The Romantic Critic

Abstract

Since the nineteen-thirties and forties, when the late Sir Herbert Read, author of Reason and Romanticism, was an influential figure in literary England, Romanticism as an avowed literary attitude has suffered an eclipse, even if vulgarized forms of Romanticism are more prevalent in society at large than ever before. Less prominent than Read was the equally Romantic critic and moralist, J. Middleton Murry. Among Murry’s younger associates was F. A.Lea, the author of several studies of Romantic writers including Shelley, Carlyle and Nietzsche. Now Mr Lea has come forward with a book of literary studies which again raises the Romantic banner. Voices in the Wilderness, studies of six “prophetic” writers of the modem age, Blake, Wordsworth, Carlyle, D H Lawrence, Middleton Murry and Arthur Koestler, is the second volume of a dual work the first volume of which, The Ethics of Reason, is a philosophical examination of attempts from Socrates onwards to define “the good man”. Voices in the Wilderness, however, is complete in itself, and constitutes a very revealing exposition of the Romantic viewpoint.Like most people whose thoughts and feelings are not limited to their own immediate circumstances, Mr Lea is appalled by the joyless collectivism towards which human societies seem inevitably to be progressing. He diagnoses the root of our trouble to lie in the Utilitarian philosophy born, he believes, out of eighteenth-century materialism with its seductive creed of “happiness here”, confused pragmatically and illogically with an abstract Christian altruism based on contradictory expectations of “happiness hereafter”. One of the consequences of this pervasive Utilitarianism is a widespread present inability to achieve originality, i.e. to penetrate beyond general concepts fixed by language into the truth of particular perceptions: to see things as they miraculously are.