CHAPTER XII

THE REVIVAL OF ROMANTICISM

I. INTRODUCTION

Literature at the Death of Pope.-When Pope died (1744), the classical ideal had been dominant for three-quarters of a century. As we have seen, the civilizing effect of this era upon literature had been great. But in its zeal for law and order the Augustan Age had sacrificed too much. It had marked as forbidden too many things which, sooner or later, men were bound to find excellent and desirable. It had set up standards of taste which, in their narrowness and inflexibility, were bound in time to bring about a revolt.

Signs of Reaction Against the Classical Ideal.-As soon as Pope's commanding presence was removed, and the fascination of his brilliant example began to be a little dimmed, signs of such a revolt were not long in making themselves apparent. Even before Pope's death, the reaction against the order of things for which he stood, had set in. Here and there a poet, tired of the sharp click and hard polish of the classic couplet, had begun to turn back to Milton and Spenser, and to imitate that fuller and freer music. Shakespeare, the "splendid barbarian," began once more to cast his spell upon adventurous readers, and to fill them with a new wonder and admiration. Things as they were, in the world of London coffee-houses and drawing-rooms, began for some minds to lose their charm, and things as they had been in the mysterious past, or as they might still be in remote regions of the earth, began to attract men's curiosity. Chosen spirits, gifted somehow with a new vision, looked out upon the world of nature, and found that it was good. They looked into their own hearts, and found there a thousand wayward impulses which conventions had long stifled, but which clamored now for expression. With

the new feeling for nature there went a new feeling for man, a greater tenderness for the unfortunate, a greater sympathy with the humble and obscure, a livelier curiosity concerning man's life in distant regions and far-off times.

The Romantic Movement Broadly Viewed. This great awakening we call, for lack of a better word, the "Romantic Movement." It was a slow awakening, for it covered the whole period from about 1725 to the end of the eighteenth century. It was as broad as it was slow, for it covered nearly the whole of Western Europe, and brought in its train no less a world-shaking event than the French Revolution. It was in essence, as the Renaissance had been, a reassertion of the freedom of the individual, but this assertion was made now in a more spiritual sense, and with a profounder conception of what freedom means to the spirit and the imagination.

The Romantic Movement in Literature.-In literature the Romantic revival expressed itself in three main directions. In the first place, it brought with it a new interest in the past, especially in the Middle Ages, because the life of the Middle Ages, with its turbulence, its strong passions, its rich barbaric color, was in strongest contrast to the well-ordered life of the "classic era," and it therefore ministered to that hunger for the "picturesque," which the formality of the Augustan Age, by a natural reaction, had engendered. In the second place, the Romantic revival brought with it a new interest in nature, especially in the wilder and more desolate aspects of natureagain, by reaction from the Augustan indifference to everything which had not been pruned and ornamented by the hand of man. In the third place, the Romantic movement brought with it a new human sympathy, especially toward such human lives as by reason of their humbleness or their rudeness had been treated with contempt by an aristocratic age.

II. THE ROMANTIC PIONEERS (FROM THOMSON TO BURNS)

Thomson's "Seasons" and "Castle of Indolence."-The earliest poet in whom the workings of the new romantic spirit can be seen, was James Thomson (1700-1748). Thomson was a Scotchman, who came up to London in 1725. The

following year he published the first section, "Winter," of a poem which he afterward continued under the titles "Summer," "Spring," and "Autumn," and which was published in 1730 as The Seasons. To the readers of his own day the novelty of this poem was great. For two generations the first-hand study of nature had been neglected. Literature had found its interests in city life; or, if it ventured into the country at all, it was into a country conventionalized and unreal, a country clipped and trimmed like a formal garden in the Italian style. Accordingly, Thomson's poem had an aspect of daring innovation. His views of English landscape, his description of the first spring showers, of the summer thunderstorms, and of the terrors of the wintry night, showed an honest understanding and love of that to which the eye had long been blind. In The Castle of Indolence, published in 1748, Thomson went back to Spenser for his inspiration. The poem is in the Spenserian stanza, and recaptures something of the master's rich, longdrawn music. The same golden atmosphere which enwraps Spenser's "land of faery" steeps the embowered castle of the enchanter Indolence, with its "listless climate," where the plaint of stock-doves mingles with the sighing of hillside pines. Gray: His Letters and Diaries.-Among the early bearers of the banner of Romanticism, the most important name is that of Thomas Gray (1716–1771). Gray lived the life of a scholar and recluse at Cambridge, where in his later years he held a professorship of history, but delivered no lectures. He was sensitive to all the finer influences of the time. He was a delightful letter-writer and diarist, and his letters and journals give a very complete view of the intellectual movements of the period. Particularly interesting are those passages which show in him the new sensibility to picturesque scenery and to Gothic architecture, two of the great enthusiasms of the romantic innovators. In a letter written in early life from Switzerland, during a tour which he made with his friend Horace Walpole, he writes of the scenery about the Grande Chartreuse: "Not a precipice, not a torrent, not a cliff, but is pregnant with religion and poetry. One need not have a very fantastic imagination to see spirits there at noonday." Years after, in the Scotch highlands, he writes of

the mountains as "those monstrous creatures of God," and declares that they "ought to be visited in pilgrimage once a year." A generation before Gray wrote from the Grande Chartreuse, Addison had crossed the Alps, and dismissed the experience thus: "A very troublesome journey. You can't imagine how I am pleased with the sight of a plain." Gray's enthusiasm over the marvels of medieval architecture at Rheims and Sienna, contrasts also with Addison's comparison of the nobility of the classic Pantheon with the "meanness of manner" in the Gothic cathedrals. Toward the end of his life Gray made one of his "Liliputian journeys" to the English lake country afterward made famous by Wordsworth's poetry. The journal which he kept on this occasion is remarkable for the intimate sympathy which it shows with the changes of mood in the landscape, under variations of weather and time of day. Gray sees nature with a modern eye, as a living thing full of sentiment and meaning.

Gray's Poetry.-Gray's most important poems are the "Elegy in a Country Churchyard" and "The Bard." The "Elegy" is perhaps the most widely known and loved of English poems. A large part of its charm comes from the poet's personal, sensitive approach to his subject. He lingers in the churchyard, noting the signs of approaching nightfall, until the atmosphere of twilight musing is established, after which his reflections upon life and death have a tone of sad and intimate sincerity. In its recognition of the dignity of simple lives lived close to the soil, and in its sympathy with their fate, the "Elegy " shows the breaking-up of the hard forms into which social feeling had stiffened, and looks forward to the enthusiasm for humanity which marked the later phases of romantic poetry. "The Bard" is more distinctly romantic, both in subject and treatment. An ancient minstrel, the last of the Welsh singers, escaped from Edward's massacre, stops the king in a wild mountain pass, and prophesies the terrors which are to gather over his descendants. This poem, with its imaginative rekindling of the passion of an ancient and perished people, shows that re-awakened interest in the Middle Ages which soon became the leading feature of romantic art.

Percy's Reliques. In 1765 Bishop Percy, an antiquarian scholar with literary tastes, published a ballad collection entitled Reliques of Ancient Poetry. These old ballads, which spoke in tones of primitive freshness and passion out of the distant past, had a great effect in quickening the romantic impulse. Long afterward, Wordsworth said of these ballads that they had led English poetry back to the truth from which it had wandered.

"Ossian": Chatterton's Imitations.-About the same time. appeared an epic poem in irregular chanting prose, entitled Fingal, purporting to have been originally written in the ancient Gaelic tongue of the Scotch highlands, by Ossian, the son of Fingal, in a dim heroic past. It seems to have been in large part a clever literary forgery, the work of a young Scotchman named Macpherson, but its influence was enormous in furthering the new taste for the mysterious past.

Of a similar nature were the series of literary forgeries put forth by Thomas Chatterton (1752-1770). These consisted of poems and prose pieces in the mediaval style and diction, which he palmed off upon the good burghers of Bristol as originals which he had unearthed in the ancient coffers of their church. Chatterton ended his morbid and amazingly precocious life by suicide in a London garret, at the age of nineteen. When the battle of the new poetry had been fought and won, Keats dedicated Endymion to his memory, and Shelley placed him in "Adonais" among the "inheritors of unfulfilled renown."

Cowper: "The Task."-William Cowper (1731-1800), though he was not conscious of being an innovator, marks the advent of a new realism in the poetic treatment of nature and human life. His early life was spent at Westminster School, and as a law-student in London. Fits of gayety, and states of mystical exaltation, were succeeded in him by periods of terrible depression. At the age of fifty-two, he was living in the obscure village of Olney, where, under the care of a widow, Mrs. Unwin, several years his senior, he was spending a peaceful interval between two attacks of religious melancholia. At the suggestion of one Lady Austin, he began a long poem in blank verse, in which he described