Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 8.djvu/453

Rh 1729-1789.] ENGLISH LITERATURE 433 (the work above mentioned he argued, keeping generally to the lines of Butler and Hutcheson, that there is a moral faculty in man, that it is guided by duty not by interest, and that these two are not in the present state of the world identical, nor are the feelings that are inspired by actions prompted by the one the same as those which are suggested by actions prompted by the other. Right and wrong, he thinks, must be held to be intrinsic qualities of actions, and not merely modes of the mind observing those actions. Everywhere he is firm and explicit on the immutability of mor.xl distinctions. In fact, in its general outcome his ethical philosophy resembles pretty closely that of Kant ; but it is not thought out with the same rigour of logic, nor founded on as searching a psychological analysis, nor expressed in as exact a terminology, as belong to the writings of the philosopher of Kouigsberg. X. the French Revolution, 1789-1832. Probably there was not a single gifted mind in any country of Europe upon which the tempest of the French Revolution did not come with a stimulating or disturbing influence. Young men hasty counsellors ever, from the days ofRehoboam, thrilled with hope and flushed with excitement, announced and believed that a golden age had opened for mankind. Wordsworth hastened from Cambridge in 1792 to France, where he lived more than a year, and formed some Girondist acquaintances ; Coleridge invented a scheme for an ideal community which was to form a model settlement, to be conducted on principles of paiitisocracy, on the banks of the Susquehanna ; Southey nearly got himself into trouble by publishing Wat Tyler, a dramatic sketch of an inflam matory and seditious character. On the other hand, the young Walter Scott looked with shrewd, clear eyes on the tumultuous scene, and was not tempted to throw himself into tho vortex ; for him the treasures of Europe s mighty past were real and precious, and not to be bartered for any quantity of visionary hopes and fairy gold. Soon the pro ceedings of the Revolutionists made it clear enough that human nature and human motives were not changed ; and the ranks of reaction were rapidly filled. In England an immense effect was produced by the appearance of Burke s Reflections on the French Revolution in 1791. The sympa thizers with the French republicans dwindled in number so fast, that at the end of the century, as it was sportively said, the whole of the opposition to Pitt s Government in the House of Lords went home from the debate in a single hack cab. Wordsworth, Southey, and Coleridge changed round to the Conservative side. The appearance in France of the Genie du Christianisme (1802) by Chateaubriand marked the commencement of the great continental reaction. The public policy of England became essentially conservative ; she endeavoured to prop up all the old monarchies on the Continent, whether they deserved to live or not ; she harboured thousands of French priests ; she supported the temporal power of the pope. A remarkable dissonance hence arose between the policy of the country and some of the finest notes in its literature. While the English aristo cracy was putting forth its full strength to combat Jacobinism by land and sea, the spirit of revolution breathed from the pages of Shelley and Byron. The war with Napoleon was waged with the approval of the great majority of the nation ; but the able critics and publicists who conducted the Edinburgh Review (started in 1802) were vehemently opposed to it, and would, if their influence had prevailed, have withdrawn the sword of England from the contest at least ten years before Waterloo. The romantic poems of Scott (Lay of the Last Minstrel, Marmion, Lady of the Lake, &c.) were popular because they were in sympathy with the return (now strongly pro nounced) of the European mind towards chivalry, feudalism, and the mediaeval spirit. The works of the Renaissance were no longer praised ; its art was held to be imitative or debased, its refinement to be superficial, its enthusiasm factitious. Taking its cue from Rousseau, all the world was thirsting, or pretending to thirst, after nature and simplicity ; the naivete and spontaneity, real or imagined, of the &quot; ages of faith &quot; seemed incalculably better than the finesse and self-consciousness of modern times. Working this vein somewhat too long, Scott was at last outshone in it by Byron, whose romantic tales (Bride of Abydos, TheEyron. Corsair, The Giaour, &c.) were still more remote from the dulness and conventionality of ordinary life than those of Scott. In Childe Harold, a poem finely but unequally versified in the Spenserian stanza, the noble poet described himself, for no one ever doubted that he was himself &quot; the great sublime he drew,&quot; travelling through Spain, Italy, and Greece, a prey to melancholy discontent, brooding over the perishing relics of departed greatness, but unable to utter any formula potent for its re-creation other than vague cries for the bursting of all fetters which repress the spirit or the limbs of men The increasing moral disorder of Byron s mind is marked by the appearance of Don Juan, a long rambling poem, written after his wife had left him, and he had gone to the Continent in 1816, never to return. In 1823 he joined the Greek insurgents who had taken arms to throw off the Turkish yoke. He landed at Misso- longhi, spent large sums of money, but effected nothing of importance ; and in April 1824 he was cut off by a fever. Shelley is a striking illustration of the influence which Shelley, the revolutionary literature of that age possessed in mould ing or modifying human character. His own earliest recollections dated to a time when all ranks of English society were animated by feelings of horror and detesta tion at the French &quot; Terror,&quot; and in no mood to embrace any revolutionary sentiment, or even give a hearing to any novel opinion. Yet the mind of Shelley nursed upon the sceptical suggestions of Hume, the Utopian speculations of Godwin, and the antinomian dreams of Rousseau, and pushing to extremes, from the fervour of a nature in which prudence and diffidence found no place, all that he read was in a state of high revolt, even in his college days, against all that was held sacred by other men. Sent away from Oxford, he fell in with the bright high-spirited Harriet Westbrook, and induced her to marry him. But all bonds, including those of matrimony, which fettered the free inclinations of the mind, Shelley had taught himself to regard as a tyranny to be withstood. He grew tired of Harriet, formed a connexion of free love with Mary God win, and deserted his hapless wife, who, two years after wards, committed suicide. Whether Shelley would e-ver have brought his wild actions and wilder thoughts under any discipline it ir&amp;gt; impossible to tell, for he was cut off by a sudden and early death. His poems display the most perfect and wonderful mastery of the resources of the English language for the purposes of imaginative expres sion that has ever been attained to among our poets. As Pope and Dryden gave us logic in metre, so Byron and Shelley gave us rhetoric in metre. Splendid pieces of declamation may be found in the Childe Harold &nd &quot;Isles of Greece &quot; of the one poet, and in the Hellas and Jievolt of Islam of the other. The &quot; Sky-lark,&quot; and some other poems, considered as creations of the pure imagination, have surely never been surpassed. An accidental circumstance, the finding of an old unfinished MS. in a forgotten nook of a cabinet, turned Sir Walter Scott into the path of prose fiction, in which his strong memory and inexhaustible imagination, joined with a gift for picturesque description, and the faculty, within certain limits, of creating and presenting living types of character, eminently qualified him to excel. Then VIII-