Arnold, Baudelaire, and the Imagination

Abstract

N HIS BOOK Matthew Arnold and the Decline of English Romanticism, D. G. James remarks on Matthew Arnold's abandonment of his Romantic inheritance and contrasts him in this respect with Charles Baudelaire who, he says, basing himself on an Aesthetic very similar to that of Coleridge, initiated the most important literary movement in Europe since that of Wordsworth and Coleridge. He goes on to point out that remains one of the great ironies of literary history that it was France and not England which, in the second half of the nineteenth century, provided a home to the symbolist movement in poetry, and that Victorian England failed to use its poetic inheritance.' In this paper I wish to examine more thoroughly some aspects of this contrasting use of the Romantic inheritance, specifically the views of the Romantics and of the two writers toward the functioning of imagination and feeling with which James is mainly concerned throughout a major portion of his book. I hope that through such an examination the differences between these two figures and the directions that each took, clearly viewed as seminal and representative by James, may be more precisely understood. In his book James identifies two traditional attitudes toward the imagination. It could be viewed unfavorably as something which fictionalized or falsified the truth and hence cut man off from accurate