The Victorian Age in Literature | Page 3

seems rather proud of
talking nonsense: I never can read that rousing and mounting
description of the storm, where it comes to--
"Who take the ruffian billows by the top, Curling their monstrous heads,
and hanging them With deafening clamour in the slippery clouds."
without seeing an immense balloon rising from the ground, with
Shakespeare grinning over the edge of the car, and saying, "You can't
stop me: I am above reason now." That is the nearest we can get to the
general national spirit, which we have now to follow through one brief
and curious but very national episode.

Three years before the young queen was crowned, William Cobbett
was buried at Farnham. It may seem strange to begin with this great
neglected name, rather than the old age of Wordsworth or the young
death of Shelley. But to any one who feels literature as human, the
empty chair of Cobbett is more solemn and significant than the throne.
With him died the sort of democracy that was a return to Nature, and
which only poets and mobs can understand. After him Radicalism is
urban--and Toryism suburban. Going through green Warwickshire,
Cobbett might have thought of the crops and Shelley of the clouds. But
Shelley would have called Birmingham what Cobbett called it--a
hell-hole. Cobbett was one with after Liberals in the ideal of Man under
an equal law, a citizen of no mean city. He differed from after Liberals
in strongly affirming that Liverpool and Leeds are mean cities.
It is no idle Hibernianism to say that towards the end of the eighteenth
century the most important event in English history happened in France.
It would seem still more perverse, yet it would be still more precise, to
say that the most important event in English history was the event that
never happened at all--the English Revolution on the lines of the
French Revolution. Its failure was not due to any lack of fervour or
even ferocity in those who would have brought it about: from the time
when the first shout went up for Wilkes to the time when the last
Luddite fires were quenched in a cold rain of rationalism, the spirit of
Cobbett, of rural republicanism, of English and patriotic democracy,
burned like a beacon. The revolution failed because it was foiled by
another revolution; an aristocratic revolution, a victory of the rich over
the poor. It was about this time that the common lands were finally
enclosed; that the more cruel game laws were first established; that
England became finally a land of landlords instead of common
land-owners. I will not call it a Tory reaction; for much of the worst of
it (especially of the land-grabbing) was done by Whigs; but we may
certainly call it Anti-Jacobin. Now this fact, though political, is not
only relevant but essential to everything that concerned literature. The
upshot was that though England was full of the revolutionary ideas,
nevertheless there was no revolution. And the effect of this in turn was
that from the middle of the eighteenth century to the middle of the
nineteenth the spirit of revolt in England took a wholly literary form. In

France it was what people did that was wild and elemental; in England
it was what people wrote. It is a quaint comment on the notion that the
English are practical and the French merely visionary, that we were
rebels in arts while they were rebels in arms.
It has been well and wittily said (as illustrating the mildness of English
and the violence of French developments) that the same Gospel of
Rousseau which in France produced the Terror, in England produced
Sandford and Merton. But people forget that in literature the English
were by no means restrained by Mr. Barlow; and that if we turn from
politics to art, we shall find the two parts peculiarly reversed. It would
be equally true to say that the same eighteenth-century emancipation
which in France produced the pictures of David, in England produced
the pictures of Blake. There never were, I think, men who gave to the
imagination so much of the sense of having broken out into the very
borderlands of being, as did the great English poets of the romantic or
revolutionary period; than Coleridge in the secret sunlight of the
Antarctic, where the waters were like witches' oils; than Keats looking
out of those extreme mysterious casements upon that ultimate sea. The
heroes and criminals of the great French crisis would have been quite
as incapable of such imaginative independence as Keats and Coleridge
would have been incapable of winning the battle of Wattignies. In Paris
the tree of liberty was a garden tree, clipped very correctly; and
Robespierre used the razor more regularly than the guillotine. Danton,
who knew