Tennyson and the Legacies of Romantic Art
Authors: PERRY SEAMUS 
Published: July 2008

Everyone knows that a number of important concepts gained a new resonance and prestige around the turn of the nineteenth century: the phenomenon is called (or is symptomatic of what is called) ‘romanticism’; and any account of romanticism's legacies might well choose to consider the continuing life of those new significances within subsequent literary thinking. The terms that matter are words such as art, aesthetic, imagination, literature, poetry; and the intricate pattern of changes in their meanings has been drawn most influentially by Raymond Williams, initially in Culture and Society and then later in Keywords. Where, for instance, art had once meant ‘any human skill’, as Williams says, it became during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century a word with a very specialised and superior sort of reference, evidence of ‘a remarkable change in ideas of the nature and purpose of art, and of its relations to other human activities and to society as a whole’ – the ‘change’ in question being something like a decision to divorce. The story is: art, which had once participated unquestioningly in the main movements of social practice, now became defined by its separateness from that life, and even by an hostility towards it. This divisive change occurs as part of much ‘wider changes in life and thought’, all ways of registering the divisive shock of modern industrial civilisation:1 ‘Clearly’, says Williams, ‘the major shift represented by the modern complex of literature, art, aesthetic, creative and imaginative is a matter of social and cultural history’.2 That history, for Williams, found its most satisfactory account in Marxist terms: ‘a general social activity was forced into the status of a department or province, and actual works of art were in part converted into a self-pleading ideology’ (Culture and Society, 47). Williams himself was not narrowly hostile to a Romantic emphasis on human ‘creativity’; and Coleridge is actually handled very sympathetically in Culture and Society. But it is not difficult to see how the association of a Romantic vocabulary with deplorable political change might be construed as a brand of complicity, and the ostensible distance of that aesthetic language from questions of real politics as a kind of deceit, the institutions of art but agents of bad ideology. Terry Eagleton, Williams's most eminent pupil, is usefully outspoken in this line: the aesthetic, he says, serves as the type of the new ‘bourgeois subject’, who is ‘autonomous and self-determining [and] acknowledges no merely extrinsic law but instead, in some mysterious fashion, gives the law to itself’.3 That is practically a paraphrase of Coleridge's description of the organic form possessed by great works of the imagination: for Coleridge, a Shakespeare play does not obey any rules from without, as does a work by Racine, but grows instead according to an inward law, ‘a law which all the parts obey[,] conforming themselves to the outward symbols & manifestations of the essential principle’.4 A work of art, in the new Romantic sense, is for Eagleton ‘a model of free, self-referential, autotelic, autoaffective being’: which is how capitalism makes the bourgeois subject think about himself.5 But all such pretensions are spurious, as it is needless to say: ‘literature is an illusion’, Eagleton wrote in his best-selling Literary Theory; and the task of the critic then becomes to expose that illusoriness, so returning works of ‘literature’ to ‘the social purposes and conditions in which they were embedded’.6