แ say it is better to take the entire period | considering proceeded mainly upon three which lies between the French Revolu- lines literary, speculative, and histortion and the English Reform Bill as repical: it reformed our style, it stimulated resenting the bridge which spans the gulf self-inspection and self-interrogation, and between the old régime and the new. The it supplied a new field for the imaginayear 1820, Mrs. Oliphant's other limit, tion, not only in the boundless hopes seems a purely arbitrary date; whereas excited by the theory of human progress, the other, 1832, undeniably marks off a but also in the seductive contrast with its period in many respects complete within more lawless and irreligious aspects preitself; and denotes the farthest point in sented by the better side of feudalism. the nineteenth century which was reached The Revolution generated at one and the by the traditions of the eighteenth. It is same time a new belief in the future, and convenient, however, to regard the transi- a new belief in the past. And both struck tion period as coëval with the French their roots deeply into the literature of Revolution, and combining in its features that memorable era. both the sympathy evoked by that event To begin with the first of these changes in its earlier stages, and the repulsion "the return to nature" in the matter which it inspired in its later ones. The of literary expression Wordsworth, in world witnessed simultaneously a great his well-known essay prefixed to the and sudden insurrection against the high- Lyrical Ballads," has told us with suffily complicated and artificial forms which cient clearness what was meant by it. It both governments, society, and literature is in fact, though not in name, an elabohad at that time assumed. Greater sim-rate answer to the theory of poetic diction plicity, "a return to nature," was every laid down in Johnson's "Life of Dryden." where the cry of the insurgents. The Johnson's account of the matter can hardaugust and the venerable were every-ly be put in fewer words than his own. where in danger of being confounded Every language of a learned nation with what was merely cumbrous and necessarily divides itself into diction schopedantic; and literature, with its brocade lastick and popular, grave and familiar, and its ruffles and its velvet, lost some- elegant and gross; and from a nice disthing also for a time of greater value-tinction of these different parts arises a the respect for dignity, for manner, for the elaborate beauty and consummate art which had been matured under the old régime. The injury, however, was but temporary; and, had it been greater than it was, would have been more than com-authors; our speech lay before them in a pensated for by the new inspiration which heap of confusion, and every man took the French Revolution brought with it. for every purpose what chance might offer The dry bones were warm with life again. him. Poets again began to see visions, and to dream dreams. The eighteenth century had found its goddess in the valley, walking with plenty in the maize, or listening to the bees and the wood-pigeons; the new generation sang to her on the mountain heights, and on the silver horns; and if the wonders which she showed them came too often through the ivory gate, the delusion was at all events in some respects beautiful and generous. Taking, therefore, the French Revolution as our starting-point, we may say that the reaction or transition we are here great part of the beauty of style. But if we except a few minds, the favorites of nature to whom their own original rectitude was in the place of rules, this delicacy of selection was little known to our "There was, then, before the time of Dryden no poetical diction, no system of words at once refined from the grossness of domestick use, and free from the harshness of terms appropriated to particular arts. Words too familiar, or too remote, defeat the purpose of a poet. From those sounds which we hear on small or on coarse occasions, we do not easily receive strong impressions, or delightful images; and words to which we are nearly strangers, whenever they occur, draw that attention on themselves which they should transmit to things." It is under the second head which we have mentioned that we find, perhaps, the most marked distinction between the poetry of the eighteenth and the poetry of the nineteenth century. The one was ex Wordsworth may be said to have met | laws. In fact, much of what Wordsworth this statement with a point-blank contra- appears to have been attacking had already diction. His contention is that the lan- been ridiculed by Johnson. When someguage which men really speak, the lan- body asked him what he thought of a new guage that is of good conversation, is the volume, he replied that there was a good proper language for poetry; and he draws deal in it of "what was poetry once a distinction between this language and spangled meads, and so forth; showing "the vulgarity and meanness of ordinary that in his opinion there was a popularly life" which does not seem to have been accepted poetic diction which time at all in Johnson's mind when he wrote the events had made ridiculous. above passage. He seems rather to have included both kinds of language here mentioned by Wordsworth under the system of words not "refined from the gross ness of domestic use." There are, in fact, three gradations of speech to be con-clusively objective; and though, of course, sidered in dealing with the controversy. we cannot say that the other has been There is the grave and dignified and elo- either exclusively or even principally subquent prose which may be employed by a jective, it owes a very great part of its great historian, a great preacher, or a charm to the predominance of this elegreat orator; the correct and well-turned, ment. This difference is very conspicuthough withal easy and familiar, prose ous in the treatment of nature by the which distinguishes the best conversation, poets of the two epochs respectively. Bethough the present generation can hardly tween Thomson and Wordsworth, or speak of it from experience; and lastly, Thomson and Tennyson, there is all the there is the language of common life, the difference between admiration and symlanguage in which men express them-pathy. One can almost fancy either of selves when they ask you the news or invite you to dinner, or describe their last dispute with a cabman. Now that the first of the three was perfectly suitable to poetry Johnson could hardly have denied, for he has used it himself. But then it is certainly not the language which even the most accomplished men use in ordinary conversation; not the language | to which Wordsworth is referring as that which is suitable for poetry. The consideration of the higher kind of prose style, however, seems to point out the true conclusion. Whatever thoughts raise us out of ordinary life, and above the level of our ordinary observation, have a claim to be expressed in language appropriate to themselves, and equally removed from familiar or vulgar associations. Whether they are in prose or verse makes no difference. Now all poetry has this elevating purpose in view, whether it succeeds or not; and therefore we agree in the main with Johnson that there is such a thing as poetic diction very properly to be distinguished from the language of conversation, however select, to use Wordsworth's own expression, it may be. And it was in this point that English literature underwent the least change of all during the transition period. Poetic diction held its ground, purified and improved no doubt by the influence of Wordsworth, but maintaining intact its personal identity and its own independent the two later poets addressing the trees and the hill as the child addresses the dog, "Cannot you talk?” Thomson's descriptions of nature are very beautiful indeed; and with the lower kind of imag ination, if imagination we are to call it, he is abundantly endowed. Collins's "Ode to Evening" is superior even to Thomson; Thomson has nothing equal to the stanzas immediately preceding and following the beautiful lines, And marks o'er all Thy dewy fingers draw was We used to be taught at school that what was called "personification" one of the highest of poetical gifts; the personification of the seasons or of the powers of nature, the highest of them all; and so perhaps, as Johnson said of spangled meads, "it was once." One can hardly, however, allow it to be so now, though when so exquisitely done as it is in Collins it belongs to a very high quality of poetic power and affords infinite delight to the genuine lover of nature. Yet even here we miss what we find in Wordsworth, in Keats, and, above all, in our own Tennyson, that subtle sympathy with nature, the source perhaps of what Mr. Ruskin calls the " 'pathetic fallacy," but also of something more than he himself seems to include in that term. The imputing to nature herself the emotions which we ex melancholy; the feeling of loneliness, wildness, and gloom, of something half akin to fear, which is characteristic of such spots, and which it is the object of the poet to awaken. Another eminent instance of it is to be found in "The May Queen: When the flowers come again, mother, beneath You will never see me more in the long grey perience or derive from the contemplation | Here we do not get merely the sound of of her is the pathetic fallacy: "The cruel, the water, but the whole moral effect of crawling foam; "the "splendid tear" of the scene at the same time: the sense of the passion-flower, and so forth. Here the poet vividly reproduces conceptions suggested to him by his own senses. But we find passages in all the three poets we have named which go beyond this; and show a power of representing in words, not directly calling attention to them, the mysterious tones in which nature occa sionally responds to our own emotions and sentiments. There is no fallacy here; not at least of the kind described by Mr. Ruskin; for nothing is imputed to nature; but words are chosen so happily appropriate at one and the same time to the aspect of nature and to the mood of the writer or his characters, that they suggest a far deeper sympathy between the two than the lines above quoted. It may be a suggestio falsi. But it is not the peculiar suggestio falsi which Mr. Ruskin criticises; and that it is a fallacy at all would probably have been denied stoutly by Wordsworth, who, in the lines on Tintern Abbey, seems to mean that with him the feeling was a reality, based on some mysterious affinity only to be appreciated by the poet. airs blow cool On the oat-grass, and the sword-grass, and the bullrush by the pool. How admirably in harmony with the situation and with all the feelings which belong to it is the picture which the dying girl sets before us. There is always a certain sadness in evening, but one kind of scenery brings it out more strongly than another, and the wide pasture fields looking grey by comparison with the meadows, and the lonely pool in the corner, with the long, sighing grass and rushes, evoke it in its full extent. There Neither Byron nor Shelley have exhib-is cheerfulness even by night about copses ited this particular poetic faculty to the and cornfields which would have been same extent as Keats and Wordsworth, fatal to the desired effect. as they represent rather the political and social than the metaphysical influence of the Revolution. Mr. Ruskin objects to the use of the word "subjective" to denote the view of nature as she presents herself to the mind of the individual worshipper, taking her color from the emotions which dominate him at the moment. But unless he will supply us with another word equally applicable to other departments of human thought as well as to poetry, we must continue to use it. Those who write or speak of objective and subjective truth may be told that they are wrong, because we do not know what truth is. But that there are the objective and subjective aspects of things we know from our own consciousness. We know that the alleged facts of history and religion assume a various aspect according to whether we look at them from the outside, as they greet us in printed pages, solid and substantial objects in the prospect of the whether we shut our eyes, so to speak, past, named, classified, and defined, or and look at them exclusively through the medium of our own contemplative faculties. And we know not how it can be said that the one view is more true than the other. The latter, however, is certainly the more interesting of the two; and therefore the poets of the reaction, the new heavens and the new earth which who mutatis mutandis, and in compari- the enthusiasts expected to result from son with the poets who preceded them, it — may be said to have taken that view of nature, possess a charm of their own which we look for in vain elsewhere. This new nature-worship was a reaction in part against that worship of the "town," which was another distinguishing trait of the eighteenth century. Towards the year 1790 the idea of the town as the centre of literature and wit and civilization, was fast wearing out. Sick of those conventional pictures of nature which a series of town-bred poets had handed down from generation to generation, like literary heirlooms, like the "topics" supplied of old to university disputants, men of taste and feeling rushed into the opposite extreme, and in their zeal to emancipate nature elevated her to the rank of a goddess. The goddess of reason owed her existence to the same causes. The cultus had its excesses and extravagances no doubt; but when the fermentation was over it left behind it the pure juice of the grape, and of a vintage of no common order. It arose in the second place from the general dissatisfaction with all human institutions which the French Revolution bred in many minds, and an attempt to find in nature what society could no longer supply. Of this particular department of restlessness Rousseau perhaps is the great representative. Another Hellas rears its mountains, But all this time a second reaction had been gradually and silently developing itself, working as it were underground, and only coming to the surface just in time to usher in the nineteenth century. In 1802 appeared the first volume of Scott's "Border Minstrelsy," which was followed, in 1805, by "The Lay of the Last Minstrel;" and the second half of the reaction was now fairly under way. Scott's early bias in favor of romantic poetry is attributed by himself and others to Bishop Percy's "Reliques." There is no doubt that Percy was the pioneer of the movement which in Scott's hands became such a mighty instrument for good both in life and literature. But like the speculative branch of the reaction, it was connected with more general causes. "Scott," says Mr. W. Rossetti, "is not and never can be the poet of literary readers; but it is highly possible for the critical tendency and estimation to be too exclusively literary." Now this is exactly what it had been during the whole of the eighteenth century. Elegance, The introspective and self-conscious which Johnson defines admirably to be spirit which was another distinctive note "the beauty of propriety," was the one of the transition period, was the natural thing needful in the eyes of the literary result of a universal disposition to in- society, which to some extent fulfilled the quire, to sift, and to analyze everything functions of the modern periodical press. that existed in the world, which accompa- Elegance is an excellent thing in its way, nied the dissolution of the ancient Euro- and so is logic. But you may have too pean system. This meets us in all the much of it, and as it was said of a celepoets of the period, and requires little brated college at Oxford fifty years ago, further commentary. The revolutionary that its common room "stunk of logic," enthusiasm in favor of freedom should, so it might be said of English polite lithowever, be compared with what may be erature just a hundred years ago, that it called the rational enthusiasm as we find stunk of elegance. If for elegant we it in Thomson and others, who composed substitute the word classical, and the two set panegyrics on liberty such as was un-in this case are synonymous, we shall see derstood to have been achieved for En- at once the style from which the "Mingland by the splendid aristocrats who strelsy" was a reaction. Men were thoraccepted dedications and bestowed pat-oughly tired of Hayley and Hoole, and ronage. This, however, hardly lasted ready to welcome any great literary innodown to the period with which we start, vator who should offer them some fresh and in which Shelley became the poet of and more stimulating diet. the "religion of humanity." So far the transition has been all in one direction, running parallel with the bright side of the Revolution, redolent of the springtime, and looking forward to But this was not all. Alongside of that sympathy with the social aspects of the Revolution which distinguished the earlier effusions of the Lake school, sprung up a strong military spirit which pervaded all classes of society. The wars of 1756 | power, the purity, and the poetry of Scott's The truth is, that our great struggles with Napoleon woke from their long sleep all the loftiest and most spiritual elements of the national character, and disposed men in every department of thought to look over the heads of commonplace and every-day circumstances, and seek in longforgotten regions the intellectual and moral food for which sudden excitement made them hunger. The Waverley novels, "The Christian Year," and the "Tracts for the Times" were all parts of one great movement, and cannot be severed from each other in any philosophic survey of the epoch now under consideration. It was the return of the imagination after her long banishment to take possession of her rightful inheritance. The queen enjoyed her own again. It was Fox, we think, who used to say that restorations were the worst revolutions; and many people, perhaps, may think that the great feudal and Catholic revival which we owe mainly to Keble and to Scott, has been utterly mischievous and disastrous. Macaulay thought the Waverley novels had done infinite harm. We, however, are concerned merely with their literary history, with the causes which led up to them, and with their influence on our style and character. Of this we think there can be no doubt. The between his style and his diction and that of any of his predecessors. He represents, not so much the freedom of thought, the various emancipations of which the French Revolution was both the cause and the effect, as the great religious renaissance of which Wesley was the author. Men of genius impress their own idiosyncrasies on whatever they write; and Cowper's heroics are not Pope's heroics. But then, no more are Goldsmith's. There is nothing in Cowper more unlike Pope than Goldsmith's description of the village clergyman; and Cowper resembles Goldsmith more than Goldsmith resembles Pope. Nothing can be more unlike than the tone, the 00s, of the three men respectively. But we can detect in Cowper no symptoms of the new birth, of the subjective, brooding, speculative, semi-sceptic spirit, of the rov. ing and lawless spirit, of the romantic and feudal spirit, which constitute the principal characteristics of the revolutionary epoch. Nor do we see in his style any premonition of the new canons which Wordsworth was shortly to put forward. Cowper was a man of the most exquisite taste and refinement - -a perfect English gentleman, as some of his predecessors were not. There is a peculiar grace and delicacy and sweetness, so to speak, in every line he wrote, whether in verse or |