every literary revolution has been hailed by its supporters as a return
to Nature. No less than the school of Coleridge and Wordsworth, the
school of Denham, of Dryden, and of Pope, proclaimed itself as the
champion of Nature; and there can be little doubt that Donne
himself--the father of all the conceits and elaborations of the
seventeenth century--wrote under the impulse of a Naturalistic reaction
against the conventional classicism of the Renaissance. Precisely the
same contradictions took place in France. Nature was the watchword of
Malherbe and of Boileau; and it was equally the watchword of Victor
Hugo. To judge by the successive proclamations of poets, the development
of literature offers a singular paradox. The further it goes back, the
more sophisticated it becomes; and it grows more and more natural as it
grows distant from the State of Nature. However this may be, it is at
least certain that the Romantic revival peculiarly deserves to be called
Naturalistic, because it succeeded in bringing into vogue the operations
of the external world--'the Vegetable Universe,' as Blake called it--as
subject-matter for poetry. But it would have done very little, if it had
done nothing more than this. Thomson, in the full meridian of the
eighteenth century, wrote poems upon the subject of Nature; but it would
be foolish to suppose that Wordsworth and Coleridge merely carried on a
fashion which Thomson had begun. Nature, with them, was something more
than a peg for descriptive and didactic verse; it was the manifestation
of the vast and mysterious forces of the world. The publication of _The
Ancient Mariner_ is a landmark in the history of letters, not because of
its descriptions of natural objects, but because it swept into the
poet's vision a whole new universe of infinite and eternal things; it
was the discovery of the Unknown. We are still under the spell of _The
Ancient Mariner_; and poetry to us means, primarily, something which
suggests, by means of words, mysteries and infinitudes. Thus, music and
imagination seem to us the most essential qualities of poetry, because