The ethics of romanticism /

A learned, original, and important book on a subject that has been shamefully neglected since Irving Babbitt several generations ago attacked romanticism for its supposed lack of morality. In the first third of his far-ranging study, Lockridge (New York University) elaborates in a general European context the concerns with romantic ethics first explored in his Coleridge the Moralist (CH, Apr'78). The remainder is devoted to searching chapters on the major English romantic poets and, among the prose writers, Hazlitt and De Quincey. Unfortunately for undergraduates, Lockridge assumes not only an audience of romantic scholars in possession of highly specialized knowledge but readers with a good background in 18th-century and 19th-century English and German moral philosophy. This fine and illuminating study is therefore all too likely to languish unread in undergraduate libraries. -N. Fruman, University of Minnesota