ENGLISH LITERATURE. 113 ENGLISH LITERATURE. his Village and his Talcs of the Hall, and Bowles for his sonnets, which Coleridge greatly admired. But, alien as he is from its spirit, the most consummate flower of the century, the st spontaneous genius of its poetry, is Robert Burns ( 1759-1796). It' ever poet was inspired by some- thing beyond himself to sing his inner raptures, it was this Scotch peasant. Head, heart, and eye alert, he sang to a rapt world such strains as are seldom heard. For fervor, genuine manhood, ab- solute sincerity, emotional power, and essential poetic beauty he has few peers. Education would have spoiled him; lie loses his sureness of touch when he essays the classical English, but he goes straight to the heart with the winsome grace of his Doric Scotch. That he should have arisen in an age which had been given over to artifice under the delusion that it was art is not amaz- ing, for he was a lyric poet born. He was democratic in a time when to be so was to be solitary, radically true when cant and hypocrisy were rampant, and his satire is the bitterer be- cause his heart was naturally so gentle and lov- ing. He had a sense of worth, a sanity of thought, a largeness of vision which made him resolute and unfearing alike in championing the true and in lashing the false. It is not to undervalue the work of such men as Burns and (hay that one singles out the names of Wordsworth and Coleridge as those of the poets who really determined once for all the character of nineteenth-century poetry, gave it back its freedom, and widened its field of vision. The year 1798, which witnessed the publication of the little anonymous volume of Lyrical Bal- lads, is, then, the epoch-making date from which these great changes are to be reckoned. The change was vast, both in matter and in manner. In style, the young and unknown authors boldly con- tended for the right to use the language of every- day life in place of the conventional words from which a century of passing from hand to hand had obliterated every characteristic feature. In subject, they struck boldly away from the man- ners of the town, or of townsmen masquerading as Arcadian shepherds, which had' been the staple of the eighteenth-century poets. When Pope wrote " The proper study of mankind is man," he meant man as displayed in the elegant circles of London, or as conceived in the speculations of deist ie philosophers. Wordsworth studied man in a vastly broader sense, and found the cottager or the wagoner as much a man at least as the beau. Like most far-reaching reforms, this went at times too far: simplicity, which, rightly under- stood, is a canon of the greatest art, became childish in his hands at times, and lent a handle to the mocking parody of the Smith brothers in their clever Rejected Addresses. But he had struck the right note, a note which is so familiar to us from the whole drift of nineteenth-century thought that we scarcely discern how valiant a departure from the mode it was. Coleridge, whether or not he was conscious of it himself, stands out clearly to us a century later as the necessary complement of his asso- ciate. While Wordsworth showed the beauty, the depth that could be found in the most common- place of lives. Coleridge rather brought home to a nation that had forgotten the daring flights of the Elizabethan age the reality of the invisible world, and paved the way for the pre-Raphaelite movement of half a centurv later. His influence on his century, however,' wae exercised less through the medium Of his poetry than of his prose, through his own pregnant thought on deep questions of philosophy, of religion, and of poli tics, and by the current of German tendencies which lie set flowing amid the still waters ol English life, powerfully seconded bj t'arlyle. If Wordsworth influenced the thought of his successors in poetry for the whole century that has followed, their form was more powerfully affected by the man who died with so many dreams unfulfilled that he spoke mournfully of himself as 'one whose name was writ in water' John Keats. Standing utterly aloof from the tierce controversies of his time, caring less than nothing for the questions of emancipation which were so vital to his friends, absorbed in the prac- tice of his art, Keats showed later poets how to seek out 'the right word,' the word which should express poignantly their inmost thought, no longer content with epithets which bad been handed down by a long line of polite predeces- sors; in Lowell's happy phrase, he "rediscovered the delight and the wonder that lay enchanted in the did ionaiv." The revolt from the conventionalities of the preceding age showed itself in another and a more startling way. The spirit of Byron, natu- rally restless and impetuous, ami exacerbated by what he felt to be the injustice of society to him- self, found voice in passionate protest against existing institutions, against anything that could cramp or fetter the individual in his search for the satisfaction of his desires. The thing became epidemic ; the figure of the reckless young lord, magnified to heroic proportions, Ajax defying the lightning, was the ideal of hundreds of other high spirited young men not only in England, but on the Continent ; and the rolling Byronic collar became the badge of a generous independence of thought. The fact that Byron voiced the spirit of his generation with so much real force and fire is at once an explanation of his immense and immediate popularity. He will always be the poet of hoi -headed youth; but it is possible to see now that he was carried by the rush of the moment into a place far higher than he can hope permanently to hold. Those wdio doubt this may be sent to the criterion proposed by a liv- ing judge of rare equipment: it is simply neces- sary to read Byron immediately after a course of one of the poets whose place in the first rank is indisputable — after Shakespeare, after Spenser, after Shelley— in order to rise from the reading with the conviction that, undeniably great as were his gifts, he is not of their companj . The name of Shelley just mentioned, and al- ways to be mentioned with reverence for the lofti- ness of his flight into the empyrean, for the splendid attainment of his music, for the moving appeal of his lyrical cry, yet must have less space than that of Keats, for example, in a survey like this of tendencies and growths rather than of men; since his genius was less seminal, less formative. With a purer, less selfish enthusiasm than Byron's for the rights of humanity, he too sang the paean of that universal freedom which seemed to be dawning on the world, and died he- fore he could be convinced, with Wordsworth and Southey, that he had mistaken the glare of a con- flagration for the sunrise. An outcome of the political excitement of this period was the revival of a spirit of patriotism and nationality, akin
