so early turned to prose, it is not easy to say.
The verse of his early days rests upon the conviction,
fundamental to his later philosophy, that all the
new ideas concerning men and the world are a revelation
of God. Wordsworth seems never consciously to
have broken with the current theology. His view
of the natural glory and goodness of humanity, especially
among the poor and simple, has not much relation to
that theology. His view of nature, not as created
of God. in the conventional sense, but as itself filled
with God, of God as conscious of himself at every
point of nature’s being, has still less.
Man and nature are but different manifestations of
the one soul of all. Byron’s contribution
to Christian thought, we need hardly say, was of a
negative sort. It was destructive rather than
constructive. Among the conventions and hypocrisies
of society there were none which he more utterly despised
than those of religion and the Church as he saw these.
There is something volcanic, Voltairean in his outbreaks.
But there is a difference. Both Voltaire and
Byron knew that they had not the current religion.
Voltaire thought, nevertheless, that he had a religion.
Posterity has esteemed that he had little. Byron
thought he had none. Posterity has felt that
he had much. His attack was made in a reckless
bitterness which lessened its effect. Yet the
truth of many things which he said is now overwhelmingly
obvious. Shelley began with being what he called
an atheist. He ended with being what we call an
agnostic, whose pure poetic spirit carried him far
into the realm of the highest idealism. The existence
of a conscious will within the universe is not quite
thinkable. Yet immortal love pervades the whole.
Immortality is improbable, but his highest flights
continually imply it. He is sure that when any
theology violates the primary human affections, it
tramples into the dust all thoughts and feelings by
which men may become good. The men who, about
1840, stood paralysed between what Strauss later called
‘the old faith and the new,’ or, as Arnold
phrased it, were ‘between two worlds, one dead,
the other powerless to be born,’ found their
inmost thoughts written broad for them in Arthur Clough.
From the time of the opening of Tennyson’s work,
the poets, not by destruction but by construction,
not in opposition to religion but in harmony with
it, have built up new doctrines of God and man and
aided incalculably in preparing the way for a new
and nobler theology. In the latter part of the
nineteenth century there was perhaps no one man in
England who did more to read all of the vast advance
of knowledge in the light of higher faith, and to
fill such a faith with the spirit of the glad advance
of knowledge, than did Browning. Even Arnold
has voiced in his poetry not a little of the noblest
conviction of the age. And what shall one say
of Mrs. Browning, of the Rossettis and William Morris,
of Emerson and Lowell, of Lanier and Whitman, who
have spoken, often with consummate power and beauty,
that which one never says at all without faith and
rarely says well without art?