into his work, to show a character stripped of the sham trappings of society, he would be welcomed and admired; but only in the same way as Gulliver in his cage was admired by the giants. So we see the Tom Joneses, the Squire Westerns, the Roderick Randoms, the Uncle Tobys and Widow Wadmans, and even, if necessary, the naked and repulsive humanity of the sordid Yahoos. But all this is only a show. The exhibitor himself remains cold and unmoved. Even if he is a poet, he never lets us see into his own heart; never allows his imagination to play freely before our eyes.

Not that these writers felt no emotions, or gave no liberty to their imaginations. But their hatred and their love were expressed in conventional forms, just as their metaphors and images were all sanctioned by age and garbed in classical dress. The woods and fields still had their nymphs and dryads as before, but how changed now! The ancient Greeks saw the gods all about them, and felt a personality in each of the forces of nature: Shakespeare heard the voices of the forest fairies, the songs of Ariel, the quarrels of Oberon and Titania. The poets of the eighteenth century could no longer see or hear them. They only knew that there ought to be such things; and so they introduced them. But we can perceive only too clearly the artificial and laborious character of their creations. The inner life of their souls is never revealed by any loud or unstudied cry. The note that they strike has the air rather of being learned from some manual of social etiquette than of being drawn straight from the heart. The correct polished style which they compelled themselves to use weakens the natural force of their feelings and the strength of their imaginations. Their personality, and with it their lyric genius, disappears under the external forms imposed by fashion and ordered by reason. The ancient Muses seem to have departed; and Blake had good grounds for the lamentation over their absence which he uttered in one of his earliest poems.

"Whether on Ida's shady brow,

Or in the chambers of the East,
The chambers of the sun, that now
From antient melody have ceas'd;
Whether in Heav'n ye wander fair,

Or the green corners of the earth,

Or the blue regions of the air

Where the melodious winds have birth;

Whether on chrystal rocks ye rove,
Beneath the bosom of the sea
Wand'ring in many a coral grove,
Fair Nine, forsaking Poetry!

How have you left the antient love
That bards of old enjoy'd in you!
The languid strings do scarcely move!

The sound is forc'd, the notes are few! 1

And yet, even in this forced music and these rare melodies we find clear indications that poetry is not dead, that fancy, passion, imagination, individuality, lyric power, have not gone for ever from literature. Because there have been one or two centuries during which certain deep, essential instincts of the human soul were considered unsuitable subjects for literature and poetry, it does not follow that these instincts are to be excluded for ever. We can no more suppress them than we can change the nature of the soul. These hidden fires must some day break forth brightly once more, illuminating the ashes beneath which they were buried. And the day of their awakening was already at hand. Already the want of some new creation was making itself felt; and they alone had the power to create. This new creation was, in political and social life, first the circulation of the ideas which produced the Revolution, and then the religious revival of the nineteenth century in the life of literature it was Romanticism. Both the one and the other of these movements were caused by passion and enthusiasm: they were a defiance cast at reason, and at the authority of established principles.

Imagination and fancy, which show themselves very little in the literature of the eighteenth century, were nevertheless so much alive that we see them appearing and springing up in many social phenomena. In France, at the very moment when the doctrines of reason were all-powerful, had not men already witnessed the birth of Quietism, that mystic dream of tender souls, that rapturous piety, which the powerful authority of Bossuet destroyed in the end? Did not the logician Descartes experience his night of Vision, and did not Pascal dream of his mystery of Jesus, and give vent to a sigh of anguish worthy of a Saint Theresa ? But under the authority of the Church, the dreams of an orthodox religion cannot subsist long. Even devotion must take a prescribed form, lest it should 1 Poetical Sketches: To the Muses (1783)

disappear. Then we find the mystic imagination passing over to another sphere. Believers add superstition to their faith; the atheists make it take its place. Here and there we find exaggerated expressions of it. At first the spiritually-minded hover over the obscure regions that lie between science and occultism, and the still more dimly defined phenomena of hysteria and hypnotism. In the beginning of the century, the Convulsionaries of Saint-Médard had visions and accomplished miracles (1729-1733). Towards the end, all Paris hastened to Mesmer's marvellous bath, and sought to discover in it mysterious forces from the great Beyond (1778). Here we have fancy touching on madness; yet nothing was more popular; and Cagliostro, adventurer and half man of science, well knew how to profit by it, whilst fostering the desires and flattering the illusions of the crowd (1785). It was an age when freemasonry attracted restless and searching minds by its quality of mystery, when people believed almost universally in Sorcery, in the Cabala and in Astrology. The Cabalist Martinez-Pasqualis originated a set of Initiates in the lodges (1754). Amongst others, he converted Saint Martin, the “Unknown Philosopher," who later on was to introduce the works of Boehme, the mystic German cobbler, into France, and to found in his turn a fresh esoteric doctrine (1775). And when the prophet Swedenborg appeared with his lately published Heaven and Hell (1758), it was snatched up, and commented upon, and discussed; and many believed in him as in a new Evangelist. To-day we call such men dreamers and madmen. The age of reason and logic called them seers and admired them; so greatly did the cravings of imaginative and mystically contemplative minds find in them their truest expression, and in their dogmas the completest satisfaction.

As for the stronger minds, for those most occupied by social realities, they were none the less possessors of their share of imagination. What else were all those projects for the renovation of Society, those visions of a Europe wrapped in a state of perpetual peace, as enounced by the Abbé de Saint Pierre (1713); or those of a regenerated humanity, like Rousseau's idea of mankind in its primitive state; or of the universal enlightenment of the human mind, as held by the encyclopaedists-what were they if not dreams supported by a scaffolding of syllogisms, as if they dared not rise without it? And the ideal social state of the revolutionists, was not that also a dream of the millennium? And their cry of Liberty, was it not uttered with the intense enthusiasm of a dreamer, seeking to realize his visions

on the earth? And their equality that cannot be realized, their mystic brotherhood of nations? A splendid dream, but too unreasonable ever to become an actual fact. Nevertheless, this mirage of their dreams attracted them; they surrounded it with close reasoning; they consecrated their life to it as they would to a religion; they made a creed of it which left no room for discussion; and they laboured to realize it with all the power of their passionate enthusiasm. Truly their faith was great, and it moved mountains. But events quickly showed how many of their ideals were pure fancy, bound to pass away. All the while they believed they were acting as reasonable and logical men, as if one could couple cold reason to the fire of a great passion. At bottom they were only wonderful dreamers; and the goddess Reason, whom they raised on their altars, was their Supreme Vision, adored under a false name. When once this goddess was removed, the mystic dream of religion could return to satisfy the soul; and the churches could again be opened.

This intensity of constrained imagination was much less visible in literature properly so called. However, it is seen in the taste for those false modes of construction which the eighteenth century possessed the artificial ode and idyll, and the pastoral. The icy raptures of Jean-Baptiste Rousseau, Delille's periphrastic descriptions, the watered Shakespearianisms of Ducis, were but an arid pasturage for the mind; yet how greedily it absorbed them! The loves of Estelle or of Galatea charmed the men of letters because they allowed their imagination to wander over mild idyllic regions, which reality could never enter and spoil. When all this could be joined to the description of some real sentiment, as in Manon Lescaut or in Paul et Virginie, and the feeling of a possible reality, then the imagination and the heart were satisfied together. When Rousseau dared to utter the declamatory outcry of his passion; the soul of the eighteenth century recognized in him all that she had dreamed without daring to express. She felt that she could admire him the more, in that he had lost nothing of his logical capacities, and that reason could find herself satisfied in him. It was not his logic, however, but the sincerity of his enthusiasms, the vigour of his capacity for hate, the exaltation of a passionate dreamer, that gave him such a power over souls. There was but one more step to take to consider reason no longer as the chief quality of a literary work; to give passion and imagination a free rein, and to cast off the rules of a too narrow logic. And that is what the Romantic School was to do.

In England, the movement of men's imaginations is less noticeable in social life, whilst on the contrary it is more remarkable in literature. It shows itself in certain minds by the recrudescence of various religious tendencies: in fact, the English protestant mind often turns to religious mysticism. The principal example is the spiritual revival which gave birth to Methodism (1738). This was the doing of Whitefield the mystic (1714-1770), and of Wesley the enthusiast (1703-1791), a dreamer and at the same time energetic, a man combining imagination and creative faith with the temperament of an organiser. Other sects, containing fewer members, were founded about the same time: the most interesting was that of Swedenborg, the" New Jerusalem " which still lives to-day. The Swedish visionary spent much of his time in London, and his principal works, the Arcana Calestia (1749-1766) and Heaven and Hell, had been read and admired with an even more lively faith than in France. We shall have to speak again of his doctrine and his influence on Blake. At this point it is sufficient to note his popularity as a sign of the times. Shortly afterwards, another initiate, William Law, about whom also we shall have to speak again, translated the works of Boehme (1764) into English, and gained a goodly number of adherents to his doctrine, amongst whom Blake himself was to be found. These are doubtless (putting aside Methodism, which was widely accepted and is still very much alive in England) almost unique manifestations of isolated facts; but they show how little extinct was the mystic tendency in the English mind.

In the political world we have enthusiasts and dreamers, but during their lifetime their actual influence on affairs was almost of no effect. They were the liberals who hailed the dawn of the French Revolution, those whose theories were so dear to Blake, as later on they were to Shelley, and whom we shall meet again soon.

As for literature, it is sufficient to note the appearance of the best known works of the period, to appreciate the growing influence of the spiritual movement, and the gradual approach of the lyrical school of poetry. Already there are many descriptive passages in Thomson (1730), where the poet's imagination glows as it pictures fine natural landscape, and where only a slight effort is needed to feel its very soul. Even the slightly artificial declamations of Young (Night Thoughts, 1743) and Blair's cunningly arranged commonplaces (The Grave, 1743), suggest, without actually expressing, a whole world, wherein the imagination can roam freely, such as Blake would