CHAPTER II

THE DAWN OF THE NEW DAY

MR. WATTS-DUNTON, in his essay on "The Renascence of Wonder in Poetry," has characterized the eighteenth century as a period of acceptance; in contrast wherewith he considers the nineteenth century to have been a period of reawakening wonder. There is something more than a half-truth in his suggestion. It is as difficult to define an age as to define a person - and the definition of persons is frankly impossible. All attempts even to characterize them are attended with well-nigh equal danger and fascination. Character is so elusive and yet so momentous a thing that clever talk about it possesses unfailing interest; we are so prone, on the other hand, to jump at conclusions which eventually prove to be our own condemnation, as to make all gossip perilous, and all personal judgement doubtful. Within limits, however, we may admit 'acceptance to have been a characteristic note of the eighteenth century, especially as voiced in its poetry and politer letters. That last adjective indeed was the bane of its literature. Things that would not submit to polish were anathema to Pope and his school. An atmosphere of literal urbanity surrounded their

writing, nowhere more evidently than when nature or the country was the theme. A partial exception may be made in favour of Thomson, whose "Seasons were in some real sense the seasons which we know. But, in general, when the sights and sounds of rural life were dealt with, it was with half-veiled apology and patronage, or with a sentimental affectation for which great literary gifts and exquisite workmanship could ill atone. Goldsmith had a tender heart and an acquaintance at first hand with the sorrows and struggles of the poor; yet there is something about "Sweet Auburn " which irresistibly recalls Marie Antoinette's high-heeled shepherdesses playing at country life in the gardens of Versailles. None the less it was mightily to the taste of Goldsmith's day, and most pronouncedly so, one suspects, when it was most sentimental. "I shall never be tired of Goldsmith's 'Deserted Village'-I shall never look again into Crabbe's 'Village,'" said Mrs. Barbauld characteristically enough to Crabb Robinson; who, it must be added, had himself so much of the spirit of acceptance that he declined to read the later works of this great poet of the poor.'

I have elsewhere maintained' that the nineteenth century has been very largely characterized by the emphasis which it has put upon accomplishmentupon the Deed as contrasted with the Word, the 1 Diary, Dec. 29, 1835.

' Dynamic of Christianity, chap. ii.

form instead of the spirit of revelation. It has been an age of enormously significant discovery, but the results have remained to a large extent in the form of facts, instead of resolving themselves into digestible and assimilable truth. Mr. Watts-Dunton calls it an age of wonder; but it seems rather to have been an age when the capacity for wonder had just begun to awake. The wealth of material which natural science and industrial invention have supplied to life has been so great as to reduce the capacity for reverent wonder in those very regions where we should expect it to have been enhanced. The third quarter of the century wondered truly-but less at the mystery of life, death, and human personality than at its own marvellous achievements. Hence has arisen a sort of scientific dogmatism not infrequently approaching Pharisaism. This sophomoric phase of experience shows signs of passing away, with the realization that mystery is still as great an element as ever in human life, and that the extension of our radius of experience has served only to enlarge-and, be it noted, in proportion to the square of our progress-its already mighty horizon.

It was but natural, therefore, that the great literature of the century should be the product of its earlier half. The sense of a humble and more seemly wonder was upon men then. They had passed through a great political and social transition. Many of them felt the approach of further changes not less

significant than those associated with the French Revolution, although they could not say where these would manifest themselves. But some, looking out with the eye of true clairvoyance, discerned enough of the future to thrill their own and later generations with their prophecies. I do not see how any one can read Tennyson's anticipations of the spiritual significance of Evolution, or contemplate Goethe's vision of the character which the thought of the century was to assume, or even note De Tocqueville's extraordinary prescience of America's opportunity and danger, without acknowledging that a spirit of genuine prophecy was still active in the world's affairs. These seers were not only endowed with the literary gift, but were also entrusted with a message fitted to their day, capable of assimilation by life, and of transformation into goodness. Since, then, it is to the former half of the century that we must look for its greatest and most significant literature, we have now to inquire as to the forerunners and heralds of this new day.

Revolution is proverbially hard to account for. We no sooner think our discovery of its origins to be satisfyingly complete than a new set of causes reveal themselves and must in turn be dealt with. I shall not attempt, therefore, to run to earth the literary influences which finally made Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, and Shelley possible, but shall be content rather to note four significant figures belonging primarily to the eighteenth century, but into

the heritage of whose influence the nineteenth century richly entered.

William Cowper was the last man in the world whom those who knew him in his lifetime could have thought to be a revolutionist; nor does he act the part any better when he is looked at in retrospect so used have we become to associate the inception of revolution with plots, and its overt acts with gunpowder barrels, guillotines, or dynamite.

In Cowper's case the weapon was a sofa, and his fellow conspirators two eminently respectable middle-aged widows. No life could have seemed milder or less likely to make a stir in the world than Cowper's, whether we find him in youth "giggling and making giggle" with his pretty cousins in Southampton Row; or thrown into a panic of shyness by the prospect of qualifying as a reader in the House of Lords, where he might easily have attained to a modest, but in all probability a lifelong, competence; or as a man fleeing to his refuge with the kind Unwins in Huntingdon, and later still retiring to the isolation and busy idleness of Olney, there to become the neighbour of Newton and the permanent ward of Mary Unwin. No career could have been more monotonous in its outward seeming; no career in reality was ever more truly adventurous. A pathos that is real and free from sentimentality attaches to the thought of the snugness and delightful monotony of home em