Stopford A. Brooke

Page 4

But the Master of Mankind did not let our country continue in this state.  A wind of the spirit, bearing with it new ideas and their native emotions, began to blow.  Men in the richer classes grew tired of mere material comfort and of only living for wealth they had not earned.  They dimly longed for the ideal, and the things which were not to be had for money.  The rage of the oppressed poor deepened; the indignation of the middle class, who made the wealth of the country but had no voice in the use of it by Parliament, rose steadily; till at last a cry was raised, full of passion and hope, and charged with the desire to better the conditions of government and of the people, which almost gave birth to a violent revolution.  At the same time, a new theological and religious movement, with a host of new emotions, and divided into two rivers of thought, stirred the hearts of men, and especially towards the improvement of the condition of the poor.  The Oxford movement and the Liberal movement in theology were born at the same time as the political movement for reform.  A tidal wave of emotion from these three centres flowed over the land, and out of it emerged a crowd of fresh ideas, fresh forms of action, new modes of art and new ideas about art, born not directly of the political and theological stir, but of the stir itself.  No contrast could be greater than that between this condition of Great Britain, thrilling with ideal life and feeling, and the condition of ten years before.   It was sure to give birth to poets, and Tennyson and Browning were born, as poets, in those years within a year of one another, and began to prophesy.  For sixty years they worked for the good and progress of mankind, on different lines and in diverse manners.  They preached the religious idea of freedom, of the individual soul alone with God, of the man realizing and doing his duty to his fellow-man.  They preached the religion of love, the love of God and the love of man, and the eternity of love in God.  They preached, with Wordsworth, the loss of self in admiration of nature as the visible form of the beauty of God.  They maintained, with Keats, the religion of beauty, but they added to it the beauty of noble conduct.  They looked forward, with Shelley, to the new birth of man, and bid the world strive for it.  They preached, and especially Browning, endless aspiration after unreached, even unconceived perfection, and mingled with this cry of uncontent with anything that earth can give a stern demand to do our duty here on earth, within the limitations which earth imposes.  "Live in, and for, the present," they cried, "but never be satisfied with it.   Follow the ever-retreating gleam; pursue ideals which can only be realized in immortal life.  We are not creatures of a day, not destined to death, but to endless progress."  This was the religion they sang, and it has profoundly influenced mankind.  Browning never wavered in it; Tennyson, less individual than his brother, more sensitive to the changes of thought that arose and fell during those sixty years, wavered somewhat with those changes, and expressed his shifting; but at the end he settled into quiet faith.

It is to the poetry which, in other hands than Tennyson's or Browning's, emerged during those changes of thought, that I now turn; and the poets who were influenced by them have their own interest, and reflect their own world.  Before 1850 had arrived, the excitement of the resurrection of emotional and intellectual life in our country, of which the political and theological movements were phases, had cast into the arena of discussion and battle a host of questions, from the existence of God to the sanitation of a village.  The passions with which the solution of these questions was sought was remarkable enough, but what was even more remarkable was, that while a vast number of books, each of which boldly claimed to have settled for ever the question to which it had addressed itself, were written and read with eagerness--there was also a general consensus that nothing could be settled, that man could come to no conclusion, that he practically knew nothing about God or himself or the world in which he lived, that the more he strove the blinder he was, and that the best thing he could do was to confess with humility his ignorance and his incapacity.  Our world, long before the term agnostic was invented, was agnostic; and the waves of that disturbance are still, with diminishing force, breaking on the shore of society.   Nevertheless, the discussion never ceased, as if men still believed that they could find, by argument, a solution of which they had no hope.  They went round and round their subjects like a horse in a mill, and they ground out nothing, for the most part, but chaff.  They analyzed, dissected, vivisected God and humanity and nature; and in these years were born, not only the philosophies which ticket and put into a museum, like fossils, all the passions, thoughts, and acts of men, but also the psychological novel, the novel of analysis, which, at first pleased with the dissection of health, now loves to dabble in disease.  In the theological world matters were just as bad.  The various parties lost sight of the great truths in which man believes without proof, if he believe at all, and argued incessantly about their views of truth; and the quicker, subtler, and more analytic their intellectual play, the further they got from the great truths.  Things beyond the realm of science, beyond phenomena, were to be settled, it was said, by the reasoning understanding--that enormous error under whose tyranny we are suffering so heavily.

The result of all this activity of the understanding, employed only on the surface of things, naturally unable to penetrate below the surface, ever arguing and never arriving, yet absurdly proud of its ability and earning the punishment of pride, was a dreadful weariness among those who retained any imagination, any passion for the unknown, any desire for beauty or the infinite world, for the impalpable, the unproveable; for something to love, to lose one's self in, to pursue for ever and to worship.  In fact, the soul gave in, and life became to many a boundless weariness.  The soul had not reached then the state of active wrath and rebellion it is at present reaching against the despotism of the understanding.  It lay down helpless, tired out by analytic chatter; was exhausted by the dryness and ugliness of a world from which all things were excluded which could not be clearly judged and arranged by logical argument.