least she showed herself unworldly. She cannot have been dazzled by his
fame, for at that time he was to all appearance merely a minor poet who
had been laughed at. He was of humble birth, and he had not even the
prospect of being able to earn a living. Add to this that he was an all
but chronic invalid. Her love must, in the circumstances, have been a
very real and unselfish affair, and there is no evidence to suggest
that, for all her taste for dancing and for going into town, it was
fickle. Keats asked too much of her. He wished to enslave her as she
had enslaved him. He knew in his saner moments that he was unfair to
her. “At times,” he wrote, “I feel bitterly sorry that ever I made you
unhappy.” There was unhappiness on both sides--the unhappiness of an
engagement that could come to nothing. “There are,” as Keats mournfully
wrote, “impossibilities in the world.” It was Fate, not Fanny, that
wrecked the life of Keats. “My dear Brown,” he wrote near the end, “I
should have had her when I was in health, and I should have remained
well.” That is not the comment a man makes on a woman whom he regards
as his destroying angel. Nor is it a destroying angel that Keats
pictures when he writes to Fanny: “You are always new. The last of your
kisses was ever the sweetest; the last smile the brightest; the last
movement the gracefullest. When you passed my window home yesterday, I
was filled with as much admiration as if I had then seen you for the
first time.” Love such as this is not the enemy of poetry. Without it
there would be no poetry but that of patriots, saints and hermits. A
biography of Keats should not be a biography without a heroine. That
would be _Hamlet_ without Ophelia. Sir Sidney Colvin’s is a masterly
life which is likely to take a permanent place in English biographical
literature. But it has one flaw. Sir Sidney did not see how vital a
clue Keats left us to the interpretation of his life and genius in that
last despairing appeal: “My dear Brown, for my sake be her advocate for
ever.”
VI
CHARLES LAMB
Charles Lamb was a small, flat-footed man whose eyes were of different
colours and who stammered. He nevertheless leaves on many of his
readers the impression of personal beauty. De Quincey has told us
that in the repose of sleep Lamb’s face “assumed an expression almost
seraphic, from its intellectual beauty of outline, its childlike
simplicity, and its benignity.” He added that the eyes “disturbed
the unity of effect in Lamb’s waking face,” and gave a feeling of
restlessness, “shifting, like Northern lights, through every mode of
combination with fantastic playfulness.” This description, I think,
suggests something of the quality of Lamb’s charm. There are in his
best work depths of repose under a restless and prankish surface. He is
at once the most restful and the most playful of essayists. Carlyle,
whose soul could not find rest in such quietistic virtue as Lamb’s,
noticed only the playfulness and was disgusted by it. “Charles Lamb,”
he declared, “I do verily believe to be in some considerable degree
insane. A more pitiful, rickety, gasping, staggering, stammering
tomfool I do not know. He is witty by denying truisms and abjuring good
manners.” He wrote this in his Diary in 1831 after paying a visit to
Lamb at Enfield. “Poor Lamb!” he concluded. “Poor England, when such
a despicable abortion is named genius! He said: ‘There are just two
things I regret in England’s history: first, that Guy Fawkes’ plot did
not take effect (there would have been so glorious an _explosion_);
second, that the Royalists did not hang Milton (then we might have
laughed at them), etc., etc.’ _Armer Teufel!_”
Carlyle would have been astonished if he had foreseen that it would be
he and not Lamb who would be the “poor devil” in the eyes of posterity.
Lamb is a tragically lovable figure, but Carlyle is a tragically
pitiable figure. Lamb, indeed, is in danger of being pedestalled among
the saints of literature. He had most of the virtues that a man can
have without his virtue becoming a reproach to his fellows. He had most
of the vices that a man can have without ceasing to be virtuous. He
had enthusiasm that made him at home among the poets, and prejudices
that made him at home among common men. His prejudices, however, were
for the most part humorous, as when, speaking of L. E. L., he said:
“If she belonged to me I would lock her up and feed her on bread and
water till she left off writing poetry. A female poet, a female author
of any kind, ranks below an actress, I think.” He also denounced
clever women as “impudent, forward, unfeminine, and unhealthy in their
minds.” At the same time, the woman he loved most on earth and devoted
his life to was the “female author” with whom he collaborated in the
_Tales from Shakespeare_. But probably there did exist somewhere in
his nature the seeds of most of those prejudices dear to the common
Englishman--prejudices against Scotsmen, Jews, and clever women,
against such writers as Voltaire and Shelley, and in favour of eating,
drinking and tobacco. He held some of his prejudices comically, and
some in sober earnest, but at least he had enough of them mixed up in
his composition to keep him in touch with ordinary people. That is
one of the first necessities of a writer--especially of a dramatist,
novelist or essayist, whose subject-matter is human nature. A great
writer may be indifferent to the philosophy of the hour or even to
some extent to the politics of the hour, but he cannot safely be
indifferent to such matters as his neighbour’s love of boiled ham or
his fondness for a game of cards. Lamb sympathised with all the human
appetites that will bear talking about. Many noble authors are hosts
who talk gloriously, but never invite us to dinner or even ring for the
decanter. Lamb remembers that a party should be a party.
It is not enough, however, that a writer should be friends with our
appetites. Lamb would never have become the most beloved of English
essayists if he had told us only such things as that Coleridge “holds
that a man cannot have a pure mind who refuses apple dumplings,” or
that he himself, though having lost his taste for “the whole vegetable
tribe,” sticks, nevertheless, to asparagus, “which still seems to
inspire gentle thoughts.” He was human elsewhere than at the table or
beside a bottle. His kindness was higher than gastric. His indulgences
seem but a modest disguise for his virtues. His life was a life of
industrious self-sacrifice. “I am wedded, Coleridge,” he cried, after
the murder of his mother, “to the fortunes of my sister and my poor
old father”; and his life with his sister affords one of the supreme
examples of fidelity in literary biography. Lamb is eminently the
essayist of the affections. The best of his essays are made up of
affectionate memories. He seems to steep his very words in some dye of
memory and affection that no other writer has discovered. He is one
of those rare sentimentalists who speak out of the heart. He has but
to write, “Do you remember?” as in _Old China_, and our breasts feel
a pang like a home-sick child thinking of the happiness of a distant
fireside and a smiling mother that it will see no more. Lamb’s work
is full of this sense of separation. He is the painter of “the old
familiar faces.” He conjures up a Utopia of the past, in which aunts
were kind and Coleridge, the “inspired charity-boy,” was his friend,
and every neighbour was a figure as queer as a witch in a fairy-tale.
“All, all are gone”--that is his theme.
He is the poet of town-bred boyhood. He is a true lover of antiquity,
but antiquity means to him, not merely such things as Oxford and a
library of old books: it means a small boy sitting in the gallery of
the theatre, and the clerks (mostly bachelors) in the shut-up South-Sea
House, and the dead pedagogue with uplifted rod in Christ’s Hospital,
of whom he wrote: “Poor J. B.! May all his faults be forgiven; and may
he be wafted to bliss by little cherub boys, all head and wings, with
no _bottoms_ to reproach his sublunary infirmities.” His essays are a
jesting elegy on all that venerable and ruined world. He is at once
Hamlet and Yorick in his melancholy and his mirth. He has obeyed the
injunction: “Let us all praise famous men,” but he has interpreted it
in terms of the men who were famous in his own small circle when he was
a boy and a poor clerk.
Lamb not only made all that world of school and holiday and office a
part of antiquity; he also made himself a part of antiquity. He is
himself his completest character--the only character, indeed, whom he
did not paint in miniature. We know him, as a result of his letters,
his essays, and the anecdotes of his friends, more intimately even than
we know Dr. Johnson. He has confessed everything except his goodness,
and, indeed, did his reputation some harm with his contemporaries
by being so public with his shortcomings. He was the enemy of dull
priggishness, and would even set up as a buffoon in contrast. He earned
the reputation of a drunkard, not entirely deserved, partly by his
_Confessions of a Drunkard_, but partly by his habit of bursting into
singing “Diddle, diddle, dumpling,” under the influence of liquor,
whatever the company. His life, however, was a long, half-comic battle
against those three friendly enemies of man--liquor, snuff and tobacco.
His path was strewn with good resolutions. “This very night,” he wrote
on one occasion, “I am going to _leave off tobacco_! Surely there
must be some other world in which this unconquerable purpose shall be
realised.” The perfect anecdote of Lamb’s vices is surely that which
Hone tells of his abandonment of snuff:
One summer’s evening I was walking on Hampstead Heath with Charles
Lamb, and we talked ourselves into a philosophic contempt of our
slavery to the habit of snuff-taking, and with the firm resolution
of never again taking a single pinch, we threw our snuff-boxes
away from the hill on which we stood, far among the furze and
the brambles below, and went home in triumph. I began to be very
miserable, and was wretched all night. In the morning I was walking
on the same hill. I saw Charles Lamb below, searching among the
bushes. He looked up laughing, and saying, “What, you are come to
look for your snuff-box too!” “Oh, no,” said I, taking a pinch out
of a paper in my waistcoat pocket, “I went for a halfpennyworth to
the first shop that was open.”
Lamb’s life is an epic of such things as this, and Mr. Lucas is its
rhapsodist. He has written an anthological biography that will have a
permanent place on the shelves beside the works of Lamb himself.
VII
BYRON ONCE MORE
It will always be easy to take an interest in Byron because he was
not only a scamp but a hero--or, alternatively, because he was not
only a hero but a scamp. As a hero he can be taken seriously: as a
villain he can be taken comically. His letters, like _Don Juan_, reveal
him at their best chiefly on the comic side. He was not only a wit,
but an audacious wit, and there is a kind of audacity that amuses
us, whether in a guttersnipe or in a peer. Byron was a guttersnipe
in scarlet and ermine. He enjoyed all the more playing the part of
a guttersnipe, because he could play it in a peer’s robe. He was
obviously the sort of person who, if brought up in the gutter, would
be sent to a reformatory. Imagine a reformatory boy, unreformed and
possessed of genius, loosed on respectable society, and you will have
a picture of Byron. Not that Byron did not share the point of view of
respectable society on the most important matters. He had no sympathy
with the heresies of Shelley, whom he thought “crazy against religion
and morality.” He did not want a new morality, as Shelley did: he was
quite content with the old morality and the old immorality. He never
could have run away with a woman on principle. Love with him was not
a principle, but an appetite. He was a glutton who did not know where
to stop. He himself never pretended that it was the desire of the moth
for the star that was the cause of his troubles. He was an orthodox
materialist, as we may gather from one of his unusually frank letters
to Lady Melbourne, a lady in her sixties, to whom he ran with the tale
of every fresh amour, like a newsboy with the stop-press edition of
an evening paper. We find him at the age of twenty-five or so writing
to explain that he was sure to die fairly young. “I began very early
and very violently,” he wrote, “and alternate extremes of excess
and abstinence have utterly destroyed--oh, unsentimental word!--my
stomach, and, as Lady Oxford used seriously to say, a broken heart
means nothing but a bad digestion.” Byron, no doubt, enjoyed posturing,
whether he exposed a broken heart or a weak stomach. But, for a poet,
he undoubtedly lived and thought on the material plane out of all
proportion to his life and thought on the spiritual plane. He felt
much the same dread of a respectable woman as did the wicked young
æsthete of the ’nineties. When he was thinking of getting married, and
had his eye on Miss Milbanke, he wrote doubtingly to Lady Melbourne: “I
admired your niece, but she is engaged to Eden; besides, she deserves a
better heart than mine. What shall I do--shall I advertise?” About the
same time he was writing concerning women in general:
I am sadly out of practice lately; except a few sighs to a
gentlewoman at supper, who was too much occupied with ye _fourth_
wing of her _second_ chicken to mind anything that was not material.
If the wing of a chicken was not at least as immaterial as Byron’s
sighs, there must have been something amiss with the cooking. Byron’s
sighs to women were material enough, one fancies, to have been visible,
like a drayman’s breath on a frosty day.
The letters to Lady Melbourne reveal him in an extraordinary light,
even for an amorist. While attempting to arrange a match with Lady
Melbourne’s niece he fills the greater part of his letter to her with
the backwash of his intrigue with her daughter-in-law, Lady Caroline
Lamb, and with stories of intrigues with various other ladies. Byron,
like many amorists, seems never to have realised that adventures are
to the adventurous in love as in other matters, but to have looked on
himself as a man pestered by women when he was only a man pestered by
ordinary greed and extraordinary opportunity. If he could not shift
the blame for his sins on to the woman, he would even shift it on to
her husband. “He literally provoked and goaded me into it,” he wrote
to Lady Melbourne, about the husband of Lady Frances Webster, at a
time when he seemed to be falling almost seriously in love with Lady
Frances. No one who cares for scandalous literature should miss these
letters in which Byron writes off to Lady Melbourne rapturous accounts
of every step in the wooing of the wife of his host. “I am glad they
amaze you,” he wrote to Lady Melbourne concerning the Websters;
“anything that confirms and extends one’s observations on life and
character delights me.” It does not appear to have occurred to him
that, amazing though the Websters were, they were but as copper to gold
compared to his own amazing self. Lady Frances, at least, would have
been considerably amazed if she had known that, every time she sighed,
the fat young poet who adored her heliographed the fact from Yorkshire
to London. In one of his letters he tells of a game of billiards
with his hostess, in the course of which he slipped a love-letter to
her. Just at that moment, “who should enter the room but the person
who ought at the moment to have been in the Red Sea, if Satan had any
civility”--in other words, Webster, his host and her husband. Even as
he is writing the description of the incident to Lady Melbourne, Byron
makes a parenthesis to tell her that Webster has again come into the
room (“I am this moment interrupted by the _Marito_, and write this
before him. He has brought me a political pamphlet in MS. to decipher
and applaud; I shall content myself with the last; oh, he is gone
again”). Ultimately, however, Byron spared Lady Frances--at least,
that is how he put it. He protested to Lady Melbourne that he loved
the lady and would have sacrificed everything for her, and that Lady
Melbourne wronged him to think otherwise. “I hate sentiment,” he told
her, “and, in consequence, my epistolary levity makes you believe me
as hollow and heartless as my letters are light.” The truth is, Byron
_was_, in many of his relations, heartless. He kissed and told, and he
enjoyed telling, at least, as much as he enjoyed kissing. He tells Lady
Melbourne, for instance, about the “exquisite oddity” of Lady Frances’s
letters--“the simplicity of her cunning and her exquisite reasons”:
She vindicates her treachery to [Webster] thus: after condemning
deceit in general, and hers in particular, she says: “But then
remember it is to deceive _un marito_, and to prevent all the
unpleasant consequences, etc., etc.”
It is clear that Lady Frances, though pure, shocked Byron, just as
Byron, though impure, shocks the average reader. She even besought him
to go on writing to her husband:
Again, she desires me to write to _him kindly_, for she believes he
cares for nobody but _me_!
Byron could never understand unconventional behaviour. “Is not all this
a comedy?” he asks Lady Melbourne.
Byron, as we read his letters and poems together, seems to lead the
double life of an actor. There is the Byron who stands in the middle
of the stage in the fierce light that beats upon a poet, and who
declaims--how gloriously!--:
The mountains look on Marathon--
And Marathon looks on the sea;
And musing there an hour alone,
I dreamed that Greece might still be free;
For standing on the Persians’ grave,
I could not deem myself a slave.
And there is Byron behind the scenes--the Byron who might have been
invented by Mr. Shaw as an example of the moral irresponsibility of
the artistic temperament. It may be doubted whether any artist of the
first rank could have written such a letter as Byron wrote to Hobhouse
in 1818, announcing that his illegitimate daughter, Allegra, had been
brought out to Italy from England by Shelley. His reference to the
child runs:
Shelley has got to Milan with the bastard, and its mother; but
won’t send the shild, unless I will go and see the mother. I have
sent a messenger for the shild but I can’t leave my quarters, and
have “sworn an oath.” Between attorneys, clerks, and wives, and
children, and friends, my life is made a burthen.
Shelley, for his part, when he is writing to Byron to ask what he is
to do with the child (which has been left on his hands month after
month), never mentions it but with a delight at least equal to his
anxiety to get rid of it. “I think,” he tells Byron, “she is the most
lovely and engaging child I ever beheld.” Shelley’s letters to Byron
are the letters of a good man, but they are not good letters. They are
the formal utterances of an angel. Byron’s letters, on the other hand,
are good letters, though they are not the letters of a good man. They
are the informal utterances of a man possessed by a devil. But whether
he was as black as he painted himself it is impossible to be sure.
When little Allegra died at the age of five, he prepared an inscription
for her tomb ending with the verse: “I shall go to her, but she shall
not return to me.” If he had been all heartless, he could never have
written his greatest lyrics. His letters, for the most part, take us
into the comic recesses of his mind: perhaps this comic Byron is the
immortal Byron. But in the letters, as in the legend of his death and
in his poems, there are hints of that greater Byron whom Shelley tried
to summon into being--a Byron who would have been Byron with a touch
of Shelley--a nobler being a little more remote from the splendour of
Hell, a candidate for Paradise.
VIII
SHELLEY
Matthew Arnold has had a bad time of it during the Shelley centenary
celebrations. He has been denounced in nearly every paper in England,
as though, in his attitude to Shelley, he had shown himself to be a
malicious old nincompoop. As a matter of fact, Matthew Arnold talked a
great deal of common sense about Shelley, and, though he underestimated
his genius, how many of the overestimators of Shelley have even praised
him so nobly as he is praised in that unforgettable image--“a beautiful
and ineffectual angel, beating in the void his luminous wings in vain”?
Yet these are the words with which Matthew Arnold’s critics quarrel
most angrily. It is not enough for them that he called Shelley a
beautiful angel. It is a compliment that few poets, few saints even,
have deserved. The partisans demand, however, it seems, that he shall
also be proclaimed an effectual angel. In one sense, of course, no
great poet is ineffectual. We might as well call a star ineffectual.
In a more limited sense, however, a great poet who is also a theorist
may be ineffectual, and Shelley, in whom the poet and the theorist are
all but inseparable, was undoubtedly ineffectual in this meaning of the
word.
He sang a philosophy of love, and one effect of his philosophy was the
suicide of Harriet Westbrook. He was, in this instance, ineffectual
in not being able to translate his theory into experience in such
a way that what was beautiful in theory would also be beautiful
in experience. Where a theory was concerned, he did not recognise
facts; he recognised only the theory. Thus, his theory that love is
“the sole law which should govern the moral world” led him in _Laon
and Cythna_ (later transformed into _The Revolt of Islam_) to make
the lovers brother and sister. This circumstance was, he declared,
“intended to startle the reader from the trance of ordinary life.” It
was introduced “merely to accustom men to that charity and toleration
which the exhibition of a practice widely differing from their own has
a tendency to promote.” Who but an ineffectual angel would have thought
of dragging idealised incest into a work of art solely with a view to
the improvement of his readers’ morals? He did not wish his readers to
practise incest: he merely wished to make them practise charity.
Shelley, indeed, was a man always hastening towards an ideal world
which at the touch of experience turned into a mirage. His political,
like his ethical, theories had something mirage-like about them. He
was a prophet who was so absorbed in the vision of the Promised Land
that he had little thought to spare for the human nature that he was
trying to incite to make the journey. His own imagination travelled
fast as a ray of light, but he could not take human beings with him
on so swift a journey. Hence, if he has been effectual, he has been
so as an inspiration to the few. He has been ineffectual as regards
achieving the earthly paradise he foretold in _The Mask of Anarchy_ and
_Prometheus Unbound_.
It ought, then, to be possible to appreciate Shelley without abusing
Matthew Arnold. Every genius is limited, and we shall not admire the
genius the less but the more if we recognise its limitations so clearly
that we come to take them for granted. Thus, if we attempt to define
Shelley’s genius as a poet, we have to start by recognising that there
is a formless quality in most of his work when it is compared to
the work of Keats or Wordsworth. His poems do not seem to be quite
vertebrate--to have a beginning, a middle, and an end. Their path is
as indeterminate as the path of the lark fluttering in the air. With
Keats we stand still to survey the earth. With Wordsworth we walk. But
Shelley, like his skylark, is a “scorner of the ground,” and our feet
do not always touch the earth when we are in his company. Even when he
journeys by land or water, he rushes us along as though the air were
the only element, and we are dizzied by the speed with which we are
carried from landscape to landscape. In _Alastor_, scene succeeds scene
faster than the eye can seize it.
Shelley, indeed, is the poet of metamorphosis. He loves the miraculous
change from shape to shape almost more than he loves any settled shape.
This aspect of his genius reveals itself most richly in “The Cloud.”
Here is the very music of the changing shape. “I change, but I cannot
die,” is the cloud’s boast:
For after the rain, when with never a stain,
The pavilion of heaven is bare,
And the winds and sunbeams with their convex gleams,
Build up the blue dome of air,
I silently laugh at my own cenotaph,
And out of the caverns of rain,
Like a child from the womb, like a ghost from the tomb,
I arise and unbuild it again.