Photo: William Wordsworth
Jacob Risinger, assistant professor of English at Ohio State University, has written a truly extraordinary book. The accepted worldview is that stoicism and romanticism mix like water and oil. Risinger shows that like a finely brewed cup of Earl Grey tea – water hot, but not boiled, so that it becomes infused with the oil of bergamot – they are in fact inseparable. (this analogy does not appear in the book)
The period of Romanticism is the early 19th century, but what happened just before that is the key to understanding what happened to Stoicism. As the author states, “What Robespierre called ‘the sublime sect of the Stoics’ was so fully identified with the revolution in France that many writers resisted public acknowledgment of their own fascination with Stoicism. This strategic silence meant that it often dropped out of the main current of literary history of the period.” In essence, the reaction against the horrors of the revolution was so profound no self-respecting writer wanted to be associated with it and its Stoic idealism. But it lived on in a coded form that Risinger translates for us; sort of like a 19th century version of Bletchley Park, in which Risinger reveals the enigma at the heart of Romanticism. “The rumours surrounding the demise of Stoicism,” he states, “are greatly exaggerated.”
In its original Roman incarnation, “Stoicism was a threefold philosophy, a systematic view of the universe in which ethics, physics, and logic intertwined to make the individual a relatively insignificant part of a large cosmological whole. Most Romantic readers approached Stoicism by way of its ethics.” The ancient role models were Epictetus, Seneca, and the great Emperor Marcus Aurelius.
There is a subtext here that Risinger does not explore, and perhaps did not even realise. Sublimity is mentioned first on page 16 and again on 55, where we see Edmund Burke (the first supreme sage who railed against the French Revolution) praising Adam Smith on his 1759 book Theory of Moral Sentiments. Risinger says Burke particularly lauded Smith for his “sublime style.” In Burke’s own words, for “that fine picture of the Stoic Philosophy which is dressed out in all the grandeur and pomp that becomes that magnificent delusion.” While it might seem paradoxical, I believe an animating principal of this study is an expression of the sublime. There is, however, no index entry for sublimity.
What Risinger does do is finally give “full justice to its [Stoicism’s] radical and poetic significance.” This becomes evident in his close study of both Wordsworth and Coleridge, who “spent more time contemplating the history and efficacy of Stoicism than almost any other writer of the period.”
My headline comes from the pen of the scholar Michael Cooke, who is quoted on page 59, the opening chapter on Wordsworth. Cooke wrote that Stoicism “posed a threat to romantic poetry, and to the romantic spirit itself.” Risinger takes a fresh look at Wordsworth’s 1814 poem The Excursion. He says the “critical desire to read the poem as a future-oriented idea of change has obscured its retrospective orientation. At almost every turn, Wordsworth’s various avatars in The Excursion pause to interrogate the moral significance of emotion, often entertaining a Stoic perspective.” Our author divines that Wordsworth, for good or ill, was the inheritor of an “impasse in eighteenth-century moral philosophy,” one of which both he and William Godwin attempted to “reconcile Stoicism with everyday life.” This prompted “a turn back to eighteenth-century moralists like Shaftesbury and Adam Smith, both of whom approached Stoicism as integral to sociability and broad justice.”
On the two men mentioned in the previous passage: For Godwin, Stoicism “signifies not the absence of passion but its perfection.” Shaftesbury enthusiastically embraced Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius. For him, “Stoicism was a private or even covert form of self-practice that was integral to the sentimental work of civic transformation.” Wordsworth wrote in 1815 that Shaftesbury was an author “at present unjustly depreciated.” The frontispiece of Shaftesbury’s 1727 book Characteristicks of Man, includes a passage from Marcus Aurelius (Emperor of the Roman Empire from 161-180 CE): “All depends on your opinions: These are in your power.”
For Shaftesbury and his Stoic precursors, writes Risinger, “the introspective work of rectifying the opinions inherent in emotion necessitated an internalized discourse.” This practice is the central node of Stoicism, and this aspect of Shaftesbury’s philosophy “would figure prominently in Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments and become a resonant subtext for Coleridge’s conversation poems.”
So, in this brief review of a very rich book, we come to Coleridge. “He never set aside his ambivalent fascination with Stoicism,” writes Risinger. In his work Dejection: An Ode, Coleridge “set both the possibility of Stoicism as well as the cost of its habitual extremity at the heart of his own poetic existence.” This also gets to the heart of the book under review, where we are admonished to suspend our belief “in the influential but often misleading self-mythology that Coleridge vouchsafed to his critics.” Not an easy thing to do. This book is only for the bravehearted!
Coleridge describes Stoicism as the best solution to what he called “the true problem of all true philosophy.” Namely to take “virtue as a precept in order to render it a nature.” But Coleridge exhibited a split impulse towards Stoicism. “For Coleridge, the Stoics erred in adopting nature as an ethical ideal without accounting for their own share in its imperfection.” For Marcus Aurelius and Epictetus, “emotions were not ‘animal urges’ or nonrational instincts, but evaluative judgments – choices or opinions about how to view the world. For Coleridge, this cognitive conception of the passions idolized a false, foolishly unrealistic nature.”
Risinger goes on to explore Stoicism in the works of Byron, Shelley and Ralph Waldo Emerson with an equally insightful eye. I cannot recommend this book more highly. While it will mostly appeal to those interested in Romanticism and Stoicism, it needs to be read more widely so that Risinger’s refined arguments are broadly adopted in studies of the late 18th and early 19th centuries.
Image: Wordsworth, age 28, in 1798. Image in the public domain.
Stoic Romanticism and the Ethics of Emotion is by Princeton University Press. It lists for $37.