Download Romanticism Comes of Age fb2

A profound and important book that gains in importance and gravity as time passes.

This provides an excellent bridge between the early work and his 1957 Saving the Appearances.

Interesting for those interested in Barfield's interest in Steiner.

Romanticism Comes of Age was a very personal collection of essays for Owen Barfield, most originally directed to fellow Anthroposophists, an audience with whom he felt familiar and comfortable. Several of those essays were originally delivered in person. Also, in roughly three-quarters of these essays, Barfield covered ground and explicated what was dear and close to him: literature, specifically English literature. Shakespeare, Blake, Coleridge, and others comprise Barfield's materials. His self-professed specialty and special joy was English Romantic literature.

These essays are personal in another way. In the introduction to the 1966 edition -- of which this new Barfield Press edition is a reprint -- he answers the question, "What is my debt to Rudolf Steiner, and how did that come about?" In that introduction, he describes his own reading of Romantic literature, his contemporaneous introduction to Rudolf Steiner's work, the movement Steiner founded called Anthroposophy, and Barfield's discovery that anthroposophy was "nothing less than Romanticism grown up" (14).

This 1966 edition is an expansion -- and contraction -- of the original 1944 edition: several essays were removed, and the last five essays added. Almost exactly coincident with the chronological and editorial break is a shift in focus, from heavily literary to distinctly philosophical, separating the last four essays from the preceding ones. Those preceding essays take Romantic literature as the subject of analysis, together with some ideas from Romantic theory suggested by the Romantics themselves. These show that indeed those Romantics' insights were not carried further since their time -- until Rudolf Steiner's work, and Barfield's own studies expressed in Barfield's book Poetic Diction: A Study of Meaning, published in 1927.

So what was it that constituted the maturity of Romanticism? Barfield argued that the Romantics brought forward human imagination as a worthy and trustworthy organ of perception of reality, expressed most directly in the appreciation of nature. What the original Romantics did not and maybe could not work out in detail was just how imagination was true.

To make Romanticism into a self-sufficient organic being, able to stand on its own legs and face the rest of the world, there ought to have been added to the new concept, beauty, to the renewed conception of freedom, a new idea also of the nature of truth.... The point is that no satisfactory critique of Romance ever arose. (28)

In that essay, "From East to West," as an answer to the lack of critique of Romance, Barfield stated that his purpose was" to introduce you to this very thing, anthroposophy" (38).

Some who are interested in Romantic literature may not at all be interested in a critique of Romance. Maybe even fewer of those are interested in a new idea of the truth; but that was Barfield's concern. He claimed that imagination apprehended truth -- apprehended nature -- as well as did the senses, as well as did reason. Further, Barfield claimed that anthroposophy advanced the practice and theory of imagination to the level of science: that is, to the level of a mature epistemology.

In Romanticism Comes of Age, Barfield attempted to take his readers from here:

Imagination is still accepted, but it is accepted for the most part, as a kind of conscious make-believe or personal masquerade. (29)

to here:

The thinking on which our experience of nature depends, really is in -- objectively in -- nature -- and is not a kind of searchlight-beam proceeding from a magic-lantern in the human skull.... (227-228)

Through these essays, to argue his point, Barfield studied language very closely: its history, the mechanisms of change (contraction and expansion of meaning), specific structures (metaphor and myth), and what all this implied about human consciousness.

One interesting consequence of Barfield's beliefs and intentions is that he takes his subjects -- the Romantic poets and their work -- so seriously. He assumes, unless arguing it specifically, that William Blake, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, William Butler Yeats, Wolfgang von Goethe, were all serious thinkers whose poetry expressed that serious thinking, especially regarding the truth of the imagination. Barfield goes further and says,

People can no longer say, with Keats, "I am certain of the truth of the imagination." No. They must know in what way imagination is true! Otherwise they cannot feel its truth. (100)

I think that impulse to know in what way imagination is true is still very much alive. We are struggling against the belief that imagination is a personal masquerade, an "entirely inner, subjective activity" (101). Although we are still "apt to distinguish sharply between our consciousness of nature and nature herself ... such a distinction is not wholly valid" (238). What Barfield pointed out, in the course of his essays, was the degree of falseness of that distinction, where to observe the typical spots or moments of distinction, and how to understand them rightly. In light of Barfield's work, to argue for the (absolute) contingent nature of meaning, of the contingent nature of authorial intention, of the centrality of convention, are all symptoms of a refusal to grow up, to unfold the potential of romanticism from adolescence into the agility and strength and stamina of young adulthood, and then beyond to the experience of a wise and humble middle age.