Page:Catholic Encyclopedia, volume 5.djvu/533

ary writers of the century. Both Johnson and Burke are touched with the romantic spirit, but Johnson would have vigorously repudiated any charge of romanticism in his work, and indeed he stood as a great bulwark against the flood of new thought and feeling which, becoming apparent after the death of Pope, had been rising little by little, especially in poetry, ever since the twenties. The great romantic movement, so difficult to define, and yet so easy to trace, becomes the supreme point of interest for the literary historian in the later eighteenth century. There is no class of poetry written during this time but stands in some relation to it, and its influence, as we have said, may be seen, though less clearly, in many of the prose writings.

This movement was for the widening and deepening of literature. New fields of subject-matter were taken in hand, and the treatment of these gradually became more imaginative and emotional than it had been since the Elizabethan age. Nature and human life, after suffering from somewhat frigid treatment at the hands of the classical school, seemed to unstiffen and to become warm, living, and natural with the romantic writers.

Sir Walter Scott
After Painting by Sir Henry Raeburn,
Collection of the Earl of Home

But this was a very gradual process, and began in the very heart of the classical movement; we may even see traces of it in the unrealized longings of Pope himself, who loved Spenser, and who wished he could write a fairy tale. We see the change coming in the gradual rise of fresh meters, and especially of blank verse, in opposition to the heroic couplet; in fact the struggle of romantic against classic centered to some extent round these two forms.

But just as marked is the choice of new subject-matter. "Nature for her own sake"—natural description imbedded in other matter, or even forming the sole subject of poems—now occupy the writer. Human life, in aspects neglected by the school of Pope, begins to assert itself. And all this new matter, treated first in a melancholy moralizing spirit, gradually grows in imaginative strength, simplicity, and naturalness, until we reach the poetry of Wordsworth and Coleridge, in which the movement is brought to its height and at the same time takes on a new freshness and impetus. James Thomson (1700-1748) published his blank-verse poem of "The Seasons" in 1726-30, and, even though there are many traces in it of the school of Pope, it sounds the first clear note of revolt. It is the first blank-verse poem of importance in the century, and the first important poem devoted to natural description. Many new elements are found in it, too, such as the interest in the poor and the laboring class, and in lands beyond England, as well as a new feeling and affection for animals. In 1748, the year of his death, Thomson published his "Castle of Indolence", the best imitation of Spenser's verse and manner that exists, and this was another sign of change. There were many poems written in blank verse or in Spenserian stanza between this poet and the work of Gray, whose contribution to the romantic movement is seen perhaps most clearly in his translations from the Icelandic and Gaelic, where he opened up a new field of subject-matter for the interest of readers and the use of poets. And Gray's poems, small in quantity, but exquisitely finished, were not his only work; as a prose writer he gives us in his letters and journals first-hand and beautiful descriptions of nature in unaffected English. But his poetry is less simple, and, with its restraint of manner, might in some aspects be claimed by the classical school. It is in the decade after his death that we find the movement towards the more natural style expressing itself unmistakably in the half-mournful glamor of Macpherson's rhythmical prose "translations" of the Celtic poetry of Ossian, in the poems of the unhappy boy-genius Chatterton, and in the collection of "Percy Ballads".

Following on these, however, there is a strong attempt at reaction in the poetry of Dr. Johnson, Churchill, and Goldsmith—though Goldsmith's charming poems are more romantic than he knew. But in the next few years the battle is quickly won for romance by four poets: Burns, Cowper, Crabbe, and Blake, whose significance in the movement is more fully recognized now than it was then. Burns, who wrote the best of his poetry in a mixed Scottish dialect, had been nourished on the best English poets of the past, and the clearness and precision of his verse as well as its satirical and didactic subject-matter belongs to the school of Pope at its best. But, on the other hand, the essential spirit of his satire, in contrast with the detached coldness of Pope's, is a consuming fire, as Swinburne has pointed out, while his songs, full of melody and passionate feeling, though all in the line of previous Scottish poetry, were new as regards England, and were truly romantic in tone and manner. There are poems and passages of verse that we wish Burns had never written, but the largest part of his work belongs to our great literary store of things noble and humane.

In William Cowper (1731-1800) we come to a poet whose influence is more and more recognized as of first importance in the romantic trend of eighteenth-century poetry. Living the most retired of lives, and not writing much until over fifty years of age, he has left a body of poetry marked with his own gentle, affectionate, humorous, and sometimes tragic genius, much of which has become classic in English. His best long poem, "The Task", in blank verse, contains his most original work in the clear and simple descriptions of natural scenery. He also, like Gray, was one of the best of our letter-writers. George Crabbe (1754-1832) wrote nearly all his poetry in the heroic couplet, but used that form with more freedom than his contemporaries. Much of his work is of the story kind, and some of his poems are like novels in verse. Though he chose a hackneyed form for his work, and though all his sketches and stories tend to edification in a didactic way, he is never dull, and his analysis of motive and temperament and his realism are strangely modern in the antiquated setting of the heroic couplet. His work deserves more notice than English readers as a rule give to it. William Blake (1757-1827), the fourth of these poets, is one of those geniuses who belong to no one time or place. Some of the simple and charming poems in his two best-known little volumes "Songs of Innocence" and "Songs of Experience", might have been written by an Elizabethan, while his long mystical works in verse, not truly poetical, show him in the light of a dreamer whose dreams are rooted in some spiritual reality which only a very few readers can discern with him. But his poetry, as a whole,