The Romantic Blessing and Menace

Friedrich Schlegel's Grave in Old Catholic Cemetery,

Dresden, Germany

Going to talk about the Sublime and Friedrich Schlegel. But first there's a question from Baxter: "Why go on and on about characters who lived their lives in the early days of the Industrial Revolution?"

It was a time of an aggressive confidence in the Western World. God might have again wondered at the point of it all and people, or some of them, thought they had more sensible answers. But the whole sentiment of "That which cannot be uttered, should not be uttered" which had impressed the Apostle Paul around 57 AD with his remarks in the Book of Romans, was coming alive. Paul had reckoned that only God could understand many of the incomprehensible moanings and groanings of the human mind, our job was to obey God and hang in there. There was Kant, a Saint of the Enlightenment who died in 1804, with his Transcendent Idealism which basically suggested there were some things we could have ideas about but could never prove or disprove, so worth keeping that in mind, but not to make too big a deal about them. There was the untutored Walking Stewart's "The philosopher must bow down to the microscope" and closer to our own time came Wittgenstein with his challenge to the logic of language that threatened to make Philosophy and philosophers redundant. If language wasn't rational, then What the hell!

In the 1700's and 1800's as a reaction to this aggressive confidence the sublime was embraced by the Romantics, and not just the daffodil and lonely cloud English Speaking Romantics. In Europe the German Romantics just didn't hold back, they jumped right in with a logic that put the pain, danger and fear into Burke's positioning of the word sublime in a symbolic order. 

The Burke in question was Edmund Burke, who died in 1797, when Thomas De Quincey was 12 years old. In an essay, Burke described his understanding of sublime this way: "Whatever is in any sort terrible, or is conversant about terrible objects, or operates in a manner analogous to terror." It wasn't up close and personal with terror, it was thinking about terror from a safe place. Sublime was one of the most powerful emotions a mind could feel, it produced a tension that "tightens the body's fibers and momentarily suspends rational thought." 

The "suspends rational thought" part of the reaction to terror from a safe place, is the subject of Burke's essay "A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful." Of coincidental interest to Burke's contribution to the meanings in Sublime are Schlegel's contribution to the word Irony. The word Irony, Schlegel suggested, humorous or otherwise, cast doubt on fact, influenced art and literature to the extent that everything remained unfinished. In the way Irony had a metaphysical affect on comprehension.

 Friedrich Schlegel's "Lucinde," published in 1799 is described as an "early work of German Romanticism." This book didn't sell well, instead it became what is called a Literary Milestone, people read it because they felt obliged to form an opinion on the book's fragmented structure and answers to just how scandalous Lucinde was. Inevitably it developed a cult following, it didn't have a recognized literary structure, and the lovers, Lucinde and Julius, engaged in shocking non-traditional expressions of equality through physical acts, Lucinde would sometimes be the man. The point for Schlegel in his search for the sublime was not only an equality, it was rehabilitation of the flesh which is an idea declaring the erotic a unity between sensual and physical love, and nothing wrong with it as the pursuit of an understanding of self which focused on the individual's right to define his or her own morality and no one else. 

Burke was a Whig of good standing, he was Protestant through and through, he liked the idea of limits to the power of kings, he believed in promoting the middle class through representation in Parliament, he liked the idea of securing property rights and he had no problem with a German Royal called George inheriting the thrown of England so long as George I wasn't Catholic.

Burke's essay on the Sublime and the Beautiful was a must read for Romantics. Burke put a value on prejudice, and being Burke when he used the word prejudice what he meant was tradition, inherited wisdom, and that sort of hard-scrabble wasteland. He was firmly on the side of ways of doing things that were established, rather than start all over again with purely abstract reasoning.

The German Romantics took the Sublime and the Beautiful to heart, and in the Romantic tradition, there were a number of German Idealists who produced scholarship that redefined the Medieval. This word Volk, or The People, the common folk, the Romantics argued were closer to the real in the Medieval Period than they were in the Europe the 1700's and 1800's. In his studies, a man called Johann Gottfried Herder had identified the Spirit of the People or Volksgeist. He'd decided that Language was an "organic embodiment of a peoples soul and way of thinking." The German Language, he argued, contained the essence of the German Volk.  Das deutsche Volk.

When Napoleon invaded the homeland of das deutsche Volk, a philosopher called Johann Gottlieb Fichte, in a series of addresses to the German patriots, having absorbed Herder's sense of the German Peoples cultural superiority, chose to remind the German Speaking Peoples that they're were the original Europeans, not like these bastard interloping French Speaking Peoples, and without any shadow of a doubt it was the German Destiny to control Europe not France. This was in 1808 when Thomas De Quincey was 21 years old

Friedrich Schlegel, the Romantic, had heard Herder and Fichte, he saw a domination of French Speaking Peoples as an abomination, he quickly became Anti-Napoleon. His Metaphysical Irony, his belief that nothing could ever be perfect, the spirit was free, collapsed. 

In 1808, the author of Lucinde moved to Austria, he found work as an Imperial Court Secretary in the service of the Austrian Empire where he wrote very exaggerated, rabble rousing proclamations against Napoleon and the French. Friedrich and his wife converted from Protestantism to Catholicism and he became a White Catholic Nationalist who believed in the destiny, the superiority and indeed the purity, of the German Speaking People.

The Sublime to the Practical, how uncomfortable was Thomas De Quincey

Elizabeth Penson. Thomas De Quincey's mother.

Miniature by Thomas Hazlehurst 1760-1818

It's difficult to get away from De Quincey's reactionary views on pretty much everything from the Peterloo Massacre to opposing the Abolitionist Movement. De Quincey didn't approve of slavery, he recognized it as a moral evil which had been around too long, he wouldn't have owned a slave himself, but much better for everyone if slave owners freed their own slaves rather than sending in the navy to sort out slave traders. De Quincey was a monarchist with little faith in the common folk. He thought British Imperialism an obvious solution to the world as it was and three years after his father died, his mother, the wife of a very successful textile merchant changed the surname to De Quincey. An association with Norman Royalty which her son Thomas learned to appreciate.

In his growing up De Quincey confronted a number of what some might call hurdles. His father died when he was seven, his older sister, who he "adored" died when he was six, and in 1796 his older brother who was like a hero to him died at fifteen years of age. His three surviving brothers and his surviving sister were normal, Thomas wasn't. He was what they call Intellectually Precocious, when he was eight he was fluent in Latin and Greek but he struggled with the shyness of Social Dyssynchrony, which is when a somewhat sickly person allows their intellect to isolate them from peers.

Say what you like about De Quincey's mum, she had the right idea taking her most difficult child out of King Edward's School in Bath and sending him to an inferior school in a small village called Wingfield in Wiltshire which was run by a strictly religious Vicar in the hopes of knocking the pompous social dyssynchrony out of him and by so doing giving him a chance to fit in.

In those days when the bread-winner croaked leaving large sums of money and business interests to the widow they used to have this whole guardian thing, which I think still happens. The Quincey family as it morphed into the De Quincey family was attended to and cared for by three guardians. The guardian put in charge of making the ultimate decisions for Thomas De Quincey's share of the inheritance was a man called Mr. Pringle. Put simply, Pringle was a religious nut who didn't approve of anything resembling joy. The shy and precocious, demonic, Thomas had problems with Mr. Pringle.

Safe to assume that Mr. Pringle's thinking on the subject of Elizabeth Quincey's son Thomas would run along the following lines: Brilliant but wayward, immensely vexing and difficult to manage, dangerously unsuitably for a stable career, fiscally irresponsible and incapable of handling his substantial inheritance. Mr. Pringle was a good Christian, I'm not blessed that way, but I can translate he nuances of decent language. What Pringle meant was this: Thomas was a real pain in the neck, he was needy and uncomfortable to be around, if he knocked on your door you'd hide in a cupboard rather than spend time with him.

When he was seventeen, young Thomas ran away from Manchester Grammar School, where he'd been sent to get him ready for The University of Oxford. He couldn't handle the life he was being forced to live any longer, he didn't want to go home to have to deal with his Guardian, a dogmatic, unimaginative man who was incapable of understanding genius. His battle now was food and shelter, hithertofore all that and luxuries had been provided for by his family. But that early morning in July of 1802 might not have been what we were all thinking. A brave man making a break for freedom, begin life anew!

Young Thomas had been in correspondence with his mother, a woman who understood genius and rather wished it hadn't fallen upon one of her children. She knew that Thomas had decided to runaway from his obligations to Mr. Pringle and the family. She hated the idea of it becoming a matter of public knowledge. She would have talked to Mr. Pringle about it. And she talked to Colonel Penson, her brother about it. Decisions were made. Conferences on the matter of what to do about Thomas were measured and very Christian, the  answer was to let him run wild for a bit, find out for himself, and Colonel Penson, rather than the Quincy estate would send him a Guinea a week. Which, Pardon my French, for a wayfarer, a homeless person, was a flecking Fortune. In today's money it would be about 200 dollars a week. 

At this point in my understanding of Thomas De Quincey, I find myself looking at a spoiled rotten, manipulative, self centered, little brat. And then I remember that when he ran from boarding school, he climbed out a window taking with him a bundle of possessions that included a collection of Greek Plays and a copy of Wordsworth's "Lyrical Ballads." 

The thing is, no matter what he took with him, he'd not be the only person to have run away from an English Boarding School. When Baxter was a bead in the eye of our heart, he and I made our run for it. We went missing at night, we had Leopards adrift on the slopes of Mount Elgon to worry about, and in a practical vein we took buttered bread from the school dinning room to feed upon. But with De Quincey I can be sure his pursuit of the sublime was a worship first enabled by the grant of one Guinea a week and the Laudanum he took for a tooth ache which he could afford to buy because of his uncle's money.

However, the title of his best selling, most memorable and lasting book "The Confessions of an English Opium-Eater" which the wide eyed and innocent can still get new, was his own brilliant practical work of marketing.

 

The White Bear and War Torn Revolutionary France

Pitt the Younger. 1759-1806

The Last Prime Minister of Great Britain and the first Prime Minister of The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland

You can't really talk about Thomas Paine or John Walking Stewart without coming across a Coaching Inn established in 1685 which was first called The Fleece and was later called The White Bear. The Inn was in a part of London England nowadays called Piccadilly.

In the 1790's Piccadilly was frightfully fashionable, relatively peaceful, in modern parlance it was a hub for the social, literary and political elite. It had posh grocery stores, and a gathering of highfalutin bookshops were people went to talk about stuff, and worth noting that in the 1790's the drinking of coffee was all the rage, with over 3000 coffee shops across England. And I have to say that I was very disappointed when I found out that around 1791-92 John Walking Stewart was a lodger at the White Bear.

It just shows how the wish factor that aligns your thinking can often hit hurdles and how easy it is to yell "Fake News" when your feelings are hurt. I should have guessed that something like that would happen to my attempts at balance. It should have been obvious! Walking Stewart had been a general for Hyder Ali, and after pissing off Hyder Ali he'd reacquainted himself with East India Company by becoming a member of the Nabob of Arcot's inner circle. Stewart had money aplenty for his walk from Madras to London. The so called threadbare Armenian private soldier's jacket he'd wear, he'd probably paid for. And indeed you have to ask whether John Walking Stewart had ever actually slept in a hedgerow or befriended a very young streetwalker like Ann who when De Quincey was on the run from his family had filled his dream time with confusion and pity. Later in his life a vision of her regularly visited him in the rush of his opium highs, poor chap.... 

Anyway, you might want to know what on earth a founding father was doing lodging with Walking Stewart at the White Bear in the fashionable Piccadilly of 1791-92. Go ahead, quarrel all you want, Paine may not have signed the bit of paper but he was a revolutionary intellectual and former disgraced English custom and excise officer whose words and writings shaped a nations 'Founding Ideals.' If the prissy fingered passionless Yankees with their attention to detail and ridiculously big army can't handle a Thomas Paine being a founding father, then f-em in the ear. 

In the 1790's The French Revolution was the talk of the town. From rural England it all looked very European, it was just one big war after another big war, but "Liberty, Equality, Fraternity" did appeal to a good few intellectual types in Piccadilly amongst whom lopping the head off a tyrannical yoke wasn't that big a problem if it was done "For the People and By the People." Perhaps not Walking Stewart's opinion, the only people he really trusted were the Laplanders

Thomas Paine had just written and published a book he'd called "Rights of Man" and lo, Pitt the Younger, Prime Minister of the British Islands and her colonies, Great Britain as it was called through the 1700's until 1800, had decided to start banning books and arresting authors who didn't really see a problem with radical changes like those French Revolutionaries were engaged in, and on this subject, Pitt the Younger, despite being a man who'd remained obedient to his doctor's advice to drink a bottle of port every day since he was 14, couldn't help but notice that Thomas Paine, a particularly incendiary rabblerouser who'd had great success in the Americas had written another book and was dolling around in Piccadilly as an unmarried male and probably drinking coffee. 

But it was because he was lodging at the White Bear in a very fashionable part of town, and not hiding in a hedgerow, Thomas Paine was warned by his friend the Poet, Painter and Madman William Blake just in time for a Founding Father to run away to France where he was already an elected representative and was receiving income as a deputy for the Pas-de-Calais region to the National Convention of France.

Paine missed his trial date for seditious libel, which had been set for December 18th 1792. The Magistrate declared him guilty, he was convicted of being an Outlaw, no better than a Highwayman, new warrants were issued for his arrest and on January 15th 1793, Thomas Paine, fulfilling his obligations as citizen of the world who represented the Pas-de-Calais region of France, was called to speak to the French National Convention on the subject of Executing Louis XVI (the sixteenth), husband of Marie Antoinette and King of France.

Thomas was of the opinion that the Republic shouldn't execute Louis, instead they should exile him. Thomas' reasons were like this: First of all, Louis wasn't all bad, if it hadn't been for Louis supporting the Americans in their war of independence from the British there would be no Constitution of the United States. Second of all he argued against the Death Penalty by suggesting it was a barbaric method of punishment favored by Monarchy and the French Republic shouldn't stoop to the level of monarchs. And thirdly, there was no point in turning Louis and his dumb-ass family into martyrs for the Royalists Cause. Thomas Paine voted against executing Louis, and for his trouble he was arrested and jailed during Robespierre and the journalist Marat's rule by fear. This was the period of French history referred to as the Reign of Terror. Thomas, a very brave man in defense of his beliefs, was lucky not to have been executed himself.

Interestingly, for those who in our difficult time may have a fever for karma, Marat, the journalist and ideas man, was stabbed to death in a bath by a supporter of the Moderate Girondin faction, a striking woman called Charlotte Corday, sometime in the year of 1793.  And  then a badly wounded Robespierre, who was the progeny of a lawyer marrying a brewer's daughter, was dutifully and formally executed for counter revolutionary activities in the July of 1794.

Vive La Belle France was by 1799 yearning for a Napoleon to tell his Grenadiers to fix bayonets. 

The Outsider In Walking Stewart

Woodland for the trees

We can't just toss the word untutored around and then accuse people of accusing other people of being untutored, and of course back then at the turn of the 18th Century, with the world rapidly reconfiguring there was sickness, disease and poxes aplenty, being untutored was often the least of your disfigurements.

So let's look at it.

Thomas De Quincey mentioned John Walking Stewart in three essays. All three essays were published after Walking Stewart was dead. For De Quincey, Stewart was all of the following: He was a "sublime visionary." He was a "Lion of London," an eccentric character who could be seen everywhere. He was the most eloquent man on the subject of nature the world had ever seen. He was a "Man of genius but not of talents."

De Quincey might have measured Stewart with a degree or two of envy, leading him to make sure everyone knew the Walking Stewart in the white hat was limited. Stewart's genius, De Quincey suggested, was wanting an organ through which to manifest itself. Stewart's ideas were crude, they were imperfect, obscure, ill-disciplined and half developed. They were not producible to a popular audience and they were poorly written. 

No matter what De Quincy, a nervous little man with a crush on Wordsworth, had to say about this and that, The Romantics thought Walking Stewart wonderful. This whole, untrained, untutored stuff was gold, it was Rousseauian poetry in a world that was slowly filling up with untethered throngs, homeless urchins, horrible smells, smoke and  things made of iron. They loved Stewart's rock star qualities, the naturalness of his eloquence on the universality of sentience, a mixture of Hindu, Buddhism, strands of the French Materialism of the 1700's that declared religion an inadequate source for an enlightened metaphysics, matter was all and everything. Schopenhauer, Henri Bergson and Alfred Whitehead were all well tutored minds we've looked at.

In most ways John Walking Stewart was an outsider as much as he was untutored. He was an expression unto himself. His companion in later life was a Miss Wilson and he must have been hell to live with. The lesson to learn from him is an insight into how we achieve understanding. For De Quincey, his book The Confessions of an English Opium-Eater is an account of his unending struggle with ghosts and with exploring himself. John Walking Stewart didn't have that trouble, he was a blockhead, he didn't need to belong, he remained an outsider, he made his own pattern of thinking.

So yes, our man was untutored!