We find this a strange and even a ridiculous spectacle, the men who had prided themselves on their common sense and reasonableness, whose literature had sparkled with wit and epigram, blubbering and crying like great children; but whatever we think of it, that is what happened. The first artist of the new type was a Frenchman, Marivaux, and his Vie de Marianne is a study of a young woman who is the embodiment of sensibility and self-consciousness, an amiable and virtuous girl, who is hardly able to enjoy the good that life brings her, for fear lest she should miss the opportunity of renunciation. The first great novel of sentiment is also French, the Abbé Prévost's Manon Lescaut, and here indeed we are in the deep waters of affliction; there are but few moments between the beginning and the end of his sad story when the hero is not in tears. And yet it is a great novel, for there are few studies of human nature, as absorbed and almost lost in emotion, which are more moving.
These novels, however, which appeared between 1730 and 1740, are overshadowed by the works of the great Englishmen, by Richardson and Sterne and Goldsmith, for these are not artists of England alone, but of all Europe, known and loved and imitated in every country in Europe. The sorrows of Clarissa, the pathetic or maudlin humour of Sterne, the idyllic grace and gentle laughter of Goldsmith, these, as they moved every heart, influenced even the greatest of European artists. The influence of Clarissa on Rousseau, of Goldsmith on Goethe and Jean Paul Richter need no exposition.
The sentimental movement reached almost its highest level in the great and morbid genius of Rousseau, who was himself the living embodiment of the movement. Far more than even his creations, more than Julie or Saint-Preux, was he himself possessed by an emotionalism which finally became a disease. But, strangely enough, it was the Olympic genius of Goethe which gave its supreme form to the treatment of life under the terms of feeling. In Werther this whole phase of art passed beyond itself into the tragedy of the vain and hopeless efforts of an honest but over-sensitive nature to control his emotion and to master his life. Not indeed that it was with Werther the movement ended: it was continued in Byron: it was perhaps the most important element in what the Germans call specifically their Romantische Schule, and in the work of the French Romantic artists from Chateaubriand to Alfred de Musset. If you wish to see it in painting you have only to look at the work of Greuze, and at the engravings in our grandmothers' 'Forget-me-nots'. In spite of all its absurdities this sentimental movement played a great part in preparing men for the great revolution itself, for it opened men's hearts, it set free their emotions; if the realism of Defoe and Hogarth had enabled men to escape from convention and the mannerisms of good taste into a world of reality, the emotional movement gave this reality fullness and content, represented a larger and more intimate apprehension of life.
This brings us to another aspect of the art of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, to the poetry and painting of 'nature', to the beginnings of that great artistic movement which culminates in Wordsworth and Turner, and whose influence dominated all Europe in the eighteenth century and continues to do so in our own time. It seems a strange thing, but it is true, that it was not till the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries that there appeared a school of painting which took landscape, and a poetry which took 'nature' specifically for its subject. There is indeed frequent reference to 'nature' in the poetry of the Middle Ages and of the sixteenth century, and this is often significant in the early English poetry and charming in the romances and in Petrarch and Chaucer, while in Dante and the Elizabethans, and especially in Shakespeare, it reaches an almost incomparable beauty; yet in all these it is, as in the backgrounds of the great Tuscan and Umbrian painters, exquisite and significant and true, but not the prime subject which engages their attention.
There are indeed two great poets in whom we begin to feel that the background begins to be almost as important as the figures of the foreground; Spenser is genuinely interested in his stories of chivalry and honour, and in his moral allegory, but we sometimes wonder whether the most important thing in his poetry is not the chequered light and shade of his forests, the picturesque splendour of his castles, and the gloom of his caverns and dungeons. Spenser's poetry is like a tapestry on which indeed some story of human life is presented, but which is in the end a great work of decorative art, to which the immediate subject contributes form and pattern and colour, but in which it is in a measure lost.
In Milton the matter is different: no one can doubt that he is a great artist of human life and fate; even if Paradise Lost were to leave us in some uncertainty, the Samson would convince us all. But, while I think this is true, it is also clear that not only in the grace of his earlier poetry, but in the maturity of his genius, in the Lycidas and even in the Paradise, Milton is at least as great an artist of nature and its beauty as he is of life. And near Milton there stands a poet, lesser indeed, but individual and unique, that is Henry Vaughan, who had unhappily strayed into the 'metaphysical' maze, and who helplessly enough tries to endue himself with the giant armour of Donne, but who, when he is himself, is one of the most exquisite and gracious poets of nature.
We may perhaps, without being fanciful, find a parallel to these poets in the great Venetian painters of the sixteenth century, in whose work we see the landscape of Venetia and the Cadore compelling more and more our attention, as not a mere background, but as an integral part of the picture; but it was not till the seventeenth century and the Flemish and Dutch painters that we see the transition complete, and the artist sets before us not some scene in human life, but simply the beauty and splendour of 'nature' herself.
It was not till Thomson began to publish The Seasons in 1726 that the development was complete in poetry. Thomson is a difficult poet to appreciate rightly, for though his subject was 'nature' his method was often as conventional and artificial as that of any Augustan; but he was a lover of the fields and woods, and his imagination, if it is not very powerful, is often very sincere. What was begun by Thomson was carried on with greater sincerity and reality by Cowper, and was transformed by the imagination of Gray and Collins. We sometimes think of this development as specifically English, and it is true that in Wordsworth and Shelley the poetry of nature grew into something which is unique and unmatched, but we must not think of the poetry of Wordsworth as though it were the only form under which nature can be presented. That would be to ignore the qualities, in England of Keats and Tennyson, and in Europe of great artists in whom the treatment of nature assumed other forms. The great poetry of nature began in England, but it was carried on in all the European countries, and for more than a century it was dominated mainly by the genius of Rousseau in France and of Goethe in Germany. I cannot here pretend to deal with the treatment of nature in Rousseau, or with the outcome of his influence first in Bernardin de Saint-Pierre and Chateaubriand, and then in the elegiac beauty of Lamartine and de Musset's Nuits; nor can I deal with the poetry of nature in Goethe, and its lesser but often beautiful expression in the German 'Romanticists', and in Heine. It is only possible here to remind ourselves that neither the poetry nor the painting of nature belongs to any one country, but is an intimate part of all modern art.
And thus at last we come to the great revolution itself, that great revolution in art and thought and life, of which the political and social revolution is one form, and of which we are all the children. In this, all the elements of which we have been thinking are gathered up and come to perfection; reality, sentiment, nature. And this was of no one country or nationality. The first and also the greatest artist of the revolution is Goethe himself, for it all culminates and reaches its highest expression in Faust. The passion for freedom, for the complete experience of life, for life itself, and not mere knowledge or mere words—this is the motive which drives Faust till he is willing to make his bargain with any power which will give him this. The infinite, the insatiable desire of the human soul, which can never be wholly satisfied, which can never reach its term, this is the passion which possesses Faust, this is the rock upon which the hopes of the poor devil are shipwrecked, the poor devil who in the limitation of the merely critical and negative temper cannot understand that Faust can never be satisfied, will never say to the moment, 'Verweile doch, du bist zu schön.' For the drama of Faust is not a drama of damnation, but of redemption, and though the breadth and scope of the whole conception pass beyond all presentation in complete and rounded form, the great tragedy of Gretchen takes us from the splendid but abstract world of ideas into the simplest experience of human life, where Faust becomes human through love itself, but too slowly, too late to avert the tragedy.