Walking in high places

Michael Neve

• The Ferment of Knowledge: Studies in the Historiography of 18th-Century Science edited by G.S. Rousseau and R.S. Porter
  Cambridge, 500 pp, £25.00, November 1980, ISBN 0 521 22599 X
• Romanticism and the Forms of Ruin by Thomas McFarland
  Princeton, 432 pp, £24.60, February 1981, ISBN 0 691 06437 7
• Poetry realised in Nature: Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Early 19th-Century Science by Trevor Levere
  Cambridge, 271 pp, £22.50, October 1981, ISBN 0 521 23920 6
• Coleridge by Richard Holmes
  Oxford, 102 pp, £1.25, March 1982, ISBN 0 19 287591 4
• Young Charles Lamb 1775-1802 by Winifred Courtney
  Macmillan, 411 pp, £25.00, July 1982, ISBN 0 333 31534 0

It is time for a change, even in the small world of historical epithets. For ages, philosophers and historians have been haunted by intellectual tags, such as Was ist Aufklärung? There have been a number of distinguished replies to this question of what the Enlightenment consisted in, but its resilience has appeared to be connected to its unanswerability. Indeed, it seemed better practice not to answer it at all, but to leave it hanging, like some family motto for generations of baffled European intellectuals, an MCC tie for the wandering intelligentsia. Similar problems hold for Romanticism. It appears to be something to do with opposition to the Enlightenment, and to do with new emphases placed on individual experience and ‘the Self’. To do with walking in high places, with sudden, untranslatable visions, with the Infinite. The problems of the Enlightenment may be unanswerable, beyond certain remarks about secularism and the march of Reason, but the siting of Romanticism is no less difficult. It may be said that it’s to do with German idealist philosophy, with political art, with opposition to science: but the travelling, conference-attending party is suddenly lost in mist; the sun vanishes, the path is unclear. Perhaps Romanticism is to do with being lost?