Pagina-afbeeldingen
PDF
ePub

EVENING ON THE LAKE.

UPON the mountain-top the purple tints
Fade into mist; and the rich golden glow
Of the low-setting sun sinks to a gray
Subdued and tender.

Home the eagle hies,
Swift to his eyrie, his broad pinions stretched,
Bearing him onwards, seeming motionless
The while with rapid wing he cleaves the air,
As ship the waters: now the grousecock crows
On heathered knoll his vesper lullaby
To his dear mate.

And from the silver lake, Cradled in mountain setting, echoing comes, With rippling music on the air, the plash Of dipping oars; and voices deep and low, Mingled with women's trebles, tuneful break The evening silence.

Grand indeed it is

[blocks in formation]

While all his Gestures and his Speech proclaim

Him great Revealer of forgotten Fame,

Such, Oh! Musician, dost thou seem to be To us who con th' Augustan Age by thee, Who hearken to thy Verse, to learn thro' it HOW DRYDEN to illustrious ORMOND writ, Or in thy fil'd and polisht Numbers hope To catch the Secret of the Art of POPE; Ah! subtil Skili! Ah! Bard of dying fires, Let us but lose thee, and a Race expires; As long as thou dost keep this Treasure thine Great ANNA'S Galaxy has Leave to shine.

Thou who do'st link us with that elder Day When either QUEENSBERRY made Court to GAY,

Thro' all the Thunders of romantick Times, Thro' Reefs of monstrous Quips and Shoals of Rhimes,

We've steer'd at last, and, like Ships long at Sea,

Our Latest-Born sail home to Grace and thee; Home-ward they sail, and find the World they left

Of all but thee, yet not of thee bereft;
Still in thy pointed Wit their Souls explore
Familiar Fields where CONGREVE rul'd before;
Still in thy human Tenderness they feel
The honest Voice and beating Heart of

STEELE.

Long be it so; may Sheaf be laid on Sheaf Ere thy live Garland puts forth its Last Leaf; As in old Prints, long may we see, in Air, Thy Guardian Angel hover o'er thy Hair; Still may the Table, where our Fathers sat To eat of Manna, hold its Autocrat; Since surely none of all the Blest can be Home-sick in Heav'n, as we on Earth, for thee. And Oh! whil'st o'er th' embattl'd Crags afar Thy practis'd Eyes gaze down the Gorge of War,

Where thro' the blinding Dust and Heat we fight

Against the Brazen-Helm'd Amalekite,
At Height of Noon, Oh! lift up both those
Hands

To urge new Virtue thro' our fainting Bands,
And when we feel our Sinews nerv'd to strike
Envy and Errour, Shame and Sloth, a-like,
We'll say 'tis well that, while we battle thus,
Our MOSES stands on high 'twixt Heav'n and

[blocks in formation]

From The National Review.
THE LIBERAL MOVEMENT IN ENGLISH
LITERATURE.
II.*

THE CONSERVATISM OF THE EIGHTEENTH
CENTURY.

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 materializing science when they look back upon the ages of free and simple imagination:

Great God! I'd rather be

[ocr errors]

A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn,
So might I, standing on this pleasant lea,
Have glimpses that would make me less for-
lorn;

Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea;
Or hear old Triton blow his wreathed horn.

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 translat ors 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 lib-natural that it should be so. Life, in the erty 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 clue
Upon the growing boy,

• LIVING AGE, No. 2095.

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 two of the greatest poets of the present century (in the face, it is true, of Wordsworth's own critical theory), although Plato, in his dialogues, insists over and over again on the essential antagonism between science and imagination, although I was most careful to disavow all sympathy with Macaulay's pessimist doctrine that "as civilization advances, poetry necessarily declines," the opinions I expressed in the last paper written on the subject in this review, were assailed in many Radical quarters as novel, heretical, perverse, and depressing. A very practical proof was thus afforded that Conservatives are much more in sympathy, than are Radicals, with the scientific doctrine of evolution. It is

Radical view, is simply change; and a Radical is ready to promote every caprice or whim of the numerical majority of the moment in the belief that the change which it effects in the constitution of society will bring him nearer to some ideal state existing in his own imagination. Life, according to the Conservative belief, on the other hand, is growth, and all real growth must be continuous. Thus Conservatism, in whatever sphere, consists in

66

preserving and expanding the stream of traditional national life which has come down to us from our fathers. Conservatism, in politics, as Burke says, bids us act upon the maxim, never wholly or at once to depart from antiquity." Conservatism in art and literature, if we are to believe Sir Joshua Reynolds, lies in discovering the principles that inspired the great masters of early times, and in applying them to our own circumstances. "It is from a careful study of the works of the ancients," says he, "that you will be enabled to attain to the real simplicity of nature; they will suggest many observations that would probably escape you if your study were confined to nature alone. And, indeed, I cannot help suspecting that in this instance the ancients had an easier task than the moderns. They had probably little or nothing to unlearn, as their manners were nearly approaching to this desirable simplicity; while the mod ern artist, before he can see the truth of things, is obliged to remove a veil with which the fashion of the times has thought proper to cover her." Here we have an expression of the true doctrine of Conservative evolution.

poetry of the seventeenth century; would any plain man hesitate to acknowledge that though, in other points besides language, he could detect a certain kinship and sympathy between past and present, yet that they were divided from each other by a wide gulf of imagination and sentiment? But fill in the gap with the eighteenth century, and we feel not only that, in spite of obvious superficial divergencies of taste and perception, we and they occupy a common intellectual ground, but also that, looking back on the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, through the light of the eighteenth, the nature of many of the sympathies which we are dimly conscious of sharing with those ages, is explained by modifications of manners effected in the intermediate period. The natural inference is that the eighteenth century, far from being a time of destruction and revolution, was a necessary link in a long chain of historic national development.

To discuss adequately the Conservatism of the eighteenth century would be the work of a volume rather than of a magazine article. I can but indicate or suggest what appears to me to be the genIn this sense the eighteenth century, eral "lie" of the ground, and illustrate which is the subject of the present paper, my view by reference to the opinions of seems to me to have played a highly Con- some of the most representative Englishservative part in the history of English men of the century. For the purposes of religion, politics, art, and literature. To my argument the great point to remember many, no doubt, the statement will sound is that there has been no breach in the paradoxical. The eighteenth century has continuity of our social development. been constantly represented to us in mod- Though our annals are sufficiently stained ern criticism as the pioneer of the great with violence and bloodshed, though we revolution in thought and manners, which have never shrunk from settling with the has been proceeding on the Continent sword differences too radical to be com since 1789, and which has, of course, exer- posed with the tongue, we have never cut cised an important influence on our own ourselves off, after the manner of France history. But, as far as England is con- at the end of the last century, from the cerned, I think it may be demonstrated sources of our historical life. We have, that the mission of the eighteenth century therefore, as yet experienced no convulwas to provide a safe mode of transition sions arising out of the complete separa. from the manners of mediæval to those of tion between Church and State; till remodern society. Suppose, for a moment, cently there has been no wide-spread that this century was eliminated from our confiscation of property; no one has yet history, and that we were obliged to carry called for a Code Napoleon. If the Reforback our thought, without halting-place, tomation produced sharp conflicts in consethe ideas and sentiments embodied in Sir quence of the dispute about the headship Philip Sydney's "Arcadia," the " Faery of the Church, the life-blood of the paQueen," or the fashionable metaphysical rochial system continued to circulate

their argument. Look at Butler, they say; it is plain that he has the depressed air of a beaten man; the low ground on which he rests his arguments is a proof of what we say. Who would believe in a probable God? And, of course, it is undeniable that Butler's whole method of argument gives a handle to any one who chooses to reason in this captious and superficial manner. Such an opportunity is obvi ously offered in the following typical passage:

almost as quietly as it circulated in the days of the "Canterbury Tales." A violent collision between the extreme principles of monarchy and republicanism no doubt overthrew, for a short period, the constitution in Church and State; but society remained unimpaired, and, finding itself completely out of harmony with the order that had been imposed on it, restored the old Constitution in 1660 and defined it in 1688. It can scarcely be doubted that the continuity of tradition has been thus preserved, because the best The evidence of religion then being adminds in the nation have enlisted them-mitted real, those who object against it as not selves in the cause of order, and have satisfactory, i.e., as not being what they wish made it the object of their deepest study it, plainly forget that this is the very condition how to reconcile this with the claims of of our being; for satisfaction, in this sense, rational liberty. If, therefore, we can see does not belong to such a creature as man. how Butler, for instance, sought to advance the cause of Christianity in his age, how Burke interpreted the Constitution, and how Pope developed the traditions of English poetry, we shall have a fairly clear conception of the nature of English Conservatism, religious, political, and literary, in the eighteenth century. It may be objected that it is fantastic to look for a common principle running through so many different spheres of activity. But it appears to me that in all of them the same intellectual tendency may be traced

namely, an instinctive acknowledgment of the truth that all spiritual, political, and artistic development must proceed in conformity with an ancestral law, the authority of which is not to be questioned, and which must be frankly obeyed by every individual who wishes to be completely free.

Only a man, urges the agnostic philoso. pher, who is conscious that he has very little to say for himself, would resort to a pessimistic argument in defence of such a high matter as revealed religion. But those who argue like this show a strange inability to recognize the relative strength of their own and their adversary's posi tion. They seem to regard Christianity merely as a speculative system which must stand or fall on purely intellectual grounds. But as a matter of fact the vast power of Christianity is derived from a practical and moral source. It is in possession of men's souls and spirits. Nineteen centuries have established its dominion over the conscience of the greatest nations of the world. The members of those nations have had their moral ideas formed in infancy on the assumption of the truth of Revelation, long before it is To begin with Butler, whose attitude in possible for them to examine the testithis respect often causes his reasoning to mony by which the authority of Revelabe misunderstood. The modern assail- tion is supported. The opponents of ants of Christianity assume that ever Christianity must therefore undermine since the Renaissance an intellectual the conscience of Christendom, before they movement has been going on which has can hope to weaken materially the belief little by little been undermining the cause in the divine authority of revealed reliof revealed religion. The Reformation, gion. The burden of proof lies with them. they argue, took away so much; the eigh-And of this fact the defenders of Christeenth century destroyed so much more; tianity have always shown themselves to the fall of the fortress before the historical and scientific criticism of modern days is inevitable. Singularly enough they point to the attitude of the great divines of the eighteenth century as evidence in favor of

be perfectly aware. As they have been, naturally, men of ardent piety and devotion, the real argument that has weighed with them has been the spiritual experience of mankind. They see the neces

« VorigeDoorgaan »