[139] Cornwallis to Lake, Sept. 19, 1805, Cornwallis Correspondence, iii., 547-55.
CHAPTER XX.
LITERATURE AND SOCIAL PROGRESS.
The period which elapsed between the resignation of Pitt and the battle of Waterloo was hardly less eventful in the history of British civilisation than in the history of British empire. To some, the boundary line between the society of the eighteenth and that of the nineteenth century appears to be marked by the outbreak of the French revolution, and the far-reaching effects of that catastrophe upon ideas, manners, and politics in Great Britain, as well as upon the continent, are too evident to be denied. But it is equally certain that, before the French revolution, an intellectual and industrial movement was in progress which must have given a most powerful impulse to civilisation, even if the French revolution had never taken place. In this country, especially, the great writers, philanthropists, scientific leaders, inventors, engineers, and reformers of various types, who adorned the latter part of George III.'s reign, largely drew their inspiration from an age, just preceding the French revolution, which is sometimes regarded as barren in originality.
When the nineteenth century opened, the classical authors of that pre-revolutionary age had mostly passed away. Hume died in 1776, Johnson in 1784, Adam Smith in 1790, Gibbon in 1794, Burns in 1796, Burke in 1797, Cowper in 1800. John Howard, the great pioneer of prison reform, became a martyr to philanthropy in 1790. The most remarkable of those manufacturing improvements and mechanical inventions upon which the commercial supremacy of England is founded date from the same period, and have been described in a previous volume. Steam navigation was still untried, but preliminary experiments had already been made on both sides of the Atlantic before 1789. The application of steam to locomotion by land had scarcely been conceived, but the facilities of traffic and travelling had been vastly developed in the first forty years of George III.'s reign.
It may truly be said, however, that English literature in the early party of the nineteenth century bears clear traces of the influence exercised on receptive minds by the French revolution. Three of the leading poets, Coleridge, Wordsworth, and Southey, were deeply infected by its spirit, and indulged in their youth fantastic dreams of a social millennium; Wordsworth, especially, who in his maturer years could be justly described as the priest of nature-worship and the poet of rural life, had imbibed violent republican ideas during a residence of more than a year in France. These were passing off in 1798, when he published, jointly with Coleridge, the volume of Lyrical Ballads containing the latter's immortal tale of the Ancient Mariner. In the following year he settled in the English lake-country, where Coleridge established himself for a while, and Southey for life. Hence the popular but very inaccurate title of the "Lake School," applied to a trio of poets who, except as friends, had little in common with each other. Indeed, after Wordsworth had developed his theory of poetical realism in the preface to a volume published in 1800, Coleridge rejected and criticised it as wholly untenable. All three, however, may be considered as comrades in a revolt against the conventional diction of eighteenth century poetry, from which Coleridge's "dreamy tenderness" and mystical flights of fancy were as remote as Wordsworth's rusticity and almost prosaic studies of humble life.
COLERIDGE AND SCOTT.
Although Coleridge survived to 1834 and Wordsworth to 1850, both seem to have lost at an early date that power of imagination, whether displayed in sympathy or in creation, in which their greatness consisted. Wordsworth wrote assiduously during the whole of this period; in 1807 he published a volume of poems, including the famous Ode on the Intimations of Immortality and several of his finest sonnets; but of his later work only an occasional lyric deserves to be ranked beside the poems published in 1800 and 1807. Coleridge, indeed, published two of his finest poems, Christabel and Kubla Khan, in 1816, but they were written long before, Christabel, partly in 1797 and partly in 1801, and Kubla Khan in 1798. Even the new metre of Christabel, which is not the least of Coleridge's contributions to English poetry, had, as early as 1805, been borrowed in the Lay of the Last Minstrel by Scott, to whom Coleridge had recited the poem. Nevertheless, Coleridge continued to exercise a great influence, partly through the charm of his conversation and partly through his prose works, in which he introduced to a British public, as yet unused to German literature, a vision of that mystical German thought which finds its father in Kant, and was represented at that day by Hegel in philosophy and Goethe in poetry. It is uncertain how far the general ignorance of German literature in England was responsible for the influence exercised in their own day by the few English or Scottish thinkers, such as Coleridge, Hamilton, and Carlyle, who had either fallen under the spell or learned the secret of the German mystics. The most important of Coleridge's prose works was Aids to Reflection, which appeared in 1828, and whatever be its literary value, it deserves the notice of the historian, as the least unsystematic treatise of an author who gave the principal philosophical impetus to the Oxford movement.
Two other poets, eminently the product of their age, though not the offspring of the French revolution, Scott and Byron, were equally in revolt against conventional diction. Scott elevated ballad-poetry to a level which it had never before attained, and composed some of the most beautiful songs in the English language. If it be remembered that he was cramped by the drudgery of legal offices during the best years of his life, that he was nearly thirty when he made his first literary venture, that he was crippled by financial ruin and broken health during his later years, that his anonymous contributions to periodicals would fill volumes, and that he died at the age of sixty-one, his fertility of production must ever be ranked as unique in the history of English literature. Already known as the author of various lyrical pieces, and the Border Minstrelsy, he published the Lay of the Last Minstrel in 1805, Marmion (with its fine stanzas on Pitt and Fox) in 1808, the Lady of the Lake in 1809, Don Roderick in 1811, and Rokeby in 1813, as well as minor poems of high merit. He is said to have abandoned poetry in deference to Byron's rising star, and it is certain that he now fills a higher place in the roll of English classics as a prose writer than as a poet. His first novel, Waverley, appeared in 1814, and was followed In the next four years by six of the greatest "Waverley Novels," as the series came to be called—Guy Mannering, the Antiquary, the Black Dwarf, Old Mortality, Rob Roy, and the Heart of Midlothian. It is not too much to say that by these works, both in poetry and in prose, he created the historical romance in Great Britain. The legends of chivalry and the folk-lore of his native land had deeply stirred his soul, and fired his imagination from childhood, and though later "research" has far outstripped the range of his antiquarian knowledge, no modern writer has ever done so much to awaken a reverence for olden times in the hearts of his countrymen. The easy flow of his style, the vivid energy of his thought, the graphic power of his descriptions, his shrewd and robust sympathy with human nature, and the evident simplicity of his own character, not unmingled with flashes of true poetical insight, justly rendered him the most popular writer of his time.