vienna, or to another tune. The point to
be taken now is less the one of who was on which side, and more the
need to realise that after the French Revolution the rules of politics were
transvalued. Although itself a reactionary settlement, the ‘Restoration’
following the nal defeat of Napoleon could not hide the fact that it,
too, was in the business of unearthing a political imaginary. Writers,
even conservative writers like Novalis and Chateaubriand, had earlier
bought into this political extension of imaginative authority. With
their political visions, we can aptly compare Burke’s ‘glory of Europe’
in the end obscured, as he sees it, by the bad modernity of the French
Revolution. The ‘anarchy’ Shelley attributes to the reactionary violence
of post-Napoleonic England is similarly opposed to a contrastingly
coherent internationale, ‘a volcano heard afar’ (like the Indonesian
one of four years before which had darkened European skies in the
summer of 1816, ‘the year without a summer’).
10
The boundaries of the
political collaboration Shelley wanted his poetry to contribute to were
always primarily European rather than British, historically as well as
geographically, as evidenced in the history he gives to poetry in his
Defence of it. As long as they remain unestablished, these images of
international unity in need of restoration survive poetically—Burkean
chivalry, Novalis’s Christianity or Europe, Chateaubriand’s genius of
Christianity, or the wandering spirit of inspired liberty in Blake, Shelley
and Anna Barbauld. This is poetry in Shelley’s ‘unrestricted’ sense,
according to which, in A Defence of Poetry, the poetry of Rome could lie
in its ‘institutions’ as much as in Virgil, Horace or Ovid. Unrestricted
poetry is like German Poesie, the idea of a general, improving creativity
inspiring ideas of human progress, an idea going back explicitly to
Diotima’s speech in Plato’s Symposium, celebrating the act of making
10 Shelley, ‘The Mask of Anarchy’, l. 363, Poetry and Prose, p. 310.
10 Romanticism and Time
visible a core creativity in all human activity if we only have the poetic
wit to isolate and prize its edifying impulse.
11
Romantic futures are optimistic, I am suggesting, the more explicitly
they are engaged in producing a counter-image to those proered by the
Napoleonic empire and then by the post-Napoleonic settlement of the
Congress of Vienna. Germaine de Staël, both in the Europe described
by her journey in exile from Napoleon’s France, and in her writings,
is the most combative. She addressed the culture of other countries
as unied entities she could then challenge to produce credentials for
joining the Europe of nations she, unlike Burke, envisaged as a reality
recoverable in modern form. Her book on Germany recorded that
country’s successful reply to her direct questioning on her visit. Her
intervention in the controversy over Romanticism in Italy through her
article on translation in Biblioteca Italiana of 1816 provoked the young
Giacomo Leopardi, who would become Italy’s second poet after Dante,
to clarify his ideas about how to recover a new cultural poise in Italy,
one owing nothing to imitations of Byron and others.
12
In the same
year, Felicia Hemans published her poem The Restoration of the Works
of Art to Italy, calling on Italy to ‘rouse once more the daring soul of
song’, but in conclusion generalising the value of this as ‘a heightened
consciousness’, not envisaging a new Italian identity but an aesthetic
delight, as Diego Saglia says, generated by ‘a fervid transnational
imagination’, contrasting with ‘the futility of imperial self-renovations’.
13
But maybe the heightened consciousness of the past empowers Italians
to recover or restore Italy in an alternative political form?
11 Such creative foundationalism is very dierent from the historicist school, which,
from Hegel and Friedrich Karl von Savigny onwards, opposed Kantian and Jacobin
rationalism but was eventually accused of the same degree of constriction by
Nietzsche—who nevertheless had no time for Romantic irony.
12 See Anna Luisa Staël Holstein, ‘Sulla maniera e l’utilità dell traduzioni’, in Giacomo
Leopardi, Discorso di un Italiano intorno alla poesia romantica, ed. by Rosita Copioli
(Milano: Biblioteca Univerzale Rizzoli, 1997), pp. 391–99.
13 ‘The Restoration of the Works of Art to Italy: A Poem’ (1816), ll. 25, 512, in Felicia
Hemans: Selected Poems, Letters, Reception Materials, ed. by Susan J. Wolfson (Princeton
and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2000), pp. 18–34. Diego Saglia, European
Literatures in Britain, 1815–32: Romantic Translations (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2019), pp. 220–21, https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108669900; ‘British
Romanticism and the Post-Napoleonic South: Writing Restoration Transnationally’,
Essays in Romanticism, 24.2 (2017), 105–24, https://doi.org/10.3828/eir.2017.24.2.2
11
1. Future Restoration
Leopardi, after all, was a poet who could conjure restoration from
almost nothing. The ercely convincing poetic integrity he constructed
out of the incoherent misery of his life was almost immediately read as
proto-Risorgimento—that is, as modelling how to summon into existence
a future Italy out of its current fragmentary state. Staël provoked even
those who outwardly opposed her, like Leopardi, to make common
cause with her by modelling, in poetic restorations of the integrity of
a disintegrating individual, the national unity Italian patriots desired
for their fragmented country. As they departed from this embattled
engagement, their vision of the future tended to blur, and pessimism
set in. After all, the French Revolution was only the precursor to a spate
of nineteenth-century revolutions, none of which achieved their aims—
1820, 1830, 1848, to name the major ones.
This cycle of repeatedly raised hopes and diminishing political
gains had a corrosive eect. In the wake of the July Revolution of 1830,
the trois glorieuses, Balzac wrote an entire novel about life defeated
in proportion to the ambitiousness of its desire, La peau de chagrin.
Comparably, Delacroix’s great painting ‘28th of July 1830, la liberté
guidant le people’, surely superimposes an earlier, republican adventure
on to the establishing of the constitutional monarchy of Louis Philippe?
Delacroix himself referred to it simply as ‘barricade’, and the catalogue
to the big Paris exhibition of his paintings in 2018 described a hugely
over-determined painting as ‘haunted by the promises of the future’
and so ‘transforming itself quickly into a tomb’, Balzac’s logic exactly.
14
The haunting, though, registered in the expressions of her awestruck
companions, is by Marianne, a spectral gure from 1789, but spectral
also through her statuesque, solid physiognomy, in this paradoxical way
recognizable as the ghost of substantial revolution. Delacroix scrambles
temporalities: the gure of revolution now recovers her once robust form
(Michelangelo-like to most critics), but only in a sculpted perfection.
Let me give one more example of this law of diminishing returns from
Alfred de Musset.
If Leopardi’s powers of imagining his own restoration, making
something out of nothing, il nulla, are limitless, Alfred de Musset’s
capability for self-loathing in his 1836 epochal Confession of a Child of
14 Sébastien Allard and Côme Fabre, Delacroix: L’art et la matière (Paris: Louvre éditions:
Hazan, 2018), pp. 104–05.
12 Romanticism and Time
our Time (my cheeky translation of La Confession d’un enfant du siècle),
of reducing something to nothing, shows the reverse. Musset’s story
of an age whose politics has ruined its culture, creating a mal de siècle
responsible for every personal misfortune is compulsive, hugely
ambitious and knowingly self-serving. You do not believe a word of it at
the same time as you admire the literary opportunism of an indefensible
stance. It has been justly celebrated for its spectacularly historical
articulation of the individuality open to Musset’s generation, one that
‘lled its lungs with the air Napoleon had breathed’.
15
In La Confession
the lovers nally know each other so ‘profoundly’ that relationship is
impossible. ‘Another’, he says to her, ‘will oer you a worthier, more
reliable, tting (‘dignement’) love, but none as profound a love’ (288).
At the personal level, the sense of always being discontented in
Musset’s confessional text makes for a kind of inertia, the consequence
of forever imagining new, more satisfying dispensations. Musset is the
opposite of the politically active love of his life, George Sand, here. And
there is a kind of pointlessness in this superiority to what is available,
which we tend to call decadent. In his 1842 poem on Leopardi, ‘Après
une lecture’, Musset sees that Leopardi writes ‘without complaining
about fate’, but adds that ‘he savoured the charm of death’, that he was
the ‘gloomy lover of death, poor Leopardi’. It is in opposition to this
false interpretation, I am suggesting, that the obscure Leopardi has been
increasingly prized for his restorative poetic power.
What do British and Irish ideas about Restoration look like against
this European background? When Wordsworth famously writes in
the 1805 Prelude, just after the description of the ‘spots of time’ that ‘I
would enshrine the spirit of the past/For future restoration’, his words
t into the tradition of creative restorations which, I have argued, will
be taken to extremes in Leopardi and discounted in Musset’s decadent
alternative.
16
To the English ear, though, Wordsworth immediately
echoes the Milton who, within a few lines of the start of Paradise Lost,
sees our human condition as directed ‘till one greater man/Restore
15 Maurice Allem and Paul-Courant, eds, Œuvres Complètes en Prose d’Alfred de Musset
(Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, 1960), p. 65.
16 The Prelude, XI. 341–43, in Gill, William Wordsworth, p. 567.
13
1. Future Restoration
us and regain the blissful seat’.
17
We can be pretty sure that Milton’s
apparent ‘mortalism’ here—a greater man not God redeems us—or the
belief that salvation is temporal and limited, pointedly does not envisage
Charles II as a candidate for the role of ‘greater man’. Paradise Lost was
published in 1667, well into the Restoration period, a Restoration to
which, like European writers 150 years later, he wants to imagine an
alternative. Placed even earlier than the rst lines, his prefatory note on
‘THE VERSE’, in the fourth issue of the rst edition of 1668, describes a
stylistic restoration he wants us to hear in his poem, ‘the rst in English,
of ancient liberty recovered to heroic poem from the troublesome and
modern bondage of rhyming’ (39).
New ways of thinking restoration are not bound to the Caroline
travesty of restoration Milton deplores. New ideas of restoration are at
issue here, rather than simply an unhappiness with rhyme, as is evident
from what happens to Milton’s subsequent writing. He writes a rhyming
tragedy against slavery, Samson Agonistes, arguably transvaluing the
tragic genre just as he had claimed to have done the epic in Paradise Lost.
And the dramatic humanism of Paradise Regained, where Jesus preserves
the freedom of his mind as sucient resistance against a supernatural
opponent, departs further from hereditary literary machinery.
When Wordsworth, at the end of ‘Home at Grasmere’ and the start of
the ‘Prospectus’ to The Excursion, passes by Milton’s own machinery to
take up lodging in ‘the mind of Man,/My haunt and the main region of
my song’, he, too, is continuing the work of Miltonic restoration, recasting
the poetic conventions of his predecessors, this time by psychologizing
inherited religious discourse.
18
In eect, he is connecting with Milton
through his own mortalism, or acceptance, as in The Prelude, that this is
‘the place in which, in the end/We nd our happiness or not at all’(X.
726–7). A new contract, a new grasp of the ‘t’ between mind and nature
is proposed. Here we usually cannot help hearing Blake’s objections
to tting and tted, ‘& please you Lordship’, and remembering that,
for Blake, psychologism rather uncovered a ‘mental ght’, ideological
conict. But Wordsworth’s conceit is more futuristic than prescriptive,
17 John Milton, Paradise Lost, ed. by Alastair Fowler (Hong Kong: Longman, 1976), pp.
40–41.
18 Gill, William Wordsworth, p. 198.
14 Romanticism and Time
‘the image of a better time’.
19
It is on the side of the ttingness to which
Musset would oppose his unfortunate profundity.
Blake’s prophetic books, too, have their restorative logic. In successive
drafts, the virtue of Wordsworth’s ‘spots of time’ is rst ‘fructifying’,
then ‘vivifying’ and nally ‘renovating’, which is closest to ‘restoration’.
Blake’s ‘moment in each day which Satan cannot nd’ in his Prophetic
Book, Milton, also ‘renovates every moment of the day if rightly placed’.
Without forcing the meaning, his key tropes in Jerusalem of ‘awakening’
and ‘redeeming’ also let us see the work’s project of restoring potential,
recovering the ‘four-fold’ being we all should enjoy.
20
Blake’s renovating
moment, then, is not a sequence, but an ever present potential, something
which, if we keep it in mind, ‘if rightly placed’, can transform any other
instant into something signicant, rather than an item in the parade
of ‘empty, homogeneous time’. And this transformation comes about,
I’d suggest, by seeing the contemporaneous quality of past, present
and future, what the Bard sees, after all, at the beginning of Songs of
Innocence and Experience—
Hear the voice of the bard,
Who present, past, and future sees –
Whose ears have heard
The Holy Word
That walked among the ancient trees… (‘Introduction’)
21
The transformation may sound ‘messianic’, but if so, it is ‘messianic’
in Walter Benjamin’s ‘weak’ sense. What makes for revelation is not
the inculcation of dogmatic belief in some millennium to come: such
convictions would be numbered for Blake among the fundamentalist
heresies of those he calls ‘the Elect’ and ‘the Reprobate’. Rather,
revelation is of the interwoven quality of the future in past and present;
so, what is revealed is our task, if we are to belong to ‘the Redeemed’,
19 William Blake, Complete Writings, ed. by Georey Keynes (London: Oxford
University Press, 1969), p. 784; ‘Home at Grasmere’, later ‘Prospectus’, in Gill,
William Wordsworth, p. 199.
20 William Blake, The Complete Poems, ed. by W. H. Stevenson and D. V. Erdman (Hong
Kong: Longman, 1972); Milton, Second Book, Plate 35; Jerusalem, Plate 15.
21 Ibid., p. 209.
15
1. Future Restoration
to take responsibility for the future—a torment of doubt rather than
acquiescence in dogma. (First Book, Plate 26). The historical Milton is
restored for Blake by future possibility, a potential only discovered by
revisiting, driven by present need, the Milton of the past and re-reading
him radically against the grain. A once-and-for-all meaning of Milton
dies. Milton, Blake writes, goes to ‘eternal death’, which is also his release
into the active meanings of eternity, the creative mutuality of past,
present and future. In comparison with this lively historical interaction,
it is Milton’s connement to a single historical meaning then that looks
‘spectral’ and not of this world. The perception of what Milton, despite
his intentions, really meant is inseparable from the realization of what
we need him to be! This maybe is what Blake means near the end of
Jerusalem by ‘speaking the words of Eternity in human forms’ (Plate
95). Or what he meant earlier in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell by
saying that ‘Eternity is in love with the productions of time’.
22
Again,
the two categories are dialectically interdependent. To be human is to
have this future-rich understanding of the past in the present, and time
is just our characteristically simultaneous deployment of the dierent
tenses. Durée, how we experience time imaginatively, is our access to the
concept of eternity.
John Wilson Croker was never one to miss the chance of doing a
good literary woman down. He was satirised by Thomas Love Peacock
as Mr Killthedead in Melincourt. When, however, he called his fellow
Irishwoman, Sydney Owenson (Lady Morgan), ‘the great Corinna of
the Radicals’, he actually paid her a huge compliment not far o the
mark.
23
Morgan’s two guides, France (1817) and Italy (1821) move out
of the genres of travelogue or memoir into that kind of politicised
cultural commentary Staël—a model again—had really created in De
l’Allemagne and prepared for in her famous novel Corinne ou l’Italie. Like
Byron, Morgan twinned Italian and Irish subjugation and thought of
them interactively. She even has a triple indictment of Castlereagh in a
footnote to Italy. Castlereagh helps perpetrate the Act of Union and its
brutal policing against the United Irishmen; having ruined Ireland, he
22 Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, Plate 7, ibid., p. 108.
23 See the very useful discussion by Donatella Abbate Badin of Morgan’s mixed
genres, reception and use of Staël, Lady Morgan’s Italy: Anglo-Irish Sensitivities and
Italian Realities (Bethseda: Academica Press, 2007), pp. 2, 72.
16 Romanticism and Time
sets to work on Britain; and then, at the Congress, Europe is in the ring
line.
When Count Confalonieri, one of the deputies from Milan, in reply to
Lord Castlereagh’s question of ‘what they wanted?’ said, ‘a Constitution
like that of England!’ the minister, we were assured, signicantly replied,
Ce n’est pas ce que nous avons de mieux! (That is not the best thing we
have!) If any man in England was justied in uttering this blasphemous
sarcasm, it was that Minister, who having destroyed the liberties of his
own country, has laboured so hard to annihilate those of the nation, by
which he has been adopted.
24
Morgan wrote four appendices to her book, France, the fourth one of which
was ‘On the State of Political Opinion in France’. There she describes in
patriotic, constitutional terms what has been, in her view, betrayed by
the deal struck at the Congress of Vienna. Like the last quotation, her
remarks are not very far from Wordsworth’s. Both recall the wording
of Wordsworth’s political sonnets a decade and a half before, extolling
Milton, Algernon Sidney, Marvell, Harrington and Vane as writers who
‘Taught us how rightfully a nation shone/In splendour’, linking them all
as patriots. But she also believes that some thinking outside the binary
of revolution and counter-revolution is necessary: revolution, in other
words, is to be thought of as something productive not just of reaction
but of other versions of itself.
To consider the revolution then as at an end, and to imagine that the
allied sovereigns have conquered the absolute possession of despotic
power, either for themselves or for the French monarchs, would be the
excess of folly. The dislocation of society has been too complete, and the
shock given to prejudices and opinions too violent, to admit of a quiet
resumption of old habits and ideas… A complete counter-revolution is
impossible; and any despotism which can be substituted for it, must be
composed of such jarring and ill-assorted materials, as never can dove-
tail and consolidate into harmony and stability.
25
Well, what would be a proper political unity for Morgan in contrast
to what she calls ‘the European republic thus disjointed’ (clxxx)? She
24 Lady Morgan [Sydney Owenson], Italy, 3rd ed., 3 vols. (London: Henry Colburn,
1821), I, p. 266n.
25 Lady Morgan [Sydney Owenson], France, 2 vols. (London: Henry Colburn, 1817),
p. clxvii.
17
1. Future Restoration
nishes her account of Lombardy, the rst area that will be annexed
and activated later during the Piedmont-led Risorgimento, with an
interesting mix of materialist analysis and hortatory idealism:
Against the liberties of Italy are the sovereigns of Europe, their armies,
and their treasures: but armies are no longer to be trusted; and treasures,
thanks to the thoughtless profusion of modern exchequers, are no longer
to be commanded. In their favour are the kindling illumination of the
age, the sympathy of the whole population of the civilized world; and
all the force that belongs, in the eternal nature of things, to justice and
to right.
26
Anities with the near-contemporary Prometheus Unbound mingle with
a very realistic reference to the composite armies that had to replace
national standing armies in the ght against Napoleon to secure
victories like that of 1813 at Leipzig (der Völkerschlacht), never mind
Waterloo. Along with this goes an awareness of the growing circulation
of capital and the global dimension Marx was going to attribute to it. Like
Hazlitt, Morgan thinks that the French Revolution has given mankind a
‘sensible shock’ connected with an inexorably approaching modernity.
Most important will be decisions about what we want to preserve in the
new dispensation, and whether we can imagine older values in a viably
restored form. Can there be a European republic which is not hopelessly
‘disjointed’?
The most grotesque contemporaneous satire on being so ‘disjointed’
comes, unsurprisingly, from the Irish poet Tom Moore—liberal Irish
patriot and friend of Byron. In ‘Letter Nine’ of The Fudge Family in Paris
(1818), a hilarious account of the Parisian tourism (made possible by
the post-Waterloo peace) of an Irish/English family, he has that avid
admirer of Castlereagh, Mr. Phil. Fudge, write to the great man about
his visit to a madman who had fantasised a Restoration to their owners
of the heads of all those guillotined in the Revolution.
27
Only some
did not quite return to the right ones. In his own case, the lunatic was
convinced, he had got the wrong head. Fudge nds food for thought
here, and innocently imagines the inter-changeability of the heads of
Sidmouth, the Prince Regent and other luminaries with satirically apt
26 Lady Morgan, Italy, I, p. 277–78.
27 Thomas Moore, The Fudge Family in Paris, Edited by Thomas Brown the Younger, Author
of the Twopenny Post-bag, 4th ed. (London: Longman et al., 1818).
18 Romanticism and Time
recipients; pickpockets, tailors and other disreputables. Eventually,
though, the apotheosis is reached when he pleasurably imagines putting
on Castlereagh’s own head:
At last I tried your Lordship’s on,
And then I grew completely addled—
Forgot all other heads, od rot ’em!
And slept, and dreamt that I was—BOTTOM. (Letter IX, pp. 100–4)
The top is the bottom, and the viscount is in the right company, that
of another master of malapropism, Shakespeare’s Bottom. (I don’t
know if Castlereagh’s political cant was exceptional in comparison with
what we hear nowadays. He talked of ‘men turning their backs upon
themselves’, which is certainly a contortion dicult to imagine. He
incorrectly used ‘joining issue’ as an opposite of ‘taking issue’, which
was one of Moore’s favourites). To take issue with his policies, though,
it is clear that, for liberals like Moore and Byron, convincing Restoration
will not be achieved by the invasion of France by the British proxy, Louis
XVIII. Some accounts have the Bourbon getting a send-o from Britain
to France comparable to the welcome accorded to the returning Charles
II 150 years before. Moore is aware of this and fully exploits the irony
right at the start of The Fudge Family. In Letter I, Miss Biddy is talking of
her father, in slightly comical anapaests—da da dum, the poetic ‘foot’
more worthy of the shoddy monarch than heroic dactyls—dum da da,
the dominant foot of Greek and Latin epic, anapaest turned the other
way—ἄνδρα μοι ἔννεπε, … Arma virumque cano... and so on. So, contrast:
By the by, though, at Calais, Papa had a touch
Of romance on the pier, which aected me much.
At the sight of that spot, where our darling DIX HUIT
Set the rst of his own dear legitimate feet*
(Modell’d out so exactly, and – God bless the mark!
’Tis a foot, Dolly, worthy so Grand a Monarque)
He exclaimed ‘Oh mon Roi!’ and with tear-dropping eye,
19
1. Future Restoration
Stood to gaze on the spot – while some Jacobin, nigh,
Mutter’d out with a shrug (what an insolent thing!)
‘Ma foi, he be right – ’tis de Englishmen’s King
And dat gros pied de cochon – begar, me vil say
Dat de foot look mosh better, if turn’d toder way.’
*To commemorate the landing of Louis le Desiré from England, the
impression of his foot is marked out on the pier, and a pillar with an
inscription raised opposite to the spot. (Letter I, pp. 3–4)
I cannot help hearing a caricature of Irish in ‘begar’—the anapaest
asks for the accent on ‘gar’, so it sounds less like ‘beggar’ and more
like ‘begorrah’ shortened—which would t the mixed critical idiom
Castlereagh provoked, the Anglo-Irish abuser of Ireland, England and
now Europe—as the French become the new Irish.
In his Political Essays of 1819, Hazlitt argued that, through the
settlements imposed by the Congress of Vienna, Britain seemed intent
on inicting on the rest of Europe a hereditary monarchy. But in its
own case, it prided itself enormously on having replaced hereditary
legitimacy with something much more like a Miltonic magistracy—
‘when the monarch still felt what he owed to himself and the people,
and in the opposite claims which were set up to it, saw the real tenure
on which he held his crown’.
28
For Hazlitt, this real tenure of Kings and
Magistrates denes itself against ‘the cant of legitimacy’ (p. xi). His
Milton, nevertheless, returns him to 1688, rather than 1649, restoring the
spirit of a constitutional monarchy rather than a revolution succeeded
by a republic. William Cobbett, too, in a surprisingly supportive letter
to Chateaubriand around the time of the Congress of Verona, resents
the way that post-Napoleonic France is kept weak, in his eyes, by not
being allowed the same degree of political democracy as England. A
Bourbon dependency is established at a time that, as Lady Morgan put
it, ‘an individual sentiment of patriotism, an entire conviction of the
equality of rights among all orders of the state, and an attachment to the
basis of the constitution, pervade private conversations, and give a very
general tone to French society’ (France, p. clxvi). Elsewhere, in ‘Fables
28 William Hazlitt, Political Essays (London: William Hone, 1819), p. xi.
20 Romanticism and Time
for the Holy Alliance’, Moore implies that Sir Robert Filmer, apologist
for monarchy from Biblical precedent (in Patriarca, or the Natural Power
of Kings, 1680), is the guru of the Congress, with Algernon Sidney, one
of Wordsworth’s Commonwealth Men, as the opponent favoured by
Moore.
29
By contrast, in The Fudge Family, Phelim Connor’s straight,
enraged polemic, addressed to Castlereagh, grasps, as did Hazlitt, at
what Napoleon had promised: that unlike monarchs, or ‘vulgar Kings’,
he had ‘rais’d the hopes of men’, although only before dashing them—
‘All this I own—but still…’
30
This aposiopesis ends the Letter, which a
footnote tells us has been censored because ‘so full of unsafe matter-of
fact’.
In conclusion, it is helpful to think about Byron in the light of what I
have been talking about. Byron laughs at Castlereagh’s language as much
as Moore does. They both think he cannot speak English. Sometimes
Byron is unable to contain his contempt, as in the ‘Dedication’ to Don
Juan.
31
His disgust for Castlereagh’s ‘language of Mrs Malaprop’, keeps
re-surfacing. Castlereagh, he says callously, committed ‘sentimental
suicide’, he was ‘the Werther of politics’ (Preface to Canto VI). In any case,
Byron was a frequently passionate advocate of the political importance
of the proper use of one’s language. Dullness is what especially appears
to rouse Byron—as it had done his hero Alexander Pope—a fault in
which all others can be poetically dissolved. The connection between
language and political action is taken as given. In 1817, in the nal Canto
Four of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, the hero, Childe Harold, had virtually
vanished; according even to the Preface to Cantos One and Two he had
been present only ‘for the sake of giving some connection to the piece’.
32
The real hero, as some commentators have pointed out, becomes the
Spenserian stanza, which Byron manipulates expertly and updates
from the start, following James Beattie in claiming in the same Preface
that it ‘admits of every variety’. Here, like Milton, he ‘recovers ancient
liberty’, but to the genre of romance, modernising and restoring it to
political ecacy in the process. By the time he writes the letter to John
29 Thomas Moore, ‘Fable IV’ of ‘Fables for the Holy Alliance’, The Poetical Works of
Thomas Moore, ed. by A.D. Godfrey (London: Oxford University Press, 1910), pp.
497–98.
30 Moore, ‘The Fudge Family in Paris’, Letter XI, The Poetical Works, p. 488.
31 McGann, Lord Byron, The Complete Poetical Works, vol. V, pp. 1–8.
32 Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, in ibid., vol. II, p. 4.
21
1. Future Restoration
Cam Hobhouse at the start of Canto 4 of Childe Harold—Hobhouse in
collaboration with Foscolo wrote the notes on Italian literature to Canto
4—this political edge has become still more obvious and pointed.
33
Again
in the Dedication to Don Juan, Castlereagh is described as someone who
‘mends old chains’. In contrast to the contemporary Congress system,
Byron writes there as elsewhere in the service of the new Italy he wants
to see established, the imaginary character with which he has replaced
Harold, the ‘child of imagination’.
The letter to Hobhouse does appear to want us to keep the parallel
with what he calls ‘the late transfer of nations’ in mind. Towards its
end, Byron recalls the lament sung by Roman workmen—‘Roma! Roma!
Roma! Roma! non è più com’ era prima’—and contrasts it with the
yells of those pleased with the dismemberment of Italy approved by
the Congress of Vienna. But to resign oneself to this melancholy would
be the equivalent of Samuel Rogers’s pretty lament in his Italy: A Poem
of 1822—lamenting nostalgically, ‘Wouldst thou hadst less, or wert
as once thou wast’.
34
By contrast, Byron’s letter is up to date with the
cultural furore in Italy over Madame de Staël’s aforementioned essay
on translation, which urged Italian literary practice to be less indebted
to Italy’s classical past in order to press more eectively her claims as a
modern nation. Byron’s intervention in this debate is a bit like Leopardi’s.
He stresses the capabilities of the Italian language. Writing in Italian,
he advocates a pluralism, calling for an Italian poetry diversied by
the dierent aesthetic stances open to it, feeding like Schlegel’s Poesie a
general Italian genius. He reels o a list of miscellaneous contemporary
Italian luminaries qualifying Italy for serious consideration as a major
European nation, concluding that in sculpture ‘Europe—the World—
has but one Canova’.
Ugo Foscolo was one of the poets he commended, and Foscolo had in
1812 written his own poem on Canova, Le Grazie (The Graces), his Carme
or lyrical hymn to Canova celebrating an earlier version of the statue of
the three Graces just commissioned by the Duke of Bedford. Foscolo had
also published his most famous poem, Dei Sepolcri (On Tombs), in 1807, all
about how new Napoleonic requirements that burials take place outside
33 Ibid., pp. 120–24.
34 Samuel Rogers, Italy: A Poem (London: Longman et al., 1822), p. 62.
22 Romanticism and Time
city walls interfered with the idea of the restorative presence of the great
dead in inspirational form at the heart of the current community.
The restoration of Italy, when it came, would see itself as the resurgent
restoration of ancient virtù desired by Foscolo and Leopardi, anticipated
surely by the famous assunta of Venice in the opening stanzas of Canto
4 of Child Harold:
She seems like a sea Cybele, fresh from ocean,
Rising with her tiara of proud towers
At airy distance, with majestic motion,
A ruler of the waters and their powers:
And such she was;—her daughters had their dowers
From spoils of nations, and the exhaustless East
Pour’d in her lap all gems in sparkling showers.
In purple was she robed, and of her feast
Monarchs partook, and deemed their dignity increased. (IV, lines 10–18)
Venice appears as that sometime republic inspiring English republican
polemic of the greatest kind, like James Harrington’s The Commonwealth
of Oceana—‘immortal Venice’ and her ‘incomparable commonwealth’.
35
Harrington was not against restoration as such, of course, he just wanted
to restore a republic, not a monarchy; and in dedicating his work to
Cromwell, the ‘The Lord Protector of the Commonwealth’, he was
reminding him of what he should ideally be protecting. Venice is the
source too of Byron’s recovery of tragedy in The Two Foscari and Marino
Faliero, as well as being exemplary for him of that openness to the East
that drove his own Turkish Tales. Ultimately Venice stands for a political
authority which, far from deferring to monarchy, might let its own
legitimacy rub o on monarchs a little if they were lucky, ‘their dignity
increased’. The restorative interactions here are complex and rewarding.
Venice’s ‘assumption’, ‘rising with her tiara of proud towers’, is not
into Heaven but into the Realpolitik of the day. Byron’s sheer delight in
35 James Harrington, The Commonwealth of Oceana and A System of Politics, ed. by J.G.A.
Pocock (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), p. 99.
23
1. Future Restoration
what Venice has been—‘The revel of the earth, the masque of Italy!’—is
turned into a historical reproach to the current treatment of Italy, and
an incentive to realise something ‘brighter’, ‘more beloved’, something
which ‘replaces what we hate’, ‘with a fresher growth replenishing the
void’. In Canto 4, Venice nally leads Byron to the ocean, ‘the image of
eternity’ (p. CLXXXIII). For Harrington, ‘The sea giveth law unto the
growth of Venice, but the growth [of his ideal republic] Oceana giveth
law unto the sea’ (p. 7). Byron’s ocean too makes ‘monarchs tremble in
their capitals’, an element become as much a creature of imagination
as the Childe had been. On this political warhorse the poet once ‘laid
my hand upon thy mane as I do here’, literally as a swimmer, but now
guratively as a political poet mounted on a sublime power more
powerful than any tyranny.
36
To this gure, the poem’s conclusion
entrusts the idea of the restoration of political justice.
Works Cited
Allard, Sébastien and Côme Fabre, Delacroix: L’art et la matière (Paris: Louvre
éditions: Hazan, 2018).
Allem, Maurice and Paul Courant, eds, Œuvres Complètes en Prose d’Alfred de
Musset (Paris: Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, 1960).
Badin, Donatella Abbat, Lady Morgan’s Italy: Anglo-Irish Sensitivities and Italian
Realities (Bethseda: Academica Press, 2007).
Bergson, Henri, Creative Evolution, trans. by Arthur Mitchell (London:
Macmillan, 1964), https://doi.org/10.5962/bhl.title.17594
Keynes, Geoffrey, ed., William Blake Complete writings (London: Oxford
University Press, 1969).
Gill, Stephen, ed., The Oxford Authors William Wordsworth (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1984), https://doi.org/10.1093/notesj/33.2.248
Godfrey, A.D., ed., The Poetical Works of Thomas Moore (London: Oxford
University Press, 1910).
Gogol, Nikolai, Dead Souls, trans. by David Magarshack (Harmondsworth:
Penguin, 1961).
Hazlitt, William, Political Essays (London: William Hone, 1819).
36 Ibid., p. 7; McGann, Lord Byron, Complete Poetical Works, vol. II, p. 186 (stanza 184).
24 Romanticism and Time
Harrington, James, The Commonwealth of Oceana and A System of Politics, ed. by
J.G.A. Pocock (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), https://doi.
org/10.1017/cbo9781139137126.005
Koselleck, Reinhart, Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time (Cambridge,
MA: MIT Press, 1985).
Leopardi, Giacomo, Discorso di un Italiano intorno alla poesia romantica, ed. by
Rosita Copioli (Milano: Biblioteca Univerzale Rizzoli, 1997).
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vol. II and V (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980, 86), https://doi.
org/10.1093/actrade/9780198127543.book.1, https://doi.org/10.1093/
actrade/9780198127574.book.1
Marx, Karl, ‘The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte’, in Surveys from
Exile: Political Writings, ed. by David Fernbach, trans. by Ben Fowkes
(Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1973).
Milton, John, Paradise Lost, ed. by Alastair Fowler (Hong Kong: Longman, 1976),
https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315834726
Moore, Thomas, The Fudge Family in Paris, Edited by Thomas Brown the Younger,
Author of the Twopenny Post-bag, 4th ed. (London: Longman et al., 1818).
Morgan, Lady [Sydney Owenson], Italy, 3rd ed., 3 vols. (London: Henry
Colburn, 1821).
——, France, 2 vols. (London: Henry Colburn, 1817).
Nietzsche, Friedrich, The Will to Power, trans. Walter Kaufmann and R.J.
Hollingdale (New York: Random House, 1968).
Reiman, Donald H., and Sharon B. Powers, eds, Shelley’s Poetry and Prose (New
York and London: Norton, 1977).
Rogers, Samuel, Italy: A Poem (London: Longman et al., 1822).
Saglia, Diego, European Literatures in Britain, 1815–32 (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2019), https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108669900
——, ‘British Romanticism and the Post-Napoleonic South: Writing Restoration
Transnationally’, Essays in Romanticism, 24.2 (2017), 105–24, https://doi.
org/10.3828/eir.2017.24.2.2
Schlegel, Friedrich, ‘Athenaeum Fragment’, no. 80, in Philosophical Fragments,
trans. by Peter Firchow (Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 1991).
Stevenson, W.H. and D. V. Erdman, eds, Blake: The Complete Poems (Hong Kong:
Longman, 1972).
Wolfson, Susan J., ed., Felicia Hemans: Selected Poems, Letters, Reception, Materials
(Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2000), https://doi.
org/10.2307/3737958
2. Anthropocene Temporalities
and British Romantic Poetry
Evan Gottlieb
As Dipesh Chakrabarty has argued, the dawning of the Anthropocene
has created not only tangible environmental and political eects, but
also has threatened to alter our traditionally anthropocentric sense of
time, which (following Quentin Meillassoux) I dub “correlationist
time.” Although these alterations feel novel, however, evidence of
temporality’s malleability can be traced back at least to the British
Romantics, who like us were navigating uncharted waters, politically as
well as ecologically. After outlining the modern Western consolidation
of “correlationist time” and locating its representational epitome in
some early poetry of William Wordsworth, I sketch four alternatives
to “correlationist time” limned by other British Romantics poets:
deep time (Charlotte Smith, Percy Shelley); slow time (Keats),
revolutionary time (Shelley again), and hyper-Chaotic time (Byron).
According to Reinhart Koselleck’s inuential formulation, the dening
experience of modernity has been acceleration. Combined with what
he calls a new sense of an ‘open future’, Koselleck argues that this
privileging of progress and novelty has been the reigning temporality
since the late eighteenth century.
1
Although this thesis clearly takes its
cues from the Industrial Revolution’s speeding up of socio-political and
economic processes, it neglects to consider the environmental impacts
that have today become (nearly) impossible to ignore.
2
This oversight
1 Reinhart Koselleck, ‘The Eighteenth Century as the Beginning of Modernity’, in
The Practice of Conceptual History: Timing History, Spacing Concepts, trans. by Todd
Samuel Presner and others (Stanford: Stanford University Press , 2002), p. 165.
2 I say ‘(nearly) impossible to ignore’ because some governments, political parties,
industries, corporations, and other entities remain all too eager to deny, downplay,
© Evan Gottlieb, CC BY 4.0 https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0232.02
26 Romanticism and Time
is symptomatic not just of Koselleck’s scholarly milieu but also of the
fact that the transition from older (feudal) modes of historical thinking
to newer, modern ones nevertheless retained a basic assumption: that
human temporalities are largely divorced from planetary ones.
3
Indeed,
the carry-over from earlier eras, which generally held nature to be at best
a passive backdrop for human activity, and at worst a stubborn obstacle
to be overcome by human ingenuity and industry, arguably lies behind
capitalist modernity’s penchant for treating the natural world primarily
as a resource to be exploited.
But in the time of the Anthropocene, this pretence is now untenable, at
least for those of us who, following Bruno Latour, are ready to admit that
‘we [have] shifted from a mere ecological crisis into what should instead
be called a profound mutation in our relation to the world’.
4
This mutation takes
many forms, to be sure, and Dipesh Chakrabarty identies its temporal
dimension in his formative 2009 article, ‘The Climate of History: Four
Theses’, where he observes that ‘anthropogenic explanations of climate
change spell the collapse of the age-old humanist distinction between
natural history and human history […]. A fundamental assumption
of Western (and now universal) political thought has come undone in
this crisis’.
5
The assumption to which Chakrabarty alludes, moreover,
is as basic as it is increasingly uncertain: ‘that our past, present, and
future are connected by a certain continuity of human experience’.
6
Such
continuity seemed to be guaranteed both by the supposed distinction
(retained by Koselleck’s accelerated modernity) between human and
planetary history, and modernity’s imagined triumph of the former over
the latter: precisely the two postulates that the Anthropocene threatens
to disprove with increasing violence, as Chakrabarty demonstrated
more than a decade ago.
or otherwise distract from the realities of global warming.
3 This is not to deny that strands of philosophical thinking have long proposed
various connections between our sense of time and our geophysical situatedness
as upright bipedals; for a fascinating meditation on such theories, see Thomas
Moynihan, Spinal Catastrophism: A Secret History (Windsor Quarry, Falmouth:
Urbanomic, 2019).
4 Bruno Latour, Facing Gaia: Eight Lectures on the New Climatic Regime, trans. by
Catherine Porter (Cambridge: Polity, 2017), p. 8.
5 Dipesh Chakrabarty, ‘The Climate of History: Four Theses’, Critical Inquiry 35
(Winter 2009), 197–222 (pp. 201, 207), https://doi.org/10.1086/596640
6 Ibid.
27
2. Anthropocene Temporalities and British Romantic Poetry
Chakrabarty posits this development as new because, like many
historians, he largely sees the Anthropocene itself as a relatively new
aair. But there are good reasons to recognise anthropocenic eects
beginning much earlier than ‘the Great Acceleration’ of the post-World-
War-II period or even the Industrial Revolution; humans have been
systematically altering our environments, after all, since the dawn of
agriculture in the Fertile Crescent some 10,000 years ago. Moreover—
and more to the point in this chapter, which will argue for William
Wordsworth’s poetry as the norm of Romantic-era constructions
of anthropocentric temporality, before outlining a number of his
contemporaries’ alternatives—the idea of the earth as primarily dead
or at least inert matter (and thus merely waiting to be exploited by us)
was already being challenged in the later nineteenth century, not least
by the naturphilosophie of Friedrich Schelling. As Iain Hamilton Grant,
Ben Woodard, and others have demonstrated, for Schelling (in his
early works at least) nature must be understood in its properly active
modality, not just as ‘the ground’ (both literal and metaphorical) of all
human thought and being, but as an active force in its own right, replete
with a ‘fundamental productivity’ that takes place on timescales far in
excess of the human.
7
Schelling’s naturphilosophie, moreover, was in line
with roughly contemporary work in the budding discipline of geology,
or ‘natural philosophy’ as it was still known, which was challenging
Biblical accounts of the Earth’s formation and history with evidence
drawn rst from the fossil record and then, more compellingly, from
contemporary lithic evidence. In France, the Comte de Buon and
his rival Georges Cuvier had already put forth competing theories of
geological change; in Britain, James Hutton was observing Scottish rock
formations, concluding that their visible strata represented successive
cycles of lithic uplift and erosion that could only be accounted for via
an ‘abyss of time’ that makes ‘the mind see[m] to grow giddy’, in the
words of his friend and populariser James Playfair.
8
As Jerey J. Cohen
7 Ben Woodard, ‘Inverted Astronomy: Ungrounded Ethics, Volcanic Copernicanism,
and the Ecological Decentering of the Human’, Polygraph 22 (2010), 79–93 (p. 81).
See also Iain Hamilton Grant, Philosophies of Nature after Schelling (London and
New York: Continuum, 2006), https://doi.org/10.5040/9781472547279; Woodard,
Schelling’s Naturalism: Motion, Space, and the Volition of Thought (Edinburgh:
Edinburgh University Press, 2019).
8 Quoted in ‘James Hutton’, Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Hutton
28 Romanticism and Time
remarks, by recognizing that the igneous expanses of Edinburgh’s
Arthur’s Seat—the remains of a once-active volcano—had thrust through
younger sedimentary stone, Hutton essentially ‘discerned the opening
of deep time, [of] the earth’s slow liveliness’.
9
Despite the ever-increasing
evidence of the planet’s titanic age and inhuman productivity, however,
the existence of God could still guarantee that the natural world was—
and by implication would remain—conducive to human ourishing.
Charles Lyell makes this plain in the nal chapter of his Principles of
Geology (1830–33), which rst states that geologists can safely conclude
‘it is not only the present condition of the globe that has been suited to
the accommodation of myriads of living creatures, but that many former
states also have been equally adapted to the organization and habits of
prior races of beings’, before reiterating the need for ‘a just estimate of
the relations which subsist between the nite powers of man and the
attributes of an Innite and Eternal Being’.
10
Although the immediate
context of Lyell’s nal call for scientic humility is the admission that
scientists may never attain a complete understanding of planetary
history, the implication is that the mismatch between human and divine
temporalities need not trouble us so long as our faith in the benevolence
of God and His creation—the Earth itself—remains unshaken.
As Noah Heringman and others have persuasively argued, these
developments in geology did not go unnoticed by the Romantic poets of
the day.
11
In this vein, a sense of human ourishing as both predicated
on and guaranteed by the natural world’s durability is perhaps best
expressed by William Wordsworth’s well-known lines: ‘My heart
leaps up when I behold/A Rainbow in the sky:/So was it when my life
began;/So is it now I am a Man;/So be it when I shall grow old,/Or
let me die!’
12
Although God is nowhere mentioned here, Wordsworth’s
choice of a rainbow as his central image seems overdetermined by its
symbolic status in the Judeo-Christian tradition, where it appears most
9 Jerey J. Cohen, Stone: An Ecology of the Inhuman (Minneapolis and London:
University of Minnesota Press, 2015), pp. 188–89.
10 Charles Lyell, Principles of Geology, ed. by James A. Secord (London and New York:
Penguin, 1997), pp. 437–38.
11 Noah Heringman, Romantic Rocks, Aesthetic Geology (Ithaca and London: Cornell
University Press, 2004), pp. 1, 5.
12 William Wordsworth, ‘My heart leaps up’, in Wordsworth’s Poetry and Prose, ed.
by Nicholas Halmi (New York and London: Norton, 2014), pp. 417–18, lines 1–6.
Subsequent citations refer to this edition.
29
2. Anthropocene Temporalities and British Romantic Poetry
prominently in Genesis as a sign of God’s ‘postdiluvian covenant with
all living creatures not to destroy the earth [again]’.
13
Wordsworth’s
shrewd incorporation of the rainbow into his poem, then, subtly reminds
readers that, whatever geology might be discovering about the earth’s
unpredictable productivity, its ultimate stability could still be counted
on as the basis of human life and, by extension, morality. Just as ‘[t]he
Child is Father of the Man’, Wordsworth reassures us that, come what
may, our environment will sustain us, spiritually as well as physically,
just as the speaker’s days, ideally, will be ‘Bound each to each by natural
piety’.
14
To be sure, many of Wordsworth’s other poems are populated
with more uncanny earthly phenomena: the ‘sounding cataract’ that
‘haunt[s]’ the ‘boyish’ Wordsworth ‘like a passion’ in ‘Lines Written a
Few Miles above Tintern Abbey’ (74–78), for example, or the inexplicable,
isolated ‘huge Stone’ that serves as an extended simile in ‘Resolution
and Independence’ (399).
15
Even in these examples, however, what
remains certain is Wordsworth’s conviction that the natural world
fundamentally exists in harmony with the human one, if only we can
learn to see it rightly. Elsewhere, I have written about this ‘tendency [of
Wordsworth] to correlate things to their human signicances’, drawing
on Quentin Meillassoux’s inuential diagnosis of ‘correlationism’ as
the mode of modern thought, inherited most directly from Immanuel
Kant, which claims we can never perceive, know, or even think about the
world on its own terms, but rather only in terms of its relation to us (and
vice versa).
16
Hence we have access only to what ‘correlates’ between
us and ‘the great outdoors’, as Meillassoux terms it. Understood in this
light, it makes perfect sense that ‘My heart leaps up’ should appear in
the ‘Moods of my Own Mind’ section of Wordsworth’s Poems, in Two
Volumes. Indeed, the apparent redundancy in that title—my own mind—
emphasises precisely Wordsworth’s commitment to correlationism:
13 Ibid., p. 417, n1.
14 Wordsworth, ‘My heart leaps up’, lines 7–9.
15 For more on the appearance of these and similar natural objects in Wordsworth and
certain of his inheritors, see, e.g. Mary Jacobus, Romantic Things: A Tree, a Rock, a
Cloud (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2012).
16 Evan Gottlieb, Romantic Realities: Speculative Realism and British Romanticism
(Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2016), p. 36.
30 Romanticism and Time
the world is knowable, not to mention meaningful, only insofar as it
correlates to Wordsworth’s mental experience of it.
We can see such correlationism everywhere in Wordsworth, but for
reasons of space, another poem published in the same 1807 volume will
have to suce as our lone second example. Here are the opening stanzas
and closing stanzas of ‘To the Daisy’:
In youth from rock to rock I went,
From hill to hill, in discontent,
Of pleasure high and turbulent.
Most pleas’d when most uneasy:
But now my own delights I make
My thirst at every rill can slake,
And gladly Nature’s love partake,
Of thee, sweet Daisy!
When soothed a while by milder airs,
Thee Winter in the garland wears,
That thinly shades his few grey hairs;
Spring cannot shun thee;
Whole summer elds are thine by right;
And Autumn, melancholy Wight!
Doth in thy crimson head delight,
When rains are on thee.
* * * *
And all day long I number yet,
All seasons through, another debt,
Which I wherever thou art met,
To thee am owing;
31
2. Anthropocene Temporalities and British Romantic Poetry
An instinct call it, a blind sense;
A happy, genial inuence,
Coming one knows not how nor whence,
Nor whither going.
Child of the Year! That round dost run
Thy course, bold lover of the sun,
And cheerful when the day’s begun
As morning Leveret,
Thou long the Poet’s praise shall gain;
Thou wilt be more belov’d by men
In times to come; thou not in vain
Art Nature’s Favorite.
17
Notwithstanding Wordsworth’s apparently high estimation of this
poem—he placed it at the opening of the rst book of Poems, in Two
Volumes—its jaunty meter and repeating octaves deny it the high
seriousness of much of Wordsworth’s better-known early verse.
Nevertheless, its opening contrast between the speaker’s supposed
prior heedlessness and his current, hard-earned maturity shares the
narrative DNA of many of Wordsworth’s more acclaimed poems,
especially ‘Lines Written a few Miles above Tintern Abbey’. Like that
poem, too, ‘To the Daisy’ credits nature’s benevolent inuence with the
speaker’s transformation from febrile boy to cool-headed man. Unlike
‘Tintern Abbey’ and the later The Prelude, however, here that sense of
psychological and philosophical progress is uncomplicated by any
narrative recursion or fascination with semi-traumatic ‘spots of time’.
Instead, the speaker establishes his mature sense of self by aligning it
with the various but predictable appearances of the titular ower, which
in turn reect the regular cycles of the seasons in the rst stanza and the
solar year in the nal stanza. This calibration of human and planetary
17 Wordsworth, ‘To the Daisy’, pp. 384–86, lines 1–16, 65–80.
32 Romanticism and Time
rhythms thus provides the ‘genial inuence’ whose appearance and
destination Wordsworth rather disingenuously claims not to know in
lines 70–71. His penultimate declaration that the daisy ‘wilt be more
belov’d by men/In times to come’, however, is clearly beholden to
precisely this certainty, since Wordsworth’s condent prediction of
human continuity and even improvement (‘more belov’d’; my italics)
is implicitly underwritten by the poem’s preceding delineations of a
regular, predictable, earthly temporality—‘all day long […]/all seasons
through’—which governs all.
Following Meillassoux, I propose to call the temporality Wordsworth
limns here as ‘correlationist time’. By this I don’t mean a radically
subjective sense of time, but rather one that connects natural history
to human history in a reassuringly correlationist manner, such that
the expectation of human continuity is underwritten by an ultimately
anthropocentric faith in humanity’s connection with a natural world
perceived by us as metastable and enduring. Although the once-common
assumption that, after the Flood, the Earth existed in a homeostatic,
generally unchanging state had been thrown into doubt by the new earth
sciences, Wordsworth’s poetry helps (re-)establish the basic coordinates
of a correlationist time in which human history and natural history are
gently ‘bound each to each’. Chakrabarty’s thesis that human history
and natural history were perceived as divergent by modernity prior
to the Anthropocene thus needs amending in light of Wordsworth’s
inuential promotion of correlationist time as an antidote to modern
malaise. Nevertheless, it is worth considering that correlationist time,
in its quiet support of a ‘world for us’ mindset, ironically chimes with
extractive capitalism’s treatment of the natural world as a resource to be
exploited and a dumping-ground for ‘external costs’ like waste water.
Yet even as this Wordsworthian attitude toward both nature (as
what sustains humanity) and history (as progress toward a more-
or-less predictable future) became more widespread, a number of
alternatives to the paradigm of correlationist time began to appear in
other British Romantic poetry. For reasons of space, I can only gesture
here toward some of the social, political, and economic factors that may
have contributed to this fracturing: the massive political upheavals
set o by the French Revolution and then partially globalised by the
Napoleonic Wars; the subsequent rehabilitation of much of Europe’s
33
2. Anthropocene Temporalities and British Romantic Poetry
old order following the Congress of Vienna; and the dramatic, post-
1815 downturn in the British economy, which in turn was worsened by
a variety of factors including the heavy national debt incurred during
wartime; the repatriation of thousands of British troops; a devastating
series of bad harvests; and an increasingly displaced agricultural
workforce.
18
Parliamentary reform, long promised, still seemed a distant
dream—one that was literally trampled on by the infamous Peterloo
Massacre of August 1819. This is not an exhaustive list by any means, and
as we will see below, alternatives to correlationist time were beginning
to appear prior to at least some these events. Nevertheless, when
considered alongside many younger Romantics’ disillusionment with
Wordsworth’s increasing conservatism—exemplied in Percy Shelley’s
sonnet ‘To Wordsworth’ and Mary Shelley’s scathing judgment after
hearing parts of Wordsworth’s Excursion: ‘He is a slave’
19
—it becomes
clear that the break between so-called rst- and second-generation
Romantics remains pertinent to any consideration of poetic as well as
political transformation during the era. At the risk of schematism, then,
I propose we can see in the work of Wordsworth’s peers and inheritors at
least four alternatives to correlationist time, which I will briey outline
and exemplify in what follows.
1. Deep Time
As discussed above, the burgeoning discipline of geology made it
increasingly evident that planetary history demands to be understood
on timescales that dwarf not only individual human lives but also
humanity as a whole. As Heringman puts it, even when Hutton, Lyell
and others made incorrect or vague conjectures about the origins and
processes that created the rock formations they observed, their accounts
cumulatively painted a picture of a ‘geological past […] so remote that
its vestiges can be read only as signs of obscure, titanic processes’.
20
These processes clearly preceded human life and presumably would
18 ‘History of the British national debt’, Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/
wiki/History_of_the_British_national_debt
19 The dismissal is from Mary Shelley’s journal entry of September 14, 1814, Shelley’s
Poetry and Prose, ed. by Donald H. Reiman and Neil Fraistat , p. 92, n1.
20 Heringman, Romantic Rocks, Aesthetic Geology, p. 4.
34 Romanticism and Time
continue without it; barring the insertion of an all-seeing and benevolent
God into the picture, the clear implication was that ‘correlationist time’
simply cannot account for the majority of Earth’s history. As it happens,
this insight forms the basis of Quentin Meillassoux’s opening gambit in
his book After Finitude, whose rst chapters outline the problems caused
for correlationists by the existence of what Meillassoux calls the ‘arche-
fossil’: artefactual evidence of material existence that clearly preceded
conscious life, or indeed any life at all.
21
Not coincidentally, such fossils nd their way into much Romantic
poetry, where they likewise frequently serve as reminders of the
incommensurability of ‘deep time’ with an anthropocentric or
correlationist view of the world. Charlotte Smith’s ‘Beachy Head’ (1807),
although written too early to be considered a ‘true’ second-generation
Romantic poem, has recently returned to the forefront of the Romantic
poetic canon in no small part because of its attention to the fossilised
shells whose presence stirs Smith’s curiosity as she walks at some
distance inland from the Sussex coastline:
Ah hills! so early loved! in fancy still
I breathe your pure keen airs; and still behold
Those widely spreading views, mocking alike
The Poet and the Painter’s utmost art.
And still, observing objects more minute,
Wondering remark the strange and foreign forms
Of sea shells; with the pale calcareous soil
Mingled, and seeming of resembling substance.
Tho’ surely the blue Ocean (from the heights
Where the downs westward trend, but dimly seen)
Here never roll’d its surge. Does Nature then
Mimic, in wanton mood, fantastic shapes
21 Quentin Meillassoux, After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency, trans.
by Ray Brassier (London and New York: Continuum, 2008), pp. 1–27.
35
2. Anthropocene Temporalities and British Romantic Poetry
Of bivalves, and inwreathed volutes, that cling
To the dark sea-rock of the wat’ry world?
Or did this range of chalky mountains, once
Form a vast basin, where the Ocean waves
Swell’d fathomless? What time these fossil shells,
Buoy’d on their native element, were thrown
Among the imbedding calx: when the huge hill
Its giant bulk heaved, and in strange ferment
Grew up a guardian barrier, ’twixt the sea
And the green level of the sylvan weald.
22
As Kevis Goodman notes, in this passage Smith takes readers through a
quick tour of the various geological theories of her day, including the idea
that such apparent abnormalities as inland ocean fossils might represent
nothing more than ‘lusus naturae (sports or tricks of nature)’.
23
Given that
Smith spends much more time considering more scientic possibilities,
however, Goodman plausibly concludes that ‘for Smith, meditating on
the fossil shells far from the sea, spatial displacement encodes historical
dierence’. In Beachy Head, human history is thoroughly mixed up with
the vestiges of a primordially productive earth; but the presence of
fossilised shells far from the sea also highlights the disjunction between
human history and the deep, planetary time that Smith can only guess
and wonder at in these lines. Certainly, Smith’s verse suggests that,
contra Wordsworth, human and planetary temporalities cannot be
unproblematically aligned.
This suggestion is taken up even more emphatically in Percy
Shelley’s alpine meditation, ‘Mont Blanc’ (1817). When Mary and Percy
toured the Chamonix Valley in the summer of 1816 and gazed up at the
22 Charlotte Smith, Beachy Head, in Charlotte Smith: Major Poetic Works, ed. by Claire
Knowles and Ingrid Horrocks (Peterborough, ON: Broadview Press, 2017), lines
368–89.
23 Kevis Goodman, ‘Conjectures on Beachy Head: Charlotte Smith’s Geological Poetics
and the Grounds of the Present’, ELH, 81.3 (Fall 2014), 983–1006 (p. 991), https://
doi.org/10.1353/elh.2014.0033
36 Romanticism and Time
cloud-obscured peaks of Mont Blanc from a bridge over the Arve river,
they were hardly the rst British tourists to do so; indeed, although
‘Mont Blanc’ has long been interpreted as Shelley’s philosophical
riposte to Wordsworth’s ‘Tintern Abbey’, it more directly responds to
S.T. Coleridge’s explicitly theocratic ‘Hymn before Sun-Rise, in the Vale
of Chamouni’ (1802). ‘Mont Blanc’ has recently become a touchstone
poem for literary critics, including me, interested in applying Speculative
Realist principles to Romantic poetry (and vice versa).
24
Here, then,
it will be enough to note how the poem is lled with allusions to the
literally inhuman spans of time over which, Shelley correctly assumes,
the mountain and its surrounding vales were formed. One passage,
drawn from the fourth section, can stand for the whole in this regard:
All things that move and breathe with toil and sound
Are born and die; revolve, subside and swell.
Power dwells apart in its tranquility
Remote, serene, and inaccessible:
And this, the naked countenance of earth,
On which I gaze, even these primaeval mountains
Teach the adverting mind.
25
The contrast between the temporality of a human life-cycle—or, for that
matter, the life-cycle of any living thing—and that of the monumental
lithic formation with which Shelley is confronted, could not be clearer;
Wordsworth’s daisy wilts by comparison. Even as Shelley’s imagination
is drawn to the mountain’s peak—his mind ‘advert[s]’ to it, implying
24 See, e.g., Greg Ellermann, ‘Speculative Romanticism’, SubStance, 44.1 (2015), 154–74,
https://doi.org/10.1353/sub.2015.0008; Gottlieb, Romantic Realities, pp. 161–67; Anne
C. McCarthy, ‘The Aesthetics of Contingency in the Shelleyan “Universe of Things,
or ‘Mont Blanc’ without Mont Blanc”’, Studies in Romanticism, 54.3 (2015), 355–75,
https://doi.org/10.1353/srm.2015.0012; Steven Shaviro, The Universe of Things:
On Speculative Realism (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press,
2014), pp. 57–59, https://doi.org/10.5749/minnesota/9780816689248.001.0001;
Chris Washington, Romantic Revelations: Visions of Post-Apocalyptic Life and Hope in
the Anthropocene (Toronto, Bualo, and London: University of Toronto Press, 2019),
pp. 44–54, https://doi.org/10.3138/9781487530310
25 Percy Shelley, ‘Mont Blanc’, in Shelley’s Poetry and Prose, p. 99, lines 94–100.
37
2. Anthropocene Temporalities and British Romantic Poetry
an involuntary absorption or fascination—the disparity between mind
and matter makes clear that they may inhabit the same space, the same
‘universe of things’ (to quote the poem’s opening line), but not the
same temporality. In this light, Shelley’s famous nal question to the
mountain—‘And what were thou, and earth, and stars, and sea,/If to
the human mind’s imaginings/Silence and solitude were vacancy?’
26
—
is anything but rhetorical; whatever else we might make of it, the deep
time of Mont Blanc precedes, exceeds, and recedes from us.
2. Slow Time
In The Poetics of Decline in British Romanticism, Jonathan Sachs makes
a compelling case for ‘slow time’ as an alternative temporality of the
Romantic era, one that is ‘not simply a reaction to [the] acceleration’
of modern commercial life, but also ‘reveals the development of new
kinds of literary experience’.
27
While Sachs’ interest is largely in slow
time as an experiential category, I think it also appears as an alternative
Romantic temporality in a more objective sense. I am primarily thinking
here, of course, of John Keats’s use of this phrase in his opening address
to the object of antiquity he calls a Grecian Urn: ‘Thou still unravish’d
bride of quietness,/Thou foster-child of silence and slow time […]’.
28
As
a product of human labour, the artefact in question obviously diers in
kind from the geological features that populate the previous section’s
deep time. The questions that the urn raises for Keats, however, in
some respects dier only in degree from those that the fossils raise for
Smith, or that Mont Blanc raises for Shelley. What is the meaning of this
non-human thing, of indeterminate age, that confronts humans with
evidence of our own relative insignicance in the historical record prior
to the Anthropocene? Is it desirable—or even possible—to strike up an
imaginative relation with it, or is that simply an act of hubris, at best a
compensatory cognitive movement designed to forestall recognition of
our historical ephemerality? The fact that Keats’ poem, like Shelley’s,
26 Ibid., lines 141–43.
27 Jonathan Sachs, The Poetics of Decline in British Romanticism (Cambridge
and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2018), p. 7, https://doi.
org/10.1017/9781108333115
28 John Keats, ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’, in The Works of John Keats (Ware, Hertfordshire:
Wordsworth Editions, 1994), p. 233, lines 1–2.
38 Romanticism and Time
ends on a famously ambiguous note—are we really supposed to
believe that the neo-classical platitude, ‘Beauty is truth, truth beauty’,
29
provides genuine salvation for suering, mortal humans?—seems far
from coincidental when seen in this light; these are not questions we will
answer in our lifetime, or any lifetime.
Yet thanks precisely to its clearly human origins, the urn oers
something that neither fossils nor mountains can: evidence of the
potential endurance of material artefacts far beyond the original
intentions, lifespans, and even civilizational contexts of their makers.
The urn that Keats likely saw in the British Museum was probably not
originally designed merely to be displayed and admired, but rather
to be used—quite possibly as a funereal vessel. Notably, however,
Keats shows no interest whatsoever in the urn’s original usage, nor in
the manner in which it eventually arrived at the British Museum for
exhibition; instead, he remains almost entirely focused on its exterior
scenes.
30
Keats’ silence on these questions, then, implies his intuitive
recognition that the urn’s history, rst as a useful implement and later as
a token of Britain’s increasing dominance on the world stage, is literally
neither here nor there; rather, the urn’s spatial presence in front of Keats
(and its virtual presence in front of us, Keats’ readers) stands in contrast
to its temporal dislocation as an object ‘out of time’, existing neither in its
original context nor unproblematically in the present moment (whether
representational or experiential). The urn thus materially embodies Ian
Hodder’s anthropological observation that ‘things and humans live in
dierent temporalities’, despite their inevitable entanglement.
31
Not all things exist in the ‘slow time’ of Keats’ urn, of course—
many things, by contrast, exist at temporalities so minuscule (from a
human perspective, at least) that we are hardly aware of them. But as
a survivor of an ancient civilization brought into Keats’ modern world
of 1817, the urn’s existence in a ‘slow time’ continuum exemplies
Hodder’s thesis that ‘There is more to history than a linear account of
sequences of events; there is also the material history, the heritage of
29 Ibid., p. 234, line 49.
30 On Keats’ relation to museum culture see, e.g., Christopher Rovee, ‘Trashing Keats’,
ELH, 75.4 (Winter 2008), 993–1022, https://doi.org/10.1353/elh.0.0022
31 Ian Hodder, Entangled: An Archaeology of the Relationships between Humans and Things
(Malden, MA and Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2007), p. 98.
39
2. Anthropocene Temporalities and British Romantic Poetry
past acts, the detritus of past millennia that bumps up against us in a
non-linear way’.
32
This insight, in turn, lends further piquancy to Keats’
half-playful admonishment of the urn: ‘Thou, silent form, dost tease us
out of thought/As doth eternity. Cold Pastoral!’ (44–45).
3. Revolutionary Time
Among the canonical Romantic poets, Percy Shelley kept the res of
revolutionary hope burning most strongly in the poetry of the post-
Waterloo era. Shelley, then, becomes the primary keeper of what,
again following Sachs, we can call ‘revolutionary time’: ‘the possibility
of change [that] is both instantaneous and radically transformative
because it produces a rupture between past and present’.
33
Although
such thinking might seem born of desperation, there was natural
philosophical precedent for it in geological theories of ‘catastrophism’,
which hypothesised that the earth’s history was generally homeostatic
except for moments of major (usually disastrous) alteration that
could not be predicted. (The Biblical Flood was the rst and ultimate
precedent here.) Thanks to newer work by the likes of Hutton and
Lyell, catastrophism was less in favour by the turn of the nineteenth
century than the gradualist theories of slow, accretional change that
correspond to the temporalities already discussed; sudden catastrophes
like the 1755 Lisbon earthquake, however, provided vivid evidence of
the potential for massive, unheralded alterations in the social fabric.
In the political realm, moreover, the original French revolutionaries
remained a major inspiration for British radicals, not only because they
represented (again, in Sachs’ words) ‘a rupture, a break in secular time
and a separation from the past’, but also because they self-consciously
tried to re-start the political clock, for example by instituting the rst day
of ‘Year One’ immediately after their monarchy’s abolition.
34
Revolutionary time thus oered a stark and, for Shelley and his
peers, attractive alternative not just to correlationist time but also to the
‘deep’ and ‘slow’ temporalities outlined above. For any given moment
to become visible or at least thinkable as containing the potential
32 Ibid., p. 101.
33 Jonathan Sachs, The Poetics of Decline in British Romanticism, p. 146.
34 Ibid., p. 147.
40 Romanticism and Time
for a sudden, even unforeseen transformation, the present must be
apprehended in both its historical and synchronic dimensions—an
apprehension that writing is especially well positioned to accomplish, as
(to revert to Derridean terms) the play of signication is always a matter
of spacing as well as timing. This is precisely the burden of Shelley’s
sonnet ‘England in 1819’, which was far too radical to be publishable in
Shelley’s lifetime:
An old, mad, blind, despised, and dying King;
Princes, the dregs of their dull race, who ow
Through public scorn,—mud from a muddy spring;
Rulers who neither see nor feel nor know,
But leechlike to their fainting country cling
Till they drop, blind in blood, without a blow.
A people starved and stabbed in th’ untilled eld;
An army, whom liberticide and prey
Makes as a two-edged sword to all who wield;
Golden and sanguine laws which tempt and slay;
Religion Christless, Godless—a book sealed;
A senate, Time’s worst statute, unrepealed—
Are graves from which a glorious Phantom may
Burst, to illumine our tempestuous day.
Notably, the entire sonnet is composed of two sentences, each of which
piles sub-clause on sub-clause until, like Walter Benjamin’s remediation
of Paul Klee’s Angelus Novus, it seems that all we can do is bear witness
to the disastrous reign of George III, the depredations of his minions,
and the suering of the British people. But as James Chandler observes
in his still-unparalleled reading of this poem,
the terms of the times in Shelley’s catalogue—the conditions of his
tempestuous day—are not simple evils and are not simply overcome
by the arrival of an enlightening “deus ex machina”. Rather […] the
41
2. Anthropocene Temporalities and British Romantic Poetry
conditions of his day become the occasion for the kind of illumination
that the nal couplet anticipates.
35
Translated into revolutionary temporality, in other words, Shelley uses
the resources of the sonnet to spread out and display conditions that,
experienced in ‘normal’ time, are a welter of simultaneous confusion—
and it is this arrangement, in turn, that allows the illumination and
saturation of the revolutionary spirit.
Signicantly, like deep and slow time, and unlike correlationist time,
revolutionary time is at least theoretically divorced from human action
or even intention. Although Shelley became a hero to the nineteenth-
century Chartists thanks to lyrics like ‘Men of England’ (‘Men of
England, wherefore plough/For the lords who lay ye low?/Wherefore
weave with toil and care/The rich robes your tyrants wear?’), which
celebrate the power of the combined masses, many of his most striking
depictions of actual revolutionary moments do not involve human
actors. Instead, like the Phantom that bursts from the graves of the
dead at the end of ‘England in 1819’, or like the gure of Hope in ‘The
Mask of Anarchy’ (also unpublishable in Shelley’s lifetime due to its
radicalism), Shelley’s revolutionary moment—the instant when past
and present coincide, temporality is converted to spatiality, and new
arrangements of both time and space can therefore be imagined—
frequently invoke abstractions or personications as their prime
movers. Regardless of whether this testies to Shelley’s idealism or
desperation, it strongly suggests that Romantic revolutionary time, in its
contingency and unpredictability, has more in common with what Alain
Badiou calls ‘an event’—which, in lieu of a full explanation here, we
can simply dene via Christopher Norris’ helpful gloss as ‘that which
occurs unpredictably, has the potential to eect a momentous change in
some given situation, state of knowledge, or state of aairs, and—above
all—has consequences such as require an unswerving delity or a xed
resolve to carry them through’
36
—than with what Chandler, writing in
35 James Chandler, England in 1819: The Politics of Literary Culture and the Case of
Romantic Historicism (Chicago and London: Chicago University Press, 1998), pp.
30–31.
36 Christopher Norris, ‘Event’, in The Badiou Dictionary, ed. by Steve Corcoran
(Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2015), pp. 115–16.
42 Romanticism and Time
the late 1990s, interprets as evidence of a still vaguely humanist new
historicism.
37
4. Hyper-Chaotic Time
Questions of contingency and unpredictability lead to my nal
proposed alternative Romantic temporality: the time of hyper-chaos. I
borrow this term, like correlationism itself, from Meillassoux. In After
Finitude, Meillassoux deploys the principle of non-contradiction, the
mathematical non-totalisability of reality, and correlationism’s own
insistence that we can give no account of the world-without-us (only the
world for us), to establish that there is only one metaphysical necessity:
‘only the contingency of what is, is not itself contingent’.
38
(Hence the
book’s full title: After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency).
In Meillassoux’s rigorous (although by no means uncontroversial)
account, the fact that reality appears to be governed be a stable set of
‘natural laws’, for example, is literally merely a fact—a temporary state
of aairs, theoretically subject to change at any moment, whose stability
and permanence only appear as such to us because of the foreshortened
timescales (and logical shortcuts) by which we tend to think about
such things. To think the universe as it truly is, says Meillassoux, is to
recognise that the only absolute we can truly think ‘is nothing other
an extreme form of chaos, a hyper-Chaos, for which nothing is or would
seem to be impossible, not even the unthinkable’.
39
For Meillassoux, the temporality of hyper-Chaos—what he calls,
elsewhere, ‘Time without Becoming’—is not a bad thing despite its
formidable name; on the contrary, in his account, it oers philosophy
a route out of the Kantian cul-de-sac and back to ‘the great outdoors’
where it belongs. More, it allows Meillassoux to conceive of the coming
of a new ‘World of justice’; this is the frame in which, in Romantic
Realities, I use Meillassoux’s most ambitious ideas regarding apocalyptic
revelations to read Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound, which likewise
imagines the possibilities for earthly renewal when the seeming
37 I borrow the outlines of this argument from Austin Webster, ‘An Evental
Romanticism’ (MA thesis, Oregon State University, May 2019).
38 Meillassoux, After Finitude, p. 80.
39 Ibid., p. 64.
43
2. Anthropocene Temporalities and British Romantic Poetry
predictability of what happens to exist gives way to the ‘reality’ of pure
contingency—a process in which we may nd ourselves in an altogether
dierent temporality, as Chris Washington observes in his neo-post-
apocalyptic reading of Prometheus Unbound.
40
If we turn away from this quasi-messianic face of hyper-Chaos,
however, we can see its more nihilistic side playing out in Byron’s
nightmarish poem, ‘Darkness’, whose 82 lines of hard-nosed blank
verse set out an unstinting picture of utter destruction.
41
Here are some
‘highlights’ of Byron’s vision:
I had a dream, which was not all a dream.
The bright sun was extinguish’d, and the stars
Did wander darkling in the eternal space,
Rayless, and pathless, and the icy earth
Swung blind and blackening in the moonless air; […]
A fearful hope was all the world contain’d;
Forests were set on re—but hour by hour
They fell and faded—and the crackling trunks
Extinguish’d with a crash—and all was black. […]
The world was void,
The populous and the powerful—was a lump,
Seasonless, herbless, treeless, manless, lifeless—
A lump of death—a chaos of hard clay. […]
The waves were dead; the tides were in their grave,
The moon, their mistress, had expir’d before;
The winds were wither’d in the stagnant air,
And the clouds perish’d; Darkness had no need
40 See Washington, Romantic Revelations, pp. 28–65.
41 Lord Byron, The Major Works, ed. by Jerome J. McGann (Oxford and New York:
Oxford University Press, 2000), pp. 272–73.
44 Romanticism and Time
Of aid from them—She was the universe. (1–5, 18–21, 69–72, 78–82)
The poem is not entirely free from melodrama and sentimentality, to
be sure, but it almost entirely lacks Byron’s well-known fondness for
self-pity, the absence of which makes the cosmic impersonality of
‘Darkness’ all the more formidable. Its immediate context was the ‘Year
without a Summer’ of 1816, in which unusually cloudy conditions and
frigid temperatures persisted through the summer months in Europe.
Around the world, harvests failed, famines claimed millions of lives,
and outbreaks of cholera and other deadly diseases took many more;
in Britain, the already unsettled conditions of post-Waterloo society
deteriorated further, leading more-or-less directly to the Peterloo
Massacre. We know now what caused the 1810s to be the coldest decade
on record: a series of volcanic explosions that spewed millions of tons
of ash into the atmosphere, culminating in the massive eruption of
Indonesia’s Mount Tambora in April of 1815, with a magnitude roughly
double that of the much more celebrated Krakatau eruption of 1883.
42
But of course Britons, on the other side of the world, had no knowledge
of this event—only of the permanently overcast skies, failing harvests,
and unseasonable temperatures from which there would be little
relief until 1819 (celebrated in Keats’ ‘To Autumn’ of that year, with its
‘mellow fruitfulness’).
43
It is no coincidence, then, that Byron’s poem
begins with a at description of an apocalyptic event—‘The bright sun
was extinguish’d’ (2)—shorn of either prelude or causation; in line
with Meillassoux’s assertion that ‘there is no reason for anything to be
or to remain the way it is’,
44
the world-for-us in Byron’s poem simply
and suddenly ends, succeeded by a world-in-itself hostile to all life.
The frailty of human civilization, whose collapse Byron mercilessly
describes over the course of the poem, is such that it leaves behind not
even a trace of itself.
Byron’s vision of hyper-Chaotic time may be extreme and, in its
melodramatic touches, inherently anthropocentric. More, its nightmarish
42 Gillen D’Arcy Wood, Tambora: The Eruption that Changed the World (Princeton, NJ
and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2014), pp. 36–40. See also David Higgins,
British Romanticism, Climate Change, and the Anthropocene: Writing Tambora (London:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2017).
43 D’Arcy Wood, Tambora, p. 39.
44 Meillassoux, After Finitude, p. 60.
45
2. Anthropocene Temporalities and British Romantic Poetry
vision of a world extinguished by frozen temperatures would, in the
main, appear at odds with our present, greenhouse-oriented future.
But in its depiction of an unprecedented environmental disaster
that renders the planet inhospitable, it returns us to the timeliness
of the Romantics’ navigation of such questions in the context of our
own precarious eco-situation. The subversion of the Wordsworthian
certainty regarding the benecent relationship between humanity and
the natural world—a subversion whose initial expression I have traced
in this chapter, primarily via the explosion of alternatives to standard
‘correlationist temporality’—now seems more pressing than ever, as the
Anthropocene simultaneously forces human and planetary timescales
together and undoes our longstanding belief in the priority of the former
over the latter. In this light, British Romanticism’s deep time, slow time,
revolutionary time, and even hyper-Chaotic time may retroactively
appear as harbingers of the ‘deep contradiction and confusion’ (to
quote Chakrabarty again) that the Anthropocene has introduced into
our contemporary historical situation.
45
Whether they aord us enough
insight and imagination to respond decisively, creatively, and humanely
to the challenges that confront us remains unknown. As what Percy
Shelley famously called ‘the mirrors of the gigantic shadows which
futurity casts upon the present’,
46
however, we can at least say that the
Romantic poets have given us the opportunity to reect critically on
their imaginative responses to the changing world they encountered.
Whether we manage to translate those reections into productive and
collective action with regard to the accelerated environmental changes
that increasingly dene our Anthropocene era, of course, remains to be
seen—as does the question (not necessarily the most important one, to be
clear) of whether there will be anyone left to reect on our reections.
47
45 Chakrabarty, ‘The Climate of History’, p. 198.
46 Shelley, ‘A Defence of Poetry’, in Shelley’s Poetry and Prose, p. 535.
47 I wish to express my appreciation to Ridvan Askin for inviting me to present an
early version of this chapter to the Department of Languages and Literatures at the
University of Basel.
46 Romanticism and Time
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3. Beethoven: Revolutionary
Transformations
Gregory Dart
This chapter investigates Fidelio’s relation to the French Revolution
by looking at it as the last of a series of revisitings of a revolutionary
‘spot of time’. First laid out by Bouilly and Gaveaux’s 1798 rescue opera,
Léonore, ou L’Amour Conjugal (1798), which was supposedly based
on a true story of the Jacobin Terror, this ‘spot’ was then returned to, and
reworked, by several European composers of the early nineteenth century,
who produced operas with the same plot, most notably Beethoven, whose
Leonores of 1805 and 1806, and Fidelio of 1814 betray a subtly
unstable perspective on recent revolutionary history. Lastly, this chapter
looks at the role of melodrama in Beethoven’s opera, not only as a curious
technical innovation, but also as a new means of conceiving of, and
dramatising, historical action, and argues that one way of seeing the
dénouement of 1814 is as an essentially conservative attempt to bury
the traumatic vision of history—of history as sforzando—that its earlier
incarnations had opened up.
GEFANGENE PRISONERS
O welche Lust! In freyer Luft Oh what joy! In the open air!
Den Athem leicht zu heben,
nur hier,
Lift your breath slightly, only
here,
nur hier ist Leben. Only here is Life!
Chor der Gefangenen, Chorus of Prisoners, Fidelio Act I.
1
That Beethoven’s operatic paean to freedom Fidelio has an intimate
relationship with the French Revolution is well known. But what the
1 Ludwig van Beethoven, Fidelio: Oper in Zwei Aufzugen (Bonn: Simroch, n. d. [1815]).
The English translations of the 1814 libretto, and of the words in the 1805 score, are
my own.
© Gregory Dart, CC BY 4.0 https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0232.03
50 Romanticism and Time
work’s precise attitude to the history of the period, or indeed to the
idea of history more generally, might be, is less easy to determine, not
least because of the way in which that relationship might be deemed
to have changed over time, as the opera underwent signicant revision
between 1805 and 1814. Fidelio, the canonical form of the opera, was
the nal revised version, unveiled in the summer of 1814, shortly after
the rst fall of Napoleon, and only a few months before the Congress
of Vienna. But the opera had rst seen the light of day nearly ten years
earlier, as Leonore, or the Triumph of Conjugal Love. That this work failed
badly at its rst attempt in November 1805 was hardly surprising,
given the circumstances surrounding its premiere. Napoleon’s army
had entered Vienna only a few days earlier, and most of the city’s
population had retreated to the country.
2
On the night of the rst and
only performance the stall seats were mainly lled by French soldiers;
although there was a certain strange ttingness in this, given the
provenance of the plot. Six months later—in 1806—Leonore was put on
again in Vienna, this time in revised form. Convinced that the initial
failure had been for dramatic rather than musical reasons, Beethoven’s
supporters had persuaded him to cut the three acts down to two,
and to rearrange and shorten some of the numbers.
3
These changes
were, however, very minor in comparison with the more signicant
refashioning that took place in 1814. Often, when assessing the
various versions of the opera, critics have focused on purely aesthetic
questions, debating which of the three works they consider to be the
best musically, or to be the most eective on stage.
4
In this chapter,
however, I want to look at these versions as instances of a shifting
political-historical consciousness, changing perspectives on a ‘spot of
time’.
2 Edgar Istel and Theodore Baker, ‘Beethoven’s “Leonore” and “Fidelio”’, Musical
Quarterly, 7.2 (April 1921), 226–51 (p. 231).
3 See Winton Dean, ‘Beethoven and Opera’, in Fidelio: Cambridge Opera Handbooks,
ed. by Paul Robinson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 40–42.
Hereafter this volume is cited as Fidelio: COH.
4 Dean, for example, thinks that the version of 1814 is musically a great improvement
on the two previous versions, but dramatically weaker (Ibid., esp. pp. 44–45, 49–50).
51
3. Beethoven: Revolutionary Transformations
I
On the front page of Jean Nicholas Bouilly’s Léonore, ou L’Amour Conjugal
(1798), the original French opera upon which Beethoven’s was based,
there was a striking assertion, set forth in big capital letters, just below
the title: FAIT HISTORIQUE (TRUE STORY).
5
Before embarking on a
career as a dramatist, Bouilly had been a government administrator in
Tours during the Revolutionary Terror of 1793–94, and in his memoirs
of 1837 he claimed that the character of Leonore was based on a real
acquaintance, a woman who had disguised herself as a turnkey’s
assistant in order to free her husband, unjustly imprisoned in a Jacobin
gaol.
6
Whether or not this story had a genuine historical basis, all trace
of its original context was eaced from the ensuing libretto. Like its
later Beethovenian incarnations, Bouilly and Pierre Gaveaux’s opera
has a deliberately vague Spanish Renaissance setting, with a king on
the throne and a villain named Pizarro, presumably in honour of the
sixteenth-century conquistador. Not that any of this would have fooled
the rst-night audience of the Theatre Feydeau in Paris, where the opera
was rst produced in February 1798. No sooner would Leonore’s covert
search for her imprisoned husband have been presented to them, than
the contemporary nature of the story would have become clear. Recent
history would have furnished forth countless parallels—from personal
experience, from the daily papers, from printed memoirs, and from
gossip. Somewhat surprisingly, perhaps, given Fidelio’s reputation as
a revolutionary or liberationist opera, the original emphasis of Leonore
was pretty clearly counter-Revolutionary, or, at least, anti-Terrorist in
nature: its victims were aristocrats and its perpetrator a rogue ocial,
acting in a recognisably Jacobin manner.
7
Leonore is a ‘rescue’ opera, a sub-genre that enjoyed a considerable
vogue in the 1790s and early 1800s. One of the rst to be staged
successfully during the Revolution itself was Luigi Cherubini’s Lodoïska
(1791), a ‘comédie héroïque’ based on a romantic episode in J-B Louvet’s
5 Léonore, ou L’Amour Conjugal, Fait Historique, en deux actes et en prose mêlée de chants.
Paroles de J.N. Bouilly, Musique de P. Gaveaux (Paris: Barba, An Septième [1799]).
6 Mes Récapitulations (Paris, 1836–37). See also Istel and Baker, ‘Beethoven’s “Leonore”
and “Fidelio”’, pp. 227–28.
7 On the Théatre Feydeau’s strong links with royalism in this period, see David
Charlton, ‘The French Theatrical Origins of Fidelio’, in Fidelio: COH, pp. 61–63.
52 Romanticism and Time
Amours de Faublas (1787–90) which ends with the eponymous heroine
being delivered from a Polish castle in a spectacular cavalcade of guns
and horses.
8
Cherubini composed another ‘rescue’ drama after the
Terror, but this time the plot and characters were considerably less
chivalric. Le Porteur d’eau, ou Les Deux Journées (1800) is the story of a
lowly Parisian water-carrier who saves an unjustly proscribed politician
by smuggling him out of the gates of the city in one of his barrels.
9
Like Leonore, this libretto was by Bouilly, and although set in the time
of Cardinal Mazarin, actually based on another real incident from the
1790s. The ‘rescue’ opera, as a genre, had considerable international
appeal in this period, an appeal that was concomitant with the new
fashion for melodrama. This is evident when we look at the rapidity
with which examples were smuggled over and adapted in England. In
1794 John Philip Kemble produced a version of Lodoïska at Drury Lane.
10
More tellingly still, in October 1802 Thomas Holcroft adapted Les Deux
Journées as The Water Carrier, commissioning new music for the drama
from Thomas Dibdin.
11
Beethoven admired Cherubini’s music for Les Deux Journées
enormously,
12
having the score at his elbow when he composed
Leonore, and one of the things that must have struck him about both
stories was their interest in how ordinary lives are transformed when
they get embroiled in politics and political history. When opera critics
criticise Beethoven’s opera they often take issue with its generic and
stylistic hybridity, complaining about the mismatch between the comic
rst act—which is very much in the spirit of Mozartian romantic
8 Interestingly, Pierre Gaveaux, the future composer of Léonore, played Floreski in the
rst Paris production of Lodoïska. In 1802 Lodoïska reached Vienna, being put on at
Schikaneder’s ‘Theater an der Wien’ in March of that year.
9 Les Deux Journées, Comédie Lyrique en trois actes, paroles de J.N. Bouilly, membre de
la Société Philotechnique, Musique du Citoyen Chérubini (Paris: André, [An
Huitième], 1800).
10 On his Account of the English Stage John Genest notes its rst night at Drury Lane, 9
June 1794: ‘This musical Romance in 3 acts was very successful—it was translated
from the French by Kemble—it is a pretty good piece for the sort of thing—much
better calculated for representation than perusal’ (vii, pp. 151–52).
11 ‘The Escapes, or, The Water Carrier’, a Musical Entertainment in Two Acts, rst
performed at Covent Garden on October 14, 1801. Genest’s comment is: ‘this
musical Entertainment, in 3 parts, was acted 12 times—but is not printed—it is a
tolerable piece’ (vii, pp. 548–49).
12 Like Lodoïska it came to Vienna in 1802, in a version translated by G.F. Trietschke, the
future librettist of Beethoven’s own Leonore.
53
3. Beethoven: Revolutionary Transformations
comedy—and the tense and heroic second.
13
But what such criticism
fails to acknowledge is just how much this combination was a conscious
and deliberate feature of the post-Revolutionary ‘rescue’ genre within
which Beethoven was working. There are many innovatory things about
the dramatic spectacle that Cherubini creates in Lodoïska, but essentially
the Revolutionary action is imagined in heroic, aristocratic terms. In
Bouilly’s post-Terror libretti, Léonore and Les Deux Journées, however,
most of the leading characters are resolutely, relatably ordinary—gures
out of a comic milieu who are forced to rise to the challenge of history.
One of the main organising ideas in Beethoven’s opera—in all its
versions—is the notion of the ‘Augenblick’—the eye-blink, or window
of opportunity.
14
This is a political conception, a reection on the micro-
level of that high French sense of the revolutionary ‘journée’, the intense,
spontaneous, decisive moment of action. The second of the two days
that make up Bouilly and Cherubini’s Deux Journées contains just such
a moment. But the ‘Augenblick’ is also, at the same time, a religious
moment, having links with the conversion experience, and with the
advent of the Last Judgement. In Leonore/Fidelio Beethoven presents us
with the paradigm of the ‘augenblick’ rst of all in negative terms. News
has arrived that the Minister is coming to investigate the prisons, having
been informed that they contain several victims of arbitrary power.
Pizarro, the governor of one particular gaol, has thus only a few hours to
get rid of Florestan, the young aristocrat who had threatened to reveal him
as a tyrant two years previously, and has been kept in secret and solitary
connement ever since. Pizarro is slenderly characterised in Bouilly
and Gaveaux’s opera. He only has a speaking part, and there is nothing
explicit in the libretto linking him to the excesses of the revolution. That
said, I don’t think any French audience of the period would have had any
diculty identifying him with the many unprincipled usurpers of public
authority that had ourished during and after the Terror. He is, to this
13 Paul Robinson runs through this argument in his ‘Fidelio and the French Revolution’,
Fidelio: COH, p. 69: ‘The whole, for many critics, is dangerously contradictory—an
opera whose conclusion explodes its musical and dramatic premises’.
14 Beethoven’s ‘Augenblicke’ in Fidelio and elsewhere have been discussed by several
critics, most notably Joseph Kerman in ‘Augenblicke in Fidelio’, Fidelio: COH, pp.
132–44. Nicholas Mathew writes about the static, spectacular nature of Beethoven’s
stretched-out moments in Fidelio in ‘Beethoven’s Moments’, Political Beethoven
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), p. 59, https://doi.org/10.1017/
cbo9780511794483
54 Romanticism and Time
extent, very much a villain of the Directory, a popular bugbear of 1798.
In Sonnleithner and Beethoven’s hands the implicit connection between
Pizarro and revolutionary terrorism is, if anything, even stronger. One
of the rst and most important things that Pizarro gives to Fidelio, in
that extraordinary opening aria of his ‘Welch ein Augenblick!’, is a
powerful sense of—indeed an overriding commitment to—the moment,
the ‘Augenblick’, the transformational instant that will change everything
forever. Like one of the Septembriseurs of 1792, he reads the imminent
return of the old established order as an invitation to consummate his
revenge upon a captive enemy. Fate has, he believes, eectively forced
his hand, and is impelling him to triumph.
PIZARRO
Ha! ha! Ha! Welch’ ein Augenblick! Ha! What a moment!
Die Rache werd’ ich kühlen! I shall cool my vengeance!
Dich rufet dein Geschick! Your fate calls you!
In seinem Herzen wühlen, To plunge in his heart,
O Wonne! großes Glück! O bliss, great joy!
Schon war ich nah’, im Staube Once I was nearly in the dust,
Dem lauten Spot zum Raube, A prey to open mockery,
Dahin gestreckt zu sein. To be laid low;
Nun ist es mir geworden Now it is my turn
Den Mörder selbst zu morden… To murder the murderer myself…
Pizarro, ‘Ah! Welch ein Augenblick!’ Fidelio (1814)
At the opposite pole to this is the moment at the end of the opera, when
the returning Minister Don Fernando pays tribute to Leonore’s heroic
rescue of her husband by giving her the key to release him from his
shackles.
LEONORE, FLORESTAN
O Gott! O welch’ ein Augenblick! O God! O What a moment!
O unaussprechlich süsses Glück! O inexpressibly sweet happiness!
‘O Gott’ Fidelio (1814)
The expansive, yearning melody Beethoven deploys here is, it turns
out, a piece of direct self-quotation, being lifted directly from his early
Funeral Cantata on the Death of Joseph II (1790), specically his setting
of the words ‘Then did men climb into the light, then the earth spun
55
3. Beethoven: Revolutionary Transformations
more joyfully around the sun, and the sun warmed it with the heaven’s
light’. It was because of this connection that Alfred Heuss saw t to dub
it Beethoven’s Humanitätsmelodie.
15
In Fidelio its emergence arguably
carries at least three layers of musical-dramatic meaning. It is a religious
moment—a moment of awe and thanksgiving; it is a humanitarian
moment—a moment of peace and reconciliation, and last but not least
it is a moment that celebrates the power of the moment. As in Pizarro’s
rst aria, this is music in praise of the transformational instant; the
dierence is that in this case it glows with utopian promise.
This dramatisation of the power of the revolutionary moment is
brilliantly handled by Beethoven, and sings out most clearly in the nal,
revised version of the opera. ‘Post a trumpeter on the roof!’ Pizarro had
said in Act I, on hearing of the Minister’s intended visit, ‘and as soon as
you see a coach, have the signal sounded immediately’. But nothing could
be further from the audience’s mind in the middle of the Act II dungeon
scene, when Leonore throws herself between her husband and Pizarro,
pistol in hand, before shouting out: ‘One more sound and you are dead!’
The utopian theorist Ernest Bloch has written of the liturgical paradigm
underlying this moment. As in a Requiem Mass, he says, the Dies Irae
of Leonore and Pizarro’s confrontation is suddenly and unexpectedly
interrupted by a Tuba Mirum—the trumpet signal heralding the last
judgment.
16
It is a sound that we have not yet heard but are nevertheless
absolutely prepared for. What had been intended by Pizarro as a warning
for him, a merely literal herald of the Minister’s arrival, is transformed
by Beethoven into a moment of universal deliverance.
PIZARRO
Geteilt hast du mit ihm das Leben You have shared life with him,
So theile nun den Tod mit ihm. Now share death with him.
LEONORE
Der Tod sei der geschworen, Death I have sworn you,
Durchboren mußt du erste
diesen Brust!
rst you must stab this heart!
Ihm schnell eine Pistole vorhaltend Suddenly brandishing a pistol at him…
15 Alfred Heuss, Die Humanitätsmelodie im ‘Fidelio’, Neue Zeitung fur Musik, 91 (1924),
545–52.
16 Ernest Bloch, Essays on the Philosophy of Music (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1985), pp. 241–43.
56 Romanticism and Time
Noch einen Laut – und du bist
tot!
One more sound—and you are
dead!
Trombe auf dem Theater [The trumpet sounds from the tower.]
Ach! Du bist gerettet! Großer
Gott!
Ah! You are saved! Almighty God!
FLORESTAN
Ach! Ich bin gerettet! Großer
Gott!
Ah! I am saved! Almighty God!
PIZARRO
Ha! Der Minister! Ha! The Minister!
Höll und Tod! Death and damnation!
ROCCO
O! Was is das? Gerechter Gott! Oh! What is that? Righteous God!
Pizarro and Rocco stand dumbfounded. Florestan and Leonore embrace. The
trumpet sounds again, but louder. Jaquino, with two ocers, and soldiers bearing
torches, appear at the uppermost opening on the staircase.
Trumpet Signal, Fidelio (1814)
In the 1814 version, no sooner is the trumpet heard than everyone on
stage knows exactly what it means. It means the Minister has arrived;
it means Pizarro’s tyranny is over, it means Florestan and Leonore are
saved. Rocco the jailer, hitherto a sleepy moral accomplice to Pizarro,
races out of the dungeon after him, but not before making his virtuous
intentions clear to Leonore and Florestan. Heartened, the two lovers
throw themselves immediately into their breathless duet ‘O namenlose
Freude!’ (‘O unspeakable joy!). The act closes, the scene changes, and
the next time we see them Leonore and Florestan have been moved
from the dungeon to the parade ground, and from the darkness to the
light. Together, and with every other member of the dramatis personae,
Rocco and Marzelline, prisoners and populace, in attendance, they
receive the Minister of Prisons, Don Fernando, and the opera turns into
a ceremonial cantata of public joy. ‘Hail the Day, hail the hour’ sing the
Chorus. Brotherhood and amity abound; not only Don Florestan but
also all the other captives of the prison are freed.
This is what happens in 1814. But in 1805 and 1806, events had played
out very dierently. Following the original French libretto much more
closely, the narrative in the rst versions of Beethoven’s opera moves
forward much more anxiously and uncertainly. As in Fidelio, the trumpet
call in Leonore No. 1 and No. 2 brings hope of deliverance, but almost
57
3. Beethoven: Revolutionary Transformations
immediately this is thrown into doubt when Rocco the jailer seizes
Leonore’s pistol and rushes out without a word. In these incarnations,
which are very much in the spirit of Bouilly and Gaveaux, the lovers’
duet ‘O namenlose Freude’ is sung in the full expectation that Pizarro
will soon return to kill them. So their joy is the joy of being reunited, with
no expectation of being freed. What is more, in this version, the duet is
prefaced by a long recitative, in which the fragile air of hope, which is
strongly identied with the oboe in this opera, repeatedly blooms and
dies (Figure 1). Thought to slow down the action unnecessarily, all such
anticipatory yearnings were cut in 1814.
Fig. 1 Ludwig van Beethoven, Recitative und Duett ‘O namenlose Freude’, Leonore
(1805 version) (Leipzig: Breitkopf and Härtel, 1905), p. 221. Public domain.
After this duet, in both the 1805 and 1806 versions, Leonore and
Floresten hear the prison echo with calls for Revenge—Rache—which
58 Romanticism and Time
they interpret (wrongly) to be directed at them. In actual fact they are
directed at Pizarro, and indicate a powerful retributive energy on the
part of the prisoners, which now sound like a burgeoning Revolutionary
mob.
CHOR/CHORUS
Zur Rache! Zur Rache! Revenge! Revenge!
Die Unschuld werde befreit!
The innocent will be released!
Gott schutzet die gerechte God protects the righteous
Sache und straft die Grausamkeit! And punishes cruelty!
‘Zur Rache’ from Leonore (1805, 1806)
Beethoven may have had Cherubini’s early rescue opera Lodoïska (1791)
in mind when he composed this, because there is a ‘Revenge’ chorus
at the climax of that opera, based on a similar musical motif. ‘Notre
fureur est légitime!’ the crowd sing in Cherubini: ‘Engloutissez ces lieux
areux!’.
17
Crucially, no change of scene takes place before the Finale in
1805 or 1806. In these versions Don Fernando, Father Rocco, Jaquino,
Marzelline, Pizarro and the Chorus of Prisoners all enter Florestan and
Leonore’s dungeon, and it is there that Florestan is released from his
chains. Both musically and dramatically, there is something innitely
more spontaneous about the glorious ‘Augenblick’ in these incarnations.
In 1805 Don Fernando hands Leonore the keys; ‘O Gott’ she sings, alone,
before having her thought completed by the rest of the cast, ‘O Gott,
Welch ein Augenblick’ (Figure 2).
17 Lodoïska, Comédie Héroïque, en trois actes, mise en musique by le Citoyen Cherubini (Paris:
Naderman, 1791), pp. 424–25.