Rousseau and Romanticism

One of the ultimate contrasts that presents itself in a subject of this kind is that between habit as conceived by Aristotle and nature as conceived by Rousseau. The first great grievance of the critical humanist against Rousseau is that he set out to be an individualist and at the same time attacked analysis, which is indispensable if one is to be a sound individualist. The second great grievance of the humanist is that Rousseau sought to discredit habit which is necessary if right analysis is to be made effective. “The only habit the child should be allowed to form,” says Rousseau, “is that of forming no habit.”[317 - “La seule habitude qu’on doit laisser prendre à l’enfant est de n’en contractor aucune.” Emile, Livre I.] How else is the child to follow his bent or genius and so arrive at full self-expression? The point I am bringing up is of the utmost gravity, for Rousseau is by common consent the father of modern education. To eliminate from education the idea of a progressive adjustment to a human law, quite apart from temperament, may be to imperil civilization itself. For civilization (another word that is sadly in need of Socratic defining) may be found to consist above all in an orderly transmission of right habits; and the chief agency for securing such a transmission must always be education, by which I mean far more of course than mere formal schooling.

Rousseau’s repudiation of habit is first of all, it should be pointed out, perfectly chimerical. The trait of the child to which the sensible educator will give chief attention is not his spontaneity, but his proneness to imitate. In the absence of good models the child will imitate bad ones, and so, long before the age of intelligent choice and self-determination, become the prisoner of bad habits. Men, therefore, who aim at being civilized must come together, work out a convention in short, regarding the habits they wish transmitted to the young. A great civilization is in a sense only a great convention. A sane individualist does not wish to escape from convention in itself; he merely remembers that no convention is final – that it is always possible to improve the quality of the convention in the midst of which he is living, and that it should therefore be held flexibly. He would oppose no obstacles to those who are rising above the conventional level, but would resist firmly those who are sinking beneath it. It is much easier to determine practically whether one has to do with an ascent or a descent (even though the descent be rapturous like that of the Rousseauist) than our anarchical individualists are willing to acknowledge.

The notion that in spite of the enormous mass of experience that has been accumulated in both East and West we are still without light as to the habits that make for moderation and good sense and decency, and that education is therefore still purely a matter of exploration and experiment is one that may be left to those who are suffering from an advanced stage of naturalistic intoxication – for example, to Professor John Dewey and his followers. From an ethical point of view a child has the right to be born into a cosmos, and not, as is coming to be more and more the case under such influences, pitch-forked into chaos. But the educational radical, it may be replied, does stress the idea of habit; and it is true that he would have the young acquire the habits that make for material efficiency. This, however, does not go beyond Rousseau who came out very strongly for what we should call nowadays vocational training.[318 - Emile was to be trained to be a cabinet-maker.] It is the adjustment to the human law against which Rousseau and all the Rousseauists are recalcitrant.

Self-expression and vocational training combined in various proportions and tempered by the spirit of “service,” are nearly the whole of the new education. But I have already said that it is not possible to extract from any such compounding of utilitarian and romantic elements, with the resulting material efficiency and ethical inefficiency, a civilized view of life. It is right here indeed in the educational field that concerted opposition to the naturalistic conspiracy against civilization is most likely to be fruitful. If the present generation – and I have in mind especially American conditions – cannot come to a working agreement about the ethical training it wishes given the young, if it allows the drift towards anarchy on the human level to continue, it will show itself, however ecstatic it may be over its own progressiveness and idealism, both cowardly and degenerate. It is very stupid, assuming that it is not very hypocritical, to denounce Kultur, and then to adopt educational ideas that work out in much the same fashion as Kultur, and have indeed the same historical derivation.

The dehumanizing influences I have been tracing are especially to be deprecated in higher education. The design of higher education, so far as it deserves the name, is to produce leaders, and on the quality of the leadership must depend more than on any other single factor the success or failure of democracy. I have already quoted Aristotle’s saying that “most men would rather live in a disorderly than in a sober manner.” This does not mean much more than that most men would like to live temperamentally, to follow each his own bent and then put the best face on the matter possible. Most men, says Goethe in a similar vein, prefer error to truth because truth imposes limitations and error does not. It is well also to recall Aristotle’s saying that “the multitude is incapable of making distinctions.”[319 - Eth. Nic., 1172 b.] Now my whole argument is that to be sound individualists we must not only make the right distinctions but submit to them until they become habitual. Does it follow that the whole experiment in which we are engaged is foredoomed to failure? Not quite – though the obstacles to success are somewhat greater than our democratic enthusiasts suspect. The most disreputable aspect of human nature, I have said, is its proneness to look for scapegoats; and my chief objection to the movement I have been studying is that more perhaps than any other in history it has encouraged the evasion of moral responsibility and the setting up of scapegoats. But as an offset to this disreputable aspect of man, one may note a creditable trait: he is very sensitive to the force of a right example. If the leaders of a community look up to a sound model and work humanistically with reference to it, all the evidence goes to show that they will be looked up to and imitated in turn by enough of the rank and file to keep that community from lapsing into barbarism. Societies always decay from the top. It is therefore not enough, as the humanitarian would have us believe, that our leaders should act vigorously on the outer world and at the same time be filled with the spirit of “service.” Purely expansive leaders of this kind we have seen who have the word humanity always on their lips and are at the same time ceasing to be human. “That wherein the superior man cannot be equalled,” says Confucius, “is simply this – his work which other men cannot see.”[320 - Doctrine of the Mean (c. XXXIII, v. 2).] It is this inner work and the habits that result from it that above all humanize a man and make him exemplary to the multitude. To perform this work he needs to look to a centre and a model.

We are brought back here to the final gap that opens between classicist and romanticist. To look to a centre according to the romanticist is at the best to display “reason,” at the worst to be smug and philistine. To look to a true centre is, on the contrary, according to the classicist, to grasp the abiding human element through all the change in which it is implicated, and this calls for the highest use of the imagination. The abiding human element exists, even though it cannot be exhausted by dogmas and creeds, is not subject to rules and refuses to be locked up in formulæ. A knowledge of it results from experience, – experience vivified by the imagination. To do justice to writing which has this note of centrality we ourselves need to be in some measure experienced and imaginative. Writing that is romantic, writing in which the imagination is not disciplined to a true centre is best enjoyed while we are young. The person who is as much taken by Shelley at forty as he was at twenty has, one may surmise, failed to grow up. Shelley himself wrote to John Gisborne (October 22, 1821): “As to real flesh and blood, you know that I do not deal in those articles; you might as well go to a ginshop for a leg of mutton as expect anything human or earthly from me.” The mature man is likely to be dissatisfied with poetry so unsubstantial as this even as an intoxicant and still more when it is offered to him as the “ideal.” The very mark of genuinely classical work, on the other hand, is that it yields its full meaning only to the mature. Young and old are, as Cardinal Newman says, affected very differently by the words of some classic author, such as Homer or Horace. “Passages, which to a boy are but rhetorical commonplaces, neither better nor worse than a hundred others which any clever writer might supply … at length come home to him, when long years have passed, and he has had experience of life, and pierce him, as if he had never before known them, with their sad earnestness and vivid exactness. Then he comes to understand how it is that lines, the birth of some chance morning or evening at an Ionian festival or among the Sabine hills, have lasted generation after generation for thousands of years, with a power over the mind and a charm which the current literature of his own day, with all its obvious advantages, is utterly unable to rival.”

In the poets whom Newman praises the imagination is, as it were, centripetal. The neo-classic proneness to oppose good sense to imagination, and the romantic proneness to oppose imagination to good sense, have at least this justification, that in many persons, perhaps in most persons, the two actually conflict, but surely the point to emphasize is that they may come together, that good sense may be imaginative and imagination sensible. If imagination is not sensible, as is plainly the case in Victor Hugo, for example, we may suspect a lack of the universal and ethical quality. All men, even great poets, are more or less immersed in their personal conceit and in the zones of illusion peculiar to their age. But there is the question of degree. The poets to whom the world has finally accorded its suffrage have not been megalomaniacs; they have not threatened like Hugo to outbellow the thunder or pull comets around by the tail.[321 - See his poem Ibo in Les Contemplations.] Bossuet’s saying that “good sense is the master of human life” does not contradict but complete Pascal’s saying that “the imagination disposes of everything,” provided only due stress be laid on the word human. It would not be easy to live a more imaginative life than Hugo, but his imagination was so unrestrained that we may ask whether he lived a very human life, whether he was not rather, in Tennyson’s phrase, a “weird Titan.” Man realizes that immensity of his being of which Joubert speaks only in so far as he ceases to be the thrall of his own ego. This human breadth he achieves not by throwing off but by taking on limitations, and what he limits is above all his imagination. The reason why he should strive for a life that is thus increasingly full and complete is simply, as Joubert suggests, that it is more delectable, that it is found practically to make for happiness.

THE END

APPENDIX

CHINESE PRIMITIVISM

Perhaps the closest approach in the past to the movement of which Rousseau is the most important single figure is the early Taoist movement in China. Taoism, especially in its popular aspects, became later something very different, and what I say is meant to apply above all to the period from about 550 to 200 B.C. The material for the Taoism of this period will be found in convenient form in the volume of Léon Wieger (1913) —Les Pères du Système taoïste (Chinese texts with French translations of Lao-tzŭ, Lieh-tzŭ and Chuang-tzŭ). The Tao Tê King of Lao-tzŭ is a somewhat enigmatical document of only a few thousand words, but plainly primitivistic in its general trend. The phrase that best sums up its general spirit is that of Wordsworth – a “wise passiveness.” The unity at which it aims is clearly of the pantheistic variety, the unity that is obtained by breaking down discrimination and affirming the “identity of contradictories,” and that encourages a reversion to origins, to the state of nature and the simple life. According to the Taoist the Chinese fell from the simple life into artificiality about the time of the legendary Yellow Emperor, Hoang-ti (27th century B.C.). The individual also should look back to beginnings and seek to be once more like the new-born child[322 - La. 55, p. 51. (In my references La. stands for Lao-tzŭ, Li. for Lieh-tzŭ, Ch. for Chuang-tzŭ. The first number gives the chapter; the second number the page in Wieger’s edition.)] or, according to Chuang-tzŭ, like the new-born calf.[323 - Ch. 22 C, p. 391.] It is in Chuang-tzŭ indeed that the doctrine develops its full naturalistic and primitivistic implications. Few writers in either East or West have set forth more entertainingly what one may term the Bohemian attitude towards life. He heaps ridicule upon Confucius and in the name of spontaneity attacks his doctrine of humanistic imitation.[324 - Ch. 12 n, p. 305.] He sings the praises of the unconscious,[325 - Ch. 11 D, p. 291. Ibid. 15, p. 331. See also Li. 31, p. 113.] even when obtained through intoxication,[326 - Ch. 19 B, p. 357.] and extols the morality of the beautiful soul.[327 - Ch. 19 L, p. 365.] He traces the fall of mankind from nature into artifice in a fashion that anticipates very completely both Rousseau’s Discourse on the Arts and Sciences[328 - Ch. 10, pp. 279-80.] and that on the Origin of Inequality.[329 - Ch. 9, pp. 274-75.] See also the amusing passage in which the brigand Chi, child of nature and champion of the weak against the oppressions of government, paints a highly Rousseauistic picture of man’s fall from his primitive felicity.[330 - Ch. 29, pp. 467 ff.] Among the things that are contrary to nature and purely conventional, according to Chuang-tzŭ and the Taoists, are, not only the sciences and arts and attempts to discriminate between good and bad taste,[331 - Ch. 2, p. 223.] but likewise government and statecraft,[332 - La. 27, p. 37.] virtue and moral standards.[333 - Ch. 8 A, p. 271.] To the artificial music of the Confucians, the Taoists oppose a natural music that offers startling analogies to the most recent programmatic and descriptive tendencies of Occidental music.[334 - Li. 5, p. 143.] See especially Chuang-tzŭ’s programme for a cosmic symphony in three movements[335 - Ch. 14 C, p. 321.] – the Pipes of Pan as one is tempted to call it. This music that is supposed to reflect in all its mystery and magic the infinite creative processes of nature is very close to the primitivistic music (“L’arbre vu du côté des racines”) with which Hugo’s satyr strikes panic into the breasts of the Olympians.

The Taoist notion of following nature is closely related, as in other naturalistic movements, to the idea of fate whether in its stoical or epicurean form.[336 - For an extreme form of Epicureanism see the ideas of Yang-chu, Li. 7, pp. 165 ff. For stoical apathy see Ch. 6 C., p. 253. For fate see Li. 6, p. 165, Ch. 6 K, p. 263.] From the references in Chuang-tzŭ[337 - Ch. 33, pp. 499 ff.] and elsewhere to various sects and schools we see that Taoism was only a part of a great stream of naturalistic and primitivistic tendency. China abounded at that time in pacifists,[338 - Ch. 33 C, p. 503.] in apostles of brotherly love, and as we should say nowadays Tolstoyans. A true opposite to the egoistic Yang-chu was the preacher of pure altruism and indiscriminate sympathy, Mei-ti. Mencius said that if the ideas of either of these extremists prevailed the time would come, not only when wolves would devour men, but men would devour one another.[339 - Bk. III, Part 2, ch. 9.] In opposing discrimination and ethical standards to the naturalists, Mencius and the Confucian humanists were fighting for civilization. Unfortunately there is some truth in the Taoist charge that the standards of the Confucians are too literal, that in their defence of the principle of imitation they did not allow sufficiently for the element of flux and relativity and illusion in things – an element for which the Taoists had so keen a sense that they even went to the point of suppressing the difference between sleeping and waking[340 - Li. 3, p. 111. Ch. 24, pp. 225-27.] and life and death.[341 - Ch. 6 E, p. 255.] To reply properly to the Taoist relativist the Confucians would have needed to work out a sound conception of the rôle of the imagination – the universal key to human nature – and this they do not seem to have done. One is inclined to ask whether this is the reason for China’s failure to achieve a great ethical art like that of the drama and the epic of the Occident at their best. The Taoists were richly imaginative but along romantic lines. We should not fail to note the Taoist influence upon Li Po and other Bohemian and bibulous poets of the Tang dynasty, or the relation of Taoism to the rise of a great school of landscape painting at about the same time. We should note also the Taoist element in “Ch’an” Buddhism (the “Zen” Buddhism[342 - See The Religion of the Samurai: a Study of Zen Philosophy (1913) by Kaiten Nukariya (himself a Zenist), p. 23.] of Japan), some knowledge of which is needed for an understanding of whole periods of Japanese and Chinese art.

In these later stages, however, the issues are less clear-cut than in the original struggle between Taoists and Confucians. The total impression one has of early Taoism is that it is a main manifestation of an age of somewhat sophistical individualism. Ancient Chinese individualism ended like that of Greece at about the same time in disaster. After a period of terrible convulsions (the era of the “Fighting States”), the inevitable man on horseback appeared from the most barbaric of these states and “put the lid” on everybody. Shi Hwang-ti, the new emperor, had many of the scholars put to death and issued an edict that the writings of the past, especially the Confucian writings, should be destroyed (213 B.C.). Though the emperor behaved like a man who took literally the Taoist views as to the blessings of ignorance, it is not clear from our chief authority, the historian Ssŭ-ma Ch’ien, that he acted entirely or indeed mainly under Taoist influence.

It is proper to add that though Lao-tzŭ proclaims that the soft is superior to the hard, a doctrine that should appeal to the Occidental sentimentalist, one does not find in him or in the other Taoists the equivalent of the extreme emotional expansiveness of the Rousseauist. There are passages, especially in Lao-tzŭ, that in their emphasis on concentration and calm are in line with the ordinary wisdom of the East; and even where the doctrine is unmistakably primitivistic the emotional quality is often different from that of the corresponding movement in the West.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

My only justification for these very unsystematic bibliographical notes is that, bringing together as they do under one cover material somewhat scattered and inaccessible to most readers, they may help to add to the number, now unfortunately very small, of those who have earned the right to have an opinion about romanticism as an international movement. A list of this kind is a fragment of a fragment. I have given, for example, only a fraction of the books on Rousseau and scarcely any of the books, thousands in numbers, which without being chiefly on Rousseau, contain important passages on him. I may cite almost at random as instances of this latter class, the comparison between Burke and Rousseau in the fifth volume of Lecky’s History of the Eighteenth Century; the stanzas on Rousseau in the third canto of Childe Harold; the passage on Rousseau in Hazlitt’s essay on the Past and Future (Table Talk).

The only period that I have covered with any attempt at fullness is that from about 1795 to 1840. Books that seem to me to possess literary distinction or to deal authoritatively with some aspect of the subject I have marked with a star. I make no claim, however, to have read all the books I have listed, and my rating will no doubt often be questioned in the case of those I have read.

I have not as a rule mentioned articles in periodicals. The files of the following special publications may often be consulted with profit. Those that have current bibliographies I have marked with a dagger.

† Revue d’Histoire littéraire de la France.– † Annales romantiques.– † Revue germanique (Eng. and German).

† Englische Studien—Anglia. – † Mitteilungen über Englische Sprache und Literatur (Beiblatt zur Anglia). – † Archiv für das Studium der neueren Sprachen (Herrigs Archiv). – † Zeitschrift für französische Sprache und Literatur—Kritischer Jahresbericht der romanischen Philologie—Germanisch-Romanische Monatschrift—Euphorion (German lit.). – † Zeitschrift für deutsches Altertum und deutsche Literatur.

Publications of the Modern Language Association of America.– † Modern Language Notes (Baltimore). —Modern Philology (Chicago). —The Journal of English and Germanic Philology (Urbana, Ill.). – † Studies in Philology (Univ. of North Car.). – † The Modern Language Review (Cambridge, Eng.).

Works that are international in scope and that fall either wholly or in part in the romantic period are as follows: L. P. Betz: ✱ La Littérature Comparée, Essai bibliographique, 2e éd. augmentée, 1904. – A. Sayous: Le XVIIIe siècle à l’étranger, 2 vols. 1861. – H. Hettner: ✱ Literaturgeschichte des 18. Jahr. 1872. 6 vols. 5th edn. 1909. (Still standard.) – G. Brandes: ✱ Main Currents in 19th Century Literature, 6 vols. 1901 ff. Originally given as lectures in Danish at the University of Copenhagen and trans. into German, 1872 ff. (Often marred by political “tendency.”) – T. Süpfle: Geschichte des deutschen Kultureinflusses auf Frankreich, 2 vols. 1886-90. – V. Rossel: Hist. de la litt. fr. hors de France. 2e éd. 1897. – C. E. Vaughan: The Romantic Revolt, 1900. – T. S. Omond: The Romantic Triumph, 1900. (A somewhat colorless book.)

ENGLISH FIELD

✱ The Cambridge History of English Literature, vols. X, XI, XII, 1913 ff. (Excellent bibliographies.) – See also articles and bibliographies in ✱ Dictionary of National Biography, Chambers Encyclopædia of English Literature (new edn.) and Encyclopædia Britannica (11th edn.).

L. Stephen: ✱ History of English Thought in the 18th Century, 1876. (To be consulted for the deistic prelude to emotional naturalism. The author’s horizons are often limited by his utilitarian outlook.) – T. S. Seccombe: The Age of Johnson, 1900. – E. Bernbaum’s English Poets of the 18th Century, 1918. (An anthology so arranged as to illustrate the growth of sentimentalism.) – W. L. Phelps: The Beginnings of the English Romantic Movement, 1893. – H. A. Beers: A History of English Romanticism in the 18th Century, 1898. A History of English Romanticism in the 19th Century, 1901. (Both vols. are agreeably written but start from a very inadequate definition of romanticism.) – C. H. Herford: The Age of Wordsworth, 1897. – G. Saintsbury: Nineteenth Century Literature, 1896. – A. Symons: The Romantic Movement in English Poetry, 1909. (Ultra-romantic in outlook.) – W. J. Courthope: History of English Poetry, vols. V and VI, 1911. – O. Elton: ✱ A Survey of English Literature, 1780-1830, 1912. (A distinguished treatment of the period, at once scholarly and literary. The point of view is on the whole romantic, as appears in the use of such general terms as “beauty” and the “infinite.”) – H. Richter: Geschichte der englischen Romantik, 1911 ff. – W. A. Neilson: The Essentials of Poetry, 1912. (The point of view appears in a passage like the following, pp. 192-93: According to Arnold high seriousness “is the final criterion of a great poet. One might suggest it as a more fit criterion for a great divine. … The element for which Arnold was groping when he seized on the σπουδή of Aristotle was not seriousness but intensity.”) – P. E. More: ✱ The Drift of Romanticism (Shelburne Essays, Eighth Series), 1913. (Deals also with the international aspects of the movement, especially in the essay on Nietzsche. The point of view has much in common with my own.)

George Lillo: The London Merchant; or The History of George Barnwell, 1731. Fatal Curiosity, 1737. Both plays ed. with intro. by A. W. Ward, 1906. (Bibliography.) – E. Bernbaum: The Drama of Sensibility, 1696-1780, 1915.

S. Richardson, 1689-1761: Novels, ed. L. Stephen, 12 vols. 1883.

D. Diderot: Eloge de R., 1761. Reprinted in Œuvres complètes, vol. v. – J. Jusserand: Le Roman Anglais, 1886. – J. O. E. Donner: R. in der deutschen Romantik, 1896. – W. L. Cross: The Development of the English Novel (chap. II, “The 18th Century Realists”), 1899. – J. Texte: ✱ J. – J. Rousseau et les Origines du Cosmopolitisme littéraire. Eng. trans. by J.W. Matthews, 1899. – C. L. Thomson: Samuel Richardson: a Biographical and Critical Study, 1900. – A. Dobson: S. R., 1902.

L. Sterne, 1713-68: Collected Works, ed. G. Saintsbury, 6 vols. 1894. Ed. W. L. Cross, 12 vols. 1904.

P. Fitzgerald: Life of S., 2 vols. 1864. 3d edn. 1906. – P. Stapfer: Laurence Sterne, 1870. – H. D. Traill: Sterne, 1882. – L. Stephen: Sterne. Hours in a Library, vol. III, 1892. – J. Czerny: Sterne, Hippel, und Jean Paul, 1904. – H. W. Thayer: L. S. in Germany, 1905. – P. E. More: Shelburne Essays, 3d Series, 1905. – W. L. Cross: The Life and Times of L. S., 1909. – W. Sichel: ✱ Sterne, 1910. – L. Melville: The Life and Letters of L. S., 2 vols. 1911. – F. B. Barton: Etude sur l’influence de S. en France au XVIIIe siècle, 1911.

Henry Mackenzie: The Man of Feeling, 1771. – Horace Walpole: The Castle of Otranto, 1765. – Clara Reeve: The Champion of Virtue, 1777. Title changed to The Old English Baron in later edns. – Thomas Amory: Life of John Buncle, Esq., 4 vols. 1756-66. New edn. (with intro. by E. A. Baker), 1904. – Henry Brooke: The Fool of Quality, 5 vols. 1766-70. Ed. E. A. Baker, 1906. – William Beckford: An Arabian Tale [Vathek], 1786. In French, 1787. Ed. R. Garnett, 1893. – L. Melville: The Life and Letters of William Beckford, 1910. – P. E. More: W. B., in The Drift of Romanticism, 1913.

Edward Young, 1683-1765: Works, 6 vols. 1757-78. Poetical Works (Aldine Poets), 1858. – George Eliot: The Poet Y., in Essays, 2d edn. 1884. – W. Thomas: Le poète E. Y., 1901. – J. L. Kind: E. Y. in Germany, 1906. – H. C. Shelley: The Life and Letters of E. Y., 1914.

James Macpherson, 1736-96: Fingal, 1762. Temora, 1763. The Works of Ossian, ed. W. Sharp, 1896. – For bibliography of Ossian and the Ossianic controversy see Lowndes’s Bibliographer’s Manual, part VI, 1861. – J. S. Smart: ✱ James Macpherson, 1905.

Thomas Percy: Reliques of Ancient English Poetry, 3 vols. 1765. Ed. H. B. Wheatley, 3 vols. 1876 and 1891. – A. C. C. Gaussen: Percy, Prelate and Poet, 1908.

Thomas Chatterton, 1752-70: Complete Poetical Works, ed. with intro. and bibliography by H. D. Roberts, 2 vols. 1906. Poetical Works, with intro. by Sir S. Lee, 2 vols. 1906-09. – A. de Vigny: Chatterton. Drame, 1835 – D. Masson: Chatterton in Essays, 1856. – T. Watts-Dunton: Introduction to poems of C., in Ward’s English Poets. – C. E. Russell: Thomas Chatterton, 1909. – J. H. Ingram: The True Chatterton, 1910.

Thomas Warton: The History of English Poetry, 1774-88. – C. Rinaker: Thomas Warton, 1916. – Joseph Warton: Essay on the Genius and Writings of Pope, 2 vols. 1756-82. – Paul-Henri Mallet: Introduction à l’Hist. de Dannemarc, 2 vols. 1755-56 – F. E. Farley: Scandinavian Influence on the English Romantic Movement, 1903 (Bibliography). – R. Hurd: Letters on Chivalry and Romance, 1762; ed. E. J. Morley, 1911.

W. Godwin, 1756-1836: Political Justice, 1793. Caleb Williams, 1794.

C. K. Paul: W. G., his Friends and Contemporaries, 2 vols 1876. – W. Hazlitt: W. G., in The Spirit of the Age, 1902. – L. Stephen: W. G.’s Novels. Studies of a Biographer, vol. III, 1902. – P. Ramus: W. G. der Theoretiker des kommunistischen Anarchismus, 1907. – H. Saitzeff: W. G. und die Anfänge des Anarchismus im xviii Jahrhundert, 1907. – Helene Simon: W. G. und Mary Wollstonecraft, 1909. – H. Roussin: W. G., 1912.

R. Burns, 1759-96: The Complete Poetical Works, ed. J. L. Robertson, 3 vols. 1896. – J. C. Ewing: Selected List of the Works of R. B., and of Books upon his Life and Writings, 1899.

W. Wordsworth: Letter to a Friend of R. Burns, 1816. – T. Carlyle: Burns, 1828. Rptd. 1854. On Heroes and Hero-Worship, 1841. – J. G. Lockhart: Life of R. Burns, 1828. – H. A. Taine: Histoire de la Littérature Anglaise, vol. III, 1863-64. – J. C. Shairp: R. Burns, 1879. – R. L. Stevenson: Familiar Studies of Men and Books, 1882. – M. Arnold: Essays in Criticism, Second Series, 1888. – A. Angellier: ✱ R. Burns: la vie et les œuvres, 2 vols. 1893. – T. F. Henderson: R. Burns, 1904. – W. A. Neilson: Burns: How to Know Him, 1917.

W. Blake, 1759-1827: The Poetical Works, ed. with an intro. and textual notes by J. Sampson, 1913.

A. Gilchrist: Life of B., 2 vols. 1863. New edn. 1906. – A. C. Swinburne: W. B., 1868. New edn. 1906. – A. T. Story: W. B., 1893. – J. Thomson (B.V.): Essay on the Poems of W. B., in Biographical and Critical Studies, 1896. – W. B. Yeats: Ideas of Good and Evil, 1903. – F. Benoit: Un Maître de l’Art. B. le Visionnaire, 1906. – P. E. More: Shelburne Essays, Fourth Series, 1906. – P. Berger: W. B., 1907. – S. A. Brooke: Studies in Poetry, 1907. – E. J. Ellis: The Real B., a Portrait Biography, 1907. – B. de Selincourt: W. B., 1909. – G. Saintsbury: A History of English Prosody, vol. III, 1910. – J. H. Wicksteed: B.’s Vision of the Book of Job, 1910. – H. C. Beeching: B.’s Religious Lyrics, Essays and Studies by Members of the Eng. Association, vol. III, 1912. – A. G. B. Russell: The Engravings of W. B., 1912.

W. Wordsworth, 1770-1850: Poetical Works, ed. T. Hutchinson, 1904. Poems, chosen and edited by M. Arnold, 1879. Prose Works, ed. W. Knight, 2 vols. 1896. Wordsworth’s Literary Criticism, ed. N. C. Smith, 1905.

W. Hazlitt: The Spirit of the Age, 1825. – C. Wordsworth: Memoirs of W. W., 2 vols. 1851. – T.B. Macaulay: Critical and Historical Essays, 1852. – J. R. Lowell: Among my Books, 1870. – R. H. Hutton: Essays Theological and Literary, 2 vols. 1871. – J. C. Shairp: W., 1872. – S. A. Brooke: Theology in the English Poets, 1874. 10th edn. 1907. – E. Dowden: Studies in Literature, 1878. New Studies in Literature, 1895. – W. Bagehot: Literary Studies, 1879. – F. W. H. Myers: W., 1881. – J. H. Shorthouse: On the Platonism of W., 1882. – W. A. Knight: Memorials of Coleorton, 2 vols. 1887. Letters of the Wordsworth Family from 1787 to 1855, 1907. – M. Arnold: ✱ Essays in Criticism, Second Series, 1888. – P. Bourget: Etudes et Portraits, vol. II, 1888. – W. H. Pater: Appreciations, 1889. – L. Stephen: Hours in a Library, vol. II, 1892. Studies of a Biographer, vol. I, 1898. – Dorothy Wordsworth: Journals, ed. W. Knight, 2 vols, 1897. – E. Legouis: ✱ The Early Life of W., 1770-98. Trans. by J.W. Matthews, 1897. – E. Yarnall: W. and the Coleridges, 1899. – W. A. Raleigh: W., 1903. – K. Bömig: W. W. im Urteile seiner Zeit, 1906. – A. C. Bradley: Eng. Poetry and German Philosophy in the Age of W., 1909. – M. Reynolds: The Treatment of Nature in Eng. Poetry between Pope and W., 1909. (Bibliography.) – L. Cooper: A Concordance to the Poems of W. W., 1911. – E. S. Robertson: Wordsworthshire. An Introduction to a Poet’s Country, 1911.

W. Scott, 1771-1832: Poetical Works, ed. J. L. Robertson, 1904. The Waverly Novels (Oxford edn.), 25 vols. 1912. The Miscellaneous Prose Works, 30 vols. 1834-71.

W. Hazlitt: The Spirit of the Age, 1825. – J. G. Lockhart: ✱ Memoirs of the Life of Sir W. S. Baronet, 2 vols. 1837-38. – T. Carlyle: Sir W.S., 1838. – G. Grant: Life of Sir W. S., 1849. – L. Stephen: Hours in a Library, vol. I, 1874. The Story of S.’s Ruin, Studies of a Biographer, vol. II, 1898. – R. H. Hutton: Sir W. S., 1876. – W. Bagehot: The Waverley Novels in Literary Studies, vol. II, 1879. – G. Smith: Sir W. S., in Ward’s English Poets, vol. IV, 1883. – R. L. Stevenson: A Gossip on Romance in Memories and Portraits, 1887. – J. Veitch: The Feeling for Nature in Scottish Poetry, 2 vols. 1887. Vol. II. History and Poetry of the Scottish Border. 2d edn. 2 vols. 1893. – C.D. Yonge: Life of Sir W.S. (bibliography by J.P. Anderson), 1888. – V. Waille: Le Romantisme de Manzoni, 1890. – A. Lang: Life and Letters of J.G. Lockhart, 2 vols. 1896. L. and the Border Minstrelsy, 1910. – F.T. Palgrave: Landscape in Poetry, 1896. – A.A. Jack: Essays on the Novel as illustrated by S. and Miss Austen, 1897. – G. Saintsbury: Sir W.S., 1897. – L. Maigron: ✱ Le Roman historique à l’époque romantique. Essai sur l’influence de W.S., 1898. – W.L. Cross: Development of the English Novel, 1899. – M. Dotti: Delle derivazioni nei Promessi sposi di A. Manzoni dai Romanzi di W.S., 1900. – W.H. Hudson: Sir W.S., 1901. – W.S. Crockett: The Scott Country, 1902. Footsteps of S., 1907. The Scott Originals, 1912. – A. Ainger: S. Lectures and Essays, vol. I. 1905. – A.S.G. Canning: History in S.’s Novels, 1905. Sir W.S. studied in Eight Novels, 1910. – G. Agnoli: Gli Albori del romanzo storico in Italia e i primi imitatori di W.S., 1906. – C.A. Young: The Waverley Novels, 1907. – G. Wyndham: Sir W.S., 1908. – F.A. MacCunn: Sir W.S.’s friends, 1909.

S. T. Coleridge, 1772-1831: Dramatic Works, ed. D. Coleridge, 1852. Poetical Works, ed. with biographical intro. by J.D. Campbell, 1893. Complete Poetical Works, ed. E.H. Coleridge, 2 vols. 1912. Prose Works, 6 vols. in Bohn’s Library, 1865 ff. —Biographia Literaria, ed. with his æsthetical essays by I. Shawcross, 2 vols. 1907. Anima Poetae, ed. E.H. Coleridge, 1895. C.’s Literary Criticism, with intro. by J.W. Mackail, 1908. Biographia epistalaris, ed. A. Tumbull, 2 vols. 1911.

W. Hazlitt: Mr. C., in The Spirit of the Age, 1825. – T. Allsop: Letters, Conversations, and Recollections of S.T.C., 2 vols. 1836. – T. Carlyle: Life of John Sterling (part I, chap, VIII), 1851. – Sara Coleridge: Memoirs and Letters of Sara Coleridge, 2 vols. 1873. – H.D. Traill: Coleridge, 1884. – A. Brandl: S.T.C. und die englishe Romantik, 1886. Eng. trans. by Lady Eastlake, 1887. – W. Pater: Coleridge. Appreciations, 1889. – T. De Quincey: S.T.C., 1889. – L. Stephen: Coleridge, Hours in a Library, vol. III, 1892. – J.D. Campbell: S.T.C., 1894. 2d edn.; 1896. – E. Dowden: C. as a Poet. New Studies in Literature, 1895. – E.V. Lucas: Charles Lamb and the Lloyds, 1898. – R.H. Shepherd: The Bibliography of C., 1900. – C. Cestre: La Révolution française et les poètes anglais (1789-1809), 1906. – J. Aynard: La vie d’un poète. Coleridge, 1907. – A.A. Helmholtz: The Indebtedness of S.T.C. to A.W. Schlegel, 1907. – A.A. Jack and A.C. Bradley: Short Bibliography of C., 1912.

C. Lamb, 1775-1834: Life and Works, ed. A. Ainger, 12 vols. 1899-1900. The Works of Charles and Mary L., ed. E.V. Lucas, 7 vols. 1903-05. The Works in Prose and Verse of Charles and Mary L., ed. T. Hutchinson, 2 vols. 1908. The Letters of C.L. Intro, by H.H. Harper, 5 vols. 1907. Dramatic Essays of C.L., ed. B. Matthews, 1891.

G. Gilfillan: C.L., vol. II, 1857. – B.W. Proctor: C.L., 1866. – P. Fitzgerald: C.L., 1866. – A. Ainger: C.L., a Biography, 1882. Lectures and Essays, vol. II, 1905. – W. Pater: C.L. Appreciations, 1889. – E.V. Lucas: Bernard Barton and his Friends, 1893. C.L. and the Lloyds, 1898. The Life of C.L., 2 vols. 1905. – F. Harrison: L. and Keats, 1899. – G.E. Woodberry: C.L., 1900. – H. Paul: C.L. Stray Leaves, 1906.