Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 45.djvu/839

 emotions of Keats lagged far behind the intellectual achievements of his time; and it was the consequent maladjustment that caused him to cling so persistently to that old order of ideas, to that cosmology of marvel and catastrophe which he felt to be slipping away from the world with all the beautiful accumulation of legend and myth which in the course of many centuries had come to cluster about it. To him "glory and loveliness" had indeed "passed away" from the present, and could be sought only in the things that the general world was rapidly outgrowing; and hence it was to these dead things alone—to Greek fable or mediæval story—that he could turn to find the beauty that was to be to him a joy forever.

But though in Keats's day the ocean of knowledge was slowly rising on every side, he had no hint of that great tidal wave of new ideas which has carried us so rapidly forward with its resistless roll. It is little to say that during the past half century the consequent emotional perturbation has been greater than the world ever experienced before; for the single generalization of evolution has disturbed the equilibrium of which we have spoken to an extent hitherto undreamed of. We face the universe from a new standpoint; our relations to Nature are altered; the problems of life, so often analyzed, so much discussed in the past, meet us in unfamiliar forms. Amid the Babel of tongues and the fierce clash of ideas and purposes to which all this has given rise, the poetry of evasion has still made its voice heard and its influence felt. In the works of Rossetti and the earlier writings of William Morris (The Earthly Paradise and the other poems antedating his conversion to socialism) we have the artistic traditions of Keats carried on with unmistakable success; the mediæval mood and attitude, however, replacing the pagan mood and attitude of the earlier bard. Both these men, too, sought to make their escape through the imagination from the life of their own time—from the rapid material changes going on in every direction, and from the speculation and inquiry with which the whole air is alive. The prelude to The Earthly Paradise, taken even by itself, makes Morris's position sufficiently clear, and to understand Rossetti's we have only to remember his own declaration of his belief that it concerned men and women far more to attend to the form of their tables and chairs than to bother about the doctrine of the conservation of energy and the hypothesis of natural selection.

Meanwhile, in the early years of the modern upheaval, a note of deeper meaning made itself heard—the outcry of earnest natures, conscious of the breaking down of old standards, but doubtful as yet of the spiritual import and tenor of the iconoclastic forces at work. To turn from the poems of Keats, Rossetti, and Morris, to the poems of Arthur Hugh Clough and Matthew