A History of English Romanticism in the Eighteenth Century

by Henry A. Beers

It is no more possible to take Monk Lewis seriously than to take Horace Walpole seriously. They are both like children telling ghost-stories in the dark and trying to make themselves shudder. Lewis was even frivolous enough to compose paradies on his own ballads. A number of these facetiae—"The Mud King," "Giles Jollup the Grave and Brown Sally Green," etc.—diversify his "Tales of Wonder."

Scott soon found better work for his hands to do than translating German ballads and melodramas; but in later years he occasionally went back to these early sources of romantic inspiration. Thus his poem "The Noble Moringer" was taken from a "Sammlung Deutscher Volkslieder" published at Berlin in 1807 by Busching and Von der Hagen. In 1799 he had made a rifacimento of a melodrama entitles "Der Heilige Vehme" in Veit Weber's "Sagen der Vorzeit." This he found among his papers thirty years after (1829) and printed in "The Keepsake," under the title of "The House of Aspen." Its most telling feature is the description of the Vehm-Gericht or Secret Tribunal, but it has little importance. In his "Historic Survey," Taylor said that "Götz von Berlichingen" was "translated into English in 1799 at Edinburgh, by Wm. Scott, Advocate; no doubt the same person who, under the poetical but assumed name of Walter, had since become the most extensively popular of the British writers"! This amazing statement is explained by a blunder on the title-page of Scott's "Götz," where the translator's name is given as William Scott. But it led to a slightly acrimonious correspondence between Sir Walter and the Norwich reviewer.[38]

The tide of German romance had begun to ebb before the close of the century. It rose again a few years later, and left perhaps more lasting tokens this second time; but the ripple-marks of its first invasion are still discernible in English poetry and prose. Southey was clearly in error when he wrote to Taylor, September 5, 1798: "Coleridge's ballad, 'The Ancient Mariner' is, I think, the clumsiest attempt at German sublimity I ever saw."[39] The "Mariner" is not in the least German, and when he wrote it, Coleridge had not been in Germany and did not know the language. He had read "Die Rauber," to be sure, some years before in Tytler's translation. He was at Cambridge at the time, and one night in winter, on leaving the room of a college friend, carelessly picked up and took away with him a copy of the tragedy, the very name of which he had never heard before. "A winter midnight, the wind high and 'The Robbers' for the first time. The readers of Schiller will conceive what I felt." He recorded, in the sonnet "To Schiller" (written December, 1794, or January, 1795), the terrific impression left upon his imagination by

—"The famished father's cry
From the dark dungeon of the tower time-rent,"

and wish that he might behold the bard himself, wandering at eve—

"Beneath some vast old tempest-swinging wood."

Coleridge was destined to make the standard translation of "Wallenstein"; and there are motives borrowed from "The Robbers" and "The Ghost-Seer" in his own very rubbishy dramas, "Zapolya"—of which Scott made some use in "Peveril of the Peak"—and "Osorio" (1797). The latter was rewritten as "Remorse," put on at Drury Lane January 23, 1813, and ran twenty nights. It had been rejected by Sheridan, who expressed a very proper contempt for it as an acting play. The Rev. W. L. Bowles and Byron, who had read it in manuscript and strangely overvalued it, both made interest with the manager to have it tried on the stage. "Remorse" also took some hints from Lewis' "Monk."

But Coleridge came in time to hold in low esteem, if not precisely "The Robbers" itself, yet that school of German melodrama of which it was the grand exemplar. In the twenty-third chapter of the "Biographia Literaria" (1817) he reviewed with severity the Rev. Charles Robert Maturin's tragedy "Bertram, or the Castle of St. Aldobrand,"[40] and incidentally gave the genesis of that whole theatric species "which it has been the fashion, of late years, at once to abuse and to enjoy under the name of the German Drama. Of this latter Schiller's 'Robbers' was the earliest specimen, the first-fruits of his youth. . . Only as such did the maturer judgment of the author tolerate the play." Coleridge avows that "The Robbers" and its countless imitations were due to the popularity in Germany of the translations of Young's "Night Thoughts," Hervey's "Meditations," and Richardson's "Clarissa Harlowe." "Add the ruined castles, the dungeons, the trap-doors, the skeletons, the flesh-and-blood ghosts, and the perpetual moonshine of a modern author[41] (themselves the literary brood of the 'Castle of Otranto,' the translations of which, with the imitations and improvements aforesaid, were about that time beginning to make as much noise in Germany as their originals were making in England), and, as the compound of these ingredients duly mixed, you will recognize the so-called German Drama," which "is English in its origin, English in its materials, and English by readoption; and till we can prove that Kotzebue, or any of the whole breed of Kotzebues, whether dramatists or romantic writers or writers of romantic dramas, were ever admitted to any other shelf in the libraries of well-educated Germans than were occupied by their originals . . . in their mother country, we should submit to carry our own brat on our own shoulders."

Germany, rather than Italy or Spain, became under these influences for a time the favored country of romance. English tale-writers chose its forests and dismantled castles as the scenes of their stories of brigandage and assassination. One of the best of a bad class of fictions, e.g., was Harriet Lee's "The German's Tale: Kruitzner," in the series of "Canterbury Tales" written in conjunction with her sister Sophia (1797-1805). Byron read it when he was fourteen, was profoundly impressed by it, and made it the basis of "Werner," the only drama of his which had any stage success. "Kruitzner" is conceived with some power, but monotonously and ponderously written. The historic period is the close of the Thirty Years' War. It does not depend mainly for its effect upon the time-honored "Gothic" machinery, though it makes a moderate use of the sliding panel and secret passage once again.

We are come to the gate of the new century, to the date of the "Lyrical Ballads" (1798) and within sight of the Waverly novels. Looking back over the years elapsed since Thomson put forth his "Winter," in 1726, we ask ourselves what the romantic movement in England had done for literature; if indeed that deserves to be called a "movement" which had no leader, no programme, no organ, no theory of art, and very little coherence. True, as we have learned from the critical writings of the time, the movement, such as it was, was not all unconscious of its own aims and directions. The phrase "School of Warton" implies a certain solidarity, and there was much interchange of views and some personal contact between men who were in literary sympathy; some skirmishing, too, between opposing camps. Gray, Walpole, and Mason constitute a group, encouraging each other's studies in their correspondence and occasional meetings. Shenstone was interested in Percy's ballad collections, and Gray in Warton's "History of English Poetry." Akenside read Dyer's "Fleece," and Gray read Beattie's "Minstrel" in MS. The Wartons were friends of Collins; Collins a friend and neighbor of Thomson; and Thomson a frequent visitor at Hagley and the Leasowes. Chatterton sought to put Rowley under Walpole's protection, and had his verses examined by Mason and Gray. Still, upon the whole, the English romanticists had little community; they worked individually and were scattered and isolated as to their residence, occupations, and social affiliation. It does not appear that Gray ever met Collins, or the Wartons, or Shenstone or Akenside; nor that MacPherson, Clara Reeve, Mrs. Radcliffe, and Chatterton ever saw each other or any of those first mentioned. There was none of that united purpose and that eager partisanship which distinguished the Parisian cénacle Romantische Schule whose members have been so brilliantly sketched by Heine.