Romance | Page 8

a true picture of life, they continued in esteem as a school of manners and deportment for the fantastic gallantry of a court. Yet through them all their Christian origin shines. Their very themes bear witness to the teaching of Christian asceticism and Christian idealism. The quest of a lady never seen; the temptations that present themselves to a wandering knight under the disguise of beauty and ease;--these, and many other familiar romantic plots borrow their inspiration from the same source. Not a few of the old fairy stories, preserved in folk-lore, are full of religious meaning--they are the Christian literature of the Dark Ages. Nor is it hard to discern the Christian origins of later Romantic poetry. Pope's morality has little enough of the religious character:
Know then this truth (enough for Man to know), Virtue alone is Happiness below.
But Coleridge, when he moralizes, speaks the language of Christianity:
He prayeth best, who loveth best All things both great and small; For the dear God who loveth us He made and loveth all.
The like contrast holds between Dryden and Shelley. It is perhaps hardly fair to take an example from Dryden's poems on religion; they are rational arguments on difficult topics, after this fashion:
In doubtful questions 'tis the safest way To learn what unsuspected ancients say; For 'tis not likely we should higher soar In search of heaven than all the church before.
When Dryden writes in his most fervent and magnificent style, he writes like this:
I will not rake the Dunghill of thy Crimes, For who would read thy Life that reads thy rhymes? But of King David's Foes be this the Doom, May all be like the Young-man Absalom; And for my Foes may this their Blessing be, To talk like Doeg and to write like Thee.
Nor is it fair to bring Shelley's lame satires into comparison with these splendors. When Shelley is inspired by his demon, this is how he writes:
To suffer woes which Hope thinks infinite; To forgive wrongs darker than death or night; To defy Power which seems omnipotent; To love, and bear; to hope till Hope creates From its own wreck the thing it contemplates; Neither to change, nor falter, nor repent; This, like thy glory, Titan, is to be Good, great and joyous, beautiful and free; This is alone Life, Joy, Empire and Victory.
Some of the great poets of the Romantic Revival took mediaeval literature for their model, but they did more than that. They returned to the cult of wild nature; they reintroduced the supernatural, which is a part of the nature of man; they described seas, and deserts, and mountains, and the emotions of the soul in loneliness. But so soon as it passed out of the hands of the greater poets, this revived Romance became as bookish as decadent Classicism, and ran into every kind of sentimental extravagance. Indeed revived Romance also became a school of manners, and by making a fashion and a code of rare emotions, debased the descriptive parts of the language. A description by any professional reporter of any Royal wedding is further from the truth to-day than it was in the eighteenth century. The average writer is looser and more unprincipled.
The word Romance supplies no very valuable instrument of criticism even in regard to the great writers of the early nineteenth century. Wordsworth, like Defoe, drew straight from the life. Those who will may call him a Romantic. He told of adventures--the adventures of the mind. He did not write of Bacchus, Venus, and Apollo; neither did he concern himself with Merlin, Tristram, and the Lady of the Lake. He shunned what is derived from other books. His theme is man, nature, and human life. Scott, in rich and careless fashion, dealt in every kind of material that came his way. He described his own country and his own people with loving care, and he loved also the melodrama of historical fiction and supernatural legend. "His romance and antiquarianism," says Ruskin, "his knighthood and monkery, are all false, and he knows them to be false." Certainly, The Heart of Midlothian and The Antiquary are better than Ivanhoe. Scott's love for the knighthood and monkery was real, but it was playful. His heart was with Fielding.
There is nothing inconsistent in the best of the traditions of the two parties. The Classical school taught simplicity, directness, and modesty of speech. They are right: it is the way to tell a ghost story. The Romantic school taught a wider imaginative outlook and a more curious analysis of the human mind. They also are right: it is the way to investigate a case in the police courts. Both were cumbered, at times, with the dead things that they found in the books they loved. All literature, except the strongest and purest,