Stoicism and Romantic literature

English literature of the Romantic period offers remarkably widespread and sophisticated, albeit often submerged and coded, engagements with Stoicism. Such engagements were mediated by the English Romantics’ reading in eighteenth-century moral philosophy, and also determined their reception, particularly Wordsworth’s, in the Victorian period and beyond. For a philosophically minded Christian Romantic such as Samuel Taylor Coleridge the agency of Stoicism needed to be acknowledged in the ongoing, morally debilitating effects of the Enlightenment’s (indeed, the “radical Enlightenment’s”) materialism and atheism. Relatedly, Stoicism played a role in English political radicalism in the period, and especially in the various responses of English Romantic authors in the 1790s and beyond to the French Revolution. The influence is, of course, not confined to Britain – although the account here will be centered on the British scene. A keen (if unsystematic and plagiarizing) reader of

German idealism, Coleridge noted the role played by Stoicism in the philosophy of his German contemporaries Kant and Fichte (Coleridge 1983: I 159; see Hamilton 2007: 17-18). He also bemoaned what he understood to be a Stoic-inflected pantheism in the poetry of his friend William Wordsworth, in passages such as the epigraph from “Tintern Abbey”. Yet Coleridge also hoped, from about 1798 onward, that Wordsworth would prove capable of writing a long “philosophical poem” that would give new direction to those who, disappointed by the failure of the French Revolution, were sinking into what he described as “an almost epicurean selfishness, disguising the same under the soft titles of domestic attachment and contempt for visionary philosophes” (Coleridge 1956: 527). As critics are increasingly acknowledging, the “philosophical poem” that Wordsworth published in 1814 in response to Coleridge’s urging, The Excursion, is crucially marked by the ancient schools, especially Stoicism, both in form and content – something that Wordsworth’s most acute contemporary readers had already detected. This discussion will proceed by describing the ways in which the Romantics drew on their

eighteenth-century precursors in their political, literary, religious and philosophical engagements with Stoicism. It will argue that the relation between Stoicism and Romantic literature needs to be understood in the context of the development of ideas of the sympathetic imagination in moral philosophy, and of the contemporaneous rise of “literature” as a distinctive form of “imaginative writing” (Williams 1976: 186). More specifically, it will seek to read the influence of Stoicism on Romantic literature in the context of a concern for “character” that the new literary and philosophical writing shared. Across the eighteenth century, moral philosophers castigated the hard-heartedness of Stoicism as often as they defended its usefulness for ideas and practices of benevolence and sympathy. Describing moral prejudices associated with ancient philosophy, David Hume, for instance, accused Stoicism’s “grave Philosophic endeavour after Perfection” of striking “at all the most endearing Sentiments of the Heart” (Hume 1904: 573). Yet the broadly “literary” or imaginative appropriations of Stoicism found in Hume and others, as well as the uses made of Stoicism in the evolution of the idea of moral sense in Shaftesbury and Hutcheson, also opened up ways of thinking about Stoic doctrine that enabled the development of new ethical systems by key Romantic Stoics such as Wordsworth. Having plotted out this context, I will then go on to examine the ways in which attention to this moral-philosophical legacy enables a clearer view of the role played by Stoicism in English radical and reactionary discourse around the French Revolution. The so-called “English Jacobins” were sometimes seen, by their enemies, as advertising the “hardheartedness” and lack of domestic affection and patriotism that troubled earlier moral philosophers such as Hume in Stoic doctrine, while radicals such as John Thelwall defended their position in markedly Stoic, cosmopolitan terms. We will then focus on Wordsworth and Coleridge, where many of these cultural tensions are played out in fascinating ways. Through focusing on the example of this well-connected and influential pair, the aim here will also be to draw attention to the engagements of other contemporary writers with the Stoics, while remaining mindful of the ways in which Romantic literature plays a significant role in mediating the reception of Stoicism in modernity.