Carl Truman on The Romantics (from The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self)

 

Carl Truman’s book The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self  had been suggested as The Closing of the American Mind  of our day so I thought to take a look.  One chapter on ‘The Unacknowledged Legislators’  suggesting that Shelley and other Romantics might have a part in the making of the modern mind seemed a place to dip my toe.  Just on that alone I decided to venture no further into the deeps of a long book.  It seemed too naive as though the author lacked an empirical acquaintance with original sin and was unaware that the libertine finds justification for the satisfaction of his desires everywhere and if countered turns the argument away as the mere prejudice of the rebarbative mind. 

Last page of chap:

"This is the point that Rousseau, Wordsworth, Blake, and Shelley understood.  It was why they used poetry as a means of achieving the moral reformation of individuals and of society..........And in a world in which the idea of universal human nature has been abandoned or attenuated to the point of being meaningless, it also means that those who shape popular taste exert the most moral power and set society’s moral standards.  While he no doubt would have retched at the thought, William Wordsworth stands near the head of a path that leads to Hugh Hefner and Kim Kardashian."

I only read ‘Playboy’ for the extracts from The Prelude. 

Take Shelley for instance.  Two Victorian sages express quite negative  judgments.  Thomas Carlyle writes:

"Shelley is a poor creature, who has said or done nothing worth a serious man being at the trouble of remembering.... Poor soul, he has always seemed to me an extremely weak creature; a poor, thin, spasmodic, hectic, shrill and pallid being. . . . The very voice of him, shrill, shrieky, to my ear has too much of the ghost! (from Invective and Abuse  by Hugh Kingsmill)"

Matthew Arnold in a review essay on Dowden’s  Life of Percy Bysshe Shelley wishes that he had been left with much less knowledge of the poet’s life.  He considers this letter to his abandoned wife Harriet writing from Troyes where he is resting on his travels with Mary Godwin:

 

"My dearest Harriet (he begins). I write to you from this detestable town; I write to show that I do not forget you ; I write to urge you to come to Switzerland, where you will at last find one firm and constant friend to whom your interests will be always dear—by whom your feelings will never wilfully be injured. From none can you expect this but me—all else are either unfeeling or selfish, or have beloved friends of their own.''

(This beautiful soul adds in conclusion some commissions)

"I wish you to bring with you the two deeds which Tahourdin has to prepare for you, as also a copy of the settlement. Do not part with any of your money. But what shall be done about the books ? You can consult on the spot. With love to my sweet little lanthe, ever most affectionately yours, S."

" I write in great haste ; we depart directly."

Arnold finds the English language lacking in the precision of invective that French supplies:

"But neither will I call the letter an odious letter, a hideous letter. I prefer to call it, applying an untranslated French word, a bete letter. And it is bete from what is the signal, the disastrous want and weakness of Shelley, with all his fine intellectual gifts—his utter deficiency in humour."

Can an Englishman say worse?