THE ROMANTIC REVIVAL
(1)
There are two ways of approaching the periods of change and new birth in
literature. The commonest and, for all the study which it entails, the
easiest, is that summed up in the phrase, literature begets literature.
Following it, you discover and weigh literary influences, the influence
of poet on poet, and book on book. You find one man harking back to
earlier models in his own tongue, which an intervening age misunderstood
or despised; another, turning to the contemporary literatures of
neighbouring countries; another, perhaps, to the splendour and exoticism
of the east. In the matter of form and style, such a study carries you
far. You can trace types of poetry and metres back to curious and
unsuspected originals, find the well-known verse of Burns' epistles
turning up in Provençal; Tennyson's _In Memoriam_ stanza in use by Ben
Jonson; the metre of _Christabel_ in minor Elizabethan poetry; the
peculiar form of Fitzgerald's translation of _Omar Khayyam_ followed by
so many imitators since, itself to be the actual reflection of the rough
metrical scheme of his Persian original. But such a study, though it is
profitable and interesting, can never lead to the whole truth. As we saw
in the beginning of this book, in the matter of the Renaissance, every
age of discovery and re-birth has its double aspect. It is a revolution
in style and language, an age of literary experiment and achievement,
but its experiments are dictated by the excitement of a new
subject-matter, and that subject-matter is so much in the air, so
impalpable and universal that it eludes analysis. Only you can be sure
that it is this weltering contagion of new ideas, and new thought--the
"Zeitgeist," the spirit of the age, or whatever you may call it--that is
the essential and controlling force. Literary loans and imports give the
forms into which it can be moulded, but without them it would still
exist, and they are only the means by which a spirit which is in life
itself, and which expresses itself in action, and in concrete human
achievement, gets itself into the written word. The romantic revival
numbers Napoleon amongst its leaders as well as Byron, Wellington, Pitt
and Wilberforce, as well as Keats and Wordsworth. Only the literary
manifestations of the time concern us here, but it is important to
remember that the passion for simplification and for a return to nature
as a refuge from the artificial complexities of society, which inspired
the _Lyrical Ballads_, inspired no less the course of the Revolution in
France, and later, the destruction by Napoleon of the smaller feudal
states of Germany, which made possible German nationality and a national
spirit.
In this romantic revival, however, the revolution in form and style
matters more than in most. The classicism of the previous age had been
so fixed and immutable; it had been enthroned in high places, enjoyed
the esteem of society, arrogated to itself the acceptance which good
breeding and good manners demanded. Dryden had been a Court poet,
careful to change his allegiance with the changing monarchy. Pope had
been the equal and intimate of the great people of his day, and his
followers, if they did not enjoy the equality, enjoyed at any rate the
patronage of many noble lords. The effect of this was to give the
prestige of social usage to the verse in which they wrote and the
language they used. "There was," said Dr. Johnson, "before the time of
Dryden no poetical diction, no system of words at once refined from the
grossness of domestic use, and free from the harshness of terms
appropriated to particular arts. Words too familiar or too remote to
defeat the purpose of a poet." This poetic diction, refined from the
grossness of domestic use, was the standard poetic speech of the
eighteenth century. The heroic couplet in which it was cast was the
standard metre. So that the first object of the revolt of the romantics
was the purely literary object of getting rid of the vice of an unreal
and artificial manner of writing. They desired simplicity of style.
When the _Lyrical Ballads_ of Wordsworth and Coleridge were published in
1798, the preface which Wordsworth wrote as their manifesto hardly
touched at all on the poetic imagination or the attitude of the poet to
life and nature. The only question is that of diction. "The majority of
the following poems," he writes, "are to be considered as experiments.
They were written chiefly with a view to ascertain how far the language
of conversation in the middle and lower classes of society is adapted to
the purposes of poetic pleasure." And in the longer preface to the
second edition, in which the theories of the new school on the nature
and methods of the poetic imagination are set forth at length, he
returns to the same point. "The language too, of these men (that is
those in humble and rustic life) has been adopted ... because such men
hourly communicate with the best objects from which the best part of
language is originally derived, and because from their rank in society,
and the sameness and narrow circle of their intercourse, being less
under the influence of social vanity, they convey their feelings and
notions in simple unelaborated expressions." Social vanity--the armour
which we wear to conceal our deepest thoughts and feelings--that was
what Wordsworth wished to be rid of, and he chose the language of the
common people, not because it fitted, as an earlier school of poets who
used the common speech had asserted, the utterance of habitual feeling
and common sense, but because it is the most sincere expression of the
deepest and rarest passion. His object was the object attained by
Shakespeare in some of his supremest moments; the bare intolerable force
of the speeches after the murder of Macbeth, or of King Lear's
"Do not laugh at me,
For as I am a man, I think this lady
To be my child Cordelia."
Here, then, was one avenue of revolt from the tyranny of artificiality,
the getting back of common speech into poetry. But there was another,
earlier and more potent in its effect. The eighteenth century, weary of
its own good sense and sanity, turned to the Middle Ages for
picturesqueness and relief. Romance of course, had not been dead in all
these years, when Pope and Addison made wit and good sense the
fashionable temper for writing. There was a strong romantic tradition in
the eighteenth century, though it does not give its character to the
writing of the time. Dr. Johnson was fond of old romances. When he was
in Skye he amused himself by thinking of his Scottish tour as the
journey of a knight-errant. "These fictions of the Gothic romances," he
said, "are not so remote from credibility as is commonly supposed." It
is a mistake to suppose that the passion for mediaevalism began with
either Coleridge or Scott. Horace Walpole was as enthusiastic as either
of them; good eighteenth century prelates like Hurd and Percy, found in
what they called the Gothic an inexhaustible source of delight. As was
natural, what attracted them in the Middle Ages was not their
resemblances to the time they lived in, but the points in which the two
differed. None of them had knowledge enough, or insight enough, to
conceive or sympathize with the humanity of the thirteenth century, to
shudder at its cruelties and hardnesses and persecutions, or to
comprehend the spiritual elevation and insight of its rarest minds. "It
was art," said William Morris, "art in which all men shared, that made
life romantic as people called it in those days. That and not robber
barons, and inaccessible kings, with their hierarchy of serving nobles,
and other rubbish." Morris belonged to a time which knew its middle ages
better. To the eighteenth century the robber barons and the "other
rubbish" were the essence of romance. For Percy and his followers,
medievalism was a collection of what actors call "properties" gargoyles,
and odds and ends of armour and castle keeps with secret passages,
banners and gay colours, and gay shimmering obsolete words. Mistaking
what was on its surface at any rate a subtle and complex civilization,
for rudeness and quaintness, they seemed to themselves to pass back into
a freer air, where any extravagance was possible, and good breeding and
mere circumspection and restraint vanished like the wind.
A similar longing to be rid of the precision and order of everyday life
drove them to the mountains, and to the literature of Wales and the
Highlands, to Celtic, or pseudo-Celtic romance. To the fashion of the
time mountains were still frowning and horrid steeps; in Gray's Journal
of his tour in the Lakes, a new understanding and appreciation of nature
is only struggling through; and when mountains became fashionable, it
was at first and remained in part at least, till the time of Byron, for
those very theatrical qualities which had hitherto put them in
abhorrence. Wordsworth, in his _Lines written above Tintern Abbey_, in
which he sets forth the succeeding stages of his mental development,
refers to this love of the mountains for their spectacular qualities, as
the first step in the progress of his mind to poetic maturity:
"The sounding cataract
Haunted me like a passion; the tall rock,
The mountain and the deep and gloomy wood,
Their colours and their forms were then to me
An appetite."
This same passion for the "sounding cataract" and the "tall rock," this
appetite for the deep and gloomy wood, gave its vogue in Wordsworth's
boyhood to Macpherson's _Ossian_, a book which whether it be completely
fraudulent or not, was of capital importance in the beginnings of the
romantic movement.
The love of mediaeval quaintness and obsolete words, however, led to a
more important literary event--the publication of Bishop Percy's edition
of the ballads in the Percy folio--the _Reliques of Ancient Poetry_.
Percy to his own mind knew the Middle Ages better than they knew
themselves, and he took care to dress to advantage the rudeness and
plainness of his originals. Perhaps we should not blame him. Sir Walter
Scott did the same with better tact and skill in his Border minstrelsy,
and how many distinguished editors are there, who have tamed and
smoothed down the natural wildness and irregularity of Blake? But it is
more important to observe that when Percy's reliques came to have their
influence on writing his additions were imitated as much as the poems on
which he grafted them. Chatterton's _Rowley Poems_, which in many places
seem almost inconceivably banal and artificial to us to-day, caught
their accent from the episcopal editor as much as from the ballads
themselves. None the less, whatever its fault, Percy's collection gave
its impetus to one half of the romantic movement; it was eagerly read in
Germany, and when it came to influence Scott and Coleridge it did so not
only directly, but through Burger's imitation of it; it began the modern
study and love of the ballad which has given us _Sister Helen_, the
_White Ship_ and the _Lady of Shalott_.
But the romantic revival goes deeper than any change, however momentous
of fashion or style. It meant certain fundamental changes in human
outlook. In the first place, one notices in the authors of the time an
extraordinary development of imaginative sensibility; the mind at its
countless points of contact with the sensuous world and the world of
thought, seems to become more alive and alert. It is more sensitive to
fine impressions, to finely graded shades of difference. Outward
objects and philosophical ideas seem to increase in their content and
their meaning, and acquire a new power to enrich the intensest life of
the human spirit. Mountains and lakes, the dignity of the peasant, the
terror of the supernatural, scenes of history, mediaeval architecture
and armour, and mediaeval thought and poetry, the arts and mythology of
Greece--all became springs of poetic inspiration and poetic joy. The
impressions of all these things were unfamiliar and ministered to a
sense of wonder, and by that very fact they were classed as romantic, as
modes of escape from a settled way of life. But they were also in a
sense familiar too. The mountains made their appeal to a deep implanted
feeling in man, to his native sense of his own worth and dignity and
splendour as a part of nature, and his recognition of natural scenery as
necessary, and in its fullest meaning as sufficient for his spiritual
needs. They called him back from the artificiality and complexity of the
cities he had built for himself, and the society he had weaved round
him, to the natural world in which Providence had planted him of old,
and which was full of significance for his soul. The greatest poets of
the romantic revival strove to capture and convey the influence of
nature on the mind, and of the mind on nature interpenetrating one
another. They were none the less artists because they approached nature
in a state of passive receptivity. They believed in the autocracy of the
individual imagination none the less because their mission was to
divine nature and to understand her, rather than to correct her
profusions in the name of art.
In the second place the romantic revival meant a development of the
historical sense. Thinkers like Burke and Montesquieu helped students of
politics to acquire perspective; to conceive modern institutions not as
things separate, and separately created, but as conditioned by, and
evolved from, the institutions of an earlier day. Even the revolutionary
spirit of the time looked both before and after, and took history as
well as the human perfectibility imagined by philosophers into its
purview. In France the reformers appealed in the first instance for a
States General--a mediaeval institution--as the corrective of their
wrongs, and later when they could not, like their neighbours in Belgium,
demand reform by way of the restoration of their historical rights, they
were driven to go a step further back still, beyond history to what they
conceived to be primitive society, and demand the rights of man. This
development of the historical sense, which had such a widespread
influence on politics, got itself into literature in the creation of the
historical novel. Scott and Chateaubriand revived the old romance in
which by a peculiar ingenuity of form, the adventures of a typical hero
of fiction are cast in a historical setting and set about with portraits
of real personages. The historical sense affected, too, novels dealing
with contemporary life. Scott's best work, his novels of Scottish
character, catch more than half their excellence from the richness of
colour and proportion which the portraiture of the living people
acquires when it is aided by historical knowledge and imagination.
Lastly, besides this awakened historical sense, and this quickening of
imaginative sensibility to the message of nature, the Romantic revival
brought to literature a revival of the sense of the connection between
the visible world and another world which is unseen. The supernatural
which in all but the crudest of mechanisms had been out of English
literature since _Macbeth_, took hold on the imaginations of authors,
and brought with it a new subtlety and a new and nameless horror and
fascination. There is nothing in earlier English literature to set
beside the strange and terrible indefiniteness of the _Ancient Mariner_,
and though much in this kind has been written since, we have not got far
beyond the skill and imagination with which Coleridge and Scott worked
on the instinctive fears that lie buried in the human mind.
Of all these aspects of the revival, however, the new sensitiveness and
accessibility to the influences of external nature was the most
pervasive and the most important. Wordsworth speaks for the love that is
in homes where poor men lie, the daily teaching that is in
"Woods and rills;
The silence that is in the starry sky,
The peace that is among the lonely hills."
Shelley for the wildness of the west wind, and the ubiquitous spiritual
emotion which speaks equally in the song of a skylark or a political
revolution. Byron for the swing and roar of the sea. Keats for verdurous
glooms and winding mossy ways. Scott and Coleridge, though like Byron
they are less with nature than with romance, share the same communion.
This imaginative sensibility of the romantics not only deepened their
communion with nature, it brought them into a truer relation with what
had before been created in literature and art. The romantic revival is
the Golden Age of English criticism; all the poets were critics of one
sort or another--either formally in essays and prefaces, or in passing
and desultory flashes of illumination in their correspondence.
Wordsworth, in his prefaces, in his letter to a friend of Burns which
contains such a breadth and clarity of wisdom on things that seem alien
to his sympathies, even in some of his poems; Coleridge, in his
_Biographia Literaria_, in his notes on Shakespeare, in those rhapsodies
at Highgate which were the basis for his recorded table talk; Keats in
his letters; Shelley in his _Defence of Poetry_; Byron in his satires
and journals; Scott in those lives of the novelists which contain so
much truth and insight into the works of fellow craftsmen--they are all
to be found turning the new acuteness of impression which was in the air
they breathed, to the study of literature, as well as to the study of
nature. Alongside of them were two authors, Lamb and Hazlitt, whose bent
was rather critical than creative, and the best part of whose
intelligence and sympathy was spent on the sensitive and loving
divination of our earlier literature. With these two men began the
criticism of acting and of pictorial art that have developed since into
two of the main kinds of modern critical writing.
Romantic criticism, both in its end and its method, differs widely from
that of Dr. Johnson and his school. Wordsworth and Coleridge were
concerned with deep-seated qualities and temperamental differences.
Their critical work revolved round their conception of the fancy and the
imagination, the one dealing with nature on the surface and decorating
it with imagery, the other penetrating to its deeper significances.
Hazlitt and Lamb applied their analogous conception of wit as a lower
quality than humour, in the same fashion. Dr. Johnson looked on the
other hand for correctness of form, for the subordination of the parts
to the whole, for the self-restraint and good sense which common manners
would demand in society, and wisdom in practical life. His school cared
more for large general outlines than for truth in detail. They would not
permit the idiosyncrasy of a personal or individual point of view: hence
they were incapable of understanding lyricism, and they preferred those
forms of writing which set themselves to express the ideas and feelings
that most men may be supposed to have in common. Dr. Johnson thought a
bombastic and rhetorical passage in Congreve's _Mourning Bride_ better
than the famous description of Dover cliff in _King Lear_. "The crows,
sir," he said of the latter, "impede your fall." Their town breeding,
and possibly, as we saw in the case of Dr. Johnson, an actual physical
disability, made them distrust any clear and sympathetic rendering of
the sense impressions which nature creates. One cannot imagine Dr.
Johnson caring much for the minute observations of Tennyson's nature
poems, or delighting in the verdurous and mossy alleys of Keats. His
test in such a case would be simple; he would not have liked to have
been in such places, nor reluctantly compelled to go there would he in
all likelihood have had much to say about them beyond that they were
damp. For the poetry--such as Shelley's--which worked by means of
impalpable and indefinite suggestion, he would, one may conceive, have
cared even less. New modes of poetry asked of critics new sympathies and
a new way of approach. But it is time to turn to the authors themselves.
(2)
The case of Wordsworth is peculiar. In his own day he was vilified and
misunderstood; poets like Byron, whom most of us would now regard simply
as depending from the school he created, sneered at him. Shelley and
Keats failed to understand him or his motives; he was suspected of
apostasy, and when he became poet laureate he was written off as a
turn-coat who had played false to the ideals of his youth. Now common
opinion regards him as a poet above all the others of his age, and
amongst all the English poets standing beside Milton, but a step below
Shakespeare himself--and we know more about him, more about the
processes by which his soul moved from doubts to certainties, from
troubles to triumph, than we do about any other author we have. This
knowledge we have from the poem called, _The Prelude_, which was
published after his death. It was designed to be only the opening and
explanatory section of a philosophical poem, which was never completed.
Had it been published earlier it would have saved Wordsworth from the
coldness and neglect he suffered at the hands of younger men like
Shelley; it might even have made their work different from what it is.
It has made Wordsworth very clear to us now.
Wordsworth is that rarest thing amongst poets, a complete innovator. He
looked at things in a new way. He found his subjects in new places; and
he put them into a new poetic form. At the turning point of his life, in
his early manhood, he made one great discovery, had one great vision. By
the light of that vision and to communicate that discovery he wrote his
greatest work. By and by the vision faded, the world fell back into the
light of common day, his philosophy passed from discovery to acceptance,
and all unknown to him his pen fell into a common way of writing. The
faculty of reading which has added fuel to the fire of so many waning
inspirations was denied him. He was much too self-centred to lose
himself in the works of others. Only the shock of a change of
environment--a tour in Scotland, or abroad--shook him into his old
thrill of imagination, so that a few fine things fitfully illumine the
enormous and dreary bulk of his later work. If we lost all but the
_Lyrical Ballads_, the poems of 1804, and the _Prelude_, and the
_Excursion_, Wordsworth's position as a poet would be no lower than it
is now, and he would be more readily accepted by those who still find
themselves uncertain about him.
The determining factor in his career was the French Revolution--that
great movement which besides re-making France and Europe, made our very
modes of thinking anew. While an undergraduate in Cambridge Wordsworth
made several vacation visits to France. The first peaceful phase of the
Revolution was at its height; France and the assembly were dominated by
the little group of revolutionary orators who took their name from the
south-western province from which most of them came, and with this
group--the Girondists--Wordsworth threw in his lot. Had he remained he
would probably have gone with them to the guillotine. As it was, the
commands of his guardian brought him back to England, and he was forced
to contemplate from a distance the struggle in which he burned to take
an active part. One is accustomed to think of Wordsworth as a mild old
man, but such a picture if it is thrown back as a presentment of the
Wordsworth of the nineties is a far way from the truth. This darkly
passionate man tortured himself with his longings and his horror. War
came and the prayers for victory in churches found him in his heart
praying for defeat; then came the execution of the king; then the plot
which slew the Gironde. Before all this Wordsworth trembled as Hamlet
did when he learned the ghost's story. His faith in the world was
shaken. First his own country had taken up arms against what he believed
to be the cause of liberty. Then faction had destroyed his friends whom
he believed to be its standard bearers. What was in the world, in
religion, in morality that such things could be? In the face of this
tremendous problem, Wordsworth, unlike Hamlet, was resolute and
determined. It was, perhaps, characteristic of him that in his desire to
get his feet on firm rock again he fled for a time to the exactest of
sciences--to mathematics. But though he got certainties there, they must
have been, one judges, certainties too arid for his thirsting mind. Then
he made his great discovery--helped to it, perhaps, by his sister
Dorothy and his friend Coleridge--he found nature, and in nature, peace.
Not a very wonderful discovery, you will say, but though the cleansing
and healing force of natural surroundings on the mind is a familiar
enough idea in our own day, that is only because Wordsworth found it.
When he gave his message to the world it was a new message. It is worth
while remembering that it is still an unaccepted one. Most of his
critics still consider it only Wordsworth's fun when he wrote:
"One impulse from the vernal wood
Can teach us more of man,
Of moral evil and of good,
Than all the sages can."
Yet Wordsworth really believed that moral lessons and ideas were to be
gathered from trees and stones. It was the main part of his teaching. He
claimed that his own morality had been so furnished him, and he wrote
his poetry to convince other people that what had been true for him
could be true for them too.
For him life was a series of impressions, and the poet's duty was to
recapture those impressions, to isolate them and brood over them, till
gradually as a result of his contemplation emotion stirred again--an
emotion akin to the authentic thrill that had excited him when the
impression was first born in experience. Then poetry is made; this
emotion "recollected" as Wordsworth said (we may add, recreated) "in
tranquillity" passes into enduring verse. He treasured numberless
experiences of this kind in his own life. Some of them are set forth in
the _Prelude_, that for instance on which the poem _The Thorn_ in the
_Lyrical Ballads_ is based; they were one or other of them the occasion
of most of his poems; the best of them produced his finest work--such a
poem for instance as _Resolution and Independence_ or _Gipsies_, where
some chance sight met with in one of the poet's walks is brooded over
till it becomes charged with a tremendous significance for him and for
all the world. If we ask how he differentiated his experiences, which
had most value for him, we shall find something deficient. That is to
say, things which were unique and precious to him do not always appear
so to his readers. He counted as gold much that we regard as dross. But
though we may differ from his judgments, the test which he applied to
his recollected impressions is clear. He attached most value to those
which brought with them the sense of an indwelling spirit, transfusing
and interpenetrating all nature, transfiguring with its radiance, rocks
and fields and trees and the men and women who lived close enough to
them to partake of their strength--the sense, as he calls it in his
_Lines above Tintern Abbey_ of something "more deeply interfused" by
which all nature is made one. Sometimes, as in the hymn to Duty, it is
conceived as law. Duty before whom the flowers laugh, is the daughter of
the voice of God, through whom the most ancient heavens are fresh and
strong. But in most of his poems its ends do not trouble; it is
omnipresent; it penetrates everything and transfigures everything; it is
God. It was Wordsworth's belief that the perception of this indwelling
spirit weakened as age grew. For a few precious and glorious years he
had the vision
"When meadow, grove, and stream,
The earth, and every common sight
To me did seem
Apparelled in celestial light,
The glory and the freshness of a dream."
Then as childhood, when "these intimations of immortality," this
perception of the infinite are most strong, passed further and further
away, the vision faded and he was left gazing in the light of common
day. He had his memories and that was all.
There is, of course, more in the matter than this, and Wordsworth's
beliefs were inextricably entangled with the conception which Coleridge
borrowed from German philosophy.
"We receive but what we give"
wrote Coleridge to his friend,
"And in our life alone doth Nature live."
And Wordsworth came to know that the light he had imagined to be
bestowed, was a light reflected from his own mind. It is easy to pass
from criticism to metaphysics where Coleridge leads, and wise not to
follow.
If Wordsworth represents that side of the Romantic Revival which is best
described as the return to Nature, Coleridge has justification for the
phrase "Renascence of Wonder." He revived the supernatural as a literary
force, emancipated it from the crude mechanism which had been applied to
it by dilettantes like Horace Walpole and Mrs. Radcliffe, and invested
it instead with that air of suggestion and indefiniteness which gives
the highest potency to it in its effect on the imagination. But
Coleridge is more noteworthy for what he suggested to others than for
what he did in himself. His poetry is, even more than Wordsworth's,
unequal; he is capable of large tracts of dreariness and flatness; he
seldom finished what he began. The _Ancient Mariner_, indeed, which was
the fruit of his close companionship with Wordsworth, is the only
completed thing of the highest quality in the whole of his work.
_Christabel_ is a splendid fragment; for years the first part lay
uncompleted and when the odd accident of an evening's intoxication led
him to commence the second, the inspiration had fled. For the second
part, by giving to the fairy atmosphere of the first a local habitation
and a name, robbed it of its most precious quality; what it gave in
exchange was something the public could get better from Scott. _Kubla
Khan_ went unfinished because the call of a friend broke the thread of
the reverie in which it was composed. In the end came opium and oceans
of talk at Highgate and fouled the springs of poetry. Coleridge never
fulfilled the promise of his early days with Wordsworth. "He never spoke
out." But it is on the lines laid down by his share in the pioneer work
rather than on the lines of Wordsworth's that the second generation of
Romantic poets--that of Shelley and Keats--developed.
The work of Wordsworth was conditioned by the French Revolution but it
hardly embodied the revolutionary spirit. What he conceived to be its
excesses revolted him, and though he sought and sang freedom, he found
it rather in the later revolt of the nationalities against the
Revolution as manifested in Napoleon himself. The spirit of the
revolution, as it was understood in France and in Europe, had to wait
for Shelley for its complete expression. Freedom is the breath of his
work--freedom not only from the tyranny of earthly powers, but from the
tyranny of religion, expressing itself in republicanism, in atheism, and
in complete emancipation from the current moral code both in conduct and
in writing. The reaction which had followed the overthrow of Napoleon at
Waterloo, sent a wave of absolutism and repression all over Europe,
Italy returned under the heel of Austria; the Bourbons were restored in
France; in England came the days of Castlereagh and Peterloo. The poetry
of Shelley is the expression of what the children of the revolution--men
and women who were brought up in and believed the revolutionary
gospel--thought about these things.
But it is more than that. Of no poet in English, nor perhaps in any
other tongue, could it be said with more surety, that the pursuit of the
spirit of beauty dominates all his work. For Shelley it interfused all
nature and to possess it was the goal of all endeavour. The visible
world and the world of thought mingle themselves inextricably in his
contemplation of it. For him there is no boundary-line between the two,
the one is as real and actual as the other. In his hands that old trick
of the poets, the simile, takes on a new and surprising form. He does
not enforce the creations of his imagination by the analogy of natural
appearances; his instinct is just the opposite--to describe and illumine
nature by a reference to the creatures of thought. Other poets, Keats
for instance, or Tennyson, or the older poets like Dante and Homer,
might compare ghosts flying from an enchanter like leaves flying before
the wind. They might describe a poet wrapped up in his dreams as being
like a bird singing invisible in the brightness of the sky. But Shelley
can write of the west wind as
"Before whose unseen presence the leaves, dead,
Are driven like ghosts from an enchanter fleeing,"
and he can describe a skylark in the heavens as
"Like a poet hidden
In the light of thought."
Of all English poets he is the most completely lyrical. Nothing that he
wrote but is wrought out of the anguish or joy of his own heart.
"Most wretched souls,"
he writes
"Are cradled into poetry by wrong
They learn in suffering what they teach in song."
Perhaps his work is too impalpable and moves in an air too rarefied. It
sometimes lacks strength. It fails to take grip enough of life. Had he
lived he might have given it these things; there are signs in his last
poems that he would have given it. But he could hardly have bettered the
sheer and triumphant lyricism of _The Skylark_, of some of his choruses,
and of the _Ode to Dejection_, and of the _Lines written on the Eugenoen
hills_.
If the Romantic sense of the one-ness of nature found its highest
exponent in Shelley, the Romantic sensibility to outward impressions
reached its climax in Keats. For him life is a series of sensations,
felt with almost febrile acuteness. Records of sight and touch and smell
crowd every line of his work; the scenery of a garden in Hampstead
becomes like a landscape in the tropics, so extraordinary vivid and
detailed is his apprehension and enjoyment of what it has to give him.
The luxuriance of his sensations is matched by the luxuriance of his
powers of expression. Adjectives heavily charged with messages for the
senses, crowd every line of his work, and in his earlier poems overlay
so heavily the thought they are meant to convey that all sense of
sequence and structure is apt to be smothered under their weight. Not
that consecutive thought claims a place in his conception of his poetry.
His ideal was passive contemplation rather than active mental exertion.
"O for a life of sensations rather than of thoughts," he exclaims in one
of his letters; and in another, "It is more noble to sit like Jove than
to fly like Mercury." His work has one message and one only, the
lastingness of beauty and its supreme truth. It is stated in _Endymion_
in lines that are worn bare with quotation. It is stated again, at the
height of his work in his greatest ode,
"Beauty is truth, truth beauty: that is all
We know on earth and all we need to know."
His work has its defects; he died at twenty-six so it would be a miracle
if it were not so. He lacks taste and measure; he offends by an
over-luxuriousness and sensuousness; he fails when he is concerned with
flesh and blood; he is apt, as Mr. Robert Bridges has said, "to class
women with roses and sweetmeats." But in his short life he attained with
surprising rapidity and completeness to poetic maturity, and
perhaps from no other poet could we find things to match his
greatest--_Hyperion, Isabella_, the _Eve of St. Agnes_ and
the _Odes_.
There remains a poet over whom opinion is more sharply divided than it
is about any other writer in English. In his day Lord Byron was the
idol, not only of his countrymen, but of Europe. Of all the poets of
the time he was, if we except Scott, whose vogue he eclipsed, the only
one whose work was universally known and popular. Everybody read him; he
was admired not only by the multitude and by his equals, but by at least
one who was his superior, the German poet Goethe, who did not hesitate
to say of him that he was the greatest talent of the century Though this
exalted opinion still persists on the Continent, hardly anyone could be
found in England to subscribe to it now. Without insularity, we may
claim to be better judges of authors in our own tongue than foreign
critics, however distinguished and comprehending. How then shall be
explained Lord Byron's instant popularity and the position he won? What
were the qualities which gave him the power he enjoyed?
In the first place he appealed by virtue of his subject-matter--the
desultory wanderings of _Childe Harold_ traversed ground every mile of
which was memorable to men who had watched the struggle which had been
going on in Europe with scarcely a pause for twenty years. Descriptive
journalism was then and for nearly half a century afterwards unknown,
and the poem by its descriptiveness, by its appeal to the curiosity of
its readers, made the same kind of success that vividly written special
correspondence would to-day, the charm of metre super-added. Lord Byron
gave his readers something more, too, than mere description. He added to
it the charm of a personality, and when that personality was enforced by
a title, when it proclaimed its sorrows as the age's sorrows, endowed
itself with an air of symbolism and set itself up as a kind of scapegoat
for the nation's sins, its triumph was complete. Most men have from time
to time to resist the temptation to pose to themselves; many do not even
resist it. For all those who chose to believe themselves blighted by
pessimism, and for all the others who would have loved to believe it,
Byron and his poetry came as an echo of themselves. Shallow called to
shallow. Men found in him, as their sons found more reputably in
Tennyson, a picture of what they conceived to be the state of their own
minds.
But he was not altogether a man of pretence. He really and passionately
loved freedom; no one can question his sincerity in that. He could be a
fine and scathing satirist; and though he was careless, he had great
poetic gifts.
(3)
The age of the Romantic Revival was one of poetry rather than of prose;
it was in poetry that the best minds of the time found their means of
expression. But it produced prose of rare quality too, and there is
delightful reading in the works of its essayists and occasional writers.
In its form the periodical essay had changed little since it was first
made popular by Addison and Steele. It remained, primarily, a vehicle
for the expression of a personality, and it continued to seek the
interests of its readers by creating or suggesting an individuality
strong enough to carry off any desultory adventure by the mere force of
its own attractiveness. Yet there is all the difference in the world
between Hazlitt and Addison, or Lamb and Steele. The _Tatler_ and the
_Spectator_ leave you with a sense of artifice; Hazlitt and Lamb leave
you with a grip of a real personality--in the one case very vigorous and
combative, in the other set about with a rare plaintiveness and
gentleness, but in both absolutely sincere. Addison is gay and witty and
delightful but he only plays at being human; Lamb's essays--the
translation into print of a heap of idiosyncrasies and oddities, and
likes and dislikes, and strange humours--come straight and lovably from
a human soul.
The prose writers of the romantic movement brought back two things into
writing which had been out of it since the seventeenth century. They
brought back egotism and they brought back enthusiasm. They had the
confidence that their own tastes and experiences were enough to interest
their readers; they mastered the gift of putting themselves on paper.
But there is one wide difference between them and their predecessors.
Robert Burton was an egotist but he was an unconscious one; the same is,
perhaps, true though much less certainly of Sir Thomas Browne. In Lamb
and Hazlitt and De Quincey egotism was deliberate, consciously assumed,
the result of a compelling and shaping art. If one reads Lamb's earlier
essays and prose pieces one can see the process at work--watch him
consciously imitating Fuller, or Burton, or Browne, mirroring their
idiosyncrasies, making their quaintnesses and graces his own. By the
time he came to write the _Essays of Elia_, he had mastered the personal
style so completely that his essays seem simply the overflow of talk.
They are so desultory; they move from one subject to another so
waywardly--such an essay as a _Chapter on Ears_, for instance, passing
with the easy inconsequence of conversation from anatomy through organ
music to beer--when they quote, as they do constantly, it is
incorrectly, as in the random reminiscences of talk. Here one would say
is the cream risen to the surface of a full mind and skimmed at one
taking. How far all this is from the truth we know--know, too, how for
months he polished and rewrote these magazine articles, rubbing away
roughnesses and corners, taking off the traces of logical sequences and
argument, till in the finished work of art he mimicked inconsequence so
perfectly that his friends might have been deceived. And the personality
he put on paper was partly an artistic creation, too. In life Lamb was a
nervous, easily excitable and emotional man; his years were worn with
the memory of a great tragedy and the constantly impending fear of a
repetition of it. One must assume him in his way to have been a good man
of business--he was a clerk in the India House, then a throbbing centre
of trade, and the largest commercial concern in England, and when he
retired his employers gave him a very handsome pension. In the early
portrait by Hazlitt there is a dark and gleaming look of fire and
decision. But you would never guess it from his books. There he is the
gentle recluse, dreaming over old books, old furniture, old prints, old
plays and play-bills; living always in the past, loving in the town
secluded byways like the Temple, or the libraries of Oxford Colleges,
and in the country quiet and shaded lanes, none of the age's enthusiasm
for mountains in his soul. When he turned critic it was not to discern
and praise the power and beauty in the works of his contemporaries but
to rediscover and interpret the Elizabethan and Jacobean romantic plays.
This quality of egotism Lamb shares with other writers of the time, with
De Quincey, for instance, who left buried in work which is extensive and
unequal, much that lives by virtue of the singular elaborateness and
loftiness of the style which he could on occasion command. For the
revival of enthusiasm one must turn to Hazlitt, who brought his
passionate and combative disposition to the service of criticism, and
produced a series of studies remarkable for their earnestness and their
vigour, and for the essential justness which they display despite the
prejudice on which each of them was confessedly based.