British Romanticism and Continental Influences

British Romanticism and Continental Influences Writing in an Age of Europhobia Peter Mortensen British Romanticism an...

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British Romanticism and Continental Influences Writing in an Age of Europhobia

Peter Mortensen

British Romanticism and Continental Influences

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British Romanticism and Continental Influences Writing in an Age of Europhobia Peter Mortensen Associate Professor of English, Aarhus University

© Peter Mortensen 2004 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, 90 Tottenham Court Road, London W1T 4LP. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The author has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2004 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS and 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010 Companies and representatives throughout the world PALGRAVE MACMILLAN is the global academic imprint of the Palgrave Macmillan division of St. Martin’s Press, LLC and of Palgrave Macmillan Ltd. Macmillan® is a registered trademark in the United States, United Kingdom and other countries. Palgrave is a registered trademark in the European Union and other countries. ISBN 1–4039–1515–6 This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Mortensen, Peter, 1969– British romanticism and continental influences : writing in an age of europhobia / Peter Mortensen. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 1–4039–1515–6 (cloth) 1. English literature—European influences. 2. English literature—19th century—History and criticism. 3. European literature—Appreciation— Great Britain. 4. Literature, Comparative—English and European. 5. Literature, Comparative—European and English. 6. Romanticism— Great Britain. 7. Europe—In literature. 8. Romanticism—Europe. I. Title. PR129.E85M67 2004 820.9′145—dc22 10 13

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Contents

vii

Acknowledgements Introduction: ‘Sickly and Stupid German Tragedies’

1

1 ‘We Know that the Enemy is Working among Us’: The Rhetoric of Romantic Europhobia From Burke to the Anti-Jacobin William Preston’s ‘Reflections’

19 19 33

2 ‘Dethroning German Sublimity’: Outrageous Stimulation in Romantic Ballad-Writing Stanley’s Leonora Coleridge’s ‘Rime of the Ancyent Marinere’ Wordsworth’s ‘Hart-Leap Well’ Lewis’s Tales of Wonder

43 47 56 66 77

3 ‘Il Est Devenue Classique en Angleterre’: Some Versions of Romantic (Anti-)Pastoral Saint-Pierre’s Paul et Virginie Cobb’s Paul and Virginia Edgeworth’s Belinda Imlay’s The Emigrants

95 98 105 112 122

4 ‘Partizans of the German Theatre’: The Poetics and Politics of Romantic Dramatic Translation Scott’s Goetz Lawrence’s Gortz Craven’s The Robbers Holman’s The Red-Cross Knights

134 140 151 155 164

5 ‘The Descent of Odin’: Romantic Writers among the Norsemen Percy’s Five Pieces and Mallet’s Northern Antiquities Wordsworth’s ‘The Danish Boy’

173 174 180

v

vi

Contents

Herbert’s Select Icelandic Poetry Scott’s Harold the Dauntless Southey’s ‘The Race of Odin’

184 193 203

Notes and References

208

Index

225

Acknowledgements I am an American-educated Dane specializing in British literature, and whatever strengths and weaknesses British Romanticism and Continental Influences may possess inevitably derive from this complex intellectual background. The fact that I have written a lengthy book about literary obligation and indebtedness, moreover, makes it particularly urgent that I begin by setting the record straight. The foundations for this work were laid during the years in the midand late 1990s that I spent as a Ph.D. student of English at The Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland, USA. I am grateful to the Fulbright Commission, the Institute of International Education, the American–Scandinavian Foundation and the Danish Research Academy for the Humanities for helping me fund my studies abroad. Among several first-rate teachers and dissertation advisors, I am particularly grateful to Jerome Christensen, Neil Hertz, Frances Ferguson and Ronald Paulson for their guidance and encouragement. The major part of this book was written during the first years of my present employment at my alma mater, Aarhus University, Denmark. Studying British Romantic literature from Continental Europe and writing about it in a language not one’s own often seem like fighting an uphill battle, and I confess that while finishing this book I have occasionally felt like Akbil Borak, the hapless Turkish Hazlitt-scholar of David Lodge’s Small World. By focusing on texts that are themselves divided, I have tried to convert this sense of in-betweenness into an asset, and any success I might have had in this I would attribute not least to the congenial research environment offered by the Aarhus University English Department. Consequently I also wish to credit en bloc the many present colleagues who have responded, directly or indirectly (and often unwittingly), to the ideas proposed in this study. Last but not least, my biggest thanks go to my family, especially my wife and two sons, for continually reminding me that life is larger and weightier than literature. Parts of Chapter 2 appeared, in modified form, as ‘“The Moving Accident is not My Trade”: Wordsworth, Lyrical Ballads, and the Anxiety of German Borrowing’, in The Influence and Anxiety of the British Romantics: Spectres of Romanticism, ed. Sharon Rushton (Lewiston, NY: Mellen, 1999); parts of Chapter 4 as ‘Translating Northern Antiquities: Walter vii

viii

Acknowledgements

Scott, Goethe, and the Politics of Goetz of Berlichingen’, in Compar(a)ison: An International Journal of Comparative Literature 1 (1999), and ‘Robbing The Robbers: Friedrich Schiller and The Politics of British Romantic Translation’, in Literature and History, 11: 1 (2002); parts of Chapter 5 as ‘ “The Descent of Odin”: Wordsworth, Scott and Southey among the Norsemen’, in Romanticism, 6: 2 (2000). Peter Mortensen Aarhus, April 2003

Introduction: ‘Sickly and Stupid German Tragedies’

The paradox of British Romanticism is that its revolution came about through an intense and largely isolated engagement with its own past.1 I once hinted to Wordsworth, as we were sailing in his boat on Grasmere lake, that I thought he had borrowed the idea of his Poems on the Naming of Places from the inscriptions of the same kind in Paul and Virginia. He did not own the obligation, and stated some distinction without a difference, in defence of his claim to originality. Any the slightest variation would be sufficient for this purpose in his mind; for whatever he added or omitted would inevitably be worth all that any one else had done, and contain the marrow of the sentiment. 2 The emergence of Romanticism in Britain coincided with a dramatically increased awareness of Continental literature, both on the parts of popular audiences and critical observers. According to Wordsworth’s 1800 Preface to Lyrical Ballads, writers and critics of the time had to contend with the presence of powerful alien forces, especially in the form of those ‘frantic novels, sickly and stupid German Tragedies, and deluges of idle and extravagant stories in verse’ whose baneful influence Wordsworth and Coleridge claimed to ‘counteract’.3 Writing almost four decades later, in 1838, Carlyle also remembered the early 1800s in terms of contagious disease, as ‘the sickliest of recorded ages when British Literature lay all puking and sprawling in Werterism, Byronism, and other Sentimentalism tearful or spasmodic (fruit of internal wind)’.4 Such bombastic statements invite a series of questions about the relationship between ‘German Tragedies’, ‘Werterism’ and ‘Sentimentalism’ on the one hand, and the more respectable category of British Romantic 1

2


literature on the other. What continuities and discontinuities link the immortal classics of British Romanticism and the more or less inferior best-sellers of pre-revolutionary and revolutionary Europe? To what extent did Romantic writers read, and what lessons did they derive from those late eighteenth-century European poets, novelists and playwrights whose works appeared in multiple scandalous translations during the 1790s and 1800s? What effect did Wordsworth’s ‘deluge’ of translated books and the panic that they caused, have on domestic literary production during the politically unstable fin de siècle years? Enticing as these questions may sound, they are not the kind of interrogations that Anglo-American critics of Romanticism have traditionally been inclined to make. In an article published in 1990, Julie Carlson trenchantly criticizes what she sees as the widespread tendency among Romantic scholars ‘to lose sight of the German connection [ . . . ] in that dramatic decade of the 1790s’, and even to ‘dismiss Germany as foreign to English sensibilities’. In Carlson’s view, it is one of Romantic scholarship’s most deeply entrenched critical commonplaces that the British Romantics (with a few noteworthy exceptions) wrote in isolation from, and indifference towards, significant trends in Continental literature. Writing at the height of the contextualist revolt against the neo-formalist dominance of Romantic criticism, Carlson recognizes a limitation in new historicist definitions of ‘context’. As a scholar of Romantic drama, Carlson is especially struck by old and new critics’ unwillingness to consider the scandal caused by British theatrical audiences’ craving for German plays – especially the plays of ‘the German Shakespeare’, August von Kotzebue – as part and parcel of ‘Romanticism’: The conventional view that except for Coleridge, Crabb Robinson, and William Taylor, the British public conceived Germany as a terra incognita until the 1830s and 1840s is accurate only if we restrict severely what counts as ‘knowing’ and ‘German letters’. German literature, and particularly German plays, poured into England during the 1790s, and the fact and strength of the deluge [ . . . ] cry out for fuller investigation. Twelve years – especially these twelve years – should not be dismissed as such a ‘short time’. Rather than viewing the nineties-mania for German drama as, at best, an oddity of the period, we might more profitably consider it another lesson in the oddity of our construction of romantic literary history. In the face of Romantic criticism’s consistent ‘effacement of [ . . . ] English interest in German plays [ . . . ] from our literary histories’,

Introduction

3

Carlson calls for ‘some rethinking of Germany’s role in England in the early decades of romanticism’. 5 In making this demand, Carlson’s polemic dovetails with the rather more general observation made by J. H. Alexander in another essay from the same year. Alexander’s point of departure is his assertion that ‘[t]he study of Continental influences on British Romanticism was a thriving activity before World War II but it has [ . . . ] rather gone out of fashion’. Paradoxically, he claims, the increasing internationalism and theoretical sophistication of post-war literary criticism and theory have tended to solidify national and cultural boundaries within the study of Romanticism. However, questioning the assumption that because Britain is an island British Romanticism is also an insular literary phenomenon seems to Alexander a timely if not overdue project. Believing that ‘it cannot surely be healthy for such a major area to have fallen so largely into disfavour’, Alexander envisions ‘a revival of a lively interest in the influence of continental literatures on British Romantic literature’. 6 In Alexander’s view such ‘a recovery for modern literary studies of the salient features of continental influence on British literary life in the Romantic period’ is likely to be a long-term benefit to Romantic studies, even if in the short term it will require that Romantic critics fundamentally alter the way in which they conceive of their field of study. Surveying Romantic criticism of the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s, it is easy to see what prompted Carlson and Alexander to protest against the dominant insularity of Romantic criticism, and to call for ‘the recovery’, ‘revival’ and ‘rethinking’ of British Romantic attitudes towards Europe. The symptomatic reluctance to consider non-British contexts for British Romantic cultural production, for example, is paradigmatic in the work of two prominent American Romanticists, Harold Bloom and Stuart Curran. Whereas previous influence-oriented critics sought to understand how a rich literary heritage enabled later writers, Bloom emphasizes the burden felt by the belated poet who struggles to emancipate himself from an overwhelmingly powerful ancestor. For Bloom, influence is a painful, even pathological suffering: ‘Influence is Influenza – an astral disease’.7 Bloom’s theory of poetry, as Frank Lentricchia writes, promises ‘to make the moribund subject of influence the pivot of the most satisfying historicism to appear in modern criticism’. 8 From a Romanticist point of view, though, Bloom’s critical apparatus also produces what often seems like surprisingly repetitive interpretations of Romantic poems. Bloom’s readings of Romantic and post-Romantic texts are so monotonous not merely because they are rooted in a privatized and de-contextualized, endlessly repeated Oedipal struggle, but also because

4


Bloom is willing to acknowledge only very few pre-Romantic writers as ‘strong’ precursor-poets – Shakespeare, Spenser, Collins, Cowper and above all Milton, since ‘Milton is the central problem in any theory and history of poetic influence in English’ (Anxiety, p. 33). Therefore, as Bloom has stated from the beginning of his career, ‘the best preparation for reading Romantic poetry always will be a close rereading of Book I of Spenser’s Faerie Queene and of Milton’s Paradise Lost which judges the spiritual content of those poems wholly and maturely’. 9 It can hardly escape notice that in this system all capable figures, whether precursors or followers, are men, nor can it be denied that Bloom uses a malecentred antagonistic imagery that all but excludes women from a creative transaction which apparently can only involve fathers and sons. Not surprisingly, the politically and institutionally conservative implications of this restrictive version of the canon have provoked much criticism. The aforementioned Lentricchia is merely one critic who believes that Bloom’s author-centred poetics, despite its overt hostility towards New Critical orthodoxy, tends to reinstate the humanist tradition of great minds speaking with one another over and above the historical tradition. Even so, the perhaps greatest awkwardness lies not in the shortness or maleness of Bloom’s list of strong poets, but in its overwhelming Englishness. Oddly, the implementation of Bloom’s eclectic and highly cosmopolitan scholarship, with its dizzying references to Freudian psychoanalysis, Nietzschean existentialism, Derridean deconstruction and gnostic Kabbalah, tends to reinforce a rigidly, even chauvinistically Anglocentric view of the national tradition. According to Bloom, apparently, translation cannot factor itself into literary history as a genuine form of ‘poetic influence’, just as there were no non-English authors potent enough to induce ‘anxiety’.10 Thus, what has become increasingly clear in recent years is the fact that Bloom’s system, because of its inherent terminological rigidity, disables critical discussion as much as it enables it. As Julie Carlson might argue, Bloom’s privatized concept of ‘anxiety’ cannot comprehend such cases of public alarum, sometimes amounting to collective hysteria, as the furore caused by Richard Brinsley Sheridan’s Drury Lane production of Pizarro (1799), a melodramatic reworking of Kotzebue’s Die Spanier in Peru (1795–1796). Similarly, given Bloom’s conviction that influence cannot cross cultural and national boundaries, it can only seem utterly mysterious why an otherwise insightful critic like Francis Jeffrey should ever have opined that the authors of ‘the Lake School of poetry [ . . . ] belong to a sect of poets’ whose ‘doctrines are of German origin, and have been derived from some of the great modern reformers in that country’.11

Introduction

5

Stuart Curran can hardly be called an ephebe of Harold Bloom, for Poetic Form and British Romanticism was undoubtedly one of the most puissant works of Romantic criticism to appear during the 1980s. Curran’s main swerve from his critical father-figure consists in his decision to foreground the concept of genre. There is nothing new about the insight that Romantic texts transgress against neo-classical taxonomies of genres and generic rules, but Curran’s main accomplishment is to show that this heterodoxy does not stem from ignorance or indifference towards genre. Conscious that traditional generic hierarchies had exhausted their usefulness, Romantic poets sought new ways to make genre matter. Romantic poems, therefore, are not sui generis but self-consciously multi-genred even to the point of obsessiveness. Romantic poetry constantly mediates between the old and the new, the high and the low, the comic and the serious; it is playful, innovative, experimental, even self-deconstructive, and Curran goes so far as to characterize Romanticism tout court as a ‘countergenre’: ‘In a countergenre the received generic tradition is subjected to such a radical deconstruction that the result constitutes virtually a new form, its attributes soon claiming the integrity of generic convention for subsequent writers’ (p. 6). By insisting on the importance of genre, Curran de-individualizes and de-psychologizes Bloom’s system, making Poetic Form and British Romanticism look like a successful Oedipal rebellion. Nonetheless there are other points on which Curran seems unwilling or unable to liberate himself from Bloom’s schema, especially when he discusses the supposed ‘isolation’ and ‘insularity’ of British Romantic discourse (p. 7). Generally speaking, Curran places great emphasis on ‘Britain’s isolation and inward turning toward self-discovery’ during the Romantic period, and for an American critic he seems strangely reliant on images of national purity and self-sufficiency (p. 15). Enabled by fresh editions of Britain’s classic writers, modern poets encountered the products of their own literary past as though for the first time, and hence ‘[t]he paradox of British Romanticism is that its revolution came about through an intense and largely isolated engagement with its own past’ (p. 22). In a later essay entitled ‘Romantic Poetry: Why and Wherefore?’, Curran contends even more sweepingly that for the Romantics ‘poetry could be characterized as a distinctly British passion, or resource. Not that other countries lacked their poets, but no nation in modern Europe had the sustained tradition of greatness, generation by generation, over several centuries that the English language could boast.’12 With such statements as these, Bloom’s latent Anglophilia becomes explicit and all but programmatic. While British Romanticism may be viewed as a conversation

6


with the past, and while writers may have shown occasional interest in other national traditions, the Romantics’ only relevant interlocutors were the male, high-canonical, English poets of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries: Chaucer, Shakespeare, Spenser, Milton, and so on. For Curran, indeed, Romanticism is ‘the revival of Renaissance and medieval poetry’, or simply ‘the second Renaissance’ (p. 25). In all fairness, of course, my revisionist claim that British Romantic writers owed considerable debts to Continental pre-Romanticism is far from unprecedented. In reiterating Carlson’s and Alexander’s objections, one must also acknowledge that since they published their articles the situation has begun to change, and that the proposed ‘recovery’ of British Romanticism’s international interests is by now well underway. To a certain extent, looking beyond Britain for the meaning of Romanticism seems an inevitable consequence of the cultural climate in the new millennium. Studying literature in a migratory age, when national cultural traditions have become obviously dislocated and de-territorialized by the transnational flows of global capitalism, cannot but heighten our consciousness of the ways in which literary innovation was always, to a certain extent, the product of complex cultural intersections whose faultlines rarely, if ever, coincided with the borders of modern nation states. More specifically, the cosmopolitan (re)orientation that one finds in recent Romantic studies also follows from the large-scale remapping of Romanticism which has been progressing for some time, and which means that today ‘perhaps for the first time students are beginning to study a “British Romanticism” that looks and feels very different from the one that most of their predecessors studied’.13 As the voluminous Oxford Companion to the Romantic Age suggests, and as the titles and contents of various recent collections like Beyond Romanticism, At the Limits of Romanticism, New Romanticisms and Questioning Romanticism amply document, this remapping has had a number of dramatic consequences, which one may applaud or deplore depending on one’s point of view. 14 Among other things, it has eroded the traditional six-poet bias of Romantic criticism; it has drawn into doubt the supremacy of lyrical poetry during the age; and it has opened up the canon to hitherto marginalized female writers like Anna Letitia Barbauld, Mary Robinson, Henrietta Maria Williams, Sydney Owenson and Lady Caroline Lamb, to mention but a few. In various ways, the so-called ‘New Romanticism’ has also fostered sensitivity to the interconnections and interdependencies among different nations, cultures, traditions and discursive practices, thus enabling new efforts to unsettle the isolationist paradigm within Romantic studies. Most recently and most dramatically, Romanticists

Introduction

7

primarily inspired by Edward Said’s Orientalism and Culture and Imperialism have discovered and begun to explore the relationship between the efflorescence of Romantic writing and the global developments that transformed Britain from a ‘colonial’ to an ‘imperial’ power during the same period.15 In Alan Richardson’s words, ‘the cultural movement called “British Romanticism” cannot be fully understood without reference to the profound geopolitical transformations that make the period 1780–1830 as important for the history of the British Empire as for conventional literary history’.16 Far from conducting a closed conversation with an autochthonous national past, it is now proposed, Romantic writers reflect and thematize British culture’s inextricable bonds to the non-British, colonial world. This nexus linking the native and the foreign, home and abroad, may be deliberately foregrounded – as in exploration-narratives such as Coleridge’s ‘Rime of the Ancient Mariner’ or abolitionist tracts à la Blake’s Vision of the Daughters of Albion – or understated and even concealed, as in Jane Austen’s domestic novel Mansfield Park, but according to critics such as Richardson it should always be borne in mind. It simply is not accurate, then, to say that ‘British Romanticism [ . . . ] came about through an intense and largely isolated engagement with its own past,’ and that there was no significant traffic between British and non-British cultural domains during the Romantic age. Romantic discourse emerges not in fixed locations or static moments, but within a constant movement across borders. Though my own interests are more conventionally literary, and though my argument is grounded in a less global (if not ‘Eurocentric’) understanding of foreignness, I sympathize with this revisionist work and certainly share the underlying desire ‘to see complementarity and interdependence instead of isolated, venerated, or formalized experience that excludes and forbids the hybridizing intrusions of human history’.17 Jonathan Wordsworth writes that ‘to see a period in terms of its books – books that made an impact at the time – is to become aware of trends, values, achievements, interconnections and disparities, that are normally obscured’. 18 According to Stephen Behrendt, too, ‘[c]onnections are [ . . . ] the key to understanding the dynamics of literary communities, whatever the time and place in which they flourish’ (p. 147). A highly noticeable example of this attention to ‘interconnections’ is Julie Carlson’s In the Theatre of Romanticism: Coleridge, Nationalism, Women, in which she fulfils her previous vow to ‘rethink [ . . . ] Germany’s role in England in the early decades of romanticism’. Since Coleridge’s death, attempts to understand his interest in German literature and philosophy have been hampered by recurrent accusations of dishonesty and plagiarism,

8


but Carlson de-criminalizes this indebtedness by reinterpreting Coleridge’s dramatic career with specific reference to Friedrich Schiller’s, and in the process she rediscovers the seminal importance of ‘German drama’ for Romantic-period playwrights and theatrical audiences.19 Most intriguingly, Carlson finds that when in the mid-1790s Coleridge began to recant his youthful enthusiasm for the ‘seditious’ Schiller of Die Räuber, his eventual turn towards England and Shakespeare was mediated by the influence of another German writer, namely the ‘mature’ Schiller of the post-revolutionary Wallenstein-plays. Coleridge, it seems, could only counteract one ‘commanding’ foreign presence by embracing another. For him there was never any escape from, or alternative to, ‘Germany’. A comparable instance from the now-burgeoning sub-field of Romantic fiction studies, which has also inspired the present study, is Nicola J. Watson’s Revolution and the Form of the British Novel 1790–1825: Intercepted Letters, Interrupted Seductions. The refreshing but ‘perhaps rather startling’ qualities of Watson’s work derives from the almost maniacal determination with which she interprets practically all British Romantic novels – from Henry Mackenzie’s to Mary Wollstonecraft’s and Jane Austen’s – as counter-fictional glosses on a single, authoritative, nonEnglish work: Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s La Nouvelle Héloïse.20 Previous discussions of Romantic-period Rousseauism and anti-Rousseauism have relied too heavily on the notion of a transcendent (and rather vaguely defined) ‘spirit of the age’, positing a series of abstract correspondences or contrasts between Rousseau and the Romantics, but eliding the crucial problem of influence.21 Watson’s approach, on the other hand, is generically and socio-historically specific, and she draws on poststructuralism, genre theory and gender studies in explaining how in the minds of British critics and writers the lurid plot of ‘seduction’ coalesced with the sublime scenario of ‘revolution’. While Watson understandably highlights attempts to discipline ‘the complex of desire and transgression upon which the narrative of revolution [ . . . ] is founded’, she also resists the potentially limiting determinism of such an account, by affirming that La Nouvelle Héloïse’s open-ended epistolary form made the book ‘a particularly fertile text to re-emplot in aesthetically and politically multiple ways’ (pp. 11, 15). In the work of Carlson, Watson and others, the recovery of neglected authors (whether male of female) and the rereading of forgotten texts (British or non-British) opens up exciting opportunities to discover how literature migrates across social, cultural, national borders. British Romanticism and Continental Influences responds to, follows up and seeks to systematize the ongoing recovery of British Romanticism’s foreign

Introduction

9

derivation. To do so, it re-examines some predominantly first-generation Romantic writers’ creative responses to Continental pre-Romanticism. My working assumption, which is itself continually tested, is that Romantic-period writers, both serious and popular, involved themselves (some more than others, and some almost fatally) in the foreign literature of terror and titillation. My argument is based on the following two-pronged hypothesis: 1. Along with an increased popular interest in Continental literature, the 1790s also saw the rise of what I label the discourse of Romantic ‘Europhobia’. Europhobic writers, whose ranks included Edmund Burke, Hannah More, John Robison and the literary editors of the two versions of the Anti-Jacobin Review, employed a trademark style of paranoid invective, apocalyptic hyperbole and relentless ad hominem antagonism. Europhobic sentiments were nourished by contemporary political events, and by the end of the century, at a time when Britain was threatened by naval mutinies abroad and the workings of seditious societies at home, Europhobic arguments had become well-nigh inescapable in public discourse, reaching a climax in texts like Thomas James Mathias’s The Pursuits of Literature (1797) and The Shade of Alexander Pope on the Banks of the Thames (1799). Inflating conventional anti-romance rhetoric and fostering an attitude of paranoid surveillance, Europhobic critics cast foreign writers not merely as political anarchists but as Satanic rebels against God. Britain, the Europhobics charged, did suffer an invasion during the late 1790s, for it was overwhelmed by foreign ballads, fictions and plays. Among their central alarmist tenets was the assumption that Britain was being ‘flooded’, ‘inundated’, ‘deluged’ or ‘overrun’ (all these metaphors were frequently used in contemporary accounts) by a heterogeneous assortment of newly translated texts, including literary classics like Choderlos de Laclos’ Dangerous Liaisons, Johann Wolfgang Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther and Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Confessions as well as more ephemeral products such as Karl von Grosse’s Horrid Mysteries and Kotzebue’s The Stranger, Lovers’ Vows and Pizarro. Recognizing and exaggerating the sexual and political liberalism of many late eighteenth-century Continental texts, and conveniently ignoring those texts that did not conform to this stereotype, Europhobics construed European literature as an overwhelming menace to Britain’s moral and political health. Regardless of literary quality or national provenance, so the argument went, popular European translations threatened to impair Britain’s performance in the ongoing war against France and its allies. In response, Europhobics advocated political censorship, or at the very least a much

10


stricter government control, as the only method of containing the onslaught of un-British publications. 2. Coming of age during the contentious and war-plagued 1790s, and having lived through the vicissitudes of the French Revolution and its aftermath, first-generation Romantic writers could hardly avoid being influenced by the Europhobic sentiments that threaded through public discourse during the decade. Even if they had wanted to, Wordsworth and the other Romantics could not simply have ignored important trends in Continental literature, especially because European texts were being translated into English on an unprecedented scale and at an alarming rate. To a certain extent, the majority of early Romantics may simply be said to have adopted the Europhobic style and internalized Europhobic arguments, insofar as several of them published shrill denunciations of the perilous foreign fictions reaching and supposedly debauching British readers from abroad. While it is now a critical commonplace that a majority of Romantic writers outgrew their youthful liberalism and came to embrace Burkean ideals, it may come as a surprise just how often and how vehemently these writers spoke out, in their poetic manifestos, literary criticism and programmatic statements, against those literary importations which they like so many contemporaries felt were making a mockery of English propriety and common sense: A multitude of causes unknown to former times are now acting with a combined force to blunt the discriminating powers of mind, and unfitting it for all voluntary exertion to reduce it to a state of almost savage torpor. The most effective of these causes are the great national events which are daily taking place, and the increasing accumulation of men in cities, where the uniformity of their occupations produces a craving for extraordinary incident which the rapid communication of intelligence hourly gratifies. To this tendency of life and manners the literature and theatrical exhibitions of the country have conformed themselves. The invaluable works of our elder writers, I had almost said the works of Shakespeare and Milton, are driven into neglect by frantic novels, sickly and stupid German Tragedies, and deluges of idle and extravagant stories in verse. When I think upon this degrading thirst after outrageous stimulation I am almost ashamed to have spoken of the feeble attempts with which I have endeavoured to counteract it (Wordsworth, Prose Works, i, 128–30). You remember, my dear Sir, that Mr. Whitbread, shortly before his death, proposed to the assembled subscribers of Drury-Lane Theatre,

Introduction

11

that the concern should be farmed to some responsible individual under certain conditions and limitations: and that his proposal was rejected, not without indignation, as subversive of the main object, for the attainment of which the enlightened and patriotic assemblage of philo-dramatists had been induced to risk their subscriptions. Now this object was avowed to be no less than the redemption of the British stage not only from horses, dogs, elephants, and the like zoological rarities, but also from the more pernicious barbarisms and Kotzebuisms in morals and taste. Drury-Lane was to be restored to its former classical renown; Shakespeare, Jonson, and Otway, with the expurgated muses of Vanburgh, Congreve, and Wycherly, were to be re-inaugurated in their rightful dominion over British audiences; and the Herculean process was to commence, by exterminating the speaking monsters imported from the banks of the Danube, compared with which their mute relations [ . . . ] were tame and inoffensive.22 The enthusiasm expressed by Lord Byron [for Rousseau’s La Nouvelle Héloïse] is no small tribute to the power possessed by Jean Jacques over the passions; and, to say truth, we needed some such evidence, for, though almost ashamed to avow the truth [ . . . ] even now we can see little in the loves of these two tiresome pedants to interest our feelings for either of them; we are by no means flattered by the character of Lord Edward Bomston, produced as the representative of the English nation; and, upon the whole, consider the dulness [sic] of the story as the best apology for its exquisite immorality. To state our opinion in language much better than our own, we are unfortunate enough to feel this far-famed history of philosophical gallantry as an ‘unfashioned, indelicate, sour, gloomy, ferocious medley of pedantry and lewdness; of metaphysical speculations, blended with the coarsest sensuality’ [ . . . ] this frenzied sophist, reasoning upon false principles, or rather that show of reasoning which is the worst pitch of madness, was a primary apostle of the French Revolution [ . . . ]23 Mignon [the female protagonist in Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship] – The situation or character, one or both, of this young person is relied upon by all admirers of Goethe as the most brilliant achievement of his poetic powers. We, on our part, are no less ready to take our stand on this as the most unequivocal evidence of depraved taste and defective sensibility. [ . . . ] Mignon is the offspring of an incestuous connexion between a brother and sister. Here let us pause one moment to point the reader’s attention to Mr. Goethe, who is now at his old tricks; – never relying on the grand high-road

12


sensibilities of human nature, but always travelling into bypaths of unnatural or unhallowed interest. Suicide, adultery, incest, monstrous situations, or manifestations of supernatural power, are the stimulants to which he constantly resorts in order to rouse his own feelings, originally feeble, and, long before the date of this work, grown torpid from artificial excitement.24 If nothing else, such statements as these (and there are many more to be found) lend substance to Marilyn Butler’s claim that ‘it is much easier to connect the first wave of Romanticism with the conservative cause than with radicalism’.25 Referring to a ‘deluge’ of ‘idle and extravagant stories in verse’ as well as ‘speaking monsters imported from the banks of the Danube’, Wordsworth and Coleridge both allude to Hannah More’s stridently patriotic Strictures on the Modern System of Female Education (1799), which condemns ‘those swarms of Publications now daily issuing from the banks of the Danube, which, like their ravaging predecessors of the darker ages, though with far other and more fatal arms, are overrunning civilised society’.26 De Quincey in turn glosses Wordsworth’s Preface to Lyrical Ballads (De Quincey’s ‘grown torpid from artificial excitement’ surely echoes Wordsworth’s ‘a state of almost savage torpor’), and Scott explicitly quotes Burke’s Letter to A Member of the National Assembly (1797) in his own denunciation of Rousseau, the ‘frenzied Sophist’. Besides demonstrating the ubiquity of certain key discursive tropes – ‘outrageous stimulation’, ‘gross and violent stimulants’, ‘degrading thirst’, ‘exquisite immorality’, ‘unnatural interest’ – within wartime Britain, these declarations also bespeak a deep affinity between Europhobic populism and literary Romanticism. The new writing’s main public exponents (here: Wordsworth, Coleridge, Scott and De Quincey) were not immune to the fears of literary poisoning, contamination and demoralization which swept away so many other writers and intellectuals during the years of the invasion-crisis. Europhobia thus provides an informative, if most frequently neglected, context for understanding Romanticism as a literary and an ideological phenomenon. In effect, one should not underestimate the extent to which some of the most prominent Romantic writers constructed their own public reputations in explicit opposition to the image of foreign writers like Kotzebue, Goethe and Rousseau, and as spokesmen for Britain’s beleaguered literary establishment and political culture. Above and beyond exhibiting evidence of Romantic xenophobia, however, my primary concern lies in explaining how both ‘major’ and ‘minor’ Romantics confronted and exploited this menacing otherness

Introduction

13

in their own writings. While the Romantics could wield nationalist rhetoric against wanton European innovation as effectively as any other controversialist writing in the period, the recycling of current highculturalist and anti-European stereotypes does not constitute the most profound aspect of the Romantics’ reaction to European literary modes. Interestingly, the Romantics’ declared hostility towards foreign textual terrorists like Rousseau and Kotzebue did not preclude widespread and intensive borrowing from the very writers singled out for the most biting criticism. My main ambition in the present work, then, is to account for the glaring paradox that Romantics borrowed – and continued to borrow, even beyond their ‘juvenile’ years – paraphernalia from those un-British writers whom they most vigorously disowned: that Wordsworth drew on Rousseau’s Confessions in The Prelude; that Coleridge continued to exploit the resources of the ‘modern jacobinical drama’ throughout his theatrical career, and especially in his greatest success Remorse (1813); that the arch-nationalist De Quincey kept up a steady supply of foreignindebted texts with titillating titles like Klosterheim; or the Masque (1832); and that Southey and Scott despite frequent claims to the contrary never wholly emancipated themselves from the siren charms of German and Gothic romance. In attempting to solve this quandary, one might assume either that Romantics were inconsistent in their attitude towards foreign writers, or that they hypocritically disdained to follow their own prescriptions for proper writing. Alternatively – and this corresponds to my own view of the matter – one might choose to understand the Romantics’ borrowings in terms of a more sophisticated technique of appropriation and adaptation, as complex intertextual manoeuvres crystallizing a variety of sometimes inchoate personal, aesthetic, financial, national and ideological ambitions and desires. Various critics have begun to sketch out such a theory of Romanticism, though the case has yet to be laid out systematically. For the British Romantics, Geoffrey Hartman writes in a classic essay, ‘the dichotomy of “gentle mind” and “false themes” (where “false themes” means the materials of romance, popular or classical in origin) remains the starting point. [ . . . ] Many, of course, accepted the alienation of the literary mind from the “exploded beings” [ . . . ] But others dared to think that literature might become a rational enchantment. They toyed with the forbidden fire (with the “Eastern Tale”, the Gothic romance, the Sublime Ode) and called up the ghosts they wished to subdue’. 27 In the Romantic period, claims Judith Wilt, ‘it was [ . . . ] the conscious business of poets (I have Wordsworth, Austen, and Scott in mind here) to warn against the splendors of pure Romance,

14


while they returned kidnapped romance to the public at gratifyingly high ransoms’. 28 Pursuing a similar argument, Karen Swann has more recently asked why Romantic writers chose to invoke heterodox romance forms at a time when the critical establishment’s complaints about the ‘German’ writing’s inflammatory effects had risen to a deafening crescendo. In answering her own question, Swann discovers in these ‘Romantic experiments in sensation’ a characteristic double strategy of re-articulation and displacement, deflection and reform. British Romantic literature, she finds, ‘plays on the contending valences of romance in a way that allowed [the Romantics] to breach and then reinforce a distinction between their projects and popular sensational literature [ . . . ] it flaunts its affinities with sensational literature and a feminized culture in order to establish its difference’. 29 ‘Rational enchantment’, ‘kidnapped romance’, ‘experiments in sensation’: instead of viewing Romantic texts as straightforward expressions of Europhobia, this study assumes that Romantic writers (and I use this category in a deliberately inclusive sense) responded strategically, and sometimes duplicitously, to the schizophrenic separation between contemporary popular and critical attitudes towards Continental writing. In my analysis, the Romantic deployment of European romance-features is always self-aware and always governed by a multiple agenda: it entails a process of economic exploitation, artistic revitalization and sociopolitical domestication that is both considerable and complex – much more considerable and much more complex, at any rate, than critics have tended to assume so far. Confronted with the perceived abominations of illicit and nonconformist texts that both attracted and repulsed them, Romantic writers sought to publicly distance themselves from European sensationalism even as they revised and harnessed its conventions in their own writings. According to Karen Swann, the 1790s had seen the emergence and intensification of an extravagant polemic that denounced the public appetite for outlandish romance forms as evidence of rapid cultural decline, and ‘[a]ny writer choosing to invoke German romance in 1798 would have to have been conscious and wary of these associations’ (p. 138). The Romantics’ (mis)appropriations of Continental romance must be studied contextually, as personally motivated genre-experiments that also respond strategically to the collective crisis of British culture and participate in the ongoing attempt to confront the national enemy and solidify the national identity. Employing a sophisticated countercultural tactic of ventriloquism, simulation and mimicry, the new writers attempted to capitalize on Europhobic panic and tap European

Introduction

15

romance’s immense popularity, drawing attention to themselves while also transforming a form of ‘outrageous stimulation’ (in the familiar terms of the Preface to Lyrical Ballads) into an alternative form appealing to ‘the discriminating powers of the mind’: writing, Wordsworth calls it, in which ‘the understanding of the Reader must necessarily be in some degree enlightened, his taste exalted, and his affections ameliorated’ (Prose Works, i, 126). If British culture and society were to be effectively refashioned in the wake of the revolutionary crisis, then contemporary writers must clutch the popular forms of Continental romance yet demolish the pre-Romantic cult of the errant ego. However, I hasten to add that the relative degree of assimilation and containment, of the power to subvert and co-opt, varies highly. The Romantic assimilation of European writing is not an ideologically monolithic phenomenon: it is manifested in texts that arise from different causes, stem from different genres, possess unequal aesthetic value and are aimed at different audiences. In addition, Romantic texts are typically conflicted and contradictory in their relations towards the foreign pretexts which they both include and exclude, simultaneously reproduce and uproot. During a key moment in Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park (1948), the family heir Tom Bertram seeks to account for his and his young companions’ private production of Kotzebue’s Lovers’ Vows (1798) in his father’s absence. When pressed by Sir Thomas, Tom responds that ‘ “My friend Yates brought the infection from Ecclesford, and it spread as those things always spread you know, sir – the faster probably from your having so often encouraged the sort of thing in us formerly.” ’30 If the rage for translation-literature represented an ‘infection’ or ‘disease’ threatening the British public’s mental and moral health, as Wordsworth, Austen and Carlyle among many others asserted, then Romantic texts like Lyrical Ballads or Mansfield Park can in turn be regarded as wholesome antidotes against the Continental malady. In a wartime context associating German drama with French extremism, and hence as opposed to British national interests, the invocation of foreignness helps Romantic writers market their poetry, drama and fiction as a benign alternative to the imported literature of shock and sensation. Effecting social and cultural change requires a cunning pharmacology, but of course the ambivalence cuts both ways. Paradoxically, as John Barrell proposes in his study of Thomas De Quincey, substitutive texts can only have a curative or inoculating effect if they induce a form of the very disease whose symptoms they also seek to remedy: ‘The process of inoculation involves simultaneously protecting someone against a disease and infecting them with it, and the troubling ambiguity of

16


this process is often visible in the very language in which it is described.’31 The Romantics necessarily incorporate many elements of the older, corrupt forms into their ‘new’ species of romance. Continental pre-Romanticism, then, is never simply conquered or subordinated; it survives and is carried forward, in spectral secondary traces, within the new cultural formation of British Romanticism. In the first chapter, which is primarily concerned with historical and discursive developments, I trace the emergence and analyze the pugnacious rhetoric of turn-of-the-century Europhobia, from its inception in Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790) to its decisive formulation in William Preston’s ‘Reflections on the Peculiarities of Style and Manner in the late German Writers, whose Works have appeared in English; and on the Tendency of their Productions’ (1802). As anti-European sentiments increased throughout these war-plagued years, Europhobic writers gradually shifted their focus from France to Germany, concerning themselves less with the agency of persons than with the perceived calamity of literary texts. With this short chronology of xenophobic writing, covering little more than a decade, I wish to show not only how Europhobia triumphed over alternative responses towards foreign writing, but also how Europhobic discourse gained momentum despite – or perhaps even because of – the blatant logical contradictions with which it was always riddled. In reacting to the ‘deluge’ of foreign writing, Europhobics introduced a potent tropology of ‘poisoning’ and ‘disease’ that enabled Romantic writers to present their own texts’ relationships to the European ‘other’ as simultaneously imitative and antagonistic. Henceforth Romantic writing could be justified and valorized as critique and warning, antidote and cure. Each of the following chapters is made up by readings that examine one or several crucial points of intersection or overlapping between British and non-British texts. Juxtaposing the native and the foreign, the male and the female, the familiar and the unfamiliar, and the high and the low, these chapters identify articulatory moves which will flesh out my contention that Romanticism should be viewed not merely as a rebellion against neo-classical aesthetic standards and mimetic theories of representation, or as the inevitable outcome of political apostasy from youthful revolutionary engagement. Rather, I hope, it will become evident that a vital aspect of what makes Romanticism ‘Romantic’ lies precisely in the Romantic writers’ ambivalent bartering with those Continental texts, genres and traditions which both captivated and perturbed them, and which they both captured and revised.

Introduction

17

In the second chapter, I discuss the German balladeer Gottfried August Bürger’s impact upon the Romantic ballad-revival in Britain. While this issue has been given in-depth treatment by several prominent Romanticists, the politically and culturally contentious qualities of Bürger’s ‘terrible’ verse have not received sufficient attention, nor have the ambivalent stratagems with which both ‘high’ and ‘low’ British poets sought to parry the perceived threat and capitalize on the economic success of the foreign Gothic ballad. British responses to Bürger, I find, supply particularly pregnant examples of the multiple ways in which Romantic-period writers sought to tap the resources of literary forms imported a few years earlier, while also adapting these shapes to the demands of a new time and to the rapidly changing social-politicaleconomical context of the early nineteenth century. Although my third chapter deals primarily with novels, its real focus is the dialectical interplay between pastoral and anti-pastoral, and I approach this theme through a discussion of Jacques Henri Bernardin de Saint-Pierre’s Paul et Virginie and its English repercussions. The most successful pastoral novel of the revolutionary age and a genuine international bestseller, Paul et Virginie submitted a Rousseauistic primitivist and organicist programme, whose decisive formulation triggered not only excitement but also widespread anxiety among British respondents. Reading Paul et Virginie against its more or less direct spin-offs involves the interpreter in a series of convoluted triangulations among France, Britain and America. The tendency among British writers to counter Paul et Virginie’s revolutionary pastoral with anti-pastoral debunkings of pastoral’s mystifications, I argue, becomes especially telling if one shifts one’s focus from avant-garde poetry to more mainstream genres like the popular drama and (especially) the novel. Romantic art is commonly celebrated for its new privileging of originality, creativity and spontaneity, but writers during this age of paradoxes also increasingly resorted to translation and adaptation in order to make a career for themselves. The reliance on different forms of transliteration was especially pronounced within the Romantic period’s burgeoning theatrical culture, even while critics routinely singled out translated foreign plays as a malignant influence threatening national standards of taste and propriety. In the fourth chapter, I explore how different Romantic writers responded to this complex situation, by considering some more or less innovative and successful attempts to Anglicize two of the most controversial non-British plays of the period: Goethe’s Götz von Berlichingen and Schiller’s Die Räuber.

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Far from simply closing themselves off from the surrounding world, Romantic writers showed a lively interest in the processes whereby foreign texts, even old, exotic and seemingly useless ones, could be reappraised, recycled and reused within new political and national contexts. In the fifth and last chapter, I dwell on the antiquarian retrieval of ancient Scandinavian literature and disinter the almostforgotten literary products spawned by this recovery. Romantic men of letters like Wordsworth, Scott, Southey and William Herbert, I find, all experimented with the then fashionable ‘Runic’ poetry of the North. But once again, even as they incorporate controversial topoi into their writings, these writers also consistently modulate conventional Gothic paraphernalia to suit their own Romantic tastes and purposes.

1 ‘We Know that the Enemy is Working among Us’: The Rhetoric of Romantic Europhobia

From Burke to the Anti-Jacobin During the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries in Britain, new nationalist narratives began to displace older universalist and cosmopolitan forms of understanding. The causes and ramifications of this increasing preoccupation with defining a unified national essence are multifarious and have been studied in detail elsewhere. One chief factor was the fact that England went through revolution in printing technology, which conditioned Britons to view themselves as an ‘imaginary community’ linked by complex communication networks. 1 Another explanation concerns Britain’s newly won status as the world’s foremost trading nation, which also heightened Britons’ self-consciousness and highlighted the question of the nation’s relation to itself.2 Most importantly, during these years Britain found itself involved in a prolonged series of bloody and costly wars against Revolutionary and Napoleonic France, for as Linda Colley holds, nothing forges a stronger sense of ‘cultural and ethnic homogeneity’ than a ‘confrontation with an obviously hostile Other’. 3 The notion that Britons shared certain salient features was buttressed by the self-conscious contrasting of Britishness to other national characters, and in Britain’s case the main ‘other’ was the enemy of the French-dominated European Continent. Indeed, as Seamus Deane puts it in The French Revolution and Enlightenment in England, ‘England created a series of images of France which then produced countervailing images of England’.4 19

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The role played by Edmund Burke in instigating and catalyzing this project of English identity-formation can hardly be overestimated. In Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790) and the many sequels that followed from his hand, Burke cemented a xenophobic image of the French national character, as cold, abstract and theory-ridden, but simultaneously and paradoxically as overexcited, enthusiastic and prone to bursts of violence. In Burke’s view, the members of the National Assembly perfectly embody the contradictions of the French nation, for even though they are ‘men of theory’ who have a speculative approach to the empirically grounded science of statecraft, they also perpetrate enormities and stage orgies of bloodshed like the assault on Marie Antoinette and the murder of her guards.5 Burke died in 1797, when the Anglo-French conflict was still in its early stages, but his anti-Gallic demonology gradually percolated into both high and low culture, becoming an important weapon in the ongoing propaganda war against Revolutionary and Napoleonic supporters.6 Perpetuating the Burkean construction of the French, as a people animated by ‘a violent and malignant zeal, of a kind hitherto unknown in the world [ . . . ] a spirit of cabal, intrigue, and proselytism’, proved an eminently useful instrument in the government’s effort to swell the ranks of the volunteer army and rally support for hitherto unpopular institutions such as the Anglican church and the Hanover monarchy (Burke, p. 213).7 Throughout the Reflections, Burke employs the consolidating pronoun ‘we’, thereby suggesting that the writer is linked with all other Englishmen across space and time, in opposition to French ‘theory’. This said, the thrust of Burke’s argument is not merely arraign ‘us’ (Englishmen) against ‘them’ (Frenchmen). Romantic Europhobia, as I will use the term, implies not only the beliefs that Britain is essentially different from and superior to its Continental neighbour-nations, and that Britons have nothing to gain, and everything to lose, from coming into close contact with alien cultures. What drives the characteristic extremist argument, logical incoherence and rhetorical hyperbole of Europhobic discourse, rather, is especially the suspicion or indeed conviction that such Europeanization is already taking place, and that it is proceeding apace. Burke’s nationalistic fanfare often seems compensatory, an attempt to rekindle the flame of heroism or suppress an underlying nervousness. The arrogant complacency of Burke’s prose is fractured, and his anxiety begins to surface, on those occasions when he traduces Richard Price, the London Constitution Society and the Revolution Society. From the outset Burke denigrates Price and his confederates as obscure and insignificant triflers, mocking their pretensions in congratulating France on

The Rhetoric of Romantic Europhobia

21

England’s behalf, yet he also seems fascinated by the LCS members – ‘who they are; how many they are; and of what value their opinions may be’ – and he returns to the dissenting societies throughout the text, reserving some of his fiercest invective for them (p. 88). A few pages into Reflections, the dissenters’ ‘club’ is relabelled a sectarian ‘cabal’, and less than half way through the text Burke likens Price to the regicide Hugh Peters, and accuses him of openly advocating ‘plots, massacres, assassinations’ (p. 156). The LCS discombobulates Burke because it shows that Jacobinism, although originating in France, is by now an international phenomenon. Remarkably, in the course of these denunciations Burke insists on placing the LCS meetings, reminding his readers at least seven times that Price’s speech was delivered in the ‘Old Jewry’ (pp. 93, 94, 99, 156, 158, 165, 180). By way of these references and through a series of scurrilous and seemingly gratuitous jibes at ‘Jews and jobbers’, Burke forges an associational link between a ‘political man of letters’ like Price and his one-time friend, the imprisoned ‘protestant Rabbin’ Lord George Gordon (pp. 136, 178, 211). Living in England, but lacking any of the emotional ties that bind Englishmen to their ‘little platoon’, Jews have placed their loyalty elsewhere, and insist on worshipping foreign gods (p. 135). Vilifying Price and his followers as Jews clearly serves to externalize a menace that could easily be understood in relation to Britain’s domestic history. At the same time, raising the spectre of a substantial foreign population living within England’s borders (England had readmitted the Jews in 1655) provokes anxieties that England may be less unified than Burke proclaims, implying that the ‘other’ has already been woven into the texture of English culture. By conjoining Judaism and Jacobinism, Burke not only taints England’s Jewish population with the smear of political subversion; he also stigmatizes Price and his followers as traitors to the national cause, insofar as they bite the hand that feeds them and proselytize for un-English causes. In converting to French-style republicanism, the members of the LCS have become like Jews within a Christian commonwealth, and as such they constitute an alien, menacing presence within the English body politic. Burke’s ingrained hostility to foreigners and foreign cultures reveals a deep-seated fear of racial, cultural and political miscegenation. For the British nationalist writing during the French wars, as John Barrell writes in his study of Thomas De Quincey and nineteenth-century psychopathology, ‘life was terrorised by the fear of an unending and interlinked chain of infections [which] threatened to enter his system and to overthrow it, leaving him visibly and permanently compromised and orientalized’. Such a writer’s worst nightmare, and simultaneously the

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perverse realization of his highest hopes, is the ‘horrified discovery that his is [ . . . ] a hybrid identity; that his relation with an imaginary [enemy], like that of an imperial power with its colonial “dependencies”, is a relation (at best) of symbiotic interdependence, and can no longer be thought of in terms of a safe transaction between a self and an other’.8 Romantic Europhobia postulates a war of national survival and urges a maniacal attitude of incessant self-monitoring. British national identity, according to the Europhobic imaginary, is always-already unravelling; the other has already entered the self, reconstituting itself with threatening vividness. Demonizing all outsiders and conjuring up superhuman enemies, this atavistic crisis-rhetoric thus bears a striking likeness to the melodramatic Cold War discourse which Richard Hofstader has analyzed under the rubric of ‘the paranoid style’, and which was popularized in 1950s science-fiction films like Invasion from Mars and The Invasion of the Body Snatchers.9 Burke’s Reflections constitutes the English nation not only as triumphant, but also as frail, vulnerable and in constant danger of self-loss. For all the excess and paranoia of Reflections and its many spin-offs, however, Burke’s foremost bogeymen – Jacobin France and its British sympathizers – look almost harmless compared to the world-encompassing secret society envisaged during the so-called ‘Illuminati controversy’.10 First, in Memoirs, Illustrating the History of Jacobinism (1797–1798) the émigré Jesuit priest Abbé Augustin de Barruel purports to explain how the Jacobin ‘Sect’ was ‘itself no other than the coalition of a triple Sect, of a triple conspiracy, in which, long before the Revolution, the overthrow of the altar, the ruin of the throne, and the dissolution of all civil society had been debated and resolved on’. The first of Barruel’s sects is the French philosophes, the second is the freemasons, but the third and by far the most pernicious, to whose history he devotes two out of four volumes, is ‘known by the name of Illuminées’, and was founded in 1776 at Ingolstadt in Bavaria by the German University-Professor Adam ‘Spartacus’ Weishaupt.11 Almost simultaneously with the appearance of Barruel’s mammoth volumes, John Robison, who was Professor of natural philosophy at the University of Edinburgh and Secretary in the Royal Society of that city, published Proofs of a Conspiracy against all the Religions and Governments of Europe, Carried on in the Secret Meetings of Free Masons, Illuminati, and Reading Societies (1797). Barruel had conflated freemasonry, Illuminism and Jacobinism, but Robison – himself an academic and an insider to masonry – finesses the Frenchman’s argument somewhat. Masonic lodges, Robison argues, were originally centres of manly and enlightened reasoning, but during the 1770s and 1780s empiricism lost its


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dominance as the Illuminati infiltrated the brotherhood of freemasons, transforming it into an instrument for publicizing antisocial and atheistic opinions. Led by the charismatic Weishaupt, and making skilful use of masonry’s Byzantine system of degrees, oaths and secret rituals, the Illuminati converted existing masons into convinced republicans, while they also zealously recruited new members from all layers of society. Each new or old member, in turn, was charged with the task of soliciting additional converts, and in this manner the Illuminati soon created a trans-European cadre of malcontents. Unlike Barruel, Robison denies that Weishaupt and his libertine confederates had any commitment to masonry’s original tenets. Their goals, rather, were first to enrich themselves, and second to bring about a state of universal moral abandon and lawlessness. Like Barruel, however, Robison hypothesizes that the movement had a significant impact upon ‘political occurrences in France’, and that it catalyzed ‘that spirit of revolt which had so long growled in secret in the different corners of that great empire’.12 Proofs of a Conspiracy reaches its speculative climax in chapter four, when Robison describes the transmission of Illuminism from Germany to France. Supposedly the key actor in this process was Count Mirabeau, who had contracted ‘this political fever’ while posted as a French ambassador in Berlin and who upon his return proceeded to reorganize the French Masonic lodges according to the new German models. This analysis, Robison admits, may strike the sceptical reader as counterintuitive, not least because Mirabeau actually published an anti-Illuminist tract, Essay sur la Secte des Illuminés. Determined to eliminate every difficulty, however, Robison in a characteristically paranoid move interprets Mirabeau’s text as a devious stratagem designed to hoodwink public opinion and blind his royalist opponents to his real, pro-Illuminati goals: ‘Mirabeau confided in his own powers of deception, in order to screen from observation those who were known to be Illuminati, and to hinder the rulers from attending to their real machinations, by means of this ignis fatuus of his own brain’ (p. 213). Confronted with men possessing such satanically capacious minds, not surprisingly, the French government was doomed. ‘Thus’, Robison concludes, ‘were the stupid Bavarians (as the French were once pleased to call them) their instructors in the art of overturning the world’, for while ‘there is surely no natural connection between Free Masonry and Jacobinism – [ . . . ] we see the link – Illuminism’ (p. 231). It was the arch-counter-revolutionary Burke himself who, in his earlier incarnation as aesthetic theorist, maintained that ‘to make any thing very terrible, obscurity seems in general to be necessary’, and that ‘a clear idea is [ . . . ] another name for a little idea’.13 Whereas French republicanism

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and Bonapartism constitute well-established and strictly localized threats, Bavarian-based Illuminism presents a much more diffuse and almost unfathomable, pan-European enemy. ‘Germany’, in Barruel and Robison’s Europhobic exposés, names a national entity that strictly speaking does not exist, and in any case the primary Illuminists are itinerant scholars ceaselessly on the move from one place to the next and constantly dispatching texts to each other across national borders. The movement’s transnational or ‘cosmo-political’ scope, moreover, leaves little hope in the minds of its harshest critics that Illuminist discourse has not already penetrated Britain. The fact that freemasonry is an international organization and the claim that it is now being controlled from abroad allow Barruel and Robison to conjure up an even more sensational scenario than the lurid spectacle of French troops poised to land on the coasts of Dover – that of impressionable British youths already being corrupted by the ‘blackguard productions of the German presses’: We know that the enemy is working among us, and that there are many appearances in these kingdoms which strongly resemble the contrivance of this dangerous Association. We know that before the Order of Illuminati was broken up by the Elector of Bavaria, there were several Lodges in Britain, and we may be certain that they are not all broken up. I know that they are not and that within these two years some Lodges were ignorant, or affected to be so, of the corrupted principles and dangerous designs of the Illuminati. [ . . . ] I am very well informed that there are several thousands of subscribing Brethren in London alone, and we can hardly doubt but that many of that number are well advanced (Robison, p. 126). ‘We know that the enemy is working among us’: like Barruel, Robison claims to possess privileged information (‘we know’, ‘I know’, ‘I think’, ‘I am very well informed’), which in turn has enabled him to establish causal connections where others have noticed only disparate events. Adding fuel to the Europhobic fire, such statements by Barruel and Robison also deserve notice for shifting the focus from persons – Burke’s clique of disaffected intellectuals assembling in the Old Jewry – to texts, which prove all the more dangerous because harder to control. Book production and consumption assume a key importance for Barruel and particularly for Robison. Trained in classical rhetoric at major European universities, the Illuminati were primarily men of letters – a ‘gang’ of ‘unwearied bookmakers’ and ‘scribblers [ . . . ] leagued against the peace of the world’ – who


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consciously employed their writing and communication skills to spread their gospel and penetrate the sinews of power (p. 162). At the height of their influence, the Illuminati seized control of publishing houses and established reading societies and circulating libraries, where new converts were unwittingly exposed to a bewildering array of pernicious disquisitions. An overwhelmingly large portion of Proofs of a Conspiracy consists of long quotations from the Illuminati’s published works and private correspondence, followed by Robison’s painstaking attempts to unravel their meaning. With depressing regularity, these texts turn out to breathe the same ‘spirit of restless discontent and [ . . . ] hankering after reform’, but what offends Robison is not merely the revolting message that Illuminati writings carry, but also the promiscuous way in which they are dispersed (p. 158). Illuminati publishing methods, he argues, show no respect for eighteenth-century book production methods – in fact they seem consciously designed to sabotage such standard practices. The Illuminati, for example, wrote under enigmatic pseudonyms like ‘Spartacus’ (Weishaupt), ‘Cato’ (Zwack), ‘Philo’ (Knigge) and ‘Hannibal’ (Bassus), and they routinely used coded expressions and cryptic ciphers allowing them to outsmart all ideological censorship. Robison also reproduces an anecdote concerning a Dr Stark of Leipzig, who was subjected to harassment when he sought to publish an anti-Illuminism pamphlet. First the Illuminati found ways to delay the volume, and then, when Stark sent his text to a rival publisher, he found ‘that it was printing with great alterations, another title, and a guide or key, in which the work was perverted and turned into ridicule by a Dr. Bahrdt, who resided in that neighbourhood’. ‘This’, Robison concludes, ‘is surely a strong instance of the machinations by which the Illuminati have attempted to destroy the Liberty of the Press’ (p. 164). The Illuminati text is ‘perverse’ not merely in the sense that it ‘sows the seeds of licentious Cosmo-politism’, encouraging readers to indulge their ‘luxurious tastes, keen desires, and unbridled passions’, but also in the sense that it upsets time-honoured conceptions of proper reading and writing (pp. 121, 159). The ‘abominable way in which the literary manufacture of Germany was conducted’, Robison complains, has made it ‘impossible to hinder the dispersion of such writings over all Germany’ (p. 195). The Illuminati have concocted a discourse that does not ‘circulate’ but ‘disseminate’, to use the contemporary agriculturalist Arthur Young’s terminological distinction.14 If the Enlightenment bourgeois public sphere was characterized by communicative transparency and accessibility, Illuminism thus takes on the shape of an anti- or counter-public: a decentered structure distinguished by shifting identities, mysterious reduplications and

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inscrutable acts of legerdemain, precipitating a seemingly endless, enigmatic and uncontrollable correspondence. Despite all their vigilance, Robison and Barruel mostly concern themselves with the influence of polemical tracts like Weishaupt’s Höhere Orden des Illuminati Ordens, and aside from taking occasional swipes at texts like Les liaisons dangereuses – that ‘abominable book’, as Robison calls it – they have little to say about more imaginative and belle-lettristic genres (p. 300). Still, as fears of French military invasion reached a crescendo during 1797–1798, and as the number of literary translations soared throughout the late 1790s, with 28 plays by the German August von Kotzebue appearing in 1799 alone, so literature increasingly moved into the foreground and so the odium attached to foreign political propaganda was inevitably transferred to poems, novels and plays. 15 It is in the pages of T. J. Mathias’s satirical poem The Pursuits of Literature (1797) that romances, especially non-English ones, are for the first time closely linked to the threat of revolution spreading across the channel from mainland Europe. Radical writers, Mathias argues, have begun to use novels to disseminate freethinking views, transforming fiction into an ideological battlefield. Consequently ‘LITERATURE, well or ill-conducted’, has become ‘THE GREAT ENGINE, by which all civilized states must ultimately be supported or overthrown’.16 In surveying the cultural field and identifying unacceptable literary offences against propriety, Mathias is outraged by the ‘lewd and systematic seduction’ and ‘unqualified blasphemy’ practised by Matthew Lewis’s The Monk (1796), and he calls upon the authorities to prosecute the novel for obscenity (pp. 248–9). Also, Mathias expresses concern about the tendency of fiction written by female writers. Novels by ‘unsexed female writers’ like Charlotte Smith and Fanny Burney, for example, are criticized because they turn girls’ heads ‘wild with impossible adventures’ and leave them ‘now and then tainted with democracy’ (pp. 56–8, 244). Last but not least, the frequency of translation agitates Mathias considerably, and towards the end he unleashes a fierce philippic against this ‘pestilential’ activity: Now when Translation to a pest is grown, And Holcroft to French treason adds his own; When Gallick Diderot in vain we shun, His blasted pencil, Fatalist, and Nun; When St. Pol sounds the sacring bell, that calls His Priests en masse from Charles’s ruin’d walls; When Thelwall, for the season, quits the Strand To organize revolt by sea and land; (pp. 352–3).


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This set of concerns – that foreign texts are contaminating British readers, and that while England may fear a military invasion the country has already been exposed to a textual invasion – becomes much more pressing in the sequel to The Pursuits of Literature, The Shade of Alexander Pope on the Banks of the Thames (1799): Mark next, how fable, language, fancy flies To Ghosts, and Beards, and Hoppergollop’s Lo, from the abyss, unmeaning Spectres drawn, The Gothick glass, blue flame, and flick’ring lawn! Choak’d with vile weeds, our once proud Avon strays; When Novels die, and rise again in plays: No Congress props our Drama’s falling state, The modern ultimatum is, ‘Translate.’ Thence sprout the morals of the German school; The Christian sinks, the Jacobin bears rule: No virtue shines, but in the peasant’s mien, No vice, but in patrician robes, is seen; Through four dull acts the Drama drags, and drawls, The fifth is stage-trick, and the curtain falls.17 In Europhobic discourse generally, and paradigmatically in Mathias’s heavily footnoted verse satires, translation-texts are castigated as improper, illegitimate, hybrid: neither here nor there. The presence and increasing popularity of foreign literature represent a scandal because they suggest that the self has already been contaminated by the other; the barbarians are not merely at the gate, but have already scaled the walls and entered the citadel. Like other critics, Mathias seems uncertain who most deserves his scorn – the shameless scribblers who peddle sordid novelties, the rapaciously unpatriotic translators who funnel such matters into Britain, or the wanton readers who crave foreign luxuries. Regardless, the result is a disastrous cultural deformation. To borrow a metaphor from contemporary debate, translations act like narcotics, and in their baneful effects they especially resemble opium. Like the opium-eater, who lets his body be invaded by foreign substances, the translator gives a foothold to hostile cultural forces. He introduces an element from abroad, disfiguring British nationhood by making it more foreign and less British. As with opium, foreign romance is acknowledged as capable of altering consciousness, and the particular terror of both substances resides in its deracinating ability to compromise its user’s identity. It is the fear, as the opium- and

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romance-habitué Thomas De Quincey puts it, of ‘find[ing] housed within [one]self – occupying, as it were, some separate chamber in his brain – holding, perhaps, from that station a secret and detestable commerce with his own heart – some horrid alien nature’. 18 The interval between The Pursuits of Literature and The Shade of Alexander Pope also saw the founding of the Anti-Jacobin, or Weekly Examiner. Established by George Canning, with Prime Minister Pitt’s approval, the journal began on 20 November 1797 and it continued to appear on every Monday while Parliament was in session, until the summer recess of 1798. While the Anti-Jacobin also published comments on foreign news and parliamentary debates, a substantial part of the journal was given over to accomplished parodies of various well-known writers and genres, and there can be no doubt that the journal was intended as a politically biased counterblast to what its editors saw as the tendentious nature of radical literature. In the first two issues, the Anti-Jacobins published the faux-humanitiarian ‘The Widow’ and ‘The Soldier’s Wife’, which lampooned Robert Southey’s Botany Bay Eclogues (1796). Later the journal turned to the neo-paganism of Erasmus Darwin and Richard Payne Knight, who were ridiculed at length in ‘The Progress of Man, A Didactic Poem’ and ‘Loves of the Triangles’. Then, writing in the persona of Mr William Higgins of ‘St. Mary’s Axe’, in issues 30 and 31 Canning and John Hookham Frere presented their perhaps best-known spoof, ‘The Rovers; or, The Double Arrangement’. A satire on the liberal German drama, ‘The Rovers’ owes a considerable debt to Alexander F. Tytler’s version of Schiller’s Die Räuber (1792) and Benjamin Thompson’s Kotzebue-translation The Stranger (1798), and it defines ‘JACOBINISM’ as the ‘system’ that ‘threatens the subversion of States, or gradually saps the foundations of domestic happiness’. Within the play the question of ‘domestic happiness’ becomes scandalously (if also hilariously) complicated, as the reader discovers that Matilda, the hero Rogero’s love and the mother of his children, has also borne children to Count Casimere, who in turn is married to the other heroine Cecilia. The play, as Mr Higgins points out, preaches ‘duty’: ‘the reciprocal duties of one or more husbands to one or more wives, and to the children who may happen to arise out of this complicated and endearing connection’. 19 The Anti-Jacobin has been seen as ‘a very powerful and largely successful weapon in what we can now recognize as a “culture war” being fought for the hearts and minds of the British people during the Parliamentary session of 1797–1798’.20 What makes the anti-literary bluffs of the 1797–1798 Anti-Jacobin stand out, however, is their witty, playful, even light-hearted tone. MPs in Pitt’s Tory administration, Canning, Frere and


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the editor George Ellis were also urbane eighteenth-century humanists, who preferred flippant mockery to self-righteous calumny as a means of discrediting opponents of Pitt’s unpopular war with France.21 Less reminiscent of Milton’s Satan than of Dryden’s Mac Flecknoe or Pope’s Theobald, the churlish Mr Higgins, who is based on Godwin and Coleridge, lacks the tell-tale demonic qualities typically attributed to foreign conspirators. If German plays are full of contradictions, so are the Anti-Jacobin parodies, which are torn between sympathy and satiric bite. Indeed, some Anti-Jacobin hoaxes (I think especially of ‘The Rovers’ and ‘The Love of the Triangles’) are almost too accomplished, which may indicate that the authors feel a genuine admiration for the foreign and find themselves attracted to what they must disapprove. 22 The final number of the weekly Anti-Jacobin appeared on 9 July 1798, featuring Canning’s celebrated poem ‘The New Morality’. Before the end of the month appeared the first issue of its follower, the monthly Anti-Jacobin Review and Magazine. Edited by the government hireling J. R. Greene (alias John Gifford), the later version of the Anti-Jacobin cannot match the brilliance of its predecessor, yet the journal is nevertheless in some ways more typical of British periodical reviewing in the late 1790s and early 1800s, and it is here that one must search for examples of the full-fledged Europhobic style. In her study The Anti-Jacobins 1798–1800, Emily Lorraine de Montluzin calculates that the later journal included among its staff writers ‘a disproportionate number of clergymen’: more than half of the known contributors ‘were or had been clerics of some sort when they wrote for the Anti-Jacobin’, and ‘the great majority [ . . . ] were beneficed clergymen in the Church of England’.23 This sociological observation helps to explain some of the changes in journalistic style that distinguish the new from the old Anti-Jacobin. Gone from the second Anti-Jacobin are the classical wit and learning that, despite all political partisanship, gave the first issues their distinctive tone. Instead, the new journal is permeated by a grim, priestly seriousness, with calumny increasingly taking the place of parody, and with one writer after the other evoking a paranoid scenario in which malign influences are already working to debauch a previously upright citizenry. Also, while Canning and his associates had mainly targeted English nonconformists like Wollstonecraft, Godwin, Lamb, Lloyd, Southey, Coleridge and Wordsworth, the authors of the later journal increasingly turned their artillery against foreign writers, publishing literally ‘thousands of pages of critiques of foreign literature’ (p. 28). In 1805, the Anti-Jacobin heaps contempt on Rousseau, ‘a selfish, depraved, and unprincipled profligate’, whose Confessions displayed ‘a gross outrage of

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decency, an audacious contempt of morality, and a most impudent insult to the virtuous part of the community’. 24 In 1809 the journal warns its readers against Madame de Staël’s Corinne as being ‘subversive of all chastity and rational virtue’ (qtd. in de Montluzin, p. 29). Already a decade earlier, the journal had begun a long series of inordinately vicious attacks on ‘the literature and literati of Germany’, in which James Walker among many other slurs accuses Goethe of adulterous living: The renowned author of Werter (Goethe) [ . . . ] publicly keeps a mistress, who (as a friend of mine, who has seen her often, assures me) is equally devoid of beauty, delicacy and fidelity. He has by her a charming little boy, who, as I learn from the same channels, is pitied by every person of sensibility who sees him, as, from the company of such a mother, and from the carelessness of such a father, he must be, in afterlife, a most unfortunate being, as the father himself, with all his fame and talent, already is at least one half of his time.25 The rationale behind such mud-slinging is given in the fourth issue, where John Gifford announces that the journal will seek to monitor ‘the state of the foreign press’ and expose its ‘systematic profligacy’ and ‘criminal indulgence’. 26 Sounding more like an Old Testament prophet than a literary reviewer, the editor then goes on to describe the major Continental nations as historical equivalents of the Biblical Sodom and Gomorrah. In France, ‘the press still remains, and will remain, so long as the republic shall continue to exist, so cramped as to preclude the hope of any original productions, which are not calculated to favour the propagation of revolutionary principles’ (p. xiv). In Germany, literature’s debasement of the populace is already a fait accompli: ‘such a scene of corruption as Germany now exhibits, an English mind shudders to contemplate. The young women, even of rank, uncontrolled by that natural diffidence, unchecked by that innate modesty, which at once heighten the allurement of, and serve as a protection to, beauty, [ . . . ] consider the age of puberty as the period of exemption from every social restraint, and sacrifice their virtue to the first candidate for their favour, who has the means either of captivating their fancy, or gratifying their avarice’ (p. xii). Even ‘Italy and Switzerland, the favourite sets of the Muses, have become a blank in the world of science and of literature’. Hence ‘[i]t is with heart-felt pleasure we turn’, the Anti-Jacobin editor concludes, from such ungrateful prospects, to our own happy island, where (though a strange, and a dangerous, apathy prevail, respecting the


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press, in quarters where a due sense of its importance, in the present state of society, ought more deeply to obtain, and though the influence of public spirit prove inadequate to perpetuate the useful exertions of literary vanity) the sciences are assiduously cultivated; where learning, in all its various branches, is diligently extended; and where genius and useful labour still meet with protection, encouragement, and reward. – So long as her national taste shall continue undepraved by philosophical literature, so long as her mind shall remain uncorrupted by philosophical principles, will Great Britain continue to enjoy this distinguished advantage, and to assert her pre-eminence in the literary, as in the political, world (p. xvi). Aside from hyperbolic rhetoric and turgid prose, this article, like virtually everything else published in the later Anti-Jacobin, also contains an ominous and thinly veiled threat of terror. The overwhelmingly important task, the editors argue, is not merely to uncover plots against established authority, but also to actively enforce the hegemony of the status quo, and in doing so one should not shrink from using extreme measures such as Pitt’s government’s blatant infringement of civil rights. In the present situation, ‘even an act of despotism, when exercised for the purpose of rescuing mankind from the worst species of oppression – the subjugation of the mind to the degrading tyranny of Philosophism – would be entitled to applause’ (p. viii). Following the swift success of the Anti-Jacobin, a remarkable number of periodical writers, critics and journalists – from the editors of the Pittite and High-Church British Critic, to the liberal writers of the Monthly Review, to the dissenting intellectuals associated with Joseph Johnson’s progressive Analytical Review – more or less converted to the bellicose Europhobic style. Sometimes this development produces striking inconsistencies and sudden alterations in the editorial policies of particular journals. In June 1795, for example, the Monthly Review still assessed Schiller’s The Ghost-Seer positively, calling it ‘a novel of great originality’ which has enriched writers and readers alike by ‘point[ing] out a new source of the TERRIBLE – the pursuit of an influence over the invisible world’.27 Then, in a November 1796 review of Thomas Dutton’s Ariel; or a Picture of the Human Heart, the otherwise moderate Monthly joins the British Critic and the Anti-Jacobin in changing its stance on German literature and the entire category of ‘the terrible’: We cannot say much in favour of this little performance, which wears the complexion of some German publications, horrid and terrifying;

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and presuming to throw the severest reflections on the government of the universe. Man, unhappy, miserable man! is here presented to view, as the mere sport of passion, the child of destiny and fate, necessitated to wickedness, and desperately plunged in a gulph of wretchedness and woe! There may be minds, – yet astonishing that it should be so! to which such representations will prove delightful: – but what ideas must they convey of the Supreme Being! [ . . . ] In some hands these notions may, perhaps, serve to promote sinister purposes: but the general tendency is not merely gloomy and terrible, but certainly PERNICIOUS. 28 Given the differences that otherwise antagonized reviewers and journals, it is instructive to witness Francis Jeffrey of the Whig Edinburgh Review censure foreign drama and romance for its immorality, immaturity and exoticism, all the while employing rhetoric strikingly similar to that used by the Tory Anti-Jacobin. ‘We have always been persuaded’, Jeffrey writes about Goethe’s Herman and Dorothea in 1802, in spite of many alarming appearances to the contrary, that the poetical taste of this nation was fundamentally different from that of our neighbours in Germany. The caprice of our national character, and the excess into which all fashions are apt to run, may have obtained a temporary popularity for some of the extraordinary production of that country; and the native skill of our actors and translators may have contributed to reconcile us to these exotic novelties. [ . . . ] but, unless we prefer sour krout to potatoes, and rhenish to port, we must not flatter ourselves that we have the taste of our entertainers.29 During the Romantic period, reviewers’ intense rivalries and libellous practices were often brutal and could sometimes turn murderous, as they did most famously in the 1821 duel between John Christie of Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine and John Scott of the London Magazine. But at approximately the same time, with a consensus utterly uncharacteristic of a periodical press known above all for its political factionalism, British critics also joined forces in what can only be described as an all-out war on imported romances, novels and plays. Consistently pathologizing foreign cultural influences, critics branded Continental romance’s inchoate phantasms a ‘drug’, ‘disease’ or ‘infection’ which, with its seemingly unlimited ability to diffuse itself, already threatened to inflame Britain’s entire body politic. Imagining a jaded readership


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enamoured of, addicted to and surfeited with toxic novelties, they also incriminated those domestic agents whom they deemed responsible for allowing the European cancer to metastasize: circulating-library owners pushing sordid superfluities to inexperienced readers; cynical theatre managers bent on ruining the institutions of the national drama; and unscrupulous copyists seeking only to make a quick profit on the latest foreign fashion. So powerful was the momentum of Europhobic discourse that its figures gradually took on a life of their own, its practitioners paying scant notice to Britain’s drastically changed historical and cultural situation after the Battle of Waterloo. Even as late as in 1825, for example, Jeffrey’s ire against Goethe and the ‘pathetic authors of Germany’ remains unabated: there is yet another distinguishing quality for which we have not accounted – and that is a peculiar kind of vulgarity which pervades all their varieties, and constitutes, perhaps, their most repulsive characteristic. [ . . . ] There certainly never were any men of genius who condescended to attend so minutely to the nonnaturals of their heroes and heroines as the novelists of modern Germany. 30 And in 1818, long after the Jacobin threat had subsided and new socio-political problems arisen instead, one can also still find the anonymous author of Prodigious!!! or, Childe Paddie in London maintaining that ‘this country is making a rapid progress toward the adoption of the licentiousness of the French press in the shape of novels’, and citing ‘the sophistry of the New Heloise, and the plainness of the Dangerous Connections’ as his examples. 31

William Preston’s ‘Reflections’ To call William Preston’s essay ‘Reflections on the Peculiarities of Style and Manner in the late German Writers, whose Works have appeared in English; and on the Tendency of their Productions’ a xenophobic work is not to engage in some facile act of critical hyperbole. In fact, it would probably be difficult to find a more perfect summa of Europhobic grandiloquence than this long polemic, which appeared in the Edinburgh Magazine in several instalments during 1802. Born and based in Ireland, Preston (1753–1807) had penned the lurid anti-French play Democratic Rage; or, Louis the Unfortunate (1793), and his was a household name in counter-revolutionary circles (DNB). Typically for Europhobic

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writers, Preston begins his ‘Reflections’ with what looks like a factual statement: An extraordinary revolution seems to be taking place in the republic of letters, as well as in other states; and the muses, in the more southern parts of Europe, appear to be menaced with subjection, if not with extirpation, by invading swarms from the northern hive. That England is peculiarly in danger of this fate, appears from the extraordinary degree of avidity, and almost exclusive attention, with which the public has of late received every coruscation of fancy, from the north, however pale and lurid, however deficient in steady light and permanent ardour. It may not be an unentertaining or useless enquiry, to investigate the pretensions of some of the productions of the German muse, which have lately appeared in an English dress. 32 Preston’s opening observation appears to have some merit. England did see a remarkable increase in the number of foreign translations published during the 1790s, and many of these hailed from ‘Germany’, although one must bear in mind that no such nation state existed at the time. Many of these texts did in fact attain considerable popularity, and given the liberal political slant of German Sturm und Drang writing it is not wholly unreasonable to assume that these texts may have stirred some readers to voice their discontent. Yet a closer look at the first paragraph also makes abundantly clear that Preston has already made a dizzying leap from fact to fantasy. Evoking an atmosphere of panic and hysteria, Preston immediately insists that England is in an acute state of crisis. By alluding to Edward Gibbon’s The Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire, and by histrionically imagining texts as ‘invading swarms from the northern hive’ threatening England with ‘subjection’ if not ‘extirpation’, Preston blithely elides the difference between cultural phenomena and military-historical events. Later on in the essay, Preston figures the dispersion of German melodrama in similar, almost apocalyptic terms, as an irresistible ‘torrent’, ‘tribe’, ‘horde’, or ‘swarming host of writings’, threatening Britain with an imminent ‘irruption of Gothic barbarism and ferocity’ (pp. 9, 18). Admittedly, this contrived geopolitical metaphor – German texts are like the barbarian invaders of the fifth and sixth centuries – forces Preston into the awkward position where he must represent England as being one of ‘the more southern parts of Europe’, but this minor inconsistency does not give him pause. Likewise, Preston further undercuts his own grandiose imagery when he simultaneously suggests that the sluggish English public, far from putting up


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a heroic resistance against their invaders, have only too willingly let themselves be overrun. In the first half of his essay, Preston presents evidence supporting his thesis that ‘the style, the characters and tendency’ of ‘the more modern German poets’ are fundamentally corrupt, and that the popularity of ‘the high Dutch muse’ amounts to nothing less than a full-scale ‘revolution in literature’. ‘German writings of the newest stamp’, Preston claims, are too long and incoherent; they do not observe the rules of classical decorum; they contain too many exclamations, onomatopoeia and italicized lines; and they routinely violate the standards of proper syntax and grammar (p. 355). German writers’ faulty language in both the original and the translated versions thus produces a ‘mental hiccup’, but ‘not content with the mutilation of words, they contract whole sentences in the same manner as we would abbreviate words; they abolish all conjunctions and connectives, and in many of the works the sentences are all separate’ (p. 361). These shortcomings would be sufficient cause for Preston’s consternation, but the ‘unnatural’ character and ‘want of moderation’ of ‘the Gothic productions of the German school’ go beyond technical issues, for ‘the German dramas and novels’, in an attempt ‘to out-herod Herod, to out-butcher butchery’ and to violate more fundamental rules than the conventions of language and diction (pp. 354–5). Always striving for novelty and sublimity, ‘German and Anglo-German playwright[s] of the monstro-terrific school’ populate their pages with low and disreputable characters, replacing real ‘heroes’ and ‘heroines’ with ‘beggars and bunters, [ . . . ] thieves, [ . . . ] cut-purses, sailors and seamstresses’ (pp. 356–7). They introduce the name of God in ‘irreverent’ and ‘profane’ ways (p. 360). Under the guise of being ‘very very natural’, the ‘hardy but savage poets of the north’ represent inordinate and unlawful passions, douse their readers with ‘display[s] of excessive tenderness and sensibility’, and generally write ‘as if they sought to persuade themselves and their readers, that the indulgence of passion is the great business of life and the great privilege of humanity’ (pp. 360, 408). Given all these unpardonable faults, Preston feels that it is his duty to denounce all German writers as Faustian overreachers: This ambitious spirit of the German writers occasions, in all their productions, another trait of family resemblance, which is excess; a straining at something superlative, an attempt to surpass nature, that produces only contortion and grimace. Their incidents are in excess, of horror, and of burlesque, that exhibit revolting spectacles

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or contemptible farces. Their personages are also in excess; there is nothing of the just size or proportion of nature, but all are giants or dwarfs. There is no true delineation of character. All the lines are aggravated, all the features are over-charged into caricature. Their heroes and heroines are bedlamites; their comic characters merry Andrews and cinder wenches. When they would depict passion, excess, excess still predominates. They want the keeping, the reserve, the chastity of manner inseparable from probability and nature. Their virtues attempt to rise to something super-human, and fall into their contraries; they are lost in the clouds of romance and extravagance, or involved in the mazes of chimerical and unintelligible refinement. Their dramatic exhibitions of vice are monsters redeemed by no virtue; they carry their malignity and guilt to an excess unexampled in the history of our species, and only to be found in what fancy may have feigned in the diabolical nature (p. 359). Nationalist self-congratulation alternating with alarmist fear-mongering; masculinist posturing admixed with self-feminizing professions of helplessness: such are the constituent parts of the Europhobic imaginary, and Preston surprises only by the thoroughness with which he all but exhausts the discourse’s rhetorical repertoire. Like virtually all Europhobic writers, Preston also attributes almost diabolically persuasive powers to writers and the written word, when in the third and fourth instalments of his essay he goes on to consider the ‘tendency’ of popular foreign texts. First, taking his cue from Aristotle’s notion of catharsis, Preston maintains that sentimental German publications, far from leading its readers ‘to controul [their] passions, and to regulate [their] feelings’, promote seduction, irresponsibility and excess: ‘We may well conceive the pernicious effect of those productions, which, while they tend to keep the mind in a state of effervescence, and wind up the passions to fury, endeavour to persuade us, that any resistance to their frenzy is an opposition to the decrees of God’ (pp. 10, 12). At this stage in his argument, Preston seems primarily concerned that German texts, since they typically represent spontaneous and strong-willed characters acting in the heat of passion, may cause British readers to sacrifice their chastity and engage in illicit sexual behaviour, as ‘young persons, of a sanguine temperament, and serious disposition, [ . . . ] are filled with a sort of amorous mysticism, which perverts the devotional language and enthusiasm, and applies them to the commerce of the sexes’ (p. 15). Borrowing an insight from Hannah More’s Strictures on the Modern System of Female Education (1799), Preston also asserts that women,


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because they are mentally weaker and more easily swayed, are also more likely to ‘outstep the modesty of nature’ and wander into ‘gross sensuality’. Like More and later Jane Austen, Preston uses the example of Kotzebue’s Lovers’ Vows to illustrate, or at least insinuate, how this demoralization occurs: When robbery, murder, suicide, and every other form of atrocious guilt is cloathed [sic] by the poet in pompous language, decked with imposing colours, and personified in his heroes and heroines, or ascribed to those characters, which he labours to exhibit as amiable or estimable; and when [ . . . ] enormities are justified as acts of virtue and heroism [ . . . ] what must be the effect on the minds of the young and unexperienced? [ . . . ] Look into the play of Kotzebue, best known by the name of Lovers’ Vows, and you will find this exemplified in a manner, that implies a systematic and rancorous hostility to virtue, sobriety, decency and good order (pp. 11, 15, 355). In this passage and in much of his essay, Preston appears to be mainly concerned about a quasi-sexual process of seduction particularly aimed at Englishwomen, and from a certain perspective nothing could be more commonplace than this sensational coupling of women, romance and licentious sexuality. The reader’s (especially the woman or lowerclass reader’s) uncritical absorption in licentious fictional entertainment, and their supposed tendency to mindlessly mimic fictional characters, have worried Western literati and cognoscenti at least since Plato banished the poets from his ideal republic. In a process beginning with Pope’s and Swift’s persiflage of the Grub Street hacks, and gathering momentum with Samuel Johnson’s critique of Fielding in the fourth issue of the Rambler (1750), those eighteenth-century critics who took it upon themselves to guide and police the public taste became increasingly wary of the large and growing female reading public, just as they grew distinctly hostile to popular genres now branded indiscriminately and dismissively as ‘novels’ and ‘romances’. 33 Towards the end of the century, the figure of the ‘female Quixote’ had already become a cliché, as ‘we begin to hear with increasing frequency a new cause of disapproval – distrust of the power of fiction to seduce the reader into an inward world’.34 But Preston exacerbates previous claims about the seductive powers of circulating-library fare. Making use of conventional anti-romance rhetoric, but clearly addressing an audience schooled in revolutionary and anti-revolutionary eschatology, Preston uses this rather unremarkable

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complaint merely to introduce much more sweepingly sensational assertion: Every motive is inculcated, which may induce men to be discontented, with the government under which they live, or, indeed, with any government, and to become active partizans of anarchy and disorder. [ . . . ] The heroes are robbers, cut-throats, suicides, poisoners and parricides. The heroines are devoid of chastity, the slaves of passion, fearless of shame, unawed by God, they talk blasphemy and call it sentiment. The blasphemous exclamations against Providence, in the Leonora of Burger, the ferocious and criminal rhapsodies of Charles De Moor and his associates, in the Robbers, and particularly the Minister throughout, may serve to establish and illustrate my assertions. In fact, the writers of the German school [ . . . ] lead us to imitate them; and they tend to rouse and stimulate such characters to action, and prepare them for some theatre, where they may display their dangerous energies (p. 11). In equating judgements concerning female sexuality with attitudes towards politics, Preston invokes and exploits an already established nexus between seduction, sensibility and revolution, as sexual apprehensions smuggle in radical Anti-Jacobin panic. The threat that German fictions pose to time-honoured standards of female sexual propriety is really the least part of the problem confronting the nation, for by the same token un-English writers also possess an exorbitant power to convert large sections of the British population, both male and female, into bona fide socio-political revolutionaries, or ‘active partizans of anarchy and disorder’. As ‘social ordinances and human restrains of action are decried’ in written discourse, so ‘the mind of the reader is soured and blackened’, and he/she is ‘instigated to the wildest excess of passion’. Aristotle held that literary texts imitate the world, but Preston posits a mimesis in reverse. In fact, Preston believes German texts to be capable of remaking the universe, for under their malign influence solid British citizens become like catatonic sleepwalkers or mindless automatons. Suddenly a population of hitherto upright men and women are transformed into ‘wretches borne away by every irregular passion, and plunged in every criminal excess’ (p. 12). Preston’s seemingly unequivocal jeremiad, however, is riddled with logical flaws and contradictions. For instance, Preston allegedly wishes to distance himself from Barruel and Robison – ‘I do not yield implicit credit to all the tales which Barruel and Robison have published, respecting the character and designs of


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the illuminated’ – but then immediately goes on to replicate their paranoid argument: ‘but I am ready to admit, that a spirit of innovation is afloat [ . . . ] and some of the most ingenious and learned men, not only throughout Germany, but in most other parts of Europe, are unfriendly to the present establishment in Church and State’ (p. 10). In another telling paradox, Preston avers that German writers like Bürger, Wieland or Schiller possess little in the way of originality, while simultaneously maintaining that the German ‘invasion’ constitutes an unprecedented, cataclysmic event. Preston also chastises British readers for the eagerness, even amounting to a ‘rage’, with which they embrace ‘exotic novelties’. But this is an astonishingly unfair allegation to make, given that Preston also portrays the German authors as men of almost supernatural mental means, seemingly capable of conquering any readerly opposition. In mounting these accusations, Preston casts himself as the spokesman for classical control and reason. ‘Having drawn the articles of my poetical faith from Aristotle’, he writes, ‘I have learned to consider the Greek tragedy as the most perfect model of dramatic composition’, and later on he underscores this point with multiple learned references to Aristotle’s Poetics and Horace’s Ars Poetica. Still, Preston does not practice as he preaches, for his own high-pitched prose style falls short (to say the least) of the criteria for proper writing – ‘sublime simplicity’, ‘chaste symmetry’, ‘harmonious integrity’ – that he derives from ‘the classic style of composition’ and ‘the sacred remains of antiquity’. Preston particularly dislikes medievalist texts like Goethe’s Götz von Berlichingen, but the British patriot consistently borrows Gothic conspiracy-plotting to lend substance and credence to his own convictions, and therefore he, no less than the hated Germans, is guilty of deviating from ‘the Greek and Roman model’ (p. 354). Indeed, the epithets with which Preston assaults ‘the German Tragedy and Romance’ – ‘wild’, ‘pompous’, ‘extravagant’, ‘improbable’, ‘bombastic’, ‘tumid’, ‘ranting and far fetched’ and so on – could just as fittingly be applied to the ‘Reflections’ itself (p. 355). At work, apparently, is the specular process by which the ‘countersubversive’ writer, due to the zeal of his malediction, unwittingly begins to model himself on the object of his hatred (Hofstadter, pp. 33–4). With truculent denunciation taking the place of sound reasoning, unresolved tensions and contradictions begin to vex ‘Reflections’. Preston derides England’s European rival nations for lacking a public sphere and a decent educational system, but this criticism has a strange ring, considering that he himself has embarked upon a crusade to curtail the freedom of the press. Even as he sanctimoniously animadverts against the immoral nature of German texts dealing with adultery and

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pre-marital intercourse, Preston nevertheless titillates his readers with lengthy and detailed plot-summaries of salubrious texts like Kotzebue’s Lovers’ Vows, Goethe’s Götz and Schiller’s The Robbers. Most problematically, perhaps, Preston’s text leaves unclear precisely how German texts ‘pollute the minds, and deprave the morality of the rising generation’ (p. 13). This is to say that there are at least two different models of textual corruption at work in ‘Reflections’, indicated by two different sets of tropes.35 Most frequently, Preston will refer to German literature as a form of ‘poison’: This revolution in literature is the more extraordinary at a time when fastidious delicacy and listless slowness to be pleased are the characters of the age, and with excessive luxury, an uncommon effeminacy and softness of manners are generally diffused. It is no less extraordinary that amidst the prevalent affectation of a prudish and sanctimonious morality, and a more than ordinary attention, on the part of government, to correct and controul the licentiousness of the press, writings of a tendency like that of the German dramas and novels should be suffered to spread and propagate their poison, without molestation or reproof from the pulpit or police (p. 355). By using the metaphor of ‘poison’, Preston ascribes a large degree of power and freedom to the German writers and their English imitators. 36 Since the time of the Anabaptists and Rosicrucians, Preston argues in a pseudo-historical digression, German intellectuals and scientists have tended to secede from the public sphere, and like their forefathers, the members of the medieval ‘secret tribunals’, modern German literati have a penchant for congregating in small groups to conduct ‘fanciful’ and ‘illegitimate’ experiments in alchemy and metaphysics: ‘And, such is the catching power of enthusiasm, that the wildest and most pernicious absurdities of the Germans have rapidly spread, and found numerous adherents and followers, in the rest of Europe’ (p. 92). The allegation that a clique of foreign intellectuals are poisoning the British public with noxious potions that should turn their readers’ stomachs resonates with Preston’s ad hominem vituperations of specific German writers, and with his unlikely theory that writers as different as Lessing, Goethe, Bürger, Schiller, Kotzebue and Wieland are all somehow working in unison, striving towards the same detrimental goal. At the same time, the figure of literature as poison also enables Preston to at least imagine a positive outcome to the crisis. A poison as potent as Goethe’s Werther or Kotzebue’s Lovers’ Vows can wreck the social body, but only if these


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texts are allowed to enter the body in the first place. If one can somehow prevent people from ingesting the ‘the poison of anarchy’, the venom will have no effect – hence Preston’s vehement calls upon British government censors and customs officers to stop ‘the inundation of translated works, which deluges the press and stage’ (pp. 11, 93). Furthermore, even for those readers whose minds are already tainted with German ideas all hope is not entirely lost, for even where a poison has been imbibed, an intellectual antidote – such as Preston’s ‘Reflections’, Mathias’s Pursuits of Literature, or the latest issue of the Anti-Jacobin Review – may still be administered. When a patient is exposed to the right curative treatment, ‘the stomach throws off over-large doses [ . . . ], and thus the most potent drugs, and even mortal poisons, may become inoperative’ (p. 355). Alongside with his use of poison, however, Preston also introduces the imagery of contagion and disease, and this new set of tropes, although he sometimes seems to use ‘poison’ and ‘disease’ interchangeably, draws his argument in a different direction: Far from leading us to controul [sic] our passions, and moderate our feelings, the German drama is calculated to operate effects directly contrary; and the perusal of such writings must be peculiarly injurious to young persons of both sexes. They represent the force of passion as irresistible; and all opposition to its impulse as fruitless and absurd; indeed, they go farther, they encourage a blind and headlong submission to the unbridled sway of passion. They even justify it, as meritorious, as an act of obedience to the supreme decrees of Heaven, a conformity with the unchangeable order of nature. These writings sap and unnerve the soundness of the intellect. They feed and diffuse a prevailing malady of the times, which has taken too full possession of the female world and, indeed, of many men, under the name of sentiment; a malady, which deifies a certain unmeaning, undescribable quickness of feeling; and exalts a morbid and absurd sensibility, into the perfection of human nature (p. 10). Substituting ‘malady’ for ‘poison’ both strengthens and weakens Preston’s diatribe against Continental emotionalism. 37 On the one hand, the substitution adds urgency to the argument and heightens its apocalyptic tone. ‘Malady’ is more frightening than ‘poison’, for unlike poisons contagious diseases have the power to lay waste entire continents and eradicate entire populations, infecting even people who have done nothing to put themselves in harm’s way. If Continental ideas spread like an epidemic, presumably even non-readers of German literature

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will be at risk, since they could contract the disease indirectly. But on the other hand, Preston’s metaphorical paradigm-shift also tends to undercut his reasoning, lifting the burden of blame from the shoulders of the very foreign writers whom he most wishes to inculpate. Introducing the medical vocabulary of ‘malady’ militates against Preston’s former explanations of textual corruption, because it severs textual effects from personal agency and authorial subjectivity, erasing the distinction between victim and perpetrator. Infectious pathogens, after all, have no creators and no origins; they obey no logic but their own and can be imprinted with no ideological programme. Independent, impersonal and anonymous, infections do not distinguish on ethnic or national ground. Given their uncontrollable, promiscuous nature, indeed, infections cannot truly be used as weapons in a concerted attack on English morals and manners. Likewise, their carriers cannot be said to be ‘guilty’ of spreading the disease, for they are as much victims of the disease as the persons whom they, in turn, infect. How exactly do German texts ‘corrupt’, ‘seduce’ and ‘pollute’ their readers? Do they poison or contaminate them, or both? Preston obviously fails to articulate a convincing model of textual efficacy, leaving his analytic enterprise on shaky conceptual grounds. Even so, remarkably enough, Preston remains unfazed by these logical flaws; in fact his air of unflappable conviction and authority seems to be intensified rather than diminished by the near-collapse of his argument. It is as though the Europhobe’s vacillations and inconsistencies, rather than intellectually weakening his case, give him the air of having weighed every possibility and considered every angle. As Kim Wheatley comments apropos of Percy Shelley’s later agon with the Tory Quarterly Review, ‘the paranoid rhetoric of the Romantic period is not undermined by its contradictions, it is strengthened by them’ (p. 2).

2 ‘Dethroning German Sublimity’: Outrageous Stimulation in Romantic Ballad-Writing

It has long been recognized that the German balladeer G. A. Bürger substantially affected the development of Romantic ballad-poetry in Britain. When introduced in 1796, Bürger’s supernatural tales immediately struck a chord with English and Scottish readers. In a letter from that year, Anna Seward reports how high and low readers alike felt that their minds were ‘grappled’ by Bürger’s ‘Lenore’.1 In a contemporary letter to Coleridge, Charles Lamb must resort to a hieroglyphic code when trying to communicate the tumultuous sensations he has received during his reading of Bürger: ‘Have you read the ballad called “Leonora”, in the second number of the “Monthly Magazine”? If you have !!!!!!!!!!!!!!’2 And writing many years after Bürger’s English debut, in 1830, Walter Scott still remembers how the ‘fanciful wildness’ of Bürger’s ‘celebrated ballad of “Lenoré”’ [sic] ‘electrified’ its readers to such an extent that it seemed to inaugurate a new era in poetry.3 Scott, in turn, began his career by translating Bürger’s poems, and many other hopeful writers imitated them. Collaborating with associates including Scott, William Taylor of Norwich and the physician John Leyden, Matthew G. Lewis served up a Bürger-indebted ‘hobgoblin repast’ in Tales of Wonder (1801), while between 1796 and 1799 the poet Robert Southey plied a lively trade supplying the New Monthly Magazine with gruesome ballads, several of which bore distinctly Teutonic-sounding titles like ‘Donica’, ‘Rudiger’ and ‘Jasper’. Not only Romanticism’s poetae minores thrilled to the terrifying rhythms of Lenore’s midnight ride, however: Bürger’s name has become familiar also to students of Romantic literature primarily because he also left his signature in that most famous volume of the late 1790s, Wordsworth’s and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads (1798/1800). 43

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None of this information should astonish literary historians, for while traditional scholarship followed the Romantics and attributed the ballad’s popularity to the examples of native British antiquarians, more recent findings highlight the international derivation of the British supernatural ballad. Writing about his ballad-experiments in his ‘Essay, Supplementary to the Preface’ (1815), Wordsworth establishes Thomas Percy, the venerable British clergyman and Enlightenment man of letters, as the ancestor of his own genre-negotiations, rather than any foreign writer. Wordsworth makes a point of lauding Percy’s Reliques of Ancient English Poetry (1765) for its ‘true simplicity and genuine pathos’, while also deprecating Bürger as a second-rate imitator who ‘had not the fine sensibility of Percy,’ and who ‘deserted his original only to go astray’.4 In an 1842 manuscript note appended to the third poem in his Memorials of a Tour in Scotland, 1803, Wordsworth again declares himself a follower of Percy, Burns, and Cowper, ‘whose writings [ . . . ] powerfully counteracted the mischievous influence of Darwin’s dazzling manner, the extravagance of the earlier dramas of Schiller, and that of other German writers upon my taste and natural tendencies’.5 Accepting Wordsworth’s highly selective genealogy on this point, however, is to ignore the fact that when supernatural ballads returned to Britain in the last half of the 1790s, they returned largely by way of Germany. Thus, both Albert Friedman and Malcolm Laws emphasize Bürger’s formative significance for British ballad-writing, including Wordsworth’s own, and Mary Jacobus even hazards to remark that ‘the traditional ballad appears to have had little direct influence on Wordsworth’s experiment’.6 Even so, much remains to be done before we can plausibly claim to have understood Bürger’s full influence upon British balladry. So far, among other things, most critics have chosen to ignore or belittle Bürger’s ‘minor’ English followers (M. G. Lewis, Walter Scott, William Taylor, John Leyden, Robert Southey and others), because they had few aesthetic ambitions and did not seek to challenge the German’s established mode of ballad-writing, but were presumably content to capitalize on the popular taste for spine-chilling tales. Alternatively, in addressing the demonstrably ‘major’ case of Lyrical Ballads, most influential critics have interpreted Wordsworth and Coleridge’s negotiations with Bürger in primarily appreciative terms, as uninformed by commercial speculations, and as precipitating profound new insights into the nature of poetry and poetic composition. According to Jacobus, comparison of Wordsworth with his ‘minor’ contemporaries shows that Wordsworth alone was prepared ‘to experiment rather than imitate’. In Southey’s ballads, for instance, ‘the basic assumptions of the genre are never

Dethroning German Sublimity

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questioned as they were to be in Lyrical Ballads. Where Southey exploits the fashion, Wordsworth challenges it’ (pp. 214, 217). Thus, while Southey, ‘Monk’ Lewis and their cohorts manufactured second-hand and second-rate products that ‘fitted the audience’s taste like a glove’, Wordsworth and Coleridge’s anti-balladry de-emphasized Gothic violence and slowed down the headlong pace of Bürger’s sensational narratives, thereby forcing readers to question the atavistic pleasure that they derived from reading penny dreadfuls filled with violent supernatural adventures. 7 This dichotomy between ‘high’ (critical, creative, innovative, aesthetic) and ‘low’ (uncritical, derivative, unintelligent, commercial) adapters of Gothic ballads appears problematic, because it overlooks some shared cultural concerns and common socio-political factors conditioning the genre’s establishment and development in Britain. Given the relentlessly xenophobic tone of British reviewing during the mid- and late 1790s, it is scarcely surprising that while some commentators dismissed the German horror ballad as childish but essentially innocent entertainment, others like Wordsworth avowed severer misgivings about Bürger’s uncanny tales’ allegedly pernicious moral, political and epistemological effects. In 1802 William Preston awards Bürger a prominent place in his pandemonium of ‘hardy but savage poets of the north’.8 A few years earlier in The Art of Poetry (1798), Joseph Fawcett positions himself as spokesman for traditional sexual morality and defender of beleaguered female virtue, when he imagines ‘listless fair ones’ shaking with ‘pleasing terror’ over ‘the harsh coarse horror of a German muse’: E’en listless fair ones shall from langour wake, And o’er the lines with pleasing terror shake, If there the lovely tremblers may peruse The harsh coarse horror of a German muse. Let hideous superstition frame the base, On which the wildly dismal tale you raise; Let ghastliest forms, pale ghosts, and goblins grim, Form of your verse the terrible sublime! Paint the dire skeleton, uncloth’d with skin, With grave-worms crawling out and crawling in, All hell’s red torches in the numbers shine, And fiends on horseback gallop through the line.9 Writing as the self-appointed champion of enlightenment and common sense just a year later in ‘A Critique on Bürger’s Leonora’ (1799), the

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Irish schoolmaster Samuel Whyte uses very similar alarmist rhetoric in warning that ‘the order of nature is subverted’, when writers like Bürger are allowed to infantilize the adult mind and perpetuate exploded forms of superstition. 10 Critics have perhaps exaggerated Wordsworth’s and Coleridge’s exceptional status, for after 1795 or so all British poets, whether lionized or derided by subsequent scholarship, were forced to take a self-conscious, critical stance towards Bürger. Although none of Bürger’s explicitly political verse was ever translated into English, the poet was well known as a political and religious dissenter, and his poetry’s flirtation with various forms of liberalism was anxiously registered by his critics when he first burst upon the literary scene in Britain. To put the same point more succinctly, the British reception, reproduction and dissemination of the Gothic ballad were not only fuelled by the strong popular demand for supernatural entertainment of the kind that Bürger offered, but also constrained by the fierce critical polemic against the representation of spectres on stage or in writing, and by the generally paranoid political climate of Britain during the Revolutionary and Napoleonic wars. As Michael Gamer phrases it, ‘[i]f writers at the turn of the nineteenth century must write for multiple audiences holding conflicting desires, then this predicament becomes particularly difficult when writers choose to work with materials that have a tendency to polarize these audiences’.11 In Bürger’s case, national prejudices exacerbated this predicament, for Bürger’s British admirers could hardly fail to be cognizant of the questions raised about German writing’s suitability as mass-produced entertainment for a war-plagued and invasion-threatened populace. Thus, while writers recognized the market-potential of German-style supernaturalism, they must also reckon with the increasingly hostile critical discourse, sometimes amounting to outright xenophobic hysteria, which (mis)identified all foreign writers (especially German-language writers associated with the Sturm und Drang movement) as agents of freethinking and sedition, and which stigmatized all generically impure forms (like the supernatural ballad) as vitiated, enervating and unnatural. This complex situation demanded that poets devise ingenious compromise solutions capable of fulfilling multiple purposes and satisfying contradictory demands simultaneously. Writing at a time of all-out warfare on several continents, and confronted with the rising tide of anti-Gothic Europhobia at home, Romantic-period balladeers had to defend themselves against implicit or explicit accusations that they too were conspiring against the British nation by carefully repositioning themselves and their texts in the literary-political landscape.


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In the following, I focus on four British texts all written during the same few years, and all indebted to Bürger’s poetry: John Thomas Stanley’s Leonora, A Tale, Translated freely from the German of Gottfried August Bürger (1796), Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s ‘The Rime of the Ancyent Marinere’ (1798), William Wordsworth’s ‘Hart-Leap Well’ (1800) and Matthew G. Lewis’s Tales of Wonder (1801). From 1796 to 1800, at the height of the Anti-Jacobin reaction, Bürger provided an imposing but also potentially rewarding antagonist for aspiring British poets to write against. The texts I have chosen differ widely in their literary quality, in their degree of proximity to Bürger’s German originals and in the revisionary methods that they bring to bear on them. What Stanley, Wordsworth, Coleridge and Lewis share, however, is not only a remarkable fondness for surrounding their publications with complex supplementary documents – prefaces, arguments, apologies, explanatory notes, marginal glosses – that problematize the author’s relationship to the conventions that he uses, but also the underlying assumption that the form and content of the German horror-ballad must be questioned and qualified if the genre is to be granted foothold within British culture. The German ballad could, when ‘tinctured’ by the colours of the imagination, be converted into cultural capital for the British Romantic movement. 12 If this errant form was both domesticated and enriched, it could be simultaneously brought under ideological control, endowed with a new literary value and turned to rhetorical advantage for British literature and the new generation of poets.

Stanley’s Leonora Set in Germany at the end of the Seven Years War (1756–1763), the narrative of Bürger’s ‘Lenore’ is probably familiar to most readers. A young girl, whose lover Wilhelm fails to return from battle with his comrades and is declared dead, falls into a desperate and even impious paroxysm of grief. Lenore’s mother tries but fails to tranquilize her daughter’s perturbed sprits, and eventually Lenore wishes herself dead. At night the trampling of a horse is heard at the gate. Her lover calls, and in earnest but obscure terms, urges her to mount behind him and ride all night to reach their bridal bed. She consents. The journey is terrific; they ride among spectres and goblins, at an alarming pace. Finally, when Lenore is conveyed to a churchyard her lover changes suddenly to the skeleton form of Death, and as he wields a dart against her, she sinks and dies. Published anonymously, J. T. Stanley’s Leonora, A Tale, Translated Freely from the German of Gottfried August Bürger was Stanley’s first literary

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undertaking, and it was one of the six ‘Lenore’-translations published within the same year. At the time of its publication, William Taylor’s Lenora had already circulated in manuscript for several years, and soon would follow new adaptations by Walter Scott, by the Poet Laureate Henry James Pye, by town wit William Robert Spencer, as well as another version by Taylor and numerous anonymous imitations and parodies. 13 This competitive situation meant that Stanley, a little-known German scholar and newcomer to the literary business, had to position himself not only against Bürger, but also against his better-known rival-translators. The key phrase in Stanley’s title is ‘Freely Translated’, for his Leonora is indisputably the ‘strongest’ interpretation among the early ‘Lenore’translations. More specifically, Stanley’s self-profiling efforts prompt him to strengthen and simplify the moral-religious message carried by Bürger’s Gothic ballad, and he does not scruple to twist Bürger’s words in such a way as to reconcile the poem with a conventional Christian worldview. This emphasis on moral righteousness is announced already in the translator’s preface: The poem will be found, in many respects, to have been altered from the original; but more particularly towards the conclusion, where the translator thinking the moral not sufficiently explained, has added several lines. [ . . . ] The success of some late publications has proved that the wild and eccentric writings of the Germans are perused which pleasure by the English reader. ‘Leonora’ is certainly not void of that fire and energy for which their authors are celebrated: It is therefore submitted to the perusal of the public, with the hope that it will not be less favourably received (p. ii). The preface shows that Stanley, who had spent considerable time in Germany, is aware of Bürger’s reception history and has considered his translation method carefully. Writing from a simultaneously admiring and censorious stance, Stanley immediately identifies the poem’s morals as the crucial problem for translators, and he constructs the German text as incomplete and therefore in need of alteration. To be sure Stanley wants to honour Bürger’s achievement in ‘Lenore’; he no doubt hopes to benefit substantially from the poem’s popularity in Germany and elsewhere, but he also wishes to criticize its author for lacking moral fibre. In the original, Stanley more than implies, Bürger has allowed narrative ‘fire and energy’ to drown out the story’s ethical implications. Leonora purports to rectify this state of affairs, by subordinating spectacular


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effects, which are only capable of giving ‘pleasure’, to a clearer and more explicitly stated moral vision. What does it mean that the ‘moral’ of ‘Lenore’ is adumbrated but not ‘sufficiently explained’, and why must the poem be properly amended before it can be placed before an English audience? Noting ‘the blasphemous exclamations against Providence, in the Leonora of Burger’ along with ‘the ferocious and criminal rhapsodies of Charles De Moor, in [Schiller’s] the Robbers’, William Preston objects to ‘a practice which sports irreverently with the name of God, and leads to irreligion and profanation’ (p. 13). Anti-clerical and anti-religious statements were conspicuous ingredients of Sturm und Drang texts like Schiller’s Die Räuber. Raised as a clergyman’s son in a God-fearing Lutheran environment, Bürger struggled with a powerful scepticism that eventually caused him to break away from the church and abandon his theology studies at the university of Halle, and ‘Lenore’ betrays its author’s religious doubts in various ways. 14 The issue most vexatious to Stanley concerns Bürger’s figuration of Providential interference in human lives. In the original ‘Lenore’, God’s role is complex and compromised in the extreme. Certainly ‘Lenore’ is presented as an exemplary ballad, designed to strengthen the reader’s religious convictions, and certainly Bürger concludes his ballad with an explicitly stated Christian homily, spoken by the howling ‘spectres’ (‘Geister’) who usher Lenore to her grave: ‘Geduld! Geduld! Wenn’s Herz auch bricht! Mit Gottes Allmacht hadre nicht! Des Leibes bist du ledig; Gott sei der Seele gnädig’. ‘Patience! Patience! Even if your heart breaks Do not quarrel with God’s omnipotence You have lost your life; God have mercy upon your soul!’15 As a conclusion, however, the exhortation of Lenore (and the reader) seems strikingly insufficient, if not directly misleading. The homily insists that God’s power is tempered by love, but the main narrative seems to undercut this claim in various ways. The poem attenuates its own benign message, for example, by mixing Christian theology and pagan demonology: God never manifests himself directly in the poem, but only acts out his will through the agency of ghouls and fiends who, although they may be serving a higher cause, are clearly themselves

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vicious. Most importantly, Bürger seems to contradict his own explicit doctrine by representing a God utterly lacking in compassion with human weakness, and entirely unwilling to accept even the slightest insubordination in his subject creatures. One searches in vain for evidence of clemency in ‘Lenore’, for the poem’s conclusion dwells entirely on Lenore’s abject terror – ‘Lenore’s shuddering heart / hung between death and life’ (‘Lenorens Herz, mit Beben, / Hang zwischen Tod und Leben’) – contrasted with the obscene glee of the dancing spectres (247–8). Despite all references to divine ‘mercy’, the fact remains that Bürger portrays a vengeful if not sadistic God, who does not hesitate to damn Lenore for her audacity, and who uses deceptive means and employs fearful diabolical creatures to administer his justice. Several establishment figures understandably wondered whether ‘Lenore’ tended to celebrate God’s omnipotence or to accuse him of despotism, and whether the poem’s widespread dissemination even among female and nonleisured readers would improve or undermine public morals. In imperial Vienna, police officers confiscated all copies of the 1773 Göttinger Musenalmanach, in which ‘Lenore’ first appeared. A similarly clear sense of the ballad’s theological unsoundness incited at least one high-ranking cleric, Professor Reinhard of Bützow, to publicly denounce Bürger as an infidel, and to disparage the poem as ‘an [ . . . ] insufferable mockery of the most sublime aspects of the Christian religion’ (qtd. in Schöne, p. 180). Despite its pious packaging, ‘Lenore’ smacks of religious heresy and particularly of the anti-authoritarian discourse then known as ‘antinomianism’.16 Providential vengeance, in Bürger’s universe, is sudden, brutal and merciless, and Bürger leaves the reader to draw his own moral conclusions from this. Like many of his contemporaries, Stanley too is worried by Bürger’s ambivalent representation of divinity, and therefore he sets out to reinterpret the poem as (in Milton’s words) ‘justify[ing] the ways of God to man’. Whenever possible, Stanley attempts to steer his poem and its readers clear of doubt, irony and ambiguity, moving them towards greater moral clarity, regularity and order. First of all, Stanley settles any doubt that may remain about the specific misdeed – blasphemy – for which Lenore/Leonora is abducted to the underworld. Compared with Bürger’s heroine, Stanley’s Leonora is much more consistent and outspoken in her deprecations of God, and therefore seems much more culpable. Already in stanza five, when she learns that William has been lost, Leonora rashly assumes that ‘Heaven hath no pity’ (29). In stanza nine, where Lenore matter-of-factly confronts her ruined hopes – ‘Lost is lost!’ (‘Verloren ist verloren!’) – Leonora’s lament amounts to a direct denial of God’s benevolence and grace:


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‘Mother, all hope has fled my mind, / The past is past: our God’s unkind; / Why did he give me breath’ (Bürger, 66; Stanley, 49–51). Then, in stanza eleven, where Lenore merely vents her despair with abstract metaphysical questions – ‘O Mother, what is blessedness? / O Mother, what is Hell!’ (‘O Mutter, was ist Seligkeit? / O Mutter, was ist Hölle?’) – Leonora effectively disowns God and all but commits her soul to the Devil: ‘Oh! mother, mother, Hell or Heaven, Woe or joy, are now all even: William was Heaven alone. Fade from my eyes, thou hated light, Descend, my soul, to endless night, For love and hope are flown’ (Bürger, 81–2; Stanley, 61–6). Whereas Lenore may perhaps be said to transgress in the heat of passion, not realizing the full import of her words, Leonora on the contrary utters her blasphemies in full consciousness and with little regard to consequences: ‘Thus rashly, Leonora strove / To doubt the truth of heavenly love’ (Stanley, 67–8). What is more, Leonora repeats her irreligious outbursts and ‘pray[s] for death’ even when her mother beckons her to be still, thus adding wilfulness and disobedience to her roster of crimes (Stanley, 70). What is eliminated from Stanley’s poem, by these changes, is any suggestion that Leonora’s acts might be explained psychologically, and any implication that there might be extenuating circumstances for her deeds. What remains, in turn, is a more schematic narrative of crime and punishment.17 Lenore may or may not have deserved her destiny, for the criteria allowing one to estimate a person’s culpability are themselves discussed in the German poem, but Leonora clearly is guilty as charged. Along the same lines, Stanley also reimagines the role of the poem’s two other main characters. Where Lenore’s mother functions as a character in her own right, with her own opinions and her own perspective on events, Leonora’s mother is much more clearly legible as the voice of reason and orthodox morality. Thus, while Bürger’s mother attempts to console her perverse daughter with the comforting vision of a ‘spiritual groom’ (‘So wird doch deiner Seelen / Der Bräutigam nicht fehlen!’), Stanley’s parallel character merely commands her, ‘Daughter, forget thy earthly love, / Look up to him who reigns above, / There joys succeed to woes’ (Bürger, 79–80; Stanley, 58–60). Where one character offers love, sympathy and understanding, the other counters with stern chastisement and formulaic doctrine: ‘Be patient, child, in God believe, / The good he can,

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and will relieve’ (37–8). Stanley also dissolves much of the mystery enveloping Lenore’s spectral bridegroom in the original version. In Bürger’s ballad the nocturnal visitor both is and is not Wilhelm, which leaves both Lenore and the reader in doubt and suspense. The revenant remains silent during the ride, and only at the end of the poem are his real character and his true mission revealed: ‘From the scull now falls his hair / Drear the death-like phantom stands, / A skeleton expos’d and bare, / Scythe and hour-glass in his hands’ (‘Zum Schädel ohne Zopf und Schopf, / Zum nachten Schädel ward sin Kopf; sein Körper zum Gerippe / Mit Stundenglas und Hippe’) (Pye, 237–40; Bürger, 237–40). Stanley’s horseman, by contrast, is clearly identified, almost from the beginning, as an agent of a higher, celestial order. Hence, when Leonora asks William why they must hurry, he answers ‘My duty bids me be in haste’ and commands ‘Leonora, no delay’ (92, 105). Later, when Leonora wonders what will happen to her, he responds with ‘Leonora, ’tis decreed’ (142). Clearly this divine messenger is merely obeying orders, and clearly he is not to be trifled with. As if there was any need for such a summation, Stanley concludes his translation by recapitulating its moral, in lines which by his own admission have no precedence in Bürger: Who can call on God, when press’d with grief, Who trust his love for kind relief, Ally their hearts to his: When Man will bear, and be resign’d, God ever soothes his suffering mind, and grants him future bliss (205–10). Once again the moral message implied by this addition is clear: God is all-powerful and all-benevolent, and Leonora brings misery upon herself by questioning his justice. Despite her bereavement, Leonora ought to have remembered the existence of a higher order of reality; she should have listened to her mother, appealed to God, and apparently all would have been well in the hereafter. In any event she herself is entirely to blame for the ills that befall her. For as her mother puts it at an earlier point, ‘the Almighty never errs’ (33). Stanley’s translation-method, although perhaps less congenial to most modern sensibilities than Scott’s or Taylor’s, was nonetheless successful, and Leonora quickly took the lead as the most frequently and positively reviewed among the many Bürger-versions. In a review-essay that must have given the author considerable satisfaction, the English Review praised


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Stanley for using ‘correct taste’ to ‘brighten’ the ‘gloom’ and ‘horror’ of ‘the northern superstitions’.18 The first edition sold out already by April 1796, so at this time Stanley brought out the revised and expanded Leonora, Translated and Altered from the German of Gottfried Augustus Bürger. The second edition of Leonora elaborates on the first, and it is informed by a new boldness and assertiveness, as the publisher William Miller allows Stanley to ascend from anonymity to authorial legitimacy and thus reap the fruits of his success. The most striking innovation to the new Leonora derives from Miller’s attempt to boost sales by commissioning a little-known London illustrator by the name of William Blake, who eventually supplied three spectacular line-and-stipple engravings.19 In addition to this visual improvement, Stanley introduces new, more thoroughgoing revisions to the ballad’s narrative texture. Despite the poem’s critical and commercial success, it seems, Stanley was still not entirely content with his revisionist efforts; too much still remained of the original’s ‘wild’ and ‘eccentric’ character. Stanley’s most daring coup, in the second edition, is to transform Leonora’s night-time sufferings into a dream. The first Leonora, while it heaps blame on Leonora to make her punishment more palatable, does nothing to assuage the reader’s more egregious doubts about the wisdom guiding Providential intervention. The final lines of the first edition – ‘God ever soothes [man’s] suffering mind, / and grants him future bliss’ – still remain unwarranted by the poem’s action; God is still represented as punishing wickedness, and hence it is only in the new version that Stanley sets about correcting the German poem’s major moral flaw. In the second Leonora, after the quarrel with her mother Leonora falls asleep, and consequently it is only in her imagination that she travels with the spectral William to her final resting-place. Once there, Leonora suddenly repents her blasphemies and begs for mercy, only to awaken and find herself in a redeemed world with William miraculously returned: Leonora, ere her sense was gone, Thus faint exclaim’d, – ‘thy will be done, Lord, let thy anger cease.’ Soft on the wind was born the pra’er; The spectres vanished into air, And all was hushed in peace. Now redd’ning tints the skies adorn, And streaks of gold, proclaim the morn;

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The night is chas’d away. The sun ascends, new warmth he gives, New hope, new joy; all nature lives, And hails the glorious day. No more are dreadful phantoms near; Love, and his smiling train, appear; They cull each sweetest flow’r, To scatter o’ver the path of youth, To deck the bridal bed, when Truth And Beauty own their pow’r. Ah – could our pow’r avert the blast Which threatens Bliss! – could passion last! Ye dear enchanters tell; What purer joy could Heaven bestow, Than when with shar’d affection’s glow, Our panting bosoms swell? Sweet spirits! wave the airy wand, Two faithful ears your care demand; Lo! bounding o’ver the plain, Led by your charm, a youth returns; With hope, his breast impatient burns; Hope is not always vain. ‘Wake, Leonora! – wake to Love! ‘For thee, his choicest wreath he wove;’ Death vainly aim’d his Dart. The Past was all a dream; she woke – He lives; – ‘twas William’s self who spoke, And clasp’d her to his Heart. 20 The second Leonora is no longer Bürger’s poem, for if Stanley’s first translation already rewrote the German original in significant ways, the second changes it almost beyond recognition. The second Leonora dissociates ballad-writing from the ideologically suspect tradition of Germanic Schauerromantik. In re-marketing Leonora as a text ‘Translated and Altered from the German’ (my italics), Stanley successfully eludes the fate of being ostracized as a single-minded votary of the Germanicoterrific romance and consequently as a traitor to the national cause. More specifically, Stanley solves the problem of German supernaturalism’s impropriety by removing marvellous effects to the chamber of individual


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consciousness. In Stanley’s new conclusion, Leonora owes her uncanny adventures entirely to her youth, her excitable temper and the heated state of her emotions upon receiving news of William’s death. Such a displacement, which may have been influenced by Ann Radcliffe’s ingenious technique of ‘the explained supernatural’, fulfils several functions at once.21 By psychologizing Leonora’s adventures, Stanley brackets the poem’s ‘wild’ and ‘eccentric’ diabolism, responding to those reviewers who accused Bürger of ‘subvert[ing] nature’ and ‘out-herod[ing] Herod’. Like most of his better-known contemporaries, Stanley intends not only to imitate but also to elevate the Gothic ballad, which means that he must find a way to exploit Bürger’s popular machinery while also redirecting public taste away from the increasingly violent stimulants of the popular press. Viewed from this angle, introducing a Radcliffean dreamsequence represents the formal solution that he has sought all along. On the one hand, such a distancing-device allows Stanley to exploit Gothic paraphernalia to full effect, and to maintain the hair-raising scenes that made the ballad an object of public adulation in the first place. On the other hand, when he dispels unnatural events from the poem’s real to its imaginary action Stanley also dissents from Bürger’s out-and-out supernaturalism, separating himself from all childish imaginings and asserting a rational, English perspective. Just as importantly, if not more so, Stanley’s final alterations definitively graft a pro-Christian interpretation onto a poem that seems implicitly if not explicitly anti-Christian. This is clear from the translator’s preface to the second version, where Stanley candidly delineates the considerations that have led him to not only alter Bürger’s narrative but also invent a new ‘catastrophe’: It is of more importance than is generally believed, both to human happiness and virtue, that the Being we adore should be considered as amiable and impartial, and not as either capricious or morose. Obedience to his will should surely be procured from men (if possible) by an appeal rather to their affections than to their fears. But what opinion, of either the kindness or justice of Providence, can be formed from the description of a young girl exposed to the most cruel of all punishments, abandoned to the malignity of every fiend from hell! let loose for her destruction, only because, in the first paroxysm of despair and agony, for the supposed loss of a love, thinking God indifferent about her fate, she refused all comfort, and wished for death. [ . . . ] Those who think the merit of the poem consists in its power of exciting terror [ . . . ] will probably condemn every

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deviation from the original as prejudicial to its interest; but, on the other hand, many may prefer it [ . . . ] who think that the first object of all writing, particularly of poetry [ . . . ] should be to teach men clear ideas of justice and injustice, vice and virtue. They will be pleased to find the Almighty no longer held up to their contemplation as an irritable and vindictive ruler, ever watchful for offence, and prepared to punish; but instead, as the friendly and affectionate parent, having but one interest with his creatures, happy in their happiness, and associated to their nature in the captivating forms of sympathy and love (pp. vi–viii). Stanley fully understands that Bürger’s demons, although seemingly ‘on the side of the angels [ . . . ] frequently function in what seem to be antimoral ways’. 22 Yet in replacing Bürger’s wrathful God with a patient God, who refrains from using his powers to punish wickedness, and who even seems to reward Leonora for voluntarily recanting her blasphemies, Stanley tempers the Old Testament harshness of the German text. If Bürger’s poem tacitly invites its readers to sympathize with Leonora, and to question the fairness of an ‘irritable’ and ‘vindictive’ deity who can ordain eternal damnation for what seems a relatively minor transgression, Stanley’s English Leonora reads like a poem much more likely to advance the cause of Christianity. Whereas Bürger’s writing drives a wedge between man and God, Stanley’s forges a new covenant between them. Hence, by ending the poem happily, with a celebration of divine and human love, Stanley resolves a moral dilemma which, as he now confesses, has perplexed him since the poem’s first publication: ‘I have often doubted whether [‘Lenore’] was not calculated (as far as its effects could extend) to injure the cause of Religion and Morality, by exhibiting a representation of supernatural interference, inconsistent with our ideas of a just and benevolent Deity’ (p. vi).

Coleridge’s ‘Rime of the Ancyent Marinere’ Every student of British Romanticism knows that Coleridge’s ‘The Rime of the Ancyent Marinere’ drew harsh comments from its earliest critics, even from those reviewers who were otherwise neutral towards other poems in the first edition of Lyrical Ballads (1798), or towards the volume as such. No review written in this context has become more notorious for its wrong-headed insensitivity to the unique achievement of the ‘Rime’ than the essay that Robert Southey, Coleridge’s brother-in-law and one-time fellow-Pantisocrat, submitted to the Critical Review. Here,


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responding to the anonymous advertisement’s postulate that the ‘Rime’ is composed in ‘imitation of the style as well as of the spirit of the elder poets’, Southey somewhat obliquely censures the ‘Rime’ as ‘a Dutch attempt at German sublimity’: We are tolerably conversant with the early English poets; and can discover no resemblance whatever, except in antiquated spelling and a few obsolete words. [‘The Rime of the Ancyent Marinere’] appears to us perfectly original in style as well as in story. Many of the stanzas are laboriously beautiful; but in connection they are absurd or unintelligible [ . . . ] We do not sufficiently understand the story to analyse it. It is a Dutch attempt at German sublimity. Genius has here been employed in producing a poem of little merit. 23 Denying the claim of the ‘Rime’ to ‘sublimity’, Southey may well have felt threatened by what he saw as Wordsworth and Coleridge’s untimely attempt to challenge his own status as one of the premier purveyors of exotic titillation to the British public. It appears clear, at any rate, that Southey interpreted the ‘Rime’ as a straightforward bid, and in his view a woefully unsuccessful one, to tap the immense commercial popularity enjoyed by Germany’s ghostly balladry. Coleridge, according to Southey, has abandoned the authentic and successful German ballad-style to substitute his own ‘Dutch attempt’, whose narrative is unfathomable and whose characters are grotesque. It is worth noticing that the third Lake Poet was far from alone among the early critics in finding something disconcertingly un-English about the ‘Rime’. More consistently than any other document in the annals of British Romanticism, the ‘Rime’ was, upon its first appearance, haunted by the problematic epithet ‘German’. Insofar as the early reviewers could agree on anything about a poem that seemed to them often baffling beyond human comprehension, they rarely failed to remark upon its family likeness to horrid mystery-narratives imported from overseas. ‘We are not pleased with it’, wrote one commentator for the Analytical Review of the ‘Rime’: ‘In our opinion it has more of the extravagance of a mad German poet, than of the simplicity of our ancient ballad-writers’ (Jackson, p. 52). Francis Jeffrey too had little doubt that the anonymous ‘Ancient Mariner’, which he took to be ‘some of Coleridge’s doings’, must be understood in the context of ‘all the German ballads and tragedies, that have been holding our hair on end for these last three years’ (Jackson, p. 102). And this critic for the Monthly Review,

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writing as late as in 1819, evidently still considers the German-centredness of the ‘Rime’ a commonplace: The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’ appeared at a time, when, to use a bold but just expression, with reference to our literary taste, ‘Hell made holiday’, and ‘Raw heads and bloody-bones’ were the only fashionable entertainment for man or woman. Then Germany was poured forth into England, in all her flood of sculls and numsculls: then the romancing novelist ran raving about with midnight torches, to shew death’s heads on horseback, and to frighten full-grown children with mysterious band-boxes [ . . . ] and then sang the Ancient Mariner [ . . . ] (Jackson, pp. 403–4). For many of Coleridge’s compeers and contemporaries, there could be no forgetting or denying that the poet had, in Henry Crabb Robinson’s words, ‘formed his taste and opinions in the German schools’ (Jackson, p. 279). Even a cursory comparison of Bürger and Coleridge makes it easy to see why this should have been the case. Most obviously, both Bürger’s German and Coleridge’s British ballads are filled with Christian trappings including sylvan hermits, religious services, tolling church-bells, and penitential wanderers. 24 Like several of Bürger’s texts, and like J. T. Stanley’s version of ‘Lenore’, the ‘Rime’ concludes with an explicit religious exhortation, in the poem’s much-discussed and much-maligned ‘moral stanzas’: Farewell, farewell! but this I tell To thee, thou wedding-guest! He prayeth best who loveth well Both man and bird and beast. He prayeth best who loveth best, All things both great and small: For the dear God, who loveth us, He made and loveth all.25 On a deeper structural level, ‘The Rime of the Ancyent Marinere’ turns on a narrative of human crime and supernatural punishment, and in the ‘Rime’ as in ‘Lenore’, ‘Der Wilde Jäger’ and innumerable Anglo-German imitation-ballads, this punishment arrives as the protagonist is abducted and persecuted by peremptory spectral creatures. The Mariner’s hostile


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deed precipitates a radical reversal of roles, as the hunter himself becomes the prey of a terrifying supernatural pursuit, and as the human agent becomes someone who ‘does not act, but is continually acted upon’, as Wordsworth put it in his 1800 explanatory note to the ‘Rime’.26 Following the shooting of the Albatross, the ‘Rime’ becomes a virtual catalogue of diabolic compulsions, abductions and possessions. The ship is immobilized and later forced to drive northward. Its crew is coerced into silence, forced to witness various revolting spectacles and later compelled to a seeming revivification in which they are pressed to work the ship. The Mariner himself is compelled to wear the albatross around his neck, to bless the water snakes and to perform his atonement by compulsively repeating his story to the people whom he meets. The tables radically turned, Coleridge’s narrator, much like Bürger’s various protagonists, is forced to undergo a series of humiliating, isolating and dehumanizing experiences at the hands of increasingly sinister infernal creatures. On some points, Coleridge even out-Germanizes the German ballad: Bürger’s Lenore, at least, must contend with only one nightmarish adversary, but Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner is hurried from one terrifying encounter to the next, until he becomes, in his own famous words, Like one that on a lonely road Doth walk in fear and dread, And having once turn’d round, walks on And turns no more his head: Because he knows, a frightful fiend Doth close behind him tread (460–5). In the poem’s Part II, the mysterious ‘Spirit that plagued us so / [ . . . ] / From the Land of Mist and Snow’ abducts and transfixes both the Mariner and the rest of the crew under the burning sun (128–30). In so doing, the mysteriously vindictive ‘Polar Spirit’ (as it will be called in future versions of the poem) submits the mariners to unbearable thirst, curses them with the extinction of language, and thus in effect robs them of the ability to even communicate and share the extent of their suffering with each other. The Mariner, consequently, must resort to selfmutilation and bite his arm to cry out when he sees the ‘Spectre-ship’ in the distance (200). Subsequently, in Part III the Mariner becomes the prize of a dice-game between the male spectre ‘Death’ and his female companion, who is ‘far liker Death than he’ (189). ‘Death’ wins his accomplices, but the Mariner himself, suffering a far severer fate, becomes the

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property of ‘Life-in-Death’ (whose name only occurs in the poem’s 1817 version). Later again, in Part V of the poem, the Mariner must once again undergo considerable pain and confusion as the vessel, which is now itself a spectre-ship ‘For a charnel-dungeon fitter’, is taken over by the revived bodies of the crew-mates (440). Invisible to the other sailors, and even to his own nephew, the Mariner can only watch as the members of the ‘ghastly crew’ steer him, at a break-neck speed that eventually causes him to faint, towards a radically uncertain destiny (332). Coleridge’s borrowings from Bürger’s lurid ballad-world seem numerous and obvious enough, but no less apparent are the variations that he introduces. If the ‘Rime’, ‘while it has a great deal else in it [ . . . ] is [ . . ] foremost of all [ . . . ] a tale in the tradition of Gothic balladry’, it is also a poem that stubbornly refuses generic pigeonholing. 27 The insight that Coleridge may have sought consciously to de-familiarize Gothic balladry was skewed by Southey but clearly expressed by another more disinterested reader no less close to Coleridge during the Lyrical Ballads years. After all Southey’s review of the ‘Rime’, with its insidious slur, was not allowed to stand unchallenged; later the same year it received a serious rebuttal in a private letter from Charles Lamb: If you wrote that review in ‘Crit. Rev.’, I am sorry you are so sparing of praise to the ‘Ancient Marinere’; – so far from calling it, as you do, with some wit, but more severity, ‘A Dutch Attempt,’ &c., I call it a right English attempt, and a successful one, to dethrone German sublimity. You have selected a passage fertile in unmeaning miracles, but have passed by fifty passages as miraculous as the miracles they celebrate (Lamb, Letters, i, 42). ‘Dethronement’ implies a controlled creative process in which textual power is channelled in new directions and re-established on different grounds. Correcting Southey’s defensive interpretation, Lamb views the Romantic poet’s interaction with German supernaturalism not as the effect of clumsiness or incompetence, but rather as a purposeful takinginto-possession, a calculated assimilation through critical commentary, ironic inversion and creative sabotage: ‘a right English attempt, and a successful one, to dethrone German sublimity’. As Lamb recognized, the ‘Rime’ plays on, and deliberately frustrates, its readers’ expectations of German-style balladry. In the conventional Gothic ballad, human misconduct inevitably begets devilish visitation. The genre presents an ordered if paranoid and grotesquely violent universe, where specific deeds always have reliable and determinate


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effects, and where the link between event and consequence can always be taken for granted. But the German ballad’s naïve conjunction of human sin and supernatural retribution is exactly the fundamental premise that Coleridge ‘dethrones’ in the ‘Rime’. The notion that the spirits terrorize the Mariner because he killed the Albatross corresponds to the version of the poem’s narrative presented in the argument that Coleridge appended to the poem in the 1800 edition of Lyrical Ballads: ‘How a ship, having first sailed to the Equator, was driven by storms, to the cold country towards the South Pole; how the Ancient Mariner cruelly, and in contempt of the laws of hospitality, killed a sea-bird; and how he was followed by many and strange judgements; and in what manner he came back to his own country’ (Lyrical Ballads, p. 769). In the 1817 marginal gloss, we encounter such statements as ‘the Ancient Mariner inhospitably killeth the bird of good omen’ and ‘the Albatross begins to be avenged’. 28 In the 1798 text, the key assumption that the Mariner unwittingly sets in motion retributory forces beyond his control is also conveyed by a number of voices speaking within the poem. During a strange interlude towards the end of the poem, for example, the Mariner overhears a conversation between ‘two voices in the air’, which strongly suggests that he, in being hurled forward ‘like a pawing horse let go’, is suffering from the effects of his blow against the Albatross (402, 394): ‘Is it he? quoth one, ‘Is this the man? ‘By him who died on cross, ‘With his cruel bow he lay’d full low ‘The harmless Albatross. ‘The spirit who ‘bideth by himself ‘In the land of mist and snow, ‘He lov’d the bird that lov’d the man ‘Who shot him with his bow. The other was a softer voice, As soft as honey-dew: Quoth he the man hath penance done And penance more will do (403–14). Last but not least, the Mariner himself apparently believes that he has brought his miserable destiny upon himself. In shooting the Albatross, he declares, he did ‘a hellish thing’ that caused him and his shipmates ‘woe’ (89–90).

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Despite their prominence, these statements in and around the poem remain declarations by disembodied voices. They amount to little more than interpretations, attempts to arrest in a coherent sequence events that may ultimately elude such arrangement. After the shooting of the Albatross the weather confusingly first turns good (a strong south wind takes the ship out of the Polar regions) before it turns bad (the wind dies down and the scorching sun rises). The enigmatic ‘spirit from the land of mist and snow’ makes his first appearance in poem only after a bewildering delay, and even then he chooses to hide his face and only reveal his presence through dreams and visions that come to the sailors during the night. It thus remains obscure not only what exact role the Polar Spirit plays in changing the climatic conditions and arresting the mariners under the sun, but also what precise relation his exertions bear on the Mariner’s preceding act. The mysteries surrounding the Polar Spirit’s machinations and ministrations are considerably exacerbated when Death and the Nightmare, Life-in-Death appear on the stage: The naked Hulk alongside came And the Twain were playing dice; ‘The Game is done! I’ve won, I’ve won!’ Quoth she, and whistled thrice (191–4). It appears that in condemning the Mariner to eternal life-in-death the spectres ‘punish’ him for his ‘crime’, but as Edward E. Bostetter pointed out long ago, this sentence is the result of a dice-game rather than careful moral deliberation.29 The dice-game episode introduces an element of blind chance to the narrative, which not only overturns the Christian ‘sacramental’ reading proposed by Robert Penn Warren but also throws into relief Coleridge’s deconstruction of the traditional supernatural ballad-structure. 30 What precise connection, if any, links the Mariner’s hostile act and the trials and tribulations that he and his comrades must subsequently undergo? As Frances Freguson argues, the ‘Rime’ continually causes us to ‘mistrust our own efforts to establish a cause-and-effect sequence’. 31 The Ancient Mariner may sail a ballad sea, but Coleridge constantly challenges his readers to discover the deeper causal principles undergirding the poem’s perplexingly indeterminate events. Southey dismissed the ‘Rime’ as a ‘Dutch attempt at German sublimity’, warning Coleridge’s readers that the poem falls short of the regularity and consistency that might be expected from such a text. Wordsworth


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also suspected that the ‘Rime’ does not cohere as a proper literary ballad, for in the 1800 ‘Note to the Ancient Mariner’ he cites the ‘defect’ that the poem’s ‘events having no necessary connection do not produce each other’ (Lyrical Ballads, p. 791). In the ‘Rime’, events simply do not follow each other as neatly as they do in poems by Bürger, Scott, Lewis or Southey. If the ‘Rime’ is a ballad of spectral persecution, then at times it even becomes unclear who exactly is persecuting whom. The Mariner describes himself as the persecuted victim, but the Mariner’s reluctant listener (‘interlocutor’ hardly describes the Wedding Guest’s role in the poem) feels that in being forced into parlay he has become the victim of another devilish waylaying, which bizarrely doubles the kidnappings suffered by the Mariner within the story itself. Furthermore, the Wedding Guest’s suspicion that the ‘grey-beard loon’ partakes of the malefic powers which he confronts within his own narrative cannot simply be dismissed as Gothic-induced dementia, for it is shared by the Hermit (‘ “What manner man art thou?” ’) and the Pilot’s Boy (‘ “full plain I see, / The devil knows how to row” ’) (15, 601–2, 610). Roles are continually reversed and positions destabilized. The same things ‘happen’ to the same kinds of characters as in Bürger (or do they? remember that we, too, are relying on the words of a ‘grey-beard loon’), but Coleridge leaves it radically uncertain why, how, and in what order. The complaint most frequently voiced by German and English critics of Bürger was that his poetry produced a surfeit of excessive sensations. Bürger prided himself on his ability to arouse his reader’s emotions, claiming that he was unable to work on ‘Lenore’ in the evening, ‘for it even makes me shudder a little’ (qtd. in Woodmansee, p. 66). According to the stern William Preston, Bürger, ‘one of the most favourite and admired German writers’, stands primus inter pares among those foreigners who ‘feed and diffuse a prevailing malady of the times, which has taken too full possession of the female world and, indeed, of many men, under the name of sensibility’ (pp. 356, 10). Even the Germanophile William Taylor conceded that Bürger pursues ‘imitative harmony [ . . . ] almost to excess’. 32 Writing as a periodical reviewer for the Critical Review from 1794 to 1798, Coleridge consistently denounced popular romance-traditions with familiar terms and arguments, using a highly strung tone of voice that strikingly anticipates Wordsworth’s more famous formulations in the 1800 Preface. In October 1797 Coleridge submitted to the Critical Review a devastating attack on M. G. Lewis’s The Monk (1796–1797), a popular Gothic romance which includes several German sensation-ballads, including Goethe’s ‘The Erl-King’ and Lewis’s own ‘Alonzo the Brave

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and the Fair Imogene’, into its texture, and which generally flaunts its indebtedness to the new European shudder-aesthetic. 33 According to Coleridge, there ‘is a nimiety – a too-muchness – in all Germans’.34 Not coincidentally, Coleridge’s one published reference to the Gothic ballad, a slighting allusion to Lewis’s ‘Alonzo’ in Biographia Literaria, indicates his suspicion that the genre provided a purely physical (and therefore tawdry) thrill: The excellence, at which they [15th- and 16th-century Italian poets] aimed, consisted in exquisite polish of the diction, combined with perfect simplicity. [ . . . ] Their measures [ . . . ] were not indebted for their variety to the introduction of new metres, such as have been attempted of late in the ‘Alonzo and Imogen’ and others borrowed from the German, having in their very mechanism a specific overpowering tune, to which the generous reader humours his voice and emphasis, with more indulgence to the author than attention to the meaning or quantity of the words, but which, to an ear familiar with the numerous sounds of the Greek and Roman poets, has an effect not unlike that of galloping over a paved road in a German waggon without springs. 35 In this passage Coleridge seems especially discommoded by Bürger’s ‘German’ reliance on rhetorical devices like onomatopoeia, exclamations and repetitions, which have a tendency to ‘overpower’ the ‘generous’ readers and rob them of their mental equipoise. In private correspondence, Wordsworth confessed very similar reservations, when he confessed that Bürger’s poetry left him with no distinct thoughts, but only an inchoate ‘hurry of pleasure’: Bürger is one of those authors whose book I like to have in my hand, but when I have laid the book down I do not think about him. I remember a hurry of pleasure, but I have few distinct forms that people my mind, not any recollection of delicate or minute feelings which he has either communicated to me, or taught me to recognise. I do not perceive the presence of character in his personages. I see everywhere the character of Bürger himself; [ . . . ] It seems to me, that in poems descriptive of human nature [ . . . ] character is absolutely necessary, &c.: incidents are among the lowest allurements of poetry.36 Bürger not only does not help the reader become more mentally aware; he actively hinders the formation and growth of consciousness. To


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become fully legible, this statement must be held beside Wordsworth and Coleridge’s better-known public pronunciation, which Mary Jacobus believes to be aimed primarily at Bürger, about those ‘deluges of idle and extravagant stories in verse’ that ‘blunt the discriminating powers of the mind, and, unfitting it for all voluntary exertion, [ . . . ] reduce it to a stage of almost savage torpor’ (Wordsworth, Prose Works, i, 128; Jacobus, pp. 219–20). At best, apparently, Gothic balladry excites pleasure and nothing else; at worst, it can encourage lascivious behaviour by overturning the mind’s control of the body and connecting pleasurable sensations to low impulses. Given Coleridge’s career-long preoccupation with controlling and reprogramming reading activities, it is hardly surprising that the ‘Rime’ tends towards awakening Bürger’s and his many copyists’ British readers from their sensuous slumber. Wordsworth sought for the ‘cooperating power in the mind of the reader’, and Coleridge proposed ‘to kindle his [the reader’s] own torch for him’. 37 What Mark Jones calls the ‘provocation theory of Romantic literature’ locates the usefulness of tales not in their ability to illustrate a useful moral, but rather in their power to stimulate reflection and help readers ‘see into the life of things’.38 In such a literary economy, it is the reader who inserts value into the tale – ‘The opacity of the medium is revealed as the message: “think for yourself”.’39 The ‘Rime’, too, falls among those Romantic texts that were designed not so much to communicate specific ideas to the reader, but rather to energize the mind in specific ways. Stephen Parrish labels the ‘Rime’ a ‘Bürgeresque’ poem, but narrative events in Coleridge cannot be said to ‘cause’ each other as they do in Bürger. 40 Unlike Bürger, who dabbles in the ‘lowest allurements’, Coleridge sets the reader to work. If German and Anglo-German poets feminize the reader and afflict him or her with ‘mental torpor’, Coleridge’s anti-Gothic in turn re-masculinizes the mind by demanding a new degree of ‘exertion’. To construct his literary pedagogics, Coleridge substitutes dense and oblique textuality for the headlong progress of the tale, and extreme ethical ambiguity for Bürger’s declared moralisms. In the terminology that the Lake Poets themselves used to discuss such issues, Coleridge elicits a different, redemptive reading-experience, and even constructs an alternative reader: a ‘thinking’ reader, who will actively use his or her mental faculties, rather than passively submitting to a violent onrush of strange emotions. Do the Mariner’s acts stand in any causal relation to, let alone justify, the ensuing supernatural incidents? Does the ‘Rime’ tell a ‘sacramental’ story of ‘crime and punishment and repentance and reconciliation’, or is the poem’s

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universe ‘a grim and forbidding one’? (Warren, p. 135; Bostetter, p. 243). In truth, the poem, as an example of what Umberto Eco calls the ‘open work’, allows both these interpretations and more: The search for suggestiveness is a deliberate move to ‘open’ the work to the free response of the addressee. An artistic work that suggests is also one that can be performed with the full emotional and imaginative resources of the interpreter. Whenever we read poetry there is a process by which we try to adapt our personal world to the emotional world proposed by the text. This is all the more true of poetic works that are deliberately based on suggestiveness, since the text sets out to stimulate the private world of the addressee so that he can draw from inside himself some deeper response that mirrors the subtler resonances underlying the text. 41 What must be underlined here is that the avant-garde aesthetics of radical open-endedness, far from being a trans-historical given, can mean different things to different writers at different periods. For Coleridge, opening the poem to multiple conflicting interpretations – in a word, to ‘thinking’ – also functions as a method of transcending the German ballad-aesthetics’ blood-curdling and mind-numbing effects, and consequently of giving the ballad-genre a higher cultural destiny. By inviting his readers to puzzle out their own answers to the ballad’s many riddles, Coleridge ‘leaves the task of making meaning unfinished’. 42 The ‘Rime’ seems a text designed to elicit, and at the same time necessarily to frustrate, thought-provoking hermeneutic activity. The poem, to borrow Wordsworth’s words, ‘is no tale; but should you think, / Perhaps a tale you’ll make it’. 43

Wordsworth’s ‘Hart-Leap Well’ First translated by Walter Scott, Bürger’s ‘Der Wilde Jäger’ (1778) was published in a slim volume, along with Scott’s ‘Lenore’-translation ‘William and Helen’, as ‘The Chase’ (1796). During the same year, excerpts of the poem also appeared in the Critical Review – the very same periodical publication that employed Coleridge as a reviewer of Gothic romances during the 1790s. Written in traditional ballad-stanzas, and characterized throughout by an evident relish for ghastly narrative effects and spectacular rhetorical devices, ‘Der Wilde Jäger’ concerns the fate of an aristocratic huntsman who decides to go out hunting one Sunday morning, notwithstanding the village church-bells that toll and call him to service.


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The huntsman soon catches sight of ‘ein weißer Hirsch’ (a ‘stag more white than mountain snow’) and sets off in pursuit of it.44 But as the ride progresses and as the hunt gathers speed, two additional horsemen, one dressed in light and the other in dark clothes, appear at his sides. The rider on his right tries to appeal to the huntsman’s better instincts, urging him to return home and warning him about the consequences of his uncontrollable fury: ‘Schlecht stimmet deines Hornes Klang’ Sprach der zur Rechten, sanften Muts, ‘Zu Feierglock’ und Choresgesang. Kehr um! Erjagst dir heut nichts Guts.’ (Bürger, 31–4). ‘Cease thy loud bugle’s clanging knell’, Cry’d the fair youth, with silver voice; ‘And for Devotion’s choral swell Exhange the rude discordant noise.’ (Scott, 29–32). The other rider, however, encourages the Wildgrave to continue in his current course and fully savour the pleasures of the chase: ‘Jagt zu, jagt zu, mein edler Herr!’ Fiel rasch der linke Ritter d’rein. ‘Was Glockenklang? Was Chorgesang? Die Jagdlust mag euch baß erfreun! (Bürger, 37–40). ‘Away, and sweep the glades along!’ The Sable Hunter hoarse replies; ‘To muttering monks leave matin-song, And bells, and books, and mysteries.’ (Scott, 37–40). As one might expect, the noble hunter heeds the latter horseman’s advice rather than the former’s; he continues his relentless assault on the stag, rather than turning back to observe his religious duties. Throughout the remainder of the run, the Wildgrave repeatedly and wilfully disobeys the voice of reason and morality, proceeding to level the crops of a poor farmer, butcher the sheep of a penniless shepherd and invade the sacred domain of a peaceful sylvan hermit. But suddenly, when the climax of the race seems close at hand, the sun is eclipsed and the sounds of the hustle disappear, as if time and place were neutralized:

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Erschrocken blickt der Graf umher; Er stößt ins Horn, es tönet nicht; Er ruft und hört sich selbst nicht mehr; Der Schwung der Peitsche sauset nicht; (Bürger, 157–60). Wild gazed the affrighted Earl around; He strove in vain to wake his horn, In vain to call: for not a sound Could from his anxious lips be borne (Scott, 157–60). Gradually, as the huntsman hears from afar the ferocious barking of the ‘Höllenhunde’ (‘dogs of hell’) the terrible irony of his fate begins to dawn upon him (Bürger, 197; Scott, 184): Er rafft sich auf durch Wald und Feld, Und flieht lautheulend Weh und Ach; Doch durch die ganze weite Welt Rauscht bellend ihm die Hölle nach, Bei Tag tief durch der Erde Klüfte, Um Mitternacht hoch durch die Lüfte (Bürger, 199–204). The Wildgrave flies o’er bush and thorn With many a shriek of helpless woe; Behind him hound, and horse, and horn, And, ‘Hark away, and holla, ho!’ With wild despair’s reverted eye, Close, close behind, he marks the throng, With bloody fangs and eager cry; In frantic fear he scours along.] (Scott, 189–96). The once-so-proud huntsman has himself become the prey of a terrifying, endless and unhallowed pursuit. From now until eternity, he will haunt the earth, a frightening example of human insolence and obstinacy to everyone who crosses his path or hears the sounds of the infernal chase. Wordsworth was cognizant that his and Coleridge’s use of German conventions throughout the Lyrical Ballads-years threatened to destabilize their positions as serious British authors, insofar as it placed them on the boundary between literary forms high and low, native and foreign, legitimate and illegitimate. There is no clearer indication of Wordsworth’s awareness of his own German legacy than the way in which he continually hedges his most experimental ballad-poetry with


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lengthy prefaces, copious footnotes and fanciful secondary explanations to the reader. At the beginning of the second part of ‘Hart-Leap Well’, for example, Wordsworth makes a personal appearance and addresses the reader in his own voice, divorcing himself from poets who are misled by their excessive concern for narrative ‘accident’ and economic ‘trade’: The moving accident is not my trade: To freeze the blood I have no ready arts: ‘Tis my delight, alone in summer shade, To pipe a simple song to thinking hearts (97–100). As so often in Wordsworth, the disclaimer draws attention to the similitude that it seeks to disavow, and indeed critics have demonstrated that Bürger’s ‘Der Wilde Jäger’ and Wordsworth’s ‘Hart-Leap Well’ are linked by striking parallels of situation, narrative and character. The poetry of Lyrical Ballads, as Wordsworth writes in the 1800 Preface, is populated by figures selected from ‘low and rustic life’, such as Betty Foy, Goody Blake, Harry Gill, and the anonymous narrator of ‘The Thorn’ (Prose Works, i, 124). But ‘Hart-Leap Well’, like ‘The Chase’, has at its centre a brash and arrogant hunting squire, and this unusual choice of an aristocratic protagonist suffices to make probable Wordsworth’s indebtedness to Bürger. In addition, the beginning lines of ‘Hart-Leap Well’ evoke the tension and excitement preceding the hunt, and Wordsworth’s Sir Walter, like Bürger’s Wildgrave, is shown abusing and bullying his servants: ‘Another horse’ – That shout the vassal heard, And saddled his best steed, a comely grey; Sir Walter mounted him; he was the third Which he head mounted on that glorious day.45 Sir Walter then sets off, and Wordsworth’s poem follows the huntsman’s pitiless pursuit of a white stag, in an impetuous, ongoing chase set in a solitary, mountainous landscape: A rout this morning left Sir Walter’s hall, That as they galloped made the echoes roar; But horse and man are vanished, one and all; Such race, I think, was never seen before. Sir Walter, restless as a veering wind, Calls to the few tired dogs that yet remain:

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Brach, Swift, and Music, noblest of their kind, Follow, and up the weary mountain strain. The Knight hallooed, he chid and cheered them on With suppliant gestures and upbraidings stern; But breath and eyesight fail; and, one by one, The dogs are stretched among the mountain fern. Where is the throng, the tumult of the race? The bugles that so joyfully were blown? – The chase it looks not like an earthly chase; Sir Walter and the Hart are left alone (13–28). Still, even as he interpolates virtually every structural component (chase, huntsman, stag, horse, dogs) of Bürger’s romance-narrative into the poetry of ‘Hart-Leap Well’, Wordsworth also departs from his textual antecedent in various important ways. Where Bürger loads his poem with dreadful supernatural events and diabolical showmanship, Wordsworth consistently eschews the somewhat macabre sensationalism that dominates his precursor’s poem, instead stressing realistic verisimilitude and convincing descriptive detail. There are no overtly preternatural occurrences in ‘Hart-Leap Well’, and no fiendish horseman appears at the end to punish the irreverent hunter for his actions. Sir Walter, Wordsworth assures us, did not meet with a particularly violent or abrupt end; he lived a full life and ‘died in the course of time’ (93). The physical chase is over by the end of the third stanza, and Wordsworth is even reluctant to relate the violent details of the slaying of the animal: ‘I will not stop to tell how far he fled’, he says of the stag, ‘Nor will I mention what death he died’ (31–2). Throughout the poem, Wordsworth underscores the ordinary setting of the action. For example, he gives the dogs individual names (Brach, Swift, and Music), and he also provides a meticulous, almost naturalistic description of the place where the stag finds its last resting-place when Sir Walter finally catches up with it: And now, too happy for repose or rest, (Was never man in such a joyful case!) Sir Walter walked all round, north, south, and west, And gazed and gazed upon that darling place. And climbing up the hill (it was at least Nine roods of sheer ascent) Sir Walter found


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Three several hoof-marks which the hunted beast Had left imprinted on the verdant ground (45–52). Almost as though to signal to the reader that he has transplanted ‘Der Wilde Jäger’ onto English ground, Wordsworth adds to his ballad a long prefatory note that anchors the action in a familiar landscape: ‘Hart-Leap Well’, Wordsworth writes, ‘is a small spring of water, about five miles from Richmond in Yorkshire, and near the side of the road which leads from Richmond to Askrigg. Its name is derived from a remarkable chase, the memory of which is preserved by the monuments spoken of in the second part of the following poem, which monuments do now exist as I have there described them’ (Lyrical Ballads, p. 133). Spoken in a new context and assimilated into English poetry, the elements of ‘Der Wilde Jäger’ clearly no longer carry the same meaning as they did in the original version. As a writer for the Göttinger Musenalmanach, Bürger eagerly followed the progress of the French Revolution until his death in 1793, and along with his famous supernatural ballads he also composed a body of straightforwardly political poetry.46 In 1776, Bürger published the sarcastically titled ‘Der Bauer, an seinen Durchlautigen Tyrannen’ (‘The Peasant to His Illustrious Tyrant’), which reveals the origin and nature of Bürger’s interest in hunting. Reminiscent of, but less ambitious than, ‘Der Wilde Jäger’, ‘Der Bauer’ is a simple dramatic monologue in which a peasant using shockingly blunt language upbraids a ‘prince’ (‘Fürst’) for depriving him of his livelihood. In the first three stanzas, the peasant enumerates the damaging effects of the prince’s hunting obsession. Then, towards the end of the poem, the farmer’s confrontational discourse modulates into a thinly veiled threat of retribution: Die Saat, so deine Jagd zertritt, Was Roß, und Hund, und du verschlingst, Das Brot, du Fürst, ist mein. Du Fürst hast nicht, bei Egg’ und Pflug, Hast nicht den Ernetag durchschwitzt. Mein, mein ist Fleiß und Brot! Ha! du wärst Obrigkeit von Gott? Gott spendet Segen aus; du raubst! Du nicht von Gott, Tyrann! (10–18)

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The corn, such as your hunt treads down, That steed and dog and you devour, That bread, you Prince, is mine. You, Prince, have not, with harrow or plow, Have not sweated through the harvest day. Mine, mine, the industry and bread! Ha! You would claim authority from God? God dispenses blessings; you plunder! You’re not from God, Tyrant!47 The plainspoken ‘plebeian’ anger that enlivens poems like ‘Der Bauer’ also finds an outlet in the poet’s better-known ballad-verse. 48 ‘Der Wilde Jäger’, characteristically, combines Christian moralism, Gothic supernaturalism and anti-aristocratic propaganda into a highly explosive cocktail. The punishment that the count receives exceeds the formal lesson in right behaviour that is ordinarily meted out in folk ballads. The sin for which the huntsman is punished, ultimately, is not just the moral transgression of hunting the stag on a Sunday in defiance of religious edict; it is also, and surely more importantly, the crime of brazenly disrespecting and mistreating fellow members of society. ‘Der Wilde Jäger’ places considerable emphasis on the substantial economic injury that the blue-blooded hunter inflicts on those lower-class countrymen and women who prowl the margins of the poem, eking out a meagre living in the barren countryside that he treats as his private pleasure-ground. When ‘ein armer Landmann’ (a ‘husbandman with toil embrown’d’) appeals to the Wildgrave to ‘“Erbarmen, lieber Herr, Erbarmen! / Verschont den sauern Schweiß des Armen”’ (‘“Spare the poor’s pittance [ . . . ] / Earn’d by the sweat these brows have pour’d / In scorching hour fierce July”’), his plea draws an unfeeling response from the patrician horseman: ‘“Hinweg, du Hund! [ . . . ] / Sonst hetz’ ich selbst, beim Teufel! dich”’ (‘“Away thou hound! So basely born, / Or dread the scourge’s echoing blow”’) (Bürger, 63, 65–6, 73–5; Scott, 66–8, 73–4). Later the sportsman encounters a shepherd who addresses him in equally pathetic terms: ‘“Erbarmen, Herr, Erbarmen! Laßt / Mein armes stilles Vieh in Ruh! / Bedenket, lieber Herr, hier gras’t / So mancher armen Witwe Kuh”’ (‘“O spare, thou noble Baron, spare / These herds, a widow’s little all, / These flocks, an orphan’s fleecy care”’) (Bürger, 97–100; Scott, 98–100). But once again the Baron’s reply is coldhearted almost to the point of inhumanity, making clear that he regards the rural poor as themselves little more than animals:


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‘Verwegener Hund, der du mir wehrst! Ha, daß du deiner besten Kuh Selbst um und angewachsen wärst, Und jede Vettel noch dazu! So sollt’ es baß mein Herz ergötzen, Euch stracks ins Himmelreich zu hetzen’ (Bürger, 109–14). ‘Unmanner’d dog! To stop my sport Vain were thy cant and beggar whine, Though human spirits, of thy sort, Were tenants of these carrion kine!’ (Scott, 105–8). For Bürger, the subject of the hunt carries the weight of social conflict, and it is used to deliver an impassioned indictment of the nobility’s privilege and behaviour. The ghastly supernatural apparitions, especially the ‘demonic huntsman’ and the ‘dogs of hell’, spring from the poem’s righteous indignation at the hunter’s shocking misconduct towards his pauperized tenants, and they administer a violently retributive justice ironically fitting the crime in question: having treated his social inferiors in a brutal way, the hunter has now himself become like a hunted beast. Bürger even lets an ‘awful voice of thunder’ (‘Donnerstimme’) address the earl from above, telling him that he must ‘Fleuch, Unhold, fleuch und werde jetzt / Von nun an bis in Ewigkeit, / Von Höll und Teufel selbst gehetzt’ (‘Go, hunt for ever through the wood, / For ever roam the affrighted wild’) (Bürger, 168, 175–7; Scott, 164, 169–70). This militant attack on lordly tyranny would have seemed congenial to the young Wordsworth, the ‘republican’ opposition poet, who wrote the inflammatory Salisbury Plain (1793–1794), ending it with a call upon the ‘Heroes of Truth’ to ‘uptear / Th’Oppressor dungeon from its deepest base’ and ‘rear /Resistless in your might the herculean mace / Of Reason’.49 Having in the meantime moved from London to Racedown, and later to Alfoxden, Germany, and then to his home at Grasmere, however, the Wordsworth of 1800 has also more or less renounced his youthful fervour for political reform: he now no longer numbers himself among the friends of liberty, and he no longer sees himself as a writer of polemical prose or verse. 50 Wordsworth’s revisions of Bürger are characteristically ambivalent, both enriching and impoverishing in relation to the original. In ‘The Thorn’, according to Stephen Parrish, Wordsworth ‘made endurable’ the theme of the supernatural curse that he had found in Taylor’s Bürger’s translation ‘The Lass of Fair Wone’ (1796): ‘ “The Thorn” [ . . . ]

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becomes not a poem about a woman but a poem about a man (and a tree); not a tale of horror but a psychological study; not a ballad but a dramatic monologue’ (pp. 101, 112). Mary Jacobus also applauds the deepening of understanding and ripening of intellect that she detects within Wordsworth’s poetry during these formative years: a trajectory which seems to take his art away from Godwinian rationalism and the ephemeral anti-war pamphlet-literature of the 1790s; which unlocks his true genius for observing nature and analyzing human passions; and which directs his vision ‘beyond topical issues to the permanent themes of loss, change, and mortality’ (p. 159). Viewed from a historicist angle, the problem with these positive critical assessments is not that they are wrong, but rather that they are insufficiently historical, and that they may testify to Romantic criticism’s ‘uncritical absorption in Romanticism’s own self-representations’. 51 Wordsworth, from a certain perspective, makes ‘better’ poetry out of the German sensation-ballad. But what is also striking in this case is that psychological sophistication, aesthetic finish and trans-historical validity are purchased only at the cost of a political domestication. Wordsworth gives with one hand and takes away with the other; what the new poetry gains in dramatic power, it simultaneously loses in specific social content. The weakening of Bürger’s anti-aristocratic stance is everywhere evident in ‘Hart-Leap Well’. Most revealingly Wordsworth abstains from the gesture of symbolically punishing the errant aristocrat, thus cautiously avoiding a scene which was daring enough when Scott translated it in 1796, and which would surely have antagonized the oversensitive AntiJacobin censors of 1800. Generally speaking, class-conflict is never a major issue in ‘Hart-Leap Well’. While in Wordsworth’s ballad the ‘knight’ is initially shown shouting to his ‘vassal’, this theme of social difference is not developed further in the poem. Evidently, what fuels Wordsworth’s writing is not – or no longer – condemnation of specific social practices and problems. The transformation that occurs in the transition from ‘Der Wilde Jäger’ to ‘Hart-Leap Well’, then, is not only the process by which an obscure German ballad is enhanced and refined into visionary English verse; it is also related to the process by which Continental radicalism is defused and deflected, and transmuted into food for virtuous thought. Still this revisionist interpretation, although it contains a great deal of truth, must be balanced by the countervailing insight that ‘Hart-Leap Well’ possesses a subtle critical power of its own. ‘Radicalism’ is never entirely erased from ‘Hart-Leap Well’, but rather transferred to the issue of human–animal relationships, which has a history and a politics of its own. Bürger’s main interest clearly lies not in the chase itself, but rather


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in what happens during the chase, as various human agents – the Wildgrave, the farmer, the shepherd, the hermit – come into contact and conflict. Briefly put, the baron’s most heinous crime, which exposes him to the wrath of the infernal huntsman, is not that he treats animals poorly, but rather that he treats the poor like animals. Drawing on a long tradition of eighteenth-century animalitarian philosophy and literature, however, Wordsworth moves man’s cruelty towards animals into his poem’s foreground.52 Not only does Wordsworth take a much stronger interest than Bürger in the actual ‘toils’ of the ‘poor hart’, speculating about the sound of its ‘last deep groan’ and including a vivid description of ‘the Hart, stone-dead, / With breathless nostrils stretched above the spring’ (29, 43, 77–8). Characteristically prioritizing ‘incident’ over ‘character’, Wordsworth also uses his psychological insight to analyze and criticize the hunter’s mentality. The nature and scope of Wordsworth’s reorganization of German ballad material become particularly clear in the poem’s most central passage, the long apostrophe that the triumphant Sir Walter addresses to the dead hart:

Sir Walter wiped his face and cried, ‘Till now Such sight was never seen by living eyes: Three leaps have borne him from this lofty brow, Down to the very fountain where he lies. ‘I’ll build a pleasure-house upon this spot, And a small arbour, made for rural joy; ‘Twill be the traveler’s shed, the pilgrim’s cot, A place of love for damsels that are coy. A cunning artist will I have to frame A basin for that fountain in the dell; And they who do make mention of the same From this day forth, shall call it HART-LEAP WELL. ‘And gallant brute! To make thy praises known, Another monument shall here be raised; Three several pillars, each a rough hewn stone, And planted where thy hoofs the turf have grazed. ‘And in the summer-time when days are long, I will come here with my paramour; And with the dancers, and the minstrel’s song, We will make merry in that pleasant bower.

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‘Till the foundations of the mountains fail My mansion with its arbour shall endure – The joy of them who till the fields of Swale, And them who dwell among the woods of Ure!’ (53–76).

Bürger barely mentions the question of the huntsman’s feelings, but Wordsworth brings psychological forces into play. Wordsworth’s analysis of the hunter’s motives is both subtle and penetrating, amounting to a thoroughgoing moral critique. There is no doubt that Sir Walter, like most hunters, fancies himself a nature-lover. Therefore, when the hunt is over Sir Walter refers to the stag as ‘gallant brute’. Launching into his long, self-congratulatory address, the knight in rhetorically ostentatious terms decides to honour the ‘glorious act’ and memorialize the hunt by erecting a pleasure bower at the site where it took place (38). At the same time, of course, Sir Walter pursues the stag with remarkable energy and determination, even with brutality and more than a hint of sadistic pleasure. Among other things, we are informed, he has wasted three horses and exhausted all his dogs but one in the course of the daredevil ‘rout’. Wordsworth throws Sir Walter’s lofty speech into striking perspective by immediately adding the brutally realistic lines about the ‘stone dead’ hart. The hunter’s professions of love and respect for the stag obviously militate against the fact that he has just murdered the creature whose memory he claims to cherish so much, yet this paradox never dawns on Sir Walter. In a certain attenuated sense, the theme of the English ballad is still aristocratic cruelty, but even so it is typical of Wordsworth in this period that he subdues – or at least finesses – the German ballad’s element of direct social protest and anti-aristocratic invective. Social categories are no longer primary for Wordsworth, which could be seen both as a loss and a gain. Bürger never allows his readers to forget his protagonist’s status as an aristocrat, but Wordsworth treats Sir Walter primarily as a generic representative of ‘man’ in his relationship to ‘nature’. This, at any rate, is the implication of the elaborate frame-narrative within which Wordsworth encloses the hart’s tale. In the second part of ‘HartLeap Well’, Wordsworth’s narrator meets up with an old, grey-haired shepherd to debate the meaning of the story of the hart. First, the shepherd puts forth his belief that the desolation of the spot where the edifice once stood is caused by the ‘curse’ of Sir Walter’s chase (123–44). The Wordsworthian narrator, in turn, proposes an alternative interpretation of the narrative, which preserves the shepherd’s fundamental insights but somewhat modifies his terms:


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‘Gray-headed shepherd, thou has spoken well; Small difference lies between thy creed and mine. This beast not unobserved by Nature fell; His death was mourned by sympathy divine. ‘The Being, that is in the clouds and air, That is in the deep green leaves among the groves, Maintains a deep and reverential care For them the quiet creatures whom he loves. ‘The pleasure-house is dust – behind, before, This is no common waste, no common gloom; But Nature, in due course of time, once more Shall here put on her beauty and her bloom. ‘She leaves these objects to a slow decay, That we are, and have been, may be known; But, at the coming of the milder day, These monuments shall be overgrown (161–76). Typically, Wordsworth does not seek to resolve the issues at stake – what are the implications of the hart’s tale? and what role does nature take in redressing the wrongs suffered by her creatures? – by tyrannically asserting an authorial perspective, or by arguing that the poet is ‘right’ and the shepherd ‘wrong’. The narrator and the shepherd fail to arrive at a shared interpretation of every detail of the poem’s core-narrative. What they do agree, however, is that the story primarily concerns the troubled relationship between man and nature, and this consensus in itself represents a significant change in relation to Bürger. What interests Wordsworth about Sir Walter is not his socially determined relationship to members of an inferior class (the peasantry), but humankind’s violent mistreatment of nature and the possible repercussions that this may have in the future.

Lewis’s Tales of Wonder To understand Matthew Lewis’s writing in Tales of Wonder (1801), one must first briefly return to the imbroglio following the publication and astounding popular success of Lewis’s The Monk and The Castle Spectre (1798). 53 The bulk of anti-Lewis criticism published during these years is remarkable not only for the ferociousness of its rhetoric, but also for the repetitiveness with which it singles out ‘Germanness’ as a damning feature of both The Monk and The Castle Spectre. In the advertisement to

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the first edition of The Monk, Lewis flippantly admitted a number of ‘plagiarisms’ from German, Danish and Spanish sources, adding that ‘many more may be found’, and The Castle Spectre footnotes ‘the Dream of Francis in Schiller’s Robbers, which, in my opinion, is surpassed by no vision ever related upon the Stage’.54 In the interval between these publications, J. Bell also brought out The Minister (1797), Lewis’s translation of Schiller’s Kabale und Liebe. For many critics, such evidence constituted proof positive that Lewis (who travelled widely on the Continent and spent 1792–1793 in Weimar) had not merely succumbed to Germany’s horrid mysteries, but had effectively renounced his allegiance to England and was now conspiring on behalf of nefarious foreign powers. When Walter Scott later tagged The Monk ‘a romance in the German taste’ and commemorated Lewis as ‘the person who first attempted to introduce something like the German taste into English fictitious dramatic and poetical composition’, he reiterated a commonplace of the mid- and late 1790s, although by 1830 the phrase ‘German taste’ had lost its accusatory sting and could even be used in a honorific way (‘Essay’, p. 29). In February 1797, the British Critic linked Lewis’s ‘pernicious novel’ to the ‘coarse and overcharged’ tragedies of Schiller, and added that ‘We cannot think that the English taste is likely to be improved by such importations’.55 Reviewing The Monk for the Critical Review during the same month, and using Schiller’s The Ghost-Seer (1795) as his main example, Coleridge interprets Lewis’s German borrowings from the perspective of cultural purism. Leaving the criticism of German literature to the Germans, Coleridge hails the prevalence of ‘the horrible’ and ‘the preternatural’ as ‘a favourable omen in the belles lettres of Germany’ but claims that Lewis’s illicit British importation of such ‘powerful stimulants’ renders ‘the same phaenomenon’ [sic] a corrupt and corrupting influence on ‘our countrymen’. A symptom of foreign decadence rather than native vitality, Lewis’s Anglicized German fiction and drama (here Coleridge conveniently omits mentioning his own German-inspired work in progress, the Gothic play Osorio) thus inaugurates a promiscuous mingling of opposites, exchanging ‘good sense’, ‘thought’ and ‘imagination’ for ‘fiends, incomprehensible characters, [ . . . ] shrieks, murders, and subterraneous dungeons’ (Miscellaneous Criticism, p. 70). Coleridge’s complaint is duplicated by yet another reviewer, writing for Walker’s Hibernian Magazine, who claims that Mr. Lewis’s intimacy with German literature is strongly proclaimed through the whole of the Castle Spectre. The dream of Osmond, his


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Atheism, Reginald’s sixteen years immurement, (derived, probably, from the Robbers) and the frequent appeals to Heaven, with a levity unusual to our stage, are all German. The licenser, if he had known the intention of his office, would have struck his pen across such expressions as ‘Saviours of the world’, ‘God of Heaven’, &c. (qtd. in Parreaux, p. 150). As the reference to Osmond’s ‘Atheism’ suggests, insinuating remarks about the essential Germanness of Lewis’s imagination were often accompanied by invective exposing his writing’s putatively anti-religious agenda. According to Parreaux, moral outrage about Lewis’s contemptuous treatment of the Bible had already begun to ferment when Coleridge, debating whether Lewis is ‘a Christian’ or ‘an infidel’, first uttered the fateful term ‘blasphemy’ (Miscellaneous Criticism, p. 75). ‘Blasphemy’ soon became the rallying cry of Lewis’s enemies, and the polemic culminated in the fourth dialogue of The Pursuits of Literature ( July 1797), where an incensed T. J. Mathias called upon officials of the British state legislature to take swift legal action against Lewis, whom he now maligns for having grossly mismanaged his responsibilities as a Member of Parliament: A legislator in our own parliament, a member of the House of Commons of Great Britain, an elected guardian and defender of the laws, the religion, and the good manners of the country, has neither scrupled not blushed to depict, and to publish to the world, the arts of lewd and systematic seduction, and to thrust upon the nation the most open and unqualified blasphemy against the very code and volume of our religion. And all this with his name style, and title, prefixed to the novel or romance called ‘THE MONK’.56 Coleridge first condemned the ‘impious’ character of The Monk, hinting that its author’s ‘infidelity’ was somehow derived from Schiller, but Coleridge was writing from the margins of élite society, awkwardly positioned as an anonymous ‘hired paragraph scribbler’ for the Critical Review and the Morning Post.57 When similar accusations were made by T. J. Mathias, the best-selling satirical author and Treasurer to the Queen, they carried greater weight and made a stronger impression. Ascertaining the exact nature, extent and origin of Lewis’s German and French borrowings in The Monk has proved troublesome, but what matters more in this context is that Lewis was perceived to be uncritically following outlandish fashions, and that the charge of foreignness

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was used to condense a host of other transgressions against proper taste, decorum and morality.58 The tell-tale conflation of national, political, ethical, religious and legal vocabularies at work in reviews of The Monk and The Castle Spectre lent the anti-Lewis rhetoric its apocalyptic, hysterical tone, because it enabled critics to represent Lewis not merely as a traitor to the national cause but also ipso facto as an apostate from God. Coleridge, no less than Mathias, traffics in images of conspiracy, seduction and sorcery, when he excessively dubs The Monk ‘a mormo for children, a poison for youth, and a provocative for the debauchee’, and when he histrionically professes disbelief at beholding ‘a mind [ . . . ] so deeply depraved by the habit of reading lewd and voluptuous tales, as to use even the Bible in conjuring up the spirit of uncleanness’ (Miscellaneous Criticism, pp. 374–5). Only a charmed text could possibly control its readers as The Monk threatens to do, and both Coleridge and Mathias hyperbolize the power of wicked books to mould audiences into preshaped patterns, just as they share the paranoid impulse to pin the blame for large social and cultural ills on single individuals or small bands of malcontents who can effect vast world-historical change. In the lurid counter-narrative that Lewis’s cleverest critics plot, the innocent romance-reader is figured as a potential rape victim, an Emily St Aubert or Antonia, who instead of being possessed by her legitimate owner has been led astray, and who has had her purity defiled by an illegitimate interloper. And this interloper, of course, is none other than ‘Monk’ Lewis himself, whose wholesale conversion to ‘the German taste’ aligns him with Ambrosio, the Faustian overreacher and wanton sensualist of Lewis’s own romance. Lewis had already been widely attacked for his novel’s grotesqueness, dissipation and contaminative violence, just as he must have felt socially humiliated by seeing himself (‘M. G. Lewis, Esq., M. P.’) classed with the likes of William Godwin, Mary Wollstonecraft and Mary Hays. But when he was threatened with an impending lawsuit he finally relented, and in February 1798 he published a watered-down fourth edition of his novel entitled Ambrosio; or, the Monk: A Romance [ . . . ] With Considerable Additions and Alterations. The outcry over The Monk and The Castle Spectre would pursue Lewis long into the new century, but even when he was stigmatized ‘a writer with a bad name’ Lewis did not lose his energy or slow down his frenetic work pace (Parreaux, p. 147). In fact, Lewis’s correspondence in the period immediately after The Castle Spectre shows him collaborating with Richard B. Sheridan, Mrs Jordan and Mrs Siddons on Drury Lane’s ambitious production of Kotzebue’s Pizarro (1799) even while helping Walter Scott, whom he befriended in Edinburgh in 1798,


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break into the competitive market for German translation plays, and in letters of 1798–1800 one also finds Lewis indefatigably soliciting contributions for his next collection of ‘horrible compositions’. 59 Still, Lewis’s run-in with Britain’s aesthetic and ideological arbiters must have impressed and possibly distressed him, for when he finally published the long-awaited Tales of Wonder he took considerable pains to evade another scandal and shield himself from adverse criticism. In a 1799 letter to Scott, Lewis outlines his editorial policy behind Tales of Wonder: ‘The Plan, which I propose to myself’, he wrote, ‘is to collect all the marvellous Ballads, that I can lay my hands upon, and publish them under the title of “Tales of Terror”. Antient as well as Modern, will be comprised in my design [ . . . ] a Ghost or a Witch is a sine-qua-non ingredient in all the dishes, of which I mean to compose my hobgoblin repast’ (Guthke, ‘Die Erste Nachwirkung’, pp. 275–6). The two-volume first edition of Tales of Wonder contained 60 ballads in all, and the principal contributors were Lewis himself (with sixteen ballads), Southey (with eight) and Scott (with five).60 Although some of these are subtitled ‘original’, many are more or less direct imitations, and few deviate very far from the established pattern of German balladwriting. The demonic-possession narrative popularized by Bürger’s ‘Lenore’ (featured in William Taylor’s 1796 translation) and ‘Der Wilde Jäger’ (represented by Scott’s ‘The Chase’, now retitled ‘The Wild Huntsman’) is replayed again and again by such texts as Lewis’s ‘The Grim White Woman’, Scott’s ‘Glenfinlas’ and Southey’s ‘Rudiger’. In addition, Tales of Wonder also finds room for Herder’s modernized folk ballad ‘Elver’s Hoh’, the German ‘Sir Hengist’, the Danish ballad ‘The Erl-King’s Daughter’ and the Runic (that is, Old Norse) lyrics ‘The Sword of Angantyr’ and ‘King Hacho’s Death-Song’. Tales of Terror has the additional interest that it introduces the poetry of Goethe, hitherto known simply as ‘the author of Werther’, to the British readers. Besides including his own rendition of ‘Der Fischer’ (‘The Fisherman’), Lewis worked hard to assemble a group of tales about spectral abduction, all derived from Goethe’s ballad of natural magic ‘Der Erl-König’ (translated by Lewis himself as ‘The Erl-King’), which eventually came to include Lewis’s ‘The Water-King’ and ‘The Cloud-King’, Scott’s ‘The Fire-King’ and Leyden’s ‘The Elfin-King’. The wealth of German-derived matter that fills up Tales of Wonder seems to justify Lewis’s image as ‘the chief purveyor of German material to the romantic generation’, but even while he continues to cultivate German horror-balladry’s popularity Lewis also aligns himself with a more dignified tradition of supernatural balladry. 61 Fulfilling his original

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intention to publish ballads ‘Antient as well as Modern’, Lewis intersperses among the more recent Anglo-German translations, adaptations and imitations examples of older texts with supernatural subjects. This second category of documents, which tends to be overlooked in discussions of Tales of Wonder, includes Ben Jonson’s ‘The Witches’ Song’ (1609), Dryden’s ‘Theodore and Honororia’ and ‘Dreams’ (1700), Thomas Parnell’s ‘The Hermit’ and ‘Edwin of the Green’ (1722), David Mallet’s ‘William and Margaret’ (1728), Richard Glover’s ‘Admiral Hosier’s Ghost’ (1740), William Julius Mickle’s ‘The Sorcerer’ (1762), Gray’s ‘The Fatal Sisters’ and ‘The Descent of Odin’ (1765), Lisle’s ‘Porsenna, King of Russia’ (1789), Burns’s ‘Tam O’Shanter’ (1791), as well as several other texts culled from Thomas Percy’s Reliques of Ancient English Poetry (1765) and Thomas Evans’s Old Ballads (1777). In commercial terms, Lewis’s secondary additions to Tales of Wonder could hardly have benefited the volume, for besides expanding an affordable one-volume text into an expensive two-volume edition, Lewis’s inclusion of long-familiar materials already accessible to readers in many different versions substantially diminished the text’s originality. Yet creating an effect of reassuring familiarity, in all likelihood, was precisely what Lewis intended by padding the volume with household names and standard material. Tales of Wonder appeared at a time when critics were widely lamenting the appearance of a German-derived supernaturalism and pseudo-supernaturalism that threatened to deluge British culture and displace the works of Spenser, Shakespeare and Milton with ‘ghostly stories and marvellous adventures [ . . . ] Events equally ridiculous, unconnected, and uninteresting [ . . . ] jumbled together, without method or meaning, resembling the wild ravings of a maniac’.62 But the present vogue for supernatural writing, Lewis points out, is deeply rooted in British culture and therefore cannot simply be dismissed as a foreign ‘importation’. Counterbalancing his many modern German imitations, Lewis’s eclectic choice of sources constructs an alternative genealogy – an ‘antient’ British genealogy – of supernatural poetry, and as such it also creates a different context for the interpretation of Lewis’s own tale-telling. Somewhat immodestly, Lewis implicitly likens his own taste for the marvellous to that of Jonson, Dryden and Gray, and with this comparison he denies that such predilections should automatically disqualify a writer’s works as childish, mawkish or unnatural. Lewis, then, not only anticipates critical objections to his volume and redirects attention from his very real (and much more substantial) obligations to German writers like Bürger, Schiller and Goethe; by placing himself in the august company of revered seventeenth- and eighteenth-century


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poets, antiquarians and men of letters, Lewis also attempts to make his own writing seem more legitimate: less a product of false taste and ephemeral fashion, and more an organic outgrowth of the genuine tradition of masculine English supernaturalism. With this in mind, Lewis’s decision to reprint a poem like Richard Glover’s ‘Admiral Hosier’s Ghost’ takes on a special significance. In this often-anthologized eighteenth-century classic, written after a successful British naval campaign in the West Indies, the ghost of Admiral Francis Hosier (1673–1727) appears before his successor Admiral Edward Vernon (1684–1757), who has just taken Porto Bello from the Spanish. Along with 4000 of his men, Hosier had succumbed to yellow fever during an ill-fated blockade in the same vicinity in 1726–1727, and in this dramatic monologue he contrasts his own humiliating failure with Vernon’s success and bitterly wishes that he had disobeyed his orders, which he now believes prevented him from doing his patriotic duty: ‘Thus, like thee, proud Spain dismaying, And her galleons leading home, Though condemned for disobeying, I had met a traitor’s doom, To have fallen, my country crying He has played an English part; Had been better far than dying Of a grieved and broken heart.’ (57–64). ‘Hosier’s Ghost’ contains its share of macabre imagery – the Admiral appears surrounded by ‘a sad troop of ghosts’ all ‘rising from their wat’ry grave’ in ‘dreary hammocks shrouded’ – but in this poem, at least, the wish to celebrate naval heroism overrides the desire to provide sensational titillation (12–13). Departing from his own ‘sad story’, Hosier concludes his speech by urging Vernon to continue his campaign against ‘your country’s foes’: ‘ “When your patriot friends you see, / Think on vengeance for my ruin, / And for England sham’d in me’ (67, 69–72). With its elevated diction and serious discussion of English patriotism, the poem seems to fit awkwardly within Lewis’s ‘hobgoblin repast’, but to explain its presence one must remember that during 1801–1802 both of Lewis’s principal collaborators moved closer to Anti-Jacobinism, with Scott taking on new responsibilities as quartermaster for the Edinburgh Voluntary Light Horse, and with Southey returning from Portugal confused and depressed about recent political developments on the Continent. 63 One must also recall that only a few years earlier Lewis, the son of a wealthy

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slave-owner and Deputy Secretary of War, was widely suspected of and almost publicly indicted for flirting with un-English views. Finally, Nelson’s fleet’s recent victories at Camperdown (1797) and in the battles of the Nile (1799) and Copenhagen (1801) had lent naval subjects a new relevance and a new popularity especially within the theatre, where ‘nautical melodrama’ temporarily became ‘the drama of England’s postNapoleonic “cold war” against revolution and reform’. 64 Viewed in a historical context, Lewis’s decision to include Admiral Hosier in his ranks of literary spectres seems too well-timed and too well-considered to be coincidental. Not only does this act of necromancy introduce yet another subject – naval warfare – which had already proven its popularity with the turn-of the reading public; insofar as it resurrects one of literary history’s most patriotic ghosts, the reprinting of ‘Hosier’s Ghost’ also allows Lewis to correct the public impression of himself as (in Lewis’s own words about William Godwin) ‘unluckily [ . . . ] half a Democrat’, thus warding off hostile criticism avant la lettre, and repositioning the author of The Monk as a mature British writer with a due sense of tradition and a firm commitment to the national cause (qtd. in Peck, A Life, p. 213). Tales of Wonder owes a greater and more immediate debt to Sturm und Drang than either The Monk or The Castle Spectre. But while in his previous writings Lewis frankly owned and even inflated his German debts, Tales of Wonder is marked by its author’s anxious consciousness of his burdensome reputation as ‘a successful imitator of the Germans’, and by his wish to distance himself from the excessive effects that he also continues to utilize (Scott, ‘Essay’, p. 34). Most obviously, Lewis in Tales of Wonder attempts to erase the controversy over The Monk by introducing an element of parody into Gothic balladry. Like The Monk and The Castle Spectre, Tales of Wonder elicited several more or less successful parodies, and of these Tales of Terror (1802) was later misattributed to Lewis himself.65 The inability to keep the two collections apart is understandable, for while much of the writing in Tales of Terror could easily have come from Lewis’s own hand, Tales of Wonder in turn anticipates such responses by relentlessly burlesquing itself. Lewis’s poetry demystifies the typical Bürger-narrative by defamiliarizing or ‘laying bare’ its devices, and it mimics both the Gothic ballad’s content and form.66 Lewis’s technique of exposure through pointed distortion is best exemplified by the moral exhortations with which Lewis concludes practically all his ballads. Thus, at the end of Lewis’s Danish ballad ‘The Water King’, the narrator addresses his readership with seeming earnestness:


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Warned by this tale, ye damsels fair, To whom you give your love beware! Believe not every handsome knight, And dance not with the Water-Sprite! (77–80). Lewis’s speaker observes the rule that he should attempt to deduce a moral from the preceding tale, but in this case the moral sounds hollow because the specificity of the advice – ‘dance not with the Water-Sprite!’ – makes the gesture virtually meaningless. The same is true of ‘The Gay Gold Ring’, which ends with a similar address to ‘damsels’: Damsels! Damsels! mark aright The doleful tale I sing! Keep your vows, and heed your plight, And go to no warrior’s tent by night, To ask for a gay gold ring (206–10). The blunt moral enforced here repeats the final injunction of Bürger’s ‘Lenore’, but once again the narrator’s extreme literal-mindedness ruins the effect: it is impossible to imagine how the advice conveyed could ever be of use to the reader. The resulting sense of anticlimax is even more pronounced in another of Lewis’s productions, ‘The Grim White Woman’: If you bid me, fair damsels, my moral rehearse, It is, that young ladies ought never to curse; For no one will think her well-bred, or polite, Who devotes little babes to Grim Women in White (229–32). With nonsensical endings such as these, Lewis mocks the moralizing stance of the typical Gothic balladeer, who feels compelled to postulate that his writing provides more than entertainment for idle hours. The assertion that supernatural verse could or should influence its readers and carry serious moral messages was always tenuous, but Lewis’s versions make the claim seem patently preposterous. While many of the poems included in Tales of Wonder teeter between seriousness and sarcasm, the collection also contains a number of texts explicitly identified as ‘parody’ or ‘burlesque’. The best-known parody of Tales of Wonder, ‘Giles Jollup the Grave, and Brown Sally Green’, targets

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not only Lewis’s own ‘Alonzo the Brave and the Fair Imogene’ but also that ballad’s German prototype, Bürger’s ‘Lenore’: A Doctor so prim and a sempstress so tight Hob-nobb’d in some right marasquin; They suck’d up the cordial with truest delight: Giles Jollup the Grave was just five feet in height And four feet the brown Sally Green (1–5). The extreme tastelessness of the language of ‘Giles Jollup’, which is dominated throughout by colloquialisms (‘He caught her while tipsy’) exclamations (‘Adzooks!’) and various kinds of non sequitur (‘The potboys ran in, and the pot-boys ran out’), deliberately satirizes Bürger’s wellknown stylistic attempts to approximate poetic discourse and everyday speech (30, 54, 59). According to one of Bürger’s first translators, William Taylor of Norwich, ‘Bürger is everywhere distinguished for manly sentiments and force of style. His extraordinary powers of language are founded on a rejection of the conventional phraseology of regular poetry, in favour of popular forms of expression, caught by the listening artist from the voice of agitated nature’ (Taylor, ‘Some Account’, p. 118). Lewis’s parody, however, pokes fun at the Romantic yearning for the primitive, by showing how easily pathos descends into bathos and how readily simplicity gives way to vulgarity. In addition to mocking the conversational German ballad-style, Lewis’s burlesque plays on, and thereby ridicules, Bürger’s narrative trick of exposing ordinary middle-class characters to bizarre supernatural incidents. In his two short essays ‘From Daniel Wunderlich’s Book’ (‘Aus Daniel Wunderlichs Buch’) (1776) and ‘Of Popularity in Poetry’ (‘Von der Popularität der Poesie’) (1778), Bürger faults contemporary poets for alienating common readers with redundant archaism and obsolete erudition. ‘All poetry must be popular [‘volksmäßig’]’, declares Bürger in ‘Of Popularity’, ‘for that is the seal of its perfection’ (Sämtliche Werke, iii, 20). True poetry should be rooted in the soil and in the folk, which means that poets should turn from long-dead heroes in faraway places and reorient themselves towards their immediate social reality – the ‘peasants, shepherds, hunters, miners, journeymen, boilermen, hatchel carriers, mariners, teamsters, trollops, Tyrolians and Tyroiliennes’ who make up the bustling commercial culture of modern Germany (iii, 12). In ‘Giles Jollup’ the female heroine fails to control her impulses and honour her commitments to her betrothed, and in consequence of her infidelity she is carried away from her wedding-feast by a ghastly


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demon-lover. Lewis, however, sets his far-fetched ghost-story in a recognizable lower middle-class urban environment, amidst doctors, sempstresses, brewers and dustmen who are all mired in the crudest sensualism. Giles Jollup’s spectral return seems laughable not merely because he (like Sally Green) is a grotesquely deformed dwarf, but also because of the abundant references to eating, drinking and digesting with which Lewis fills the poem. The Gothic belief in a disembodied spiritual state works against the extreme coarseness of the characters, the narrator and the plot. Hence, when Giles Jollup appears at Sally Green’s wedding, to the brewer his appearance is still grotesquely physical: His wig was turn’d forwards, and short was his height; His apron was dirty to view: The women (oh! wondrous) were hush’d at his sight: The cats, as they eyed him, drew back (well they might), For his body was pea-green and blue! (42–6). Virtually everything in ‘Giles Jollup’ revolves around the consumption of food. Proceeding with mindless persistency, the speaker insists on enumerating all the items on the menu – strong beer, roast beef and fried pudding – enjoyed by the wedding-guests. And when Giles Jollup finally sets about punishing his errant bride, he does so by fulfilling his previous vow to ‘physic’ her with rhubarb ‘and send her well dosed to the grave’ (21, 67). Widening the gap between supernatural narrative and naturalistic setting is the method applied by Lewis in all his parodies. For instance, Lewis’s ‘The Sailor’s Tale’ relates another meeting between the living and the dead, but this time the encounter takes place onboard a ship, the ‘Lovely Nan’, and the ghost in question is that of Jack Tackle, ‘a ghastly form [ . . . ] in dripping trowsers rigg’d’ (7). In this ballad, even the Devil (‘Old Nick’) speaks in nautical slang: ‘ “You lubber, make your will, and dam’me, downwards steer”’ (13, 16). Proceeding in a very similar way, ‘The Cinder King’, which Lewis claims to have received anonymously, travesties the folk-poetry of Goethe’s ‘The Erl-King’ and its many spin-offs, by reducing it to a domestic erotic intrigue. The uncanny power of Goethe’s ballad stems from the way in which the Erl-King and his elfish daughter appear uninvited, and from the fact that they remain invisible to anyone except the father’s son. In Lewis’s rewriting, however, the demon has a specific and ludicrous appearance, and he is consciously invoked by the scullery-maid Betty, ‘who saw the

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false tailor, Bob Scott / Lead a bride to the altar; which bride she was not’ (5–6). The Romantic animism of Goethe’s poem is further offset by the trivial surroundings of the conjuring scene (‘Now spent tallowcandle-grease fattened the soil / And the blue-burning lamp had half wasted its oil’), and by the profane nature of the substance whence the cinder-king finally emerges: Then the jack fell a-going as if one should sup, Then the earth rocked as though it would swallow one up; With fuel from hell, a strange coal-scuttle came, And a self-handled poker made fearful the flame. A cinder shot from it, of size to amaze, With a bounce, such as Betty ne’er heard in her days, Thrice, serpent-like, hissed, as its heat fled away, And lo! something dark in a vast coffin lay (17–24). The elusive wit of this parody, as of ‘Giles Jollup’ and ‘The Sailor’s Tale’, consists in its incongruous mixture of the high and the low, the sublime and the vulgar, the supernatural and the natural, but according to Lewis this discrepancy already lies implicit in ‘serious’ Gothic verse. The parody debunks the intrusion of quotidian details into melodramatic action, but again it is the German originals – particularly ‘Lenore’ – that provide the archetype and point the way. Containing both too much and too little realism, Lewis intimates, Bürger’s and Goethe’s ballads violate proper taste in various inchoate ways. Such poetry perpetuates superstitious delusions even while it reduces human life to the level of base bodily functions. Lewis’s fondness for whimsical self-denial has been viewed (positively) as pre-postmodern ‘sporting with irresolution, reversal and paradox’ and (negatively) as ‘flippancy and indifference towards all literary activity’, but one should not discount a certain strategic defensiveness on Lewis’s part.67 Linda Hutcheon’s and Margaret A. Rose’s complementary accounts of ‘double-coded’ parody enable us to understand how Lewis uses burlesque to inscribe signs of critical distance towards the preformed literary materials that he also continues to refunction.68 The parodies of Tales of Wonder perform the same disarming manoeuvre as Lewis’s preface to the Gothic play Adelmorn, the Outlaw, which he published during the same year. In this document Lewis briefly recurs to the ‘uncandid criticism, unmitigated censure, and exaggerating misrepresentation’ that greeted The Monk, and he imagines the objections likely


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to be made by his critics to his new composition: that ‘“The Outlaw” is insufferably stupid, absurd, uninteresting’; that ‘Sigismond’s speech in the third act [ . . ] is the sentiment of a Jacobin’; that another scene in the third act ‘is intended to make a mockery of the Ascension’; and finally that ‘“The Outlaw” is written by the author of “The Monk”; therefore it must be immoral and irreligious’. 69 To defend his reputation and defuse such ‘charges equally discordant with my principles, and insulting to my understanding’, Lewis then presents Adelmorn as a deliberately unambitious play, rife with conscious and unconscious ‘imperfections’, which aims to ‘satisfy the thirst of the most insatiable swallower of wonders’ and simultaneously send up the predominant taste for ‘nonsense’ by ‘affect[ing] the risible muscles of the audience’ (pp. ii-iii, ix). By interspersing serious Gothic verse with mock-Gothic distortions throughout Tales of Wonder, and by generally writing poetry that constantly verges on parody, Lewis similarly assures his readers and critics that he is fully conscious of the criticisms brought against Bürger and Goethe, that he shares some if not all of these misgivings, and that his invocation of such writers is always tongue-in-cheek. It has often been observed that etymologically ‘parodia’ can mean both ‘against’ and ‘beside’ (Rose, p. 29). The parodist always remains ambivalently dependent on and independent of the object of its criticism, which is simultaneously reconstructed and deconstructed, recuperated as well as revised. Exploiting this intrinsic doubleness, Lewis’s parodies construct a new, self-conscious version of the Gothic ballad, which signals its author’s awareness of the genre’s moral and intellectual weaknesses, and which undermines its claims to aesthetic value or ethical seriousness, even as it continues to reproduce the same conventions that it lampoons. Tales of Wonder is duplicitous and almost schizophrenic in the way that it combines multiple irreconcilable attitudes towards ballad supernaturalism. It is as though Lewis alternates between two authorial subject-positions: a ‘German’ position that simply allows the reader to indulge her gluttonous appetite for supernatural marvels and an ‘English’ position that seeks to educate the reader and make her realize the errors of her ways. Lewis’s posthumous reputation among Romantic writers and critics owes much to a letter sent from Coleridge to Wordsworth in late January 1798, a month after The Castle Spectre had begun its triumphant run at Drury Lane: I have just read the Castle Spectre – & shall bring it home with me. I will begin with it’s [sic] defects, in order that my ‘But’ may have a charitable transition. 1. Language – 2. Character. 3. Passion. 4. Sentiment.

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5. Conduct – 1. [ . . . ] There are no felicities [of language] in the humorous passages; and in the serious ones it is Schiller Lewis-ized – i.e., a flat, flabby, unimaginative Bombast oddly sprinkled with colloquialisms. [ . . . ] 2. No character at all. [ . . . ] [3.] positively, not one line that marks even a superficial knowledge of human feelings. [ . . . ] [4.] Jokes that would have stunk, had they been fresh; and alas! they have the very saeva mephitis of antiquity on them. – BUT – 5. – the Conduct of the Piece is, I think, good. [ . . . ] This Play proves how accurately you conjectured theatric merit. The merit of the Castle Spectre consists wholly in it’s situations. These are all borrowed, and all absolutely pantomimical; but they are admirably managed for stage effect [ . . . ] the play is a mere patchwork of plagiarisms – but they are very well worked up, & for stage effect make an excellent whole. [ . . . ] This play struck me with utter hopelessness – it would be [easy] to produce these situations (Collected Letters, i, 378–9). Coleridge’s dismantling of Lewis uncannily anticipates Thomas De Quincey’s later claim that Coleridge’s own writings were grounded in ‘verbatim translation[s]’ from Schelling and other German authors, ‘a barefaced plagiarism, which could in prudence have been risked only by relying too much upon the slight knowledge of German literature in this country’. 70 Throughout his critical essays, lectures and letters, Coleridge always distinguished between ‘copying’ and ‘imitation’, defending the author’s right to participate in the literary tradition by annexing source matter from another author, as long as this annexing was informed by authorial purposiveness and judiciousness.71 In a lecture on English literature, Coleridge depicts Milton as a model example of ‘the free imitator, who seizes with a strong hand whatever he wants or wishes for his own purpose and justifies the seizure by the improvement of the material or the superiority of the purpose to which it is applied’ (Lectures, i, 476). Even master-poets do not create ex nihilo, and Coleridge was quite willing to accept simulation, if carried out imaginatively, as an acceptable, time-honoured mode of aesthetic composition. Most striking in this respect, perhaps, is the surprisingly philosophical attitude that Coleridge took towards what he and Wordsworth saw as Walter Scott’s borrowing from ‘Christabel’ and ‘Hart-Leap Well’: He who can catch the Spirit of an original has it already. It will not [be] by the original spirit itself. This is to be found neither in a Tale however interesting, which is but the Canvass, no nor yet in the Fancy or the Imagery – which are but Forms & Colors – it is a subtle


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Spirit, all in each part, reconciling & unifying all – Passion and Imagination are it’s most appropriate names; but even these say little – for it must be not merely Passion but poetic Passion, poetic Imagination. Here Coleridge once again distinguishes between genuine ‘imitation’ and its disreputable versions: ‘artifices [ . . . ] theft[s], transpositions, dilutions, substitutions [ . . . ]&c &c’. Whether or not Scott has borrowed from ‘Christabel’ (and everything indicates that he has) in fact matters very little, for The Lay of the Last Minstrel remains unmistakably his poem, stamped by his unique genius (Collected Letters, iii, 361). Conversely, in the 1798 letter to Wordsworth, Coleridge categorizes Lewis by systematically refuting his claim to ‘poetic passion’ and ‘poetic Imagination’, and by confining his writing to a sub-category of purely conventional discourse. Critical appropriations, Coleridge implies, should seek to transcend the lowly origins of commonplace stories and add intellectual substance to ‘pantomimical [ . . . ] situations’. Presumably Coleridge’s and Wordsworth’s own experiments with the ‘romantic & wild & somewhat terrible’ – including Wordsworth’s The Borderers (1796) and Coleridge’s Osorio (1797) – would fall within this higher category (Collected Letters, i, 318). Yet the thrust of Coleridge’s phrase ‘Schiller Lewis-ized’ is precisely that Lewis has undertaken no such intelligent reshaping of his material, and that the ‘situations’ of The Castle Spectre are ‘all borrowed’. Amputated of satiric impulse, devoid of wit and lacking in any sense of overall purpose, Lewis’s use of German source-texts yields a text that is subject-, character- and intention-less: ‘a mere patchwork of plagiarisms’. Coleridge’s caricature of Lewis as an uncritical copyist of foreign conventions was echoed by other writers who shared Coleridge’s aesthetic priorities. In re-presenting and re-collecting his career trajectory for public consumption and critical inspection, Walter Scott frequently contrasted himself with the author of The Monk. Referring to Lewis in his 1825 annotations to Lord Byron’s diary, Scott reminisces that Mat had queerish eyes; they projected like those of some insects, and were flattish on the orbit. His person was extremely small and boyish – he was indeed the least man I ever saw, to be strictly well and neatly made [ . . . ]. This boyishness went through life with him. He was a child, and a spoiled child, but a child of high imagination; and so he wasted himself on ghost-stories and German romances.72

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As the conflation of Lewis’s mental and physical ‘boyishness’ with his taste for ‘German romances’ suggests, Scott consistently presents Lewis as a figure who, although vital to Scott’s initial efforts in literary translation and transliteration, is antithetical to his adult identity as a legitimate author of original compositions. Although he began writing under Lewis’s tutelage, fraternizing with outré and déclassé forms of romance and drama, Scott soon weaned himself from his sophomoric trifling with scandalous novelties, and as he ceased Gothicizing he turned instead towards the healthier springs of his native clime: Border balladry, Buccleuch family legend, different kinds of antiquarian lore, and first and foremost the history of his beloved Scotland. Already when discussing the drawn-out composition and publication of Tales of Wonder in a 1801 series of letters, Scott appears eager to control public impressions about his own quite substantial role in this process, seeking now to absolve himself from what has become, in the meantime, an onerous connection with ‘Lewis’s stock of horribles’.73 ‘You are very flattering in your approbation of the trifles which I gave Lewis’, he writes to George Ellis, shrewdly conveying the sense that he has bestowed his favours upon Lewis rather than vice versa: ‘I hope my London friends understand that I have no concern in the publication except that of these gratuitous contributions’ (xii, 177). In July 1801, Scott writes to Dr Curie declaring his newly developed scepticism about the role of ghosts in literature: ‘I think that the Marvellous in poetry is ill-timed and disgusting when not managed with moderation and ingrafted upon some circumstance of popular tradition or belief which can give even to improbability an air of something like probability’ (i, 121). Then, in another letter to Ellis, later the same year, Scott attempts to drive a wedge between his present and his past selves, decisively severing the erstwhile habitué of German immoderacy and intemperance from the mature and respectable author who has been re-accommodated, by the beneficent influence of Joanna Baillie’s Plays on the Passions (1798), to the permanent forms of legitimate British culture:

I am glad that Mrs. Ellis and you have derived any amusement from the House of Aspen [ . . . ] . At one time I certainly thought, with my friends, that it might have ranked well enough by the side of the Castle Spectre, Bluebeard, and the other drum and trumpet exhibitions of the day; but the Plays of the Passions have put me entirely out of conceit with my Germanized brat; and should I ever again attempt


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dramatic composition, I would endeavour after the genuine old English model (i, 124). To a considerable extent, Scott’s construction of his own authorial persona in terms of maturity, manliness and critical intelligence depends on denying that Lewis ever possessed any of the same qualities. According to the script of this künstlerroman, Scott’s dwelling with his friend ‘Mat’ in ‘the enchanted land of German faëry and diablerie’ comes to symbolize the period of foolhardy audacity that necessarily precedes the turn to higher and greater things, whereas Lewis remained a Germanmad ‘boy’ who ‘wasted’ himself on the same intoxicating ‘ghost-stories’ that engrossed him during his earliest adolescence (‘Essay’, p. 34). The Romantics’ persistent attempts to exile Lewis from the visionary company of proper writers, however, appears problematic in the light of the consanguinity that connects Lewis’s late 1790s ballad-verse with Wordsworth’s, Scott’s and Coleridge’s. I have chosen to dwell on Lewis’s contributions to Tales of Wonder because they have so often been used, both by Lewis’s contemporaries and by subsequent critics, to illustrate an unironic, unintelligent and deeply un-Romantic attitude towards German Schauerromantik, which contrasts unfavourably with Wordsworth’s and Coleridge’s more sophisticated intertextual transactions. 74 Yet the arguments that Lewis had no critical distance towards the conventional paraphernalia that he used, and that he made his career by mechanically plagiarizing foreign styles, simplify a more complex situation and therefore need to be rethought. Long seen as the work of a mindless compositor, Tales of Wonder vividly manifests both the wariness with which British poets, both ‘Gothic’ and ‘Romantic’, approached Bürger’s verse, and the complex negotiations by which they sought to make both him and themselves more acceptable while also wooing Bürger’s many readers within the literary marketplace. At the turn of the nineteenth century, Sturm und Drang offered a repertoire of genres, tropes and conventions which could be used to considerable critical and commercial success, but which must also be used cautiously. Like Wordsworth, Coleridge, Scott and Stanley, but even more frequently than any of them, Lewis throughout his writing career (re)turned to German, Gothic and other popular romance forms. Even Lewis’s last popular success, The Bravo of Venice (1804), reworks Johann Heinrich Zschokke’s Abellino der große Bandit (1794), but in the aftermath of The Monk and The Castle Spectre Lewis’s appropriations

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became increasingly knowing and circumspect. Hence, in the preface to The Bravo of Venice Lewis appears eager to separate his own taste from the German author’s: I must confess, that in making this translation I have taken some liberties with the original. Everything that relates to Monaldeschi (a personage who does not exist in the German romance) and the whole of the concluding chapter (with the exception of a very few sentences) have been added by myself. I have also omitted a song, supposed to be sung by Rosabella, in the fourth chapter of the third book, the merit of which I could not discover; and several passages which seemed to me too harsh for the taste of English readers, have been either left out entirely, or considerably softened down. However, where the expressions appeared to be either characteristic of the author’s style, or of the character by whom they were supposed to be used, I did not think myself at liberty to alter them; I have there suffered Parozzi’s speech in the third book, about ‘the devil’s grandmother’, as well as several others, to remain, though I request not to be supposed to have retained them in compliment to my own taste.75 That Lewis sought to adapt his balladizing to the post-revolutionary climate is clear from the scrupulousness with which he integrated ‘German’ and ‘English’ viewpoints into Tales of Wonder, and from the care he took to signal ‘both a critical and an admiring attitude to his “target” or “model”’ (Rose, p. 35). Also, that Lewis was distraught at the continuing widespread apprehension of him as a Europeanized ‘plagiarist’ who inclined towards Jacobinical opinions and cared nothing about his country’s welfare is evident from the contemporary preface to Adelmorn, the Outlaw. Thus, while it is apt to say that Romantic writers involved themselves with German literature more consistently and intimately than they cared to admit to themselves or their public, it is conversely true that Lewis even in his most obviously German-inspired poems deploys popular conventions in conflicted and mediated ways that sometimes remind us of writers like Wordsworth and Coleridge. Lewis’s stance towards the German ballad, drama and romance was and remained ambivalent, revitalizing and self-conscious, and for lack of a better term such an attitude could easily be described as ‘Romantic’.

3 ‘Il Est Devenue Classique en Angleterre’: Some Versions of Romantic (Anti-)Pastoral

Although the canonical Romantics generally eschewed labelling their own works ‘pastoral’, the concept has remained central to the critical understanding of Romanticism. The scholarship primarily responsible for reviving discussion about pastoral, beginning with the pioneering work of Raymond Williams, extended the term to cover all writing that celebrates the ethos of rurality in contrast to the ethos of the city, using historical evidence to expose pastoral’s erasures, blind spots and inconsistencies. According to Williams, the persistence of pastoral denotes a lamentable failure of the sympathetic imagination on the part of those predominantly middle-class writers who resist modernization and salute the healthiness of natural living as an antidote to urban moral decadence. Urbanized outsiders to the countryside whose values they purport to champion, such writers have generally despaired of representing the real exigencies of rural living, instead reduplicating comforting clichés – ‘Arcadia’, ‘the Golden Ages’, ‘Old England’, ‘the Organic Society’ – that ahistorically fix rustic life as the enduring repository of positive value. 1 Thus, for Williams and his many followers, the most serious and oftenrepeated accusation becomes the claim that pastoral offers a simplified celebration of country pleasure, and that the pastoralist’s idealized images of retreat and return tend to cover up and even tacitly endorse the various social injustices happening in the country, such as the enclosures of the commons and the consequent proletarianization of English rural workers under seventeenth- and eighteenth-century agricultural capitalism. 2 Yet the claims that pastoral inevitably simplifies real life, and that such simplifications tend to eternalize oppressive social conditions, are themselves vulnerable to accusations of simplifying the pastoral mode’s 95

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ideological flexibility and ambiguity. In contrast to the cultural materialists’ somewhat disillusioned view of pastoral, recent revisionists have noted that establishment figures (like Edmund Burke) and enemies of the status quo (like Thomas Paine) alike professed to love all living creatures, and that both revolutionists and anti-revolutionists deployed organicist rhetoric to make their arguments appealing.3 A pastoral poet like John Clare, for example, manifests an awareness of interdependency and interconnectedness that may easily be recognized, in today’s environmentally conscious climate, as a ‘radical’ gesture.4 Centring on man’s harmonious existence in nature surely need not result in misanthropic yearning or escapist turning away from the world into selfabsorbed reverie.5 On the contrary, pastoral’s insistence on tying man back to the environment from which he has exiled himself could constitute a prerequisite for a social reformation potentially more disruptive, forward-looking and far-reaching than the enfranchisement of women or the freeing of slaves. In urging a more natural way of life, the notion of ‘Arcadia’ can be used not only to idealize the past but also to effect a release from the prison house of history, for ‘to the extent that pastoral represents an idealization, it must also imply a better future conceived in the language of the present’ (Gifford, p. 35). Literary critics and cultural historians have carefully documented British Romantic writers’ receptiveness to pastoral, but here I want to choose a somewhat different strategy and focus on the widely shared but mostly neglected British resistance to certain kinds of European pastoral writing. One useful index of Romantic pastoral’s ‘oppositional’ or ‘counterinstitutional’ potential is the amount of anti-pastoral discourse that it called forth, for if the emergence of Romanticism signalled a revivification of pastoral it also witnessed a flourishing of revisionist writing designed to counter the genre’s claims with a series of counterclaims (Buell, p. 50). The tradition of anti-pastoral, defined as writing that ‘challenges, refutes, and exposes the fallacies underlying the pastoral mode’, can be understood as a form of mimicry (Walter Raleigh’s ‘The Nymph’s Reply to the Shepherd’ being the classic example) that employs the conventions of pastoral to delegitimize its suppositions, and oftentimes pastoral and anti-pastoral impulses coexist within the same work.6 A strong current in early modern writers like Spenser, Shakespeare and Milton, anti-pastoral was revitalized during the Romantic period, when some of the most lurid invectives, such as Richard Mant’s Simpliciad (1808), aimed precisely to lampoon the cult of simplicity and satirize contemporary writers’ assertion that it was possible and desirable to approximate ‘nature’.7

Some Versions of Romantic (Anti-)Pastoral

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In this chapter, I use the dialectic of pastoral and anti-pastoral to discuss some significant instances in the English reception and appropriation of the Romantic period’s perhaps most controversial example of ‘future-oriented’ and ‘hope-instilling’ pastoral, Jacques Henri Bernardin de Saint-Pierre’s Paul et Virginie (1788) (Metzger, p. 23). Classified by its author as ‘this species of pastoral’ (‘cette espèce de pastorale’), extravagantly praised and translated into at least a dozen different languages within a few years of its appearance, and equally extravagantly excoriated as a prime specimen of libertinism and immorality, Paul et Virginie became one of the few works capable of rivalling Saint-Pierre’s mentor Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s La Nouvelle Héloïse, not only in France but throughout Europe. 8 Paul et Virginie intervenes in various debates and draws on numerous discourses popular during the pre-Revolutionary and Revolutionary periods. Combining political liberalism and abolitionism with philosophical holism and organicism, the novel urges the necessity not merely of reforming ancien régime societies, but also of reconsidering the conditions under which human beings interact with other living organisms – a dual focus that makes Paul et Virginie a prime example of the ‘ecological’ or ‘ecosocial’ Romantic orientation. Whereas pre-revolutionary France provided a fertile climate for coupling the rights of man with the rights of nature, this project was obviously more controversial in post-revolutionary Britain. Paul et Virginie produced among its English respondents a characteristic mixture of desire and anxiety, and to a considerable extent this ambivalence cut across ideological dividing lines. Paul et Virginie, in other words, intimidated both friends and enemies of the progressive cause. Like other forbidden bestsellers imported from abroad, the novel was taken up by a number of writers with more or less pronounced conservative views, who attempted to harness the novel’s popularity to the establishment war against dissent. At the same time, while it is true that Paul et Virginie also elicited more sympathetic literary responses from British centrist, left-wing and avantgarde writers, it is far from obvious that even the most stalwart ‘Jacobins’ were able or willing to embrace Saint-Pierre’s pastoral utopianism wholeheartedly. What concerns me here, then, is the ideological agendas and aesthetic payoffs of such appropriations, and especially the ways in which British writers of different political persuasions registered – and contested – Saint-Pierre’s blurring of the boundary-line between nature and culture, and the methods whereby they fitted his narrative to a different national, social and ideological situation. My specific interest, in other words, lies not only with how Paul et Virginie used pastoral conventions to unsettle time-worn conceptions of human–human and

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human–nature relations, but also with the ways in which other writers – specifically British writers – used (anti-)pastoral techniques to occupy the French novel’s territory and qualify its content.

Saint-Pierre’s Paul et Virginie Set on Mauritius in the early eighteenth century, and drawing extensively on Saint-Pierre’s own experiences as a colonial administrator, Paul et Virginie follows the fortunes of two generations of emigrants. 9 Virginie’s mother, the aristocratic Madame de la Tour, had come to the Île de France with her husband because her family had opposed their marriage, but Monsieur le Noir died of a tropical disease before the novel begins. Paul’s mother Marguerite was ‘born in Brittany into a simple peasant family who loved her dearly’, but has been seduced and abandoned by her noble lover. 10 Accompanied by two African slaves the two women seek out a remote ‘asylum’, where they settle into a life based on subsistence-farming and wool-spinning: ‘Between themselves there was a bond of common need; the injuries they had suffered were of nearly the same kind. With one another they used the tender names of friend, companion and sister; they had but one will, one interest, one table. Everything was shared between them’ (p. 45). Having borne Paul and Virginie, the affectionate mothers decide to raise their children as brother and sister, and sometimes the two infants ‘were exchanged at the breast by the two friends who had given them life’ (p. 46). Paul and Virginie grow up sheltered by nature and exempt from the entanglements of civilized life, but the fragile idyll is too perfect to last. Class differences and status anxieties, exacerbated by the uncertainties of the capitalist market economy, reassert themselves when Virginie returns to France, hoping to gain a large inheritance that will allow her to return to the island and marry Paul. Virginie’s rich great-aunt has other plans for her niece, however, and when Virginie refuses to marry an aristocrat of her aunt’s choice she is cruelly dismissed and dies in a shipwreck on her way back to Mauritius. Paul survives her only by two months, and within another month both Marguerite and Madame de la Tour follow their children to the grave. This rather sorrowful conclusion is somewhat mitigated by the ending, which postulates the persistence of Paul and Virginie – not merely in the collective mind of the islanders, who bestow ‘names to some parts of this island which will perpetuate the memory of Virginia’s loss’, but also in the novel that makes them cultural icons and ensures them an enduring afterlife (p. 136). In the sentimental economy of identification that Saint-Pierre proposes to his readers,


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perusing Paul et Virginie and pondering the characters’ fates function as ways of recollecting and reawakening the ‘natural’ virtues for which the unhappy lovers stood.11 During the 1780s, Saint-Pierre worked on a prose epic entitled L’Arcadie, and in the preface to the 1788 edition of Paul et Virginie he admits wishing to become the Virgil or Theocritus of the tropics (p. 37). The conventions of the classical pastoral are evoked when Saint-Pierre quotes from Virgil’s Eclogues and Horace’s Odes, and when he lets his characters dress up as shepherds and perform a bucolic pantomime representing ‘the happiness of rustic life’ (p. 67). Going a step further, Saint-Pierre at one point characterizes the French colonists’ life as one of prelapsarian plenitude: ‘so must our first parents have appeared in the garden of Eden when, coming from the hands of God, they saw each other and drew near and talked for the first time as brother and sister; Virginie, modest, trusting and mild like Eve, and Paul, another Adam, having the statute of a man and the simplicity of a child’ (p. 71). Such similies were à la mode in French literature of the 1780s, but Saint-Pierre lends his idyll a historical and geographic specificity lacking in most rococo pastoralism. 12 Paul et Virginie has previously been classified as ‘non-political’ and ‘harmless’ entertainment, and on one level the novel appears simply to idealize childhood and bemoan the onset of adulthood, which uproots Paul and Virginie and robs them of their primal innocence. 13 Viewed in a different optique, though, the novel takes on the shape of what Greg Garrard, coining an oxymoronic-sounding phrase, labels ‘radical pastoral’. Published on the eve of the Revolution, by a writer known for his liberal sympathies and his friendship with Rousseau, Paul et Virginie most effectively assaults aristocratic ideology by disaffiliating inherited social status from innate moral merit, and by insisting on the ethical superiority of basely born characters. Both Marguerite’s gentleman seducer and Virginie’s Parisian maiden aunt are monsters of hypocrisy, selfishness and inconsistency, and during her sojourn in Paris, Virginie also fails to encounter a single member of fashionable life who meets with her moral approval. The island’s French governor, M. de la Bourdonnais, has the authority to relieve poor families, but he too brushes off Madame de la Tour at the height of her adversity: ‘ “I shall see . . . we shall see . . . perhaps in time . . . there are many unfortunate people . . . your aunt is a very respectable woman, why trouble her? . . . it is you who are at fault” ’ (p. 50). Upper-class characters inevitably fail to honour their social obligations, and conversely the frankness and consideration shown by the novel’s lowest characters, including the fallen woman Marguerite and her bastard son Paul, also reveal how society’s objective status

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categories do not adequately represent, and often directly misconstrue, characters’ true worth. To rise in the ‘country of savages’ that is France, one inevitably compromises one’s inborn sense of right and wrong, and therefore virtuous characters are found primarily if not exclusively in the social periphery (p. 47). Indeed, it is only when the dispossessed Madame de la Tour renounces Europe and dresses herself ‘in the coarse blue Bengal cloth usually worn by slaves’ that she can enter into fulfilling human relationships and receive the blessing ‘that neither wealth nor rank can give – a friend’ (pp. 41, 45). It can hardly escape notice that throughout the novel the values of charity, kindliness and friendship are carried forward by women. This feminocentrism may be hard to credit in an eighteenth-century male author, and it is certainly an issue that should be handled carefully. Rousseau’s exaltation of supposedly ‘natural’ female characteristics was fraught with contradictions, as Mary Wollstonecraft recognized, and one may doubt whether sentimentalism’s feminization of culture expressed any real concern for women’s historical plight.14 But in any case the mapping of social conflicts onto gender distinctions is highly germane to Paul et Virginie’s programme, and it may safely be said that the novel upholds women as patterns of conduct more consistently and resolutely than most contemporary novels. Paul et Virginie idealizes and essentializes women in the portrayal of the two mothers, and most emphatically in the figure of Virginie, who modestly chooses death by drowning rather than showing herself naked to the sailor who attempts to rescue her (p. 120).15 Women dominate the action entirely, and with the exception of the aged narrator adult male figures are relegated to the novel’s margins, where they appear as unsympathetic minor characters such as M. de la Bourdonnais or the ominous slave-owner on the Black River, ‘a tall and forbidding man with olive skin and black brows that met above a pair of sunken eyes’ (p. 52). On this background, one can conclude that the central part of Paul et Virginie enlists ‘woman’ in the counter-cultural presentation of a ‘fatherless’ society in which ‘patriarchal’ values like social ambition, sexual desire and the lust for power have been eradicated and replaced with ‘matriarchal’ compassion, kindness and solicitude.16 A kind of primitive communism is hypothesized, premised on a munificent maternity that obviates the necessity of sibling rivalry. The culture of this femalecentred society, as Saint-Pierre imagines it, is egalitarian rather than hierarchical, and its work-ethic is based on co-operation and interdependence rather than competitive and possessive individualism. As a coruscating impeachment of Europe, however, Paul et Virginie does not merely codify pre-revolutionary writers’ hopes vested in ‘the


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pleasures of love and the happiness of equality’; it also voices the period’s changing ideas about man’s proper relationship to nature (p. 46). On this point as on so many others, Saint-Pierre apparently follows Rousseau, who shocked his contemporaries by preferring the ‘state of nature’ over the ‘state of society’ in Discours sur l’origine et les fondements de l’inégalité parmi les hommes (1755), although admittedly this preference was not without strong reservations.17 Rousseau’s writings are rightly seen not merely as a stimulant of the French Revolution, but also as a precursor to Romanticism and a significant antecedent of modern environmentalism.18 Still, Paul et Virginie’s pioneering advocacy of wild nature cannot be entirely attributed to Rousseau’s precedence, for Saint-Pierre had solid naturalist credentials of his own. During his military career at Mauritius, Saint-Pierre gained firsthand acquaintance with the many environmental problems – including pollution, deforestation, species loss and resource exhaustion – following from the colonization and rapid commercial development of the island. Foreign service taught Saint-Pierre that man cannot prosper in a degenerate natural environment, and this experience influenced him deeply, as his subsequent writings show. Thus, it is Saint-Pierre’s efforts to sustain the order of nature and preserve biological diversity which connect the disparate parts of Études de la nature (to which Paul et Virginie is tangentially related), and which inspire the modern eco-historian Richard H. Grove to number him among the ‘pioneers of modern environmentalism’. 19 Paul et Virginie places democratic men and women in, rather than above, nature. In Saint-Pierre’s novel, anti-patriarchal politics are intertwined with an idealistic (though sentimental and perhaps somewhat naive) proto-environmental doctrine advocating household economy and upholding the possibility of restoring the natural world to its original state of harmony between all living creatures. Disrupting the ‘cruel prejudices of Europe’ and instituting a reign of peace and compassion also entail a commitment to ending the enmity between man and nature (p. 46). While de-emphasizing adult heterosexual relationships, Paul et Virginie emphasizes not only the emotional ties binding brother to sister and children to mothers, but also the ties binding everyone to the earth, their mutual mother. One of the features that most forcefully distinguishes Paul et Virginie from previous island romances in the Robinson Crusoe-vein is Saint-Pierre’s insistence that wild tropical nature is an accommodating rather than a hostile milieu. Nature on Mauritius is almost wholly benign: a permanent, productive, life-giving landscape, whose fearful aspects have been carefully excluded. Marguerite and Madame de la Tour’s upland valley home is

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repeatedly characterized as a ‘nest’ providing ‘shelter’ for ‘sensitive and suffering creatures’, and like much of the novel’s language these terms work to feminize the vale and to accentuate the characters’ dependence on nature’s protection (p. 41). In return for the sanctuary that nature grants these persecuted humans, the novel’s protagonists treat nature with care, esteem and even love. Having grown up in a state of nature, Paul and Virginie instinctively know themselves ethically beholden not merely to their fellow men, but also to the plants and animals that surround them. This devotion to nature, and the corresponding formulation of a new, non-aggressive code of human comportment towards the island’s multiple life-forms, are probably best emblematized by Paul’s cultivation of the orchard that he takes over from Domingue: At twelve years of age Paul was more robust and intelligent than Europeans at fifteen, and where the Negro Domingue had merely cultivated, he had beautified. He went with him to the neighbouring woods to uproot young lemon- and orange-trees, tamarinds whose round tops are of a such a lovely green, and custard-apple trees whose fruit contains a sweet cream with the fragrance of orangeblossoms. [ . . . ] Besides these, he had planted the pips and kernels of myrobalans, mangoes, avocados, guavas, jack-fruits and jambos, most of which had already grown into trees and were affording their young master fruit and shade. His industrious hand had brought fecundity even to the most arid parts of the enclosure. [ . . . ] He had arranged the trees and plants so as to compose a view that could be enjoyed all at once. In the middle of the valley he had planted grasses of low growth, then shrubs, next trees of medium height and finally, around the circumference, tall trees; so that , from its centre this vast enclosure appeared an amphitheatre of greenery, fruits and flowers, containing vegetables, strips of meadow and fields of rice and corn. But in disposing these plants and trees according to his own plan he had not strayed from Nature’s: with her as his guide, he had put in the high places those whose seeds are dispersed by the wind, and beside water those with seeds designed to float: so did each plant grow in its proper site and each site receive from its plant its natural ornament (pp. 38–9). In passages such as this, Paul et Virginie reads less like a revolutionary-age novel and more like a preservationist’s manifesto, but in this remarkable novel these two viewpoints are integrated into one coherent


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statement. Alluding to contemporary debates about horticulture, agriculture and forestry, Paul’s progressive-minded gardening style provides Saint-Pierre’s most evocative trope for the pastoral possibilities of life in the new world. Paul owes his success as a gardener to the willingness with which he follows the designs of nature. While Paul’s grove necessarily involves an element of manipulation and aesthetic artifice, his desire to secure a plentiful crop never misleads him to ride roughshod over nature’s own patterns. In his garden, on the contrary, all plants have been arranged in accordance with their properties of size and their needs of water and sunlight. Instead of seeing the land with the modern agricultural colonizer’s eye, as resources available for exploitation, Paul takes a nurturing, protective relationship towards the land. Saint-Pierre, in effect, reverses the Wordsworthian structure of ‘love of nature leading to love of mankind’, for in Paul et Virginie it is social outrage that fuels the attempt to break down the rigid hierarchical thinking that abrogates nature as humanity’s ‘other’. 20 Nature provides the yardstick by which all progress is gauged, as when the family measure the children’s growth beside a pair of cocoa trees. Conversely, abstract moral concepts like ‘concord’ and ‘friendship’ find their concrete correlatives when projected onto places in the actual, physical landscape (p. 62). Sympathies among parents, children and siblings are extended outwards, until they encompass the entirety of nature in a family based on ‘friendship’ and maternal ‘affection’ (p. 46). Although the banished protagonists of Paul et Virginie own the property they inhabit, they exhibit a remarkably unassertive attitude towards the land, acting as stewards rather than masters. Virginie, even more assiduously than Paul, seeks to protect nature’s abundance and preserve its equilibrium: Virginia, who performed her most ordinary actions with the god of others in mind, would never eat fruit in the country without burying the stones or the pips in the earth. ‘They will produce trees’, she would say, ‘which will give their fruit to some traveller, or at least to a bird’. One day when she had eaten a papaw, she planted its seeds at the foot of this rock. Not long afterwards, several papawtrees sprang up, among them a female, which is the one that bears fruit (p. 100). The belief that nature deserves respect, and that man is merely one among a multiplicity of creatures sharing nature’s bounty, is shared by

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all the members of the community. Pastoral and georgic fictions commonly depict humans and animals working together to make the earth fruitful, but Saint-Pierre’s portrayal of the Mauritian settlers’ life lends a new poignancy to this traditional feature. It may seem a redundant detail that Madame de la Tour and Marguerite’s ‘pair of goats [ . . . ] were reared with the children’, but animal-symbolism plays an important role throughout Paul and Virginia (p. 45). While still a child, Virginie leads Paul on a perilous mission across the island to intercede for a runaway slave. This deed adds to our understanding of Virginie’s ‘eager desire to do good’, but Virginie’s capacity for sympathy also allows her to embrace non-human members of the natural commonwealth. Thus, the runaway-slave episode is paralleled by a later, highly sentimental vignette, showing Virginie surrounded by wild and domesticated animals: Virginia liked to rest beside this fountain which was decorated with a splendour at once wild and magnificent. She would often wash the family linen in the shade of the two coconut-trees. Sometimes she would lead her goats there to graze, and while making cheeses with their milk, would watch with delight as they browsed on the maidenhair that grew on the steep side of the rock, or stood on a ledge high in the air, as if on a pedestal. When Paul saw that this place was a favourite of hers, he brought to it the nests of every sort of bird from the neighbouring forest. Soon the parents of these birds followed their young and settled in this new colony. From time to time Virginia would come and scatter grains of rice, maize and millet among them. As soon as she appeared, whistling blackbirds, bengalis, who warble so sweetly, and cardinals with their fiery plumage would leave their bushes; parrots as green as emeralds would fly down from the lataniatrees nearby and partridges come running through the grass: all of them would rush helter-skelter to her feet like hens. She and Paul found rapturous enjoyment in observing their play, their feeding and their loves (pp. 63–4). It is symptomatic of Saint-Pierre’s fusion of political, sexual and protoenvironmental modes of thought that he should also frown on hunting – lest we forget, a ritualized manifestation of power over nature and an important ingredient in male aristocratic culture. On the island of Mauritius, ‘monkeys [ . . . ] romp in the dark branches, where they stand out with their grey and greenish coats and their pure black faces’. But all the community’s inhabitants deplore hunting for recreation or


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sustenance, and therefore, as the narrator points out, ‘[t]he murderous gun has never affrighted those peaceful children of nature’ (p. 99). Paul and Virginie’s distaste for hunting also leads them to prefer a vegetable diet. In the garden of Eden, Adam and Eve had supposedly been vegetarians, and Rousseau’s Émile had advocated a vegetable-rich ‘natural diet’ for children and parents. 21 Saint-Pierre associates the islanders’ asceticism not with Spartan abstinence, but rather with the propagation of peaceful and sympathetic reciprocity amongst humans and between humans and animals. Disdaining violence of all kind, and seemingly reverting to the primitive vegetarianism of prelapsarian life, the Mauritian settlers partake only of ‘country fare, for which no animal had paid with its life’: ‘gourds brimming with milk, fresh eggs, rice-cakes served on banana-leaves, baskets of sweet-potatoes, custard-apples, mangoes, oranges, pomegranates, bananas and pineapples’ (p. 64).

Cobb’s Paul and Virginia The earliest English rendition of Paul et Virginie was Daniel Malthus’ oddly titled translation Paul and Mary: An Indian Story (1789), but it was Helen Maria Williams’s acclaimed Paul and Virginia (1795) that blazed the trail for the dozens of rivalling English translations that would appear in subsequent years. 22 Paul et Virginie, Saint-Pierre exulted a few years after its publication, ‘has become a classic in England’ (‘il est devenue classique en Angleterre’), and the novel’s impact on Englishlanguage writers presents an intriguing but under-researched subject (qtd. in Menhennet, pp. 489–90).23 Certainly Saint-Pierre’s international best-seller often appeared in contemporary English novels, as a topic of debate and controversy. The story of Sydney Owenson’s national tale The Wild Irish Girl (1806), for instance, pivots on the English aristocrat hero Horatio M.’s decision to disguise himself as a lower-class tutor to enjoy the company of Glorvina, the daughter of the Irish Prince of Innismore. As part of his plot, Horatio provides the princess with a number of romances that he believes will contribute to her instruction: I saw nothing of Glorvina until evening, except for a moment, when I perceived her lost over a book (as I passed her closet window), which, by the Morocco binding, I knew to be the Letters of the impassioned Heloise. Since her society was denied me, I was best satisfied to resign her to Rousseau. A-propos! it was among the books I brought hither; and they were all precisely such books as Glorvina had not, yet should read, that she may know herself, and the latent

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sensibility of her soul. They have, of course, all been presented to her, and consist of ‘La Nouvelle Heloise’, de Rousseau – the unrivalled Lettres sur la Mythologie, de Moustier – the Paul et Virginie of St. Pierre – the Werter of Goethe – the Dolbreuse of Loasel, and the Attila of Chateaubriand. Let our English novels carry away the prize of morality from the romantic fictions of every other country; but you will find they rarely seize on the imagination through the medium of the heart; and, as for their heroines, I confess, that, though they are the most perfect of beings, they are also the most stupid. Surely virtue would not be the less attractive for being united to genius and the graces.24 In this scene, Owenson knowingly reverses the conventional Female Quixote-motif and recasts the scene, virtually inescapable in Anti-Jacobin fiction, where an older male teacher-figure chastises a younger woman for her irresponsible indulgence in foreign romance-literature and attempts to guide her towards sounder reading habits. 25 Not coincidentally, most if not all texts in Horatio’s libertine library feature one or several indiscreet women who follow their heart and fall away from respectable society, only to be forgiven and reinstated in their proper place towards the end. Shunning English conduct books in favour of a diet of French and German fiction that appeals directly to the ‘imagination’ and the ‘heart’, Horatio launches an anti-pedagogy that prepares Glorvina for the inevitable break with her father’s bigoted worldview. Insofar as it loosens English cultural hegemony over Ireland, Horatio’s preference for Rousseau, Chateaubriand and Goethe also anticipates the transformation that occurs at the end of the novel, where Owenson uses the union of Horatio and Glorvina to allegorize her vision of a new postcolonial relationship between England and Ireland. The provocation of Horatio’s recommendation of Paul et Virginie along with other ‘romantic fictions’ presupposes the reader’s awareness that the novel was frequently listed, almost always along with Goethe’s Werther, Rousseau’s Julie, de Laclos’ Dangerous Liaisons and Madame de Staël’s Delphine, on the list of British officialdom’s forbidden romances. As part of the same campaign, Anti-Jacobin writers also sought to control the novel’s supposedly destructive tendencies by enlisting it in an antithetical rewriting. Anti-Jacobinism’s most brazen co-optation of Paul et Virginie was undoubtedly James Cobb’s theatrical adaptation Paul and Virginia: A Musical Drama (1801), which played for 13 nights in May 1800 at Covent Garden Theatre.26 A prolific professional playwright, Cobb carefully avoids mentioning Saint-Pierre in the published play’s frontispiece; he also provides the play with a happy end, adds a number


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of song-and-dance routines and moves it from the Île de France to ‘a Spanish island, in the West Indies’. 27 This last displacement is expressive of Cobb’s intentions with the play: relocating the action to a site of long-standing political rivalry among the major European powers not only further distances Paul and Virginia from its French origins, but also allows Cobb to accentuate the differences between British and Continental ways of thinking and acting. Cobb’s two-act musical melodrama takes place on Virginia’s fifteenth birthday, which is also the date designated for the revelation of her noble heritage. During the first act, the happiness of Paul and Virginia is disturbed by the machinations of the rapacious plantationmanager Diego. Based on a loose assembly of villainous stereotypes, Diego imposes an iron discipline on those African slaves whom he oversees, and when the play begins, his tyrannical regime has incited the slave Alambra to mutinous rebellion followed by an escape into the wilderness. Diego’s zealous pursuit of Alambra, we are told, does not stem from racial persecution alone, for Alambra attacked Diego when his sister was corporeally punished for not working hard enough. In his dealings with the slaves, Diego’s speeches and actions typecast him as a lower-class interloper whose sole motivation is ‘avarice’ (p. 10). Diego’s money-grubbing numbs his emotional life, making him unable to recognize the slaves as fellow men or even conceive of human relations in non-economic terms. For example, when Diego’s master offers his slaves ‘another holiday [ . . . ] and a proper allowance of grog to make them happy’, Diego protests that ‘Englishmen do not understand how to deal with your slaves. Your own country affords no practice in that way’ (p. 13). Likewise, Diego’s initial exchange with Mary, when he finds the poor women and children of the island celebrating Virginia, reveals his fundamental incomprehension of the term ‘charity’: Diego: Heyday! what mumming is here? what fool’s holiday is this? Mary: Fool’s holiday indeed! it ought to be a holiday throughout the island. It is the birthday of Virginia, the amiable, the excellent Virginia. Every heart acknowledges her goodness, every tongue proclaims it. Diego: Ah! I have heard of her, though I have never seen her. Mary: Then you must have heard, that deeds of charity are her delight. Diego: Charity indeed! ha! ha! ha! an orphan, poor and friendless, to boast of charity!

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Mary: You may deem her poor, because she subsists on the gains of her own industry – but friendless she can never be, while gratitude lives in the hearts of all around her. Diego: But if the girl has no money, whence comes her charity? Mary: From a rich treasury – her own beneficial heart. Her kindness smooths the brow of age, and lightens the burthen of calamity. Her example encourages every one to be content with their own lot (pp. 2–3). In accordance with the Manichean logic of the melodramatic mode, Cobb eliminates narrative complications and restructures Paul and Virginia as a quasi-allegorical confrontation of virtue and vice, good and evil. That said, Cobb does not simply equate evil with low and mercenary practices, for during the second act of the play Diego is supplemented the haughty aristocrat Antonio de Guardas, an agent of Virginia’s noble aunt. Diego and Don Antonio are social opposites, and their moral viciousness makes them natural associates in plotting Paul and Virginia’s downfall. Where Diego calculates human value by the laws of the marketplace, Don Antonio in turn assumes that birth equals worth, and that classallegiance always cancels out all other social obligations. This mistaken sense of innate nobility prompts Don Antonio to kidnap Virginia and temporarily remove her from the company of the illegitimately born Paul. In both the first and the second act, however, disaster is averted, and on each occasion Paul and Virginia are reunited through the timely intervention of the Englishman Tropick, the play’s real hero. Tropick would have made a more fitting title for Cobb’s play than Paul and Virginia, for Paul and Virginia remain remarkably passive stock characters, who speak primarily in platitudes and who perform few memorable actions. Tropick, on the other hand, is designed to exhibit all that is noble and generous in the British national character, and his presence alone lends the play the imaginative life that it possesses. Jovial, boisterous and whimsical, Tropick’s character allows Cobb to balance French-derived sentimentalism with the sturdy comic realism of eighteenth-century writers like Fielding, Smollett and Sterne. A former sailor, Tropick is also an instinctive empiricist who distrusts theoretical abstraction of any kind, and who prefers to base his ideas on his own extensive experience of life: I am an old seaman, and hate a skulker. Mankind are brother sailors, thro’ the voyage of life. – ’Tis our duty to assist each other. – ’Tis true, we have different stations; some on the quarter-deck, and others before the mast; or else, how could the vessel sail. But the cause of society is


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a common cause; and he that won’t lend a hand to keep the vessel in sailing trim; heave him overboard to the sharks, I say. [ . . . ] Yes, my native country is my ship, and I am proud to call her Great Britain. Long may she ride like a peerless first-rate, the queen of the ocean; with a gallant crew, and beloved commander (p. 14). Tropick’s down-to-earth philosophy manifests itself primarily in the pragmatic attitude towards slavery that he espouses and practices on the large plantation that he has recently purchased from its former Spanish owner. On the one hand, Tropick defines Britain in absolutionist terms, as the ‘land of freedom’: ‘it is the boast of Britons, that from the moment a slave imprints his footsteps on our shore, the moment he breathes the air of our land of freedom, he becomes free’ (p. 13). On the other hand, since slavery remains the basis of the colonial economy, and since the Spanish laws of the island allow slavery, Tropick is inclined to follow convention and adapt himself to the present situation. Still, Cobb insists that Tropick’s British version of slavery differs substantially from the Spanish model, insofar as it is tempered by humanitarian concerns for the slaves’ physical and emotional well-being. A paternalist at heart, Tropick believes that his position carries with it certain moral responsibilities, and he takes a genuine joy in pleasing his slaves by handing out grog and allowing extra holidays. Benevolence only turns to anger when Diego suggests that he work his slaves harder to boost the plantation’s profits: ‘What! have not I authority over my own plantations? Have not I absolute power over my slaves? Yes, I have; and I chuse to shew that power by rendering them as happy as I can. It is a fancy of mine, and no one shall controul me in it’ (p. 12). Similarly, when Paul and Virginia intercede with Tropick on behalf of Alambra, in a scene more or less directly derived from Saint-Pierre, the man of feeling is swayed by their reasoning and immediately pardons the runaway. Cobb transparently uses Tropick’s character to define English nationhood in terms of balance, moderation and good-nature, but there is nothing moderate about Cobb’s appropriation of Saint-Pierre. It may be argued that Romantic-period theatrical adaptations of popular novels almost inevitably drifted towards social conservatism, partly because of the paranoid cultural climate in which they appeared, and partly because of certain structural limitations intrinsic to the melodramatic genre. Yet even when compared with contemporary and much more successful productions, like George Coleman the younger’s The Iron Chest (1796) (based on William Godwin’s Caleb Williams) and James Boaden’s The Italian Monk (1797) (based on Ann Radcliffe’s The Italian), Paul and Virginia

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still appears calculated and almost cynical in its attempt to capture the spirit of the age with a series of tendentious readjustments. Practising slavery with a human face, Tropick disproves the abolitionist argument that slavery inevitably de-sensitizes both slave and slave-owner. By reinstating a ‘gallant Englishman’ as the play’s moral epicentre, Paul and Virginia fends off Saint-Pierre’s attack on patriarchy and re-naturalizes the order upset by Marguerite and Madame de la Tour, who are notably absent from the English play (Cobb, p. 28). Paul and Virginia thus testifies to the hegemonic power of British wartime anti-Gallicism, demonstrating this discourse’s almost uncanny capacity to absorb previous representations and convert them to an antithetical purpose. But if Paul and Virginia vindicates the Englishman’s ‘absolute power’ over his colonial subjects, it also buttresses the human subject’s continued jurisdiction over the natural world. Perhaps the efficacy of Paul and Virginia, as a rejoinder to the French novel, lies not primarily in its heavy-handed introduction of Anti-Jacobin character typology, but in its rather more subtle anti-pastoral re-colonization of pastoral. At least as noteworthy as his ideological biases, in other words, are Cobb’s evident distaste for the pastoral mode and his attempt to nullify ‘the reciprocal integration of the natural universe and the human world which constitutes one of the essential points of Bernardin’s naturalist ideology’ (Racault, p. 190). In terms of genre, the shift from novelistic narrative to melodrama drastically reduces the scope allowed for representations and discussions of nature. For Saint-Pierre, nature is not passive or inert but represents a dynamic force that participates in the action and impinges actively on the characters’ lives. Transferring the story from novel to stage, however, inevitably underscores the human action, reducing the importance and impoverishing the meaning of the non-human. Descriptions of the island are deliberately vague and tend to evoke the English countryside rather than tropical nature. Like English rural workers, the island natives live in humble ‘cottages’ and Tropick’s plantation is located in a so-called ‘pleasant country’ (p. 31). While other Romantic playwrights favoured elaborate sets and spectacular costuming, Paul and Virginia reduces scenery and stage directions to an absolute minimum. Consistently privileging action over setting, Cobb seemingly has no eye for natural detail: he sacrifices Paul et Virginie’s lush descriptiveness and extreme topographical specificity to rapid plot-development, and once again this minimalism seems to be the result of both generic imperatives and conscious authorial strategy. In terms of plot, Cobb carries out a similar reorientation by removing the main action from Madame de la Tour and Marguerite’s embowered


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hut to Tropick’s plantation. What is abandoned is Saint-Pierre’s deeply unsettling interrogation of European conceptions of man’s relationship towards the environment, and his paradigmatic willingness to understand an ecosystem as a place where co-operation and mutually beneficial exchange occur alongside severer forms of competition. SaintPierre envisions nature as a sacred system of interdependent organisms, requiring that humans relinquish the will to power and commit themselves to an ethic of co-operation and self-sacrifice. Throughout the English Paul and Virginia, however, the French original’s concepts of natural diversity, altruism and symbiosis are reduced to sentimental clichés, or left out altogether. We are told, briefly, that Virginia ‘subsists on the gains of her own industry’, and that her ‘example encourages every one to be content with their own lot’ and do his or her ‘duty’ (p. 3). This, however, rather trivializes Paul et Virginie’s sophisticated philosophy of voluntary simplicity, as does the song in which Cobb mockingly reduces primitivism to a lewd spectacle of dancing half-naked ‘negroes’: When the moon shines o’er the deep, Ackee-o, And whisker’d Dons are fast asleep, Snoring fast asleep, From their huts the Negroes run, Full of frolic, full of fun, Holiday to keep; . . . . . . . . . . . . . Black lad whispers to black lass, Ackee-o, Glances fly between them pass, Of beating hearts to tell, Tho’ no blush can paint the cheek, Still her eyes the language speak, Of passion, quite as well (pp. 6–7). Cobb clearly understands the implications of naturalist discourse, and he shows his awareness by subjugating Paul and Virginia’s antieconomy to the productionist tenets of Tropick’s well-regulated and efficient plantation household, which offers a realistic and therefore preferable alternative to the Rousseauistic state of nature. On Cobb’s island, Tropick’s common-sense philosophy reigns triumphant, having vanquished all temptation to engage in ungrounded critical speculation

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about the origin of culture and the value of civilization. The reassuring presence of the English sailor and planter, in other words, ensures that human life can still be viewed as unfolding in relative independence of, and superiority to, nature. Saint-Pierre’s novel encourages its readers to reflect on new possibilities for man and nature to coexist in harmonious and mutually sustaining ways. Insofar as it matters at all on Cobb’s island, however, external nature exists only as raw material to be used by human characters: in the form of the flowers ornamenting Virginia on her birthday, or as the sugar canes that are processed and commodified at Tropick’s plantation.

Edgeworth’s Belinda The appearance of the printed edition of Cobb’s melodrama coincided with the publication of a rather more thoughtful English response to Paul et Virginie, in the form of Maria Edgeworth’s third novel Belinda (1801). Unlike Cobb, Maria Edgeworth was neither a partisan propagandist for traditional English mores nor an undiscriminating enemy of foreign cultural influences. Educated by her father Richard Lovell Edgeworth, the eccentric Enlightenment scientist, Edgeworth was well-acquainted with European literature and philosophy, including the work of Rousseau. She had many friends among foreign literati, and she visited the Continent on several occasions, first during the Peace of Amiens in 1802–1803.28 Nonetheless Edgeworth’s turn-of-the-century fiction reveals that she, like many of her contemporaries, feared the consequences of the reading public’s uncritical absorption in certain licentious European novels, and that she dedicated her writing to effecting the cultural reformation that she and other Romantic-period novelists desired. 29 Elaborating on this issue, Nicola J. Watson convincingly interprets the novel of letters Leonora (1805) as a self-reflexive rejoinder to epistolary fiction á la Rousseau’s Julie and Madame de Staël’s Corinne, a novel which ‘seems primarily interested in subjecting the letter to authoritative rereading in order to neutralize it’. 30 In Watson’s interpretation, Leonora uses the epistolary novel to contemplate, exploit and ridicule the vogue for sentimental correspondence, and to redefine the letter as a vehicle of transparent and officially sanctioned meaning. Belinda too does not pretend to be written in a cultural vacuum, but presumes a reader wellversed in contemporary fiction and hence receptive to the novel’s pedagogical lesson. Like Belinda’s high-society anti-heroine Lady Delacour, Edgeworth theatrically flaunts her learning with frequent and ostentatious allusions


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to literary texts belonging to various genres and national traditions, including Bürger’s ‘Lenore’ (1796), Voltaire’s Zaire (1732) and L’Ecossaise (1760) and Thomas Day’s abolitionist poem The Dying Negro (1773). Most conspicuously, of course, Edgeworth’s novel derives its title, its setting and to a certain extent its theme from Alexander Pope’s The Rape of the Lock (1713). Structurally and ideologically, though, SaintPierre’s Paul et Virginie is least as prominent an intertext for Edgeworth’s fiction as Pope’s mock epic. References to Paul et Virginie infiltrate Edgeworth’s writing throughout Belinda, and just as Jane Austen’s engagement with August von Kotzebue’s Lovers’ Vows in Mansfield Park (1814) suggests a deliberate allusiveness that should not be dismissed as opportunistic name-dropping, so Edgeworth’s interest in Saint-Pierre can only be fully understood in the context of British writers’ imaginative resistance to, and purposeful borrowing from, fashionable non-English literary models. 31 On the most general level, Belinda like Paul et Virginie juxtaposes English and colonial characters to extrapolate a theory of cultural difference.32 Saint-Pierre could be accused of simplifying complex matters when he, using the anonymous hermit-narrator as his mouthpiece, advances Creole ‘innocence’ as a wholesome antidote to European ‘decadence’. For example, when Paul desires to distinguish himself in public life the narrator lectures him on the folly of ambition and the impossibility and undesirability of social mobility in European societies: In this country and in your circumstances you have enough to live on without deceiving or flattering, or demeaning yourself, as most of those must do who seek fortune in Europe. Your condition is compatible with every virtue. You need have no fear of being good, true, sincere, learned, patient, temperate, chaste, lenient, pious; no ridicule will come to blight your discretion, which is just beginning to flower. Heaven has given you freedom, health, a clear conscience and friends; the kings whose favour you long to win are not so fortunate as you are (p. 104). According to the narrator, who echoes Saint-Pierre’s views often enough to be identified with him, colonial-style living preserves the integrity of the human soul while ‘[m]ost Europeans pass their lives in [ . . . ] moral disorder’ (p. 109). Belinda parodies such preferences by incarnating the primitivist impulse in Mr Vincent, a wealthy but fatherless West Indian gentleman who takes up residence with the aristocratic Percival family to be educated. When Vincent is first introduced to Belinda and the

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reader, he is presented – misleadingly, it will later turn out – as a man whose robust physique suggests a corresponding moral innocence: Mr. Vincent was a creole; he was about two-and-twenty; his person and manners were striking and engaging; he was tall, and remarkably handsome; he had large dark eyes, an aquiline nose, fine hair, and a sun-burnt complexion, which gave him a manly appearance; his countenance was open and friendly, and when he spoke upon any interesting subject it lighted up, and became full of fire and animation. He used much gesture in conversation; he had not the common manners of young men who are, or who aim at being thought, fashionable, but he was perfectly at ease in company, and all that was uncommon about him appeared foreign. He had a frank ardent temper, incapable of art or dissimulation, and so unsuspicious of all mankind, that he could scarcely believe falsehood existed in the world, even after he had himself been its dupe. 33 In stark and attractive contrast to effete fops (like Sir Philip Baddely and Mr Rochfort) and ponderous empiricists (like Mr Percival and Dr X), ‘Mr. Vincent thought, acted, and suffered as a man of feeling’ (p. 424). In continuation of this first appearance, Vincent a few pages later launches into an eulogy of the women of his native climate, whose ‘softness, grace, delicacy’ make them superior to women whose characters have been moulded and vitiated by ‘European cultivation’. This rhapsodic praise of colonial innocence provokes the thoughtful Percival into asking his ward whether he prefers the ‘savage’ state to ‘civilized society’: ‘Would you, at this instant, change places with that ploughman yonder, who is whistling as he goes for want of thought? or would you choose to go a step higher in the bliss of ignorance, and turn savage?’ (p. 234). Percival’s response shows that he recognizes Vincent as a reader and follower of Rousseau. Well might Percival question the sincerity of Vincent’s professions, for Edgeworth continues to unfold a narrative that undercuts Vincent’s status and makes it impossible for him to pontificate on the shortcomings of ‘European cultivation’. During the middle part of the novel a complex concatenation of circumstances, including Belinda’s misunderstanding of Clarence Hervey’s errant behaviour and her estrangement from Lady Delacour, cause her to seek refuge in Mr and Lady Percival’s House. Here, due to the advocacy of the Percivals, Vincent temporarily displaces Clarence Hervey in Belinda’s affections, and for a while it appears as though the Creole might carry the day in the competition for her hand. At this point,


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however, the narrative begins to backtrack, as Edgeworth sets about disclosing Vincent’s utter unfitness to marry an Englishwoman of Belinda’s calibre. At the time when he encounters Belinda, Vincent has already squandered substantial parts of his inheritance at gambling table and is now seeking to recoup his losses. When on one desperate night he loses ‘nearly all that he was worth in the world’, Mr Vincent enters into a downward spiral of increasingly meaningless and selfdestructive acts (p. 429). Before long his futile attempt to control ‘the ruinous effects of high play’ consumes all his energy, and within a few days he tries to commit suicide, challenges Hervey to a duel, actually fights a duel with Sir Philip Baddely, and finally tries to borrow money from a disreputable Jewish moneylender (p. 423). Almost more alarmingly, throughout these proceedings Vincent keeps his gambling-habits a secret from his fiancée, and hence it is the West Indian’s many dishonesties, deceptions and equivocations, as much as his ‘unfortunate propensity to a dangerous amusement’, which finally convince Belinda to break off the engagement (p. 448). In subsequent revisions of Belinda, Edgeworth claimed that she extracted ‘everything that gave encouragement (beyond esteem) to Mr. Vincent’ (qtd. in Perera, p. 16). But even the 1801 edition of the novel illuminates a dark underside to the Creole character, showing how rapidly Vincent’s innate ‘simplicity’ and ‘sensibility’ degenerate into ‘impetuosity’ and almost ‘insanity’ (Edgeworth, Belinda, p. 429). Endowed with many admirable qualities, Vincent still lacks the mental resources to withstand ‘the evil spirit of gambling’, and hence ‘when the tide of passion had swept away the landmarks, he had no method of ascertaining the boundaries of right and wrong’ (pp. 425, 439). More than an isolated character-flaw, Vincent’s passion for play hints at a more general mental immaturity and lack of moral stamina, suggesting that ‘his feelings were always more powerful than his reason’. It is clear, moreover, that this fatal penchant has deep roots in the colonial agricultural society whose values Vincent champions in his conversations with Percival. In an important narrative aside, Edgeworth points out that Vincent’s taste for gambling he had acquired whilst he was a child; but as it was then confined to trifles, it had been passed over, as a thing of no consequence, a boyish folly, that would never grow up with him: his father used to see him, day after day, playing with eagerness, at games of chance, with his negroes, or with the sons of neighbouring planters; yet he was never alarmed; [ . . . ] and he did not foresee, that

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this boyish fault might be the means of his son’s losing, in a few hours, the wealth which he had been years amassing (pp. 422–3). Ultimately Vincent need not fear being compromised by a European education, for in the dichotomy that Edgeworth sets up Vincent’s corruption originates ‘at home’ rather than ‘abroad’ (p. 10). Vincent’s subsequent decline from ‘boyish folly’ into detestable ‘vice’, at any rate, throws his earlier extravagant praise of colonial ‘indolence’ into ironic perspective, for in a sense it is precisely his father’s permissively ‘indolent’ attitude towards child-rearing and education that causes the loss of the family estates (p. 234). Compared with Saint-Pierre, Edgeworth seems altogether less impressed by Creole virtue, and less convinced that Creoles have a constructive part to play in the regeneration of European societies. It might even be said that Edgeworth reverses the communication between European and non-European characters. In Paul et Virginie Europeans clearly stand in need of colonial re-education, but in Belinda Vincent is the moral beneficiary of Percival’s enlightened instruction, although in the end the former’s West Indian upbringing proves stronger than his master’s salutary influence. Rather than a redeeming outsider, Vincent’s lamentable passion for play makes him the natural associate of the novel’s other ‘subaltern’ outsiders: the scheming adulteress Mrs Luttridge, the cross-dressing amazon Harriet Freke, the infantile black servant Juba and the unsavoury Jewish moneylender Solomon (Perera, p. 26). Countering the discourse of noble savagery with an image of monstrosity, Lady Delacour also at one point tellingly likens Vincent to Caliban (p. 339). Insofar as the colonies still represent difference in Belinda, then, Edgeworth seems to make this alterity an object of anxiety rather than desire or admiration. Colonials can contribute little to solving the problems of European civilization, and Europeans in turn have every reason to be wary of forming lasting attachments to such suspect aliens. Consequently the reader is inclined to be grateful to Lady Delacour, when she takes upon herself the necessary task of distinguishing ‘home’ from ‘abroad’ by reattaching Belinda to the reassuringly English Hervey. Edgeworth’s intertextual demystification of Saint-Pierre and Rousseau’s value-system becomes more forceful in the subplot involving Clarence Hervey and Virginia Saint-Pierre. In Chapter 11 (‘Difficulties’), the reader first learns of the mysterious girl whom the hero Hervey is rumoured to keep imprisoned in a sequestered rural location. Then in Chapter 14 (‘The Exhibition’), Belinda and the Delacours visit the Royal


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Exhibition in London, where the season’s sensation is a painting of Saint-Pierre’s Virginia depicted in exotic natural surroundings:

Belinda hastily withdrew her eyes from the picture at which she was looking. –‘A most beautiful creature!’ exclaimed Lady Delacour. ‘O, faith! yes – I always did Clary the justice to say, he has a damned good taste for beauty’. ‘But this seems to be a foreign beauty’, continued Lady Delacour, ‘if one may judge by her air, her dress, and the scenery about her – cocoa-trees, plantains – Miss Portman, what think you?’ ‘I think’, said Belinda (but her voice faltered so much that she could hardly speak, ‘that it is a scene from Paul and Virginia. I think the figure is St. Pierre’s Virginia’. ‘Virginia St. Pierre! ma’am’, cried Mr. Rochfort, winking at Sir Philip. ‘No, no, damme! there you are wrong, Rochfort. Say Hervey’s Virginia, and then you have it, damme! or, may be, Virginia Hervey, – who knows?’ (p. 190).

All major characters with the exception of Sir Phillip Baddely respond positively to the painting and the novel that it illustrates. When Hervey eulogizes Saint-Pierre as a writer who, ‘[t]hough he does not write in rhyme, surely [ . . . ] has a poetical imagination’, Belinda unequivocally concurs: ‘Certainly [ . . . ] M. de St. Pierre undoubtedly has a great deal of imagination, and deserves to be called a poet’ (p. 192). Yet the painting, which is widely assumed to represent Hervey’s illicit paramour, also evokes an air of mystery and casts a dark shadow on Belinda’s mind. Assuming that it conceals a sordid story of seduction and betrayal, Belinda worries about the destiny of the model and the way in which this affects her own relationship to Hervey: ‘ “And what will become of her? Can Mr. Hervey desert her? She looks like innocence itself! and so young, too! Can he leave her for ever to sorrow, and vice, and infamy?” thought Belinda, as she kept her eyes fixed, in silent anguish, upon the picture of Virginia’ (p. 191). Belinda is kept in suspense until Chapter 26 (‘Virginia’) of the novel, in which a letter from Hervey finally details ‘a history of his connexion with Virginia St Pierre’. Hervey dates the liaison to a phase in his life when, disgusted with fashionable life’s ‘luxury, dissipation’ and ‘licentious gallantry’, he had turned to ‘the works of Rousseau’, whose

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‘declamations produced more than their just effect upon an imagination naturally ardent’ (p. 362). Suffering from this attack of cultural pessimism, Hervey one day loses his way in the New Forest and stumbles upon an Arcadian scene that seems to possess the combined charms of Julie d’Étange’s garden at Varens, and Paul and Virginie’s upland valley in Mauritius: One fine evening in autumn, as he was riding through New Forest, charmed with the picturesque beauties of the place, he turned out of the beaten road, and struck into a fresh track, which he pursued with increasing delight, till the setting sun reminded him, that it was necessary to postpone his farther reflections on forest scenery, and that it was time to think of finding his way out of the wood. He was now in the most retired part of the forest, and he saw no path to direct him; but, as he stopped, to consider which way he should turn, a dog sprang from a thicket, barking furiously at his horse: his horse was high spirited, but he was master of him, and obliged the animal to stand quietly till the dog, having barked himself hoarse, retreated of his own accord. Clarence watched, to see which way it would go, and followed it, in hopes of meeting with the person, to whom it belonged: he kept his guide in sight, till he came into a beautiful glade, in the midst of which was a neat, but very small cottage, with numerous bee-hives in the garden, surrounded by a profusion of rose trees, which were in full blow. Having already established her hero’s volatile mood on this occasion, Edgeworth stresses the subjectivity of Hervey’s transporting experience, which is evidenced in a profusion of ironic details. As Hervey scans his surroundings with the sentimentalizing gaze of the Rousseauistic pastoralist, the sylvan cottage appears to him a normal one, except that it forms a pleasing contrast with the ‘wildness’ of the surrounding countryside. An old woman otherwise ‘like most other old women’ seems to have ‘a remarkably benevolent countenance’. Most strikingly, the young girl Rachel who offers him roses ‘did not appear to Clarence like any other young girl, that he had ever seen’ (p. 363). Like the strayed traveller of pastoral or chivalric romance, Hervey is transported to a world that he believed irretrievably lost or only existing in fiction. Rachel and the world of ‘artless sensibility’ impress him ‘so powerfully [ . . . ] that he remained for some moments silent, totally forgetting, that he came to ask his way out of the forest’. In sum, the place ‘appeared to him a terrestrial paradise’ (p. 364).


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The Virginia subplot of Belinda is usually interpreted as a veiled Wollstonecraftian satire of the English Rousseauist Thomas Day’s philosophy of female education, but the passage also registers Edgeworth’s more fundamental reservations about contemporary writers’ utopian faith in nature (McCann, p. 73). When Rachel’s female guardian passes away, Hervey vows to protect the girl’s ‘innocence’, ‘purity’ and ‘natural feeling’, and to do this he ensconces Rachel and the elderly Mrs Osmond in a house at Windsor (p. 367). On this occasion, Hervey also renames Rachel Virginia, because ‘he was struck with the idea that she resembled the description of Virginia in M. de St. Pierre’s celebrated Romance’ (p. 370). As the re-christening suggests, Hervey dogmatically adheres to the philosophy set forth in Émile and Paul et Virginie. Enamoured of ‘a favourite system of education’ that presumes nature’s superiority to culture, Hervey deliberately insulates Virginia in a pastoral ‘retirement’, secluding her from social contacts and limiting her access to supposedly pernicious ‘book-learning’ (p. 368). Ignorant of ‘any thing beyond the walls of the garden that belonged to the house in which she lived’, Virginia’s mind is shaped only by the natural objects that surround her: ‘All her ideas of happiness were confined to the life she had led during her childhood; and as she had accidentally lived in a beautiful situation on the New Forest, she appeared to have an instinctive taste for the beauties of nature, and for what we call the picturesque’ (pp. 370, 372). The result of his experiment pleases Hervey so much that he decides to raise Virginia and later claim her as his wife. ‘ “What a difference”, he exults, “between this child of nature and the frivolous sophisticated slaves of art”’ (p. 371). Like all Romantic primitivists, Hervey assumes that life in close contact with nature will produce a morally superior species of individual, immune to ‘vanity, affectation, and artifice’ (p. 362). Yet, as Virginia’s subsequent story makes clear, this assumption is precisely what Edgeworth’s sceptical counter-pastoral sets out to dispute and disprove. First, Hervey begins to doubt his own principles, when it appears to him that Virginia’s isolated upbringing makes the prospect of marrying her less attractive than it might have seemed. Nature has developed Virginia’s aesthetic sensibility but not the rest of her mental faculties, and at seventeen she still has the ‘understanding’ of a child (p. 375). In all honesty Hervey must admit that despite moral qualms he derives greater pleasure from the company of ‘une franche coquette’ like Lady Delacour, in whose conversation ‘his faculties were always called into full play’, while ‘in talking to Virginia, his understanding was passive; he perceived that a large proportion of his intellectual

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powers and of his knowledge was absolutely useless to him in her company’ (p. 378). While Hervey may fancy Virginia a moral exemplar and view her world as a ‘terrestrial paradise’, reality shows her ‘an insipid, though innocent child’, whose ‘mind was either perfectly indolent, or exalted by romantic and visionary ideas of happiness’ (p. 379). What Hervey gradually understands, in other words, is that ‘innocence’ is a highly ambiguous term, with both positive and negative inflections, and that pastoral life can foster ‘simplicity and naïveté’ but can also (as in the case of Mr Vincent) breed unfortunate intellectual ‘indolence’ and ‘ignorance’ (p. 378). Hervey’s problems are compounded when Virginia’s forced dependence on nature and profound ignorance of ‘book-learning’ subject her to the danger of recuperating the tragic career of ‘the female Quixote’. 34 The hardships begin when Mrs Osmond allows Virginia to ‘indulge’ her taste for ‘romances’, which she ‘devours’ with ‘the greatest eagerness’ (p. 380). The well-intentioned housekeeper assumes that a diet of romantic fiction will strengthen Virginia’s passion for her guardian and husband-to-be, but as so often before ‘common novels’ have an unsettling effect on a young female mind. Virginia’s ennui particularly attracts her to Gothic, pathetic and sensational texts, but such reading only agitates her already overactive imagination. Instead of helping her, Virginia admits, such books call up a host of ‘confused ideas, floating in my imagination [ . . . ] I do not distinctly know my own feelings’ (p. 381). Taking leave of the actual world, Virginia begins to conjure up ideal scenarios and fantasize about ‘those heroes, those charming heroes, that I read of in [ . . . .] books’ (p. 383). Not surprisingly, the crisis escalates when Virginia avidly consumes Saint-Pierre’s Paul et Virginie. Reading this novel and hysterically imagining herself in the role of the female protagonist excite Virginia’s adolescent erotic desires and produce a tormented and tormenting sexual awakening. Merging Hervey with Paul and other idealized male figures, Virginia falls into a feverish narcissistic dream vision of herself ‘seated under the shade of a planetree, beside Virginia’s fountain’ (p. 387). When Hervey simultaneously begins to court Belinda and neglect his female protégé, Virginia careens towards a psychological breakdown, and for a while she seems destined for the madness or untimely death suffered by so many other romancebesotted heroines. Only the deus ex machina reappearance of Virginia’s long-vanished father and the even more miraculous revelation of a preexisting love affair between Virginia and a certain Captain Sunderland can assuage the crisis and steer Virginia towards a more rational form of female subjectivity.


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The anti-pastoral implications of the Virginia-episode are fairly straightforward, and a reading of Belinda inevitably leads to the conclusion that Edgeworth doubted her contemporaries’ faith in the beneficial power of nature. Languishing under the idiocy of rural life, Virginia appears unable to handle the emotional crises of adolescence, and Hervey’s infantilizing project makes her unnecessarily vulnerable to the morbid emotions catalyzed by dangerous reading. ‘Virginia’, Edgeworth writes, ‘had been inspired by romances with the most exalted notions of female delicacy and honour; but from her perfect ignorance, these were rather vague ideas than principles of conduct’ (p. 385). Pace Rousseau and Saint-Pierre, substituting nature for culture does not in itself purify, enrich or ennoble the human mind, nor does it seem likely to further the individual’s long-time happiness. On the contrary, Hervey’s excessive naturalism fosters a sickly sensibility and throws Virginia into mental chaos, by constraining her development and arresting her in an artificially-prolonged childhood. In her Vindication of the Rights of Women (1792), Mary Wollstonecraft piercingly charged that Rousseau’s pastoral pedagogy reproduces the errors of the courtly ideology that it ostensibly impugns. Interestingly, Virginia’s lapse from decorum recalls the earlier episode when Lady Delacour, terrified by the prospect of her imminent mastectomy, succumbs to the power of certain ‘mystical’, ‘methodistical’ and ‘highly oratorical’ religious books that Belinda finds stowed away in her confidante’s closet (p. 270). As Edgeworth always maintained, religious bigotry can beguile the reader as surely as lewd romances, but in this case the criticism particularly targets Lady Delacour, for whom self-absorbed indulgence signifies a ‘breach of domestic femininity’ (Macfayden, p. 428). The parallelism with Virginia is notable: in terms of age and social status Virginia (an orphaned child of nature) and Lady Delacour (a wealthy and sophisticated middle-aged coquette) occupy different if not directly opposite positions within the novel, yet upon closer examination this polarity collapses. By unexpectedly aligning Virginia and Lady Delacour under the trope of false female reading, Edgeworth renders Hervey and Saint-Pierre’s distinction between natural ‘simplicity’ and metropolitan ‘corruption’ a moot point. Virginia and Lady Delacour can be grouped together insofar as they are both products and victims of ideological systems that seem mutually oppositional but are in fact complementary in their destructive and disabling effects. These two women are antithetical not in relation to each other, but in relation to the enlightened middle-class values represented by domestically oriented characters like Belinda and the Percivals. Hervey’s ‘system’

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partakes of the decadence that it purports to cure, and therefore pastoralism and courtliness must be renounced together. As Andrew McCann suggests, the resolution of Belinda’s narrative intricacies hinges on a process of ‘domestic enlightenment, in which characters move inexorably towards the ideal of conjugal love and harmonious private space’ (p. 57). For Lady Delacour, the denouement that re-establishes her as ‘la femme comme il n’y en a peu’ involves not just the curing of her diseased body but also the humbling of her pride and to a certain extent the taming of her wit. For Virginia, however, domestic salvation entails a different process of being brought from the state of nature into the state of society – not by the chivalric lover of her feverish fantasies, but by his real-life counterpart, Captain Sunderland.

Imlay’s The Emigrants Among English readers and critics of Paul et Virginie, it was undoubtedly the members of William Godwin’s literary and intellectual circle who showed the greatest interest and responded most sympathetically. In the preface to Paul and Virginia (1796), the Godwin-associate Helen Maria Williams presented her rendition of Saint-Pierre’s ‘pathetic narrative’ as a welcome respite from revolutionary and counter-revolutionary violence, and as a wartime effort to mediate between England and France. 35 Despite his reputation as a rigid rationalist, Godwin himself wrote Imogen: A Pastoral Romance (1784), and in Book 8 Chapter 3 of An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice (1793), Godwin offers a glowing anarchist vision of a future utopia where the central state has withered away, and where men and women have returned to living in selfsustaining, small-scale, exclusively agrarian communities: Every man would have a frugal, yet wholesome diet; every man would go forth to that moderate exercise of his corporal functions that would give hilarity to the spirits; none would be made torpid with fatigue, but all would have leisure to cultivate the kindly and philanthropical affections, and to let loose his faculties in the search of intellectual improvement.36 One might speculate interestingly, albeit inconclusively, about the possible impact of Saint-Pierre’s novel on Coleridge, Southey and the project of Pantisocracy, which was another attempt to coalesce revolutionary activism and pastoral naturalism.37 Certain it is that the Wordsworths owned copies of Paul et Virginie in Italian, French, Spanish and


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English, and William admired Saint-Pierre’s translator so much that he penned one of his earliest sonnets ‘On Seeing Miss Helen Maria Williams Weep at a Tale of Distress’ (1787). 38 Yet as Marilyn Butler points out, Anglo-American ‘Jacobinism’ rested not only on hostility towards Burkean conservatism, but also on pronounced scepticism vis-á-vis Rousseauistic primitivism, and this anti-sentimental heritage complicates the Jacobins’ relationship to the pastoral. 39 Even the most enthusiastic Godwinite testimonies to Paul et Virginie’s popularity were tinged with hesitancy, which is particularly manifest in the most ambitious English-language attempt to write a novel pitting the idea of the colonial simple life against an overcomplex and devitalized Europe. The authorship of the epistolary novel The Emigrants, or the History of an Expatriated Family (1793) has remained mysterious. When the novel appeared in London, its frontispiece announced that it was written ‘in America’ by ‘G. Imlay, Esq.’, but because the American soldier, speculator and philanderer Gilbert Imlay published no other novels and showed few signs of literary promise, the novel has also been attributed to his then lover, the Englishwoman Mary Wollstonecraft.40 Recently the emphasis has once again shifted, with the editors of the Penguin Classics edition declaring that ‘there is no evidence whatsoever that Wollstonecraft contributed in any way to The Emigrants [ . . . ] except indirectly through her emancipatory tract A Vindcation of the Rights of Woman’. 41 In any case the uncertainties enveloping The Emigrants, and the fact that both Imlay and Wollstonecraft led rootless, itinerant lives, have made it correspondingly troublesome for critics to place the novel in its proper generic and national-literary context. Variously touted as the first American novel, as an outgrowth of the British Jacobin novel and as a thinly disguised sales pitch for Imlay’s dubious commercial adventures in the new world, The Emigrants currently seems to hover somewhere over the mid-Atlantic, a striking illustration of the thesis that the meaning of ‘Romanticism’ should be located not in stable national essences but in British and American writers’ ‘continuing transatlantic awareness’.42 In charting Imlay’s and Wollstonecraft’s transatlantic peregrinations, however, critics have paid scant notice to the novel’s use of pastoral imagery, just as they have tended to ignore Imlay’s powerful French connections. Although no direct evidence links the two novels, my claim that Imlay sought to exploit and adapt Saint-Pierre’s successful formula is strongly supported not only by similarities in genre, plot and character, but also by circumstantial evidence: Imlay spent most of 1792–1793 in Paris, where he mingled with prominent revolutionary

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politicians like Brissot de Waville and Charles-Edmond Genet, and where he was surely exposed to Saint-Pierre’s astounding popular triumph, which was then at the height of its international fame.43 At the very least we know that while in Paris, Imlay was acquainted with Wollstonecraft through Helen Maria Williams (with whom he may also have had an affair), the friend and admirer of Saint-Pierre and the subsequent translator of Paul et Virginie (Gilroy and Verhoeven, pp. xxvi–xxx). Mixing romantic narrative with topographic description, and following a group of English expatriates who endeavour, this time successfully, to create the perfect natural society, The Emigrants juxtaposes European over-sophistication with colonial simplicity and rewrites the myth of communal rebirth in the wilderness. Having lost their fortune and social status through some unfortunate business ventures, the members of the T–n family journey to America to make a new start in the western territories. While crossing the Appalachian mountains, the novel’s heroine Caroline T–n falls in love both with the sublime landscape and with Captain Arl–ton, the revolutionary war veteran who is Imlay’s chief embodiment of the new American virtues. In Pennsylvania the T–ns decide to follow Arl–ton, Mr Il–ray and General and Mrs W– to the lowlands of Kentucky, which promises to become a sanctuary for those pining for release from Europe’s ‘diabolical tyranny’ (p. 236). This escape proves more difficult than expected, however, for agents of the continent where ‘everything has been perverted by the tyranny of custom’ continue to dog Caroline and Arl–ton even in America (p. 108). The devious Mr S–, for example, attaches himself to the emigrant party, before he is exposed as a villain and finally dies. Even more vexingly, members of Caroline’s own family remain mired in European degeneracy. Her sister Mary, for instance, absurdly persists in acting as a fashionable society hostess, and with her cold formality she almost causes a rupture between Caroline and Arl–ton. Meanwhile, Caroline’s effete brother George recoils at America’s rusticity, and having dissipated what remains of the family funds ‘with all the wanton extravagance of the most contemptible and prodigal spendthrift’, he returns to Europe (p. 142). For both Saint-Pierre and Imlay, Europe represents a cesspool of almost satanic corruption: a place which is itself totally beyond redemption, and which offers its inhabitants no alternative to escape. Read in relation to its famous French predecessor, The Emigrants appears to strengthen the pastoral novel’s political content, and to invest its enterprise with greater intellectual acumen. Unlike Saint-Pierre, that is, Imlay is not content merely to show how Europe’s feudal system produces dysfunctional social manners; he also wishes to explain this process.


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Interspersed with descriptive and narrative passages, The Emigrants contains several long digressions in which characters dissect the gothic vices and mock the absurd affectations of courtly culture, such as alcoholism, overeating, overdressing and duelling. Whereas Paul et Virginie personifies aristocratic evil in Virginie’s perverse great-aunt, The Emigrants uses the term ‘aristocracy’ to denote an all-encompassing system which permeates European mentality, and which inevitably barbarizes relationships between parents and children, brothers and sisters and especially husbands and wives. Given the overwhelming likelihood that Mary Wollstonecraft indirectly contributed to the novel, it seems less than wondrous that The Emigrants should foreground ‘the inconveniences which flow from the existing laws respecting marriage’ and ‘espouse the cause of oppressed women’ (pp. 13, 111). Mr P–’s inset narrative about his involvement with Lord and Lady B–, analogously with the sub-plot concerning Caroline’s sister Eliza’s marriage to the nobleman F., clearly documents the dehumanizing effects of the English marriage system, which reduces the husband to a tyrannical ogre and the wife to a de facto prostitute. As explained by P–, who functions as Imlay’s spokesman in matters of sexual politics, those high-ranking men most eager to exalt women are in fact most guilty of degrading them, for they treat woman ‘merely as a domestic machine, necessary only as they are an embellishment to their house, and the only means by which their family can be perpetuated’ (p. 93). Women’s quandary is intensified by British divorce laws, which force distraught wives to form liaisons with other men, and which thus leave them vulnerable to character-attacks and accusations of infidelity. ‘How’ asks P– in defence of legal reforms, sounding the rhetorical note of Wollstonecraft’s Vindication, can it be an injury to a man to loose that upon which he sets no value, and which he has treated in such a manner as to prove it by his conduct? Or, is it possible that there can be a human being so preposterous as to think, a woman is a mere animal who it is necessary sometimes to immolate, in order to support the presumptuous and supercilious prerogatives of arrogant and inhuman men? (pp. 115–16). Richard Slotkin points out that The Emigrants ‘for all its American setting’ draws exclusively on European literary models and ‘is addressed entirely to current European concerns (the woman question, the difficulties of the class structure, the complications of romantic love)’. 44 To be sure, many of Imlay’s characters are equally well-versed in pastoral literature, with a fondness for quoting from the classics. ‘Come to these Arcadian

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regions where there is room for millions’, exults Mrs W– to her friend Miss R–, and Caroline’s sister Eliza also alludes to ‘the simple and sincere manners of your [ . . . ] Arcadian regions’ (p. 145). Confronted with the ‘naiveté’ of the inhabitants of the Illinois River, Il–ray writes, ‘you would believe you was living in those Arcadian days, when the tuneful shepherd used to compose sonnets to his mistress’ (p. 205). Arl–ton repeatedly likens Caroline to pastoral heroines from classical literature and mythology, and at one time he quotes a saying by Voltaire: ‘if ever the golden age existed, it was in the middle provinces of America’ (p. 232).Voltaire places the Golden Age in the past, yet in this novel Arcadia is not merely a fiction of the past but also a promise of the future. The purpose of The Emigrants, finally, is not merely to lament the decline of civilization in the Old World, but also to envisage a salutary alternative in the New World. It takes Imlay most of the novel to disentangle Caroline from her familial involvements and to purge the new community of the remaining impurities. Eventually a convenient inheritance allows Mr and Mrs T–n to return to Europe with Mary, and in exchange Caroline is joined by her rediscovered uncle P– and her recently widowed sister Eliza, who quickly changes her name to Mrs Il–ray. With this realignment of morality and geography, Caroline, now engaged to Arl–ton, can finally settle down at Louisville, Kentucky, which promises to become ‘a land of freedom and love’ (p. 248). The English emigrants reach their safe haven when Arl–ton, who has bought up a considerable tract of land, decides to establish the commonwealth entitled Bellefont: As the government of this district is not organized, it is my intention to form in epitome the model of society which I conceive ought to form part of the polity of every civilized commonwealth; – for which purpose I have purchased a tract of country lying upon the Ohio from the rapids of Louisville [ . . . ] This tract I have laid out into two hundred and fifty-six parcels, upon which I am settling men who served in the late war, giving to each a fee-simple in the soil he occupies, who shall be eligible to a seat in a house of representatives consisting of twenty members, who are to assemble every Sunday in the year, to take into consideration the measures necessary to promote the encouragements of agriculture and all useful arts, as well to discuss upon the science of government and jurisprudence (p. 233). Like Paul and Virginie’s embowered ‘petite societé’ at Mauritius, Imlay’s Bellefont (‘beautiful fountain’) reconstructs the classical pastoral’s


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Arcadian dream for the Revolutionary age. In comparison with the sentimental utopia that Saint-Pierre was prepared to conceive, however, Imlay foresees a jettisoning of the feudal legacy that is more sweeping in its scope. Concerning the problem of religion, for example, Imlay twists Saint-Pierre’s tender-hearted deism in the direction of a more aggressive atheism, when he lets the legislative assembly meet on Sundays, and when he has Mr P–ban clerics from the premises because they ‘cloud’ the ‘ray of reason’ (p. 234). In like manner, whereas Saint-Pierre struggles unsuccessfully to accommodate slavery to his permissive world-view, Imlay rejects the hackneyed notion of the decent slave-owner out of hand, and he condemns all forms of human bondage as entirely at variance with the nature of the future good society. Writing during the heyday of British abolitionism, Imlay not only remonstrates against the institution of slavery, which degrades humans ‘to a situation no better than that of brutes’, but also lavishes sympathy upon ‘the unfortunate African who is torn from his home – from his family – and from that independence when he laboured for himself’ (pp. 60–1). In a levelling move that would have been difficult if not impossible to imagine for pre-revolutionary writers, Imlay’s hero Arl–ton bestows an equal-sized plot of land on his trusty ‘servant’ Andrew, thereby voluntarily relinquishing authority and repositioning master and servant as future ‘friends’ and ‘comrades’ (p. 247). Borrowing the structure of the transoceanic romance juxtaposing degenerate Europeans and regenerate colonials, Imlay set out to transplant Saint-Pierre’s pastoral to his native environment. The Western territories of North America, Imlay argues, offer a concrete and historically unique opportunity to realize those utopian hopes that the age of democratic revolutions had evoked (Gravill, pp. 38–9). Yet Imlay’s American background and ideological affinity with Paineite radical republicanism forces him into a critical confrontation with previous pastoral representations, forcing him to take issue with Rousseau and his followers. While The Emigrants appears to continue Paul et Virginie’s project, the former novel also includes elements of anti-pastoral critique, and here it is the attitude towards nature that most noticeably distinguishes the American writer from his French predecessor. Compared to Saint-Pierre’s formulation of a new ruralist ethos, Imlay’s naturalism is less consistent, or at least has a different valence. Saint-Pierre, as pointed out above, draws on his colonial experiences in visualizing Mairitius as a lush, accommodating garden, where man can realize his ancient ideal of peaceful coexistence with the environment. But Imlay, geographic explorer, land-developer and child of the British

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Enlightenment as he was, cannot bring himself to depict Kentucky in quite this way. To a certain degree The Emigrants does embrace a positive view of physical nature, for it uses the currently fashionable aesthetic vocabularies of the beautiful, the sublime and the picturesque to celebrate the American scenery’s variability and abundance. Here, for example, is Caroline’s rapturous description of the site where she and Arl–ton decide to settle down: Nearly in the center of one of these lots, is a fountain, I have called Bellefont, from whence the name of our seat is taken. [ . . . ] It is in every respect entitled to the distinction; for nothing of the sort can possibly be more beautiful. It gushes from a rock; and when its different pliant rills have joined at its base, they form an oval basin, about three hundred feet diameter, which float over a bed of crystals, that eradicates its surface, and give to it a polish more transparent than a mirror of glass. [ . . . ] The water steals off in several directions, and in their meandering course moistens the flowery banks, which, as if to return the loan, spread their blooming sweets on every side, and the soft gales gather their odours as they pass; and while they perfume the ambient air, the wanton hours dancing to the gentle harmony of sweet sounds, which the feathered songsters warble in modulated strains, love seems to have gained absolute and unbounded empire, and her in the couch of elegance and desire, to dally in the charms of its various joys [ . . . ] (pp. 246–7). The use of aesthetic terminology, however, also places the landscape at a distance from the human observer, and this distancing manoeuvre is utterly characteristic of Imlay’s writing. Where Paul et Virginie represents wild nature as a valuable and vulnerable friend, in need of man’s protection, Imlay generally subscribes to a different ideology that views the American landscape as an overwhelmingly powerful enemy requiring opposition, discipline and cultivation. The recurring epithets that various characters use to describe the western landscape suggest how Imlay subverts the pastoral account of man’s proper relation to nature. Some of the novel’s governing tropes are introduced already in the opening chapter, when the American west is presented as a region ‘inhabited mostly by wild beasts’ and ‘savages’, and when the T–ns are said to have been ‘banished from their country into the wilds of a desart’ [sic] (pp. 5, 7). When reading about Caroline’s adventures, Eliza T–ton pictures her sister stranded amidst ‘the horrors of a savage wildness’


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(p. 160). Never having left Europe, Eliza understands ‘wild’ nature as the opposite of ‘civilization’ and consequently views it as ‘horrible’, but what is more revealing is that other characters use similar terms, expressing ambivalent emotions of attraction and repulsion towards ‘wildness’. Caroline herself also comments on the ‘savage wildness of that region you are obliged to travel through in your way’ from Pennsylvania. While Caroline speaks about the West as ‘these almost uninhabited wilds’, Il–ray describes the Alleghany River as ‘fierce’ (pp. 155, 163). Even Arl–ton, Imlay’s swashbuckling Saint-Preux figure, at one time describes the Mississippi region an ‘uncultivated, and uncivilized waste’ where a person is likely to go ‘wild’ (p. 186). And at a later point Arl–ton repeats Eliza’s words verbatim when he likens the Illinois riverbanks to ‘the horrors of a wilderness’ (p. 198). Beautiful the Kentucky landscape may be, but also sublime, which is to say that it produces ‘that state in the soul, in which all its motions are suspended, with some degree of horror’.45 Sometimes ‘wildness’ takes on more palpably disturbing forms, for the discourse of ‘savagery’ that pervades The Emigrants also hints at a darker threat lurking within the American landscape – a threat that finally erupts during the settlers’ confrontation with the Indians. Throughout the novel, tensions have been built up around the Indians, who make sure that we never forget about unruly nature. Caroline and Arl–ton receive their first warning about Indians, when upon crossing the mountains a countryman tells them about ‘the havock of their depredations’ (p. 27). When Indians materialize later during the same journey, however, they appear surprisingly courteous, calling Arl–ton ‘brother’ and assuring him of their friendship (pp. 48–9). Yet this falsely reassuring episode cannot be reconciled with other references to ‘Indians’ and ‘savages’ (the two terms are used interchangeably throughout the novel) such as Eliza’s premonitory vision of Caroline ‘insulated, and liable to be carried off by [ . . . ] Indians’, or with P–’s woeful narrative of how a dastardly ‘body of Indians’ entered his house and carried off his wife Juliana and their two children, while P– himself was ‘left for dead, and scalped’ (pp. 160, 130). We are therefore not entirely unprepared when disaster strikes, as Caroline, ‘having crossed this morning into the Indian country, unattended,’ is ‘carried off [ . . . ] by a party of Indians from the heights of Silver Creek’ (p. 192). Reflecting Imlay’s mixed feelings about nature, the Indians come out of and vanish back into the landscape, for after Caroline’s abduction ‘not a vestige of an Indian’ can be discovered. To establish Arcadia, for Imlay, one must not simply adapt nature to oneself and oneself to nature,

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for wild nature, although aesthetically pleasing, is inhabited by primitive forces that do not welcome strangers. The imperative, rather, is to confront and overcome, even conquer, nature’s stubborn resistance to humanization. Unleashing a state of war, the kidnapping of Caroline brings to the surface all Imlay’s barely-suppressed anxiety and hostility towards the ‘wild’ and ‘savage’ aspects of nature. First, Il–ray threatens the Indians with genocide, demanding that ‘Caroline shall be given up; otherwise the whole race of savages, must expiate with their lives the robbery they have committed’ (p. 194). Fortunately Arl–ton, stumbling upon Caroline’s abductors in the forest, can employ his innate shrewdness and acquired military skill to ‘retake’ Caroline as well as two Indian prisoners (p. 203). Given that American nature is a ‘wilderness’ or ‘waste’, inhabited by howling beasts and ferocious savages, it follows that the emigrants’ prime task is to civilize it as best as they can. Undoubtedly both SaintPierre and Imlay criticize commercialism and uphold an ethos of ruralism, but the forms of land use that they favour differ remarkably. If Paul and Virginie hardly ever seem to work, it is because Saint-Pierre locates pastoral contentment in almost child-like ethos of collaborative dwelling within nature’s maternal ambience, with only a minimum of labour. Like Saint-Pierre’s Virginie, Imlay’s Caroline sympathizes with captured animals, and in one instance she is shown releasing a caged bird from captivity: ‘go thou little innocent thing, said she to the bird, putting her hand out of the window at the same time to facilitate its escape, you shall not be a moment longer confined, for perhaps, already have I robbed thee of joys, which the exertions of my whole life could not repay’ (p. 202). This rather conventional gesture on the part of a sentimental heroine, however, is the book’s only declaration of sympathy for non-human creatures, and thus it is the closest that Imlay ever approaches to Rousseau and Saint-Pierre’s embrace of wildness. More typically Imlay transfigures passive enjoyment of nature’s bounty into laziness, and attaches it to the novel’s least likeable character, George T–n, who crosses the Appalachians supine in a horse-cart. A prototype of the style-conscious aristocratic beau, George’s character can also be interpreted as a parodic representation of the primitivist impulse to luxuriate in nature’s lap, yet for his unwillingness to work George is condemned as a ‘lethargic’ and ‘torpid beast’ (p. 16). The antithesis of such inactive communing is found in Caroline, Arl–ton and her uncle P–: active characters who view wild nature as something to be developed and cultivated, and whose admirable work ethic destines them for successful farming careers. Throughout The Emigrants, urbanites


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like Mr T–n and Mr S come to ruin because they engage in ungrounded financial speculations, but their examples are offset by passages like Caroline’s admiring account of P–’s farming practices: ‘His little plantation is upon the southern branch of the Ohio, about twenty miles above this place, which he has cultivated with all the care of an English farmer, and it produces him all the comforts of living in the most superfluous abundance: for this abundance there is always a generous market, as the emigrants who are continually passing through the country to form new settlements upon the Mississippi, after crossing the mountain want all kinds of necessaries’ (p. 169). As a farmer, P– is everything that Saint-Pierre’s Paul, whose rusticity makes him a denizen of the land rather than its master, is not. P– has made himself a home in the hostile barrenness, breaking its resistance and converting the ‘desert’ into a rolling farmland. Imlay evidently perceives no necessity for preserving the wilderness as wilderness. For all American nature’s beauty and abundance, man dare not wait for redemption to be awarded. On the contrary, Imlay insists on the need to convert Kentucky into a beautiful and fertile garden. It is clear that Imlay, like Benjamin Franklin and William Godwin, believes in the ennobling value of work, and that he also believes human relations with nature should be structured by utility and productivity. Success, finally, stems not from appeasement with and adaptation to nature, but from exercise of power. Preferring the rational homo oeconomicus to the Rousseauistic solitary walker or the Wordsworthian chosen son of Nature, Imlay consequently reserves his highest praise for women who like Caroline do not shrink from imagining themselves ‘clad in the garb, and with the habiliments of milk maids’, and for men who like Arl–ton occupy their mornings ‘in laying out his grounds, and planting the several fruits, and other things necessary to the comfort and pleasure of living’ (pp. 42, 247). Only when the Indian menace has been warded off, can Imlay’s settlers proceed with their main business, the founding of Bellefont: The country gently rises from the banks of the river, for nearly six furlongs, and presents a ridge, that runs parallel with it for several leagues; which elevated prospect affords the expanded beauties of the country a long distance back, and at this genial season, the earth, where Pomona reigns, yields bounteous plenty to all, and every being shares the golden stores that gild the variegated plains. [ . . . ] The country on the opposite shore, overhung with woods, is not less rich in variety; but as it remains yet uninhabited, we have the charms of cultivation contrasted by the beauties of wildness. This body of land

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Arl–ton has parcelled out into a number of lots, which are in part settled, and the remainder are settling, he having reserved six for himself and those friends who may in future wish to join us (p. 246). In The Machine in the Garden, Leo Marx distinguishes two different versions of pastoral, expressed through two sets of ‘ecological images’. On the one hand, Marx argues, writers have imagined Arcadia as a ‘lovely garden, promising an ideal of immediate, joyous fulfilment’.46 Such writers, including Montaigne, Rousseau and Saint-Pierre, dream of disaffiliating from society and recovering radical innocence, and the garden-imagery can thus be associated with those ‘primitivist-anarchist programs’ that ‘repudiate calculated human effort, the trained intellect, and, for that matter, the idea of civilization itself’ (p. 55). Characteristically, Marx privileges those writers who more realistically depict Arcadia as ‘the middle state’ between culture and nature. This school of thought is ‘progressivist’ rather than ‘primitivist’, and therefore the imagery of the middle landscape traditionally ‘provided a paradigm for the agrarian celebration’ (p. 98). Following contemporaries such as Thomas Jefferson and Hector St John de Crèvecoeur, Imlay characterizes Bellefont – ‘a new creation bursting from the shades of wildness into a populous state’ – precisely as an intermediary region halfway between over-refinement and barbarism, offering ‘the charms of cultivation contrasted by the beauties of wildness’ (pp. 47, 246). Imlay’s physiocratic cult of the efficient farmer, however, contradicts Saint-Pierre’s writings, where ‘there is no sympathy for colonial agriculture of any kind’ (Grove, p. 250). As Marx admits, writers propounding the ‘middle state’ theory often favour a high degree of technological cultivation, while they attach little importance to protecting or conserving wilderness as such. Like most countrymen Jefferson was ‘unsentimental about unmodified nature’, and in Crèvecoeur’s text the ‘farmer is enlisted in a campaign to dominate the environment by every possible means’ (pp. 116, 141–2). As model republican farmers, Arl–ton and P– take a practical rather than ethical view of nature, and on this basis one might argue that Imlay offers a ‘reforming rather than truly revolutionary’ pastoral, in which ‘wildness is regarded as something unholy, bestial, pagan, fit only for conversion into an orderly garden’. 47 Contemplating the meaning of the phrase ‘radical pastoral’, Greg Garrard concludes that ‘because the meanings of bother terms is always at stake’ today ‘[w]e are less sure [ . . . ] what would count as “radicalism”’ (p. 464). While it is sometimes argued that English-language writers romanticized


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French radical discourse, The Emigrants appears less ‘Romantic’ than Paul et Virginie. According to Wollstonecraft’s biographer Ralph Wardle, Imlay’s life and writings were part of a deliberate self-fashioning, creating the ‘impression that, more than most Americans, he was an unspoiled child of nature, an incarnation of Rousseau’s Emile’ (qtd. in Slotkin, p. 317). But the image of Imlay as ‘Emile in buckskins’ seems ironic, not least because Imlay in his writings deliberately refrains from the key gesture of upholding being-in-the-state-of-nature as a desideratum in itself. Imlay wrote The Emigrants both to critique and promote the ideology of progress, and this tension begins to show at the end of the novel, when he virtually ignores the Paradisal imagery he had employed previously. The resulting paradox is that Imlay in attempting to radicalize pastoral risks denying precisely what is most ‘radical’ about it. It may be said, perhaps, that Imlay’s lack of romantic sentiment and his continuing emphasis on the benefits of thoroughgoing cultivation show a more realistic sense of what it would mean to make a home in an alien environment. To this claim one might counter that Imlay’s utilitarianism vis-à-vis nature bespeaks a profound and unacknowledged contradiction at the heart of his ideological project. For all Imlay’s avowal of pacifism, there is an awkward subtext of aggressiveness running through The Emigrants. Founded by Captain Arl–ton and General W–, Bellefont is established as a colony inhabited by ex-warriors, for ‘most of the settlers are old soldiers, that served under Arl–ton, and whom he regards as his best friends, and the comrades of Andrew’ (p. 247). While they prepare him to welcome new members into the human polis, Imlay’s Enlightenment values still restrict him to envisioning nature and its inhabitants as a hostile ‘other’. Imlay lends the pastoral romance a new polemical sharpness, but he also loses – or excludes – what was for Saint-Pierre a necessary corollary of social liberalism: the cultivation of a non-violent, non-complacent bonding with nature.

4 ‘Partizans of the German Theatre’: The Poetics and Politics of Romantic Dramatic Translation

Among the most inspiring developments in recent Romantic criticism has been the ongoing revival and reappraisal of Romantic drama. As Greg Kuchich noted already a decade ago, British Romantic drama has undergone ‘an important revaluation [ . . . ] with numbers of critics [ . . . ] showing that the dismissal of Romantic drama has arisen from conventional and mistaken assumptions about its strategies and principles’. 1 Kucich may overstate his case here, for it is no recent discovery that most canonical Romantics, including Wordsworth, Coleridge, Scott, Byron and Shelley, wrote and published plays designed for the stage, most often with limited commercial success. Still, whereas earlier scholars tended to study High Romantic drama in isolation from the period’s dramatic production, and while they, perhaps echoing the canonical Romantics themselves, took a generally dismissive view of popular dramas like M. G. Lewis’s The Castle Spectre (1797) and Charles. R. Maturin’s Bertram (1816), more recent efforts have increasingly been oriented towards recovering and reassessing hitherto neglected forms, authors and plays. One telling manifestation of this trend is Jeffrey N. Cox’s Seven Gothic Dramas, which heroically undertakes to restore an entire genre to critical consciousness.2 Another instance is the recent resurgence of interest in the works of women playwrights generally, and especially in the plays of Joanna Baillie, that ‘model of an English Gentlewoman’ as Wordsworth called her. 3 Thus, if many revisionist critics implicitly or explicitly challenge the ideology propping the High Romantic lyrical closet drama, their primary aim is not simply to supplant the works of the canonical Romantics with a new, revisionist canon, but rather to reconstruct a more historically accurate sense of what ‘the Romantic drama’ might have been. In the words of Gillian Russell, to focus only on the ‘major’ Romantics ‘ignores the complexity 134

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of the theatre at this period, the fact that the patent theatres were multimedia enterprises employing visual artists, scene designers, mechanics, musicians, and dancers, as well as actors and dramatists’. 4 What has become possible is a fuller understanding of late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century theatrical culture: a heterogeneous world destabilized by politically motivated censorship by the Examiner of Plays; ideological polarization both on stage and in the audience; increasing competition between the two patent theatres and their upstart rivals; market-driven experimentation producing new generic hybrids such as monodrama, aquadrama and burletta; and last but not least, an increasing reliance on foreign translated drama, which rendered British Romantic drama an area ‘of multiculturalism, not chauvenism’ (Russell, p. 229). In this chapter, I discuss the importance of translation in the development of British Romantic drama, and the role that dramatic translation played in the emergence of a certain type of Romantic authorship. The 1790s and early 1800s were, as Allardyce Nicholl pointed out long ago, the heyday of translation-drama in British theatrical history. At this time, both Drury Lane Theatre and Covent Garden Theatre routinely relied on foreign sensational matter to attract audiences and fill their vast galleries, with France and Germany supplying many of the period’s most spectacularly popular plays.5 Around 1800, at the time when ‘the main current of Romanticism began to flow in full force’, the ‘vogue for German drama in England was sufficiently great to be referred to as “the rage”’.6 Then again, smash hits like James Boaden’s Fountainville Forest (1794), J. C. Cross’s Julia of Louvain; or, Monkish Cruelty (1797) and Thomas Holcroft’s The Child of Mystery: A Melo-drame (1801) were all based on recent French plays allegorizing the revolutionary upheavals that had transformed the nation into a republic.7 It is a thought-provoking but little-explored paradox that patrons of the English theatre should have developed a sudden and powerful craving for foreign productions, at the precise moment when war was escalating and many Britons were arming themselves in apprehension of Continental invasion. Needless to say, the portentousness of this coincidence was not lost on Europhobic commentators, who crammed newspapers, reviews and journals with jeremiads written in the trademarkheightened rhetorical style also employed by this writer for the Lady’s Monthly Museum: [W]hat must their taste be who lend their suffrage to such a farrago, and pleased with the delineations of faculties so sunk and vitiated? After this let us no more hear of the purity of our taste, or the morality

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of our theatres, the lessons, either of good manners or common decency, to be drawn from that school. [ . . . ] Is not Lovers’ Vows fraught with encouragement for servant girls to intrigue with their masters? – Can our youth witness the development of a story more adapted to fire their passions, and seduce their rising affections from the love of honesty and truth? Have not the paths of illicit pleasures sufficient attractions in their own nature, without the aid of art, of talent, and of dramatic exhibition, for misleading to irretrievable ruin both old and young?8 So powerful was the popular demand for dramatic translations, however, that it spurred S. T. Coleridge, who otherwise spent much of his career abjuring the cheap thrills of the popular drama, to offer his blank-verse versions of Schiller’s Die Piccolomini and Wallensteins Tod (1798) to the publisher Longman, who published the plays as Wallenstein and The Death of Wallenstein (1800). Coleridge’s engagement with Schiller has remained the most obscure chapter in one of the period’s otherwise most carefully scrutinized literary lives, not least because Coleridge himself dismissed his work on the Wallenstein-plays as mindlessly mechanized wage-labour (‘fagging’ was his favourite term for this activity) akin to the chores that he was currently performing as a ‘hired paragraph-scribbler’ for Daniel Stuart’s Morning Post.9 However, abundant evidence supports the suggestion that Coleridge consciously understated his own investment in the unfortunate Schiller-adventure, and that he in fact took quite seriously his ‘irksome & soul-wearying Labor, the Translation of Schiller’ (i, 587). Indeed, everything about Wallenstein and The Death of Wallenstein – their provocative association with Schiller, their highly wrought blank verse and not least the sheer beauty and expensiveness of Longman’s books – identifies them as an intelligently conceived intervention into the contentious debate over the meaning and position of the ‘German drama’ within turn-of-the-century British culture. 10 By investing several months of work in the Wallenstein-plays, Coleridge no doubt sought to capture the new readers who had made German imitations and adaptations such a financially remunerative enterprise. But the flourishing business of dramatic translation, although promising a handsome reward, could also jeopardize the translator’s reputation, as Coleridge realized when John Ferrier of the Monthly Review published a review-essay laden with artful insinuation: It is remarked by Mr. Coleridge, that these plays may be said to bear the same relation to the Robbers and the Cabal and Love of Schiller,


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with that which the historical plays of Shakespeare bear to his Lear and Othello. Yet, in the most meagre of Shakespeare’s Histories, we occasionally meet with passages of uncommon beauty, which imprint themselves indelibly on our minds; and we have not observed any sentiments or expressions of this kind in the tragedies before us. [ . . . ] We have allowed an unusual length to this article, because we think that Mr. Coleridge is by far the most rational partizan of the German theatre whose labours have come under our notice; and because we are glad to see any thing void of absurdity and extravagance from an author whose bold genius has so completely defied all rules. 11 Like other reviewers, Ferrier wilfully disregards Coleridge’s careful positioning of Wallenstein as a moral and aesthetic alternative to run-of-the-mill German translations. In response Coleridge sent the Monthly a peevish letter of protest, but to no avail: henceforth he would be known, among many members of the reading public, simply as a ‘partizan of the German theatre’ (Letters, i, 648). Another prominent British man of letters, Richard Brinsley Sheridan, made very similar disheartening experiences. In 1798, encouraged by the recent success of The Stranger (1798), Benjamin Thompson’s English version of August von Kotzebue’s Menschenhass und Reue (1788), Sheridan decided to wager the fortunes of the financially troubled Drury Lane Theatre on Pizarro, an ambitious translation-adaptation of the German author’s Die Spanier in Peru oder Rollas Tod (1796). To do so, Sheridan assembled an all-star cast composed of the day’s best-known actors (John Phillip Kemble, Sarah Siddons, Dorothy Jordan), added a liberal smattering of operatic music to the play and dramatically increased the number of violent, turbulent and pathetic scenes in what had by then become an extravagant Gesamtkunstwerk. Perhaps sensing the risk of this venture into foreign territory, Sheridan also supplemented the play with a number of thinly veiled allegorical scenes, clearly intended to celebrate Britain’s recent victories in the war against France. 12 In some respects, Sheridan’s bold speculation certainly paid off, for Pizarro became an overwhelming commercial success, staving off ruin for both Sheridan and his theatre. During its first two seasons alone, Pizarro earned a total of £30,046, played an almost unprecedented 67 times at Drury Lane, and even lured King George III and the other members of the royal family to attend a performance at a theatre where for political reasons they had not set foot for several years.13 But Pizarro also elicited a storm of critical protest, comparable only to the

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commotion caused a few years earlier when Matthew G. Lewis published The Monk. For today’s readers it is tempting to dismiss Kotzebue’s play about the Spaniards in Peru as trivial sentimental fare, but in Romantic Britain the play possessed an almost unprecedented ability to polarize opinions. While ordinary theatre-goers flocked to the cavernous, 3611-seat playhouse at Drury Lane, critical reviewers fashioning themselves as protectors of the reading public sought to outdo each other in heaping invective not only upon the play’s protagonists, but also upon everyone somehow involved in the production. The otherwise liberal Analytical Review mentions Pizarro’s ‘puerile extravagance’ and adds that it can do no good ‘to the reputation of the author of “The School for Scandal”’.14 The Critical Review believes that in Kotzebue’s melodrama ‘noise and nonsense have been substituted for the feelings of the heart and the dignity of the tragic emotions’.15 The Monthly Review finds that Pizarro betrays the ‘sickened and depraved’ state of ‘public taste’.16 The Monthly Mirror also finds that ‘there is much to blame, both as to religion and politics, in the play of Kotzebue,’ and goes on to question whether Sheridan’s rendering augments or reduces these faults.17 The British Critic mentions Pizarro’s ‘absurd, extravagant, and unnatural’ elements and concludes that Sheridan has chosen ‘rather to exhibit a drama which might allure and fascinate, from the splendour of its representation, than a Tragedy that could improve and delight, when examined as a Composition’.18 And the Gentlemen’s Magazine even more harshly considers Pizarro’s popularity as shocking proof that ‘the libertine taste of the times and German principles now pervade our theatre’.19 Frequently reproaches against Pizarro included or took the form of lurid ad hominem attacks on its adapter and producer. Besides being a long-time Whig Member of Parliament, and besides managing the nation’s largest patent theatre, Sheridan was also Britain’s best-known living playwright, the distinguished author of eighteenth-century classics like The Rivals (1775) and The School for Scandal (1777), and a man who with some legitimacy could claim to descend from Shakespeare, Jonson and Dryden. The Pizarro-affair, however, did considerable damage to his reputation. A writer in Sheridan’s elevated position could reasonably be expected to promote and uphold the values of British belles-lettres, and to many commentators, including the author of the anonymous poem ‘On the Prevalence of the German Drama’ (1800), it was precisely this assumption that made Sheridan’s apostasy from the proper style of writing and his conversion to German-style spectacle so infuriating:


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See how thy own, once verdant, laurels fade Since thou canst stoop to call in foreign aid; Since thou canst join the tame translating crew, And banish Avon’s bard for Kotzebue.20 Once again, however, a text printed in the Anti-Jacobin Review surpasses all others in scurrility and vituperative fervour. In ‘Remarks on Kotzebue’s Pizarro’ ( June 1799) the correspondent John Mavor (who signs his letter ‘AN ADMIRER OF THE DRAMA’) first spends several pages enumerating the many faults of Kotzebue’s Spanish play – it is too long; it is incoherent; it lacks consistent characterization; it portrays low characters as virtuous and high characters as villainous; it refuses to condemn female immorality and so on. Then he concludes his essay by calling upon his male British readers to resist a play which can tend only ‘to loosen those bonds which have hitherto so successfully held society together’: There is not a soliloquy in the whole piece that is worth reading; but, indeed, I do not believe that Kotzebue is capable of writing one. The eye may be delighted with the actor’s and the painter’s art, but the understanding meets with nothing but disgust! – there is nothing but dulness and error, artifice and confusion [ . . . ] Let us, for God’s sake, look with a little more circumspection at the claims of these German philosophers, before we so readily admit the value of them; nor suffer the public taste to be vitiated thus, without making one single attempt to expose the absurdity of its seducer. My blood boils with indignation when I see my beloved Shakespeare, Otway, Rowe, thrust aside to make way for the filthy effusions of this German dunce! [ . . . ] Forbid it Britons! – forbid it common sense! With characteristic bravado, Mavor figures Britain’s theatrical and literary culture as a chaste wife or virginal daughter, who is the rightful property of the male, British, high-cultural tradition extending from Shakespeare to Otway and Rowe. But instead of being possessed by its legitimate owners, the British theatre audience has been ‘seduced’ and ‘vitiated’ by an illegitimate interloper from abroad. If the British public is like an innocent maiden in distress, however, and if Kotzebue is guilty of debauching her purity, then Sheridan is no less to blame for playing the rapacious go-between. Consequently, Mavor is not content to accuse Sheridan of ‘exert[ing] his abilities [ . . . ] to promote the views of his party, by a gradual dissolution of the most sacred ties of society’;

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he also paranoiacally stigmatizes the Whig playwright a nefarious foreign agent widely suspected of conspiring with the Illuminati.21 As the examples of Coleridge and Sheridan show, the practice of translating foreign plays represented both the promise of success and the threat of infamy, confronting aspiring playwrights with conflicting, inchoate demands. In this chapter, I will concentrate on the British reception and recapitulation of two of German Sturm und Drang’s undisputed masterpieces: Johann Wolfgang Goethe’s Götz von Berlichingen mit der eisernen Hand (1773) and Friedrich Schiller’s Die Räuber (1780). More specifically, my argument will centre on four lesser-known texts which were all published within the crisis year 1799, when the controversy over the foreign drama came to a head, and whose authors openly declare their debt to Goethe and Schiller: Walter Scott’s Goetz of Berlichingen with the Iron Hand: A Tragedy, Translated from the German of Goethé, author of ‘The Sorrows of Werter’, etc.; Rose Lawrence’s Gortz of Berlingen, with the Iron Hand. An Historical Drama, Of the Fifteenth Century. Translated from the German of Goethe; Keppel Craven’s The Robbers, A Tragedy in Five Acts. Translated and Altered from the German. As it was Performed at Brandenburgh-House Theatre; and Joseph George Holman’s The Red-Cross Knights. A Play [ . . . ] Founded on the Robbers of Schiller. By making the translation strategies adopted in these four plays the focal point of my analysis, I highlight the dilemma faced by pro-establishment British writers who confront un-British playwrights whose imaginative powers they both envy and fear. The writing and rewriting of Goethe’s and Schiller’s plays, I argue, became a site of social, cultural and political contestation, engendering an embittered conflict over signs and meanings. Scott, Lawrence, Craven and Holman make no secret of their patriotically motivated desire to accommodate, nationalize and domesticate Goethe’s and Schiller’s rebel-dramas; all wish to exploit these European plays’ explosive popularity, while also assimilating them to the post-revolutionary climate of Edmund Burke and William Pitt’s Britain. Yet all writers also find themselves beset with difficulties in the process, and most fail to arrive at an end-product that is satisfying to themselves and their critics. Ultimately, then, I will also want to address the incongruities that inevitably result when playwrights try to rewrite earlier plays from a belated Anti-Jacobin perspective.

Scott’s Goetz It is a striking yet little-remembered and rarely-discussed fact that Walter Scott’s first literary endeavours consisted almost exclusively of


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German translations, imitations and adaptations. As his letters from the period indicate, Scott spent considerable time and effort in making German ballads and plays suitable for English audiences, and he sincerely hoped that his labours in this burgeoning field would launch him on a successful career as a professional author. Whenever later critics and biographers have mentioned Scott’s German translations, nevertheless, they have tended to characterize them as juvenile exercises in romance and melodrama, stepping-stones on the path towards literary stardom. At best, it is argued, Scott’s translation-work exposed him to cultural influences whose models he had to internalize and later repudiate in order to grow into the stature of the great Romantic author whom he eventually became; at worst, Scott’s involvement with Schiller, Bürger, Goethe and Weber introduced an alien and disturbing element that threatened to distract him from his proper business of inventing historical realism. Yet what most critics have been able to agree upon so far is the argument that Scott’s translations from Goethe, Schiller, Bürger and others are not noteworthy in themselves, but only insofar as and to the extent that they illuminate aspects of his later, mature work. Suffice it here to cite Scott’s two most influential biographers of the twentieth century. First, John Buchan writes that Scott, during his flirtation with the German literature of terror and frisson, ‘had forgotten all about Burns, of whom he had been thrilled to get a casual glimpse as a boy. He was passing through the inevitable stage in a literary education, when the foreign seems marvellous because it is strange, and the domestic humdrum because it is familiar. He was soon to return by way of Liddlesdale and the ballads to his own kindly earth’.22 Then, almost four decades later, Edgar Johnson extracts a virtually identical moral, when he figures German romance’s influence upon Scott in terms of a children’s disease, as a temporary ailment that inflames the body yet also somehow leaves it all the better prepared for the trials of full-grown manhood: ‘In fact, by this time [1799] Scott was recovering from the German measles that had mottled English literature with a rash of Gothic melodrama. He was to move steadily away from the monstrous absurdities of its horrors and in the direction of good sense.’ 23 First, however, the developmental narrative stipulating that Scott gradually outgrew his adolescent absorption in lowbrow, un-English Schauerromantik disregards the frequent recurrence of horror-motifs in Scott’s writings, not just in his later dramatic experiments but also in his historically-oriented novels. 24 Secondly, and more importantly to my present argument, Scott’s German translations are interesting in

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their own right, and they raise questions that may well be worth entertaining for critics, especially at a time when we seem to be experiencing a renewed interest in intertextual, cross-cultural and transnational exchanges between Britain and the European Continent during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. What, then, are we to make of Scott’s interest in translating the products of German pre-Romanticism, especially in the light of what we have recently come to know about Scott’s and the other British Romantics’ gradual abandonment of their youthful radicalism in favour of more conservative ideological positions? The German Sturm und Drang was, in the words of one modern critic, ‘the most highly developed stage of prerevolutionary writing’ in Europe, a utopian literature which looked ‘towards the future, towards a society beyond the feudal’.25 But Scott, at the turn of the nineteenth century, had left all revolutionary sympathies (assuming that he ever really felt any) behind; by that stage, Scott was a declared Anti-Jacobin, a staunch Tory nationalist and an eager amateur cavalryman, who spent his weekends and holidays drilling, drinking and writing war songs for the Edinburgh Voluntary Light Dragoons.26 Götz von Berlichingen is set in sixteenth-century Europe during the time of the Peasant Wars, but critics have tended to suspect that it concerns socio-political issues pertaining to the late eighteenth-century age of democratic revolutions. The politics of Goethe’s play, if so viewed, are certainly ambiguous. On the one hand, Götz unequivocally condemns the peasant insurgents’ mass-rebellion, which is portrayed as brutal and self-serving in the extreme. On the other hand, the play clearly endorses the nobleman Götz von Berlichingen’s armed opposition to the Austrian Emperor Maximilian II and his henchman the Bishop of Bamberg, for in challenging his social betters Götz displays many admirable qualities, including virtue, manliness, independence and good breeding. This distinction between individual and collective activism has caused some orthodox Marxist critics, chief among them Georg Lukács, to question the tragedy’s rebelliousness and even to condemn it as reactionary. 27 But it is precisely in its valorization of strong-willed individuals, as Andreas Huyssen has shown more recently, that the play puts forward a progressive and even a radical critique of existing social conditions: ‘Bent on emancipation’, Huyssen writes, ‘the German bourgeoisie could identify with Götz’ political struggle, especially because Götz exhibited all the qualities that middle class Germans lacked: strength, self-confidence, fighting power’.28 Dramatizing the conflict between tyranny and liberty, and exposing the luxury and corruption that breed at court, Götz


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expresses the young Goethe’s sympathy with the heroic freedom-fighter strong and courageous enough to resist the encroachment of hegemonic might. This, at any rate, was the way in which Goethe’s contemporaries interpreted the tragedy, for Götz was to its initial readers a revolutionist play, rife with subversive potential and brimming with dangerous ideas. A no less important feudal magnate than King Frederick II of Prussia publicly pronounced Götz a ‘disgusting’ and ‘revolting’ piece of ‘trash’, only ‘fit [ . . . ] to be played before the savages of Canada’.29 At the same time, Götz also became an early favourite on the stages of the French republican theatres, as ‘a wonderful accord was established between the hero of Goethe or Schiller and the young people of the revolutionary epoch’. 30 In the volatile climate of late eighteenth-century Europe, Götz was inevitably caught up in the revolution controversy. The danger of Goethe’s tragedy, as anti-revolutionary writers and critics recognized, was that it lent itself much too easily to a reading along Jacobinical lines. Götz’ final cry for ‘Freedom! Freedom!’ (‘Freiheit! Freiheit!’) and his many ranting speeches against ‘priests’, ‘princes’ and ‘princes’ servants’ (‘Pfaffen’, ‘Fürsten’ and ‘die Diener der Fürsten’) voiced, or could only too readily be construed as voicing, a rallying cry to action against the vested interests of church and court.31 Walter Scott’s English translation of Götz, however, pre-empts any radical assimilation of the play, by anchoring it securely within a specific cultural tradition and historical milieu. Leaving the German play’s plot relatively unharmed, Scott’s revisions are almost entirely stylistic and linguistic. In writing Götz, first of all, Goethe made little attempt to approximate his characters’ speech to early modern German linguistic usage. But where Goethe’s original play is for the most part written in direct and powerful contemporary German, Scott on the contrary peppers his English translation with a variety of old-fashioned words and modern words spelled in distinctly old-fashioned ways: ‘Zounds’, ‘quarter-staff’, ‘burthen’, ‘betwixt’, ‘fain’, ‘shaven’, ‘quoth’, ‘periwig’d’, ‘prithee’, ‘serjeant-at-arms’, ‘wot’, ‘plenipotentaries’, ‘meed’, ‘blood-wort’, to mention just a few examples from Scott’s lexicon of quaint terms and expressions. 32 Drawing on Elizabethan writers like Sidney, Shakespeare and Spenser, Scott includes a strong strain of archaism in his translation, inserting a textual element that is largely missing, or at least much less conspicuous, in Goethe’s original. Throughout the play, Götz and Adelbert von Weislingen, who have most of the play’s important speeches, ‘thou’ and ‘thee’ each other as well as other characters, even if ‘thou’

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by 1799 had long been the exclusive property of dialect-speakers and religious minorities: Weislingen: You look upon the Princes as the wolf upon the shepherd. And yet, canst thou blame them for uniting in the defence of their territories and property? Are they a moment secure from the unruly chivalry of your free knights, who plunder their vassals upon the very high-roads, and sack their castles and towns? While upon the frontiers the public enemy threaten to overrun the lands of our dear Emperor, and, while he needs their assistance, they can scarce maintain their own security – is it not our good genius which at this moment suggests a means of bringing peace to Germany, of securing the administration of justice, and giving to great and small the blessings of quiet? For this purpose is our confederacy; and dost thou blame us for securing the protection of the powerful Princes our neighbours, instead of relying on that of the Emperor, who is so far removed from us, and is hardly able to protect himself? Goetz: Yes, yes, I understand thee, Weislingen, were the Princes as you paint them, we should be all agreed – all at peace and quiet! Yes, every bird of prey naturally likes to eat its plunder undisturbed. The general weal! – They will hardly acquire untimely grey hairs in studying for that. – And with the Emperor they play a fine game – Every day comes some new adviser and gives his opinion. The Emperor means well, and would gladly put things to right – but because a great man can soon give an order, and by a single word put a thousand hands into motion, he therefore thinks his orders will be as speedily accomplished. Then come ordinances upon ordinances contradictory of each other, while the Princes all the while obey those only which serve their own interest, and help them to press under their footstool their less powerful neighbours – and all the while they talk of the quiet and peace of the Empire! (p. 35). Götz and Weislingen, although childhood friends and companions, are also the play’s main opponents, and their long dialogue in act one, when Weislingen is imprisoned at Götz’s castle Jaxthausen, provides the key to understanding many of the issues that Goethe wishes to raise. Scott, sure enough, translates even the most seditious-sounding of Götz’s bitter tirades against princes, churchmen and placeholders. But by having his hero and his villain soliloquize and converse in the manner of Renaissance characters, Scott also attenuates the play’s antiaristocratic, anti-monarchical and anti-imperialist politics and empties


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these charged debates of their contemporary implications, suggesting that the themes treated belong to a particular situation within a particular historical period. Choosing vintage English phrases and old-world modes of address, Scott renders Goethe’s tragedy curiously antiquated, and he rarely misses an opportunity to substitute an outdated word for a modern one. Consequently, ‘Krug’ (drinking cup) becomes ‘stoup’, and ‘Flasche’ (bottle) becomes ‘flagon’ (Goethe, pp. 77, 98; Scott, pp. 8, 32). Where Goethe’s Götz simply fears that his property may be ‘forfeited’ to the Emperor (‘dem Kaiser heimgefallen’), Scott’s protagonist uses the arcane verb ‘escheated’, which the OED glosses as a late Middle English legal term (Goethe, p. 151; Scott, p. 151). A perfectly ordinary German sentence – ‘Glaubt dem Gerüchte nicht! Und laßt Götzen nichts merken’ – suddenly becomes freighted with literary and historical weight: ‘Hearken not to rumour; and let not Goetz remark aught’ (Goethe, p. 174; Scott, p. 199). As another distinct peculiarity, Scott repeatedly leaves out verbs of movement, which is a well-known stylistic feature characteristic of Shakespearean English: ‘Whither so late?’; ‘You will away?’; ‘George shall to Bamberg’; ‘Come, let us to the periwigs’; ‘Let us away’ (Scott, pp. 10, 69, 74, 157, 197). And as part of the same archaizing strategy, last but not least, Scott consistently eschews the paraphrastic use of ‘to do’ and instead renders his characters’ questions and negations by using inverted word order, thus evoking an earlier time when English was more in touch with its Germanic roots: ‘What mean ye?’; ‘Hast thou that from his own mouth?’; ‘Thinkest thou to awe me’; ‘He needs not my blessing’ (Scott, pp. 56, 90, 179, 200). In Scott’s Goetz, to a far larger degree than in Goethe’s Götz, Gothic style occludes topical subject-matter. The play, Scott’s translation insists, is above all a historical drama, with a particular claim upon readers interested in northern antiquities. Not only, however, does Scott seek to identify Götz ever so closely with the historical period upon which it bears; more importantly still, Scott’s translation also continually calls attention to the fact that it is a German play which has been rendered into English. To do so, Scott often chooses distinctly unidiomatic phrases and awkward formulations, making characters speak in a foreign accent that advertises the text’s derivative, secondary status. Scott’s translation, abounds with Germanic-sounding words and sentences, which challenge the decorum and transgress the rules of proper English style, syntax and grammar, and which make it virtually impossible to forget the text’s translatedness. Twice, for example, Scott with blatant and wilful literal-mindedness translates the German verb ‘bleiben’ as ‘to stay’.

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Hence, Elizabeth’s ‘Ich kann nicht begreifen, wo mein Herr bleibt’ (‘I don’t understand where my husband lingers’) becomes in Scott’s version ‘I cannot understand why my husband stays’, and Götz’s ‘Wo meine Knechte bleiben’ (‘Where do my servants linger’) becomes ‘Where can my people stay’ (Goethe, pp. 76, 84; Scott, pp. 10, 21). Scott’s ‘The bare recital would put me mad’ hardly does adequate justice to Goethe’s ‘Nur von der bloßen Erinnerung komm ich außer mir’ (‘Even the memory is enough to disturb me’) (Goethe, p. 102; Scott, p. 56). Scott consistently paraphrases German locutions with a brutal directness that disrupts the reading experience and shatters the illusion of transparent, natural discourse. ‘Even thy husband speaks him good and affectionate’ is a remarkably clumsy substitute for ‘Erzählte nich selbst dein Mann so viel Liebes und Gutes von ihm!’ (‘Even your husband had many good things to say about him’) (Goethe, p. 85; Scott, p. 23). ‘Bruter Martin, du sagtest wohl’ (‘Brother Martin, you were right’) is bluntly reproduced as ‘Brother Martin, you said well’ (Goethe, p. 88; Scott, p. 26). More jarringly still, Scott chooses to translate the fixed expression ‘Wir werden ihnen die Hölle heiß machen’ simply as ‘we will make hell hot for them’, rather than trying to find an idiomatic substitute for it (Goethe, p. 106; Scott, p. 64). To continue this itinerary of bizarre phraseology, Scott calls Götz not ‘a thorn in the Emperor’s side’ or ‘a thorn in the Emperor’s flesh’, but ‘a thorn in [the Emperor’s] eyes’, as the German phrase has it (‘ein Dorn in den Augen’) (Goethe, p. 92; Scott, p. 37). Similarly, the expression ‘Das ist ein gefunden Fressen’ (‘this is a windfall’) becomes ‘Peter, we have found the game’ (Goethe, p. 76; Scott, p. 5). Maria’s ‘My heart shudders in my bosom’ is an equally literal, and equally inelegant, version of ‘Das Herz zittert mir im Leibe’, just as Lerse’s ‘The very heart within me bled’ stands in uneasily for ‘Das Herz blutete mir’ (Goethe, pp. 86, 162; Scott, pp. 25, 178). And Metzler’s ‘Fell the hound dead’ hardly does adequate justice to ‘Schlag den Hund tot!’ (Goethe, p. 75; Scott, p. 3). The British play’s oaths, greetings and imprecations almost always have a heavy and ponderous not to say a Teutonic ring to them: ‘God greet you’ (‘Gott grüß euch’); ‘Sacred heaven!’ (‘Heiliger Gott!’); ‘Hell and death!’ (‘Hölle und Tod!’) (Goethe, pp. 101, 122, 168; Scott, pp. 55, 93, 186). To render particular words or phrases, Scott often insists on coining strange, artificial neologisms, rather than choosing obvious equivalents. Hence, ‘Nimmersatt’ (‘glutton’) becomes ‘Neverenough’; ‘höllische Schurken’ (‘damned scoundrels’) becomes ‘hellish cowards’; and ‘Lumpenhunde’ (‘yellow-bellies’) becomes ‘flinching dogs’ (Goethe, pp. 74, 76, 133; Scott, pp. 1, 6, 116). At other times, Scott


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studiously avoids clear-cut translations in favour of words which lie closer, both in sound and meaning, to the German original. Thus, ‘Burgermeister’ (‘mayor’) changes into ‘Burgomaster’, ‘neutral’ (‘impartial’) becomes ‘neuter’, and ‘Bürger’ (‘citizen’) is replaced by ‘Burgher’ (Goethe, pp. 107, 125, 141; Scott, pp. 64, 100, 145). One could go on enumerating the discursive oddities that Scott cultivates almost ad infinitum, but a few more examples will probably suffice to illustrate my point. Scott makes free use of the subjunctive, which is common in German but rare in modern English: ‘Be it our last word when we die’; ‘It were a sight to make an angel weep’; ‘See he escape you not’ (Scott, pp. 132, 140, 179). Most provocatively, perhaps, Scott repeatedly substantivizes adjectival phrases in the singular, which one cannot normally do in English. Hence, for instance, ‘ein Unbekannter’ (‘an unknown man’) is rendered simply as ‘an unknown’ (Goethe, p. 163; Scott, p. 177). With its self-alienated language, gnarled sentence-structures and perverse lexical choices, Scott’s Goethe-translation sometimes presses against the borders of intelligibility. Much later in his career, when he was preparing the publication of his collected poetical works (1838), Scott completely revised his translation of Goetz, striving for greater clarity and following a recognizably English word order. In the earlier version, however, the examples of Scott’s literalisms, solecisms and Germanisms are both numerous and obtrusive, so numerous and so obtrusive that they were noticed and even ridiculed by some of the reviewers.33 Faced with the many anomalies of Goetz, it would be quite possible simply to categorize them as mistakes, and one might ascribe the text’s gaucheness to Scott’s relative youth, his inexperience in translation, or his relative unfamiliarity with German. This is what most critics who mention the play have done, and this is also what Scott himself did in 1827, in a self-effacing letter to his long-time admirer Mrs Hughes: I have great pleasure in sending you what you wish to see [a copy of Goetz]. I have cause however to be ashamed of the thing itself. It was undertaken when I did not understand German and I am not able to revise it now because I have forgotten the little I then knew. [ . . . ] It is quite at your service to keep or copy or do what you will with. I will send you some similar attempts never published one I think is a fine subject the Fiesco of Schiller. I remember I used to read it to sobbing and weeping audiences & no wonder for whatever may be thought of the translation the original is sublime. These were the works of my nonage – not quite literally but when I was about

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twenty two or twenty three and certainly had no hope of doing any thing out of my own head. 34 In another letter to Mrs Hughes from later the same year, Scott again reviews his career as a movement away from, and beyond, those puerile forms of melodrama that preoccupied him so much when he was, as he now writes, ‘German-mad’: I admire your patience in copying over old Goetz & I am sorry I have given away or lost a translation of Fiesco which is [I] think a finer thing. Some others I have, made at the time I was German-mad. If you would like to see them I could easily send them up to town but I think they are in general sad trash and if you read ever so little german [sic] you would see how inferior they are to the original (x, 331). Scott’s slighting reference to his ‘sad trash’, and his claim that Goetz and Fiesco were undertaken when his taste was ‘very green’ (he was 28 at the time), are indicative of the role that he ascribes to Goethe and other German writers in the unfolding drama of Scott’s own life in letters. Reviewing his earliest activities from the vantage point of his post-1800 position, Scott consistently presents German romance as an element which, although it was vital to his initial efforts in literary translation and transliteration, is immaterial and indeed antithetical to his adult identity as a seasoned man of letters and legitimate author of original compositions. Even in his earliest attempts at self-imaging or selfimagining, Scott disdainfully marginalizes his engrossment with nonnative writers, which he characterizes as a strong and unreasoning but ultimately fleeting attachment, somewhat like Edward Waverley’s passion for Flora MacIvor in Waverley (1814). On these occasions, Scott makes it seem as though he hardly knew what he was about in anglicizing Götz, and many later critics have taken him at his word. But Scott was apt, particularly in his later years, to deliberately downplay his own continuing interest and investment in Gothic fiction and drama, which he like everyone else had come to associate with bad taste, moral impropriety and suspicious politics (Robertson, pp. 21–67). The matter is further complicated by the fact that Scott apparently did not know as little German as he sometimes liked to claim. 35 By Scott’s own admission, he and a group of Edinburgh friends had begun to study German language and literature intensively already ten years before, immediately after attending Henry Mackenzie’s


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landmark Royal Society address ‘On the German Theatre’ in 1788.36 Also one must not forget that Scott, by the end of the century, was no novice in the art of adaptation. On the contrary, he was quite capable of writing and publishing smooth translations from the German, as he had proved already several years earlier in his elegant and critically acclaimed adaptations of Bürger’s supernatural ballads ‘Der Wilde Jäger’ and ‘Lenore’ (1796). Despite Scott’s later professions of disdain, modesty and embarrassment, there is every indication that he could have written a more easily accessible and readily enjoyable translation had he wanted to, and there is little or no reason to doubt that he chose to write as he did for a reason. A more plausible conclusion would be that Scott, strange as it may sound, resists the demands of fluency and bends his English syntax towards the German, because he wishes his readers and critics to be aware of the fact that the play before them is a translation, rather than an original play. Scott, in other words, never allows his readers to slip into the delusion that they are reading an English not a German product. Instead, signifying the foreignness of the foreign text remains one of his primary concerns. Scott’s desire to bury Goetz in a different time and place is most clearly signalled in the translator’s preface, where he provides the sociological and historical information that he deems necessary for a correct understanding of the play. The violent incidents of Goethe’s tragedy, Scott explains, must be seen as the outcome of the conflict, specific to Germany of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, between the members of a class of independent feudal lords, the so-called ‘Reichsritter’, and the potentates of the Holy Roman Empire. ‘A race of proud and military barons’, the petty knights wished to preserve their right to form alliances and wage war as they pleased, whereas the princes, bishops and merchants of the realm wanted to consolidate their power and create conditions for economic growth: Such was the state of the German nobles, when, on the 7th of August 1495, was published the memorable edict of Maximilian for the establishment of the public peace of the empire. By this ordinance the right of private war was totally abrogated, under the penalty of the Ban of the empire, to be enforced by the Imperial Chamber then instituted. This was at once a sentence of anathema secular and spiritual, containing the dooms of outlawry and excommunication. – This ordinance was highly acceptable to the princes, bishops, and free towns, who had little to gain and much to lose in these perpetual feuds; and they combined to enforce it with no small severity against

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the petty feudatories: – these, on the other hand, sensible that the very root of their importance consisted in their privilege of declaring private war, without which they foresaw they would not long be able to maintain their independence, struggled hard against the execution of this edict; by which their confederacies were declared unlawful, and all means taken from them of resisting their richer neighbours. [ . . . ] Upon the jarring interests of the princes and clergy on the one hand, and of the free knights and petty Imperial feudatories on the other, arise the incidents of the following drama (pp. ix–x). The message of Scott’s exercise in Enlightenment historiography could hardly be any clearer. Goetz, in Scott’s presentation, is a disquisition on Gothic manners and a contribution to the history of chivalry, which Scott himself would attempt to write several times over in the course of his later career. By so arguing, Scott also implicitly cautions and disciplines those readers who would be tempted to extrapolate from Goethe’s play to contemporary society. According to William Preston, writing a few years later, the extremely violent nature of Götz in itself makes it an unfit text for representation or translation. ‘Goss with the iron hand [sic]’, Preston writes with reference to Scott’s rendition, ‘is filled with all the attrocities [sic] incident to the subject’, and with a pointed allusion to the French Revolution Preston goes on to argue that Götz inaugurated ‘the cannibalism of the theatre, the reign of terror and of blood in the Drama’.37 What Preston fails or refuses to notice, however, is that Scott studiously historicizes anti-authoritarian violence. Goetz and his retainers may take up arms against imperial authority, and they may speak much about ‘freedom’, ‘rights’ and ‘justice’, yet according to Scott’s particularist gloss on Goethe these are much less recognizable and strictly localized acts and beliefs, relative to the German free knights and petty feudatories of the late Middle Ages. The ‘desperate insurrections’ depicted in Goetz, Scott admits in a moment of anxiety, may at times ‘resemble in their nature [ . . . ] the rebellions of Tyler and Cade in England, or that of the Jacquerie in France’ (p. xi). The main thrust of Scott’s translation, nevertheless, is precisely to deny this cross-cultural and trans-historical significance, and thus to keep the play’s ‘jarring interests’ at arm’s length. The strength of Goethe’s play, Scott insists, and the reason for its popularity in Germany and on the Continent, is the way in which ‘the ancient manners of the country are faithfully and forcibly painted’ (p. xii). Consequently, readers would be deeply mistaken in looking to Goetz or any other character for patterns of moral conduct that might help them make sense of their own lives.


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Lawrence’s Gortz In foregrounding the historical theme and German origin of Goethe’s play, Scott’s Goetz resembles the other Goethe-translation that appeared in Britain in 1799, Rose Lawrence’s Gortz of Berlingen. Like Scott, Lawrence writes from the contradictory position of both having to satsify and frustrate the audience’s expectations of a ‘German’ play. Like Scott, but even more markedly than he, Lawrence is disconcerted both by Goethe’s scandalous reputation and by the coincidence between the historical theme of Götz and the contemporary political situation, that is, between the medieval ‘state of disorder’ when ‘the peasantry began to hear the accents of freedom, to see, as well as to feel their oppressions; and assuming to themselves the redress of their own grievances, they rose in dreadful insurrection, and carried everywhere murder and desolation’, and ‘the melancholy crisis in which Europe is at present involved’. 38 Published in an age of revolution, Götz strikes entirely too close to home, and so to downplay undesirable associations of ideas and uncouple Götz from any kind of modern heterodoxy, Lawrence introduces changes that go beyond those of Scott’s Goetz. Among the exchanges that have been significantly toned down in the English version is the key scene where Götz upbraids Weislingen for having surrendered to the decadence of court life: ‘But that wretched court life kept you back, and the flirting and dawdling after women. I always told you, if you took up with those vain and dirty sluts and told them tales about unhappy marriages, seduced girls, and the harsh skin of a third party, or whatever else they like to hear about, you would turn out a scoundrel, as I used to say, Adelbert’ (‘Da hielt dich das unglückliche Hofleben, und das Schlenzen und Scherwenzen mit den Weibern. Ich sagt es dir immer, wenn du dich mit den eiteln garstigen Vetteln abgabst, und ihnen erzähltest von mißvergnügten Ehen, verführten Mädchen, der rauhen Haut einer Dritten, oder was sie sonst gerne hören, du wirst ein Spitzbub, sagt ich, Adelbert’) (p. 90). By stripping Gortz’s appeal to Weislingen’s loyalty of its references to female unchastity, Lawrence also robs it of its rhetorical power: ‘If thou hadst but followed me when I entreated thee to follow me to Brabant, all had yet been well. But thou wert then immersed in the frivolous dissipation of a court, in the idle or enervating society of women. Did I not tell thee, when thou gav’st up thy time to titled gossips, when thou prattledst with them of discontented marriages, forsaken maidens, or of the personal defects of their acquaintance, did I not tell thee then, Adelbert, thou wouldst be a villain!’ (pp. 18–19). At other strategic points in the

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play, Lawrence chooses to entirely eliminate speeches that might cause readers to form wrong conceptions about Goethe’s and his woman translator’s intentions with the text. Writing with a suitably female concern for delicacy, Lawrence not only casts out most of Goethe’s references to the physical body, like an anonymous trooper’s indelicate reference to his unruly ‘bowels’ (‘Gedärme’), and like Götz’s audacious demand that an imperialist Captain kiss his arse (‘Er aber, sag’s ihm, er kann mich – – –’) (pp. 129, 139). Deleted from the play, even more notably, are several daring speeches by the play’s most disagreeable female character, the voluptuous court siren Adelheid von Waltraut, who uses her sexuality to bewitch the men surrounding her, and who lures Weislingen into betraying Götz’s party. Like Scott’s Goetz, Lawrence’s Gortz is prefaced by a lengthy translator’s introduction, indicating the translator’s eagerness (or anxiety) to direct her readers towards the correct interpretative strategies. As Lawrence’s translator’s preface makes clear, furthermore, her rendition remains anchored in the Romantic historicism that also informs Scott’s. To introduce the play, Lawrence distinguishes Götz from Goethe’s hitherto best-known and most notorious work, The Sorrows of Young Werther: ‘The author, the celebrated Goethe, is known throughout Europe by various literary publications, particularly by his Sorrows of Werter, a work beautiful in its separate pictures, though in its general tendency unfavourable to virtue and happiness, and which but for this fatal objection, might have ranked with the most successful efforts of modern genius.’ Götz, by contrast, is no contemporary play dealing with unsavoury subjects like infidelity, suicide and frustrated ambition. Rather, it is a play in the high heroic style, set in a period ‘turbulent [ . . . ] brave, generous, and sincere’, and populated with a cast of monarchs and noblemen: ‘The principal character is a feudal Baron, living in the reign of the Emperor Maximilian (grandfather and immediate successor to Charles V)’ (p. v). Lawrence then clinches her canonization of Götz by explicitly comparing Goethe with Shakespeare: Of the troubled condition of Germany during the period already mentioned, it seems, indeed, to have been the principal design of Goethe to give an animated representation, and for this purpose he has written this historical drama after the manner of Shakespeare, of whom he is well known to be an enthusiastic admirer. Like the historical plays of our great Bard, it includes a period, and contains a history of several years; hence the scene is perpetually shifting even in the same act; and thus are violated with the utmost disregard, and


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even wantonness, all the unities of time and place. Like Shakespeare our author exhibits a great variety of characters, from the throne to the cottage, and often introduces individuals that serve less to advance the plot of a regular drama, than to relate the incidents or illustrate the manners of the age. Like him also, he passes by rapid transition, not only over distance of place, but from one train of sentiment, to another that is opposite; his principal characters are exhibited in almost every variety of situation, from the most calm and peaceful, to the most tumultuous and terrible; and everywhere is displayed, not merely the power, but the prodigality of genius. It is to be feared indeed that the reader will discover this but faintly in this translation; in the German of Goethe however it is assuredly to be found. He whose taste is formed on the laws of the Greek or the French stage will scarcely tolerate the irregularities of Gortz of Berlingen: the disciples of Shakespeare and nature will give him welcome, and dismiss him with applause (pp. vi–vii). The Shakespeareanizing tendency of Lawrence’s translation calls for comment. Despite the efforts of writers like Coleridge and Hazlitt to consecrate a particular partisan version of Shakespeare’s genius, ‘our great Bard’ could always be quoted in a variety of contexts, lending support to many different ideologies. 39 Also, although it is obviously true that Goethe was on some level influenced by Shakespeare (what eighteenth- or nineteenth-century playwright was not?), it has remained controversial whether, how and to what extent he and other German writers sought to adapt Shakespeare to their own purposes.40 But while the claim that Goethe used Shakespeare means little in itself, it is clear in this context that Lawrence invokes ‘our great Bard’, whom she positions as primarily the author of ‘historical drama’, to delimit the contemporary significance of Götz, and to confine Goethe’s text to the past, as a play ’of the Fifteenth Century’. Like Scott, Lawrence believes that one must possess detailed historical knowledge to enter into the play’s spirit, and therefore she provides a wealth of information situating the conflicts leading to the peasant rebellions in Central Europe. She hesitates, however, to use modern political terminology to discuss the play’s events: ‘Among the other rights of sovereignty exercised by the individual members of the Germanic body, was the right (if we may so express it) of private wars’ (p. vii). Lest any reader should be misled to confuse the past and the present, Lawrence also includes the following tell-tale warning about the perils of ‘improper application’: ‘This play was published in Germany about the year 1771. The author therefore could not

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in writing it, have any reference to the melancholy crisis in which Europe is at present involved. To prevent, however, any improper application, a few sentences are softened or expunged’ (p. ix). A number of similarities link Lawrence’s Goethe-adaptation not only with Scott’s Götz but also with Coleridge’s Wallenstein and The Death of Wallenstein. Unlike The Robbers (Alexander F. Tytler’s 1792 version of Die Räuber) and The Minister (M. G. Lewis’s 1797 translation of Kabale und Liebe), Coleridge patiently explains in the translator’s preface to The Death of Wallenstein, Schiller’s more recent tragedies are not plays in which ‘curiosity is excited by terrible and extraordinary incident’. They also are not, as one might be led to believe from their hero Albrecht von Wallenstein’s often incendiary rhetoric, texts that treat contemporary problems like economic inequality, social injustice, political war, revolution and the desire for change. On the contrary, Coleridge warns, readers should ‘reflect’ that these plays are Historical Dramas, taken from a popular German History; that we must therefore judge of them in some measure with the feelings of Germans; or by analogy, with the interest excited in us by similar Dramas in our own language. Few, I trust, would be rash or ignorant enough to compare Schiller with Shakespeare yet, merely as illustration, I would say that we should proceed to the perusal of Wallenstein, not from Lear or Othello, but from Richard the Second, or the three parts of Henry the Sixth.41 Like Coleridge, both Scott and Lawrence invoke historical particularism to release the ‘mature’ Goethe from his youthful association with Continental libertinism, and to establish Goetz and Gortz as culturally legitimate projects. Such ‘foreignizing’ translations of Goethe, one might argue, implicitly defuses the challenge of German Sturm und Drang by placing Götz at a historical and geographical remove from the embattled English public sphere.42 While both translators thus share the desire to minimize the play’s relevance to contemporary readers caught up in the debate about the meaning of the French Revolution, it is Scott who most carefully weaves his historical vision into the play’s linguistic fabric. It is small wonder, finally, that while Lawrence’s Gortz slipped into oblivion, Scott’s Goetz was rediscovered and re-evaluated, several years after the Battle of Waterloo, by the revisionist contributors to the Quarterly Review and Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine. For, as Scott’s son-in-law and self-appointed literary executor John Gibson Lockhart pointed out in 1824, Goetz was translated with the aim of ‘opposing,


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in the hearts of modern men, the influence of those new doctrines by which the revolutionary literature of France had appealed so powerfully to the self-love of its generation’.43

Craven’s The Robbers In the Romantic context, no foreign play posed a larger problem than Friedrich Schiller’s Die Räuber. On the one hand, the popularity of Schiller’s tragedy speaks for itself. Although it was denied a license for performance and was never staged publicly, Alexander F. Tytler’s translation The Robbers (1792) had already appeared in four editions by 1800, and the play was re-translated twice in 1799 (by William Render and Keppel Craven) and once in 1801 (by Benjamin Thompson). According to Carlyle, the publication of Die Räuber marked a new beginning ‘not only in Schiller’s history, but in the literature of the world’.44 Marilyn Butler too considers it ‘one of the most influential books of the period’, and Terence Hoagwood adds that ‘Schiller’s plays – particularly The Robbers – contain plot elements that became paradigmatic in the drama of the period.’45 On the other hand, although Schiller was never a Jacobin, and although Die Räuber was published before the irruption of large-scale war and rebellion, the play soon became the subject of international scandal, as it was almost inevitably caught up in the turmoil of the revolution-controversy. Lamartellière’s French adaptation Robert, chef des brigands (1792) became a popular favourite on the revolutionary stage in Paris, where Wordsworth may have witnessed a performance of the play in 1792.46 It was another French version, Friedel and de Bonneville’s Les voleurs (1785), that Tytler used for his pioneering English translation, and thus Die Räuber was from the outset tainted with connotations of French license as well as German excess. The identification of Die Räuber with levelling and libertarian principles, indeed, was so strong that the National Assembly in 1792 made Schiller an honorary citizen of France. A German play appropriated for the image of the French Revolution, Die Räuber came to figure an amorphous, pan-European threat to English self-definitions: it seemed to epitomize everything that was menacing in recent Continental literature and politics. Because of its extreme popularity and equally extreme unpopularity, Die Räuber posed a challenge to British critics, poets, playwrights and translators. The popularization of Die Räuber, these writers suspected, could well be read as part of a conspiracy to erode British readers’ morals and manners. But if Schiller’s early masterpiece were imaginatively

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refashioned, it could still become a powerful, economically propitious instrument in the ideological re-consolidation of British nationhood during the French Revolution crisis. To be successful, British writers must both tap the success of Die Räuber and cleanse Schiller’s play of all its Jacobinical associations, in essence reinventing it as an apolitical or even a counter-revolutionary tract. More than a few writers, not surprisingly, decided to take up this challenge. The British Library on-line catalogue lists no fewer than eight direct translations of Die Räuber published between 1792 and 1827. Provoking a considerable number of additional British responses which, although not exactly translations, veer between adaptation, imitation, parody and pastiche, the play also attracted the interest of several canonical Romantic writers, including Coleridge, Wordsworth, Shelley, Byron and Hazlitt. 47 At the beginning of Die Räuber, the honourable and talented Karl Moor has been unfairly dispossessed of the title and the property that is rightfully his by his evil brother Franz, who takes advantage of his father’s feebleness. In response to being ostracized, Karl pledges his life to the protection of those who have been unjustly trampled upon, and he directs his titanic anger not just against the aristocratic tyrant directly responsible for his own disinheritance, but against all of respectable society. In swiftly changing scenes alternating between Franconia and Bohemia, Schiller then pits the egalitarian camaraderie and bonhomie of Karl’s robber-band against the decadent absolutism of Franz. After a series of more or less heroic acts, involving the sacking of a town and the defeat of an entire imperial army, Karl and his rebels return to his native region. Here Karl exposes the tangled plot that his brother has contrived, and releases his father who has been left to die in a dungeon. Finally, the two brothers confront each other, and Franz is vanquished in a violent showdown singled out by the critic Henry Mackenzie for its ‘barbarous heroism’.48 Whatever else the plot might have meant in its original, prerevolutionary, German context, turn-of-the-century British reviewers were almost bound to consider it a thinly veiled endorsement of Jacobinical ideas and beliefs: a piece of radical propaganda intended to foment destructive desires and encourage antisocial forms of behaviour, by presenting outlawry and brigandage in an ethically understandable and even attractive light. Tytler’s English rendition of Die Räuber, consequently, was received and excoriated as a malicious and incendiary play, advocating violent retaliation as the only proper reaction to social suppression and economic inequality. Already Mackenzie, in his otherwise positive discussion of Die Räuber in ‘Account of the German Theatre’,


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alerts his readers to the moral and political malignancy implicit in Schiller’s alluring representation of Moor. To point his audience to the potentially baleful effects that Schiller’s play and protagonist may have, ‘especially on young minds’, Mackenzie narrates an anecdote concerning a group of Freiburg university-students, who, having read Die Räuber and having been ‘struck and captivated with the grandeur of the character of its hero Moor’, formed their own gang of cutpurses in the forests of Bohemia. ‘Hence’, Mackenzie deduces, ‘the danger of a drama such as this. It covers the natural deformity of criminal actions with the veil of high sentiment and virtuous feeling, and thus separates (if I may be pardoned the expression) the moral sense from that morality which it ought to produce’ (pp. 191–2). With his manifest apprehension about Schiller’s spellbinding play’s socio-political influence, and with his remarks about Moor’s power to incite lax morality and bewitch readers into civic insubordination, Mackenzie anticipated later critics’ fascinated yet overwhelmingly negative reception of The Robbers. So universal and so vociferous was the critical condemnation of Die Räuber that even A. F. Tytler himself, in the preface to the second edition of his version (1795), somewhat disingenuously declares that the translator wishes ‘earnestly [ . . . ] that he had left undone what he has done’.49 And so powerful were the objections mounted against Schiller’s tragedy that even the Scottish hero-worshipper Carlyle, writing more than thirty years after the publication of The Robbers in The Life of Friedrich Schiller (1825), evidently still feels that he has to rehearse the apocryphal tale of the misled Freiburg-scholars. In his portrait of Moor, Carlyle cautiously adds, Schiller may well be accused ‘of having set up to the impetuous and fiery temperament of youth a model of imitation, which the young were too likely to pursue with eagerness, and which could only lead them from the safe and beaten tracks of duty into error and destruction’ (p. 13). In the preface and prologue to The Robbers, Keppel Craven boasts of having transformed Die Räuber into a tasteful and decorous tragedy perfectly suitable for middle- and upper-class country families. A younger son of the sixth Baron Craven, and a man whose connections within the highest echelons of élite society made him a chamberlain to the Princess of Wales, Craven is highly cognizant of Schiller’s troublesome reputation as a playwright who possesses immense powers of imagination, but who also airs hazardous opinions that make him the enemy of aristocracy, monarchy and established religion. In The Robbers, Craven attempts to solve this problem by presenting a softened version of the play. The Robbers, Craven assures his readers at the outset, can be

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enjoyed without scruples or anxieties, and it may be placed before even the youngest and most innocent readers. No longer a text which fastidious gentlemen and women must think twice to put into the hands of their sons, daughters or servants, the play has in fact become a didactic instrument, useful for instructing ‘every child’ with lessons of ‘humanity’, ‘patience’ and ‘forgiveness’.50 To accomplish this feat, Craven points out, he has ‘prun’d’ the play ‘with British care’, divesting it of ‘all the Jacobinical Speeches that abound in the Original’ (p. i). Critical scrutiny of Craven’s Schiller version bears out these preliminary remarks. Where Tytler’s relatively faithful 1792 version of Die Räuber weighs in at 220 pages, Craven’s version takes up only 101 pages, and this considerable reduction in scope has been achieved primarily by patiently eliminating virtually all the most controversial elements of the play. To illustrate Craven’s strategy of selective ‘pruning’, one might consider his rendition of the last scene of Schiller’s second act. At this time in the play, when the robber army seems hopelessly surrounded and outnumbered by imperial militiamen, a pompous and sanctimonious priest (‘Pater’) appeals to Karl to surrender himself to justice. In so doing, however, the preacher only elicits a page-long indictment of hypocrisy and priest-craft: Da donnern sie Sanftmuth und Duldung aus ihren Wolken, und bringen dem Gott der Liebe Menschenopfer wie einem Feuerarmigen Moloch – predigen Liebe des Nächsten, und fluchen den achzig-jährigen Blinden von ihren Thüren hinweg; stürmen wider den Geiz und haben Peru um goldner Spangen willen entvölkert und die Heyden wie Zugvieh vor ihre Wagen gespannt – Sie zerbrechen sich die Köpfe wie es doch möglich gewesen wäre, dass die Natur hätte können einen Ischariot schaffen, und nicht der schlimmste unter ihnen würde den dreyeinigen Gott un zehen Silberlinge verrathen! O über euch Pharisäer, euch Falschmünzer der Wahrheit, euch Affen der Gottheit!51 F. J. Lamport, Schiller’s modern translator, renders this passage in the following way: Gentleness and tolerance they thunder from their clouds, and offer the God of love human sacrifices like a fiery-armed Moloch – they preach the love of their neighbour, and they curse the blind octogenarian at their door – they fulminate against covetousness, and


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they have slaughtered Peru for the sake of golden brooches and harness the pagans like beasts of burden to drag their wagons – they rack their brains in wonder that nature could have brought forth a Judas Iscariot, and he is not the meanest of them who would betray God’s Holy trinity for ten pieces of silver! Oh, you Pharisees, you forgers of the truth, you apes and mockers of God!52 Obviously appalled by Karl’s virulent outburst against the establishment, Craven in his version not only tempers but virtually silences his protagonist’s anti-clericism. First, he substitutes Schiller’s priest with a more neutral ‘commissary’, making sure that Karl’s insult will no longer have its original force, since it will no longer be aimed against the clergy as a profession and the church as an institution. Second, Craven drastically curtails and completely reformulates Karl’s response, which now seems vague in its content and almost respectful in its address: ‘Now, hear me, Sir; hear what Moor says [ . . . ] I scale no walls in the dark, and force no bolts to plunder. What I have done, shall be engraven in that book, where all the actions of mankind are recorded. But with you, poor ministers of earthly justice, I hold no further communing’ (Craven, p. 49). This method of surgically removing all elements likely to cause offence to chaste loyalist ears has been applied by Craven throughout his translation. Gone from Craven’s version of the play, characteristically, are practically all scenes and speeches tending to challenge conventional truths, particularly those in which the robbers harass representatives of the church, law and political establishment, and those in which they desecrate places of worship. Craven makes no mention, for example, of key episodes like Spiegelberg’s tricks with the justice at Leipzig, of his and Grimm’s carousing with the naked nuns at St Cecelia’s convent, or of the anonymous robber’s plundering of St Stephen’s church during the raid of the Bohemian town where Roller is imprisoned (Schiller, pp. 53–5, 63). In shortening the play, Craven has also felt free to write out the lower-class revolutionary Kosinsky, who joins Karl’s retinue because he values ‘freedom’ (‘Freyheit’) more than ‘honour and life’ (‘Ehre und Leben’), who refuses to ‘bow beneath the yoke of despotism’ (‘unter das Joch des Despotismus krümmen’), and who claims that Karl’s name sounds sweet to ‘the poor and the oppressed’ (‘den Armen und Unterdrückten’) (Schiller, pp. 81, 86). In this new, demonstratively English version, Spiegelberg is no longer allowed to recommend that Germany abolish the use of the Bible, and Franz no longer scoffs at Pastor Moser’s religious authority (Schiller, pp. 55, 120–4). Missing

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from the play, even more significantly, are Karl’s tirade against the ‘weak century of eunuchs’ (das schlappe Kastratenjahrhundert’); his rant against the ‘law’ that ‘slows the flight of eagles to a snail’s pace’ (‘Das Gesez hat zum Schneckengang verdorben, was Adlerflug geworden wäre’); his wish to turn Germany into a ‘republic that would make Rome and Sparta look like nunneries’ (‘aus Deutschland soll eine Republik werden, gegen die Rom und Sparta Nonnenklöster seyn sollen’); and his call to ‘raise the bears of the north against the race of murderers’ (‘die Bären des Nordlands wider dis mörderische Geschlecht anhezen’) and ‘blow the trumpet of rebellion throughout the realm of nature (‘durch die ganze Natur das Horn des Aufruhrs blasen’) (Schiller, pp. 21, 31). Last but not least, Craven is also scandalized by the freedom that Schiller grants his feisty and independent-minded heroine Amalia. Overt disobedience in men is outrageous enough, but violent predilections in women is apparently more than Craven can stomach, or more than he believes that his readers will countenance. Hence, Craven’s Amalia abuses Franz merely by calling him ‘Worm’ and ‘Reptile’ to his face, whereas Schiller’s heroine uses much more compelling if also more unladylike arguments: she simply ‘delivers him a blow across the face’ (‘gibt ihm eine Maulschelle’) (Craven, p. 55; Schiller, p. 75). Not only, however, has Craven cut out all elements of social invective, and not only has he excised all the expressions of frustrated longing and utopian desire that endeared Schiller to the French revolutionaries and gave his play its status as the master-text of late eighteenthcentury radicalism. Craven’s is a more thoroughgoing revision, which alters the form as well as the content of the original. According to the Europhobe William Preston, not only does Schiller exhibit ‘active partizans of anarchy and disorder’ in a positive light , by ‘represent[ing] [ . . . ] inequality as a sufficient plea for the outrages of the robber and the pirate’. Even more incriminating is Preston’s observation that the author, that he may make the murderous crew, the associates of his hero, talk in character, fills the dialogue with horrid oats and imprecations, with blasphemy and ribaldry, worthy of the refuse of a guard house, or a goal. Nor [does Schiller] confine the use of oaths and imprecations, the display of profane and impious sentiments, to characters which are meant and professed to be drawn as ferocious and censurable, to robbers and assassins. We find them ascribed to females, nay, to females which the poet announces as feminine, good and amiable, and exhibits, as objects of imitation, to their sex (pp. 11, 13, 359).


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The threat that Die Räuber poses to religious and ideological orthodoxy, as Preston recognizes, is not merely an effect of the political beliefs that Karl and his co-conspirators are allowed or not allowed to utter and act out. More fundamentally, the play’s insolent rebelliousness is inscribed in its very linguistic fabric, for Schiller includes within his play a strong strain of what Mikhail Bakhtin has called ‘grotesque realism’: a style (or anti-style) characterized by a fondness for low and vulgar locutions, a tendency to travesty the serious and oppressive discourses of official high culture, and a constant movement towards the lower bodily stratum. 53 What seems so transgressive and what is transgressive about Die Räuber, ultimately, concerns not merely how the robbers act, or threaten to act, but also how they speak. Bakhtin accents the emancipatory and worldrenovating power of grotesque rhetoric and exorbitant discourse, especially as these were applied by his hero Rabelais: ‘No dogma, no authoritarianism, no narrow-minded seriousness can coexist with Rabelaisian images; these images are opposed to all that is finished and polished, to all pomposity, to every ready-made solution in the sphere of thought and world outlook’ (p. 3). Schiller’s robbers’ singing, chanting and laughing partake of carnival and its vision of a world beyond social and moral convention. The outlaws fashion an anti-official language of parody and excess, allowing them to establish a utopian space beyond the reach of religious edicts and ideological state apparatuses. One aspect that typifies the robbers’ idiom is their constant references to the physical body, especially its lowest and least dignified aspects. Much of the robbers’ conversation is couched in imagery of eating, drinking, consuming and digesting. The play’s first scene from the robber camp shows Moor and Spiegelberg in their cups, reminiscing about the time when, ‘in the heat of the wine’ (‘im Dampfe des Weins’), they bought up all the meat in Leipzig and stuffed themselves with food (p. 22). Later on, the robber band itself is characterized as a ‘corpus [ . . . ] growing hourly like a bishop’s belly’ (‘das Korpus [ . . . ] schwillt dir stündlich wie ein Prälats-Bauch’) (p. 55). Along the same lines, the vulgar Schufterle speaks, in almost scatological detail, of ‘babes in arms dirtying their linen’ (‘Wikelkinder, die ihre Lacken vergolden’) and ‘wrinkled grandmothers chasing the flies from them’ (‘eingeschnurrte Mütterchen, die ihnen die Müken wehrten’) (p. 64). Spiegelberg also describes nuns ‘wetting themselves with fright so you could have learnt to swim’ (‘Nonnen die [ . . . ] die Stube so besprenzten, daß du hättest das Schwimmen drinn lernen können’), and to entertain his fellows he pictures St Cecilia’s abbess as an ‘old hag’, a ‘wizened, hairy old dragon

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dancing about in front of me, conjuring me by her maiden’s honour’ (‘ein altes Weib, und nun denk dir einmal den Drachen vor mir herumtanzen, und mich bey aller jungfräulichen Sittsamkeit beschwören’) (p. 54). In addition, just as the robbers foreground and elevate the low, so they also denigrate the high. To a striking extent, the robbers intersperse their banter with elements of Classical culture and Scriptural learning, sacrosanct discourses which they subvert and demystify by inserting them into new, debasing contexts. For example, Schweitzer characterizes the imperial priest as a ‘worn-out sheepdog’ (‘abgerichteter Schäferhund’), and dismisses his pious harangue as ‘a fine speech to keep one’s belly warm’ (‘das war wohlgesprochen sich den Magen warm zu halten’) (pp. 67, 69). We are told early on that when Karl’s dog was killed at Leipzig, the robbers composed odes in honour of the departed dog, staging an elaborate mock-heroic funeral which satirized the town’s ruling caste of merchants and bureaucrats (p. 22). And later, Roller also describes his release from captivity in terms of an extended Biblical parody. The town of his captors, he says, was like ‘Sodom and Gomorrha’ (‘Gomorrha und Sodom’), the ladder leading to the scaffold reminded him of ‘the blessed ladder that was going to take me up to Abraham’s bosom’ (‘der Sakerments-Leiter, auf der ich in den Schoos Abrahams steigen wollte’), and when delivered from bondage he left the company ‘staring back petrified like Lot’s wife’ (‘versteinert wie Loths Weib zurückschaun’) (pp. 61–2). Such acts of linguistic terrorism, short-circuiting discursive oppositions and resisting the prohibitions of proper speech and dignified writing, are part and parcel of the robbers’ project. Even Karl, who is certainly capable of great moral seriousness, and who often speaks in lofty soliloquies, cannot refrain from engaging in anti-hegemonic verbal horseplay. In the second scene of the first act, for example, when Karl Moor and Spiegelberg are idly casting about for ideas about what to do next, Spiegelberg makes the following, facetious suggestion: ‘suppose we all turned Jews, and began talking about the Kingdom again?’ (‘wie wärs wenn wir Juden würden, und das Königreich wieder aufs Tapet brächten’). Spiegelberg means that they should journey to Palestine and help the Jews ‘establish the new Jerusalem’ (‘Jerusalem wieder aufbauen’). In answering, Karl refuses to take Spiegelberg’s proposal seriously. Wilfully misunderstanding his friend’s already-ironic idealism, Karl turns the Biblical reference into a scurrilous jest about circumcision and the mutilation of bodies: ‘I see. You want to put foreskins out of fashion, because the barber has yours already?’ (‘nun merk ich – du willst die


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Vorhaut aus der Mode bringen, weil der Barbier die deinige schon hat?’) (p. 22). Karl’s clever repartee exemplifies the rhetorical strategy that Bakhtin refers to as ‘Gay Grammar’ (Bakhtin, pp. 468–9). By reducing the Bible’s ‘Word’ to a matter of bodies and body parts, Karl breaks up codes and reconstitutes meaning, in such a way as to liberate himself and his interlocutor from the mental constraints imposed by autocratic culture and normative language-use. Understanding that ‘Jacobinism’ is a form of linguistic subversion as well as a political ideology, however, Craven purifies the robbers’ ‘Billingsgate’ (to use one of Bakhtin’s favourite terms) of its linguistic free play, verbal crudities, obscene references and sexual innuendoes. Absent from Craven’s play, significantly, are all the original’s disrespectful quotations from Scripture and Classical belleslettres. Lacking, also, are most of Die Räuber’s references to sexuality and physicality: Franz’s reference to his ‘mother’s womb’ (‘Mutterleib’); Karl’s mockery of ‘fellows who faint when they have fathered a child’ (‘Kerls, die in Ohnmacht fallen wenn sie einen Buben gemacht haben’); Karl’s ribald joking about Spiegelberg’s ‘foreskin’ (‘Vorhaut’); Schwarz’s playful proposition that ‘all which remains for us is to turn into women and become bawds, or even hawk our own maidenhood on the streets’ (‘Izt fehlte nur noch, dass wir Weiber und Kupplerinnen würden, oder gar unsere Jungferschaft zu Markte trieben’); Spiegelberg’s grotesque description of St Cecelia’s abbess, ‘dressed like Eve before the Fall’ (‘angezogen wie Eva vor dem Fall’); and Schufterle’s eyewitness account of ‘women in childbed, and pregnant women afraid of miscarrying under the gallows’ (‘Kindbetterinnen und hochschwangere Weiber, die befürcheteten, unterm lichten Galgen zu abortieren’) (Schiller, pp. 18, 20, 22, 28, 54, 64). The ‘courtesan’ (‘Meze’) whom Franz makes up to slander Karl has become merely a ‘woman’ in the new version, and Craven makes light of Franz’s subsequent claim that Karl has contracted syphilis by engaging in ‘filthy vice’ (‘garstige Laster’) (Schiller, pp. 34, 35; Craven, p. 14). Also, Franz’s threat that he will have Amalia for his ‘mistress’ (‘Maitresse’) and that he will ‘take your virgin bed by storm, and conquer your proud innocence with my greater pride’ (‘dein jungfräuliches Bette mit Sturm ersteigen, und deine stolze Schaam mit noch gröserem Stolze besiegen’) has been replaced by his vow to ‘drag you by those locks to the altar, and with my dagger force from your quivering heart the nuptial oath’ (Schiller, pp. 74–5; Craven, pp. 55–6). Schiller’s robbers feel at home within the language of the popular marketplace, a code replete with sexual double entendres and humorous references to bodily functions. The speech of Craven’s robbers, by

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contrast, is that of self-conscious British gentlemen worried about the impression that they will make. The criminals no longer express their outsider status through their eccentric sociolect, for in the new version everyone speaks Standard English – the socially homogenizing code of the aristocracy and the conformist bourgeoisie.54 At every point, Craven’s bowdlerized translation is marked by a grave concern, utterly alien to Schiller’s original, for taste and decorum. The few times when they try their luck with a pun or joke, Craven’s outlaws fall on their face. Even Craven’s oaths seem awkwardly blunted and colourless in relation to Schiller’s. In The Robbers, for example, Franz’s emphatic curse on his father, ‘Feeble bag of bones!’ (‘Kraftlose Knochen!’) becomes merely ‘Damnation!’; and Old Moor’s response, ‘May a Thousand curses follow you’ (‘Tausend Flüche donnern dir nach!’), shrinks to ‘Oh, misery!’ (Schiller, p. 50; Craven, p. 37).

Holman’s The Red-Cross Knights J. G. Holman’s The Red-Cross Knights is a much more ambitious project than Craven’s The Robbers, and it goes much further in transforming Schiller into a mainstay of British establishment culture and ruling-class ideology. Unlike Craven, Holman made his living as a professional actor and dramatist, and his production shows that he was a skilful cultural entrepreneur, who understood the volatile climate of British drama and acknowledged the conflicting demands made upon dramatists during the Revolutionary and Napoleonic wars. Not only has Holman moved Schiller’s story to sixteenth-century Spain, changing all the names in the process, and not only has he interspersed the dramatic action with abundant scenes of singing, dancing and clowning by the comic figure Popoli; where the unimaginative Keppel Craven simply extracts offensive elements from Die Raüber, Holman materially alters the relationship between the play’s portagonists, thereby purging Schiller’s plot of ethical ambivalence and polarizing its characters in a manner that lends it an entirely new meaning. In The Red-Cross Knights, the younger brother Roderic (Franz) still deprives Ferdinand (Karl) of his rightful inheritance by forging calumnies against him, and he still makes unwelcome sexual advances towards the virtuous Eugenia (Amalia). But as Holman goes out of his way to point out already from the beginning, Roderic is not a legitimate son of Count Ladesma (Count Moor). He is, instead, Roderic de Froila, an illegitimate outsider whom Ladesma adopted after the death of his second wife:


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Ferdinand dead, I am the absolute heir of my step-father, Count Ladesma’s wealth and power. That was determined on my mother’s union with him. Each by a former marriage having a son, the compact was, that on the failure of more issue, Ferdinand and myself were mutual heirs. A contract well stipulated by my prudent mother; as my inheritance is not a twentieth part of the rich lordships of Ladesma. 55 Insofar as Holman makes Roderic an adopted rather than a legitimate son, he also assigns him a more traditional, clear-cut villain-role. Where Schiller’s Franz understandably feels that he has been overlooked and slighted by his father, Holman’s Roderic conforms to the stereotype of the penniless, ambitious, lascivious interloper of obscure lower-class origin. He is a man who has no claims on anybody’s emotions, who pretends to a status that he does not deserve, and who brings corruption into the aristocratic family. Evil in The Red-Cross Knights does not originate within the beleaguered institutions of church, state and kinship relations, which are themselves pristine and beyond reproach. Rather, evil comes from without, which certainly makes it an all the more demonic and powerful force, but which also makes the malefactor easier to identify, confront and master. More provocative still are Holman’s changes to the character of Karl, Schiller’s charismatic and troubling villain-hero, whom the English writer resurrects as an unambiguous hero, a stalwart warrior for church, king and country. In The Red-Cross Knights, when Ferdinand discovers that he has been unjustly exiled from his family, he responds not by declaring war on princely tyranny and clerical hypocrisy, but rather by devoting himself wholeheartedly to the battle against the Moslem forces currently invading the country, to effect ‘their total expulsion from Spain’: Yes, the wrongs and miseries of Spain shall rouse me from remembrance of my own. My poor Eugenia! one tear to thy loss and thy distress, and now I am all my country’s. Come, fellow warriors, hasten to take the sacred vows of chivalry; and when its holy badge adorns your bosoms, the Infidels shall prove we wear the ensigns of Religion’s soldiers, not for vain ornament nor empty form; but as the zealous active ministers of Heaven. Be it our glorious duty to redeem our altars from unbelieving impious violators; to release the groaning captive from the gloomy dungeon where he lies, body and mind in shackles (Holman, pp. 16, 20–1).

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Holman redirects Karl’s antisocial energies, channelling them in a proestablishment direction; the forces that Karl’s brigands combat are the same forces that Ferdinand’s troopers defend. Where Schiller lets Karl proclaim that ‘my trade is retribution – vengeance is my calling’ (‘mein Handwerk ist Wiedervergeltung – Rache ist mein Gewerbe’), and where in Tytler’s translation Moor commands his men ‘to vindicate the rights of man!’, Ferdinand in Holman’s version preaches ‘loyalty’, ‘virtue’ and the soldier’s ‘duty’ to ‘quell an insurrection’ against ‘a monarch enthroned so firmly in his people’s love’ (Schiller, p. 71; Tytler, p. 218; Holman, pp. 14, 26). Conversely, in The Red-Cross Knights, it is not Ferdinand but Roderic and Roderic’s vicious henchman Bertran who espouse and pursue ‘vengeance’ (Holman, p. 14). With his crucial revisionist ploy of converting Karl’s robber band into a troop of rank-and-file soldiers, Holman both reflects and augments the national chauvinism, masculinism and militarism that engulfed British public discourse during the 1790s and 1800s. It was precisely at this historical juncture that the nation, embroiled in all-out war on several continents and confronting an implacable foe in Napoleonic France, found itself in need of heroic role-models. The demand, as Linda Colley explains, was met by the development of a cult of martial heroism enveloping figures like Pitt, Nelson and Wellington, whose soldierly prowess was celebrated in lavish church-and-king spectacles like the Naval Thanksgiving Day (1797) and the Jubilee Day (1809). 56 By setting his play amidst a war of national survival, and by crowding his stage with uniformed knights errant, Holman not only alludes to the preceding years’ recurrent invasion scares, but also seeks to capture and exploit the British public’s enthusiasm for warfare and warlike deeds. The play’s consistently belligerent tone is perhaps best summed up by the crusaders’ chorus at the end of the first act: To arms, to arms! each breast inspiring; Glory leads us to the field: Our country calls, our aid requiring, ‘Gainst Pagan foes the sword to wield. The righteous cause by Heaven is bless’d, Hallow’d the arm that shields th’ oppress’d. The Red Cross let our symbol be, And Victory crown our Chivalry (p. 21). Whereas Moor burns down an entire village to release one captured confederate from churchmen and magistrates, Ferdinand, acting very


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much like an upright defender of hearth and home, goes on to deliver a Christian town from heathen bondage, which earns him profuse expressions of gratitude from a band of captured Spanish women. Afterwards, Ferdinand cogently chooses not to invest the injured with the power of their oppressors, and he delivers a Burke-inspired speech on the dangers of sudden social upheavals and the necessity of curbing the tyranny of unbounded ‘Will’: Slaves who have burst their bonds, and seized on power, prove the worst of tyrants. And in the preference of wretchedness, he would be wise who rather chose to be enrolled the slave of the most lordly ruler of the East, than bear the mockery of a freeman’s name where slaves are become rulers. No! there alone is happiness where Law is supreme, not Will. Will uncontrolled, even if prone to goodness, is clogged with Nature’s passions and infirmities; Law speaks the dictates of unclouded Reason; and there only Justice dwells, where those who deal the law are subject to the law (pp. 38–9). Ferdinand’s magisterial mien in re-establishing social hierarchies clearly betrays the influence of the counter-revolutionary rhetoric upon Holman’s play, as does the hero’s penchant for invoking allegorical absolutes like ‘Law’, ‘Will’, ‘Reason’ and ‘Justice’. Thus, by re-imagining Karl Moor as a vigilant servant of the state, fighting to safeguard authority and uphold the rule of law, Holman moves his characters and audience away from the corrosive doubt and disruptive violence that dominated pre-revolutionary and revolutionary writing, instead steering them towards a new conception of national culture as constituting a unified front against the enemy. Vanished from The Red-Cross Knights are even the last remnants of Karl Moor’s irreligion, anti-authoritarianism and lawlessness. Most importantly, where Schiller critiques the patriarchal family, by representing a weak and fallible father, Holman painstakingly seeks to exonerate the very same institution and delegitimize alternative forms of social organization, such as the republican band of brothers. As one might expect, The Red-Cross Knights ends not tragically, with every major character either dead or imprisoned, but happily, with virtue rewarded and order restored. Holman unlike Schiller lets Count Ladesma survive the shock of re-encountering the prodigal son whom he believes dead, and this swerve more than anything else clarifies his wish to rehabilitate fatherhood and reconsecrate traditional forms of familial power. With the marriage of Ferdinand and Eugenia, moreover,

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the thwarted sexual desire that erupts at crucial points in Schiller’s narrative is neatly (re-)contained within matrimonial bonds. The end of the play restores the traditional community, based on family ties and heterosexual, conjugal love, which Roderic and the Moors had threatened to demolish, and the subversive traces of sexual and materialistic passion engendered in the process seem almost to vanish in the midst of this pastoral harmony. Roderic’s machinations and the Moorish insurrection, the play argues, were not symptoms of an irresistible apocalypse shaking the foundations of the social fabric, but merely temporary aberrations, minor disturbances of a timeless moral structure grounded in sound family values and paternalistic authority: Ladesma: My Ferdinand alive! Oh extasy! Come, my children – Here, Ferdinand, thy hand – and thine, Eugenia. Such happiness I never looked for in this life. Here let me bless your union, and for ever. Ferdinand: (To his troop.) Ye dear companions of my toils, and instruments of my happiness, I know my joy has kindled transport in your friendly bosoms. By encountering danger for my country’s happiness, I have attained my own. Thus Heaven ever blesses those who seek the bliss of others (p. 68). Once the barbarians have been cast out, and once the illegitimate intruder has been handed over to the police, Count Ladesma can resume control of his possessions, and then he can bestow his blessings on the union of Ferdinand and Eugenia, who in turn are free to devote themselves to ‘domestic happiness’ (p. 5). From European to English, Gothic to Classical, revolutionary to conservative, the transvaluation of values carried out by The Red-Cross Knights could hardly be any more complete. Holman even appears to thematize his strategy of simulation, when he has his hero Ferdinand disguise himself ‘in Moorish vestments’ to gain access to his father’s castle. ‘To combat villainy’, Ferdinand states on his own and perhaps his creator’s behalf, ‘ ’tis sometimes needful that honesty should use the villain’s weapon – cunning’ (p. 45). The appropriate generic designation for this cunning play, no doubt, is melodrama, which a number of critics have singled out as the dominant theatrical genre of post-revolutionary Britain. Like the oratory of the revolutionary period, ‘melodrama starts from and expresses the anxiety brought by a frightening new world in which the traditional patterns or moral order no longer provide the necessary social glue’. But melodrama also resolves this anxiety by replaying again and again the triumph of virtue, thereby demonstrating


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that ‘the signs of ethical forces can be discovered and can be made legible’. 57 Melodrama thus perpetuates the submission of individual and collective desire to destiny; patriarchal power is challenged only to be resuscitated in strengthened and purified form, both in the familial microcosm and the national macrocosm. The Red-Cross Knights’ formulation of a regressive family politics, to be sure, is far from irrelevant to the larger political issues that the play also raises, for during this period ideological conflicts were often conceptualized as struggles between parents, sons and brothers, and conservative writers frequently wielded the ideal of domesticity to envision the perfectly harmonious state. The play’s denouement leaves Count Ladesma more firmly in command of his domain than ever, and the song-and-dance routines of The Red-Cross Knights virtually swell with loyalist and royalist fervour – even more so than the very similar scenes which Sheridan incorporated into his wildly successful Pizarro. Indeed, just as one may easily recognize Ferdinand’s stirring battle cry against ‘infidels’ and ‘unbelieving impious violators’ as an allusion to Britain’s military confrontation with the atheist armies of its current Continental enemy, so it is tempting to interpret the play’s consistent celebration of the noble Spanish King Alphonso as a veiled reference to George III, the British nation’s collective ‘Father’. Also, the patriotic connotations of Holman’s title, with its inevitable echoes of Spenser’s The Faerie Queene and the chivalric cult of St George, are surely no coincidence, for Holman consistently plays on the double meaning of the red cross, a symbol both of Christianity and English nationhood. Contributing to English empire-building and the ideological warfare against France and its allies, Holman deconstructs Schiller’s drama by restructuring it along a set of binary oppositions – native and foreign, Christian and heathen, legitimate and illegitimate – perfectly consistent with the relentlessly Manichean worldview of British wartime nationalism. Trafficking in secondary representations and intertextual mimicry, Craven and Holman’s plays not only illustrate the Romantic translators’ typically conflicted stance towards their source-texts; they also demonstrate how translation could be used to effect the dispersal and evacuation of oppositional writing in Romantic Britain. The task of the translator, in this period, cannot be separated entirely from that of the expurgator. Considered in its own right, playwrights realized, European sensationalism may have been alarming, unsound, perhaps even degenerate: it directly or suggestively challenged reigning aesthetic, social and political orders. But if foreign writers’ antinomian plots, characters, figures and conventions were redefined and reinvested, dressed in new

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clothes suitable for a different country and a new age, they could still be made subservient to the reconstruction of Britain along the lines of Burke’s and Pitt’s legitimist programme. It may come as a surprise, given the observations that I have made so far, that Craven’s version of Die Räuber was not welcomed by the critical establishment, and that the play was widely perceived as still falling somewhat short of the ideological consistency which was its declared aim. Ultimately, Craven could not convince his audience that The Robbers would serve as a politically and morally innocuous antidote to the diseased French and German drama. According to the Morning Chronicle, ‘the Democratic points of this heavy play’ are ‘mostly cut out, but the tendency remains’. Other journalists expressed similar grave doubts about the play’s moral effects. The Morning Post and Gazetteer, for example, cautioned its readers to ‘take care of their pockets’ when attending a performance at the Cravens’ theatre (qtd. in Willoughby, p. 304). The influential moralist Hannah More was equally unwilling to be mollified by Craven’s efforts. In her Strictures on the Modern System of Female Education (1799), more notes with considerable dismay, and with clear reference to the unsavoury proceedings at Brandenburgh House, that Schiller’s tragedy, which the English censor John Larpent had permanently banned from the scenes of the Theatres Royal, has nevertheless been smuggled onto the stage and is currently being performed clandestinely in private aristocratic theatres very much like the makeshift playhouse that Thomas Bertram and John Yates construct in Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park (1814).58 It is surely even more puzzling that Holman’s musical extravaganza, which was performed eight times in August and September 1799 at the Haymarket Theatre, once again failed to strike a chord with those contemporary critics who were otherwise clamouring for the very kind of salubrious entertainment which The Red-Cross Knights represents. On its first appearance, The Red-Cross Knights drew nothing but sceptical and often hostile reviews. In their notices, both the Critical Review and the European Magazine find that Holman’s alterations, instead of giving new life and vigour to Die Räuber, deprive it of what interest it possessed.59 The Monthly Review calls Holman’s play an ‘insipid’ example of ‘the little benefit which our language derives from the Teutonic stage’. 60 The Lady’s Monthly Museum more forcefully describes The Red-Cross Knights as an incoherent and unattractive ‘mélange of dialogue, decoration, scenery, and music’.61 And even a writer for the staunchly High-Church British Critic, in an otherwise generally positive review-essay, wonders whether Holman’s changes would be


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enough to give readers and viewers ‘satisfaction [ . . . ] without danger to morals’. 62 Critics of Craven and Holman were remarkably sceptical about the attempt to alter outlandish plays by blue-pencilling their language and re-tailoring their plots, and about the effect that this creative sabotage might have on a volatile, uneducated audience. Why did reviewers demanding theatrical reform fail to applaud plays expressly written, as Coleridge later put it, to facilitate the ‘redemption of the British stage not only from horses, dogs, elephants, and the like zoological rarities, but also from the more pernicious barbarisms and Kotzebuisms in morals and taste’, by ‘exterminating the speaking monsters imported from the banks of the Danube’?63 It may be, of course, that Craven and Holman simply underestimated the deterring power of the name ‘Schiller’ and the phrase ‘German literature’. The mere admission that a play was somehow ‘translated and altered from the German’, that is, may have sufficed to cloud the critics’ judgement and eliminate the possibility of a balanced reception. Still, we should not rule out the possibility that the lukewarm reception of Craven’s and Holman’s revisionist drama does more than illustrate the paranoiac perversity and unpredictability of turn-of-the-century British reviewers. Addressing a fundamental ambivalence that haunts several British Schiller-translators, in other words, the reviews may raise unresolved issues pertaining not only to Craven’s The Robbers and Holman’s The Red-Cross Knights, but to the very project of creating an Anti-Jacobin drama by basing it on English, French or German plays of a previous generation. There is, after all, something inescapably paradoxical in the attempt to efface popular representations with secondary substitutes, for appropriation is also, and cannot avoid being, a form of reinscription, which brings the original to consciousness. Romantic drama’s anti-German plays remain predicated on, and hence inescapably indebted to, the foreign. From this perspective, the severest limitation of Craven’s and Holman’s dramas, and of most if not all other Die Räuber-translations, derives not from the plays’ moral content or ideological message, but rather from their subject matter. Although The Robbers and The Red-Cross Knights are no longer plays advocating revolution, they of course remain plays about violent disruption, and therefore they never become entirely harmless. Even if they write from antithetical positions, Schiller, Craven and Holman all respond to the same questions and the same conflictual social reality, and in the reviews this shared referencepoint comes to overshadow the differences that otherwise divide these playwrights into opposing camps. Insofar as Craven and Holman share

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Schiller’s concern with militant acts of rebellion, invasion and usurpation, The Robbers and The Red-Cross Knights almost cannot but evoke the transgressive play which precedes them, and on which they are based. A perverse or merely strong-willed reader – the young William Hazlitt, for example – could still easily choose to read these plays against the grain, as instances of the Jacobin rather than the Anti-Jacobin drama.64 As the critics seem to have suspected, and as reader-reactions also documented, British playwrights unwittingly testify to the recalcitrant power of the same texts that they seek to displace, if only by the sheer act of choosing these plays for translation. Notwithstanding all efforts to prune, alter and redistribute, ‘the tendency remains’.

5 ‘The Descent of Odin’: Romantic Writers among the Norsemen

During the late eighteenth century, British writers and readers discovered the Vikings and the culture of the ancient Scandinavian North. In 1768, Thomas Gray issued his Norse odes ‘The Fatal Sisters’ and ‘The Descent of Odin’, which amply demonstrate his familiarity with current scholarship on Scandinavian matters.1 The subsequent years produced a plethora of lesser-known and lesser-regarded publications such as Thomas Penrose’s ‘The Carousal of Odin’ (1775), Richard Hole’s Arthur; or the Northern Enchantment (1789) and Frank Sayers’s Dramatic Sketches of the Ancient Northern Mythology (1790).2 So pronounced and widespread was the rage for Nordic myth and folklore in poetry that contemporary critics were struck and oftentimes perturbed by it. In part four of The Pursuits of Literature (1797) T. J. Mathias, transfixed by the paranoid scenario of the counter-revolution, chided Percy, Gray and Walpole for reviving barbaric superstitions, while he presented any lapse from the polite and polished neo-classical style as a symptom of perverse aesthetics, subversive politics and indecent morals: Speak then, the hour demands; Is Learning fled? Spent all her vigour, all her spirit dead? Have Gallick arms and unrelenting war Borne all her trophies from Britannia far? Shall nought but ghosts and trinkets be display’d, Since Walpole ply’d the virtuoso’s trade, Bade sober truth revers’d for fiction pass, And mus’d o’er Gothick toys through Gothick glass?3 ‘Gothic’, as Fred Botting points out, was one of the period’s most unstable and problematic words. Associated with ‘excess’, ‘transgression’ and 173

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‘irrationality’, the term was also connected to ‘the history of the northern, Germanic nations [ . . . ] popularly believed to have brought down the Roman empire’.4 For Mathias as for many other representatives of the cultural establishment, at any rate, the issue was clear: exoticist and primitivist sympathies betokened a dangerous, potentially un-English enthusiasm. And yet, for all their repetitiveness and despite their extreme rancour, rebarbative anti-Gothic animadversions such as Mathias’s cannot always be taken entirely at face value. Strikingly, Mathias himself was also the author of a short volume of verse entitled Runic Odes (1781).5 There is a substantial and controversial body of Viking-poetry in English. 6 Even so, it has largely escaped scholarly notice that the British Romantic poets shared their contemporaries’ fascination with northern antiquities, and that Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Southey and Scott all wrote and published poetry utilizing Norse themes and legends. In this chapter, I will attempt to recover the forgotten Romantic poetry of Scandinavia by concentrating primarily on William Wordsworth’s short lyrical fragment ‘The Danish Boy’ (1800), William Herbert’s critically praised collection Select Icelandic Poetry (1804–1806) and Walter Scott’s long metrical romance Harold the Dauntless (1817). In so doing, I will be especially interested in addressing how Wordsworth, Herbert and Scott self-consciously exploited the popularity of Nordic topoi with the turnof-the-century British reading public, while also dissenting from, and protesting against, the visions that these subjects were mostly used to articulate. When Viking figures appear in Romantic poetry, I contend, they undergo transformations and suffer sea changes. To highlight and contrast these ambiguous rewritings of contemporary ideas about preChristian Scandinavia and its inhabitants, finally, I will also briefly consider Robert Southey’s little-known poem ‘The Race of Odin’ (1795). Compared with the work of the other Romantics, I propose, Southey’s poem represents a refreshingly different, if also marginal and ultimately unproductive, form of late eighteenth-century literary antiquarianism. The young Southey, in other words, adumbrates an alternative version of what the Romantic literature of the North might be, or what it might have been.

Percy’s Five Pieces and Mallet’s Northern Antiquities Romantic-period writers interested in Norse culture could draw their ideas and imagery from two primary sources. First, there was the vogue for translations of Old Norse poems or fragments of poems and the

Romantic Writers among the Norsemen

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critical discussion that it triggered. This fashion began when Bishop Thomas Percy published Five Pieces of Runic Poetry (1763), containing as its longest and most memorable texts prose translations of ‘The Dying Ode of Regnar Lodbrog’ and ‘The Invocation of Hervor’. In the first of these, a dramatic monologue also known as the ‘Krákumál’, the mythical Danish King Regnar Lodbrog, who is supposedly speaking at a time when he has been captured and thrown into a pit of snakes by the Northumbrian King Ella, provides a blood-soaked history of his career as a warrior, beginning each episode with the words ‘We fought with swords’. At the end of the ode, after 23 stanzas of ultra-violent reminiscences, Regnar’s thoughts finally turn to his imminent death, and it is in contemplating his reward for his bravery and faithfulness that he famously dies laughing: ’Tis with joy I cease. The goddesses of destiny are come to fetch me. Odin hath sent them from the habitation of the gods. I shall be joyfully received into the highest seat; I shall quaff full goblets among the gods. The hours of my life are past away. I die laughing. 7 ‘The Invocation of Hervor’, also subsequently known as ‘The Waking of Angantyr’, relates the dialogue between the amazon warrior Hervor and the spectre of her father Angantyr. Hervor raises her father’s ghost to persuade him to fulfil his obligations and relinquish his hold of the magically endowed sword Tirfing, which she, a ‘young maid [ . . . ] of manlike courage’, plans to use in future military expeditions. Angantyr first tells her that the sword is no longer in his possession, and then he resists her demand with misogynist generalizations: ‘I know no maid, in any country, that dares take this sword in hand.’ But when Hervor insults his manhood – ‘I took thee for a brave man, before I found your hall’ – he finally relents: Angantyr: O conceited Hervor, thou art mad: rather than thou, in a moment, shouldest fall into the fire, I will give thee the sword out of the tomb, young maid; and not hide it from thee. Hervor: Thou didst well, thou offspring of heroes, that thou didst send me the sword out of the tomb; I am now better pleased O prince, to have it, than if I had gotten all Norway (pp. 33–5). The indisputable centrepieces of Percy’s collection, ‘Regnar’ and ‘Hervor’ nicely complement each other. Both tap the source of intrepid, indomitable passion, and both focus on characters who prevail under extremely strenuous circumstances. Both were repeatedly quoted, paraphrased

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and re-translated throughout the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, even to the point of becoming ‘hackneyed’, to use Coleridge’s phrase. 8 Thus, the years between 1760 and 1810 saw the appearance of no less than eleven different printed versions of ‘Regnar’, and ‘Hervor’ was only slightly less in demand, for it was published in seven translations during the same period.9 The upsurge in the popularity of northern romance was often explained by its advocates as a reaction against the luxurious sophistication of social life. Percy presents his translated pieces as ‘primitive’ and ‘barbarous’ – terms that should be understood not in the old-fashioned negative sense, as documenting a sub-human and uncultured mode of existence, but rather in the modern appreciative sense, as abounding with ‘laboured metaphors’, ‘studied refinements’ and ‘bold and swelling figures’ (pp. iv–v). The Critical Review in June 1790 championed ‘the religious system of the old Scandinavians [which] contains many images truly grand and sublime, such, as if skilfully introduced, might add many striking and unusual graces to modern poetry. The mythology of Greece and Rome is become trite and insipid. [ . . . ] Neither in itself, indeed, is it to be compared with that of the North, in respect to gloomy grandeur and wild magnificence’ (qtd. in Farley, p. 124). Critics like Thomas Warton and Richard Hurd also proclaimed the superiority of ‘Gothic’ writing (a category into which they lumped both pagan, medieval and Renaissance forms) over neo-classicist poetry such as Pope’s. 10 While such writers did not find reason to question the authenticity of Percy’s five pieces, several critics thought it appropriate to liken Regner’s and Hervor’s outpourings to the effusions of Macpherson’s Fingal, mistakenly seen as the quintessential example of the untutored, free-spoken genius. The period’s most influential theorist of primitive literature, the Edinburgh university Professor Hugh Blair, who defended Fingal and Temora, felt simultaneously stimulated and repulsed by the poetry of ‘the Goths, under which name we usually comprehend all the Scandinavian tribes’, which he believed resembled yet fell short of the Erse specimens.11 Quoting ‘Regnar’ in full in A Critical Dissertation on the Poems of Ossian (1765), Blair applauds the ode for being ‘wild, harsh and irregular; but at the same time animated and strong; the style [ . . . ] full of inversions, and [ . . . ] highly metaphorical and figured’. Simultaneously, though, Blair also recoils from the brutal imagery and sanguinary content of ‘Regnar’, and as a good Scottish nationalist he finally declares his preference for Gaelic verse, where ‘we find tenderness, and even delicacy of sentiment, greatly predominant over fierceness and barbarity’ (p. 20).


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Other writers, however, championed the ‘barbaric’ Scandinavian poetry more unequivocally. Most outspoken in his enthusiasm was probably Nathan Drake, who in the third volume of Literary Hours (1804) rehearses already-familiar arguments concerning the ‘terrible’ and ‘sublime’ quality of Scandinavia’s poetry: In short, the most bold and astonishing imagery, expressed with the utmost vehemence and fire, more generally breathing the soul of war, but sometimes sounding the softer tones of love and friendship, characterizes the Scandinavian Muses, who are the offspring of pure passion and imagination, and widely differing from the modern Nine, who seem to have lost, in a great measure, that magic influence, which, in the infancy of society, for ever playing round the heart, produced effects so truly wonderful and romantic.12 Drake can appreciate the poetry of Dryden and Pope intellectually, but Gothic romances, because they appeal to the reader’s buried pre-rational self, are more fundamental, more honest and ultimately more natural. True poetry, Drake argues along lines previously laid down by the likes of Warton, Hurd and Blair, is folk-poetry, and such writing flourishes best in primitive, superstitious cultures, where people still experience the world’s magic and splendour directly. Not only, however, does Drake laud the poetical specimens familiarized by Percy’s volume, and not only does he call for further antiquarian researches into the misty and still only half-explored world of Norse poetry and mythology; in providing information that may be adapted to modern use, Drake also advocates a revitalized neo-Gothic poetry in English. Modern British poets live in an age of refinement and enlightenment, which is really an age of impoverishment, when the spirit languishes and imaginative resources have all but run dry. Despite this predicament, all hope is not lost, Drake insists, for the day’s debilitated artists may still follow the example of Gray, whom Drake considers the greatest modern poet, and for whose neo-bardic compositions he has nothing but the highest praise. Although they can never hope to retrieve a state of innocence, that is, poets may still seek inspiration by imitating the truly inspired bards of previous ages and foreign climates. Just as important as the age of sensibility’s discovery of ‘Runic’ poetry, if not more so, was contemporary social analysts’ re-evaluation of traditional dichotomies between Classical and Gothic, Roman and barbarian, South and North. Eighteenth-century historians and anthropologists’ discourse of the North was heavily politicized, rooted in

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liberal ideology and aligned with the social meliorism of the age. To some extent, this discourse rested on traditional assumptions. The North has been viewed as the historical cradle of liberty ever since the Roman historian Tacitus, in his tract De Origine et Situ Germanorum, commonly known as Germania (AD 98), portrayed the barbarian Germanic tribes as a proud and freedom-loving people, thereby using them to criticize the cruelty, decadence and despotism of imperial Rome indirectly.13 As historians have shown, there existed an anti-aristocratic, anti-absolutist and at least potentially radical body of thought in British political life, going back to the parliamentary debates of the seventeenth century and possibly even to the Middle Ages, which linked the AngloSaxon and Scandinavian heritage with the ideal of civil independence and the desire for constitutional change. 14 From a certain perspective, there was little new in what eighteenth-century writers had to say about the North: the difference lay in the vehemence and frequency with which they said it. For the long-established association between northern peoples and democratic principles was significantly strengthened in the course of the second half of the century, which witnessed a remarkable resurgence of interest in all things Gothic. The most important event for Norse-inspired writing in Britain occurred when the Swiss historian Paul-Henri Mallet published his two antiquarian treatises Introduction à l’histoire de Dannemarc, ou l’on traite de la religion, des loix, des moeurs et des usages des anciens Danois (1755) and Monumens de la mythologie et de la poésie des Celtes, et particulièrement des anciens Scandinaves (1756), which Thomas Percy translated into one English volume under the title Northern Antiquities (1770). The text accounts, in considerable detail, for the religious beliefs, military campaigns, sexual mores and musical and literary performances of the ancient Scandinavians, but Mallet is above all interested in characterizing ‘the Gothic form of government’. 15 To do so, Mallet first reproduces the theory that Scandinavian civilization was founded when the historical conqueror Odin arrived in the extreme North of Europe around the beginning of the Christian era. Odin, Mallet explains, was originally a chieftain and statesman in Asia Minor, but during his reign the Romans began to invade his domain with hostile armies. Alarmed by this incursion, and having learned that fame awaited him in Scandinavia, Odin gathered his most faithful retainers and worked his way northward, eventually settling in Denmark. Mallet defends this mythological account of Odin, both on poetic and historiographic grounds. A champion of liberty and an inveterate enemy of the Roman Empire, Mallet argues, Odin ‘made great changes in the government, manners, and religion’ of


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the northern countries, effectively shaping the life-style of the people who after his death continued to worship him as a god (p. 79). Later on, in a chapter on ‘The Form of Government which Formerly Prevailed in the North’, Mallet fleshes out his analysis of the political system established by Odin. Here, once again, Mallet shows himself particularly partial to the notion that Norsemen possessed a large degree of individual freedom, and that they could freely choose the leaders whom they wanted to represent them: Here we see kings, who owe their advancement to an illustrious extraction, presiding, rather than ruling, over a free people. Here we see the nation assembling at certain stated times, and making resolutions in their own persons on all affairs of importance, as to enact laws, to choose peace or war, to conclude alliances, to distribute justice in the last resort, and to elect magistrates. Here also we distinguish a body of the chiefs of the nation, who prepare and propose the important matters, the decision of which is reserved for the general assembly of all the free men [ . . . ] Here we discover the origin of that singular custom, of having a elective general, under a hereditary king (p. 124). A Professor of French literature at the University of Copenhagen, Mallet was commissioned to write his study by the Danish government, and Northern Antiquities includes a strong element of flattery and propaganda for the Scandinavian countries, particularly Denmark and Norway, attributing to them a glorious and heroic past.16 Apart from this topical concern, Mallet’s text also participates in a larger intellectual project, since it remains firmly embedded in the Enlightenment ideology shared by most writers on similar subjects during the period. To announce one’s interest in Scandinavia was, ipso facto, to declare one’s allegiance to progress, reason and democracy. Like his avowed master Tacitus, and like his Swiss countryman and contemporary Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Mallet uses ethnography and philosophical history polemically to intervene in public debate and to influence decision-making processes. Mallet, more specifically, enlists the ancient Scandinavians to critique the Old Regime and to affirm those republican virtues that he believes are missing from contemporary European society: reason, courage, moderation, chastity and, above all, the love of liberty. Hence, for example, Mallet shrugs off the claim that the North was, among other things, a slave society, based on the conquest and subjugation of enemies. On the contrary, he argues, the Norsemen were in most respects defenders of human rights and paragons of proper civic conduct. At a time when

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virtually all southern peoples were enslaved by the Roman Emperor, the northern nations had already established a quasi-democratic form of government with manhood suffrage and free parliamentary elections, imposing severe restrictions on the powers of hereditary monarchs. ‘The most free and warlike people upon earth’, Mallet holds, the Vikings had ‘a natural aversion to the authority of a single person’. The ‘spirit of liberty’, indeed, was the distinguishing characteristic of Norse culture and society on every level, and it even manifested itself in relations between the sexes (p. 125). Danes, Norwegians and Icelanders ‘did not so much consider the other sex as made for their pleasure, as to be their equals and companions, whose esteem, as valuable as their other favours, could only be obtained by constant attentions’, and for that reason ‘nothing was formerly more common in the north’ than to see women who were ‘admitted into [ . . . ] councils, and consulted [ . . . ] on the business of the state’ (pp. 199–200).

Wordsworth’s ‘The Danish Boy’ As readers familiar with The Prelude (1805/1850) will know, Wordsworth at one time contemplated writing an epic poem on the heroic subject of Odin’s arrival in the North: Sometimes, more sternly moved, I would relate How vanquished Mithridates northward passed, And, hidden in the cloud of years, became Odin, the Father of a race by whom Perished the Roman Empire [ . . . ]17 Fortunately or unfortunately as the case may be, the poem on Odin’s northward migration was never written. Wordsworth instead began work on his magnum opus, the philosophical epic The Recluse, and his bestknown extant poem with a Norse theme remains the short unfinished lyric ‘A Fragment’, which was later re-entitled ‘The Danish Boy’, and which first appeared in the second edition of Lyrical Ballads (1800). Presumably set in the North of England, the site of the Danish and Norwegian invasions, the poem narrates the speaker’s (there is no reason not to say Wordsworth’s) visionary encounter with the spirit of a slain Viking warrior: Between two sister moorland rills There is a spot that seems to lie


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Sacred to flowerets of the hills, And sacred to the sky. And in this smooth and open dell There is a tempest-stricken tree; A corner-stone by lightning cut, The last stone of a lonely hut; And in this dell you see A thing no storm can e’er destroy, The shadow of a Danish Boy.18 Recent critics of Wordsworth have painstakingly traced the process by which the poet renounced the revolutionary rationalism of his earliest writings, moving towards the quietism, scepticism and self-confessed nature-worship expressed in his poetry of the late 1790s and 1800s. In a carefully contextualized study, James K. Chandler has contended that Wordsworth had lost faith in revolutionary action, essentially absorbing the organicist social philosophy of Edmund Burke, already by the time when Wordsworth and Coleridge set about writing and assembling the poems that were to compose Lyrical Ballads.19 It is small wonder that signs of this estrangement can also be detected in ‘The Danish Boy’, which was written exactly during the crisis-years of 1798–1799, when Wordsworth and Coleridge had escaped the persecution of the counter-revolutionary repression in Britain, finding a temporary refuge in Germany. Following Tacitus, eighteenth-century social critics glorified the Norse citizen-soldier as a tireless freedom fighter, foremost in the battle for honour, virtue and independence. Mallet devoted his writing to consecrating the view of Scandinavia as the source of liberty, and the many poetic summonings of Regnar Lodbrog, whose ode Mallet discusses at some length, popularized a very similar image of the Norse freeman as the valiant enemy of tyrannous oppression. Wordsworth, however, imitates yet alters conventional literary representations of the North, subtly revising their political valences in the process. There is little heroic or warlike, first of all, about Wordsworth’s ‘calm’ and ‘gentle’ warrior-hero (54). ‘The Danish Boy’, on the contrary, is explicit in its denial of public militant activism of any kind. In a headnote that he appended to the poem in 1827, Wordsworth points out that ‘these stanzas were designed to introduce a Ballad upon the story of a Danish Prince who had fled from battle, and, for the sake of the valuables about him, was murdered by the inhabitant of a cottage in which he had taken refuge’ (Lyrical Ballads, p. 397). But the Danish Boy, although he has apparently been

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the victim of injustice and betrayal, displays none of the proudly vindictive behaviour that one has come to expect of literary Norsemen following Odin and Regnar. Rather, the Boy exhibits what Wordsworth in another lyrical ballad written during the same year labelled a ‘wise passiveness’. 20 Although the Boy is dressed in military garb (‘A regal vest of fur [ . . . ] / In colour like a raven’s wing’), he is in fact unarmed, carrying only his harp (27–8). Besides, as though he is anxious to avoid any misunderstanding, Wordsworth adds that ‘in [the Boy’s] face you spy / No trace of a ferocious air’, that ‘From bloody deeds his thoughts are far’, and that even if he ‘warbles songs of war / They seem like songs of love’ (45–6, 51–3). During his residence in France in the early 1790s, Wordsworth consorted with those ardent agitators who wished to export the Jacobin uprising to the British isles, and he may even have been tempted to take up arms and join the expatriate legions forming abroad.21 What is certain is that Wordsworth, returning to London in 1793, penned but did not publish the incendiary political pamphlet ‘A Letter to the Bishop of Llandaff’, where he bitterly attacked the enemies of the French Revolution, signing himself ‘a Republican’.22 But by the late 1790s, having suffered great dejection at the unravelling of his millenarian schemes, Wordsworth can make no further use of the counter-cultural and anti-imperialist implications of Scandinavianist discourse. At this time, in effect, he does his utmost to efface previous inscriptions and frustrate his reader’s expectations, by portraying the Danish Boy as a peculiarly passive and powerless figure. Conversely, Wordsworth also endows the Boy with a new, substitutive value: A harp is from his shoulder slung; He rests the harp upon his knee; And there in a forgotten tongue He warbles melody. Of flocks upon the neighbouring hills He is the darling and the joy; And often, when no cause appears, The mountain-ponies prick their ears, They hear the Danish Boy, While in the dell he sings alone Beside the tree and corner-stone (34–43). In the most penetrating commentary on the poem so far, Geoffrey Hartman suggests that ‘The Danish Boy’ enacts the transition between


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‘incident’ and ‘character’ in poetry, which had been a recurrent topic in discussions between Wordsworth and Coleridge between 1797 and 1800.23 But Hartman’s interpretation, subtle as it is, does not exhaust the import of Wordsworth’s revisionism, which concerns politics at least as much as poetics. In Wordsworth’s poem, to be sure, the Danish Boy is still presented as a positive figure, but what he personifies is no longer the promise of a new Golden Age of democracy and independence. Stripped of his conventional identity as a belligerent terrorist for free self-expression, the Norse marauder becomes instead a nature deity or spirit of the place: what Hartman elsewhere terms ‘a borderer, at once natural and human’.24 Like other supernatural or quasi-supernatural figures in Wordsworth’s poetry of the same period – the aged vagabond in ‘The Old Cumberland Beggar’, the Scottish highland maid in ‘The Solitary Reaper’, Lucy in the so-called ‘Lucy poems’ – the Danish Boy mediates between mind and world, subject and object. Both dead and alive, omnipresent and invisible, the Boy hovers between ontological categories. ‘He seems a form of flesh and blood,’ but Wordsworth also refers to him as a disembodied ‘spirit’ or ‘thing’, which is also what he calls the young girl in one of the ‘Lucy Poems’ (10).25 Despite his spectral appearance, the Danish Boy entirely lacks repulsive qualities, and Wordsworth is not unsettled but rather heartened by the apparition. The Boy remains an alluring, attractive, perhaps even a redemptive apparition to the poet, for in his joyful ‘warbling’ and his happy, pastoral communion with birds, sheep and mountain-ponies, the Boy also embodies another, mystical form of existence. The Boy’s ‘helmet has a vernal grace’ and his ‘vest’ is ‘fresh and blue / As budding pines in spring’, which strongly suggests that he, like the old leech-gatherer in ‘Resolution and Independence’, has regressed to a more original, vegetative life-form (27, 30–32). Like the Boy of Winander, who blows ‘mimic hootings to the silent owls’, the Danish Boy reflects the sounds of Nature back onto Nature herself, making the horses ‘prick their ears’.26 Including opposites, breaching distinctions and obliterating alienated modes of being, the Boy lets us glimpse into ‘the beyond’, which is the place where ‘humanness is thingness and vice versa’.27 ‘Blest / And happy in his flowery cove’, he shadows forth a oneness with Being itself which is out of reach for ordinary man, and which he can only enjoy temporarily and vicariously, through visionary experiences such as those Wordsworth tries to communicate to the reader (49–50). ‘In moments of crisis’, writes Jerome J. McGann in The Romantic Ideology, ‘the Romantic will turn to Nature or the creative Imagination as his places of last resort’.28 Having killed off the old Viking hero,

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Wordsworth resurrects him in a new guise, invested with a new cultural significance. The Danish Boy no longer epitomizes a staunch commitment to liberty and equal rights. Rather, he acquires a spiritual and transcendental, even a mystical meaning, symbolizing the unity of all things living and dead. Like the other borderline-creatures in Wordsworth’s poetry, he makes visible and palpable what Wordsworth famously but obscurely calls the one ‘life of things’: a sense sublime Of something far more deeply interfused, Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns, And the round ocean and the living air, And the blue sky, and in the mind of man, A motion and a spirit, that impels All thinking things, all objects of all thought, And rolls through all things.29 Wordsworth’s use of Norse material, compared with that of pre-Romantic bards and philosophers, is consistently much less specific and much more oblique. Writing on the threshold of the nineteenth century, Wordsworth is interested precisely in divorcing himself from such writers’ politicized, polemical or functionalist conception of literary antiquarianism. ‘Sacred to the flowrets’ and ‘sacred to the sky’, loved and respected by ‘beast’, ‘bird’ and ‘The bees borne on the breezy air’, the Danish Boy still offers the possibility of a fullness beyond ordinary human existence, but it is a plenitude that has been transposed from the social to the natural sphere, from collective to individual experience, from the reason to the imagination (16–17). The poem, when read in this way, provides a near-perfect example of what M. H. Abrams means when he describes British Romantic poetry as a ‘displaced theology’.30 The Danish Boy’s significance, in Wordsworth’s version of the northern enchantment, lies beyond the turbulent realm of struggle and contention. Severed from his ties to politics, rescued from the world of ideologies, the Boy has been discreetly relocated within the matrix of the emergent Romantic nature-religion.

Herbert’s Select Icelandic Poetry At first sight there is nothing striking or original about the Norse material that William Herbert includes in his two-volume collection Select Icelandic Poetry, for the publication falls within an established mould and seems


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to conform quite closely with a proven late-Enlightenment formula. Three of Percy’s original five pieces of Runic poetry – ‘The Dying Song of Regner Lodbrock’, ‘The Death of Hacon’ and ‘The Song of Harald the Hardy’ – find their way into the volumes’ pages, and Herbert also re-translates that other perennial classic of eighteenth-century Nordicism, Gray’s ‘Vegtam’s Song; or, the Descent of Odin’. Most of Herbert’s poems were already available in several different English versions; some, like ‘The Death of Hacon’, had been popularized and trivialized by massmarket publications such as Matthew Lewis’s Tales of Wonder (1801). Select Icelandic Poetry appears to regurgitate already-familiar material, prompted by a transparent intent to exploit the British public’s wellestablished enthusiasm for the Gothic sublime. Nevertheless Herbert insists on distinguishing his text from previous publications gathered under the trope of ‘the North’. Throughout the collection, Herbert uses his copious prefaces, footnotes and annotations to conduct a running argument against all those writers who have tried their hands – unsuccessfully, according to Herbert – at Norse translations. Surprisingly, given Herbert’s reliance on Thomas Percy’s pioneering Five Pieces, this text comes in for remarkably harsh treatment. Although his version of ‘The Funeral Song of Hacon’ is not quite so ‘inaccurate’ as the rest of the book, Percy’s other translation-poetry, and particularly ‘The Dying Song of Regner Lodbrog’, ‘teems with errors, and indeed scarce a line of it is properly interpreted’.31 Yet the most despicable among would-be Norsescholars, and the writer whom Herbert is most anxious to dissociate himself from, is not Percy but Amos Cottle, the radical author of Icelandic Poetry, or the Edda of Sæmund Translated into English Verse (1797). First, in the notes to ‘The Song of Thrym’, Herbert’s points out that ‘Mr. Cottle has published, what he calls a translation of this ode, but it bears little resemblance to the original. [ . . . ] Mr. C. has not even taken the trouble of understanding the Latin’ (i, 10). After this slur on the diminutively named ‘Mr C’ follows a long list of blunders exposing what Herbert takes as Cottle’s lacking abilities as a linguist and grammarian. Later on, in the notes to ‘The Descent of Odin’, Cottle must once again bear the brunt of Herbert’s righteous indignation: ‘An imitation of the whole ode has been published by Mr. Cottle on a volume entitled, but Mr. Cottle has taken such liberties with the Icelandic poetry and mythology, which in some places he has purposely amplified, and in others misunderstood, that, if he had published his work as original, he could scarcely have been accused of plagiarism. It may be sufficient to quote his translation of the third and fourth stanzas of this ode, to show how much he has departed from the original’ (i, 45–6). Herbert’s approach to Thomas

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Gray is rather more respectful, for after all Gray was both a learned gentleman and a canonical poet. Still Gray’s ‘Descent’, although at times ‘beautiful’, nevertheless ‘convey[s] notions respecting the Icelandic mythology, which are not warranted by the original’ (i, 47–8). Gray’s other Norse ode, ‘The Fatal Sisters’, is ‘very inferior to his descent of Odin, and in some passages has lost much of the strength and spirit of the original’ (i, 49). Compared to Gray, however, Bartholinus is ‘careless’, Saxo’s rendition of ‘Biarkamal’ is ‘very free’, and Biörner’s version of ‘Grymur and Hialmar’ is ‘very loose’, rather ‘a summary of the contents, than a translation; for he has moulded many Icelandic sentences into one Latin period, and given the whole a different cast’ (i, 124; ii, 54, 81). Sandvig, another Danish translator, has ‘misunderstood’ an important point in ‘The Song of Thrym’ (i, 31). Finally, in the case of ‘The Song of Harald the Hardy’, instances of incompetence proliferate, producing not only a barely recognizable parody of the original but a mélange bordering on the grotesque: No relick of Icelandic poetry has been so mangled and misconstrued by its translators, as the song of Harald. The Latin, by Bartholinus, is partly erroneous; it was, however, rendered into French uncorrected by Mallet, from whom the bishop of Dromore drew his prose translation. The errors were naturally multiplied in the progress; and, at last, in the poetical translation by Mason [ . . . ] not only the ideas of the original, but the historical facts alluded to in the poem, are so completely perverted, that few vestiges of the Icelandic ballad are discernible in the English (i, 53). Herbert’s polemic against his predecessors underpins the rather immodest claims that he makes for his own abilities as a translator, and for the superior quality of his own volumes. What Herbert’s treatise possesses, and what previous essays in the field so strikingly fail to acquire, is the overriding cultural value of ‘accuracy’: The following poems are closely translated, and unadorned; with a few exceptions they are rendered line for line; and (I believe) as literally, as the difference of language and metrical rules would permit. [ . . . ] The only merit, I have aimed at, is that of accuracy; if I have judged wrong, I can only say in my defence, that it would have been much easier to adorn them, than to copy faithfully. [ . . . ] The original verses have no final rhymes, but regular alliteration and corresponding syllables. Such was the old metre of the north;


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and when rhymes were adopted, the rules of alliteration were still preserved (i, ix). Herbert’s advantage over his predecessors stems from the fact that he, unlike them, has been able to work directly from the Norse originals, without Latin intermediaries. Already in his title, Select Icelandic Poetry. Translated from the Originals with Notes, and his dedication to Carsten Anker of the Copenhagen East Asia Company, Herbert puts his status as polyglot and polyhistor on display. Then, in his preface, Herbert further establishes his scholarly credentials, when he points out that his labours are informed by many years’ patient study, by a thorough familiarity with Norse history, culture and society, and most importantly by a full knowledge of all the Scandinavian languages. ‘Translations made, like Dr. Percy’s, by a person unacquainted with the Icelandic language, through the medium of a Latin prose text, cannot be expected to represent the style and spirit of the originals’ (i, 9). Contrariwise a ‘direct’ translation will be more ‘accurate’, and therefore more valuable, and Herbert’s own training as a linguist and historian has rendered him uniquely qualified to translate Norse texts with a new awareness of the original style and spirit, and with a new attention to detail. Previous assemblers of Norse relics felt free to alter, amend and adulterate materials to suit their particular tastes and purposes. In a certain sense, they could not avoid removing themselves and their readers further and further from the original scripts, for they simply lacked the skills that would have enabled them to implement an adequate and appropriate style of presentation. Possessing far greater knowledge of Old Icelandic and modern Scandinavian language and culture, however, Herbert can apply objective methods of historical and philological scholarship to the study of traditional forms, and he can fix in print texts that have for centuries been allowed to circulate promiscuously among members of several different cultures. Herbert’s sole and declared ambition is to represent the cultural document such as it really is, and he does so by avoiding modernizing ‘imposition’, by respecting textual ‘origins’, and by remaining ‘faithful’ to the object before him (ii, 64). Hence, in substituting Schöning’s ‘loose’, ‘careless’ and ‘vague’, and ‘improbable’ version of ‘Grymur and Hialmar’, Herbert has ‘rendered it line for line, and nearly in the metre of the original’ (ii, 81). In re-translating ‘The Descent of Odin’, similarly, Herbert has chosen phrases which, however ‘inharmonious to the English ear [ . . . ] may serve to give a more distinct idea of Icelandic poetry’, and thus to expose unwarranted ‘variations’ from ‘the original’ (i, 51):

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Him the dog of darkness spied, His shaggy throat he opened wide, While from his jaws, with carnage filled, Foam and human gore distilled: Hoarse he bays with hideous din, Eyes that glow and fangs that grin; And long pursues with fruitless yell The father of the powerful spell. Onward still his way he takes, (The groaning earth beneath him shakes,) Till full before his fearless eyes The portals nine of hell arise. Right against the eastern gate, By the moss-grown pile he sate, Where long of yore to sleep was laid The dust of the prophetic maid (Gray, pp. 223–4). The dog he met from hell advancing; His adverse breast with blood was clotted, His jaws for combat keenly grinning, Fierce he bay’d the spell’s dread father, Oped [sic] his huge throat, and howl’d long after. On rode Odin; the deep earth sounded; Ugger rode to the Eastern portals, There he knew was the tomb of Vala. Strange verse he sang the slain enchanting, Traced mystic letters northward looking (Herbert, i, 50–1). ‘Inharmonious’ may be an understatement here, for compared to Gray’s easily accessible and graceful but inaccurate version Herbert’s firsthand rendition of ‘Odin’ seems difficult, and at times almost forbiddingly academic. Where Gray has used the iambic tetrameter couplet to make Odin’s experiences culturally legible, for example, Herbert tries to preserve the Norse ode’s original metre ‘which is regulated by a corresponding letter in the two halves of each verse, instead of rhyme’ (i, 51). Not only, however, does Herbert seek to capture the spirit of the source-text through metrical experiments that seem almost designed to intimidate the common or casual reader. To a much larger extent than Gray, Herbert also tends to eschew modern English words, favouring older expressions that lie closer, in sound or in meaning, to the Germanic roots of the language. This element of exoticism and archaism, which is already


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noticeable in ‘The Descent of Odin’, becomes even more pronounced later on, in Herbert’s version of ‘Regnar’: We smote with swords; nor long, before In arms I reach’d the Gothic shore, To work the loathly serpent’ death. I slew the reptile of the heath; My prize was Thora; from that fight By warriors am I Lodbrock hight. I pierced the monster’s scaly side With steel, the soldier’s wealth and pride. We smote with swords; in early youth I fought by Eyra’s billowy mouth. Where high the echoing basnites rung To the hard javelin’s iron tongue, The crop was glean’d by wolves that howl, And many a golden-footed fowl. Dark grew the ocean’s swollen water; The raven waded deep in slaughter (ii, 38). Pressing his vocabulary to the limit, Herbert apparently has no fear of compromising literary decorum, or even of violating ordinary linguistic usage, in his quest to reproduce the ‘original’. Complaining about the lacking literary qualities of Herbert’s renditions, however, would be tantamount to missing the point, for Select Icelandic Poetry is not designed to be aesthetically pleasing. For Percy, Gray, Cottle, Lewis and others, the merit of Norse balladry was not necessarily linked to its authenticity. If these very different individuals shared any underlying assumption, surely it was the precept that closeness to the original was not a value in itself, and certainly not a consideration equal or comparable to that of beauty, taste or sublimity of feeling. Yet the strength of Herbert’s archaeology is precisely that it bestows upon the ballads a value quite independent of their aesthetic merit, insofar as Select Icelandic Poetry presents the Norse verses in a manner intended to appeal not to the literary sensibility but to the antiquarian taste. It is clear, then, that Herbert does not just do more thoroughly what prior compilers did clumsily, and that he does not merely excel where previous writers have failed. Rather, he fundamentally alters the rules of the game, insisting that Norse publications henceforth be judged solely on the basis of their relative proximity to pristine originals. The songs, odes and ballads of

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Select Icelandic Poetry, in other words, deserve to be noticed not because they are elegant, harmonious or fascinating, but simply because they are in some fundamental sense genuine. Like Wordsworth, Herbert simultaneously gratifies and educates the readers’ taste for Nordic novelties, thereby engaging in a clever act of self-promotion. With one bold stroke, an entire array of rival representations is disqualified as not just deficient in aesthetic quality but also lacking in substantial value. Herbert’s fetishization of authenticity, and the almost sacrosanct value that he accords to the original text, allow him to situate himself above predecessors and contemporaries and to stabilize his own volatile class-status, by claiming membership in the select club of British gentlemanly antiquarians. ‘The Honourable and Very Reverend William Herbert’, as he would eventually be known, was born into a precarious social position and went through a number of careers in his life. The third son of the Earl of Carnavon, Herbert briefly practised at the bar after graduating from Eton and Cambridge, but in 1806 he entered politics and was elected MP for Hampshire. In 1812 he retired from politics, and in 1814 he was ordained and nominated to the rectory of Spofford in Yorkshire. Then in 1840, seven years before his death, he was promoted to the deanery of Manchester (DNB). Lawyer, politician, clergyman, but, above all, scholar: with Select Icelandic Poetry, Herbert makes a bid for a particular privileged subject position, displaying all the virtues associated with the rise of antiquarian scholarship, including competence, seriousness, objectivity and clear-mindedness. By entering into contention with a number of figures usually considered authorities in the field, Herbert proves himself a man of learning at home in several academic disciplines. Not just a man of learning, however, but also a man of taste, Herbert carefully offsets specialized information with signs of a more genteel connoisseurship. ‘The Icelandic poetry’, writes Herbert, ‘in style, expression, and obscurity, bears some analogy to the choruses of the Greek tragedians’ (i, 80). And the swift ease with which he, who had published a collection of Latin poetry, Ossiani Darthula, already in 1801, moves between various ancient writers, from Tacitus to Livy to Pliny, is a sign of distinction that cannot and should not be overlooked in this context, especially considering the author’s declared contempt for Cottle’s boorish dilettantism with regard to classical belles-lettres. In another strategic move that also contributes to his selffashioning project, Herbert casually drops a tell-tale reference to Milton and Johnson, which more than suffices to signal his familiarity with the giants of English literature: ‘Tælder, from the verb tæla, to tale, or lead on by deceit into a snare. It is derived from tal, deceit. Johnson in his


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dictionary has called this expressive word “a barbarous provincial term”, though he has quoted the authority of Locke. It is singular, that he did not recall that it is used in one of the finest passages of Beaumont and Fletcher, which Milton has imitated, but not surpassed in Comus’ (i, 59–60). In conclusion, the classic virtues that inform Herbert’s treatise, in conjunction with the abundant details and painstaking documentation that cram his pages, establish him beyond all doubt as a man of cultural sophistication and polite manners, as well as a man who has stocked his mind with a wealth of learning. Liberally educated and professionally trained at the bar, both urbane and knowledgeable, Herbert is no amateur sciolist driven by an inchoate passion for a subject that he only dimly discerns and at best half-understands. Rather, he cultivates the persona of the fastidious, scientific-minded, middle-class man of letters, who pursues his well-established ends with dedication and determination. But Herbert’s realignment of Norse studies has socio-cultural as well as personal implications. Herbert, after all, does more than simply claim that he has recovered cultural artefacts that have been changed beyond recognition; he also buttresses these texts’ new and prominent status by surrounding them with a multitude of materials corroborating their authenticity. In effect it is the presentation of the ballads, more than the ballads themselves, that works most impressively to validate Herbert’s claims on their behalf. Select Icelandic Poetry is prefaced by a dedicatory poem (‘Til Herr Anker’) and a five-page advertisement, and it is rounded off with an eight-page ‘Note on the Discovery of Iceland’. What most strikes the modern reader of the collection, though, is the size and scope of the footnotes following each individual poem. A typical example is the ballad ‘Gunlaug and Rafen’, a ballad of two pages and 30 lines, which is followed by no less than eight pages of voluminous commentary. Each of these notes is really an antiquarian essay en miniature, and their bulk entirely dwarfs the poem that they ostensibly explicate. In these notes Herbert explains the origins of words, evaluates the accuracy of sources, relates anecdotes, engages in long-winded historical discussions, and most importantly quotes from a host of learned sources in Latin, Greek, English, French, German, Danish and Icelandic. Thus, the notes supply a wide-ranging and generous context for poems that cannot and should not be allowed to stand alone: ‘Brast’. Icelandic, breste. The use of this word cannot be better exemplified, than by the famous answer of Einar to Olave Trygvason, king of Norway, in the fatal battle, in which that valiant champion of

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Christianity was overpowered with his small squadron by Earl Eric and the Kings of Denmark and Sweden, on his return from Vindland (which included Mecklenburg and Pomerania) in the year 1000. His followers defended themselves with desperate resolution, and the Danish and Swedish fleets were repulsed; but Eric vigorously renewed the attack with his Norwegians. Einar, an expert bowman in King Olave’s ship, had aimed at him twice. The first arrow flew by his head, the second between his arm and body; Einar had put a third arrow to the bow, which probably would have proved fatal, and turned the fortune of the day, when the string was struck by a broad-pointed weapon, and broke with noise. ‘What brast’, said Olave, who heard the sound. ‘Norway from thine hands, king’, replied Einar. King Olav was vexed, and answered, ‘That must God decide, not thy bow.’ Then the fight waxed hotter, and most of the principal men in the king’s ship were slain, and the quarters so thinned, that Eric and his followers boarded the vessel, and rushed on like savage wolves. See Olaf Tryg. Sag. C. 64 (i, 48). By treating every Norse piece as a special case in point, and by carefully enclosing each individual item within a network of particular names, facts and historical dates, Herbert subtly changes these poems’ cultural status and social significance. Previous writers, and presumably their readers as well, responded to Norse folk ballads because they portrayed powerful and supposedly universal emotions such as anger, desire, pride, affection and above all the wish for freedom. The Critical Review in May 1768 honoured the ‘glowing and animated’ style and the ‘vigorous imagination’ of Gray’s ‘The Fatal Sisters’ and ‘The Descent of Odin’, and thirty years later Nathan Drake still applauded the ‘thrilling horror’ of Scandinavia’s ‘wild yet terrifying mythology’ (Farley, p. 36; Drake, ii, 73). The archaic remnants of Nordic civilization, despite this culture’s historical remoteness and obscure religion, were part of ordinary culture and seemed generally accessible to nonspecialist audiences. No special abilities were required to appreciate the vigour of ‘Hervor’ and ‘Regner’, and herein lay much of their appeal. Herbert, however, does not target those ordinary ballad-readers who had thrilled to Gray’s Odes, Percy’s Five Pieces or Lewis’s Tales of Wonder. Instead, Herbert addresses a select audience of discriminating, professional university-educated gentlemen who, like himself, value accuracy above immediate interest, who can follow academic arguments, and who are able to recognize past documents as past documents. Introducing a new element of reflexivensess into the reading-experience, the


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editor-translator interposes himself between text and reader, thereby disabling any spontaneous investment in the Scandinavian texts. Balladscholarship is now de-popularized and academicized, for the introduction of a complex documentary apparatus shifts the emphasis from immediate suggestiveness to specialized knowledge and transforms ‘Regner’ and ‘Hervor’ into a new kind of object. Arguably, Herbert’s adaptive reproduction of popular ballad-material ends up, as Michel de Certeau puts it, ‘removing it from the people’s reach and reserving it for the use of scholars and amateurs’.32 With the ushering-in of a new set of criteria, the titanic feelings typically portrayed in ‘Runic’ poems – Regner’s fearless welcoming of death and Hervor’s bold defiance of her father’s unreasonable command, for example – are suddenly encased within an isolated enclave, held at a distance from the drama of the public sphere and from the arena of everyday human problems.

Scott’s Harold the Dauntless Unlike most other Norse publications, Select Icelandic Poetry was extensively and, with few exceptions, positively reviewed. The Monthly Mirror admits that Herbert ‘possess[es] an uncommon erudition’, but is nevertheless unwilling to pronounce him a ‘first rate poet’ or ‘faultless translator’. 33 Lord Byron was also not without ironic reservations when in the caustic couplets of English Bards and Scotch Reviewers (1809) he encouraged Herbert to ‘wield Thor’s hammer’ and told his reader that ‘sometimes / In gratitude, thou’lt praise his rugged rhymes’.34 The ultraconservative British Critic, on the other hand, was more explicitly appreciative, and more in line with the general consensus. In its view Herbert’s selections have been ‘translated with much spirit and accuracy’, they have ‘real merits to plead’, and they ‘furnish no small degree of satisfaction’. 35 The Monthly Review commends Herbert for his ‘accomplishments as a linguist, and his acquaintance with Danes of rank and learning’, and even the radical William Taylor, writing in the Annual Register for 1805, pays tribute to the ‘acquirements’ by which Herbert fulfils his difficult task ‘in a rare and superior manner’ (qtd. in Farley, pp. 168–9). The gush of critical approbation that met Herbert’s volumes contrasts suggestively with the leading journalists’ condemnation of Amos Cottle’s Icelandic Poetry less than a decade earlier, and with the general suspicion cast upon all forms of ‘Gothick’ diabolism by government-sponsored writers like T. J. Mathias. At a historical moment when members of the neoconservative establishment went out of their way to calumniate all forms of primitivist experimentalism, and at

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a time when partisan reviewing and critical invective were almost de rigeur, Herbert’s volumes nevertheless managed to find a sympathetic audience among periodical reviewers. Most noticeable among the reviews of Select Icelandic Poetry was a lengthy and highly favourable essay written by Walter Scott, which appeared in the Edinburgh Review in 1806, soon after the publication of the collection’s second volume. Choosing to focus entirely on the Icelandic selections, Scott first of all echoes Herbert in chastising all previous writers in the same field for the excessive subjectivity and arbitrariness of their methods: although translations of many of these very pieces have been made by poets of differing degrees of merit, from Gray to Amos Cottle, yet it has happened, rather perversely, that not one of these translators understood the original Icelandic, but contented themselves with executing their imitations from the Latin version, and thus presenting their readers with the shadow of a shade. Mr Herbert has stepped forward to rescue these ancient poets from this ignominious treatment [ . . . ] We therefore hail with pleasure an attempt to draw information from the fountain-head, especially where it is interesting both in point of intrinsic poetic merit, and as a curious source of historic investigation.36 Unlike some of his Edinburgh colleagues, Scott avoided partisan extremes and strove towards a balanced reviewing-style, and his essay on Herbert is unusual for the unequivocally positive view that Scott voices, and for the almost enthusiastic support that he lends the English author. That said, it is far from difficult to see why Scott should have been so taken with Herbert’s collection. In complimenting Herbert, after all, Scott also gratifies his own vanity, for on a number of important points – its concern with authenticity, its attention to historical detail, its fondness for lengthy prefaces, footnotes and appendices – Select Icelandic Poetry betrays the influence of, and participates in the same project as, Scott’s own Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border (1801–1802). Scott’s constant reiteration of key concepts of literary value – ‘merit’, ‘understanding’, ‘information’, ‘plain sense’, ‘taste’, ‘knowledge’ – testifies to the remarkable coincidence between his own and Herbert’s interests. Applauding his fellow-lawyer’s shift in textual priorities, Scott bestows on Herbert what must from this perspective be the highest possible praise. ‘The whole’ of Select Icelandic Poetry, he says, ‘display[s] an intimate acquaintance with Scandinavian lore, and lead[s] us to expect with anxiety


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a promised dissertation upon the ancient history and literature of Iceland’ (vi, 60). Of course Scott’s identification with Herbert is no coincidence. Both writers seek to exploit the British passion for primitive cultures, both associate themselves with the tradition of British antiquarian scholarship, and both seek to reclaim Gothic romance for the masculine republic of letters, by insisting that such romancing should at least possess authenticity through a strict attention to detail. In the first decades of the nineteenth century, the Edinburgh Review attained cultural predominance, primarily because it was the most fully professionalized of the leading journals. 37 During the same period Walter Scott emerged as the writer who best understood how to exploit and manipulate a variety of cultural contradictions, by appealing to contemporary reading tastes while also preserving a scrupulous attention to historical fact.38 Speaking on his own behalf, having recently succeeded in launching a career in letters, and also on behalf of the newly founded Edinburgh Review, Scott in his review embraces Herbert as a fellow-labourer in the specialization of knowledge and the bureaucratization of literary labour. Previous translators have been content to dabble in simulacra of ‘the northern romance’, which Scott derisively calls ‘shadow[s] of [ . .. ] shade[s]’. Herbert, on the other hand, has gone to the ‘fountain-head’, excelling through his ‘intimate acquaintance with the languages of the North’ (vi, 56). What is most remarkable about Scott’s review of Miscellaneous Poetry, however, is not Scott’s acknowledgement of Herbert’s attempt to give Norse studies the dignity of a gentlemanly, quasi-scientific undertaking, but rather his shrewd awareness of the volume’s political drift. For Select Icelandic Poetry differs from previous Norse anthologies, according to Scott, not only because its author exerts himself to get things right, but also because he is guided by a radically different worldview: We are surprised to find, that some of our brother reviewers, upon the slight foundation of a verse or two in this translation, have taxed Mr. Herbert with favouring revolutionary and levelling opinions. We should think it difficult to read far in his book, without seeing traces of very opposite politics, and would be more apt to number this ingenious poet with a party who must be allowed to possess a large share of literary merit, and of whom a professed dislike to innovation has been the leading and distinguishing principle (vi, 63). Select Icelandic Poetry, as Scott recognizes, corrects previous exercises in ‘Northern romance’ in more than one way. Not only does it use modern

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philological methods to substitute ‘plain sense’ for ‘gross errors’; at the same time, it also introduces a healthier political sense into a discursive field that has sometimes favoured ‘outrageous sensibility’ over ‘manly vigour’ (vi, 63). The accusation of harbouring liberal and even ‘levelling’ opinions might reasonably be used to browbeat previous writers presenting ‘specimens of Scaldic poetry’, such as Thomas Gray (who wrote poetry celebrating historical progress) and Amos Cottle but in Herbert’s case this charge misses its aim (vi, 56). But Herbert, as far as Scott can make out, is a writer with solid Anti-Jacobin credentials. Of all the British Romantics, Geoffrey Hartman argues, ‘Wordsworth made the most determined effort not only to respect the matter of the North but also to modernize it’ (‘Wordsworth and Goethe’, p. 395). Pace Hartman, it was Walter Scott who showed the keenest interest in the literary remnants of Norse civilization, and Scott also went to the greatest lengths to incorporate its legends and heroes into his poetry and prose. Scandinavian-derived characters, with colourful names such as Ulrica, Hroca, and Norna of the Fitful Head, make strategic appearances in texts from The Lay of the Last Minstrel (1805) to Ivanhoe (1820) and The Pirate (1822). In Henry Weber and John Jamieson’s Illustrations of Northern Antiquities (1814) Scott also published his abstract of the Icelandic Eyrbyggja Saga, which has since been praised as a breakthrough in Old Norse academic scholarship.39 Even so, there can be little doubt that Scott’s most interesting and ambitious attempt to base an entire publication on northern lore is his last metrical romance, Harold the Dauntless (1817). Sharing its location with Wordsworth’s ‘The Danish Boy’, Scott’s Viking-romance is set in northern Britain during the eleventh century, at a time when the pagan religion of Scandinavia is in decline, and when even the most irascible of the old Danish invaders have more or less been assimilated into Anglo-Saxon culture. Only Harold the Dauntless, son and heir of Count Witikind the Waster, refuses to give up ‘the pride of the North’: Young Harold was fear’d for his hardihood, His strength of frame, and his fury of mood. Rude he was and wild to behold, Wore neither collar nor bracelet of gold, Cap of fair nor rich array, Such as should grace that festal day: His doublet of bull’s hide was all unbraced, Uncover’d his head, and his sandal unlaced:


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His shaggy black locks on his brow hung low, And his eyes glanced through them a swarthy glow; A Danish club in his hand he bore, The spikes were clotted with recent gore; At his back a she-wolf, and her wolf-cubs twain, In the dangerous chase that morning slain.40 When Harold’s father converts to Christianity and agrees to settle down peacefully in return for ‘broad lands on the Tyne and the Wear’, Harold upbraids Witikind for his shameful betrayal of the ancient ‘war-gods’ Odin, Freya and Thor (i, 70, 128). After a heated argument, Harold renounces his father and goes abroad, accompanied only by the young scald Gunnar, and having vowed never to return. Years later, when he hears that the Count is dead, Harold changes his mind, and he returns to Britain to reclaim his paternal inheritance, which has meanwhile been confiscated by the church. It has often been claimed that Scott was a Romantic primitivist who mourned the advance of historical progress, and who wished to preserve the values of those indigenous cultures which he portrayed in such vivid detail. 41 Harold the Dauntless, however, makes such a view seem implausible if not untenable, for in this poem Scott shows little or no nostalgia for the behavioural code followed by ‘the champion of the North’ (vi, 310). Certainly, Scott follows previous writers in presenting Harold as a rebellious nonconformist, a fiery combatant strong and courageous enough to defy the power of the almighty Catholic church and stand up against the ecclesiastics at St Cuthbert’s in Durham. But in so doing, Scott also reverses the value-judgements implicit or explicit in previous representations of Nordic heroism, launching instead a critique of individualism and a defence of the existing socio-political order. Harold’s primary problem, from Scott’s perspective, is the fact that he is completely without self-control, a slave to ‘rage’ and the ‘rude / And wild distemper’ of the moment (iii, 143–4). To put the matter bluntly, Harold cannot see beyond the gratification of his most immediate desires and appetites. This point of criticism is voiced several times over in the poem. First, in canto one, Count Witikind remarks that Harold has always been ‘stubborn and wilful’, knowing neither ‘reason’ nor ‘ruth’: ‘Hence! to the wolf and the bear in her den; / These are thy mates, and not rational men’ (i, 142, 152–3). Later on, the priests and prelates of St Cuthbert’s also denounce Harold as ‘tameless, and furious, and bold’ (i, 324). And in canto three, most explicitly, the minstrel-page Gunnar complains that often it seems as though

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of my master’s breast Some demon were the sudden guest; Then at the first misconstrued word His hand is on the mace and sword, From her firm seat his wisdom driven, His life to countless dangers given (iii, 152–7). Gunnar’s tell-tale reference to the ‘demon’ of rage provides a key to the poem’s major theme. There is something devilish or monstrous, as Gunnar recognizes, about Harold’s furious distempers and his inability or unwillingness to resist them. Like the German and Scandinavian Gothic ballads that Scott translated in his youth, Harold the Dauntless abounds with ghosts, spectres, ogres and other ominous creatures. Some of these are merely the projected results of individual characters’ mental delusions and superstitious beliefs; others, by contrast, turn out to be real. At one point, for example, Scott has the witch Ulrica raise the old Saxon idol Zernebock, in a scene that recalls both Percy’s ‘The Invocation of Hervor’ and Gray’s ‘The Descent of Odin’. At another point in the poem, Odin himself makes an appearance. These troubling supernatural manifestations, as so often in Scott’s writings, can also be read symbolically as indices to the poem’s ethical, psychological or social problems. This would mean, as Gunnar surmises, that the real ‘demon’ of the narrative, and the demon that Harold must ultimately confront and exorcize, is the demon within himself, the demon of excessive and unregulated selfhood. In response to the reflections cited above, Harold rebukes Gunnar by solemnly informing him that he cannot understand the ethos of the northern ‘Berserkar’, and that he should therefore not presume to pass judgement: Profane not, youth – it is not thine To judge the spirit of our line – The bold Berserkar’s rage divine, Through whose inspiring, deeds are wrought Past human strength and human thought. . . . . . . . . . . . . . Thou know’st the signs of look and limb, When ‘gins that rage to overbrim – Thou know’st when I am moved, and why; And when thou seest me roll mine eye, Set my teeth thus, and stamp my foot, Regard thy safety and be mute; (iii, 163–91).


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Harold’s self-defence cannot be credited, for the ‘bold’ exploits ‘past human strength’ that he enacts in the poem tend to destabilize human relations, producing dire consequences for other characters. Scott places great emphasis on the antisocial nature and detrimental results of Harold’s feats. In the second canto, for instance, Harold haughtily commands the Saxon maid Metelil to marry him, notwithstanding her prior attachment to Sir William of Witton-le-Mer. In the third canto, Harold invades and desecrates Saint Cuthbert’s abbey, threatening the Bishop with pillage and plunder. In the fourth canto, Harold kills and decapitates Anthony Conyers and Alberic Verse, the two noblemen who legally occupy the land that Harold believes to be his by right of inheritance. Finally, in canto five, Harold breaks up Metelil’s and Sir William’s wedding-party, making havoc in his path, and murdering both the bride’s parents. These brutal and ill-considered acts, as Gunnar understands, combine to seriously call into question, if not to entirely overthrow, Harold’s view of himself as an avatar of the ancient ‘pride’ and ‘glory of the North’ (i, 225). Rather, they make him seem simply an uncontrollable presence within the poem’s social and moral landscape: a ‘lover of bloodshed, slaughter, and scathe’, who has little or no concern for the lives of other people, and who is finally not so much free-spirited as merely ‘stubborn, and wayward, and wild’ (i, 259). In Scott’s post-revolutionary romance, timeworn clichés about ‘northern freedom’ and ‘northern independence’ are revived and exploited even while they are savagely subverted and exposed as empty signifiers. The impetuous man-at-arms seemingly has no positive vision to offer, for in the course of the poem he performs nothing but anarchic bursts of ‘bloodshed’ and ‘scathe’ (i, 327). Rugged individualism begins to look very much like sheer foolhardiness or simple lack of self-discipline; the time-honoured and highly-vaunted virtues of the ‘stern Dane’ threaten to collapse into primitive natural instinct, red in tooth and claw (iii, 53). Even Harold’s name, it turns out, is primarily ironic, for the ‘dauntlessness’ in which he takes such pride manifests itself primarily in wildly irrational and grotesquely violent forms of misconduct: ‘shedding of blood, and rending of hair, / Rape of maiden, and slaughter of priest, / Gathering of ravens and wolves to the feast’ (i, 6–8). The very traits which writers of the previous century were apt to admire most in the Norse swashbuckler – atavistic pride, manly courage, martial prowess – have, for Scott, become the most radically suspected, something to be resisted and cautioned against. In his text, consequently, the erstwhile noble preserver of freedom, justice and equity reemerges as a sociopathic ‘Berserkar’, who challenges the rule of law and reason in pursuing his

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own phantasmal agendas, and who must ultimately be condemned as the enemy, not the friend of civilization. Mark Girouard’s The Return to Camelot reminds us of how great an influence the struggle against the French had on Scott’s narrative poetry. Not only did Scott take extremely seriously his tasks as quartermaster in the fiercely patriotic volunteer force, drilling, drinking and writing battle-songs for the Edinburgh Light Horse, and at one point riding 100 miles in twenty-four hours to join his company when the beacon-fires were lit in anticipation of invasion. And not only did the author-turnedmilitiaman compose a number of poems, most notably The Vision of Don Roderick (1811) and The Field of Waterloo (1815), to celebrate patriotic duty, advocate obedience to the national leaders, and further the British cause in the war. ‘To a considerable extent’, in fact, ‘all his most famous poems, even though set in the Middle Ages, were war-poems, written in time of war and under stress of its excitement, at once inspired by the deeds being performed by contemporary soldiers, and intended to inspire them’.42 Consider for example the occasional piece ‘The Bard’s Incantation’ (1806) in which Scott, once again speaking in the voice of the Border Minstrel, berates his fellow writers for their pusillanimity at a time when the nation is threatened with ‘Murder’ and ‘Rapine’ by a foe of almost supernatural proportions. 43 He then encourages the ‘bards’ of ‘Albion’ to fashion a sense of pride in war-heroes such as Admiral Nelson, ‘him, of veteran memory dear / who victor died on Aboukir’, and interestingly enough he also calls for a levée en masse comparable to that which was mounted ‘when Lochlin plow’d her billowy way, / And on your shores her Norseman flung / Her Norsemen train’d to spoil and blood, / Skill’d to prepare the Raven’s food’: ‘By all their swords, by all their scars By all their names, a mighty spell! By all their wounds, by all their wars, Arise, the mighty strain to tell! For fiercer than fierce Hengist’s strain, More impious than the heathen Dane, More grasping than all-grasping Rome, Gaul’s ravening legions hither come’ (46–7, 26–9, 48–55). Playing on conventional images of the 1803–1804 invasion scare, Scott rolls all historical enemies into one, while also placing Britain in the position of peace-loving Anglo-Saxons forced to take arms against an


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overwhelmingly powerful antagonist. One would expect the defeat of Napoleon to have relaxed Scott’s writing of the late 1810s and early 1820s, but the Battle of Waterloo did not put an end to the social tensions whose appeasement had made Scott, in Lockhart’s memorable phrase, the ‘ “mighty minstrel” of the Antigallican war’.44 On the contrary, as the end of hostilities gave a new impetus to domestic movements for political reform, Scott like many other Anti-Jacobins continued to be plagued with nightmares of disruption and violence. In a December 1819 letter, for example, Scott somewhat hysterically imagines an imminent popular uprising in Britain, with ‘50,000 blackguards [ . . . ] ready to rise between Tyne and Wear’.45 Written and published half-way between Waterloo and Peterloo, Harold the Dauntless impugns unbridled ambition and defends existing property-relations, promoting social harmony and religious conformity. ‘It appears to me’, remarks William Herbert of the Norse berserkers, that this temporary madness was merely the violent irruption of a savage disposition, amongst men undisciplined and untamed; whose limbs had been invigorated by the practice of every corporeal exertion; who from their habits of life and their religion were entirely devoid of fear, from earliest youth had been accustomed to constant warfare and pillage, and had known no controul but their own will, no bond to their desires, but the impossibility of gratifying them’ (Select Icelandic Poetry, i, 57). By constantly yielding to his ‘outrage insane’, Harold decisively forfeits any moral or legal claim that he might have had to his father’s possessions (Harold, i, 143). Contrariwise, as Scott’s narrative proceeds it becomes markedly more sympathetic towards the prudent clerics of Saint Cuthbert’s, who seek to curb Harold’s aggression by dispatching him on a perilous mission to the Castle of the Seven Shields, which is purportedly haunted by the Devil. What the churchmen cannot accomplish, though, woman can. Throughout the latter part of the romance, Harold is plagued by recurrent trances and visions, in which spectral apparitions upbraid him for his crimes and urge him to change his evil ways. First, a hooded ‘Phantom’ approaches Harold to tell him that he has been running ‘an evil race’ of ‘avarice and vice’, and that he must henceforth ‘resist’ the ‘tempest of wrath’ and ‘fury’ (v, 162, 171, 173). Later on, during his stay at the dangerous castle, this phantom identifies himself as the ghost of Harold’s father Witikind, who now commands his capricious heir to ‘tame [his] wilful heart to live / In peace’ and beckons

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him ‘to pity and forgive’ (vi, 209–10). These hallucinations, we are informed in a not-so-surprising final turn of events, have somehow been brought about by the Christian maid Eivir, who in her disguise as Gunnar has been following Harold all along, secretly praying for him and working for his salvation with magic ministrations. Eivir’s labours are crowned with success, for Harold awakes from the last frightening vision ‘an alter’d man’, convinced about his errors and determined upon reform (vi, 141). Like virtually all Scott’s verse-romances, Harold ends with the smoothingout of conflict and the restoration of social harmony – a re-establishment of things as they are which is neatly formalized in the nuptials of the ‘Christian knight’ and the ‘Christian bride’: Eivir! Since thou for many a day Hast follow’d Harold’s wayward way, It is but meet that in the line Of after-life I follow thine. To-morrow is Saint Cuthbert’s tide, And we will grace his altar’s side, A Christian knight and Christian bride; And of Witikind’s son shall the marvel be said, That on the same morn he was christen’d and wed (vi, 336–52). A key-figure in the Romantic revival, Scott perhaps better than anyone else understood the art of transforming popular materials of different origins into new and economically and politically more propitious kinds of poetry. 46 In Harold the Dauntless, Scott takes the paraphernalia of an earlier, antithetical writing as the subject matter of ‘a new species of romance’, to use Horace Walpole’s formulation in the second preface to The Castle of Otranto (1764), a book that Scott both knew and admired.47 Or, to quote William Hazlitt’s remark in The Spirit of the Age (1820), Scott ‘props the actual throne by the shadow of rebellion’, providing ‘a relief to the mind, rarefied as it has been, and heated with ultraradicalism’.48 By modelling his poem’s hero on the Scandinavian warrior-swordsman, Scott gives his publication an invigorating infusion of northern blood, lending some momentum to his career and defending his status, which had recently been challenged by the advent of Byron, as Britain’s pre-eminent romancer. At the same time, Scott also puts this formulaic character-type to sophisticated intertextual use, by paying special attention to the ways in which Harold’s plotting for property produces extremely widespread and pernicious effects, at one point


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almost jeopardizing the entire Christian community. Scott, in a word, celebrates the binding, not the unbinding of Prometheus. Once an alien, threatening and troublesome presence within the body politic, Harold finally converts to Christianity and bows to the all-embracing power of the church. But Scott intends his readers to fully understand that this is a happy ending, as the volatile intruder is finally brought within the purview of the dominant culture, and so religion, domesticity and marriage help dispel, or at least temporarily assuage, Romantic Britain’s collective anxieties about upward mobility and exorbitant ambition.

Southey’s ‘The Race of Odin’ Trafficking in ‘pre-established codes of decision’, Wordsworth, Herbert and Scott contribute to the dispersal and evacuation of oppositional antiquarian writing in Britain (Wordsworth, Prose Works, x, 126). If this is a form of ‘bricolage’, to apply the useful anthropological term that Jon Mee has introduced into Romantic scholarship, then surely it is bricolage with a decisive conservative slant.49 Considered in its own right, these Romantic writers realized, the eighteenth-century Scandinavianist tradition in European letters may have been alarming, unsound, perhaps even degenerate: it directly or suggestively challenged reigning aesthetic, social and political orders. But if previous writers’ dangerously antinomian texts, characters, figures and conventions were imaginatively redefined and reinvested, dressed in new clothes suitable for a new age, they could still be made subservient to the Romantic reconstruction of British culture. Still my story, which might otherwise be taken simply to suggest that hegemonic literary forms replaced dissident ones, has a different ending and an unexpected hero. An alternative to High Romanticism’s dominant literary practices, I propose, may be found in Robert Southey’s early poem ‘The Race of Odin’ (1795). During the mid-1790s Southey, having met Coleridge in June 1794, was captivated by the northern romance. Between 1793 and 1798, Southey took out several books on Nordic subjects from the Bristol public library.50 Southey probably had some share in Coleridge’s ‘Historical Sketch of the Manners and Religion of the Ancient Germans’, published in the third issue of Coleridge’s antiministerial journal The Watchman (1796), just as Coleridge most likely assisted Southey in writing his historical lecture on ‘the Manners and Irruptions of the Northern Nations’, which was delivered in London in 1795.51 Southey’s interest in the North deeply influenced his view of what literature is, was and should be. For the Norsemen, according to

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Paul-Henri Mallet, poetry was no isolated and specialized form of knowledge, as it was increasingly becoming in the second half of the eighteenth century. On the contrary, poetry was at the centre of civic life, ‘essentially connected with religion, politics, or morality’ (p. 238). The poet was seen not as a socially marginal figure but as an important member of the community; his power of memorizing important events and commenting upon public affairs gave him ‘a very high degree of esteem and respect’ and made him ‘an essential officer of the state’. According to Mallet, ‘all the historical monuments of the north are full of the honours paid this order of men both by princes and people; nor can the annals poetry produce any age or country which reflects more glory and lustre upon it. [ . . . ] In a word, the poetic art was held in such high estimation, that great lords and even kings did not disdain to cultivate it with the utmost pains themselves’ (pp. 234–5). This lofty conception of the bardic office undoubtedly held a significant appeal to the young Southey, for whom an interest in poetic experimentation went hand in hand with a commitment to social change. For the guiding idea behind ‘The Race of Odin’, Southey once again reverts to Mallet’s postulate that Odin was the historical foe of Rome, and that he fled to Scandinavia to escape the ravages of the imperial legions. Mallet also points out that Odin was conventionally believed to possess prophetic powers. Southey’s poem, consequently, opens with Odin pronouncing his curse on Rome and foretelling the fall of classical civilization, which he sees as a culture based on ‘slaughter’, ‘ambition’ and ‘luxury’: ‘Roman!’ (’twas the chief of ASGARD cry’d) ‘Ambitious Roman! triumph for a while; Trample on freedom in thy victor pride; Yet, though now thy fortune smile, Though MITHRIDATES fly forlorn, Once thy dread, but not thy scorn, ODIN will never live a shameful slave; Some region will he yet explore, Beyond the reach of Rome; Where, upon some colder shore, Freedom yet thy force shall brave, Freedom yet shall find a home’. 52 The following stanzas relate the rise and development of a specific northern socio-cultural order, in details more or less closely derived from


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Tacitus, Montesquieu, Rousseau and Mallet. Unlike the Mediterranean South, the Scandinavian North comes to house a civilization based on ‘justice’, characterized by ‘vigour’ and animated with a love for ‘genuine poesy’: a society where ‘freedom’, not ‘vice’ or ‘luxury’, inspirits ‘the free-born offspring of the free-born sire’ to perform heroic and selfless exploits (14, 42, 49–53). Thus, as ‘Sparta revives on Scandinavia’s shore’ the dying hour of Rome draws nearer, and so the poem closes, suitably enough, with the fulfilment of Odin’s initial prophecy: The destin’d hour at length is come, And vengeful heaven decrees the queen of cities’ doom; No longer heaven withholds the avenging blow From those proud domes whence BRUTUS fled; Where just CHEREA bow’d his head, And proud oppression laid the GRACCHI low: In vain the timid slaves oppose, For freedom led their sinewy foes, For valour fled with liberty: Rome bows her lofty walls, ‘She falls – and lo, the world again is free!’ (92, 104–15). ‘The Race of Odin’ may not be one of British Romanticism’s or even one of Southey’s most successful poems, when considered from a strictly aesthetic perspective. With his cumbersome sentences and ornately Latinate diction, to mention but a few flaws, Southey falls somewhat short of what eighteenth-century theorists of primitive literature saw as the ‘obscure’, ‘enigmatical’ and boldly ‘figurative’ style of ‘Runic’ verse (Mallet, pp. 237–8). But the poem nevertheless suffices to show that there is no inescapable logical necessity dictating Wordsworth, Herbert and Scott’s adroit manoeuvres. In contrast to his fellow-Romantics, Southey not only refuses to domesticate the cult of the northern sublime; he radicalizes it, lending greater relevance to familiar ideas and going beyond previous writers even in the act of imitating them. It is not difficult to see that Southey’s poem is inextricably intertwined with the all-engrossing political conflicts of the 1790s, nor is there any doubt what position its author takes on these issues. Given the evidence available, indeed, it is hard to interpret the poem as anything but an allegory of events occurring during the tumultuous years of the French Revolutionary wars. The conclusion of Southey’s Runic poem significantly parallels the optimistic denouement of Southey and Coleridge’s The Fall of Robespierre (1794), where France – lest we forget, a regicidal nation now at war with

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Britain – emerges from its troubles strengthened and purified, as the focus of renewed struggle against ‘treason’ and ‘oppression’: Sublime amid the storm shall France arise, And like the rock amid surrounding waves Repel the rushing ocean. – She shall wield The thunder-bolt of vengeance – she shall blast The despot’s pride, and liberate the world!53 By contrasting Gothicism and Classicism, by celebrating Odin’s ingrained hostility towards imperial might, and by conflating northern freedom with the spirit of republicanism (Brutus, Cherea and the Gracchi were all republican heroes, admired by the French insurgents), Southey constructs a transparent set of references that invite or even compel his readers to recognize analogies between what happened then and what happens now. He forces them to see Rome as the equivalent of the ancien régime in England and France, and to view the northern invaders as a historical parallel to the apocalyptic forces of the modern revolutionary movement currently spreading throughout the European Continent. Rome has fallen once, and now it is about to fall again. Envisioning Odin as a sans-culotte leader avant la lettre, Southey uses Scandinavia’s rough-hewn vigour as a rallying cry for insurrection, and thus he brings his poem close – perilously close, considering the suspicious climate in which he wrote – to Jacobin ideology. It is familiar knowledge that the notorious young troublemaker Southey, when confronted with government harassment and threats of imprisonment and deportation, chose to recant his seditious views on culture and society, and that he soon after began to refashion himself as a spokesman for British tradition and common sense.54 In the light of this development, it is scarcely surprising that Southey, in his later guise as robust Tory nationalist and Poet Laureate, excluded ‘The Race of Odin’ and its companion poem ‘The Death of Odin’ until the publication of Poetical Works (1829), and then only admitted them into his oeuvre under the curious category of ‘suppressed poems’. But poetic history cannot be undone, and Southey did write his youthful poem on Odin, although in his later years he no doubt came to wish that he had never done so. In 1817, as is well known, the publishers Sherwood, Neely and Jones brought out without authority the first edition of Southey’s Wat Tyler. This publication caused a considerable stir in intellectual circles, and among other things it led to Southey’s being ridiculed in the House of Commons and in the pages of several prominent


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journals. In the opinion of William Hazlitt, writing in Leigh Hunt’s Examiner, Wat Tyler represented an unpleasant but historically auspicious return of the repressed; it shattered the myth of Lake School orthodoxy, reminding Southey, the Tory government and the general public that the ‘Ultra-loyalist’ Poet Laureate had once been an ‘Ultra-jacobin’ who ‘saw nothing but the abuses of power’, and who ‘did not stop short of general anarchy’.55 In like manner, ‘The Race of Odin’ may even from its presently suppressed and marginalized position within Southey’s oeuvre help us recollect the various ideological positions that are expressed and that coexist, albeit uneasily, within Romantic literature. In Marilyn Butler’s influential essay on ‘The Cult of the South’, the older Romantics’ Germanic predilections are presented as intrinsically ‘gloomy’, ‘introspective’ and ‘pessimistic’, while it is argued that younger liberal and radical writers ‘switched [ . . . ] to preponderantly classic and Mediterranean models’. 56 But Southey’s poem shows that the Gothic/Classical dualism cannot be mapped onto the period’s political schisms quite so easily, for Southey values the figure of Odin precisely because he incarnates republican soldierliness. Restored to critical consciousness, ‘Odin’ strikes a defiant note of ongoing conflict and protest, not of reconciliation and defeatism. As such, it recalls the first-generation Romantics’ radical points of departure, just as it points forward to later, second-generation texts – poems like Shelley’s ‘The Revolt of Islam’ (1817) and Keats’s two versions of ‘Hyperion’ (1818–1819) – that use antiquarian sources in similar ways, seeking to effect revolutionary changes of consciousness. Keats and Shelley were dismissive of Southey, whom they spoke of as ‘having sold himself to the Court’, but in a characteristic revisionist swerve they were also influenced by, and actively drew on, his myth-saturated poetry in their own compositions. 57 Like Southey, Keats and Shelley self-reflexively revive apparently meaningless systems of signification to represent the promesse de bonheur resultant upon ‘the march of passion and endeavour’.58 All three poets scan the annals of outworn creeds and non-Christian (Norse, Hellenic and Zoroastrian) legends, in the hope that they will locate a prefiguration of the positive dynamic force, the heroic leader who may be used to imagine the necessary break with the past and the longed-for inauguration of some bright future. Despite its uncertain status and limited imaginative scope, ‘The Race of Odin’ still draws attention to something that one would not have suspected from reading Wordsworth and Scott: during the Romantic period it was still possible, apparently, to write poetry which did not repress, occult or occlude, but which in fact underlined and amplified, the politically progressive beliefs enshrined in traditional notions of northern freedom.


Introduction: ‘Sickly and Stupid German Tragedies’ 1. Stuart Curran, Poetic Form and British Romanticism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), p. 22. 2. William Hazlitt, My First Acquaintance with Poets, in The Complete Works of William Hazlitt, ed. P. P. Howe, 21 vols (London: Dent, 1931), XVII, p. 116. 3. Preface to Lyrical Ballads (1800), The Prose Works of William Wordsworth, eds W. J. B. Owen and Jane W. Smyser, 3 vols (Oxford: Clarendon, 1974), I, p. 128. 4. Thomas Carlyle, ‘Walter Scott’, in The Works of Thomas Carlyle, 30 vols (London: Chapman and Hall, 1896–1899), XXIX, pp. 22–87 (p. 39). 5. Julie Carlson, ‘Unsettled Territory: The Drama of English and German Romanticisms’, Modern Philology, 88 (1990), 43–56 (pp. 44–5). 6. J. H. Alexander, ‘Learning from Europe: Continental Literature in the Edinburgh Review and Blackwood’s Magazine 1802–1825’, Wordsworth Circle, 21 (1990), 118–23 (p. 118). 7. Harold Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry (New York: Oxford University Press, 1975), p. 95. 8. Frank Lentricchia, After the New Criticism (London: Athlone Press, 1980), pp. 325–6. 9. Harold Bloom, The Visionary Company: A Reading of English Romantic Poetry (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1961), p. xviii. 10. ‘Where does [Bloom] find his strong poets?’ asks Thomas McFarland, and answers: ‘they are given to him under the rubric of English literature. He rarely questions the canon, not does he question the use of poetry as such [ . . . ] he is docile in accepting the valuations already given by literary history, as is strikingly apparent in his book called The Visionary Company, which is simply a résumé of the canon of English Romantic poetry’. McFarland, ‘Field, Constellation, and Aesthetic Object’, New Literary History, 13 (1982), 421–47 (p. 425). 11. Francis Jeffrey, review of Thabala the Destroyer by Robert Southey, Edinburgh Review, 1 (October 1802), 63–83 (p. 63). 12. Stuart Curran, ‘Romantic Poetry: Why and Wherefore?’, in The Cambridge Companion to British Romanticism, ed. Curran (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), pp. 216–34 (p. 221). 13. Stephen C. Behrendt, ‘New Romanticisms for Old: Displacing Our Expectations and Our Models’, Midwest Quarterly, 41 (2000), 145–59 (p. 145). 14. An Oxford Companion to the Romantic Age: British Culture 1776–1832, gen. ed. Iain McCalmain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999); Beyond Romanticism, eds Stephen Copley and John Whale (London: Routledge, 1992); At the Limits of Romanticism, ed. Mary A. Favret (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994); New Romanticisms, eds David Clark and Donald C. Goellnicht 208

Notes and References 209

15.

16.

17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24.

25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31.

1

(Toronto: Toronto University Press, 1994); Questioning Romanticism, ed. John Beer (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995). See Tim Fulford and Peter J. Kitson, ‘Romanticism and Colonialism: Texts, Contexts, Issues’, in Romanticism and Colonialism: Writing and Empire 1780–1830, eds Fulford and Kitson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 1–12. Alan Richardson, ‘On Saree Makdisi’s Romantic Imperialism: Universal Empire and the Culture of Modernity’, Romantic Circles Reviews, 3 (1999) , 8 pars. (1). Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism (New York: Knopf, 1993), p. 97. Jonathan Wordsworth, Ancestral Voices (Woodstock: Spelsbury, 1991), p. 2. Julie Carlson, In the Theatre of Romanticism: Coleridge, Nationalism, Women (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994). Nicola J. Watson, Revolution and the Form of the British Novel 1790–1825: Intercepted Letters, Interrupted Seductions (Oxford: Clarendon, 1994), p. 4. See Margey Sabin, English Romanticism and the French Tradition (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1976). Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, eds W. J. Bate and James Engell, 2 vols (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983), II, p. 208. Walter Scott, ‘Lord Byron’, in Miscellaneous Prose Works, 7 vols (Paris: n.p., 1837–1838), I, pp. 304–5. Thomas De Quincey, review of Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship, in The Collected Writings of Thomas De Quincey, ed. David Masson, 14 vols (London: Black, 1896), XI, pp. 246–7. Marilyn Butler, Romantics, Rebels and Reactionaries: English Literature and Its Background 1760–1830 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981), p. 5. Hannah More, Strictures on the Modern System of Female Education (London: T. Cadell and W. Davies, 1799), p. 41. Geoffrey Hartman, ‘False Themes and Gentle Minds’, Philological Quarterly, 47 (1966), 55–68 (pp. 56,57). Judith Wilt, Secret Leaves: The Novels of Walter Scott (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), p. 21. Karen Swann, ‘Public Transport: English Romantic Experiments in Sensation’, American Notes and Queries, 6 (1993), 136–42 (pp. 138–9). Jane Austen, Mansfield Park, ed. R. W. Chapman, 3rd edn (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1948), p. 184. John Barrell, The Infection of Thomas De Quincey: A Psychopathology of Imperialism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991), p. 16.

‘We Know that the Enemy is Working among Us’

1. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1991). 2. Marlon B. Ross, ‘Romancing the Nation-State: The Poetics of Romantic Nationalism’, in Macropolitics of Nineteenth-Century Literature: Nationalism, Exoticism, Imperialism, eds Jonathan Arac and Harriet Ritvo (Durham: Duke University Press, 1991), pp. 56–85. 3. Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation 1707–1837 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992), p. 5.

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4. Seamus Deane, The French Revolution and Enlightenment in England, 1789–1832 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1988), p. 3. 5. Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France, ed. Conor Cruise O’Brien (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1969), p. 128. 6. Stella Cotrell, ‘ “The Devil on Two Sticks”: Franco-phobia in 1803’, in Patriotism: The Making and Unmaking of British National Identity, ed. Raphael Samuel, 3 vols (London: Routledge, 1989), I, pp. 259–74. 7. See David Simpson, Romanticism, Nationalism, and the Revolt against Theory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993). 8. John Barrell, The Infection of Thomas De Quincey: A Psychopathology of Imperialism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991), pp. 15, 18. 9. Richard Hofstadter, ‘The Paranoid Style in American Politics’, in The Paranoid Style in American Politics and Other Essays (London: Jonathan Cape, 1966), pp. 3–40. Hofstadter’s relevance to Romantic studies is discussed in Kim Wheatley, Shelley and His Readers: Beyond Paranoid Politics (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1999). I have benefited considerably from Wheatley’s analysis. 10. The standard study of conspiracy theory in the French Revolutionary era is J. M. Roberts, The Mythology of the Secret Societies (London: Secker and Warburgh, 1972). 11. Augustin de Barruel, Memoirs, Illustrating the History of Jacobinism, trans. Robert Clifford, 4 vols (London: De Barruel, 1798), I, p. xiii. 12. John Robison, Proofs of a Conspiracy Against all the Religions and Governments of Europe, Carried on in the Secret Meetings of Free Masons, Illuminati, and Reading Societies (London: Cadell and Davies, 1797), p. 207. 13. Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry Into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, ed. James T. Boulton (London: University of Notre Dame Press, 1968), pp. 58, 63. 14. See Jon P. Klancher, The Making of English Reading Audiences, 1790–1832 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1987), pp. 34–5. 15. See Walter Sellier, Kotzebue in England: Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte der englischen Bühne und der Beziehungen der deutschen Litteratur zur englischen (Leipzig: Oswald Schmidt, 1902). 16. T. J. Mathias, The Pursuits of Literature: A Satirical Poem in Four Dialogues, 4th edn (London: Owen, 1797), p. 162. 17. T. J. Mathias, The Shade of Alexander Pope on the Banks of the Thames (Dublin: J. Milliken, 1799), pp. 51–64. 18. Thomas De Quincey, Confessions of An English Opium-Eater, in The Collected Writings of Thomas De Quincey, ed. David Masson, 14 vols (London: Black, 1896), XIII, p. 291. 19. George Canning and John Hookham Frere, in Poetry of the Anti-Jacobin, ed. Jonathan Wordsworth (Oxford: Woodstock, 1991), p. 165. 20. Kenneth R. Johnston, ‘Romantic Anti-Jacobins or Anti-Jacobin Romantics?’, Romanticism On the Net, 15 (August 1999) , 38 pars. (8). 21. Graeme Stones, ‘Parody and the Anti-Jacobin’, Wordsworth Circle, 24 (1993), 161–6 (p. 162). 22. See Ronald Paulson, Representations of Revolution (1789–1820) (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1983), pp. 183–204. 23. Emily Lorraine de Montluzin, The Anti-Jacobins, 1798–1800: The Early Contributors to the Anti-Jacobin Review (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1988), pp. 26, 30–1.

Notes and References 211 24. Quoted in Edward Duffy, Rousseau in England: The Context for Shelley’s Critique of the Enlightenment (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979), p. 42. Rousseau, however, had been a target already in the weekly Anti-Jacobin. 25. James Walker, ‘The Literature and Literati of Germany’, Anti-Jacobin Review and Magazine, 5 (April 1800), 568–80 (p. 571). 26. John Gifford, ‘Preface’, Anti-Jacobin Review and Magazine, 4 (September 1799), vi–xvi (p. vii). 27. Monthly Review, n. s. 18 (1795), 346–7 (p. 346). 28. Monthly Review, n. s. 21 (1796), 349–50. 29. Francis Jeffrey, review of Goethe’s Herman and Dorothea, Monthly Review, 39 (December 1802), 383–90 (p. 383). 30. Francis Jeffrey, review of Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship, Edinburgh Review, 84 (August 1825), 120–42 (pp. 124–5). 31. Quoted in Winfield Rogers, ‘The Reaction against Melodramatic Sentimentality in the English Novel, 1796–1830’, PMLA, 49 (1934), 89–122 (p. 117). 32. William Preston, ‘Reflections on the Peculiarities of Style and Manner in the late German Writers, whose Works have appeared in English; and on the Tendency of their Productions’, Edinburgh Magazine, 20 (1802), 353–61, 406–8; 21 (1802), 9–18, 89–96 (p. 353). 33. See Novels and Romance 1700–1800: A Documentary Record, ed. Ioan Williams (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1970). 34. David H. Richter, ‘The Reception of the Gothic Novel in the 1790s’, in The Idea of the Novel in the Eighteenth Century, ed. Robert W. Uphaus (East Lansing: Colleagues Press, 1988), pp. 117–37 (p. 124). 35. Kim Wheatley argues that this medical confusion, which Preston shared with many other critics, reflects contemporary scientists’ misconceptions about the ways that bodily ailments spread from one person to another (pp. 61–6). 36. The idea that foreign literature ‘poisoned’ the British reader was widespread. For a parallel reference, see the following remark from a contemporary review of Kotzebue’s Johanna of Montfaucon (1800): ‘When it is considered how large a quantity of Kotzebue we have been obliged to swallow, the reader cannot wonder at our shuddering when a fresh dose is offered to us. There is, alas! no honey around the edges of the nauseating cup; on the contrary, they are tinged with fresh bitterness by the awkwardness of his translators. Indeed we must confess, with Falstaff, that we had as lieve they would offer to put ratsbane in our mouth, as to stop it with More Kotzebue’. Monthly Review, 32 (1800), 326. 37. Burke had referred to French freethinking as a ‘plague’, and many other writers also regarded Continental literature as a sickness (Reflections, p. 185).

2

‘Dethroning German Sublimity’

1. Letters of Anna Seward Written between the Years 1784 and 1807, 6 vols (Edinburgh: Constable, 1811), IV, p. 287. 2. The Letters of Charles and Mary Lamb, ed. Edwin W. Marrs, Jr, 3 vols (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1975), I, p. 136. 3. Walter Scott, ‘Essay on Imitations of the Ancient Ballad’, in Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border, 4 vols (Edinburgh: Oliver and Boyd, 1932), IV, pp. 37–8. 4. The Prose Works of William Wordsworth, eds W. J. B. Owen and Jane W. Smyser, 3 vols (Oxford: Clarendon, 1974), III, p. 76.

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5. The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, eds Ernest de Selincourt and Helen Darbishire, 5 vols (Oxford: Clarendon, 1940–1949), III, p. 442. 6. Albert B. Friedman, The Ballad Revival: Studies in the Influence of Popular on Sophisticated Poetry (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1961), pp. 259–91; Malcolm Laws, The British Literary Ballad: A Study in Poetic Imitation (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1972), pp. 26–37; Mary Jacobus, Tradition and Experiment in Wordsworth’s Lyrical Ballads (1798) (Oxford: Clarendon, 1976), p. 211. Other important discussions of Bürger include Geoffrey Hartman, ‘False Themes and Gentle Minds’, Philological Quarterly, 47 (1966), 55–68; Stephen M. Parrish, The Art of the Lyrical Ballads (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1973), pp. 86–93; Evelyn Jolles, G. A. Bürgers Ballade ‘Lenore’ in England (Regensburg: Hans Carl, 1974); John K. Primeau, ‘The Influence of Gottfried August Bürger on the “Lyrical Ballads” of William Wordsworth: The Supernatural vs. the Natural’, Germanic Review, 58 (1983), 89–96; and Martha Woodmansee, The Author, Art, and the Market: Rereading the History of Aesthetics (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), pp. 111–18. 7. According to William Hazlitt, Wordsworth used these words to dismiss Lewis’s Gothic play The Castle Spectre (1797). My First Acquaintance with Poets, in The Complete Works of William Hazlitt, ed. P. P. Howe, 19 vols (London: Dent, 1930–34), XVII, p. 118. 8. William Preston, ‘Reflections on the Peculiarities of Style and Manner in the late German Writers, whose Works have appeared in English; and on the Tendency of their Productions’, Edinburgh Magazine, 20 (1802), 353–61, 406–08; 21 (1802), 9–18, 89–96 (p. 360). 9. Joseph Fawcett, ‘The Art of Poetry’, quoted in Samuel Monk, The Sublime: A Study of Critical Theories in 18th-Century England (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1960), p. 138. 10. Whyte complains that Bürger’s fiction ‘is too violent; it out-herods Herod, and seems merely calculated to keep alive and propagate the exploded notions of ghosts and hobgoblins to the great annoyance of poor children, whose ductile minds are liable to fearful impressions, which by the strongest exertion so reason and good sense are scarcely ever afterwards to be wholly obliterated’. A Miscellany, Containing [ . . . ] A Critique on Bürger’s Leonora (Dublin: Whyte, 1799), pp. 163–4. 11. Michael Gamer, Romanticism and the Gothic: Genre, Reception and Canon Formation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), p. 23. 12. Jerome Christensen, ‘The Color of Imagination and the Office of Romantic Criticism’, in Coleridge’s Theory of Imagination Today, ed. Christine Gallant (New York: AMS Press, 1989), pp. 227–42 (p. 229). 13. J. T. Stanley, Leonora, A Tale, Translated freely from the German of Gottfried August Bürger (London: Miller, 1796); Henry James Pye, Lenore: a Tale from the German of Gottfried Augustus Bürger (London: John Archer, 1796); W. R. Spencer, Leonora, Translated from the German of Gottfried Augustus Bürger (London: Edwards, 1796); Walter Scott, ‘The Chase’ and ‘William and Helen’: Two Ballads from the German of Gottfried Augustus Bürger (Edinburgh: Manners and Miller, 1796); William Taylor, ‘Lenore’, Monthly Magazine, 1 (March 1796), 135–7; and Ellenore, A Ballad, Originally Written in German by G. A. Bürger (Norwich: n.p., 1796).

Notes and References 213 14. The religious conflicts of Bürger’s life and works are discussed in Albrecht Schöne, Säkularisation als sprachbildende Kraft: Studien zur Dichtung deutscher Pfarrersöhne (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht, 1958), pp. 152–89. 15. Bürger, ‘Lenore’, in Sämtliche Werke, ed. Wolfgang von Wurzbach, 4 vols (Leipzig: Max Hesse, 1902), pp. 118–24 (253–6). 16. See Martin Priestman, Romantic Atheism: Poetry and Freethought, 1780–1830 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), pp. 82–5. 17. Evely Jolles reads Leonora as a deliberate throwback to the eighteenth-century ‘exemplary’ ballad (p. 96). 18. English Review, 28 (1796), 80–4 (p. 84). 19. The Leonora-images are reproduced in The Complete Graphic Works of William Blake, ed. David Bindman (London: Thames and Hudson, 1978), pp. 380–2. 20. Leonora. Translated and Altered from the German of Gottfried Augustus Bürger, trans. J. T. Stanley (London: W. Miller, 1796) (229–64). 21. For a specific parallel in Ann Radcliffe, see chapter seven of The Romance of the Forest, ed. Chloe Chard (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), pp. 108–10. Here the heroine Adeline has a succession of ghastly supernatural dreams. 22. Patricia M. Spacks, The Insistence of Horror: Aspects of the Supernatural in EighteenthCentury Poetry (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1962), p. 118. 23. Robert Southey, review of Lyrical Ballads, quoted in Coleridge: The Critical Heritage, ed. J. R. de J. Jackson (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1970), p. 53. 24. Throughout this section I have also been influenced by Karen Swann’s pair of essays on ‘Christabel’: ‘Christabel: The Wandering Mother and the Enigma of Form’, Studies in Romanticism, 23 (1984), 533–53; and ‘Literary Gentlemen and Lovely Ladies: The Debate on the Character of Christabel’, ELH, 52 (1985), 397–418. 25. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ‘The Rime of the Ancient Marynere’ (1798), in The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. Ernest Hartley Coleridge, 2 vols (Oxford: Clarendon, 1912), II, pp. 1030–48 (643–50). 26. Wordsworth, note to the ‘Ancient Mariner’, in Lyrical Ballads and Other Poems, eds James Butler and Karen Green (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1992), p. 791. 27. O. Bryan Fulmer, ‘The Ancient Mariner and the Wandering Jew’, Studies in Philology, 66 (1969), 797–815 (p. 800). 28. Coleridge, ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’, in Poetical Works, I, pp. 186–209 (pp. 189, 191). 29. Edward E. Bostetter, ‘The Nightmare World of “The Ancient Mariner” ’, Studies in Romanticism, 1 (1962), 241–54. 30. See Robert Penn Warren, ‘A Poem of Pure Imagination: An Experiment in Reading’, in Selected Essays (New York: Random House, 1961), pp. 121–63. 31. Frances Ferguson, ‘Coleridge and the Deluded Reader: “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” ’, Georgia Review, 31 (1977), 617–35 (p. 621). 32. William Taylor, ‘Some Account of the Poems of G. A. Bürger’, Monthly Magazine, 1 (1796), 117–18 (p. 117). 33. Coleridge, review of The Monk, in Coleridge’s Miscellaneous Criticism, ed. Thomas M. Raysor (London: Constable, 1936), pp. 370–8. 34. Coleridge, Table Talk: Recorded by Henry Nelson Coleridge (and John Taylor Coleridge), ed. Carl Woodring, 2 vols (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990), I, p. 484.

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35. Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, eds W. J. Bate and James Engell, 2 vols (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983), II, p. 33. 36. The Letters of William and Dorothy Wordsworth: The Early Years, 1787–1805, ed. Ernest de Selincourt (Oxford: Clarendon, 1967), p. 234. 37. Wordsworth, Prose Works, iii, 81; Coleridge, The Friend, ed. Barbara Rooke, 2 vols (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1969), p. 16. 38. Wordsworth, ‘Lines Written a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey’, in Lyrical Ballads, pp. 116–20 (50). 39. Mark Jones, ‘Interpretation in Wordsworth and the Provocation Theory of Romantic Literature’, Studies in Romanticism, 30 (1991), 565–604 (p. 575). 40. Stephen Parrish, ‘ “Leaping and Lingering”: Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads’, in Coleridge’s Imagination: Essays in Memory of Pete Laver, eds Richard Gravil, Lucy Newlyn and Nicholas Roe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), pp. 102–16 (p. 109). 41. Umberto Eco, The Open Work, trans. Anna Cangoni (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1989), p. 9. 42. Don H. Bialostosky, Making Tales: The Poetics of Wordsworth’s Narrative Experiments (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), p. 47. 43. Wordsworth, ‘Simon Lee, the Old Huntsman’, in Lyrical Ballads, pp. 64–7 (79–80). 44. Bürger, ‘Der Wilde Jäger’, in Sämtliche Werke, pp. 165–71 (53); ‘The Chase’, in ‘The Chase’ and ‘William and Helen’, trans. Walter Scott, pp. 1–18 (54). 45. Wordsworth, ‘Hart-Leap Well’, in Lyrical Ballads, pp. 133–8 (5–8). 46. Günter Häntzschl, Gottfried August Bürger (Munich: Beck, 1988), pp. 69–77. 47. The English translation is the one used by Woodmansee (p. 68). 48. See Franz Leschnitzer, ‘G. A. Bürger – ein plebejischer Dichter’, Neue Deutsche Litteratur, 2 (1954), 109–22. 49. Wordsworth, ‘Salisbury Plain’, in The Salisbury Plain Poems of William Wordsworth, ed. Stephen C. Gill (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1975), pp. 19–38 (541–5). Wordsworth signed himself ‘a Republican’ in his ‘Letter to the Bishop of Llandaff’ (1793) (Prose Works, i, 29). 50. Kenneth R. Johnston, ‘Philanthropy or Treason? Wordsworth as “Active Partisan” ’, Studies in Romanticism, 25 (1986), 371–409. 51. Jerome McGann, The Romantic Ideology: A Critical Investigation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), p. 1. 52. David Perkins discusses the political implications of Wordsworth’s and Coleridge’s animalitarianism in ‘Wordsworth and the Polemics against Hunting: Hart-Leap Well’, Nineteenth-Century Literature, 52 (1998), 421–45. 53. For the reception of The Monk and The Castle Spectre, see André Parreaux, The Publication of The Monk: A Literary Event 1796–1798 (Paris: Marcel Didier, 1960). 54. Matthew G. Lewis, The Monk, ed. Howard Anderson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1973), p. 6; The Castle Spectre (London: Bell, 1797), p. 9. 55. The British Critic, 10 (1797), 551. 56. T. J. Mathias, The Pursuits of Literature: A Satirical Poem in Four Dialogues, 4th edn (London: Owen, 1797), p. 239. 57. Collected Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. Earl Leslie Griggs, 6 vols (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1956–1971), I, p. 365. 58. For German influences in Lewis’s writings, see Karl S. Guthke, Englische Vorromantik und deutscher Sturm und Drang: M. G. Lewis’ Stellung in der Geschichte der deutschenglischen Litteraturbeziehungen (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht, 1958).

Notes and References 215 59. Karl S. Guthke, ‘Die Erste Nachwirking von Herders Volksliedern in England: Unveröffentliche Dokumente zu den Tales of Wonder’, Archiv für das Studium der neueren Sprachen, 193 (1956), 273–84 (p. 276). 60. Lewis, Tales of Wonder, 2 vols (London: J. Bell, 1801). All references to Lewis’s poetry are taken from this edition. 61. Louis F. Peck, A Life of Matthew Gregory Lewis (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1961), p. 116. 62. Review of The Genius, by Marquis von Grosse, Critical Review, n. s. 18 (1796), 342. 63. Mark Girouard, The Return to Camelot: Chivalry and the English Gentleman (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1981), pp. 32–3; Mark Storey, Robert Southey: A Life (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), pp. 122–61. 64. Jeffrey N. Cox, ‘The Ideological Tack of Nautical Melodrama’, in Melodrama: The Cultural Emergence of a Genre, eds Michael Hays and Anastasia Nikoloupolou (London: Macmillan 1996), pp. 167–89. 65. Elizabeth Church, ‘A Bibliographical Myth’, Modern Philology, 19 (1921), 307–14. 66. Victor Shklovsky, ‘Art as Technique’, in Debating Texts: A Reader in 20th Century Literary Theory and Method, ed. Rick Rylance (Milton Keynes: Open University Press, 1987), pp. 48–56. 67. Robert Miles, Gothic Writing 1750–1820 (London: Routledge, 1993), p. 70; Robin Lydenberg, ‘Ghostly Rhetoric: Ambivalence in M. G. Lewis’s The Monk’, Ariel, 10 (1979), 65–79 (p. 65). 68. Linda Hutcheon, ‘The Politics of Parody’, in The Politics of Postmodernism (New York: Routledge, 1989), pp. 93–117; Margaret A. Rose, Parody/MetaFiction: An Analysis of Parody as a Critical Mirror to the Writing and Reception of Fiction (London: Croon Helm, 1979). 69. Lewis, Adelmorn, the Outlaw; A Romantic Drama, in Three Acts, As Originally Written by M. G. Lewis (London: n.p. 1801), pp. iv–v. 70. Thomas De Quincey, ‘Samuel Taylor Coleridge’, in The Collected Writings of Thomas De Quincey, ed. David Masson, 14 vols (London: Black, 1896), II, pp. 138–225 (p. 146). 71. Coleridge, ‘On Poesy or Art’, in Lectures 1808–1819 on Literature, ed. R. A. Foakes. 2 vols (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987), II, pp. 219–20. 72. Quoted in J. G. Lockhart, Memoirs of the Life of Sir Walter Scott, Bart. 6 vols (Philadelphia: Carey, Lea and Blanchard, 1839), I, p. 231. 73. The Letters of Sir Walter Scott, ed. H. J. C. Grierson, 12 vols (London: Constable, 1932), XII, p. 158. 74. G. Malcolm Laws dismisses Lewis’s volume as a ‘fad’, and Albert B. Friedman also writes that compared with Lyrical Ballads ‘Lewis’s Tales of Wonder (1801) is the classic repository of spectral shockers’ (Laws, p. 37; Friedman, p. 287). 75. Lewis, The Bravo of Venice, A Romance, Translated from the German, 5th edn (London: Shury, 1807), pp. v–vi.

3

‘Il Est Devenue Classique en Angleterre’

1. Raymond Williams, The Country and the City (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1973). 2. For elaborations of Williams’s critique, see especially John Barrell, The Dark Side of the Landscape: The Rural Poor in English Painting 1740–1830

216

3.

4. 5. 6. 7. 8.

9.

10.

11. 12.

13. 14. 15.

16.

Notes and References (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980); and John Lucas, England and Englishness (London: Hogarth, 1990). For example Lore Metzger, One Foot in Eden: Modes of Pastoral in Romantic Poetry (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1986); Lawrence Buell, ‘Pastoral Ideology’, in The Environmental Imagination: Thoreau, Nature Writing, and the Formation of American Culture (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1995), pp. 31–55; Greg Garrard, ‘Radical Pastoral?’, Studies in Romanticism, 35 (1996), 449–65; and Terry Gifford, Pastoral (London: Routledge, 1999). See for example, John Clare, ‘The Mores’, in The Penguin Book of Pastoral Verse, eds John Barrell and John Bull (London: Penguin, 1974), pp. 412–15 (1–9). Here I draw on Jonathan Bate, Romantic Ecology: Wordsworth and the Environmental Tradition (London: Routledge, 1992). Larry E. Taylor, Pastoral and Anti-Pastoral Patterns in John Updike’s Fiction (Carbondale: Southern Illinois Press, 1971), p. 17. Richard Mant, The Simpliciad; A Satirico-Didactic Poem containing Hints for the Scholars of the New School (London: John Joseph Stockdale, 1808). Saint-Pierre labelled his work a ‘pastoral’ both in the prefaces to the 1788, the 1789 and the definitive 1806 editions. Saint-Pierre, Paul et Virginie, ed. Pierre Trahard (Paris: Garnier, 1964), pp. v, clix, 4. Having done his army service as an engineer on the island of Mauritius in the Indian Ocean, Saint-Pierre (1737–1814) first published the travel account Voyage à l’île de France (1773), which brought him to the attention of Rousseau. Over the next decade Saint-Pierre devoted himself to composing a series of philosophical meditations on natural history entitled Études de la nature (1784), and to the third edition of Études (1788) he appended Paul et Virginie, which he then printed as an independent text the following year. Jacques-Henri Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, Paul and Virginia, trans. John Donovan (London: Penguin, 1982), p. 42. All references to the novel are taken from this edition. Anna Neill, ‘The Sentimental Novel and the Republican Imaginary: Slavery in Paul and Virginia’, Dicacritics, 23 (1993), 36–47. See Jean Fabre, ‘Paul et Virginie, pastorale’, in Lumières et romantisme: energie et nostalgie de Rousseau a Mickiewicz (Paris: Klincksieck, 1963), pp. 167–99; and Jean-Michel Racault, ‘Pastorale et roman dans Paul et Virginie’, in Études sur Paul et Virginie et l’oeuvre de Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, ed. Racault (Paris: Didier, 1986), pp. 177–200. Brian Thacker, The Wildness Pleases: The Origins of Romanticism (London: Croons Helm, 1983), pp. 269–71. Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, ed. Carol H. Poston (New York: Norton, 1988). Philip Robinson, ‘Virginie’s Fatal Modesty: Thoughts on Bernardin de SaintPierre and Rousseau’, British Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies, 5 (1982), 35–48. As Lynn Hunt points out, ‘neither Paul nor Virginie have fathers in the novel, which gets its motive force precisely from the effort of their two families without fathers to confront the world outside the island paradise’. Hunt, The Family Romance of the French Revolution (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), p. 29.

Notes and References 217 17. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, ‘Discourse on the Origin and Foundations of Inequality Among Men’, in Political Writings, eds Alan Ritter and Julia C. Bondanella, trans. Julia C. Bondanella (New York: Norton, 1988), pp. 3–57. 18. Gilbert F. LaFreniere, ‘Rousseau and the European Roots of Environmentalism’, Environmental History Review, 14 (1990), pp. 41–72. 19. Richard H. Grove, Green Imperialism: Colonial Expansion, Tropical Island Edens and the Origins of Environmentalism, 1600–1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), p. 9. 20. Gary Kelly also writes that Paul et Virginie ‘uses nature to attack both the courtly society and imperialistic commercialism of Europe’. Kelly, Women, Writing, and Revolution, 1790–1827 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), p. 58. 21. Timothy Morton, Shelley and the Revolution in Taste: The Body and the Natural World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994). 22. Philip Robinson, ‘Traduction ou trahison de Paul et Virginie? L’exemple de Helen Maria Williams’, Revue d’histoire littéraire de la France, 5 (1989), 843–55. 23. Quoted in David Menhennet, ‘International Bestseller: Paul and Virginia’, Book Collector, 38 (1989), 483–502 (pp. 489–90). 24. Sydney Owenson, Lady Morgan, The Wild Irish Girl, ed. Kathryn Kirkpatrick (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), pp. 143–4. 25. For a particularly telling example, see Eaton Stannard Barrett’s The Heroine (1813), where the yeoman hero Robert Stuart delivers a long Europhobic tirade against the kind of fiction that has caused Cherry Wilkinson to elope from home and rename herself Cherubina Willoughby. Barrett, The Heroine, or Adventures of Cherubina [ . . . ] Second Edition, with Considerable Additions and Alterations (London: Colburn, 1813), p. 255. 26. The London Stage 1660–1800: A Calendar of Plays, Entertainments and Afterpieces, Together With Casts, Box-Receipts and Contemporary Comment, ed. Charles Beecher Hogan, 5 vols (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1968), V, p. 2207. 27. James Cobb, Paul and Virginia: A Musical Drama, in Two Acts (London: n.p., 1801), p. i. 28. Marilyn Butler, Maria Edgeworth: A Literary Biography (Oxford: Clarendon, 1972). 29. Gary Kelly, ‘The Limits of Genre and the Institution of Literature: Romanticism between Fact and Fiction’, in Romantic Revolutions: Criticism and Theory, eds Kenneth R. Johnston, Gilbert Chaitin, Karen Hanson and Herbert Marks (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990), pp. 158–75. 30. Nicola J. Watson, Revolution and the Form of the British Novel 1790–1825: Intercepted Letters, Interrupted Seductions (Oxford: Clarendon, 1994), p. 78. 31. Joseph Litvak, ‘The Infection of Acting: Theatricals and Theatricality in Mansfield Park’, ELH, 53 (1986), 331–55. 32. Critical discussions of colonial relations in Belinda include Suvendrini Perera, Reaches of Empire: The English Novel from Edgeworth to Dickens (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), pp. 15–31; Kathryn J. Kirkpatrick, ‘“Gentlemen Have Horrors upon This Subject”: West Indian Suitors in Maria Edgeworth’s Belinda’, Eighteenth-Century Fiction, 5 (1993), 331–48; Andrew McCann, ‘Conjugal Love and Enlightenment Subject: The Colonial Context of Non-Identity in Maria Edgeworth’s Belinda’, Novel: A Forum on Fiction, 30 (1996), 56–77; and Susan C. Greenfield, ‘“Abroad and at Home”: Sexual

218

33. 34.

35. 36. 37.

38.

39. 40.

41.

42.

43. 44. 45.

46. 47.

Notes and References Ambiguity, Miscegenation and Colonial Boundaries in Edgeworth’s Belinda’, PMLA, 112 (1997), 214–28. Maria Edgeworth, Belinda, ed. Kathryn J. Kirkpatrick (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), p. 217. See Heather Macfayden, ‘Lady Delacour’s Library: Maria Edgeworth’s Belinda and Fashionable Reading’, Nineteenth-Century Literature, 48 (1994), 423–39. Jacques Henri Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, Paul and Virginia, trans. Helen Maria Williams (London: n.p., 1796), pp. vii. William Godwin, An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice, ed. Isaac Kramnick (London: Penguin, 1976), p. 730. Nicholas Roe, Wordsworth and Coleridge: The Radical Years (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), pp. 113–15; and James C. McKusick, ‘“Wisely Forgetful”: Coleridge and the Politics of Pantiscocracy’, in Romanticism and Colonialism: Writing and Empire, 1780–1830, eds Tim Fulford and Peter J. Kitson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), pp. 107–28. Duncan Wu, Wordsworth’s Reading 1770–1799 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), pp. 120–1. William Hazlitt suspected that Saint-Pierre’s influence on Wordsworth’s later work was considerable – more considerable, at any rate, than Wordsworth was ever willing to admit. Marilyn Butler, Jane Austen and the War of Ideas. 1975, 2nd edn (Oxford: Clarendon, 1987), pp. 29–56. According to Robert R. Hare, ‘Imlay’s known attitudes and activities suggest neither literary interests nor feminist opinions, and if he had radical views, Mary’s letters to him make it clear that she was quite unaware of them’. The Emigrants [ . . . ] Traditionally Ascribed to Gilbert Imlay But, More Probably, by Mary Wollstonecraft, ed. Robert R. Hare (Gainesville: Scholars’ Facsimilis and Reprints, 1964), p. x. W. M. Verhoeven, and Amanda Gilroy, editors’ introduction, in Gilbert Imlay, The Emigrants (London: Penguin, 1998), pp. ix–xlix (pp. xliii–xliv). Since Verhoeven and Gilroy’s argument seems the most convincing, I will assume that Imlay wrote the novel. Richard Gravill, Romantic Dialogues: Anglo-American Continuities 1776–1862 (London: Macmillan, 2000), p. xv. See Edith Franklin Wyatt, ‘The First American Novel’, Atlantic Monthly, 144 (1929), 466–75; and John Seelye, Beautiful Machine: Rivers and the Republican Plan 1755–1825 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), pp. 154–60. See Ralph Leslie Rusk, ‘The Adventures of Gilbert Imlay’, Indiana University Studies, 10, no. 57 (1923), 3–26. Richard Slotkin, Regeneration through Violence: The Mythology of the American Frontier, 1600–1869 (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1973), p. 320. Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry Into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, ed. James T. Boulton (London: University of Notre Dame Press, 1968), p. 57. Leo Marx, The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1964), p. 42. John Seelye, ‘Some Green Thoughts on a Green Theme’, in Literature in Revolution, eds George A. White and Charles Newman (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1972), pp. 576–638 (pp. 588–9).

Notes and References 219

4

‘Partizans of the German Theatre’

1. Greg Kucich, ‘“A Haunted Ruin”: Romantic Drama, Renaissance Tradition, and the Critical Establishment’, Wordsworth Circle, 23 (1992), 64–75 (p. 64). 2. Seven Gothic Dramas, ed. Jeffrey N. Cox (Columbus: Ohio University Press, 1992). 3. Quoted in Marilyn Gaull, English Romanticism: The Human Context (New York: Norton, 1988), p. 101. For discussions of Baillie’s influential A Series of Plays: in Which it is Attempted to Delineate the Stronger Passions of the Mind. Each Passion being the Subject of a Tragedy and a Comedy (1798), see especially Andrea Henderson, ‘Passion and Fashion in Joanna Baillie’s “Introductory Discourse”’, PMLA, 122 (1997), 198–213. 4. Gillian Russell, ‘Theatre’, in An Oxford Companion to the Romantic Age: British Culture 1776–1832, gen. ed. Iain McCalmain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), pp. 223–31 (p. 228). 5. Allardyce Nicoll, A History of Late Eighteenth Century Drama 1750–1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1927), pp. 56–73. 6. Theodore Grieder, ‘The German Drama in England, 1790–1800’, Restoration and 18th-Century Theatre Research, 3 (1964), 39–50 (p. 39). 7. Jeffrey N. Cox, ‘Ideology and Genre in the British Antirevolutionary Drama of the 1790s’, ELH, 58 (1991), 579–610. 8. Review of Kotzebue’s Lovers’ Vows, Lady’s Monthly Museum, 2 (1799), 69–71 (pp. 70–1). 9. Collected Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. Earl Leslie Griggs, 6 vols (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1956–1971), I, p. 365. 10. Joyce Crick, ‘Some Editorial and Stylistic Observations on Coleridge’s Translation of Schiller’s Wallenstein’, Journal of the English Goethe Society, 54 (1984), 37–75. 11. Coleridge: The Critical Heritage, ed. J. R. de J. Jackson (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1970), p. 63. 12. Pizarro; A Tragedy, in Five Acts; As Performed at the Theatre Royal in Drury-Lane: Taken from the German drama of Kotzebue; and Adapted to the English stage by Richard Brinsley Sheridan (London: J. Ridgway, 1799). 13. The London Stage 1660–1800: A Calendar of Plays, Entertainments and Afterpieces, Together With Casts, Box-Receipts and Contemporary Comment, ed. Charles Beecher Hogan, vol. 5 (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1968), p. 2202. 14. Analytical Review, n. s. 1 (1799), 606–8 (p. 606). 15. Critical Review, 2nd ser. 26 (1799), 308–16 (p. 310). 16. Monthly Review, n. s. 29 (1799), 341–4 (p. 341). 17. Monthly Mirror, 7 (1799), 359–62 (p. 359). 18. British Critic, 14 (1799), 63–9 (p. 63). 19. Gentlemen’s Magazine, 69 (1799), 691. 20. Quoted in Walter Sellier, Kotzebue in England: Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte der englischen Bühne und der Beziehungen der deutschen Litteratur zur englischen (Leipzig: Oswald Schmidt, 1902), p. 40. 21. John Mavor, ‘Remarks on Kotzebue’s Pizarro’, Anti-Jacobin Review and Magazine, 3 (June 1799), 207–10 (pp. 209–10). 22. John Buchan Sir Walter Scott (London: Cassell, 1932), pp. 50–1.

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23. Edgar Johnson, Sir Walter Scott: The Great Unknown, 2 vols (London: Macmillan, 1970), I, p. 186. 24. Fiona Robertson, Legitimate Histories: Scott, Gothic, and the Authorities of Fiction (Oxford: Clarendon, 1994). 25. Peter Müller, ‘Grundlinien der Entwicklung, Weltanschauung und Ästhetik des Sturm und Drang’, in Sturm und Drang: Weltanschauliche und Ästhetische Schriften, ed. Peter Müller, 2 vols (Berlin: Aufbau-Verlag, 1978), I, p. xviii. 26. See Mark A. Weinstein, ‘Sir Walter Scott’s French Revolution: the British Conservative View’, Scottish Literary Journal, 7 (1980), 31–40. 27. Georg Lukács, Skizze einer Geschichte der neueren deutschen Literatur (Berlin: Aufbau-Verlag, 1955), p. 28. 28. Andreas Huyssen, Drama des Sturm und Drang: Kommentar zu einer Epoche (Munich: Winckler, 1980), p. 140. 29. Quoted in Der junge Goethe im zeitgenössischen Urteil, ed. Peter Müller (Berlin: Akademie-Verlag, 1969), pp. 68–70. 30. Renée Lelièvre, ‘Le Théâtre Allemand en France’, Revue de Litterature Comparée, 48 (1974), 256–92 (p. 291). 31. Johann Wolfgang Goethe, Götz von Berlichingen mit der eisernen Hand, in Goethes Werke, ed. Erich Trunz, 14 vols (C. H. Beck: Munich, 1974), IV, pp. 73–175 (p. 77). 32. Goethe, Goetz of Berlichingen with the Iron hand: A Tragedy, Translated from the German of Goethé, Author of ‘The Sorrows of Werter’ etc., trans. Walter Scott (London: Bell, 1799), pp. 4, 6, 13, 37, 38, 57, 67, 80, 109, 140, 148, 154, 161, 183. 33. See for example The Analytical Review, n. s. 1 (1799), 609–13. 34. The Letters of Sir Walter Scott, ed. H. J. C. Grierson, 12 vols (London, Constable: 1932), X, p. 282. 35. Paul M Ochojski, ‘Sir Walter Scott’s Continuous Interest in Germany’, Studies in Scottish Literature, 3 (1966), 164–73. 36. See Walter Scott, Essay on Imitations of the Ancient Ballad’, in Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border, 4 vols (Edinburgh: Oliver and Boyd, 1932), IV, pp. 1–52. 37. William Preston, ‘Reflections on the Peculiarities of Style and Manner in the late German Writers, whose Works have appeared in English; and on the Tendency of their Productions’, Edinburgh Magazine, 20 (1802), 353–61, 406–08; 21 (1802), 9–18, 89–96 (p. 90). 38. Rose Lawrence, Gortz Of Berlingen, with the Iron Hand. An Historical Drama, of the Fifteenth Century. Translated From the German of Goethe (Liverpool: n.p., 1799), p. xiii. 39. See Jonathan Bate, Shakespearen Constitutions (Oxford: Clarendon, 1989). 40. For a detailed discussion, see Kurt Ermann, Goethes Shakespeare-Bild (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer, 1983). 41. The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, edn Ernest Hartley Coleridge, 2 vols (Oxford: Clarendon, 1912), II, pp. 724–25. 42. I derive the concept of ‘foreignizing’ translation from Lawrence Venuti, The Translator’s Invisibility: A History of Translation (London: Routledge, 1995). 43. J. G. Lockhart, ‘Goetz von Berlichingen, a Tragedy, by Goethe’, Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, 16 (1824), 369–385 (p. 371).

Notes and References 221 44. Thomas Carlyle, The Life of Friedrich Schiller, in The Works of Thomas Carlyle, 30 vols (London: Chapman and Hall, 1896–1899), XXV, p. 13. 45. Marilyn Butler, Jane Austen and the War of Ideas, 2nd edn (Oxford: Clarendon, 1987), p. 116; Terence Hoagwood, ‘Prolegomenon for a Theory of Romantic Drama’, The Wordsworth Circle, 23 (1992), 49–64 (p. 54). 46. Reeve Parker, ‘ “In Some Sort Seeing With My Proper Eyes”: Wordsworth and the Spectacles of Paris’, Studies in Romanticism, 27 (1988), 369–90. 47. For accounts of Schiller’s and The Robbers’s reception, popularity and notoriety in England, see L. A. Willoughby, ‘English Translations and Adaptations of Schiller’s The Robbers’, Modern Language Review, 27 (1921), 297–315; and Douglas Millburn, Jr., ‘The First English Translation of Die Räuber: French Bards and Scottish Translators’, Monatshefte, 59 (1967), 41–53. 48. Henry Mackenzie, ‘Account of the German Theatre’, Transactions of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, 2 (1790), 154–92 (p. 190). 49. Johann Christoph Friedrich Schiller, The Robbers, trans. Alexander F. Tytler, 2nd edn (London: n.p., 1795), p. v. 50. Keppel Craven, The Robbers, A Tragedy in Five Acts. Translated and Altered from the German. As it was Performed at Brandenburgh-House Theatre (London: n.p., 1799), pp. 3–4. The prologue was written by Craven’s mother Elizabeth, also known as Her Serene Highness the Margravine of Anspach. 51. Schiller, Die Räuber: Ein Schauspiel, ed. Herbert Stubenrauch (Weimar: Hermann Böhlau, 1953), p. 70. 52. Schiller, The Robbers, trans. F. J. Lamport (London: Penguin, 1979), pp. 89–90. 53. Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, trans. Hélène Iswolsky (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984). 54. Olivia Smith, The Politics of Language 1791–1819 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1984). 55. Joseph George Holman, The Red-Cross Knights. A Play [ . . . ] Founded on the Robbers of Schiller (London: n.p., 1799), p. 6. 56. Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation 1707–1837 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992), pp. 283–319. 57. Peter Brooks, The Melodramatic Imagination: Balzac, Henry James, Melodrama, and the Mode of Excess (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1976), p. 15. 58. ‘Schiller’s Tragedy of the Robbers, which inflamed the young nobility of Germany to enlist themselves into a band of highwaymen to rob in the forests of Bohemia, is now acting in England by persons of quality!’ Hannah More, Strictures on the Modern System of Female Education (London: Cadell and Davies, 1799), p. 42. 59. Critical Review, 2nd ser. 27 (1799), 472–4; European Magazine, 36 (1799), 187–9. 60. Monthly Review, n. s. 32 (1800), 322–3 (p. 322). 61. Lady’s Monthly Museum, 3 (1799), 309–10 (p. 310). 62. British Critic, 14 (1799), 669. 63. Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, eds James Engell and W. Jackson Bate, 2 vols (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983), II, p. 208. 64. For Hazlitt’s comments on Die Räuber, see Lectures on the Age of Elizabeth (1818), in The Complete Works of William Hazlitt, ed. P. P. Howe, 21 vols (London: Dent 1932), VI, pp. 362–3.

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5


‘The Descent of Odin’

1. ‘The Fatal Sisters: An Ode’ and ‘The Descent of Odin: An Ode’, in The Poems of Thomas Gray, William Collins, Oliver Goldsmith, ed. Roger Lonsdale (London: Longman, 1969), pp. 215–28. 2. See Thomas Penrose, ‘The Carousal of Odin’, in Flights of Fancy (London: n.p., 1775); Richard Hole, Arthur; or the Northern Enchantment. A Poetical Romance in Seven Books (London: n.p., 1789); Frank Sayers, Dramatic Sketches of the Ancient Northern Mythology (London: n.p., 1790). 3. T. J. Mathias, The Pursuits of Literature: A Satirical Poem in Four Dialogues, 4th edn (London: Owen, 1797), p. 402 (541–8). 4. Fred Botting, Gothic (London: Longman, 1995), pp. 5,6. 5. T. J. Mathias, Runic Odes Imitated from the Norse Tongue in the Manner of Mr. Gray (London: T. Becket, 1781). 6. See Margaret Omsberg, Scandinavian Themes in English Poetry, 1760–1800 (Uppsala: Almqvist and Wiksell, 1976). 7. ‘The Dying Ode of Regner Lodbrog’, in Five Pieces of Runic Poetry. Translated from the Icelandic Language, ed. Thomas Percy (London: Dodsley, 1763), p. 13. 8. Collected Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. Earl Leslie Griggs, 6 vols (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1956–1971), I, p. 357. 9. Frank E. Farley, Scandinavian Influences in the English Romantic Movement (Boston: Ginn and Company, 1903), pp. 44–84. 10. See Jonathan Brody Kramnick, ‘The Cultural Logic of Late Feudalism: Placing Spenser in the Eighteenth Century’, ELH, 63 (1996), 871–92. 11. Hugh Blair, A Critical Dissertation on the Poems of Ossian (London: Becket and de Hondt, 1765), p. 6. 12. Nathan Drake, Literary Hours, or Sketches Critical and Narrative, 3rd edn, 3 vols (London: Cadell and Davies, 1804), III, pp. 370–1. 13. P. Cornelius Tacitus, Germania, trans. H. Mattingly (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1948). 14. See Christopher Hill, ‘The Norman Yoke’, in Puritanism and Revolution: Studies in Interpretation of the English Revolution of the 17th Century (London: Secker and Warburg, 1958), pp. 50–122. 15. Paul-Henri Mallet, Northern Antiquities, 1770, trans. Thomas Percy (London: Bohn’s Antiquarian Library, 1864), p. 58. 16. For a consideration of Mallet’s career, see Thor J. Beck, Northern Antiquities in French Learning and Literature (1755–1855) (New York: Columbia University Press, 1934). 17. William Wordsworth, The Prelude: 1799, 1805, 1850, eds Jonathan Wordsworth, M. H. Abrams and Stephen Gill (New York: Norton, 1979), p. 38 (185–9). 18. Wordsworth, ‘The Danish Boy’, in Lyrical Ballads and other Poems, eds James Butler and Karen Green (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1992), pp. 239–41 (1–11). 19. James K. Chandler, ‘Wordsworth and Burke’, ELH, 47 (1980), 741–77. Chandler expands on this hypothesis in Wordsworth’s Second Nature: A Study of the Poetry and Politics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984). 20. Wordsworth, ‘Expostulation and Reply’, in Lyrical Ballads, pp. 107–8 (24). 21. See David V. Erdman, ‘The Man Who Was not Napoleon’, The Wordsworth Circle, 12 (1981), 92–6.

Notes and References 223 22. Wordsworth, ‘A Letter to the Biship of Llandaff’, in The Prose Works of William Wordsworth, eds W. J. B. Owen and Jane W. Smyser, 3 vols (Oxford: Clarendon, 1974), I, p. 29. 23. Geoffrey H. Hartman, ‘Wordsworth and Goethe in Literary History’, New Literary History, 6 (1975), 393–413. 24. Geoffrey H. Hartman, Wordsworth’s Poetry 1787–1814 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1964), p. 202. 25. Wordsworth, ‘A Slumber Did My Spirit Seal’, in Lyrical Ballads, p. 164 (3). 26. Wordsworth, ‘There Was A Boy’, in Lyrical Ballads, pp. 139–41 (10). 27. E. D. Hirsch, Jr., Wordsworth and Schelling: A Typological Study of Romanticism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1971), p. 17. 28. Jerome J. McGann, The Romantic Ideology: A Critical Investigation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), p. 67. 29. Wordsworth, ‘Lines Written a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey’, in Lyrical Ballads, pp. 116–20 (49, 96–104). 30. M. H. Abrams, Natural Supernaturalism: Tradition and Revolution in Romantic Literature (New York: Norton, 1971), p. 68. 31. William Herbert, Select Icelandic Poetry. Translated from the Originals with Notes, 2 vols (London: Reynolds, 1806), I, pp. 115–16. 32. Michel de Certeau, ‘The Beauty of the Dead: Nisard’, in Heterologies: Discourse on the Other, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985), pp. 119–36 (p. 119). 33. Monthly Mirror, 18 (1804), 315–16 (p. 315) 34. Lord Byron, English Bards and Scotch Reviewers, in Complete Poetical Works, ed. Frederick Page (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970), pp. 113–17 (510–11). 35. British Critic, 25 (1805), 138. 36. Scott, ‘Herbert’s Poems’, in Miscellaneous Prose Works of Sir Walter Scott, 7 vols (Paris: n.p., 1837–1838), VI, pp. 56–65 (pp. 56–7). 37. Marilyn Butler, ‘Culture’s Medium: The Role of the Review’, in The Cambridge Companion to British Romanticism, ed. Stuart Curran (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), pp. 120–47. 38. Here my perspective on Scott’s writing is informed by Ina Ferris, The Achievement of Literary Authority: Gender, History, and the Waverley Novels (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991). 39. See John M. Simpson, ‘Scott and Old Norse Literature’, in Scott Bicentenary Essays: Selected Papers Read at the Sir Walter Scott Bicentenary Conference, ed. Alan Bell (Edinburgh: Scottish Academic Press, 1971), pp. 300–13. 40. Walter Scott, Harold the Dauntless: A Poem, in Six Cantos, in The Poetical Works of Sir Walter Scott, ed. J. Logie Robertson (London: Oxford University Press, 1926), pp. 369–400 (I, 101–16). 41. For a classic statement of this thesis, see Mark Twain, Life on the Mississippi, in Scott: The Critical Heritage, ed. John O. Hayden (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1970), pp. 537–9. 42. Mark Girouard, The Return to Camelot: Chivalry and the English Gentleman (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1981), p. 32. 43. Scott, ‘The Bard’s Incantation (Written under the Threat of Invasion in the Autumn of 1804)’, in Poetical Works, pp. 449–50 (37–8). 44. John Gibson Lockhart, Memoirs of the Life of Sir Walter Scott, Bart. 6 vols (Philadelphia: Carey, Lea and Blanchard, 1839), I, p. 500.

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45. The Letters of Sir Walter Scott, ed. H. J. C. Grierson, 12 vols (London, Constable: 1932), VI, p. 76. 46. For Scott’s career as a metrical romancer, see Marlon B. Ross, ‘Scott’s Chivalric Pose: The Function of Metrical Romance in the Romantic Period’, Genre, 18 (1986), 267–97. 47. Horace Walpole, The Castle of Otranto, ed. Emma J. Clery (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), p. 14. 48. William Hazlitt, The Spirit of the Age, in The Complete Works of William Hazlitt, ed. P. P. Howe, 21 vols (London: Dent, 1932), XI, p. 65. 49. Jon Mee, Dangerous Enthusiasm: William Blake and the Culture of Radicalism in the 1790s (Oxford: Clarendon, 1992), pp. 1–19. Mee derives the term from Claude Lévi-Strauss. 50. Paul Kaufman, ‘The Reading of Southey and Coleridge: The Record of Their Borrowings from the Bristol Library, 1793–1798’, Modern Philology, 27 (1924), 317–20. 51. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The Watchman, ed. Lewis Patton (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1970), pp. 89–91. 52. Robert Southey, ‘The Race of Odin’, in Poetical Works (London: Longman, 1829), pp. 711–12 (13, 15–26). 53. Coleridge and Southey, The Fall of Robespierre, in The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. Ernest Hartley Coleridge, 2 vols (Oxford: Clarendon, 1912), II, p. 517 (219–23). 54. Southey’s changing poetic principles and political beliefs are analyzed in David Eastwood, ‘Robert Southey and the Meanings of Patriotism’, Journal of British Studies, 31 (1992), 265–87. 55. Hazlitt, ‘Wat Tyler’, in Complete Works, VII, pp. 169–70. 56. Marilyn Butler, Romantics, Rebels and Reactionaries: English Literature and Its Background 1760–1830 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981), pp. 120–3. 57. Diary, Reminiscence and Correspondence of Henry Crabb Robinson, 3rd edn, ed. Thomas Sadler, 3 vols (London: Macmillan, 1869), III, p. 727. 58. The Letters of John Keats, ed. Hyder Edward Rollins, 2 vols (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1958), I, p. 207.

Index

abolitionism, 110, 127 Abrams, M. H., 184 aesthetics, 128–9 agriculture, 130–2 Alexander, J. H., 3 America, 124–33 Analytical Review, 31, 57, 138 anglophilia, 5 animals, 74–6, 104–5, 130 Anti-Jacobin Review and Magazine, 29–31, 32, 139–40 Anti-Jacobin, or Weekly Examiner, 28–9, 211 Anti-pastoral, 17, 96–7, 110, 121, 127 antidote, 15–16, 41 antiquarianism, 190–3 Arcadia, 95, 99, 125–6 aristocracy, 72–3, 108, 121–2, 125 Aristotle, 38 Austen, Jane, 7, 8, 15, 37, 113, 170 Baillie, Joanna, 92, 134 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 161, 163 Ballad revival, 43–7 Barrell, John, 15–16, 121–2 Barrett, Eaton Stannard, 217 Barruel, Augustin de, 22–4, 26, 38–9 Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, 154 Blair, Hugh, 176 Blake, William, 7, 53 blasphemy, 50–2, 79–80, 160 Bloom, Harold, 3–5 Boaden, James, 109, 135 Bostetter, Edward E., 62 Botting, Fred, 173–4 bricolage, 203 British Critic, 31, 78, 138, 170, 193 Buchan, John, 141

Bürger, Gottfried A., 17, 43–56, 58–60, 63–8, 70–7, 81, 84, 86, 88, 93, 149 freethinking, 49–50 ‘From Daniel Wunderlich’s Book’, 86 hostile reception, 45–6, 63 ‘Lenore’, 43, 47, 49–53, 56, 149 ‘Of Popularity in Poetry’, 86 popularity, 43 populism, 86 sensationalism, 63–5 social criticism, 71–3 ‘The Chase’, 66–8, 72–3, 149 ‘The Lass of Fair Wone’, 73 ‘The Peasant’, 71–2 Burke, Edmund, 9, 12, 16, 20–2, 23, 181, 211 Burney, Fanny, 26 Butler, Marilyn, 12, 123, 155, 207 Byron, George Gordon, Lord, 11, 193, 202 Canning, George, 28 Carlson, Julie, 2–3, 4, 7–8 Carlyle, Robert, 1, 155, 157 censorship, 9, 135 Certeau, Michel de, 193 Chandler, James K., 181, 222 chivalry, 166–7, 169 Christie, John, 32 Clare, John, 96 Classicism, 39 Cobb, James, 106–12 defence of slavery, 109 disinterest in nature, 110–12 use of melodrama, 108–10 use of stereotypes, 108–9 Coleman, George, 109 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 1, 7, 12, 13, 43, 56–66, 78–9, 80, 89–91, 136–7, 154, 171, 203, 205–6 and Bürger, 43–5, 58–9, 66 and Lewis, 63–4, 78–9, 89–91 225

226

Index

Coleridge, Samuel Taylor – continued Lyrical Ballads, 43, 68 manipulation of readers, 65–6 oblique narrative, 60–3 Osorio/Remorse, 78, 91 periodical reviews, 63–4, 78–9 and Scott, 56–7, 90–1, 154 and Southey, 56–7, 203, 205–6 ‘The Ancient Mariner’, 7, 56–66 The Fall of Robespierre, 205–6 The Watchman, 203 Wallenstein, 8, 136–7, 154 and Wordsworth, 59, 62–3 Colley, Linda, 19, 166 Conspiracy, 24–6, 39–40 Cottle, Amos, 185, 193, 196 Covent Garden Theatre, 135 Cox, Jeffrey N., 134 Craven, Elizabeth, 221 Craven, Keppel, 157–64, 170 aristocratic background, 157–8 bad reviews, 170 bowdlerized translation, 158–60 linguistic purism, 160, 163–4 Crèvecoeur, Hector St. John de, 132 Critical Review, 63–4, 66, 138, 170, 176, 192 Cross, J. C., 135 Curran, Stuart, 3, 5–6 Darwin, Erasmus, 28 Day, Thomas, 119 De Quincey, Thomas, 12, 13, 21–2, 90 Deane, Seamus, 19 Denmark, 179 Drake, Nathan, 177, 192 Drury Lane Theatre, 11, 135, 137–8 Dryden, John, 29 Dutton, Thomas, 31 Eco, Umberto, 66 Edgeworth, Maria, 112–22 ambivalence towards Europe, 112, 113, 114, 116 anti-primitivism, 117–20 Belinda, 112–22 Leonora, 112

middle-class preferences, 120–2 and Pope, 113 and Saint-Pierre, 113, 116–22 view of colonies, 113–16 Edgeworth, Richard Lovell, 112 Edinburgh Review, 32, 195 Ellis, George, 29 English Review, 52–3 Enlightenment, 25–6, 150 environmentalism, 101 epistolary fiction, 112 European Magazine, 170 Europhobia, 9–12, 16, 19–42, 45–6 ‘Explained supernatural’, 55 Fawcett, Joseph, 45 ‘Female Quixote’, 37, 106, 120 Feminism, 100, 121 Ferguson, Frances, 62 Ferrier, John, 136–7 Franklin, Benjamin, 131 Frederick II, 143 Frere, John Hookham, 28 Friedman, Albert, 44, 215 Gamer, Michael, 46 Garrard, Greg, 99, 132 genre, 5 Gentlemen’s Magazine, 138 George III, 137, 169 Gibbon, Edward, 34 Girouard, Mark, 200 globalization, 6 Glover, Richard, 83–4 Godwin, William, 122, 131 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang, 9, 11–12, 17, 32, 33, 81, 87, 140, 142–7, 151–5 Götz von Berlichingen, 17, 140, 142–7 Herman and Dorothea, 32 heroic individualism, 142–4 notoriety in England, 11–12, 32 and Shakespeare, 153 ‘The Erl-King’, 81, 87 The Sorrows of Young Werther, 9, 152 Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship, 11–12 Gothic, 173–4

Index Gray, Thomas, 173, 177, 185–6, 187–8, 192, 198 Greene, J. R. (alias John Gifford), 29, 30–1 Grosse, Karl von, 9 Grotesque realism, 161–2 Grove, Richard H., 101 Hartman, Geoffrey H., 13, 182–3, 196 Haymarket Theatre, 170 Hazlitt, William, 153, 202, 207, 218 Herbert, William, 184–96, 201 authenticity, 187–90 contempt for rivals, 185–6 lengthy footnotes, 191–2 positive reviews, 193–6 scholarly self-fashioning, 186–7, 190–1 and Scott, 194–6 historical drama, 154–5 Hoagwood, Terence, 155 Hofstadter, Richard, 22 Holcroft, Thomas, 135 Holman, Joseph George, 164–72 bad reviews, 170–1 family politics, 167–9 militarism, 166–7 revisionist translation, 164–7 use of melodrama, 168–9 Horticulture, 102–3 Hosier, Francis, 83–4 Hunt, Lynn, 216 Hunting, 74–6, 104–5 Hurd, Richard, 176 Hutcheon, Linda, 88 Huyssen, Andreas, 142 Illuminati, 22–6, 140 Imlay, Gilbert, 123–33 critique of Europe, 124–6 fear of Indians, 129–30 praise of farming, 130–1 utopian politics, 126–7 view of nature, 127–33 and Williams, 124 and Wollstonecraft, 123–4, 125 Indians, 129–30

227

infection, 15–16, 21, 41–2 influence, 3–4 invasion, 9, 26, 34–5, 39, 135, 200 Jacobinism, 22, 156–7, 163–4, 206–7 Jacobus, Mary, 44, 74 Jefferson, Thomas, 132 Jeffrey, Francis, 4, 32, 33, 57 Jews, 21 Johnson, Edgar, 141 Johnson, Samuel, 37 Jolles, Evelyn, 213 Jones, Mark, 65 Jordan, Dorothy, 80, 137 Keats, John, 207 Kemble, John Phillip, 137 Knight, Richard Payne, 28 Kotzebue, August von, 2, 4, 9, 15, 26, 113, 137–9, 211 Johanna of Montfaucon, 211 Lovers’ Vows, 9, 15, 113 Pizarro, 4, 9, 137–9 The Stranger, 9 Kucich, Greg, 134 Laclos, Choderlos de, 9 Lady’s Monthly Museum, 135–6, 170 Lamb, Charles, 60–1, 93 Larpent, John, 170 Lawrence, Rose, 140, 151–5 allusions to Shakespeare, 152–4 and Coleridge, 154 sexual delicacy, 151–2 Laws, Malcolm, 44, 215 Lentricchia, Frank, 3–4 Lewis, Matthew Gregory, 26, 43, 45, 63–4, 77–94, 134, 185, 192 Adelmorn the Outlaw, 88, 94 ‘Alonzo the Brave’, 64 blasphemy, 79 and Bürger, 43, 81, 84, 86, 88 childishness, 91–3 defensiveness, 83–4, 88, 93–4 ‘Giles Jollup’, 85–7 and Goethe, 81, 88 likeness with Romanticism, 94

228

Index

Lewis, Matthew Gregory – continued perceived Germanness, 79–80, 84 professed patriotism, 81–4 and Schiller, 78 and Scott , 43, 70, 80–1 and Sheridan, 80 Tales of Wonder, 43, 81–94, 185, 192 The Bravo of Venice, 93–4 The Castle Spectre, 77–81, 89–90, 134 ‘The Cinder King’, 87 ‘The Erl-King’, 81 ‘The Gay Gold Ring’, 85 ‘The Grim White Woman’, 85 The Minister, 78 The Monk, 26, 63–4, 77–81 ‘The Sailor’s Tale’, 87, 88 ‘The Water King’, 84 unoriginality, 89–91 Lockhart, John Gibson, 134–5 Lodbrog, Regnar, 175 London Constitution Society, 20–1 Longman (publisher), 136 Lukács, George, 142 McCann, Andrew, 122 McFarland, Thomas, 208 McGann, Jerome J., 183 Mackenzie, Henry, 8, 148–9, 156–7 Macpherson, James, 176 Mallet, Paul-Henri, 178–80, 181, 204 Malthus, Daniel, 105 Mant, Richard, 96 Marx, Leo, 132 Mathias, Thomas James, 9, 26–8, 79, 80, 173–4 Runic Odes, 174 The Pursuits of Literature, 26–7, 79, 173 The Shade of Alexander Pope, 27 Maturin, Charles R., 134 Mavor, John, 139–40 Mee, Jon, 203 Melodrama, 107–12, 168–9 Miller, William, 53 Mirabeau, Honoré-Gabriel Riqueti, Count, 23 Montaigne, Michel de, 132 Monthly Mirror, 138, 193, 211

Monthly Review, 31–2, 57–8, 136–7, 138, 170, 173 Montluzin, Emily Lorraine de, 29 More, Hannah, 9, 12, 36, 37, 170 Morning Chronicle, 170 Morning Post, 136, 170 Nationalism, 19, 83, 108–9, 166–7, 169 New Historicism, 2 New Monthly Magazine, 43 ‘New Romanticism’, 6 Nicholls, Allardyce, 135 Odin, 178–9, 180, 198, 204–7 opium, 27–8 Owenson, Sydney, 105–6 Pantisocracy, 122–3 ‘Paranoid style’, 22 parody, 84–9 Parrish, Stephen, 65, 73–4 pastoral, 95–8 Percy, Thomas, 44, 174–7, 178, 185, 192, 198 Perkins, David, 214 plagiarism, 90–1 poison, 40–1, 211 Pope, Alexander, 29, 113 Preston, William, 16, 33–42, 45, 63, 150, 160–1 and Bürger, 46, 63 contradictory arguments, 38–42 fears of revolution, 37–8 and Goethe, 150 and Kotzebue, 37 paranoid rhetoric, 34–5 professed classicism, 36–9 and Schiller, 160–1 sexual anxieties, 36–7 Price, Richard, 20–1 primitivism, 102–5 Pye, Henry James, 48 Quarterly Review, 42 Radcliffe, Ann, 55 Render, William, 155 Revolution Society, 20

Index Richardson, Alan, 7 Robinson, Henry Crabb, 58 Robison, John, 22–6, 38–9 Romantic drama, 134–40 Romanticism, 1–16 Rose, Margaret, 88 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 8, 9, 11, 13, 29–30, 97, 101, 112, 114, 179, 211 Confessions, 9 Discourse on the Origin of Inequality, 101 Émile, 105, 133 influence in England, 8 La Nouvelle Héloïse, 8, 11, 97, 112 and Saint-Pierre, 101 unpopularity with critics, 29–30, 211 ‘Runic’ poetry, 174–7 Russell, Gillian, 134–5 Said, Edward, 7 Saint-Pierre, Jacques Henri Bernardin de, 17, 97, 98–105, 123–4, 127, 130, 216 attitude to nature, 97, 100–5, 127 Études de la nature, 101, 211 feminism, 100 L’Arcadie, 99 Paul et Virginie, 17, 98–105, 123–4, 127, 130 politics, 99–100, 104 reception in England, 97, 122–3 and Rousseau, 97, 101 sympathy with animals, 104–5 Voyage à l’Île de France, 216 Scandinavia, 177–80 Schiller, Johann Christoph Friedrich, 8, 17, 30, 49, 78, 140, 155–68 blasphemy, 50, 158–60 grotesque realism, 160–3 radicalism, 155–7 reception, 8, 30, 155–7 The Ghost-Seer, 31, 78 The Minister, 154 The Robbers, 8, 17, 49, 155–70 Wallenstein, 8, 136–7 Scott, John, 32

229

Scott, Walter, 12, 13, 43, 48, 66, 78, 80–1, 83, 91–3, 140–50, 154–5, 194–203 ‘Abstract of the Eyrbyggja Saga’, 196 alienating translation, 143–7 and Bürger, 43, 48, 66 career as translator, 140–2 critique of primitivism, 197–200 ‘Essay on Imitations’, 78 fear of invasion, 201–2 and Goethe, 140–50 Goetz of Berlichingen, 143–50, 154–5 Harold the Dauntless, 196–203 and Herbert, 194–6 and Lewis, 78, 80–1, 91–3 military training, 83, 143, 200 Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border, 194 Norse references, 196 and Rousseau, 12 self-narration, 92–3, 147–9 ‘The Bard’s Incantation’, 200–1 The Field of Waterloo, 200 The Lay of the Last Minstrel, 91 The Vision of Don Roderick, 200 Waverley, 148 seduction, 37 sensibility, 38 Seward, Anna, 43 Shakespeare, William, 8, 152–4 Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 42, 207 Sheridan, Richard Brinsley, 4, 80, 137–40, 169 Siddons, Sarah, 137 slavery, 107, 109, 127 Slotkin, Richard, 125 Smith, Charlotte, 26 Southey, Robert, 13, 28, 43, 44–5, 56–7, 62, 81, 83, 203–7 and Bürger, 44–5 and Coleridge, 56–7, 62, 203, 205–6 conversion to Anti-Jacobinism, 83, 206–7 early Jacobinism, 205–6 and Lewis, 81 Norse interests, 203–4 ‘The Death of Odin’, 206 The Fall of Robespierre, 206 ‘The Race of Odin’, 204–7 Wat Tyler, 206–7

230

Index

Spencer, William Robert, 48 Spenser, Edmund, 169 Staël, Germaine de, 30, 112 Stanley, John Thomas, 47–56, 58 anti-supernaturalism, 45–5 and Blake, 53 critical success, 52–3 Leonora (first ed.), 47–52 Leonora (second ed.), 52–6 and Radcliffe, 55 religious orthodoxy, 48–52, 55–6 Sturm und Drang, 34, 46, 49, 84, 93, 140, 142, 154 sublime, 129 supernaturalism, 46, 54–5, 198–9 Swann, Karen, 14 Tacitus, Cornelius, 178, 181 Taylor, William, 43, 48, 73, 86, 193 Thompson, Benjamin, 28 translation, 17, 26–8, 135–40 Tytler, Alexander Fraser, 155, 157 vegetarianism, 105 Vikings, 173, 177–80 Voltaire (François-Marie Arouet), 113, 126 Walker, James, 30 Walker’s Hibernian Magazine, 78–9 Walpole, Horace, 202 Wardle, Ralph, 133 Warren, Robert Penn, 162 Warton, Thomas, 176 Watson, Nicola J., 8, 112 Weishaupt, Adam, 22–3 Wheatley, Kim, 42, 211 Whyte, Samuel, 46, 212

Williams, Helen Maria, 105, 122 Williams, Raymond, 95 Wilt, Judith, 13 Wollstonecraft, Mary, 8, 100, 119, 121, 123, 125 Wordsworth, Jonathan, 7 Wordsworth, William, 1–2, 10–11, 12, 13, 16, 43–5, 47, 59, 62–3, 65, 68–77, 122–3, 155, 180–4, 196 ‘A Letter to the Bishop of Llandaff’, 182 anxiety about borrowing, 68–9 and Bürger, 43–5, 65, 68–77 and Burke, 181 and Coleridge, 59, 62–3 concern for nature, 74–7, 182–4 ‘Essay, Supplementary’, 44 ‘Hart-Leap Well’, 69–77 ‘Lucy poems’, 183 Lyrical Ballads, 15, 43, 44–5, 68, 180 political disappointments, 73, 182 Preface to Lyrical Ballads, 1, 12, 15, 63, 69 preference for ‘character’, 183 residence in Europe, 73, 182 and Saint-Pierre, 122–3 Salisbury Plain, 73 The Borderers, 91 ‘The Boy of Winander’, 183 ‘The Danish Boy’, 180–4 ‘The Old Cumberland Beggar’, 183 The Prelude, 180 ‘The Solitary Reaper’, 183 ‘The Thorn’, 73 and Williams, 123 Young, Arthur, 68 Zschokke, Johann Heinrich, 93

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