The Civilised Romantic

What is it about the word romantic that sends the British into terminal recoil? Recently the Romantic Novelists’ Association (RNA) polled its members for the most popular romance of all time: “Pride and Prejudice” won. I was out to dinner with 5 friends that day and mentioned it. Explosions!

“Jane Austen romantic?” they said, when they stopped harrumphing. “Ridiculous. She’s classical.” The Brontes, they conceded, were romantic. One felt they could do without the Brontes.

In one way, of course, they have a point. If we are talking about literary movements, you can make a decent case that Jane is the inheritor of Augustan Reason and Restraint, rather than fellow travelling with Weedyworth and Soppy Shelley - always burbling about winds and clouds and how they felt. But then again, you could also make a case that she’s a member of the same club as Byron and my dear Charles Lamb, also fully paid up members of the Romantic Club.

But of course the poll wasn’t asking people about literary movements. It was asking about love stories. “Pride and Prejudice” is indubitably a love story. Paradoxically, the impediment to true love is marriage – the young men know the terrible truth is that the Bennett sisters’ career options are strictly limited; they do have to find husbands. It gives Mr Darcy (and even, to a lesser extent, kind Mr Bingley) a high sense of his own worth. Mr Darcy lets it show. Elizabeth is bridling before they have been in each other’s company for half an hour and the reader doesn’t blame her. After that she is willing to believe anything bad about him. They both have lessons to learn – through justified offence, embarrassment, anger, rejection, longing until, finally, they recognise that they are each other’s equal and acknowledge it frankly. It is the classic romantic journey.

The Brontes are certainly different. They embrace the thunderous weather and landscapes of the Romantic poets; their plots are more melodramatic, their protagonists more extreme. Their heroines fling themselves into the high winds of passion and welcome the buffeting they get, which one could not say of any of Austen’s young ladies. But the end is the same: intimacy, recognition, equality. Here is Jane Eyre, less restrained and sophisticated than Elizabeth Bennett – Lizzie would never have admitted to being plain or obscure, one feels - but not so far in feeling:

"I tell you I must go!" I retorted, roused to something like passion. "Do you think I can stay to become nothing to you? Do you think I am an automaton?--a machine without feelings? and can bear to have my morsel of bread snatched from my lips, and my drop of living water dashed from my cup? Do you think, because I am poor, obscure, plain, and little, I am soulless and heartless? You think wrong!--I have as much soul as you,--and full as much heart! And if God had gifted me with some beauty and much wealth, I should have made it as hard for you to leave me, as it is now for me to leave you. I am not talking to you now through the medium of custom, conventionalities, nor even of mortal flesh;--it is my spirit that addresses your spirit; just as if both had passed through the grave, and we stood at God's feet, equal,--as we are!"
~ “Jane Eyre” by Charlotte Bronte, Chapter 23

This division remains a constant. Even today romantic fiction splits between that which accepts “the medium of custom, conventionalities” and that which rejects them utterly in favour of mad and, it must be admitted, sometimes humourless passion. But both sides are after the same thing – the marriage of true minds, mutual understanding, respect.

In the twenty-first century which does not readily respect anyone very much (and with good reason), that seems to me to be pretty civilised.