The Godwinian Critic

Chapter two discloses how Robinson’s in-depth study of William Godwin’s Political Justice prompted his first theory of literature, published in a mid-1795 article in Benjamin Flower’s radical Cambridge Intelligencer. According to this theory, Godwin’s necessitarian philosophy had succeeded in situating truth in the moral concerns that a poet raises. Where an author’s imagination proves compatible with the laws of necessity, literature may exert a direct didactic influence on the motives governing the mind, and thus promote disinterested benevolence. Godwinism qua ‘New Philosophy of Love’, it emerges further from Robinson’s hitherto unknown draft article ‘on novels’ (1798) that he intended for John Aikin’s radical Monthly Magazine but never submitted, pervades Robinson’s formal and informal literary criticism prior to his turn to Kant. Robinson’s Godwinian criticism already comprised comparative elements, discussing, for instance, novels by Godwin himself, Thomas Holcroft, Ann Radcliffe, Jonathan Swift, Voltaire, and Friedrich Maximilian Klinger, among many more.

Introduction

The introduction elaborates the key claim of the book, namely that Robinson was the most pioneering comparative critic in England during the early Romantic period. He developed a revolutionary theory of literature’s cross-cultural ethical relevance from his unrivalled understanding of Kantian and post-Kantian thought, the Anglo-French philosophical tradition, as well as his broad reading across English, German, and French literature, primarily. Robinson’s prescient 1802 critique of Wordsworth and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads as generating non-didactic moral discourse emerges as the exemplary manifestation of his critical approach, according to which a poet’s aspiration to artistic disinterestedness, though never to be fulfilled entirely, may function as a catalyst for moral disinterestedness. The introduction further places this claim in its historical and present-day contexts – from Hazlitt, Schiller, and the Schlegels’ critical schools to Walter Benjamin’s dissertation on German Romantic criticism to the present ‘ethical turn’ in literary studies – before parcelling it out by means of chapter synopses. It also clarifies the terminology that Robinson applied, for instance ‘literator’ for his career choice of cross-cultural literary critic and disseminator – or comparatist, in today’s terms.

Radical Self-education and First Authorship

Chapter one argues that, between 1790–95, the teenage Robinson was the epitome of the British ‘juvenile enlightenment’ (Kathryn Gleadle). Barred from the English universities because of his Dissenting allegiance – orthodox Presbyterian turning liberal Unitarian – he became, with the help of Colchester Dissenters and their libraries, a self-taught polymath. In early 1795, he published his first article, entitled ‘On the Essential and Accidental Characteristics of Informers’, in the radical Norwich journal The Cabinet. In an original move based on David Hume’s logic and Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s approach to the law, Robinson here urges his readers to divert to the law the hatred with which informers (people passing information on to the authorities) are commonly met. This chapter analyses in detail Robinson’s unpublished manuscript diaries and earliest surviving correspondence, and explores the ingenious ways in which he engaged with the on-going ‘Revolution Controversy’ (Marilyn Butler).

Kant, Aesthetic Autonomy, and Literary Ethics

Chapter three reveals the paradigm shift in Robinson’s theorization of literature that his ‘conversion’ from the empiricism of Locke, Hume, and Godwin to Kant’s critical philosophy prompted. Yet Kant’s notion of aesthetic autonomy – of art’s detachment from the motives of the mind and the causality governing the laws of nature – occasioned an impasse in Robinson’s conceptualization of literature’s ethical relevance. He resolved this in an ingenious move by skilfully locating in Kant’s critical philosophy, and then developing, an analogy between art and morals: the self-contained structure and dynamic of a work of literature find their corresponding parameters in the reader’s mind, in her or his moral compass. On the basis of this analogy, chapter three argues, Robinson conducted his own ‘ethical turn’ away from notions of absolute aesthetic autonomy, and developed the ground-breaking critical principle of ‘Free Moral Discourse’ (Hunnekuhl) that from here onwards underpinned his literary activities. Against the backdrop of various unpublished manuscripts, this chapter discusses Robinson’s articles on Hume and causality, and on Moses Mendelssohn and the Pantheism Controversy, in the Monthly Magazine (1799–1801), as well as his letters ‘On the Philosophy of Kant’ in the Monthly Register and Encyclopaedian Magazine (1802–03).

Friedrich Schlegel, Coleridge, and the Ethics of Amathonte

Chapter seven discusses Robinson’s final attempt at making a living as a professional comparatist, or intercultural ‘literator’, to use his own term – his translation and critical transmission of Christian Leberecht Heyne’s ‘Persian tale’ Amathonte (published by Longman under the title Amatonda in 1811). Amathonte, in all its humour and playfulness characteristic of Heyne, is a scathing satirical attack on the habitual indifference with which one imbibes, from familial and social authorities, motives for decision-making. Robinson, in the preface to his translation, hence praises the book as ‘a picture of moral excellence and domestic felicity’, not least for its abolitionist appeal and advocation of emancipated communal life. This chapter hence argues that Robinson undertook the transmission of the work, encompassing his critical introduction of Friedrich Schlegel to his readers as well as appended samples from Jean Paul, according to his pioneering approach of ‘Free Moral Discourse’. Amathonte subsequently caught the attention of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, who discussed and praised it in a letter to Robinson of March 1811. Chapter seven therefore also recapitulates Robinson’s ‘intimate acquaintance’ with, and ‘enthusiasm for’ (Diana Behler), the critical school of the Schlegel brothers, in particular their Athenaeum.

Moral Discourse in A.W. Schlegel, Schiller, Goethe, and Lessing

Chapter four focuses on Robinson’s five-letter series on German literature, in particular Goethe and Schiller, in the Monthly Register and Encyclopaedian Magazine (1802–03) that accompanied his transmissions of Kantianism to England, as well as his articles on Lessing in the Unitarian Monthly Repository of Theology and General Literature (1806). Read against the backdrop of Robinson’s explications of Kant and informal discussion of August Wilhelm Schlegel, all of these writings emerge as erudite, autonomous attempts at resolving the impasse between aesthetic autonomy and literature’s moral relevance detailed in the preceding chapter. These attempts are further characterized by an experimental oscillation between Kantian and post-Kantian approaches to art, and demonstrate that Robinson was increasingly regarding literary form as those universal parameters that may facilitate moral discourse across national, cultural, and historical gulfs. The letters on German literature, and afterwards the appreciation of the ‘free-thinking spirit and love of humanity’ (Diana Behler) in Lessing’s cosmopolitanism, hence enabled Robinson to establish in terms of practical criticism his ‘ethical turn’ away from notions of full aesthetic autonomy and towards his critical principle of ‘Free Moral Discourse’.

‘matters of Religion & Morality’: Herder, Wordsworth, and Blake

Chapter six aims to elucidate the decisive overall agreement, as well as the subtle nuances, that Robinson discerned in the works of Herder, Wordsworth, and Blake, and according to which he disseminated them, both among these poets and wider audiences in England and Germany. Robinson found these three poets to be advancing idiosyncratic forms of aesthetic free play that kindle the moral imagination of their readers. The chapter reads Robinson’s three articles on Herder in the Unitarian Monthly Repository (1808–09) and his German article on Blake in Friedrich Perthes’s Vaterländisches Museum (1811) against the informal critiques of Wordsworth and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads that Robinson elaborated in a series of letters in late 1802. These critiques are so ground-breaking since they constitute a profound, autonomous development of Kantian and post-Kantian notions of aesthetic autonomy into a distinctive conceptualization of literature’s cross-cultural ethical relevance, and thus provide the clearest definition of Robinson’s critical principle of ‘Free Moral Discourse’. According to this principle, art has a bearing on morality through their shared aspiration to disinterestedness, while the ultimate unattainability of such reciprocal disinterestedness creates a dynamic interplay between its two constituents.

Hazlitt, Napoleon, and Literary Disinterestedness

Chapter five examines the ‘strong intellectual affinity’ (Uttara Natarajan) between William Hazlitt’s early work and German philosophy, and in particular Kant, in the light of Robinson’s work on the philosopher and the meetings with Hazlitt that Robinson recorded in his unpublished manuscript diaries. Doing so reveals that a paradigm shift – from the imagination establishing disinterestedness diachronically to the ‘formative’, or synthesizing, mind along the lines of Kant – occurred in Hazlitt’s metaphysics around 1806, and that Robinson facilitated this paradigm shift. The chapter then looks at Robinson’s critical transmission of, and preface to, Gustav von Schlabrendorf’s Napoleon, and the French People under His Empire (1806), and how Robinson and Hazlitt began to drift apart as a result of their opposing views on Napoleon and the intensifying war with France. Ultimately, chapter five aims to demonstrate that Robinson’s critical admiration of Hazlitt the writer prevailed in accordance with Robinson’s theoretical principle of ‘Free Moral Discourse’. The originality and stylistic finesse of Hazlitt’s works opened up the kind of ethical discourse whose underlying philosophy – Dissenting disinterestedness amplified by Kant – Robinson continued to share.

Conclusion

The conclusion discusses the ways in which Robinson’s comparative literary criticism pervades his main diary, which he began in January 1811 – upon completing his translation of Amathonte – and continued until days before his death in 1867. He here elaborates the same ethical responsibility that distinguishes his work as a ‘literator’ or comparatist, and transfers to the keeping of his diary the duty of the critical disseminator of literature to bridge and unite. A strong sense of the cross-pollination between the social and the literary thus pervades Robinson’s diary-keeping ‘experiment’, as he emerges more of the Wordsworth than the Boswell of his chosen field that is comparative literature. The conclusion further discusses this claim in relation to the critical commentary on William Taylor’s translation of Sacontalá (1789), Anna Letitia Barbauld’s Eighteen Hundred and Eleven (1812), and George Henry Lewes’s Life of Goethe (1855) that Robinson committed to his diary. It also provides select examples from the wealth of hitherto unknown comparative criticism that may yet be found in Robinson’s main diary, and raises questions as to his influence on Coleridge and Thomas De Quincey which future scholarship may wish to address.