“Tiger!  Tiger! burning bright
 In the forests of the night,
 What immortal hand or eye
 Could frame thy fearful symmetry.”

In all the English lyric there is no voice so clear, so separate or distinctive as his.

CHAPTER VII

THE ROMANTIC REVIVAL

(1)

There are two ways of approaching the periods of change and new birth in literature.  The commonest and, for all the study which it entails, the easiest, is that summed up in the phrase, literature begets literature.  Following it, you discover and weigh literary influences, the influence of poet on poet, and book on book.  You find one man harking back to earlier models in his own tongue, which an intervening age misunderstood or despised; another, turning to the contemporary literatures of neighbouring countries; another, perhaps, to the splendour and exoticism of the east.  In the matter of form and style, such a study carries you far.  You can trace types of poetry and metres back to curious and unsuspected originals, find the well-known verse of Burns’ epistles turning up in Provencal; Tennyson’s In Memoriam stanza in use by Ben Jonson; the metre of Christabel in minor Elizabethan poetry; the peculiar form of Fitzgerald’s translation of Omar Khayyam followed by so many imitators since, itself to be the actual reflection of the rough metrical scheme of his Persian original.  But such a study, though it is profitable and interesting, can never lead to the whole truth.  As we saw in the beginning of this book, in the matter of the Renaissance, every age of discovery and re-birth has its double aspect.  It is a revolution in style and language, an age of literary experiment and achievement, but its experiments are dictated by the excitement of a new subject-matter, and that subject-matter is so much in the air, so impalpable and universal that it eludes analysis.  Only you can be sure that it is this weltering contagion of new ideas, and new thought—­the “Zeitgeist,” the spirit of the age, or whatever you may call it—­that is the essential and controlling force.  Literary loans and imports give the forms into which it can be moulded, but without them it would still exist, and they are only the means by which a spirit which is in life itself, and which expresses itself in action, and in concrete human achievement, gets itself into the written word.  The romantic revival numbers Napoleon amongst its leaders as well as Byron, Wellington, Pitt and Wilberforce, as well as Keats and Wordsworth.  Only the literary manifestations of the time concern us here, but it is important to remember that the passion for simplification and for a return to nature as a refuge from the artificial complexities of society, which inspired the Lyrical Ballads, inspired no less the course of the Revolution in France, and later, the destruction by Napoleon of the smaller feudal states of Germany, which made possible German nationality and a national spirit.