[CHAPTER XXXII.]
THE ROMANTIC MOVEMENT.
Coleridge.
The so-called Romantic Movement in the English Literature of the early nineteenth century, was, first, the result of a tendency to expansion in every conceivable direction. There was delight in the freedom of the open air and of Nature: in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, most men who were not fox hunters were devoted to "the stuffy business of living in houses," and passed the greater part of the day in coffee houses and taverns, drinking wine, tea, chocolate, and ceaselessly conversing. The fat Georgian faces of Hume and Gibbon, the early corpulence and early gout are indications of the life led, when they could afford it, by men of letters. "The Return to Nature," in poetry implied a reaction against these habits.
Politically, there was, in connexion with the French Revolution, expansion in the direction of Universal Brotherhood. "Be my Brother or I will cut your throat" (Sois mon frère, ou je te tue) was the motto of extreme philanthropists.
It's comin' yet for a' that
That man to man the world o'er
Shall brithers be for a' that,
wrote Burns while the guillotine was in the making, and the thunder was approaching of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic wars.
These emotions of hope for the near future entered, no less than the love and study of Nature, into the Romantic literature, and the minds of the poets also expanded in theological and mystical speculation, half German, half in the style of Greek Platonic philosophy.
The sentiment of human unity also turned to the past; history was revivified; mediaeval art was appreciated; chivalry was an ideal—and a very excellent ideal, were human nature capable—of carrying it into practice. Verse was emancipated, all that Goldsmith protested against,—sonnets, blank verse, happy negligence, "anapests"—flourished, and the characteristics of the new age were variously illustrated by men all born within some five years of each other, in the north or the south, William Wordsworth (1770), Walter Scott (1771), Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772), Robert Southey (1774), and Charles Lamb (1775), to whom we may add Walter Landor (1775).