From Society To Self-realisation: The Development Of British Radical Responses To The French Revolution (romantic Formative Essay)

The Romantic Period 1780-1840 Name

David Jones

Module Tutor

Anne McDermot

Question

Examine some of the effects of the French Revolution in the Writing of this Period

Title

From Society to Self-Realisation: The Development of British Radical Responses to the French Revolution

MHRA Citation

David Jones Romantics 1780-1840 Essay: “From Society to Self-Realisation: The Development of British Radical Response to the French Revolution” January/February 2003

From Society to Self-Realisation The Development of British Radical Responses to the French Revolution

Behold the light you have struck out, after setting America free, reflected to France and there kindled into a blaze that lays despotism in ashes, and warms and illuminates Europe. (Richard Price, A Discourse on the Love of our Country in Wu ed. 2000, 3) “Where silent zephyrs sported with the dust Of the Bastille I sat in the open sun, And from the rubbish gathered up a stone And pocketed the relic in the guise Of an enthusiast” (Wordsworth “Thirteen Book Prelude Book IX”, ll.63-67) In response to the French Revolution, British radicals produced impassioned rhetoric and socially-conscious verse that marked an unprecedented

interrelationship

between

poetry

and

political

discourse. Coleridge described ‘Fears in Solitude’ as “perhaps not poetry but rather a sort of middle thing between poetry and oratory – sermoni propriora” (Wu 2000, 468 n.2). The first of the above passages, from a political pamphlet, actually contains more conventionally ‘poetic’ language than the poem it precedes. It extends the conventional metaphor of the Revolution as ‘light’ to stir up Revolutionary fervour on emotive rather than rational grounds. Wordsworth, by contrast, is hardly more rational but writes in far more measured tones. He rejects poetic ‘finery’ such as rhyme, metaphor, or assonance. In these lines the emotive element, his disappointment, is directly connected to the political element, the failure of the Revolution to change society for the better. In

this

context

of

interlinked

poetry

and

politics

the

Revolution’s ‘failure’ (culminating in the Terror of 1794 and war against

Britain)

significantly

shaped

future

poetic

practice.

Extending the theory of M.H. Abrams, this essay contends that the 2

David Jones Romantics 1780-1840 Essay: “From Society to Self-Realisation: The Development of British Radical Response to the French Revolution”

French Revolution played a pivotal role in a shift in British poetry at the turn of the Nineteenth Century, from focus on the analogue of the Mirror to focus on the analogue of the Lamp (1953, Preface ii) 1. It will first investigate two poems about the Fall of the Bastille that are characteristic of early radical enthusiasm, Helen Maria Williams’ ‘The Bastille, A Vision’ (a character discourse in her novel Julia) and Coleridge’s ‘Destruction of the Bastille’. It will demonstrate the way in which they purport to be mimetic but serve a pragmatic function. The essay will then examine the way in which later responses to the French Revolution, after the turnaround in radical opinion, moved away from the ‘political’ world to serve an expressive, more introspective and self-reflexive function. Poems written in the months following the Fall of the Bastille focus on the external political world, and propagate ideology through various strategies of symbolic construction. ‘The Bastille, A Vision’ and ‘The Destruction of the Bastille’ are mimetic; they imitate this momentous historical event in order to comment upon it. Williams reports the actual fall of the tower using the powerful immediacy of the narrative present: “It falls – the guilty fabric falls!” (l.56). Rather than directly examining the poets’ internal response to the event, both poems efface their own textuality in favour of characterisation in, and personifications of, the external world. Williams is in fact doubly effaced, as her poem is framed inside a novel, and is narrated by “a friend lately arrived from France, and who, for some supposed offence against the state, had been immured several years in the Bastille” (2000, 147 n.1). The convict’s immediacy to the events he describes is emphasised by the repetition of ‘I’ at the head of three consecutive lines in verse III.I: I lose the sense of care! I feel the vital air – I see, I see the light of day! (ll.50-52)

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David Jones Romantics 1780-1840 Essay: “From Society to Self-Realisation: The Development of British Radical Response to the French Revolution”

The reader is closely orientated to this speaker as he sees his prison crumble, imitating the idiomatic repetition of his emotional voice. The liberated mood is heightened by a shift from the structured abbacdcd scheme of previous stanzas to a more emphatic flurry of couplets in aabbccdd. First-person narration adds authenticity to a report

of

an

event

that

Williams

herself

would

only

have

experienced from reports. But bizarrely, as Williams’ novel is set before the Fall of the Bastille yet she is writing after it, the prisoner’s report is cast as a ‘prophetic dream’ (2000, 147 n.1). Totally unpacked, ‘The Bastille, a Vision’ is a fictional report of an unreal event in a fictional world that anticipates a real event in the real world. This narrative framework could hardly convey Williams’ internal response to the Revolution in a more indirect manner. Coleridge’s poem is equally complex. It does not report the actual ‘destruction’ of the Bastille, but does present the oppression of the French people: “In sighs their sickly breath was spent; each gleam/Of Hope had ceas’d the long long day to cheer” (ll.11-12). Moreover it has been suggested that the missing stanzas II and III described conditions in the Bastille, so focus is undoubtedly on the exterior political world. Yet there is also some impression of the poet, of this entity to which Coleridge’s later verse primarily turned. At this point, however, he constructs himself merely as focaliser: “I see, I see! Glad Liberty succeed”. The Fall of the Bastille is not glorious inside his subjectivity, it is incontestably glorious, simply perceived and reported by him. He sees it as a “universal cry” whose principles should be universally extended to “every land from pole to pole” (l.37). Despite this mimetic dimension, neither poem constitutes a straightforward report. For Abrams they are ‘pragmatic’ (Abrams 1953, 15) though Belsey’s definition of imperative texts is more precise (see 2002, 84). They are imperative as they aim to inspire the reader to adopt a position of struggle in the extra-textual world, aligning them with the Revolutionary discourses and practices of

4

David Jones Romantics 1780-1840 Essay: “From Society to Self-Realisation: The Development of British Radical Response to the French Revolution”

Godwin and Paine, in opposition to ancien régime structures and Burke’s neo-Conservativism. Both poems make recourse to what Abrams defines as a ‘transcendental’ theory of poetry. This specifies “the proper objects of art to be Ideas or Forms which are perhaps approachable by the world of sense, but are ultimately transempirical, maintaining an independent existence in their own idea space, and available only to the eye of the mind” (1953, 36). The ideals adopted are those laid down by Thomas Paine’s Rights of Man: freedom, equality, liberty, property, security, resistance to oppression and ‘the nation’ (in Wu 2000, 16). Coleridge’s ‘Destruction of the Bastille’ takes the propagation of these ideals as an explicit political function, following Price’s enthusiasm for “catching and spreading” (2000, 2) Revolutionary ideas to Britain. As P.M.S. Dawson notes “poets work in language, the same medium in which concepts and demands are formulated, contested and negotiated” (1993, 48). Coleridge is thus responsible for

constructing

the

ideals

that

he

spreads

in

this

poem.

Unsurprisingly, since he was pro-active as a political journalist, he makes little distinction between poetry and oratory. Coleridge rhetorically invokes a British Revolution, declaring “Shall France alone a Despot spurn? Shall she alone, O Freedom boast thy care?” (l.31). Revolutionary expansion is portrayed through a particularly energetic image: “Thro Power’s blood-stain’d streamers fire the air/And wider yet thy influence spread” (ll.34-35). The Revolution promises a new world order, yet a closing couplet appeals to nationalism to spur Revolutionary action: wider yet thy influence spread, Not e’er recline thy weary head, Till every land from pole to pole Shall boast one independent soul! And still, as erst, let favour’d Britain be First ever of the first and freest of the free (ll.35-40)

5

David Jones Romantics 1780-1840 Essay: “From Society to Self-Realisation: The Development of British Radical Response to the French Revolution”

Williams establishes Paine’s ideals using several similar strategies. Ancien régime France is differentiated against Britain, establishing France as the other that must be expurged. The prisoner’s captivity, “stretched helpless in this living tomb” (l.9) is a metaphor for general oppression. Though the “clanging fetter” is referred to in a literal sense, it also refers intertextually to the widespread use of the image as a symbol of oppression 2. If ancien régime France’s ‘unconscious gloom’ (l.12) is one of captivity, then this is emphasised through the conventional figure of Britain as ‘land of the free’. Williams strongly propagates ideals of ‘the nation’, verging on jingoism: Britain, thy exiled son no more Thy blissful vales shall see; Why did I leave thy hallowed shore, Distinguished land, where all are free? (ll.13-16) Where France is confined inside the artificial, man-made structure of the prison cell “whose lonely bounds/Unvisited by light/Chill silence dwells with night” (ll.1-3), Britain is a natural expanse of “blissful vales” and “hallowed shores”. Williams’ uses superlative modality: blissful, hallowed, distinguished. A generic sentence casts Britain as universally emancipated: “Distinguished land, where all are free” Herein lies an obvious contradiction. Britain is land of the free, yet the French Revolution which entirely opposed Britain’s fundamental precepts, is equally emancipatory. Williams’ attempt to align the reader with Revolutionary ideals continues on an even more figurative level. She ties the Revolution into the pattern of the most established of all narrative oppositions, a heaven and hell dichotomy. Tortured howls tie the interior of the Bastille to hell, “thy hideous pile/Which stains of blood defile” (16), as does its superlative hopelessness, an “Abyss where mercy never came!” (l.6). As “this living tomb” (9), the Bastille bears hellish traces of perpetual torment. This is strengthened by recourse to a 6

David Jones Romantics 1780-1840 Essay: “From Society to Self-Realisation: The Development of British Radical Response to the French Revolution”

Gothic mode, in the cathartic call to “shroud me in unconscious gloom” (l.12). Equally, religious imagery authorises the Fall of the Bastille as a “consecrated act” (77) and reifies the Revolution as “freedom’s sacred temple” (63). This is Williams’ second major contradiction. Traditional, ‘mystical’ narrative structures are used to validate a Revolution that is supposedly based solely upon reason, which supposedly uses its light to make “those troubled phantoms melt away’ (l.50). Here the Fall of the Bastille is entirely symbolic, detached from the material event. It is not portrayed as a mob action caused by complex socio-economic factors, which built upon an aristocratic revolt, the Reveillon riots and troop desertions of preceding months. Instead the sans culottes are puppets at the hand of nature, described as homogonous ‘patriot bands’ (l.66). Agentive or medium-initiator roles are performed not by human beings but by several of Paine’s revolutionary principles. The Bastille is torn down by “nature’s execrations” (l.62) and “eternal powers!” (l.53). Events are unfolded by ‘the book of fate’ (l.59). This is naturalisation ideology (defined by Thompson in Knowles 1996, 59), enforcing the idea that the Revolution marks a return to the ‘correct’ order of things, as the ancient régime had ‘violated’ nature’s ‘laws’ (l.68). As with Colerdige, the purpose of this symbolic construction is made explicit, that this emancipation will be emulated by the world: ‘charm an emulating world!’ (64). There are strong undertones that the Revolution will spread, taking over as the ‘loved theme of future time? . . . Age shall the growing tale repeat” (ll.74-75, 79). The ideology propagated in ‘The Bastille, A Vision’ appears to have interpellated Williams’ own later writings. In her Letters Written in France in The Summer of 1790 she has grown drunk on the implications of her earlier narrative, and reports what was previously ‘poetic license’ (the Bastille myth) or encased inside other discourses, as historical fact. She reports a state of mind, the ‘air of triumph’ (2000, 150) encountered rather than her own

7

David Jones Romantics 1780-1840 Essay: “From Society to Self-Realisation: The Development of British Radical Response to the French Revolution”

experiences. The extended metaphor of the ancien régime as darkness and the Bastille myth perpetuate, raising its symbolic importance: “We drove under that porch which so many wretches have entered to repass” (2000, 50). Williams could hardly have been party to contemporary historical evidence that, at the time it was taken, the Bastille contained only seven prisoners who were in far better conditions than the majority of captives. But that such luminaries as Voltaire had been in and out of the prison twice, however, indicates that Williams was rather too caught up in the imagery of despotic letres de cachet, unimaginable torture and inevitable death to consider the ‘real world’ nature of the Revolution. Poetic

conjecture

obscures

everything

that

Williams

encounters in this letter. The Bastille spiritually opposes the ‘light’ of Enlightenment: “a noxious vapour . . . more than once extinguished the candle” (150). The full horror of the place is created in her imagination, though she attributes it to the outside world: “Good God! – and to these regions of horror were human creatures dragged at the caprice of despotic power . . . There appears to be a greater number of these dungeons than one could have imagined the hard heart of tyranny itself could contrive” (150). She takes every report at face value, as they perpetuate her earlier poem, and make the letter a kind of validating paratext to it: “Some skeletons were found in these recesses with irons still fastened on their decaying bones” (50). The image of the fetter introduced in ‘The Bastille, A Vision’ perpetuates, now not merely metaphor but also fact. Williams’ dramatised account of the ‘old man’ (150) derives from a popular story (“of whom you have no doubt heard”) and describes an event utterly similar to that encountered by the speaker in ‘The Bastille, A Vision’. Both are reactions to being emancipated into the light of day. Williams presents his speech with a huge amount of conjectural modality: “he staggered, shook his white beard and cried faintly” (150). This is a unilateral account, the

8

David Jones Romantics 1780-1840 Essay: “From Society to Self-Realisation: The Development of British Radical Response to the French Revolution”

folklore description of “unanimous” refusal of liquor by the perpetrators obscuring the street-butcherings of the Marquis de Launay, Jacques de Flesselles, Bertier de Sauvigny and several others, which marked the beginning of the bloodshed of the Revolution. So the emphasis on imitating the events of the external world, the analogue of the lamp, in early responses to the Revolution, was prone to a particularly partisan objectivity. As the opinion of early radicals towards the Revolution shifted to disappointment and regret, bringing with it a focus on the ‘internally generating’ analogue of the Lamp, the partisan nature of earlier texts is addressed. Helen Maria Williams’ later letters admit their own textuality, and express the subjective nature of the writer who is generating them. Seeing the gallows at La Maison de Ville she comments “at that moment, for the first time, I lamented the revolution” (151). Having done this she is able to establish that there is a flipside to her earlier view, that those being executed are still human beings despite “the imprudence or the guilt of those unfortunate men” (151). She indirectly reports her thought, rather than dramatising events as ‘fact’ as she has done earlier: “I painted in my imagination the agonies of their families and friends, nor could I for a considerable time chase these gloomy images from my thoughts” (151). At this stage, however, she is able to dismiss these events as ‘a few shocking instances of public vengeance” (151). They are a necessary evil, but one which highlights for her that history is generated as much from an author’s discourse as from external events: “Where do the records of history point out a revolution unstained by some actions of barbarity?” (151). Later, with the full implementation of the Terror, Williams develops a new discourse. The previous imagery of the Revolution as light is inverted: “every street is blackened with a gallows . . . the land which these mighty musicians have suddenly covered with darkness” (151). The liberation of the Revolution suddenly has a very similar tone, of “the shriek of despair and the agony of torture”

9

David Jones Romantics 1780-1840 Essay: “From Society to Self-Realisation: The Development of British Radical Response to the French Revolution”

to the oppression that it first railed against (151). Williams is still prone to universalise, as the negative generics “every street” and “every highway” demonstrate, but here they serve an inward function, demonstrating her regret as strongly as previous modality demonstrated her enthusiasm. Interior feelings are now explicitly discussed: “Are these the images of that universal joy which called tears into my eyes and made my heart throb with sympathy?” (151). She acknowledges that she has always had an emotional rather than objective response. She repeats that this text is only her response: “To me, . . . to me, this land of desolation appeared dressed in additional beauty beneath the genial smile of liberty. The woods seemed to cast a more refreshing shade” (151). Her next description of an emotional event, the death of Madam Roland, is based upon an emotional response to a real woman that she has really met (“I visited her in the prison of St Pelagie” 152) rather than recourse to folklore or urban myth. Coleridge’s rapture also turned sour, with an even more marked turn inwards. His ‘France: An Ode’ in ‘Fears and Solitude’ was initially titled ‘The Recantation: An Ode’, demonstrating his commitment to taking back his earlier ideas. Here he turns away from institutional politics and towards nature, taking up Rousseau’s idea of the ‘noble savage’, who was corrupted by descent away from nature and into civilisation. The poem demonstrates nature’s vast expanse in an opening that sweeps in on man through “clouds, that far above me float and pause” (l.1) and oceans, and rapidly sweeps out again with “oh ye clouds, that far above me soared!/Thou rising sun! Thou blue rejoicing sky!” (ll.16-17). In this context man is changing

where

nature

is

eternal:

“Ye

ocean

waves

that,

wheresoe’er ye roll,/Yield homage only to eternal laws!” (ll.3-4). Laws should be imposed by nature rather than man. By instigating the Revolution man tried to command the natural order which “no mortal may control!” (l.2) Here the ideals Coleridge previously located in the Revolution can only be found in nature: “With what

10

David Jones Romantics 1780-1840 Essay: “From Society to Self-Realisation: The Development of British Radical Response to the French Revolution”

deep worship I have still adored/The spirit of divinest liberty!” (l.20). On the edge of a cliff he declares “Oh Liberty, my spirit felt thee there!” (l.105). At this point, the focus remains on the external world, a Mirror of nature. It gradually transpires, however, that nature is not important as an external force but in that it fires the poets’ imagination, the analogue of the Lamp, which is inwardly generated but touches the world. The external political world generates only false discourses, embodied most strongly by “France, her front deep-scarred and gory,/Concealed with clust’ring wreaths of glory” (ll.51-52). Ideology is revealed to be just that, a false construct through which treachery may be enacted: “Shall France compel the nations to be free . . . and wear the name/Of freedom graven on a heavier chain!” (l.62). Later in ‘Fear and Solitude’ Coleridge produces his most vitriolic attack upon political discourse, when calling for Britons to defend themselves: Stand forth! Be men! Repel an impious foe Impious and false, a light yet cruel race That laugh away all virtue, mingling mirth With deeds of murder; and still promsing Freedom, themselves too sensual to be free, Poison life’s amities, and cheat the heart Of faith and quiet hope (ll.136-142) To this extent Coleridge’s later poems are self-reflexive, questioning the function of language to corrupt (“Poison life’s amities”), trick (“impious and false”) and impose the oxymoronic (“mingling mirth/With deeds of murder”). Coleridge (incorrectly) locates the numinous3 - even jouissance (defined in Leader and Groves 1995, 59) - outside language in nature. The closing six lines of ‘France: An Ode’ demonstrate a powerful internal response to landscape, but do not attempt to articulate this “intensest love” (l.104) beyond stating the terms that inspired it: “I stood and gazed, my temples bare/And shot my being through earth, sea and air” (l.104-5).

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David Jones Romantics 1780-1840 Essay: “From Society to Self-Realisation: The Development of British Radical Response to the French Revolution”

By the time Coleridge wrote ‘Fears in Solitude. Written April 1798, During the Alarms of an Invasion’ (in Wu 2000, 468) the Revolution had become a direct threat to ‘the nation’ of Britain itself, and Coleridge’s introspection becomes more intense. The abstract rhetoric of ‘Destruction of the Bastille’ has been replaced with the facts of war: “the certain death/Of thousands and ten thousands!” (ll.101-102). He recants the very idea of political rhetoric, turning his back on a younger self who “Knew just so much of folly” (l.15) by declaring with alliterative sententiousness that “We have been too long/Dupes of a deep delusion” (ll.156-7). Though he has never been more than a commentator, he now attacks the abstraction of war as “a thing to talk of - / Spectators and not combatants” (ll.92-93). Most powerfully, Coleridge attacks the inadequacy of words, the failure of the signifier to fully connotate the signified in polite discourse, in a satirical portrait: Boys and girls, And women that would groan to see a child Pull off an insect’s leg – all read of war, The best amusement for our morning meal! . . .all our dainty terms for fratricide Terms which we trundle smoothly o’er our tongues Like mere abstractions, empty sounds to which We join no feeling and attach no form (ll.101-104, 110-113) War is turned into a form of “amusement”; it is distorted by “dainty terms”. Words have failed him – the political discourse he had hoped would inspire practical action in readers has transpired to be “mere abstractions, empty sounds to which / We join no feeling an attach no form”. The admission that he has been wrong is vital in validating his continuing attack upon British corruption: “never can courage dwell with them/Who, playing tricks with conscience, dare not look/At their own vices” (471). His response to this crisis is to turn his back upon institutional authority, and to generate a desire to participate in society through an isolated pantheism: “he with many

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David Jones Romantics 1780-1840 Essay: “From Society to Self-Realisation: The Development of British Radical Response to the French Revolution”

feelings, many thoughts,/Made up a meditative joy, and found religious meanings in the forms of nature!” (ll.22-24). Ultimately then, the French Revolution certainly had a notable effect on a shift in British radical poetry, from reflecting the external political world to an examination of the poet’s inner nature, which illuminates verse. Early responses to the Revolution mark radical enthusiasm for the potential of politics, so much so in the case of Helen Maria Williams that she gets caught up in her own ideology-propagation. The poems are clearly imperative; they aim to inspire the reader to Revolutionary action. As the Revolution slid into Terror and War, however, texts became more self-reflexive. In doing so they examine the nature of the poets’ own internal responses, and the way in which they generate texts. In Coleridge’s case, this introspective shift is accompanied by a withdrawal into isolated pantheism. However it is impossible to convincingly demonstrate so broad a trend in so few words. Constraints of space may obscure the subtleties of this argument. No poets ever withdrew from the external political world completely; indeed Coleridge’s later poems still serve a political function, but now against both the British state and the French Revolution. Equally crucially, these poems must be seen in the context of a dialogue against the prevailing Conservative discourse, and later an identification with it when Wordsworth surprisingly declared, “Genius of Burke!”

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David Jones Romantics 1780-1840 Essay: “From Society to Self-Realisation: The Development of British Radical Response to the French Revolution”

Sources Cited Abrams, M.H. 1953. The Mirror and the Lamp: Romantic Theory and the Critical Tradition, USA: Oxford Univ. Press Belsey, Catherine 2002 Critical Practice (2nd ed) Routledge: Cornwall Dawson, P.M.S. “Poetry in an Age of Revolution” in Curran, Stuart, ed. 1993 The Cambridge Companion to British Romanticism Cambridge Univ. Press: Cambridge Jaffé, Aniela trans. Winston, Richard and Clara 1995 C.G. Jung: Memories, Dreams, Reflections Great Britain: Fontana Press Knowles, G.M. & Malmkjaer, M.K. (1996) Language & Control in Children's Literature London: Routeledge Leader, Darian and Groves 1995 Judy Introducing Lacan Cambridge: Icon Simpson, David “Romanticism, Criticism and Theory” in Curran, Stuart, ed. 1993 The Cambridge Companion to British Romanticism Cambridge Univ. Press: Cambridge Wu, Duncan, ed 2000 Romanticism: An Anthology with CD-ROM 2nd edn, Cornwall: Blackwell

14

1

Notes

The mirror and the lamp are “two common and antithetic metaphors of mind, one comparing the mind to a reflector of external objects, the other to a radiant projector which makes a contribution to the objects it perceives . . . the second typifies the prevailing romantic conception of the poetic mind” (1953, Preface ii). So initially poetry strongly ‘reflected’ the supposedly glorious opening actions of the Revolution, such as the establishment of the Estate General and especially the Fall of the Bastille. As the ideas of the Constitution of 1792 gradually became corrupted however, there is a general trend of poets’ turning inwards to examine their own emotional responses, and the emotional states behind their initial ‘faulty’ enthusiasm. 2

In A Discourse on the Love of our Country Richard Price declared: “Behold kingdoms admonished by you, starting from sleep, breaking their fetters, and claiming justice from their oppressors!” (in Wu 2000, 3). James Mackintosh uses the image when referencing a parliamentary response to the Revolution: “they will break their chains on the heads of their oppressors” (in Wu 2000, 174). Coleridge uses the image twice in ‘Destruction of the Bastille’: “Freedom rous’d by fierce Disdain/Has wildly broke thy triple chain . . . No fetter vile the mind shal know/And Eloquence shall fearless glow” (ll.7-8, 36-37). 3

Numinous. C.G. Jung defines the numinous as "inexpressible, mysterious, terrifying, directly experienced and pertaining only to the divinity" (Jung, page 416). It is a sense of profound familiarity, not dissimilar to déjà vu, and spiritual awakening.