The Veil of Familiarity: Romantic Philosophy and the Familiar Essay

Abstract

THE OBJECT OF THIS DISCUSSION IS A DISTINCTLY ROMANTIC PROSE GENRE, the essay. The qualifier familiar is definitive, and separates from the great critical and thematic writings of the period, the kind of prose essay categorized by its randomness and spontaneity. This is published prose in a private and informal guise; which, appearing under such titles as Reading Books, the Want of Money, Poor Relations, or Old China, remains miscellaneous, occasional, conversational. The assumption implicit in all of these descriptors, an assumption by which the essay has traditionally been marked, is of a fundamental lack of seriousness or purpose. This paper will contribute to the ongoing critical project of undoing that assumption. Despite the considerable increase in recent years of critical interest in the genre, the essay is still fully to be recognized as being, at its best, a primary form of a distinctly creativity, embodying and affirming a philosophical position that we are used to identifying elsewhere in literature, and especially in its poetry. The vindication of the romanticism of the essayists collectively is the basis of at least one study that predates mine, Thomas McFarland's Romantic Cruxes: The English Essayists and the Spirit of the Age (1987). The success of this study is limited, not least by its focus on the characters of the essayists rather than on the practice of the essays, and by its continuing construction of the essayists as secondary and second-rate in relation to the poets, especially Coleridge. McFarland's metaphor of the essayists as the lesser mountains in a range that includes the dizzying elevations of Wordsworth and Coleridge, (1) perpetuates a hierarchy, the unsettling of which must be central to any reassessment of the essay. The project remains outstanding, of relocating the essay within the romantic mainstream, not below, but on a par with the poetry. Conversation: the Common Ideal In the past, poetry and poets' statements about poetry have exemplified a monolithic and unifying Romanticism to which the essay has borne little if any relevance at all. More recently, having grown to prize the discontinuous, non-linear, and fragmentary qualities that the essay so fashionably manifests, we are even less minded to recognize its common ground with an increasingly problematic canon. Yet it is so well known that it hardly needs saying that the common ground of poetry and prose is the subject of one of the most powerful and influential statements of poetics. In his 1800 Preface to the Lyrical Ballads, Wordsworth famously insists that between the language of prose and metrical composition ... there neither is nor can be any essential difference, claiming, by that insistence, to move poetry out of an inaccessible celestial realm into the workaday world of common humanity: ... where shall we find bonds of connection sufficiently strict to typify the affinity betwixt metrical and prose composition? They both speak by and to the same organs; the bodies in which both of them are clothed may be said to be of the same substance, their affections are kindred and almost identical, not necessarily differing even in degree; Poetry sheds no tears 'such as Angels weep,' but natural and human tears; she can boast of no celestial Ichor that distinguishes her vital juices from those of prose; the same human blood circulates through the veins of them both. (2) In thus humanizing poetry, and despite the metaphor of celestial and terrestrial, Wordsworth is not of course lowering, but lifting, both poetry and humanity, and in so doing, reveals his common ground with the German theorists. Kant's disciple Schiller, in his essay On the Naive and Sentimental in Literature (1795), writes that poetry means nothing else than to give humanity its most complete expression possible. …