Monthly Bulletin - Clpdigital.org

224 CARNEGIE LIBRARY OF PITTSBURGH
epigram, their mischievous inconsistencies and contradictions
tried by that final test of literature, confrontation with life. The constructive
side is represented by a highly serious attempt to mediate
between the old idealism and these modern elements, which it had too
much ignored and which in their turn have too much ignored it." Nation,
1913.
(Call number 840.4 Bll)
A Survey of English Literature, 1780-1830
By Oliver Elton
"Probably no period in English literature was charged with such
important consequences as that which Professor Elton has selected as
the subject of these volumes. England was slowly awaking from an
intellectual torpor which had benumbed the national imagination and
frozen the national fancy for close upon fifty years. New ideals were
in process of formation. The hard crust of classicism was giving way
before the warmth of a humanitarian sentiment which was to find its
ultimate expression—though in varying forms—in the poetry of Wordsworth
and of Shelley. Collins had already sounded—however faintly—
the trumpet of revolt, and the process of emancipation was carried a
stage further by Cowper. Crabbe, 'a Pope in worsted stockings,' had
opened up a new realm for poetry in the lives of humble people, and
his successors, while they discarded his diction, were careful to retain
much of his sentiment. Blake piped down the valleys wild to an unheeding
generation. In Scotland an inspired ploughman was enriching
the language of his country with the sweetest lyrics that it had ever
known, while Sir Walter Scott brought back to English literature the
breath of that older romance which had filled the Middle Ages with
mystery and colour.
The French Revolution, which set thrones a-tottering throughout
Europe, left its permanent impress alike upon English life and English
literature. It was in vain for Edmund Burke, the last of the Whigs
and the first of the Conservatives, to attempt to stem with his lofty and
impassioned rhetoric the incoming tide of democracy. The world—
or so men felt—was being re-created. Shelley appeared as the herald
of a new dawn, and Byron—that Titanic figure—his head in the clouds
and his feet planted firmly on the earth, flaunted through Europe 'the
pageant of his bleeding heart.' The fight between the old classical
tradition and that new spirit which has been so happily termed 'the
renaissance of wonder,' raged fiercely for a space, flickered down, and
died. The victory lay with the moderns.
To write the literary history of such a period is a task almost superhuman
in its magnitude. It is not, indeed, the task of any one man,
be he never so gifted. Professor Elton applies himself to a work at
once more modest and more effective. 'The book,' he writes, 'is really
a review, a direct criticism, of everything I can find in the history of
fifty years that speaks to me with any sound of human voice.' As