MkR

The Age of Wordsworth by C.H.Herford . (1897) New Delhi : APD, 2003.

Foreword by Mohit K. Ray:

It was in 1924 that in an essay entitled “On the Discrimination of Romanticism”( PMLA 39) Arthur O. Lovejoy questioned the homogeneity of European Romanticism and remarked that “the word ‘romantic' has come to mean so many things and that by itself , it means nothing. It has ceased to perform the function of a verbal sign.” René Wellek, in 1949, refuted the argument of Lovejoy and tried to show that identical or very similar views of nature, of imagination and of symbol and myth pervade all European literature of that time. Thus, in “The Concept of Romanticism in Literary History” ( Comparative Literature I, 1949) Wellek held that the homogeneity of European Romanticism consists of “Imagination for the view of poetry, nature for the view of the world, symbol and myth for the poetic style.”

Two years later Morse Peckham singled out the criterion of “organic dynamism” as the hallmark of Romanticism in “Toward a Theory of Literature” (1951). For M.H. Abrams ( The Mirror and the Lamp , 1953) it was a shift in emphasis from imitation theory to theory of expression, from the mirror to the lamp, from the mechanistic, metaphorical analogies of neoclassical theory to the biological imagery of the romantic critics.

It is amazing to note how Herford with his fine critical perception had looked into the nature of European romanticism and anticipated most of the ideas mentioned above. The very first sentence of his classic study of Romanticism, The Age of Wordsworth (1897) is: “No title can adequately label a period so immensely rich in achievement as the first thirty years of the present century.” He finds in Romanticism “an extraordinary development of imaginative sensibility” and argues that the peculiarity of Romanticism “lies in this , that in apparently detaching us from the real world, it seems to restore us to reality at a higher point – to emancipate us from the ‘prison of the actual,' by giving us spiritual rights in a universe of the mind, exempt from the limitations of the matter, and time, and space, but appealing at countless points to the instinct for that which endures and subsists.” Herford also anticipated the theory of “organic dynamism”: “[…] the fundamental presumption about the nature of things, upon which the current reflection of the age is always based began to be derived not from aggregates of mutually attracted atoms, but from totalities of parts each involved in and involving the whole, and sharing in a continuous evolution towards an implicit end.” As a literary historian Herford was one of the first to point out that the character of Romanticism is “extremely complex” and identified as one of its most potent causes “the gradual prevalence of conceptions derived from organic life over those derived from mechanics.”

The special quality of Herford is his luminosity. Although his main focus is on English Romanticism he gives us a lucid and yet profound , general and yet succinct idea of the late eighteenth century and the early nineteenth century intellectual ethos, the cultural milieu, the philosophical speculations of German Romanticism and the revolutionary idealism of France and is able to place the individual writers against the contemporary intellectual background and gives us a very clear idea of their strengths and weaknesses. It is not without reason that Herford 's The Age of Wordsworth is a must for any student of English literature.