impostor. Wordsworth, who knew what simplicity means in poetry, declared that all the imagery of the poems is false and spurious. But the whole question early became a national quarrel, and the honor of Scotland was involved in it. There are signs that Macpherson would gladly have escaped from the storm he had raised. Aided by his early literary success, he became a prosperous man, held a well-paid post at court, entered Parliament, and was pensioned by the government. Still the controversy persisted. He had found it easy to take up a haughty attitude towards those hostile critics who had doubted his good faith and had asked him to produce his Gaelic originals. But now the demand for the originals came from his champions and friends, who desired to place the fame of Scotland’s oldest and greatest poet on a sure foundation. He wriggled on the hook, and more than once timidly hinted that the poems owed not a little to the poetic genius of the translator. But this half-hearted attempt to rob the great Ossian of a part of his fame stirred the Caledonian enthusiasts to a frenzy of indignation. At last,
when he was no longer able to restrain his supporters, the wretched Macpherson found no escape but one. In middle age, some twenty years after his first appearance on the poetic horizon, he sat down, with a heavy heart and an imperfect knowledge of the Gaelic tongue, to forge the originals. In 1807, eleven years after his death, these were at last published. The progress of genuine Celtic scholarship during the succeeding century did the rest; and the old blind bard rejoined the mists and vapors which were the inspiration of his Muse. [78] The poems of Ossian are only one, though perhaps the most signal, instance of the forgeries which prevailed like an epidemic at the time of the Romantic Revival. Some of these, like Ireland’s Shakespeare forgeries, were little better than cold-blooded mercenary frauds. Others, like Chatterton’s Rowley Poems and Horace Walpole’s Castle of Otranto, are full of the zest and delight of play-acting. Even Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner, though it is free from the reproach of forgery, is touched by the
same spirit. The severe morality of scholarship had not yet been applied to mediaeval or modern matter. Scholars are the trustees of poets; but where this trust is undertaken by men who are poets themselves, there is usually a good deal of gaiety and exuberance in its performance.
I have now traced some of the neglected sources of revived Romance, and have shown how in this movement, more notably, perhaps, than in any other great movement in literature, it was not the supply which created the demand, but the demand which created the supply. The Romantic change was wrought, not by the energy of lonely pioneers, but by a shift in public taste. Readers of poetry knew what it was they wanted, even before they knew whether it existed. Writers were soon at hand to prove that it had existed in the past, and could still be made. The weakness of vague desire is felt everywhere in the origins of the change. Out of the weakness came strength; the tinsel Gothic castle of Walpole was enlarged to house the magnanimous soul of Scott; the Sorrows of Werther gave birth to Faust.
The weakness of the Romantic movement, its love of mere sensation and sentiment, is well exhibited in its effect upon the sane and strong mind of Keats. He was a pupil of the Romantics; and poetry, as he first conceived of it, seemed to open to him boundless fields of passive enjoyment. His early work shows the struggle between the delicious swoon of reverie and the growing pains of thought. His verse, in its beginnings, was crowded with “luxuries, bright, milky, soft, and rosy.” He was a boy at the time of England’s greatest naval glory, but he thinks more of Robin Hood than of Nelson. If Robin Hood could revisit the forest, says Keats,
He would swear, for all his oaks
Fallen beneath the dockyard strokes,
Have rotted on the briny seas.
His use of a word like “rich,” as Mr. Robert Bridges has remarked, is almost inhuman in its luxurious detachment from the human situation.
Now more than ever seems it rich to die,
To cease upon the midnight with no pain.
Or if thy mistress some rich anger shows,
Emprison her soft hand, and let her rave.
By his work in this kind Keats became the parent and founder of the Aesthetic School of poetry, which is more than half in love with easeful death, and seeks nothing so ardently as rest and escape from the world. The epilogue to the Aesthetic movement was written by William Morris before ever he broke out from those enchanted bowers:
So with this earthly paradise it is,
If ye will read aright, and pardon me
Who strive to build a shadowy isle of bliss
Midmost the beating of the steely sea,
Where tossed about all hearts of men must be,
Whose ravening monsters mighty men must slay,
Not the poor singer of an empty day.