CHAPTER IX

THE REVOLUTIONARY PERIOD (1800 to 1837)

Historical References

History of England, c. 38-41.

GUIZOT, T. P. G.

MARTINEAU, H.

HUGHES, T. S.

History of England during the Thirty Years' Peace. History of England, v. 5–7.

KNIGHT, C. History of England, v. 7-8.

AUBREY, V. 3 c. 78-81.

IN the first half of the nineteenth century the population of England reached fifteen millions. The great

Historical

social questions between capital and labor Sketch. began to assume importance. The corn laws or duties on imported grain gave the landowners an unfair advantage, now that the island could no longer produce food enough for its inhabitants. The poverty and distress, resulting partly from the high price of food, partly from the introduction of labor-saving machinery in many important branches of production and the consequent temporary deprivation of employment for large numbers. of workers, stirred thinking men profoundly and intensified sympathy with the poor. The repeal of the Corn Laws (1846), the Catholic emancipation (1829), the abolition of slavery, and the reforın (1832) which gave representation to the populous cities and took it away from the "rotten boroughs," and extended the right of suffrage to multitudes hitherto disfranchised, are all outcomes of the democratic spirit, and of the recognition of the rights

of man. The wars with Napoleon excited the country to a passionate patriotism. The success of the navy aroused national pride and made England sole mistress of the sea. The monopoly of the East India Company was repealed and an immense impulse given to commerce. England came out of the Napoleonic wars with increased colonial possessions in all parts of the world. The sentiment of patriotism, the pride in belonging to an expanding and victorious nation, the growing perception of the brotherhood of men, and the incorporation of the new ideas in legislation after a long and bitter struggle with the evil forces of privilege, resulted in the production of some great literature, of a tone far more full and enthusiastic than that of the last century.

But further, we have seen that, irrespective of the disNew Forms position to revolt from the past and to express

of Litera

ture

Demanded.

the wild and irregular conception of freedom created by the French Revolution, men had grown tired of the old forms and tone of academic literature. Crabbe and Cowper already had drawn from real life and humble things, and not from plaster casts of the heroic models of a classic civilization. Younger men found that in the verse of Robert Burns there was something more germane to the spirit of the age than in the verse of Pope. It pleased them more and touched them more — there seemed to be in it a more varied and sweeter

music and more truth. In 1798 two young men, William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, sold for twenty pounds, to a country bookseller named Cottle, a little volume of verses called "Lyrical Ballads." Cottle published them, and, though they had no great success, the very fact that they were published shows that the time had come when a new school of poetry would soon

find acceptance. This volume contained the "Ancient Mariner," in which the ballad form was shown to be capable of embodying a new poetic vision, and the "Lines Written near Tintern Abbey," in which is expressed a sense of man's relation to nature as something great, powerful, wild, and yet mystically sympathetic, a conception far removed from the thought of Pope or Johnson and in advance of that of Thomson or the gentle Cowper. The publication of the "Lyrical Ballads" really marks the opening of the new period, but 1800 is taken in order to bring the century date and the period date together. For the reasons suggested in the above paragraphs the period is designated the "period of the Revolution."

William

Wordsworth was born at the village of Cockermouth, on the river Derwent, in Cumberland. His father was an attorney and law agent for a landed proprietor, Wordsworth, the Earl of Lonsdale. Wordsworth's parents 1770-1850. died in his childhood, and at the age of seventeen he was sent by his uncle to St. John's College, Cambridge. Here he took his degree in 1791, but showed a disinclination to settle down to any profession. In 1791 he crossed to France with the ostensible design of learning the language. He sympathized so enthusiastically with the Revolutionists that he was ready to join them practically, but his relatives stopped his allowance and forced him to return in a year. He had much of the obstinacy of the North Briton, and still refused to take up any regular employment. He published a slight volume of verse called "An Evening Walk and Descriptive Sketches," in which he uses the classic meters, the heroic couplet and the Spenserian stanza, without displaying much originality, though his love of nature is

evident, as also, in a less degree, is his interest in the outcasts and unfortunates of country life. Soon after this a friend left him a legacy of £900, on which he contrived to live, with his excellent sister Dorothy, for some eight years. At the end of this time Lord Lonsdale died, and his son paid the Wordsworths a considerable sum for professional services due their father's estate. Wordsworth married in 1802 and at first lived in the south of England, later at Grasmere, and after 1813 at Rydal Mount, in the "lake region" of the north. In that year he was appointed "stamp collector" of the district, an office which brought him in from £500 to £800 a year and made but slight demands on his time. He was thus enabled to devote his life to the theory and practice of verse. On the death of Southey in 1843 he was appointed poet laureate, an honorary office to which Alfred Tennyson succeeded him after his death in 1850.

When he was living with his sister in Somersetshire he was visited by Coleridge in June, 1797. Coleridge was two years his junior and was a remarkably stimulating talker. He woke Wordsworth up and inspired him to cut his way out of the labyrinth of poetical conventions and to follow the promptings of his genius in verse, which "had a character not hitherto reflected by books." Out of this companionship grew the "Lyrical Ballads" already referred to. Wordsworth had formed a theory, based partly upon his admiration of the popular ballads in Percy's "Reliques" and Burns's songs, that very simple and unadorned incidents in the lives of persons and people of humble station, if realistically told, might, from their very lack of artificiality, be made the subject matter of poetry. This is undoubtedly true, and he was right, too, in discarding for poems of this sort the worn-out dic

tion of contemporary verse; but unfortunately he possessed little of the talent of the story-teller and selected in some cases incidents of little dramatic interest. He rhymed with great facility, and thus it came that some of his narrative poems, like the "Idiot Boy” and “Goody Blake,” are not interesting nor striking. The moment a poem on a homely subject becomes tiresome it becomes ridiculous, and so some of Wordsworth's narrative poems were laughed at when they first appeared and have been laughed at ever since.

Soon after the publication of "Lyrical Ballads," Coleridge and Wordsworth went to Germany for a year, a "Lyrical journey in Coleridge's case momentous in the Ballads." influences that followed the introduction to a new world of thought, but powerless to mold the unyielding rock of Wordsworth's puritanic egotism. On their return a new edition of the "Ballads" was called for and issued, containing important additions. A preface was annexed in which Wordsworth defined his doctrine of poetical art, and this subjected him to a good deal of unfavorable criticism, as it was in some ways a defiance of accepted authority. He says:

“There will be found in these volumes little of what is called poetic diction; I have taken as much pains to avoid it as others ordinarily take to produce it; this I have done for the reason already alleged, to bring my language near to the language of men, and further, because the pleasure which I have proposed to myself to impart, is a kind very different from that which is supposed by many persons to be the object of poetry. I do not know how I can give my reader a more exact notion of the style in which I wished these poems to be written than by informing him that I have at all times endeavored to look steadily at my subject; consequently, I hope that there is in these poems little falsehood of description, and that my ideas are expressed in language fitted to their respective importance. Something I must have gained by this practice, as it is friendly to one property of all good poetry, namely, good sense: but it has necessarily cut me off