Barfield's abiding passion for the Romantic movement
in literature and philosophy dates back at least as early as his Oxford
days prior to World War I. Most interested in the work of the German romantic
and the Englishman Samuel Taylor Coleridge
(about whom he wrote a book--What Coleridge Thought--as well as
his writings contain numerous references as well to most of the other major
British romantics and to the German romantic philosophers as well (especially Schelling).
For Barfield, Romanticism represents a rebirth
of the "perennial philosophy" (Huxley), of ideas that had Oriental equivalents2
and had been around in the West since the ancient Greeks,
as he made clear as early as History in English Words.
But Romanticism gave these ideas a new, more "natural"
emphasis; indeed, Romanticism equated imagination and nature.
Slowly the divers of the Romantic
expedition brought up to the surface of consciousness that vast new cosmos
which had so long been blindly forming in the depths. It was a cosmos in
which the spirit and spontaneity of life had moved out of Nature and into
man. The magic of Persia, the Muses of Greece, the witches and fairies
and charms and enchantments or Romance--all these had been locked safely
in man's bosom, there to sleep until the trumpet of Romanticism sounded
its call to imagination to give back their teeming life to Nature. . .
. this re-animation of Nature was
possible because the imagination
was felt as creative in the full religious sense of the word. It had itself
assisted in creating the natural forms which the senses were now contemplating.
It had moved upon the face of the waters. For it was the "repetition in
the finite mind of the eternal act of creation"--the Word made human. (212)
Barfield chose to call a collection of occasional
writings and lectures published during World War II (his first published
book since Poetic Diction ) Romanticism Comes of Age--a
title which referred to a central Barfield thesis: that the thought of Rudolf
could become, if accepted and fully realized, the mature fruition of Romantic
thought. This thesis is developed in the three representative passages
quoted below, all from
Romanticism Comes of Age:
For there is no doubt [for the Romantics]
about where the life in an invented or fictitious image comes from. There
can be no "pathetic fallacy" there,3
What is peculiar to the Romantic Movement--as, indeed, its very name recalls--is
the further reaction of this enthusiasm for fictitious and fabulous representations
on the phenomena--on Nature herself. This is also what took the Romantic
conception of art, properly understood, a step beyond the Neo-Platonic
theory. . . . The Neo-Platonic theory holds that man the artist is, in
some measure, a creator. The Romantic conception agrees--but goes further
and returns him, in this capacity, to Nature herself. (SA 129)
Twenty three years later, Barfield seemed less
optimistic that Romanticism had, in fact, grown up. In Saving the Appearances
he seems to have less faith that his prediction will come true: "The tremendous
impulse underlying the Romantic movement has never grown to maturity;"
he concedes there, "and after adolescence, the alternative to maturity
is puerility" (130-31).
A young man may be considered as fully come of
age only when he has discovered two things: firstly his identity and secondly
his vocation. . . . the young man called the Romantic Impulse appears to
have gone a long way . . . toward discovering his identity, but . . . I
see little sign as yet of his having discovered his vocation. (22)
To make Romanticism into a self-sufficient organic
being, able to stand on its own legs and face the rest of the world, there
ought to have been added to the new concept, beauty, the renewed conception
of freedom, a new idea also of the nature of truth. (28)
In the legend of Parsifal
tragic consequences follow the failure of the hero to ask the crucial question
at the crucial moment. The question he should have asked when he saw the
Holy Grail was "Of what is it served?" The same question should have been
asked by the Romantic Movement, when it saw the visionary Grail of the
human imagination. But it was not asked . . . except by Coleridge.
. . . And in the state of Romanticism, as it exists today, we see the tragic
consequences that followed. The charm faded. The mirror cracked from side
to side. Just as Coleridge, who had indeed had a vision of imagination
as the vessel by which the divinity passes down into humanity--just as
he fell back from this kind of imagination into the fantastic dreams of
the opium slave; so the metaphysic of Romanticism has gradually fallen
sick, lost faith in itself. Imagination is still accepted, but it is accepted
for the most part as a kind of conscious make-believe or personal masquerade.
|See in particular
What Coleridge Thought,
Comes of Age,
likewise editor of a volume--Coleridge's philosophical letters--in the
still-yet-to-be-published definitive edition of Coleridge's collected writings.
imagination, Barfield concedes, "represents "the emergence in the West
. . . of an experience which the East had cultivated for ages" (quoted
in BAR 18).
post-Romantic, Victorian-era term, coined to expose and condemn the tendency
to project human emotions into nature.