History in English words

by Owen Barfield

At the same time another word appeared in the vocabulary of aesthetic criticism. An Elizabethan critic had already pointed out that, if poets could indeed spin their poetry entirely out of themselves they were as “creating gods”, and Dryden soon used the same verb of Shakespeare, because, in Caliban, he had invented “a person not in Nature”. So also Addison:

... this Talent of affecting the Imagination ... has something in it like Creation: It bestows a kind of Existence, and draws up to the Reader’s View several Objects which are not to be found in Being. It makes Additions to Nature, and gives greater Variety to God’s Works.

This word, too, with its derivative creative, is used far too often and too lightly[72] now to allow us to easily perceive its importance. ‘Creare’ was one of those old Latin words which had been impregnated through the Septuagint and the Vulgate with Hebraic and Christian associations; its constant use in ecclesiastical Latin had saturated it with the special meaning of creating, in divine fashion, out of nothing, as opposed to the merely human making, which signified the rearrangement of matter already created, or the imitation of “creatures”. The application of such a word to human activities seems to mark a pronounced change in our attitude towards ourselves, and it is not surprising that, in the course of its career, the new use should have met with some opposition on the grounds of blasphemy.

Once established, however, the conception evidently reacted on other terms embodying theories of art, such, for example, as original and originality (already mentioned), art, artist, genius, imagination, inspiration, poesy, poetry, and others. The meaning which inspiration possessed up to the seventeenth or eighteenth centuries carries us right back to the old mythical outlook in Greece and elsewhere, when poets and prophets were understood to be the direct mouthpieces of superior beings—beings such as the Muses, who inspired or “breathed into” them the divine afflatus. Through Plato and Aristotle this conception came to England at the Renaissance and lasted as an element of aesthetic theory well on into the eighteenth century, if it can be said to have died out altogether even now. But, like so many other words, this one began in the seventeenth century to suffer that process which we have called “internalization”. Hobbes poured etymologically neat scorn on the senseless convention “by which a man, enabled to speak wisely from the principles of Nature and his own meditation, loves rather to be thought to speak by inspiration, like a Bagpipe”. And we may suppose that from about this time inspiration, like some of the “character” words which we traced in a previous chapter, began to lose its old literal meaning and to acquire its modern and metaphorical one. Like instinct, it was now felt, whatever its real nature, to be something arising from within the human being rather than something instilled from without.

Such a revised notion of the immediate source of human activities inevitably concentrated attention on the individual artist—a fact which may perhaps be reflected in the use from the seventeenth century onwards of the word genius to describe not merely the “creative” faculty, but its possessor. For we can speak now of such and such a man being “a genius”. This little word, on which a whole chapter might be written, comes from the Latin ‘genius’[73] (from ‘gign-o’, ‘to bring into being’, a stem appearing also in ingenious, engine, ...), which in Roman mythology meant a person’s tutelary spirit, or special angel attending him everywhere and influencing his thoughts and actions. Its early meaning in English was much the same as that of talent,[74] which, of course, takes its meaning from the New Testament parable. That is to say, genius signified an ability implanted in a man by God at his birth. But from about the seventeenth century this meaning began to ferment and expand in the most extraordinary way; it was distinguished from, and even opposed to, talent, and in the following century its force and suggestiveness were much enhanced by the use which was made of it to translate the Arabic ‘Djinn’, a powerful supernatural being. Although nowadays we generally distinguish this particular sense by the spelling Genie, the temporary fusion of meanings certainly deepened the strength and mystery of the older word, and may even have procreated the later Byronic tradition of mighty, lonely poets with open necks and long hair and a plethora of mistresses and photographs.

Before, however, these words could acquire the potent meanings which they bear to-day, they had to run the gauntlet of the Age of Reason, with its hatred of all enthusiasm and fanaticism. And it was out of the ridicule and distrust which they encountered at its hands that the important new epithet romantic, together with some obsolete terms like romancy, romancical, romantical, ... was born. With its meaning of ‘like the old romances’ (and therefore barbarous, fantastic), romantic was one of those adjectives, like enthusiastic, extravagant, Gothic, by which the later seventeenth, and the eighteenth century expressed their disapproval of everything which did not bear the stamp of reason and polite society. It was soon applied to people whose heads were stuffed out with the ballooning extravagancies of the old romances, just as enthusiastic was employed to describe superstitious people who believed themselves distended with a special variety of divine inspiration. Above all, it had the sense of fabulous, unreal, unnatural. “Can anything,” asked Bishop South, “be imagined more profane and impious, absurd, and indeed romantic?” But at the beginning of the eighteenth century this meaning developed a little farther. Romantic was now used of places, or aspects of Nature, of the kind among which the old Romances had been set. It was noticed that “romantic” people displayed a preference for wild landscapes and ruined castles, and would even “fancy” these things, where more rational people could see nothing more exciting than a tumbledown barn and a dirty ditch. And it is this particular shade of meaning, together with a strong suggestion of absurdity and unreality, which the word seems still to have conveyed to Jane Austen, who preferred to use picturesque in contexts where we should now employ romantic in its approving or non-committal sense.

Had one of her heroines, however, succeeded in emerging from that endless round of incredibly dull activities which she contrives to make so incredibly interesting, and had this enterprising young woman then attempted to breast the intellectual currents of the age, she would have been startled to find that that sarcastic consciousness of a war between sense and sensibility, which was her creator’s inspiration, was a spent stream flowing from the remote past. For while echoes of the original thinking of men like Bacon, Hobbes, and Locke continued to rumble and reverberate on in the disparaging implications carried by a word like romantic, a new note had already become audible beneath them as long ago as the beginning of the century. It was an undertone of reluctant approval. These “romantic” notions might be absurd, but they were at least pleasant. “We do not care for seeing through the falsehood,” wrote Addison, “and willingly give ourselves up to so agreeable an imposture.”

It was in the second half of the eighteenth century that this aesthetic[75] vocabulary—genius, original, romantic, ...—whose meanings had up to the present been developed largely by the English, began to make a stir on the Continent. The words were talked of in France; they were taken up by the critics, poets, and philosophers of Germany; and after much handling by men like Kant, Hegel, Schelling, Goethe, and others, the further and partly popularized meanings which they thus acquired were, in a sense, again inserted into their English forms by one or two Englishmen who, towards the close of the century, felt a strong affinity between their own impulses and the Sturm und Drang which had been agitating Germany. The most influential of these was Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and just before the turn of the century there burst, with his help, upon England that strange explosion which received, naturally enough, the name of the Romantic Movement. At first it took the form of a sort of cult of the Middle Ages. Ballad is another word which added several cubits to its stature by travelling in France and Germany, where it also gave birth to the musical ballade; and we find medieval words like bard, foray, gramarye[76] (and its Scotch derivative, glamour), and raid, revived by Walter Scott after having fallen out of use for two or three hundred years. Derring-do—another of these revivals—is interesting because it originates in a mistake made by Spenser about Chaucer. He had described how Troilus was second to nobody in “daring do that belongeth to a knight”—that is to say, “in daring to do that which belongs to a knight”—or, in Cornish idiom, “that which a knight ‘belongs to do’”. It is easy to see the nature of Spenser’s error. The mysterious substantive derring-do (desperate courage), which he created and used several times, is not found again until Scott’s Ivanhoe.

Very soon the Romantic Movement was resuscitating the Elizabethan world as well as the “Gothic”—a word, by the way, which now, for the first time in its history, began to connote approval. It was Coleridge himself who invented the word Elizabethan, and his magnificent lectures on Shakespeare must be very largely responsible for that renewed and deepened interest in the great dramatist in which Germany once more set us the example. It is also noteworthy that the word fitful, which Shakespeare had probably coined in the famous line from Macbeth, was never used again until the close of the eighteenth century; and another word which expired when the Elizabethan spirit expired in Milton, to be resurrected in the nineteenth century, is faery, with that spelling, and with the meaning, not so much of an individual sprite as of a magic realm or state of being—almost “the whole supernatural element in romance”.