France and England 1795–1820

Abstract

The word ‘enthusiasm’, like ‘nature’ and ‘revolution’, was in the process of changing its connotations at the end of the eighteenth century. Literally meaning (from the Greek) ‘possession by a god’, it had always, from its first recorded use in English in 1603, been something of an ambiguous term. Possession by a Greek god could involve divine inspiration, but it could also bring on frenzy and madness in which the possessed could commit terrible crimes, afterwards to be bitterly regretted. Throughout the eighteenth century it was more often an insult than a compliment, commonly implying a regrettable lack of self-control and sound judgement, though there were a few who were prepared to glory in the accusation — the early Methodists, for instance, or the poet Joseph Warton, who in 1744 published a poem he called The Enthusiast: or the Lover of Nature, which is sometimes regarded as being one of the first Romantic works. Certainly by the last quarter of the century enthusiasm had become much more respectable. Associated with other such vogue-words as ‘sensibility’ and ‘feeling’, it had become a quality commonly expected in artistic, progressive and reformist circles.