“A New Unfolding of Life”: Romanticism in the Late Novels of George Eliot

Abstract

Victorian ambivalence toward Romanticism is expressed with alternating vehemence and reticence. Repudiating “the noise / And outcry of the former men” who “left their pain” for Victorian generations (“Stanzas from the Grande Chartreuse,” 127–28, 131), in his critical essays Arnold nevertheless reiterates respect for Wordsworth, and in “Dover Beach” he incorporates the free-associationist structure of Coleridge' conversation poems. InHard Times, the rural world beyond Coketown and Blackpool' gospel of the holiness of the heart constitute Dickens' consolations for the hellish industrial wasteland, but at the same time Harthouse — personifying the empty prodigality and flashy decadence that Victorians saw in Byron and Shelley — subverts moral order. Browning, though warning against the self-defeating diffidence and isolation of the Romantic artist in “Andrea del Sarto,” reaffirms Romantic individuality of vision and rebellion against tradition in “Fra Lippo Lippi.” While venerating the Goethe who proclaimed aspiration for infinitude and extension of the limits of possibility, Carlyle sees Lord Byron as the personification of moral and psychic pathology — unreined sorrow and cynicism, world weariness and decadent hedonism, derisive mockery and pessimism, high-strung sensitivity and emotional vulnerability — defects which Carlyle also sees as immanent in Shelley and which are subsumed in the Victorians' image of the negative side of the Romantics:Poor Shelley always is a ghastly object: colorless, pallid, tuneless, without health or warmth or vigour, the sound of him shrieky, frosty, as if a ghost were trying to sing to us; the temperament of him, spasmodic, hysterical, instead of strong or robust — a man infinitely too weak for that solitary scaling of the Alps. (Reminiscences2: 292–93; qtd. in Buckley 22)