vellous, the supernatural, which played so large a part in the literature of this period, particularly in its later phases. In the wider and less definite sense, they may be used to signify that revolt from the purely intellectual view of man's nature, that recognition of the rights of the emotions, the instincts and the passions, that vague intimation of sympathy between man and the world around himin one word, that sense of mystery which, with more or less clearness of utterance, inspires all that is best, all that is most characteristic, in the literature of the last half of the eighteenth century; whether, in the stricter and more familiar sense of the term, it is to be called "romantic" or no. Other implications of the word "romantic" will come before us in the course of our inquiry. But these two at any rate stand out from the beginning, and they must be kept carefully apart.

Yet, distinct as these two things are, it is not difficult to see how, by shades almost imperceptible, the one passes into the other. It is the sense of mystery, the instinct of discontent with the world of "dry light," of pure intellect, which in truth lies at the root of both. It is this which comes first in the order of thought. It is this, with all that directly flows from it, which comes first also in order of time. The vaguer and less specialised forms of romanticism precede those which are more definite and specific. Gray and Burke come before Coleridge; Lessing and Herder so far as Lessing may in any sense be reckoned with the romanticists-before Tieck and

the Schlegels; Rousseau and Diderot before Chateaubriand and Hugo. But, in each case, the earlier band of writers prepares the way for the later. In each case the later builds upon the foundations which the earlier had laid. In each case the younger men, if they do not own (nor even consciously feel) discipleship, at least win their hearing from an audience which the older had created.

It is this which enables us, apart from exceptional cases already indicated, to treat the various tendencies of the time as contributive to the same movement. It is this which justifies us in saying that they are sprung, in some sense, from a common source. But in saying this, we are bound also to acknowledge how widely separate are the springs from which that source is fed. We are bound to admit that we apply the term "romantic" to Wordsworth in a sense very different from that in which we use it of Coleridge; to Rousseau or Herder in a sense very different from that in which we give it to Chateaubriand or Bürger or Tieck.

the preceding

The general conditions under which the romantic movement took its rise, from which it was more or Contrast be- less consciously a reaction, have been set tween this and forth in the two preceding volumes. They period. represent an obviously narrow range of human experience, a markedly limited view of human life. Keen observation and solid wisdom are there in abundance. So, in a still greater degree, are grace and wit and all the more trenchant, the more distinc

tively intellectual, weapons of style. A wide, if not adventurous, humanity makes itself heard with ever deepening intensity as the century wears on. But however high we may place these qualities-and it is easy to rate them far too low,-no man will say that they are the only qualities which we demand in literature; few will even claim that they are the highest. Even in prose, where the surest achievements of the period were undoubtedly won, we miss the note of individual emotion, of brooding reflection, of imaginative passion-we miss the colour and the music-which we find in the greatest writers both of the preceding and the following age. In poetry, it need hardly be said, the contrast makes itself still more strongly felt. The world of Pope, and even the world of Collins, Gray, and Goldsmith, is small indeed when compared with that of Shakespeare and Milton, of Wordsworth and Coleridge; while in France and Germany the earlier part of the century can offer absolutely no names to point the contrast against the giants of its last forty years; against Rousseau or against Chénier, against Bürger, Schiller, and Goethe.

It was in England, as readers of the preceding volume are well aware, that the dawn of the romantic movement first declared itself. And it is in England that the various elements which met and harmonised in that movement may most

The precursors.

1 See the remarks on this point in Mr Millar's Mid-Eighteenth Century, pp. 212-214.

readily be traced. For that purpose it will be well to glance back for a moment over the ground already traversed.

The poets who led the revolt against the ideals of ' the Augustan age have certain features in common. Of these the most significant are a ready openness to the influences of external nature, and an equally ready response to the tenderer springs of feeling; a poignant sympathy with the sadder side of man's experience; with the trouble that comes to him from without or, what is yet more characteristic of the time, with the melancholy, sometimes of a more pensive, sometimes of a sterner cast, which besets him from within.

Thomson.

In Thomson, who is generally held to have initiated the revolt against the school of Pope, the two impulses are commonly held apart. In his successors they tend more and more completely to fuse. The human episodes in The Seasons are, with few exceptions,1 in the nature of purple patches, thrust in, it might not unfairly be said, to relieve the monotony of the descriptive groundwork. And just because it is descriptive, the groundwork presents the various scenes, successively enwoven in it, as so many pictures reproduced faithfully from nature, with as little refraction as may be from the personal emotions of the painter.

In Goldsmith the process is exactly reversed. The scenery has become little more than a background

1 The most notable of them is the picture of the shepherd lost in the storm (Winter).

Goldsmith

for the human figures that move across it; and this is still more true of The Deserted Village than and others. it is of The Traveller. In Gray and Collins, who represent a more decisive breach with Augustan tradition than Goldsmith, a like result is reached by strangely different means. Here the fusion of the two elements is complete. The churchyard is not merely the resting-place, but in its suggestion of sorrow lit by "trembling hope," the fitting symbol of a life "marked by melancholy for her own"; while every object in the wide watered landscape, half seen by Collins through the "dusky veil" of evening, gives back an echo to the "softened strain" of pensive rapture which fills his own heart with melody. In all three poets, it is not so much the voice of nature herself, as the "still sad music of humanity" vibrating in it, that strikes on our ear.

And this is a new note in English poetry. It is different from the mystical adoration of nature, as the symbol of God, which is to be found in Vaughan and Herbert. It is still more different from the blithe delight in nature for her own sake which we know in the Elizabethans. And, though it is also different enough from the calculated effects of Coleridge, or the "exulting and abounding" force of Byron, it still has something of what we recognise as most peculiar to their temper. It is the first stage of that gradual transfusion of the spirit of man into outward nature, of outward nature into the spirit of man, which is among the most marked characteristics of romantic. poetry.