Declaration of Amer ican Independence..1776 Independence of United States acknowl Lives of the Poets, 1779- MACPHERSON'S Ossian, 1760- 1763. edged.. 1783 JAMES BOSWELL, 1740-1795. PERCY'S Reliques, 1765. 1789 Reign of Terror in France. England declares war on France. Battle of the Nile. NOVELISTS Roderick Random, 1748; Tour to the Hebrides, 1786; The Village, 1783 (The FANNY BURNEY, 1752-1840. WM. COWPER, 1731-1800. The Task, 1783; later short ROMANTIC NOVELISTS icea, On his Mother's Por- HORACE WM. BLAKE, 1757-1827. Poet 1797. 1765. WALPOLE, 1717 Castle of Otranto. the Caliph Vathek, 1784. (Monk Lewis), The Monk, ical Sketches, 1783; Songs WM. BECKFORD, History of ANNE RADCLIFFE, 1774-1823. CHAPTER XIII THE NINETEENTH CENTURY: THE ROMANTIC TRIUMPH I. INTRODUCTION The Revolutionary Era: the First Group of Poets.Toward the end of the eighteenth century there occurred two events of world-wide consequence, long prepared for by circumstances but only vaguely foreseen; America threw off her political bondage to England, and the French people, in the name of freedom and universal brotherhood, rose up to destroy the old fabric of the state, founded upon privilege and caste. In 1776 the Declaration of Independence was signed at Philadelphia; in 1789 the Bastille, the famous French prison which stood as a symbol of tyranny and oppression, was levelled by the revolutionists. The American revolution, though destined to have an incalculable effect upon the world's progress, was of far less immediate moment than the French revolution. This terrible upheaval affected the whole of Europe. It brought in its train a series of bloody wars, in the course of which the map of the continent was remade, and both government and the social spirit were everywhere profoundly changed. In England alone, by reason of her detached position, the fabric of government stood firm. England's task, politically, was a repressive one. She took it upon herself to hold in check the powers which were making for violent change, especially when the bright dreams of the early revolution gave place, during the Reign of Terror, to an unbridled frenzy of destruction, and later to the gigantic military ambitions of Napoleon. It was English diplomacy, English gold, and English arms which held back the tide of Napoleonic conquest, and finally sealed Napoleon's fate at Waterloo (1815). But while the British government, under the guid、 ance of Pitt and the inspiration of Burke, was hostile to the revolution, the French cry of "Liberty, Equality, Fraternity" found an echo in thousands of English hearts. Burns lived long enough to greet the dawn of the revolutionary struggle, and to become actively involved in sympathy with the cause to such a degree as to draw official reproof upon his head. Of the three great literary figures of the next generation, Wordsworth, Coleridge and Scott, the first two were, during their young manhood, ardent champions of the doctrines of the revolution. Wordsworth especially watched with enthusiastic hope the early stages of the great drama which was being played in France, and he came near to throwing himself personally into the struggle, in the year preceding the Reign of Terror. "Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive," he writes, "and to be young was very heaven." When the fair dawn had given place to a noon blood-red with violence and crime, and later, when the sun of liberty seemed to have set forever in the barren military rule of Napoleon, Wordsworth passed through a period of gloom and despondency, from which he emerged as a conservative of the school of Burke. The Second Group of Poets.-This reaction toward conservatism was shared by almost all the men of the generation of Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Scott. But the next generation contained a group of poets who were destined to take up the torch of revolutionary doctrine, after the actual Revolution as a political fact had failed. Byron, born 1788, was only a year old when the Bastille fell, Shelley was born in 1792, the year before the Reign of Terror, and Keats two years after it (1795). Of these three, Keats stands apart from the political agitation of the time, but Byron and Shelley were passionate revolutionists, who spent their lives in storming the citadels of ancient prejudice, and attempting to plant upon stronghold after stronghold of tyranny, bigotry, and blind custom, the flag of the new thought. Though dead as a political experiment, the revolution lived on in them, as an inspiration and a beckoning light; nor has it ever ceased so to live, from then until now, though taking on new forms and expressing itself in new ways. II. SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE (1772-1834) Coleridge's Early Life.-Samuel Taylor Coleridge was born in 1772, at Ottery St. Mary, a Devonshire village. His father was an eccentric and unworldly country parson. Of Coleridge's childhood we have some vivid glimpses, one in particular which shows him "slashing with a stick at rows of nettles representing the Seven Champions of Christendom." He tells us that he "never thought or spoke as a child," and his precocity made him solitary in the midst of his boisterous brothers. At nine he became a "blue-coat boy" at Christ's Hospital, an ancient charity school in the heart of London.. One of his fellow-pupils was Charles Lamb, who has left us a picture of the school and of Coleridge, in his essay "Christ's Hospital Five and Thirty Years Ago." Lamb tells us that casual visitors in the halls of the school would stop spell-bound to listen while Coleridge talked or recited Greek hexameters, and "the walls of old Greyfriars re-echoed the accents of the inspired charity boy." At nineteen he entered Cambridge. With his friend Robert Southey, then a student at Oxford, he took an excited share in the enthusiasm for social progress which the French Revolution had kindled. Before long, anxiety over some college debts drove him to London, where he enlisted as a cavalry soldier, and spent two wretched months in barracks. Fortunately, he was a favorite with his mess-mates, who groomed and saddled his horse in return for the charming letters which he wrote home for them. A Latin lament scribbled under his saddle-peg by "Private Cumberback" (as he signed himself in humorous allusion to his poor horsemanship) gained him his release. The incident shows his impulsiveness and human charm, as well as the weakness of will which was to be so fatal to him. After leaving college, Coleridge and Southey evolved a radiant scheme for establishing a Utopian community across the ocean, on the banks of the Susquehanna. There, in a virgin Paradise, they and their fellow colonists were to spend the few hours of daily toil necessary to make the wilderness |