Losing their heads
Linda Kelly
ROMANTIC AFFINITIES: PORTRAITS FROM AN AGE, 1780-1830 by Rupert Christiansen Bodley Head, .06 This book is not so much a history of the romantic movement though it could well take the place of one — as a series of interlinking portraits of its leading figures. Its opening scene is in the prison of Saint Lazare where in July 1792, on a thin strip of brown paper used for tying laundry, the poet Andre Chenier wrote his final lines, clear-eyed in their expectation of his im- pending death: Toi, vertu, pleure si je meure. He went to the scaffold the next day, to be followed only two days later by Robespierre, whose own brand of virtue reinforced by terror had proved too much for human endurance.
Andre Chenier acted out in his own life the tragic dilemma of all those who had greeted the Revolution as the dawn of liberty and had seen their ideals founder in bloodshed. In the years that followed, the French Revolution and the unsolved ques- tions it posed would be, as Shelley wrote to Byron, 'the master theme of the epoch'. Wordsworth before he retreated into con- servatism, Coleridge before the fumes of opium took over, were passionately con- cerned with the political and social prob- lems of the day. For every hour of thought he gave to poetry, Wordsworth once said, he gave 12 to 'the conditions and prospects of society'.
It was a strange contradiction that even when most urgently involved in public issues the romantic poet was popularly seen as an outsider, at odds with society and himself. The theme of alienation, leading to 'despondency and madness' was a powerful one, seen sometimes in real life as in the case of Kleist and Chatterton, and sometimes still more potently in fiction. Goethe's The Sorrows of Young Werther swept Europe and inspired a spate of suicides in its wake. Equally outsiders, as Mr Christiansen points out in a fascinating chapter, were the women who sought a destiny beyond their home and family. The French Revolution brought forward a handful of outstanding women. Madame Roland wrote her memoirs which he de- scribes as 'perhaps the prose masterwork of the first revolutionary years' in the shadow of the guillotine and left them, inevitably, unfinished. Madame de Stael survived to astound Europe with her novels and love affairs, and in her ground- breaking De l'Allemagne to draw the litera- ture of Germany into the mainstream of European thought.
Romantic Affinities covers a span of 50 years, ending in 1830 with the triumph of French romantic theatre in Hernani and the establishment of Louis Philippe and bourgeois rule in France. Mr Christiansen is steeped in the atmosphere of the period. He conveys the excitement of great events, sometimes by drawing 20th-century analo- gies. He compares the shock of Byron's death, for instance, to that of Kennedy's assassination, or Kean's arrival on the London stage to Marlon Brando's first appearance on the screen. He has an eye for the telling detail which brings a charac- ter or situation to life, Coleridge jumping over the gate on his first visit to the Wordsworths, his small son Hartley's anguished response to his father's relent-- less pyschological probing: 'Don't ask me any more questions, Papa! I can't bear it!' His portraits are vivid, moving, sometimes funny; together they create a kaleidoscopic picture of an age which to those who lived through it must have seemed every bit as fragmented and confusing as our own.
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