reaction was confronted with unbelief in lyric form. His immature Queen
Mab was vital enough with conviction to serve as an inspiration to a
whole host of unlettered freethinkers not only in its own generation
but in the next. Its notes preserved, and greatly expanded, the
tract entitled The Necessity of Atheism, for which he was expelled
from Oxford; and against his will it became a people's book, the law
refusing him copyright in his own work, on the memorable principle that
there could be no "protection" for a book setting forth pernicious
opinions. Whether he might not in later life, had he survived, have
passed to a species of mystic Christianity, reacting like Coleridge,
but with a necessary difference, is a question raised by parts of
the Hellas. Gladstone seems to have thought that he had in him such
a potentiality. But Shelley's work, as done, sufficed to keep for
radicalism and rationalism the crown of song as against the final
Tory orthodoxy [1840] of the elderly Wordsworth and of Southey; and
Coleridge's zeal for (amended) dogma came upon him after his hour of
poetic transfiguration was past.
And even Coleridge, who held the heresies of a modal Trinity and
the non-expiatory character of the death of Christ, was widely
distrusted by the pious, and expressed himself privately in
terms which would have outraged them. Miracles, he declared,
"are supererogatory. The law of God and the great principles
of the Christian religion would have been the same had Christ
never assumed humanity. It is for these things, and for such as
these, for telling unwelcome truths, that I have been termed an
atheist. It is for these opinions that William Smith assured the
Archbishop of Canterbury that I was (what half the clergy are in
their lives) an atheist. Little do these men know what atheism
is. Not one man in a thousand has either strength of mind or
goodness of heart to be an atheist. I repeat it. Not one man in
ten thousand has goodness of heart or strength of mind to be an
atheist." Allsopp's Letters, etc., as cited, p. 47. But at other
times Coleridge was a defender of the faith, while contemning
the methods of the evidential school. Id. pp. 13-14, 31.
On the other side, Scott's honest but unintellectual romanticism,
as we know from Newman, certainly favoured the Tractarian reaction,
to which it was æsthetically though hardly emotionally akin. Yet
George Eliot could say in later life that it was the influence
of Scott that first unsettled her orthodoxy; [1841] meaning,
doubtless, that the prevailing secularity of his view of life and
his objective handling of sects and faiths excluded even a theistic
solution. Scott's orthodoxy was in fact nearly on all fours with his
Jacobitism--a matter of temperamental loyalty to a tradition. [1842]
But the far more potent influence of Byron, too wayward to hold a
firm philosophy, but too intensely alive to realities to be capable
of Scott's feudal orthodoxy, must have counted much for heresy even
in England, and was one of the literary forces of revolutionary
revival for the whole of Europe. Though he never came to a clear
atheistical decision as did Shelley, [1843] and often in private gave
himself out for a Calvinist, he so handled theological problems in
his Cain that he, like Shelley, was refused copyright in his work;
[1844] and it was widely appropriated for freethinkers' purposes. The
orthodox Southey was on the same grounds denied the right to suppress
his early revolutionary drama, Wat Tyler, which accordingly was made
to do duty in Radical propaganda by freethinking publishers. Keats,
again, though he melodiously declaimed, in a boyish mood, against
the scientific analysis of the rainbow, and though he never assented
to Shelley's impeachments of Christianity, was in no active sense a
believer in it, and after his long sickness met death gladly without
the "consolations" ascribed to creed. [1845]