ROMANTICISM
AND CLASSICISM
T.E.HULME
[Lecture notes by
Dr. S. Sreekumar
Prepared for Annamalai University MPhil Scholars]
This is a revised version. The Blog has another essay with the same title
This is a revised version. The Blog has another essay with the same title
Disclaimer
Scholars, please note:
These study materials are only for classroom
purposes. The explanations are not original in any sense but taken from various
sources. These notes are offered with the sole intention of helping students
and research scholars with a quick overview of Hulme’s ideas. Those who would
like to have a deeper or original study of the subject must look elsewhere for
assistance.
Brief
Biographical Note
T.E
HULME (1833 – 1917) was a philosopher and
aesthetician. He was killed in the First World War. From his unpublished papers,
Herbert Reed edited a volume of critical essays entitled Speculations from
which ‘Romanticism and Classicism’ is taken. This essay can be read as the
manifesto of Imagism, especially in its recommendation of a dry hard style of
poetry. Hulme is the thinker behind the Pound-Eliot revolution in English
poetry. His influence is visible in the poetry of Eliot. The essay advocates a
preference for Classicism over Romanticism and establishes a modernist poetics
based on that.
Hulme
speaks about the root of Romanticism thus: - “…man the individual, is an
infinite reservoir of possibilities; and if you can rearrange society by the
destruction of oppressive order then these possibilities will have a chance and
you will get Progress”.
Hulme
defines Classicism thus: - “Man is an extraordinarily fixed and limited animal
whose nature is absolutely constant. It is only by tradition and organization
that anything decent can be got out of him”.
Romanticism and Classicism are Two
Different Views.
Romanticism
says that man is intrinsically good, spoilt by circumstances. Classicism
says that he is intrinsically limited but disciplined by order and tradition to
something fairly decent.
For
Romanticism man’s nature is like a well.
For
Classicism it is like a bucket.
The
Romantic view regards man as a well, a reservoir
full of possibilities.
The
Classical view regards him as a very finite and
fixed creature.
Classical
and Romantic Ideas and Belief in God – an Analogy
The Classical idea
is identical to the normal religious
attitude. Part of the fixed nature of man is the belief in God. This belief is as fixed in every man as the
belief in the objective world or the belief in the existence of matter. It is
parallel to appetite, the instinct of sex, and all the other fixed qualities. At
certain times these instincts have been suppressed either by force or by
rhetoric. This happened in Florence under Savonarola, in Geneva under Calvin,
and in England under the Roundheads. The inevitable result of suppression is
that it will burst out in some abnormal direction. So is with religion.
By
the perverted rhetoric of rationalism, if religion
is suppressed, the instincts that find their normal outlet in religion will
come out in another way.” You don’t believe in God, so you begin to believe
that man is a god. You don’t believe in Heaven, so you begin to believe in a
heaven on earth. In other words, you get Romanticism”.
Hulme gives an example: “It is like pouring
a pot of treacle over the dinner table. Romanticism then, and this is the best
definition I can give of it, is spilt religion”.
Classical and Romantic in
Verse
When
people talk of Classical and Romantic in verse, the contrast comes into
their mind between Racine and Shakespeare. This contrast is incorrect. Shakespeare is not exactly a Romantic but
neither is he a Classic like Racine. There are two kinds of Classicism, the
static and the dynamic. Shakespeare is the Classic in motion.
A
particular convention of art is like organic life. It
grows old and dies. If we look at the extraordinary flowering of poetry during
the Elizabethan period we see that the discovery of the blank verse was one of
the main reasons for it. It was new and the poets wanted to play with the new
tune.
Each
field of artistic activity is exhausted by the first great artist who gathers a
full harvest from it.
We
can argue that poets are individuals and cannot be made slaves to any
particular movement. A poet can be a Classicist or Romantic, as he likes it. But
no one can stand outside the age in which he lives. Every poet is governed
by the literary history of the ages that came before him. Hulme quotes Spinoza
to explain his point. Spinoza said that when a stone fell to the ground it
would think that it was falling because of its conscious effort. Similarly, the
amount of freedom a man has is limited. Many acts, which we label as free, are
in reality automatic.
The
Prevalent Views about Poetry
Romantic
poetry is associated with much whining and moaning about something or other.
The belief in Romantic poetry is so prevalent that any poem, which is dry and
hard, is not considered poetry at all. Verse for them always means the bringing
of some emotion or other. To them, poetry is something that leads them beyond
of some kind. Romanticism has so much changed the reader that without some form
of vagueness, poetry is not considered poetry at all. The general tendency
is to think that verse is the expression of unsatisfied emotion. People believe
that verse is impossible without some sentiment. A Classical revival appears to
them as the death of poetry.
Classicism,
Romanticism and the Idea of Beauty
Classicism
defines beauty as lying in conformity to certain standard fixed norms. The Romantic
view drags in the infinite. Art must aim at a precise description. But it is very
difficult to give a precise description. Mere carefulness does not bring
exactness of expression. The use of language by its very nature is a communal thing.
It never expresses the exact idea. What it expresses is a compromise. Language
has its conventions and special nature. We can express anything exactly only
through concentrated effort.
Prophecy and Views on the
Languages of Prose and Poetry
Hulme
asserts that “a period of dry, hard, Classical verse is coming”. His prophecy
was proved accurate by the poetry of Ezra Pound, T.S.Eliot and others. He believes
that in prose as in algebra concrete things are embodied in signs or counters,
which are moved about according to certain rules. Poetry can be considered an
effort to avoid this effect of prose. “It is not a counter language, but a
visual concrete one”. It always tries to capture the reader’s attention. It
chooses fresh epithets and fresh metaphors, not so much because they are new,
and we are tired of the old, but because the old cease to convey a physical
thing and become abstract counters. A poet says a ship ‘coursed the seas’,
instead of the counter word ‘sailed’.
Visual
meanings can be transferred by the new bowl of metaphor; prose is an old pot
that lets them leak out. Images in verse are not mere decoration, but the very
essence of an intuitive language. Verse is a pedestrian taking you over the
ground, prose- a train which delivers you at a destination.
Views on ‘fresh’
and ‘unexpected’.
When
people praise a poem or a work as ‘fresh’, they mean that it is good. There is
nothing desirable in being ‘fresh’.
Works
of art aren’t eggs. Rather the contrary. It is simply an unfortunate necessity
due to the nature of language and technique that the only way the element that
constitutes goodness, the only way in which its presence can be detected
externally, is by freshness.
Poets
have to avoid conventional language to get the exact meaning. The terms they
use may be quite unexpected. Herrick uses the phrase “tempestuous petticoat” to
describe a woman’s dress, an apt expression by one who had carefully observed
the movement of a woman.
Opinions on the Poetry of the Future.
In
the poetry of the future fancy will be the chief weapon of the Classical
school. “…the verse we are going to get will be cheerful, dry and
sophisticated…” Subjects do not matter for the verse of the future. It may be
the same as in Romantic poetry.
It
isn’t the scale or kind of emotion produced that decides, but this one fact: Is
there any real zest in it? Did the poet have an actually realized visual object
before him in which he delighted? It doesn’t matter if it were a lady’s shoe or
the starry heavens.
Fancy
is not mere decoration added to plain speech. Plain speech is essentially
inaccurate. It is only by new metaphors, that is, by fancy, that it can be made
precise.
The
Romantic Movement is going to end shortly. It may be deplored. But it cannot be
helped – ‘wonder must cease to be wonder’. It is the 'inevitableness' of the
process.
A
literature of wonder must have an end as inevitably as a strange land loses its
strangeness when one lives in it. Wonder can only be the attitude of a man
passing from one state to another; it can never be a permanently fixed thing.
[Direct quotes are included in this piece]
Dr.
S. Sreekumar,
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