Vol. 17 No. 6 1950 - page 636

636
PARTISAN REVIEW
them as unconditionally as they have been attacked; nor does he use
their poetry as a norm by which to belittle modem writers.
Placing the English Romantics in a European perspective, he points
out that all the major European countries had a Romantic movement
stemming "from a prevailing mood of longing for something more com–
plete and satisfying than the familiar world"; but that "almost alone
in England is the poetry which rises from it connected with a visionary
insight into a superior order of being." (Holderlin in Germany and
Tyutchev in Russia are mentioned as exceptions to this statement.)
It was only with Rimbaud and Mallarme that French poetry attempted
anything similar, partially, at least with Mallarme, under the direct
influence of English Romanticism; and it is one of the historical ironies
of recent literature that modem English poetry, inspired by late French
Symbolism, should have used the English Romantics as their sacrificial
lambs. Edmund Wilson argued as long ago as
Axel's Castle
that French
Symbolism was an extreme development of Romantic tendencies, and,
whatever the differences in poetic technique, this view will eventually
be accepted as historically accurate.
Another anomaly of the modem attack on Romanticism is the
relegation of Byron's
Don Juan
to a fate worse than death-respectful
obscurity. In a period like our own, when criticism places such a high
value on wit, ironic complexity and the deflation of romantic sentiment,
it is surely surprising that
Don Juan
has not been held up as a model of
these virtues. Mr. Bowra's essays on
Don Juan
is markedly appreciative,
and he writes that Byron's creation "is something quite outside the range
of his great contemporaries"; but he missed a chance here, in my view,
to speak out more cogently for this most neglected of nineteenth-century
masterpieces, still astonishingly fresh and vigorous to a modem reader.
Byron's later work, like that of Heine, represents the inner dissolution
of Romanticism, the self-criticism of Romantic pretensions by a poet
who shares the Romantic dissatisfaction with reality but who, at the
same time, turns typical Romantic attitudes into comedy:
Now my sere fancy «falls into the yellow
Leaf," and Imagination droops her pinion.
And the sad truth which hovers o'er my desk
Turns what was once romantic to burlesque.
Actually,
Don Juan
was too strong for the early nineteenth century
to stomach. It did not affect the course of later English poetry, which,
with Tennyson, Swinburne and Rossetti, continued in paths made
smooth by the early Romantic generation. Only in our own day, with
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