by Craig Bernthal<\/p>\n
Private Papers<\/i><\/p>\n
At the beginning of the 20th century, T. E. Hulme, in his great essay \u201cRomanticism v. Classicism\u201d defined Romanticism as \u201cspilt religion.\u201d It was religion unchanneled by any theology that acknowledged humanity\u2019s proclivity toward evil and its debilitating effects: warped perception and stupidity. Instead, what Romanticism at its worst offered was a perpetual pantheistic liberation of the human spirit that was supposed to end in an epiphany, the individual\u2019s identity with the cosmos at large. Hulme fingered \u201cLamartine, Hugo, part of Keats, Coleridge, Byron, Shelley, and Swinburne,\u201d as examples, but landed on Hugo as the model of spilt religion in this contrast between \u201cClassicism\u201d and \u201cRomanticism\u201d:<\/p>\n
What I mean by the classical in verse, then, is this. That even in the most imaginative flights there is always a holding back, a reservation. The classical poet never forgets this finiteness, this limit of man. He remembers always that he is mixed up with earth. He may jump, but he always returns back; he never flies away into the circumambient gas.<\/p>\n
You might say if you wished that the whole of the Romantic attitude seems to crystallize in verse round metaphors of flight. Hugo is always flying, flying, over abysses, flying up into the eternal gases. The word infinite in every other line.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
In short, Romanticism unhooked English literature from the concept of original sin, which according to G. K. Chesterton, \u201cis the only part of Christian theology which can really be proved.\u201d If challenged on the idea of original sin, I think Chesterton might have said with Joyce, behold history, the nightmare from which mankind is trying to awake. I do not go completely with Hulme about the Romantics. Like C. S. Lewis, I enjoy teaching and reading them, but Lewis also recognized that Romanticism was, in fact, spilt religion. He merely added that the water on the floor might be worth paying attention to. Lewis\u2019s point was that Romanticism expressed a real joy, which was a fundamental part of reality, and that joy was the one thing in life worth pursuing. Lewis\u2019s pursuit, however, was eventually guided by a religion which never lost sight of the inherent human tendency toward moral failure and political nightmare.<\/p>\n
Chesterton and Hulme (less so Lewis, who saw it coming) might be surprised that the spilt religion of Romanticism has mainly filled the vial of therapy, and that the therapeutic ideal has invaded every facet of western culture, even the churches. We\u2019ve been sold therapy as a kind of technologized Romanticism.<\/p>\n
A quick walk through Barnes and Noble or a glance at the iTunes bookstore reveals very quickly how publishing has been overwhelmed by therapeutic Romanticism. You don\u2019t have to go to the self-help or psychology sections to see it. Fiction is overwhelmed by it: tale after tale is tailor-made for Oprah\u2019s book club, as people free themselves from alcohol, drugs, abusive fathers, abusive husbands, abusive bosses, abusive religions, miserable little towns \u2014 all or any combination of the above. Oprah herself, of course, both keyed into this cultural wave and pushed it, making herself the media queen of therapeutic Romanticism and, happily, billions of dollars besides.<\/p>\n
A brief glace at Amazon.com\u2019s book section yields the following:<\/p>\n
On\u00a0The Descendants<\/em>, by Kaui Hart Hemmings, from\u00a0The New Yorker<\/em>:\u201cWhen a catamaran accident leaves his wife in a coma he [Matthew King] must wake from his own \u2018prolonged unconsciousness,\u2019 reacquaint himself with his neglected daughters, and track down his wife\u2019s lover. Meanwhile, his cousins are urging him to sell the family\u2019s vast landholdings for development \u2014 to relinquish, in his eyes, the final vestige of their native Hawaiian ancestry. Hemmings channels the voice of her befuddled middle-aged hero with virtuosity, as he teeters between acerbic and sentimental, scoffing at himself even as he grasps for redemption.\u201d<\/p>\n
On\u00a0The Year of Wonders<\/em>, by Geraldine Brooks: \u201cInspired by the actual town commemorated as Plague Village because of the events that transpired there in 1665-1666, Brooks tells her harrowing story from the perspective of 18-year-old Anna Frith, a widow with two young sons. Anna works as a maid for vicar Michael Mompellion and his gentle, selfless wife, Elinor, who has taught her to read. When bubonic plague arrives in the community, the vicar announces it as a scourge sent by God; obeying his command, the villagers voluntarily seal themselves off from the rest of the world. The vicar behaves nobly as he succors his dwindling flock, and his wife, aided by Anna, uses herbs to alleviate their pain. As deaths mount, however, grief and superstition evoke mob violence against ‘witches,’ and cults of self-flagellation and devil worship. With the facility of a prose artist, Brooks unflinchingly describes barbaric 17th-century customs and depicts the fabric of life in a poor rural area. If Anna’s existential questions about the role of religion and ethical behavior in a world governed by nature seem a bit too sophisticated for her time, Brooks keeps readers glued through starkly dramatic episodes and a haunting story of flawed, despairing human beings. This poignant and powerful account carries the pulsing beat of a sensitive imagination and the challenge of moral complexity. Forecast: Brooks should be a natural on talk shows . . . .\u201d The heroine, Anna Frith, finally liberates herself from male dominance, patriarchal religion, and backwards-European science, by fleeing to the freedom of 17th-century Islamic northern Africa, where she comes under the tutelage of an Arabian physician! Well, Viking knows what sells.<\/p>\n