Coleridge and the other members of the Lake School would never have
dreamt of calling themselves anything but warm friends of liberty; the
days were past when the reactionaries called themselves by another
name. Coleridge wrote one of his most beautiful poems, the _Ode to
France_, in the form of a hymn to liberty, to his constant love for
which he calls clouds, waves, and forests to testify; and Wordsworth,
who dedicated two long series of his poems to liberty, regarded himself
as her acknowledged champion. A cursory glance at the works of these
poets might well leave us with the impression that they were as true
lovers of liberty as Moore, or Shelley, or Byron. But the word liberty
in their mouths meant something different from what it did in Moore's,
or Shelley's, or Byron's. To understand this we must dissect the word
by means of two simple questions: freedom, from what?--liberty, to do
what?
To these conservative poets freedom is a perfectly definite thing,
a right which England has and the other countries of Europe have
not--the right of a country to govern itself, un-tyrannised over by
an autocratic ruler of foreign extraction. The country which has this
privilege is free. By liberty, then, the men in question understood
freedom from foreign political tyranny; there is no thought of liberty
of action in their conception at all. Look through Wordsworth's
_Sonnets Dedicated to Liberty_, and see what it is they celebrate.
It is the struggle of the different nations against Napoleon, who is
described as a species of Antichrist. (Scott calls him "the Devil on
his burning throne.")
The poet mourns the conquest of Spain, Switzerland, Venice, the Tyrol,
by the French; he chants the praises of Hofer, the undaunted, of brave
Schill, and daring Toussaint L'Ouverture, the men who ventured to face
the fierce conquerors; and he sings with quite as great admiration
of the King of Sweden, who with romantically chivalrous folly threw
down the gauntlet to Napoleon, and proclaimed his longing for the
restoration of the Bourbons. (Ere long Victor Hugo and Lamartine, in
their character of supporters of the Legitimist monarchy, followed
suit in singing the praises of the Swedish king and his son, Prince
Gustavus Vasa.) Hatred of Napoleon becomes aversion for France. In one
of the sonnets ("Inland, within a hollow vale, I stood") Wordsworth
tells how the "barrier flood" between England and France for a moment
seemed to him to have dwindled to the dimensions of a river, and how he
shrank from the thought of "the frightful neighbourhood"; in another he
rejoices in the remembrance of the great men and great books England
has produced, and remarks that France has brought forth "no single
volume paramount ... no master spirit," that with her there is "equally
a want of books and men."
He always comes back to England. His sonnets are one long declaration
of love to the country for which he feels "as a lover or a child," the
country of which he writes: "Earth's best hopes are all with thee." He
follows her through her long war, celebrating, like Southey, each of
her victories; and it is significant of his attitude that, appended
to the _Sonnets Dedicated to Liberty_, we find the great, pompous
thanksgiving ode for the battle of Waterloo. We of to-day ask what kind
of liberty it was that Waterloo gained; but we know full well that the
group of poets whose heroes were the national heroes--Pitt, Nelson, and
Wellington, and who sang the praises of the English constitution as
being in itself liberty, and lauded England as the model nation, won a
degree of favour with the majority of their countrymen to which their
great poetic antagonists have not even yet attained. Wordsworth and his
school considered the nation ideal as it was, whereas the others tried
to compel it to turn its eyes towards an ideal, not only unattained,
but as yet unrecognised; the former flattered it, and were rewarded
with laurels; the latter educated and castigated it, and were spurned
by it. Scott was offered the post of Poet Laureate, and Southey and
Wordsworth in turn occupied it; but to this day the English nation has
shown no public recognition of what it owes to Shelley and Byron.[1]
And the reason is, that these men's conception of liberty was utterly
different from that of the Lake School. To them it was not realised in
a nation or a constitution--for it was no accomplished, finished thing;
neither was their idea of the struggle for liberty realised in a highly
egoistic war against a revolutionary conqueror. They felt strongly what
an absence of liberty, political as well as intellectual, religious as
well as social, there might be under a so-called _free_ constitution.
They had no inclination to write poems in honour of the glorious
attainments of the human race, and more especially of their own
countrymen; for in the so-called land of freedom they felt a terrible,
oppressive want of freedom--of liberty to think without consideration
of recognised dogmas, to write without paying homage to public opinion,
to act as it was natural to men of their character to act, without
injury from the verdict of those who, because they had no particular
character of their own, were the most clamorous and unmerciful
condemners of the faults which accompanied independence, originality,
and genius. They saw that in this "free" country the ruling caste
canted and lied, extorted and plundered, curbed and constrained quite
as much as did the one great autocrat with his absolute power--and
without his excuse, the authority of intellect and of genius.
To the poets of the Lake School, coercion was not coercion when it
was _English_, tyranny was not tyranny when it was practised under a
_constitutional monarchy_, hostility to enlightenment was not hostility
to enlightenment when it was displayed by a _Protestant_ church. The
Radical poets called coercion coercion, even when it proceeded to
action with the English flag flying and the arms of England as its
policemen's badge; they cherished towards monarchs generally, the
objection of the Lake School poets to absolute monarchs; they desired
to free the world not only from the dominion of the Roman Catholic
priesthood, but from priestly tutelage of every description. When they
heard poets of the other school, who in the ardour of youth had been
as progressive as themselves, extolling the Tory Government of England
with the fervour which distinguishes renegades, they could not but
regard them as enemies of liberty. Therefore it is that Shelley, in his
sonnet to Wordsworth, writes:--
"In honoured poverty thy voice did weave
Songs consecrate to truth and liberty.
Deserting these, thou leavest me to grieve,
Thus having been, that thou shouldst cease to be."
Therefore it is that Byron is tempted again and again "to cut up
Southey like a gourd." And therefore it is that the love of liberty
of the Radical poets is a divine frenzy, a sacred fire, of which not
a spark is to be found in the Platonic love of the Lake School. When
Shelley sings to liberty:--
"But keener thy gaze than the lightning's glare,
And swifter thy step than the earthquake's tramp;
Thou deafenest the rage of the ocean; thy stare
Makes blind the volcanoes; the sun's bright lamp
To thine is a fen-fire damp;"
we feel that this liberty is not a thing which we can grasp with our
hands, or confer as a gift in a constitution, or inscribe among the
articles of a state-church. It is the eternal cry of the human spirit,
its never-ending requirement of itself; it is the spark of heavenly
fire which Prometheus placed in the human heart when he formed it, and
which it has been the work of the greatest among men to fan into the
flame that is the source of all light and all warmth in those who feel
that life would be dark as the grave and cold as stone without it. This
liberty makes its appearance in each new century with a new name. In
the Middle Ages it was persecuted and stamped out under the name of
heresy; in the sixteenth century it was championed and opposed under
the name of the Reformation; in the seventeenth it was sentenced to
the stake as witchcraft and atheism; in the eighteenth it became first
a philosophical gospel, and then, through the Revolution, a political
power; in the nineteenth it receives from the champions of the past the
new nickname of Radicalism.
What the poets of the Lake School extolled was a definite, actually
existing _sum of liberties_--not liberty. What the revolutionary poets
extolled was undoubtedly true liberty; but their conception was so
extremely ideal, that in practical matters they too often shot beyond
the mark. In the weakening of all established government they saw
only the weakening of bad government; in the half-barbaric revolts of
oppressed races they saw the dawn of perfect liberty. Shelley had so
little knowledge of his fellow-men that he thought the great victory
would be won if he could exterminate kings and priests at a blow;
and Byron's life was almost over before he learned by experience how
few republican virtues the European revolutionists leagued together
in the name of liberty possessed. The poets of the Lake School were
safeguarded against the generous delusions and overhastiness of the
Radical poets; but posterity has derived more pleasure and profit from
the aberrations due to the love of liberty in the latter than from the
carefully hedged in and limited Liberalism of the former.
[1] This year (1875) Disraeli, as Chairman of the Byron Memorial
Committee, has started a subscription for the erection of a statue to
Byron on some prominent site in London.