Radicalism presents to men an ideal state where everybody is bright and free and happy; and thus helps to detach the affections from beliefs and institutions which are no longer helpful. The emotions may not adhere to the radicals’ scheme, but they are at least freed from their old bondage and can embrace the reforms of the less conservative. The influence that radicalism exerts in this way is a very powerful one. Everybody knows Carlyle’s famous outburst of rhetoric bearing on this point: “There was once a man called Jean Jacques Rousseau. He wrote a book called The Social Contract. It was a theory and nothing but a theory. The French nobles laughed at the theory, and their skins went to bind the second edition of the book.”
The strength of radicalism lies in the fact that it is poetical and philosophical. Through philosophy it makes its influence felt on a country’s leaders, through poetry on the citizens themselves. Andrew Fletcher, of Saltown, has said: “Let me write a country’s songs, and I don’t care who makes its laws.” The poet and the radical are brothers. Both live on abstractions. As soon as they particularize their mission fails; the one ceases to be a poet and the other a radical. In his admirable essay on Shelley, Francis Thompson tells clergymen that “poetry is the preacher to men of the earthly as you of the Heavenly Fairness.” According to Saint-Beuve “the function of art is to disengage the elements of beauty, to escape from the mere frightful reality.” Substitute radicalism for poetry and art in these quotations and they would still be true. Emerson calls the poets “liberating gods.” The ancient bards had for the title of their order: “Those who are free throughout the world.” “They are free and they make free.” This is exactly what one would write about radicals. Poetry and radicalism then go hand in hand. When radicalism is in the ascendant, poetry will throb with the feverish energy of the people. It will not only be more abundant, but it will show more of real life—the stuff of which literature is made. In conservative times questions concerning life do not agitate men’s minds to any great extent. People take things as they find them. Set men a thinking, however, place new ideals before them, and then you get a Shakespeare and a Milton or a galaxy of sparkling gems such as scintillated in the dawn of the nineteenth century.
We find then two tendencies which always exist in any progressive society—radicalism and conservatism. Both have appeared in connection with every phase of thought and human activity. Either, as Emerson has said, is a good half but an impossible whole. One is too impetuous, the other is too wary. The one rushes blindly into the future, the other clings too much to the past. There is constant warfare between the two for the mastery. In a progressive community neither of them is in the ascendant for any length of time. A period of radicalism is inevitably followed by one of conservatism and vice versa. The pendulum swings to one extreme and then back again to the other. As long as human nature will be what it is, our institutions will be defective, and change will be the order of the day. This no doubt results in progress, which Goethe has compared to a movement in a spiral direction.
This action and reaction is reflected in the literature of a nation. No matter what definition of literature we may accept, whether it be Newman’s personal use of language, Swinburne’s imagination and harmony, or Matthew Arnold’s criticism of life, it will always be found that literature is a crystallization of the ideals of the age. This is true both of poetry and of prose. The poet is not an isolated individual. On the contrary, he is peculiarly sensitive to the influences which surround him. He is the revealer and the awakener of these influences. “And the poet listens and he hears; and he looks and he sees; and he bends lower and lower and he weeps; and then growing with a strange growth, drawing from all the darkness about him his own transfiguration, he stands erect, terrible and tender, above all those wretched ones—those of high place as well as those of low, with flaming eyes.”[7]
CHAPTER I
EARLY INFLUENCES
The intensity of one’s radicalism depends on the extent to which the institutions of a country cause one suffering and disappointment. Shelley says in Julian and Maddalo:
Most wretched men
Are cradled into poetry by wrong,
They learn in suffering what they teach in song.