CHAPTER VI.

MODERN TIMES.

1800-1850.

Ruling Ideas :-Theory of the Spontaneous in Poetry.

As no summary which our limits would permit us to give of the political events between 1800 and 1850 could add materially to the student's knowledge respecting a period so recent, we shall omit here the historical sketch which we prefixed to each of the two preceding chapters.

At once, from the opening of the nineteenth century, we meet with originality and with energetic convictions; the deepest problems are sounded with the utmost freedom: decorum gives place to earnestness; and principles are mutually confronted instead of forms. We speak of England only; the change to which we refer set in at an earlier period in France and Germany. In the main, the chief pervading movement of society may be described as one of reaction against the ideas of the eighteenth century. Those ideas were, in brief, Rationalism and Formalism, both in literature and in politics. Pope, for instance, was a rationalist, and also a formalist, in both respects. In his views of society, he took the excellence of no institution for granted-he would not admit that antiquity in itself constituted a claim to reverence; on the contrary, his turn of mind disposed him to try all things, old and new, by the test of their rationality, and to ridicule the multiplicity of forms and usages-some marking ideas originally

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irrational, others whose meaning, once clear and true, had been lost or obscured through the change of circumstances -which encumbered the public life of his time. Yet he was, at the same time, a political formalist in this sense, that he desired no sweeping changes, and was quite content that the social system should work on as it was. It suited him, and that was enough for his somewhat selfish philosophy. Again, in literature he was a rationalist, and also a formalist; but here in a good sense. For in literary, as in all other art, the form is of prime importance; and his destructive logic, while it crushed bad forms, bound him to develop his powers in strict conformity to good Now the reaction against these ideas was twofold. The conservative reaction, while it pleaded the claims of prescription, denounced the aberrations of reason, and endeavoured to vindicate or resuscitate the ideas lying at the base of existing political society, which the rationalism of the eighteenth century had sapped, rebelled at the same time against the arbitrary rules with which-not Pope himself, but his followers-had fettered literature. The liberal, or revolutionary reaction, while, accepting the destructive rationalism of the eighteenth century, it scouted its political formalism as weak and inconsistent, joined the conservative school in rebelling against the reign of the arbitrary and the formal in literature. This, then, is the point of contact between Scott and the conservative school on the one hand, and Coleridge, Godwin, Byron, Shelley, and the rest of the revolutionary school on the other. They were all agreed that literature, and especially poetry, was becoming a cold, lifeless affair, conforming to all the rules and proprieties, but divorced from living nature, and the warm spontaneity of the heart. They imagined that the extravagant and exclusive admiration of the classical models had occasioned this mischief; and fixing their eyes on the rude yet grand beginnings of modern society, which the spectacle of the

feudal ages presented to them, they thought that by imbuing themselves with the spirit of romance and chivalry-by coming into moral contact with the robust faith and energetic passions of a race not yet sophisticated by civilisation-they would wake up within themselves the great original forces of the human spirit-forces which, once set in motion, would develop congenial literary forms, produced, not by the labor lima, but by a true inspiration.

Especially in poetry was this the case. To the artificial, mechanical, didactic school, which Pope's successors had made intolerable, was now opposed a counter theory of the poetic function, which we may call the theory of the Spontaneous. As light flows from the stars, or perfume from flowers-as the nightingale cannot help singing, nor the bee refrain from making honey;-so, according to this theory, poetry is the spontaneous emanation of a musical and beautiful soul. The poet is born, and is not made;' and so is it with his poetry. To pretend to construct a beautiful poem, is as if one were to try to construct a tree. Something dead and wooden will be the result in either case. In a poet, effort is tantamount to condemnation; for it implies the absence of inspiration. For the same reason, to be consciously didactic is incompatible with the true poetic gift. For whatever of great value comes from a poet, is not that which he wills to say, but that which he cannot help saying-that which some higher power-call it Nature or what you will-dictates through his lips as through an oracle.

This theory, which certainly had many attractions and contained much truth, led to various important results. It drove away from Helicon many versifiers who had no business there, by depriving them of an audience. The Beatties, Akensides, Youngs, and Darwins, who had inflicted their dulness on the last century, under the impression that it was poetry-a delusion shared by their

readers had to pale their ineffectual fire and decamp, when their soporific productions were confronted with the startling and direct utterances of the disciples of the Spontaneous. On the other hand, the theory produced new mischiefs and generated new mistakes. It did not silence inferior poets; but they were of a different class from what they had been before. It was not now the moralist or the dabbler in philosophy, who, imagining himself to have important information to convey to mankind, and aiming at delighting while he instructed, constructed his epic, or ode, or metrical essay, as the medium of communication. It was rather the man gifted with a fatal facility of rhyme -with a mind teeming with trivial thoughts and corresponding words—who was misled by the new theory into confounding the rapidity of his conceptions with the spontaneity of genius, and into thinking revision or curtailment of them a kind of treason to the divine afflatus. Such writers generally produced two or three pretty pieces, written at their brightest moments, amidst a miscellaneous heap of fugitive poems'-rightly so called-which were good for little or nothing. Upon real genius the theory acted both for good and for evil. Social success, upon which even the best poets of the eighteenth century had set the highest value, was despised by the higher minds of the new school. They loved to commune with nature and their own souls in solitude, believing that here was the source of true poetic inspiration. The resulting forms were, so far as they went, most beautiful and faultless in art; they were worthy of the profound and beautiful thoughts which they embodied. In diction, rhythm, proportion, melody—in everything, in short, that constitutes beauty of form-no poems ever composed attained to greater perfection than Shelley's Skylark or Keats' Hyperion. Yet these forms, after all, were not of the highest order. The judgment of many generations has assigned the palm of superiority among poetic forms to the Epos

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and the Drama; yet in neither of these did the school of poets of which we speak achieve any success of moment. This was probably due to the influence of the theory which we are considering. The truth is, that no extensive and complex poem was ever composed without large help from that constructive faculty, which it was the object of the theory to depreciate. Even Shakspeare, whom it is-or was the fashion to consider as a wild, irregular poet, writing from impulse, and careless of art, is known to have carefully altered and re-arranged some of his plays -Hamlet, for instance-and by so doing to have greatly raised their poetic value. Virgil-Tasso-Dante-must all have expended a great amount of dry intellectual labour upon their respective masterpieces, in order to harmonise the parts and perfect the forms of expression. The bright moments are transitory, even with minds endowed with the highest order of imagination; but by means of this labour

tasks in hours of insight willed May be in hours of gloom fulfilled.

But this truth was obscured, or but dimly visible, to minds which viewed poetry in the light we have described. Even Scott-true worker though he was-may be held to have produced poems not commensurate with the power that was in him, owing to a want of due pains in construction, attributable to the influence of the prevalent ideas.

Poetry: Sir Walter Scott, Keats, Shelley, Byron, Crabbe, Coleridge, Southey, Campbell, Wordsworth, Hood, Hogg, &c.

The Life of Scott, edited by his son-in-law, Lockhart, opens with a remarkable fragment of autobiography. Unhappily, it extends to no more than sixty pages, and conducts us and the writer only to the epoch where, his