Spring 1994
Volume 20, Number 3

Romanticism at the End of History
by Jerome Christensen

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"We profess it in our Creed, we confess it in our lives.
--Jeremy Taylor, HOLY LIVING (1727)

I profess romanticism, I romantically confess. And if I choose a pretheoretical, prerevolutionary epigraph from an eighteenth- century divine to enfranchise this essay rather than a phrase from a more timely master such as Paul de Man or M. H. Abrams, it is because I want to use Jeremy Taylor as Samuel Taylor Coleridge chronically used him: to stage a resistance to theory, to ward off revolutionary utterance, and to keep melancholy at bay. In Taylor's terms, professing romanticism is what I do on each occassion of classroom teaching at Johns Hopkins University or of publishing an article in a specialized journal or a book at a university press. My creed, of coursse, is not to Coleridge, to Byron, or to Wordsworth. I do not commit belief to what is loosely called a canon but to that discipline which the institutions of education and publlication collaboratively authorize and reproduce and which in turn certifies the felicity of my professions. If, as Taylor states, confessing is a matter of living, living ought to be imagined as that structuring activity that Anthony Giddens calls "practical consciousness": an ensemble of repetitive maneuvers, signature gestures, and obsessive themes. Living is for servants and for critics-- for those who do not have texts in Edward Said's sense of the term but only what Coleridge calls "personalities." This practical, pretextual consciousness assorts the idiosyncratic and the routinized into a compromise formation: something romantic, something like a Biographia Litteraria, something which may be at odds or at evens with an institutional warrant. It depends.

I want to confess how confessing romantically bears on the profession of romanticism and to argue that its bearing matters. This essay presupposes that romanticism is not an object of study-- neither the glorious expression nor the deplorable symptom of a distant epoch and peculiar mentality-- but a problem in identification and in practice. As a Christian divine, Jeremy Taylor sought to induce a harmony between creed and life in himself and for others. Romantic writers grandiloquently profess to wish for such a harmony (POET is the name that Coleridge gives to the achieved ideal), even as they prosaically confess that what our creeds profess and what our untimely lives confess do not often synchronize. The advantages of that discrepancy clarify in the light of the "end of history" argument as it has been influentially advanced by Francis Fukuyama in his interrogatory 1989 article "The End of History?" and his recent declarative book The End of History and the Last Man..."