times remote and therefore indefinite and mysterious was to be preferred by many to the times of their own day when descriptions had to be confined to reality and narration to the natural. The medieval romances permitted the individual author to cultivate "a wild strain of imagination" and "let loose his invention" in ways which the ordinary novel and drama prevented.

Walpole's Castle of Otranto, Beckford's Vathek, Godwin's St. Leon, Mrs. Ratcliffe's Mysteries of Udolpho are but a scant few of the multitudes of romances that raced from the pens of that day, but they exemplify the trend in sufficient detail to illustrate our analysis. Colman's lines:

"A novel now is nothing more

Than an old castle and a creaking door,
a distant hovel,

Clanking of chains-a galley—a light
Old armour and a phantom all in white.
And there's a novel,"

vivify something of the extremity of the genre. There had been an interest in old romances and medieval magic before, but as Mr. de Maar points out, this eighteenth-century interest can be called modern romanticism in that it expressed "a new treatment of nature" and reveals a more "individual spirit." (Italics mine.)

Г

Moreover, it is important to remember that a social movement is likely to develop divergent forms and fashions. Beneath all of the forms and fashions, nevertheless, there runs a similar motivation. Between cause and effect, social stimulus and individual response, there enters that chemistry of personality which, however limited by its environment, often tends to diversify otherwise similar material. Thus one school may cling to a bourgeois realism of the Richardsonian type, and another, almost within the same generation, wander into a world of medieval castles and "faery lands forlorn." Behind both, however, is a verisimilitude of spirit that is more striking and important than the disparities of theme and treatment. Beneath both is the same spirit of revolt, the same advance of individualism, the same distaste for aristocratic attitudes toward sex and morality in general, that were so inevitably characteristic of the sociology of the era. Then, too, it should not be forgotten that the Gothic romance, in precise chronology, followed the Richardsonian school of realism—although they both occurred within the last sixty years of the century-and, in a sense, advanced another step toward the culmination of the romantic revolt in the work of Wordsworth and Keats in the beginning of the next century.

In conclusion, we must note the sex attitudes that prevailed in all of the schools, in every period of the

century. With the 1690's and the political assertion of the bourgeoisie had come the Sentimental Comedy and then the Bourgeois Tragedy; in quick succession came the Wartonian romanticists and the Gothic enthusiasts whose influence raced on practically until the close of the century with Walter Scott as their outstanding spokesman in the next.16 In all of this literature with its manifold variations of form and thesis, the moral attitude of the bourgeoisie predominates. Bourgeois morality was part of the spirit of the age. There is scarcely a contrast in world literature of sharper and more revealing character than that between the literature of the Elizabethans, Jacobeans and Restorationists in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and that of the bourgeoisie in the eighteenth. The time has come to cease calling the eighteenth century an age of reason --and dismissing it at that. We must relate this literature to its social basis. Its so-called restraint and moralism, its flaunted individualism, are all parts of a bourgeois psychology attuned to the social conditions of eighteenth-century life. Its sex expression was confined because the ideology of the bourgeoisie was reprehensively puritanical. Its dramatists, Lillo, Moore, Cumberland, Kelly, Sheridan, Goldsmith were like saints in their treatment of sex in comparison with the

16 In a way, Maurice Hewlett could have been classified as their vestigal representative in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Of course, Hewlett's work was an anachronism.

treatment of sex by Shakespeare and Dryden. Sex had become a sanctified taboo. Private property, as we showed in our chapter on Puritan Esthetics, had invested marriage with a new economic significance. Literature that featured situations, conjured up plots, starred characters that were likely to promote a looseness of morality injurious to the habits and concepts of bourgeois life was not a literature that could prosper and progress under the new régime that had arisen from commercialism and that was to change the countenance of the world with the Industrial Revolution. Lillo did not write as Dekker did about sex, or Goldsmith as Wycherly, not because of individual whimsicalities or preference, but because of class change and economic evolution.

CHAPTER VII

POLITICS AND POETRY

HE nineteenth century chalked the completion of

THE

the romantic revolt. At first accelerated, if later retarded, by the French Revolution, this final phase of the romantic movement swept away the major remnants of feudalism. What remained of the old régime, with this new generation, were but scattered, colorless vestiges, hollow, empty, impotent gestures of the ancient order. Political and poetical expression took on more definite and decisive character. Romanticism became now not only a movement for freedom from forms in art and design, but also for liberty in politics.

"Le Romantisme, tant de fois mal défini, n'est que le libéralisme en littérature,"

wrote Hugo in 1830 in his preface to Hernani. Warton had striven for greater liberty of form, further elasticity of structure, but now this struggle for liberty in literature had joined itself with the desire for greater liberty in life. This new attitude, as we previously stated, was due to the type of life needed by the expanding bourgeoisie and not because of any innate