But these general and most marked characteristics of the period are
modified in a very perceptible manner by certain peculiarly English
characteristics, which, observable nowhere else, are to be found in all
the English authors of the day, however little resemblance there may be
between them in other respects.
These English characteristics can all be traced back to one original
distinctive quality, namely vigorous _Naturalism_. As we have observed,
the first advance in the new literary movement is the inspiration of
the authors of every country by a national spirit. Now in England this
meant becoming a Naturalist, just as in Germany it meant becoming a
Romanticist, and in Denmark a devotee of the Old-Scandinavian. The
English poets, one and all, are observers, lovers, worshippers of
nature. Wordsworth, who loves to parade his propensities as ideas,
inscribes the word _nature_ on his banner, and paints pictures,
grand in spite of their minute detail, of the hills, the lakes, the
rivers, and the rustic population of the North of England. Scott's
descriptions of nature, based upon close observation, are so accurate
that a botanist might acquire a correct idea of the vegetation of the
district from them. Keats, with all his devotion to the antique and
to Greek mythology, is a sensualist, who, gifted with the keenest,
widest, most delicate perceptions, sees, hears, feels, tastes, and
inhales all the varieties of glorious colour, of song, of silky
texture, of fruit flavour, of flower fragrance, which nature offers.
Moore is the personification of spiritualised sensuality; the
pampered, pampering poet, he seems to live surrounded by all that
is rarest and most beautiful in nature; he dazzles our minds with
sunshine, deafens them with the song of the nightingale, drowns them
in sweetness; we live with him in endless dreams of wings, flowers,
rainbows, smiles, blushes, tears, kisses--always kisses. The strongest
tendency even of works like Byron's _Don Juan_ and Shelley's _Cenci_
is in reality Naturalism. In other words, Naturalism is so powerful
in England that it permeates Coleridge's Romantic supernaturalism,
Wordsworth's Anglican orthodoxy, Shelley's atheistic spiritualism,
Byron's revolutionary liberalism, and Scott's interest in the past. It
influences the personal beliefs and the literary tendencies of every
author.
This realism, so full of sap and vigour, is a result of various
strongly-marked and almost universal English characteristics. There is,
in the first place, the English love of the country and of the sea.
Almost all the English poets of this period are either countrymen or
seamen. The English Muse of poetry has from time immemorial frequented
the country seat and the farm. Wordsworth's genuinely English poetry
is in exact keeping with the well-known paintings and engravings
representing English country life, which produce an impression of
health and tranquillity, and, when such subjects as family worship or
the country clergyman's fatherly ministrations are portrayed, also of
piety. Burns, the ploughman poet, Scotland's greatest poetic genius,
early dedicated Scottish poetry to the country; and there is truth in
Emerson's caustic remark that Scott, in his narrative poems, simply
wrote a rhymed guide-book to Scotland. That the same idea had occurred
to the poet's own contemporaries is evident from the satirical manner
in which Moore writes of Scott's "doing" the one country-seat after the
other.[1]
And what an important part country seats play in the lives of two
such antipodal literary characters as Byron and Scott! Newstead Abbey
is as inseparably connected with Byron's name as Abbotsford is with
Sir Walter Scott's. The old abbey, with its medieval and fantastic
architecture, is to Byron the indispensable accompaniment of his
peerage and the pledge of his English citizenship. He does not dispose
of it until he has turned his back on his native land for ever. Scott's
proprietorship is not so ancient and venerable; but he buys Abbotsford
when the desire to own land, which has always been strong in him,
becomes irresistible, and, during the happy period of his life passed
there, lives as if he had grown up with no other prospect before him
than that of exercising the regal hospitality of an old Scottish landed
proprietor and living his hardy out-of-door life. His greatest delight
is in such perilous amusements as wading through a raging stream--with
a bridge not fifty yards off, riding a horse unmanageable by any one
else, spearing salmon by torch-light, soaked with rain or shivering
in the cold night air. And is not every reader of Byron's life here
reminded of that poet's love of wild rides and daring swimming exploits?
Nevertheless there is in the attitude of the two authors to their
estates a difference, characteristic of their different natures.
Byron's love for Newstead Abbey had its origin in his aristocratic
proclivities, Scott's for Abbotsford in his historic instincts. Just
as Sir Walter's estate had Ettrick Forest for its background, Newstead
had Sherwood Forest, with its memories of Robin Hood and his merry
men. But these memories exercised no perceptible influence on Byron's
poetry, though we have an admirable description of the Abbey itself in
the Thirteenth Canto of _Don Juan_. The whole of Scott's poetry, on
the contrary, is pervaded, as by a refrain, by the memories of Ettrick
Forest; and it is Scott, instead of Byron, who (in _Ivanhoe_) brings
the poetry of Sherwood Forest to life again.
Another English qualification for Naturalism is the love of the poets
for the nobler animals, and their intimacy with the animal world in
general. They have that affection for all domestic animals which is
a result of their English love of home. When they travel they carry
home and their domestic animals with them. Almost all the authors
of our period are devoted to manly exercises, and in particular to
riding. And in observing this we must not fall into the common error
of mistaking a thoroughly national characteristic for a personal and
rare one. It is not without its significance that the English race
traces its descent from two mystic heroes bearing the names of horses
(Hengist and Horsa). The love of horses, dogs, and all kinds of wild
animals, which is so often mentioned as a peculiar characteristic of
Byron, the misanthropical exile, is quite as marked a characteristic
of Scott, living at home in the happiest domestic circumstances.
Matthew's well-known letter describing the life at Newstead Abbey shows
us Byron, the youth, surrounded by a whole menagerie, including a bear
and a wolf; in Medwin's account of the poet's life in Italy we read
that he took with him when he left Ravenna in 1821, "seven servants,
five carriages, nine horses, a monkey, a retriever, a bull-dog, two
cats, three Guinea fowls, and other birds." One is apt to think this
an exhibition of purely personal singularity, until one reads, in
Lockhart's Life, Scott's own description of the removal to Abbotsford.
"The neighbours have been much delighted with the procession of my
furniture, in which old swords, bows, targets, and lances made a
very conspicuous show. A family of turkeys was accommodated within
the helmet of some _preux_ chevalier of ancient Border fame; and the
very cows, for aught I know, were bearing banners and muskets. I
assure your ladyship that this caravan, attended by a dozen of ragged
rosy peasant children, carrying fishing-rods and spears, and leading
poneys, greyhounds, and spaniels, would, as it crossed the Tweed, have
furnished no bad subject for the pencil." The only difference is that
the old curiosity shop of the collector is added to the menagerie.
Byron's love for his dog, Boatswain, and the solemn inscription
engraved on the stone marking the favourite's grave, are apt to be
instanced as signs of the poet's rooted melancholy. But it helps us
to a more correct appreciation of such feelings to remember that the
cheerful-minded Scott had his favourite dog, Camp, solemnly buried in
the garden at Abbotsford, the whole family standing weeping round the
grave.
But even more characteristically English than the attachment to
horses and dogs and land, and the witness in literature to the same,
is the love of the sea. The Englishman is an amphibious animal. A
considerable part of the description of nature in the literature of
this period is marine painting. It was an ancient tradition, gloriously
maintained at this particular time, that England was the mistress of
the sea; and English writers have always been the best delineators and
interpreters of the sea. There is a breath of its freshness and freedom
in all the best poetry of the country. To the Englishman the sea has
always been the great symbol of liberty, as the Alps have been to the
freedom-loving Swiss. Wordsworth exclaims with truth in one of his
_Sonnets Dedicated to Liberty_:--
"Two Voices are there; one is of the Sea,
One of the Mountains; each a mighty voice:
In both from age to age thou didst rejoice,
They were thy chosen music, Liberty!"
We understand, therefore, how it was that the long-dormant Viking
spirit re-awoke in the best poets of the country during this remarkable
period of English literature. In Coleridge's _Ancient Mariner_ we
have all the terror and horror of the sea; Campbell's _Mariners of
England_ is an entrancingly melodious and manly glorification of
the heroism and might of the English seamen; Byron's Vikinglike
expeditions are mirrored in the exploits of Childe Harold and Don Juan;
Shelley's passion for the sea and sailing lives and breathes in the
billowy rhythm of his verse and in all the poems which extol wind and
wave--above all others that masterpiece, the _Ode to the West Wind_.
Transferred to the domain of society, Naturalism becomes, as it did
in Rousseau's case, revolutionary; and beneath that attachment to the
soil, and that delight in encountering and mastering the fitful humours
of the sea, which are the deep-seated causes of Naturalism, there is
in the Englishman the still deeper-seated national feeling, which,
under the peculiar historical conditions of this period, naturally led
the cleverest men of the day in the direction of Radicalism. No nation
is so thoroughly penetrated by the feeling of personal independence
as England. This is best seen in the Englishman abroad; it is with a
flourish of trumpets that he proclaims himself to be an Englishman.
It is the transmission of this independence and self-sufficiency
to English literature which has at decisive moments made its art a
"character-art"; and at the period under consideration it is this
peculiar quality which, asserting itself, actually produces the new
movement in the literature of Europe. It took an Englishman to do what
Byron did, stem alone the stream which flowed from the fountain of the
Holy Alliance--in the first place, because only an English author would
have had the audacity to do it, in the second, because at that time
only English literary men had the strong political tendency and the
keen political intelligence which have always distinguished the first,
possibly the only, parliamentary nation. And an Englishman, too, was
needed to fling the gauntlet boldly and defiantly in the face of his
own people. Only in the haughtiest of nations were there to be found
great men haughty enough to defy the nation.
This personal independence which distinguishes the country's most
eminent authors is the outcome of a genuinely English peculiarity.
These men are the followers of no particular doctrines; they rarely
profess any artistic principles, and certainly never any philosophical
creed. The great German authors, Lessing, Goethe, Schiller, all do most
important services to science; but amongst the Englishmen there is not
a single scientist. And a still more remarkable fact is that they never
even consult one another. Goethe and Schiller carry on an interminable
correspondence on the subject of the nature and proper treatment
of the different varieties of poetic themes; they even sometimes
discuss at great length the propriety of the addition or suppression
of a single stanza. Heiberg, the Dane, and his school follow certain
definite artistic principles which they have agreed to observe, and
are almost as critical as they are productive. But Scott and Byron and
Moore, in spite of the cordial friendship subsisting between them,
are perfectly isolated as regards authorship; each produces his works
without receiving or desiring any suggestion or advice whatever from
his brother authors. Even in the very exceptional case when one is
influenced by another--as Byron, for instance, occasionally is by
Wordsworth, and still more perceptibly by Shelley--the thing happens,
as it were, secretly, quite insensibly, so that it is not alluded to,
or at any rate not acknowledged as influence by the recipient. An
American author has aptly described this characteristic of the race in
the words: "Each of these islanders is himself an island."
We have already spoken of intelligent interest in politics. Just as
there is not one among these authors who is a scientist, so there
is hardly one among them who is not a politician. This interest in
politics is a direct product of the national practicality. The opinions
held by the different authors may be very dissimilar, but they are
all party men; Scott is a Tory, Wordsworth a Monarchist, Southey and
Coleridge are first supporters, then antagonists, of the democratic
ideas of the day; Moore is on the side of the Irishmen; Landor,
Campbell, Byron, and Shelley, as Radicals, side with all the oppressed
nations. In excepting such an author as Keats, who may almost be said
to have been devoted to art for art's sake, we must not forget that he
died at the age of twenty-five.
The intense interest taken in practical matters explains why purely
literary questions (such as that of the respective merits of Classicism
and Romanticism), in their utter disconnectedness with life, never
became of such exaggerated importance in English as they did at this
period in German, Danish, and even French literature. It is, however,
amusing to observe how our authors combine the Englishman's impulse
towards practical action with the fantastic proclivities of the poet.
Scott carried his antagonism to the Revolution to a perfectly Quixotic
length. He arranged with one of his friends, a duke, that, if the
French landed in England, they two would take to the woods and live
the life of Robin Hood and his followers. And it was about the same
time that Southey and Coleridge, in the first Jacobinical ardour of
their youth, informed their acquaintances that it was their intention
to emigrate to a scantily populated part of America; the banks of the
Susquehanna were chosen because the name of this river struck the young
men as being peculiarly _beautiful and melodious_; they proposed to
found a community there, a pantisocrasy, with community of goods and
equality of all the members under natural conditions. Landor, who, as
a soldier in Spain, proved that he was prepared to risk his life for
his opinions, as a youth cherished the idea of reviving, at home in
Warwickshire, the Arcadian idyllic age; he is the literary counterpart
of Owen, the Socialist. Shelley, as politician, showed such keenness of
perception that, studying him as such, we are constantly reminded of
the characterisation in _Julian and Maddalo_:
"_Me_, who am as a nerve o'er which do creep
The else unfelt oppressions of this earth."
He foresaw many a political revolution that actually came to pass.
But the same Shelley who, half a century before the passing of the
Reform Bill of 1867, published an accurate draft of it in a political
pamphlet, and who in his drama, _Hellas_, prophesied the success of the
revolt of the Greeks at a time when their cause seemed hopeless, is
an utter fantast as soon as he begins to enlarge on the coming Golden
Age of humanity. Read his description of it in a youthful work, _Queen
Mab_. The Polar icebergs melt, the deserts are cultivated, the basilisk
licks the infant's feet, the hurricane blasts become melodious, the
fruits of the earth are always ripe and its flowers always in bloom, no
animal is killed and eaten by man, the birds no longer fly from him,
fear no longer exists. We cannot but be reminded of some of the wildest
dreams of the French Socialists of the same period. The spread of the
_Phalansteries_ devised by Fourier was expected to bring about such
a change in the whole economy of the world that at last even natural
conditions would be entirely altered; an immense aurora borealis,
perpetually suspended above the North Pole, would make Siberia as
warm as Andalusia; man would deprive the sea of its salt and give it
in return a flavour of lemonade; and the monsters of the deep would
allow themselves to be harnessed, like sea-horses, to our ships. The
invention of the steam-engine fortunately rendered this species of
traction superfluous. Even Byron, who is decidedly the most practical
of these poets, is often the poet in his politics. It hardly admits of
doubt that he had the crown of Greece before his eyes as the recompense
of his exertions in the cause of that country.
There was plenty of fantasticalness in practical matters in the English
poets, too; but there undoubtedly is more practicality in their
morality and their view of life than in those of the poets of other
nations. There are a few more grains of sound sense in their works.
They are, one and all, distinguished by a strong _desire for justice_.
Wordsworth inherits it from Milton; Campbell, Byron, and Shelley feel
it intuitively, and are ready in the strength of the feeling to defy
the world. It plays no part, this feeling, in the life of Byron's great
German predecessor, Goethe, or of his richly gifted French successor,
De Musset. Neither of these ever summoned monarchs and governments
before the tribunal of justice. But what is peculiarly English is, that
this justice of which the Englishmen dream is not, like that which
Schiller, for instance, worships, a cherished, preconceived idea, but
a child of utility. To prove this let us take a poet as ethereally
idealistic as Shelley, and we shall see that even his morality is as
distinctly utilitarian as Bentham's and John Stuart Mill's. Here is a
striking passage taken from the second chapter of his _Speculations on
Morals_:--"If a man persists to inquire _why_ he ought to promote the
happiness of mankind, he demands a mathematical or metaphysical reason
for a moral action. The absurdity of this scepticism is less apparent,
but not less real than the exacting a moral reason for a mathematical
or physical fact." In the maxim, "the greatest happiness of the
greatest number," and in the profound, practical desire for justice,
which is its psychological basis, we have the real point of departure
of the Radicalism of English poetry during the period of the great
European reaction.
[1]
Should you feel any touch of poetical glow
We've a Scheme to suggest--Mr. Scott, you must know,
Having quitted the Borders, to seek new renown
Is coming, by long Quarto stages, to Town.
And beginning with Rokeby (the job's sure to pay)
Means to _do_ all the Gentlemen's Seats on the way.
Now the Scheme is (though none of our hackneys can beat him)
To start a fresh Poet through Highgate to meet him;
Who, by means of quick proofs--no revises--long coaches,
May do a few Villas, before Scott approaches.
Moore: _Intercepted Letters_, No. 7.