Swinburne represents nature as crying to man, and this suits the poet exactly. Perhaps Swinburne's prose shows more clearly than his poetry the divergence of the puritan temper and the poetical one in the matter of religious humility. "We who worship no material incarnation of any qualities," he wrote, "no person, may worship the Divine Humanity; the ideal of human perfection and aspiration, without worshipping any god, any person, any fetish at all. Therefore I might call myself, if I wished, a kind of Christian (of the Church of Blake and Shelley) but assuredly in no sense a theist." [Footnote: Edmund Gosse, Swinburne, p. 309.]
Nothing less than complete fusion of the three worlds spoken of by Goethe, will satisfy the poet. If fusion of the outer world and the other world results in the pantheistic color of the poet's religion, the third element, the inner world, makes it imperative that the poet's divinity should be a personal one, no less, in fact, than a deification of his own nature. This tendency of the poet to create God in his own image is frankly acknowledged by Mrs. Browning in prayer to the "Poet God." [Footnote: A Vision of Poets.]
Of all English writers, William Blake affords the clearest revelation of the poet's instinctive attitude, because he is most courageous in carrying the implications of poetic egotism to their logical conclusion. In the Prophetic Books, in particular, Blake boldly expresses all that is implicit in the poet's yearning for a religion which will not humble and thwart his nature, but will exalt and magnify it.
Even the puritan cannot affirm that the poet's demand for recognition, in his religious belief, of every phase of his existence, has not flowered, once, at least, in most genuinely religious poetry, for the puritan himself feels the power of Emily Brontë's Last Lines, in which she cries with proud and triumphant faith,
Though earth and man were gone,
And suns and universes ceased to be,
And Thou wert left alone,
Every existence would exist in Thee.
There is not room for Death,
Nor atom that his might could render void;
Thou, Thou art Being and Breath,
And what Thou art may never be destroyed.
There remains the plain man to be dealt with. What, he reiterates, has the poet to say for his orthodoxy? If he can combine his poetical illusions about the divinity of nature and the superlative and awesome importance of the poet himself with regular attendance at church; if these phantasies do not prevent him from sincerely and thoughtfully repeating the Apostle's creed, well and good. The plain man's religious demands upon the poet are really not excessive, yet the poet, from the romantic period onward, has taken delight in scandalizing him.
In the eighteenth century poets seem not to have been averse to placating their enemies by publishing their attendance upon the appointed means of grace. Among the more conservative poets, this attitude lasted over into the earlier stages of the romantic movement. So late a poet as Bowles delighted to stress the "churchman's ardor" of the poet. [Footnote: See his verse on Southey and Milton.] Southey also was ready to exhibit his punctilious orthodoxy. Yet poor Southey was the unwitting cause of the impiety of his brothers for many years, inasmuch as Byron's A Vision of Judgment, with its irresistible satire on Southey, sounded the death-knell of the narrowly religious poet.
The vogue which the poet of religious ill-repute enjoyed during the romantic period was, of course, a very natural phase of "the renaissance of wonder." The religious "correctness" of the eighteenth century inevitably went out of fashion, in poetic circles, along with the rest of its formalism. Poets vied with one another in forming new and daring conceptions of God. There was no question, in the romantic revolt, of yielding to genuine atheism. "The worst of it is that I do believe," said Byron, discussing his bravery under fear of death. "Anything but the Church of England," was the attitude by which Byron shocked the orthodox. "I think," he wrote, "people can never have enough of religion, if they are to have any. I incline myself very much to the Catholic doctrine." [Footnote: Letter to Tom Moore, March 4, 1822. See also the letter to Robert Charles Dallas, January 21, 1808.] Cain, however, is not a piece of Catholic propaganda, and the chief significance of Byron's religious poetry lies in his romantic delight in arraigning the Almighty as well as Episcopalians.
Shelley comes out even more squarely than Byron against conventional religion. In Julian and Maddalo, he causes Byron to say of him,