CARLYLE AND COLERIDGE

 

In the attempt to describe how Romanticism affected American political views in the early to mid-eighteen hundreds, this blog next looks at two British writers who had significant influence on those Americans.  They were Thomas Carlyle and Samuel Taylor Coleridge.  The first is primarily remembered as an influential historian and essayist and the second as a poet.

         Carlyle’s writing has been judged as reflecting a recurring balance between the Romantic thrust for both emotions, such as a love for freedom, and what was known to be historical and political fact.  But within that general aim, he was drawn to the heroic struggle.  This admiration for struggle, per se, seemed to take priority over any of the issues that such struggles represented. 

In that, the “great man” seemed to be his main topic for analysis.  One of his most famous pieces betrays this emphasis, On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History.  That was a book that shared a series of lectures about how important heroic leadership was to history.[1]  One can sense in Carlyle an anti-democratic bent and that his ideas – not necessarily his writings – lent to the march toward dictatorial leadership in the twentieth century.

Along with this level of hero-worshipping, he also promoted a nationalism.  He is thought of as a strong protagonist of Anglo-Saxonism – Carlyle saw the Anglo-Saxon “race” as being superior to all others.  “Thomas Carlyle was perhaps the first notable Englishman to enunciate a belief in Anglo-Saxon racial superiority, and, as he told [Ralph Waldo] Emerson, among the members of this select race he counted the Americans.”[2] 

Apparently, this sense of kinship, albeit reserved (Americans were seen as formless in their Saxon character), served to solidify whatever affinity he and Emerson shared.  Carlyle’s nationalism had some complexity in that it ascribed a role to the Norman invaders of the eleventh century.  The Normans added order to the English national structure in Carlyle’s thesis.

Added to his unfortunate – in that they were anti-democratic – views was his antisemitism.  He refused to support the extension of the franchise to Jews in 1848.  He argued that Jews were two-faced in seeking the vote when their true homeland was Palestine where they should go.  Of course, he also expressed common stereotypical attributes to Jews, such as being excessively materialistic and using their wealth to lead to corrupt practices.  To varying degrees, his thoughts and biases had their effects on those Americans who extended him credulity.

As for Coleridge, he is most known for his literary masterpieces.  The titles, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner and Kubla Khan are well entrenched in the British literary canon.  He left readers a timeless instruction that when they are reading literature, to engage in a “suspension of disbelief.”  Considered by current biographers as a bipolar person, he suffered from recurring physical challenges which originated with a serious case of rheumatic fever and other diseases as a child.

Unfortunately, during his time he was treated with laudanum which led to a lifelong addiction to opium.  All of this, it is believed, set the stage for his constant suffering from anxiety and depression.  This fits convincingly with his best-known metaphor, the albatross around the neck featured in the The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.

He also knew and had an effect on Emerson, the American essayist.  Along with many early supporters of the French Revolution who would eventually become a critic of that disruption.  Eventually, he became politically a conservative more in the line of thoughts expressed by Edmund Burke.  Today, he is credited with influencing John Stuart Mill.  His political thinking centered on three themes.  They are:

1.     “The idea” or function of institutions as opposed to shortcomings being central to how institutions should be judged.[3]

2.    Social stability or “Permanence” as Coleridge stated this concern in that what he emphasized was community and national education.[4]

3.    British history depicted as organic, natural growth with an emphasis on common law as exemplifying this growth.[5]

In these studies, Coleridge took on an internal – inside the social matrix – vantage point instead of an external, unfamiliar, objective view.[6]

          As one can see with these two British writers, Emerson, in America, takes on a central role in the popularization of Romantic sentiments.  As in Europe, it was a many-sided belief system and highly individualistic although through various angles.  Also mimicking the Romantics from across the ocean, Americans had intense levels of moral excitement, support for individualism, and the promotion for the importance of intuitive thinking or perception.  They also adopted that Romantic attraction to nature as a source of goodness while seeing society as the source of corruption.

          Within these broader themes, American Romantics sought a bit of freedom from strict religious dogma and practices as it reinvigorated their rebellious spirit from the previous generation.  They tended to reject Calvinistic beliefs in predestination and a more liberalized view of what humans’ relationship to God should be.

          For example, people could and should have less restrictive religious sanctions put on them.  All of this was philosophically in tune with the transcendentalism the last posting reviewed.  In that, reason is at least diminished, and intuitiveness enhanced.  Also, customs and traditions came under scrutiny as their value was questioned relative to the more modern conditions of those days.

          Generally, on the political front, Romanticism encouraged Americans to spur a level of concern for the poor and those considered oppressed.  This was further emphasized by expounding ideals supporting freedom – extending to the relief of exploited people – and the promotion of social progress along equalitarian grounds.  And here one finds its most pro-federation message.  That is, it prized the federalist sense of civic responsibility for fellow-citizens and that was even extended, among many transcendentalists, to the slave population. 

          Now, this story is ready to focus on Emerson, the topic of the next posting.  He was not the ideal Romantic, but he employed many of their assumptions.  If he accomplished anything along Romantic lines, he gave definitional substance to individual integrity, a central concern of federation theory.

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[1] Eric Bentley, The Cult of the Superman:  A Study of the Idea of Heroism in Carlyle and Nietzsche, with Notes on Other Hero-Worshippers of Modern Times (London, UK:  Robert Hale, 1969).

[2] Robert Frankel, Observing America:  The Commentary of British Visitors to the United States, 1890-1950 (Studies in American Thought and Culture) (Madison, WI:  University of Wisconsin Press, 2007), 54.

[3] Andy Hamilton, “Coleridge, Mill, and Conservatism:  Contemplation of an Idea,” in Coleridge and Contemplation, ed. by Peter Cheyne (Oxford, UK:  Oxford University Press, 2017), 143 (source did not have total pages).

[4] Alan Ryan, J S Mill (London, UK:  Routledge, 1974).

[5] Pamela Edwards, The Statesman’s Science (New York, NY:  Columbia University Press, 2004).

[6] John Skorupski, Why Read Mill Today (London, UK:  Routledge, 2006).