Source: Cloudsley, Tim. Romanticism and the indus istory of European ideas, trial revolution in Britain. v. 12, no. 6, pp.611-816. PC201 COMMONWEALTH OF AUSTRALIA. Copyright Reguiations 1969 WARNING This material has been reproduced and communicated to you by or on behalf of the University of Sydney pursuant to Part VB of the Copyright Act 1968 (the Act). ‘The material in this communication may be subject to copyright under the Act. Any further reproduction or communication of this material by you may be the subject of copyright protection under the Act. Do not remove this notice dors of Epes Hear NO 12, 5.99 6M, 180 cipsatemen he pe ROMANTICISM AND THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION IN BRITAIN Tim CLounstey* ‘An Industrial Revolution is an historical process in which scientific and technological knowledge is systematically harnessed to production. It is process which increases the productivity of the society in which it occurs to Gegrees unprecedented in its history. Once adopted it is extended infinitely, ushering in an age in which continuous, if uneven, revolutionisation of productive techniques is the norm. The first Industrial Revolution occurred in Britain in the 1780's; as for any historical phenomenon an interpretation of its genesis must elucidate a unique constellation of factors which made it possible." he precondition for the Industrial Revolution was a well-developed capitalist economic system-—that is, by 1770 a, pre-industrial capitalist economy was far enough evolved to consider Britain a capitalist socio-economic formation. A mmanvfacturing class of entrepreneurs was free co deploy capital, set up factories land use technological innovations in whatever ways might maximise profits from. production. At the same time a state apparatus existed which represented the interests, and was motivated by the economic principles of, the manufacturing ‘and commercial classes. This state, with astrong Navy, was committed to foreign policies orientated towards securing raw materials and potential markets, Ai the fame time, the increase in population in eighteenth century Britain, and a slight rise in the average standard of living, supplied a minimal domestic market for the first mass-produced goods, Other necessary conditions for the first Industrial Revolution may have included the small size of Britain: in an age when the transportation of goods twenty miles overland could double their cost, there could be little chance of a first Industrial Revolution in a land-locked area. But the overriding point is that the mode of production in Britain was capitalist: the Industrial Revolution occurred as a logical process, given certain, Scientific knowledge, in a kind of economy in which the maximisation of jndividual entrepreneurs’ profit was unfetwred. For the first time in history, a manufacturing class had the power to implement technological innovations systematically in production and was able to obtain higher profits by so doing. This is not to say that a bourgeoisie held political power directly in 1770. In fact, the centuries-long transition from a feudal to a capitalist mode of production in Britian was not accompanied by the simple ascendence of one class and the decline of unother, From the Tudor period onwards, the land-owning nobility showed a strong tendency to commercialise agriculture; the backing of a monarchy in need of money allowed land-owners to enclose their own land and the traditional commons of the peasantry and turn them over to commercial production—mainly of wool—for an export market. From the micldle of the cighteenth century this process was carried out through Parliamentary Enclosure “Department of Sociology, Glasgow College, Coweadldens Rd, Glasgow G4 OBA, UK. on612 Tim Cloudstey ‘Acts, Much of the nobility became eftestvely capitalist, creating atthe seme (ae rough the expropriation of land from the peasantry and their expulsion, amurban proletariat? “he commerciliation ofthe nobility weatside by side with theemergence ofa manufacturing bourgeoisie; they intorpenstrated one another in every sense Through marrage through manufacturers using country estatesand smulting aeee tic ifeayles or through the nobility becoming entrepreneurs when, for aretibte coal war discovered on their land, Thus, abourgeois state in Britain was sare dsecly by the manufacturing cltss even in the nineteenth ceaturys the poorly of stzesmen were oF arisocratie origin even in the 18R0"s, Rather, aie tetoring interests dizceted the movement ofthe sinte without a cataclsmig epiuiton ofthe aristocracy asin France, ending instead to favour the stability seer iegitonal authority vested in a nobility provided it was propresive see gh in economic policy. In Britain i was, and hence the confit betvcen sre retaty and bourgvoisie was protracted and muted when open confit did se peover the insu of protection of English com prices as against Free Trade Wine 1630's and 40's for instance —bourgeos interests eventually triumphed Buaish Romantiisme—a cultural efflorescence comprising literature and toa eset extent painling-—wes to a considatuble degree conscious of itelf a3 a ISetment produced by, related to, reflecting upon and criticising the earliest Bias of th Industrial Revolution. Alkhough the Industral Revolution between Fre sn 125 wn forte most port conan win the ext indus end ttanspon, the Romantics were conscfous ofits impact upon society asa whole of reretcanlt bore to the kind of society that had alceady emerged, and probed ni eatenondinary senuvisy and insight into the human implications of tis wat gthutering tien of history. This esay i concerned with the Romantic Meee er nature as evsuructue of sensibilities found in certain poets betwen Visoteais ts an asateacton fom the sre, contadietry, ana dynam apeience and literary expression of certain individuals ‘Works of at come imo being within un infinitely complex rotality—a particular socio-histortel context. The meaning ofan art work is no analytical rpstrction, holding vay tothe degree to which it makes realty intelligible Kn vinfnite member of structures of sensibility could be extracted from @ ‘iculnrstt work, depending on the slant of the investigator, Suck a concept Folds an cpistemotogea? sts similar to Max Weber's “ideal type’, The cokttraction of a sensibility structure must consider the art work itself, the sesShatiy uructure of the artis, and the soco-historeal context. Ulimatel. se or thee terme con only be understood in relation to the others. I the ar Setk'is considered stone, an acsthetie meaning fs attributed fo it which ean Mndiy'do omer than reflect the valver of the fnvestigator. Since thse are raasoned, particular historically rlative values and modes of pereeption are crated in alatorical absolute terms the art works seen only in reation 0 the artist's personality, the interpretation may tend, as in Freud's discussion of Toon da Vine, co assume universal, uhistorieal laws of psychic dynamics Meets creative: process. Such an agproach cannot giasp the dialetial iMentladon between the socierhistorial ontent and the individual's biography, seve depres of social constraint upon tchaiqus, medium content and foro the art work Romanticism anc The Industrial Revolution 613 But if the art work is considered only in relation to socio-historical context, a tendency to determinism is likely to result. With this, the simplified idea of art ‘reflecting’ society arises. By this is implied @ one-to-one relationship of ‘experience’ to art and a psychologistic notion of artistic expression; from it can also arise deterministic dogma about how art should relate to its social context. ‘The point is missed that social reality expressed in an art work is mediated through a particular personality with a unique experience. ‘The further we move into the modern era the more important do artists’ personalities become. This is due to the increased degree of individualisation (which is not necessarily also individuation) resulting from increasing social differentiation; that is, ‘world-views' become relatively more specific to individuals and less ‘organic’ or collective. But it does not mean that knowledge of artists" personalities could not be important to the understanding of art in other historical epochs—of primitive or Ancient Egyptian art for example. If a constantly moving interpretation works between the totality of the art work, the totality of the artist's psyche, and the totality of the society in question, then ‘aspects of the artist's personality can help to construct a sensibility structure. Instead of allotting random, psychologistic relationships between aspects of the artist’s personality and isolated features in his or her work, ‘meaningful features of the artist and his life may clarify the art work as a whole, and may help to delineate the exact way in which a social totality has engendered a particular work of art—conceived not mechanically, but dialectically. Thus, the sorts of experience lived through by nineteenth century artists especially, may be crucial for understanding the meaning of their art; loneliness or anxiety may not be incidental, but structurally related to the reality of that society—so that an understanding of Shelley’s or Van Gogh’s life would be essential to analysing their work; or the meaning of such a work as the Pastoral Symphony might be better appreicated after an acquaintance with Beethoven's letters in which he describes his walks in the country. Psychoanalytical insights could also take their place within a widely contextual analysis, without making assumptions about an artist’s psyche from an art work, or vice versa, directly, The assumption need not be made, that the same, universal ahistorical instincts are sublimated into ‘complicated symbol-condensations in the art of all times and places. Aitistic productions tap the ‘infinity’ of a creative individual's experience: ‘infinity’ because experience is dynamic and not structured, patterned, or catcgorised until articulated into an expressive communication, Aspects of experience are then nailed into symbols, strokes, sounds—into the form of a sonnet, the characters of a play, the harmonies in music. Meaning, feelings, and ideas are interpervaded in a balanced, organic wholeness in what is called a work of art Artis a creative synthesis from experience that gives it form. Anartist does not ‘choose a form and then fill it with what he wants to say; he or she struggles with the world (words, sounds, or lumps of rock) to wrest out of it something of himself. Human beings collectively create their environment, theit world of objects, feelings, beliefs, activities; society interacts with nature in the production of things, activities of all kinds, and in the creation of art forms. Asa particular artifact arising from the mediation between man and nature, art is one of the ways in which any particular society (and more specifically, within this, anyeis Tim Cloudstey® particular social group, or any individual) expresses its metabolism with natu At the same time art often poses an imaginative projection of an alternative | relationship of society to nature. Artis linked to all other buman pursuits through which man’s World is created end transformed. ‘The work of art therefore taps all levels of the artist’s psyche simultaneously; » conscious meanings contained in precise public symbolisms, personal idiosyn- cratic feelings, and also deeper-than-coascious strands of sensibility which are profoundly related to the socio-historical context but which elude exact linguistic description. These different ‘levels’ of the psyche should not be viewed 2s lying on « a continuum, with the ‘social self’ sliding into an individual self. All the self—from levels of publicly defined knowledge and feeling to more elusive, personal experience—-is equally social; that is, it is formed through the individual's interaction with all other reality—though uniquely to each individual. The ‘deepest’ levels should not be conceived as the unchanging essence of an individual, present from birth. All such {evels must be considered in the Romantic vision of nature. ‘The sociology of artis faced with a dilemma over what it is ultimately studying in terms of socio-historical context: the experience from which an art work derives, the structural integrity of the ar: work itself, or the process of reception and assimilation of the art work by other individuals. The lasts variable; thatis, the way a performance is understood and experienced depends upon the ‘audience according to its social group and historical location, The nature ofsuch variation in the reception of art works is in itself a subject for investigation. ” However, the sensibility structure I elucidate here is not based on any specific audience—other than I myself in my socio-historival location. Art works are always communications, understood in ways that vary in relation tothe audience in question. Thus, a sensibilty structure is objective inasmuch as it is rationally located in the context being considered, but like Weber's ideal type its objectivity is relative to the investigator's concerns and historical position. Ic exists as an abstraction in the investigator's mind—a particular abstraction among many possible ones, always, from an infinitely complex, dynamic reality ‘The experience from which an art work derives, and its structure, can only be understood in relation one to another. The experience itself is partially understood through art works though also from other convergent kinds of evidence. On the other hand, the way in which an art work structures experience is itself an aspect of that experience, in that particular kinds of experience make for the choice of particular subject matter and media, whether this is effected through patterns of patronage, or through the internalisation of certain ‘tastes’, or through a very personal response to experience. Thus it may appear that analytical separation of experience from att work is tautological. In fact however, contextual analysis cannot avoid elucidation of different phenomena in terms of one another, as Lovell! pointed out. Far from being undesieable, this is essential if explanations are to go beyond positivistic notions of causation. Because ‘experience’ is hard to get to directly, the category is often ignored. Thus, art works are discussed in their own te-ms alone—meaning and development being conceived of as ‘immanent to art itself’ or, they are seen simply as artifacts of specific socio-historical structures, again bypassing consciousness and ‘experience, Romanticism and The Industrial Revolution ois Experience is the totality of an individual's or # group's “being-in-the-world’, every aspect of which is related in some way to every other aspect. R.D. Laing’s way of understanding the psychiatric patient as a person is relevant here. Laing wrote: *. .. no matter how circumscribed or diffuse the initial complaint may be, ‘one knows that the patient is bringing into the treatment situation, whether intentionally or unintentionally, his existence, his whole being-in-hs-world. One knows also that every aspect of his being is related in some way to every other aspect, although the manner in which these aspects are articulated may be by no means clear. It is the task of existential phenomenology to articulate what the other's “world” is and his way of being in it’ ‘The totality of an individual’s experience is a structure of beliefs and feelings that complements in some way a given socio-economic formation, and more particularly, the social group in which that individual bas arisen. The sociology of art needs a conceptual framework that allows one to relate the experience of individuals or groups to their society's whole mode of existence. This does not involve falling into a ‘group mind’ conception. It merely attempts to show the partial interrelatedness of subjective experiences across classes. Thus, Roman- ticism existed within the contradictory totality ofearly nineteenth century British, society. It is not to be seen as an experience related essentially to a specific class, even though most Romantic poets came from the educated classes. Generally, cultures should be seen as expressing dynamic relationships, as structured through the tensions and contradictions between classes. Aspects of working, class experience and perspective force themselves into the aesthetic totality of a bourgeois art form, which may simultaneously wrestle with and incorporate dimensions of a receding aristocratic world-view. The Romantic orientation is bound up with the experience and actions of the working class, even if working class individuals themselves rarely evolved a Romantic attitude to nature. Shelley was self-consciously committed to the creation of a cultural counterpart to the proletarian radicalism of the early nineteenth century, and saw Romantic poetry as part of the English Revolution. In general, Romanticism wrested form out of the experience of capitalist industrialisation, as the active radical culture of the artisans, weavers and spinners ‘made’ them into a class simuttanecusly to being ‘made’ ‘a proletariat by the processes of economic change. Conceiving individuals experience in relation to social structure requires that we encompass a continuous dynamic dialectic between parts within the totality of individual and group (or class) experience, and between these and concrete historical formations in their totality. ‘The dynamic totality of an individual's or group's experience consists of feelings, thoughts and perceptions in ‘multiple realities’.«Deep’ or esoteric levels, of experience are interrelated with concrete or ‘mundane’ levels, and changes in any one level give rise to modifications of the whole, The psychologist F. Kruger described individual experience in the following way: ter-connected, embedded within a Everything distinguishable in experience is total-whole that penetrates and envelops it... Feelings and emotions are influenced by every change in the experience content and its conditions (quality, intensity, duration, etc.). Here the smallest causes may have the greatest effects,616 Tim Cloudstey -change in total complexes is more exactly perceived than any change in thett pars'? ‘The emergence of a particular structure of sensibilities within particular individuals, conceived as a subtle tonal pattern of emotion and thought, must be related to more than social group or class, Changes in the society as a whole—technological and urban developments in particular in the present case—must be seen as directly and indirectly affecting now structures of sensibility. Different classes evolve different sensibilities that reflect their different relations to the whole, but they may hold a mutual interrelatedness on the deepest levels. Thus there were Romantic poets among farm-labourers, the professional middle class, and among aristocrats. ‘The totality of consciousness, or experience, is made up of what Alfred Schutz called *provinces of meaning’ or ‘realms of experience’ «it is the meaning of our experiences, and not the ontological structure of the ‘objects, which constitutes reality. Each province of meaning—the paramount world of real objects and events into which we can gear by ouractions, the world of imaginings and phantasms, such as the flay world of the child, the world of the insane, but also the world of art, the world of dreams, the world of scientific ‘contemplation—has its particular cognitive style. It isthis particular style of a set of ‘our experiences which constitutes them asa finite province of meaning. All experiences within each of these worlds are, with respect to this cognitive style, consistent in themscives and compatible with one another...each of these finite provinces of meaning, is, among other things, characterized by a specific tension of Cconsciouness, by a specific time-perspective, by a specific form of experiencing oneself, and, finally, by a apecifie form of saciality"" The paramount reality for Schutz is that of everyday life which commonsense thinking takes for granted. It includes ‘physical objects, facts, and events within our actual and potential reach’, that is, direct experience in work, family, and community. Other provinces of meaning, with their specific ‘cognitive styles’, ate “transcendences’ of everyday life experience. The transcendent realities of Nature and Society are common to all mankind, though experienced within different perspectives and adumbrations: we find in our socio-cultural environment itself socially approved systems offering answers for our quest for the unknowable transcendences, Devices are developed to apprehend the disquieting phenomena transcending the world of everyday life in a way analogous to the familiar phenomena within it." Although each province of meaning is characterised by a mode of experience incompatible with the others, all provinces are interrelated in the totality of human consciousness. The nature of ev:ryday life experience impresses itself upon transcendent realms of experience; changes in the ordering of it must affect transcendent realms. At the same time, transcendent realms come to operate within everyday life experience: phantasy and theoretical contemplation enter, for example, into the concrete world of work. Now the Romantic vision cuts across all provinces of meaning in Schutz’s Romanticism and The Industrial Revolution 17 sense. It involves an attitude to and perception of everyday life experience, and is a mode of understanding society—intellectual (ideas about politics, economics etc.), intuitive and emotional. Its a relation to the cosmos, a bearing open of the soul to the universe in a particular way—emotional, but also involving elements of a scientific cosmology. All levels of experience are interrelated in complex ways. The most esoteric, transcendent modes of feeling are rclated to the experience of everyday life, and to the totality of society at this particular historical moment. The understanding of such esoteric experience is a door into the inside reality ofthe society, even if the experience was articulated by only very few actual individuals. It can be suggested that there has been, throughout the history of Western Civilisation, a deep strand of sensibility associated with the imaginative vision of nature. Its essentially an opening up of the second type of imaginary awareness according to Sartre's!’ distinction: the first is the purely imaginative creation of non-existent objects, in inner fantasy. The second is an appreheasion of the real in which perceptual experience is given meaning ‘beyond itsel?—the object is ‘clothed in meanings drawn from all levels of experience. This kind of imaginative perception is accompanied, in the Romantic vision, by a throwing of overcoming emotion upon nature, particulars of which become both image and symbol of intense subjective and ultimate cosmic fecling. Its the imaginative vision of the eternal within the particular, cosmic vitality in growth, essence in movement. In itis the melancholy of Time, the painin experienced tension between change and Being, and consciousness of humanity's rupture from nature. Suddenly it is ‘humanly untouched nature’—the very thought being significant, This sensibility ‘goes deeper than the varied forms in which it has been expressed. In fifteenth century Flemish landscape painting it is still within a stylised arrangement of nature, but the experience is nevertheless a visionary perception. In an ideal vision of nature painted by Bouts, truth gleams sadly through theforms of leaves, flowers, water, hills. In seventeenth century Holland, Ruisdael moves in the vital, writhing growth of trees, swirls of clouds and water, in a new Romantic vision, ‘Then, in late eighteenth century England, Constable sketches directly from nature, capturing transient particularities to demonstrate the work of the Creator, This sensibility follows the major shocks of new disruptive orders in human society: fifteenth-century Flemish urban capitalism, seventeenth century Dutch, ighteenth- and nineteenth-century industrial captatism in Britain." The eternal condition of man, alienated through his unique possession of consciousness, reflection, awareness of isolation, time and deat, is heightened by the new intensified forms alienation takes on within capitalist society. For the Romantic poets, a psychic dislocation gives rise to a visionary perception of nature: ‘normal’ appearance—mattet—cracks, disintegrates, allowing communion with its essence. Shelley's poem Eptpsychidion isa declaration of love toa woman, and the expression of a Platonic vision of Truth within and beyond all reality. Although the island he and his lady will go to is a fantasy, itis infused with this, experience of the Divine gleaming through Nature, which came from his personal trance-like observation:618 ‘And from the sea there rise, and from the sky There fall, clear exhalations, soft and bright, Veil after veil, cach hiding some delight, Which Sun or Moon or Zephyr draw aside, Till the isle's beauty, like a naked bride Glowing at once with love and lovel:ness, Blushes and trembles at its own excess Yet, like a buried lamp, a Soul no less Burns in the heart of this delicious isle, ‘An atom of th'Eternal, whose own smile Unfolds itself, and may be felt, not seen O'er the gray rocks, blue waves, and forests green, Filling their bare and void interstices. In Shelley, like Wordsworth, the various forms of nature are listed in a stea dreamlike, sonorous meandering; the whole expresses a ‘visionary glealn’s Raymond Williams says: It is often a prolonged, rapt, exceptional description: an intricate workig particularity, as opposed to the more characteristic atribution of single ident Qualities ia most earlier writing «the human separation of Wordsworth and Clare. ..is mediated by « projecig ‘of personal fecling into a subjectively particularized and objectively general Nature." The union with nature is melancholy and lonely; all the Romantics felt sense of another ostracised from their society, though all were ‘itd concerned with society. Whether it :s John Clare, aware of enclosures él commercialisation of agriculture destroying the ‘natural’ countryside}! feeling of Wordsworth and Shelley that the developing society is adi Nature in all its ways, there is the conviction that the return to Nat individuals and as humanity, is the all-embracing quest for mankind. Nat the teacher, 2s Wordsworth explicit y says: «of all the mighty world Of eye and ear, both what they half create And what perceive; well please to recognize Tn nature and the language of the sease, ‘The anchor of my purest thoughts, the aurse, ‘The guide, the guardian of my heart. and soul Of all my moral being.”* ‘Truthful existence is in Nature. On Shelley's ideal island in Epipsychidtoii: (Our simple life wants little, and true taste Hires not the pale drudge Luxury, to waste ‘The scene it Would adorn, and therefore still, Nature with all her children haunts the bill. The ring-dove, in the embowering ivy, yet Keeps up her love-lament, and the owls flit Round the evening tower, and the young stars glance Between the quick bats in their twilight dance."* Tim Clowd@ Fomansiion and The Intusria Revolution os Kcommunion with Nature should mean that relations between people are jeharacterised by love, generosity, and mutual understanding. Thought of such Hove between human Beings embedded in mature, is one level of meaning in pipsychidion, simultaneous to the expression of personal love fora particular woman: ls sour breath shall intrmix, our bosoms bound, iBi'and our vein beat together; and our Kips with other eloquence than Words, eclipse [The soul that burns between them FO As mountainsprings under the morning sun fjy-Weaball Become the same, We shall be one.” live in spiritual closeness with Nature did not mean literally a return to Ihermivlike simplicity. In Shelley's writings, the iden emerges of ar urban society pfbich mightattain anew harmony with nature. Ina letertohisfriend Peacock in 819, Shelley wrote: f. I now understand why the Greeks were such great poets: and above all, I can ‘Account, it seems to me, for the harmony, the unity, the perfection, the unifo txcellonce, of all their works of art. They lived im a perpetual coramerce with ® external nature, and nourished themselves upon the spirit of ite forms, Their theatres were all open to the mountains and the sky. Their columns, the idea! types ot a sacred forest, with its roof of interwoven tracery, admitted the light and wind; {the odour and the freshness of the country penetcated the cities. w Romantic poets experienced isolation in their lives. As pocts many of them lerwent the experience of being ignored, partly because patterns of traditional itionage were declining—leaving art like everything cise to the selection of an iSnymous market."” This market was not able to recognise great poetry, Giiring rather whichever fashionable, inauthentic style was in vogue. Their Hasiuvity to the realities of their society led many of them to epen rebelion inst the social order and the ruling classes, even when, as in the ease of Shelley, iey came from these classes. (Apart from his antagonism toward class society n principle, it was likely that Shelley's sensibility would lead him to reject his, i Particular class-background, where wealth gained in commerce had been ed to buy estates with attendant gentry status. This could hardly be thought an Fistoccacy whose wealth and power were in some sense justified’ by closeness (0 €.£0il, or by its benevolence to the lower classcs.) ‘The paradox arose whereby Wordsworth could speak of the respect and $¥erence a poet should feel toward the People, whilst the Public, “ever governed Ydactitious influence’? should not be prostituted to, And Saclley, whilst Sstowing upon poets the highest duty to their society as ‘legislators of the forld’, adds the word unacknowledged’ °" Trelawny records that Shelley said to ron: ‘Write nothing but what your conviction ofits truth inspires you to write: you Cul give counsel to tc wie, nd not take it from the foolish, Time il verse (the judgement of the vulgar.” e620 Tim Cioudsiey ‘The Romantics—as much as any group of artists before or since—were locked into a situation in which the quest for ‘truth’, and the acceptance of responsibitity to humanity, meant censure, rejectior, and hatred from their contemporaries from the educated classes. Furthermore, they were characteristicaily people who. experimented with mores and life-styles beyond their time and class-origins. Not surprisingly, they wrote for posterity, putting their hopes on the future to understand and make use of them, That the future in fact made out of them a legend of glorious isolation, twisting their undersired pain into a glorification of ‘art for art's sake’ and the lonely garret—is a function of the continued development of industrial capitalist society. The Romantic Myth is the very opposite of Blake, Shelley, or Keats. ‘The actual isolation of their lives heightened their communication with nature and with humanity in the abstract. As Shelley wrote: in solitude, or in that deserted state when we are surrounded by human beings, ‘and yet they sympathize not with us, we love the lowers, the grass, and the waters, and the sky. In the emotion of the very aves of spring, in the blue air, thercisthen found a secret correspondence with our aeart. There is eloquence in the tongucless wind, and a melody in the flowing brooks and the rustling af the reeds beside them, which by their inconceivable relation 12 something within the soul, awaken the spirits toa danee of breathless rapture, and bring tears of mysterious tenderness 10 the eyes... The expression of human alientation was given its burning intensity from personal experience. The exploration of beauty or truth always enters realms of melancholy, unreal, shadowy dream. Taough ecstatic, their penetration leads to loneliness and the fecling that they recede just as they are found. Love is unattainable, elusive, yet worshipped for being as powerful as the god of any religion. The unearthly beauty of passages in Epipsychidion departs utterly from normal perception; it is both a cosmic and an inner voyage. The sound penetrates and shimmers beneath the veil of sanity, to enter a timeless, unbearable love, communion wearily and desperately yearned for. The words seem to be a spell, transporting the self to a state of ultimate being in which all emation is felt, and united, Pain and sustained eestasy reach Eternity: ‘The Blue Aegean girds this chosen home, With ever-changing sound and light and foam, Kissing the sifted sands, and caverns hear, And all the winds wandering along the shore Undulate with the undulating tide: ‘There are thick woods where sylvan Forms abide; And many a fountain, rivulet, and pond, ‘As clear as elemental diamond, (Or serene morning air; and far beyond, The mossy tracks made by the goats and deer (Which the rough shepherd treads but once a year) Pierce into glades, caverns, and bowers, and halls Built round with ivy, Which the waterfaits Mluminating with sound that never fails ‘Accompany the noonday nightingates; ‘And all the place is peopled with sweet airs; Romanticism and The Indusirial Revolution ear ‘The light clear element which the isle wears Is heavy with the scent of lemon-flowers, ‘Which floats like mist laden with unseen showers, And falls upon the eyelids like faint sleep; ‘And from the moss violets and jonquils peep, ‘And dart their arrowy odour through the brain ‘Till you might faint with that delicious pain, And every motion, odour, beam and tons, ‘With that deep music is in uniso1 ‘Which is a soul within a soul—they seem Like echoes of an antenatal dream? The visionary perception of nature is often thought of asdream; the imagination runs like fluid into it, making it glow with the freshness and purity of Adam's Garden in the dawn of time. The veil over normal perception falls, and reality listens in its ‘isness'—revealing Truth, the inspiration of poetry. For John Keats it is the trees themselves that dream: ‘As when, upon a tranced summer night, Those green-robed senators of mighty woods, Tall oaks, branch-charmed by the earnest stars, Dream, and so dream afl night without a stir? Whether the vision isa dreamlike perception of reality, or an imagined reality ina dream, is inconsequential. 4 bowery nook Will be elysium—an eternal book Whence I may copy many a lovely saying About the leaves, and flowers—about the playing (Of nymphs in woods, and fountains; and the shade Keeping a silence round a sleeping m: ‘And many a verse from so strange influence That we must ever wonder how and whence Ic came, Also imaginings will hover Round my fireside, and haply there discover, Vistas of solemn beauty, where 'd wander In happy silence, like the clear meander Through its lonely vales; and where I found a spot ‘Of awfuller shade, or an enchanted grot, ‘Or a green hill o'erspread with chequered dress Of flowers, and fearful from its loveliness, Write on my tablets all that was permitted, Al that was for our human senses fitted.* Or, in Shelley: the Earth and Ocean seem To sleep in one another's arms, and dream Of waves, flowers, clouds, woods, rocks and all that we Read in their smiles, and call reality."022 Tim Cloudsiey The forms of nature ure perceived as if they were drawn into an inner reception, intense and ethereal; they are fels' with the entire, bared-open, hypere sensitised soul. his experience shades into Truth as known through art, human freedom, or love. ‘Often the ‘essential’ vision of nature—as both material and divine—isfelt tobe elosest in childhood, before intuition iseroded by conception. This is part of the sadness of time and change for Wordsworth: ‘There was a time when meadow, grove and stream, ‘The earth, and every common sight, To me did seem Apparelied in celestial light, ‘The glory and the freshness of a drcam, Iv is not now as it hath been of yore— ‘Turn whereso'er I may By night or day, “The things which T have seen I now can see no more. Shelley also felt it: ‘There was a Being whom my spirit oft Met on its visioned wanderings, far aloft, In the clear golden prime of my youth's dawn, Upon the fairy isles of sunny lawn, ‘Amid the enchanted mountuins, and the caves Of divine sleep, and on the air-like waves Of wonder-levet dream...” So far is normal life estranged from the one sure knowledge of Truth, that life itselt comes eventually to be seen as anextinction of that communion (as in some forms of Buddhism)—a temporary eclipse: (Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting..." and That Benediction which the eclipsing Curse Of birth ean quench not...” Penetration to the ‘essence” or vital energy in Nature, in which the veil of normal, surface perception falls—is an experience in which the categories of the normal self dissolve. The experience is therefor “To mingle with the Universe and feet What Tean ne'er express, yet can not all conceal."* Human emotions take on a cosmic significance—the grief, ecstasy, and totality of human feelings with which Nature is saturated take on an absolute intensity: ‘To me the meanest flower that blows can give Thoughts that do often lie too deep fur tears.”* Romanticism and The Industrial Revolution 623 or: -.ms from a hyacinth full (Of honey-dew, a liquid murmur drops, Killing the sense with passion. ‘The death of self is not Death; and since Nature and Man are ultimately one reality, there being no theological dualism of Matter and Diviaity."* death is simply a rejoining in the endless process: He is made one with Nature: there is heard His voice in all hex music, from the moan Of thunder, to the song of night's sweet bird; He is a presence to be felt and known In darkness and in light, from herb to stone, Spreading itself where'er that Power may move ‘Which has withdrawn his being to its own.% ‘The fact that many Romantic poets turned to the pastoral gene in poetry, is, partially responsible for a conception of them as escapist and backward-looking. But Shelley strove explicitly for ‘something wholly new and relative to the age, and yet surpassingly beautiful’.”” Being onc of the oldest strands of western culture, the pastoral genre was one which allowed particular emotions to be transcended, embracing ‘eternal’ levels of human experience—especially mutability and death, In such a ‘supra-individual’ form and symbolism the poet's feclings are able to reverberate and set off asociations into many historical epochs from Theocritus to Milton. A symbolism that had not taken so long coming into being could not carry the intensity of emotion and the infinite implications of meaning which are found in Epipsychidion or Adonais. But it is essentially the feelings of the nineteenth century that are poured into the names of flowers, muses, etc.—whilst sparking of resonations that seem to stzetch to infinity. For Keats and Shelley, pastoral poetry allowed a harmony of sound and feeling, and a kind of imagery, which they believed aroused the imaginative faculties and the human sympathies—hence it was urgently related to the age. It is not strange but rather an indication of understandable contradiction in Romanticism, that a fundamentally ‘aristocratic’ genre should have taken on a radical relation to the age. In many civilisations it seems, a sudden developmentof propery relations and urbanism has been accompanied by the turning of artists to ature; human experience becomes intermingled with nature, from where new symbolisms are found which then enter social experience. Both personal and wider public experience are viewed through natural symbols. The new heights of alienation brought about by industrial urban capitalism are expressed in Romantic poetry through an interpenetration of human and natural symbolism. Jntermingling of the natural and the human occurs on all Jevels. 1n Shelley's To a Skylark and in Keats’s Odes, personal feelings flow subtly into the observations cf nature, which then come back into experience. The conversation between Byron and Shelley in the latter's poem Julian and Maddalo is interspersed with poignant natural descriptions:624 Tim Cloudstey with a remembered friend I love To ride as then T rede;—for the winds drove ‘The living spray along the sunny air Into our faces; the blue heavens were bare, Stripped to their depths by the awakening north; ‘And, from the waves, sound like deligh: broke forth Harmonising with solitude, and sent Into our hearts aereal merriment. So, as we rode, we talked; and the swift thought, Winging itself with laughter, lingered not, But flew from brain to brain...°* ‘The late eighteenth and carly nineteenth centuries saw the creation of fully artificial urban environments, apparently outside of nature. Wordsworth writes: -+-2 multitude of causes, unknown to former times, are now acting with a combined force to blunt the discriminating powers of the mind, and, unfitting it for alt voluntary exertion, to reduce it to a siate of almost savage torpor. The most effective of these causes are the great national events which arc daily taking place, and the increasing accumulation of men in cities, where the uniformity of theit ‘occupations produces a craving for extraordinary incident, which the rapid ‘communication of intelligence hourly gratifies.”” And: Lite we see in Nature that is ours; We have piven our hearts away, a sordid boon!® Experience in nature is contrasted with experience in the city. London by 1815 had a population of over one million people. Here the mind and senses are constantly stimulated by sounds, sights, and movements beyond the individual's powers of selection; the state engendered is one of continuous superficial sensory arousal, making all things of equal significance. [n nature, mind and feelings are able to settle into a deeper, more melodious mode of perception and contact with the self; sounds and sights can be selected and discriminated in a state of being, which allows greater refinement of sensibility. This intuitive, integrated mode of existence only comes to be considered such when cities exist to provide a contrasts reflection then allows a clearer understanding of harmonious being; nature becomes a teacher. A higher calmness is believed to allow experience of the deepest passions. It is not thought that human beings can be taught to become ‘good’ or that aggression and selfishress can simply be suppressed by self control. Rather, such tendencies are accepted as vital parts of the whole spectrum of human experience. But, in a state of harmonious relation between self and nature, the ‘instincts’ can be channeled and balanced—steered away from disintegrative and destructive paths. This is the feeling in Byron, who loves ‘not Man the less, but Nature more’ Romanticism and The Industrial Revolution 625 To fly from, need not be to hate, mankind: All are not fit with them to stir and toil, Nor is it discontent to keep the mind Deep in its fountain, lest it overboil In the hot throng, where we become the spoil Of our infection, till too late and long We may deplore and strugale with the coil, In wretched interchange of wrong and wrong. Midst a contentious worl, striving where none are strong. Are not the mountains, waves, and skies a part (Of me and of my soul, as J of them? Is not the love of these deep in my heart ‘With a pure passion? Or, as Keats writes: ‘Oh ye! who have your eye-balls vexed and tired, Feast them upon the wideness of the Sea; ‘Oh ye! whose ears are dinned with uproar rude, Or fed 100 much with cloying melody. 1? Different aspects of alienation are touched upon by the different Romantic poets, yet the various expressions coalesce into a vision of alienation from nature. John Clare, a farm-labourer, observed enclosures and growing capitalist agriculture Grive the rural lower classes off their land or into desperate poverty. In spite of the ideology of laissez-faire which legitimised the new relationship between the ruling class and the people, the 1815 Corn Law (representing the land-owners? interests) restricted the import of corn, Keeping the price of bread above the farm- labourers" means. In 1830 starving field labourers rioted for a wage of hatf-a- crown a day; three were hanged, four hundred and twenty were deported to Australia, The labourers” experience is found in Clare: Accursed Wealth! o'er-bounding human laws, (Of every evil thou remainst the cause: Victims of want, those wretches such as me, Too truly lay their wretchedness to thee: Thou art the bar that keeps from being fed, And thine our loss of labour and of bread.** And in explicit discussion of enclosure: There once were lanes in nature's freedom drapt, ‘There once were paths that every valley wound — Inctosure came, and every path was stopt; Each tyrant fix'd his sign where paths were found.** Robert Bloomfield laments the separation from nature of those ii environments:626 Tim Cloudsley Must scenes like these expand, Scenes s0 magnificently gran, ‘And milione breathe, and pas aay Ghoiesedy throushows tei Ue day, With one short ghmpoe?™™ Te may have been this feeling that ied the Commons Preservation Society in the 1860's to resist the exclusion of urban populations from the nearby countryside. During the Romantic era, the continuing division of Britain into large, private estates alongside the growth of towns, was seen by the Romantic poets as an unprecedented trampling on ‘the old laws of England’. Injustice and tyranny were felt to be related to this cutting off of people from nature. It is perhaps in Shelley that the implictions of the imaginative perception of nature are most thoroughily pursued into social and political thought, thowgh similar visions are to be found in other Romantics, He expresses the idea that both worker and capitalist are alienated in a society dominated by market relationships. Although the markets ameans by which exploitation is enacted, it has an autonomous dynamic. It is a blind force compelling the capitalist 10 behave in certain ways if he is not to collapse. If the worker, forced to sell his labour power on the “free” market, is driven by invisible forces beyond his conirol, the capitalist, as Marx described him, is a “mero predicate of capital’. He is not the subject of his actions but follows rather the dictates of a reified system, in the same way that the worker's labour is determined by the production process. But he believes he is authentic, an individualist. He believes his selfishness is virruons and in the interests of mankind; authentic feelings are so far eroded that he is unaware of the alienated callous relations between himself and others, between himself and nature: Commerce has set the mark of selfishness, The signet of its all-enslaving power Upon a shining ore, and called it gold: Before whose image bow the vulgar great, The vainly rich, the miserable proud, ‘The mob of petsants, nobles, priests, and kings, ‘And with blind feelings reverence the power ‘That grinds them to the dust of misery: The market, competitivencs, and greed are not ‘natural’ as the economists would have it Hath Nature's soul, ‘That formed this world so beautiful... fon Man alone, Heaped ruin, vice and slavery... ‘Nature!—no! Icis in a specific historical epoch that man is being rent from nature in this way. The direct, deeper-than-analytical knowledge that nature teaches, is that all human beings have the same rights to live, fove, and expiore their potential to the utmost Romanticism and The Industrial Revolution 627 v.-T know ‘That Love makes all things equal. I have heard By mine own heart this joyous truth averred. ‘Human oppression is quite simply ‘the insolent violation of the most sacred ties of nature and society’? Human oppressors are: _- Woadmen whe expel Love's gentle Dryads from the haunts of life And vex the nightingales in every dell.*" ‘The understanding of this is ‘too deep for the brief fanthomline of thought and sense’: it is the awareness in Nature of the inestimable beauty, of the uniqueness and sacredness of every leaf, flower or cloud—which, in natural spontaneity blend together to form a higher order, a harmony, as should exist in human society. From the basis of an experience of oneness with all, in which all human powers are integrated; from an identification of the ever-changing soul with the mysterious movement of clouds and water, emerges the will to see all human beings free. From the ever-changing patterns of light on the moving forms of nature, a sense of human existence being part of the natural process is derived. ‘Through the transient, never-repeated patterns can be glimpsedan eternal truth. Inscparably linked with this intuitive experience are rational conceptions of human history. It cannot be said that Shelléy developed a coherent philosophy of history, but numerous lines of poetry and statements in prose suggest the germ of a profound comprehension of history as an active process, occurring within and transforming nature, of society as an ever-developing complex totality in which institutions and patterns of ideas and culture interact dialectically. For example: habite which subsist only in relation to a particular state of social institution may ‘be expected to cease as soon as that relation is dissolved ** And: Poets, not otherwise than philosophers, painters, sculptors, and musicians, are, in fone sense, the creators, and, in another, the creations of theic age.”* Shelley did not achieve a coherent philosophical synthesis from his ahistorical Platonic idealism and his rational, empirical, materialism. His tendency to forge aunity of ideal and material sometimes falls back into a theological dualism. On the other hand he sometimes seems committed to the static Natural Laws, the mechanical materialism, of the Enlightenment, though the deeper experience of his poetry is that of Truth as a becoming, an ever-changing relation between self and nature through Promethean struggle and realisation of human potential. ‘Sometimes his understanding of social reality inclines one to believe that, had he lived to the modest age of sixty-five, he would have found such a synthesis in Marxism, He was aware that the evils he observed in Britain were not the results of industry in itself, but of industrialisation and agricultural commercialisation ina capitalist economic system. Money, he saw, is the embodiment ofa particular628 Tin Cloudstey social relationship—a phantom that appears a natural ‘thing’, But it is stored” labour; the capitalist’s wealth flows from his control over others’ lives and his ownership of the product of their work: “Tis to let the Ghost of Gold Take ftom Toil a thousandfold ‘More than eer its substance could In the Tyrannies of old, Paper coin—that forgery Of the title-deeds, which ye Hold to something of the worth Of the inheritance of Farth “Tis t0 be a slave an soul And to hold no strong control Over your awn wills, but be Alll that others make of ye And at length when ye complain With a murmur weak and vain “Tis to see the Tyrant’s crew Ride over your wives and you— Blood is on the grass like dew. In a situation where one class owns the means of production and can harness a ispossessed class to work for it in order to maximise profits, the organisation of labour in industry is alienated, Within capitalism, the mest ‘efficient’ method of organising labour is to harness each worker 10 one cog in the production process. Technology—which could be the basis for a higher human existence—fragments, enslaves, mutilates and impoverishes the worker: We have more scientific and economical knowledge than can be accommodated 10 the just distribution of the produce which it multiplies ‘The cultivation of those sciences which have enlarged the limits of the empire of man over the external world, has... proportionally circumscribed those of the internal world; and man, having enslaved the elements, remains himself a slave. the abuse of all invention for abridging and combining labour, (is) to the exasperation of the inequality of mankind. .. the discoveries which should have lightened, have added a weight to the curse imposed on Adam, ‘The resolution to the miseries of exploitation and alienation in capitalist society is through social revolution, condueted by organised, conscious working people:** ‘cience, Poetry, and Thought ‘Ave thy lamps. Let # great Assembly be OF the fearless and the free Romanticism and The Industrial Revotutton 629 Rise like Lions after slumber In unvanquishable oumber— Shake your chains to earth like dew Which in sleep had fallen on you Ye are many—they are few.” ‘The following has the resonance of The Communist Manifesto: This is the age of the war of the oppressed against the oppressors, and every one of those ringleaders of the privileged gangs of murderers and swindlers, called Sovereigns, look to each other for aid against the common enemy, and suspend their mutual jealousies in the presence of a mightier fear. OF this holy alliance all the despots of the earth are virtual members. But a new race has arisen throughout Europe, nursed in the abhorrence of the opinions which are ts chains, and she will continue to produce fresh generations to accomplish that destiny which tyrants forsee and dread.” Shelley implicitly characterises different kinds of society as different forms of relation between man and nature—within economies, and in ideas and feelings. Capitalist society is the highest form of alienation from nature; it destroys both nature and man. The capitalist made of production is associated with a consciousness dominated by the ‘calculating faculty’ at the expense of the imaginative, creative faculty. In a similar way Herbert Marcuse has identified “technical reason’ as an ideology that banishes imaginative thought about how technology could be used to the benefit and fulfilment of society as a whole; banishes the possibility that ‘progress’ could be other than capitalist progress. Shelley's Defense of Poerry has often been taken to suggest that the answer lies simply in the cultivation of poetry, but his ideas are far more complex and realistic than that. He identifies the revolutionary orientation with the ircagination, The imagination overcomes the fragmentation of knowledge, allowing its possibilities to be realised: ‘The poetry is these systems of thought is concealed by the accumulation of facts and calculating processes.'*! The imagination welds ideas to actions, in praxis: There ig no want of knowledge respecting what is wisest and best ia morals, government, and political economy... ‘We want the creative faculty to imagine that which we know; we wan: the generous impulse to act that which we imagine; we want the poetry of life... Clearly, Shelley was getting at the idewof'a revolutionary consciousness: the idea of # new human being, in whom intellect and feeling would be harmoniously balanced. This new consciousness is related to dialogue with nature, for the imagination is excited by communion with nature. The society of the future would exist in harmonious metabolism with nature, and within close relationships of feeling between men: Thow hait a voice, great Mountain, to repeat Large codes of fraud and woe; not understood By ail, but which the wise, and great and good Amterpret, or make felt, or deeply feel".630 Tim Cloudsley A society in harmony with nature and itself would not be ruled by a science and technology of domination over nature and man; knowledge would be guided by the imagination, and harnessed to the fulfilment of human ideals. MH Abrams writes in a footnote to Shelley's Mont Blan .+. This work... emphasizes the interchange between mind and nature in perception and goes on to pose the question of the significance of nature of man ‘The poem raises the central problem sbout the nature and human significance of Power”, the ultimate principle behind all natural and mental process. The symbol of this power is the river Arve, which has its “secret throne” at the summitof Mont Blanc. Itis the entightened human will alone which can convert this purposeless destroyer and preserver te moral purposefulness, by harnessing process as means to its own, human ends, even to the revolutionary end of total reform by the repeal of “Large codes of fraud and woe”. ‘The emergence of revolutionary consciousness is conceived by Shelley historically. He considered industrial capitalism to be the first kind of society in which the age-old conflict between ruled and ruling classes coutd be resolved into classlessness, with cooperative production and equal access to civilisation and the cultivation of creative faculties. This is because industrial capitalism engenders the productive potential for the elimination of material scarcity, as well as the kind of knowledge necessary for this. The French Revolution could not fulfill the ambition of equality contained in its rhetoric because of ‘a defect of correspondence between the knowledge existing in society and the improvement for gradual abolition of political institutions’.® But in a developed capitalist society, ideas and sensibilities in the interests of the working people have a larger historical significance. They are identifiable with the ultimate ideal of human emancipation, not only in rhetoric but for real political and ethical reasons. Development of the emancipatory oricntation requires time and hard-learned ‘experience: Could they listen to the plea of reason who had groaned under the calamities of a social state according to the provisioas of which one man riots in luxury whilst another famishes for want of bread? Can he who the day before was a trampled slave suddenly become liberal-minded, forbearing, and independent? This is the consequence of the habits of state or society to be produced by resolute perseverance and indefatigabl: hops, and long-suifering and long-believing Courage, and the systematic efforts of generations of men of intellect and virtue. Shelleys seems to have arrived at the Marxist insight that knowledge is never disinterested—it is always ‘class-related’. The most comprehensive knowledge within capitalism corresponds with the aims of the masses—is identifiable with human emancipation. It will be less fettered than ruling class knowledge, which is presented so as to appear neutral: (Romanticism and The Industrial Revolution 631 1 ss-1 have, what a Scotch philosopher characteristically terms, « “passion for feforming the world: what passion incited him to write and publish his book, he ‘omits to explain. For my part, Thad rather be damned with Plato and Lord Bacon than go to Heaven with Paley and Malthus.” cae 2 ‘The emancipatory orientation requires imagination. When Shelley wrote: “A “man, to be greatly good, must imagine intensely and comprehensively; he must ‘put himself in the place of another and of many others; the pains and pleasure of hhis species must become his own’, he was not simply referring to altruism and -the wish for sincere, sympathetic relations of feeling between people. He was | pointing toward the idea of historical awareness, an understanding of the sclf § (one’s own and others") as patt of the stream of history. This isatrancendence of F the self as constructed out of immediate experiences in life; it is understanding fiat phenomena like money and classes are not ‘natural’ but are historically ‘reatcd and historically relative. It is therefore the overcoming of class, national, beliefs and values. And it is the imagination that pus jperson in the place of others. Tolerance, though not without moral judgement, fand understanding of why people are what they are, arc then possible. The imagination identifies with others’ predicaments, with historically conditioncd Achievements of the conscious mind. The transcendent consciousness can Benvisage itself as a unique point in the intersections of an ever-moving proces no abstraction inherent in cach separate individual. Tn its ality it is the ensemble of human relations’ Fi The imagination understands the self within the process of hisiory and nature. bit envisages higher orders of being, and strives to attain them, reconceiving the Oused in the masses of peaple, it will lead to conscious, collective existence in sure; social and economic practices will at last he organised to serve human ids, This is close to the ideas of Mao Tse Tung in this century, for whom social [development should be conceived as society working on itself in nature; policies Bhould be adopted as people themselves choose them. No logic of techaology Blight to be allowed to determine the organization of society; man should be ject of man’s affairs. ‘Technology should be adopted where and when it is sired, in ways that enhance unalicnated social existence in harmony with ure. Production would then be organised by free human beings; efficiency Prould not be a technical issue, but # human one. ‘The balance between iBlellectual analysis and imaginative feeling in Mao Tse Tung is very much the Et of consciousness that began to germinaic in Shelley and the Romantic pocts. ‘or the Romanties, the source of poetry wasin the direct comraunication with ture. Romantic perception felt the divine in nature, in a melancholy feystberation with decper-than-seen forms of beauty, in which solitary pain is Bepérienced in the yearning fot intimated perfection and consummated emotion: Bie soul moves mysteriously through the surf on waves, the writhing of tree KS, the twisting of leaves in the wind and sprinkting sualight, Onto the lonelyTim Cloudsley, ripples of moonlit water is projected the ove which is unattainable with conere beings. Simultaneously, experience of the one moving Power in greet ‘manifested in infinitely vaied forms, isthe ocacte of man’s destiny. the teacher gp how and what he should feel and do. For Shelley and Wordsworth itis Nature tse that speaks through the poet, ag icis for Taoist poets and painters: “The breath whose might Thave invoked st song’. Once aroused in the post, imaginative uncersianding of tithe a expressed in ways that may excite otlers into the same state 632 Be thou, Spirit fierce, My spirit! Be thou me, impetuous one! Drive my dead thoughts over the universe Like withered leaves to quicken a new birth! ‘And, by the incantation of this verse, Scatter, as from an unextinguished hearth ‘Ashes and sparks, my words among mankind?" ‘This is a pleading invocation to the wind, symbol of the one Power in nature and man. Itis like the Taoist who wishes the Tao to run its course through humanity! ‘Destroyer and preserver; hear, oh, hear!”? It is an urgent plea because the time! are suppressed of imagination, This theme is common to William Blake, Coleridge, and Keats: ye were dead To things ye knew not of, —were closely wed ‘To musty laws lined out with wretched rule ‘And compass vile...” Much of Blake's poetry and paintin| ‘4 celebration of Imagination as a power of Light in the dark ages of calculating reason. While Coleridge, ina letter to Wordsworth, wrote: *...the philosophy of mechanism...cheats itself by mistaking clear images for distinct conceptions, and... idly demands conceptions where intuitions alone are possible or adequate to the majesty of Truth. In shorty facts elevated into theory—theory into laws—and laws into living and intelligent powers’! Poetry in the narrow sense is one meens to awaken the deadened imagination in utilitarian, capitalist industrial society; ‘The most unfailing herald, companion, and follower of the awakening of a great people to work a beneficial change in opinion or instivution, is poetry. At such periods there is an accumulation of the power of communicating and receiving intense and impassioned codceptions respecting man and nature”? More broadly, imagination cracks systems of knowledge to extract their kernals. of human emacipatory meaning; it creates a susceptibility ta the ‘poetry’ concealed in ideas and experiences. For Shelley the "poetry of economics’ would bbe the exploration of possibilities for material liberation, Knowledge should not be held down as mere systems and theories. it should be part of human praxis—the flux of thought into action, action into thought. Romanticism and The Industrial Revolution 633 Marxism developed the idea of a dialectical emergence of * consciousness the coming of people into intellectual awareness of self, class, and history in the process of humanly willed social transformation. Earlier the Romantic poctshad dreamed of an evolution of imaginative awareness, and of those sensibilities orientated toward integrated existence, communication, and harmonious balance of reason with emotion. The complex relationship between Marxism and Romaticism in capitalist industrial society is a moment, in the wider historical struggle between intuition and intellect, and the human effort to forge their unity. Socialist transformation might be said to have failed hitherto to the extent that these two faculties of human comprehension have remained rent from one another. ‘In the failure of the two traditions to come to a point of junction, something was lost. How much we cannot be sure, for we are among the losers'.’* Tim Clot Isley Glasgow College NOTES: 1. See E, J, Hobsbawn, Industry and Empire (Penguin, 1972). 2. See Burtington Moore, Jr, Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy (Penguin, 1973), and also E.P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (Pelican 1972}, Not all the migration from country to town was directly caused by enclosures: much of it was the result of increasing commercialisation ofthe land making existence impossible for smaliholding farmers. 3, The particularly repressive governments in Britain during and after the revolutionary wars with France also helped to shape the social and political perspectives of the Romantics, See the introduction by W, Marshall to The Major English Romantic Poets 4963) 4. T, Lovell, Sociology of Aesthetic Structures and Contextuatism in Sociology of Mass Communications, ed. D. McQuail (Penguin, 1972). 5. RD. Laing, The Divided Self (Pelican, 1973), p. 25. 6. See Alfred Schute, On Phenomenology and Social Relations (University of Chicago, 1973). 7. F, Krueger, The Essence of Feeling in The Nature of Emotion, ed. M.B. Arnold (Penguin, 1969), pp. 97 and 100, 8. Alfred Schutz, op. ct, pp. 252-3, 9. Ibid, p. 253. 10, Ibid, p. 247, 11, See Jean Paul Sarsre, The Psychology of Imagination (Methuen, 1972). 12, Herbert Read in The Meaning of Art (Faber & Faber, 1972), pp. 160-64, also found in fifteenth century Flemish landscape painting a sensibility in common with nineteenth ‘century English Romanticis 1 point hast be fixed for the beginning of modern landscapepainting, itmight as well be Patenir (1485-1524); ... What that quality is... has nothing to do with the quasi-scientifie interest in the morphology of rocks and plants which inspired the only possible predecessor of Patenir in this branch of art—Leonardo da Vinei To painting, I think it would have to be called “poetry” Fomantic art. ., Constable came, like Wordsworth ...to resto a more definite name to the quality that distinguishes landscape soit is essentially a the poetic worth,034 Tim Cloudsley- of realism and naturalism... a key to this attitude can be found in... English poctry. The seeret is in Wordswosth’s counsel: ‘Let nature be yur teacher". Ttig! an aititude far removed from the aggressive Sachlichkelt of German art and the’ sardonic realisme of French art ..{in Constable) nature sin some sense refuge’ from life.... courage and... vision... blaze out in Blake and Turner. Shelley, Fpipsyohidion, in Poetical Works, ed. Thomas Hutchison (Oxford, 1970}, pp. 421-22. Raymond Williams, The County ana the City (Paladin, 1973), p. 166. Wordsworth, Lines Wrinen a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey, The Poetry of Wordsworth, (University of London, 1972), p. 107. Shelley, Epipsychtdion, p. 423. Shelley, Epipsychidion, p. 423. Shelley, Letter to Peocock in Shelly. Poetry and Prose (Oxtord, 1973), p. 168, See R. Williams, Cullure and Society 1780-1950 (Pelican, 1982). Quoted in R. Williams, Culture and Society 1780-2950, p51. Shelley, A Defense of Poeiry (Atheneum Press, 1890), p. 46, E. J. Trelawny, Records of Shelley, Byron and the Author (Penguin, 1973), p. 73. . Shelley, On Love, in Poemy and Prose, p. 160. 1. Shelley, Epipsyehidion, p. 421. Keats, Hyperion, The Pactical Warks (Acthue Pearson, 1899), p. 238. | Keats, Seep and Poetry, tbid., p. 50. Shelley, Fpipsychidion, p. 422 Wordsworth, Zntimations of Immortality from Recoltections of Early Childhood, in op. eit, p. 169. Shelley, Epipsychidion, p. 16. Wordsworth, op. eft. p. 71. Shelley, Adonats, Poetical Works, p. 443. Byron, Childe Harold's Prigrimage, Canto IV, in The Penguin Book of Religious Verse, (1963), p. 130, Wordsworth, op. eit. p- 176. Shelley, Epipapchidion, p. 43. The Unity of Matter and Spirit is also central 1o William Blake, In a commentary to, the first of Blake's Ilustrations of the Book of Job, S. Foster Damon (Blake's Job, Dutton, 1969), p. 12) writes: Job is basically a good man, although he has never recognised the true God. Therefore on his right is his spiritual weslih, a Gothic Church, und on his left bis material wealth, the flock and bsrns. But the sun is setting, Shelley, Adonais, p. 441. Letter to Mrs Shelley (Aug. 1821), quoted in Shetley. Poetry and Prose, p. t71. Shelley, Julian and Maddalo, Poetical Works, p. 190. Wordsworth, Preface to Lyrical Ballads. Wordsworth, Sonnet The World is Too Much With Us, op. eit. p. 161 Byron, Childe Harold, Canto 1V Keats, Sonnet On the Sea, Tho Poettea! Works, p. 337, J. Clare, Helpsrone, quoted in R. Wiliams: The Country and the City, p. 171. J. Clare, The Village Minstrel, in ibid. p. 169. Robert Bloomfield, in ibid., p. 168. See D. Thomson, England in the Nineteenth Century (Pelican, 1973), p. 100. Shelley, Queen Mab, pp. 779-780. Wid. pp. 775-6. Shelley, Epipsychidion, p. 414. Shelley, Letter to the Editor of The Examiner (June 1821) Romanticism and The Industrial Revolution si. 52, 53, 34 55, 56. 57. 58. 99, 60. ol. 2 8, oa 70, n n. B nm 1S. 16. 635 Shelley, The Woodman and the Nightingale. Poetical Works, p. 564. Shelley, Epipsychidion, pp. 413-3. Shelley, Preface to Hellas, in ibid, p. 447, Shelley, Preface to Prometheus Unbound, in ibid p. 206. Coleridge retains a theological dualism, yet he also grasps dialectical, organic'form and movement. In this he takes over the contradictions of German idealism, through contact with which his mind was shaped., Coleridge's France: An Ode feels Liberty as a spivit in Nature, rather than a force of nature and humanity Shelley, The Mast of Anarchy, Poetical Works, p. 341 Shelley, A Defense of Poetry, p. 37. See E. P. Thompson (op. cit.) for an account ofthe very considerably developed class consciousness and radical culture ofthe period. It was asa part of ths that Shelley saw such poems as The Mask of Anarchy. Shelley, The Mask of Anarchy, pp. 342, 343 and 344 Shelley, Preface to Hellas, Poetical Works, p. 448. This paragraph wassuppressed by the publishers in 1822, and was first restored in 1892. Shelley, A Defense of Poetry, p. 37. For Blake too, the ‘Resurrection to Unity, the return to the ‘Universal Man’ from the Fall into Division’ of the human faculties is equated with the coming to life of the imagination. Did, p. 37. Shelley, Mont Blanc, Poetical Works, p. 533 1M. H. Abrams in The Norton Anthology of English Literarure, Vol. (1968). The unity ‘of mind and nature, the ‘power’, is akin to the oriental Tao, Human existence is in ‘Truth if it is aligned to this, for both Shelley and Taoism, Shelley, Preface to The Revolt of Islam, Poetical Works, p. 3. Did, p33. Shelley, Preface to Prometheus Unbound, ibid., p. 203. Shelley, A Defense of Poetry, p. 14 Karl Marx, Sixth Thesis on Feuerbach, in K. Marxand F. Engels: The German Ideology (international Publishers, 1967), p. 198, Shelley, Adonais, Poetical Works, p. 444, Shelley, Ode to the West Wind, ibid., p. 579. Ibid, p. 577, Keats, Sleep and Poetry, The Poetical Works, p. 54 Quoted in R. Williams, Culture and Society 1780-1950, p. 82. Sheley, A Defense of Poetry, p. 46. E.P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class, p. 915.