Proserpine and Midas | Page 6

was slow to go back to
classical themes. Winckelmann and Goethe, and Chenier--the last,
indeed, practically all unknown to his contemporaries--had long
rediscovered Antiquity, and felt its pulse anew, and praised its enduring
power, when English poetry had little, if anything, to show in answer to
the plaintive invocation of Blake to the Ancient Muses.
The first generation of English Romantics either shunned the subject
altogether, or simply echoed Blake's isolated lines in isolated passages
as regretful and almost as despondent. From Persia to Paraguay
Southey could wander and seek after exotic themes; his days could be
'passed among the dead'--but neither the classic lands nor the classic
heroes ever seem to have detained him. Walter Scott's 'sphere of
sensation may be almost exactly limited by the growth of heather', as
Ruskin says; [Footnote: Modern Painters, iii. 317] and when he came
to Rome, his last illness prevented him from any attempt he might have
wished to make to enlarge his field of vision. Wordsworth was even
less far-travelled, and his home-made poetry never thought of the
'Pagan' and his 'creed outworn', but as a distinct pis-aller in the way of
inspiration. [Footnote: Sonnet 'The world is too much with us'; cf. The
Excursion, iv. 851-57.] And again, though Coleridge has a few

magnificent lines about them, he seems to have even less willingly than
Wordsworth hearkened after
The intelligible forms of ancient poets, The fair humanities of old
religion. [Footnote: The Piccolomini, II, iv.]
It was to be otherwise with the later English Romantic poets. They
lived and worked at a time when the whole atmosphere and even the
paraphernalia of literary composition had just undergone a considerable
change. After a period of comparative seclusion and self- concentration,
England at the Peace of Amiens once more found its way to
Europe--and vice versa. And from our point of view this widening of
prospects is especially noticeable. For the classical revival in
Romanticism appears to be closely connected with it.
It is an alluring subject to investigate. How the progress of scholarship,
the recent 'finds' of archaeology, the extension of travelling along
Mediterranean shores, the political enthusiasms evoked by the stirrings
of young Italy and young Greece, all combined to reawaken in the
poetical imagination of the times the dormant memories of antiquity
has not yet been told by the historians of literature. [Footnote: At least
as far as England is concerned. For France, cf. Canat, La renaissance
de la Grece antique, Hachette, Paris, 1911.]
But--and this is sufficient for our purpose--every one knows what the
Elgin Marbles have done for Keats and Shelley; and what inspirations
were derived from their pilgrimages in classic lands by all the poets of
this and the following generation, from Byron to Landor. Such
experiences could not but react on the common conception of
mythology. A knowledge of the great classical sculpture of Greece
could not but invest with a new dignity and chastity the notions which
so far had been nurtured on the Venus de' Medici and the Belvedere
Apollo--even Shelley lived and possibly died under their spell. And
'returning to the nature which had inspired the ancient myths', the
Romantic poets must have felt with a keener sense 'their exquisite
vitality'. [Footnote: J. A, Symonds, Studies of the Greek Poets, ii, p.
258.] The whole tenor of English Romanticism may be said to have
been affected thereby.

For English Romanticism--and this is one of its most distinctive
merits--had no exclusiveness about it. It was too spontaneous, one
would almost say, too unconscious, ever to be clannish. It grew,
untrammelled by codes, uncrystallized into formulas, a living thing
always, not a subject-matter for grandiloquent manifestoes and more or
less dignified squabbles. It could therefore absorb and turn to account
elements which seemed antagonistic to it in the more sophisticated
forms it assumed in other literatures. Thus, whilst French
Romanticism--in spite of what it may or may not have owed to
Chenier--became often distinctly, deliberately, wilfully anti- classical,
whilst for example [Footnote: As pointed out by Brunetiere, Evolution
de la Poesie lyrique, ii, p. 147.] Victor Hugo in that all-comprehending
Legende des Siecles could find room for the Hegira and for Zim-Zizimi,
but did not consecrate a single line to the departed glories of mythical
Greece, the Romantic poets of England may claim to have restored in
freshness and purity the religion of antiquity. Indeed their voice was so
convincing that even the great Christian chorus that broke out afresh in
the Victorian era could not entirely drown it, and Elizabeth Barrett had
an apologetic way of dismissing 'the dead Pan', and all the 'vain false
gods of Hellas', with an acknowledgement of
your beauty which confesses Some chief Beauty conquering you.
This may be taken to have been the average attitude, in the forties,
towards