PRINTED BY 
 
 SPOTTISWOODE AND CO., NEW-STREET SQUARE 
 LONDON 
 
THE 
 
 'LIBEEAL MOVEMENT 
 
 IN 
 
 BY WILLIAM JOHN COURTHOPE, M.A. 
 
 [I 
 
 AUTHOR OF ' THE PARADISE OF BIRDS ' ETC. 
 
 
 LONDON 
 JOHN MUKKAY, ALBEMARLE STKEET 
 
 1885 
 
 All rights reserved 
 
GENERAL 
 
So tenacious are we of our old ecclesiastical modes and fashions 
 of institution, that very little change has been made in them since 
 the fourteenth or fifteenth centuries, adhering in this particular, 
 as in all else, to our old settled maxim never entirely nor at once 
 to depart from antiquity. We found these institutions on the 
 whole favourable to morality and discipline, and we thought they 
 were susceptible of amendment without altering the ground. We 
 thought they were capable of receiving and meliorating and, above 
 all, of preserving the accessories of science and literature as the 
 order of Providence should successively produce them. And after 
 all, with this Gothic and monkish education (for such it is in the 
 groundwork), we may put in our claim to as ample and early a 
 share in all the improvements in science, in arts, and in literature 
 which have illuminated the modern world as any other nation in 
 Europe. We think one main cause of this improvement was* our 
 not despising the patrimony of knowledge which was left us by our 
 forefathers. 
 
 BURKE, Reflections on the French If evolution. 
 
 159435 
 
PREFACE. 
 
 THE following papers appeared in the ' National 
 Review/ and, with the exception of a few para- 
 graphs, I have thought it best to republish 
 them in their original form. Their issue at set 
 monthly intervals has given me the advantage 
 of observing the kind of judgments likely to be 
 pronounced on them : on the other hand, it 
 has necessarily prevented my critics from con- 
 sidering them with reference to the argument as 
 a whole. Various and conflicting objections 
 have been made to the opinions expressed in 
 them. I might, of course, reply to these in 
 detail, but, as the papers are now grouped in a 
 volume, I prefer to present them without com- 
 ment to the impartial consideration of the reader, 
 only adding a few words on a point on which 
 
Vlll PKEFACE 
 
 my intention seems to have been very generally 
 misunderstood. 
 
 It has been suggested to me that I prejudice 
 my cause by giving to a literary subject a title 
 necessarily carrying with it political associations. 
 I might, indeed, have called the series ' The 
 Romantic Movement in English Literature/ but 
 this would not have expressed all that I had 
 in my mind. Art is the ideal reflection of 
 national life, and owes much of its development 
 to the social and political causes that determine 
 the course of a people's history. Even, therefore, 
 if I had simply intended to illustrate from the 
 poetry of the present century the political effects of 
 the sreat democratic movement since the French 
 
 o 
 
 Revolution in 1789, I could, I think, have pro- 
 vided myself with historic materials not irrele- 
 vant to the subject. But is it correct to limit 
 the use of the word ' Liberalism ' to politics ? to 
 associate it simply with the events that produced 
 the change in the Poor Law, the extension of the 
 Franchise, the Repeal of the Corn Laws, and the 
 Emancipation of the Press ? Is it not rather 
 the case that these are only the external mani- 
 
I PEEFACE ix 
 
 festations of a spirit working in the mind of the 
 people, which has assumed a particular aspect 
 in politics, but which has produced analogous 
 results in the spheres of religion and art ? So, 
 at least, it has appeared to others beside myself/ 
 and if any are still inclined to question the pro- 
 priety of my title, I may appeal to the example 
 of so great a master of the English language as 
 Cardinal Newman, in whose * History of my 
 Religious Opinions ' the word ' Liberalism 7 is 
 employed over and over again to denote a move- 
 ment in the region of thought. 
 
 I have not used the words ' Liberalism ' and 
 4 Conservatism ' in any invidious or party sense. 
 By ' Liberalism ' I mean the disposition which 
 _leadsjpeii to seek abova..all things the enlarge- 
 ment of individual liberty : by ' Conservatism ' 
 that which makes them desire primarily to pre- 
 serve the continuity of national development. 
 Between these two principles I can see no essen- 
 tial contradiction, nor do I think that they can 
 be safely separated. At the same time it is 
 perfectly easy to consider ea,ch by itself; and 
 indeed, it is sufficiently obvious that, under our 
 
x PEEFACE 
 
 party system, there is an unfortunate tendency 
 to regard them as if one was exclusive of the 
 other. Pushed to their logical extremes, each 
 has a danger peculiar to itself. Excessive Con- 
 servatism may doubtless develop into the stag- 
 nation of Ancestor Worship. On the other 
 hand, the extravagant pursuit of Liberty ends 
 in an individualism which strikes at the root of 
 social and national growth. If, for instance, 
 the maintenance of rigid commercial restrictions 
 in favour of a particular interest may have been 
 injurious to the development of the nation, has 
 there been no danger in the universal application 
 of the principle of laisser fairs without regard 
 to circumstances ? If the imposition of political 
 disabilities on those who refused to conform to 
 the established religion of the country was a 
 policy which could only be defended under cer- 
 tain conditions of society, is it more reasonable, 
 in the interests of so-called freedom of thought, 
 to uproot a religious organisation which has 
 from time immemorial formed part of the na- 
 tional life ? So in the sphere of creative Ima- 
 gination. There may be no less error in the 
 
PKEFACE xi 
 
 theories of those who, like Wordsworth, make 
 the individual mind the standard of art, and 
 defy the rules of tradition and convention, than 
 in the inflexibility of critics such as Gifford, 
 who are inclined to yield to prescription an 
 almost passive obedience. 
 
 My intention has been to trace historically 
 the manner in which the movement on behalf 
 of liberty during the present century has affected 
 the order established in the sphere of Imagina- 
 tion since the Revolution of 1688. I have 
 sought to exhibit the constant course of conflict 
 and reconciliation between the spirit of Autho- 
 rity and the spirit of Freedom, which has 
 hitherto preserved for us the continuity of our 
 national life. I have shown how, out of the 
 ruins of Feudal and Catholic sentiment, arose 
 a new code of taste, derived from old English 
 sources, corrected and refined by classical au- 
 thority ; how this assimilated naturally with the 
 ideas of a ruling aristocracy ; how the romantic 
 element in our language was virtually sup- 
 pressed ; and how, in the latter part of the 
 eighteenth century, as the classical spirit began 
 
xii PEEFACE 
 
 ' to languish, the genius of Romance revived, and 
 associated itself in a multitude of subtle forms 
 with the growing spirit of Liberty and Demo- 
 cracy. The subject is a large one, and I have 
 not been able to treat it otherwise than in 
 outline ; but, now that these essays have been 
 collected, I trust it may appear that I have been 
 animated by the spirit of a student rather than 
 of an advocate, and that, according to my 
 lights, I have endeavoured to trace accurately 
 the course of the great conflict of opinion visible 
 in the sphere of taste since the French Revolu- 
 tion. At the same time, I do not for a moment 
 imagine that the account here given of the 
 Liberal and Romantic movement in our litera- 
 ture is wholly dispassionate. The men of genius 
 who played the most prominent part in it lived 
 too near to our own times, and are associated 
 too closely with our own feelings and prejudices, 
 to be judged like Greek and Roman authors, 
 and I can well believe that the impartial reader 
 may detect a bias in my judgments of which I 
 am myself unconscious. If, however, he be 
 inclined to complain that the tribute paid in 
 
PEEFACE xiii 
 
 these essays to the great romantic poets of the 
 present century is short of what justice demands, 
 I would ask him to remember that he is required 
 by Liberal critics to believe that ' Dryden and 
 Pope are not classics of our poetry/ When two 
 writers who have exercised so powerful an in- 
 fluence on the growth of English metrical litera- 
 ture are thus stripped of their laurels by the 
 stroke of a pen, and without any intelligible 
 reason being assigned, it is perhaps not wonder- 
 ful that those who reverence and admire them 
 as poets should scrutinise closely the claims of 
 the new deities in whose honour they are de- 
 posed. 
 
 Numerous symptoms, such as the contro- 
 versy between Mr. Arnold and Mr. Swinburne 
 respecting the merits of Byron and Shelley, 1 show 
 that we have not yet emerged from the party 
 struggle that divided the critical world in the 
 beginning of the century. The relative position 
 in the history of English literature that will 
 finally be assigned to the great poets of the 
 
 1 See Mr. Swinburne's essays on ' Byron and Wordsworth ' 
 in the Nineteenth Century for April and May 1884. 
 
xiv PEEFACE 
 
 present century, has still to be determined by 
 the free conflict of opinion ; and, as I have said 
 in my introductory paper, I pretend simply to 
 describe the Liberal Movement from a Conser- 
 vative point of view. The description itself may 
 be false or inadequate : but I venture to think 
 it cannot be put aside as unworthy of exa- 
 mination. 
 
CONTENTS. 
 
 ESSAY 
 
 I. INTRODUCTORY 
 
 II. THE CONSERVATISM OF THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 35 
 
 in. WORDSWORTH'S THEORY OF POETRY . . . . 71 
 
 IV. THE REVIVAL OF ROMANCE I SCOTT, BYRON, SHELLEY 1 1 1 
 
 V. POETRY, MUSIC, AND PAINTING : COLERIDGE AND 
 
 KEATS ........ 159 
 
 VI. CONCLUSION : THE PROSPECTS OF POETRY 197 
 
THE 
 
 LIBERAL MOYEMENT IN ENGLISH 
 LITERATURE 
 
I. 
 
 INTRODUCTORY. 
 
 EVERYONE who shares the instincts of humanity 
 looks with interest on a quarrel between authors. 
 It arouses excitement of the same kind as that 
 which in old days for I believe I am speak- 
 ing of the manners of the past used to be fell 
 when a whisper ran through the form that there 
 was to be a fight after school was over, or as 
 that which still rises when every corner of the 
 House of Commons fills in anticipation of ' a 
 scene/ We know that there will be an exhi- 
 bition of human nature as it really is, not merely 
 as it strives to appear. The record of such 
 combats proved a fruitful topic to the industry 
 of Disraeli the elder. But a portion of the sub- 
 ject is still unexhausted, and a chapter of lite- 
 rary history almost equally entertaining might 
 
 B 2 
 
4 THE LIBERAL MOVEMENT ESSAY i 
 
 be written respecting quarrels about authors. If 
 a dispute between authors has all the interest 
 of a duel, the other attains the magnitude of 
 a battle. As one thinks of the desperate en- 
 counters in foot-notes between rival editors of 
 the classics, or of all the arguments discharged 
 by the Academies that fought over the merits of 
 Tasso and Ariosto, vast materials of literary his- 
 tory at once present themselves. And all for 
 the sake of some favourite poet or novelist who 
 may have been dead and buried a hundred 
 years ! The matter-of-fact spectator of wars of 
 this kind is apt to lift up his hands in amaze- 
 ment at the passions which are excited, and to 
 wonder whether they might not be composed by 
 some intervention like that which Virgil recom- 
 mends for the pacification of belligerent bees. 
 
 So, doubtless, wondered many a sober reader 
 while considering the astounding invectives with 
 which Mr. Swinburne EaS'lately been endeavour- 
 ing to befoul Byron's memory. ' Doest thou 
 well to be angry/ he may have been inclined to 
 ask, 'because Mr. Arnold has preferred Byron 
 to Shelley as a poet ? ' The question sounds 
 
ESSAY i IN ENGLISH LITEEATURE 5 
 
 reasonable enough, yet it would betray but an 
 imperfect appreciation of the real causes of Mr. 
 Swinburne's violence. The fact is that, under a 
 controversy apparently involving only individual 
 preferences, radical antipathies of taste and feel- 
 ing are latent which are as old as the history of 
 art, and which have, in the present instance, 
 been brought into collision by the operation of 
 historic causes as closely connected with each 
 other as the Thirty Years' War was with the 
 Reformation. If anyone questions the accuracy 
 of this assertion he has but to refer to the con- 
 troversy about Pope in 1820, and he will find 
 that the respective positions of the disputants of 
 that period are substantially identical with those 
 now severally occupied by Mr. Arnold and Mr. 
 Swinburne. 
 
 It is worth while to recall for a moment the 
 outlines, of a dispute which- attracted great at- 
 tention in its day, both from the eminence of the 
 combatants and from the intrinsic interest of 
 the issues that were raised. The occasion of the 
 war was tke supposed attempt of Bowles to de- 
 tract from the poetical reputation of Pope, whose 
 
6 ' THE LIBERAL MOVEMENT ESSAY i 
 
 works he had edited. Bowles's real intention 
 was to prove that Pope was not a poet of the 
 highest order, a proposition which everyone 
 would have accepted without argument, if he 
 had not thought fit to force an open door by 
 laying siege to it with a whole park of artillery. 
 Nothing would satisfy him but ^to take the posi- 
 tion he desired by slow and regular approaches, 
 and he advanced under cover of two prodigious 
 axioms which he loudly proclaimed to be 4 in- 
 variable principles ' of poetry. These ran as 
 follows : ' All images drawn from what is beau- 
 tiful and sublime in the works of Nature are 
 more beautiful and sublime than images drawn 
 from Art, and are therefore more poetical. 1 And: 
 ' Subject and execution are equally to be con- 
 sidered ; the one respecting the poetry, the other 
 the .art and talents of the poet.' From these he 
 concludes : ' With regard to the first, Pope can- 
 not be placed among the highest order of poets ; 
 with regard to the second, none was ever his 
 superior.' 
 
 I think it is obvious that if Bowles's anta- 
 gonists had fixed their attention on the really 
 
SSAY i IN ENGLISH LITERATURE 7 
 
 weak points in his two positions, he might have 
 suffered instant and disastrous defeat. It is im- 
 proper to speak of a subject as being intrinsically 
 poetical ; it may be sublime per se, but it becomes 
 poetical in consequence of the conception and 
 execution of the poet. There is nothing beau- 
 tiful or sublime in the subject of the ' Rape of 
 the Lock/ and yet few would deny that the sub- 
 ject is treated in an exceedingly poetical manner. 
 It is, in fact, merely begging the question to 
 assume that the sole sources of poetry are the 
 beautiful and the sublime. 
 
 Roused, however, to indignation by what 
 they considered an insidious attempt to detract 
 from the reputation of their favourite, Pope's 
 champions either fell upon Bowles at those 
 points where he was really impregnable, or ad- 
 vanced counter-propositions which could not be 
 sustained. Bowles had argued that i all images 
 drawn from what is beautiful and sublime in 
 Nature are more beautiful and sublime than 
 images drawn from Art/ This is substantially 
 undeniable. Pope, however, drew his images 
 largely from art ; therefore Campbell felt it in- 
 
8 THE LIBERAL MOVEMENT ESSAY i 
 
 cuinbent on him to dispute an almost self-evident 
 proposition. Bowles, again, insisted that all 
 poetry inhered in the subject ; Byron, plunging 
 into the fray, as he says himself, ' like an Irish- 
 man in a row, anybody's customer,' maintained, 
 on the other hand, with justice, that it lay rather 
 in the execution ; but he went on to contend 
 that, as Pope's execution was nearly faultless, 
 he was therefore entitled to occupy the same 
 poetical rank as Homer himself ! With his 
 adversaries committing blunders of this kind, 
 Bowles was able partially to disguise his own, 
 and to make so much better a fight than he 
 deserved that a considerable portion of the public 
 fancied he had been victorious all along the line, 
 and had fully established his ' invariable prin- 
 ciples.' 
 
 Sixty years have gone by, and in the place 
 
 ( of Bowles testing the rank of poets by ' images 
 
 s drawn from the sublime and beautiful in Nature," 
 
 and deposing Pope from his usurped throne, we 
 
 have Mr. Arnold telling us : 'It is important, 
 
 therefore, to hold fast to this : that poetry is at 
 
 bottom a criticism of life ; that the greatness of 
 
ESSAY i v IN ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 V 
 
 a poet lies in his powerful and beautiful applica- 
 tion of ideas to life to the question : How to 
 live. 7 To which question it would appear that, 
 in Mr. Arnold's opinion, Shelley has not re- 
 turned a wholly satisfactory answer, and is there- 
 fore not to be reckoned a great classical poet. 
 Whereupon, as was to be expected, Mr. Swin- 
 burne takes the field with ' a simple postulate, 
 or at least a simple assumption, on which, 7 says 
 he, ' I would rest my argument. It would be 
 absolute waste of time for one who assumes it as 
 indisputable to enter into controversy with one 
 who regards it as disputable that theitwo primary 
 and essential qualities of poetry are i 
 
 and harmony ] that whiprp these qualities are 
 can be no poetry properly 
 
 called, and that_where these qualities are_per- 
 ceptible in the highest degree, there, even though_ 
 they should be"^maccoinpanied and unsupported 
 by anffL_ other great quality whatever even 
 though the ethical or critical quality should be 
 conspicuous by its absence there, and only 
 there, is the best and the highest poetry. 7 From 
 which premises we are to conclude that Shelley 
 
THE LIEEEAL MOVEMENT ESSAY i 
 
 is the third, if not the second, in rank of all the f 
 English poets. 
 
 ' Who shall decide when doctors disagree ? ' 
 Decision is twice as hard in the present disagree- 
 ment as it was in the great Pope controversy. 
 Then the disputants attacked and resisted 
 according to the established rules of logic. 
 Major, minor, and conclusion were all mar- 
 shalled before the reader, and the combatants 
 triumphed with or succumbed to unimpeachable 
 syllogisms. Not so our contemporaries. When 
 Mr. Arnold has assured us that poetry in the 
 future will fill the place of religion we are very 
 ready to concede that, if such is to be the case, 
 it is desirable that we should have only such 
 poetry as gives us the truest criticism of life, 
 and that we ought, therefore, to be always 
 studying the best poetical models. But how 
 are we to know these ? 4 Well/ says Mr. Arnold 
 in effect, with his usual engaging frankness, ' I 
 really can't give you any infallible rules, but 
 perhaps the best way is to carry in your head 
 I certain lines and passages about which there can 
 be no mistake, and to be always asking yourself 
 
ESSAY i IN ENGLISH LiTEKATURE 11 
 
 V 
 
 then you meet with a poem whether it comes 
 p to this classical mark.' And he gives a 
 number of such lines as examples, about which 
 it is only necessary to say that, being selected 
 by Mr. Arnold, they are of course judiciously 
 selected, but that the greatness and nobility of 
 the verses he cites depends entirely upon their 
 harmonious adjustment to a particular context 
 from which they have been arbitrarily torn. 
 And when can a poet be said to have criticised 
 life in the truest way ? Shakespeare and Milton 
 may pass without much examination. But 
 Chaucer and Burns ? These are not quite up 
 to the mark. They want ' the <r7rou8a/oVr2, the 
 high and excellent seriousness which Aristotle 
 assigns as one of the grand virtues of poetry.' 
 As for Dryden and Pope, ' though they may 
 write in verse, though they may in a certain 
 sense be masters of the art of versification, 
 Dryden and Pope are not classics of our poetry 
 they are classics of our prose. 7 
 
 Surely when a critic of great eminence j/ 
 thinks it necessary to give such advice to a pre- \ 
 sumably large number of readers the art of poetry 
 
12 THE LIBEKAL MOVEMENT ESSAY i 
 
 must have fallen upon evil days. For if there 
 be any students so extremely cautious and de- 
 liberative as to fear to trust to their natural 
 instinct in judging poetry, it is certain that they 
 might go on applying Mr. Arnold's tests for a 
 hundred years without being ever able to tell 
 good poetry from bad. Think of the Greek 
 rhapsodists whose raptures in reciting Homer 
 were so strong as to throw them into convul- 
 sions : can we imagine men who delight in poetry 
 in such a way as this balancing their judgments 
 like wine-tasters and seeking to ' detect the 
 presence or absence of high quality 7 in the verse 
 that they read ? Or the spectators at the festival 
 of the Dionysia : would Mr. Arnold have had 
 them distract their imaginations from the great 
 world of Aristophanic horse-play to reflect 
 whether the imagery presented to them was 
 quite worthy of the ' high destinies of poetry ' ? 
 When Shakespeare called upon the assembled 
 theatre to lift their imaginations to the glories 
 of Agincourt : 
 
 Suppose within the girdle of these walls 
 Are now confined two mighty monarchies, 
 
ESSAY i IN ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 Whose high upreared and abutting fronts 
 The perilous narrow ocean parts asunder : 
 Piece out our imperfections with your thoughts ; 
 Into a thousand parts divide one man, 
 And make imaginary puissance ; 
 Think, when we talk of horses that you see them 
 Printing their proud hoofs i' the receiving earth, 
 For 'tis your thoughts that now must deck our kings- 
 was there an Englishman with the soul of 
 poetry within him who did not answer the 
 appeal in the spirit with which Sir Philip Sidney 
 says that he always read the ballad ' Chevy 
 Chase,' and without the slightest attempt at con- 
 sidering whether the entertainment was quite 
 up to the classical mark ? Or, once more, will 
 Mr. Arnold ever persuade any reader of average 
 sensibility that what ought to be enjoyed in the 
 ' Scholar Gipsy ' is rather the moral of the poem, 
 than the beautiful and affecting images of the 
 Oxfordshire landscape with which the poet has 
 surrounded the story ? Never ! 
 
 In short, I submit with deference, but with 
 confidence, that the ethical standard of judg- 
 ment which Mr. Arnold proposes as the test 
 of the highest poetry is narrow and arbi- 
 
THE LIBERAL MOVEMENT ESSAY 7 
 
 fcrary ; that in criticising any poet, nothing is 
 to be gained by comparing his qualities with 
 ,, those of some other poet of a perfectly distinct 
 species ; but that each should be judged on his 
 own merits, with sole reference to the end pro- 
 posed, the real question being whether that end 
 is in itself a just one, and if so, how nearly it is 
 attained. True lovers of poetry will, in rny 
 opinion, side with Mr. Swinburne against Mr. 
 Arnold when the former maintains it to be in- 
 disputable that ' the two primary and essential 
 qualities of poetry are imagination and harmony.' 
 And that Mr. Swinburne, in his calm moments, 
 entertains a large and generous idea of the space 
 that is covered by the terms ' imagination and 
 i harmony/ no one can doubt who reads his 
 admirably just and appreciative observations on 
 the poetry of Crabbe. How comes it, then, that 
 a critic who can perceive ' imagination and har- 
 mony ' in the ' Dutch School ' of English poetry 
 seems absolutely incapable of detecting either 
 quality in the verse of Byron ? How is it 
 that he does not see that he is not damaging 
 Byron's poetry, but his own critical reputation, 
 
KSSAY I 
 
 IK ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 when lie pours out his invective on his vie 
 tim's 'blundering, floundering, lumbering, and 
 stumbling stanzas,' on his ' gasping, ranting, 
 wheezing, broken-winded verse,' or his ' drawl- 
 ing, draggle-tailed drab of a Muse ' ? The fact 
 is that Mr. Swinburne, being in a passion at the 
 preference given by Mr. Arnold to Byron over 
 his favourite Shelley, is determined in revenge 
 to lower Byron's reputation by overwhelming 
 him with critical ' Billingsgate,' and by parody- 
 ing (rather pointlessly) some of his flimsiest 
 and most tawdry verse. But as to settling the 
 question by argument, the 'aesthetic' test which 
 he brings to prove Byron's deficiency in ' imagi- 
 nation and harmony ' is every whit as arbitrary 
 as Mr. Arnold's ethical method. 
 
 < The test of the highest poetry,' says he, < is that it 
 eludes all tests. Poetry in which there is no element 
 at once perceptible and indefinable by any reader or 
 hearer of any poetic instinct may have every other 
 good quality ; it may be as nobly ardent and mvigoi 
 ating as the best of Byron's, or as nobly mournful and 
 contemplative as the best of Southey's : if all its pro- 
 perties can easily or can ever be gauged and named by 
 their admirers, it is not poetry-above all, 1 
 lyric poetry of the first water . . . 
 
16 THE LIBEEAL MOVEMENT ESSAY i 
 
 Will no one tell me what she sings ? 
 
 Perhaps the plaintive numbers flow 
 For old, unhappy, far off things, 
 
 And battles long ago. 
 
 If not another word was left of the poem in which 
 these two last lines occur, those two lines would 
 suffice to show the hand of a poet differing, not in 
 degree but in kind, from the tribe of Byron or of 
 Southey. In the whole expanse of poetry there can 
 hardly be two verses of more perfect and profound and 
 exalted beauty. But if anybody does not happen to 
 see this, no critic of all that ever criticised, from the 
 days of Longinus to the days of Arnold, from the days 
 of Zoilus to the days of Zola, could succeed in making 
 visible the certainty of this truth to the mind of that 
 person.' 
 
 In spite of this tremendous affirmation, I 
 venture to think not only that what Mr. Swin- 
 burne calls the ' certainty of truth ' will be im- 
 perceptible to many persons not devoid of poetic 
 sense, but that to any man of plain mind it can 
 be shown to be palpable falsehood. For sup- 
 posing that the two lines 
 
 For old, unhappy, far off things, 
 And battles long ago, 
 
 had been all of the poem which was in existence, 
 
ESSAY i IN ENGLISH LITERATURE 1 7 
 
 their pathos, and beauty, and harmony would 
 have been entirely lost. The high quality of the 
 verses depends upon their association with the 
 image of the solitary Highland reaper singing 
 unconsciously her ' melancholy strain ' in the 
 midst of the autumn sheaves : detached from 
 this image, the lines would scarcely have been 
 more affecting than our old friends 4 Barbara, 
 celarent,' &c. And as for Mr. Swinburne's 
 general principle, it will not hold water any 
 more than his particular instance. c Poetry,' he 
 tells us, * in which there is no element at once 
 perceptible and indefinable by any reader or 
 hearer of any poetic instinct is not poetry of the 
 first water. 7 It may safely be said of all genuine 
 poetry that there is something about it which 
 cannot be analysed or defined, and which is the 
 genius or character it derives from the poet 
 himself. So far Mr. Swinburne's proposition 
 amounts to no more than a truism. And again, 
 it is true that language is only an imperfect 
 vehicle for expressing the images which the, 
 mind conceives, and therefore there will always; 
 be something in all imaginative writing which 
 
 
18 THE LIBERAL MOVEMENT ESSAY i 
 
 escapes analysis. But if Mr. Swinburne means 
 
 to assert that vagueness and indistinctness of 
 
 / thought and feeling are the characteristics of the 
 
 ; highest poetry, he will have to explain away the 
 
 IN J greater part of Homer, and Virgil, and Shake- 
 
 i speare, and Milton ; the fact being that the 
 
 greatness of these poets consists in the manly 
 
 strength, the distinctness, and the propriety of 
 
 the language by means of which they bring 
 
 images of things at once sublime and impalpable 
 
 before the mind's eye. 
 
 I have referred to the controversy between 
 Mr. Arnold and Mr. Swinburne, not because I 
 seek presumptuously to intervene in a duel 
 between two eminent poets and critics, but 
 because the issues raised by it seem to me to 
 throw a strong light on the movement which gives 
 the title to this paper. The spectacle of critics 
 emulously endeavouring to secure precedence in 
 the poetical Pantheon for Byron, or Words- 
 worth, or Shelley, or Keats, ought to remind us 
 that two generations ago three of these claimants 
 by no means appeared in the light of deities to 
 those w r ho were then supposed to be the dis- 
 
ESSAY i IN ENGLISH LITERATURE 19 
 
 pensers of fame, but were ruthlessly denounced 
 as impostors and false prophets. Time has 
 brought its revenge ; the idols of an older 
 generation have been displaced in favour of the 
 once-despised innovators : we adore what our 
 fathers burned, and burn what they adored. 
 Human justice proceeds in this rough way ; but 
 the catastrophe that has overtaken the able and 
 accomplished critics of the early part of the 
 present century might at least make us modest 
 in anticipating the permanence of our own judg- 
 ments. 
 
 The fact is that though most of us believe in 
 the existence of Absolute Truth in questions of 
 art, it is impossible to measure this by an abso- 
 lute standard of taste. When any society has 
 passed from the stage of creation into that of 
 criticism, parties develop themselves as naturally 
 in art as they do in politics ; and all critics, con- 
 sciously or unconsciously arraying themselves on 
 different sides, regard the prepossessions, the 
 prejudices, and even the cant of their own con- 
 nection as demonstrable truth. This is the ex- 
 perience of all communities that can boast of a 
 
 c 2 
 
20 THE LIBEEAL MOVEMENT ESSAY i 
 
 literature. We find a Conservative and Liberal 
 Party in Art a Party, that is, adhering to 
 tradition and authority, and a Party striving 
 after change and novelty in Athens under 
 Pericles, and afterwards ; in Rome under Au- 
 gustus ; in France under Louis XIV., and after 
 the Bourbon Restoration of the present century. 
 In England the happy Elizabethan period, was 
 an age of creation rather than of criticism ; but 
 Shakespeare and his contemporaries appeared to 
 the critics of the eighteenth century very nearly 
 as unsatisfactory, in point of art, as Dryden and 
 Pope appear to Mr. Arnold and Mr. Swinburne, 
 and as, perhaps, the great Liberal school of 
 literature, which has done so much to determine 
 the taste of the present generation, will appear 
 to the times that shall be hereafter. 
 
 For it is plain enough to all who consider 
 the matter that the dispute between Mr. Arnold 
 and Mr. Swinburne about Wordsworth and 
 Byron is of an int^n^me character. Both 
 
 / <-<S-VL*^g*-gjiS 
 
 critics are Liberals : the poets they are writing 
 about were Liberals : their criticisms are made 
 on Liberal principles. The Conservatives are 
 
ESSAY i IN ENGLISH LITEKATUKE 21 
 
 out of the quarrel altogether. Not that either of 
 the two critics is intolerant enough to deny to 
 the Conservatives a certain raison d'etre. Mr. 
 Arnold has the charity, in his own man- 
 ner, to allow the eighteenth century to have 
 been 'excellent and indispensable,' though he 
 will not admit the great typical writers of the 
 period to enter his charmed poetical circle. Mr. 
 Swinburne, as we have seen, goes farther, and is 
 even ready to praise the poetry of Crabbe, and to 
 concede that Byron and Pope were poets ' after 
 a fashion.' Nor is either critic blind to the im- 
 perfections of the poets whom he most admires. 
 Twenty years ago, when the tide of Liberalism 
 was still running strong, the Liberal critic who 
 declined to accept the 6 Excursion ' as one of the 
 canonical books of the art of poetry would have 
 been regarded as a heretic. But now Mr. Arnold 
 admits that ' although Jeffrey completely failed 
 to recognise Wordsworth's real greatness, he 
 was yet not wrong in saying of the " Excursion " 
 as a work of poetic style, " This will never do." 
 When a concession of this kind can be made, it 
 may be hoped that we have approached a time in 
 
22 THE LIBEEAL MOVEMENT ESSAY i 
 
 which it will be again possible to examine, in 
 something like a judicial temper, poetical qualities 
 that have been obscured by a passionate dislike 
 or an equally passionate admiration. But the 
 proper balance of judgment will not be attained 
 until Liberal critics leave off regarding Con- 
 servative principles from the heights of con- 
 
 ! temptuous superiority, and consider whether in 
 some respects the ages we have been taught to 
 disparage ought not rather to be regarded as our 
 masters in the art of expression. It is with the 
 hope that I may be able, however inadequately, 
 to stimulate inquiry in this direction, that I 
 propose, in a short series of papers, to trace from 
 the Conservative point of view the course and 
 
 I the character of the Liberal movement in our 
 literature. 
 
 Let me say, by way of preface, that by the 
 word c literature ' I mean imaginative literature, 
 and especially poetry ; and by 4 Liberal move- 
 ment/ the writings of those who, in point of 
 time, followed the French Revolution, and who 
 
 i founded their matter and style on the principles 
 
 \ to which that Revolution gave birth. It may, I 
 
ESSAY i IN ENGLISH LITEE.iTUEE 23 
 
 think, be regarded as no less certain that the 
 democratic upheaval has developed a Liberal 
 movement in art than that it caused a Liberal 
 movement in politics and a Liberal movement 
 in religion. In all three spheres, as I have said 
 in a previous paper, optimism, the fundamental | 
 principle of Liberalism, is ever at work, firing 
 men's fancies with the idea of a constant expan- 
 sion of the human powers of morality and 
 imagination. Thus Mr. Arnold tells us : 
 
 The future of poetry is immense, because in poetry, 
 where it is worthy of its high destinies, our race as 
 time goes on will find an ever surer and surer stay. 
 There is not a creed which is not shaken, not an 
 accredited dogma which is not shown to be question- 
 able, not a received tradition which does not threaten 
 to dissolve. Our religion has materialised itself in the 
 fact, in the supposed fact ; it has attached its emotion 
 to the fact, and now the fact is failing it. But for 
 poetry the idea is everything ; the rest is a world of 
 illusion, of divine illusion. Poetry attaches its emotion 
 to the idea ; the idea is the fact. 
 
 This is only saying in other words what 
 Wordsworth said at the beginning of the cen- 
 tury : 
 
 Poetry is the first and last of all knowledge it is 
 
24 THE LIBEEAL MOVEMENT ESSAY i 
 
 as immortal as the heart of man. If the labours of 
 men of science should ever create any material revo- 
 lution, direct or indirect, in our condition, and in the 
 impressions which we habitually receive, the Poet will 
 sleep then no more than at present ; he will be ready 
 to follow the steps of the man of science, not only in 
 those general indirect effects, but he will be at his side, 
 carrying sensation into the midst of the objects of the 
 science itself. 
 
 In both these passages the influence of the 
 principle oiLjy^timism is sufficiently apparent. 
 The Conservative, on the other hand, whose 
 principles lead him to believe in the radical 
 imperfection of all mortal nature, and in the 
 inherent taint of evil in man, takes a far less 
 sanguine view of the prospects of the art of 
 poetry. He is more inclined to Macaulay's con- 
 clusion : 
 
 We think that as civilisation advances poetry 
 almost necessarily declines. ... In an enlightened 
 age there will be much intelligence, much science, 
 much philosophy, abundance of just classification and 
 subtle analysis, abundance of wit and eloquence, abun- 
 dance of verses, and even of good ones ; but little 
 poetry. Men will judge and compare, but they will 
 not create. 
 
 It will be observed that in these three 
 
ESSAY i IN ENGLISH LITERATUKE t 25 
 
 passages the word ' poetry ' is used in sub- 
 stantially the same sense, as meaning, that is 
 to say, ' poetical sentiment/ or the raw stuff 
 out of which poems are made. And using it in 
 this sense, I confess I do not understand how it 
 is possible to dispute the truth of Macaulay's 
 proposition. Science and poetry are antagonistic^ 
 forces, since the advance of science narrows' 
 the kingdom of imagination, which is the source 
 of creative poetical life. Wordsworth, it is true, 
 credited imagination with a transmutative power 
 which, in some mysterious way, enables it to 
 change objects of knowledge into something dif- 
 ferent from themselves. ' The remotest discover- 
 ies/ says he, 4 of the chemist, the botanist, or 
 mineralogist, will be as proper objects of the 
 poet's art as any upon which it can be employed, 
 if the time should ever come when these things 
 shall be familiar to us, and the relations under 
 which they are contemplated by the followers of 
 these respective sciences shall be manifestly and 
 palpably material to us as enjoying and suffering 
 beings.' Well, we boast, and with justice, of 
 the vast discoveries which have been made in all 
 
26 THE LIBERAL MOVEMENT ESSAY i 
 
 these sciences, and of the extent to which they 
 are studied by the people : but I would put it 
 to any plain man who shall glance at the charm- 
 ing dialogues of Izaak Walton, or at the ' Vulgar 
 Errors ' of Sir Thomas Browne, whether he does 
 not find ten times as much material for poetical 
 creation in the views about natural objects which 
 prevailed even two hundred years ago as in all 
 the enlightenment of Darwin and Lyall. It 
 must be so. Where fact and science come, 
 I imagination must depart. Like some ancient 
 indigenous race it retires before the irresistible 
 forces of well-equipped invaders : inaccessible 
 mountain-peaks and tracts of impenetrable forest 
 remain in its possession ; but the rich and open 
 country of every -day life, over which it once 
 roamed with the freedom of unquestioned owner- 
 ship, is lost to it for ever. 
 
 Against the optimist views of the Liberals 
 as to the inexhaustible resources of poetry, it 
 appears to me, then, that Macaulay's position is 
 unassailable. It is not a question what the 
 poet would like to do, or what he ought to do, 
 with his imagination, but what the inexorable 
 
ESSAY i IN ENGLISH LITERATURE 27 
 
 laws of Nature and Society will allow him to do. 
 On the other hand, I do not think that Con- 
 servatives are at all bound to follow Macaulay 
 to the extreme limits of his pessimist conclu- 
 sion. If his reasoning were sound, the greatest 
 poems ought to be produced in the rudest ages, 
 whereas we know that this is contrary to ex- 
 perience. It is obvious that even the age ofj 
 Homer was one of considerable artistic refine- 
 ment, and it would have been quite impossible 
 for a barbarous stage of society to have produced 
 ' The ^Eneid/ < The Divine Comedy/ or ' Para- 
 dise Lost.' The reason is obvious. For the 
 making of all great poetry not only is abundant 
 imagination and sentiment required, but judg- 
 ment, knowledge of composition and proportion, 
 a language rich, full, and harmonious, and, in 
 a word, all the resources of art. These qualities 
 are not found in an infant community. Such a 
 community will provide the raw material, the 
 poetical elements, which the great poet will 
 afterwards use, but it will not produce the great 
 poem. It is not the peasant creator of the 
 fairies, but Shakespeare the artist, who invents 
 
28 THE LIBERAL MOVEMENT ESSAY i 
 
 the incomparable machinery of the 4 Midsummer 
 Night's Dream : ' the imagination of Caedmon 
 may, in some respects, vie even with that of 
 Milton ; but the harsh crudities of the Anglo- 
 Saxon language would have overpowered the 
 genius of Milton himself. Long ages of refine- 
 ment and philosophy were wanted to prepare 
 for the glories of ' Paradise Lost/ 
 
 It seems to me that half the confusion that 
 prevails in the discussion of the subject is due 
 to the ambiguous sense attaching to the word 
 ' poetry.' When Macaulay says that * an en- 
 lightened age will have little poetry,' he really 
 Inieans that it will have no widespread imagina- 
 Jtive feeling. But the only just and precise 
 sense in which the word can be used is to 
 signify the Art of Poetry as opposed to the 
 other imitative arts of Painting, Sculpture, 
 and Music. Macaulay carries his confusion of 
 thought into his definition of the art of Poetry. 
 
 c By poetry/ he says, c we mean not all writing in 
 verse, nor even all good writing in verse. Our defi- 
 nition excludes many metrical compositions which, on 
 other grounds, deserve the highest praise. By poetry 
 jwe mean the art of employing words in such a manner 
 
ESSAY i IN ENGLISH LITERATURE 29 
 
 as to produce an illusion on the imagination, the art of 
 doing by means of words what the painter does by 
 means of colours.' I 
 
 But plainly, on this principle, we should 
 have to deny the title of painter to many who 
 have expressed their thoughts by means of/ 
 colours. It can scarcely be said that the pic- 
 tures of Teniers, for instance, ' produce an illu- 
 sion on the imagination. 7 But can we, without 
 abuse of language, say that Teniers is less a 
 painter (not a lesser painter, observe) than Tin- 
 toretto because he does not rise above the 
 representation of Dutch fairs, while the other 
 depicts the most sublime scenes of Scripture 
 history ? Macaulay's definition is framed to 
 cover only poems of the highest order of creative ) 
 invention. It will not even suit lyric poetry, 
 the end of which is not to produce an illusion,! 
 but to touch the feelings in the most direct and 
 immediate manner. It will not include such a 
 poem as the ' Georgics,' and he would be a bold 
 man indeed who should deny the ' Georgics,' to 
 be poetry. It naturally excludes all satiric and 
 epigrammatic verse ; but what are we to do 
 
30 THE LIBEEAL MOVEMENT ESSAY i 
 
 with this large class of composition which, for 
 some reason or other, is expressed in a manner 
 that is not prose ? The common sense of the 
 world has assigned to such writers the title of 
 poet. Johnson asks, ' Who is a poet if Pope is 
 not ? ' and I do not know that anyone has ever 
 been able to answer his question. 
 
 I venture in the face of Macaulay's definition, 
 and in the face of the speculations of modern 
 philosophers who have thrown contempt on such 
 a simple view of the matter, to affirm that all 
 good writing in verse in other words, good 
 composition in metre is good poetry in its own* 
 kind. /By poetry I mean the art of producing 
 pleasure by the just expression of imaginative 
 thought and feeling in metrical language.) There 
 are many kinds of feeling sublime, pathetic, 
 serious, ludicrous which can be better expressed 
 in metre than they can in prose. One kind of 
 feeling is doubtless much higher than another ; 
 therefore the poet who produces pleasure by 
 satisfying men's ideas of the sublime belongs to I 
 a higher order than he who merely pleases their 
 
ESSAY i IN ENGLISH LITERATURE 31 
 
 sense of the gay or the ludicrous. But the test 
 of the standard rank of any poet is simply his 
 capacity for producing lasting pleasure by the 
 metrical expression of thought, of whatever kind 
 it may be ; and therefore Horace, and Dryden, 
 and Pope, have as good a title to be considered 
 classical poets as Teniers has to be ranked 
 among the masters of painting. On the other 
 hand, there may be poets finely endowed with 
 gifts of imagm^jtion and harmony, who may yet 
 fail in many of their works to produce that last- 
 ing pleasure which is the test of classical poetry, 
 either because they have squandered their powers 
 on the treatment of subjects which lie beyond 
 the just range of imagination, or have used them 
 for the expression of imaginative ideas which do 
 not possess an enduring interest. I shall attempt, 
 then, by reference to this standard, to determine 
 in the next paper what were the aims andjxleals 
 of those English writers who constituted the 
 tradition established during the eighteenth cen- 
 tury ; then to examine in what respects the 
 great writers of the present century, who have 
 
32 LIBERAL MOVEMENT IN LITERATURE ESSAY i 
 
 produced the movement in literature that I have 
 called Liberal, departed from this tradition ; 
 and in conclusion, to consider what kind of a 
 prospect the movement, now that it is fully 
 developed, seems to disclose to us. 
 
THE 
 
 CONSERVATISM OF THE EIGHTEENTH 
 CENTURY 
 
II. 
 
 THE CONSERVATISM OF THE EIGHTEENTH 
 CENTURY. 
 
 I WOULD ask the reader who follows my argu- 
 ment to consider that it rests on two assump- 
 tions. The first is, that poetry is a social art ; \ 
 that the creations of the greatest poets are not 
 mere isolated conceptions of their individual, 
 minds, but are the products of influences which! 
 are felt by all their contemporaries, though the 
 poet alone has the power of expressing them. 
 4 There must/ says Shelley, ' be a resemblance 
 which does not depend on their own will be- 
 tween all the writers of any particular age. 
 They cannot escape from subjection to a com- 
 mon influence which arises out of an infinite 
 combination of circumstances belonging to the 
 
 D 2 
 
36 THE CONSERVATISM OF ESSAY n 
 
 times in which they live, though each is in a 
 degree the author of the very influence by which 
 his being is thus pervaded. Thus the tragic 
 poets of the age of Pericles ; the Italian revivers 
 of ancient learning ; those mighty intellects of 
 our own country that succeeded the Reforma- 
 tion, the translators of the Bible, Shakespeare, 
 Spenser, the dramatists of the reign of Elizabeth, 
 and Lord Bacon ; the colder spirits of the in- 
 terval that succeeded ; all resemble each other, 
 and differ from every other in their several 
 classes. And this is an influence from which 
 neither the meanest scribbler nor the sublimest 
 genius of any era can escape ; and which I have 
 not attempted to escape. 7 The second assump- 
 tion is that the general spiritual imagination of 
 society, which is the source of all poetry, ^sjess 
 free in a refined than in a rude age, just as the 
 imagination is far more at liberty in each of us 
 during childhood and youth than after we have 
 acquired the judgment and experience of mature 
 life. Wordsworth illustrates this truth by two 
 very beautiful images. One is in the ' Ode to 
 Immortality ' : 
 
ESSAY ii THE EIGHTEENTH CENTUKY 37 
 
 Heaven lies about us in our Infancy ! 
 Shades of the prison-house begin to close 
 
 Upon the growing boy, 
 But he beholds the light, and whence it flows, 
 
 He sees it in his joy. 
 
 The youth who daily farther from the East 
 Must travel, still is Nature's priest, 
 
 And by the vision splendid 
 
 Is on his way attended ; 
 At length the man perceives it die away, 
 And fade into the light of common day. 
 
 And he expresses the regret which so many 
 experience in a period of materialising science 
 when they look back upon the ages of free and 
 simple imagination : 
 
 Great God ! I'd rather be 
 A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn, 
 So might I, standing on this pleasant lea, 
 Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn ; 
 Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea ; 
 Or hear old Triton blow his wreathed horn. 
 
 It is obvious that a remarkable evolution, 
 alike in the imaginative life of the individual 
 and in that of society, is described or suggested 
 in these lines. Yet although both assumptions 
 are thus severally supported by the authority of 
 
38 THE CONSERVATISM OF ESSAY n 
 
 two of the greatest poets of the present century 
 (in the face, it is true, of Wordsworth's own 
 critical theory) ; although Plato, in his dialogues, 
 insists over and over again on the essential 
 antagonism between science and imagination ; 
 although I was most careful to disavow all 
 sympathy with Macaulay's pessimist doctrine 
 that, ' as civilization advances, poetry necessarily 
 declines/ the opinions I expressed in the last 
 paper written on the subject were assailed in 
 many Radical quarters as novel, heretical, per- 
 verse, and depressing. A very practical proof 
 was thus afforded that Conservatives are much 
 more in sympathy, than are Radicals, with the 
 scientific doctrine of Evolution. It is natural 
 that it should be so. Life, in the Radical view, 
 is simply change ; and a Radical is ready to 
 promote every caprice or whim of the numerical 
 majority of the moment in the belief that the 
 change which it effects -in the constitution of 
 society will bring him nearer to some ideal state 
 existing in his own imagination. Life, accord- 
 ing to the Conservative belief, on the other hand, 
 is growth, and all real growth must be con- 
 
ESSAY ii THE EIGHTEENTH CENTUKY 39 
 
 tinuous. Conservatism, in whatever sphere, 
 consists in preserving and expanding the stream 
 of traditional national life which has come down 
 to us from our fathers. Conservatism, in politics, 
 as Burke says, bids us act upon the maxim, 
 ' never wholly or at once to depart from anti- 
 quity/ | Conservatism in art and literature, if 
 we are to believe Sir Joshua Reynolds, lies in 
 discovering the principles that inspired the great 
 masters of early times, and in applying them to 
 our own circumstances. ' It is from a careful 
 study of the works of the ancients/ says he, 
 ' that you will be enabled to attain to the real 
 simplicity of nature ; they will suggest many 
 observations that would probably escape you if 
 your study were confined to nature alone. And, 
 indeed, I cannot help suspecting that in this in- 
 stance the ancients had an easier task than the 
 moderns. They had probably little or nothing 
 to unlearn, as their manners were nearly ap- 
 proaching to this desirable simplicity ; while the 
 modern artist, before he can see the truth of 
 things, is obliged to remove a veil with which 
 the fashion of the times has thought proper to 
 
40 THE CONSERVATISM OF ESSAY n 
 
 cover her.' Here we have an expression of the 
 true doctrine of Conservative Evolution. 
 
 In this sense the eighteenth century, which 
 is the subject of the present paper, seems to me 
 (to have played a highly Conservative part in 
 the history of English religion, politics, art, and 
 literature. To many, no doubt, the statement 
 will sound paradoxical. The eighteenth century 
 has been constantly represented to us in modern 
 criticism as the pioneer of the great Revolution 
 in thought and manners, which has been pro- 
 ceeding on the Continent since 1789, and which 
 has, of course, exercised an important influence 
 on our own history. But, as far as England is 
 concerned, I think it may be demonstrated that 
 . the work of the eighteenth century consisted in 
 /providing a safe mode of transition from the 
 manners of mediaeval to those of modern society. 
 Suppose, for a moment, that this century were 
 eliminated from our history, and that we were 
 obliged to carry back our thoughts, without 
 halting-place, to the ideas and sentiments em- 
 bodied in Sir Philip Sidney's ' Arcadia,' the 
 ' Faery Queen/ or the fashionable ' metaphysical ' 
 
ESSAY ii THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 41 
 
 poetry of the seventeenth century ; would any 
 plain man hesitate to acknowledge that though, 
 in other points besides language, he could detect 
 a certain kinship and sympathy between past 
 and present, yet that they were divided from 
 each other by a wide gulf of imagination and 
 sentiment ? But fill in the gap with the 
 eighteenth century, and we feel not only that, in 
 spite of obvious superficial divergencies of taste 
 and perception, we and they occupy a common 
 intellectual ground, but also that, looking back 
 on the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, 
 through the light of the eighteenth, the naturq 
 of many of the sympathies which we are dimly 
 conscious of sharing with those ages, is ex- 
 plained by modifications of manners effected in 
 the intermediate period. The natural inference 
 is that the eighteenth century, far from being a I 
 time of destruction and revolution, was a neces- f 
 sary link in a long chain of historic national I 
 development. 
 
 To discuss adequately the Conservatism of 
 the eighteenth century would be the work of a 
 volume rather than of a magazine article. I can 
 
42 THE CONSERVATISM OF . ESSAY n 
 
 but indicate or suggest what appears to me to be 
 the general ' lie ' of the ground, and illustrate my 
 view by reference to the opinions of some of the 
 most representative Englishmen of the century. 
 For the purposes of my argument the great 
 point to remember is that there has been no) 
 breach in the continuity of our social history.] 
 Though our annals are sufficiently stained with 
 violence and bloodshed, though we have never 
 shrunk from settling with the sword differences 
 too radical to' be composed with the tongue, we 
 have never cut ourselves off, after the manner of 
 France at the end of the last century, from the 
 sources of our national life. We have, therefore, 
 as yet experienced no convulsions arising out 
 of the complete separation between Church and 
 State ; till recently there has been no wide- spread 
 confiscation of property ; no one has hitherto 
 called for a Code Napoleon. If the Reformation 
 produced sharp conflicts in consequence of the 
 dispute about the Headship of the Church, the 
 life-blood of the parochial system continued to 
 circulate almost as quietly as it circulated in the 
 days of the ' Canterbury Tales.' A violent 
 
ESSAY ii THE EIGHTEENTH CENTUKY 43 
 
 collision between the extreme principles of 
 Monarchy and Republicanism no doubt over- 
 threw, for a short period, the constitution in 
 Church and State ; but the foundations of 
 society remained unimpaired, and the nation, 
 finding itself completely out of harmony with 
 the order that had been imposed on it, restored 
 the old Constitution in 1660, and defined it in 
 1688. It can scarcely be doubted that the jcon^ 
 tinui^y .of tradition has been thus preserved, \ 
 becai .se our best minds have enlisted themselves 
 in the cause of order, and have made it the 
 object of their deepest study how to reconcile 
 this with the claims of rational liberty. If, 
 therefore, we can see how Butler, for instance, 
 sought to advance the cause of Christianity in 
 his age, how Burke interpreted the Constitution, 
 and how Pope developed the traditions of Eng- 
 lish poetry, we shall have a fairly clear con- 
 ception of the nature of English Conservatism, 
 religious, political, and literary, in the eighteenth 
 century. It may be objected that it is fantastic 
 to look for a common principle running through 
 so many different spheres of activity. But it 
 
44 THE CONSEKVATISM OF ESSAY n 
 
 appears to me that in all of them the same 
 ^intellectual tendency may be traced namely, an 
 instinctive acknowledgment of the truth that all 
 spiritual, political, and artistic development must 
 proceed in conformity with an ancestral law, the 
 authority of which is not to be questioned, and 
 which must be frankly obeyed by every indi- 
 vidual who wishes to be completely free. 
 
 To begin with Butler, whose attitude in this 
 respect often causes his reasoning to be mis- 
 understood. The modern assailants of Chris- 
 tianity assume that ever since the Renaissance 
 an intellectual movement has been going on 
 which has little by little been undermining the 
 cause of revealed religion. The Reformation, 
 they argue, took away so much ; the eighteenth 
 century destroyed so much more ; the fall of the 
 fortress before the historical and scientific criti- 
 cism of modern days is inevitable. Singularly 
 enough they point to the attitude of the great 
 divines of the eighteenth century as evidence in 
 favour of their argument. Look at Butler, they 
 say ; it is plain that he has the depressed air 
 of a beaten man ; the low ground on which he 
 
ESSAY ii THE EIGHTEENTH CENTUKY 45 
 
 rests his arguments is a proof of what we say. 
 Who would believe in a probable God ? And, 
 of course, it is undeniable that Butler's whole 
 method of argument gives a handle to anyone 
 who chooses to reason in this captious and 
 superficial manner. Such an opportunity is 
 obviously offered in the following typical 
 passage : 
 
 The evidence of religion then being admitted real, 
 those who object against it as not satisfactory, i.e. as 
 not being what they wish it, plainly forget that this is 
 the very condition of our being ; for satisfaction, in this 
 sense, does not belong to such a creature as man. 
 
 Only a man, urges the agnostic philosopher, 
 who is conscious that he has very little to say 
 for himself, would resort to a pessimistic argu- 
 ment in defence of such a high matter as revealed 
 religion. But those who reason like this show a 
 strange inability to recognise the relative strength 
 of their own and their adversary's position. 
 They seem to regard Christianity merely as a 
 speculative system which must stand or fall on 
 purely intellectual grounds. But as a matter of 
 fact the vast power of Christianity is derived 
 
46 THE CONSERVATISM OF ESSAY n 
 
 from a practical and moral source. It is in 
 possession of men's souls and spirits. Nineteen 
 centuries have established its dominion over the 
 conscience of the greatest nations of the world. 
 The members of those nations have had their 
 moral ideas formed in infancy on the assumption 
 of the truth of Revelation long before it was 
 possible for them fo examine the testimony by 
 which the authority of Revelation is supported. 
 The opponents of Christianity must therefore 
 undermine the conscience of Christendom, before 
 they can hope to weaken materially the belief in 
 the divine authority of revealed religion. The 
 burden of proof lies with them. And of this fact 
 the defenders of Christianity have always shown 
 themselves to be perfectly aware. As they have 
 been, naturally, men of ardent piety and devo- 
 tion, the real argument that has weighed with 
 them has been the spiritual experience of man- 
 kind. They see the necessity, no doubt, of 
 defending the credibility of the testimony by 
 which the truth of Revelation is established. 
 On the other hand, they know that it is not 
 incumbent on them to persuade the Christian 
 
ESSAY ii THE EIGHTEENTH GENTUEY 47 
 
 world of the truth of Revelation, but rather on 
 their adversaries to prove its falsehood, and that 
 this is a physical impossibility. The moral 
 obligations imposed by Christianity on the con- 
 science can never, therefore, be disregarded. 
 'Religion,' says Butler, 'is a practical thing, and 
 consists in such a determinate course of life, as 
 being what, there is reason* to think, is com- 
 manded by the Author of Nature.' Relying, 
 then, on the strength of their moral and spiritual 
 position, Christian writers have often made use 
 of intellectual weapons calculated to give their 
 adversaries wrong ideas as to their belief. 
 Jeremy Taylor, in his ' Liberty of Prophesying,' 
 employs a purely sceptical line of argument in 
 order to establish the right of freely interpreting 
 Scripture. Locke, in his ' Reasonableness of 
 Christianity,' followed a course of reasoning 
 which Toland afterwards developed into an 
 argument for Deism. As for Butler, no one 
 who reads the following passage can mis- 
 take, except designedly, the purpose of the 
 4 Analogy ' : 
 
 I desire it may be considered with respect to the 
 
48 THE CONSERVATISM OF ESSAY u 
 
 whole of the foregoing objections, that in this Treatise 
 I have argued upon the principles of others, not of my 
 own ; and have omitted what I think true and of the 
 utmost importance, because by others thought unintel- 
 ligible or not true. Thus I have argued upon the 
 principles of the Fatalists, which I do not believe ; and 
 have omitted a thing of the utmost importance which I 
 do believe the moral fitness or unfitness of actions 
 prior to all will whatever ; which I apprehend as cer- 
 tainly to determine the Divine conduct, as speculative 
 truth and falsehood necessarily determine the Divine 
 judgment. 
 
 *Put into a summary form, what I may, I 
 hope without offence, call the Conservative posi- 
 tion of the Anglican divines of the eighteenth 
 century seems to be something of this kind : 
 The fact that the Christian law, eighteen hun- 
 dred years after its institution, continues to 
 exercise a living power over the conscience of 
 men, is the highest proof that can be afforded of 
 its divine origin. But this divine authority is 
 denied by some on purely speculative grounds : 
 let us, therefore, meet them on the grounds of 
 speculation, and test the arguments on which 
 they rely, so that, by proving their unsoundness, 
 we may deprive them of the right of resisting 
 
ESSAY ii THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 49 
 
 the claims of conscience by the voice of so-called 
 reason. ' The design of this Treatise/ says 
 Butler, speaking at the conclusion of his ' Ana- 
 logy/ ' is not to vindicate the character of God, 
 but to show the obligations of men ; it is not to 
 justify His providence, but to show what belongs 
 to us to do.' 
 
 If we turn from religion to the sphere of 
 politics, probably everyone will readily allow 
 Burke to be the best representative that could 
 be selected of the broad Conservatism of the 
 eighteenth century. He is the most eminent 
 of the Whigs or Moderate Liberals before the 
 French Revolution. Since that epoch there has 
 been a constant tendency in the leaders of the 
 Whig party to gravitate towards Revolutionary 
 Radicalism. They have shown the greatest in- 
 genuity in appropriating to their faction abstract 
 principles, as when Fox drank to ' The Sove- 
 reignty of the People,' and his successors to 
 * The cause for which Hampden perished in the 
 field, and Sidney on the scaffold.' Such Platonic 
 enthusiasm is harmless enough, so long as it is 
 confined to animating the Liberal party to exer- 
 
50 THE CONSEEVATISM OF ESSAY n 
 
 tions sufficient to turn out the Tories when they 
 happen to be in power. But now that it is 
 being employed to persuade the people of the 
 congenital virtue of the Liberals, and the inbred 
 wickedness of the Tories, it is well to remember 
 that old-fashioned Whiggism was something 
 fundamentally different in character from any- 
 thing that at present disguises itself under the 
 name. Whiggery, in Burke's days, meant simply 
 [adherence to the principles of the Revolution of 
 1688, and the Whig Party meant the connection 
 of noblemen and gentlemen associated in Parlia- 
 ment to control the still preponderant power of 
 the Crown. And because it meant this, and 
 only this, there was scarcely a Tory statesman 
 or writer of distinction in the eighteenth century 
 who would have hesitated, so far as principle 
 was concerned, to call himself a Whig. Oxford 
 and Bolingbroke, as well as Pitt and Canning, 
 started in their political careers in connection with 
 the Whig Party ; Bolingbroke avowedly bases 
 his political theories on the old Whig principles ; 
 Swift, long after writing his ' Examiners/ de- 
 clares that he is still, what he always was, a 
 
ESSAY ii THE EIGHTEENTH CENTUEY 51 
 
 Whig of the Revolution settlement ; Pope bit- 
 terly denounces Walpole in glowing lines which 
 Warton declares to be the incarnation of Whig- 
 gism. What, then, made it so easy for rival 
 statesmen in the last century to occupy common 
 ground of principle ? Two or three passages 
 from Burke will set the matter in the plainest 
 light. 
 
 c ln the 1st of William and Mary,' says he, c in the 
 famous statute called the Declaration of Right, the two 
 houses utter not a syllable of " a right to frame a 
 government for themselves." You will see that their 
 whole case was to secure the religion, laws, and liberties 
 that had been long possessed, and had been latterly 
 endangered. " Taking into their most serious considera- 
 tion the best means for making such an establishment, 
 that their religion, laws, and liberties might not be in 
 danger of being again subverted," they auspicate all 
 their proceedings, by stating as some of those best 
 means, " in the first place to do as their ancestors in 
 like cases have usually done for vindicating their 
 antient rights and liberties, to declare ; " and then they 
 pray the king and queen " that it may be declared and 
 enacted, that all and singular the rights and liberties 
 asserted and declared are the true antient and indubitable 
 rights and liberties of the people of this kingdom." 
 
 c You will observe, 5 Burke continues, < that from 
 Magna Charta to the Declaration of Eight, it has been 
 
 E 2 
 
52 THE CONSERVATISM OF ESSAY n 
 
 the uniform policy of our Constitution to claim and 
 assert our liberties, as an entailed inheritance derived 
 to us from our forefathers, and to be transmitted to 
 our posterity, as an estate specially belonging to the 
 people of this kingdom, without any reference whatever 
 to any other more general or prior right. By this 
 means our Constitution preserves an unity in so great 
 a diversity of its parts. We have an inheritable crown, 
 an inheritable peerage, and a House of Commons and a 
 people inheriting privileges, franchises, and liberties 
 from a long line of ancestors.' 
 
 And again : 
 
 We wished at the period of the Ee volution, and do 
 now wish, to derive all we possess as an inheritance 
 'from our forefathers. Upon that body and stock of 
 inheritance we have taken care not to inoculate any 
 scion alien to the nature of the original plant. All the 
 reformations we have hitherto made have proceeded 
 upon the principle of reference to antiquity; and I 
 hope, nay, I am persuaded, that all those which possibly 
 may be made hereafter, will be carefully formed upon 
 analogical precedent, authority, and example. 
 
 There is not a syllable in these utterances to 
 which a modern Conservative would not cheer- 
 fully subscribe. But how many leagues away 
 do they carry us from the Liberal-Radicalism 
 now crying out for the abolition of the hereditary 
 
ESSAY ii THE EIGHTEENTH CENTUKY 53 
 
 branch of the Legislature, because it appeals to 
 the people against the arbitrary will of the 
 dominant faction in a House of Commons which 
 is approaching the term of its constitutional 
 existence ! 
 
 ^ It may seem at first a more difficult and 
 obscure matter to trace the Conservative move- 
 ment, distinctive of the eighteenth century, in 
 its literature ; but I think that a little consider- 
 ation will show it to be very visible in the work 
 of Pope, whom I have chosen as the natural 
 representative of the poetry of the period. If 
 we go back to the poetry of Chaucer, we find 
 very clearly shown in it the beginnings of two 
 separate streams of inspiration, each of which 
 may be traced in a distinct course through the 
 history of our literature, the poetry of Komance 
 and the poetry of Manners. The former had its 
 source in the institutions of Chivalry and in 
 Mediaeval Theology. It makes its first appear- 
 ance in many of the 4 Canterbury Tales,' and in 
 poems like ' The Romance of the Rose ' and 
 i The Flower and the Leaf ' ; it runs strongly 
 through our national ballad poetry ; it attains a 
 
54 THE CONSEEVATISM OF ESSAY n 
 
 large and noble flow in the 4 Faery Queen/ and 
 then, wasting itself among the refinements and 
 gallantries of the seventeenth century, may be 
 said to run underground till it reappears in a 
 new and unexpected shape in the romantic out- 
 burst of the early part of the present century. 
 The other poetical river has been fed by the life, 
 action, and manners of the nation. After show- 
 ing itself in full flow in the admirable Prologue 
 to the ' Canterbury Tales,' it almost vanishes 
 from sight for two centuries, when it is suddenly 
 discovered again in the satires of Hall, and the 
 comedies and historical plays of Shakespeare, 
 being carried on through the series of noble 
 historical portraits in 'Absalom and Achitophel/ 
 through the moral satires of Pope, the didactic 
 poems of Johnson and Goldsmith and the Tales 
 of Crabbe and in prose through the novels of 
 Fielding, Smollett, Madame D'Arblay, and Miss 
 Austen, as late as the generation that produced 
 ' Vanity Fair/ 
 
 Now, if we trace the course of the romantic 
 stream of our poetry, we shall find that it affords 
 a very remarkable illustration of what has been 
 
ESSAY ii THE EIGHTEENTH CENTUEY 55 
 
 already said about the exhaustibility of poetical 
 materials. In Chaucer and in our ballad poetry 
 the volume of imagination is swift and strong ; 
 but in the poetry of succeeding generations the 
 impulse is far feebler, and even in the ' Faery 
 Queen ' the reader feels, in spite of the genius of 
 the poet, that as springs of social action, Medi| 
 aevalism and Feudalism are losing their forcef 
 The poem is an allegory : of dramatic life and 
 movement it is entirely devoid. When we come 
 to the seventeenth century, the source of inspira- 
 tion seems almost to have run dry. Here and 
 there a genuine note of chivalry is heard in 
 poetry, as in the noble lines of Lovelace : 
 
 I could not love thee, dear, so much, 
 Loved I not Honour more ; 
 
 or in the monarchical fancy of the gallant Mont - 
 
 rose : 
 
 My dear, my only love, I pray 
 
 That little world of thee 
 Be governed by no other sway 
 
 Than purest Monarchy. 
 For if Confusion have a part, 
 
 Which virtuous souls abhor, 
 And call a synod in thy heart, 
 
 I'll never love thee more. 
 
56 THE CONSERVATISM OF 
 
 
 The muse of Herrick, too, seizes with the 
 felicity of real inspiration, and adorns with de- 
 lightful fancy and humour, old Catholic customs 
 still lingering in the country districts. But 
 these are exceptions. No doubt the poets of the 
 seventeenth century seem in many respects to 
 be more gifted than those of the eighteenth. 
 They try to ^get farther away from common 
 life ; they show a more curious invention, more 
 ingenious flights of fancy. But they have one 
 fatal defect : take them as a whole, it is impos- 
 sible to read them. Pope, with his usual piercing 
 insight, passes just judgment on the seventeenth- 
 century style in the four verses in which he sums 
 up the merits of Cowley> a really noble and 
 elevated spirit : 
 
 Who now reads Cowley ? If he pleases yet, 
 His moral pleases, not his pointed wit. 
 Forgot his epic, nay, Pindaric art ; 
 But still I love the language of his heart. 
 
 There is the truth of the matter. The poetry 
 of the seventeenth century c wants heart/ 1 Two 
 
 1 I am, of course, only speaking of poetry peculiar to the 
 age in which it was written. The poetry of Shakespeare and 
 Milton belongs, in the literal sense, to the seventeenth century, 
 
ESSAY ii THE EIGHTEENTH CENTUKY 57 
 
 thoroughly representative passages, showing the 
 manner in which the distinguished poets of the 
 period treated questions of love and religion 
 their favourite topics will illustrate what is 
 meant. The first is an extract from Cowley's 
 4 Mistress/ and is called ' Counsel ' : 
 
 Gently, ah ! gently, madam, touch 
 
 The wound which you yourself have made ; 
 
 That pain must needs be very much 
 Which makes me of your hand afraid. 
 
 Cordials of pity give me now, 
 
 For I too weak for purgings grow. 
 
 Do but awhile with patience stay 
 (For counsel yet will dq no good) 
 
 Till time, and rest, and Heaven allay 
 The violent burnings of my blood. 
 
 For what effect from this can flow, 
 
 To chide men drunk for being so ? 
 
 Perhaps the physic's good you give, 
 But ne'er to me. can useful prove ; 
 
 Med'cine may cure but not revive ; 
 And I'm not sick, but dead in love. 
 
 In Love's Hell, not his world, am I, 
 
 At once I live, am dead, and die. 
 
 but the interest of each is universal ; it is not the product of a 
 particular fashion of thought. 
 
58 THE CONSERVATISM OF ESSAY n 
 
 Of writing like this we may say with cer- 
 tainty that a lover, sufficiently master of himself 
 to discover so many ingenious fancies, could not 
 have been so ill as he would have us suppose : 
 it is evident that he is not speaking 6 the lan- 
 guage of the heart/ A still more remarkable 
 specimen of unreality is furnished in Crashaw's 
 poem called ' The Weeper/ on Mary Magdalene, 
 of which the following is an extract : 
 
 Hail, sister springs, 
 
 Parents of silver-footed rills, 
 
 Ever-bubbling things ! 
 
 Thawing crystals ! snowy hills, 
 
 Still spending, never spent ! I mean 
 
 Thy fair eyes, sweet Magdalene. 
 
 Heavens thy fair eyes be, 
 
 Heavens of ever-falling stars ; 
 
 'Tis seed-time still with thee, 
 
 And stars thou sowest, whose harvest dares 
 
 Promise the earth to countershine 
 
 Whatever makes Heaven's forehead fine. 
 
 Upwards thou dost weep ; 
 
 Heaven's bosom drinks the gentle stream ; 
 
 Where the milky rivers creep 
 
 Thine floats above, and is the cream. 
 
 Waters above the heavens, what they be 
 
 We are taught best by thy tears and thee. 
 
ESSAY ii THE EIGHTEENTH CENTUKY 59 
 
 Mary Magdalene's tears the cream of the 
 Milky Way ! In its own age this contortion of 
 fancy was supposed to give proof of a fine 
 poetical genius ; but time has taught us that 
 men only write in such a style when they have 
 really nothing to say. 
 
 It is indeed evident that unless poetry were 
 recruited by new and abundant waters, it was 
 in danger, in the seventeenth century, of perish- 
 ing in a marsh. The eighteenth century brought 
 the much-needed supply. Everyone knows that 
 Pope, the most thoroughly representative poet 
 of the age, aimed at i correctness ' in writing, 
 but what the exact quality was that is signified 
 by this word, is by no means generally under- 
 stood. The common belief, that he sought to 
 attain nothing but a mechanical regularity of 
 versification, is, it is almost unnecessary to say, 
 very wide indeed of the mark. Correctness in 
 metrical composition, as I understand Pope to 
 mean, implies obedience to the laws of imagina-4 
 tive thought, and, therefore, not only precision ofV 
 poetical expression, but justice of poetical con- I 
 ception. In this sense, the fashionable metrical 
 
60 THE CONSEEVATISM OF ESSAY n 
 
 writing of the seventeenth century was astonish- 
 ingly incorrect. The poets of the age sought to 
 invest with fanciful and romantic forms, thoughts 
 and feelings which had long ceased to move 
 the imagination of society. Pope perceived this, 
 and he understood that the quibbles, refine- 
 ments, and affectations that mark their style, 
 were the product of imaginative exhaustion. His 
 criticism on their work is sweeping, but few will 
 deny it to be just. 
 
 As for the wits of either Charles's days, 
 
 The mob of gentlemen who write with ease. 
 
 Sprat, Carew, Sedley, and a hundred more, 
 
 Like twinkling stars the Miscellanies o'er, 
 
 One simile, that solitary shines 
 
 In the dry desert of a thousand lines, 
 
 Or lengthened thought that gleams through many a 
 
 page, 
 Has sanctified whole poems for an age. 
 
 Vividly attracted as his own keen and sensi- 
 tive nature was to the romantic traditions of 
 English literature, his instinct told him that 
 these had, for the time at least, lost their 
 vitality, and that the true course of poetical 
 development lay in the direction which Dryden 
 
ESSAY ii THE EIGHTEENTH CENTUEY 61 
 
 had given to our poetry in ' Absalom and 
 Achitophel/ and other satiric and didactic com- 
 positions. Accordingly, though he had set out 
 in his own career on the high romantic road, he 
 takes credit to himself in the full maturity of his 
 judgment 
 
 That not in Fancy's maze he wandered long, 
 But stooped to Truth and moralized his song. 
 
 Addison prided himself oil having ' brought 
 philosophy out of closets and libraries, schools 
 and colleges, to dwell at clubs and assem- 
 blies, at tea-tables and in coffee-houses/ and 
 so Pope, in the true spirit of his ancestor, 
 r Chaucer, taught poetry to come down from her 
 romantic heights to sympathize with the thoughts! 
 and to elevate the language of men busily) 
 engaged in establishing for themselves new 
 traditions of political and social order. The 
 ancient spring of inspiration derived froim 
 national life and manners was renewed, and a* 
 long succession of poets Thomson, Collins, 
 Gray, Goldsmith, Johnson, and Crabbe carried 
 on the ethical impulse communicated to poetry 
 by Pope. 
 
62 THE CONSEKVATISM OF ESSAY n 
 
 There is something equally Conservative in 
 the development of the metrical form in which 
 the new movement clothed itself. No one, I 
 think, can doubt that the colloquial form of the 
 heroic couplet, as it is handled first by Chaucer, 
 and afterwards by Dryden and Pope, affords 
 admirable scope for the expression of those 
 thoughts and feelings which lie properly within 
 the sphere of imagination, and yet not far from 
 the sympathies of common social life. Mr. 
 Arnold, it is true, speaks of the style of 
 eighteenth-century verse as if it were not poeti- 
 cal at all ; but it is evident that he has no 
 sympathy with the writers of the period, or he 
 would scarcely have selected one of the poorest 
 couplets Pope ever wrote as a good specimen of 
 his manner. 1 When we think, however, of the 
 distinctness with which writers of varying 
 genius have stamped their own character on the 
 heroic couplet, and the manifold themes of which 
 it is made the vehicle, it seems to me impossible 
 not to regard it as a noble and harmonious 
 
 1 To Hounslow Heath I point, and Banstead Down : 
 Thence comes your mutton, and these chicks my own. 
 
ESSAY ii THE EIGHTEENTH CENTUEY 63 
 
 poetical instrument. Let us remember how 
 social were the aims of the great writers of the 
 age. ' The proprieties and delicacies of the . 
 English/ says Dryden, the immediate father of 
 the whole line, ' are known to few ; 'tis impos- 
 sible even for a good wit to understand and 
 practise them without the help of a liberal edu- 
 cation, long reading and digesting of those few 
 good authors we have among us, the knowledge 
 of men and manners, the freedom and habitude 
 of conversation with the best company of both 
 sexes ; and, in short, without wearing off the 
 rust he has acquired while laying in a stock of 
 learning.' This is an excellent description of 
 that union of traditional metrical language with 
 the forms and idioms of modern society which 
 is the groundwork of the ' poetical diction ' of 
 the eighteenth century ; and it may be supple- 
 mented by what Pope tells us of the capacities 
 of the heroic couplet as the vehicle of expression 
 for such a poem as the ' Essay on Man/ 
 
 ' This/ says he, c I might have done in prose : but 
 I chose verse, and even rhyme, for two reasons. The 
 one will appear obvious that principles, maxims, or 
 
64 THE CONSEKVATISM OP 
 
 
 
 precepts so written, both strike the reader more strongly 
 at first, and are more easily retained by him after- 
 wards ; the other may seem odd, but it is true : I found 
 I could express them more shortly this way than in 
 prose itself; and nothing is more certain, than that 
 much of the force, as well as of the grace, of arguments 
 or instructions depends on their conciseness. I was 
 unable to treat this part of the subject more in detail 
 without becoming dry and tedious, or more poetically 
 without sacrificing perspicuity to ornament, without 
 wandering from the precision, or breaking the chain, of 
 reasoning. If any man can unite all these without 
 diminution of any of them, I freely confess he will 
 compass a thing above my capacity.' 
 
 It would be impossible to find a passage 
 indicating better than this the general aims of 
 c correctness ' in poetry, namely, a clear percep- 
 tion in the poet of what it is just to express in 
 metre ; a severe exclusion of whatever is not 
 subsidiary to the end in view ; and a determina- 
 tion not to be satisfied with any form of metrical 
 language short of that which is exactly required 
 for the forcible, concise, and harmonious expres- 
 sion of the thought. 
 
 These illustrations will, I hope, suggest in 
 outline the nature of the Conservatism of the 
 
ESSAY ii THE EIGHTEENTH CENTUKY 65 
 
 eighteenth century. So far from being the de- 
 structive period that its critics represent it to 
 be, such revolutions of thought and manners as 
 took place in England were accomplished in the 
 sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and the 
 task of the eighteenth was to recombine the j 
 shattered forms of the old national life into a j 
 system suited to modern circumstances. The 
 Reformation had destroyed the external unity 
 and absolute authority of the Church ; Protes- 
 tantism generated a multitude of sects, the most 
 extreme of which questioned the foundations 
 of Revelation itself. Such rebellion could no 
 longer be put down by interdict and excommu- 
 nication, but Butler met it by asserting thel 
 supremacy of conscience ; and the authority of * 
 the continuous Christian tradition. The Revo- 
 lution of 1688 overthrew the last remains of 
 Monarchical Feudalism, but the aristocracy 
 carried on the best traditions of the old into the 
 new regime, and, as has been said. Burke con- 
 tended with jiistice that the Revolution gave 
 Englishmen no rights which they did not pre- 
 viously possess under the law of their country. 
 
66 THE CONSEKVATISM OF ESSAY n 
 
 In the sphere of thought the decay of Mediaeval 
 and Feudal influences had exhausted those ro- 
 mantic imaginations on which men's minds had 
 once loved to linger. But to renew the sunken 
 springs, Dryden, Pope, and their followers intro- 
 duced a generous fountain of fresh inspiration by 
 reviving and developing Chaucer's old satiric 
 methods of portraying life and character. Every- 
 where we see signs of development with a con- 
 stant reference at the same time to the most 
 ancient sources of national tradition ; every- 
 where we are reminded of Wordsworth's lines: 
 
 joy ! that in our embers 
 Is something that doth live, 
 
 That nature yet remembers 
 What was so fugitive. 
 
 The general result of all this is that, in spite 
 of certain debasing aspects of the eighteenth cen- 
 tury, in spite of the wide- spread corruption of 
 Politics, the worldliness of the Church, the 
 realism of Art, it is impossible to study the 
 theology, the oratory, the poetry, the fiction, or 
 the painting of the age, without coming to the 
 conclusion that the ancient spirit of religion and 
 
ESSAY IT THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 67 
 
 chivalry is still an operant influence in the Eng- 
 lish nation. Retrenched of its old splendour and 
 picturesqueness, subordinated to the growing 
 element of commerce, it is still there, not merely 
 as an image flashing before the fancy of the 
 individual, but as a living power affecting the 
 faith and manners of the people. For though the 
 predominant characteristic in eighteenth century 
 art and literature is its strong perception of the 
 realities of life, and the vividness with which it 
 portrays the evil side of human nature, it still 
 shows itself alive to man's nobler aspirations. 
 If it has created for us Tom Jones, and Moll 
 Flanders, and Sporus, and Jonathan Wild, it 
 has also created Sir Roger de Coverley, the 
 Man of Ross, the Vicar of Wakefield, Robinson 
 Crusoe, and Uncle Toby, together with that air 
 of grace and high-breeding visible in the work of 
 the great portrait-painters of the age. Its types 
 are limited and to some extent formal, but as far 
 as they go they are manly and natural. ) The 
 very limitation of its ideal gives an added dis- 
 tinctness to the form in which it is expressed. 
 Style and method are, in all the arts, the objects 
 
 T? 9 
 
68 CONSEEVATISM OF EIGHTEENTH CENTUEY ESSAY n 
 
 of constant consideration, and Pope's principles 
 of correctness in versification find a counterpart 
 in the rules of painting elaborated by Sir Joshua 
 Reynolds in his 6 Discourses ' to the Royal 
 Academy. In second-rate artists and writers 
 this strict attention to propriety often leads, no 
 doubt, to stiffness and bombast, but even in 
 them it acts as a salutary preventive against 
 vulgarity, obscurity, and inaccuracy of ex- 
 pression. 
 
 
WORDSWORTH'S THEORY OF POETRY 
 
III. 
 
 WORDSWORTH'S THEORY OF POETRY. 
 
 Not that I think the amiable bard of Rydale shows judg 
 ment in choosing such subjects as the popular mind cannot 
 sympathize in. I do not compare myself in point of imagination 
 with Wordsworth, far from it ; for his is naturally exquisite, 
 and highly cultivated from constant exercise. . . . But 1 cry 
 no roast-meat. There are times a man should remember what 
 Rousseau used to say : ' Tais-toi, Jean Jacques, car on ne 
 t'entend pas.' . . . The error is not in you yourself receiving 
 deep impressions from slight hints, but in supposing that pre- 
 cisely the same sort of impressions must rise in the minds of 
 men, otherwise of kindred feeling ; or that the commonplace 
 folk of the world can derive such inductions at any time or under 
 any circumstances. Scott's Journal, January 1, 1827. 
 
 IN the last paper I said that one of the most 
 marked features of the imaginative genius of 
 
 le eighteenth century was its limitation. When 
 ^P*"*W* .~~ " 
 
 fe range of thought and feeling in the 4 Can- 
 terbury Tales,' the ' Faery Queen/ Shakespeare's 
 plays, and ' Paradise Lost,' is compared with the 
 suoject matter of Dryden and Pope's satires, of 
 the ' Vanity of Human Wishes, 7 the ' Elegy in 
 
72 WORDSWORTH'S THEORY OF POETRY ESSAY in 
 
 a Country Churchyard/ the ' Bard/ and the 
 i Progress of Poesy/ the Odes on Liberty/ and 
 the ' Passions/ the Deserted Village/ and the 
 6 Traveller/ everyone must perceive within how 
 narrow a tract the imagination of the later 
 period is circumscribed, and that the mines of 
 poetry which the region contains, though pre- 
 cious, are not inexhaustible. 
 
 The causes of this limitation are readily dis- 
 coverable by the light of history. Chaucer had 
 at his disposal all the resources of a social 
 system highly stimulative to the imagination, 
 which was not peculiar to one country, but pre- 
 vailed over the whole of Europe. His suc- 
 cessors, after the period of the Reformation, 
 drew inspiration from still deeper wells. With 
 minds dramatically excited by the spirit of re- 
 ligious liberty and by ardent patriotism, they 
 employed the materials afforded by the still vivid 
 traditions of romantic chivalry, together with 
 the wealth of idgas-and the beauty of form dis- * 
 covered in the revival of classical letters. All 
 these opposite veins of thought may easily %e 
 detected in the wonderfully compounded work 
 
ESSAY in WORDSWORTH'S THEORY OF POETRY 73 
 
 of Spenser, Shakespeare, and Milion. But after 
 the civil war, religious, political, and social in- 
 fluences turned the imagination of the English 
 people exclusively upon their own manners. 
 The old modes of mediaeval thought had lost 
 their power over the mind : the spirit of reli- 
 gious fanaticism which rose up in opposition to 
 them seemed hostile to every form of creative 
 art. In the sphere of politics the ancient 
 traditions of Monarchical Government were sub- 
 verted first by the Rebellion and afterwards 
 by the Revolution. Everywhere men were ask- 
 ing themselves wherein consisted the foundations 
 of society, what were the limitations of liberty, 
 and how they were to recognise the first prin- 
 ciples of art. And, these being the questions 
 which agitated the mind of the nation above all 
 others, it was these for which a natural, an irre- 
 sistible instinct drove men of genius to provide 
 an answer, either in a philosophic or in an ima- 
 ginative shape. The poetry of the eighteenth 
 century is the poetry of Society and Manners. 
 
 So long as a powerful necessity compelled 
 men to think and act for themselves, their work 
 
74 WOKDSWOETH'S THEOKY OF POETKY ESSAY in 
 
 was marked by a vital originality of matter and 
 form, and hence in literature almost everything 
 of imaginative value belonging to what may be 
 broadly called the eighteenth- century movement 
 came into existence between the Restoration and 
 the accession of George III. Dryden, Pope, 
 Thomson, Gray, Johnson, among the poets ; 
 Swift, Steele, Addison, Fielding, and Smollett, 
 among the essayists and novelists, had written 
 their all or their best before 1 760. The i Deserted 
 Village/ the ' Traveller/ the 4 Vicar of Wakefield/ 
 Crabbe's ' Village/ and Miss Burney's novels, 
 are nearly all the works of genius or talent, 
 peculiarly characteristic of the eighteenth cen- 
 tury, produced after this date and before the 
 French Revolution. When the liberties of the 
 nation were finally secured, and the principles 
 of taste and manners advocated in the ' Tatler ' 
 and 'Spectator' had met with general accept- 
 ance, the creative impulse of the age seems to 
 h|iyejaeased. Faction reigned supreme in politics : 
 the Church sank into slumber : artifice in poetry 
 prevailed over thought. We see a Junius suc- 
 ceeding a Swift as a controversialist ; a War- 
 
ESSAY in WOEDSWOETH'S THEOEY OF POETEY 75 
 
 burton following a Butler in theology ; for Pope 
 as a satirist we have to put up with Churchill ; 
 and the pure Horatian style of the ' Epistle to 
 Arbuthnot ' is exchanged for the sonorous empti- 
 ness of the ' Botanic Garden/ 
 
 I endeavoured to illustrate the decay of 
 medievalism in the seventeenth century by 
 citing two poems of Cowley and Crashaw ; a 
 comparison of a passage from Thomson's 4 Sea- 
 sons ' with one from Darwin's poem mentioned 
 just above, will be equally suggestive of the 
 exhaustion of the inspiring impulse of the eight- 
 eenth century. The following extract from 
 4 Winter ' shows the creative spirit of the age 
 still in its vigour : 
 
 What art thou, Frost ? and whence are thy keen stores 
 
 Derived, thou secret all-invading power 
 
 Whom even the illusive fluid cannot fly ? 
 
 Is not thy potent energy, unseen, 
 
 Myriads of little salts, or hooked, or shaped 
 
 Like double wedges, and diffused immense 
 
 Through water, earth, and ether ? hence at eve, 
 
 Steamed eager from the red horizon round, 
 
 With the fierce rage of Winter, deep suffused, 
 
 An icy gale, oft shifting, o'er the pool 
 
 Breathes a blue film, and in its mid career 
 
76 WORDSWORTH'S THEORY OF POETRY ESSAY in I 
 
 Arrests the bickering stream. The loosened ice 
 Let down the flood, and half-dissolved by day 
 Rustles no more ; but to the sedgy bank 
 Fast grows, or gathers round the pointed stone, 
 A crystal pavement by the breath of heaven 
 Cemented firm ; till, seized from shore to shore, 
 The whole imprisoned river growls below. 
 Loud rings the frozen earth, and hard reflects 
 A double noise ; while at his evening watch 
 The village dog deters the nightly thief ; 
 The heifer lows ; the distant waterfall 
 Swells in the breeze ; and with the hasty tread 
 Of traveller, the hollow-sounding plain 
 Shakes from afar. The full ethereal round, 
 Infinite worlds disclosing to the view, 
 Shines out intensely keen, and, all one cope 
 Of starry glitter, glows from pole to pole. 
 
 In the following from the ' Botanic Garden ' 
 the same spirit is seen in its decay : 
 
 Nymphs, your fine forms with steps impassive mock 
 Earth's vaulted roofs of adamantine rock ; 
 Round her still centre tread the burning soil, 
 And watch the billowy lavas as they boil : 
 Where in basaltic waves imprisoned deep 
 Reluctant fires in dread suspension sleep ; 
 Or sphere on sphere in widening waves expand, 
 And glad with genial warmth the incumbent land. 
 So when the Mother-bird selects their food 
 With curious bill, and feeds her callow brood, 
 
ESSAY in WOKDSWORTH'S THEORY OF POETRY 77 
 
 Warmth from her tender heart eternal springs, 
 And pleased she clasps them with extended wings, 
 You from deep cauldrons and unmeasured caves 
 Blow flaming airs, or pour vitrescent waves, 
 O'er shining Ocean ray volcanic light, 
 Or hurl innocuous embers to the night ; 
 While with loud shouts to Etna Hecla calls 
 And Andes answers from his beaconed walls : 
 Sea-wildered crews the mountain-stars admire, 
 And Beauty beams amid terrific fire. 
 
 There is evidently a common element in 
 these two passages. In both (though only in 
 the first few lines of Thomson) the descrip- 
 tion is, to some extent, scientific, and, as far 
 as it is so, would find a more fitting expres- 
 sion in prose ; in both the frequent use of Latin 
 words and the Latin method of linking epi- 
 thets to substantives is observable ; but while 
 Thomson has conceived his subject with en- 
 thusiasm, and imparts his enthusiasm to the 
 reader, Darwin thinks throughout in a matter- 
 of-fact spirit, and uses metre merely for decora- 
 tive purposes ; so small is his sense of sublimity 
 that he does not perceive anything ridiculous 
 in imagining one volcano hallooing to another. 
 
78 WOKDSWOKTH'S THEORY OF POETRY ESSAY in 
 
 Wordsworth lamented that he could not ' hear 
 old Triton blow his wreathed horn. 7 Darwin 
 feigns, without a blush, that the operations of 
 Nature are performed by a whole army of 
 nymphs, sylphs, and gnomes, yet in the very 
 same breath describes with scientific coldness 
 the mechanical forces to which they owe their 
 origin ! 
 
 Poetry of this kind is as sure a symptom as 
 the lethargy of the Church or the prevalence of 
 petty faction in politics that the vigorous and 
 constructive Conservatism of the eighteenth cen- 
 tury, the nature of which I attempted to describe 
 in the last paper, has become crystallized in 
 lifeless forms and conventions. Side by side, 
 however, with these indications of exhaustion in 
 the established order of society there are many 
 signs of the activity and progress of the demo- 
 cratic spirit. Wilkes in the field of politics, 
 Wesley in the sphere of religion, and Burns in 
 the realms of poetry, all, though with very dif- 
 ferent intentions, strike the same note : 
 
 The rank is but the guinea stamp, 
 The man's a man for a' that. 
 
ESSAY in WOEDSWOKTH'S THEOKY OP POETRY 79 
 
 At the same time, the centrifugal movement 
 of the individual away from society, which 
 appears to be a natural accompaniment of demo- 
 cracy, and which manifests itself in France in 
 the philosophy of Rousseau, is seen in the blended 
 Methodism and love of Nature in Cowper's 
 poetry. Many influences thus combined to pre- 
 pare the way for that strife between the spirit 
 of aristocracy and the spirit of democracy both in 
 politics and art, the outbreak of which was has- 
 tened by the incidents of the French Revolution. 
 
 In Literature the battle began with the con-\ 
 troversy excited by the publication of Words- ! 
 worth's 4 Lyrical Ballads/ To prevent the 
 historical accuracy of this assertion being ques- 
 tioned, let me quote what Coleridge, who had 
 every means of knowing, says in his ' Biographia 
 Literaria/ about the origin of the volume, and 
 the influence it exerted on the taste of the times : 
 
 The thought suggested itself (to which of us I do 
 not recollect) that k series of poems might be composed 
 of two sorts. In the one, the incidents and agents were 
 to be, in part at least, supernatural ; and the excellence 
 aimed at was to consist in the interesting of the affec- 
 
 
80 WOKDSWOKTH'S THEOKY OF POETEY ESSAY in 
 
 tions by the dramatic truth of such emotions as would 
 naturally accompany such situations, supposing them 
 real. ... For the second class, gubjects were to be 
 chosen from Qrdinaryjife ; the characters and incidents 
 were to be such as will be found in every village and 
 its vicinity where there is a meditative and feeling 
 mind to seek after them, or to notice them when they 
 present themselves. In this idea originated the plan 
 of the < Lyrical Ballads ' ; in which it was agreed that 
 my endeavours should be directed to persons and cha- 
 racters supernatural, or at least romantic ; yet, so as to 
 transfer from our inward nature a human interest and 
 a semblance of truth sufficient to procure for these 
 shadows of imagination that willing suspension of dis- 
 belief for the moment, which constitutes poetic faith. 
 Mr. Wordsworth, on the other hand, was to propose to 
 himself, as his object, to give the charm of novelty to 
 things of every day, and to excite a feeling analogous 
 to the supernatural, by awakening the mind's attention 
 from the lethargy of custom, and directing it to the 
 loveliness and the wonder of the world before us ; an 
 inexhaustible treasure, but for which, in consequence of 
 the film of familiarity and selfish solicitude, we have 
 eyes yet see not, ears that hear not, and hearts that 
 neither feel nor understand. 
 
 Coleridge accordingly wrote the ' Ancient 
 Mariner ' with a view to its insertion in a volume 
 of poems composed upon this double principle, 
 but it was eventually determined that Words- 
 
ESSAY in WORDSWORTH'S THEORY OF POETRY 81 
 
 worth's poems should be published by them- 
 selves, and they therefore appeared under the 
 title of ' Lyrical Ballads.' 
 
 'To the second edition/ says Coleridge, < he added 
 a preface of considerable length, in which, notwith- 
 standing some passages of apparently a contrary import, 
 he was understood to contend for the extension of this 
 style to poetry of all kinds, and to reject as vicious and 
 indefensible all phrases and forms of style that were 
 not included in what he (unfortunately, I think, adopt- 
 ing an equivocal expression) called the language of real, 
 life. From this preface, prefixed to poems in which 
 it was impossible to deny the presence of real genius, 
 however mistaken its direction might be deemed, arose 
 the whole long-continued controversy. For from the 
 conjunction of perceived power with supposed heresy, I 
 explain the inveteracy, and in some instances, I grieve 
 to say, the acrimonious passions, with which the con- 
 troversy has been conducted by the assailants.' 
 
 Here, then, is an announcement made on the 
 very highest authority that ' Lyrical Ballads ' 
 sounded the first note of the ' new departure ' 
 which I have called ' The Liberal Movement in 
 English Literature/ I have not selected this 
 title without deliberate purpose. Before Words- 
 worth's time it had been the acknowledged 
 
 G 
 
82 WORDSWORTH'S THEORY OF POETRY ESSAY in 
 
 function of the poet to give definite form and 
 coherence to the ideal conceptions which, floated 
 vaguely and without consistency in the mind of 
 society at large. But, as we see from the fore- 
 going passages, Wordsworth held that the object 
 of poetry was to ' awaken the mind from the 
 lethargy of custom/ and to reveal to it truths 
 which it could not perceive without the media- 
 tion of the c sacer vates.' The poet, as he de- 
 scribes him in his preface, is a man exalted, 
 not only in his powers of conception and ex- 
 pression, but in his moral^Jkmilties, far above 
 his fellows, ' rejoicing more than other men in 
 the spirit of life that is in him/ and therefore 
 qualified to act as the intfirpxete^to them of the 
 mysteries of Nature. To suppose that a being 
 of this kind should submit himself to ancient 
 traditions and conventions of the art, would be 
 unreasonable ; rather it is for society to wait 
 for such oracles as may be vouchsafed to it by 
 the poet, and be thankful. Hence the main 
 contention of Wordsworth in his theory of 
 poetry is to assert the right of the individual 
 poet, by virtue of his superior endowments, to 
 
ESSAY in WOEDSWOKTH'S THEOKY OF POETKY 83 
 
 exercise his imagination as he chooses, without 
 reference to the imagination of society. 
 
 In this contention there is an element of 
 
 truth : 
 
 Pictoribus atque poetis 
 Quidlibet audendi semper fuit cequa potestas. 
 
 Wordsworth gave expression, with greater power 
 and feeling than any other poet, to certain 
 universal perceptions in the English mind, to 
 which society during the prevalence of urban 
 habits in the eighteenth century had become 
 insensible. He was therefore fully justified in 
 asserting his own liberty against the conven- 
 tional canons of criticism, in so far as these 
 helped to dull the sense of natural beauty. But 
 he went much further, and, in the preface of 
 which Coleridge speaks, endeavoured to establish 
 a code of abstract principles by which the value 
 of all poetry might be tested. As his reasoning! 
 largely influenced his own practice and the sub- 
 sequent course of English poetry, I shall attempt 
 in this paper to examine how far it is in harmony 
 with the fundamental principles of the art. 
 
 In the first place, however, in order to test 
 
84 WOKDSWOKTH'S THEOEY OF POETKY ESSAY m 
 
 the character of Wordsworth's theory, it is im- 
 portant to recall the circumstances under which 
 it was evolved. What roused him into rebellion 
 against the canons of criticism generally accepted 
 in his day was undoubtedly the style of ' poetical 
 diction ' then considered to be the indispens- 
 able dress of all true poetry. He saw that the 
 mode of expression employed by Darwin in his 
 ' Botanic Garden ' was widely admired, yet the 
 colouring of this poem appeared to him, as to 
 most men of just and manly taste, to be jalse 
 and gaudy. Looking back to the earlier poets 
 of the century, he found that germs of the same 
 diction were discoverable in them ; as, for in- 
 stance, in Pope's 'Messiah/ in some of Johnson's 
 verses, and, indeed, in almost all the charac- 
 teristic poems of the age. Instead of reason- 
 ing that the defect might spring from the 
 natural corruption of some true principle of art, 
 he inferred from his observations that it arose 
 from a false ideal of composition, consciously 
 adopted by the poets. And, as so often happens 
 to men of a combative turn, his violent senti- 
 ments of dislike led him to argue that all true 
 
ESSAY in WORDSWORTH'S THEORY OF POETRY 85 
 
 poetry must be composed on a system exactly i , 
 opposite to the style which he condemned.^) 
 Darwin seemed to withdraw himself deliberately 
 from the common sympathies of humanity ; true 
 poetry, Wordsworth argued, should, therefore, 
 look for its subjects in the objects and incidents 
 of every-day life. Darwin's diction was artificial 
 in the highest degree ; it follows that the genu- 
 ine language of poetry should resemble as closely 
 as possible the language of the peasantry. Dar- 
 win wrote in a style which was the antithesis of 
 prose ; hence Wordsworth would have us believe 
 that there is no essential difference between the 
 language of prose and verse, and that the fact 
 of poems being written in metre is merely to be 
 regarded as an accident of the art. 
 
 In considering the justice of these views I 
 suppose that everybody would be on Words- 
 worth's side as far as he was opposed to Darwin. 
 Almost any species of verse-writing, if it show 
 sincere feeling, is better than a style inspired 
 simply by pomposity and affectation. To enlarge 
 the spiritual experience of an artificialised society 
 by imaginative representations of the beauty of 
 
86 WOEDSWOETH'S THEOEY OF POETEY ESSAY m 
 
 Nature and common life was a just and noble 
 aim for poetry, but it was not a new one. To 
 take only a few examples which at once occur, 
 Virgil had written the ' Georgics,' Thomson the 
 ' Seasons/ Gray the ' Elegy in a Country Church- 
 yard/ Goldsmith the ' Deserted Village. 7 All 
 these were ' subjects chosen from ordinary life/ 
 just as much as ' Peter Bell/ the 4 Idiot Boy/ 
 4 Alice Fell/ ' Beggars/ or the ' Sailor's Mother/ 
 The real innovation introduced by Wordsworth 
 was one of poetical_j^rm, and lay in the manner 
 in which he employed the imagination to present 
 objects to the reader with a view of producing 
 pleasure. On this point it is best to let him 
 speak for himself. 
 
 The principal object, then, proposed in these poems 
 was to choose incidents and situations from common 
 life, and to relate or describe them, throughout, as far 
 as was possible in a selection of language really used 
 by men, and at the same time to throw over them a 
 certain colouring of imagination, whereby ordinary 
 things should be presented to the mind in an unusual 
 aspect ; and further and above all, to make these 
 incidents and situations interesting by tracing in them, 
 truly though not ostentatiously, the primary laws of our 
 nature : chiefly as far as regards the manner in which 
 we associate ideas in a state of excitement. 
 
ESSAY HI WOKDSWOKTH'S THEOEY OF POETRY 87 
 
 Here we have a compendious statement of 
 the radical difference between the practice of 
 Wordsworth and that of preceding poets who 
 had dealt with i subjects chosen from ordinary 
 life.' Neither Virgil, nor Thomson, nor Gray, 
 nor Goldsmith, had attempted to present the 
 objects they described ' to the mind in an un- 
 usuaL aspect/ They trusted to produce pleasure 
 by associating qualities inherent in these objects 
 with other beautiful ideas, naturally connected 
 with them, and expressed in a noble and harmo- 
 nious form of verse. With them the subject 
 matter of poetry lay in associations of ideas 
 existing in their readers' imaginations equally 
 with their own. With Wordsworth, on the 
 other hand, all depended on the perception of 
 the poet himself, and his power to displace and 
 recombine the ordinary association of ideas so 
 as to ' present them to the mind in an unusual 
 aspect.' And, of course, if he had been able to 
 produce great and permanent pleasure on the 
 principles he lays down, all objection would have 
 been silenced, and the only thing to be said 
 would be that he had discovered principles of art 
 
88 WORDSWORTH'S THEORY OF POETRY ESSAY in 
 
 Fortunately Wordsworth's works comprise poems 
 composed on the old principles as well as on his 
 own, so that we are able to compare the two 
 systems at work in the same mind, with the 
 result that his finest poetical effects are seen to 
 be produced when he is most flagrantly violating 
 his own rules. 
 
 Comparing ' Lucy Gray/ for instance, which 
 everyone will admit to be a perfect work of art, 
 with ' The Idle Shepherds,' which is one degree 
 less successful, and, again, with ' The Sailor's 
 Mother,' or ' Peter Bell,' which are not successful 
 at all, it will be found that the pleasure excited 
 arises from the simple association, in a beautiful 
 metrical form, of ideas that naturally affect the 
 feelings, and that this pleasure diminishes in 
 proportion as the poet intrudes his personality 
 upon the reader, and endeavours to eke out the 
 tenuity of his subject by analysis and reflection. 
 In ' Lucy Gray ' the narrative is of the most 
 direct kind ; there is no sort of mental analysis 
 employed ; the exquisite charm of the workman- 
 ship comes from the simple description of pa- 
 thetic objects, and the admirable and unexpected 
 
ESSAY m WORDSWORTH'S THEORY OF POETRY 89 
 
 turns of the ballad style in which the story is 
 told. In 'The Idle Shepherd Boys' the real 
 beauty of the poem consists in the delightful 
 landscape presented to the imagination in the 
 first three stanzas, particularly the third : 
 
 Along the river's stony marge 
 
 The sand-lark chants a joyous song ; 
 
 The thrush is busy in the wood, 
 And carols loud and strong. 
 
 A thousand lambs are on the rocks. 
 All newly born ! both earth and sky 
 
 Keep jubilee, and more than all 
 
 Those boys with their green coronal ; 
 
 They never hear the cry, 
 
 That plaintive cry which up the hill 
 Comes from the depth of Dungeon-Ghyll. 
 
 There is no analysis here ; nothing but a 
 musical combination of images that produce 
 immediate pleasure in the mind and heart ; such 
 incidents as the narrative contains are redeemed 
 from meanness only by falling in naturally with 
 the beautiful pastoral scene called up before the 
 imagination ; and, even as it is, several stanzas 
 are so prosaically expressed as to jar on the 
 effect of the melodious opening. But take ' The 
 Sailor's Mother, 7 and it will be seen that the 
 
90 WOKDSWOKTH'S THEOKY OF POETEY ESSAY in 
 
 occasional flatness of expression, which mars the 
 completeness of ' The Idle Shepherd Boys/ pre- 
 vails from the first line to the last, with the 
 exception perhaps of the second stanza. 
 
 One morning (raw it was and wet, 
 
 A foggy day in winter-time), 
 A woman in the road I met, 
 
 Not old, though something past her prime ; 
 Majestic in her person, tall and straight ; 
 And like a Roman matron's was her mien and gait. 
 
 The ancient spirit is not dead ; 
 
 Old times, thought I, are breathing there ; 
 Proud was I that my country bred 
 Such strength, a dignity so fair : 
 She begged an alms like one in poor estate ; 
 I looked at her again, nor did my pride abate. 
 
 When from these lofty thoughts I woke, 
 
 f What is it,' said I, ' that you bear, 
 Beneath the covert of your cloak, 
 
 Protected from the cold damp air ? ' 
 She answered soon as she the question heard, 
 ' A simple burden, Sir, a little singing-bird.' 
 
 And thus continuing, she said, 
 
 6 1 had a son, who many a day 
 Sailed on the seas, but he is dead ; 
 In Denmark he was cast away : 
 And I have travelled weary miles to see 
 If aught which he had owned might still remain for me. 
 
ESSAY in WOKDSWORTH'S THEORY OF POETEY 9 1 
 
 i The bird and cage they both were his ; 
 
 'Twas my son's bird ; and neat and trim 
 He kept it : many voyages 
 
 The singing-bird had gone with him ; 
 When last he sailed he left the bird behind, 
 From bodings, as might be, that hung upon his mind. 
 
 < He to a fellow-lodger's care 
 
 Had left it to be watched and fed, 
 And pipe its song in safety ; there 
 
 I found it when my son was dead ; 
 And now, God help me for my little wit ! 
 I bear it with me, Sir, he took so much delight in it/ 
 
 I suppose that there is scarcely anyone largely 
 acquainted with poetry who would not say, on 
 first reading it, that there was an incongruity 
 between the matter of this poena and the metrical 
 form in which it is expressed. But, ' Hold, 
 hold ! ' we may imagine Wordsworth to reply ; 
 * you are wrong to judge in this way ; for, if you 
 think about the poem, you will see that the 
 simple incident it records puts you upon a train 
 of the most suggestive thought respecting the 
 unseen spiritual world and the nature of the 
 affections. The imagination has therefore dis- 
 charged its functions properly. As I say in 
 " Peter Bell," another poem of the same kind : 
 
92 WOKDSWOKTH'S THEORY OF POETRY ESSAY m 
 
 c The dragon's wing, the magic ring 
 
 I shall not covet for my dower, 
 If I along that lowly way, 
 With sympathetic heart may stray. 
 
 And with a soul of power. 
 These given, what more need I desire 
 
 To stir, to soothe, or elevate ? 
 What nobler marvels than the mind 
 May in life's daily prospect find, 
 
 May find or there create ? 
 
 ' And that the imagination has this creative 
 power of " conferring additional properties upon 
 an object, or abstracting from it some of those 
 which it actually possesses/' l I can prove to you 
 by the language which poets use. For instance, 
 take the use of the word " hang " in poetry : 
 
 c Non ego vos posthac viridi projectus in antro 
 Dumosa pendere procul de rape videbo. VIRGIL. 
 
 c Half way down 
 ' Hangs one who gathers samphire. SHAKESPEARE. 
 
 c As when, far off at sea, a fleet descried 
 Hangs in the clouds. MILTON. 
 
 1 In all these passages it is obvious that the 
 quality of hanging does not really inhere in the 
 object, but is conferred on it by the imagination, 
 
 1 Preface to the edition of 1815. 
 
ESSAY in WORDSWORTH'S THEORY OF POETRY 93 
 
 which I have, therefore, properly employed analy- 
 tically, though in a different direction, to suggest 
 a train of feeling connected with the incident of 
 the sailor's mother. And as to your complaint 
 that there is an incongruity between the nature 
 of the thought and the mode of its expression, 
 that arises from the false ideas of poetical diction 
 which you have derived from your study of the 
 poets. True, I might have said what I had to 
 say in prose, but " why should I be condemned 
 for attempting to add to such description the 
 charm which, by the consent of all nations, is 
 acknowledged to exist in metrical language? " 
 
 To this, however, the reader may reply con- 
 fidently : ' Your reasoning, no doubt, is very 
 fine and ingenious, but the matter is one not for 
 argument but for perception. If the association 
 of ideas is so strongly rooted in my mind that 
 no exercise of your imagination is able to over- 
 come the repugnance I feel at finding a subject 
 which seems to me naturally prosaic treated in 
 metre ; while, on the other hand, you are often 
 
 1 I have endeavoured in the above passage to condense the 
 argument of Wordsworth's Prefaces to the Editions of his Poems 
 published in 1805 and 1815. 
 
94 WOKDSWOKTH'S THEOKY OF POETRY ESSAY m 
 
 able to produce the highest pleasure in my mind 
 by your metrical treatment of more imaginative 
 subjects ; and if, besides, this latter is evidently 
 the way in which all great standard poets pro- 
 duce pleasure, is it not possible that on this 
 occasion you have been employing your imagina- 
 tion improperly ? ' Wordsworth seems to have 
 thought that a poet could always write poetically 
 by the mere exercise of his will. But the evidence 
 of the greatest creative poetry proves that the 
 imagination must, in the first place, be over- 
 mastered and possessed by an impulse from 
 without, and Scott describes universal experience 
 in the following passage of one of his letters : 
 
 Nobody knows that has not tried the feverish trade 
 of poetry, how much it depends upon rnood and whim : 
 I don't wonder that in dismissing all the other deities 
 of Paganism the Muse should have been retained by 
 common consent, for, in sober reality } writing good 
 verses seems to depend upon something separate from the 
 volition of the author. I sometimes think my fingers 
 set up for themselves, independent of my head ; for 
 twenty times I have begun a thing on a certain plan, 
 and never in my life adhered to it (in a work of ima- 
 gination, that is) for half an hour together. 
 
 This is a vivid description of the working of 
 
ESSAY in WORDSWORTH'S THEORY OF POETRY 95 
 
 the ' estro ' or ' afflatus,' without which Byron 
 so often declares in his letters that he cannot 
 write well in metre ; of that ' Eros ' which Plato 
 tells us, in the ' Symposium/ seizes and inflames 
 the imagination of the poet. Nor is it the first 
 act of poetical conception alone which is per- 
 formed in this manner in all the imaginative 
 arts the form of the work produced is largely 
 determined by fortune and inspiration. I re- 
 member, among the studies of the painters pre- 
 served at Florence, a rough design of (I think) 
 Parmigiano, in which the artist, desiring to 
 represent the image of terror on a man's face, 
 has left on the paper three or four unsuccessful 
 attempts, showing that he only attained by 
 degrees the expression of the exact idea that he 
 had conceived. Milton, we know, had originally 
 resolved to cast 4 Paradise Lost ' into the form of 
 a drama. Nor can anything be more suggestive 
 than the account which Lockhart gives of the 
 growth of 4 The Lay of the Last Minstrel.' 
 
 Sir John Stoddart's casual recitation, a year or two 
 before, of Coleridge's unpublished ' Christabel/ had 
 fixed the music of that noble fragment in his memory ; 
 
96 WOEDSWOETH'S THEOEY OF POETEY ESSAY m 
 
 and it occurs to him that by throwing the story of 
 Gilpin Homer into somewhat of a similar cadence, he 
 might produce such an echo of the later metrical 
 romance as would serve to connect his c Conclusion ' 
 of the primitive Sir Tristram with his imitations of the 
 popular ballad in < The Grey Brother ' and < Eve of St. 
 John.' A single scene of feudal festivity in the hall 
 of Branksome, disturbed by some pranks of a non- 
 descript goblin, was probably all that he contemplated ; 
 but his accidental confinement in the midst of a volun- 
 teer camp gave him leisure to meditate his theme to 
 the sound of a bugle ; and suddenly there flashes on 
 him the idea of extending his simple outline, so as to 
 embrace a vivid panorama of that old border-life of war 
 and tumult, and all earnest passions, with which his 
 researches on the ' Minstrelsy ' had by degrees fed his 
 imagination, until every the minutest feature had been 
 taken home and realised with unconscious intenseness 
 of sympathy ; so that he had won for himself in the 
 past another world, hardly less complete or familiar than 
 the present. Erskine or Cranstoun suggests that he 
 would do well to divide the poem into cantos, and 
 prefix to each of them a motto explanatory of the 
 action, after the fashion of Spenser in the < Faery 
 Queen.' He pauses for a moment and the happiest 
 conception of the framework of a picturesque narrative 
 that ever occurred to any poet one that Homer might 
 have envied the creation of the ancient harper starts 
 to life. By such steps did the 'Lay of the Last 
 Minstrel ' grow out of the ' Minstrelsy of the Scottish 
 Border.' 
 
ESSAY in WORDSWORTH'S THEOKY OF POETRY 97 
 
 When the imagination is in this exhilarating 
 atmosphere, as it requires some larger and bolder 
 means of expression than is afforded to it by 
 prose, it seizes on metre as naturally as a bird 
 takes to the air, and employs the vivid meta- 
 phorical forms of language which led Words- 
 worth into his fallacious views about its methods 
 of analysis and transmutation. Unless a man's 
 imagination is inspired from without, and his 
 design is conceived when the mind is in that 
 excited state, he will do wrong to choose metre 
 as his instrument of expression. Hence it is 
 that so much of Wordsworth's verse seems to be 
 written in violation of the laws of poetical art. 
 In the i Excursion,' for instance, though it is 
 full of the most noble incidental passages, evi- 
 dently written under the influence of direct 
 inspiration, yet, as the design of the whole poem 
 is certainly formed by a process of cool medita- 
 tion, we are constantly haunted by a sense that 
 we are in an atmosphere unfavourable to the 
 movement of metre. I have opened the ' Ex- 
 cursion ' at random, and I light at once on the 
 following passage : 
 
98 WORDSWOKTH'S THEOKY OF POETKY ESSAY in 
 
 Forgive me if say 
 
 That an appearance which hath raised your minds 
 To an exalted pitch (the self-same cause 
 Different effect producing), is for me 
 Fraught rather with depression than delight ; 
 Though shame it were could I not look around 
 By the reflection of your pleasure, pleased. 1 
 
 It is plain that these thoughts would be 
 much more fittingly expressed in prose than 
 they are in verse. Nor is this simply because 
 the substance of them is philosophical and 
 didactic, for so is the substance of the ' Essay 
 on Man/ and yet the thought in the ' Essay on 
 Man ' is (for the reason given by Pope, and 
 quoted in my last paper) expressed better in 
 metre than it could be in prose. The reason is, 
 as everyone can see, that the writer of the above 
 passage is not in a mood for the expression of 
 thoughts for which metre is adapted. Even in 
 pathetic narrative poems like 4 Michael/ the 
 prosy effect is often reproduced. 
 
 A good report did from their kinsman come 
 Of Luke and his well-doing ; and the boy 
 Wrote loving letters, full of wondrous news, 
 Which, as the housewife phrased it, were throughout, 
 
 1 Excursion, Book iii. 
 
ESSAY in WORDSWORTH'S THEORY OF POETRY 99 
 
 ' The prettiest letters that were ever seen.' 
 
 Both parents read them with rejoicing hearts. 
 
 So many months passed on : and once again 
 
 The shepherd went about his daily work 
 
 With confident and cheerful thoughts ; and now 
 
 Sometimes when he could find a leisure hour, 
 
 He to that valley took his way, and there 
 
 Wrought at the sheep-fold. Meanwhile Luke began 
 
 To slacken in his duty ; and at length 
 
 He in the dissolute city gave himself 
 
 To evil courses ; ignominy and shame 
 
 Fell on him, so that he was driven at last 
 
 To seek a hiding-place beyond the seas. 
 
 Is any charm superadded to this narrative 
 by the employment of metre ? I imagine that 
 the story told as Mrs. Graskell, for instance, 
 might have told it in prose, would have been 
 more pathetic, simply from the fact that the 
 artifice would have been less felt. But now 
 compare with this the noble opening stanza in 
 ' Laodamia ' : 
 
 With sacrifice before the rising morn 
 
 Vows have I made by fruitless hope inspired ; 
 
 And from the infernal gods, 'mid shades forlorn 
 
 Of night, my slaughtered Lord have I required : 
 
 Celestial pity I again implore, 
 
 Restore him to my sight great Jove, restore ! 
 
100 WORDSWORTH'S THEORY OF POETRY ESSAY in 
 
 How could this passionate invocation have 
 been given in prose ? And why could it not ? 
 Because the imagination is moving in a world 
 of its own : it is exhilarated by the atmosphere ; 
 and it seeks for unusual forms in which to ex- 
 press-its enthusiasm. Or take, again, the mag- 
 nificent lines on ' Yew Trees 7 : 
 
 There is a Yew-Tree, pride of Lorton Yale, 
 
 Which to this day stands single in the midst 
 
 Of its own darkness, as it stood of yore : 
 
 Not lot 1 to furnish weapons for the bands 
 
 Of Umfraville or Percy ere they marched 
 
 To Scotland's heaths ; or those that crossed the sea 
 
 And drew their sounding bows at Azincour, 
 
 Perhaps at early Crecy or Poictiers. 
 
 Of vast circumference and gloom profound 
 
 This solitary tree ! a living thing 
 
 Produced too slowly ever to decay ; 
 
 Of form and aspect too magnificent 
 
 To be destroyed. But worthier still of note 
 
 Are those fraternal four of Borrowdale, 
 
 Joined in one solemn and capacious grove ; 
 
 Huge trunks, and each particular trunk a growth 
 
 Of intertwisted fibres serpentine, 
 
 Up-coiling and inveterately convolved ; 
 
 Nor uninformed with Phantasy, and looks 
 
 That threaten the profane ; a pillared shade 
 
 Upon whose grassless floor of red-brown hue, 
 
ESSAY in WOKDSWOKTH'S THEOKY OF POETEY 101 
 
 By sheddings from the pining umbrage tinged 
 Perennially beneath whose sable roof 
 Of boughs, as if for festal purpose decked 
 With unrejoicing berries ghostly Shapes 
 May meet at noontide ; Fear and trembling Hope, 
 Silence and Foresight ; Death the Skeleton, 
 And Time the Shadow ; there to celebrate, 
 As in a natural temple scattered o'er 
 With altars undisturbed of mossy stone, 
 United worship ; or in mute repose 
 To lie and listen to the mountain flood 
 Murmuring from Glaramara's inmost caves. 
 
 These lines, read in the light of 1% theory, 
 seem to me to suggest vividly the source of 
 Wordsworth's greatness and weakness as a poet. 
 His formulated creed was that the imaginative 
 mind, by an act of meditation, can make any 
 subject, however trivial, poetical. But his 
 practice proves that a poet only writes poeti- 
 cally when he is under an overmastering 
 externaljjifluence, directing his mind to a sub- 
 ject congenial to his powers. The yew-trees 
 that inspired the above noble verses were 
 certainly not such an object ' as will be found 
 in every village,' nor could any ' meditative and 
 feeling mind ' have given such splendid utter- 
 
102 WORDSWORTH'S THEORY OF POETRY ESSAY in 
 
 ance to the emotions they excite. No : the 
 forces that made Wordsworth a poet were far 
 different from those conscious reasonings on 
 Man and Society of which he gives an account 
 in the 4 Prelude ' : his inspiration sprang from 
 mysterious sources which, as he shows us in the 
 first book of his curious metrical autobiography, 
 had been ^7^^w5OTinimaes into his 
 
 mind from his earliest childhood. The religious 
 ideas excited by the unseen life of Nature, the 
 sublime outlines of mountain and valley, the 
 blending of wood and water, the changes of 
 light and shadow, the spirit-like movements of 
 birds, the simple manners and passions of the 
 peasantry, mingled so suggestively with the 
 historic monuments of the past, these were the 
 romantic fountains at which other poets had 
 drunk in passing, but to which Wordsworth 
 was constantly returning for deep draughts^of 
 
 When he is completely under the direction 
 of his Muse he illustrates as happily as any man 
 the truth of Horace's observation, 
 
 Cui lecta potenter erit res, 
 Nee facundia deseret hunc, nee lucidus ordo. 
 
I ESSAY in WORDSWORTH'S THEORY OF POETRY 103 
 
 His theory, on the other hand, shows him to 
 have been under the impression that he merely 
 chose to express himself in verse in order to give 
 a certain additional charm to his thought, and 
 that he purposely selected a style of diction 
 approaching as nearly as possible to the manner 
 of prose. And, no doubt, this sufficiently de- 
 scribes his case in his uninspired moments, 
 which are frequent enough. But when the 
 c afflatus ' is upon him it turns his genius 
 naturally into ancient traditional channels of 
 expression, and prompts him, like all great 
 poets, to develop metrical movements which 
 certainly did not originate with himself. His 
 use of the Ballad form, for instance, was largely 
 due to the publication of Percy's ' Ancient 
 Reliques ' ; Bowles had previously revived and 
 popularised the use of the Sonnet ; Words- 
 worth's style of writing blank verse is unmis- 
 takably his own, but no one can read his lines 
 on i Yew- Trees ' without perceiving how greatly 
 he was influenced by Milton, while at other 
 times the example of Cowper seems not to have 
 been without its effect. 
 
104 WORDSWORTH'S THEORY OF POETRY ESSAY m 
 
 Again, Wordsworth in his ^theory lays the 
 foundations of poetry in the perceptions of thf 
 individual poet. But all his best workjs based 
 on universal associations^ and its merit comes 
 from the beauty of the form in which a general 
 feeling is expressed. If one recalls those poems 
 of his which have taken the deepest root in the 
 national mind, the ' Ode onjhnmortality/ c Lucy 
 Gray/ ' the ' Song at the Feast of Brougham 
 Castle/ 4 The Boy of Windermere/ numerous 
 sonnets, of which 4 Westminster Bridge ' and 
 ' It is a beauteous evening calm and free/ are 
 types ; and such characteristic lines as 
 
 The light that never was on sea or land, 
 
 The consecration and the poet's dream ; 
 or 
 
 Love had he found in huts where poor men lie ; 
 
 His daily teachers had been woods and rills ; 
 The silence that is in the starry sky ; 
 
 The sleep that is among the lonely hills 
 
 one is aware immediately that the poet has put 
 into the best possible form of musical words a 
 feeling w^hich had hitherto been lying chaotically 
 indistinct in the heart. Wordsworth's genius 
 
WORDSWOBTlfiS Ol? 0|JTRY 1 05 
 
 moved with a large and^SSpaiTumg power in the 
 midst of a society accustomed to town life, 
 limited, refined, highly artificialised, and ex- 
 clusively occupied with the contemplation of its 
 own manners ; he extended men's social ideas 
 by showing with unsurpassed power what beau- 
 tiful, pathetic, and sublime associations were 
 connected with the natural life of their country. 
 Hence, in so far as he was genuinely a poet, the 
 Liberalising influence he exerted on literature 
 was, in the deepest and truest sense, Conserva- 
 tive. 
 
 On the other hand, his solitary habits led 
 him in theory, and often in practice, to princi- 
 ples which, as far as the art of poetry is * con- 
 cerned, may be called thoroughly Jacobinical. 
 Perpetually occupied with the contemplation of 
 his own mind, he forgot that it was said that 
 those who measure themselves by themselves 
 and compare themselves with themselves are 
 not wise. Incessant introspection increased his 
 intellectual arrogance and impaired his judg- 
 ment. He could not appreciate the genius of 
 others who had written as well of men and 
 
106 WORDSWORTH'S THEORY OF POETRY ESSAY in 
 
 society as he had written of external nature ; 
 and when Scott sent him his edition of Dryden, 
 he avows in his letter of acknowledgment that 
 he considers the latter to be no poet. Every- 
 thing, however, that passed into his own mind 
 
 O ' / JL : ' ' 
 
 appeared to him to become possible material for 
 poetry. He never said to himself, ' Tais-toi, 
 Jean Jacques, on ne t'entend pas ; ' but imagined 
 that each experience interesting to himself would 
 be of equal interest to the world. This over- 
 weening estimate of his own genius caused him 
 to undervalue tradition, and, as far as he could, 
 to obliterate and level the distinctions which the 
 practice of the best poets had created between 
 the style of poetry and prose. 
 
 Summarised briefly, what I have endeavoured 
 to establish in the present and in the preceding 
 papers comes to this. Reason shows that 
 there are certain subjects as incapable of just 
 expression in metrical language as others are 
 by the arts of painting, sculpture, and music. 
 Experience proves that the sources of all great 
 poetry are to be sought far back in the annals, 
 traditions, and religion of the people ; and the 
 
ESSAY in WORDSWORTH'S THEORY OF POETRY ^ 
 
 history of English literature further indicates 
 that the stream of national creative imagination 
 flows from two main sources, the poetry of 
 romance and the poetry of miners. Words- 
 worth's great and truly Conservative achieve- 
 ment consists in his having given to the poetry 
 of romance, the existence of which during the 
 eighteenth century had come to be almost for-\ 
 gotten, a large and surprising development. But 
 in his hatred of the canons of criticism, which 
 had prevailed through that century, he com- 
 mitted himself in theory, and often in practice, 
 to principles revolutionary of the whole character 
 of the art. 
 
 In brief, the great changes in English 
 poetry which he initiated in opposition to the 
 rules of art prevailing in the eighteenth century 
 were these : he taught that poetry was the ideal 
 of the Individual not the ideal of Society ; he 
 therefore removed the art from the sphere of 
 social action to that of individual reflection and 
 mental analysis ; and he insisted that as any 
 object may become a fit subject for poetry, 
 provided that it be sufficiently modified by the 
 
-v/6 WORDSWOKTH'S THEORY OF POETRY ESSAY m 
 
 imagination of the poet, so the language in which 
 the subject is presented should not be regulated 
 by the mixed literary and social standard sanc- 
 tioned by tradition, but should as closely as pos- 
 sible follow the diction of real life, particularly 
 that of the peasantry. It is not difficult to see 
 that if Wordsworth's views on these points be 
 correct, then the practice of the great classical 
 poets in all nations must have been completely 
 wrong. 
 
THE BEVIVAL OF ROMANCE; 
 
 SCOTT, BYRON, SHELLEY 
 
IV. 
 
 THE REVIVAL OF ROMANCE: SCOTT, BYRON, 
 SHELLEY. 
 
 BY his habits of severe and lonely meditation 
 and of philosophical analysis, Wordsworth was 
 well qualified to become the apostle of the new 
 movement which, as Coleridge tells us, was in- 
 augurated by the publication of ' Lyrical Bal- 
 lads.' On the other hand, his remoteness from 
 social life and action, and the studied prosiness 
 of much of his versification, prevented his poems 
 from making an immediate impression on the 
 taste of an age imbued with reverence for the 
 classical models of poetical diction. The shock 
 which was felt by the imagination of society at 
 the end of the eighteenth century, and which 
 produced the vast development or the complete 
 subversion of so many deeply-rooted feelings and 
 ideas, exhibits its effects most distinctly in the 
 
112 THE REVIVAL OF ROMANCE: ESSAY iv 
 
 work of those great writers whose names stand 
 at the head of this paper. In this paper I 
 shall endeavour to trace the rise of the new 
 school of Romance in English Literature, its con- 
 nection with the classical school of the eighteenth 
 century, and the various channels into which it 
 was directed by Scott, Byron, and Shelley. 
 
 The genius of the eighteenth century in Eng- 
 land was hostile to Romance in all its shapes. 
 Almost every writer of the period is a disciple 
 of Cervantes. The early part of the century 
 produced the most exquisite and delicate satire 
 on feudal Toryism in the person of Sir Roger 
 de Coverley. Chivalrous feeling could scarcely 
 breathe in the same atmosphere as Gulliver. 
 Pope, whose mind was very open to the in- 
 fluences of the old-fashioned sentimental gal- 
 lantry, boasts, nevertheless, that he soon aban- 
 doned ' Fancy's maze ' to * moralize his song/ 
 Fielding found the inspiring motive for his own 
 novels in his contempt for the sentimentalities 
 of Richardson. Goldsmith, the finest artist of 
 the school of Addison, shows himself utterly in- 
 sensible to the influences that were operating on 
 
ESSAY iv SCOTT, BYRON, SHELLEY 113 
 
 the genius of Gray. As for Johnson, perhaps 
 the most thoroughly representative man of letters 
 in the century, his opinion on the matter, mani- 
 fested in almost every page of Boswell's Life, 
 is well illustrated by his recorded criticism on 
 'La Nouvelle Hfloise.' 'Eoswett."! don't 
 deny, Sir, but that his novel may perhaps do 
 harm ; but I cannot think his intention was 
 bad.' 7 Johnson. " Sir, that will not do. We 
 cannot prove any man's intention to be bad. 
 You may shoot a man through the head, and 
 say you intended to miss him, but the judge 
 will order you to be hanged. An alleged want 
 of intention, when evil is committed, will not 
 be allowed in a court of justice. Rousseau, Sir, 
 is a very bad man, I would sooner sign a sen- 
 tence for his transportation than that of any 
 felon that has gone from the Old Bailey these 
 many years. Yes, I should like to have him 
 work in the plantations." 
 
 It is to be hoped that we have so far out- 
 lived the sickly dreaminess of the revolutionary 
 period as to own that the manly Doctor was in 
 the main right. He saw that Rousseau's view 
 
 i 
 
114 THE REVIVAL OF ROMANCE: ESSAY IT 
 
 of life, however attractive to the imagination, 
 had no basis of reality, and that without the estab- 
 lished order which this sense of reality implies, 
 civilised society cannot exist. The view that 
 Johnson propounded in his direct i knock-down ' 
 style was shared by all his great contemporaries. 
 The sons, grandsons, or great grandsons of men 
 who had learned from many disappointments to 
 distrust all fanaticism and enthusiasm, they had 
 seen the old principle of feudal monarchy, up- 
 held by Plantagenets and Tudors, dwindle in 
 the feeble keeping of the Stuarts ; the knightly 
 rule of devotion to women travestied by the 
 adoration of such fc mistresses ' as sprang out of 
 the brain of Cowley or Waller ; the lofty arid 
 beautiful imagery of the ( Faery Queen ' replaced 
 by the gallantries of a Suckling, a Rochester, 
 and even of an Afra Behn. The Feudal Ideal 
 was, for the time, extinct as a social force. Yet 
 the void thus created was far from being filled 
 by the principle of Puritanical or Deistic de- 
 mocracy. Sour, gloomy, bigoted, tyrannical, 
 or at best dry and pedantic, the reign of the 
 Saints and of the Philosophers was scarcely 
 
ESSAY iv SCOTT, BYRON, SHELLEY 115 
 
 more tolerable than that of the Atheists. In 
 this arid social desert, where could men who 
 desired a manly and moderate Freedom find a 
 national standard of political order, good breed- 
 ing, and good taste, which should be in touch 
 with the traditions of the past, and yet con- 
 formable to the growth of modern society ? 
 This was the problem which the Conservatism 
 of the eighteenth century had to solve, and I 
 confess that when I think, on the one hand, of 
 the anarchy of extremes into which the imagin- 
 ation of the English people had fallen after the 
 Restoration, and, on the other, of the masculine, 
 unaffected, straightforward habits of thought, 
 as w^ell as of the finish and perfection of style, 
 achieved by the great writers of the post- Revo- 
 lution period, no words seem to me too strong 
 to express the debt of gratitude which the 
 nation owes to Steele, Addison, Pope, Gray, 
 Fielding, Johnson, and Goldsmith. Critics of 
 the present day are apt to talk in a superior 
 and patronising tone of the eighteenth century. 
 They say it is ' unpoetical,' unromantic, scep- 
 tical, utilitarian. But surely the wonder is that, 
 
1 1 6 THE REVIVAL OF ROMANCE : ESSAY iv 
 
 after the Revolution through which it had 
 passed, English society was able to construct 
 an ideal life of any kind. The best answer to 
 those who disparage the eighteenth century is 
 the question, 4 What should we have done with- 
 out it ? ' 
 
 The attitude of the great representative 
 writers of the eighteenth century towards 
 Romance is very intelligible. It expresses the 
 contempt of men trained in the stern school of 
 experience for the Quixotism of visionaries who 
 think it an easy thing to reconstitute society 
 after ideas existing only in their own mind. 
 Having themselves struggled manfully with all 
 kinds of physical and moral ill, they know the 
 extreme difficulty of establishing a social modus 
 vivendi. Hence their distrust of mere senti- 
 ment and enthusiasm. Undoubtedly, however, 
 their ingrained pessimism exercises a contract- 
 ing influence on their understandings. A keen 
 ense of reality in the external order of nature 
 and of human society causes them to disregard 
 the spiritual wants of the individual. No one 
 knew better than Johnson the reality of the 
 
ESSAY iv SCOTT, BYKON, SHELLEY 117 
 
 inward life, but he looked with apprehension on 
 its consequences when converted into action. 
 All attempts to change the established order in 
 the fond hope of reaching an ideal state of 
 things seemed to him equally blameworthy ; 
 hence he comprehended in a common anathema 
 Wilkes and Washington in politics, Behrnen 
 and Wesley in religion, Macpherson and Gray 
 in literature. 
 
 For the same reason he overlooked the 
 obvious danger to society that the modus vivendi 
 might corne to be mistaken for the life itself 
 which was, indeed, precisely what happened in 
 the last part of the eighteenth century. There 
 was real value in the form and order constituted 
 by the statesmen, artists, and men of letters 
 who grappled with the confusion and anarchy 
 produced by the downfall of the old regime, but 
 they were valuable only because they were an 
 outward expression of vigorous life and thought. 
 When the new order was once established, 
 natural indolence prompted society to be content 
 with mere rules, without looking for the living 
 spirit of things, and a period of torpor accord- 
 
118 THE REVIVAL OF EOMANCE : ESSAY iv 
 
 ingly supervened in Church, State, and Litera- 
 ture. Anglican theology lapsed into formalism ; 
 the Whiggery of the Revolution declined into 
 petty factiousness under the Pelhams and many 
 of their successors ; while the standard of c cor- 
 rectness,' which had once been represented by 
 the energy and conciseness of Pope, was con- 
 founded as, indeed, Macaulay himself con- 
 founds it with the mechanical regularity of 
 Hayley and Pye. 
 
 Apprehending that the new literary move- 
 ment was based, as he says of Methodism, on ' a 
 principle utterly incompatible with social or civil 
 security.' Johnson miscalculated the true nature 
 of the tendencies of taste disclosed in the 
 poetry of Gray and Collins, and in the popular 
 favour shown to Percy's ' Reliques.' He had 
 taken an active part as a combatant in the 
 political and literary struggle which ended in 
 the re-establishment of order, and, having fought 
 his way through all kinds of obstacles to a 
 dictatorship in the world of letters, he regarded 
 the classical Settlement as final. But now that 
 the battle was done, others were less content 
 
ESSAY iv SCOTT, BYRON, SHELLEY 119 
 
 with the fruits of victory. They were at leisure 
 to contemplate critically what had been accom- 
 plished, and as the fervid atmosphere, which had 
 been so favourable to the production of satirical 
 and controversial writing, cooled, a feeling of 
 ennui, and of the melancholy which always 
 accompanies it, gradually spread through society. 
 Comparing the new social idea with the old, 
 men could not fail to see that the former had 
 many imperfections and the latter many advan- 
 tages. The dry light of judgment and common 
 sense approved of the existing standard as the 
 best that circumstances permitted, but, judged 
 side by side with the comprehensiveness of the 
 Catholic Church and the Feudal System, it 
 appeared colourless and uninspiring. Conscious 
 of this deficiency, the creative faculty of the age 
 accepted the principles of the established regime 
 as constituting the code of practical conduct, 
 but set itself eagerly to search for fresh materials 
 wherewith to amuse, to stimulate, to enrich, and 
 to amplify the life of the Imagination. 
 
 Out of this new spirit in Society arose what 
 may be called the Dilettante school of English 
 
120 THE KEVIVAL OF EOMANCE : ESSAY iv 
 
 literature a school which branches into many 
 departments, and comprehends artists as different 
 in excellence as Gray and Delia Crusca, but the 
 chief representatives of which are Gray, Collins, 
 Horace Walpole, and the two Wartons. Gray 
 and Collins are the poets of the movement 
 The leading characteristics of their poetical work 
 and of Gray's more especially are a pervading 
 melancholy, an inclination to select romantic 
 subjects, and at the same time an adherence to, 
 and even an accentuation of, the classical forms 
 of diction which had been naturalised in the 
 language by the genius of Pope. Horace Wal- 
 pole is the virtuoso pure and simple. Without a 
 spark of genius, he has a taste, bright and in- 
 telligent, for the arts ; he understands their prin- 
 ciples, and dabbles in them all. He revives 
 Gothic architecture in Strawberry Hill a toy 
 house ; he makes an experiment in romance in 
 ' The Castle of Otranto ' a toy novel ; he 
 writes sketchy Lives of the Painters, and com- 
 poses an ingenious ' Essay on Landscape 
 Gardening/ The brothers Joseph and Thomas 
 Warton exercised considerable influence on the 
 
ESSAY iv SCOTT, BYRON, SHELLEY 121 
 
 public taste by their powers of criticism. Joseph's 
 ' Essay on the Genius of Pope/ while showing a 
 scholar's appreciation of Pope's wonderful skill 
 in expression, reminded the reader of what had 
 been long forgotten, the superior qualities of the 
 older and more imaginative style of poetry. 
 Thomas had himself a genuine vein of romance, 
 and his fine ' History of English Poetry ? 
 awakened general interest in the early sources of 
 our metrical literature. Towards the close of 
 the eighteenth century the taste for the super- 
 natural and the marvellous was quickened by 
 German influences, which inspired the fictions 
 of Monk Lewis and Mrs. Radcliffe ; and the 
 stream of romance added to its volume the 
 French Revolutionary ethics advocated in the 
 imaginative and philosophical works of William 
 Godwin. In all these writers two leading cha- 
 racteristics are manifest ; a Conservative adhe- 
 rence to classical form, and a Liberal tendency 
 to encourage romantic feeling ; a tendency which, 
 it is evident, maybe either so chastened by judg- 
 ment and reflection as simply to intensify the 
 pleasures of the imagination, or, if unchecked 
 
122 THE REVIVAL OF ROMANCE: ESSAY iv 
 
 by reason, may ripen into revolt against the 
 whole order of existing society. Examples of 
 both results are seen in the writers who are the 
 special subject of this paper. 
 
 It seems to me an undeniable fact, looking 
 at the question in its relation not to morality 
 but simply and solely to art, that the most en- 
 during creations of the romantic school are the 
 work of the man who adhered most tenaciously 
 to the social common sense and the inherited life 
 of his nation, and kept the firmest check upon 
 the caprices of his own individual genius. I 
 need hardly say that I allude to Scott. In his 
 patriotism, his passionate love of the past, and 
 his reverence for established authority, literary 
 or political, Scott is the best representative 
 among English men of letters of Conservatism 
 in its most generous form. Conservatism, in- 
 dead, penetrates his whole being to such an 
 extent that our Radical Diogenes will not even 
 admit that he possesses the quality of greatness. 
 
 He had nothing (says Carlyle) of the martyr ; into 
 no < dark region to slay monsters for us ' did he, either 
 led or driven, venture down : his conquests were for his 
 
ESSAY iv SCOTT, BYEON, SHELLEY 123 
 
 own behoof mainly, conquests over common market 
 labour, and reckonable in good metallic coin of the 
 realm. The thing he had faith in except power, power 
 of what sort soever, and even of the rudest sort, would 
 be difficult to point out. One sees not that he believed 
 in anything ; nay, he did not even disbelieve ; but 
 quietly acquiesced and made himself at home in a world 
 of conventionalities : the false, the semi-false, and the true 
 were alike true in this, that they were there, and had 
 power in their hands more or less. It was well to feel 
 so ; and yet not well ! We find it written l Wo to 
 them that are at ease in Zion ; ' but surely it is a 
 double wo to them that are at ease in Babel, in Dom- 
 daniel. On the other hand he wrote many volumes, 
 amusing many thousands of men. Shall we call this 
 great ? It seems to us there dwells and struggles 
 another sort of spirit in the inward parts of great men. 
 
 And so on through a long tirade full of an 
 envious admiration, an extorted enthusiasm, a 
 reluctant love, that make Carlyle's Essay on 
 Walter Scott one of the most interesting pieces 
 of autobiography and one of the worst pieces of 
 literary criticism in the English language. For 
 what does this censure amount to ? That Scott 
 was a Conservative, and that he amused the 
 people. But the question is not whether Scott 
 was a great man, but whether he was a great 
 
124 THE KEVIVAL OF ROMANCE: ESS, 
 
 writer ; and if Carlyle's standard of measure 
 ment is adopted, the most famous poets must 
 all be excluded from the category of greatness. 
 What was there of ' the martyr' in Homer, 
 Virgil, or Shakespeare ? May we not even say, 
 in a sense, that Milton and Dante are ' at ease 
 in Zion ' ? Bat if the real greatness of artistic 
 achievement consists in that grandeur and serenity 
 of soul which enables the creator to merge him- 
 self in his work, then beyond all question Scott 
 was great, and great not in spite of, but because 
 of, his Conservatism. 
 
 It was precisely his calm acceptance of the 
 facts of life that furnished Scott with his broad 
 basis of dramatic romance. He was ready to 
 work witli any tools that came to his hand. He 
 found romance in the keeping of the dilettanti, 
 and society rejoicing in the supernatural ma- 
 chinery of the Minerva Press. Nevertheless, 
 while he was perfectly alive to the childishness 
 of the prevalent taste, he never speaks but with 
 respect of his predecessors, Horace Walpole and 
 Mrs. Radcliffe, to whom he ungrudgingly ac- 
 knowledges his obligations. Indeed, his own 
 
SSAY iv SCOTT, BYRON, SHELLEY 125 
 
 name and fame seem to be the last things he 
 desired to thrust into prominence. His early 
 adventures in the semi-civilized society of Scot- 
 land had provided him with sufficient individual 
 experience for an interesting autobiography ; yet, 
 though the incidents of his own life are worked 
 into his tales with the finest dramatic skill, the 
 author of the ' Waverley Novels ' remained 
 through the whole wonderful series ' the Great 
 Unknown/ 
 
 With all his enthusiastic love of the past, 
 Scott's practical instinct told him that the ' com- 
 mon sense 7 of the eighteenth century was the 
 best rule of modern life ; hence the ideal world 
 that he has created for us has its foundations on 
 a sound and sober conception of reality. His 
 heroes are often complained of as unheroic ; but 
 examine a little closer, and it will be seen that 
 the weaknesses of their disposition are necessary 
 to the development of the action, and to the 
 grouping of the stronger and more interesting 
 characters required for the construction of the 
 story. What can be better adapted to its end 
 than the character of Waverley himself? ' My 
 
126 THE EEViVAL OF ROMANCE : ESSAY iv 
 
 intention/ says Scott, ' is not to follow the steps 
 of that inimitable author (Cervantes) in describ- 
 ing such total perversion of intellect as mis- 
 construes the objects actually presented to the 
 senses, but that more common aberration from 
 sound judgment, which apprehends occurrences 
 indeed in their reality, but communicates to them 
 a tincture of its own romantic tone and colour- 
 ing/ So, too, in his renderings of history. 
 Nothing would have been easier for him in i Old 
 Mortality/ for instance, than to throw the whole 
 balance of the reader's sympathy on the Stuart 
 side. And yet with what delicate art is that 
 sympathy secretly instilled without any positive 
 violation of historic truth ; how dexterous the 
 conception of making the Presbyterian Morton 
 the hero of the story ! how generous the repre- 
 sentation of the heroism of the Covenanters ! 
 how unfaltering the delineation of their brutal 
 judges ! Think, again, of the masterly skill 
 with which, in ' The Antiquary/ all the shades and 
 gradations of a complex feudal society are brought 
 together upon a single canvas ; the shrewd 
 pedantry of Oldbuck, the vagrant license of 
 
ESSAY iv SCOTT, BYRON, SHELLEY 127 
 
 Edie Ochiltree, the criminal devotedness of 
 Elspeth Mucklebackit, and the asceticism of Lord 
 Glenallan. See the fine contrasts of character ; 
 Claverhouse and Balfour of Burley ; Jeanie 
 Deans and the Duke of Argyll ; Rob Roy and 
 Bailie Nicol Jarvie ; the Master of Ravenswood 
 and Bucklaw : or the blending of the humorous 
 with the pathetic ; Dandie Dinmont with Meg 
 Merrilies ; Cuddie Headrigg with Ephraim 
 Macbriar ; and Evan Dhu Maccombich with the 
 Baron of Bradwardine. How utterly impossible 
 would this power of producing vivid impressions 
 of reality have been to a man who had not 
 accepted the standard of faith and morals esta- 
 blished in the historic society to which he be- 
 longed, and who would, therefore, have been 
 unable to impart dramatic consistency to the 
 creatures of his imagination ! 
 
 All this, however, we are given to under- 
 stand, is in truth but flimsy stuif, very far, 
 ndeed, from being genuine ideal creation. 
 
 6 We might say,' continues Carlyle, ' in a short 
 word, which means a long matter, that your Shake- 
 speare fashions his characters from the heart outwards ; 
 your Scott fashions them from the skin inwards, never 
 
128 THE REVIVAL OF ROMANCE: ESSAY iv 
 
 getting near the heart of them. The one set become 
 living men and women ; the other amount to little 
 more than mechanical cases, deceptively painted auto- 
 matons. ... To the same purport, indeed, we are to 
 say that these famed books are altogether addressed to 
 the e very-day mind ; that for any other mind there is 
 next to no nourishment in them. Opinions, emotions, 
 principles, doubts, beyond what the intelligent country 
 gentleman can carry along with him, are not to be 
 found. It is orderly, customary, it is prudent, decent ; 
 nothing more. 9 
 
 Nothing more ! The enlightened Radical 
 mind can find nothing more than what is fc decent 
 and customary ' in Jeanie Deans, Meg Merrilies, 
 Dandie Dinmont, Nicol Jarvie, Dugald Dalgetty, 
 Cuddle Headrigg, Edie Ochiltree ; James I. 
 and Louis XI. seem to it ' little more than 
 mechanical cases, deceptively painted auto- 
 matons ' ; the grief of Saunders Mucklebackit 
 over his drowned son ; the wild-animal attach- 
 ment of Meg Merrilies ; the devotion of Gurth 
 and Wamba to their master ; the heroism of 
 Ephraim Macbriar : this is painting men ' from 
 the skin inwards, never getting near the heart 
 of them. 7 Heaven and earth ! But the secret 
 of this astonishing judgment is to be found in 
 
ESSAY iv SCOTT, BYKON, SHELLEY 129 
 
 the fact that ' these famed books are altogether 
 addressed to the every-day mind/ There lay 
 the offence. It mattered not that the mar- 
 vellous world called into existence by the Great 
 Magician had enchanted the imagination of 
 hundreds of thousands of men and women who, 
 amid the prosaic and often sordid conditions of 
 their actual life, caught far-off glimpses of the 
 noble, the heroic, and the beautiful, in the ideal 
 reproduction of the life of their ancestors. In 
 the serene atmosphere of this imaginary sphere 
 there was no introspection, no self-torturing, no 
 mental analysis. Hence Radical philosophy 
 finds that imagination has failed in its proper 
 duty. But the ' every-day mind ' which has 
 tasted the nectar and ambrosia of romance will 
 continue to lavish its tribute of passionate affec- 
 tion on the memory of Scott for having preserved 
 an ideal world, pure from the smoke and din of 
 4 common day/ and will bow before him as, after 
 Shakespeare and Milton, the greatest creator in 
 the English language. 
 
 I say ' creator ' and not ' poet ' advisedly ; 
 for, as a poet in the strict technical sense of the 
 
 K 
 
130 THE EEVIVAL OF ROMANCE: ESSAY iv 
 
 word^ Scott evidently stands on a lower level 
 than Byron, Wordsworth, and Shelley. His 
 metrical romances, admirable as tours de force, 
 and full of passages of effective rhetoric and 
 striking description, do not compel the imagina- 
 tion to that complete 4 suspension of disbelief ' 
 which is the mark of the highest kind of poetry. 
 The reason is obvious. Scott's genius was for 
 historical romance ; and, as Aristotle tells us, 
 the poet deals with what is general, the historian 
 with what is particular. Skilfully as the cha- 
 racter of Marmion has been constructed, the 
 reader cannot help feeling that it has been put 
 together ; hence we never quite breathe in the 
 story, as we do in the ' Iliad 7 or the ' Odyssey/ 
 the ideal atmosphere which is produced by the 
 perfection of metrical writing. Prose alone 
 could secure the large and unfettered liberty 
 that historical romance requires : when Scott 
 employs his magic powers to clothe the spirit 
 of the Past in the language of real life the veri- 
 similitude of his creation is complete. 
 
 A vehicle of a very different kind was 
 
ESSAY iv SCOTT, BYKON, SHELLEY 131 
 
 required for the romance of Byron : indeed, it 
 would be difficult to find two writers belonging 
 to the same school with so many features in 
 common yet opposed to each other in so many 
 essential particulars as Byron and Scott. Scott 
 was, in the highest sense of the word, a creator ; 
 he lives in a hundred beings of his own inven- 
 tion. Byron's poetical faculty was mainly 
 lyrical, not dramatic : Macaulay says of him, 
 with justice : ' Lord Byron never wrote without 
 some reference, direct or indirect, to himself.' 
 Scott used his individual experience as the basis 
 of his ideal creations : Byron employed ideal 
 forms to invest his own person with a poetical 
 atmosphere. Scott was, heart and soul, a Con- 
 servative : Byron's mind was the battle-field of 
 contending impulses, the aristocratic sense of 
 order and the democratic love of liberty ; 
 sentiment and cynicism ; religious instinct and 
 sceptical philosophy. Hence, while all Scott's 
 romantic characters are obviously creatures of 
 the imagination pure and simple, the. difficulty 
 with Byron's representations of himself is to 
 discover how much of them belongs to the 
 
132 THE EEVIVAL OF ROMANCE : ESSAY iv 
 
 world of reality and how much to the world of 
 romance. 
 
 This curious twofold nature of his genius 
 has been the cause of stumbling to critics like 
 Macaulay and Carlyle, who endeavour to explain 
 it on a single principle. Macaulay, looking ex- 
 clusively at the romantic aspect of his poetry, 
 disparages it in a well-known passage, describ- 
 ing its effects on undergraduates and medical 
 students, as if it were mere affectation the 
 expression of a transitory fashion of feeling. 
 But he does not attempt to explain the cause of 
 the extraordinary intensity of this contemporary 
 feeling, or of the power with which the poetry 
 of Byron still affects the imagination. Carlyle, 
 on the other hand, with a truer perception of 
 the spirit and reality of the emotions excited by 
 his verse, describes them as Werterism, ' a class 
 of feelings/ to use his own words, ' deeply 
 important to modern minds ; feelings which arise 
 from passion incapable of being converted into 
 action, which belong to an age as indolent, 
 cultivated, and unbelieving as our own.' But 
 the character of the drivelling German 
 
ESSAY iv SCOTT, BYKON, SHELLEY 133 
 
 Whose passion boiled and bubbled, 
 Till he blew his silly brains out, 
 And by it no more was troubled 
 
 is something different in kind from the character 
 of Byron. There is very little of impotence in 
 4 English Bards and Scotch Reviewers.' Even 
 Byron's romantic heroes know how to find a 
 vent for their vapours in some sort of action. 
 Childe Harold himself seeks to obtain self- 
 forgetfulness by incessant travel. Conrad gets 
 rid of his ennui, misanthropy, and self- contempt, 
 by piracy. Don Juan is anything but a 
 dreamer. Carlyle's explanation, in short, if 
 less superficial than Macaulay's, is quite as 
 incomplete. 
 
 It seems to me that throughout Byron's 
 poetry three main elements of feeling may be 
 traced : the romance of the dilettante, the indig- 
 nation of the satirist, and the lyrical utterances 
 of the man himself. Moreover, looking at his 
 works historically and biographically, it is 
 possible to observe these elements alternately 
 predominating, or blending with and absorbing 
 each other in his poetical creations, according as 
 
134 THE EEVIVAL OF KOMANCE : ESSAY iv 
 
 his genius was affected by external circum- 
 stances. In the ' Hours of Idleness,' as is 
 natural, we find them all in embryo, separate 
 and distinct. The romantic sentiment of the 
 dilettante is plainly visible in numerous love- 
 poems, in melancholy musings over the decayed 
 halls of his ancestors, and in recollections of the 
 Highland home of his childhood. Satire, in a 
 crude and boyish form, exhibits itself in the 
 portrait of Pomposus. But the note of genuine 
 personal unhappiness sounds unmistakably in 
 the following stanzas : 
 
 Few are my years, and yet I feel 
 
 The world was ne'er designed for me : 
 Ah ! why do darkening shades conceal 
 
 The hour when man must cease to be ? 
 Once I beheld a splendid dream, 
 
 A visionary scene of bliss. 
 Truth ! wherefore did thy hated beam 
 
 Awake me to a world like this ? 
 
 I loved but those I loved are gone ; 
 
 Had friends my early friends are fled. 
 How cheerless feels the heart alone 
 
 When all its former hopes are dead ! 
 Though gay companions o'er the bowl 
 
 Dispel awhile the sense of ill ; 
 Though pleasure stirs the maddening soul. 
 
 The heart the heart is lonely still. 
 
>SAY iv SCOTT, BYKON, SHELLEY 135 
 
 Igneus est ollis vigor et coelestis origo. It is 
 pathetic to trace the consistency of Byron's 
 genius in these lines, the utterances of boyhood, 
 and in those written at Missolonghi on the com- 
 pletion of his thirty-sixth year : 
 
 My days are in the yellow leaf; 
 
 The flowers and fruits of love are gone ; 
 The worm, the canker, and the grief 
 Are mine alone ! 
 
 The fire that on my bosom preys 
 
 Is lone as some volcanic isle ; 
 No torch is kindled at its blaze 
 A funeral pile. 
 
 The hope, the fear, the jealous care, 
 
 The exalted portion of the pain 
 And power of love, I cannot share, 
 But wear the chain. 
 
 In English Sards and Scotch Reviewers we see 
 the poet, stung into resistance by the injustice 
 of the reviews on his first volume, casting aside 
 the cloak of the dilettante and pouring forth his 
 scorn alike on the romanticism and on the 
 pedantry of his age. Dilettantism resumes its 
 sway in ' Childe Harold,' and in all that series 
 of romantic poems which, on his return from 
 
136 THE KEVIVAL OF ROMANCE: ESSAY iv 
 
 his travels, made his name so rapidly famous in 
 every country of Europe, and himself the darling 
 of English society. It is dilettantism, blended 
 with the deep vein of personal melancholy which 
 had shown itself separately in his early poems, 
 and is, therefore, something very different from 
 the conceits of a posing sentimentalist. Still, the 
 ' unreality ' of the following is transparent : 
 
 I now leave Ohilde Harold to live his day, such as 
 he is ; it had been more agreeable, and certainly more 
 easy, to have drawn an amiable character. It had been 
 easy to varnish over his faults, to make him do more 
 and express less, but he never was intended as an ex- 
 ample further than to show that early perversion of mind 
 and morals leads to satiety of past pleasures, and dis- 
 appointment in new ones, and that even the beauties of 
 nature and the stimulus of travel (except ambition, the 
 most powerful of all excitements) are lost on a soul so 
 constituted or, rather, misdirected. 
 
 If Byron had attempted to make his hero 
 4 an amiable character,' or anything but what he 
 is, his poem would have been a failure. The 
 merit of the work lies in the description of the 
 Pilgrimage, not in the character of the Pilgrim ; 
 but the latter is admirably designed for giving 
 human interest to a series of pictures, otherwise 
 
ESSAY iv SCOTT, BYRON, SHELLEY 137 
 
 unconnected, which, without this central figure, 
 would heave been utterly wanting in poetical life 
 and unity. 
 
 The same self-conscious air reappears in the 
 preface to ' The Corsair.' 
 
 With regard to my story, I should have been glad 
 to have rendered my personages more perfect and 
 amiable, if possible, inasmuch as I have been sometimes 
 criticised and considered no less responsible for their 
 deeds and qualities than if all had been personal. Be 
 it so if I have deviated into the gloomy vanity of 
 4 drawing from self/ the pictures are probably like, 
 since they are unfavourable ; and, if not, those who 
 know me are undeceived, and those who do not I have 
 little interest in undeceiving. 
 
 By this mixture of romance with reality he 
 exactly hit the public taste. 
 
 In his later poems all this is changed. Society 
 has now condemned the poet to banishment : he 
 leaves England for ever. The effect of his exile 
 on his genius is prodigious. The bored dilettante, 
 with his transparent dramatic disguises, dis- 
 appears : in the third canto of ' Childe Harold ' 
 and in 'Manfred' the identity of the poet with 
 his characters is scarcely concealed. Romance 
 
138 THE EEVIVAL OF EOMANCE : ESSAY 
 
 is discarded ; he bares his heart, and fiercely 
 insists on the sole reality, universal suffering. 
 The intensity of his feelings imparts to his style 
 a splendour and passion that raise it far above 
 the diction of his earlier poems, and yet in the 
 midst of it all the predominant note discovers 
 the author of ' Hours of Idleness ' ' the heart, 
 the heart, is lonely still.' Nor is he satisfied 
 with simply stripping off his ideal trappings. 
 In his recoil from society the spirit of the satirist 
 revives, and in ' Don Juan ' he pours forth a 
 flood of cynical contempt on the high- strung, 
 romantic, and sentimental fancies dear to that 
 popular taste which he had himself done so 
 much to encourage. 
 
 If, then, passing from the remarkable mix- 
 ture of romance, cynicism, and natural feeling in 
 the genius of the poet, we search for the special 
 quality that gives his work its enduring interest 
 and its strange power over the imagination, I 
 think it will be found to be reality reality in 
 description, reality in feeling, reality in style. 
 
 1. In spite of his habits of morbid intro- 
 spection, Byron always sees with the greatest 
 
ESSAY IT SCOTT, BYRON, SHELLEY 139 
 
 clearness the objects he describes. He never 
 confounds his own wishes, fancies, and dreams 
 with external truth. He is, in fact, a pessimist ; 
 and the two last cantos of ' Childe Harold/ the 
 high-water mark of his poetical achievement, are 
 a new and splendid variation of the always fasci- 
 nating old theme, ' vanity of vanities.' Nothing 
 can be more brilliant than his illustrations from 
 nature and history of the truths which the 
 writers of the books of Job and Ecclesiastes, as 
 well as Virgil and Heraclitus, had told before 
 
 him : 
 
 Omnia fatis 
 In pejus ruere. 
 
 Eebel and sceptic though he is, no Christian, 
 no Conservative, could wish to have his case 
 stated on stronger natural premisses than in 
 6 Childe Harold,' and in many passages of 4 Don 
 Juan.' 
 
 2. His romantic representations of his own 
 sufferings are qualified by a kind of common- 
 sense of the imagination. I am far from seeking 
 to defend his conduct on moral grounds. I 
 admit fully that what Carlyle calls his Werterism, 
 
140 THE EEVIVAL OF EOMANCE : ESSAY iv 
 
 his practice of procuring materials for poetry 
 from his own sufferings, was unmanly. I am 
 equally sensible that his egotism was prejudicial 
 to his art ; that it impaired his sense of pro- 
 portion, and disqualified him from being either 
 a good dramatist or a good story-teller. But, 
 looking at his poetry in its purely lyrical aspect, 
 it is surely impossible for any man not to be 
 carried away on the tide of its power and 
 passion. 
 
 To each his sufferings : all are men, 
 
 Condemned alike to groan. 
 The tender for another's pain, 
 
 The unfeeling for his own ; 
 
 and if Byron's perpetual references to his own 
 pain betray a want of feeling, they at least com- 
 pel universal sympathy. Nay, even when his 
 Werterism expresses itself in its most theatrical 
 forms, in his Conrads, his Alps, and his Laras, 
 we are conscious that he is discharging not 
 merely the torrent of his private unhappiness, 
 but a pent-up volume of social emotion. These 
 characters are the ideal spokesmen of an ancient 
 and still chivalrous society turning its imagina- 
 
ESSAY iv SCOTT, BYKON, SHELLEY 141 
 
 tion fondly back to the ages of arms, love, and 
 adventure, and rebelling against the tame utili- 
 tarian standards imposed on it by the growth of 
 industrial civilization. 
 
 3. But perhaps the most powerful factor in 
 Byron's poetical genius is his style. Alone 
 among his contemporaries he understood how 
 to swell the stream of English poetical diction 
 as it had come down to him from the eighteenth 
 century, so as to make it an adequate vehicle of 
 expression for romantic thought and feeling. 
 Wordsworth speaks the language of philoso- 
 phers, Shelley of spirits, but Byron of men. Of 
 this superiority he was himself conscious. ' The 
 pity of these men,' says he, in one of his letters 
 to Murray, speaking of certain contemporary 
 poets, ' is that they never lived in high life, nor 
 in solitude : there is no medium for the know- 
 ledge of the busy or the still world. If ad- 
 mitted into high life for a season, it is merely as 
 spectators they form no part of the mechanism 
 thereof. Now Moore and I, the one by circum- 
 stances and the other by birth, happened to be 
 free of the corporation, and to have entered, into 
 
142 THE EEVIYAL OF KOMANCE : ESSAY iv 
 
 its pulses and passions quarum paries fuimus? 
 He had, in fact, served the apprenticeship which 
 Dryden, in a passage I have previously quoted, 
 declares to be necessary for the poet, viz. : ' a 
 liberal education, long reading and digesting of 
 those few good authors we have among us, the 
 knowledge of men and manners, the freedom 
 and habitude of the best company of both sexes, 
 the wearing off the rust one has acquired while 
 laying in a stock of learning.' Since his boy- 
 hood his reading, though not , deep, had been 
 wide and various, and he had formed his taste 
 on the best authors of the eighteenth century. 
 Even in his early poems we see that he is master 
 of a mould and manner of poetical diction, in- 
 herited from the school of the Dilettanti, which 
 if conventional, is plain and vigorous. As the 
 glow of his thought and feeling intensified, his 
 style expanded ; but the traditional manner with 
 which he started remained the groundwork of 
 his versification. The lines on the battle of 
 Waterloo, some of the soliloquies in ' Manfred/ 
 the description of the shipwreck in ' Don Juan/ 
 and such a lyric as ' She Walks in Beauty/ show 
 
ESSAY iv SCOTT, BYEON, SHELLEY 143 
 
 that he had the power of clothing his most 
 sublime and fiery thoughts in language as lucid 
 and precise as Pope's. Macaulay's estimate of 
 his poetical position is admirable : 
 
 He belonged half to the old and half to the new 
 school of poetry. His personal taste led him to the 
 former ; his thirst of praise to the latter ; his talents 
 were equally suited to both. His fame was a common 
 ground on which the zealots on both sides Gifford, 
 for example, and Shelley might meet. He was the 
 representative, not of either literary party, but of both 
 at once, and of their conflict, and of the victory by 
 which the conflict was terminated. His poetry fills 
 and measures the whole of the vast interval through 
 which our literature has moved since the time of 
 Johnson. It touches the ' Essay on Man ' at one ex- 
 tremity and ' The Excursion ' at the other. 
 
 The absence of this element of reality is 
 mainly what distinguishes the romance of Shelley 
 from that of Byron. Shelley's poetry is scarcely 
 less personal than his friend's. He, himself, is 
 the poet in c Alastor ; ' Laon in the { Revolt of 
 Islam ; ' ' Prometheus Unbound ; ' and ' Prince 
 Athanase ; ' in all his longer poems the inci- 
 dents of his own life are reproduced in an ideal 
 form ; like Byron, too, he is constantly dwelling 
 
144 THE EEVIVAL OF ROMANCE: ESSAY IT 
 
 upon his own feelings. But Byron had a fine 
 tact and business-like instinct as to the kind of 
 feelings which were available for treatment in 
 poetry. As the impulse seized him he threw 
 these off in a poetical form, finding relief from 
 his suffering in the art of composition. But, the 
 moment of inspiration gone, he relapsed into 
 himself : in him the poet made only a portion of 
 the man. He never attacked the foundations of 
 religion and society ; his quarrels were with 
 men as individuals. Shelley, on the other hand, 
 is the Don Quixote of poetry. He is the poet 
 par excellence, ' of imagination all compact.' The 
 visions of his own mind are to him the real 
 system of the universe, and, full of the Revolu- 
 tionary philosophy of the period, he tilts at the 
 existing order of society as the knight at the 
 windmills, and much with the same result. 
 
 Mr. Arnold would have us conclude that the 
 cause of the unsubstantial character of Shelley's 
 longer compositions is his false ' criticism of life.' 
 It seems to me it would be juster to say that the 
 cause is his imperfect perception of the limits of 
 art. For, after all, in this world of mere sense it 
 
KSSAY iv SCOTT, BYRON, SHELLEY 145 
 
 is difficult to say what criticism of life is abso- 
 lutely true. Besides, many poems which philo- 
 sophically are based on a false criticism of life, 
 such as Pope's ' Essay on Man,' have, as works 
 of art, achieved enduring fame. Shelley's i Ode 
 to Liberty ' is full of the same political spirit as 
 his ' Revolt of Islam ; ' but it is an admirable 
 composition, which the other is not. What is 
 the reason? In poetry the goodness or badness 
 of the central conception depends not on its 
 philosophical truth, but on its fitness for the 
 purposes of art. Though the theory of life 
 maintained in the c Essay on Man ' is false, it 
 forms a convenient backbone for the poern, and 
 serves for a support to all those brilliant aphor- 
 isms and epigrams in which Pope's genius shone 
 with unrivalled lustre. In the same way 
 Shelley's political enthusiasm found its just 
 vehicle of expression in the ode. But in those 
 forms of poetry which depend upon the repre- 
 sentation of character and action his unchecked 
 imagination destroys his sense of order and pro- 
 portion, and of the proper boundaries between 
 romance and reality. I have already dwelt upon 
 
 L 
 
146 THE REVIVAL OF ROMANCE: ESSAY iv 
 
 the advantages which Scott derived from his 
 Conservatism, in being able to take the estab- 
 lished order of things as the basis of his romance. 
 Shelley wished to upset the established order, 
 and to reconstruct society on an ideal foundation. 
 He describes himself in the character of Julian : 
 ' Without concealing the evil in the world, he is 
 for ever speculating how good may be made 
 superior. He is a complete infidel, and a scoffer 
 at all things reputed holy.' What were the con- 
 sequences of these Revolutionary opinions upon 
 his art ? 
 
 If greatness in poetry consisted in a suc- 
 cession of dazzling images, and a rapid flow of 
 splendid verse, Shelley would be entitled to 
 almost the first place in English literature. In 
 an elegiac poem like ' Adonais/ these qualities 
 produce a magical effect. What can be more 
 sublime than the following : 
 
 Life, like a dome of many-coloured glass 
 Stains the white radiance of Eternity. 
 
 The same greatness of imagery is visible in 
 the c Revolt of Islam,' as, for example : 
 
ESSAY iv SCOTT, BYRON, SHELLEY 147 
 
 The King with gathered brow and lips 
 Wreathed by long scorn, did inly sneer and frown. 
 With hue like that when some great painter dips 
 His pencil in the gloom of earthquake and eclipse : 
 
 and in ' Prometheus Unbound/ as in the mar- 
 vellous picture of the Dream : 
 
 What shape is that between us ? Its rude hair 
 Roughens the winds that lift it, its regard 
 Is wild and quick, yet 'tis a thing of air, 
 For through its grey robe gleams the golden dew 
 Whose stars the noon has quenched not. 
 
 But in all the higher qualities of epic and 
 dramatic construction his work is defective. 
 Take the ' Revolt of Islam/ for instance. Homer, 
 Virgil, and even Ariosto, make us sympathise 
 with their heroes and heroines, ideal creatures, 
 no doubt, but always acting and suffering in a 
 manner befitting the imaginary circumstances in 
 which they are placed. In Shelley's poem we 
 are in constant doubt what is romance and what 
 is reality. The hero and heroine are young 
 philosophers of the modern French school, who 
 contrive a social revolt, somewhat after the 
 ancient Greek pattern, from which, however, 
 
1 48 THE KEVIVAL OF EOMANCE : ESSAY iv 
 
 they retire at the most critical moment, to relate 
 their experiences to each other, and indulge in 
 rapturous embraces. The action of the poem is 
 involved in the greatest perplexity. We have a 
 suspicion that what the poet intends to describe, 
 or to allegorise, is the conflict between the 
 French and the armies of the Allied Sovereigns, 
 but the supernatural machinery of the fable 
 seems to carry us back to the plains of Troy. 
 Laon and Cythna speak like disciples of Con- 
 dorcet, while at the same time they are involved 
 in adventures resembling those of the ' Arabian 
 Nights.' 
 
 Precisely the same defects exhibit themselves 
 in ' Prometheus Unbound,' where Shelley has 
 borrowed a Greek legend as the vehicle of ex- 
 pression for his private beliefs. As a whole, in 
 spite of its splendid passages, it is a tiresome 
 poem. The imagery blazes without relief ; the 
 action flags amid the cloying sweetness of the 
 melodies ; the characters are mere empty ab- 
 stractions employed on a monotonous repetition 
 of a tale of pain, misery, and oppression which 
 cloaks the dialect of the French Revolution. 
 
ESSAY iv SCOTT, BYKON, SHELLEY 149 
 
 How different is the method of the genuine 
 dramatist, as shown in the ' Prometheus Vinc- 
 tus ' ; how simple indeed, how matter-of-fact 
 is the treatment of the myth ; how straight- 
 forward the plot ; how well distinguished and 
 how justly balanced the characters the cheery 
 manliness of Prometheus, the feminine sympathy 
 of the Oceanides, the humorous fussiness of 
 Oceanus, and the gentlemanly good breeding of 
 Hermes ! The reason of the difference in result 
 is obvious enough. Shelley's conception has its 
 foundation in French sentimentalism : ^Eschylus 
 built on Attic common-sense. 
 
 Whenever, then, Shelley endeavours to cast 
 his romantic ideas of human nature into an epic 
 or dramatic form his art fails. Even in ' The 
 Cenci/ where he has to deal with a subject of 
 matter-of-fact which he has conceived with great 
 power, the horrible and monstrous nature of his 
 theme prevents that free play of natural human 
 action and passion which is characteristic of the 
 highest kind of tragedy. It is not till he works 
 his lyrical or elegiac vein, and gives utterance to 
 his own personal feeling, that we feel he is in- 
 
150 THE EEVIVAL OF KOMANCE : ESSAY iv 
 
 deed in contact with reality. And the character 
 of his lyrical poetry is the best comment on the 
 soundness of his philosophical principles. As 
 we see in ' Julian and Maddalo/ he scoffed at the 
 doctrine of the weakness of the human will, 
 which is the fundamental doctrine of Christianity : 
 though Plato, Ovid, and his own friend Byron 
 were as convinced of the truth of this doctrine 
 as St. Paul himself, he held that it was re- 
 sponsible for most of the ills of humanity : he 
 insisted that men were sole masters of their 
 destinies. And yet all his most impassioned 
 lyrics are charged with the expression of his 
 own suffering. Like Byron, he shows himself 
 a complete pessimist. Such poetical abandon may 
 have been unmanly ; it was certainly not what 
 was to be expected of one who revived the old 
 Stoic doctrine of the self-sufficiency of the will ; 
 but it is impossible to deny the extraordinary 
 beauty and intensity of the language in which it 
 is expressed. It is in poems of this sort that 
 Shelley deeply touches the heart, and makes us 
 feel the reality of his own nature. When he 
 says in dejection sitting by the sea at Naples : 
 
ESSAY iv SCOTT, BYRON, SHELLEY 151 
 
 I could lie down like a tired child, 
 
 And weep away the life of care 
 Which I have borne and yet must bear, 
 
 Till death like sleep might steal on me, 
 And I might feel in the warm air 
 
 My cheek grow cold, and hear the sea 
 Breathe o'er my dying brain its last monotony : 
 
 when he cries to the West Wind : 
 
 
 If I were a dead leaf thou mightest bear ; 
 
 If I were a swift cloud to fly with thee ; 
 
 A wave to pant beneath thy power and share 
 
 The impulse of thy strength, only less free 
 Than thou, uncontrollable ! If even 
 I were as in my boyhood, and could be 
 
 The comrade of thy wanderings over heaven, 
 
 As then when to outstrip the skiey speed 
 
 Scarce seemed a vision, I would ne'er have striven 
 
 As thus with thee in prayer in my sore need. 
 Oh ! lift me as a wave, a leaf, a cloud ! 
 I fall upon the thorns of life ! I bleed ! 
 
 A heavy weight of hours has chained and bowed 
 One too like thee : tameless and swift and proud : 
 
 when, above all, he exclaims, on hearing the 
 sky-lark : 
 
152 THE KEVIVAL OF KOMAKCE : ESSAY iv 
 
 We look before and after 
 
 And pine for what is not : 
 Our sincerest laughter 
 
 With some pain is fraught : 
 Our sweetest songs are those that tell of saddest 
 thought. 
 
 Yet if we could scorn 
 
 Hate, and pride, and fear ; 
 If we were things born 
 
 Not to shed a tear, 
 I know not how thy joy we ever could come 
 
 near 
 
 when we read verse so full of music and anguish, 
 we wonder how the poet failed to perceive that 
 the power of Christianity lies not in superstition, 
 but in the hope which it offers to the unsatisfied 
 longings of the soul, 
 
 The desire of the moth for the star, 
 
 Of the night for the morrow ; 
 The devotion to something afar 
 
 From the sphere of our sorrow. 
 
 I have endeavoured in this and in the pre- 
 ceding paper to trace the causes that gave rise 
 to the Liberal Movement in English Literature, 
 and the relation of the new Romantic school to 
 the Classical school of art and letters dominant 
 
ESSAY iv SCOTT, BYRON, SHELLEY 153 
 
 after the Restoration. The Revolution of 1688 
 saved constitutional liberty, but saved it by the 
 sacrifice of much that was picturesque, loyal, 
 and enthusiastic in the semi- Catholic and semi- 
 feudal England of the seventeenth century. 
 Similarly, the standard of taste formed mainly 
 by the influence of the ' Tatler ' and ' Spectator ' 
 involved a virtual suppression of the romantic 
 element which had figured so prominently in 
 early English literature. It struck a mean be- 
 tween the immorality and conceit fashionable in 
 the poetry of the seventeenth century and the 
 austere barrenness of Puritan democracy. It 
 speedily commended itself to the perception of the 
 educated and refined classes, the exclusive posses- 
 sors at that time of political power, familiar with 
 the best models of classical writing, and with the 
 rules of politeness current in modern society, and 
 capable of enjoying the conversational brilliancy 
 produced by the keen encounter of wits in clubs 
 and coffee-houses. On the other hand, it pro- 
 vided an inadequate ideal for the great middle 
 class throughout the nation, which, excluded 
 from any direct participation in the government, 
 
I 54 THE EEVIVAL OF KOMANCE : ESSAY iv 
 
 began, nevertheless, to acquire a definite sense of 
 its own growing power. The solitary thinker 
 who compared the actual condition of things 
 with some image in his own mind, the demo- 
 cratic malcontent inspired with a passion for 
 equality, the man of fashion wearied with mono- 
 tony and convention, the religious devotee alien- 
 ated by the semi-Erastianism of the Established 
 Church, all failed to find satisfaction in the 
 social ideal of the age. A great ferment was, 
 therefore, working in the heart of the nation 
 long before the outbreak of the French Revolu- 
 tion, moving some to seclude themselves from 
 company, others to seek for an expansion in the 
 sources of rational pleasure, others to rebel 
 against the restrictions of law and morals, and 
 a few to aim at the reconstruction of society on 
 new and abstract lines. 
 
 All these motives were at work in the move- 
 ment we know under the name of Liberalism, 
 and all disclose themselves in the poetry of the 
 great writers who have just been passing under 
 review. In Wordsworth we see reflected the 
 natural tendency of the imaginative mind to 
 
VY iv SCOTT, BYRON, SHELLEY 155 
 
 withdraw itself from the sphere of social action, 
 and to solace itself with pure contemplation. 
 Scott, Byron, and Shelley, on the other hand, 
 
 epresent the various forms of social action in 
 which the new movement sought to find imagina- 
 
 ive expression. The work of Scott is a symbol 
 of the natural healthy desire for expansion in 
 the heart of society, which, while strongly 
 attached to the ancient order, is conscious in 
 
 tself of abounding vitality, and delights to find 
 a reflection of its own spirit of boldness and ad- 
 venture in the stirring narratives of the life of 
 its ancestors. Byron speaks rather the feelings 
 of an ancient aristocracy, who find this inherited 
 spirit of adventure still strong within them, and 
 not being able under the conditions of modern 
 society to give it all the scope they desire, end 
 by openly defying the moral laws and restrictions 
 by which that society is cemented. Shelley is at 
 the pole of Romance opposite to Scott. The one 
 appeals to the instinct of Reverence, the other 
 to the passion of Hope. Scott was passionately 
 attached to the institutions of his country, not 
 only because they secured to him a large share 
 
156 THE REVIVAL OF ROMANCE ESSAY iv 
 
 of personal happiness and liberty, but on account 
 of the free access which, through them, his spirit 
 obtained to the ideal region of the past. Shelley 
 hated them because he saw in them only a brute 
 barrier between mankind and the happy state he 
 imagined for it in the future. The varied crea- 
 tions of Scott, therefore, are based on experience, 
 common sense, and the continuity of tradition ; 
 the creations of Shelley rest on the hopes which 
 he built in his aerial and splendid imagina- 
 tion, in whose rainbow colours the taint of evil 
 that ever debars men from the sense of complete 
 ideal satisfaction, is lost or transfigured. As to 
 the soundness of this foundation for the purposes 
 of art, many suggestive inferences may be drawn 
 from the character of Shelley's own work, and 
 others from the nature of the parallel movement 
 in poetry initiated by the genius of Coleridge 
 and Keats. 
 
POETRY, MUSIC, AND PAINTING 
 
 COLERIDGE AND KEATS 
 

 
V. 
 
 POETRY, MUSIC, AND PAINTING: COLERIDGE 
 AND KEATS. 
 
 IN a passage of his ' Life of Byron/ interesting 
 as giving a poet's estimate of the inspiring forces 
 of his age, Moore describes the effects of the 
 drama of the French Revolution on contemporary 
 imagination. 
 
 ' There are those/ says he, c who trace, in the pecu- 
 liar character of Lord Byron's genius, strong features 
 of relationship to the times in which he lived ; who 
 think that the great events which marked the close of 
 the last century, by giving a new impulse to men's 
 minds, by habituating them to the daring and the free, 
 and allowing full vent to the " flash and outbreak of 
 fiery spirits," had naturally led to the production of such 
 a poet as Byron ; and that he was in short as much the 
 child and representative of the Revolution, in poesy, as 
 another great man of the age, Napoleon, was in states- 
 manship and warfare. Without going the full length 
 of this notion, it will, at least, be conceded, that the 
 free loose which had been given to all the passions and 
 
160 POETRY, MUSIC, AND PAINTING: ESSA 
 
 energies of the human mind, in the great struggle ol 
 that period, together with the constant spectacle of 
 such astounding vicissitudes as were passing, almost 
 daily, on the theatre of the world, had created, in all 
 minds, and in every walk of intellect, a taste for strong 
 excitement, which the stimulants supplied from ordinary 
 sources were insufficient to gratify ; that a tame defer- 
 ence to established authorities had fallen into disrepute, 
 no less in literature than in politics, and that the poet 
 who should breathe into his songs the fierce and pas- 
 sionate spirit of the age, and assert, untrammelled and 
 unawed, the high dominion of genius, would be most 
 sure of an audience toned in sympathy with his strains.' 
 
 Dull, indeed, must the spirit have been 
 which failed to catch some inspiring fervour from 
 the atmosphere of those extraordinary times. 
 The ages of knight errantry seemed to have re- 
 vived. While historic dynasties were overthrown 
 in a single night, while every common soldier 
 felt that he might carry his marshal's baton in 
 his knapsack, while obscure adventurers seated 
 themselves on the most ancient thrones of 
 Europe, it would have been strange if imagina- 
 tion had been anything but romantic. Byron 
 may be the best poetical representative of the 
 Revolutionary forces of the period, but he is by 
 
ESSAY v COLEKIDGE AND KEATS 161 
 
 no means the only one. Their influence is 
 equally visible in the fire and flow of Shelley's 
 verse. The romantic spirit, indeed, makes itself 
 felt in the work of those whose temper is most 
 opposed to the Revolutionary movement. Camp- 
 bell, who in another age would probably have 
 had to rest content with such reputation as he 
 might have acquired from the ' Pleasures of 
 Hope/ is inspired with ' The Battle of the Baltic' 
 and ' Hohenlinden ; 7 while if Byron may be 
 claimed as the special child of Cosmopolitanism, 
 Patriotism can at least boast of having informed 
 the better part of the genius of Scott. 
 
 But while the French Revolution quickened 
 the spirit of romantic action in poetry, it also 
 gave birth to the more enduring movement of 
 romance in philosophical thought. The outburst 
 of Liberty and the expansion of genius, coinci- 
 ding as they did with the advance of democracy, 
 encouraged the spread of the Optimism cherished 
 by all the philosophers who derived their descent 
 from Rousseau. A belief in the unlimited pro- 
 gress of the human race took possession of most 
 reflecting minds. The vast development of 
 
 M 
 
162 POETEY, MUSIC, AND PAINTING : ESSAY v 
 
 physical science, and the revolution which this 
 entailed in man's circumstances, were supposed 
 to be accompanied by a corresponding enlarge- 
 ment of his virtue, his wisdom, and of his cor- 
 poral powers. Condorcet assured his disciples 
 that they might hope for the unlimited prolon- 
 gation of life. Shelley, treading in the steps of 
 his French masters, insisted that, if we could 
 only get rid of the debasing superstitions of 
 Christianity, we might expect to become per- 
 fectly good and happy. Others, to heighten the 
 charms of the smiling prospect, indulged the 
 idea that, as man was destined in this life to deve- 
 lop moral and physical capacities far in advance 
 of anything he could at present conceive, so he 
 might look forward to the conquest and posses- 
 sion of untold treasures of art, latent in a new 
 world of imagination. 
 
 Prominent among these sanguine prophets 
 was Wordsworth. Like many other enthusiastic 
 young men of talent he had hailed the beginning 
 of the French Revolution, and had excused as 
 natural its bloody excesses. Even when its 
 true nature dawned on his mind, and he saw 
 
ESSAY v COLERIDGE AND KEATS 163 
 
 that the Jacobin movement was directed against 
 the cause of Liberty, he retained a chastened 
 faith that the future would behold the realisation 
 of the glowing hopes and visions in which he 
 had indulged. So noble a principle as Liberty, 
 he felt sure, could not fail to be the pioneer of 
 moral progress, and always in the van of human 
 movement he saw the poet's imagination cheering 
 on the race to fresh conquests. Arguing against 
 those who entertained a contracted and artificial 
 view of the nature of Poetry, and who adhered 
 to the current theories of poetic diction, 
 
 ' The objects,' he cried, ' of the poet's thoughts are 
 everywhere ; though the eyes and senses of man are, it 
 is true, his favourite guides, yet he will follow wherever 
 he can find an atmosphere of sensation in which to 
 move his wings. ... The remotest discoveries of the 
 chemist, the botanist, or mineralogist, will be as proper 
 objects of the poet's art as any upon which it can be 
 employed, if the time should ever come when these 
 things shall be familiar to us, and the relations under 
 which they are contemplated by the followers of their 
 respective sciences shall be manifestly and palpably 
 material to us as enjoying and suffering beings.' 
 
 In these words we find the first application to 
 Poetry of the Revolutionary theory of perpetual 
 
lf)4 POETEY, MUSIC, AND PAINTING: ESSAY T 
 
 Progress. The belief is an amiable one, but it 
 can scarcely be entertained without ignoring 
 facts in the history of art which raise an entirely 
 different presumption. Could Wordsworth have 
 pointed to a single nation in which poetry of the 
 highest order had been produced in the full , 
 maturity of philosophy and natural science ? 
 Plato declared that there was an old-standing 
 quarrel between philosophy and poetry, and re- 
 solved to banish the poets from his ideal Re- 
 public. It would be difficult to name a Greek 
 or Latin poet of the highest creative order who 
 arose after Aristotle had produced his ' Physics 7 
 or Pliny his ' Natural History.' Galileo was an 
 enthusiastic student of Tasso's poetry, but I 
 never heard of any Italian poet who derived his 
 inspiration from the scientific discoveries of 
 Galileo. 
 
 And, again, if Wordsworth had been asked 
 to account, on his hypothesis of constant pro- 
 gress in poetry, for the extreme regularity of 
 the phenomena that mark the rise, development, 
 and decline of the art, it is difficult to see what 
 answer he could have returned. The golden 
 
1 ESSAY v COLERIDGE AND KEATS 165 
 
 age of poetical production is as a rule confined 
 within well-marked epochs of national history. 
 Greece has its great epic period ; its great lyrical 
 period ; its great dramatic period ; afterwards 
 comes the age of decadence, brightened by the 
 genius of Theocritus, and closing with the 
 Anthology. Rome produces her Lucretius and 
 Catullus ; then her Horace and Virgil ; then 
 her Juvenal, and, of course, the inevitable epi- 
 grammatist, Martial. Dante in Italy is followed 
 bv Ariosto and Tasso, but in the next genera- 
 
 ./ ' O 
 
 tion the rage is for Marini. Spam's genius was 
 less fertile in poetry, but she was the land of 
 chivalry and romance, out of which rose the 
 beautiful idiom of Cervantes, only to be suc- 
 ceeded, however, by the estilo culto of Gongora. 
 If poetry in England survived the euphuism, 
 the mannerism, and the affectation which dis- 
 figured the poetry of those whose attempts to 
 combine the spirit of Medievalism with the 
 spirit of the Renaissance rival the contortions of 
 the Marinis and Gongoras of the Continent, this 
 was chiefly thanks to the manly genius of Dryden, 
 who brought fresh vitality into the art by deal- 
 
166 POETRY, MUSIC, AND PAINTING: ESSAY v 
 
 ing \vith life and manners according to the 
 tradition of Chaucer. And yet, genuine as the 
 Conservative movement of Dryden and his fol- 
 lowers was, the English imagination felt that 
 something was gone, that 'there had passed 
 away a glory from the earth/ Look at the con- 
 clusion of the ' Ode on the Poetical Character/ 
 and see how Collins, the most romantic repre- 
 sentative of the Classical school in the eighteenth 
 century, felt as he gazed backwards on the 
 vanished ages of imagination. 
 
 I view that oak the fancied glades among, 
 By which, as Milton lay, his evening ear, 
 From many a cloud that dropped ethereal dew, 
 Nigh sphered in heaven, its native strains could hear ; 
 On which that ancient trump he reached was hung ! 
 Thither oft, his glory greeting, 
 From Waller's myrtle shades retreating, 
 With many a vow from Hope's aspiring tongue, 
 My trembling feet his guiding steps pursue ; 
 In vain such bliss to one alone 
 Of all the sons of soul, was known ; 
 And Heaven and Fancy, kindred powers, 
 Have now o'erturned the inspiring bowers, 
 Or curtained close such scene from every future view. 
 
 Such being the feelings of one of Words- 
 
ESSAY v COLERIDGE AND KEATS 167 
 
 worth's immediate predecessors and Collins' 
 complaint is repeated in various forms by Gray 
 and Cowper it seems strange that the founder 
 of the new Romantic school should have cherished 
 so firm a persuasion of the boundless resources 
 of poetry. A closer examination of his views, 
 however, renders his conclusions less surprising. 
 He believed that the English poets had been 
 long following a false track, and that he had 
 himself discovered the only true principles of 
 poetical composition. The old-fashioned poet 
 may be said to resemble the Demiurgus of Plato's 
 ' Timseus.' Creator as he is, he creates not the 
 subject matter of his art, which he finds already 
 existing chaotically in the mind of his nation, 
 but the ideal form and order in which those 
 scattered ideas must be presented to the people. 
 This realm of national imagination has a natural 
 tendency to contract. Scientific methods of 
 thought deprive it of much ground over which, 
 in the infancy of society, it was accustomed to 
 range with perfect freedom. The growth of 
 commerce, and of artificial manners, extinguishes 
 the local life, customs, and traditions out of 
 
168 POETRY, MUSIC, AND PAINTING: ESSAY v 
 
 which, during the active, warlike ages, are woven 
 ballad poetry and romance. And not only does 
 the ground of imagination contract before the 
 encroachment of external forces, but it is occu- 
 pied as property by the elder poets, so that La 
 Bruyere has some reason for his complaint : 
 ' Les anciens ont tout dit ; on vient aujourd'hui 
 trop tard pour dire des choses nouvelles.' 
 
 To these considerations, however, Words- 
 worth's answer was simple. He held that the 
 real source of poetry is the mind of the indi- 
 vidual poet, and that all feelings and impressions 
 which it receives from the outside world become 
 proper subject matter for poetry after passing 
 through the crucible of imagination. Hence his 
 conclusion : ' Poetry is immortal as the heart of 
 man,' since Nature is boundless, and the poet is 
 at perfect liberty to cast his impressions into an 
 imaginative mould just as his individual caprice 
 may dictate. Of course, if this be really so, 
 cadit qucestio ; because, as the impressions of 
 every individual are different, the number of 
 metrical combinations in which they can be 
 expressed will be infinite. 
 
ESSAY v COLERIDGE AND KEATS 169 
 
 But is it so ? Look at the poetry of Words- 
 worth himself, and see how his theory works 
 out. If all the poems included in his published 
 works were composed on his own principle, and 
 were valuable in themselves, his reasoning would 
 be colourable, for in mere bulk his metrical 
 writings are weighty enough. When, however, 
 these are classified, we find that one large group, 
 containing among others such noble poems as 
 i Laodamia,' and the ' Ode on Immortality/ is 
 composed on the old lines, the poet having 
 founded his subject on universal associations, 
 and simply cast them into an ideal form. Of 
 another large class, such as ' The Excursion/ 
 6 The Prelude,' < The White Doe of Rylstone/ 
 and 4 Peter Bell,' we may say that they are so 
 entirely wanting in the primary qualities of 
 poetical design, unity, and proportion, that, 
 whatever individual beauties they may possess, 
 they have no title to be considered works of art. 
 Wordsworth himself pronounces judgment on 
 compositions of this kind when he says that 
 their chief justification lies in their moral pur- 
 pose. Mark, however, his admission : 4 Not that 
 
170 POETKY, MUSIC, AND PAINTINGS : ESSAY v 
 
 / always began to write with a distinct purpose 
 formally conceived? But no extensive work of 
 art is worth anything that is not so conceived, 
 because it is impossible that it can be an ideal 
 whole. And yet once more, observe that striking 
 characteristic which Coleridge notes in Words- 
 worth's poetry : 
 
 c I affirm/ says he, c that from no contemporary 
 writer could so many lines be quoted without reference 
 to the poem in which they are found for their own 
 independent weight and beauty. From the sphere of 
 my own experience, I can bring to my recollection 
 three persons of no every-day powers and acquirements, 
 who had read the poems of others with more and more 
 unalloyed pleasure, and had thought more highly of 
 their authors as poets ; who have yet confessed to me 
 that from no modern work had so many passages 
 started up anew in their minds at different times, and 
 as different occasions had awakened a different mood.' 
 
 Coleridge satisfies himself with recording this 
 phenomenon without attempting to account for it, 
 and yet the explanation of it is full of interest 
 from the light it throws on Wordsworth's Theory 
 of Poetry. Of all the great English poets, 
 Wordsworth has, it seems to me, least of the 
 faculty of the Demiurgus. Endowed with an 
 
K>SAY v COLERIDGE AND KEATS 171 
 
 imagination of remarkable power and beauty, he 
 is deficient in the highest of all poetical qualities, 
 Invention. His method of writing in verse is 
 unlike that of almost all his predecessors. Poetry 
 he defines to be ' the spontaneous overflow of 
 powerful emotion ' ; and this, no doubt, suffi- 
 ciently describes his own principle of composition 
 which led him, after receiving a hint or impulse 
 from the external world, immediately to give it 
 expression in metre. But to the operations of 
 the presiding faculty of the mind which shapes 
 impressions into an ideal whole, admitting some 
 and rejecting others, according as they are 
 related to a central design, he was almost a 
 stranger. His ideas were quickly received and 
 sharply returned, in individual and isolated 
 forms. Hence, as I have already said, his 
 longer poems are without form and void : on 
 the other hand, no man ever employed with 
 more force and felicity that mould of poetry 
 which is specially adapted for the expression of 
 individual thought, namely, the Sonnet. 
 
 If Wordsworth's poetry vividly illustrates 
 the practical worth of his theory, Coleridge's 
 
172 POETEY, MUSIC, AND PAINTING: ESSAY v 
 
 work shows us the natural development of the 
 Romantic movement in the hands of a genuine 
 Inventor. The latter had embraced Words- 
 worth's philosophy of poetry, of which indeed 
 he was the joint author, but being a born artist, 
 he dissented from his friend's application of it. 
 He agreed with him in deriving all poetry from 
 the mind of the individual poet, and his love of 
 metaphysics induced him to believe that he 
 could penetrate behind the veil of sense, and 
 establish a transcendental basis for the Law of 
 the Association of Ideas Like Wordsworth, 
 too, he was transported with a belief in the 
 boundless range of the Imagination, and was an 
 enthusiast for its perfect Liberty. ' How oft/ 
 he cries, in the fine opening of his ' France '- 
 
 How oft, pursuing fancies holy, 
 
 My moonlight way o'er flowering weeds I wound, 
 
 Inspired, beyond the guess of folly, 
 
 By each rude shape and wild unconquerable sound ! 
 
 ye loud waves ! and ye forests high ! 
 
 And ye clouds that far above me soared ! 
 Thou rising sun ! thou blue rejoicing sky ! 
 
 Yea, everything that is and will be free ! 
 
 Bear witness for me wheresoe'er ye be, 
 
 With what deep worship I have still adored 
 The spirit of divinest Liberty ! 
 
ESSAY v COLERIDGE AND KEATS 173 
 
 And yet the recipient of all these varied 
 impressions has left only four poems with which 
 his name will be for ever associated, ' The 
 Ancient Mariner/ ' Christ abel/ ' Kubla Khan/ 
 and (on a lower level) ' The Dark Ladie/ 
 What is the cause of this comparative sterility 
 in the midst of such abundant resources ? 
 Partly, no doubt, the one usually assigned, 
 want of will and resolute purpose. Coleridge 
 wasted his powers on a multiplicity of designs 
 which he had never sufficient perseverance to 
 carry into execution. The dream of Panti- 
 socracy on the banks of the Susquehanna, the 
 'Watchman/ and a hundred vast projects of 
 theology and metaphysics, all tell the same tale. 
 In poetry, however, it is only fair to remember 
 that Coleridge always declared the cause of the 
 paucity of his productions was not idleness but 
 impotence. In the Preface to ' Christabel/ 
 published in 1816, he says : ' Since 1800 my 
 poetic powers have been till lately in a state of 
 suspended animation ; J and with his peculiar 
 poetical aims, I hold that the statement is 
 deserving of entire credit. He considered, as I 
 
174 POETRY, MUSIC, AND PAINTING : ESSAY v 
 
 have said, that the object of poetry was to 
 excite subtle trains of imaginative associations ; 
 but he was not satisfied, like Wordsworth, with 
 simply analysing the impressions of his own 
 mind. Feeling in himself the impulse of the 
 Inventor and Creator, he was always searching 
 after new 4 Forms/ Cowper, in ' The Task/ 
 had been the first to show how a poem might 
 be written, by simply following out a train of 
 ideas, not embodied in a definite subject, but 
 naturally connected with each other, and united 
 by a moral purpose. To Coleridge's keen 
 artistic perception this plan had not enough 
 of unity, and he sought, as he tells us in his 
 ' Biographia Liter aria/ to improve on it, by 
 taking as his subject a Brook which he con- 
 ceived might be treated, with all its associations 
 of ideas, as it widened into a river and made its 
 way to the sea. His genius, however, was of 
 far too weird and romantic an order to succeed 
 in didactic poetry, and soon abandoning his 
 enterprise, he set himself to look for ' fresh 
 woods ' in other directions. Though, of course, 
 he would not have admitted anything of the 
 
ESSAY v COLERIDGE AND KEATS 175 
 
 kind, I think it is evident that he next began 
 to reason on the subtle affinities between sound 
 and sense, and to perceive that isolated romantic 
 images might be so linked together by mere 
 metrical movement as to produce the effect of 
 unity which the mind requires in an ideal 
 creation. He resolved, in fact, deliberately to 
 compose as a Musician. We see this very plainly 
 in the beautiful fragment entitled ' The Knight's 
 Grave/ which was confessedly composed as an 
 experiment in metre. 
 
 Where is the grave of Sir Arthur O'Kellyn ? 
 
 Where may the grave of that good man be ? 
 By the side of a spring, on the breast of Helvellyn, 
 
 Under the twigs of a young birch tree ! 
 The oak that in summer was sweet to hear, 
 And rustled his leaves in the fall of the year, 
 And whistled and roared in the winter alone, 
 Is gone, and the birch in its stead has grown. 
 The Knight's bones are dust, 
 And his good sword rust ; 
 His soul is with the saints, I trust. 
 
 There is very little necessary logical con- 
 nection between the images contained in these 
 verses, and yet I should think scarcely anyone 
 
176 POETRY, MUSIC, AND PAINTING: ESSAY v 
 
 could read them without being affected by their 
 subtle pathos. Probably the motive of the 
 composition was the word ' Helvellyn,' which 
 is musical in its sound, and, as the name of a 
 mountain, carries with it romantic associations. 
 To connect these with the grave of a knight 
 was a natural sequence of thought, and the 
 disappearance of the oak which had once grown 
 in the place of the young birch tree, as chivalry 
 had preceded the modern order of society, is 
 beautifully suggestive. But the unity of the 
 piece lies in the dactylic movement of the 
 metre, which probably came into the poet's 
 mind in connection with the name which he 
 invented to rhyme with Helvellyn, and which 
 is admirably adapted to convey the desired 
 feeling. 
 
 So little does the effect of Coleridge's poetry 
 depend upon the logical sequence of ideas, that 
 of his four really characteristic poems, three, 
 viz. ' Christabel/ ' Kubla Khan,' and ' The Dark 
 Ladie,' are fragments ; one, ' Kubla Khan,' is 
 said to have been composed in a dream, while 
 ' The Ancient Mariner ' was founded, so far as 
 
ESSAY v COLERIDGE AND KEATS 177 
 
 the bulk of the story is concerned, on the dream 
 of a friend. All this is the almost inevitable 
 result of his method of composition. He de- 
 clared, indeed, that he had always intended to 
 finish 4 Chris tabel,' the story being complete in 
 his mind, but, had he done so, the result must 
 have been unsatisfactory, for, while in the poem, 
 as it is, the mind passes on satisfied from one 
 image to another, it is impossible that so wild a 
 tale could ever have had a conclusion more 
 rational than a dream. 4 The Ancient Mariner ' 
 is complete, but we 'do not read it, nor was it 
 composed, for the sake of the action or the 
 moral. As we know, it was put together piece- 
 meal after the manner of ' The Knight's Grave/ 
 and the effect, both in this poem and in 
 4 Christabel,' is produced by the combination 
 of isolated weird and romantic images in a 
 strange elfin metre. We are not affected by any 
 human interest in either story, but by the vivid 
 pictures of 
 
 The one red leaf, the last of its clan, 
 
 That dances as often as dance it can, 
 
 Hanging so light, and hanging so high, 
 
 On the topmost twig that looks up at the sky ; 
 
 N 
 
178 POETEY, MUSIC, AND PAINTING : ESSAY 
 
 or of 
 
 The chamber carved so curiously. 
 
 Carved with figures strange and sweet, 
 All made out of the carver's brain, 
 
 For a lady's chamber meet : 
 The lamp with two-fold silver chain 
 
 Is fastened to an angel's feet : 
 
 or by such melodies as 
 
 And the good south wind still blew behind. 
 
 But no sweet bird did follow ; 
 Nor any day for food or play, 
 
 Came to the mariner's hollo ! 
 
 and 
 
 Oh sleep ! it is a gentle thing, 
 
 Beloved from pole to pole ! 
 To Mary Queen the praise be given ! 
 She sent the gentle sleep from heaven, 
 
 That slid into my soul. 
 
 Coleridge is in fact the great Musician of the 
 romantic school of English poetry. His practice 
 is the exact antithesis of Wordsworth's theory 
 that there is no essential difference between the 
 language of poetry and the language of prose. 
 In him metrical movement is all in all. He was 
 the first to depart from the lofty severe iambic 
 movement which had satisfied the feeling of the 
 
ESSAY v COLEKIDGE AND KEATS 179 
 
 eighteenth century, and, by associating pictur- 
 esque images and antique phrases in melodious 
 and flowing metres, to set the imagination free 
 in a world quite removed from actual experience. 
 His invention exercised a profound influence 
 upon the course of English verse-composition. 
 4 Christabel/ as we know, inspired the metrical 
 movement in the ' Lay of the Last Minstrel, 7 
 and since the ' Siege of Corinth,' and L Parisina,' 
 are obviously prompted by the 4 Lay of the Last 
 Minstrel/ Byron's repudiation of plagiarism, in 
 the ' Siege of Corinth/ from ' Christabel/ which 
 had only just been published, must be taken as 
 applying to the thought, and not to the music of 
 the poem. 
 
 An analogous movement, though quite in 
 another direction, is observable in the poetry 
 of Keats. Keats' method . of composition was, 
 in every principle, opposed to that of the Lake 
 School. Wordsworth and Coleridge regarded 
 Liberty as the mainspring of all human action, 
 and the latter, though he was far from putting 
 his moral principles into practice, justifies the 
 movement of the French Revolution, as I have 
 
 K 2 
 
180 POETRY, MUSIC, AND PAINTING : ESSAY v 
 
 shown in the passage quoted from his ' France/ 
 by the operation of the laws of external Nature. 
 Similarly it was Wordsworth's object in poetry 
 c to choose incidents and situations from common 
 life . . . and at the same time to throw over 
 them a certain colouring of imagination whereby 
 ordinary things should be presented to the mind 
 in an unusual aspect/ For this purpose the 
 Imagination required the sovereign liberty and 
 transmutative power which Wordsworth claimed 
 for it, and which it could exert with little diffi- 
 culty in the midst of the romantic associations 
 of the Lake district. But to Keats, the child of 
 London parents, and accustomed from infancy to 
 the mean and sordid routine of city life, Nature 
 imparted none of those philosophical and moral 
 ideas which she aroused in the poet of the 
 Cumberland mountains. The Liberty of the 
 Imagination meant for him something very 
 different from the Kevolutionary yearnings of 
 
 the period. 
 
 Though I do not know 
 
 The shiftings of the mighty winds that blow 
 Hither and thither all the changing thoughts 
 Of men ; though no great ministering reason sorts 
 
:SSAY y COLERIDGE AND KEATS 181 
 
 Out the dark mysteries of human souls 
 To clear conceiving, yet there ever rolls 
 A vast idea before me, and I glean 
 Therefrom my liberty ; thence, too, I've seen 
 The end and aim of Poesy. 
 
 To the future of humanity which occupied so 
 large a part of Shelley's thoughts he was pro- 
 foundly indifferent. Fame, 
 
 Fame the last spur that the clear spirit doth raise 
 To spurn delights and live laborious days 
 
 was the object of his scornful ridicule ; human 
 action of any kind even of the romantic ballads 
 that had stirred the heart of Sir Philip Sidney 
 6 like the sound of a trumpet/ and of history that 
 had inspired some of the noblest of Shakespeare's 
 drama's was nothing to him compared to the 
 emotion of an ideal love- scene : 
 
 Hence pageant history ! hence gilded cheat ! 
 
 Swart planet in the wilderness of deeds ! 
 
 Wide sea that one continuous murmur breeds 
 
 Along the pebbled shore of memory ! 
 
 Many old rotten-timbered boats there be 
 
 Upon thy vaporous bosom magnified 
 
 To goodly vessels ; many a sail of pride, 
 
 And golden-keeled is left unlaunched and dry. 
 
 But wherefore this ? What care though owl did fly 
 
182 POETEY, MUSIC, AND PAINTING : ESSAY T 
 
 Above the great Athenian admiral's mast ? 
 What care though striding Alexander past 
 The Indus with his Macedonian numbers ? 
 Though old Ulysses tortured from his slumbers 
 The glutted Cyclops, what care ? Juliet leaning 
 Amid her window flowers sighing weaning 
 Tenderly her fancy from its maiden snow 
 Doth more avail than these : the silver flow 
 Of Hero's tears, the swoon of Imogen, 
 Fair Pastorella in the bandit's den, 
 Are things to brood on with more ardency 
 Than the death-day of Empires. 
 
 One cause and one alone can explain and 
 excuse this unblushingly- avowed preference for 
 the feminine over the masculine motives of com- 
 position, namely, physical debility. To this 
 indulgence Keats is entitled : and yet when we 
 think of the fiery spirit that has fretted out 
 many a puny body, it is difficult to read without 
 disgust the following confession of an apparently 
 contented materialist : 
 
 This morning I am in a sort of temper indolent 
 and supremely careless ; I long after a stanza or two of 
 Thomson's ' Castle of Indolence ' ; my passions are all 
 asleep, from my having slumbered till nearly eleven, 
 and weakened the animal fibre all over me to a delight- 
 ful sensation about three degrees on this side faintness. 
 
ESSAI \ COLERIDGE AND KEATS 183 
 
 If I had teeth of pearl, and the breath of lilies, I should 
 call it languor; but as I am, I must call it laziness. 
 In this state of effeminacy the fibres of the brain are 
 relaxed in common with the rest of the body, and to 
 such a happy degree, that pleasure has no show of 
 enticement, and pain no unbearable frown ; neither 
 Poetry nor Ambition nor Love have any alertness of 
 countenance ; as they pass by me they seem rather 
 like those figures on a Greek urn, two men and a 
 woman, whom no one but myself could distinguish in 
 their disguisement. This is the only happiness, and is a 
 rare instance of advantage in the body overpowering the 
 mind. 
 
 We have in this passage a clear index of 
 Keats' motive when he was in the comparatively 
 active mood of poetical composition. To the 
 vivid and powerful imagination which worked 
 within his diseased frame, i the vast idea/ ' the 
 end and aim of Poesy/ of which he speaks in his 
 lines on 4 Sleep and Poetry/ was to escape from " 
 the detested surroundings of actual life into the 
 ideal world which was ever floating before his 
 mind's eye. In his earlier poems he seems to 
 be haunted by the fear lest he should die before 
 he had time to execute his purpose. The diffi- 
 culty was to find a form of metrical composition 
 
184 POETRY, MUSIC, AND PAINTING: ESSAY v 
 
 adapted to the expression of his conception. 
 Though, in its repugnance to the actual and the 
 real, his imagination is akin to that of Coleridge, 
 yet the mind of the latter was of a much more 
 energetic and manly order, while the metrical 
 music which he invented had too much of con- 
 tinuous action to depict adequately the steadfast 
 and isolated images which Keats' fancy loved to 
 evoke. Nor could the younger poet make any- 
 thing of an extended narrative in verse. As a 
 story, l Endymion ' deserves all that its worst 
 enemies ever said of it. ' Hyperion 7 shows a 
 remarkable advance, but it is well that Keats 
 left it a fragment, for it is plain that, with his 
 " effeminate notion of Apollo, he could never have 
 
 invented anv kind of action which would have 
 
 / 
 
 interested the reader in learning how the old 
 Titan Sun-God was turned out of his kingdom. 
 The poem, in its language, challenges comparison 
 with 4 Paradise Lost,' where Milton is confronted 
 with the same difficulty, yet even he, with all 
 his skill in construction and his noble power of 
 representing character, often contends vainly 
 against the poverty of human interest and inci- 
 dent inherent in his subject. 
 
ESSAY v COLEKIDGE AND KEATS 185 
 
 Keats evidently felt that in ' Endynrion ' he 
 had not reached his 'end and aim of poesy/ 
 But he was on the right track. In 4 Sleep and 
 Poetry ' he lets us see very plainly, though he is 
 himself scarcely conscious of the fact, that the 
 source of his inspiration is Sculpture and Paint- 
 ing. In looking on a picture by Titian, or on 
 the reliefs on a Grecian Urn, his Fancy lit on 
 objects which carried him away into a world 
 entirely remote from his actual circumstances, 
 and we see him in 'Endymion' constantly trying^ 
 to reproduce, in words, the image of some land- 
 scape or figure which he remembers in painting. 
 These isolated pictures, indeed everyone will 
 recall the description of Adonis asleep, of Cybele 
 drawn by her lions, and the beautiful proces- 
 sional song of the Bacchanals are the only 
 successful parts of .the poem. But in his later 
 works he had found his foothold, and in fc St. 
 Agnes 7 Eve/ the ' Ode to the Nightingale,' the 
 ' Ode on the Grecian Urn/ and other short 
 poems of the same kind," he shows that he has 
 discovered a group of sculpturesque and pictur- 
 esque subjects subjects, that is to say, which 
 
186 POETRY, MUSIC, AND PAINTING: ESSAY v 
 
 suggest permanent forms in the midst of con- 
 stant material change on which his imagination 
 can work with perfect happiness and freedom. 
 v He has realised his own ideal. As he says in 
 the last stanza of the ' Ode on the Grecian 
 Urn ' 
 
 Attic shape ! Fair Attitude ! with brede 
 Of marble men and maidens overwrought 
 
 With forest branches and the trodden weed ; 
 Thou silent form dost tease us out of thought 
 
 As doth Eternity : cold Pastoral ! 
 
 When old age shall this generation waste, 
 Thou shalt remain in midst of other woe 
 
 Than ours, a friend to man, to whom thou sayst 
 1 Beauty is Truth, Truth Beauty' that is all 
 Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know. 
 
 With what skill he had learfred to call up a 
 picture in all its distinctness of form and colour 
 before the imagination, is best seen in the open- 
 ing stanzas of i St. Agnes 7 Eve/ and in the un- 
 rivalled description of the painted window in the 
 same poem : 
 
 A casement high and triple-arched there was, 
 All garlanded with carven imageries 
 Of fruits, and flowers, and branches of knot-grass, 
 And diamonded with panes of quaint device 
 
ESSAY v COLERIDGE AND KEATS 187 
 
 Innumerable of stains and splendid dyes, . 
 As are the tiger-moths' deep-damasked wings, 
 And in the midst, 'mong thousand heraldries 
 And twilight saints and dim emblazonings, 
 A shielded scutcheon blushed with blood of queens and 
 kings. 
 
 It is, in fact, evident that, just as Coleridge, 
 by an instinctive process, learned how to pro- 
 duce musical effects in language by combina- 
 tions of metrical sounds, so Keats came gradually 
 to perceive the analogy between painting and 
 poetry latent in the picturesque associations of 
 individual words. We see the tendency betray- 
 ing itself early, in his sonnet on Chapman's 
 ' Homer ' ; in its maturity, in the beautiful 
 lines 
 
 Charmed magic casements opening on the foam 
 Qf perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn ; 
 
 in the passage that follows : 
 
 Forlorn ! the very word is like a bell 
 
 To toll me back from thee to my sole self ; 
 
 and in the lines in ' Lamia 7 
 
 Then once again the charmdd god began 
 
 An oath, and through the serpent's ears it ran, 
 
 Warm, tremulous, devout, psalterian. 
 
188 POETEY, MUSIC, AND PAINTING: ESSAY v 
 
 And it is carried to its height in the wonderful 
 description immediately connected with these 
 lines a passage in which the distinctness of the 
 painting is equalled by its loathliness depicting 
 the agony of the serpent during her transforma- 
 tion into a woman. 
 
 These are remarkable achievements which 
 only those who are insensible to the power of 
 genius are likely to underrate. Both Coleridge 
 and Keats must be regarded as inventors in the 
 art of poetry, and, as we know, Virgil gives in- 
 ventors of all kinds a place beside the poets in 
 Elysium. 
 
 Quique pii vates et Phoebo digna locuti ; 
 Inventas aut qui vitam excoluere per artes. 
 
 I think it will not be contended that I have 
 sought grudgingly to deprive the romantic poets 
 of the honours that are justly their due. On 
 the other hand, it would be the mark of a feeble 
 or a servile mind to shrink, either in deference 
 to the authority of genius, or in gratitude for 
 the boon of novelty, from inquiring whether 
 those who in this century have discovered 
 
ESSAY v COLERIDGE AND KEATS 189 
 
 fresh arts of metrical composition, have always 
 ' spoken things worthy of Phoebus.' I must go 
 one step farther. I think that men of impartial 
 judgment will not deny that whatever results 
 may be achieved by the new methods must be 
 achieved by the sacrifice of some principle which 
 lies at the foundation of what the world has 
 agreed to regard as the highest kinds of poetry. 
 Look at Wordsworth's method, for instance. 
 There can be no doubt that, by carefully watch- 
 ing the individual impressions made on his own 
 mind by objects in the external world, it may 
 be possible for a man of genius and imagination 
 to notice many subtle beauties which may have 
 escaped general observation, and to record them 
 in a striking metrical form. But it is absolutely 
 essential that if he adopt the principle of analysis, 
 he should forego the principle of action ; since 
 he cannot form his conception in the sphere of 
 imagination pure and simple, nor can he give 
 to his creation that extension and proportion 
 which is indispensable to any great ideal whole. 
 Moreover, by basing poetry solely on the analysis 
 of his own impressions, he necessarily deprives 
 
190 POETRY, MUSIC, AND PAINTING: ESSAY 
 
 the art of its ancient social influence, because, 
 Scott justly says, he can have no guarantee tha 
 a record of his individual experience will hav 
 power to arouse in the minds of his hearer; 
 those universal associations to which the gr< 
 masters of verse appeal. 
 
 Again, a man may follow in the track 
 Coleridge and Keats, and make it his chief ai 
 to touch the imagination by discovering ne 
 associations of metrical sound, or fresh combi 
 nations of picturesque words. But do not 1 
 it be argued that those who devote themselvei 
 to this pursuit are enlarging the boundaries of 
 the art, when in fact they are sensibly contract- 
 ing them. Poetry contains in itself the prin- 
 ciples of painting, sculpture, and music, but, in 
 its highest forms, it only develops and employs 
 these for the representation of some human in- 
 terest and action. For instance, the passage in 
 the i Penseroso ' 
 
 Oft on a plot of rising ground 
 I hear the far-off curfew sound, 
 Over some wide- watered shore, 
 Swinging slow with sullen roar; 
 
 
ESSIY v COLERIDGE AND KEATS 191 
 
 Or if the air will not permit. 
 
 Some still removed place will fit, 
 
 Where glowing embers through the room 
 
 Teach light to counterfeit a gloom ; 
 
 Far from all resort of mirth, 
 
 Save the cricket on the hearth, 
 
 Or the bellman's drowsy charm 
 
 To bless the doors from nightly harm. 
 
 Here is the Law of Association at work in 
 all its power, a number of apparently uncon- 
 nected images being combined, as in ' Christabel/ 
 in a musical metre ; but, unlike ' Christabel/ the 
 unity of the poem lies, not in the music, but in 
 the thought, namely, the description of the 
 features of Melancholy. 
 
 As to painting, there is almost as much 
 highly wrought imagery to be found in a simile 
 of Homer or of Ariosto, as in a whole poem of 
 Keats, and yet with them the simile is merely a 
 halting-place for repose in the midst of a swift 
 narrative of ideal action. Is there anything 
 in Keats that can match the following as a 
 picture ? 
 
 And at a stately side-board, by the wine 
 That fragrant smell diffused, in order stood 
 Tall stripling youths rich-clad, of fairer hue 
 
192 POETRY, MUSIC, AND PAINTING: ESSAY 
 
 Than Ganymed or Hylas ; distant more 
 
 Under the trees, now tripped, now solemn stood, 
 
 Nymphs of Diana's train, and Naiades 
 
 With fruits and flowers from Amalthea's horn, 
 
 And ladies of th' Hesperides, that seemed 
 
 Fairer than feigned of old or fabled since 
 
 Of faery damsels met in forest wide 
 
 By Knight of Logres or of Lyones, 
 
 Lancelot, or Pelleas, or Pellenore ; 
 
 And all the while harmonious airs were heard 
 
 Of chiming strings, or charming pipes, and winds 
 
 Of gentlest gales Arabian odours fanned 
 
 From their soft wings, and Flora's earliest smells. 
 
 But will anybody say that this most noble 
 passage was the motive of ' Paradise Regained ' 
 in the sense that the desire to produce gorgeous 
 word-colours was the motive of ' St. Agnes' Eve? ' 
 
 The nearer Poetry approaches to Painting, 
 the farther must it depart from action, because a 
 picture can only represent an action suspended 
 in a single moment of time. And if you sacrifice 
 action in poetry, you sacrifice all that makes it 
 the noblest of the arts, since it alone is able to 
 convey to the mind in a rational form an idea of 
 the most lofty and energetic passions that sway 
 the human heart. Of these Keats knew nothing. 
 
ESSAY v COLERIDGE AND KEATS 193 
 
 With his brilliant pictorial fancy, he was able to 
 conjure up before his mind's eye all those forms 
 of the Pagan world which were, by his own con- 
 fession, invisible to Wordsworth ; but, on the 
 other hand, to the actual strife of men, to the 
 clash and conflict of opinion, to the moral mean- 
 ing of the changes in social and political life, he 
 was blind or indifferent. Physical science he 
 regarded as the enemy of Poetry. ' Do not all 
 charms/ he asks 
 
 Do not all charms fly 
 At the mere touch of cold philosophy ? 
 There was an awful rainbow once in heaven ; 
 We know her woof, her texture ; she is given 
 Jn the dull catalogue of common things. 
 Philosophy will clip an angel's wings, 
 Conquer all mysteries by rule and line, 
 Empty the haunted air and gnomed mine, 
 Unweave a rainbow. 
 
 These lines appear to me to contain a world 
 of suggestion. They speak with equal force, 
 artistically, to enthusiasts who, like Words- 
 worth, contend that the sphere of poetry is 
 co-extensive with the sphere of Nature, and 
 morally (in their pessimism and melancholy) to 
 
 o 
 
194 POETRY, MUSIC, AND PAINTING ESSAY v 
 
 those other optimists who hold that the re- 
 sources of Art are boundless, so long as it is 
 pursued simply for its own sake. To detach the 
 imagination from its proper sphere, from the 
 range of associations in which it can move with 
 natural freedom, and to plunge it into the midst 
 of common actual life, is to confuse the limits 
 that separate composition in verse from com- 
 position in prose ; while, on the other hand, to 
 struggle to get absolutely free from the world of 
 sense and reality in pursuit of mere Beauty of 
 Form, involves a relaxation of all the nerves and 
 fibres of manly thought, the growth of affecta- 
 tion, and the consequent encouragement of all 
 the emasculating influences that produce swift 
 deterioration and final decay. 
 
CONCLUSION: 
 THE PROSPECTS OF POETRY 
 
 o 2 
 
VI. 
 
 CONCLUSION: THE PROSPECTS OF POETRY. 
 
 AN attempt has been made in the foregoing 
 papers to ascertain by an historical inquiry the 
 origin of the movement described in the above 
 title. Now that I am on the point of arriving 
 at a conclusion, 1 may be 'permitted to dwell for 
 a moment on the meaning of that title since 
 its propriety has been more than once ques- 
 tioned to justify the critical method that I have 
 pursued, and to recapitulate the general course 
 of my argument. 
 
 And, in the first place, I think I need not 
 waste many words in proving that during the 
 present century there has been a movement 
 whatever we choose to call it in literature, as 
 distinct and definite as what are known in reli- 
 gion by the names of the Methodist and Trac- 
 v tarian movements, and in politics by the names 
 
198 CONCLUSION: PKOSPECTS OF POETRY ESSAY vi 
 
 of the Liberal and Radical movements. How- 
 ever much Wordsworth and Shelley and Keats 
 may differ from each other in their individual 
 characteristics, no one, I imagine, who considers 
 the subject, will deny that in many important 
 respects they were moved by common external 
 impulses, and united by a common spirit of 
 antagonism to their immediate predecessors. 
 
 In the next place, it is scarcely more open to 
 dispute that this movement was a party move- 
 ment. The present age is quick enough to 
 recognize the fact that criticisms such as that 
 in the ' Edinburgh Review ' on Coleridge's 
 4 Christabel,' or that in the ' Quarterly ' on 
 Keats 7 ' Endymion/ were founded on purely 
 party principles, that the critics, starting as 
 they did from certain axioms of their own as to 
 the requisites of poetry, were quite insensible to 
 the essential beauties of the poems they were 
 considering ; but it is not sufficiently remem- 
 bered that Wordsworth and Coleridge were no 
 less dogmatic and no less narrow in their depre- 
 ciation of such a poet as Gray, or that the per- 
 ception of Keats was dead to the merits of the 
 
KSSAT vi CONCLUSION: PROSPECTS OF POETRY 199 
 
 famous writer whom he ridiculously speaks of 
 as ' one Boileau/ and whom with equal absurdity 
 he regarded as the progenitor of the English 
 poets of the eighteenth century. Besides, it is 
 easy enough to separate the critics of the first 
 thirty years of the present century into two 
 groups, one containing such men as Gifford, Sir 
 Walter Scott, George Ellis, Campbell, Jeffrey, 
 and Macaulay, all of whom (though two of them 
 certainly speak with very little gratitude of those 
 from whom they had learned the most) had evi- 
 dently formed their taste on eighteenth-century 
 literature ; the other including writers like 
 Wordsworth, Coleridge, Keats, Leigh Hunt, 
 and others who were bitterly opposed to the 
 eighteenth century and all its works. 
 
 Once more. Whereas sixty years ago the 
 critical principles of the eighteenth century were 
 still in the ascendent, and the apostles of the 
 new departure were suffering martyrdom or 
 struggling with a hostile public opinion, the 
 balance of taste has so entirely shifted that the 
 writers whom our grandfathers regarded with 
 the greatest esteem are now spoken of at most 
 
200 CONCLUSION : PROSPECTS OF POETRY ESSAY vi 
 
 with tolerance and often with contempt. Thus 
 Mr. Swinburne, wishing to disparage Byron in 
 comparison with Shelley, classes the former with 
 Pope, and is so kind as to allow both to be 
 ' poets after a fashion,' while Mr. Arnold goes 
 still farther, and loftily decides : ' Though 
 Dryden and Pope may write in verse, though 
 they may in a certain sense be masters of the 
 art of versification, Dryden and Pope are not 
 classics of our poetry, they are classics of our 
 prose.' 
 
 Now considering that nearly two hundred 
 years have passed since the birth of Pope, and 
 that, from his death up to the present time, he 
 and Dryden have unanimously been accounted 
 4 classics of our poetry,' we have a right to 
 expect that Mr. Arnold should support his para- 
 doxical judgment with corresponding strength 
 of demonstration. And at first sight it appears 
 as if he were ready to satisfy our requirements. 
 His reasoning is deduced from axioms and postu- 
 lates almost Euclidean in their absoluteness. 
 The poetry of Dryden and Pope, he says, lacks 
 that ' high seriousness ' which is the mark of 
 
ESSAY vi CONCLUSION: PEOSPECTS OF POETKY 201 
 
 the true poetical classic, and which is to be 
 found in a number of isolated passages from the 
 poets selected by him as examples of the classical 
 style. But when we ask him further to define 
 this ' high seriousness/ he declines to do any- 
 thing of the kind. 
 
 ' The characters/ says he, ' of a high quality of 
 poetry are what is expressed there. They are far better 
 recognised by being felt in the verse of the master, by 
 being perused in the verse of the master, than in the 
 prose of the critic. Nevertheless, if we are urgently 
 pressed to give some critical account of them, we may 
 safely, perhaps, venture on laying down, not, indeed, 
 how and why the characters arise, but where and in 
 what they arise. They are in the matter and substance 
 of the poetry, and they are in its manner and style. 
 Both of them, the substance and the matter on the one 
 hand, the style and manner on the other, have a mark, 
 an accent of high beauty, worth, and power. But if 
 we are asked to define this mark and accent in the 
 abstract, our answer must be : No, for we should 
 thereby be darkening the question, not clearing it. 
 The mark and accent are as given by the substance 
 and matter of that poetry, by the style and manner of 
 that poetry, and of all other poetry which is akin to it 
 in quality/ 
 
 It must, I should think, be apparent to every 
 reader that, after delivering himself of the dis- 
 
202 CONCLUSION : PROSPECTS OF POETRY ESSAY vi 
 
 paraging judgment that two of the greatest 
 metrical writers in our language are ' not classics 
 of our poetry/ Mr. Arnold has chosen to main- 
 tain his thesis simply by proving that they do 
 not write in the same manner as other poets of 
 a totally different order, whose style commends 
 itself to his perception as possessing the exclu- 
 sive hall-mark of l high beauty, worth, and 
 power.' He makes not the slightest attempt to 
 explain why the two writers whom he allows to 
 be l classics of our prose ' should in nine-tenths 
 of their best known work have chosen to express 
 themselves in a metrical form. 
 
 So long as Mr. Arnold restricted himself to 
 judgments on writers who, whatever may be 
 their exact position in our literature, are allowed 
 to be classics of some kind, his paradoxes might 
 only have excited amusement. But he has 
 determined to apply his test to poets whose 
 merits have from the very first been the subject 
 of fierce controversy ; and happening to decide 
 that Shelley is not to be reckoned among our 
 poetical ' classics,' he has naturally aroused the 
 wrath of Mr. Swinburne. Mr. Swinburne tells 
 
ESSAY vi CONCLUSION : PKOSPECTS OF POETRY 203 
 
 him roundly that his moral canons are good for 
 nothing, and then makes as if he were about to 
 establish an impregnable position of his own by 
 reasoning and argument. He declines, he says, 
 to discuss a question of poetical taste with any 
 man who will not grant the assumption that 
 c the two primary and essential qualities of 
 poetry are imagination and harmony.' Many of 
 us would be very glad to concede thus much ; 
 but, oddly enough, when this new critical method 
 comes to be tested by application, the standard 
 of ' imagination and harmony ' is found to be of 
 just as much practical use as the standard of 
 ' high poetic seriousness ' that is to say, for 
 controversial purposes it is of no use at all. 
 
 ' The test of the highest poetry/ we are informed, 
 < is that it eludes all tests. Poetry in which there is no 
 element at once perceptible and indefinable by any 
 reader or hearer of any poetic instinct ... is not 
 poetry above all, it is not lyric poetry of the first 
 water.' 
 
 And then Mr. Swinburne quotes two lines from 
 Wordsworth, which, as I have said, removed 
 from their context, are absolutely devoid of 
 
204 CONCLUSION : PEOSPECTS OF POETRY ESSAY vi 
 
 meaning, and declares in his own manner : * If I 
 not another word of the poem was left in which I 
 these two lines occur, those two lines would 
 suffice to show the hand of a poet differing not 
 in degree but in kind from the tribe of Byron/ 
 No doubt ; but differing also from the tribe of 
 Homer, Virgil, and Milton, whose most sublime 
 passages can readily be analysed into their 
 elements, though the life and genius that inspires 
 them is, of course, beyond the reach of analysis. 
 All that Mr. Swinburne proves by his argument 
 is that the poetry of Byron is of a different kind 
 from the poetry of Wordsworth and Shelley, and 
 that he himself infinitely prefers the poetry of 
 the two latter. 
 
 Neither Mr. Arnold nor Mr. Swinburne 
 justifies the absolute test of poetry which they 
 respectively propose. Their principles of ' high 
 poetic seriousness,' and of ' imagination and 
 harmony/ do not carry them a single step in 
 advance of their own perceptions : stat pro 
 ratione voluntas. Must we, then, give up all 
 hopes of arriving at a general agreement about 
 the nature of poetry and the merits of individual 
 
ESSAY TI CONCLUSION : PKOSPECTS OF POETRY 205 
 
 poets, and be content to acquiesce in the anar- 
 chical maxim, De gustibus non est disputandum ? 
 I think not. Poetry, as I have already said 
 and I believe that for controversial purposes it 
 is the only working definition that can be found 
 is the art of producing pleasure for the im- 
 agination by means of metrical language. The 
 test of poetry, therefore, is the extent and 
 quality of the pleasure it produces a relative 
 standard of judgment, no doubt. The man 
 who can, by his metrical writing, produce plea- 
 sure in the mind of any reader is pro tanto a 
 poet. But since we are all constituted more or 
 less after the same fashion, metrical writing, 
 if it is worth anything, must be capable of 
 exciting general pleasure, and pleasure in the 
 minds of good judges. If it can do this it is 
 presumably good poetry. But, again, since 
 contemporary judgment is liable to be distracted 
 and confused by transitory currents of feeling, 
 it is impossible to decide certainly whether 
 metrical writing has in it the qualities that 
 please permanently and generally until it has 
 been tested by time. When it has secured the 
 
206 CONCLUSION : PKOSPECTS OF POETKY ESSAY vi 
 
 approval of generations of good judges, then we 
 may be sure that the writer, whatever be the 
 kind of pleasure which his verse excites, is a 
 classic poet. Nor is it open to any critic, how- 
 ever distinguished, to challenge the position 
 which these poets have acquired, because his 
 opinion can weigh nothing against the verdict 
 of time and common sense. All that he can do 
 usefully is to observe and record the methods 
 which the poet, whatever his kind, has em- 
 ployed, and to apply these as a test to the 
 contemporary metrical writers who attempt com- 
 position of an analogous order. 
 
 But if there be one element in all classical 
 poetry which is relative simply to the sense of 
 the individual, there is another which is relative 
 solely to the sense of the nation. We are apt 
 to think of the genius of great poets as some- 
 thing original and per se, yet anyone who con- 
 siders the matter will see that all genuine poetry 
 springs out of the imagination of the people. 
 If it be, as it is, the function of the poet to show 
 4 the very age and body of the time his form 
 and pressure,' he must, in order to do this, 
 
ESSAY vi CONCLUSION: PROSPECTS OF POETRY 207 
 
 first receive into his own mind the influences 
 that are operating on his age and time. These 
 he reproduces in an ideal form, and hence 
 poetry is as much the reflection of the growth 
 of the national mind and conscience, as history 
 is the record of national life and action. Spenser 
 shows a clear perception of this truth when he 
 says : 
 
 For deeds do die, however nobly done, 
 
 And thoughts of men do as themselves decay ; 
 
 But wise words, taught in numbers for to run, 
 Recorded by the Muses, live for aye. 
 
 To understand, therefore, the genius of 
 classical poets, their relations to each other, as 
 well as to the whole course of their nation's 
 literature, and the causes that made them write 
 in metre in the way they did, we ought to be 
 historically acquainted with the general laws that 
 seem everywhere to determine the progress of 
 popular imagination. 
 
 In the paper with which I opened this 
 series I examined the assertion of Macaulay that 
 ' as civilisation advances poetry almost neces- 
 sarily declines/ The proposition is contra- 
 
208 CONCLUSION : PROSPECTS OF POETRY ESSAY vi 
 
 dieted, as I showed, by universal experience, 
 since the greatest poems of the world, the 
 < .Eneid/ ; The Divine Comedy,' < Paradise Lost/ 
 the plays of the Greek dramatists and of Shake- 
 speare, were all produced in the maturity of 
 national life, while even the ' Iliad ' and the 
 4 Odyssey ' argue a high degree of refinement 
 in the surroundings of the poet. The fact is 
 indisputable, and the explanation of it is simple. 
 Early society lacks the power of expression. 
 Language is then wanting in precise and philo- 
 sophical terms, as well as in rhythmical har- 
 mony, and these, no less than the mental 
 qualities which they imply, judgment, design, 
 the power of selection and rejection, in a word, 
 all that is involved in the word ' taste/ are 
 essential to the composition of a really great 
 poem. 
 
 But, in so far as what Macaulay is thinking 
 of is poetical conception, I hold that his opinion 
 is entirely right. The early ages of a nation's 
 life are the ages of belief, and belief is the 
 parent of poetry. It is then when primitive 
 and warlike habits prevail ; when there are few 
 
ESSAY vi CONCLUSION: PROSPECTS OF POETRY 209 
 
 facilities for communication and comparison of 
 ideas ; before men have begun to observe and 
 inquire into the nature of things ; that the 
 unconscious life and liberty of Imagination is 
 largest and fullest. Monarch of all it sur- 
 veys, it employs its incomparable myth-making 
 powers in investing the various appearances of 
 nature with an atmosphere of marvel and mys- 
 tery. As society becomes more orderly and 
 refined, it is recognised that many of the pheno- 
 mena hitherto ascribed to supernatural agencies 
 are the effects of uniform causes ; and wherever 
 this scientific observation extends there is so 
 much territory conquered from the unconscious 
 creative Imagination. Poets of genius at the 
 same time arise who, perceiving the extraor- 
 dinary wealth of material created for them by 
 the unconscious imagination of their fathers, 
 utilise this for the purposes of their own sub- 
 lime inventions. It cannot be denied, for ex- 
 ample, that all the great poems I enumerated in 
 the last paragraph have their roots in national 
 belief. But the subject-matter of Imagination, 
 already encroached upon by science, is thus 
 
210 CONCLUSION: PROSPECTS OF POETEY ESSAY vi 
 
 largely appropriated by the poets themselves, 
 so that, for the purposes of creation, the oppor- 
 tunities of the late poet being much diminished, 
 his genius is naturally turned towards the 
 ethical, didactic, and satiric orders of metrical 
 composition all of which have their origin in 
 the religious instincts of the people ; and in 
 this sphere he strives to compensate for the 
 lower range of his thought by the polish and 
 perfection of his language. It would appear, 
 then, that, if Macaulay's proposition be amended 
 so as to assert that as civilisation advances the 
 matter for poetical creation diminishes, while 
 the powers of poetical expression are multiplied, 
 we shall have a correct description of an in- 
 variable phenomenon in the history of the art. 
 
 Applying this general law to the course of 
 English literature, it seems to me we may arrive 
 at some very definite conclusions. Throughout 
 its history the genius of our poetry exhibits 
 itself in two aspects. Viewed in one light, it is 
 seen to be mystical, picturesque, romantic ; in 
 the other, it appears real, positive, natural. 
 The sources of English poetry are, on the one 
 
ESSAY vi CONCLUSION: PROSPECTS OF POETRY 211 
 
 hand, the Catholic Church and the Feudal 
 System, those ' Gothic and Monkish founda- 
 tions/ as Burke calls them in his vivid manner, 
 of our national life ; and on the other, the spirit 
 of the Renaissance, which has done so much to 
 modify the form of the literary superstructure. 
 Moreover, through the earlier and greater period 
 of our literature, the period between Chaucer 
 and Milton, we see these two apparently con- 
 flicting elements harmoniously fused and blended 
 in the work of the poets, though, as our litera- 
 ture develops, each element appears mixed there 
 in very different proportions. 
 
 Let me dwell on this point with a little more 
 detail. Take the poetry of Chaucer for instance. 
 With him romance, in our sense of the word, is 
 reality. He writes from within a system or 
 order of society which has long ceased to exist, 
 and he reflects all the ideas and sentiments 
 proper to that system with complete naivete and 
 good faith. In the Parson's Tale,' for instance, 
 he speaks like a good Catholic in approval of 
 auricular confession ; 4 The Flower and the 
 Leaf 7 is full of the mystical morality of the age ; 
 
 p 2 
 
212 CONCLUSION : PKOSPECTS OF POETRY ESSAY vi 
 
 while of the thirty Canterbury pilgrims them- 
 selves, the names of at least two-thirds express 
 some ecclesiastical relation which has no longer 
 any meaning for English society. And yet the 
 mystical atmosphere in which he breathed has 
 had no power to obscure the clear imagination 
 of the poet. The figures and characters of his 
 imperishable ' Pilgrimage ' stand out before us 
 with as much distinctness as if five hundred 
 years had not intervened. In this power of 
 looking through social fashions and institutions 
 at Nature, as she really is, we see the first 
 traces in our literature of the genius of the 
 Renaissance. 
 
 In Spenser all this is changed : the romantic 
 in his work predominates over the real. The 
 feudal system is no longer part and parcel of 
 the national life : it has become an allegory r , a 
 philosophical ideal to be aimed at by every 
 gentleman who desires to cultivate inward per- 
 fection. Throughout the allegory Pagan myths 
 lie oddly jumbled with mediaeval dogmas, and 
 legendary forms are employed to cloak political 
 allusions ; yet all is somehow blended so as to 
 
ESSAY vi CONCLUSION: PROSPECTS OF POETRY 213 
 
 seem natural and harmonious in the fairy-land 
 <rf Spenser's fancy. In spite of the Protestan- 
 tism of the poet and the nation, we feel, as we 
 read the splendid description of the procession 
 of the Seven Deadly Sins in the House of Pride, 
 how deeply Catholic theology had coloured the 
 English imagination, and can readily understand 
 that, though much of the sense of the allegory 
 is lost to the modern world, the knightly virtues 
 of Prince Arthur possessed a real significance 
 
 y"or men like Sidney, Raleigh, and Essex. 
 When we come to Shakespeare we find a 
 perfect balance of the opposing principles. 
 Many incidental expressions throughout his 
 plays, and notably his histories, prove his 
 sympathies to have been monarchical, and his 
 religious faith Catholic, in the broad sense of the 
 word ; while in all his judgments of men and 
 manners he speaks like a typical Englishman 
 of the age of Elizabeth. These ' Gothic and 
 Monkish foundations,' however, are only the 
 ground on which, just as Scott did after him, 
 he took his stand to let his imagination build 
 with more facility ideal structures out of the 
 
214 CONCLUSION: PROSPECTS OF POETRY ESSAY vi 
 
 materials supplied to it by his all-embracing 
 observation. He does not, like Chaucer, write 
 as the representative of a particular order of 
 society ; he does not, like Spenser, inculcate any 
 special ideal ; he views nature as she appears in 
 the strongest light of reason, common- sense, 
 and imagination : in a word, we feel in his 
 genius, as in that of no other poet, the spirit of 
 Humanity. 
 
 Milton's work, too, shows a like harmonious 
 blending of opposites ; but in him the centre of 
 gravity has travelled far to the side of Realism. 
 His subject-matter is Catholic and Romantic ; 
 witness, the whole theme of ' Paradise Lost,' 
 and those numerous allusions to the books of 
 chivalry, survivals of his ideas when it was in 
 his mind to take King Arthur as the hero of an 
 epic poem. Who can forget the comparison of 
 the mustering of the fallen angels with 
 
 What resounds, 
 
 In fable or romance of Uther's son, 
 Begirt with British and Armoric knights ; 
 And all who since, baptised or infidel, 
 Jousted at Aspramont, or Montalban, 
 Damasco, or Morocco, or Trebizond, 
 
ESSAY vi CONCLUSION: PKOSPECTS OF POETRY 215 
 
 Or whom Biserta sent from Afric shore, 
 When Charlemagne with all his peerage fell 
 At Fontarabia. 
 
 But the form of his imagination is completely 
 classical, and the whole bent of his individual 
 prejudice, strongly Calvinist and Republican, is 
 against the feudal and ecclesiastical institutions 
 which are the cradle of Romance. 
 
 Now it is a fact which I think will be ac- 
 knowledged by every careful student of English 
 literature, that the two opposing principles 
 which, even as late as the production of ' Para- 
 dise Lost/ appear in harmonious fusion, are, 
 from Milton's time up to our own, seen in 
 perpetual antagonism. During the eighteenth 
 century Realism completely overpowers Ro- 
 mance ; in the present century Romanticism 
 has shown a constantly increasing hostility to 
 Reality. How is this remarkable phenomenon 
 to be explained ? What was it that made a 
 poet like Pope reject on critical grounds the 
 principle of romance, and men of such robust 
 genius as Fielding and Johnson encounter any- 
 thing like enthusiastic sentiment with dislike 
 
216 CONCLUSION: PEOSPECTS OF POETEY ESSAY vi 
 
 and contempt ? It will not do to say that this 
 kind of spirit was in the air, that the eighteenth 
 century was an age of prose and reason, not of 
 poetry ; for that is merely restating the diffi- 
 culty in other words, besides overlooking the 
 fact that the present century has been an epoch 
 far more scientific and critical even than the 
 eighteenth, and yet the present century has 
 witnessed an- extraordinary revival of romance. 
 
 The explanation of the phenomenon that 
 I have offered in the foregoing papers is that 
 men of letters, after the Restoration, found 
 themselves confronted by an imaginative pro- 
 blem exactly analogous to the political diffi- 
 culties that perplexed the statesman. Just as 
 Sorners and his allies perceived the decline of 
 the feudal system as a motive power in the 
 constitution of society, and sought to establish 
 a new order with the least possible sacrifice 
 of ancient principle > so Dryden, Addison, and 
 Pope, finding that Romance, the ideal reflection 
 of the feudal spirit, was no longer a fitting 
 form for the expression of the ideas of the age. 
 
ESSAY vi CONCLUSION: PKOSPECTS OF POETKY 217 
 
 modelled their style exclusively on forms derived 
 from the Renaissance. 
 
 I have called this movement Conservative, 
 because it was, in the first place, a movement 
 in behalf of Order. The last half of the seven- 
 teenth century was a period of political and 
 imaginative anarchy. When government by pre- 
 rogative passed from the Tudors to the Stuarts, 
 the end of government by prerogative was 
 evidently at hand. Similarly, no one can study 
 the poetry of the merely fashionable writers of 
 the seventeenth century without seeing that the 
 spirit of old Romance had ceased to be a living 
 influence on the imagination. Whether you 
 turn to the rants of the romantic drama under 
 Charles II. and James II., or to the witty 
 conceits of the poets of gallantry, like Suckling 
 and Rochester, or to the ghosts of chivalric 
 sentiment in the love-poems of Cowley and 
 Waller, everywhere you find a vapid idealism 
 based on hollowness and unreality. The ques- 
 tion for the creative genius of the new age was 
 whether some natural ideal could not be con- 
 stituted between this lifeless formalism and 
 
218 CONCLUSION: PKOSPECTS OF POETKY ESSAY vi 
 
 realism of the loathsome kind that throve so 
 rankly in the comedies of Etherege and his con- 
 temporaries. The answer was provided by the 
 poets in the characters of Achitophel and Zimri ; 
 of Atticus and Sporus and Atossa ; in the 
 ' Vanity of Human Wishes ' ; in ' The Traveller' ; 
 in ' The Village ' and 4 The Borough ' ; and by 
 the writers of fiction in the person of Sir Roger 
 de Coverley, and all that splendid series of 
 pictures representing contemporary life and 
 manners from ' Tom Jones ' down to ' Vanity 
 Fair.' Throughout this series the spirit of the 
 Renaissance speaks as clearly in the new order 
 of society as it did in Chaucer under the feudal 
 system. 
 
 Again, the imaginative movement after the 
 Restoration and in the eighteenth century may 
 be justly called Conservative, because it aimed 
 at preserving the principle of literary continuity. 
 When Carlyle, in his anger with the shams and 
 conventionalities of English life, calls out in 
 * Sartor Resartus ' for ' old sick society to be 
 burned/ and when in an analogous spirit, in 
 order to emphasise his own individuality and 
 
ESSAY vi CONCLUSION: PROSPECTS OF POETRY 219 
 
220 CONCLUSION: PROSPECTS OF POETKY ESSAY vi 
 
 hundred years after his decease. Milton has acknow- 
 ledged to me that Spenser was his original, and many 
 besides myself have heard our famous Waller own that 
 he derived the harmony of his numbers from the God- 
 frey of Bulloigne, which was turned into English by 
 Mr. Fairfax. 
 
 Pope was, in like manner, the poetical son of 
 Dry den ; and when he announced ' correctness 7 
 to be his aim in writing, he merely signified, by 
 an epigrammatic phrase, his view of the kind of 
 development which the language appeared to 
 him to be still capable of receiving at the historic 
 stage in which he found it. 
 
 Now, whatever judgment we may be inclined 
 to pass on the poetry of the present century, I 
 think it will be generally acknowledged that, in 
 all essential points, its spirit is radically opposed 
 to the spirit of eighteenth-century verse. The 
 latter reflects the taste of a national aristocracy, 
 and is coloured throughout by the political 
 genius of the men who effected the Revolution 
 of 1688 ; the former has a thousand points of 
 contact and sympathy with the democratic 
 movement culminating in the French Revolu- 
 tion, which roused such vehement antipathy in 
 
ESSAY vi CONCLUSION: PROSPECTS OF POETRY 221 
 
 the mind of a typical Englishman like Burke. 
 The literary movement in the eighteenth century 
 was a constructive movement in behalf of social 
 order in the sphere of imagination ; the move- 
 ment of the nineteenth century was a practical 
 assertion of the unfettered liberties of the indi- 
 vidual imagination. And while the eighteenth 
 century employed the classical forms familiar to 
 the Renaissance to embody its positive and 
 direct judgments on life and manners, the nine- 
 teenth century has striven *to express the vague 
 and unsatisfied cravings of imagination, by re- 
 viving forms of romance peculiar to the lan- 
 guage in the earlier stages of society. For all 
 these reasons I have transferred from politics the 
 term usually opposed to the word ' Conservative/ 
 and have called the imaginative revolution of 
 this century ' The Liberal Movement in English 
 Literature/ 
 
 We are in the habit of thinking of this great 
 change in taste as the work of a few men of 
 genius, who arbitrarily turned the imagination 
 into new channels ; but the closer we look into 
 the question, the more clearly we see that there 
 
222 CONCLUSION: PEOSPECTS OF POETKY ESSAY vi 
 
 was an influence 'in the air/ and the general 
 causes which were at work in society disclose 
 themselves as plainly as those which operated 
 after the Restoration. The ruling force of the 
 eighteenth century, as has been said, was Aristo- 
 cracy, an aristocracy which preserved the social 
 order produced spontaneously under the feudal 
 regime, while it discarded the outward forms 
 which expressed the Catholic and chivalric con- 
 ceptions of life. Dryden and Addison, and 
 Pope and Fielding and Johnson, are the faithful 
 representatives of their age : their style exhibits 
 many of the essential qualities of the elder 
 writers whose language they inherit ; vigour, 
 distinctness of outline, unerring observation of 
 Nature, brilliant wit, with an added finish and 
 accuracy of expression but it lacks certain 
 other qualities which the work of those pre- 
 decessors also possessed, pathos, enthusiasm, 
 emotion, mystery, in a word Romance. More- 
 over, we find that as the aristocratic regime of 
 the eighteenth century becomes settled, and its 
 action regular and mechanical, individual im- 
 pulse and vitality decline ; forms and con- 
 
ESSAY vi CONCLUSION : PROSPECTS OF POETRY 223 
 
 ventions gradually predominate. So, too, in 
 literature. Comparing the work of Darwin and 
 Hayley and Pye or even poems of merit like 
 the ' Pleasures of Memory ' and the ' Pleasures 
 of Hope ' with work like ' Absalom and 
 Achitophel ' or the ' Epistle to Arbuthnot ' or 
 ' The Traveller/ we feel how feeble has become 
 the impulse of the once abundant fountains of 
 the Classical School, and that the poets who 
 drink from them are in the same exhausted case 
 as the last representatives of medievalism in the 
 venteenth century. 
 
 Contrarily, one sees the germs of the new 
 Romantic School far back in the literature of 
 the eighteenth century. They are visible in 
 what I have called the school of the Dilettanti, 
 in the poetry of men of genius like Gray and 
 Collins, where the imagination appears brooding 
 fondly over the images of bygone times. The 
 active spirit of democracy glows in the provincial 
 poetry of Burns. Rousseau's spirit of philosophic 
 melancholy transforms itself in England into the 
 religious melancholy of Cowper. But all these 
 external impulses are at present qualified and 
 
 se 
 
224 CONCLUSION: PROSPECTS OF POETEY ESSAY vi 
 
 checked by that prevailing sense of form which 
 distinguishes the style of the poets of the eight- 
 eenth century. 
 
 Then comes the French Revolution, and 
 whatever forces are at work in the age to carry 
 the individual away from society, or to influence 
 his mind against existing institutions, acquire 
 an enormous impetus. Individualism becomes 
 rampant ; Liberty is everywhere the watchword 
 of generous spirits ; it is the mark of genius to 
 assail all kinds of tradition and established 
 order. The spirit of the age embodies itself in 
 the philosophic isolation of Wordsworth ; in 
 the rebellion of Byron against society ; in the 
 Utopianism of Shelley ; in the artistic reaction 
 of Coleridge and Keats. I have traced in pre- 
 vious papers the. various imaginative channels 
 into which the rising waters forced their way ; 
 it is needless to recapitulate here what has been 
 said ; and it now only remains to endeavour 
 to* estimate the general results of the move- 
 ment and its probable influence on the future of 
 English poetry. 
 
 The vein of mediaeval Romance was ex- 
 
ESSAY vi CONCLUSION: PEOSPECTS OF POETEY 225 
 
 hausted in the seventeenth century ; the in- 
 spiration of the Classical School failed at the 
 end of the eighteenth century : have we grounds 
 for thinking that the poetry of the nineteenth 
 century is fed from more enduring fountains ? 
 Mr. Arnold has no misgivings on the subject : 
 
 ' The future of poetry,' says he, ' is immense, be- 
 cause in poetry, when it is worthy of its high destinies, 
 our race, as time goes on, will find an ever surer and 
 surer stay. There is not a creed which is not shaken, 
 r ,ot an accredited dogma which is not shown to be 
 questionable, not a received tradition which does not 
 threaten to dissolve. Our religion has materialised 
 itself in the fact, in the supposed fact, and now the fact 
 is failing it. But for poetry the idea is everything ; 
 the rest is a world of illusion, of divine illusion. Poetry 
 attaches its emotions to the idea ; the idea is the fact. 
 The strongest part of our religion to-day is its uncon- 
 scious poetry.' 
 
 Forbearing any criticism on the characteristic 
 paradox which places the power of religion in 
 poetry, whereas all history shows that poetry 
 springs out of religion, what, let me ask, are the 
 grounds for Mr. Arnold's extraordinary confi- 
 dence ? Holding, as he does, that the metrical 
 compositions of the eighteenth century are un- 
 
 Q 
 
226 CONCLUSION : PROSPECTS OF POETRY ESSAY vi 
 
 deserving of the name of poetry, and all his 
 sympathies being given to the poetical move- 
 ment originating with Wordsworth, it is plain 
 that he must look for the supply of the poetical 
 ideas of which he speaks to the Romantic sources 
 in our literature. And yet I should think no 
 one can take a survey of the poetry of this 
 century without being impressed with the large 
 amount of what is merely temporary, evanescent, 
 particular, in the romantic ideas embodied in it. 
 For instance, there was the Romance of what 
 Carlyle calls Werterism. To Byron this was a 
 reality ; for the society contemporary with Byron 
 it possessed enough of reality to become a 
 fashion ; but the poet who should now think of 
 working the mine would hardly make his fortune. 
 There was, again, the Romance of Jacobinism. 
 This was, in Shelley's time, virgin soil, and, as 
 Mr. Swinburne has shown us in his ; Songs 
 before Sunrise/ it still produces ideas available 
 for treatment in verse ; but anyone may see that 
 the thoughts and feelings which filled the mind 
 of the elder poet with something like religious 
 belief have changed in the hands of his successor 
 
ESSAY vi CONCLUSION : PROSPECTS OF POETRY 227 
 
 into a mere theme for metrical rhetoric. Once 
 more, there was what Wordsworth conceived to 
 be the Romance of Common Life. Yet it is 
 evident that what really inspired Wordsworth 
 was not Common Life, but the particular group 
 of romantic and patriotic associations connected 
 with his own birthplace ; nor has anyone since 
 been able to bend the bow of the Ulysses of the 
 Lakes, iastly, there was Romance pure and 
 simple, and those who would test the difference 
 in romantic temperature between the first and 
 last quarters of the century have only to com- 
 pare Marmion and William of Deloraine with 
 the revived Knights of the Round Table. In 
 the one case we have the representative of the 
 feudal age in England, a real being, though 
 with a touch of melodrama impiger, iracundus, 
 inexorabilis, acer ; in the other, ideal figures, 
 which had some verisimilitude for the feudal 
 times in which they were conceived, but which, 
 in these latter days, in spite of their admirably 
 picturesque equipment, can scarcely disguise the 
 democratic and commercial nature of their origin. 
 As far, therefore, as the materials of Romance 
 
 Q 2 
 
228 CONCLUSION: PEOSPECTS OF POETKY ESSAY vi 
 
 go, there scarcely seems to be promise of a 
 boundless future for Poetry. 
 
 If we look at the Form in which the ideas of 
 Romance are expressed, in other words, at the 
 question of Poetical Diction, our conclusions 
 will not be very different. Dryden, after the 
 Restoration, had sought to fix the standard of 
 poetic diction by modelling it on the style of 
 the best authors in the language qualified by the 
 language of the best society of the time. He 
 thus provided for the principles both of stability 
 and development. To Wordsworth, however, 
 this literary and social standard appeared too 
 artificial. He wanted a larger liberty. It was 
 
 his object : 
 
 Along Life's common way 
 With sympathetic heart to stray. 
 And with a soul of power. 
 
 As a follower of Rousseau, he held that the 
 language of poetry should be founded not on 
 literature or the forms of refined society, but on. 
 the idiom of the peasantry. As a philosopher, 
 desiring to make poetry reflective, he sought 
 to break down the distinctions between the 
 
ESSAY vi CONCLUSION: PROSPECTS OF POETRY 229 
 
 language of poetry and the langhage of prose. 
 He has had many followers, and a generation 
 ago volumes of philosophy in verse were much 
 more common than they are at present. But 
 the movement was contrary to the genius of the 
 art. Of metrical compositions of this kind the 
 reader instinctively asks, 4 Why were they not 
 written in prose ? ' 
 
 The movement initiated by Coleridge and 
 Keats was also a rebound from the standard of 
 Dry den, but in a totally different direction. 
 Their aim was to set the imagination at liberty 
 by removing it from all contact with modern 
 life, and they, therefore, looked for literary 
 models as free as possible from contemporary 
 associations. These they found in the early 
 romantic poetry of the nation, where the spirit 
 of feudal Romance is still strong, and the 
 language, highly charged with metaphor, has 
 not yet come to maturity. Steeping them- 
 selves in this atmosphere, they sought to com- 
 bine certain dream-like associations of romantic 
 ideas in musical movements of metre and 
 picturesque combinations of words. 
 
230 CONCLUSION: PEOSPECTS OF POETEY ESSAY vi 
 
 One might, indeed, imagine that the inex- 
 haustible variety of literary romantic themes 
 would give scope for an almost boundless 
 extension of the art of poetry to those who 
 simply seek to develop in it the elements of 
 painting and music. Yet though the movement 
 begun by Coleridge and Keats was continued 
 with exquisite skill by Lord Tennyson in his 
 earlier poems, and though it has received a yet 
 further development in the hands of Mr. Swin- 
 burne and the late Mr. Rossetti, no one, I should 
 think, can fail to be struck with the fact that in 
 the works of the two latest representatives of the 
 Romantic School there is far less liberty of 
 imagination. In ' The Ancient Mariner/ and in 
 ' St. Agnes' Eve ' the rapid succession of musical 
 ideas, or the rich colouring of the verbal 
 imagery, carries us away into dreamland. But 
 in a 4 Ballad ' of Mr. Swinburne or Mr. Rossetti, 
 the effect is quite different. What primarily 
 impresses the reader is the extraordinary skill 
 shown by the poet in the imitation of antique 
 forms ; we are always conscious of the presence 
 of the artist ; it is plain that he is thinking less 
 
ESSAY vi CONCLUSION: PROSPECTS OF POETRY 231 
 
 of the theme itself than of its capacities for 
 enabling him to display his powers of word- 
 painting or of metre-music. 
 
 All these symptoms seem to me to point to 
 but one conclusion. As the Classical and Con- 
 servative Movement in English Literature ex- 
 hausted itself at the end of the last century, so 
 the inspiration of the Romantic School is now 
 failing, and the Liberal Movement in our Litera- 
 ture, as well as in our Politics, is beginning to 
 languish. Nor are the causes of this decline at 
 all difficult to comprehend. The Liberal Move- 
 ment was a practical protest on behalf of liberty 
 for the individual imagination a protest against 
 the trammels of form and convention which, at 
 the end of the eighteenth century, were stifling 
 life and nature and simplicity. But owing to 
 the force of circumstances it has grown to be 
 a revolt against society. Forgetful that the 
 source of poetry, as of the language which is 
 its vehicle, lies not only in himself, but in the 
 nation to which he belongs, the latter-day poet 
 has sought to turn poetry into the ideal of the 
 individual, instead of being what it once was. 
 
232 CONCLUSION : PEOSPECTS OF POETEY ESSAY vi 
 
 the ideal of society. Hence the revival of forms 
 and methods of poetical diction proper to bygone 
 ages. The present direction of the movement is 
 contrary to nature. In its craving for unlimited 
 liberty of imagination our latest school of 
 metrical writing is aiming at an unattainable 
 ideal. The author of 6 Marius the Epicurean ' 
 a book full of fine genius and imagination 
 himself a Liberal in the region of art, shows a 
 far truer perception of the nature of the problem 
 which the modern poet has to solve. 
 
 Homer had said/ so lie writes 
 
 Ol '6Ye <)7 Xijiterog Tro\v/3tv6iog ivrbg 7/coiro, 
 r I0T/a /uev are/Aai'To, Qiffav ft iv vifi fjte\aii'rj 9 
 
 { And how poetic tlie simple incident seemed told just 
 thus : Homer was always telling things in this manner. 
 And one might think there had been no effort there ; 
 that it was but the almost mechanical transcript of a 
 time intrinsically and naturally poetic, in which one 
 could hardly have spoken at all without ideal effect, or 
 the sailors have pulled down their boat without making 
 a picture " in the great style," against a sky charged 
 with marvels. Must not an age, itself thus ideal, have 
 counted for more than half of the whole work ? ' 
 
 Undoubtedly it must; in the early ages of 
 
ESSAY vi CONCLUSION : PROSPECTS OP POETRY 233 
 
 society the atmosphere of imagination is uni- 
 versal and its pressure is equal on all sides. In 
 later times, as science and refinement advance, 
 the pressure diminishes ; but in every age there 
 are certain ideal perceptions of nature which 
 are common to every individual ; and he who 
 realises these most strongly and expresses them 
 in metre most naturally is the classical poet. 
 
 It is this positive ideal spirit, prevailing in 
 the best poetry of the eighteenth century, which 
 all metrical composers of the rising generation 
 might study with advantage. The men of 
 genius in that age felt that the spirit which had 
 produced the philosophy of Bacon, the psycho- 
 logical speculations of Locke, the discoveries of 
 Newton, as well as the Reformation and the 
 
 .evolution of 1688, could not find adequate 
 xpression in those romantic forms which the 
 
 shionable poets of the seventeenth century 
 employed to decorate the expiring spirit of 
 medievalism. They faced nature boldly, and 
 wrote about it in metre directly as they felt it : 
 hence their conception, such as it is, is founded 
 on reality ; the portraits of Zimri the statesman, 
 
234 CONCLUSION: PEOSPECTS OF POETEY ESSAY vi 
 
 and Atticus the man of letters, are, in their own 
 kind, as ideally true as Chaucer's Good Parson 
 and Shakespeare's Hamlet. The ideal was, no 
 doubt, too cold, unemotional, and repressive, 
 nor is it at all wonderful that the men who lived 
 through the fever of the Revolutionary period 
 should have rebounded into Romanticism. That 
 period was essentially a lyrical one, when poets 
 were moved to write about their own feelings 
 and ideas, rather than about things. But now 
 that the atmosphere has sensibly cooled ; now 
 that the poet is beginning to aim again at In- 
 vention and Creation ; it is all-important to be 
 sure that we have solid and positive conceptions 
 of Nature on which to build our ideal. 
 
 On the other hand, if we are simply and 
 solely positive, we shall not be able to create at 
 all. The exclusively scientific order which the 
 philosophers who have appropriated the title of 
 Positive would impose upon society is more 
 remote from the reality of nature, or, at least, of 
 human nature, than the wildest extravagances 
 of the c Arabian Nights.' The revolt of the 
 Romantic school against the excessive realism of 
 
ESSAY vi CONCLUSION : PROSPECTS OF POETRY 235 
 
 the eighteenth century, ought to prove, a fortiori, 
 that men will not tolerate an intellectual system 
 from which the mystical and religious element 
 is altogether excluded. 
 
 In an ancient nation like ours, moved by 
 instincts and beliefs of which the origin lies far 
 beyond the reach of analysis, the progress of 
 imagination keeps pace with the development of 
 society ; and just as in the political world it is 
 becoming more and more evident that an union 
 must be effected between the principles of Libe- 
 ralism and Conservatism, so the best hopes for 
 the future of Poetry seem to lie in a reconcilia- 
 tion between the Positive and Romantic elements 
 of the Imagination. There is no essential con- 
 tradiction between the two principles. Mr. 
 William Morris, indeed, one of those who have 
 done the most to develop the Romantic move- 
 ment pure and simple, urges as an apology for 
 reviving the external manner of Chaucer that 
 the present is ' an empty day.' But of no 
 society in which men retain, even in the lowest 
 degree, the power of forming ideal conceptions 
 can this justly be said. If the spirit of patriotic 
 
236 CONCLUSION : PROSPECTS OF POETRY ESSAY vi 
 
 action out of which spring the Epic and the Drama 
 languishes, if the ethical standard of society 
 decays, yet the historic conscience of the nation 
 has the Satiric Form in which to embody itself, 
 and Juvenal's scornful question Quid magis 
 Heradeas? has profound significance as an 
 answer to all those who, in a declining age, cry 
 to Poetry to ' simply tell the most heart-easing 
 things.' But we are not living under a Domi- 
 tian. We are all of us conscious, Mr. Morris as 
 much as any man, of imaginative impulses from 
 without ; what is wanting is the genius to con- 
 ceive and construct some Ideal which shall ' show 
 the very age and body of the time his form and 
 pressure.' Doubtless it is a matter of infinite 
 difficulty in an era of Steam, Electricity, and 
 Cheap Literature, in an Age of Appearances, 
 when everything seems to take a momentary 
 shape and then to be forgotten, to discover the 
 element of the real, the permanent, the classical 
 the ideal element, that is to say, which is 
 relative not only to the individual but to society. 
 Yet such an element there must be somewhere ; 
 and within this ideal region, whatever it may 
 
ESSAY vi CONCLUSION : PROSPECTS OF POETRY 237 
 
 be, are the limits of the just liberties of the 
 poet. 
 
 To attempt to define the boundaries of poetic 
 liberty would be foolish ; but, as a- practical con- 
 clusion to these papers, I will venture to indicate 
 two points in which I think that the reappear- 
 ance of the Positive Element in poetic creation 
 and an increased attention to classical models 
 would exercise a vitalizing influence on the art. 
 In the first place we should recognize the sound- 
 ness of Dryden's principle of poetic diction. It 
 is true that the principle is essentially aristo- 
 cratic, and that there is a danger of its proving 
 artificial in its application ; it is true, too, that 
 Wordsworth, yielding to the democratic impulse, 
 and to the desire to be natural, strove to break 
 down what he regarded as the arbitrary barriers 
 between the language of poetry and the language 
 of prose ; but it is no less true that the counter- 
 movement of Coleridge and Keats proves that 
 the poetical instinct insists on the distinction 
 between the two methods of expression. The 
 purely literary standard erected by Coleridge 
 and Keats has been carried forward by succes- 
 
238 CONCLUSION : PROSPECTS OF POETEY ESSAY vi 
 
 sive modern poets with great artistic skill and 
 invention ; the mischief of it is that those who 
 hold by it, ignoring the .social principle of Dryden, 
 the ' usus ' of Horace, and concentrating their 
 energies solely on the construction of new metres, 
 or new metrical combinations of words, help to 
 exhaust the virility and stunt the growth of 
 the language. An attempt to restore the habit 
 of writing naturally, yet with the distinctions 
 proper to verse, would probably lead to a 
 revival of the simpler iambic movements of 
 English in metres historically established in our 
 literature. How readily such metres mould 
 themselves to the social idiom of the time may 
 be seen from Byron's use of the Spenser stanza 
 in his noble reflections on the Battle of Waterloo 
 in ' Childe Harold/ and of the ottava rima in the 
 description of the shipwreck in ' Don Juan/ 
 
 Again, a study of the classical poets would 
 re-establish those habits of instinctive judgment 
 which enable the metrical writer to discern the 
 boundaries and relations between the sphere of 
 poetry and the sphere of science. What one 
 admires in the work of Homer and ^Eschylus 
 
ESSAY vi CONCLUSION : PKOSPECTS OF POETRY 239 
 
 and Aristophanes and Virgil and Juvenal, and 
 in the English poets who most resemble them, 
 in Chaucer and Shakespeare, and Dryden and 
 Scott, is the power of reproducing the idea of 
 external Nature, and the complete disappear- 
 ance of the poet in his creation. In modern 
 poetry one finds, on the contrary, perpetual self- 
 consciousness opinions, theories, philosophies, 
 broken lights reflected from many minds, but 
 not the distinct idea of an external world. Why 
 is this ? Is it not that the old poets started 
 from a basis of positive Acceptance, while the 
 modern poet writes in an atmosphere of Doubt. 
 Since Wordsworth's time, the poets have uni- 
 versally adopted the method of introspection, 
 and have introduced into their art the principle 
 of analysis which is the proper instrument of 
 science. The man of science begins his inves- 
 tigation with doubt because he hopes to end 
 with certainty ; but the poet whose object is to 
 create must necessarily build on a foundation of 
 belief. The ideal creator in prose or verse who 
 seeks to represent the real character, the positive 
 life, of the Nation something necessarily very 
 
240 CONCLUSION : PEOSPECTS OF POETEY ESSAY vi 
 
 different from the kaleidoscopic thoughts about 
 itself which it reads daily in the newspapers- 
 will draw his inspiration not simply from his 
 own individual mind, but from national In- 
 stinct, Conscience, Memory, fountains which 
 lie far back in the infancy of the people, and 
 beyond the reach of Analysis. In respect of 
 this inspiration, poets are not free agents : the 
 freedom of true Genius is shown by constructing 
 from the conceptions of Nature with which the 
 national Muse supplies her favourites, a form of 
 expression unaffected in thought, masculine in 
 diction, suitable to the growth of the language 
 and the scientific requirements of the age. 
 
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