A History of English Romanticism in the Nineteenth Century | Page 2

Mme. de Stael's, will not give such a very
different idea of Romanticism." And if, in an analysis of the romantic
movement throughout Europe, any single element in it can lay claim to
the leading place, that element seems to me to be the return of each
country to its national past; in other words, mediaevalism.
A definition loses its usefulness when it is made to connote too much.
Professor Herford says that the "organising conception" of his "Age of
Wordsworth" is romanticism. But if Cowper and Wordsworth and
Shelley are romantic, then almost all the literature of the years
1798-1830 is romantic. I prefer to think of Cowper as a naturalist, of
Shelley as an idealist, and of Wordsworth as a transcendental realist,
and to reserve the name romanticist for writers like Scott, Coleridge,
and Keats; and I think the distinction a serviceable one. Again, I have

been censured for omitting Blake from my former volume. The
omission was deliberate, not accidental, and the grounds for it were
given in the preface. Blake was not discovered until rather late in the
nineteenth century. He was not a link in the chain of influence which I
was tracing. I am glad to find my justification in a passage of Mr.
Saintsbury's "History of Nineteenth Century Literature" (p. 13): "Blake
exercised on the literary history of his time no influence, and occupied
in it no position. . . . The public had little opportunity of seeing his
pictures, and less of reading his books. . . . He was practically an
unread man."
But I hope that this second volume may make more clear the unity of
my design and the limits of my subject. It is scarcely necessary to add
that no absolute estimate is attempted of the writers whose works are
described in this history. They are looked at exclusively from a single
point of view. H. A. B.
APRIL, 1901.

TABLE OF CONTENTS.

CHAPTER
I. WALTER SCOTT
II. COLERIDGE, BOWLES, AND THE POPE CONTROVERSY
III. KEATS, LEIGH HUNT, AND THE DANTE REVIVAL
IV. THE ROMANTIC SCHOOL IN GERMANY
V. THE ROMANTIC MOVEMENT IN FRANCE
VI. DIFFUSED ROMANTICISM IN THE LITERATURE OF THE
NINETEENTH CENTURY
VII. THE PRE-RAPHAELITES
VIII. TENDENCIES AND RESULTS

A HISTORY OF ENGLISH ROMANTICISM.

CHAPTER I.
Walter Scott.[1]
It was reserved for Walter Scott, "the Ariosto of the North," "the
historiographer royal of feudalism," to accomplish the task which his
eighteenth-century forerunners had essayed in vain. He possessed the
true enchanter's wand, the historic imagination. With this in his hand,
he raised the dead past to life, made it once more conceivable, made it
even actual. Before Scott no genius of the highest order had lent itself
wholly or mainly to retrospection. He is the middle point and the
culmination of English romanticism. His name is, all in all, the most
important on our list. "Towards him all the lines of the romantic revival
converge." [2] The popular ballad, the Gothic romance, the Ossianic
poetry, the new German literature, the Scandinavian discoveries, these
and other scattered rays of influence reach a focus in Scott. It is true
that his delineation of feudal society is not final. There were sides of
mediaeval life which he did not know, or understand, or sympathize
with, and some of these have been painted in by later artists. That his
pictures have a coloring of modern sentiment is no arraignment of him
but of the genre. All romanticists are resurrectionists; their art is an
elaborate make-believe. It is enough for their purpose if the world
which they re-create has the look of reality, the verisimile if not the
verum. That Scott's genius was in extenso rather than in intenso, that his
work is largely improvisation, that he was not a miniature, but a
distemper painter, splashing large canvasses with a coarse brush and
gaudy pigments, all these are commonplaces of criticism. Scott's
handling was broad, vigorous, easy, careless, healthy, free. He was
never subtle, morbid, or fantastic, and had no niceties or secrets. He
was, as Coleridge said of Schiller, "master, not of the intense drama of
passion, but the diffused drama of history." Therefore, because his
qualities were popular and his appeal was made to the people, the
general reader, he won a hearing for his cause, which Coleridge or
Keats or Tieck, with his closer workmanship, could never have won.

He first and he alone popularised romance. No literature dealing with
the feudal past has ever had the currency and the universal success of
Scott's. At no time has mediaevalism held so large a place in
comparison with other literary interests as during the years of his
greatest vogue, say from 1805 to 1830.
The first point to be noticed about Scott is the thoroughness of his
equipment. While