FROM THE FRENCH REVOLUTION TO THE DEATH OF SCOTT.
1789-1832.
The burst of creative activity at the opening of the 19th century has
but one parallel in English literary history, namely, the somewhat
similar flowering out of the national genius in the time of Elizabeth
and the first two Stuart kings. The later age gave birth to no supreme
poets, like Shakspere and Milton. It produced no _Hamlet_ and no
_Paradise Lost_; but it offers a greater number of important writers, a
higher average of excellence, and a wider range and variety of literary
work than any preceding era. Wordsworth, Coleridge, Scott, Byron,
Shelley, and Keats are all great names; while Southey, Landor, Moore,
Lamb, and De Quincey would be noteworthy figures at any period, and
deserve a fuller mention than can be here accorded them. But in so
crowded a generation, selection becomes increasingly needful, and in the
present chapter, accordingly, the emphasis will be laid upon the
first-named group as not only the most important, but the most
representative of the various tendencies of their time.
[Illustration: Wordsworth, Byron, Shelley, Keats.]
The conditions of literary work in this century have been almost unduly
stimulating. The rapid advance in population, wealth, education, and the
means of communication has vastly increased the number of readers. Every
one who has any thing to say can say it in print, and is sure of some
sort of a hearing. A special feature of the time is the multiplication
of periodicals. The great London dailies, like the _Times_ and the
_Morning Post_, which were started during the last quarter of the 18th
century, were something quite new in journalism. The first of the modern
reviews, the _Edinburgh_, was established in 1802, as the organ of the
Whig party in Scotland. This was followed by the London _Quarterly_, in
1808, and by _Blackwood's Magazine_, in 1817, both in the Tory interest.
The first editor of the _Edinburgh_ was Francis Jeffrey, who assembled
about him a distinguished corps of contributors, including the versatile
Henry Brougham, afterward a great parliamentary orator and lord
chancellor of England, and the Rev. Sydney Smith, whose witty sayings
are still current. The first editor of the _Quarterly_ was William
Gifford, a satirist, who wrote the _Baviad_ and _Mæviad_ ridicule of
literary affectations. He was succeeded in 1824 by John Gibson Lockhart,
the son-in-law of Walter Scott, and the author of an excellent _Life of
Scott_. _Blackwood's_ was edited by John Wilson, Professor of Moral
Philosophy in the University of Edinburgh, who, under the pen-name of
"Christopher North," contributed to his magazine a series of brilliant
imaginary dialogues between famous characters of the day, entitled
_Noctes Ambrosianæ_, because they were supposed to take place at
Ambrose's tavern in Edinburgh. These papers were full of a profuse,
headlong eloquence, of humor, literary criticism, and personalities
interspersed with songs expressive of a roystering and convivial Toryism
and an uproarious contempt for Whigs and cockneys. These reviews and
magazines, and others which sprang up beside them, became the _nuclei_
about which the wit and scholarship of both parties gathered. Political
controversy under the Regency and the reign of George IV. was thus
carried on more regularly by permanent organs, and no longer so largely
by privateering, in the shape of pamphlets, like Swift's _Public Spirit
of the Allies_, Johnson's _Taxation No Tyranny_, and Burke's
_Reflections on the Revolution in France_. Nor did politics by any means
usurp the columns of the reviews. Literature, art, science, the whole
circle of human effort and achievement passed under review.
_Blackwood's_, _Fraser's_, and the other monthlies published stories,
poetry, criticism, and correspondence--every thing, in short, which
enters into the make-up of our magazines to-day, except illustrations.
Two main influences, of foreign origin, have left their trace in the
English writers of the first thirty years of the 19th century, the one
communicated by contact with the new German literature of the latter
half of the 18th century, and in particular with the writings of Goethe,
Schiller, and Kant; the other springing from the events of the French
Revolution. The influence of German upon English literature in the 19th
century was more intellectual and less formal than that of the Italian
in the 16th and of the French in the 18th. In other words, the German
writers furnished the English with ideas and ways of feeling rather than
with models of style. Goethe and Schiller did not become subjects for
literary imitation as Molière, Racine, and Boileau had become in Pope's
time. It was reserved for a later generation and for Thomas Carlyle to
domesticate the diction of German prose. But the nature and extent of
this influence can, perhaps, best be noted when we come to take up the
authors of the time one by one.
The excitement caused by the French Revolution was something more
obvious and immediate. When the Bastile fell, in 1789, the enthusiasm
among the friends of liberty and human progress in England was hardly
less intense than in France. It was the dawn of a new day; the shackles
were stricken from the slave; all men were free and all men were
brothers, and radical young England sent up a shout that echoed the roar
of the Paris mob. Wordsworth's lines on the _Fall of the Bastile_,
Coleridge's _Fall of Robespierre_ and _Ode to France_, and Southey's
revolutionary drama, _Wat Tyler_, gave expression to the hopes and
aspirations of the English democracy. In after life, Wordsworth, looking
back regretfully to those years of promise, wrote his poem on the
_French Revolution as it Appeared to Enthusiasts at its Commencement_.
Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive;
But to be young was very heaven. O times
In which the meager, stale, forbidding ways
Of custom, law, and statute took at once
The attraction of a country in romance.
Those were the days in which Wordsworth, then an under-graduate at
Cambridge, spent a college vacation in tramping through France, landing
at Calais on the eve of the very day (July 14, 1790) on which Louis XVI.
signalized the anniversary of the fall of the Bastile by taking the oath
of fidelity to the new constitution. In the following year Wordsworth
revisited France, where he spent thirteen months, forming an intimacy
with the republican general, Beaupuis, at Orleans, and reaching Paris
not long after the September massacres of 1792. Those were the days,
too, in which young Southey and young Coleridge, having married sisters
at Bristol, were planning a "Pantisocracy," or ideal community, on the
banks of the Susquehannah, and denouncing the British government for
going to war with the French Republic. This group of poets, who had met
one another first in the south of England, came afterward to be called
the Lake Poets, from their residence in the mountainous lake country of
Westmoreland and Cumberland, with which their names, and that of
Wordsworth, especially, are forever associated. The so-called "Lakers"
did not, properly speaking, constitute a school of poetry. They differed
greatly from one another in mind and art. But they were connected by
social ties and by religious and political sympathies. The excesses of
the French Revolution, and the usurpation of Napoleon disappointed them,
as it did many other English liberals, and drove them into the ranks of
the reactionaries. Advancing years brought conservatism, and they became
in time loyal Tories and orthodox churchmen.
William Wordsworth (1770-1850), the chief of the three, and, perhaps,
on the whole, the greatest English poet since Milton, published his
_Lyrical Ballads_ in 1798. The volume contained a few pieces by his
friend Coleridge--among them the _Ancient Mariner_--and its appearance
may fairly be said to mark an epoch in the history of English poetry.
Wordsworth regarded himself as a reformer of poetry; and in the preface
to the second edition of the _Lyrical Ballads_, he defended the theory
on which they were composed. His innovations were twofold: in
subject-matter and in diction. "The principal object which I proposed to
myself in these poems," he said, "was to choose incidents and situations
from common life. Low and rustic life was generally chosen, because, in
that condition, the essential passions of the heart find a better soil
in which they can attain their maturity...and are incorporated with
the beautiful and permanent forms of nature." Wordsworth discarded, in
theory, the poetic diction of his predecessors, and professed to use "a
selection of the real language of men in a state of vivid sensation." He
adopted, he said, the language of men in rustic life, "because such men
hourly communicate with the best objects from which the best part of
language is originally derived."
In the matter of poetic diction Wordsworth did not, in his practice,
adhere to the doctrine of this preface. Many of his most admired poems,
such as the _Lines written near Tintern Abbey_, the great _Ode on the
Intimations of Immortality_, the _Sonnets_, and many parts of his
longest poems, _The Excursion_ and _The Prelude_, deal with philosophic
thought and highly intellectualized emotions. In all of these and in
many others the language is rich, stately, involved, and as remote from
the "real language" of Westmoreland shepherds as is the epic blank verse
of Milton. On the other hand, in those of his poems which were
consciously written in illustration of his theory, the affectation of
simplicity, coupled with a defective sense of humor, sometimes led him
to the selection of vulgar and trivial themes, and the use of language
which is bald, childish, or even ludicrous. His simplicity is too often
the simplicity of Mother Goose rather than of Chaucer. Instances of this
occur in such poems as _Peter Bell_, the _Idiot Boy_, _Goody Blake and
Harry Gill_, _Simon Lee_, and the _Wagoner_. But there are multitudes of
Wordsworth's ballads and lyrics which are simple without being silly,
and which, in their homeliness and clear profundity, in their production
of the strongest effects by the fewest strokes, are among the choicest
modern examples of _pure_, as distinguished from decorated, art. Such
are (out of many) _Ruth_, _Lucy_, _She was a Phantom of Delight_, _To a
Highland Girl_, _The Reverie of Poor Susan_, _To the Cuckoo_, _The
Solitary Reaper_, _We Are Seven_, _The Pet Lamb_, _The Fountain_, _The
Two April Mornings_, _Resolution and Independence_, _The Thorn_, and
_Yarrow Unvisited_.
Wordsworth was something of a Quaker in poetry, and loved the sober
drabs and grays of life. Quietism was his literary religion, and the
sensational was to him not merely vulgar, but almost wicked. "The human
mind," he wrote, "is capable of being excited without the application of
gross and violent stimulants." He disliked the far-fetched themes and
high-colored style of Scott and Byron. He once told Landor that all of
Scott's poetry together was not worth sixpence. From action and passion
he turned away to sing the inward life of the soul and the outward life
of nature. He said:
To me the meanest flower that blows can give
Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears.
And again:
Long have I loved what I behold.
The night that charms, the day that cheers;
The common growth of mother earth
Suffices me--her tears, her mirth,
Her humblest mirth and tears.
Wordsworth's life was outwardly uneventful. The companionship of the
mountains and of his own thoughts, the sympathy of his household, the
lives of the dalesmen and cottagers about him furnished him with all the
stimulus that he required.
Love had he found in huts where poor men lie;
His only teachers had been woods and rills,
The silence that is in the starry sky,
The sleep that is among the lonely hills.
He read little, but reflected much, and made poetry daily, composing, by
preference, out of doors, and dictating his verses to some member of his
family. His favorite amanuensis was his sister Dorothy, a woman of fine
gifts, to whom Wordsworth was indebted for some of his happiest
inspirations. Her charming _Memorials of a Tour in the Scottish
Highlands_ records the origin of many of her brother's best poems.
Throughout life Wordsworth was remarkably self-centered. The ridicule of
the reviewers, against which he gradually made his way to public
recognition, never disturbed his serene belief in himself, or in the
divine message which he felt himself commissioned to deliver. He was a
slow and serious person, a preacher as well as a poet, with a certain
rigidity, not to say narrowness, of character. That plastic temperament
which we associate with poetic genius Wordsworth either did not possess,
or it hardened early. Whole sides of life were beyond the range of his
sympathies. He touched life at fewer points than Byron and Scott, but
touched it more profoundly. It is to him that we owe the phrase "plain
living and high thinking," as also a most noble illustration of it in
his own practice. His was the wisest and deepest spirit among the
English poets of his generation, though hardly the most poetic. He wrote
too much, and, attempting to make every petty incident or reflection the
occasion of a poem, he finally reached the point of composing verses
_On Seeing a Harp in the shape of a Needle Case_, and on other themes
more worthy of Mrs. Sigourney. In parts of his long blank-verse poems,
_The Excursion_, 1814, and _The Prelude_--which was printed after his
death in 1850, though finished as early as 1806--the poetry wears very
thin and its place is taken by prosaic, tedious didacticism. These two
poems were designed as portions of a still more extended work, _The
Recluse_, which was never completed. _The Excursion_ consists mainly of
philosophical discussions on nature and human life between a
school-master, a solitary, and an itinerant peddler. _The Prelude_
describes the development of Wordsworth's own genius. In parts of _The
Excursion_ the diction is fairly Shaksperian:
The good die first,
And they whose hearts are dry as summer dust
Burn to the socket;
a passage not only beautiful in itself but dramatically true, in the
mouth of the bereaved mother who utters it, to that human instinct which
generalizes a private sorrow into a universal law. Much of _The Prelude_
can hardly be called poetry at all, yet some of Wordsworth's loftiest
poetry is buried among its dreary wastes, and now and then, in the midst
of commonplaces, comes a flash of Miltonic splendor--like
Golden cities ten months' journey deep
Among Tartarian wilds.
Wordsworth is, above all things, the poet of nature. In this province he
was not without forerunners. To say nothing of Burns and Cowper, there
was George Crabbe, who had published his _Village_ in 1783--fifteen
years before the _Lyrical Ballads_--and whose last poem, _Tales of the
Hall_, came out in 1819, five years after _The Excursion_. Byron called
Crabbe "Nature's sternest painter, and her best." He was a minutely
accurate delineator of the harsher aspects of rural life. He photographs
a Gypsy camp; a common, with its geese and donkey; a salt marsh, a
shabby village street, or tumble-down manse. But neither Crabbe nor
Cowper has the imaginative lift of Wordsworth,
The light that never was, on sea or land,
The consecration, and the poet's dream.
In a note on a couplet in one of his earliest poems, descriptive of an
oak-tree standing dark against the sunset, Wordsworth says: "I recollect
distinctly the very spot where this struck me. The moment was important
in my poetical history, for I date from it my consciousness of the
infinite variety of natural appearances which had been unnoticed by the
poets of any age or country, and I made a resolution to supply, in some
degree, the deficiency." In later life he is said to have been impatient
of any thing spoken or written by another about mountains, conceiving
himself to have a monopoly of "the power of hills." But Wordsworth did
not stop with natural description. Matthew Arnold has said that the
office of modern poetry is the "moral interpretation of Nature." Such,
at any rate, was Wordsworth's office. To him Nature was alive and
divine. He felt, under the veil of phenomena,
A presence that disturbs me with the joy
Of elevated thought: a sense sublime
Of something far more deeply interfused.
He approached, if he did not actually reach, the view of pantheism which
identifies God with Nature; and the mysticism of the Idealists, who
identify Nature with the soul of man. This tendency was not inspired in
Wordsworth by German philosophy. He was no metaphysician. In his rambles
with Coleridge about Nether Stowey and Alfoxden, when both were young,
they had, indeed, discussed Spinoza. And in the autumn of 1798, after
the publication of the _Lyrical Ballads_, the two friends went together
to Germany, where Wordsworth spent half a year. But the literature and
philosophy of Germany made little direct impression upon Wordsworth. He
disliked Goethe, and he quoted with approval the saying of the poet
Klopstock, whom he met at Hamburg, that he placed the romanticist Bürger
above both Goethe and Schiller.
It was through Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834), who was
pre-eminently the _thinker_ among the literary men of his generation,
that the new German thought found its way into England. During the
fourteen months which he spent in Germany--chiefly at Ratzburg and
Göttingen--he had familiarized himself with the transcendental
philosophy of Immanuel Kant and of his continuators, Fichte and
Schelling, as well as with the general literature of Germany. On his
return to England, he published, in 1800, a free translation of
Schiller's _Wallenstein_, and through his writings, and more especially
through his conversations, he became the conductor by which German
philosophic ideas reached the English literary class.
Coleridge described himself as being from boyhood a bookworm and a
day-dreamer. He remained through life an omnivorous, though
unsystematic, reader. He was helpless in practical affairs, and his
native indolence and procrastination were increased by his indulgence in
the opium habit. On his return to England, in 1800, he went to reside at
Keswick, in the Lake Country, with his brother-in-law, Southey, whose
industry supported both families. During his last nineteen years
Coleridge found an asylum under the roof of Mr. James Gilman, of
Highgate, near London, whither many of the best young men in England
were accustomed to resort to listen to Coleridge's wonderful talk. Talk,
indeed, was the medium through which he mainly influenced his
generation. It cost him an effort to put his thoughts on paper. His
_Table Talk_--crowded with pregnant paragraphs--was taken down from his
lips by his nephew, Henry Coleridge. His criticisms of Shakspere are
nothing but notes, made here and there, from a course of lectures
delivered before the Royal Institute, and never fully written out.
Though only hints and suggestions, they are, perhaps, the most
penetrative and helpful Shaksperian criticisms in English. He was always
forming projects and abandoning them. He projected a great work on
Christian philosophy, which was to have been his _magnum opus_, but he
never wrote it. He projected an epic poem on the fall of Jerusalem. "I
schemed it at twenty-five," he said, "but, alas! _venturum expectat_."
What bade fair to be his best poem, _Christabel_, is a fragment. Another
strangely beautiful poem, _Kubla Khan_--which came to him, he said, in
sleep--is even more fragmentary. And the most important of his prose
remains, his _Biographia Literaria_, 1817, a history of his own
opinions, breaks off abruptly.
It was in his suggestiveness that Coleridge's great service to posterity
resided. He was what J.S. Mill called a "seminal mind," and his thought
had that power of stimulating thought in others which is the mark and
the privilege of original genius. Many a man has owed to some sentence
of Coleridge's, if not the awakening in himself of a new intellectual
life, at least the starting of fruitful trains of reflection which have
modified his whole view of certain great subjects. On every thing that
he left is set the stamp of high mental authority. He was not, perhaps,
primarily, he certainly was not exclusively, a poet. In theology, in
philosophy, in political thought and literary criticism he set currents
flowing which are flowing yet. The terminology of criticism, for
example, is in his debt for many of those convenient distinctions--such
as that between genius and talent, between wit and humor, between fancy
and imagination--which are familiar enough now, but which he first
introduced or enforced. His definitions and apothegms we meet
every-where. Such are, for example, the sayings: "Every man is born an
Aristotelian or a Platonist." "Prose is words in their best order;
poetry, the best words in the best order." And among the bits of subtle
interpretation that abound in his writings may be mentioned his
estimate of Wordsworth, in the _Biographia Literaria_, and his sketch of
Hamlet's character--one with which he was personally in strong
sympathy--in the _Lectures on Shakspere_.
The Broad Church party, in the English Church, among whose most eminent
exponents have been W. Frederic Robertson, Arnold of Rugby, F.D.
Maurice, Charles Kingsley, and the late Dean Stanley, traces its
intellectual origin to Coleridge's _Aids to Reflection_, to his writings
and conversations in general, and particularly to his ideal of a
national clerisy, as set forth in his essay on _Church and State_. In
politics, as in religion, Coleridge's conservatism represents the
reaction against the destructive spirit of the 18th century and the
French Revolution. To this root-and-branch democracy he opposed the view
that every old belief, or institution, such as the throne or the Church,
had served some need, and had a rational idea at the bottom of it, to
which it might be again recalled, and made once more a benefit to
society, instead of a curse and an anachronism.
As a poet, Coleridge has a sure, though slender, hold upon immortal
fame. No English poet has "sung so wildly well" as the singer of
_Christabel_ and the _Ancient Mariner_. The former of these is, in form,
a romance in a variety of meters, and in substance, a tale of
supernatural possession, by which a lovely and innocent maiden is
brought under the control of a witch. Though unfinished and obscure in
intention, it haunts the imagination with a mystic power. Byron had seen
_Christabel_ in manuscript, and urged Coleridge to publish it. He hated
all the "Lakers," but when, on parting from Lady Byron, he wrote his
song,
Fare thee well, and if forever,
Still forever fare thee well,
he prefixed to it the noble lines from Coleridge's poem, beginning
Alas! they had been friends in youth.
In that weird ballad, the _Ancient Mariner_, the supernatural is
handled with even greater subtlety than in _Christabel_. The reader is
led to feel that amid the loneliness of the tropic-sea the line between
the earthly and the unearthly vanishes, and the poet leaves him to
discover for himself whether the spectral shapes that the mariner saw
were merely the visions of the calenture, or a glimpse of the world of
spirits. Coleridge is one of our most perfect metrists. The poet
Swinburne--than whom there can be no higher authority on this point
(though he is rather given to exaggeration)--pronounces _Kubla Khan_,
"for absolute melody and splendor, the first poem in the language."
Robert Southey, the third member of this group, was a diligent worker,
and one of the most voluminous of English writers. As a poet, he was
lacking in inspiration, and his big oriental epics, _Thalaba_, 1801, and
the _Curse of Kehama_, 1810, are little better than wax-work. Of his
numerous works in prose, the _Life of Nelson_ is, perhaps, the best, and
is an excellent biography.
Several other authors were more or less closely associated with the Lake
Poets by residence or social affiliation. John Wilson, the editor of
_Blackwood's_, lived for some time, when a young man, at Elleray, on the
banks of Windermere. He was an athletic man of outdoor habits, an
enthusiastic sportsman, and a lover of natural scenery. His admiration
of Wordsworth was thought to have led him to imitation of the latter, in
his _Isle of Palms_, 1812, and his other poetry.
One of Wilson's companions, in his mountain walks, was Thomas De
Quincey, who had been led by his reverence for Wordsworth and Coleridge
to take up his residence, in 1808, at Grasmere, where he occupied for
many years the cottage from which Wordsworth had removed to Allan Bank.
De Quincey was a shy, bookish man, of erratic, nocturnal habits, who
impresses one, personally, as a child of genius, with a child's
helplessness and a child's sharp observation. He was, above all things,
a magazinist. All his writings, with one exception, appeared first in
the shape of contributions to periodicals; and his essays, literary
criticisms, and miscellaneous papers are exceedingly rich and varied.
The most famous of them was his _Confessions of an English Opium Eater_,
published as a serial in the _London Magazine_, in 1821. He had begun to
take opium, as a cure for the toothache, when a student at Oxford, where
he resided from 1803 to 1808. By 1816 he had risen to eight thousand
drops of laudanum a day. For several years after this he experienced the
acutest misery, and his will suffered an entire paralysis. In 1821 he
succeeded in reducing his dose to a comparatively small allowance, and
in shaking off his torpor so as to become capable of literary work. The
most impressive effect of the opium habit was seen in his dreams, in the
unnatural expansion of space and time, and the infinite repetition of
the same objects. His sleep was filled with dim, vast images;
measureless cavalcades deploying to the sound of orchestral music; an
endless succession of vaulted halls, with staircases climbing to heaven,
up which toiled eternally the same solitary figure. "Then came sudden
alarms, hurrying to and fro; trepidations of innumerable fugitives;
darkness and light; tempest and human faces." Many of De Quincey's
papers were autobiographical, but there is always something baffling in
these reminiscences. In the interminable wanderings of his pen--for
which, perhaps, opium was responsible--he appears to lose all trace of
facts or of any continuous story. Every actual experience of his life
seems to have been taken up into a realm of dream, and there distorted
till the reader sees not the real figures, but the enormous, grotesque
shadows of them, executing wild dances on a screen. An instance of this
process is described by himself in his _Vision of Sudden Death_. But his
unworldliness and faculty of vision-seeing were not inconsistent with
the keenness of judgment and the justness and delicacy of perception
displayed in his _Biographical Sketches_ of Wordsworth, Coleridge, and
other contemporaries: in his critical papers on _Pope_, _Milton_,
_Lessing_, _Homer and the Homeridæ_: his essay on _Style_; and his
_Brief Appraisal of the Greek Literature_. His curious scholarship is
seen in his articles on the _Toilet of a Hebrew Lady_, and the
_Casuistry of Roman Meals_; his ironical and somewhat elaborate humor in
his essay on _Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts_. Of his
narrative pieces the most remarkable is his _Revolt of the Tartars_,
describing the flight of a Kalmuck tribe of six hundred thousand souls
from Russia to the Chinese frontier: a great hegira or anabasis, which
extended for four thousand miles over desert steppes infested with foes,
occupied six months' time, and left nearly half of the tribe dead upon
the way. The subject was suited to De Quincey's imagination. It was like
one of his own opium visions, and he handled it with a dignity and force
which make the history not altogether unworthy of comparison with
Thucydides's great chapter on the Sicilian Expedition.
An intimate friend of Southey was Walter Savage Landor, a man of kingly
nature, of a leonine presence, with a most stormy and unreasonable
temper, and yet with the courtliest graces of manner, and with--said
Emerson--"a wonderful brain, despotic, violent, and inexhaustible." He
inherited wealth, and lived a great part of his life at Florence, where
he died in 1864, in his ninetieth year. Dickens, who knew him at Bath,
in the latter part of his life, made a kindly caricature of him as
Lawrence Boythorn, in _Bleak House_, whose "combination of superficial
ferocity and inherent tenderness," testifies Henry Crabb Robinson, in
his _Diary_, was true to the life. Landor is the most purely classical
of English writers. Not merely his themes, but his whole way of thinking
was pagan and antique. He composed indifferently in English or Latin,
preferring the latter, if any thing, in obedience to his instinct for
compression and exclusiveness. Thus, portions of his narrative poem,
_Gebir_, 1798, were written originally in Latin and he added a Latin
version, _Gebirius_, to the English edition. In like manner his
_Hellenics_, 1847, were mainly translations from his Latin _Idyllia
Heroica_, written years before. The Hellenic clearness and repose which
were absent from his life, Landor sought in his art. His poems, in their
restraint, their objectivity, their aloofness from modern feeling, have
something chill and artificial. The verse of poets like Byron and
Wordsworth is alive; the blood runs in it. But Landor's polished,
clean-cut _intaglios_ have been well described as "written in marble."
He was a master of fine and solid prose. His _Pericles and Aspasia_
consists of a series of letters passing between the great Athenian
demagogue; the hetaira, Aspasia; her friend, Cleone of Miletus;
Anaxagorus, the philosopher, and Pericles's nephew, Alcibiades. In this
masterpiece, the intellectual life of Athens, at its period of highest
refinement, is brought before the reader with singular vividness, and he
is made to breathe an atmosphere of high-bred grace, delicate wit, and
thoughtful sentiment, expressed in English "of Attic choice." The
_Imaginary Conversations_, 1824-1846, were Platonic dialogues between a
great variety of historical characters; between, for example, Dante and
Beatrice, Washington and Franklin, Queen Elizabeth and Cecil, Xenophon
and Cyrus the Younger, Bonaparte and the president of the Senate.
Landor's writings have never been popular; they address an aristocracy
of scholars; and Byron--whom Landor disliked and considered
vulgar--sneered at him as a writer who "cultivated much private renown
in the shape of Latin verses." He said of himself that he "never
contended with a contemporary, but walked alone on the far Eastern
uplands, meditating and remembering."
A school-mate of Coleridge at Christ's Hospital, and his friend and
correspondent through life, was Charles Lamb, one of the most charming
of English essayists. He was a bachelor, who lived alone with his sister
Mary, a lovable and intellectual woman, but subject to recurring
attacks of madness. Lamb was "a notched and cropped scrivener, a votary
of the desk;" a clerk, that is, in the employ of the East India Company.
He was of antiquarian tastes, an ardent playgoer, a lover of whist and
of the London streets; and these tastes are reflected in his _Essays of
Elia_, contributed to the _London Magazine_ and reprinted in book form
in 1823. From his mousing among the Elizabethan dramatists and such old
humorists as Burton and Fuller, his own style imbibed a peculiar
quaintness and pungency. His _Specimens of English Dramatic Poets_,
1808, is admirable for its critical insight. In 1802 he paid a visit to
Coleridge at Keswick, in the Lake Country; but he felt or affected a
whimsical horror of the mountains, and said, "Fleet Street and the
Strand are better to live in." Among the best of his essays are _Dream
Children_, _Poor Relations_, _The Artificial Comedy of the Last
Century_, _Old China_, _Roast Pig_, _A Defense of Chimneysweeps_, _A
Complaint of the Decay of Beggars in the Metropolis_, and _The Old
Benchers of the Inner Temple_.
The romantic movement, preluded by Gray, Collins, Chatterton,
Macpherson, and others, culminated in Walter Scott (1721-1832). His
passion for the mediæval was excited by reading Percy's _Reliques_ when
he was a boy; and in one of his school themes he maintained that Ariosto
was a greater poet than Homer. He began early to collect manuscript
ballads, suits of armor, pieces of old plate, border-horns, and similar
relics. He learned Italian in order to read the romancers--Ariosto,
Tasso, Pulci, and Boiardo--preferring them to Dante. He studied Gothic
architecture, heraldry, and the art of fortification, and made drawings
of famous ruins and battle-fields. In particular he read eagerly every
thing that he could lay hands on relating to the history, legends, and
antiquities of the Scottish border--the vale of Tweed, Teviotdale,
Ettrick Forest, and the Yarrow, of all which land he became the
laureate, as Burns had been of Ayrshire and the "West Country." Scott,
like Wordsworth, was an outdoor poet. He spent much time in the saddle,
and was fond of horses, dogs, hunting, and salmon-fishing. He had a keen
eye for the beauties of natural scenery, though "more especially," he
admits, "when combined with ancient ruins or remains of our forefathers'
piety or splendor." He had the historic imagination, and, in creating
the historical novel, he was the first to throw a poetic glamour over
European annals. In 1803 Wordsworth visited Scott at Lasswade, near
Edinburgh; and Scott afterward returned the visit at Grasmere.
Wordsworth noted that his guest was "full of anecdote, and averse from
disquisition." The Englishman was a moralist and much given to
"disquisition," while the Scotchman was, above all things, a
_raconteur_, and, perhaps, on the whole, the foremost of British
story-tellers. Scott's Toryism, too, was of a different stripe from
Wordsworth's, being rather the result of sentiment and imagination than
of philosophy and reflection. His mind struck deep root in the past; his
local attachments and family pride were intense. Abbotsford was his
darling, and the expenses of this domain and of the baronial hospitality
which he there extended to all comers were among the causes of his
bankruptcy. The enormous toil which he exacted of himself, to pay off
the debt of £117,000, contracted by the failure of his publishers, cost
him his life. It is said that he was more gratified when the Prince
Regent created him a baronet, in 1820, than by the public recognition
that he acquired as the author of the Waverley Novels.
Scott was attracted by the romantic side of German literature. His first
published poem was a translation made in 1796 from Bürger's wild ballad,
_Leonora_. He followed this up with versions of the same poet's _Wilde
Jäger_, of Goethe's violent drama of feudal life, _Götz Von
Berlichingen_, and with other translations from the German, of a similar
class. On his horseback trips through the border, where he studied the
primitive manners of the Liddesdale people, and took down old ballads
from the recitation of ancient dames and cottagers, he amassed the
materials for his _Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border_, 1802. But the
first of his original poems was the _Lay of the Last Minstrel_,
published in 1805, and followed, in quick sucession by _Marmion_, the
_Lady of the Lake_, _Rokeby_, the _Lord of the Isles_, and a volume of
ballads and lyrical pieces, all issued during the years 1806-1814. The
popularity won by this series of metrical romances was immediate and
wide-spread. Nothing so fresh or so brilliant had appeared in English
poetry for nearly two centuries. The reader was hurried along through
scenes of rapid action, whose effect was heightened by wild landscapes
and picturesque manners. The pleasure was a passive one. There was no
deep thinking to perplex, no subtler beauties to pause upon; the
feelings were stirred pleasantly, but not deeply; the effect was on the
surface. The spell employed was novelty--or, at most, wonder--and the
chief emotion aroused was breathless interest in the progress of the
story. Carlyle said that Scott's genius was _in extenso_, rather than
_in intenso_, and that its great praise was its healthiness. This is
true of his verse, but not altogether so of his prose, which exhibits
deeper qualities. Some of Scott's most perfect poems, too, are his
shorter ballads, like _Jock o' Hazeldean_, and _Proud Maisie is in the
Wood_, which have a greater intensity and compression than his metrical
tales.
From 1814 to 1831 Scott wrote and published the _Waverley_ novels, some
thirty in number; if we consider the amount of work done, the speed with
which it was done, and the general average of excellence maintained,
perhaps the most marvelous literary feat on record. The series was
issued anonymously, and takes its name from the first number: _Waverley,
or 'Tis Sixty Years Since_. This was founded upon the rising of the
clans, in 1745, in support of the Young Pretender, Charles Edward
Stuart, and it revealed to the English public that almost foreign
country which lay just across their threshold, the Scottish Highlands.
The _Waverley_ novels remain, as a whole, unequaled as historical
fiction, although here and there a single novel, like George Eliot's
_Romola_, or Thackeray's _Henry Esmond_, or Kingsley's _Hypatia_, may
have attained a place beside the best of them. They were a novelty when
they appeared. English prose fiction had somewhat declined since the
time of Fielding and Goldsmith. There were truthful, though rather tame,
delineations of provincial life, like Jane Austen's _Sense and
Sensibility_, 1811, and _Pride and Prejudice_, 1813; or Maria
Edgeworth's _Popular Tales_, 1804. On the other hand, there were Gothic
romances, like the _Monk_ of Matthew Gregory Lewis, to whose _Tales of
Wonder_ some of Scott's translations from the German had been
contributed; or like Anne Radcliffe's _Mysteries of Udolpho_. The great
original of this school of fiction was Horace Walpole's _Castle of
Otranto_, 1765; an absurd tale of secret trap-doors, subterranean
vaults, apparitions of monstrous mailed figures and colossal helmets,
pictures that descend from their frames, and hollow voices that proclaim
the ruin of ancient families.
Scott used the machinery of romance, but he was not merely a romancer,
or an historical novelist even, and it is not, as Carlyle implies, the
buff-belts and jerkins which principally interest us in his heroes.
_Ivanhoe_ and _Kenilworth_ and the _Talisman_ are, indeed, romances pure
and simple, and very good romances at that. But, in novels such as _Rob
Roy_, the _Antiquary_, the _Heart of Midlothian_, and the _Bride of
Lammermoor_, Scott drew from contemporary life, and from his intimate
knowledge of Scotch character. The story is there, with its entanglement
of plot and its exciting adventures, but there are also, as truly as in
Shakspere, though not in the same degree, the observation of life, the
knowledge of men, the power of dramatic creation. No writer awakens in
his readers a warmer personal affection than Walter Scott, the brave,
honest, kindly gentleman; the noblest figure among the literary men of
his generation.
Another Scotch poet was Thomas Campbell, whose _Pleasures of Hope_,
1799, was written in Pope's couplet, and in the stilted diction of the
18th century. _Gertrude of Wyoming_, 1809, a long narrative poem in
Spenserian stanza, is untrue to the scenery and life of Pennsylvania,
where its scene is laid. But Campbell turned his rhetorical manner and
his clanking, martial verse to fine advantage in such pieces as
_Hohenlinden_, _Ye Mariners of England_, and the _Battle of the Baltic_.
These have the true lyric fire, and rank among the best English
war-songs.
When Scott was asked why he had left off writing poetry, he answered,
"Byron _bet_ me." George Gordon Byron (1788-1824) was a young man of
twenty-four when, on his return from a two years' sauntering through
Portugal, Spain, Albania, Greece, and the Levant, he published, in the
first two cantos of _Childe Harold_, 1812, a sort of poetic itinerary of
his experiences and impressions. The poem took, rather to its author's
surprise, who said that he woke one morning and found himself famous.
_Childe Harold_ opened a new field to poetry: the romance of travel, the
picturesque aspects of foreign scenery, manners, and costumes. It is
instructive of the difference between the two ages, in poetic
sensibility to such things, to compare Byron's glowing imagery with
Addison's tame _Letter from Italy_, written a century before. _Childe
Harold_ was followed by a series of metrical tales, the _Giaour_, the
_Bride of Abydos_, the _Corsair_, _Lara_, the _Siege of Corinth_,
_Parisina_, and the _Prisoner of Chillon_, all written in the years
1813-1816. These poems at once took the place of Scott's in popular
interest, dazzling a public that had begun to weary of chivalry romances
with pictures of Eastern life, with incidents as exciting as Scott's,
descriptions as highly colored, and a much greater intensity of passion.
So far as they depended for this interest upon the novelty of their
accessories, the effect was a temporary one. Seraglios, divans, bulbuls,
Gulistans, Zuleikas, and other oriental properties deluged English
poetry for a time, and then subsided; even as the tide of moss-troopers,
sorcerers, hermits, and feudal castles had already had its rise and
fall.
But there was a deeper reason for the impression made by Byron's poetry
upon his contemporaries. He laid his finger right on the sore spot in
modern life. He had the disease with which the time was sick, the
world-weariness, the desperation which proceeded from "passion incapable
of being converted into action." We find this tone in much of the
literature which followed the failure of the French Revolution and the
Napoleonic wars. From the irritations of that period, the disappointment
of high hopes for the future of the race, the growing religious
disbelief, and the revolt of democracy and free thought against
conservative reaction, sprang what Southey called the "Satanic school,"
which spoke its loudest word in Byron. Titanic is the better word, for
the rebellion was not against God, but Jupiter; that is, against the
State, Church, and society of Byron's day; against George III., the Tory
cabinet of Lord Castlereagh, the Duke of Wellington, the bench of
bishops, London gossip, the British constitution, and British cant. In
these poems of Byron, and in his dramatic experiments, _Manfred_ and
_Cain_, there is a single figure--the figure of Byron under various
masks--and one pervading mood, a restless and sardonic gloom, a
weariness of life, a love of solitude, and a melancholy exaltation in
the presence of the wilderness and the sea. Byron's hero is always
represented as a man originally noble, whom some great wrong, by others,
or some mysterious crime of his own, has blasted and embittered, and who
carries about the world a seared heart and a somber brow. Harold--who
may stand as a type of all his heroes--has run "through sin's
labyrinth," and feeling the "fullness of satiety," is drawn abroad to
roam, "the wandering exile of his own dark mind." The loss of a
capacity for pure, unjaded emotion is the constant burden of Byron's
lament;
No more, no more, O never more on me
The freshness of the heart shall fall like dew:
and again,
O could I feel as I have felt--or be what I have been,
Or weep as I could once have wept, o'er many a vanished scene;
As springs in deserts found seem sweet, all brackish tho' they be,
So, midst the withered waste of life, those tears would flow to me.
This mood was sincere in Byron; but by cultivating it, and posing too
long in one attitude, he became self-conscious and theatrical, and much
of his serious poetry has a false ring. His example infected the minor
poetry of the time, and it was quite natural that Thackeray--who
represented a generation that had a very different ideal of the
heroic--should be provoked into describing Byron as "a big sulky dandy."
Byron was well fitted by birth and temperament to be the spokesman of
this fierce discontent. He inherited from his mother a haughty and
violent temper, and profligate tendencies from his father. He was
through life a spoiled child, whose main characteristic was willfulness.
He liked to shock people by exaggerating his wickedness, or by
perversely maintaining the wrong side of a dispute. But he had traits of
bravery and generosity. Women loved him, and he made strong friends.
There was a careless charm about him which fascinated natures as unlike
each other as Shelley and Scott. By the death of the fifth Lord Byron
without issue, Byron came into a title and estates at the age of ten.
Though a liberal in politics he had aristocratic feelings, and was vain
of his rank as he was of his beauty. He was educated at Harrow and at
Trinity College, Cambridge, where he was idle and dissipated, but did a
great deal of miscellaneous reading. He took some of his Cambridge
set--Hobhouse, Matthews, and others--to Newstead Abbey, his ancestral
seat, where they filled the ancient cloisters with eccentric orgies.
Byron was strikingly handsome. His face had a spiritual paleness and a
classic regularity, and his dark hair curled closely to his head. A
deformity in one of his feet was a mortification to him, and impaired
his activity in many ways, although he prided himself upon his powers as
a swimmer.
In 1815, when at the height of his literary and social _éclat_ in
London, he married. In February of the following year he was separated
from Lady Byron, and left England forever, pursued by the execrations of
outraged respectability. In this chorus of abuse there was mingled a
share of cant; but Byron got, on the whole, what he deserved. From
Switzerland, where he spent a summer by Lake Leman, with the Shelleys;
from Venice, Ravenna, Pisa, and Rome, scandalous reports of his
intrigues and his wild debaucheries were wafted back to England, and
with these came poem after poem, full of burning genius, pride, scorn,
and anguish, and all hurling defiance at English public opinion. The
third and fourth cantos of _Childe Harold_, 1816-1818, were a great
advance upon the first two, and contain the best of Byron's serious
poetry. He has written his name all over the continent of Europe, and on
a hundred memorable spots has made the scenery his own. On the field of
Waterloo, on "the castled crag of Drachenfels," "by the blue rushing of
the arrowy Rhone," in Venice on the Bridge of Sighs, in the Coliseum at
Rome, and among the "Isles of Greece," the tourist is compelled to see
with Byron's eyes and under the associations of his pilgrimage. In his
later poems, such as _Beppo_, 1818, and _Don Juan_, 1819-1823, he passed
into his second manner, a mocking cynicism gaining ground upon the
somewhat stagey gloom of his early poetry--Mephistophiles gradually
elbowing out Satan. _Don Juan_, though morally the worst, is
intellectually the most vital and representative of Byron's poems. It
takes up into itself most fully the life of the time; exhibits most
thoroughly the characteristic alternations of Byron's moods and the
prodigal resources of wit, passion, and understanding, which--rather
than imagination--were his prominent qualities as a poet. The hero, a
graceless, amorous stripling, goes wandering from Spain to the Greek
islands and Constantinople, thence to St. Petersburg, and finally to
England. Every-where his seductions are successful, and Byron uses him
as a means of exposing the weakness of the human heart and the
rottenness of society in all countries. In 1823, breaking away from his
life of selfish indulgence in Italy, Byron threw himself into the cause
of Grecian liberty, which he had sung so gloriously in the _Isles of
Greece_. He died at Missolonghi, in the following year, of a fever
contracted by exposure and overwork.
Byron was a great poet but not a great literary artist. He wrote
negligently and with the ease of assured strength; his mind gathering
heat as it moved, and pouring itself forth in reckless profusion. His
work is diffuse and imperfect; much of it is melodrama or speech-making,
rather than true poetry. But, on the other hand, much, very much of it
is unexcelled as the direct, strong, sincere utterance of personal
feeling. Such is the quality of his best lyrics, like _When We Two
Parted_, the _Elegy on Thyrza_, _Stanzas to Augusta_, _She Walks in
Beauty_, and of innumerable passages, lyrical and descriptive, in his
longer poems. He had not the wisdom of Wordsworth, nor the rich and
subtle imagination of Coleridge, Shelley, and Keats when they were at
their best. But he had greater body and motive force than any of them.
He is the strongest personality among English poets since Milton, though
his strength was wasted by want of restraint and self-culture. In Milton
the passion was there, but it was held in check by the will and the
artistic conscience, made subordinate to good ends, ripened by long
reflection, and finally uttered in forms of perfect and harmonious
beauty. Byron's love of Nature was quite different in kind from
Wordsworth's. Of all English poets he has sung most lyrically of that
national theme, the sea; as witness, among many other passages, the
famous apostrophe to the ocean which closes _Childe Harold_, and the
opening of the third canto in the same poem,
Once more upon the waters, etc.
He had a passion for night and storm, because they made him forget
himself.
Most glorious night!
Thou wert not sent for slumber! Let me be
A sharer in thy fierce and far delight,
A portion of the tempest and of thee!
Byron's literary executor and biographer was the Irish poet, Thomas
Moore, a born song-writer, whose _Irish Melodies_, set to old native
airs, are, like Burns's, genuine, spontaneous singing, and run naturally
to music. Songs such as the _Meeting of the Waters_, _The Harp of Tara_,
_Those Evening Bells_, the _Light of Other Days_, _Araby's Daughter_,
and the _Last Rose of Summer_ were, and still are, popular favorites.
Moore's Oriental romance, _Lalla Rookh_, 1817, is overladen with
ornament and with a sugary sentiment that clogs the palate. He had the
quick Irish wit, sensibility rather than passion, and fancy rather than
imagination.
Byron's friend, Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822), was also in fiery
revolt against all conventions and institutions, though his revolt
proceeded not, as in Byron's case, from the turbulence of passions which
brooked no restraint, but rather from an intellectual impatience of any
kind of control. He was not, like Byron, a sensual man, but temperate
and chaste. He was, indeed, in his life and in his poetry, as nearly a
disembodied spirit as a human creature can be. The German poet, Heine,
said that liberty was the religion of this century, and of this religion
Shelley was a worshiper. His rebellion against authority began early. He
refused to fag at Eton, and was expelled from Oxford for publishing a
tract on the _Necessity of Atheism_. At nineteen, he ran away with
Harriet Westbrook, and was married to her in Scotland. Three years
later he deserted her for Mary Godwin, with whom he eloped to
Switzerland. Two years after this his first wife drowned herself in the
Serpentine, and Shelley was then formally wedded to Mary Godwin. All
this is rather startling, in the bare statement of it, yet it is not
inconsistent with the many testimonies that exist to Shelley's singular
purity and beauty of character, testimonies borne out by the evidence of
his own writings. Impulse with him took the place of conscience. Moral
law, accompanied by the sanction of power, and imposed by outside
authority, he rejected as a form of tyranny. His nature lacked
robustness and ballast. Byron, who was at the bottom intensely
practical, said that Shelley's philosophy was too spiritual and
romantic. Hazlitt, himself a Radical, wrote of Shelley: "He has a fire
in his eye, a fever in his blood, a maggot in his brain, a hectic
flutter in his speech, which mark out the philosophic fanatic. He is
sanguine-complexioned and shrill-voiced." It was, perhaps, with some
recollection of this last-mentioned trait of Shelley the man, that
Carlyle wrote of Shelley the poet, that "the sound of him was shrieky,"
and that he had "filled the earth with an inarticulate wailing."
His career as a poet began, characteristically enough, with the
publication, while at Oxford, of a volume of political rimes, entitled
_Margaret Nicholson's Remains_, Margaret Nicholson being the crazy woman
who tried to stab George III. His boyish poem, _Queen Mab_, was
published in 1813; _Alastor_ in 1816, and the _Revolt of Islam_--his
longest--in 1818, all before he was twenty-one. These were filled with
splendid, though unsubstantial, imagery, but they were abstract in
subject, and had the faults of incoherence and formlessness which make
Shelley's longer poems wearisome and confusing. They sought to embody
his social creed of perfectionism, as well as a certain vague
pantheistic system of belief in a spirit of love in nature and man,
whose presence is a constant source of obscurity in Shelley's verse. In
1818 he went to Italy, where the last four years of his life were
passed, and where, under the influences of Italian art and poetry, his
writing became deeper and stronger. He was fond of yachting, and spent
much of his time upon the Mediterranean. In the summer of 1822 his boat
was swamped in a squall, off the Gulf of Spezzia, and Shelley's drowned
body was washed ashore, and burned in the presence of Byron and Leigh
Hunt. The ashes were entombed in the Protestant cemetery at Rome, with
the epitaph, _Cor cordium_.
Shelley's best and maturest work, nearly all of which was done in Italy,
includes his tragedy, _The Cenci_, 1819, and his lyrical drama,
_Prometheus Unbound_, 1821. The first of these has a unity and a
definiteness of contour unusual with Shelley, and is, with the exception
of some of Robert Browning's, the best English tragedy since Otway.
Prometheus represented to Shelley's mind the human spirit fighting
against divine oppression, and in his portrayal of this figure he kept
in mind not only the _Prometheus_ of Aeschylus, but the Satan of
_Paradise Lost_. Indeed, in this poem, Shelley came nearer to the
sublime than any English poet since Milton. Yet it is in lyrical, rather
than in dramatic, quality that _Prometheus Unbound_ is great. If Shelley
be not, as his latest editor, Mr. Forman, claims him to be, the foremost
of English lyrical poets, he is at least the most lyrical of them. He
had, in a supreme degree, the "lyric cry." His vibrant nature trembled
to every breath of emotion, and his nerves craved ever newer shocks; to
pant, to quiver, to thrill, to grow faint in the spasm of intense
sensation. The feminine cast observable in Shelley's portrait is borne
out by this tremulous sensibility in his verse. It is curious how often
he uses the metaphor of wings: of the winged spirit, soaring, like his
skylark, till lost in music, rapture, light, and then falling back to
earth. Three successive moods--longing, ecstasy, and the revulsion of
despair--are expressed in many of his lyrics; as in the _Hymn to the
Spirit of Nature_ in _Prometheus_, in the ode _To a Skylark_, and in the
_Lines to an Indian Air_--Edgar Poe's favorite. His passionate desire to
lose himself in Nature, to become one with that spirit of love and
beauty in the universe which was to him in place of God, is expressed in
the _Ode to the West Wind_, his most perfect poem:
Make me thy lyre, even as the forest is;
What if my leaves are falling like its own!
The tumult of thy mighty harmonies
Will take from both a deep autumnal tone
Sweet, though in sadness. Be thou, Spirit fierce,
My spirit! be thou me, impetuous one!
In the lyrical pieces already mentioned, together with _Adonais_, the
lines _Written in the Euganean Hills_, _Epipsychidion_, _Stanzas Written
in Dejection near Naples_, _A Dream of the Unknown_, and many others,
Shelley's lyrical genius reaches a rarer loveliness and a more faultless
art than Byron's ever attained, though it lacks the directness and
momentum of Byron.
In Shelley's longer poems, intoxicated with the music of his own
singing, he abandons himself wholly to the guidance of his imagination,
and the verse seems to go on of itself, like the enchanted boat in
_Alastor_, with no one at the helm. Vision succeeds vision in glorious
but bewildering profusion; ideal landscapes and cities of cloud
"pinnacled dim in the intense inane." These poems are like the
water-falls in the Yosemite, which, tumbling from a height of several
thousand feet, are shattered into foam by the air, and waved about over
the valley. Very beautiful is this descending spray, and the rainbow
dwells in its bosom; but there is no longer any stream, nothing but an
iridescent mist. The word _ethereal_ best expresses the quality of
Shelley's genius. His poetry is full of atmospheric effects; of the
tricks which light plays with the fluid elements of water and air; of
stars, clouds, rain, dew, mist, frost, wind, the foam of seas, the
phases of the moon, the green shadows of waves, the shapes of flames,
the "golden lightning of the setting sun." Nature, in Shelley, wants
homeliness and relief. While poets like Wordsworth and Burns let in an
ideal light upon the rough fields of earth, Shelley escapes into a
"moonlight-colored" realm of shadows and dreams, among whose
abstractions the heart turns cold. One bit of Wordsworth's mountain turf
is worth them all.
By the death of John Keats (1796-1821), whose elegy Shelley sang in
_Adonais_, English poetry suffered an irreparable loss. His _Endymion_,
1818, though disfigured by mawkishness and by some affectations of
manner, was rich in promise. Its faults were those of youth, the faults
of exuberance and of a sensibility, which time corrects. _Hyperion_,
1820, promised to be his masterpiece, but he left it unfinished--"a
Titanic torso"--because, as he said, "there were too many Miltonic
inversions in it." The subject was the displacement by Phoebus Apollo of
the ancient sun-god, Hyperion, the last of the Titans who retained his
dominion. It was a theme of great capabilities, and the poem was begun
by Keats with a strength of conception which leads to the belief that
here was once more a really epic genius, had fate suffered it to mature.
The fragment, as it stands--"that inlet to severe magnificence"--proves
how rapidly Keats's diction was clarifying. He had learned to string up
his loose chords. There is nothing maudlin in _Hyperion_; all there is
in whole tones and in the grand manner, "as sublime as Aeschylus," said
Byron, with the grave, antique simplicity, and something of modern
sweetness interfused.
Keats's father was a groom in a London livery-stable. The poet was
apprenticed at fifteen to a surgeon. At school he had studied Latin but
not Greek. He, who of all the English poets had the most purely Hellenic
spirit, made acquaintance with Greek literature and art only through the
medium of classical dictionaries, translations, and popular
mythologies; and later through the marbles and casts in the British
Museum. His friend, the artist Haydon, lent him a copy of Chapman's
Homer, and the impression that it made upon him he recorded in his
sonnet, _On First Looking into Chapman's Homer_. Other poems of the same
inspiration are his three sonnets, _To Homer_, _On Seeing the Elgin
Marbles_, _On a Picture of Leander_, _Lamia_, and the beautiful _Ode on
a Grecian Urn_. But Keats's art was retrospective and eclectic, the
blossom of a double root; and "golden-tongued Romance with serene lute"
had her part in him, as well as the classics. In his seventeenth year he
had read the _Faerie Queene_, and from Spenser he went on to a study of
Chaucer, Shakspere and Milton. Then he took up Italian and read Ariosto.
The influence of these studies is seen in his poem, _Isabella, or the
Pot of Basil_, taken from a story of Boccaccio; in his wild ballad, _La
Belle Dame sans Merci_; and in his love tale, the _Eve of St. Agnes_,
with its wealth of mediæval adornment. In the _Ode to Autumn_, and _Ode
to a Nightingale_, the Hellenic choiceness is found touched with the
warmer hues of romance.
There is something deeply tragic in the short story of Keats's life. The
seeds of consumption were in him; he felt the stirrings of a potent
genius, but he knew that he could not wait for it to unfold, but must
die
Before high-piled books in charactry
Hold like rich garners the full-ripened grain.
His disease was aggravated, possibly, by the stupid brutality with which
the reviewers had treated _Endymion_; and certainly by the hopeless love
which devoured him. "The very thing which I want to live most for," he
wrote, "will be a great occasion of my death. If I had any chance of
recovery, this passion would kill me." In the autumn of 1820, his
disease gaining apace, he went on a sailing vessel to Italy,
accompanied by a single friend, a young artist named Severn. The change
was of no avail, and he died at Rome a few weeks after, in his
twenty-sixth year.
Keats was, above all things, the _artist_, with that love of the
beautiful and that instinct for its reproduction which are the artist's
divinest gifts. He cared little about the politics and philosophy of his
day, and he did not make his poetry the vehicle of ideas. It was
sensuous poetry, the poetry of youth and gladness. But if he had lived,
and if, with wider knowledge of men and deeper experience of life, he
had attained to Wordsworth's spiritual insight and to Byron's power of
passion and understanding, he would have become a greater poet than
either. For he had a style--a "natural magic"--which only needed the
chastening touch of a finer culture to make it superior to any thing in
modern English poetry, and to force us back to Milton or Shakspere for a
comparison. His tombstone, not far from Shelley's, bears the inscription
of his own choosing: "Here lies one whose name was writ in water." But
it would be within the limits of truth to say that it is written in
large characters on most of our contemporary poetry. "Wordsworth," says
Lowell, "has influenced most the ideas of succeeding poets; Keats their
forms." And he has influenced these out of all proportion to the amount
which he left, or to his intellectual range, by virtue of the exquisite
quality of his _technique_.
* * * * *
1. Mrs. Oliphant's Literary History of England, 18th-19th
Centuries. London: Macmillan & Co., 1883.
2. Wordsworth's Poems. Chosen and edited by Matthew
Arnold. London, 1879.
3. Poetry of Byron. Chosen and arranged by Matthew
Arnold. London, 1881.
4. Shelley. Julian and Maddalo, Prometheus Unbound,
The Cenci, Lyrical Pieces.
5. Landor. Pericles and Aspasia.
6. Coleridge. Table-Talk, Notes on Shakspere, The Ancient
Mariner, Christabel, Love, Ode to France, Ode to the Departing
Year, Kubla Khan, Hymn before Sunrise in the Vale of Chamouni,
Youth and Age, Frost at Midnight.
7. De Quincey. Confessions of an English Opium Eater,
Flight of a Tartar Tribe, Biographical Sketches.
8. Scott. Waverley, Heart of Midlothian, Bride of Lammermoor,
Rob Roy, Antiquary, Marmion, Lady of the Lake.
9. Keats. Hyperion, Eve of St. Agnes, Lyrical Pieces.
Boston: J.R. Osgood, 1871.
[Illustration: Southey, Scott, Coleridge, Macaulay.]