Page:Catholic Encyclopedia, volume 5.djvu/534

ENGLAND though scarcely heeded at all by the public of his own day, has been found, as it has received more attention recently, to contain within itself the germs of many later developments of thought and feeling in society and literature. He was an engraver and painter as well as a poet, and his work in these capacities cannot be neglected if one wishes to understand the character of his genius.

Crabbe and Blake carry us on into the nineteenth century, but before their death Wordsworth and Coleridge accomplished the first of their epoch-making work. With these two poets we enter upon the story of our modern literature. Wordsworth and Coleridge are still in some sense with us, as their predecessors of the seventeenth and eighteenth century are not. All English modern poets are directly or indirectly influenced by them. They deliberately determined to be missionaries in poetry, and they accomplished a mission in the face of great discouragement and opposition. The small volume of "Lyrical Ballads" published in 1798, when they were young men together under thirty, made a revolution in poetry and was the fulfilment of nearly all that the romantic writers had been trying half unconsciously to bring about. The "Ancient Mariner", which opened the book, and the "Tintern Abbey Lines", which closed it, to say nothing of the many successes and few failures which fill up the space between, were alone enough to set up a poetic standard of high and peculiar significance. In these poems there was accurate nature-description of the best kind, shot through with the poet's own imagination and feeling; there was love of, and interest in, vivid human life, regardless of class or country; there was weighty ethical matter without dullness. It is perhaps in this seriousness with which life is viewed that we find one of the key-notes of the poetical literature of the later Victorian age. It has been said of William Wordsworth (1770-1850) that he wrote of "what is in all men", and the leading ideas of his poetry are indeed those in which all natural and sane human beings can join. The healing and joy-giving power of nature, the strength, beauty, and pathos of the simplest human affections, more especially as seen in the less sophisticated men and women of the poorer classes in the country, may be realized by all. But Wordsworth had also a philosophy of nature and her relationship to human beings which was the foundation of all his teaching, and which he expounded in poem after poem, in passages often of very great beauty, and in much variety of style. It may be here noticed that Wordsworth's style varies more than the ordinary judgment gives him credit for. In his eagerness for freedom from conventional phrasing, he strove, as he himself tells us in his prose critical prefaces to the poems, for utter simplicity of language which to us at times seems bare and even puerile in its effect; but he is capable more than most of a richness of style and diction, especially in his blank verse, that is the very opposite of his own theory. He has many styles, and no critical summing up of his manner is ever quite satisfactory to the Wordsworthian who realizes this.

The poetry of Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834) does not represent the poet with anything like the same fullness as does that of Wordsworth. Those of Coleridge's poems which are of the first order of poetry are few, but they are inimitable and perfect of their kind, and have a melody of peculiar witchery. Coleridge was a greater, wider genius than Wordsworth, and his deepest thoughts went into pedestrian prose. He has left only fragmentary work on philosophy and criticism behind him, but even that has affected and still affects the thought of our own time. Had Coleridge possessed the will-power and endurance of Wordsworth in addition to his own genius, no one can tell to what heights he might have attained. His career is a tragedy of character.

On these two poets when young men, as well as on Southey and others, the altruistic philosophy of the French revolutionary movement had a profound effect, and in Wordsworth's "Prelude" we may see to some extent the extraordinary and stimulating influence of these ideas upon some of the young and generous English minds. But in spite of much that was true in it, the elements of error, inadequacy, and crudeness in this philosophy became apparent, especially in the course of the French Revolution, and a revulsion from it fell upon both Coleridge and Wordsworth. Wordsworth alone of the two emerged from the trial unembittered—thanks to nature and to his sister Dorothy—though how crucial to his life this crisis was he has himself told us. No one can properly understand the poetry of this time, nor of the following age of Shelley, Byron, and Keats, if he does not to some extent realize the high and generous hopes raised by the ideas of the Revolution in certain ardent minds in England. They saw countless evils and oppression in the social life of the time, and here, in the working out of the ideas of Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity, seemed a full remedy. The three poets just mentioned lived in the reaction from these hopes. Byron was embittered, partly from personal causes, and partly because of the state of the society in which he lived. He saw no redemption at hand. Shelley was fired by the revolutionary principles as he found them interpreted by the rationalism of Godwin, even while he shared, too, in the reaction caused by the excesses of France. Keats never entered into them at all, but turned by a sort of instinct away from the dreariness of life, as he saw it around him, to nature and beauty.

But there is one great writer who was untouched either by the action or reaction of the revolutionary ferment. Sir Walter Scott (1771-1832) loved the past and believed in it, and to the end of his life he was conservative in religion and politics. In his novels and in much of his poetry he made popular those romantic elements in the life of the past which are more particularly associated with the Ages of Faith. His close and affectionate description of the Scottish scenery he loved so much was a strong influence in developing the care for natural scenery which has become one of the leading marks of the nineteenth century. His poetry at its very best is found in many of his short songs and ballads, and in detached passages of his longer poems, and it is verse not unworthy to be placed beside the finest romantic work of the time. But his best-known narrative poems—"The Lay of the Last Minstrel", "Marmion", and "The Lady of the Lake"—have all through a great and special charm, and their style, clear, rapid, full of energy, together with their almost faultless diction, make them worthy of their place among our classics. The popularity of Scott's narrative poetry was overshadowed, however, by the narrative work of Lord Byron, but to our gain, since this led Scott to turn to another form of art and to produce "The Waverley Novels".

Of the three young poets of genius whose short lives accomplished such remarkable poetic work, Lord Byron (1788-1824) is now perhaps the least influential, though at the time his fame overshadowed every other writer of verse. His extraordinarily vigorous satires, marked by his study of Pope, whose poetry he championed in a literary controversy of the time, are unique in the energy of their style and the strength and sting of their wit. It is unfortunate that a large part of them are marred, for the ordinary reader, by their extreme voluptuousness. His verse tales of romantic adventure are imaginative, but pall upon us by their tendency to sentimentality. His songs and occasional pieces, together with "Childe Harold"—parts of which have fine nature-description—show him in a more agreeable poetic light. His many dramas are not truly dramatic, but are rather the outpouring of his own powerful mind seeking an outlet. If we are inclined to take an anti-Byronic attitude, it is well to