It started English
literature after the Revolution with a sort of bent towards independence
and eccentricity, which in the brighter wits became individuality, and
in the duller ones, Individualism. English Romantics, English Liberals,
were not public men making a republic, but poets, each seeing a vision.
The lonelier version of liberty was a sort of aristocratic anarchism in
Byron and Shelley; but though in Victorian times it faded into much
milder prejudices and much more _bourgeois_ crotchets, England retained
from that twist a certain odd separation and privacy. England became
much more of an island than she had ever been before. There fell from
her about this time, not only the understanding of France or Germany,
but to her own long and yet lingering disaster, the understanding of
Ireland. She had not joined in the attempt to create European democracy;
nor did she, save in the first glow of Waterloo, join in the
counter-attempt to destroy it. The life in her literature was still, to
a large extent, the romantic liberalism of Rousseau, the free and humane
truisms that had refreshed the other nations, the return to Nature and
to natural rights.
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