In these early days of 2019, we resume our journey along the paths of English romanticism as the initiator of literary modernity, in a second and final part. There are figures belonging to it that cannot be ignored, and they are the ones we will deal with this time, in the shortest and most illustrative way possible.

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In the English romantics, as in other representatives of European romanticism, a taste for the indefinite and vague was awakened, which was expressed in a fascination for "the distant, magical, unknown, including the gloomy, the irrational, the funereal", as Umberto Eco indicates.

Percy Shelley, the attraction to remoteness and transcendence

Percy Bysshe Shelley, by Alfred Clint (1819) Source

He lived between 1792 and 1822. It was characterized by attitudes of political rebellion and anti-religious, and a marital and paternal life a little dissipated. He left England and lived in Switzerland when he joined Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin (known as Mary Shelley) and then in Italy, where he drowned during a storm at the age of 30. She wrote a literary work of great emotional intensity, which includes reflection texts such as Defense of Poetry, but mainly poems of extraordinary beauty, where "To the Lark", "Hymn to Intellectual Beauty", "Liberated Prometheus" (dramatic poem) and "Mont Blanc" stand out among many. We read in the first: "Hail to thee, blithe spirit! / Bird thou never wert-/ That from heaven or near it / Pourest thy full heart / In profuse strains of unpremeditated art", and in the second: "Spirit of Beauty, that dost consecrate / With thine own hues all thou dost shine upon / Of human thought or form,-where art thou gone? / Why dost thou pass away and leave our state, / This dim vast vale of tears, vacant and desolate?". In his dramatic poem, the myth of Chained Prometheus serves to express the longing for freedom and transcendence by picking up the rebellion of the Greek titan against Jupiter, who is presented as a despotic god, an enemy of man. Critic Abrams, in interpreting Shelley's poem, says that "man is the agent of his own fall, the tyrant of himself, his own avenger and his own potential redeemer.

In "Mont Blanc", an ode to the great mountain of the French Alps, Shelley establishes a certain analogy between the immensity and power of the mountain with the human mind and imagination. He recognizes the strength of the universe in that, its overwhelming presence, in the face of man's loneliness and precariousness. We reproduce his fifth (and last) stanza:

Mont Blanc. Photograph: Owen Franken/Corbis Source

Mont Blanc yet gleams on high:-the power is there,
The still and solemn power of many sights,
And many sounds, and much of life and death.
In the calm darkness of the moonless nights,
In the lone glare of day, the snows descend
Upon that Mountain; none beholds them there,
Nor when the flakes burn in the sinking sun,
Or the star-beams dart through them. Winds contend
Silently there, and heap the snow with breath
Rapid and strong, but silently! Its home
The voiceless lightning in these solitudes
Keeps innocently, and like vapour broods
Over the snow. The secret Strength of things
Which governs thought, and to the infinite dome
Of Heaven is as a law, inhabits thee!
And what were thou, and earth, and stars, and sea,
If to the human mind's imaginings
Silence and solitude were vacancy?

(You can read the complete poem in this link)

The English Romantics cultivated verse, as we have already seen, but also poetic and narrative prose. Narrative prose, particularly the novel, gained much ground with romanticism in general; one could almost say that in romanticism, the novel acquires the definitive thrust of modernity.

It is known that the term "romantic", around the seventeenth century, had in its meaning the meaning of "as in old novels", because of its allusion to romances or chivalry stories; that fictitious, chimerical, "unreal novels" character seems to be transferred to romanticism at the end of the eighteenth and beginning of the nineteenth century; it is the romantic as an aesthetic feeling of nature, related to the charm of a world sunk in the distance of time (the medieval) and to the unusual in daily life (the medieval); it is the romantic as an aesthetic feeling of nature, related to the charm of a world sunken in the distance of time (the medieval) and to the unusual in everyday life. Thus, the novelty takes root. For this reason, Echo points out: "the romantic man lives his own life like a novel, dragged by the force of feelings he cannot resist". The "beauty of the novel" will emerge, as this author notes.

Lord Byron, between narrative poem and adventure

Lord Byron in Albanian dress by Thomas Phillips (1835) Source

George Gordon Byron (1788-1824) was one of the few to achieve fame in his time. His physical attractiveness, his love affairs, his exile and his early death (at the age of 36) in the Greek War of Independence made him an emblematic romantic figure. From a very young age (1809) he undertook trips to Europe (Spain, Portugal, Albania, Turkey, etc.) and then in 1816 he left his country definitively, with stays in Switzerland, Italy and Greece. In Switzerland he befriended Percy and Mary Shelley and John Polidori, and it is said from their meetings that the narrative projects Frankenstein and The Vampire were conceived by the last two names. Byron is the author of a prolix work in which poems in verses, narrative poems in prose and dramatic poems are narrated. His experiences as a traveller and, of course, his libertine life had an important influence on his work. They can be highlighted: The pilgrimages of Childe Harold, The prisoner of Chillon, "The dream" (poem in verses), Manfredo (dramatic poem), Beppo, Mazeppa, Caín (dramatic poem) and Don Juan, inconclusive following his death.

Let's read a fragment of "El Sueño", a poem very representative of the romantic vision, which incorporates the dream as the central motif of literary creation:

Our life is twofold: Sleep hath its own world,
A boundary between the things misnamed
Death and existence: Sleep hath its own world,
And a wide realm of wild reality,
And dreams in their development have breath,
And tears, and tortures, and the touch of Joy;
They leave a weight upon our waking thoughts,
They take a weight from off our waking toils,
They do divide our being;[1] they become
A portion of ourselves as of our time,
And look like heralds of Eternity;

(You can read the whole poem by visiting the following link).

We cannot leave out the reference to an important text in Byron's work: *Don Juan. It is an extensive poem (a novel in verses for some) of satirical and ironic character, in which Byron recreates the legend of Don Juan, a character who had already appeared in the Spanish theater -Tirso de Molina- and French -Moliére- in the seventeenth century. Byron's Don Juan is a character who makes it possible to question the hypocrisy and norms of society, as well as to defend freedom and sensuality. Let's read a fragment from the beginning (in a prose version), where something of Byron's vision can be seen:

Cover page of a book edition Source

When John turned sixteen he was a tall, beautiful, a little feminine waiter perhaps, alive, strong, well-formed and arrogant; cheerful and unwrapped like a bird. How they saw him, except his mother, they looked at him already as you look at a man, but if one of them did. Doña Inés became angry and bit herself. lips nervous, scared to death, because the fact that John represented so graciously and so precociously the manhood, it turned out to be to be the most criminal thing in the world for her.
Among the many knowledge and friends of don Juan, all of them chosen for the prudence and careful devotion of their mother, there was a beautiful doña Julia, who was to call beautiful is mild justice. Her thousand charms were as natural to her as the scent is and the soft touch in the flowers, the salt in the Ocean, the whole of the beauty of Venus and the loving bow in the god Cupid. The color of ebony from his oriental eyes accredited the origin of the of his blood.
(…)
Doña Julia, of whom we will have much to talk about, she was beautiful, healthy, chaste. I counted twenty-three years old and was married. Her eyes were slanted and black, beautiful, but no but only a part of their fire. until she talked. Then, in spite of her sweet reserve, he let shine in his gazes one of the most pretty expression, rather arrogant than angry, which served to prove that love reigned. in that body and in that soul with the most decision than any other feeling. To such eyes you would surely see the desire if it were not because Doña Julia's will imposed on them silence with firmness. Her black hair is curled gracefully over a forehead whose sweetness had no equal, animated by the noble reflection of intelligence. The eyebrows formed a sweet curve, similar to the rainbow, low so pretty front; the cheeks, rosy with the incarnate of the youth and life, had sometimes as a a transparent aureole, as if a fire Suddenly and secretly circulates through his veins.

(You can read the full text at this link)

Mary Shelley, between a romantic gothic novel and science fiction

Portrait of Mary Shelley, by Richard Rothwell, 1840 Source

As we have noted, Mary Shelley (single Mary Godwin) is the author of Frankenstein or the modern Prometheus. A native of London, where she was born in 1797 and died in 1851, she made incursions into novels, dramaturgy, essays and biographies; she held political ideas and with respect to radical women, under the influence of her father and mother. From 1814 he had a love affair with the poet Percy Shelley, with whom he married in 1816. This year, while the couple were in Switzerland, during an evening at Byron's house, they devised the creation of the novel Frankenstein, which would be published in 1818.

Frankenstein is part of the tradition of the so-called "Gothic novel", whose conventional beginning is fixed in 1765 with The Castle of Otranto by Horace Walpole. This sub-genre of the considered terror narrative developed during the second half of the 18th and 19th centuries and, assumed by romanticism, was a mode of opposition to the prevailing rationalism. Its name derives from a renaissance of a taste for the Gothic, in other words, for the medieval, associated with castles and monasteries, to an iconography composed of cemeteries, ghosts, demons, vampires, etc.. In short, it is an aesthetic that vindicates the mournful and the funereal. As Eco says, "beauty can now be expressed by making opposites converge; so what is ugly is not denial, but the other side of beauty". And in this way we will reach the grotesque (but we'll leave that for when we talk about French romanticism).

Frontispiece to Mary Shelley, Frankenstein published in London 1831 Source

But also Frankenstein is somehow the initiator of science fiction. Let's remember her story: the young medical student Victor Frankenstein, obsessed with knowing the secrets of life, carries out an experiment in which he makes a creature of the union of parts of human corpses. This monster will take on a life of its own and commit various crimes as a way of expressing its hatred and revenge for the rejection of which it is the object. In an encounter with his creator, he manages to convince him that a companion believes him; Victor, who had agreed, destroys his new creation. The monster kills, among others, the fiancée of the young man, who decides to pursue him to finish with him, in this attempt, dies and the monster decides to end his own life.

We observe the conjunction of the elements of terror and science fiction, all within the framework of a vision touched by the romantic (his reference to the figure of Prometheus is no coincidence). In the introduction that Mary Shelley writes for the first edition we can read:

My imagination, unbidden, possessed and guided me, gifting the successive images
that arose in my mind with a vividness far beyond the usual bounds of reverie. […]
Swift as light and as cheering was the idea that broke in upon me. "I have found it!
What terrified me will terrify others; and I need only describe the spectre which had
haunted my midnight pillow." On the morrow I announced that I had thought of a
story. I began that day with the words, It was on a dreary night of November, making
only a transcript of the grim terrors of my waking dream.

(You can access the source of this text here)

And let's also read from the end of the novel, the image of that monster that romanticism "beautifies":

But it is true that I am a wretch. I have murdered the lovely and the helpless; I have strangled the innocent as they slept and grasped to death his throat who never injured me or any other living thing. I have devoted my creator, the select specimen of all that is worthy of love and admiration among men, to misery; I have pursued him even to that irremediable ruin. There he lies, white and cold in death. You hate me, but your abhorrence cannot equal that with which I regard myself. I look on the hands which executed the deed; I think on the heart in which the imagination of it was conceived and long for the moment when these hands will meet my eyes, when that imagination will haunt my thoughts no more.
(…)
Some years ago, when the images which this world affords first opened upon me, when I felt the cheering warmth of summer and heard the rustling of the leaves and the warbling of the birds, and these were all to me, I should have wept to die; now it is my only consolation. Polluted by crimes and torn by the bitterest remorse, where can I find rest but in death?

(You can go to the complete book by visiting the following link)

(There are numerous versions of Frankenstein's story taken to the theatre and cinema. Of the cinematographic versions it is highly recommended the one made by the English director Kenneth Branagh, in 1994, with Robert De Niro). Here's your trailer: