THE AGE OF ROMANTICISM

THE period which extends roughly from 1780 to 1830 is usually called the Age of Romanticism. It was distinctly a time of reaction, a reassertion of the poetic nature always strong in the English people. Towards the end of the eighteenth century there came a general protest against the cold conformity to rule that had been the aim of writers under Anne and the early Georges. The result was that imagination got the upper hand and that the age became one of enthusiasm and poetry instead of one of sophistication and prose. Yet men had been taught a lesson by the school of Pope. The Elizabethans, as the Rev. Stopford Brooke points out, had followed chiefly the instincts of nature; the Augustans, on the other hand, had lost themselves in artificial devices. It remained for the Romanticists to combine the two art and nature. This period, therefore, produced many great poets; it stands, in fact, next to the great age of Elizabeth in literary significance.

The beginnings of the Romantic reaction can be traced underground into the very strongholds of the Augustans. Faint signs of it begin in the hey-day of Pope's despotism; and though Dr. Johnson, still true to the Augustan traditions, made fun of the ballads which his friend Percy collected in 1765, and scourged Macpherson for forging in Ossian what Johnson held to be contemptible stuff, yet ballad and epic were alike trumpet-calls in the Romantic movement.

The most general characteristics of this period are freedom from restraint and a love for the strange and the picturesque, what Walter Pater has called "strangeness added to beauty." For purposes of study, however, it will be found convenient to subdivide into five heads, though it must be remembered that no writers so defy glib classification as the Romantic writers and that the ticketing of poets with this or that characteristic is a fatal practice. (1) Men, wearying of the artificial fripperies of the Queen Anne age, began to seek natural beauty. At first they had resort only to quiet, rural, noon-day nature; but soon the interest deepened into a fondness for wild and awe-inspiring scenery, for the mountains and the storm-swept sea. (2) Another feature was the revival of the Middle Ages, a keen interest in ancient tales of mystery and romantic deeds, a love of the picturesqueness and pageantry of olden times. This is the widest characteristic of the time; it has, in fact, given the name Romantic to the period. (3) A phase in common with the French Revolution was a growing sympathy with the life of the poor, a sympathy felt more keenly by individual poets, such as Burns and Wordsworth, than by the people as a whole. (4) A very natural development, too, which resulted from greater freedom of thought and a more inquiring spirit, was a more genuine, fundamental philosophy. In many cases of morbid or highly emotional men this brought about over-wrought self-analysis, with the double result of great advance in thought and of frequent melancholia. Such Hamlet-moods may be found in nearly all the poets. (5) Finally, the verseform kept pace with the freedom of thought. Poets, emancipated from the tyranny of the heroic couplet,

interested in the literatures of all ages, tried many different metres. At first they followed chiefly Spenser and Milton, but soon they revived ballad stanza, the Italian "ottava rima," the sonnet, and a variety of lyrical

measures.

In such an age of emotion and spontaneity most of the greater writers were of course poets. There were, to be sure, many able prose writers, such as Scott, Lamb, De Quincey; but it is a significant fact that nearly all the prose-writers tried their hand at poetry: the age was decidedly a poetic age.

ROBERT BURNS

It is significant that in speaking of the greatest Scotch poet we nine times in ten call him Bobbie Burns- a pleasant familiarity inspired only by a few great writers, such as Kit Marlowe and Dick Steele. To the readers of Burns's songs, he will ever be the blithesome Ayrshire farmer-boy who whistled and sang at the plow-tail. Indeed, as Carlyle points out, in one aspect he never wholly grew to full manhood; he died a youth in his thirty-seventh year, full of the exuberant emotions and delusions of youth, still unsettled in moral conviction. Yet in another sense he grew up all too soon; blossomed and flourished in a day, exhausted his strength like an unpruned plant. These two sides of Burns's nature remain distinct to the end. The one showed him at his best, truly a great genius, sincerely affectionate, of a fine independent spirit, bursting with fullness of song. The other manifested itself, by strange contrast, in his inconstancy, in his moral irresolution, in a deal of false pride. At first glance it is difficult to believe that Bobbie Burns, who wrote The Cotter's Saturday Night and Bonnie Doon, was the same person as Rab the Ranter, who drank away a good portion of his life, made irreverent songs about the clergy, and was the lover of a dozen women. As we come to a knowledge of the man's life, however, and of the circumstances in which he was placed, we perceive that he was precisely the person in whom these two characters could find expression - with a splendid and tragic result.

Robert Burns, the son of William Burness [or Burnes] and Agnes Brown, was born on the 25th of January, 1759, in an "auld clay bigging" at Alloway, about two miles from the town of Ayr, Scotland. His father, a poor farmer, did his best for the education of his sons. He instructed them in arithmetic, borrowed books for them on history and theology, and loved to turn aside from his labors or to give up his evenings for "solid conversation" with them. Robert in after life spoke often of the sound training he had received from his father-a man with a good understanding, he wrote to Dr. Moore, of “ men, their manners, and ways," and of a "stubborn ungainly integrity." This education at Ayr made up all of Burns's regular training, except for an early period at the village school and instructions from the excellent Murdoch, a needy teacher engaged by Mr. Burness and some neighbors while the family lived at Mt. Oliphant. But the boy read so eagerly that by manhood he had acquired a respectable stock of book-learning, to say nothing of an education which his natural keenness and sympathy assimilated from everything he touched. At this early date the story of Sir William Wallace, he afterwards wrote, "poured a Scottish prejudice into my veins, which will boil along there, till the flood gates of life shut in eternal rest."

When Robert was seven his father moved to a farm at Mt. Oliphant, about two miles away. Here for eleven years the father and growing sons toiled to squeeze out of barren soil a wretched existence-the life which Burns afterwards referred to as "the unceasing moil of a galley-slave." In 1777 the family took another farm, at Lochlea, in the parish of Tarbolton. Robert now