"Trying all things": Romantic Polymaths, Social Factors, and the Legacies of a Rhetorical Education

Abstract

"Trying all things":Romantic Polymaths, Social Factors, and the Legacies of a Rhetorical Education Catherine E. Ross There is perhaps no practical art which may not be acquired, in a very considerable degree, by example and practice, without reducing it to rules . . . practice, joined with rules, may carry a man on in his art farther and more quickly, than practice without rules. —Thomas Reid, A Brief Account of Aristotle's Logic, with Remarks (1774, 1778), 414-15 In the summer of 1810 Samuel Taylor Coleridge was writing in the eighteenth of the sixty-seven commonplace books he kept during his lifetime. Trained in the classical tradition at both Christ Hospital School and at Cambridge, Coleridge filled his commonplace books with ideas, bits of facts, and lines of argument that he might use in his writing. In the book he kept in the summer of 1810, Coleridge describes his notes as "Hints & first Thoughts. . . . cogitabilia . . . a me." These writings, he claims, were not necessarily his "fixed opinions," though he would often use them in his lectures and published works; they were, instead, "acts of obedience to the apostolic command of Trying all things."1 The willingness to "try all things," that is, to think, write, and discourse publicly about a wide variety of topics from poetics to politics, mathematics to medicine, was more common among intellectuals of the Romantic period than it is today, cable television pundits notwithstanding. Furthermore, many Romantics did more than just scribble or chat about diverse domains of knowledge; they were "devoted to the pursuit of knowledge" and sought or possessed "great or varied learning"; in short, they were philosophical polymaths as defined by the Oxford English Dictionary. Indeed, Romantic-era polymaths took all of knowledge as their province, regardless of formal training, and published and often worked in various fields, either professionally or avocationally. To be a polymath in a time when disciplines were less advanced and specialized might seem like less of an accomplishment than it would be today; nevertheless, the term—and the accomplishment it implies— [End Page 401] accurately characterizes many of the Romantics, with the added differences that most Romantic polymaths were almost entirely self-taught and most considered it their duty to pass on their knowledge in what I call the "educational impulse" of the age.2 Romantic-era writers' intellectual curiosity and endeavors to create a "commonwealth of learning" have inspired numerous interdisciplinary studies, such as Heringman's work on literature and geology (2004), Cantor et al. on the literary periodicals and science (2004), Caldwell on literature and Romantic-era medicine (2004), and the collaborative effort of Fulford, Lee, and Kitson on "bodies of knowledge" in the Romantic period (2004). Broader studies have fruitfully explored aspects of the development and relationships of intellectual disciplines; among these are Siskin's The Work of Writing (1999), Valenza's Literature, Language, and the Rise of the Intellectual Disciplines in Britain, 1680- 1820 (2009), and a recent volume of Critical Inquiry on disciplinarity, with contributions by W. J. T. Mitchell, Judith Butler, James Chandler, and other distinguished scholars (January 2009). In this essay I have begun to map an area of investigation that has largely been neglected: the educational attitudes and practices that helped to train a group of writers notable for the breadth of their intellectual reach and the audacity of their aspirations. I offer a glimpse of the social frameworks and institutional conditions that made it possible for so many Romantic thinkers to be polymaths and that inspired them in their impulse to educate. In the first half of this essay, I document the ubiquity of Romantic polymathy with evidence from the private lives, social activities, and periodical reading of individuals from all social strata. In the second half of my essay, I locate one of the primary sources of the Romantics' polymathic and educational impulses in the principles and pedagogies of the English grammar school tradition, with its deep roots in classical learning and rhetoric. Though the English grammar school system of the long eighteenth century had many flaws, and though it was poised to shift radically from its classical orientation to the scientific one still in place today, grammar school...