IV.

THE REVIVAL OF ROMANCE: SCOTT, BYRON, SHELLEY.

By his habits of severe and lonely meditation and of philosophical analysis, Wordsworth was well qualified to become the apostle of the new movement which, as Coleridge tells us, was inaugurated by the publication of 'Lyrical Ballads.' On the other hand, his remoteness from social life and action, and the studied prosiness of much of his versification, prevented his poems from making an immediate impression on the taste of an age imbued with reverence for the classical models of poetical diction. The shock which was felt by the imagination of society at the end of the eighteenth century, and which produced the vast development or the complete subversion of so many deeply-rooted feelings and ideas, exhibits its effects most distinctly in the

work of those great writers whose names stand at the head of this paper. In this paper I shall endeavour to trace the rise of the new school of Romance in English Literature, its connection with the classical school of the eighteenth century, and the various channels into which it was directed by Scott, Byron, and Shelley.

The genius of the eighteenth century in England was hostile to Romance in all its shapes. Almost every writer of the period is a disciple of Cervantes. The early part of the century produced the most exquisite and delicate satire on feudal Toryism in the person of Sir Roger de Coverley. Chivalrous feeling could scarcely breathe in the same atmosphere as Gulliver. Pope, whose mind was very open to the influences of the old-fashioned sentimental gallantry, boasts, nevertheless, that he soon abandoned 'Fancy's maze' to 'moralize his song.' Fielding found the inspiring motive for his own novels in his contempt for the sentimentalities of Richardson. Goldsmith, the finest artist of the school of Addison, shows himself utterly insensible to the influences that were operating on

the genius of Gray. As for Johnson, perhaps the most thoroughly representative man of letters in the century, his opinion on the matter, manifested in almost every page of Boswell's Life, is well illustrated by his recorded criticism on 'La Nouvelle Héloïse.' "Boswell.-"I don't deny, Sir, but that his novel may perhaps do harm; but I cannot think his intention was bad." Johnson." Sir, that will not do. We cannot prove any man's intention to be bad. You may shoot a man through the head, and say you intended to miss him, but the judge will order you to be hanged. An alleged want of intention, when evil is committed, will not be allowed in a court of justice. Rousseau, Sir, is a very bad man. I would sooner sign a sentence for his transportation than that of any felon that has gone from the Old Bailey these many years. Yes, I should like to have him work in the plantations."

It is to be hoped that we have so far outlived the sickly dreaminess of the revolutionary period as to own that the manly Doctor was in the main right. He saw that Rousseau's view

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of life, however attractive to the imagination, had no basis of reality, and that without the established order which this sense of reality implies, civilised society cannot exist. The view that Johnson propounded in his direct 'knock-down' style was shared by all his great contemporaries. The sons, grandsons, or great grandsons of men who had learned from many disappointments to distrust all fanaticism and enthusiasm, they had seen the old principle of feudal monarchy, upheld by Plantagenets and Tudors, dwindle in the feeble keeping of the Stuarts; the knightly rule of devotion to women travestied by the adoration of such mistresses' as sprang out of the brain of Cowley or Waller; the lofty and beautiful imagery of the Faery Queen' replaced by the gallantries of a Suckling, a Rochester, and even of an Afra Behn. The Feudal Ideal was, for the time, extinct as a social force. Yet the void thus created was far from being filled by the principle of Puritanical or Deistic democracy. Sour, gloomy, bigoted, tyrannical, or at best dry and pedantic, the reign of the Saints and of the Philosophers was scarcely

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more tolerable than that of the Atheists. In this arid social desert, where could men who desired a manly and moderate Freedom find a national standard of political order, good breeding, and good taste, which should be in touch with the traditions of the past, and yet conformable to the growth of modern society? This was the problem which the Conservatism of the eighteenth century had to solve, and I confess that when I think, on the one hand, of the anarchy of extremes into which the imagination of the English people had fallen after the Restoration, and, on the other, of the masculine, unaffected, straightforward habits of thought, as well as of the finish and perfection of style, achieved by the great writers of the post-Revolution period, no words seem to me too strong to express the debt of gratitude which the nation owes to Steele, Addison, Pope, Gray, Fielding, Johnson, and Goldsmith. Critics of the present day are apt to talk in a superior and patronising tone of the eighteenth century. They say it is 'unpoetical,' unromantic, sceptical, utilitarian. But surely the wonder is that,