“While he would no doubt have retched at the thought, William Wordsworth stands near the head of a path that leads to Hugh Hefner and Kim Kardashian.”
He is right, of course. But his accuracy lies more in diagnosis than genealogy. The Romantic poets, especially the second generation (John Keats, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Lord Byron), certainly epitomized the proud and promiscuous lifestyle rightly decried by conservatives. Of the marital bond, Shelley infamously said, “I conceive that from the abolition of marriage, the fit and natural arrangement of sexual connection would result.” His friend Lord Byron put this theory to the test. Yet neither the second generation Romantics nor their first generation counterparts (William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, William Blake, Robert Southey) were the font of the movement.
The true “head of the path,” the intellectual and aesthetic forerunner of Romanticism, was none other than the father of modern conservatism, Edmund Burke. In 1757, he published A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, his first major work and the first major aesthetic treatise to separately address the themes of beauty and sublimity. In Burke’s aesthetic theory — like his political writings — conservatives can find much inspiration.
The term sublime derives from the Latin sublimis, meaning “up to the limits of.” Burke describes the sublime as “[w]hatever is fitted in any sort to excite the ideas of pain and danger,…whatever is in any sort terrible, or is conversant about terrible objects.” The effects of the sublime, he says, are “[a]stonishment…admiration, reverence, respect.”
Though his theory is much more complex than these brief descriptions suggest, these words capture his central intuition: the sublime beckons us outside of ourselves, bringing us to our limits in the consideration of the limitless. Though it does not present us with actual danger, it excites the feelings that only arise when contemplating ourselves in the face of larger forces.
Where Burke’s sublime sees limits, others seek limitlessness. Hillsdale professor Dwight Lindley responds to Trueman’s book, suggesting there were many “Romanticisms” during the 19th century, some of a “light” variety and others of a “dark” variety. Contra Trueman, Lindley says, Romanticism was not a singular rejection of metaphysics in pursuit of pure self-expression. In its “light” varieties, the romantic impulse “is the pursuit of the infinite in the finite.” On the “dark” side, he argues, Romanticism devolves into its “Nietzschean strain,” which “sees the transcendent as more inimical to human life and lies at the roots of some of our most pessimistic contemporary literature.” By Nietzschean strain, he generally means the idea that human will, and thus the earthly present, is the only source of moral formation. There is no higher capital “w” Will under which we must place ourselves. The present — and thus ourselves — are all there is. Man transgresses the limits of nature, attempting to construct the world for himself.
Although it preceded Nietzsche by a century, the French Revolution embodied a similar rejection of limitation. From the toppling of the Catholic Church rose the Cult of Reason. In rejecting the “superstitions” of religion, it sought a life and politics dictated by pure rational inquiry. The individual was subsumed under the ideal, expendable — a la guillotine — to the larger whims of revolutionary fervor. Though, like in Burke’s sublime, the self confronted a greater force, this force was itself the product of human creation. Not, it may be noted, the carefully-accrued wisdom of centuries, but the rash violence of the moment.
Here lies a paradox.
Burke’s embrace of institutions and traditions is, in one sense, an embrace of human creations — but of creations marked by humility and reverence for higher things, not by revenge against them. We embrace tradition because it limits our impulse for drastic, momentary change, and we embrace institutions because they magnify our potential while mitigating our depravity.
The true sublime — and thus the true Romanticism — beckons us upward whilst keeping us rooted. The false sublime pulls God down to our level, presuming to shape by our own will the forces only He can marshal.
Burke’s sublime was a necessary counterbalance to the threat of Enlightenment scientism. Instead of asserting the world could be fully understood and controlled by human effort, Burke insisted that true pleasure came through apprehending and appreciating our limits. Thus, he writes in Reflections on the Revolution in France, that “all who administer the government of men, in which they stand in the person of God himself, should have high and worthy notions of their function and destination, that their hope should be full of immortality.”
So what does this all have to do with poetry?
The Romantic tradition — even that of scandalous second generation — provides a unique perspective on the idea of personal and political limitation. Consider Wordsworth’s “The Excursion,” where he attacks the French Revolution and criticizes:
“Philosophers, who, though the human soul / Be of a thousand faculties composed, / And twice ten thousand interests, do yet prize / This soul, and the transcendent universe, / No more than as a mirror that reflects / To proud Self-love her own intelligence.”
Or think of Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s “Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” a poetic parable of redemption for a sailor who kills an albatross following his ship, only to be cursed by his act and only released from the curse when he finds new appreciation for God’s creation.
Percy Bysshe Shelley’s “Ozymandias,” where a traveller recounts the sight of an ancient king’s broken, sand-swept statue, contains sublime reflections on the impermanence of power. And, perhaps most famously, his wife, Mary Shelley, penned the first science fiction novel, Frankenstein. Its subtitle, The Modern Prometheus, tells the tale of a man who tries to play God, ultimately being consumed by his own creation. In this tale, we find among the most harrowing warnings for our tech-obsessed society.
Sadly, the dominance of algorithmic entertainment and the looming threat of artificial general intelligence are shaping our world much like the Industrial Revolution remade the English countryside. To make sense of this increasingly senseless world, we will need the Romantics. We must look inside, yet not reduce ourselves to it. A new Cult of Reason is developing, one which casts away the bonds of human limitation and makes man’s scientific perfection the aim of technological innovation.
Conservatives would do well to recover the Romanticism of Burke: a vision that marvels at the natural world while holding man in his proper, humble place. A world that understands that our creations can not outstrip, nor should they presume to rival, the works of God.
We need a New Romanticism, a heartfelt reaction to the overzealousness of reason. Heart and mind must balance one another, not wage war for the souls of mankind.
