ABSTRACT
I F "Victorianism" on analysis proves increasingly elusive, romanticism has already passed into the realm of the unknowable. The so-called "romantic movement" in England, we discover, subscribed to no common aesthetic capable of general definition. Far more than its Continental parallels, it was eclectic in its tastes, distrustful of systematized creeds, disinclined to issue aesthetic manifestoes. Though poets might attack the artificialities of eighteenth-century diction, none set out self-consciously to challenge the tenets of "neoclassicism." Whi le Victor Hugo could drive an audience at the ComedieFrangaise to physical violence by his deliberate flouting of the bienseances of French classical drama, English romantics were at a loss
to find any literary conventions so staunchly maintained, for the Augustan aestheticians had left no rigid rules to cramp rebellious talents. A romantic revolt could scarcely gather head if there were no organized tyranny to overthrow. Nor could a crusade be launched if there were no evangel to inspire its campaign. In Germany Novalis could adjust his dithyrambic verses to the requirements of a newly articulated "romantic idealism." But in Britain no new philosophy became sufficiently entrenched to provide the basis for a new aesthetic theory. However open to European influences they may have been, English artists of the Regency period owed far less to the metaphysics of Kant and Fichte than to the empirical relativism of the British tradition, which they inherited from the eighteenth century and adapted to their own purposes.1 Intellectually, then, the romantic movement in England was less a sudden revolution than a remarkable development in the long organic process of cultural history. And the Victorians most ready to question its achievements were quite unable to regard "romanticism" as a fixed unit beginning arbitrarily wi th the first Lyrical Ballads and ending climactically wi th the death of Lord Byron.
