One of the first and chief things observable in this English literary
group, is that it has certain characteristics in common with the whole
European intellectual tendency of the period. These characteristics
are universal because of the universal existence of their cause.
Napoleon was threatening Europe with a world-wide Empire. To escape
annihilation, all the threatened nationalities either instinctively
or deliberately re-invigorated themselves from the sources of their
national life. The national spirit is awakened and spreads and grows in
Germany during the War of Liberation; in Russia it bursts into flames
along with the ancient capital of the country; in England it inspires
enthusiasm for Wellington and Nelson, and vindicates in bloody battles,
from the Nile to Waterloo, the ancient English claim to the sovereignty
of the sea; in Denmark the cannonade of the battle of Copenhagen
awakens a new national spirit and produces a new literature. It is this
patriotic spirit which leads all the different nations to the eager
study of their own history and their own customs, their own legends and
folk-lore. The devotion to everything national incites to the study and
the literary representation of the "people"--that is to say, the lower
classes of society, with whom the literature of the eighteenth century
had not concerned itself. The reaction against French as a universal
language brings even dialect into high repute.
In _Germany_, as we have already seen, patriotism led to enthusiasm
for the country's past, for the Middle Ages--their faith, their
superstitions, and their social order. In _Italy_ we have, in Manzoni's
religious verse, an apparent return to Catholicism. The faith which
had petrified into dogma, and meant renunciation of the flesh, is
upheld as synonymous with poetry and morality; it is transformed from
a religion into an art _motif_. Manzoni's religious enthusiasm is the
same enthusiasm as that which accompanied the Pope back to Rome and
inspired Alexander with the idea of the Holy Alliance. Even _France_,
the country which had produced Napoleon, was driven by the spirit of
the age into a path leading in much the same direction as that taken
by Germany; the new French literary movement was directed against
the Academy, against the so-called classical, _i.e._, universal,
cosmopolitan literature; the age of Louis XIV. was neglected, and the
poets of the sixteenth century, Du Bellay, Ronsard, nay, even the poor
grotesque poets whom Boileau had scoffed at and rejected, came into
vogue again. (Victor Hugo's attack on the literary opinions of the
period previous to his own; Sainte-Beuve's earliest literary criticism;
Théophile Gautier's _Les Grotesques_.) In _Denmark_ at the beginning of
the century it was mainly in the wake of the German current that men's
minds moved. They assumed an antagonistic attitude to French culture.
But in the second and equally important stage of the literary movement,
the antagonism becomes an antagonism to everything foreign, and more
especially to Germany, which had for so long played the part of the
oppressor in Denmark.[1]
In _England_ we find the same essential features which distinguish the
movement in all the other countries. The influence of France, which
in the eighteenth century had been paramount in the upper classes of
society, was shaken off. Pope, the last poet of the classical school,
did not long remain a master in the eyes of the younger generation.
They began to pluck at the little man's elaborate wig and trample over
the trim beds of his garden. And now it became apparent what a powerful
intellectual reserve force the British nation possessed in those
countries which lay remote from the centre of political life, fresh,
unexhausted by civilisation. Ireland, which in the eighteenth century
had produced such a thinker as Swift and such a writer as Goldsmith,
owned a treasury of lovely melodies which, as soon as a great lyric
poet lent them words, were poured forth by all the singing throats of
Europe. The Welsh collected and published their old songs and poems.
And in Scotland, to which country the mean, depressing conditions
prevailing among the English industrial classes had not as yet spread,
but where a people, proud of its past and its land, preserved its
national songs, its superstitions, and its political peculiarities,
there appeared in the second half of the eighteenth century, as a
protest against cold reason and artificiality in poetry, Macpherson's
_Ossian_. The influence of _Ossian_ was alike great upon Alfieri
and Foscolo in Italy, upon Herder and Goethe in Germany, and upon
Chateaubriand in France. On it follow in England Percy's collection
of old English, and in Scotland Walter Scott's collection of Scotch,
ballads.
But in the interval between these two publications our attention is
demanded by one of those literary currents flowing from one country to
another and back again, which it is our chief aim to trace, and which
in this case is remarkably plain. Not long after Percy's _Reliques_
appeared, a luckless young German lawyer in Government employ, Bürger
by name, was appointed to a small post in Göttingen, where he lived
in straitened circumstances and in unhappy and demoralising marital
relations with two sisters. Into this man's house Percy's book finds
its way. It makes a powerful impression on him, and fires him with
the desire to write something which had long been proscribed by the
rules of poetical art, but which he himself calls (to Baggesen, see
_The Labyrinth_) poetry proper, namely, a ballad. He begins the
famous _Lenore_ and works at it slowly, week after week, with such a
conviction of the importance of the step he is taking that his letters
to his friends are full of nothing else. The ballad appears, and is
soon read in every country in Europe. In the year 1795 an Edinburgh
young lady introduces it to the notice of another lawyer in Crown
employ; and this young man, Walter Scott by name, who was also to be an
author, and a very much greater one, makes his literary _début_ with
a translation of _Lenore_ and another ballad of Bürger's, _The Wild
Huntsman_. His translations meeting with a favourable reception, Scott
began to regard himself as a poet. And it was upon the basis of these
translations and that of _Götz von Berlichingen_, which he published in
1799, that the national Scottish Romanticism of his poetry was founded.
There is, then, originally in this literature a distinct trace of the
general European reaction against the eighteenth century. The strong
national feeling which superseded the feeling of cosmopolitanism is to
be found in England in Wordsworth in the form of patriotic poetical
description, in Southey in the form of eulogy (at times partly, at
times purely, official) of the Royal Family and the national exploits,
in the Scottish-born Campbell in the form of passionately British
songs of liberty and war; whilst Scott and Moore are positive literary
personifications of Scotland and Ireland. The universal return to the
popular has its chief representative and spokesman in Wordsworth,
whose special theme is the life of the lower and lowest classes. The
predilection for the Middle Ages is strongest in Scott, who combines
the antiquarian's delight in memories and survivals of the past with
the Tory politician's desire to represent the traditional in the most
attractive light. The Romanticism of superstition finds its poet in
Coleridge, whose studied childishness and simplicity are near of
kin to Tieck's; and it is Coleridge, too, who, thoroughly imbued
with the doctrines of the German philosophy of the day, enters a
general scientific protest against those of the age of enlightenment.
His philosophy is quite un-English; it is, in contradiction to the
experimental nature of English science, purely transcendental; it is
conservative, pious, and historical, because the philosophy preceding
it had been radical, infidel, and metaphysical; it is a "Schellingism,"
which at first endeavours to preserve as many of the philosophic
conclusions of the preceding century as possible, but which, ever more
obstinate and ever more narrow-minded, hastens towards the opposite
extreme from that which had proved fatal to the preceding period. The
confusedly fantastic side of Romanticism is represented by Southey with
his Oriental narrative poems; and as for the passionate, despairing
heroes of Chateaubriand and Romanticism generally, we find them, more
passionate and more manly, in the works of Byron; whilst Shelley's
spiritualism and dissolution of all solid form into ethereal music
recalls the ardour and vagueness of Novalis.
[1] This "oppression" was what today would be called "cultural
imperialism". It should be remembered that the Danish kings were also
German dukes (of Schleswig and Holstein) and very properly patronised
German artists. In Denmark proper there was after 1800 a reaction
against the German influence. Also Brandes is bitter because of the
German annexation of the Danish part of Schleswig in 1864, but that
happened half a century later and Denmark was not exactly an innocent
victim.--Transcriber's note.