Redefining Balance: Revised Perspectives of Romantic Idealism for the Modern World
William Wordsworth
Where there prevails uncertainty and tension, as our globe is experiencing amid the Covid 19 pandemic of 2020, individuals begin to look inward more than ever before. They ask questions in relation to how well they are living their lives, how they are managing extreme stress and difficulty, and whether or not they have been able to find relative peace. The natural direction of these questions may lead to the topic of balance and an ideal set of expectations to aim for; in mind, heart, the practice of life, and in relation to one’s circumstances. This paper is a detailed discussion of several relevant thinkers in the Romantic Period of literature, as well as those who influenced and were influenced by such thinkers, and will serve as the basis in which the question of balance and the ideal is examined. The purpose of the analysis is to ask whether balance, in the way it has historically been understood, is an ideal that can be fully achieved and held onto, or whether it is necessary to reach for a new definition and discover a revitalized way of perceiving and pursuing harmony in today’s modern world.
There is an ebb and flow governing this life. Seasons shift and a perpetual fluctuating system ties each unique element together; a coming and going, a death and rebirth of all things. One can see this in action by observing the natural world. It's in the shape of a flower, with perfect petals and attractive blooms born each spring out of foliage from the previous season. It is in the death of a tree whose decomposition allows new mushrooms to grow. Balance, as it has been understood, is the state in which a middle road is carved out between two extremes. In all walks of life, throughout history, a sense of equilibrium is ever present if one looks closely enough, but is not always completely attainable. Siddhartha pursued it in his search for Nirvana. Aristotle looked for it through the lense of justice and virtue, claiming that happiness is found when we seek to exist at the centre of life’s dualities; the particular versus universal laws, the group versus the individual, and relative goodness versus relative utility. In 1580, Michel de Montaigne published the first edition of his collection of Essays in which he mused on what he noticed, experienced, and felt in everyday life. In his essay on Sadness, Montaigne writes that “For pleasures to be tasted and then digested they must remain moderate” (10), exemplifying a sympathy for principles of balance and humility. Jean-Jacques Rousseau examined the same topic in Reveries of the Solitary Walker, published in 1782, where he dove inward in hopes of enlightening himself. As a result, he discovered many challenging and thought provoking aspects concerning the nature of humanity and the state of the world in which we live. In the Third Walk Rousseau explains that “[He] knew as [he] meditated on these matters, that human understanding… could not fully comprehend them. [He] therefore limited [himself] to what was within [his] grasp and did not tackle what was beyond it” (31). As he roamed, Rousseau came to understand that though we may fully attempt to reach an understanding of the incredible joys and tragedies in life, and while moments of clarity may reach us, these moments are ephemeral as we are incapable of fully grasping and keeping whatever balance we seek. Then, as the Industrial Revolution erupted and countrymen and women were removed in troves, by choice or by force, from their country lives into factories and cities, whatever semblance of perceived balance existed among them was thwarted by industry, modern society, and the blind progress of technology. There were those, however, who resisted. Poets, painters, artisans, philosophers, and all who “acquired a greater readiness and power in expressing what he thinks and feels” (Wordsworth 104) rose up to write in the image of man and nature, and to document those instances of great passion within the push toward a world filled with reason. Many writers, including Mary Wollstonecraft, set out to capture changes and upheavals in society and document them so as to be both pleasing to the public and to unleash an open lens upon the world. While most fell into a sensationalist and gothic medium, where images, plays, stories, and poetry were written with a focus on gore, ghosts, and ghouls, understandably capturing traumatic elements of people’s lives, there were those, including William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, who attempted to fall away from the extreme, and appropriate a sense of equilibrium between the chaos of the modern and warn torn society, and the tranquil levity of an English Countryside. Thus began the Romantic Age and the setting of a precedent for the pursuit and sustainability of balance through ideal principles, which would ultimately fall apart. Coming out of such Romantic ideals, other writers, including Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, and William Butler Yeats, managed to recognize that the Romantic way of achieving balance is remarkable and worthy, yet unsustainable. While it starts with a powerful force that calls for introspection, observation, and a dream, it fails to grasp that chaos and disruption will always upset whatever calm one believes to have captured, forcing a repeated reset of our pursuit for a grand symmetry. The action one must take then, is that of seeing the world through the lens of a Romantic Idealist, while recognizing and anticipating eventual chaos and thus developing a new definition for balance that can be realistically achieved. A framework must be devised where we can observe the beauty of life, seek to live modestly between the two great poles that govern the scale of balance, and anticipate a fluxation toward one end and the other at any given moment. A revised definition of balance must include the existence of a continual flow state, rather than an attempt to capture and keep a balanced life that will inevitably be thrown asunder, making it altogether completely unattainable, and thus, via disappointment, leading to disillusionment and depression.
To understand what the Romantic Ideal idealized, one must first imagine life prior to the Industrial and French Revolutions, before the fall of the Bastille and the execution of the French King and Queen, before the disillusionment of English revolutionaries with the French Revolution itself, and the counter revolutionary alarm England invoked upon her people. Prior to 1760, pastoral communities in England, self-sufficient with home and community agriculture, were places where one worked hard, contributed, and built a decent life. Families had basic domesticated animals, small plots of land, and an openness between neighbours. Forest paths meandered through grassy groves and along flowered banks of moving water where row boats drifted and young children fished and swam under the delicate sky. This idyllic description was certainly the childhood of many Romantic-era writers who used it as a backdrop in describing the balance one should achieve amid a shattered world, yet before they could use it as a set for their ideal it must first be taken away. In 1765, when James Watt perfected the steam engine, England saw the pastoral way of life slowly end with the dawn of the Industrial age. Factories and businesses for manufacturing erupted while governments began the process of enclosure in the countryside. What used to be simple homes, with community based processes for farming where one could roam freely, turned into enclosed sections of land belonging to an industrial company or wealthy landowner who produced large quantities of one crop. As a reaction to large populations moving into cities with no time or space to grow their own food, the process of enclosure was certainly necessary in order to feed the wave of labourers joining the industrial overhaul. The result, however, was the end of one way of life and the beginning of another with a new class of citizen. Calling for their own voice in government, which was slow to come, young English men and women expanded their small town ideals into cities in England and abroad. As a result, their ideas of life and liberty began to change in ways that would influence an entire era of thinkers.
In France, after the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the fall of the Bastille, along with continuous economic cycles of inflation and depression, and foreign revolutionary ideology penetrating the collective consciousness of the people, threats toward the social structure resulted in the beginning of the French Revolution. English liberals and radicals, as a result of the shifting balance and creation of a new class of workers in England, unsatisfied with their own government, fell in line with French Revolutionary ideals and crossed the English Channel. The incredible imbalance in both France and England, caused in part by the end of an idyllically equitable pastoral lifestyle and the eruption of a new industrial based economy, caused considerable unrest. While the move toward industrialization may have been a reasonable one for the growth of economies and progression into modern societies, the laissez faire attitude of the government's attempt to “let it be” left many forced out of their homes, abandoning small agricultural communities, only to find underpaid, overtaxed, work. Many felt abandoned by their government. The imbalance and tumultuous snapshot of chaos, perhaps in part, sewed a sense of disillusionment with the status quo, setting the first stones for a path leading to what would come to be known as the Romantic Period.
Mary Wollstoncraft, who arguably sewed somes of the first seeds for the ideas governing the Romantics, discovered, at the age of nineteen as a companion to a widow living in Bath, the opulence and entitlement of the English upper class. This, along with her strong female friendship and aberration toward her abusive father, may arguably have led her toward revolutionary ideologies and the rights and freedoms of men and women. After starting and failing to uphold a girl’s school just outside of London at Newington Green, Wollstoncraft wrote her first book Thoughts on the Education of Daughters. She continued to write and publish several books throughout her lifetime, including novels, stories for children, and book reviews. When Edmund Burke wrote Reflections on the Revolution in France, where he attacked the French Revolution and its English sympathizers, Wollstoncraft quickly responded with A Vindication of the Rights of Men, calling for a more balanced ideology than that which Burke had provided. She exclaimed while referring to those who suffered greatly in the wake of the Industrial Revolution that “They have a right to more comfort than they ar present enjoy; and more comfort might be afforded them, without encroaching on the pleasures of the rich”(Wollstonecraft 160). This passionate and powerful sentiment gave a voice to those suffering in the English lower classes, calling for the opportunity to reach a balance between the classes. She criticized Burke’s motives in his own writing and congratulated and called to action all those disenfranchised by their government, and the imbalanced way of life that erupted as a result of the forced move from Pastoral to Industrial life. Wollstoncraft’s plea would have been heard by a great many writers and poets, leaving a lasting effect and sparking their own search for a more balanced way of life. One of these individuals would have been William Wordsworth.
Born in 1770 in England’s Lake District, William Wordsworth spent his time, after his mother died and was sent to school at Hawkshead, wandering about the countryside. When not in school, he roamed freely drinking in the natural sights and sounds where he came to know the country people and forested hills and paths sculpting his memory at every turn. Later, Wordsworth would attend college at Cambridge University, travel on foot through France and the Alps, visit London, then return to France where he would fall in love with Annette Vallon and become an ardent, and idyllistic supporter of the French Revolution. Perhaps his sheltered, if orphaned, childhood meandering through fields of grass, gazing at wandering clouds, contemplating a flower, and knowing the simple life of country people, adhering to the natural waves of the land, instilled in Wordsworth a sense of balance he believed the world should aspire to. Wordsworth would have known of the troubles in his country and experienced the French revolution first hand, which would lead him to join English revolutionary sympathizers and aid in the renewal of society. Over time, however, as the Jacobins took more power over the Revolutionary forces, and one Royal Regime would be replaced by another in the form of Napoleon, extreme violence led to Wordsworth’s disillusionment with whole affair. He had gone from idyllistic supporter of a new way of life, to the realization that chaos was inevitable — regardless the intentions. In The Prelude, a compilation of poems unknown to the public until after his death, Wordsworth describes in the tenth book, “A conflict of sensations without name” (290). He continued to poetically document the Revolution after the French King and Queen had been cast out of Versailles. Yet, the conflict between England and France, the Reign of Terror, and his own sleepless nights where “Through months, through years, long after the last beat/ of those atrocities, the hour of sleep/ To [him] came rarely charged with natural gifts” (373). It is clear that Wordsworth began to struggle with the reality of an erupted chaos taking the place of a revolution toward a more balanced and equal society. He began to break down. However, reconnecting with his sister Dorothy, and finding great friendship in Samuel Taylor Coleridge, brought Wordsworth into a place where the ideal consumed him and his form of revolution came about.
In 1795, Wordsworth and Dorothy moved to Racedown, Dorsetshire where Samuel Taylor Coleridge sauntered down the road and into their lives. Together the two men along with Dorothy’s abiding encouragement and love, devised a poetic revolution intended as an experiment in language and structure, that would challenge the form of society and shift writers, poets, artists, and every day individuals, into the Romantic Age. Lyrical Ballads, published in 1798, was the result of Coleridge and Wordsworth compiling ideas about the political climate in France as well as England,who had feared threats to British Liberty and tightened up borders, imposing regulations on the people, and pushed for a resurgence of the special values of the English Family and the English way of life. With the population at this time divided between the wealthy capitals and the labouring poor, great tensions developed throughout England. Wordsworth and Coleridge spent many days and weeks walking about the countryside developing a continued distaste for the revolution and the “exceedingly hard times for country people when the suffering caused by the displacement of small farms and of household crafts by large-scale farms and industries aggravated by the economic distress caused by… wars” (Stillinger, et al. 390). They both observed thieves and beggars, disintegrating war veterans, ousted farm families, fugitives, and abandoned women being left to wander without aid, which culminated in the mutual desire to collaborate on Lyrical Ballads. Their intent, as Wordsworth would later clearly point out in the Preface of the second printing, was to demonstrate the powers of an individual's feelings and ideas in a state of pure excitement. They sought, using the ballad form, simple language, and everyday themes and observations, to use poetry as a weapon against the extravagant joy and frantic gruesome mania produced by other writers at the time. The ballads preached a balance between city and country, and provided a plausible way for one to maintain the equilibrium between the tumultuousness and chaos in life and the simplicity of nature. Through imagination, reflection, and observation, Wordsworth argued in the Preface that one could capture the inconsistencies in life, learn to understand the pain and suffering of others, use the past to inform the future, and observe beauty and aesthetics to obtain perfect balance in a world filled with madness and uncertainty. The writing not only described the world at the time, but also provided a backdrop within which individuals could learn to seek out the place between reason and passion. It projected Wordsworth, Coleridge, and other writers into the realm of the Romantic Ideal where if we could only maintain this peaceful understanding of the complexities of the world, we might achieve a state of greater balance between nature and society. In The Ruined Cottage, written in 1797 and published in 1814, Wordsworth describes “...an aged Man,/Alone, and stretched upon the cottage bench;/… With instantaneous joy [he] recognized/ That pride of nature and of lowly life,/… a friend/ As dear to me as the setting sun” (289). It is not unlikely that Wordsworth might have considered this aged man as a representation of his own prospective character farther on in life; certainly a romantically appealing vision. In spite of their intentions, however, both Wordsworth and Coleridge would find it difficult to hold onto the ideal they had captured throughout Lyrical Ballads.
Throughout the initial Advertisement, published with the 1798 anonymous version of Lyrical Ballads, the Preface, published in 1801 and again in 1802, and the poems themselves, it is apparent that the narrator is seeking an element of balance. Whether it be between the past and the present, the eruption of emotion and control of language, the city and the country, the inward reflective life and the connection to humanity, this theme is consistent and radical in the wake of serious trauma and uncertainty created by tragedy in war, a reaction to an extremely structured Age of Reason, and a sensationalism in all other written and performed entertainment at the time. The urge for balance was immense in an incredibly unbalanced world. Wordsworth and Coleridge were the first to capture it in the form they did. While criticized by some, they sparked a Romantic era, idealizing the notion of balance; if one could achieve and keep all extremes at bay, life would be sublime. In the 1801 edition of Lyrical Ballads, Wordsworth’s poem Expostulation and Reply was moved to the front of the book, starting the collection with a question of why he sits alone, dreaming, without books to feed his mind and help him find a reasonable purpose in life. To these queries Wordworth replies, “Nor less I deem that there are powers/ Which of themselves our minds impress;/ That we can feed this mind of ours/ In a wise passiveness” (117). Wordsworth explains that while there are many ways to impress knowledge and power upon the mind, being passive and still is one such way to achieve wisdom, further reiterating his call for balance; an ideal way of being. This exemplifies the principle of duality. Where there is light there must be dark, what goes up must come down, with Yin we can find Yang, and alongside balance there will inevitably be imbalance. The perpetual pull from one to the other, never fully achieving a lasting status, suggests that while Wordsworth wrote about and perhaps felt at one time or another, the full benefits and joys that a balanced moment would produce, it would never be fully realized, since its basic nature requires imbalance, simply for balance itself to exist. Wordsworth, perhaps, and Samuel Taylor Coleridge for certain, as well as other Romantics and individuals before and after, would feel the disintegration of balance as its ideal shattered over time. One cannot find balance and keep it; eventually its dual nature will surface. The key would be to know this, expect it, and live one's life in perpetual pursuit, knowing that it will come and go. In the end, it would be the life habit change, and the effects of that change, that makes a lasting difference in one's life.
As a young man, William Wordsworth was full of zeal and wonder. He had an extraordinary passion for the way life should be and how one could learn to live; a quality that allowed him to write unprecedented poetry, filled with wonder, beauty, and an ideal. As “an indispensable figure in the evolution of modern writing, a finder and a keeper of the self-as-subject, a theorist and apologist” (Heaney vii), Wordsworth managed to capture heightened emotion in a balanced and reasonably crafted form in a way that can only be described as Wordsworthian. In his poem Resolution and Independence, written in 1807 after the famed Lyrical Ballads and before some of his later, more uninspired work, Wordsworth captures the duality present in his mind and in the world, and the beginnings of a shift away from passion. He writes in the final two lines of the seventh stanza that “We poets in our youth begin in gladness;/ But thereof come in the end despondency and madness” (107). Throughout this poem and and amidst many others, Wordsworth battles with the beauty of his past; the peaceful, tranquil, and ideal youth where he wandered and experienced all the joys of a simple life. In his later years, however, he had lost the passionate state of mind which allowed him to be in tune with nature, disenfranchised people, and the joys and triumphs as well as the great defeats of the world. It would be a slow, almost unnoticeable shift from his more passionate and idealistic way of being, to a solid and overly reasonable way of life, marked by many tragedies he would be unable to contend with. After his engagement in the French Revolution, the experience led him to a near breakdown. Along with the suffering witnessed and endured in the Revolution, Wordsworth was partial to other personal tragedies, some of which included the death of several of his children, the mental breakdown of his sister Dorothy, and a lengthy falling out with Samuel Taylor Coleridge. While he became somewhat of an institution in his later years, he led a comfortable yet passionless life.
The incredible ebb and flow to the meandering beauty of life and chaos that Wordsworth experienced certainly dictated what he wrote. In many of his poems, an element of balance exists where one, as expressed in Ode:Intimations of Immorality, might “... have the power to make/ Our noisy years seem moments in the being/ of eternal Silence…”(Heaney 104), and also know that while life was once bright and joyous, those days and an ability to capture it could be lost. Branded as a sell out later in his life, Wordsworth had lost his vision for the world’s beauty, and was left only with memories of what once was. He became too reasonable, too structured, and passionless. Seamus Heaney writes in the Introduction to his collected Wordsworth poems that “[Wordsworth] had lost the path that should have kept leading more confidently and deeply inward.” Heaney acknowledges that Wordsworth knew how much he was unable to capture a pristine existence, as he wrote about it in various poems such as the Elegiac Stanzas, lamenting in the tenth stanza: “Not for a moment could I now behold/ A smiling sea, and be what I have been;/ The feeling of my loss will ne’er be told;/ This, which I know, I speak with mind serene” (Heaney 131). Captured here is Wordsworth’s understanding that while he seems to have arrived as a successful poet, in spite of the struggle within his life, the cost for reaching such a comfortable state was, for him, a passionless life. Where he began as a moody, dream-riddled, adventurous, child, who grew into an idealistic and revolutionary young man, whose poems were ripe with life and love, chaos and strife, and the balancing act between them, William Wordsworth was unable to continue this path between reason and passion and fell instead toward the reasonable side of the spectrum where he lived easily, devoid of emotional crisis and the power to quell with beauty and romanticism. He was at his best while balancing between struggle and peace. When he drifted to one side or the other, he could no longer hold up that balance. This realization led to great disappointment throughout the remainder of his life. What Wordsworth failed to capture and contend with, was the fact that life is constantly thrown into chaos. While one may try to live in perfect balance, it will never to be sustained. Chaos will erupt, moments of peace will arrive, and chaos again will throw that peace off balance. What Wordsworth and others who aimed their awareness at seeking balance failed to understand, is that ebb and flow is the essence of balance itself. It is the pull between the two that makes up what it actually is. Falling to one side and staying there, as Coleridge went toward chaos in addiction and suffering, and as Wordsworth found monotony, is not a balanced way and will not lead one to happiness. It is the space in between the two extremes; the constant journey from one end to the other that counts. Wordsworth and other Romantics attempted to catch a place in the middle, hold it, and sustain it, yet the essence of that place is not sustainable. What needs to be searched for, instead, is the continuity of the searching itself. What counts in balance is the pursuit of that balance. Whether we find ourselves on one end of the spectrum or the other at any given time, we must pursue that side which we are not currently on. To live in perfect equilibrium is to float between both poles of the extreme, while at any time each place we are currently in may be thrown asunder. This is the element that Wordsworth and other Romantics failed to capture; the imbalance that exists within balance itself knowing that “these brief moments of madness and passion… are… only ever scattered points along the long line of our life” (Rousseau 54), and we must move through them with grace, for they are the elements that keep us connected, alive, peaceful, and tranquil, all at once. Without movement, there would be no balance to find.
Before Wordsworth’s time, as an echo of inspiration, Jean- Jacques Rousseau attempted to pursue his own form of equilibrium in Reveries of the Solitary Walker. As he wandered about, in deep introspection, he too was unable to achieve the balance sought. Excessive rumination into the recesses of his mind, kept Rousseau in spaces where pain and suffering multiplied. While he attempted to see a lighter side, he often fell to the chaotic tremblings of his own mind, unable to fully grasp a hint of reason. The key to unlocking this difficulty, a key he would never find, is in the expectation and anticipation that balance would turn to imbalance and imbalance to balance; a continuous flux from one side to the other and all that lies between. In his earlier life, as with Wordsworth, Rousseau wrote about the joys and pleasures of life that he would aim to seek. In the introduction to the Oxford World’s Classics translation of Rousseau's Reveries of a Solitary Walker, Russel Goulbourne quotes the beginning of a poem titled Sylvie’s Walk written thirty years prior, where Rousseau writes, “As I wander freely in these groves,/My heart the highest pleasure knows!” (ix). These words certainly contain an ideal worth pursuing, however what this and other earlier poems are missing, as Goulbourne points out, are the intense anxieties that Rousseau’s life was actually plagued with. Like Wordsworth, Rousseau found joy in the natural world, the wanderings he engaged in, and the self reflective nature of his writing. He too used the past to inform his future, and set that as a precedent for something he would spend the remainder of his life looking for as he walked. While Wordsworth would come to the end of his life without passion, existing in a rather spiritless state, Rousseau alternatively would find increased chaos in his difficulty with authority, quarreling with friends, and a growing paranoia around his work; constantly seeking to justify the relevance of what he wrote. On the opposite side of Wordsworth’s life, where he existed in a reasonable spectrum, Rousseau’s would be tumultuous and filled with anxiety and suffering. Both writers, one influenced by the idealism of the other, found themselves without the balance they desired, and instead capturing whispers of it in fleeting moments. They were unable to hold onto the middle ground, to flow easily between reason and passion. Had they anticipated, expected, and prepared for inevitable fluctuation, and not fall prey to disappointment at their failure, they might have continued seek the opposite of where they stood, knowing that everything was bound to fluctuate. Their inability to see the great imbalance hiding within the balance itself, is present in the blind ideal they had created.
Prior to Rousseau, Wordsworth, and the notion of the Romantic Ideal as a gateway to achieving balance in one’s life, there was Michel De Montaigne. Born in France, Montaigne was brought up reading. The extremely classical schooling his father imposed upon him came after a brief childhood of exploration and fascination. Like Rousseau and Wordsworth, Montaigne was allowed to wander, experiment, and learn while he trapsed about his world, in innocent inquiry. It is perhaps this natural childhood that inspired his love of nature and curiosity of human nature. He would come to believe that people should relax and rely on their own human nature to guide them through the dull and passionate places they may fall into at any given time. Through his own example in the Essays, initially published in 1580, Montaigne exemplifies that he was able to do what Wordsworth, Rousseau, and other Romantics who came after him, could not. Montaigne could see, understand, and document, a form of balance that would last. It was within his nature to appreciate the ideal, its true, however he also observed the constant flow between the poles of balance, and acknowledged that incredibly important fluctuation, where those who came after him could not. Montaigne observed that it is in this flow where true balance exists.
Montaigne’s life, though perceived as quintessential in his childhood, was not without struggle. Like those who came after him, in their burn to understand the pains and joys of life, Montaigne had cause to ponder his own suffering. After a period of calm study in his early adulthood, where he learned and practiced law, travelled, ready philosophy and travel journals, Rousseau’s father died. Along with his own personal brush with death, he would also grieve the death of his only true friend, Etienne de la Boetie, and all but one of his children. He would live at his family estate with a wife and mother in-law living in a separate tower, allowing him to spend many of his days alone. With the weight of suffering heavy on his mind, Montaigne fell “into an unbalanced melancholy; his spirit galloped off like a runaway horse; his mind, left, fallow, produced weeds not grass” (Screech xiv). Subsequently, grief and isolation led him to ravings about his life and experiences, and to questions of the world. The Essays became his way of exorcizing his own madness by putting life into focus. His thoughts and feelings were brought to the surface through an increased self-awareness, resulting in “a hunt for truth, personality and a knowledge of humanity through an exploration of his own reactions to his reading, his travels, his public and private experience in peace and in Civil War, in health and in sickness” (Screech xv), not unlike Rousseau and Wordsworth, and many other Romantic writers. The difference between them, however is that Montaigne would capture an understanding that life moves along the spectrum of balance. He accepted that everything was in doubt and constant flux. In one moment pain, suffering, and chaos could envelop our minds, in the next a cloud floats by and we are brought back to a tedious and wearisome state of reason. This duality between the poles of balance, where extreme reason and passion exist on either end, became a way of life for Montaigne; he found balance in acknowledging that life is imbalanced and drifted between them like a speck of dust in the wind. Even in the fact that he would add to his essays throughout his life at different stages and with different points of view, constantly contradicting himself, is in itself an example of that imbalance and flux. While it's true, he retreated into himself to search for emotion and understanding, he was not lost when gazing at his centre, like Rousseau, and therefore did not delve into suffering and linger there on one end of the scale. He also did not work to capture the beauty of a landscape or the ideality of a simple life, like Wordsworth. He did not quest for revolution or attempt to capture what life is, he simply allowed himself to exist and recorded whatever came to be; filled with overpowering and spontaneous emotion, or simply watching his cat. Instead of falling to the reasonable or chaotic sides, as Wordsworth and Rousseau did, Montaigne reflected and thus achieved balance by accepting experiences as they came. He disagreed with wandering in solitude as Rousseau practiced before being enveloped by a sort of paranoid madness, instead Montaigne suggests that it is the way in which one is alone and how they may linger that causes their issues. In his essay On Solitude, Montaigne writes “If you do not first lighten yourself and your soul of the weight of your burdens, moving about will only increase their pressure on you” (268). He goes on to explain that we take our suffering with us, and walking about will not help but will only drag along our imagination and tie up our perceived freedom with struggle and pain. With this ideology, Montaigne managed to achieve the balance that the Romantics had later searched for, and never fully realized, possibly because the form of balance were after, was flawed. Instead of developing an ideal place to exist directly between the two great poles of this life, where if one deviates and lingers too much on one end or the other, they risk staying there by way of the absolute disillusionment at not being able to sustain that ideal, Montaigne employed a level of moderation as the way to perfect happiness. He accepted that some things are mundane while others are extraordinary, and one need only to acknowledge this fact and move with it, flowing between the two extremes; this flow is where true balance lies.
While it is attractive to adhere to Montaigne’s philosophy of moderation and the understanding of flux and imbalance in the pursuit of a form of homeostasis, one cannot help but wonder what our world would be like without the madness contained in writings like Rousseau’s Reveries, or the simplistic beauty captured in Wordsworth’s later poems. The mad meanderings of Rousseau, for example, would inspire writers, artists, and thinkers, for generations to follow. The revolutionary form of Wordsworth and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads borne out of tumultuous chaos, eventually leading Wordsworth to a more reasonable and passionless existence, allowed dreamers to see the world in an entirely new light. Without such extremes, what would this world be? Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, was able to create an antidote to pain while also capturing beauty, without falling to one extreme or another. She recognized, like Montaigne perhaps, the constant chaos that plagues our world. Born in 1797 to William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft, two famed writers and advocates for human rights and revolution, Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley was no stranger to suffering. Her mother died after Mary’s birth, and her father remarried four years later. The relationship between Mary and her stepmother, Jane Clairmont, grew bitter and resentful. When Mary was fourteen, she was sent to live in Scotland with a friend of her father’s, William Baxter. Here she would spend “two pleasant years roaming the countryside, daydreaming, and writing stories” (Stillinger et al. 956). Upon returning to her family home, Mary would meet, fall in love with, become pregnant by, and run away with Percy Bysshe Shelley. Though she enjoyed the happy wanderings through France, Switzerland, and Germany, wrote books, and relished her new love and life, Shelley’s existence continued to be far from ideal. Suffering, discontent, and death followed her as she lost many children via miscarriages, premature births, and childhood deaths. Her half sister committed suicide, and Percy Shelley’s estranged first wife drowned herself in the Serpentine Lake at Hyde Park in London. Mary Shelley, as a result of a lifetime of tragedies at such a young age, marrying Percy at only sixteen years, was thrown into a depression that later developed into apathy. She emotionally withdrew from Percy, who then gave his affection to their friend Jane Williams. After he died, Mary was left with the sense that she had failed her husband and her life had been a failure. Such chaos, comparably seen in many other notable lives, could lead one to seek peace amid such torment. However, it has invariably been seen that those who experience such heightened experiences in life, whether passionately tragic or joyous, largely end on one side of the spectrum. It was the calling card of the Romantics to experience life fully, and to engage in all manner of aesthetics, reason, and passion, in order to find and keep balance in one’s life as a way to happiness and peace. Rousseau, who looked inward and sent himself wandering about, when he did not find a balanced life, fell into one of extreme passion. Wordsworth, after a life of capturing extreme beauty, participating in revolution and befalling tragedy, fell to reason, void of passion and unable to capture the silvery beauty that life still had to offer. Montaigne seemed to find the answer in moderation. He acknowledged that there would be great suffering and great joy, and it is in one’s ability to float between the two at any given moment, where true balance lies. Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, in spite of her own tragic life, acquiring a level of apathy at one point, would spend the remainder of her days as a professional woman of letters, publishing books, crafting beautiful stories, and offering her own form of an antidote to the sufferings of life. This antidote, while perfected perhaps in her later writing, can be seen starting to take form in her more famous novel, Frankenstein. Written in a gothic castle in Switzerland amidst stimulating conversations with Percy Shelley and Lord Byron, the novel has never been out of print. It remains mythic due to the chaos described at the outset. It does not pretend to have a cure or path toward great balance, but instead simply describes a tale of “the man of science who, with catastrophic consequences, seeks to conquer nature, rival the divinity, and make a new life” (Stillinger et al. 956). While the novel and its ideas came out of revolutionary times, and its achievement exists in “the quietly astonishing feat of looking beyond… and creating a lasting symbol of the perils of scientific Prometheanism”(Joseph xiii), it is also a warning against seeking balance through extreme perfection. The novel’s narrator, Dr. Victor Frankenstein sought the ultimate creation in his monster, and when his ideal turned into something else, shattered, the failure was more than he could cope with. In pursuing the ideal, there is negligence in acknowledging that suffering will exist alongside great joy, and great failure; the ideal is unachievable in it’s conception. A novel like Shelley’s Frankenstein discusses the possibility that if Victor could have foreseen the consequences, tamed his dream, practiced looking inward and anticipating that chaos that would arise, then a tragedy such as the Monster’s would not have risen. Shelley writes in an apologia in her journal that “some have a passion for reforming the world; others do not cling to particular opinions… For myself, I earnestly desire the good and enlightenment of my fellow creatures… ; but I am not for violent extremes, which only brings on an injurious reaction…”(Wollstonecraft 957). She apologizes for the life she lived, and in her perceived inability to do what was needed of her, exclaiming that she did her best and instead of falling to the extreme of chaos and passion, which is acknowledged as part of human nature, she instead sought to live in flux somewhere between the poles of enlightenment and pain existing along the line of balance.
Following Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley in her pursuit of a more equitable understanding of pursuing balance, is an individual often regarded as one of the last Romantic Poets. William Butler Yeats bridged the gap between the aesthetically pleasing Romantic Age in his writing of the 19th century and the realist Modernist era of the 20th, which developed into direct opposition of the Romantics. Focussed on realism, as a response to new technologies, a mass literate population, cheap journalism, and the rejection of aestheticism, the Modernist era developed a revised form of expression seeking experimentation with style and syntax, stream of consciousness writing, alienation themes, and an image focussed direction. Yeats was born in 1865 in County Sligo, Ireland, to parents who had left a respectable profession to pursue art. Like those who paved the way before him, Yeats spent his childhood frolicing about the countryside. He spoke to local peasants, farmers, and country men and women who instilled in him the magic of ancient Irish Folklore permeating the landscape. While he would move to London with his family, and spend much time between London and Dublin, his idealistic childhood filled with nature, magic, and beauty, set a precedent for the poetry he came to write. Amid many of Yeats’ earlier poems he captures this idealism with perfect form and exquisite language, true to the Romantic feeling that attempted to capture and hold some semblance of balance within a passion for beauty in nature. In The Stolen Child, infused with Irish magic and folklore, Yeats writes of an ideal place, alongside a recognition of the world’s pain set to shatter that ideal:
Where dips the rocky highland
Of Sleuth Wood in the lake,
There lies a leafy island
Where flapping herons wake
The drowsy water-rats;
There we’ve hid our faery vats,
Full of berries
And of reddest stolen cherries.
Come away, O human child!
To the waters and the wild
With a faery, hand in hand,
For the world’s more full of weeping that you can understand (53).
While Yeats’ early work was saturated with images of nature, the purity of childhood, and the language of love and longing, following the form and function of the Romantic tradition, there is one element that separates him from the fate of those who had sought to capture balance and were ultimately unable to do so, as in the cases of Rousseau and Wordsworth. Instead, Yeats follows the lead of Montaigne and Shelley in changing, reworking, and revitalizing himself throughout his life. Yeats early on, acknowledges the faults in Romanticism and the idea of balance, and instead moves to a more modern mentality of direct, realist writing. Unlike others of his time, however, he is able to maintain the aesthetic quality of language and form, while connecting with the fluctuations brought by an ever changing, ever chaotic world. In his poem, September 1913, Yeats laments the loss of such beauty and criticizes the dull and ordinary lives of his fellow Irelanders by exclaiming “You have dried the marrow from the bone… Romantic Ireland’s dead and gone” (210). This is in contrast to all the beautifully crafted Romantic lines that came before the reality of revolution erupting between England and Ireland. Later, in poems like The Second Coming, Yeats’ dissolution continues to fester, as he follows in the footsteps of those before him who could not ride the fluctuating nature of balance and life. He writes:
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the rest are full of passionate intensity (294).
In the last line of this stanza, the emblematic pull between the poles of balance rings out. On the one hand, exemplified by Wordsworth’s life, Yeats points out that “The best lack all conviction”(294), while on the opposite side, as Rousseau was unable to break free from, “... the rest are full of passionate intensity” (294). Neither end can sustain itself, and while the world continues to release chaos and suffering, those who innocently sought to stay static in the balance they perceived to have achieved, are lost. What makes Yeats different is in his knowing that he must walk a path in pursuit of a balanced life that may never fully be realized. In spite of similar experiences, childhoods, tragedies, and a shattered perspective of the ideal, Yeats never gave up on bringing passion into the modern world coupled with creating a bridge to reason. There are “many different Yeatses” (Stillinger 2022) who, similar to Shelley and Montaigne, but different from Rousseau and Wordsworth, managed to change his attitude and his perspectives throughout his life. He mirrored this change in his poetry, as exemplified in A Prayer for Old Age where he writes, “God guard me from those thoughts men think/ In the mind alone; ... I pray… That I may seem, though I die old,/ A foolish, passionate man” (Yeats 401). He acknowledges the dangers of falling into ones own mind toward one side of the spectrum of balance or the other, and is instead willing to be seen as foolish, but passionate in a way that is ever changing, ever brightening, and ever aware of all that can happen in life. In his own form of an epitaph, in Under Ben Bulben, Yeats proclaims that “Many times man lives and dies/ Between his two eternities” (449). Here is where we can take Yeats, Shelley, Wordsworth, Rousseau, Montaigne, and all others who sought for balance in a world plagued by pain, and bring this pursuit in the modern scope from which we today might follow suit in our own struggle amid constant chaos.
As romantic as the Romantic ideal may be, it fails to capture the chaos into which we are cast into this modern world. Throughout history, where we are blinded by the ideal, unable to walk the line of change and flexibility, we fail in the most incredible way. The city of Troy, the Unsinkable Titanic, war for the sake of bringing peace to the people, a lover who fulfills what we thought we wanted, and many other examples exist where the ideal was held on a pedestal; it would be only a matter of time before the golden platform toppled leaving us in ruins where we either fall to chaos and self destruction, or apathy and lack of passion, living out our days unable to move between the two extremes, and fated to remain static. Today, the planet is engulfed by uncertainty. The pandemic we are currently experiencing is one such tragic occurrence that exemplifies the precariousness in which we live. After the Romantics, those before them, and the Modernists after, technology, production, globalization, and all related elements continued to grow and expand, where we now find ourselves in a state saturated by another form of ideal, the post-modern. Here, there is an intense focus on the individual, the independent, and the growth for the sake of growth at all costs. For many, the state of our world, our families, our communities, and our countries have changed so drastically that they would be unrecognizable to anyone discussed here. There has been an all time push for progress which resulted in groundbreaking technologies that shifted the way we understand life itself. We are believed to have captured the state of living where anything is possible; a new golden age. However, those not already in a state of chaos erupted by war or famine, the recent pandemic has shattered our shiny new pedestal. The uncertainty that was always there but remained masked by media, technology, fast entertainment, and busyness, now faces us front and centre. We are cast into the unknown, and our sense of balance in the life we live has erupted into a certain unknowability that many are failing to contend with. We are faced with what so many before us had seen, shining light on the simple reality that chaos continues, regardless of the ideals and perceptions we hold. Therefore, it is perhaps time to take a lesson of warning from Wordsworth and Rousseau, who in times of strain, and when unable to maintain the balance they thought they had, slipped to either side of the spectrum. What is perhaps needed, instead, is the equilibrium of thought between the many great minds of our past. There is incredible value in the Romantic ideal which Wordsworth Coleridge so beautifully harnessed in Lyrical Ballads and many other early works. There is also merit in self-reflection and inward thinking, as Rousseau noted in the Reveries. The aesthetic, slow living, return to nature, and quiet mentality, is ever more important in a world where a certain kind of madness has overtaken us. Yet, as in previous ages, when unaware or in not acknowledging that chaos can at any time erupt, we face the danger of inflexibility. The ideal is simply not enough. The antidote, then, lies both within the idealism of Wordsworth, the introspection of Rousseau, the acknowledgement of Shelley and Montaigne, and bridging of the past and the present as exemplified by Yeats. His Holiness the Dalai Lama said that “... despite the progress in our age, human beings remain searching beings. We long for a deeper meaning in our existence” (97). If we channel our inner Romanticism and pursue, but not expect to fully achieve, a Romanticized way of life, anticipating and welcoming change at any time, we will in fact learn how to bridge the gap between reason and passion, to ride the flux of chaos and peace, to move gracefully through a world of uncertainty and notice the beauty that exists within the imbalances of this life.
While some remarkable individuals, with patience, persistence, and genius, achieve a form of balance within what they create, capturing a moment in time where stars align and everything falls into place, it is inevitable that an imbalance will take over again and again. No matter how often we capture a balanced state, it is ephemeral and vanishes as quickly as it comes upon us. We cannot live in the endless pursuit of the flawed definition of balance. Instead, we must give way and let go of attempting to hammer our thoughts into unity. Whether we use poetry, story, or philosophy as our medium in making sense of the world, we must relinquish the desire to turn passion into order, spontaneity into balance, imbalance into reason. Instead, we must live between these extremes, in them, and away from them, at any given moment, expecting that it will change and that stability, as we perceive it, will never be obtained. In this way, it is understood that the Romantic ideal, as a beautiful representation of life, poetic, and perfectly balanced between the poles of reason and passion, is not achievable. However valuable it is in itself, for there should always be a standard to reach out for, there is an essential element missing in the way the Romantics understood the ideal life. A new definition of balance must therefore be forged; one that is not static and existing in one perfect illusory place, but instead fluctuates between the poles of reason and passion, chaos and calm, excitement and apathy. When we create a lofty notion for what the perfect life looks like and how one can achieve and hold it, we are destined for disappointment and disillusionment. We must dream, and capture beauty like Wordsworth, look inward and contemplate as Rousseau, anticipate disaster and accept fluctuation in our pursuit for balance, as Montaigne and Shelley did, while also bridging the gaps between past and present, as Yeats exemplified, to understand that the ideal is something worthy to aim for yet is inevitably unattainable without the ability to ride the wave. Pursuing balance, then, becomes the goal, not the capturing of balance itself. In acknowledging our inability to achieve and maintain that equilibrium due to the constant chaos we are habitually thrust into, the result is a life habit change, an altered perspective, and a commitment to a practice instead of a search for one definite goal. We must shatter the ideal, before it shatters us, and come into a space of recognition, anticipation, flexibility, and allowance for what is yet to come.
Works Cited
The Dalai Lama. Path of Wisdom, Path of Peace. Forward by Wei Jingsheng, Crossroad, 2004, New York.
Montaigne, de Michel. The Complete Essays. Translated by M. A. Screech, Penguin Classics. 2003, London, England.
Sillinger, Lynch, et al. Norton Anthology of English Literature. The Romantic Period. Edited by Stephen Greenblatt and M.H. Abrams, Eighth Ed., Vol.D., W.W. Norton & Co., 2006, New York
Rousseau, Jean-Jacques. Reveries of the Solitary Walker. Edited by Russell Goulbourne, Oxford World’s Classics, 2011, Oxford.
Shelley, Mary. Frankenstein or Modern Prometheus. Edited by M.K. Joseph, Oxford World’s Classics, 2008, Oxford.
Wordsworth, William and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Lyrical Ballads. 1798 and 1802. Edited by Fiona Stafford, Oxford Worlds Classics, 2013, Oxford.
Wordsworth, William. William Wordsworth. Poems selected by Seamus Heaney. Faber Nature Poets, 2016, London, England.
Yeats, William Butler. Yeats’ Poems. Edited and annotated by Norman Jeffares. PAPERMAC, 1989, London, England.