Chapter I
The Religious Milieu of the Romantics
(I)
Towards the end of the eighteenth century, the English people experienced an unprecedented change in history caused by three revolutions, namely, the American and the French Revolutions and the Industrial Revolution. There is a unity among all these three. There occurred a movement of industry from the village to the factories of the cities, and the same driving force caused the political movements.
Government was forced to grapple with a new phase in commerce and transport and to carry out various reforms for the new-born social problems. These circumstances gave birth to a common restlessness among the people: they were no longer content with the traditional ways of doing and thinking. Broadly speaking, the tide of the European historical mind shifted: the world was no longer in stasis but in continual movement. Especially the French Revolution, a secular version of the Last Judgment, was thought to predict the millennium foretold in the Revelation. People were expectant of a new world to be created before their own eyes.
The new tide inevitably forced man to reinterpret the traditional relationship of Man and God. The poets, ever sensible of the ethos of the society they live in, were aware that the older Christian myth was no longer absolute and unchangeable, and they tried to build their own system of values which would conform to and reflect the spirit of the age. They composed their personal myths which would give meaning and direction to their unstable existence.
If one were asked what was the darkest period in the modern history of the Church, one would surely answer that it was the age covering the late eighteenth and the early nineteenth centuries.
The family had been away for a long time, warring with Bonaparte on....
西山清著Keats's Myth of the Fall （北星堂書店）、第一ページより引用。
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