Page:Hutcheson Macaulay Posnett - Comparative Literature (1886).djvu/407

 her with the extinct flocks of Pan, the long-withered fruits of Pomona, and the ancient charms of the elderly but ever-blushing Flora. It was in courtly literature that shallow individualism began to understand itself, and worked out to their bitterest disenchantment all the pleasures of which its "palace of art" was capable. The ferocious misanthropy of Swift is the spirit of this individualism in the act of violent suicide; the tame cynicism of Voltaire is this same spirit dying of old age, though wearing still the garlands of a vanished youth. Men, in the poetry of Allan Ramsay and Thomson, Klopstock, Saint Lambert, began to see that Nature without court dress was none the less beautiful; that there were myriads of her sights and sounds which the restricted and now effete individualism of courts had never freely experienced; that of “"this fair volume which we World do name" they had been too long content with "coloured vellum, leaves of gold, fair dangling ribbons," or, at most, "some picture on the margin wrought." At first, indeed, simple truthfulness of description, such as may be found plentifully in Cowper's poems, marked the change from classical and courtly idealism into open-air freedom; but soon the sentiment of Nature was to become something infinitely deeper than any description, however accurate, however beautiful, could express.

Democratic revolution, with its vast masses of men in action, with its theoretic obliteration of all individual inequalities, and its consequent readiness to imagine human life as impersonal—a readiness to be increased by scientific ideas of physical laws likewise impersonal—now came to force into intense conflict ideas of individual and collective humanity. Individualism, feeling trampled underfoot in the rush of multitudes, turned to Nature in search of