CHAPTER II

THE NEW POETRY

The opening years of the eighth decade of the eighteenth century saw, in

unusually close conjunction, the births of the men who were to be the

chief exponents, and in their turn the chief determining forces, of the

new movement. The three greatest were born, Wordsworth in 1770, Scott in

1771, and Coleridge in 1772; Southey, who partly through accident was to

form a trinity with Wordsworth and Coleridge, and who was perhaps the

most typical instance of a certain new kind of man of letters, followed

in 1774; while Lamb and Hazlitt, the chief romantic pioneers in

criticism, Jeffrey and Sydney Smith, the chief classical reactionaries

therein, were all born within the decade. But the influence of Scott was

for various reasons delayed a little; and critics naturally come after

creators. So that the time-honoured eminence of the "Lake

Poets"--Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Southey--need not be disturbed.

The day of the birth of William Wordsworth was the 7th of April, the

place Cockermouth. His father was an attorney, and, as Lord Lonsdale's

agent, a man of some means and position; but on his death in 1783 the

eccentric and unamiable character of the then Lord Lonsdale, by delaying

the settlement of accounts, put the family in considerable difficulties.

Wordsworth, however, was thoroughly educated at Hawkshead Grammar School

and St. John's College, Cambridge, where he took his B.A. degree in

1791. He travelled in France, and for a time, like many young men, was

a fervent Republican; but, like all the nobler of those who had "hailed

the dawn of the French Revolution," he lived to curse its noon. He

published early, his first volume of poems bearing the date 1793; but,

though that attention to nature which was always his chief note appeared

here, the work is not by any means of an epoch-making character. He was

averse from every profession; but the fates were kind to him, and a

legacy of L900 from his friend Raisley Calvert made a man of such simple

tastes as his independent, for a time at least. On the strength of it he

settled first at Racedown in Dorset, and then at Alfoxden in Somerset,

in the companionship of his sister Dorothy; and at the second of the two

places in the neighbourhood of Coleridge. Massive and original as

Wordsworth's own genius was, it is almost impossible to exaggerate the

effect, both in stimulus and guidance, of the influence of these two;

for Dorothy Wordsworth was a woman of a million, and Coleridge,

marvellous as were his own powers, was almost more marvellous in the

unique Socratic character of his effect on those who possessed anything

to work upon. The two poets produced in 1798 the _Lyrical Ballads_,

among the contents of which it is sufficient to mention _Tintern Abbey_

and _The Ancient Mariner;_ and they subsequently travelled together in

Germany. Then Wordsworth returned to his native lakes and never left

them for long, abiding first at or near Grasmere, and from 1813 at his

well-known home of Rydal Mount. When Lord Lonsdale died in 1802, his

successor promptly and liberally settled the Wordsworth claims. The poet

soon married his cousin Mary Hutchinson; and Lord Lonsdale, not

satisfied with atoning for his predecessor's injustice, procured him, in

the year of his migration to Rydal, the office of Distributor of Stamps

for Westmoreland--an office which was almost a sinecure, and was, for a

man of Wordsworth's tastes, more than amply paid. It is curious, and a

capital instance to prove that the malignity of fortune has itself been

maligned, that the one English poet who was constitutionally incapable

of writing for bread never was under any necessity to do so. For full

sixty years Wordsworth wandered much, read little, meditated without

stint, and wrote, though never hurriedly, yet almost incessantly. The

dates of his chief publications may be best given in a note.[3] For some

years his poems were greeted by the general public and by a few of its

critical guides with storms of obloquy and ridicule; but Wordsworth,

though never indifferent to criticism, was severely disdainful of it,

and held on his way. From the first the brightest spirits of England had

been his passionate though by no means always undiscriminating admirers;

and about the end of the first quarter of the century the public began

to come round. Oxford, always first to recognise, if not always first to

produce, the greatest achievements of English literature, gave him its

D.C.L. in 1839. He received a pension of L300 a year in 1842 from Sir

Robert Peel, who, unlike most English Prime Ministers, cared for men of

letters; the laureateship fell to him in right of right on Southey's

death in 1843, and he died on the 23rd of April 1850, having come to

fourscore years almost without labour, and without many heavy sorrows.

Of his character not much need be said. Like that of Milton, whom he in

many ways resembled (they had even both, as Hartley Coleridge has

pointed out, brothers named Christopher), it was not wholly amiable, and

the defects in it were no doubt aggravated by his early condition (for

it must be remembered that till he was two and thirty his prospects were

of the most disquieting character), by the unjust opposition which the

rise of his reputation met with, and by his solitary life in contact

only with worshipping friends and connections. One of these very

worshippers confesses that he was "inhumanly arrogant"; and he was also,

what all arrogant men are not, rude. He was entirely self-centred, and

his own circle of interests and tastes was not wide. It is said that he

would cut books with a buttery knife, and after that it is probably

unnecessary to say any more, for the fact "surprises by itself" an

indictment of almost infinite counts.

But his genius is not so easily despatched. I have said that it is now

as a whole universally recognised, and I cannot but think that Mr.

Matthew Arnold was wrong when he gave a contrary opinion some fifteen

years ago. He must have been biassed by his own remembrance of earlier

years, when Wordsworth was still a bone of contention. I should say that

never since I myself was an undergraduate, that is to say, for the last

thirty years, has there been any dispute among Englishmen whose opinion

was worth taking, and who cared for poetry at all, on the general merits

of Wordsworth. But this agreement is compatible with a vast amount of

disagreement in detail; and Mr. Arnold's own estimate, as where he

compares Wordsworth with Moliere (who was not a poet at all, though he

sometimes wrote very tolerable verse), weighs him with poets of the

second class like Gray and Manzoni, and finally admits him for his

dealings with "life," introduces fresh puzzlements into the valuation.

There is only one principle on which that valuation can properly

proceed, and this is the question, "Is the poet rich in essentially

poetical moments of the highest power and kind?" And by poetical moments

I mean those instances of expression which, no matter what their

subject, their intention, or their context may be, cause instantaneously

in the fit reader a poetical impression of the intensest and most moving

quality.

Let us consider the matter from this point of view.[4]

The chief poetical influences under which Wordsworth began to write

appear to have been those of Burns and Milton; both were upon him to the

last, and both did him harm as well as good. It was probably in direct

imitation of Burns, as well as in direct opposition to the prevailing

habits of the eighteenth century, that he conceived the theory of poetic

diction which he defended in prose and exemplified in verse. The chief

point of this theory was the use of the simplest and most familiar

language, and the double fallacy is sufficiently obvious. Wordsworth

forgot that the reason why the poetic diction of the three preceding

generations had become loathsome was precisely this, that it had become

familiar; while the familiar Scots of Burns was in itself unfamiliar to

the English ear. On the other hand, he borrowed from Milton, and used

more and more as he grew older, a distinctly stiff and unvernacular form

of poetic diction itself. Few except extreme and hopeless Wordsworthians

now deny that the result of his attempts at simple language was and is

far more ludicrous than touching. The wonderful _Affliction of Margaret_

does not draw its power from the neglect of poetic diction, but from the

intensity of emotion which would carry off almost any diction, simple or

affected; while on the other hand such pieces as "We are Seven," as the

"Anecdote for Fathers," and as "Alice Fell," not to mention "Betty Foy"

and others, which specially infuriated Wordsworth's own contemporaries,

certainly gain nothing from their namby-pamby dialect, and sometimes go

near to losing the beauty that really is in them by dint of it.

Moreover, the Miltonic blank verse and sonnets--at their best of a

stately magnificence surpassed by no poet--have a tendency to become

heavy and even dull when the poetic fire fails to fuse and shine through

them. In fact it may be said of Wordsworth, as of most poets with

theories, that his theories helped him very little, and sometimes

hindered him a great deal.

His real poetical merits are threefold, and lie first in the

inexplicable, the ultimate, felicity of phrase which all great poets

must have, and which only great poets have; secondly, in his matchless

power of delineating natural objects; and lastly, more properly, and

with most special rarity of all, in the half-pantheistic mysticism which

always lies behind this observation, and which every now and then breaks

through it, puts it, as mere observation, aside, and blazes in unmasked

fire of rapture. The summits of Wordsworth's poetry, the "Lines Written

at Tintern Abbey" and the "Ode on Intimations of Immortality,"--poems of

such astonishing magnificence that it is only more astonishing that any

one should have read them and failed to see what a poet had come before

the world,--are the greatest of many of these revelations or

inspirations. It is indeed necessary to read Wordsworth straight

through--a proceeding which requires that the reader shall be in good

literary training, but is then feasible, profitable, and even pleasant

enough--to discern the enormous height at which the great Ode stands

above its author's other work. The _Tintern Abbey_ lines certainly

approach it nearest: many smaller things--"The Affliction of Margaret,"

"The Daffodils," and others--group well under its shadow, and

innumerable passages and even single lines, such as that which all good

critics have noted as lightening the darkness of the _Prelude_--

Voyaging through strange seas of thought, alone--

must of course be added to the poet's credit. But the Ode remains not

merely the greatest, but the one really, dazzlingly, supremely great

thing he ever did. Its theory has been scorned or impugned by some;

parts of it have even been called nonsense by critics of weight. But,

sound or unsound, sense or nonsense, it is poetry, and magnificent

poetry, from the first line to the last--poetry than which there is none

better in any language, poetry such as there is not perhaps more than a

small volume-full in all languages. The second class of merit, that of

vivid observation, abounds whereever the poems are opened. But the

examples of the first are chiefly found in the lyrics "My Heart Leaps

up," "The Sparrow's Nest"; the famous daffodil poem which Jeffrey

thought "stuff," which some say Dorothy wrote chiefly, and which is

almost perfect of its kind; the splendid opening of the "Lines to

Hartley Coleridge," which connect themselves with the "Immortality

Ode"; the exquisite group of the "Cuckoo," the best patches of the Burns

poems, and the three "Yarrows"; the "Peel Castle" stanzas; and, to cut a

tedious catalogue short, the hideously named but in parts perfectly

beautiful "Effusion on the Death of James Hogg," the last really

masterly thing that the poet did. In some of these we may care little

for the poem as a whole, nothing for the moral the poet wishes to draw.

But the poetic moments seize us, the poetic flash dazzles our eyes, and

the whole divine despair or not more divine rapture which poetry causes

comes upon us.

One division of Wordsworth's work is so remarkable that it must have

such special and separate mention as it is here possible to give it; and

that is his exercises in the sonnet, wherein to some tastes he stands

only below Shakespeare and on a level with Milton. The sonnet, after

being long out of favour, paying for its popularity between Wyatt and

Milton by neglect, had, principally it would seem on the very inadequate

example of Bowles (see _infra_), become a very favourite form with the

new Romantics. But none of them wrote it with the steady persistence,

and none except Keats with the occasional felicity, of Wordsworth. Its

thoughtfulness suited his bent, and its limits frustrated his prolixity,

though, it must be owned, he somewhat evaded this benign influence by

writing in series. And the sonnets on "The Venetian Republic," on the

"Subjugation of Switzerland," that beginning "The world is too much with

us," that in November 1806, the first "Personal Talk," the magnificent

"Westminster Bridge," and the opening at least of that on Scott's

departure from Abbotsford, are not merely among the glories of

Wordsworth, they are among the glories of English poetry.

Unfortunately these moments of perfection are, in the poet's whole work,

and especially in that part of it which was composed in the later half

of his long life, by no means very frequent. Wordsworth was absolutely

destitute of humour, from which it necessarily followed that his

self-criticism was either non-existent or constantly at fault. His

verse was so little facile, it paid so little regard to any of the

common allurements of narrative-interest or varied subject, it was so

necessary for it to reach the full white heat, the absolute instant of

poetic projection, that when it was not very good it was apt to be

scarcely tolerable. It is nearly impossible to be duller than Wordsworth

at his dullest, and unluckily it is as impossible to find a poet of

anything like his powers who has given himself the license to be dull so

often and at such length. The famous "Would he had blotted a thousand"

applies to him with as much justice as it was unjust in its original

application; and it is sometimes for pages together a positive struggle

to remember that one is reading one of the greatest of English poets,

and a poet whose influence in making other poets has been second hardly

to that of Spenser, of Keats, or of the friend who follows him in our

survey.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge was born in Devonshire, at Ottery St. Mary, of

which place his father was vicar, on the 21st October 1772. The family

was merely respectable before his day, but since it has been of very

unusual distinction, intellectual and other. He went to Christ's

Hospital when he was not quite ten years old, and in 1791 was admitted

to an exhibition at Jesus College, Cambridge, with his thoughts already

directed to poetry by the sonnets of Bowles above mentioned, and with a

reputation, exaggerated perhaps, but certainly not invented, in Lamb's

famous "Elia" paper on his old school. Indeed, high as is Coleridge's

literary position on the strength of his writing alone, his talk and its

influence on hearers have been unanimously set higher still. He did very

well at first, gaining the Browne Medal for Greek Verse and

distinguishing himself for the Craven Scholarship; but he speedily fell

in love, in debt, it is suspected in drink, and it is known into various

political and theological heresies. He left Cambridge and enlisted at

Reading in the 15th Light Dragoons. He obtained his discharge, however,

in three or four months, and no notice except a formal admonition

appears to have been taken of his resuming his position at Cambridge.

Indeed he was shortly after elected to a Foundation Scholarship. But in

the summer of 1794 he visited Oxford, and after he had fallen in with

Southey, whose views were already Jacobinical, the pair engaged

themselves to Pantisocracy[5] and the Miss Frickers. This curious and

often told story cannot be even summarised here. Its immediate result

was that Coleridge left the University without taking a degree, and,

though not at once, married Sarah Fricker on October 1795. Thenceforward

he lived on literature and his friends, especially the latter. He tried

Unitarian preaching and newspaper work, of which at one time or another

he did a good deal. The curious ins and outs of Coleridge's strange

though hardly eventful life have, after being long most imperfectly

known, been set forth in fullest measure by Mr. Dykes Campbell. It must

suffice here to say that, after much wandering, being unable or

unwilling to keep house with his own family, he found asylums, first

with some kind folk named Morgan, and then in the house of Mr. Gillman

at Hampstead, where for years he held forth to rising men of letters,

and where he died on the 25th June 1834. His too notorious craving for

opium had never been conquered, though it had latterly been kept in some

check.

Despite this unfortunate failing and his general inability to carry out

any schemes of work on the great scale, Coleridge's literary production

was very considerable, and, except the verse, it has never been

completely collected or systematically edited. He began verse-writing

very early, and early found a vent for it in the _Morning Chronicle_,

then a Radical organ. He wrote _The Fall of Robespierre_ in conjunction

with Southey in 1794, and published it. Some prose pamphlets followed,

and then Cottle, the Bristol providence of this group of men of letters,

offered thirty guineas for a volume of poems, which duly appeared in

1796. Meanwhile Coleridge had started a singular newspaper called _The

Watchman_, which saw ten numbers, appearing every eighth day. The

_Lyrical Ballads_ followed in 1798, and meanwhile Coleridge had written

the play of _Osorio_ (to appear long afterwards as _Remorse_), had begun

_Christabel_, and had contributed some of his best poems to the _Morning

Post_. His German visit (see _ante_) produced among other things the

translation of _Wallenstein_, a translation far above the original. Some

poetry and much newspaper work filled the next ten years, with endless

schemes; but in 1807 Coleridge began to lecture at the Royal

Institution--a course somewhat irregularly delivered, and almost

entirely unreported. 1809 saw his second independent periodical venture,

_The Friend_, the subsequent reprint of which as a book is completely

rewritten. In 1811-12 he delivered his second course of lectures, this

time on his own account. It was followed by two others, and in 1813

_Remorse_ was produced at Drury Lane, had a fair success, and brought

the author some money. _Christabel_, with _Kubla Khan_, appeared in

1816, and the _Biographia Literaria_ next year; _Zapolya_ and the

rewritten _Friend_ the year after, when also Coleridge gave a new course

of lectures, and yet another, the last. _Aids to Reflection_, in 1825,

was the latest important work he issued himself, though in 1828 he

superintended a collection of his poems. Such of the rest of his work as

is in existence in a collected form has been printed or reprinted since.

A more full account of the appearance of Coleridge's work than is

desirable or indeed possible in most cases here has been given, because

it is important to convey some idea of the astonishingly piecemeal

fashion in which it reached the world. To those who have studied the

author's life of opium-eating; of constant wandering from place to

place; of impecuniousness so utter that, after all the painstaking of

the modern biographer, and after full allowance for the ravens who seem

always to have been ready to feed him, it is a mystery how he escaped

the workhouse; of endless schemes and endless non-performance--it is

only a wonder that anything of Coleridge's ever reached the public

except in newspaper columns. As it was, while his most ambitiously

planned books were never written at all, most of those which did reach

the press were years in getting through it; and Southey, on one

occasion, after waiting fifteen months for the conclusion of a

contribution of Coleridge's to _Omniana_, had to cancel the sheet in

despair. The collection, after many years, by Mr. Ernest Coleridge of

his grandfather's letters has by no means completely removed the mystery

which hangs over Coleridge's life and character. We see a little more,

but we do not see the whole; and we are still unable to understand what

strange impediments there were to the junction of the two ends of power

and performance. A rigid judge might almost say, that if friends had not

been so kind, fate had been kinder, and that instead of helping they

hindered, just as a child who is never allowed to tumble will never

learn to walk.

The enormous tolerance of friends, however, which alone enabled him to

produce anything, was justified by the astonishing genius to which its

possessor gave so unfair a chance. As a thinker, although the evidence

is too imperfect to justify very dogmatic conclusions, the opinion of

the best authorities, from which there is little reason for differing,

is that Coleridge was much more stimulating than intrinsically valuable.

His _Aids to Reflection_, his most systematic work, is disappointing;

and, with _The Friend_ and the rest, is principally valuable as

exhibiting and inculcating an attitude of mind in which the use of logic

is not, as in most eighteenth century philosophers, destructive, but is

made to consist with a wide license for the employment of imagination

and faith. He borrowed a great deal from the Germans, and he at least

sometimes forgot that he had borrowed a great deal from our own older

writers.

So, too, precise examination of his numerous but fragmentary remains as

a literary critic makes it necessary to take a great deal for granted.

Here, also, he Germanised much; and it is not certain, even with the aid

of his fragments, that he was the equal either of Lamb or of Hazlitt in

insight. Perhaps his highest claim is that, in the criticism of

philosophy, of religion, and of literature alike he expressed, and was

even a little ahead of, the nobler bent and sympathy of his

contemporaries. We are still content to assign to Coleridge, perhaps

without any very certain title-deeds, the invention of that more

catholic way of looking at English literature which can relish the

Middle Ages without doing injustice to contemporaries, and can be

enthusiastic for the seventeenth century without contemning the

eighteenth.[6] To him more than to any single man is also assigned (and

perhaps rightly, though some of his remarks on the Church, even after

his rally to orthodoxy, are odd) the great ecclesiastical revival of the

Oxford movement; and it is certain that he had not a little to do with

the abrupt discarding of the whole tradition of Locke, Berkeley and

Hartley only excepted. Difficult as it may be to give distinct chapter

and verse for these assignments from the formless welter of his prose

works, no good judge has ever doubted their validity, with the above and

other exceptions and guards. It may be very difficult to present

Coleridge's assets in prose in a liquid form; but few doubt their value.

It is very different with his poetry. Here, too, the disastrous, the

almost ruinous results of his weaknesses appear. When one begins to sift

and riddle the not small mass of his verse, it shrinks almost

appallingly in bulk. _Wallenstein_, though better than the original, is

after all only a translation. _Remorse_ (either under that name or as

_Osorio_) and _Zapolya_ are not very much better than the contemporary

or slightly later work of Talfourd and Milman. _The Fall of Robespierre_

is as absurd and not so amusing as Southey's unassisted _Wat Tyler_. Of

the miscellaneous verse with which, after these huge deductions, we are

left, much is verse-impromptu, often learned and often witty, for

Coleridge was (in early days at any rate) abundantly provided with both

wit and humour, but quite occasional. Much more consists of mere

Juvenilia. Even of the productions of his best times (the last lustrum

of the eighteenth century and a lucid interval about 1816) much is not

very good. _Religious Musings_, though it has had its admirers, is

terribly poor stuff. _The Monody on the Death of Chatterton_ might have

been written by fifty people during the century before it. _The Destiny

of Nations_ is a feeble rant; but the _Ode on the Departing Year_,

though still unequal, still conventional, strikes a very different note.

_The Three Graves_, though injured by the namby-pambiness which was

still thought incumbent in ballads, again shows no vulgar touch. And

then, omitting for the moment _Kubla Khan_, which Coleridge said he

wrote in 1797, but of which no mortal ever heard till 1816, we come to

_The Rime of the Ancient Mariner_ and the birth of the new poetry in

England. Here the stutters and flashes of Blake became coherent speech

and steady blaze; here poetry, which for a century and a half had been

curbing her voice to a genteel whisper or raising it only to a forensic

declamation, which had at best allowed a few wood-notes to escape here

and there as if by mistake, spoke out loud and clear.

If this statement seems exaggerated (and it is certain that at the time

of the appearance of the _Ancient Mariner_ not even Wordsworth, not even

Southey quite relished it, while there has always been a sect of

dissidents against it), two others will perhaps seem more extravagant

still. The second is that, with the exception of this poem, of _Kubla

Khan_, of _Christabel_, and of _Love_, all of them according to

Coleridge written within a few months of each other in 1797-98, he never

did anything of the first class in poetry. The third is that these

four--though _Christabel_ itself does not exceed some fifteen hundred

lines and is decidedly unequal, though the _Ancient Mariner_ is just

over six hundred and the other two are quite short--are sufficient

between them to rank their author among the very greatest of English

poets. It is not possible to make any compromise on this point; for upon

it turns an entire theory and system of poetical criticism. Those who

demand from poetry a "criticism of life," those who will have it that

"all depends on the subject," those who want "moral" or "construction"

or a dozen other things,--all good in their way, most of them

compatible with poetry and even helpful to it, but none of them

essential thereto,--can of course never accept this estimate. Mrs.

Barbauld said that _The Ancient Mariner_ was "improbable"; and to this

charge it must plead guilty at once. _Kubla Khan_, which I should rank

as almost the best of the four, is very brief, and is nothing but a

dream, and a fragment of a dream. _Love_ is very short too, and is

flawed by some of the aforesaid namby-pambiness, from which none of the

Lake school escaped when they tried passion. _Christabel_, the most

ambitious if also the most unequal, does really underlie the criticism

that, professing itself to be a narrative and holding out the promise of

something like a connected story, it tells none, and does not even offer

very distinct hints or suggestions or what its story, if it had ever

been told, might have been. A thousand faults are in it; a good part of

the thousand in all four.

But there is also there something which would atone for faults ten

thousand times ten thousand; there is what one hears at most three or

four times in English, at most ten or twelve times in all

literature--the first note, with its endless echo-promise, of a new

poetry. The wonderful cadence-changes of _Kubla Khan_, its phrases,

culminating in the famous distich so well descriptive of Coleridge

himself--

For he on honey dew hath fed,

And drunk the milk of Paradise,

the splendid crash of the

Ancestral voices prophesying war,

are all part of this note and cry. You will find them nowhere from

Chaucer to Cowper--not even in the poets where you will find greater

things as you may please to call them. Then in the _Mariner_ comes the

gorgeous metre,--freed at once and for the first time from the

"butter-woman's rank to market" which had distinguished all imitations

of the ballad hitherto,--the more gorgeous imagery and pageantry here,

the simple directness there, the tameless range of imagination and

fancy, the fierce rush of rhythm:--

The fair breeze blew, the white foam flew,

The furrow followed free:

We were the first that ever burst

Into that silent sea.

And thereafter the spectre of Life-in-Death, the water-snakes, the

rising of the dead men, the snapping of the spell. There had been

nothing like all this before; and in all the hundred years, for all the

great poetry we have seen, we have seen nothing so _new_ as it. _Love_

gave the magnificent opening stanza, the motto and defence at once of

the largest, the most genuine, the most delightful part of poetry. And

_Christabel_, independently of its purple patches, such as the famous

descant on the quarrels of friends, and the portents that mark the

passage of Geraldine, gave what was far more important--a new metre,

destined to have no less great and much more copious influence than the

Spenserian stanza itself. It might of course be easy to pick out

anticipations in part of this combination of iambic dimeter, trochaic,

and anapaestic; but it never had taken thorough form before. And how it

seized on the imagination of those who heard it is best shown by the

well-known anecdote of Scott, who, merely hearing a little of it

recited, at once developed it and established it in _The Lay of the Last

Minstrel_. In verse at least, if not in prose, there is no greater

_master_ than Coleridge.

Robert Southey, the third of this curiously dissimilar trio whom partly

chance and partly choice have bound together for all time, was born at

Bristol on 12th August 1774. His father was only a linen-draper, and a

very unprosperous one; but the Southeys were a respectable family,

entitled to arms, and possessed of considerable landed property in

Somerset, some of which was left away from the poet by unfriendly uncles

to strangers, while more escaped him by a flaw in the entail. His

mother's family, the Hills, were in much better circumstances than his

father, and like the other two Lake Poets he was singularly lucky in

finding helpers. First his mother's brother the Rev. Herbert Hill,

chaplain to the English factory at Lisbon, sent him to Westminster,

where he did very well and made invaluable friends, but lost the regular

advancement to Christ Church owing to the wrath of the head-master Dr.

Vincent at an article which Southey had contributed to a school

magazine, the _Flagellant_. He was in fact expelled; but the gravest

consequences of expulsion from a public school of the first rank did not

fall upon him, and he matriculated without objection at Balliol in 1793.

His college, however, which was then distinguished for loose living and

intellectual dulness, was not congenial to him; and developing extreme

opinions in politics and religion, he decided that he could not take

orders, and left without even taking a degree. His disgrace with his own

friends was completed by his engaging in the Pantisocratic scheme, and

by his attachment to Edith Fricker, a penniless girl (though not at all

a "milliner at Bath") whose sisters became Mrs. Coleridge and Mrs.

Lovell. And when the ever-charitable Hill invited him to Portugal he

married Miss Fricker the very day before he started. After a residence

at Lisbon, in which he laid the foundation of his unrivalled

acquaintance with Peninsular history and literature, he returned and

lived with his wife at various places, nominally studying for the law,

which he liked not better but worse than the Church. After divers

vicissitudes, including a fresh visit (this time not as a bachelor) to

Portugal, and an experience of official work as secretary to Corry the

Irish Chancellor of the Exchequer, he at last, at the age of thirty,

established himself at Greta Hall, close to Keswick, where Coleridge had

already taken up his abode. This, as well as much else in his career,

was made possible by the rare generosity of his friend of school-days

and all days, Charles Wynn, brother of the then Sir Watkin, and later a

pretty well known politician, who on coming of age gave him an annuity

of L160 a year. This in 1807 he relinquished on receiving a government

pension of practically the same amount. The Laureateship in 1813 brought

him less than another hundred; but many years afterwards Sir Robert

Peel, in 1835, after offering a baronetcy, put his declining years out

of anxiety by conferring a further pension of L300 a year on him. These

declining years were in part unhappy. As early as 1816 his eldest son

Herbert, a boy of great promise, died; the shock was repeated some years

later by the death of his youngest and prettiest daughter Isabel; while

in the same year as that in which his pension was increased his wife

became insane, and died two years later. A second marriage in 1839 to

the poetess Caroline Bowles brought him some comfort; but his own brain

became more and more affected, and for a considerable time before his

death on 21st March 1843 he had been mentally incapable.

Many morals have been drawn from this melancholy end as to the wisdom of

too prolonged literary labour, which in Southey's case had certainly

been prodigious, and had been carried so far that he actually read while

he was taking constitutional walks. It is fair to say, however, that,

just as in the case of Scott the terrible shock of the downfall of his

fortunes has to be considered, so in that of Southey the successive

trials to which he, a man of exceptionally strong domestic affections,

was exposed, must be taken into account. At the same time it must be

admitted that Southey's production was enormous. His complete works

never have been, and are never likely to be collected; and, from the

scattered and irregular form in which they appeared, it is difficult if

not impossible to make even a guess at the total. The list of books and

articles (the latter for the most part written for the _Quarterly

Review_, and of very great length) at the end of his son's _Life_ fills

nearly six closely printed pages. Two of these entries--_the Histories

of Brazil_ and of the _Peninsular War_--alone represent six large

volumes. The Poems by themselves occupy a royal octavo in double columns

of small print running to eight hundred pages; the correspondence, very

closely printed in the six volumes of the _Life_, and the four more of

_Letters_ edited by the Rev. J. W. Warter, some five thousand pages in

all; while a good deal of his early periodical work has never been

identified, and there are large stores of additional letters--some

printed, more in MS. Nor was Southey by any means a careless or an easy

writer. He always founded his work on immense reading, some of the

results of which, showing the laborious fashion in which he performed

it, were published after his death in his _Commonplace Book_. He did not

write very rapidly; and he corrected, both in MS. and in proof, with the

utmost sedulity. Of the nearly 14,000 books which he possessed at his

death, it is safe to say that all had been methodically read, and most

read many times; while his almost mediaeval diligence did not hesitate at

working through a set of folios to obtain the information or the

corrections necessary for a single article.

It is here impossible to mention more than the chief items of this

portentous list. They are in verse--_Poems_, by R. Southey and R.

Lovell, 1794; _Joan of Arc_, 1795; _Minor Poems_, 1797-99; _Thalaba_,

1801; _Metrical Tales_ and _Madoc_, 1805; _The Curse of Kehama_, 1810;

_Roderick_, 1814; with a few later volumes, the chief being the unlucky

_Vision of Judgment_, 1821, in hexameters. A complete edition of the

Poems, except one or two posthumously printed, was published by himself

in ten volumes in 1837, and collected into one ten years later with the

additions. This also includes _Wat Tyler_, a rhapsody of the poet's

youth, which was (piratically and to his infinite annoyance) published

in 1817.

In prose Southey's most important works are the _History of Brazil_,

1810-19 (this, large as it is, is only a kind of off-shoot of the

projected _History of Portugal_, which in a way occupied his whole life,

and never got published at all); the _History of the Peninsular War_,

1822-32; the _Letters from England by Don Manuel Espriella_, 1812; the

_Life of Nelson_ (usually thought his masterpiece), 1813; the _Life of

Wesley_, 1820; _The Book of the Church_, 1824; _Colloquies on Society_

(well known, if not in itself, for Macaulay's review of it), 1829;

_Naval History_, 1833-40; and the great humorous miscellany of _The

Doctor_ (seven volumes), 1834-47; to which must be added editions, often

containing some of his best work, of Chatterton, Amadis of Gaul,

Palmerin of England, Kirke White, Bunyan, and Cowper, with divers

_Specimens_ of the British Poets, the charming prose and verse

_Chronicle of the Cid_, the miscellany of _Omniana_, half-way between

table- and commonplace-book, the _Commonplace Book_ itself, and not a

little else, besides letters and articles innumerable.

Certain things about Southey are uncontested and uncontestable. The

uprightness and beauty of his character, his wonderful helpfulness to

others, and the uncomplaining way in which he bore what was almost

poverty,--for, high as was his reputation, his receipts were never a

tithe of the rewards not merely of Scott or Byron or Tom Moore, but of

much lesser men--are not more generally acknowledged than the singular

and pervading excellence of his English prose style, the robustness of

his literary genius, and his unique devotion to literature. But when we

leave these accepted things he becomes more difficult if not less

interesting. He himself had not the slightest doubt that he was a great

poet, and would be recognised as such by posterity, though with a proud

humility he reconciled himself to temporary lack of vogue. This might be

set down to an egotistic delusion. But such an easy explanation is

negatived by even a slight comparison of the opinions of his greatest

contemporaries. It is somewhat staggering to find that Scott, the

greatest Tory man of letters who had strong political sympathies, and

Fox, the greatest Whig politician who had keen literary tastes, enjoyed

his long poems enthusiastically. But it may be said that the eighteenth

century leaven which was so strong in each, and which is also noticeable

in Southey, conciliated them. What then are we to say of Macaulay, a

much younger man, a violent political opponent of Southey, and a by no

means indiscriminate lover of verse, who, admitting that he doubted

whether Southey's long poems would be read after half a century, had no

doubt that if read they would be admired? And what are we to say of the

avowals of admiration wrung as it were from Byron, who succeeded in

working himself up, from personal, political, and literary motives

combined, into a frantic hatred of Southey, lampooned him in print, sent

him a challenge (which luckily was not delivered) in private, and was

what the late Mr. Mark Pattison would have called "his Satan"?

The half century of Macaulay's prophecy has come, and that prophecy has

been fulfilled as to the rarity of Southey's readers as a poet. Has the

other part come true too? I should hesitate to say that it has. Esteem

not merely for the man but for the writer can never fail Southey

whenever he is read by competent persons: admiration may be less prompt

to come at call. Two among his smaller pieces--the beautiful "Holly

Tree," and the much later but exquisite stanzas "My days among the dead

are past"--can never be in any danger; the grasp of the

grotesque-terrific, which the poet shows in the "Old Woman of Berkley"

and a great many other places, anticipates the _Ingoldsby Legends_ with

equal ease but with a finer literary gift; some other things are really

admirable and not a little pleasing. But the longer poems, if they are

ever to live, are still dry bones. _Thalaba_, one of the best, is spoilt

by the dogged craze against rhyme, which is more, not less, needed in

irregular than in regular verse. _Joan of Arc_, _Madoc_, _Roderick_,

have not escaped that curse of blank verse which only Milton, and he not

always, has conquered in really long poems. _Kehama_, the only great

poem in which the poet no longer disdains the almost indispensable aid

to poetry in our modern and loosely quantified tongue, is much better

than any of the others. The Curse itself is about as good as it can be,

and many other passages are not far below it; but to the general taste

the piece suffers from the remote character of the subject, which is not

generally and humanly interesting, and from the mass of tedious detail.

To get out of the difficulty thus presented by indulging in contemptuous

ignoring of Southey's merits has been attempted many times since Emerson

foolishly asked "Who is Southey?" in his jottings of his conversation

with Landor, Southey's most dissimilar but constant friend and

panegyrist. It is extremely easy to say who Southey is. He is the

possessor of perhaps the purest and most perfect English prose style, of

a kind at once simple and scholarly, to be found in the language. He has

written (in the _Life of Nelson_) perhaps the best short biography in

that language, and other things not far behind this. No Englishman has

ever excelled him in range of reading or in intelligent comprehension

and memory of what he read. Unlike many book-worms, he had an

exceedingly lively and active humour. He has scarcely an equal, and

certainly no superior, in the rare and difficult art of discerning and

ranging the material parts of an historical account: the pedant may

glean, but the true historian will rarely reap after him. And in poetry

his gifts, if they are never of the very highest, are so various and

often so high that it is absolutely absurd to pooh-pooh him as a poet.

The man who could write the verses "In my Library" and the best parts of

_Thalaba_ and _Kehama_ certainly had it in his power to write other

things as good, probably to write other things better. Had it been in

his nature to take no thought not merely for the morrow but even for the

day, like Coleridge, or in his fate to be provided for without any

trouble on his own part, and to take the provision with self-centred

indifference, like Wordsworth, his actual production might have been

different and better. But his strenuous and generous nature could not be

idle; and idleness of some sort is, it may be very seriously laid down,

absolutely necessary to the poet who is to be supreme.

The poet who, though, according to the canons of poetical criticism most

in favour during this century, he ranks lower than either Wordsworth or

Coleridge, did far more to popularise the general theory of Romantic

poetry than either, was a slightly older man than two of the trio just

noticed; but he did not begin his poetical career (save by one volume of

translation) till some years after all of them had published. Walter

Scott was born in Edinburgh on the 15th of August 1771. His father, of

the same name as himself, was a Writer to the Signet; his mother was

Anne Rutherford, and the future poet and novelist had much excellent

Border blood in him, besides that of his direct ancestors the Scotts of

Harden. He was a very sickly child; and though he grew out of this he

was permanently lame. His early childhood was principally spent on the

Border itself, with a considerable interval at Bath; and he was duly

sent to the High School and University of Edinburgh, where, like a good

many other future men of letters, he was not extremely remarkable for

what is called scholarship. He was early imprisoned in his father's

office, where the state of relations between father and son is supposed

to be pretty accurately represented by the story of those between Alan

Fairford and his father in _Redgauntlet_; and, like Alan, he was called

to the bar. But even in the inferior branch of the profession he enjoyed

tolerable liberty of wandering about and sporting, besides sometimes

making expeditions on business into the Highlands and other

out-of-the-way parts of the country.

He thus acquired great knowledge of his fatherland; while (for he was,

if not exactly a scholar, the most omnivorous of readers) he was also

acquiring great knowledge of books. And it ought not to be omitted that

Edinburgh, in addition to the literary and professional society which

made it then and afterwards so famous, was still to no small extent the

headquarters of the Scotch nobility, and that Scott, long before his

books made him famous, was familiar with society of every rank. His

first love affair did not run smooth, and he seems never to have

entirely forgotten the object of it, who is identified (on somewhat more

solid grounds than in the case of other novelists) with more than one of

his heroines. But he consoled himself to a certain extent with a young

lady half French, half English, Miss Charlotte Carpenter or Charpentier,

whom he met at Gilsland and married at Carlisle on Christmas Eve 1797.

Scott was an active member of the yeomanry as well as a barrister, an

enthusiastic student of German as well as a sportsman; and the book of

translations (from Buerger) above referred to appeared in 1796. But he

did nothing important till after the beginning of the present century,

when the starting of the _Edinburgh Review_ and some other things

brought him forward; though he showed what he could do by contributing

two ballads, "Glenfinlas" and "The Eve of St. John," to a collection of

terror-pieces started by Monk Lewis, and added Goethe's _Goetz von

Berlichingen_ to his translations. He had become in 1799 independent,

though not rich, by being appointed Sheriff of Selkirkshire.

His beginnings as an author proper were connected, as was all his

subsequent career, partly for good but more for ill, with a school

friendship he had early formed for two brothers named Ballantyne at

Kelso. He induced James, the elder, to start a printing business at

Edinburgh, and unfortunately he entered into a secret partnership with

this firm, which never did him much good, which caused him infinite

trouble, and which finally ruined him. But into this complicated and

still much debated business it is impossible to enter here. James

Ballantyne printed the _Border Minstrelsy_, which appeared in 1802,--a

book ranking with Percy's _Reliques_ in its influence on the form and

matter of subsequent poetry,--and then Scott at last undertook original

work of magnitude. His task was _The Lay of the Last Minstrel_,

published in 1805. It may almost be said that from that day to his death

he was the foremost--he was certainly, with the exception of Byron, the

most popular--man of letters in Great Britain. His next poems--_Marmion_

(1808) and _The Lady of the Lake_ (1810)--brought him fame and money

such as no English poet had gained before; and though Byron's

following--for following it was--for the time eclipsed his master, the

latter's _Rokeby, The Lord of the Isles_, and others, would have been

triumphs for any one else.

How, when the taste for his verse seemed to cool, he struck out a new

line in prose and achieved yet more fame and yet more money than the

verse had ever given him, will concern us in the next chapter. But as it

would be cumbrous to make yet a third division of his work, the part of

his prose which is not fiction may be included here, as well as the rest

of his life. He had written much criticism for the _Edinburgh_, until he

was partly disgusted by an uncivil review of _Marmion_, partly (and

more) by the tone of increasing Whiggery and non-intervention which

Jeffrey was imposing on the paper; and when the _Quarterly_ was founded

in opposition he transferred his services to that. He edited a splendid

and admirably done issue of Dryden (1808) and another not quite so

thoroughly executed of Swift (1814), and his secret connection with the

Ballantynes induced him to do much other editing and miscellaneous work.

In the sad last years of his life he laboured with desperation at a

great _Life of Napoleon_, which was a success pecuniarily but not in

many other ways, produced the exquisite _Tales of a Grandfather_ on

Scottish history, and did much else. He even wrote plays, which have

very little merit, and, except abstract philosophy, there is hardly a

division of literature that he did not touch; for he composed a sermon

or two of merit, and his political pamphlets, the _Letters of Malachi

Malagrowther_, opposing what he thought an interference with Scottish

privileges in currency matters, are among the best of their kind.

His life was for many years a very happy one; for his marriage, if not

passionately, was fairly successful, he was extremely fond of his

children, and while his poems and novels began before he had fully

reached middle life to make him a rich man, his Sheriffship, and a

Clerkship of Session which was afterwards added (though he had to wait

some time for its emoluments), had already made him secure of bread and

expectant of affluence. From a modest cottage at Lasswade he expanded

himself to a rented country house at Ashestiel on the Tweed, having

besides a comfortable town mansion in Edinburgh; and when he was turned

out of Ashestiel he bought land and began to build at Abbotsford on the

same river. The estate was an ill-chosen and unprofitable one. The house

grew with the owner's fortunes, which, founded in part as they were on

the hardest and most honest work that author ever gave, were in part

also founded on the quicksand of his treacherous connection with men,

reckless, ill-judging, and, though perhaps not in intention dishonest,

perpetually trading on their secret partner's industry and fame. In the

great commercial crash of 1825, Constable, the publisher of most of the

novels, was involved; he dragged the Ballantynes down with him; and the

whole of Scott's fortune, except his appointments and the little

settled on his wife and children, was liable for the Ballantynes' debts.

But he was not satisfied with ruin. He must needs set to work at the

hopeless task of paying debts which he had never, except technically,

incurred, and he actually in the remaining years of his life cleared off

the greater part of them. It was at the cost of his life itself. His

wife died, his children were scattered; but he worked on till the

thankless, hopeless toil broke down his strength, and after a fruitless

visit to Italy, he returned, to die at Abbotsford on 21st September

1832.

Scott's poetry has gone through various stages of estimate, and it can

hardly be said even now, a hundred years after the publication of his

first verses, to have attained the position, practically accepted by all

but paradoxers, which in that time a poet usually gains, unless, as the

poets of the seventeenth century did in the eighteenth, he falls, owing

to some freak of popular taste, out of really critical consideration

altogether. The immense popularity which it at first obtained has been

noted, as well as the fact that it was only ousted from that popularity

by, so to speak, a variety of itself. But the rise of Byron in the long

run did it far less harm than the long-delayed vogue of Wordsworth and

Coleridge and the success even of the later schools, of which Tennyson

was at once the pioneer and the commander-in-chief. At an uncertain time

in the century, but comparatively early, it became fashionable to take

Scott's verse as clever and spirited improvisation, to dwell on its

over-fluency and facility, its lack of passages in the grand style

(whatever the grand style may be), to indicate its frequent blemishes in

strictly correct form and phrase. And it can hardly be said that there

has been much reaction from this tone among professed and competent

critics.

To a certain extent, indeed, this undervaluation is justified, and Scott

himself, who was more free from literary vanity than any man of letters

of whom we have record, pleaded guilty again and again. Dropping as he

did almost by accident on a style which had absolutely no forerunners in

elaborate formal literature, a style almost absolutely destitute of any

restrictions or limits, in which the length of lines and stanzas, the

position of rhymes, the change from narrative to dialogue, and so forth,

depended wholly and solely on the caprice of the author, it would have

been extremely strange if a man whose education had been a little

lacking in scholastic strictness, and who began to write at a time when

the first object of almost every writer was to burst old bonds, had not

been somewhat lawless, even somewhat slipshod. _Christabel_ itself, the

first in time, and, though not published till long afterwards, the model

of his _Lay_, has but a few score verses that can pretend to the grand

style (whatever that may be). Nor yet again can it be denied that, acute

as was the sense which bade Scott stop, he wrote as it was a little too

much in this style, while he tried others for which he had far less

aptitude.

Yet it seems to me impossible, on any just theory of poetry or of

literature, to rank him low as a poet. He can afford to take his trial

under more than one statute. To those who say that all depends on the

subject, or that the handling and arrangement of the subject are, if not

everything, yet something to be ranked far above mere detached beauties,

he can produce not merely the first long narrative poems in English,

which for more than a century had honestly enthralled and fixed popular

taste, but some of the very few long narrative poems which deserve to do

so. Wordsworth, in a characteristic note on the _White Doe of Rylstone_,

contrasts, with oblique depreciation of Scott, that poem and its famous

predecessors in the style across the border; but he omits to notice one

point of difference--that in Scott the _story_ interests, and in himself

it does not. For the belated "classical" criticism of the _Edinburgh

Review_, which thought the story of the _Last Minstrel_ childish, and

that of _Marmion_ not much better, it may have been at least consistent

to undervalue these poems. But the assumptions of that criticism no

longer pass muster. On the other hand, to those who pin their poetical

faith on "patches," the great mass of Scott's poetical work presents

examples of certainly no common beauty. The set pieces of the larger

poems, the Melrose description in _The Lay_, the battle in _Marmion_,

the Fiery Cross in the _Lady of the Lake_, are indeed inferior in this

respect to the mere snatches which the author scattered about his

novels, some of which, especially the famous "Proud Maisie," have a

beauty not inferior to that of the best things of his greatest

contemporaries. And in swinging and dashing lyric, again, Scott can hold

his own with the best, if indeed "the best" can hold _their_ own in this

particular division with "Lochinvar" and "Bonnie Dundee," with Elspeth's

ballad in the _Antiquary_, and the White Lady's comfortable words to

poor Father Philip.

The most really damaging things to be said against Scott as a poet are

two. First, that his genius did not incline him either to the expression

of the highest passion or to that of the deepest meditation, in which

directions the utterances of the very greatest poetry are wont to lie.

In the second place, that the extreme fertility and fluency which cannot

be said to have improved even his prose work are, from the nature of the

case, far more evident, and far more damagingly evident, in his verse.

He is a poet of description, of action, of narration, rather than of

intense feeling or thought. Yet in his own special divisions of the

simpler lyric and of lyrical narrative he sometimes attains the

exquisite, and rarely sinks below a quality which is fitted to give the

poetical delight to a very large number of by no means contemptible

persons. It appears to me at least, that on no sound theory of poetical

criticism can Scott be ranked as a poet below Byron, who was his

imitator in narrative and his inferior in lyric. But it may be admitted

that this was not the opinion of most contemporaries of the two, and

that, much as the poetry of Byron has sunk in critical estimation during

the last half century, and slight as are the signs of its recovery,

those who do not think very highly of the poetry of the pupil do not, as

a rule, show much greater enthusiasm for that of the master.

Byron, it is true, was only half a pupil of Scott's, and (oddly enough

for the poet, who, with Scott, was recognised as leader by the Romantic

schools of all Europe) had more than a hankering after the classical

ideals in literature. Yet how much of this was due to wilful "pose" and

a desire not to follow the prevailing school of the day is a question

difficult to answer--as indeed are many connected with Byron, whose

utterances, even in private letters, are very seldom to be taken with

absolute confidence in their sincerity. The poet's character did no

discredit to the doctrines of heredity. His family was one of

considerable distinction and great age; but his father, Captain John

Byron, who never came to the title, was a _roue_ of the worst character,

and the cousin whom the poet succeeded had earned the name of the Wicked

Lord. His mother, Catherine Gordon of Gight, was of an excellent Scotch

stock, and an heiress; though her rascally husband made away with her

money. But she had a most violent temper, and seems to have had

absolutely no claims except those of birth to the title of lady. Byron

was born in Holles Street, Cavendish Square, on 22nd January 1788; and

his early youth, which was spent with his mother at Aberdeen, was one of

not much indulgence or happiness. But he came to the title, and to an

extremely impoverished succession, at ten years old, and three years

later was sent to Harrow. Here he made many friends, distinguishing

himself by obtruding mentions and memories of his rank in a way not

common with the English aristocracy, and hence, in 1805, he proceeded to

Trinity College, Cambridge. He spent about the usual time there, but

took no degree, and while he was still an undergraduate printed his

_Hours of Idleness_, first called _Juvenilia_. It appeared publicly in

March 1807, and a year later was the subject of a criticism, rather

excessive than unjust, in the _Edinburgh Review_. Byron, who had plenty

of pluck, and who all his life long inclined in his heart to the Popian

school, spent a considerable time upon a verse-answer, _English Bards

and Scotch Reviewers_, in which he ran amuck generally, but displayed

ability which it was hopeless to seek in his first production. Then he

went abroad, and the excitement of his sojourn in the countries round

the Mediterranean for the next two years not only aroused, but finally

determined and almost fully developed, his genius.

On his return home he took his seat and went into society with the

success likely to attend an extremely handsome young man of

twenty-three, with a vague reputation both for ability and naughtiness,

a fairly old title, and something of an estate. But his position as a

"lion" was not thoroughly asserted till the publication, in February

1812, of _Childe Harold_, which with some difficulty he had been induced

by his friend Dallas, his publisher Murray, and the critic Gifford to

put before some frigid and trivial _Hints from Horace_. Over _Childe

Harold_ the English public went simply mad, buying seven editions in

five weeks; and during the next three years Byron produced, in rapid

succession, _The Giaour_, _The Bride of Abydos_, _The Corsair_, _Lara_,

_The Siege of Corinth_, and _Hebrew Melodies_. He could hardly write

fast enough for the public to buy. Then the day after New Year's Day

1814, he married Miss Milbanke, a great heiress, a future baroness in

her own right, and handsome after a fashion, but of a cold, prim, and

reserved disposition, as well as of a very unforgiving temper. It

probably did not surprise any one who knew the pair when, a year later,

they separated for ever.

The scandals and discussions connected with this event are fortunately

foreign to our subject here. The only important result of the matter for

literature is that Byron (upon whom public opinion in one of its sudden

fits of virtuous versatility threw even more of the blame than was

probably just) left the country and journeyed leisurely, in the company

of Mr. and Mrs. Shelley for the most part, to Venice. He never returned

alive to England; and Venice, Ravenna, Pisa, and Genoa were successively

his headquarters till 1823. Then the Greek Insurrection attracted him,

he raised what money he could, set out for Greece, showed in the

distracted counsels of the insurgents much more practical and

untheatrical heroism than he had hitherto been credited with, and died

of fever at Missolonghi on the 19th of April 1824. His body was brought

home to England and buried in the parish church of Hucknall Torkard,

near Newstead Abbey, his Nottinghamshire seat, which, however, he had

sold some time before. The best of Byron's poems by far date from this

latter period of his life: the later cantos of _Childe Harold_, the

beautiful short poems of _The Dream_ and _Darkness_, many pieces in

dramatic form (the chief of which are _Manfred_, _Cain_, _Marino

Faliero_, and _Sardanapalus_), _Mazeppa_, a piece more in his earlier

style but greatly superior to his earlier work, a short burlesque poem

_Beppo_, and an immense and at his death unfinished narrative satire

entitled _Don Juan_.

Although opinions about Byron differ very much, there is one point about

him which does not admit of difference of opinion. No English poet,

perhaps no English writer except Scott (or rather "The Author of

Waverley"), has ever equalled him in popularity at home; and no English

writer, with Richardson and Scott again as seconds, and those not very

close ones, has equalled him in contemporary popularity abroad. The

vogue of Byron in England, though overpowering for the moment, was even

at its height resisted by some good judges and more strait-laced

moralists; and it ebbed, if not as rapidly as it flowed, with a much

more enduring movement. But abroad he simply took possession of the

Continent of Europe and kept it. He was one of the dominant influences

and determining causes of the French Romantic movement; in Germany,

though the failure of literary talent and activity of the first order in

that country early in this century made his school less important, he

had great power over Heine, its one towering genius; and he was almost

the sole master of young Russia, young Italy, young Spain, in poetry.

Nor, though his active and direct influence has of course been exhausted

by time, can his reputation on the Continent be said to have ever waned.

These various facts, besides being certain in themselves, are also very

valuable as guiding the inquirer in regions which are more of opinion.

The rapidity of Byron's success everywhere, the extent of it abroad

(where few English writers before him had had any at all), and the

decline at home, are all easily connected with certain peculiarities of

his work. That work is almost as fluent and facile as Scott's, to which,

as has been said, it owes immense debts of scheme and manner; and it is

quite as faulty. Indeed Scott, with all his indifference to a strictly

academic correctness, never permitted himself the bad rhymes, the bad

grammar, the slipshod phrase in which Byron unblushingly indulges. But

Byron is much more monotonous than Scott, and it was this very monotony,

assisted by an appearance of intensity, which for the time gave him

power. The appeal of Byron consists very mainly, though no doubt not

wholly, in two things: the lavish use of the foreign and then unfamiliar

scenery, vocabulary, and manners of the Levant, and the installation, as

principal character, of a personage who was speedily recognised as a

sort of fancy portrait, a sketch in cap and yataghan, of Byron himself

as he would like to be thought. This Byronic hero has an ostentatious

indifference to moral laws, for the most part a mysterious past which

inspires him with deep melancholy, great personal beauty, strength, and

bravery, and he is an all-conquering lover. He is not quite so original

as he seemed, for he is in effect very little more than the older

Romantic villain-hero of Mrs. Radcliffe, the Germans, and Monk Lewis,

costumed much more effectively, placed in scheme and companionship more

picturesquely, and managed with infinitely greater genius. But it is a

common experience in literary history that a type more or less familiar

already, and presented with striking additions, is likely to be more

popular than something absolutely new. And accordingly Byron's bastard

and second-hand Romanticism, though it owed a great deal to the

terrorists and a great deal more to Scott, for the moment altogether

eclipsed the pure and original Romanticism of his elders Coleridge and

Wordsworth, of his juniors Shelley and Keats.

But although the more extreme admirers of Byron would no doubt dissent

strongly from even this judgment, it would probably be subscribed, with

some reservations and guards, by not a few good critics from whom I am

compelled to part company as to other parts of Byron's poetical claim.

It is on the question how much of true poetry lies behind and

independent of the scenery and properties of Byronism, that the great

debate arises. Was the author of the poems from _Childe Harold_ to _Don

Juan_ really gifted with the poetical "sincerity and strength" which

have been awarded him by a critic of leanings so little Byronic in the

ordinary sense of Matthew Arnold? Is he a poetic star of the first

magnitude, a poetic force of the first power, at all? There may seem to

be rashness, there may even seem to be puerile insolence and absurdity,

in denying or even doubting this in the face of such a European concert

as has been described and admitted above. Yet the critical conscience

admits of no transaction; and after all, as it was doubted by a great

thinker whether nations might not go mad like individuals, I do not know

why it should be regarded as impossible that continents should go mad

like nations.

At any rate the qualities of Byron are very much of a piece, and, even

by the contention of his warmest reasonable admirers, not much varied or

very subtle, not necessitating much analysis or disquisition. They can

be fairly pronounced upon in a judgment of few words. Byron, then, seems

to me a poet distinctly of the second class, and not even of the best

kind of second, inasmuch as his greatness is chiefly derived from a sort

of parody, a sort of imitation, of the qualities of the first. His verse

is to the greatest poetry what melodrama is to tragedy, what plaster is

to marble, what pinchbeck is to gold. He is not indeed an impostor; for

his sense of the beauty of nature and of the unsatisfactoriness of life

is real, and his power of conveying this sense to others is real also.

He has great, though uncertain, and never very _fine_, command of poetic

sound, and a considerable though less command of poetic vision. But in

all this there is a singular touch of illusion, of what his

contemporaries had learnt from Scott to call gramarye. The often cited

parallel of the false and true Florimels in Spenser applies here also.

The really great poets do not injure each other in the very least by

comparison, different as they are. Milton does not "kill" Wordsworth;

Spenser does not injure Shelley; there is no danger in reading Keats

immediately after Coleridge. But read Byron in close juxtaposition with

any of these, or with not a few others, and the effect, to any good

poetic taste, must surely be disastrous; to my own, whether good or bad,

it is perfectly fatal. The light is not that which never was on land or

sea; it is that which is habitually just in front of the stage: the

roses are rouged, the cries of passion even sometimes (not always) ring

false. I have read Byron again and again; I have sometimes, by reading

Byron only and putting a strong constraint upon myself, got nearly into

the mood to enjoy him. But let eye or ear once catch sight or sound of

real poetry, and the enchantment vanishes.

Attention has already been called to the fact that Byron, though

generally ranking with the poets who have been placed before him in this

chapter as a leader in the nineteenth century renaissance of poetry, was

a direct scholar of Scott, and in point of age represented, if not a new

generation, a second division of the old. This was still more the case

in point of age, and almost infinitely more so in point of quality, as

regards Shelley and Keats. There was nothing really new in Byron; there

was only a great personal force directing itself, half involuntarily and

more than half because of personal lack of initiative, into contemporary

ways. The other two poets just mentioned were really new powers. They

took some colour from their elders; but they added more than they took,

and they would unquestionably have been great figures at any time of

English literature and history. Scott had little or no influence on

them, and Wordsworth not much; but they were rather close to Coleridge,

and they owed something to a poet of much less genius than his or than

their own--Leigh Hunt.

Percy Bysshe Shelley, the elder of the two, was Byron's junior by four

years, and was born at Field Place in Sussex in August 1792. He was the

heir of a very respectable and ancient though not very distinguished

family of the squirearchy; and he had every advantage of education,

being sent to Eton in 1804, and to University College, Oxford, six years

later. The unconquerable unconventionality of his character and his

literary tastes had shown themselves while he was still a schoolboy, and

in the last year of his Etonian and the first of his Oxonian residence

he published two of the most absurd novels of the most absurd novel kind

that ever appeared, _Zastrozzi_ and _St. Irvyne_, imitations of Monk

Lewis. He also in the same year collaborated in two volumes of verse,

_The Wandering Jew_ (partly represented by _Queen Mab_), and "_Poems_ by

Victor and Cazire" (which has vindicated the existence of reviewers by

surviving only in its reviews, all copies having mysteriously perished).

His stay at Oxford was not long; for having, in conjunction with a

clever but rather worthless friend, Thomas Jefferson Hogg (afterwards

his biographer), issued a pamphlet on "The Necessity of Atheism" and

sent it to the heads of colleges, he was, by a much greater necessity,

expelled from University on 25th March 1811. Later in the same year he

married Harriet Westbrook, a pretty and lively girl of sixteen, who had

been a school-fellow of his sister's, but came from the lower middle

class. His apologists have said that Harriet threw herself at his head,

and that Shelley explained to her that she or he might depart when

either pleased. The responsibility and the validity of this defence may

be left to these advocates.

For nearly three years Shelley and his wife led an exceedingly wandering

life in Ireland, Wales, Devonshire, Berkshire, the Lake District, and

elsewhere, Shelley attempting all sorts of eccentric propagandism in

politics and religion, and completing the crude but absolutely original

_Queen Mab_. Before the third anniversary of his wedding-day came round

he had parted with Harriet, against whose character his apologists, as

above, have attempted to bring charges. The fact is that he had fallen

in love with Mary Godwin, daughter of the author of _Political Justice_

(whose writings had always had a great influence on Shelley, and who

spunged on him pitilessly) and of Mary Wollstonecraft. The pair fled to

the Continent together in July 1814; and two years later, when the

unhappy wife, a girl of twenty-one, had drowned herself in the

Serpentine, they were married. Meanwhile Shelley had wandered back to

England, had, owing to the death of his grandfather, received a

considerable independent income by arrangement, and in 1815 had written

_Alastor_, which, though not so clearly indicative of a new departure

when compared with _Queen Mab_ as some critics have tried to make out,

no other living poet, perhaps no other poet, could have written. He was

refused the guardianship, though he was allowed to appoint guardians, of

his children by the luckless Harriet, and was (for him naturally, though

for most men unreasonably) indignant. But his poetical vocation and

course were both clear henceforward, though he never during his life had

much command of the public, and had frequent difficulties with

publishers, while the then attitude of the law made piracy very easy.

For a time he lived at Marlow, where he wrote or began _Prince

Athanase_, _Rosalind and Helen_, and above all _Laon and Cythna_, called

later and permanently _The Revolt of Islam_. In April 1818 he left

England for Italy, and never returned.

The short remains of his life were spent chiefly at Lucca, Florence, and

Pisa, with visits to most of the other chief Italian cities; Byron being

often, and Leigh Hunt at the last, his companion. All his greatest poems

were now written. At last, in July 1821, when the Shelleys were staying

at a lonely house named Casa Magni, on the Bay of Spezia, he and his

friend Lieutenant Williams set out in a boat from Leghorn. The boat

either foundered in a squall or was run down. At any rate Shelley's body

was washed ashore on the 19th, and burnt on a pyre in the presence of

Byron, Hunt, and Trelawny.

Little need be said of Shelley's character. If it had not been for the

disgusting efforts of his maladroit adorers to blacken that not merely

of his hapless young wife, but of every one with whom he came in

contact, it might be treated with the extremest indulgence. Almost a boy

in years at the time of his death, he was, with some late flashes of

sobering, wholly a boy in inability to understand the responsibilities

and the burdens of life. An enthusiast for humanity generally, and

towards individuals a man of infinite generosity and kindliness, he yet

did some of the cruellest and some of not the least disgraceful things

from mere childish want of realising the _pacta conventa_ of the world.

He, wholly ignorant, would, if he could, have turned the wheel of

society the other way, reckless of the horrible confusion and suffering

that he must occasion.

But in pure literary estimation we need take no note of this. In

literature, Shelley, if not of the first three or four, is certainly of

the first ten or twelve. He has, as no poet in England except Blake and

Coleridge in a few flashes had had before him for some century and a

half, the ineffable, the divine intoxication which only the _di majores_

of poetry can communicate to their worshippers. Once again, after all

these generations, it became unnecessary to agree or disagree with the

substance, to take interest or not to take interest in it, to admit or

to contest the presence of faults and blemishes--to do anything except

recognise and submit to the strong pleasure of poetry, the charm of the

highest poetical inspiration.

I think myself, though the opinion is not common among critics, that

this touch is unmistakable even so early as _Queen Mab_. That poem is no

doubt to a certain extent modelled upon Southey, especially upon

_Kehama_, which, as has been observed above, is a far greater poem than

is usually allowed. But the motive was different: the sails might be the

same, but the wind that impelled them was another. By the time of

_Alastor_ it is generally admitted that there could or should have been

little mistake. Nothing, indeed, but the deafening blare of Byron's

brazen trumpet could have silenced this music of the spheres. The

meaning is not very much, though it is passable; but the music is

exquisite. There is just a foundation of Wordsworthian scheme in the

blank verse; but the structure built on it is not Wordsworth's at all,

and there are merely a few borrowed strokes of _technique_, such as the

placing of a long adjective before a monosyllabic noun at the end of

the line, and a strong caesura about two-thirds through that line. All

the rest is Shelley, and wonderful.

It may be questioned whether, fine as _The Revolt of Islam_ is, the

Spenserian stanza was quite so well suited as the "Pindaric" or as blank

verse, or as lyrical measures, to Shelley's genius. It is certainly far

excelled both in the lyrics and in the blank verse of _Prometheus

Unbound_, the first poem which distinctly showed that one of the

greatest lyric poets of the world had been born to England. _The Cenci_

relies more on subject, and, abandoning the lyric appeal, abandons what

Shelley is strongest in; but _Hellas_ restores this. Of his comic

efforts, the chief of which are _Swellfoot the Tyrant_ and _Peter Bell

the Third_, it is perhaps enough to say that his humour, though it

existed, was fitful, and that he was too much of a partisan to keep

sufficiently above his theme. The poems midway between, large and

small--_Prince Athanase_, _The Witch of Atlas_ (an exquisite

and glorious fantasy piece), _Rosalind and Helen_, _Adonais_,

_Epipsychidion_, and the _Triumph of Life_--would alone have made his

fame. But it is in Shelley's smallest poems that his greatest virtue

lies. Not even in the seventeenth century had any writer given so much

that was so purely exquisite. "To Constantia Singing," the "Ozymandias"

sonnet, the "Lines written among the Euganean Hills," the "Stanzas

written in Dejection," the "Ode to the West Wind," the hackneyed

"Cloud," and "Skylark," "Arethusa," the "World's Wanderers," "Music,

when soft voices die," "The flower that smiles to-day," "Rarely, rarely,

comest thou," the "Lament," "One word is too often profaned," the

"Indian Air," the second "Lament," "O world! O life! O time!" (the most

perfect thing of its kind perhaps, in the strict sense of

perfection, that all poetry contains), the "Invitation," and the

"Recollection,"--this long list, which might have been made longer,

contains things absolutely consummate, absolutely unsurpassed, only

rivalled by a few other things as perfect as themselves.

Shelley has been foolishly praised, and it is very likely that the

praise given here may seem to some foolish. It is as hard for praise to

keep the law of the head as for blame to keep the law of the heart. He

has been mischievously and tastelessly excused for errors both in and

out of his writings which need only a kindly silence. In irritation at

the "chatter" over him some have even tried to make out that his

prose--very fine prose indeed, and preserved to us in some welcome

letters and miscellaneous treatises, but capable of being dispensed

with--is more worthy of attention than his verse, which has no parallel

and few peers. But that one thing will remain true in the general

estimate of competent posterity I have no doubt. There are two English

poets, and two only, in whom the purely poetical attraction, exclusive

of and sufficient without all others, is supreme, and these two are

Spenser and Shelley.

The life of John Keats was even shorter and even less marked by striking

events than that of Shelley, and he belonged in point of extraction and

education to a somewhat lower class of society than any of the poets

hitherto mentioned in this chapter. He was the son of a livery stable

keeper who was fairly well off, and he went to no school but a private

one, where, however, he received tolerable instruction and had good

comrades. Born in 1795, he was apprenticed to a surgeon at the age of

fifteen, and even did some work in his profession, till in 1817 his

overmastering passion for literature had its way. He became intimate

with the so-called "Cockney school," or rather with its leaders Leigh

Hunt and Hazlitt--an intimacy, as far as the former was concerned, not

likely to chasten his own taste, but chiefly unfortunate because it led,

in the rancorous state of criticism then existing, to his own efforts

being branded with the same epithet. His first book was published in the

year above mentioned: it did not contain all the verse he had written up

to that time, or the best of it, but it confirmed him in his vocation.

He broke away from surgery, and, having some little means, travelled to

the Isle of Wight, Devonshire, and other parts of England, besides

becoming more and more familiar with men of letters. It was in the Isle

of Wight chiefly that he wrote _Endymion_, which appeared in 1818. This

was savagely and stupidly attacked in _Blackwood_ and the _Quarterly_;

the former article being by some attributed, without a tittle of

evidence, to Lockhart. But the supposed effect of these attacks on

Keats' health was widely exaggerated by some contemporaries, especially

by Byron. The fact was that he had almost from his childhood shown

symptoms of lung disease, which developed itself very rapidly. The sense

of his almost certain fate combined with the ordinary effects of passion

to throw a somewhat hectic air over his correspondence with Miss Fanny

Brawne. His letters to her contain nothing discreditable to him, but

ought never to have been published. He was, however, to bring out his

third and greatest book of verse in 1820; and then he sailed for Italy,

to die on the 23rd of February 1821. He spoke of his name as "writ in

water." Posterity has agreed with him that it is--but in the Water of

Life.

Nothing is more interesting, even in the endless and delightful task of

literary comparison, than to contrast the work of Shelley and Keats, so

alike and yet so different. A little longer space of work, much greater

advantages of means and education, and a happier though less blameless

experience of passion, enabled Shelley to produce a much larger body of

work than Keats has to his name, even when this is swollen by what Mr.

Palgrave has justly stigmatised as "the incomplete and inferior work"

withheld by Keats himself, but made public by the cruel kindness of

admirers. And this difference in bulk probably coincides with a

difference in the volume of genius of the two writers. Further, while it

is not at all improbable that if Shelley had lived he would have gone on

writing better and better, the same probability is, I think, to be more

sparingly predicated of Keats.