It is not to undervalue the work of such men as Burns and (;ray that one singles out the names of Wordsworth and Coleridge as those of the poets who really determined once for all the character of nineteenth-century poetry, gave it back its freedom, and widened its field of vision. The year 179S, which witnessed the publication of the little anonymous volume of Lyrical is. then, the epoch-making (late from which these great changes are to be reckoned. The change was vast, both in matter and in manner. In style, the young and unknown authors boldly con tended for the right to use the language of every clay life in place of the conventional words from which a century of passing from hand to hand had obliterated every characteristic feature. In subject, they struck boldly away from the man ners of the town, or of townsmen masquerading as Arcadian shepherds. which had been the staple of the eighteenth-century poets. When Pope wrote "The proper study of mankind is man," he meant man as displayed in the elegant circles of London, or as conceived in the speculations of deistic philosophers. Wordsworth studied man in a vastly broader sense, and found the cottager or the wagoner as much a man at lea t as the beau. Like most far-reaching reforms, this went at times too far: simplicity, which, rightly under stood, is a canon of the greatest art, became childish in his hands at times, and lent a handle to the mocking parody of the Smith brothers in their clever Rejected Addresses. But he had struck the right note, a note which is so familiar to us from the whole drift of nineteenth-century thought that we scarcely discern how valiant a departure from the mode it was.
Coleridge, whether or not he was conscious of it himself. stands out clearly to us a century later as the necessary complement of his asso ciate. While Wordsworth showed the beauty, the depth that could be found in the most common place of lives, Coleridge rather brought home to a nation that had forgotten the daring flights of the Elizabethan age the reality of the invisible world, and pared the way for the pre-Raphaelite movement of half a century later. His influence on his century, however,' was exercised less through the medium of his poetry than of his prose, through his own pregnant thought I m deep questions of philosophy, of religion, and of poll ties, and by the current of (heroin tendencies which he set flowing amid the still waters of English life, powerfully seconded by Carlyle.
If Wordsworth influenced the thought of his successors in poetry for the whole century that has followed, their form was more powerfully affected by the man who died will so runny dreams unfulfilled that he spoke mournfully of himself as 'one whose name was writ in John Keats. Standing utterly aloof from the fierce controversies of his time. caring less than nothing for the questions of emancipation which were so vital to his friends, absorbed in the prac tice of his art, Keats showed later poets how to seek out 'the right word,' the word which should express poignantly their inmost thought, no longer content with epithets which had been handed down by a long line of polite predeces sors; in Lowell's happy phrase, he "rediscovered the delight and the wonder that lay enchanted in the dictionary."
The revolt from the conventionalities of the preceding age showed itself in another and a more startling way. The spirit of Byron, natu rally restless and impetuous. and exacerbated by what he felt to be the injustice of society to him self, found voice in passionate protest against existing institutions, against anything that could cramp or fetter the individual in his seareh for the satisfaction of his desires. The thing became epidemic; the figure of the reckless young lord, magnified to heroic proportions, Ajax defying the lightning, was the ideal of hundreds of other high-spirited young men not only in England. but on the Continent ; and the rolling Byronic collar became the badge of a generous independence of thought. The fact that Byrim voiced the spirit of his generation with so much real force and fire is at once an explanation of his immense and immediate popularity. lie will always be the poet of hot-headed youth ; hut it is possible to see that he was carried by the rush of the moment into a place far higher than he can hope permanently to hold. Those who doubt this may be sent to the criterion proposed by a liv ing judge of rare equipment : it is si.nply neces sary to read Byron immediately after a course of one of tire poets whose place in the first rank is indisputable—after Shakespeare, after Spenser, after Shelley—in order to rise from the reading with the conviction that, undeniably great as were his gifts, he is not of their company.
The name of Shelley just mentioned. and al ways to he mentioned with reverence for the lofti ness of his flight into the empyrean. for the splendid attainment of his music, for the moving appeal of his lyrical cry, yet must have less space than that of Keats, for example. in a survey like this of tendencies and growths rather than of men; since his genius was less seminal. less formative. With a purer. less selfish enthusiasm than Byron's for the rights of humanity, he too sang the wean of that universal freedom which seemed to be dawning on the world, and died be fore he could be convinced, with Wordsworth and Southey, that he had mistaken the glare of a con flagration for the sunrise. An outcome of the political excitement of this period was the revival of a spirit of patriotism and nationality, akin to that which had been so potent in the Eliza I days. but which the calm. cosmopolitan culture of the eighteenth century had rather lulled to sleep. It is represented by the stirring war-songs of Thomas Campbell, a convert from classicism In by the poetry as well as by the novels of Scott; and by the Irish lyrics of lloinas Moore. far more genuine and worthy of preservation than the artificial decorativeness of his Oriental tales.