Note 179 — Chapter XXI · FREETHOUGHT IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY

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;179 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.180 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,181 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;182 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.183