Naturalism as an intellectual tendency in England, makes its appearance
in Wordsworth in the form of love of all the external phenomena of
nature, a habit of storing up natural impressions, and piety towards
animals, children, country people, and the "poor in spirit." With him
as its representative, it strays for a moment into a blind alley,
that of uninspired imitation of nature. In Coleridge, and even more
in Southey, it approaches the German Romanticism of the day, follows
it into the world of legend and superstition, but avoids its worst
excesses by treating Romantic themes in a Naturalistic manner and
keeping an open eye on land and sea and all the elements of reality.
In Scott, Naturalism occupies itself with the character and history
of a whole nation, and in vivid colours paints man as the son of
a race and a period; in Keats, it takes possession of the whole
world of the senses, and reposes for a moment on the neutral ground
between tranquil contemplation of nature and the proclamation of a
gospel of nature and of natural rights. In Moore it becomes erotic,
and espouses Liberalism in politics; the sight of the sufferings of
his native island drives this poet into the ranks of the lovers of
liberty, intellectual and political. In Campbell, it becomes eulogy of
England as Queen of the Sea and expression of English liberal views.
In Landor, it takes the shape of pagan Humanism, of too repellent and
proud a character to win the suffrage of Europe. It is transformed in
Shelley into a soulful love of nature and a poetic Radicalism, which
have at their command poetic gifts of the very highest order; but the
incorporeal universality of Shelley's Naturalism, in combination with
the circumstance that he is much too far ahead of his age, and with his
early death, causes his song to die away unheard, Europe never learning
what a poet she possesses and loses.
Then, like Achilles arising in his wrath after he has burned the body
of Patroclus, Byron, after Shelley's death, arises and lifts up his
mighty voice. European poetry was flowing on like a sluggish, smooth
river; those who walked along its banks found little for the eye to
rest on. All at once, as a continuation of the stream, appeared this
poetry, under which the ground so often gave way that it precipitated
itself in cataracts from one level to another--and the eyes of all
inevitably turn to that part of a river where its stream becomes a
waterfall. In Byron's poetry the river boiled and foamed, and the roar
of its waters made music that mounted up to heaven. In its seething
fury it formed whirlpools, tore itself and whatever came in its way,
and in the end undermined the very rocks. But, "in the midst of the
infernal surge," sat such an Iris as the poet himself has described
in _Childe Harold_--a glorious rainbow, the emblem of freedom and
peace--invisible to many, but clearly seen by all who, with the sun
above them in the sky, place themselves in the right position.
It presaged better days for Europe.