|
Writing in the 1930s, Bertrand Russell
attributes the birth of the Romantic Movement to Lord Byron and Rousseau.
Russell then goes on to claim that the current age of totalitarian dictatorships
-- Mussolini, Hitler, Stalin -- are direct philosophical and cultural
consequences of the movement founded by Rousseau and Byron, that without Byron
and Rousseau, there could not 150 years later have been a Hitler or a Stalin in
Europe.
Perhaps as an American I'm not nearly
as intimate with Rousseau and Byron as Europeans are. I can't imagine the kind
of impact and influence that Russell claims a rock-star poet and an aggressively
perverse philosopher had on Europe.
When the Bronte Sisters were little
girls growing up in the north of England, they got to read the London scandal
and gossip sheets, which were filled with the shocking, lurid exploits of Lord
Byron -- "Mad, bad, and dangerous to know." In the Bronte novels, the
dark, brooding, angry heroes are all modelled on their childhood gossip-sheet
impressions of Mr George Gordon.
|