THE

CONSERVATISM OF THE EIGHTEENTH

CENTURY

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II.

THE CONSERVATISM OF THE EIGHTEENTH

CENTURY.

I WOULD ask the reader who follows my argument to consider that it rests on two assumptions. The first is, that poetry is a social art; that the creations of the greatest poets are not mere isolated conceptions of their individual, minds, but are the products of influences which are felt by all their contemporaries, though the poet alone has the power of expressing them. 'There must,' says Shelley, 'be a resemblance which does not depend on their own will between all the writers of any particular age. They cannot escape from subjection to a common influence which arises out of an infinite combination of circumstances belonging to the

times in which they live, though each is in a degree the author of the very influence by which his being is thus pervaded. Thus the tragic poets of the age of Pericles; the Italian revivers of ancient learning; those mighty intellects of our own country that succeeded the Reformation, the translators of the Bible, Shakespeare, Spenser, the dramatists of the reign of Elizabeth, and Lord Bacon; the colder spirits of the interval that succeeded; all resemble each other, and differ from every other in their several classes. And this is an influence from which neither the meanest scribbler nor the sublimest genius of any era can escape; and which I have not attempted to escape.' The second assumption is that the general spiritual imagination of society, which is the source of all poetry, is less free in a refined than in a rude age, just as the imagination is far more at liberty in each of us during childhood and youth than after we have acquired the judgment and experience of mature life. Wordsworth illustrates this truth by two very beautiful images. One is in the 'Ode to Immortality':

Heaven lies about us in our Infancy!

Shades of the prison-house begin to close
Upon the growing boy,

But he beholds the light, and whence it flows,
He sees it in his joy.

The youth who daily farther from the East
Must travel, still is Nature's priest,
And by the vision splendid

Is on his way attended;

At length the man perceives it die away,
And fade into the light of common day.

And he expresses the regret which so many experience in a period of materialising science when they look back upon the ages of free and simple imagination :

Great God! I'd rather be

A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn,—

So might I, standing on this pleasant lea,
Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn ;
Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea;

Or hear old Triton blow his wreathed horn.

It is obvious that a remarkable evolution, alike in the imaginative life of the individual and in that of society, is described or suggested in these lines. Yet although both assumptions are thus severally supported by the authority of