CHAPTER VI.

Diffused Romanticism in the Literature of the Nineteenth Century.

Most of the poetry of the century that has just closed has been romantic

in the wider or looser acceptation of the term. Emotional stress,

sensitiveness to the picturesque, love of natural scenery, interest in

distant times and places, curiosity of the wonderful and mysterious,

subjectivity, lyricism, intrusion of the ego, impatience of the limits of

the _genres_, eager experiment with new forms of art--these and the like

marks of the romantic spirit are as common in the verse literature of the

nineteenth century as they are rare in that of the eighteenth. The same

is true of imaginative prose, particularly during the first half of the

century, the late Georgian and early Victorian period. In contrast with

Addison, Swift, and Goldsmith, De Quincey, Carlyle, and Ruskin are

romanticists. In contrast with Hume, Macaulay is romantic, concrete,

pictorial. The critical work of Hazlitt and Lamb was in line with

Coleridge's. They praised the pre-Augustan writers, the Elizabethan

dramatists, the seventeenth-century humorists and moralists, the Sidneian

amourists and fanciful sonneteers, at the expense of their classical

successors.

But in the narrower sense of the word--the sense which controls in these

inquiries--the great romantic generation ended virtually with the death

of Scott in 1832. Coleridge followed in 1834, Wordsworth in 1850. Both

had long since ceased to contribute anything of value to imaginative

literature. Byron, Shelley, and Keats had died some years before

Coleridge; Leigh Hunt survived until 1859. The mediaevalism of

Coleridge, Scott, and Keats lived on in dispersed fashion till it

condensed itself a second time, and with redoubled intensity, in the work

of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, which belongs to the last half of the

century. The direct line of descent was from Keats to Rossetti; and the

Pre-Raphaelites bear very much such a relation to the elder group, as the

romantic school proper in Germany bears to Bürger and Herder, and to

Goethe and Schiller in their younger days. That is to say, their

mediaevalism was more concentrated, more exclusive, and more final.

We have come to a point in the chronology of our subject where the

material is so abundant that we must narrow the field of study to

creative work, and to work which is romantic in the strictest meaning.

Henceforth we may leave out of account all works of mere erudition as

such; all those helps which the scholarship of the century has furnished

to a knowledge of the Middle Ages; histories, collections, translations,

reprints of old texts, critical editions. Middle English lexicons and

grammars, studies of special subjects, such as popular myths or miracle

plays or the Arthurian legends, and the like. Numerous and valuable as

these publications have been, they concern us only indirectly. They have

swelled the material available for the student; they have not necessarily

stimulated the imagination of the poet; which sometimes--as in the case

of Chatterton and of Keats--goes off at a touch and carries but a light

charge of learning. In literary history it is the beginnings that count.

Child's great ballad collection is, beyond comparison, more important

from the scholar's point of view than Percy's "Reliques." But in the

history of romanticism it is of less importance, because it came a

century later. Mallet's "Histoire de Dannemarc" has been long since

superseded, and the means now accessible in English for a study of Norse

mythology are infinitely greater than when Gray read and Percy translated

the "Northern Antiquities." But it is not the history of the revival of

the _knowledge_ of mediaeval life that we are following here; it is

rather the history of that part of our modern creative literature which

has been kindled by contact--perhaps a very slight and casual

contact--with the transmitted _image_ of mediaeval life.

Nor need we concern ourselves further with literary criticism or the

history of opinion. This was worth considering in the infancy of the

movement, when Warton began to question the supremacy of Pope; when Hurd

asserted the fitness for the poet's uses of the Gothic fictions and the

institution of chivalry; and when Percy ventured to hope that cultivated

readers would find something deserving attention in old English

minstrelsy. It was still worth considering a half-century later, when

Coleridge explained away the dramatic unities, and Byron once more took

up the lost cause of Pope. But by 1832 the literary revolution was

complete. Romance was in no further need of vindication, when all

Scott's library of prose and verse stood back of her, and

"High-piled books in charactery

Held, like rich garners, the full-ripened grain."

As to Scott's best invention, the historical romance, I shall not pursue

its fortunes to the end. The formula once constituted, its application

was easy, whether the period chosen was the Middle Ages or any old period

B.C. or A.D. Here and there an individual stands forth from the class,

either for its excellent conformity with the Waverley type or for its

originality in deviation. Of the former kind is Charles Reade's "The

Cloister and the Hearth" (1861); and of the latter Mr. Maurice Hewlett's

"The Forest Lovers" (1898). The title page of Reade's novel describes

the book as "a matter-of-fact romance." It is as well documented as any

of Scott's, and reposes especially upon the "Colloquies" of Erasmus, the

betrothal of whose parents, with their subsequent separation by the

monastic vow of celibacy, is the subject of the story. This is somewhat

romanticised, but keeps a firm grip upon historical realities. The

period of the action is the fifteenth century, yet the work is as far as

possible from being a chivalry tale, like the diaphanous fictions of

Fouqué. "In that rude age," writes the novelist, "body prevailing over

mind, all sentiments took material forms. Man repented with scourges,

prayed by bead, bribed the saints with wax tapers, put fish into the body

to sanctify the soul, sojourned in cold water for empire over the

emotions, and thanked God for returning health in 1 cwt, 2 stone, 7 lbs.,

3 oz., 1 dwt. of bread and cheese." There is no lack in "The Cloister

and the Hearth" of stirring incident and bold adventure; encounters with

bears and with bandits, sieges, witch trials, gallows hung with thieves,

archery with long bow and arbalest--everywhere fighting enough, as in

Scott; and, also as in Scott, behind the private drama of true love,

intrigue, persecution, the broad picture of society. It is no idealised

version of the Middle Ages. The ugly, sordid side of mediaeval life is

turned outwards; its dirt, discomfort, ignorance, absurdity, brutality,

unreason and insecurity are rendered with crass realism. The burgher is

more in evidence than the chevalier. Less after the manner of the

Waverley novels, and more after that of "Hypatia," "Romola," and "Fathers

and Sons," it depicts the intellectual unrest of the time, the

conflicting ideals of the old and new generations. The printing-press is

being set up, and the hero finds his art of calligraphy, learned in the

scriptorium, no longer in request. The Pope and many of the higher

clergy are infected with the religious scepticism and humanitarian

enthusiasm of the Renaissance. The child Erasmus is the new birth of

reason, destined to make war on monkery and superstition and thereby

avenge his parents' wrongs. Of quite another fashion of mediaevalism is

Mr. Hewlett's story--sheer romance. The wonderful wood of Morgraunt,

with its charcoal burners and wayside shrines, black meres frowned over

by skeleton castles, and gentle hinds milked by the heroine to get food

for her wounded lover, is of no time or country, but almost as unreal as

Spenser's fairy forest. Through its wild ways Isoult la Desirous and

Prosper le Gai go adventuring like Una and her Red Cross knight, or Enid

and Geraint. Or, again, Isoult in her page's dress, and forsaken by her

wedded lord, is like Viola or Imogen or Rosalind, or Constance in

"Marmion," or any lady of old romance. Or sometimes again she is like a

wood spirit, or an elemental creature such as was Undine. The invented

place names, High March, Wanmeeting, Market Basing, etc., with their

transparent air of actuality, sound an echo from William Morris' prose

romances, like "The House of the Wolfings" and "The Sundering Flood." As

in the last named, and in Thomas Hardy's "Return of the Native," the

reader's imagination is assisted by a map of the Morgraunt forest and the

river Wan. Mr. Hewlett has evidently profited, too, by recent romances

of various schools: by "Prince Otto," _e.g._, and "The Prisoner of

Zenda," and possibly by others. His Middle Ages are not the Middle Ages

of history, but of poetic convention; a world where anything may happen

and where the facts of any precise social state are attenuated into

"atmosphere" for the use of the imagination. "The Forest Lovers" is

nearer to "Christabel" or "La Belle Dame sans Merci" than to "Ivanhoe":

is, indeed, a prose poem, though not quite an allegory like "Sintram and

his Companions."

Among Scott's contemporaries, Byron and Shelley, profoundly romantic in

temper, were not retrospective in their habit of mind; and the Middle

Ages, in particular, had little to say to them. Scott stood for the

past; Byron--a man of his time, a modern man--for the present; Shelley--a

visionary, with a system of philosophical perfectionism--for the future.

Memory, Mnemosyne, mother of the muses, was the nurse of Scott's genius.

Byron lived intensely in the world which he affected to despise. Shelley

prophesied, with eyes fixed upon the coming age. We have found, in

Byron's contributions to the Pope controversy, one expression of his

instinctive sympathy with the classical and contempt for the Gothic.

Shelley, too, was a Hellenist; and to both, in their angry break with

authority and their worship of liberty, the naked freedom, the clear

light, the noble and harmonious forms of the antique were as attractive

as the twilight of the "ages of faith," with their mysticism, asceticism,

and grotesque superstitions, were repulsive. Remote as their own

feverish and exuberant poetry was from the unexcited manner of classical

work, the latter was the ideal towards which they more and more inclined.

The points at which these two poets touch our history, then, are few.

Byron, to be sure, cast "Childe Harold" into Spenserian verse, and gave

it a ballad title.[1] In the first canto there are a few archaisms;

words like _fere_, _shent_, and _losel_ occur, together with Gothic

properties, such as the "eremite's sad cell" and "Paynim shores" and

Newstead's "monastic dome." The ballad "Adieu, adieu my native shore,"

was suggested by "Lord Maxwell's Good-Night" in the "Border Minstrelsy,"

and introduces some romantic appurtenances: the harp, the falcon, and the

little foot-page. But this kind of falsetto, in the tradition of the

last-century Spenserians, evidently hampered the poet; so he shook

himself free from imitation after the opening stanzas, and spoke in his

natural voice.[2] "Lara" is a tale of feudal days, with a due proportion

of knights, dames, vassals, and pages; and an ancestral hall with gloomy

vaults and portrait galleries, where

"--the moonbeam shone

Through the dim lattice o'er the floor of stone,

And the high fretted roof and saints that there

O'er Gothic windows knelt in pictured prayer. . . .

The waving banner and the clapping door,

The rustling tapestry and the echoing floor;

The long dim shadows of surrounding trees,

The flapping bats, the night-song of the breeze,

Aught they behold or hear their thought appalls,

As evening saddens o'er the dark grey walls."

But these things are unimportant in Byron--mere commonplaces of

description inherited from Scott and Lewis and Mrs. Radcliffe. Neither

is it of importance that "Parisina" is a tale of the year 1405, and has

an echo in it of convent bells and the death chant of friars; nor that

the first scene of "Manfred" passes in a "Gothic gallery," and includes

an incantation of spirits upon the model of "Faust"; nor that "Marino

Faliero" and "The Two Foscari" are founded on incidents of Venetian

history which happened in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries

respectively; nor yet that Byron translated the Spanish ballad "Woe is me

Alhama" and a passage from Pulci's "Morgante Maggiore." [3] Similarly

Shelley's experimental versions of the "Prolog im Himmel," and

"Walpurgisnacht" in "Faust," and of scenes from Calderon's "Magico

Prodigioso" are felt to be without special significance in comparison

with the body of his writings. "Faust" impressed him, as it did Byron,

and he urged Coleridge to translate it, speaking of the current English

versions as wretched misrepresentations of the original. But in all of

Shelley's poetry the scenery, architecture, and imagery in general are

sometimes Italian, sometimes Asiatic, often wholly fantastic, but never

mediaeval. Their splendour is a classic splendour, and not what Milton

contemptuously calls "a Hunnish and Norwegian stateliness." His

favourite names are Greek: Cythna, Ianthe, and the like. The ruined

cathedral in "Queen Mab"--a poem only in its title romantic--is coupled

with the ruined dungeon, in whose courts the children play; both alike

"works of faith and slavery," symbols of the priestcraft and kingcraft

which Shelley hated, now made harmless by the reign of Reason and Love in

a regenerated universe. How different is the feeling which the empty

cathedral inspires in Lowell; once thronged with worshippers, now

pathetically lonely--a cliff, far inland, from which the sea of faith has

forever withdrawn! At the time when "Queen Mab" was written, Coleridge,

Southey, and Landor's "Gebir" were Shelley's favourite reading. "He was

a lover of the wonderful and wild in literature," says Mrs. Shelley, in

her notes on the poem; "but had not fostered these tastes at their

genuine sources--the romances and chivalry of the Middle Ages--but in the

perusal of such German works as were current in those days.[4] . . . Our

earlier English poetry was almost unknown to him."

"Queen Mab" begins with a close imitation of the opening lines of

Southey's "Thalaba the Destroyer." The third member of the Lake School

is a standing illustration of Mr. Colvin's contention that the

distinction between classic and romantic is less in subject than in

treatment. Southey regarded himself as, equally with Wordsworth and

Coleridge, an innovator and a rebel against poetic conventions. His big

Oriental epics, "Thalaba" and "The Curse of Kehama," are written in verse

purposely irregular, but so inferior in effect to the irregular verse of

Coleridge and Scott as to prove that irregularity, as such, is only

tolerable when controlled by the subtly varying lyric impulse--not when

it is adopted as a literary method. Southey's worth as a man, his

indefatigable industry, his scholarship, and his excellent work in prose

make him an imposing figure in our literature. But his poetical

reputation has faded more rapidly than that of his greater

contemporaries. He ranged widely in search of subjects and experimented

boldly in forms of verse; but his poems are seldom inspired; they are

manufactures rather than creations, and to-day Southey, the poet,

represents nothing in particular.

But, like Taylor of Norwich, Southey, by his studies in foreign

literature, added much to the romantic material constantly accumulating

in the English tongue. In his two visits to the Peninsula he made

acquaintance with Spanish and Portuguese; and afterwards by his

translations and otherwise, helped his countrymen to a knowledge of the

old legendary poetry of Spain, the country above all others of chivalry

and romance. Mention has already been made of his versions of "Amadis of

Gaul," "Palmerin of England," and the "Chronicle of the Cid." The last

named was not a translation from any single source, but was put together

from the "Poem of the Cid," which the translator considered to be

"unquestionably the oldest poem in the language" and probably by a writer

contemporary with the great Campeador himself; from the prose "Chronicle"

assigned to the thirteenth century; and from the ballads, which Southey

thought mainly worthless, _i.e._, from the historical point of view.

Southey's long blank verse poems on mediaeval subjects, partly

historical, partly legendary, "Joan of Arc" (1795), "Madoc" (1805), and

"Roderick, the Last of the Goths" (1814), like his friend Landor's

"Gebir," are examples of romantic themes with classical or, at least,

unromantic handling. The last of them was the same in subject, indeed,

with Landor's drama, "Count Julian." I have spoken of "Thalaba" and "The

Curse of Kehama" as epics; but Southey rejected "the degraded title of

epic" and scouted the rules of Aristotle. Nevertheless, the best

qualities of these blank verse narratives are of the classic-epic kind.

The story is not badly told; the measure is correct if not distinguished;

and the style is simple, clear, and in pure taste. But the spell of

romance, the witchery of Coleridge and Keats is absent; and so are the

glow and movement of Scott.

Southey got up his history and local colour conscientiously, and his

notes present a formidable array of authorities. While engaged upon

"Madoc," he went to Wales to verify the scenery and even came near to

leasing a cottage and taking up his residence there. "The manners of the

poem," he asserted, "will be found historically true." The hero of

"Madoc" was a legendary Welsh prince of the twelfth century who led a

colony to America. The _motif_ of the poem is therefore nearly the same

as in William Morris's "Earthly Paradise," and it is curious to compare

the two. In Southey's hands the blank verse, which in the last century

had been almost an ear-mark of the romanticising schools, is far more

classical than the heroic couplet which Morris writes. In the Welsh

portion of "Madoc" the historical background is carefully studied from

Giraldus Cambrensis, Evans' "Specimens," the "Triads of Bardism," the

"Cambrian Biography," and similar sources, and in the Aztec portion, from

old Spanish chronicles of the conquest of Mexico and the journals of

modern travellers in America. In "The Earthly Paradise" nothing is

historical except the encounter with Edward III.'s fleet in the channel.

Over all, the dreamlike vagueness and strangeness of romance. Yet the

imaginative impression is more distinct, not an impression of reality,

but as of a soft, bright miniature painting in an old manuscript.

In common with his literary associates, Southey was prompted by Percy's

"Reliques" to try his hand at the legendary ballad and at longer metrical

tales like "All for Love" and "The Pilgrim to Compostella." Most of

these pieces date from the last years of the century. One of them, "St.

Patrick's Purgatory," was inserted by Lewis in his "Tales of Wonder."

Another of the most popular, and a capital specimen of grotesque, "The

Old Woman of Berkeley," was upon a theme which was also undertaken by

Taylor of Norwich and Dr. Sayers of the same city, when Southey was on a

visit to the former in 1798. The story, told by Olaus Magnus as well as

by William of Malmesbury, was of a witch whose body was carried off by

the devil, though her coffin had been sprinkled with holy water and bound

with a triple chain. For material Southey drew upon Spanish chronicles,

French _fabliaux_, the "Acta Sanctorum," Matthew of Westminster, and many

other sources. His ballads do not compare well with those of Scott and

Coleridge. They abound in the supernatural--miracles of saints,

sorceries, and apparitions; but the matter-of-fact narrative,

common-place diction, and jog-trot verse are singularly out of keeping

with the subject matter. The most wildly romantic situations become

tamely unromantic under Southey's handling. Though in better taste than

Lewis' grisly compositions, yet, as in Lewis, the want of "high

seriousness" or any finer imagination in these legendary tales makes them

turn constantly towards the comic; so that Southey was scandalised to

learn that Mr. Payne Collier had taken his "Old Woman of Berkeley" for a

"mock ballad" or parody. He affected especially a stanza which he

credited to Lewis' invention:

"Behind a wide column, half breathless with fear

She crept to conceal herself there;

That instant the moon o'er a dark cloud shone clear,

And she saw in the moonlight two ruffians appear,

And between them a corpse did they bear." [5]

Southey employs no archaisms, no refrains, nor any of the stylistic marks

of ancient minstrelsy. His ballads have the metrical roughness and plain

speech of the old popular ballads, but none of their frequent, peculiar

beauties of thought and phrase,

Spain, no less than Germany and Italy, was laid under contribution by the

English romantics. Southey's work in this direction was followed by such

things as Lockhart's "Spanish Ballads" (1824), Irving's "Alhambra," and

Bryant's and Longfellow's translations from Spanish lyrical poetry. But

these exotics did not stimulate original creative activity in England in

equal degree with the German and Italian transplantings. They were

imported, not appropriated. Of all European countries Spain had remained

the most Catholic and mediaeval. Her eight centuries of struggle against

the Moors had given her a rich treasure of legendary song and story. She

had a body of popular ballad poetry larger than either England's or

Germany's.[6] But Spain had no modern literature to mediate between the

old and new; nothing at all corresponding with the schools of romance in

Germany, from Herder to Schlegel, which effected a revival of the

Teutonic Middle Age and impressed it upon contemporary England and

France. Neither could the Spanish Middle Age itself show any such

supreme master as Dante, whose direct influence on English poetry has

waxed with the century. There was a time when, for the greater part of a

century, England and Spain were in rather close contact, but it was

mainly a hostile contact, and its tangential points were the ill-starred

marriage of Philip and Mary, the Great Armada of 1588, and the abortive

"Spanish Marriage" negotiations of James I.'s reign. Readers of our

Elizabethan literature, however, cannot fail to remark a knowledge of,

and interest in, Spanish affairs now quite strange to English writers.

The dialogue of the old drama is full of Spanish phrases of convenience

like _bezo los manos_, _paucas palabras_, etc., which were evidently

quite as well understood by the audience as was later the colloquial

French--_savoir faire_, _coup de grâce_, etc.--which began to come in

with Dryden, and has been coming ever since. The comedy Spaniard, like

Don Armado in "Love's Labour's Lost," was a familiar figure on the

English boards. Middleton took the double plot of his "Spanish Gipsy"

from two novels of Cervantes; and his "Game of Chess," a political

allegorical play, aimed against Spanish intrigues, made a popular hit and

was stopped, after a then unexampled run, in consequence of the

remonstrances of Gondomar, the Spanish ambassador. Somewhat later the

Restoration stage borrowed situations from the Spanish love-intrigue

comedy, not so much directly as by way of Molière, Thomas Corneille, and

other French playwrights; and the duenna and the _gracioso_ became stock

figures in English performances. The direct influence of Calderon and

Lope de Vega upon our native theatre was infinitesimal. The Spanish

national drama, like the English, was self-developed and unaffected by

classical rules. Like the English, it was romantic in spirit, but was

more religious in subject and more lyrical in form. The land of romance

produced likewise the greatest of all satires upon romance. "Don

Quixote," of course, was early translated and imitated in England; and

the _picaro_ romances had an important influence upon the evolution of

English fiction in De Foe and Smollett; not only directly through books

like "The Spanish Rogue," but by way of Le Sage.[7] But upon the whole,

the relation between English and Spanish literature had been one of

distant respect rather than of intimacy. There was never any such inrush

of foreign domination from this quarter as from Italy in the sixteenth

century, or from France in the thirteenth, fourteenth, and latter half of

the seventeenth.

The unequalled wealth of Spanish literature in popular ballads is

partially explained by the facility with which such things were composed.

The Spanish ballad, or _romance_, was a stanza (_redondilla_, roundel) of

four eight-syllable lines with a prevailing trachaic movement--just the

metre, in short, of "Locksley Hall." Only the second and fourth lines

rimed, and the rime was merely assonant or vowel rime. Given the subject

and the lyrical impulse, and verses of this sort could be produced to

order and in infinite number by poets of the humblest capacity. The

subjects were furnished mainly by Spanish history and legend, the

exploits of national heroes like the Cid (Ruy Diaz de Bivar), the seven

Princes of Lara, Don Fernán Gonzalez, and Bernaldo del Carpio, the leader

in the Spanish versions of the great fight by Fontarabbia

"When Rowland brave and Olivier,

And every paladin and peer

On Roncesvalles died."

Southey thought the Spanish ballads much inferior to the English and

Scotch, a judgment to which students of Spanish poetry will perhaps

hardly agree.[8] The Spanish ballads, like the British, are partly

historical and legendary, partly entirely romantic or fictitious. They

record not only the age-long wars against the Saracen, the common enemy,

but the internecine feuds of the Spanish Christian kingdoms, the quarrels

between the kings and their vassals, and many a dark tale of domestic

treachery or violence. In these respects their resemblance to the

English and Scotch border ballads is obvious; and it has been pointed out

that they sprang from similar conditions, a frontier war for national

independence, maintained for centuries against a stubborn foe. The

traditions concerning Wallace and the Bruce have some analogy with the

chronicles of the Cid; but as to the border fights celebrated in Scott's

"Minstrelsy," they were between peoples of the same race, tongue, and

faith; and were but petty squabbles in comparison with that epic crusade

in which the remnants of the old Gothic conquerors slowly made head

against, and finally overthrew and expelled, an Oriental religion, a

foreign blood, and a civilisation in many respects more brilliant than

anything which Europe could show. The contrast between Castile and

Granada is more picturesque than the difference between Lothian and

Northumberland. The Spanish ballads have the advantage, then, of being

connected with imposing passages of history. In spirit they are

intensely national. Three motives animate them all: loyalty to the king,

devotion to the cross, and the _pundonor_: that sensitive personal

honour--the "Castilian pride" of "Hernani,"--which sometimes ran into

fantastic excess. A rude chivalry occasionally softens the ferocity of

feudal manners in Northern ballad-poetry, as in the speech of Percy over

the dead Douglas in "Chevy Chase." But in the Spanish _romances_ the

knightly feeling is all-pervading. The warriors are _hidalgos_,

gentlemen of a lofty courtesy; the Moorish chieftains are not "heathen

hounds," but chivalrous adversaries, to be treated, in defeat, with a

certain generosity. This refinement and magnanimity are akin to that

ideality of temper which makes Don Quixote at once so noble and so

ridiculous, and which is quite remote from the sincere realism of the

British minstrelsy. In style the Spanish ballads are simple, forcible,

and direct, but somewhat monotonous in their facility. The English and

Scotch have a wider range of subject; the best of them have a condensed

energy of expression and a depth of tragic feeling which is more potent

than the melancholy grace of the Spanish. Women take a more active part

in the former, the Christians of the Peninsula having caught from their

Saracen foes a prejudice in favour of womanly seclusion and retirement.

There is also a wilder imagination in Northern balladry; a much larger

element of the mythological and supernatural. Ghosts, demons, fairies,

enchanters are rare in the Spanish poems. Where the marvellous enters

into them at all, it is mostly in the shape of saintly miracles. St.

James of Compostella appears on horseback among the Christian hosts

battling with the Moors, or even in the army of the Conquistadores in

Mexico--an incident which Macaulay likens to the apparition of the "great

twin Brethren" in the Roman battle of Lake Regillus. The mediaeval

Spaniards were possibly to the full as superstitious as their Scottish

contemporaries, but their superstitions were the legends of the Catholic

Church, not the inherited folklore of Gothic and Celtic heathendom. I

will venture to suggest, as one reason of this difference, the absence of

forests in Spain. The shadowy recesses of northern Europe were the

natural haunts of mystery and unearthly terrors. The old Teutonic

forest, the Schwarzwald and the Hartz, were peopled by the popular

imagination with were-wolves, spectre huntsmen, wood spirits, and all

those nameless creatures which Tieck has revived in his "Mährchen" and

Hauptmann in the Rautendelein of his "Versunkene Glocke." The treeless

plateaus of Spain, and her stony, denuded sierras, all bare and bright

under the hot southern sky, offered no more shelter to such beings of the

mind than they did to the genial life of Robin Hood and his merry men

"all under the greenwood tree." And this mention of the bold archer of

Sherwood recalls one other difference--the last that need here be touched

upon--between the ballads of Spain and of England. Both constitute a

body of popular poetry, _i.e._, of folk poetry. They recount the doings

of the upper classes, princes, nobles, knights, and ladies, as seen from

the angle of observation of humble minstrels of low degree. But the

people count for much more in the English poems. The Spanish are more

aristocratic, more public, less domestic, and many of them composed, it

is thought, by lordly makers. This is perhaps, in part, a difference in

national character; and, in part, a difference in the conditions under

which the social institutions of the two countries were evolved.

Spain collected her ballads early in numerous songbooks--_cancioneros_,

_romanceros_--the first of which, the "Cancionero" of 1510, is "the

oldest collection of popular poetry, properly so-called, that is to be

found in any European literature." [9] But modern Spain had gone through

her classic period, like England and Germany. She had submitted to the

critical canons of Boileau, and was in leading-strings to France till the

end of the eighteenth century. Spain, too, had her romantic movement,

and incidentally her ballad revival, but it came later than in England

and Germany, later even than in France. Historians of Spanish literature

inform us that the earliest entry of French romanticism into Spain took

place in Martinez de la Rosa's two dramas, "The Conspiracy of Venice"

(1834) and "Aben-Humeya," first written in French and played at Paris in

1830; and that the representation of Duke de Rivas' play, "Don Alvaro"

(1835), was "an event in the history of the modern Spanish drama

corresponding to the production of 'Hernani' at the Theatre Francais" in

1830.[10] Both of these authors had lived in France and had there made

acquaintance with the works of Chateaubriand, Byron, and Walter Scott.

Spain came in time to have her own Byron and her own Scott, the former in

José de Espronceda, author of "The Student of Salamanca," who resided for

a time in London; the latter in José Zorrilla, whose "Granada," "Legends

of the Cid," etc., "were popular for the same reason that 'Marmion' and

'The Lady of the Lake' were popular; for their revival of national

legends in a form both simple and picturesque." [11] Scott himself is

reported to have said that if he had come across in his younger days

Perez de Hita's old historical romance, "The Civil Wars of Granada"

(1595), "he would have chosen Spain as the scene of a Waverley

novel." [12]

But when Lockhart, in 1824, set himself to

"--relate

In high-born words the worth of many a knight

From tawny Spain, lost in the world's debate"--

her ballad poetry had fallen into disfavour at home, and "no Spanish

Percy, or Ellis, or Ritson," he complains, "has arisen to perform what no

one but a Spaniard can entertain the smallest hope of achieving." [13]

Meanwhile, however, the German romantic school had laid eager hands upon

the old romantic literature of Spain. A. W. Schlegel (1803) and Gries

had made translations from Calderon in assonant verse; and Friedrich

Schlegel--who exalted the Spanish dramatist above Shakspere, much to

Heine's disgust--had written, also in _asonante_, his dramatic poem

"Conde Alarcos" (1802), founded on the well-known ballad. Brentano and

others of the romantics went so far as to practise assonance in their

original as well as translated work. Jacob Grimm (1815) and Depping

(1817) edited selections from the "Romancero" which Lockhart made use of

in his "Ancient Spanish Ballads." With equal delight the French

romanticists--Hugo and Musset in particular--seized upon the treasures of

the "Romancero"; but this was somewhat later.

Lockhart's "Spanish Ballads," which were bold and spirited paraphrases

rather than close versions of the originals, enjoyed a great success, and

have been repeatedly reprinted. Ticknor pronounced them undoubtedly a

work of genius, as much so as any book of the sort in any literature with

which he was acquainted.[14] In the very same year Sir John Bowring

published his "Ancient Poetry and Romance of Spain." Hookham Frere, that

most accomplished of translators, also gave specimens from the

"Romancero." Of late years versions in increasing numbers of Spanish

poetry of all kinds, ancient and modern, by Ormsby, Gibson, and others

too numerous to name, have made the literature of the country largely

accessible to English readers. But to Lockhart belongs the credit of

having established for the English public the convention of romantic

Spain--the Spain of lattice and guitar, of mantilla and castanet,

articles now long at home in the property room of romance, along with the

gondola of Venice, the "clock-face" troubadour, and the castle on the

Rhine. The Spanish brand of mediaevalism would seem, for a number of

years, to have substituted itself in England for the German, and

doubtless a search through the annuals and gift books and fashionable

fiction and minor poetry generally, of the years from 1825 to 1840, would

disclose a decided Castilian colouring. To such effect, at least, is the

testimony of the Edinburgh reviewer--from whom I have several times

quoted--reviewing in January, 1841, the new and sumptuously illustrated

edition of "Ancient Spanish Ballads." "Mr. Lockhart's success," he

writes, "rendered the subject fashionable; we have, however, no space to

bestow on the minor fry who dabbled in these . . . fountains. Those who

remember their number may possibly deprecate our re-opening the

floodgates of the happily subsided inundation."

The popular ballad, indeed, is, next after the historical romance, the

literary form to which the romantic movement has given, in the highest

degree, a renewal of prosperous life. Every one has written ballads, and

the "burden" has become a burden even as the grasshopper is such. The

very parodists have taken the matter in hand. The only Calverley made

excellent sport of the particular variety cultivated by Jean Ingelow.

And Sir Frederick Pollock, as though actuated by Lowell's hint, about "a

declaration of love under the forms of a declaration in trover," cast the

law reports into ballad phrase in his "Leading Cases Done into English

(1876):

"It was Thomas Newman and five his feres

(Three more would have made them nine),

And they entered into John Vaux's house,

That had the Queen's Head to sign.

The birds on the bough sing loud and sing low,

What trespass shall be _ab initio_."

Of course the great majority of these poems in the ballad form, whether

lyric or narrative, or a mixture of both, are in no sense romantic. They

are like Wordsworth's "Lyrical Ballads," idyllic; songs of the

affections, of nature, sentiment, of war, the sea, the hunting field,

rustic life, and a hundred other moods and topics. Neither are the

historical or legendary ballads, deriving from Percy and reinforced by

Scott, prevailingly romantic in the sense of being mediaeval. They are

such as Macaulay's "Lays of Ancient Rome," in which--with ample

acknowledgment in his introduction both to Scott and to the

"Reliques"--he applies the form of the English minstrel ballad to an

imaginative re-creation of the lost popular poetry of early Rome. Or

they continue Scott's Jacobite tradition, like "Aytoun's Lays of the

Scottish Cavaliers," Browning's "Cavalier Tunes," Thornbury's "Songs of

the Cavaliers and Roundheads" (1857), and a few of Motherwell's ditties.

These last named, except Browning, were all Scotchmen and staunch Tories;

as were likewise Lockhart and Hogg; and, for obvious reasons, it is in

Scotland that the simpler fashion of ballad writing, whether in dialect

or standard English, and more especially as employed upon martial

subjects, has flourished longest. Artifice and ballad preciosity have

been cultivated more sedulously in the south, with a learned use of the

repetend, archaism of style, and imitation of the quaint mediaeval habit

of mind.

Of the group most immediately connected with Scott and who assisted him,

more or less, in his "Minstrelsy" collection, may be mentioned the

eccentric John Leyden, immensely learned in Border antiquities and

poetry, and James Hogg, the "Ettrick Shepherd." The latter was a peasant

bard, an actual shepherd and afterward a sheep farmer, a self-taught man

with little schooling, who aspired to become a second Burns, and composed

much of his poetry while lying out on the hills, wrapped in his plaid and

tending his flocks like any Corydon or Thyrsis. He was a singular

mixture of genius and vanity, at once the admiration and the butt of the

_Blackwood's_ wits, who made him the mouthpiece of humour and eloquence

which were not his, but Christopher North's. The puzzled shepherd hardly

knew how to take it; he was a little gratified and a good deal nettled.

But the flamboyant figure of him in the _Noctes_ will probably do as much

as his own verses to keep his memory alive with posterity. Nevertheless,

Hogg is one of the best of modern Scotch ballad poets. Having read the

first two volumes of the "Border Minstrelsy," he was dissatisfied with

some of the modern ballad imitations therein and sent his criticisms to

Scott. They were sound criticisms, for Hogg had an intimate knowledge of

popular poetry and a quick perception of what was genuine and what was

spurious in such compositions. Sir Walter called him in aid of his third

volume and found his services of value.

As a Border minstrel, Hogg ranks next to Scott--is, in fact, a sort of

inferior Scott. His range was narrower, but he was just as thoroughly

saturated with the legendary lore of the countryside, and in some

respects he stood closer to the spirit of that peasant life in which

popular poetry has its source. As a ballad poet, indeed, he is not

always Scott's inferior, though even his ballads are apt to be too long

and without the finish and the instinct for selection which marks the

true artist. When he essayed metrical romances in numerous cantos, his

deficiencies in art became too fatally evident. Scott, in his longer

poems, is often profuse and unequal, but always on a much higher level

than Hogg. The latter had no skill in conducting to the end a fable of

some complexity, involving a number of varied characters and a really

dramatic action. "Mador of the Moor," _e.g._, is a manifest and not very

successful imitation of "The Lady of the Lake"; and it requires a strong

appetite for the romantic to sustain a reader through the six parts of

"Queen Hynde" and the four parts of "The Pilgrims of the Sun." By

general consent, the best of Hogg's more ambitious poems is "The Queen's

Wake," and the best thing in it is "Kilmeny." "The Queen's Wake" (1813)

combines, in its narrative plan, the framework of "The Lay of the Last

Minstrel" with the song competition in its sixth canto. Mary Stuart, on

landing in Scotland, holds a Christmas wake at Holyrood, where seventeen

bards contend before her for the prize of song. The lays are in many

different moods and measures, but all enclosed in a setting of

octosyllabic couplets, closely modelled upon Scott, and the whole ends

with a tribute to the great minstrel who had waked once more the long

silent Harp of the North. The thirteenth bard's song--"Kilmeny"--is of

the type of traditionary tale familiar in "Tarn Lin" and "Thomas of

Ercildoune," and tells how a maiden was spirited away to fairyland, where

she saw a prophetic vision of her country's future (including the

Napoleonic wars) and returned after a seven years' absence.

"Late, late in a gloamin' when all was still,

When the fringe was red on the westlin hill,

The wood was sere, the moon i' the wane,

The reek o' the cot hung o'er the plain,

Like a little wee cloud in the world its lane;

When the ingle lowed wi' an eiry leme,

Late, late in the gloamin' Kilmeny came hame."

The Ettrick Shepherd's peculiar province was not so much the romance of

national history as the field of Scottish fairy lore and popular

superstition. It was he, rather than Walter Scott, who carried out the

suggestions long since made to his countryman, John Home, in Collins'

"Ode on the Superstitions of the Highlands." His poems are full of

bogles, kelpies, brownies, warlocks, and all manner of "grammarie." "The

Witch of Fife" in "The Queen's Wake," a spirited bit of grotesque, is

repeatedly quoted as authority upon the ways of Scotch witches in the

notes to Croker's "Fairy Legends and Traditions of the South of Ireland."

Similar themes engaged the poet in his prose tales. Some of these were

mere modern ghost stories, or stories of murder, robbery, death warnings,

etc. Others, like "The Heart of Eildon," dealt with ancient legends of

the supernatural. Still others, like "The Brownie of Bodsbeck: a Tale of

the Covenanters," were historical novels of the Stuart times. Here Hogg

was on Scott's own ground and did not shine by comparison. He

complained, indeed, that in the last-mentioned tale, he had been accused

of copying "Old Mortality", but asserted that he had written his book the

first and had been compelled by the appearance of Sir Walter's, to go

over his own manuscript and substitute another name for Balfour of

Burley, his original hero. Nanny's songs, in "The Brownie of Bodsbeck,"

are among Hogg's best ballads. Others are scattered through his various

collections--"The Mountain Bard," "The Forest Minstrel," "Poetical Tales

and Ballads," etc.

Another Scotch balladist was William Motherwell, one of the most

competent of ballad scholars and editors, whose "Minstrelsy: Ancient and

Modern," was issued at Glasgow in 1827, and led to a correspondence

between the collector and Sir Walter Scott.[15] In 1836 Motherwell was

associated with Hogg in editing Burns' works. His original ballads are

few in number, and their faults and merits are of quite an opposite

nature from his collaborator's. The shepherd was a man of the people,

and lived, so far as any modern can, among the very conditions which

produced the minstrel songs. He inherited the popular beliefs. His

great-grandmother on one side was a notorious witch; his grandfather on

the other side had "spoken with the fairies." His poetry, such as it is,

is fluent and spontaneous. Motherwell's, on the contrary, is the work of

a ballad fancier, a student learned in lyric, reproducing old modes with

conscientious art. His balladry is more condensed and skilful than

Hogg's, but seems to come hard to him. It is literary poetry trying to

be _Volkspoesie_, and not quite succeeding. Many of the pieces in the

southern English, such as "Halbert the Grim," "The Troubadour's Lament,"

"The Crusader's Farewell," "The Warthman's Wail," "The Demon Lady," "The

Witches' Joys," and "Lady Margaret," have an echo of Elizabethan music,

or the songs of Lovelace, or, now and then, the verse of Coleridge or

Byron. "True Love's Dirge," _e.g._, borrows a burden from

Shakspere--"Heigho! the Wind and Rain." Others, like "Lord Archibald: A

Ballad," and "Elfinland Wud: An Imitation of the Ancient Scottish

Romantic Ballad," are in archaic Scotch dialect with careful ballad

phrasing. Hogg employs the broad Scotch, but it is mostly the vernacular

of his own time. A short passage from "The Witch of Fife" and one from

"Elfin Wud" will illustrate two very different types of ballad manner:

"He set ane reid-pipe till his muthe

And he playit se bonnileye,

Till the gray curlew and the black-cock flew

To listen his melodye.

"It rang se sweit through the grim Lommond,

That the nycht-winde lowner blew:

And it soupit alang the Loch Leven,

And wakenit the white sea-mew.

"It rang se sweit through the grim Lommond,

Se sweitly but and se shill,

That the wezilis laup out of their mouldy holis,

And dancit on the mydnycht hill."

"Around her slepis the quhyte muneschyne,

(Meik is mayden undir kell),

Hir lips bin lyke the blude reid wyne;

(The rois of flouris hes sweitest smell).

"It was al bricht quhare that ladie stude,

(Far my luve fure ower the sea).

Bot dern is the lave of Elfinland wud,

(The Knicht pruvit false that ance luvit me).

"The ladie's handis were quhyte als milk,

(Ringis my luve wore mair nor ane).

Hir skin was safter nor the silk;

(Lilly bricht schinis my luve's halse bane)."

Upon the whole, the most noteworthy of Motherwell's original additions to

the stores of romantic verse were his poems on subjects from Norse legend

and mythology, and particularly the three spirited pieces that stand

first in his collection (1832)--"The Battle-Flag of Sigurd," "The Wooing

Song of Jarl Egill Skallagrim," and "The Sword Chant of Thorstein Randi."

These stand midway between Gray's "Descent of Odin" and the later work of

Longfellow, William Morris and others. Since Gray, little or nothing of

the kind had been attempted; and Motherwell gave perhaps the first

expression in English song of the Berserkir rage and the Viking passion

for battle and sea roving.

During the nineteenth century English romance received new increments of

heroic legend and fairy lore from the Gaelic of Ireland. It was not

until 1867 that Matthew Arnold, in his essay "On the Study of Celtic

Literature," pleading for a chair of Celtic at Oxford, bespoke the

attention of the English public to those elements in the national

literature which come from the Celtic strain in its blood. Arnold knew

very little Celtic, and his essay abounds in those airy generalisations

which are so irritating to more plodding critics. His theory, e.g., that

English poetry owes its sense for colour to the Celts, when taken up and

stated nakedly by following writers, seems too absolute in its ascription

of colour-blindness to the Teutonic races. Still, Arnold probably

defined fairly enough the distinctive traits of the Celtic genius. He

attributes to a Celtic source much of the turn of English poetry for

style, much of its turn for melancholy, and nearly all its turn for

"natural magic." "The forest solitude, the bubbling spring, the wild

flowers, are everywhere in romance. They have a mysterious life and

grace there; they are Nature's own children, and utter her secret in a

way which makes them something quite different from the woods, waters,

and plants of Greek and Latin poetry. Now, of this delicate magic,

Celtic romance is so pre-eminent a mistress that it seems impossible to

believe the power did not come into romance from the Celts."

In 1825 T. Crofton Croker published the first volume of his delightful

"Fairy Legends and Traditions of the South of Ireland." It was

immediately translated into German by the Grimm brothers, and was

received with enthusiasm by Walter Scott, who was introduced to the

author in London in 1826, and a complimentary letter from whom was

printed in the preface to the second edition.

Croker's book opened a new world of romance, and introduced the English

reader to novel varieties of elf creatures, with outlandish Gaelic names;

the Shefro; the Boggart; the Phooka, or horse-fiend; the Banshee, a

familiar spirit which moans outside the door when a death impends; the

Cluricaune,[16] or cellar goblin; the Fir Darrig (Red Man); the Dullahan,

or Headless Horseman. There are stories of changelings, haunted castles,

buried treasure, the "death coach," the fairy piper, enchanted lakes

which cover sunken cities, and similar matters not unfamiliar in the

folk-lore of other lands, but all with an odd twist to them and set

against a background of the manners and customs of modern Irish

peasantry. The Celtic melancholy is not much in evidence in this

collection. The wild Celtic fancy is present, but in combination with

Irish gaiety and light-heartedness. It was the day of the comedy

Irishman--Lover's and Lever's Irishman--Handy Andy, Rory O'More, Widow

Machree and the like. It took the famine of '49 and the strenuous work

of the Young Ireland Party which gathered about the _Nation_ in 1848, to

displace this traditional figure in favour of a more earnest and tragical

national type. But a single quotation will illustrate the natural magic

of which Arnold speaks: "The Merrow (mermaid) put the comb in her pocket,

and then bent down her head and whispered some words to the water that

was close to the foot of the rock. Dick saw the murmur of the words upon

the top of the sea, going out towards the wide ocean, just like a breath

of wind rippling along, and, says he, in the greatest wonder, 'Is it

speaking you are, my darling, to the salt water?'

"'It's nothing else,' says she, quite carelessly; 'I'm just sending word

home to my father not to be waiting breakfast for me.'" Except for its

lack of "high seriousness," this is the imagination that makes myths.

Catholic Ireland still cherishes popular beliefs which in England, and

even in Scotland, have long been merely antiquarian curiosities. In her

poetry the fairies are never very far away.

"Up the airy mountain,

Down the rushy glen

We daren't go a-hunting

For fear of little men." [17]

Irish critics, to be sure, tell us that Allingham's fairies are English

fairies, and that he had no Gaelic, though he knew and loved his Irish

countryside. He was a Protestant and a loyalist, and lived in close

association with the English Pre-Raphaelites--with Rossetti especially,

who made the illustration for "The Maids of Elfin-Mere" in Allingham's

volume "The Music Master" (1855). The Irish fairies, it is said, are

beings of a darker and more malignant breed than Shakspere's elves. Yet

in Allingham's poem they stole little Bridget and kept her seven years,

till she died of sorrow and lies asleep on the lake bottom; even as in

Ferguson's weird ballad, "The Fairy Thorn," the good people carry off

fair Anna Grace from the midst of her three companions, who "pined away

and died within the year and day."

To the latter half of the century belongs the so-called Celtic revival,

which connects itself with the Nationalist movement in politics and is

partly literary and partly patriotic. It may be doubted whether, for

practical purposes, the Gaelic will ever come again into general use.

But the concerted endeavour by a whole nation to win back its ancient,

wellnigh forgotten speech is a most interesting social phenomenon. At

all events, both by direct translations of the Gaelic hero epics and by

original work in which the Gaelic spirit is transfused through English

ballad and other verse forms, a lost kingdom of romance has been

recovered and a bright green thread of Celtic poetry runs through the

British anthology of the century. The names of the pioneers and leading

contributors to this movement are significant of the varied strains of

blood which compose Irish nationality. James Clarence Mangan was a Celt

of the Celts; Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu and Aubrey de Vere were of

Norman-Irish stock, and the former was the son of a dean of the

Established Church, and himself the editor of a Tory newspaper; Sir

Samuel Ferguson was an Ulster Protestant of Scotch descent; Dr. George

Sigerson is of Norse blood; Whitley Stokes, the eminent Celtic scholar,

and Dr. John Todhunter, author of "Three Bardic Tales" (1896), bear

Anglo-Saxon surnames; the latter is the son of Quaker parents and was

educated at English Quaker schools.

Mangan's paraphrases from the Gaelic, "Poets and Poetry of Munster,"

appeared posthumously in 1850. They include a number of lyrics, wildly

and mournfully beautiful, inspired by the sorrows of Ireland: "Dark

Rosaleen," "Lament for the Princes of Tir-Owen and Tir-Connell,"

"O'Hussey's Ode to the Maguire," etc. The ballad form was not practised

by the ancient Gaelic epic poets. In choosing it as the vehicle for

their renderings from vernacular narrative poetry, the modern Irish poets

have departed widely from the English and Scottish model, employing a

variety of metres and not seeking to conform their diction to the manner

of the ballads in the "Reliques" or the "Border Minstrelsy." Ferguson's

"Lays of the Western Gael" (1865) is a series of historical ballads,

original in effect, though based upon old Gaelic chronicles. "Congal"

(1872) is an epic, founded on an ancient bardic tale, and written in

Chapman's "fourteener" and reminding the reader frequently of Chapman's

large, vigorous manner, his compound epithets and spacious Homeric

similes. The same epic breadth of manner was applied to the treatment of

other hero legends, "Conary," "Deirdré," etc., in a subsequent volume

(1880). "Deirdré," the finest of all the old Irish stories, was also

handled independently by the late Dr. R. D. Joyce in the verse and manner

of William Morris' "Earthly Paradise." [18] Among other recent workers

in this field are Aubrey de Vere, a volume of selections from whose

poetry appeared at New York in 1894, edited by Prof. G. E. Woodberry;

George Sigerson, whose "Bards of the Gael and the Gall," a volume of

translations from the Irish in the original metres, was issued in 1897;

Whitley Stokes, an accomplished translator, and the joint editor (with

Windisch) of the "Irische Texte "; John Todhunter, author of "The Banshee

and Other Poems" (1888) and "Three Bardic Tales" (1896); Alfred Perceval

Graves, author of "Irish Folk Songs" (1897), and many other volumes of

national lyrics; and William Larminie--"West Irish Folk Tales and

Romances" (1893), etc.

The Celtism of this Gaelic renascence is of a much purer and more genuine

character than the Celtism of Macpherson's "Ossian." Yet with all its

superiority in artistic results, it is improbable that it will make any

such impression on Europe or England as Macpherson made. "Ossian" was

the first revelation to the world of the Celtic spirit: sophisticated,

rhetorical, yet still the first; and it is not likely that its success

will be repeated. In the very latest school of Irish verse, represented

by such names as Lionel Johnson, J. B. Yeats, George W. Russell, Nora

Hopper, the mystical spirit which inhabits the "Celtic twilight" turns

into modern symbolism, so that some of their poems on legendary subjects

bear a curious resemblance to the contemporary work of Maeterlinck: to

such things as "Aglivaine et Salysette" or "Les Sept Princesses." [19]

The narrative ballad is hardly one of the forms of high art, like the

epic, the tragedy, the Pindaric ode. It is simple and not complex like

the sonnet: not of the aristocracy of verse, but popular--not to say

plebeian--in its associations. It is easy to write and, in its commonest

metrical shape of eights and sixes, apt to run into sing-song. Its

limitations, even in the hands of an artist like Coleridge or Rossetti,

are obvious. It belongs to "minor poetry." The ballad revival has not

been an unmixed blessing and is responsible for much slip-shod work. If

Dr. Johnson could come back from the shades and look over our recent

verse, one of his first comments would probably be: "Sir, you have too

many ballads." Be it understood that the romantic ballad only is here in

question, in which the poet of a literary age seeks to catch and

reproduce the tone of a childlike, unself-conscious time, so that his art

has almost inevitably something artificial or imitative. Here and there

one stands out from the mass by its skill or luck in overcoming the

difficulty. There is Hawker's "Song of the Western Men," which Macaulay

and others quoted as historical, though only the refrain was old:

"And shall Trelawney die?

Here's twenty thousand Cornish men

Will know the reason why!" [20]

There is Sydney Dobell's "Keith of Ravelston," [21] which haunts the

memory with the insistent iteration of its refrain:--

"The murmur of the mourning ghost

That keeps the shadowy kine;

Oh, Keith of Ravelston,

The sorrows of thy line!"

And again there is Robert Buchanan's "Ballad of Judas Iscariot" which Mr.

Stedman compares for "weird impressiveness and power" with "The Ancient

Mariner." The mediaeval feeling is most successfully captured in this

poem. It recalls the old "Debate between the Body and Soul," and still

more the touches of divine compassion which soften the rigours of

Catholic theology in the legends of the saints. It strikes the keynote,

too, of that most modern ballad mode which employs the narrative only to

emphasize some thought of universal application. There is salvation for

all, is the thought, even for the blackest soul of the world, the soul

that betrayed its Maker.[22] Such, though after a fashion more subtly

intellectual, is the doctrinal use to which this popular form is put by

one of the latest English ballad makers, Mr. John Davidson. Read, e.g.,

his "Ballad of a Nun," [23] the story of which was told in several shapes

by the Spanish poet Alfonso the Learned (1226-84). A runaway nun returns

in penitence to her convent, and is met at the gate by the Virgin Mary,

who has taken her likeness and kept her place for her during the years of

her absence. Or read "A New Ballad of Tannhäuser," [24] which

contradicts "the idea of the inherent impurity of nature" by an

interpretation of the legend in a sense quite the reverse of Wagner's.

Tannhäuser's dead staff blossoms not as a sign of forgiveness, but to

show him that "there was no need to be forgiven." The modern balladist

attacks the ascetic Middle Age with a shaft from its own quiver.

But it is time to turn from minor poets to acknowledged masters; and

above all to the greatest of modern English artists in verse, the

representative poet of the Victorian era. Is Tennyson to be classed with

the romantics? His workmanship, when most truly characteristic, is

romantic in the sense of being pictorial and ornate, rather than

classically simple or severe. He assimilated the rich manner of Keats,

whose influence is perceptible in his early poems. His art, like Keats',

is eclectic and reminiscent, choosing for its exercise with equal

impartiality whatever was most beautiful in the world of Grecian fable or

the world of mediaeval legend. But unlike Keats, he lived to add new

strings to his lyre; he went on to sing of modern life and thought, of

present-day problems in science and philosophy, of contemporary politics,

the doubt, unrest, passion, and faith of his own century. To find work

of Tennyson's that is romantic throughout, in subject, form, and spirit

alike, we must look among his earlier collections (1830, 1832, 1842).

For this was a phase which he passed beyond, as Millais outgrew his

youthful Pre-Raphaelitism, or as Goethe left behind him his "Götz" and

"Werther" period and widened out into larger utterance. Mr. Stedman

speaks of the "Gothic feeling" in "The Lady of Shalott," and in ballads

like "Oriana" and "The Sisters," describing them as "work that in its

kind is fully up to the best of those Pre-Raphaelites who, by some arrest

of development, stop precisely where Tennyson made his second step

forward, and censure him for having gone beyond them." [25] This

estimate may be accepted so far as it concerns "The Lady of Shalott,"

which is known to have worked strongly upon Rossetti's imagination; but

surely "The Sisters" and "Oriana" do not rank with the best

Pre-Raphaelite work. The former is little better than a failure; and the

latter, which provokes a comparison, not to Tennyson's advantage, with

the fine old ballad, "Helen of Kirkconnell," is a weak thing. The name

Oriana has romantic associations--it is that of the heroine of "Amadis de

Gaul"--but the damnable iteration of it as a ballad burden is irritating.

Mediaeval _motifs_ are rather slightly handled in "The Golden Supper"

(from the "Decameron," 4th novel, 10th day); "The Beggar Maid" (from the

ballad of "King Cophetua and the Beggar Maid" in the "Reliques"); and

more adequately in "Godiva," a blank-verse rendering of the local legend

of Coventry, in which an attempt is made to preserve something of the

antique roughness under the smooth Vergilian elegance of Tennyson's

diction. "The Day Dream" was a recasting of one of Perrault's fairy

tales, "The Sleeping Beauty," under which title a portion of it had

appeared in the "Poems Chiefly Lyrical" of 1830. Tennyson has written

many greater poems than this, but few in which the special string of

romance vibrates more purely. The tableau of the spellbound palace, with

all its activities suspended, gave opportunity for the display of his

unexampled pictorial power in scenes of still life; and the legend itself

supplied that charmed isolation from the sphere of reality which we

noticed as so important a part of the romantic poet's stock-in-trade in

"Christabel" and "The Eve of St. Agnes"--

"The hall-door shuts again and all is still."

Poems like "The Day Dream" and "The Princess" make it evident that Scott

and Coleridge and Keats had so given back the Middle Ages to the

imagination that any future poet, seeking free play in a realm unhampered

by actual conditions--"apart from place, withholding time"--was apt to

turn naturally, if not inevitably, to the feudal times. The action of

"The Day Dream" proceeds no-where and no-when. The garden--if we

cross-examine it--is a Renaissance garden:

"Soft lustre bathes the range of urns

On every slanting terrace-lawn:

The fountain to its place returns,

Deep in the garden lake withdrawn."

The furnishings of the palace are a mixture of mediaeval and Louis

Quatorze--clocks, peacocks, parrots, golden mantle pegs:--

"Till all the hundred summers pass,

The beams that through the oriel shine

Make prisms in every carven glass

And beaker brimm'd with noble wine."

But the impression, as a whole, is of the Middle Age of poetic

convention, if not of history; the enchanted dateless era of romance and

fairy legend.

"St. Agnes" and "Sir Galahad," its masculine counterpart, sound the old

Catholic notes of saintly virginity and mystical, religious rapture, the

_Gottesminne_ of mediaeval hymnody. Not since Southwell's "Burning Babe"

and Crashaw's "Saint Theresa" had any English poet given such expression

to those fervid devotional moods which Sir Thomas Browne describes as

"Christian annihilation, ecstasies, exolution, liquefaction,

transformation, the kiss of the spouse, gustation of God and ingression

into the divine shadow." This vein, we have noticed, is wanting in

Scott. On the other hand, it may be noticed in passing, Tennyson's

attitude towards nature is less exclusively romantic--in the narrow

sense--than Scott's. He, too, is conscious of the historic associations

of place. In Tennyson, as in Scott,--

"The splendour falls on castle walls

And snowy summits old in story"--[26]

but, in general, his treatment of landscape, in its human relations, is

subtler and more intimate.

"St. Agnes" and "Sir Galahad" are monologues, but lyric and not dramatic

in Browning's manner. There is a dramatic falsity, indeed, in making Sir

Galahad say of himself--

"My strength is as the strength of ten

Because my heart is pure,"

and the poem would be better in the third person. "St. Simeon Stylites"

is a dramatic monologue more upon Browning's model, _i.e._, a piece of

apologetics and self-analysis. But in this province Tennyson is greatly

Browning's inferior.

"The Princess" (1847) is representative of that "splendid composite of

imagery," and that application of modern ideas to legendary material, or

to invented material arbitrarily placed in an archaic setting, which are

characteristic of this artist. The poem's sub-title is "A Medley,"

because it is

"--made to suit with time and place,

A Gothic ruin and a Grecian house,

A talk of college and of ladies' rights,

A feudal knight in silken masquerade,

And, yonder, shrieks and strange experiments."

The problem is a modern one--the New Woman. No precise historic period

is indicated. The female university is full of classic lore and art, but

withal there are courts of feudal kings, with barons, knights, and

squires, and shock of armoured champions in the lists.

But the special service of Tennyson to romantic poetry lay in his being

the first to give a worthy form to the great Arthurian saga; and the

modern masterpiece of that poetry, all things considered, is his "Idylls

of the King." Not so perfect and unique a thing as "The Ancient

Mariner"; less freshly spontaneous, less stirringly alive than "The Lay

of the Last Minstrel," Tennyson's Arthuriad has so much wider a range

than Coleridge's ballad, and is sustained at so much higher a level than

Scott's romance, that it outweighs them both in importance. The

Arthurian cycle of legends, emerging from Welsh and Breton mythology;

seized upon by French romancers of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries,

who made of Arthur the pattern king, of Lancelot the pattern knight, and

of the Table Round the ideal institute of chivalry; gathering about

itself accretions like the Grail Quest and the Tristram story; passing by

translation into many tongues, but retaining always its scene in Great or

Lesser Britain, the lands of its origin, furnished the modern English

romancer with a groundwork of national, though not Anglo-Saxon epic

stuff, which corresponds more nearly with the Charlemagne epos in France,

and the Nibelung hero Saga in Germany, than anything else which our

literature possesses. And a national possession, in a sense, it had

always remained. The story in outline and in some of its main episodes

was familiar. Arthur, Lancelot, Guinivere, Merlin, Modred, Iseult,

Gawaine, were well-known figures, like Robin Hood or Guy of Warwick, in

Shakspere's time as in Chaucer's. But the epos, as a whole, had never

found its poet. Spenser had evaporated Arthur into allegory. Milton had

dallied with the theme and put it by.[27] The Elizabethan drama, which

went so far afield in search of the moving accident, had strangely missed

its chance here, bringing the Round Table heroes upon its stage only in

masque and pageant (Justice Shallow "was Sir Dagonet in Arthur's show"),

or in some such performance as the rude old Seneca tragedy of "The

Misfortunes of Arthur." In 1695 Sir Richard Blackmore published his

"Prince Arthur," an epic in ten books and in rimed couplets, enlarged in

1697 into "King Arthur" in twelve books. Blackmore professed to take

Vergil as his model. A single passage from his poem will show how much

chance the old chivalry tale had in the hands of a minor poet of King

William's reign. Arthur and his company have landed on the shores of

Albion, where

"Rich wine of Burgundy and choice champagne

Relieve the toil they suffered on the main;

But what more cheered them than their meats and wine,

Was wise instruction and discourse divine

From Godlike Arthur's mouth."

There is no need, in taking a summary view of Tennyson's "Idylls," to go

into the question of sources, or to inquire whether Arthur was a

historical chief of North Wales, or whether he signified the Great Bear

(Arcturus) in Celtic mythology, and his Round Table the circle described

by that constellation about the pole star.[28] Tennyson went no farther

back for his authority than Sir Thomas Malory's "Morte Darthur," printed

by Caxton in 1485, a compilation principally from old French Round Table

romances. This was the final mediaeval shape of the story in English.

It is somewhat wandering and prolix as to method, but written in

delightful prose. The story of "Enid," however (under its various titles

and arrangements in successive editions), he took from Lady Charlotte

Guest's translation of the Welsh "Mabinogion" (1838-49).

Before deciding upon the heroic blank verse and a loosely epic form, as

most fitting for his purpose, Tennyson had retold passages of Arthurian

romance in the ballad manner and in various shapes of riming stanza. The

first of these was "The Lady of Shalott" (1832), identical in subject

with the later idyll of "Lancelot and Elaine," but fanciful and even

allegorical in treatment. Shalott is from Ascalot, a variant of Astolat,

in the old _metrical_ romance--not Malory's--of the "Morte Arthur." The

fairy lady, who sees all passing sights in her mirror and weaves them

into her magic web, has been interpreted as a symbol of art, which has to

do properly only with the reflection of life. When the figure of

Lancelot is cast upon the glass, a personal emotion is brought into her

life which is fatal to her art. She is "sick of shadows," and looks

through her window at the substance. Then her mirror cracks from side to

side and the curse is come upon her. Other experiments of the same kind

were "Sir Galahad" and "Sir Lancelot and Queen Guinivere" (both in 1842).

The beauty of all these ballad beginnings is such that one is hardly

reconciled to the loss of so much romantic music, even by the noble blank

verse and the ampler narrative method which the poet finally adopted.

They stand related to the "Idylls" very much as Morris' "Defence of

Guenevere" stands to his "Earthly Paradise."

Thoroughly romantic in content, the "Idylls of the King" are classical in

form. They may be compared to Tasso's "Gierusalemme Liberata," in which

the imperfectly classical manner of the Renaissance is applied to a

Gothic subject, the history of the Crusades. The first specimen given

was the "Morte d'Arthur" of 1842, set in a framework entitled "The Epic,"

in which "the poet, Everard Hall," reads to his friends a fragment from

his epic, "King Arthur," in twelve books. All the rest he has burned.

For--

"Why take the style of those heroic times?

For nature brings not back the Mastodon,

Nor we those times; and why should any man

Remodel models? these twelve books of mine

Were faint Homeric echoes."

The "fragment" is thus put forward tentatively and with

apologies--apologies which were little needed; for the "Morte d'Arthur,"

afterwards embedded in "The Passing of Arthur," remains probably the

best, and certainly the most Homeric passage in the "Idylls." Tennyson's

own quality was more Vergilian than Homeric, but the models which he here

remodels were the Homeric epics. He chose for his measure not the

Spenserian stanza, nor the _ottava rima_ of Tasso, nor the octosyllables

of Scott and the chivalry romances, but the heroic blank verse which

Milton had fixed as the vehicle of English classical epic. He adopts

Homer's narrative practices: the formulated repetitions of phrase, the

pictorial comparisons, the conventional epithets (in moderation), and his

gnomic habit--

"O purblind race of miserable men," etc.

The original four idylls were published in 1859.[29] Thenceforth the

series grew by successive additions and rearrangements up to the

completed "Idylls" of 1888, twelve in number--besides prologue and

epilogue--according to the plan foreshadowed in "The Epic." The story of

Arthur had thus occupied Tennyson for over a half century. Though

modestly entitled "Idylls," by reason of the episodic treatment, the poem

when finished was, in fact, an epic; but an epic that lacked the formal

unity of the "Aeneid" and the "Paradise Lost," or even of the "Iliad." It

resembled the Homeric heroic poems more than the literary epics of Vergil

and Milton, in being not the result of a single act of construction, but

a growth from the gradual fitting together of materials selected from a

vast body of legend. This legendary matter he reduced to an epic unity.

The adventures in Malory's romance are of very uneven value, and it

abounds in inconsistencies and repetitions. He also redistributed the

ethical balance. Lancelot is the real hero of the old "Morte Darthur,"

and Guinivere--the Helen of romance--goes almost uncensured. Malory's

Arthur is by no means "the blameless king" of Tennyson, who makes of him

a nineteenth-century ideal of royal knighthood, and finally an

allegorical type of Soul at war with Sense. The downfall of the Round

Table, that order of spiritual knight-errantry through which the king

hopes to regenerate society, happens through the failure of his knights

to rise to his own high level of character; in a degree, also, because

the emprise is diverted from attainable practical aims to the fantastic

quest of the Holy Grail. The sin of Lancelot and the Queen, drawing

after it the treachery of Modred, brings on the tragic catastrophe. This

conception is latent in Malory, but it is central in Tennyson; and

everywhere he subtilises, refines, elevates, and, in short, modernises

the _Motivirung_ in the old story. Does he thereby also weaken it?

Censure and praise have been freely bestowed upon Tennyson's dealings

with Malory. Thus it is complained that his Arthur is a prig, a curate,

who preaches to his queen and lectures his court, and whose virtue is too

conscious; that the harlot Vivien is a poor substitute for the damsel of

the lake who puts Merlin to sleep under a great rock in the land of

Benwick; that the gracious figure of Gawain suffers degradation from the

application of an effeminate moral standard to his shining exploits in

love and war, that modern _convenances_ are imposed upon a society in

which they do not belong and whose joyous, robust _naïveté_ is hurt by

them.[30]

The allegorical method tried in "The Lady of Shalott," but abandoned in

the earlier "Idylls," creeps in again in the later; particularly in

"Gareth and Lynette" (1872), in the elaborate symbolism of the gates of

Camelot, and in the guardians of the river passes, whom Gareth

successively overcomes, and who seem to represent the temptations

incident to the different ages of man. The whole poem, indeed, has been

interpreted in a parabolic sense, Merlin standing for the intellect, the

Lady of the Lake for religion, etc. Allegory was a favourite mediaeval

mode, and the Grail legend contains an element of mysticism which invites

an emblematic treatment. But the attraction of this fashion for minds of

a Platonic cast is dangerous to art: the temptation to find a meaning in

human life more esoteric than any afforded by the literal life itself. A

delicate balance must be kept between that presentation of the concrete

which makes it significant by making it representative and typical, and

that other presentation which dissolves the individual into the general,

by making it a mere abstraction. Were it not for Dante and Hawthorne and

the second part of "Faust," one would incline to say that no creative

genius of the first order indulges in allegory. Homer is never

allegorical except in the episode of Circe; Shakspere never, with the

doubtful exception of "The Tempest." The allegory in the "Idylls of the

King" is not of the obvious kind employed in the "Faëry Queene"; but

Tennyson, no less than Spenser, appeared to feel that the simple

retelling of an old chivalry tale, without imparting to it some deeper

meaning, was no work for a modern poet.

Tennyson has made the Arthur Saga, as a whole, peculiarly his own. But

others of the Victorian poets have handled detached portions of it.

William Morris' "Defence of Guenevere" (1858) anticipated the first group

of "Idylls." Swinburne's "Tristram of Lyonesse" (1882) dealt at full

length, and in a very different spirit, with an epicyclic legend which

Tennyson touched incidentally in "The Last Tournament." Matthew Arnold's

"Tristram and Iseult" was a third manipulation of the legend, partly in

dramatic, partly in narrative form, and in changing metres. It follows

another version of Tristram's death, and the story of Vivian and Merlin

which Iseult of Brittany tells her children is quite distinct from the

one in the "Idylls." Iseult of Brittany--not Iseult of Cornwall--is the

heroine of Arnold's poem. Thomas Westwood's "Quest of the Sancgreall" is

still one more contribution to Arthurian poetry of which a mere mention

must here suffice.

For our review threatens to become a catalogue. To such a degree had

mediaevalism become the fashion, that nearly every Georgian and Victorian

poet of any pretensions tried his hand at it. Robert Browning was not

romantic in Scott's way, nor in Tennyson's. His business was with the

soul. The picturesqueness of the external conditions in which soul was

placed was a matter of indifference. To-day was as good as yesterday.

Now and then occurs a title with romantic implications--"Childe Roland to

the Dark Tower Came," _e.g._, borrowed from a ballad snatch sung by the

Fool in "Lear" (Roland is Roland of the "Chanson"). But the poem proves

to be a weird study in landscape symbolism and the history of some dark

emprise, the real nature of which is altogether undiscoverable. "Count

Gismond," again, is the story of a combat in the lists at Aix in

Provence, in which a knight vindicates a lady's honour with his lance,

and slays her traducer at her feet. But this is a dramatic monologue

like any other, and only accidentally mediaeval. "The Heretic's Tragedy:

A Middle Age Interlude," is mediaeval without being romantic. It

recounts the burning, at Paris, A.D. 1314, of Jacques du Bourg-Molay,

Grand Master of the Templars; and purports to be a sort of canticle, with

solo and chorus, composed two centuries after the event by a Flemish

canon of Ypres, to be sung at hocktide and festivals. The childishness

and devout buffoonery of an old miracle play are imitated here, as in

Swinburne's "Masque of Queen Bersabe." This piece and "Holy Cross Day"

are dramatic, or monodramatic, grotesques; and in their apprehension of

this trait of the mediaeval mind are on a par with Hugo's "Pas d'armes du

Roi Jean" and "La Chasse du Burgrave." But Browning's mousings in the

Middle Ages after queer freaks of conscience or passion were occasional.

If any historical period, more than another, had special interest for

him, it was the period of the Italian Renaissance. Yet Ruskin said:

"Robert Browning is unerring in every sentence he writes of the Middle

Ages."

Among Mrs. Browning's poems, which, it needs hardly be said, are not

prevailingly "Gothic," there are three interesting experiments in ballad

romance: "The Romaunt of the Page," "The Lay of the Brown Rosary," and

"The Rime of the Duchess May." In all of these she avails herself of the

mediaeval atmosphere, simply to play variations on her favourite theme,

the devotedness of woman's love. The motive is the same as in poems of

modern life like "Bertha in the Lane" and "Aurora Leigh." The vehemence

of this nobly gifted woman, her nervous and sometimes almost hysterical

emotionalism, are not without a disagreeable quality. With greater range

and fervour, she had not the artistic poise of the Pre-Raphaelite

poetess, Christina Rossetti. In these romances, as elsewhere, she is

sometimes shrill and often mannerised. "The Romaunt of the Page" is the

tale of a lady who attends her knight to the Holy Land, disguised as a

page, and without his knowledge. She saves his life several times, and

finally at the cost of her own. A prophetic accompaniment or burden

comes in ever and anon in the distant chant of nuns over the dead abbess.

"Beati! beati mortui."

"The Lay of the Brown Rosary" is a charming but uneven piece, in four

parts and a variety of measures, about a girl who, while awaiting her

lover's return from the war, learns in a dream that she must die, and

purchases seven years of life from the ghost of a wicked nun whose body

has been immured in an old convent wall. The spirit gives the bride a

brown rosary which she wears under her dress, but her kiss kills the

bridegroom at the altar. The most spirited and well-sustained of these

ballad poems is "The Rime of the Duchess May," in which the heroine rides

off the battlements with her husband. "Toll slowly," runs the refrain.

Mrs. Browning employs some archaisms, such as _chapélle_, _chambére_,

_ladié_. The stories are seemingly of her own invention, and have not

quite the genuine accent of folk-song.

Even Matthew Arnold and Thomas Hood, representatives in their separate

spheres of anti-romantic tendencies, made occasional forays into the

Middle Ages. But who thinks of such things as "The Plea of the Midsummer

Fairies" or "The Two Peacocks of Bedfont" when Hood is mentioned; and not

rather of "The Bridge of Sighs" and "The Song of the Shirt"? Or who, in

spite of "Balder Dead" and "Tristram and Iseult," would classify Arnold's

clean-cut, reserved, delicately intellectual work as romantic? Hood was

an artist of the terrible as well as of the comic; witness his "Last

Man," "Haunted House," and "Dream of Eugene Aram." If he could have

welded the two moods into a more intimate union, and applied them to

legendary material, he might have been a great artist in mediaeval

grotesque--a species of Gothic Hoffman perhaps. As it is, his one

romantic success is the charming lyric "Fair Ines." His longer poems in

this kind, in modifications of _ottava rima_ or Spenserian stanza, show

Keats' influence very clearly. The imagery is profuse, but too distinct

and without the romantic _chiaroscuro_. "The Water Lady" is a manifest

imitation of "La Belle Dame sans Merci," and employs the same somewhat

unusual stanza form. Hood--incorrigible punster--who had his jest at

everything, jested at romance. He wrote ballad parodies--"The Knight and

the Dragon," etc.--and an ironical "Lament for the Decline of Chivalry":

"Well hast thou cried, departed Burke,

All chivalrous romantic work

Is ended now and past!

That iron age--which some have thought

Of mettle rather overwrought--

Is now all overcast."

And finally, "The Saint's Tragedy" (1848) of Charles Kingsley affords a

case in which mediaeval biography is made the pretext for an assault upon

mediaeval ideas. It is a _tendenz_ drama in five acts, founded upon the

"Life of St. Elizabeth of Hungary," as narrated by her contemporary,

Dietrich the Thuringian. Its militant Protestantism is such as might be

predicted from Kingsley's well-known resentment of the Romanist attitude

towards marriage and celibacy; from his regard for freedom of thought;

and from that distrust and contempt of Popish priestcraft which involved

him in his controversy with Newman. "The Middle Age," says the

Introduction, "was, in the gross, a coarse, barbarous, and profligate

age. . . . It was, in fact, the very ferocity and foulness of the time

which, by a natural revulsion, called forth at the same time the

Apostolic holiness and the Manichean asceticism of the mediaeval

saints. . . . So rough and common a life-picture of the Middle Age will,

I am afraid, whether faithful or not, be far from acceptable to those who

take their notions of that period principally from such exquisite dreams

as the fictions of Fouqué, and of certain moderns whose graceful

minds . . . are, on account of their very sweetness and simplicity,

singularly unfitted to convey any true likeness of the coarse and stormy

Middle Age. . . . But really, time enough has been lost in ignorant

abuse of that period, and time enough also, lately, in blind adoration of

it. When shall we learn to see it as it was?"

Polemic in its purpose and anti-Catholic in temper, "The Saint's Tragedy"

then seeks to dispel the glamour which romance had thrown over mediaeval

life. Kingsley's Middle Age is not the holy Middle Age of the German

"throne-and-altar" men; nor yet the picturesque Middle Age of Walter

Scott. It is the cruel, ignorant, fanatical Middle Age of "The Amber

Witch" and "The Succube." But Kingsley was too much of a poet not to

feel those "last enchantments" which whispered to Arnold from Oxford

towers, maugre his "strong sense of the irrationality of that period."

The saintly, as well as the human side, of Elizabeth's character is

portrayed with sympathy, though poetically the best thing in the drama

are the songs of the Crusaders.

Kingsley, in effect, was always good at a ballad. His finest work in

this kind is modern, "The Last Buccaneer," "The Sands of Dee," "The Three

Fishers," and the like. But there are the same fire and swing in many of

his romantic ballads on historical or legendary subjects, such as "The

Swan-Neck," "The Red King," "Ballad of Earl Haldan's Daughter," "The Song

of the Little Baltung," and a dozen more. Without the imaginative

witchery of Coleridge, Keats, and Rossetti, in the ballad of action

Kingsley ranks very close to Scott. The same manly delight in outdoor

life and bold adventure, love of the old Teutonic freedom and strong

feeling of English nationality inspire his historical romances, only one

of which, however, "Hereward the Wake" (1866), has to do with the period

of the Middle Ages.

[1] "It is almost superfluous to mention that the appellation 'Childe,'

as 'Childe Waters,' 'Childe Childers,' etc., is used as more consonant

with the old structure of versification which I have adopted."--Preface

to "Childe Harold." Byron appeals to a letter of Beattie relating to

"The Minstrel," to justify his choice of the stanza.

[2] See vol. i., p. 98.

[3] For Byron's and Shelley's dealings with Dante, _vide supra_, pp.

99-102.

[4] For the type of prose romance essayed by Shelley, see Vol. i., p. 403.

[5] "Mary, the Maid of the Inn."

[6] Duran's great collection, begun in 1828, embraces nearly two thousand

pieces.

[7] It is hardly necessary to mention early English translations of

"Palmerin of England" (1616) and "Amadis de Gaul" (1580), or to point out

the influence of Montemayor's "Diana Enamorada" upon Sidney, Shakspere,

and English pastoral romance in general.

[8] "The English and Scotch ballads, with which they may most naturally

be compared, belong to a ruder state of society, where a personal

violence and coarseness prevailed which did not, indeed, prevent the

poetry it produced from being full of energy, and sometimes of

tenderness; but which necessarily had less dignity and elevation than

belong to the character, if not the condition, of a people who, like the

Spanish, were for centuries engaged in a contest ennobled by a sense of

religion and loyalty--a contest which could not fail sometimes to raise

the minds and thoughts of those engaged in it far above such an

atmosphere as settled round the bloody feuds of rival barons or the gross

maraudings of a border warfare. The truth of this will at once be felt,

if we compare the striking series of ballads on Robin Hood with those on

the Cid and Bernardo de Carpio; or if we compare the deep tragedy of Edom

O'Gordon with that of the Conde Alarcos; or, what would be better than

either, if we should sit down to the 'Romancero General,' with its

poetical confusion of Moorish splendours and Christian loyalty, just when

we have come fresh from Percy's 'Reliques' or Scott's 'Minstrelsy'."

("History of Spanish Literature," George Ticknor, vol. i., p. 141, third

American ed., 1866). The "Romancero General" was the great collection of

some thousand ballads and lyrics published in 1602-14.

[9] "The Ancient Ballads of Spain." R. Ford, in Edinburgh Review, No.

146.

[10] "A History of Spanish Literature." By James Fitz-Maurice Kelly, New

York, 1898, pp. 366-67.

[11] _Ibid._, pp. 368-73.

[12] Kelly, p. 270.

[13] The collection of Sanchez (1779) is described as an imitation of the

"Reliques" (Edinburgh Review, No. 146).

[14] He preferred, however, Sir Edmund Head's rendering of the ballad

"Lady Alda's Dream" to Lockhart's version.

[15] Scott and Motherwell never met in person.

[16] Mr. Churton Collins thinks that the lines in "Guinevere"--

"Down in the cellars merry bloated things

Shouldered the spigot, straddling on the butts

While the wine ran"--

was suggested by Croker's description of the Cluricaune. ("Illustrations

of Tennyson" (1891), p. 152.)

[17] "The Fairies." William Allingham.

[18] See vol. i., p. 314. Dr. Joyce was for some years a resident of

Boston, where his "Ballads of Irish Chivalry" were published in 1872.

His "Deirdré" received high praise from J. R. Lowell. Tennyson's "Voyage

of Maeldune" (1880) probably had its source in Dr. P. W. Joyce's "Old

Celtic Romances" (1879) (Collins' "Illustrations of Tennyson," p. 163).

Swinburne pronounced Ferguson's "Welshmen of Tirawley" one of the best of

modern ballads.

[19] For a survey of this department of romantic literature the reader is

referred to "A Treasury of Irish Poetry in the English Tongue." Edited

by Stopford A. Brooke and T. W. Rolleston (New York, 1900). There are a

quite astonishing beauty and force in many of the pieces in this

collection, though some of the editors' claims seem excessive; as,

_e.g._, that Mr. Yeats is "the first of living writers in the English

language."

[20] Robert Stephen Hawker was vicar of Morwenstow, near "wild Tintagil

by the Cornish Sea," where Tennyson visited him in 1848. Hawker himself

made contributions to Arthurian poetry, "Queen Gwynnevar's Round" and

"The Quest of the Sangreal" (1864). He was converted to the Roman

Catholic faith on his death-bed.

[21] Given in Palgrave's "Golden Treasury," second series. Rossetti

wrote of Dobell's ballad in 1868: "I have always regarded that poem as

being one of the finest, of its length, in any modern poet; ranking with

Keats' 'La Belle Dame sans Merci' and the other masterpieces of the

condensed and hinted order so dear to imaginative minds." The use of the

family name Keith in Rossetti's "Rose Mary" was a coincidence. His poem

was published (1854) some years before Dobell's. He thought of

substituting some other name for Keith, but could find none to suit him,

and so retained it.

[22] _Cf._ Matthew Arnold's "St. Brandan," suggested by a passage in the

old Irish "Voyage of Bran." The traitor Judas is allowed to come up from

hell and cool himself on an iceberg every Christmas night because he had

once given his cloak to a leper in the streets of Joppa.

[23] "Ballads and Songs," London, 1895.

[24] "New Ballads," London, 1897.

[25] "Victorian Poets." By E. C. Stedman. New York, 1886 (tenth ed.),

p. 155.

[26] This famous lyric, one of the "inserted" songs in "The Princess,"

was inspired by the note of a bugle on the Lakes of Killarney.

[27] See vol. i., pp. 146-47. Dryden, like Milton, had designs upon

Arthur. See introduction to the first canto of "Marmion":

"--Dryden, in immortal strain,

Had raised the Table Round again,

But that a ribald king and court

Bade him toil on, to make them sport."

[28] For a discussion of these and similar matters and a bibliography of

Arthurian literature, the reader should consult Dr. H. Oskar Sommer's

scholarly reprint and critical edition of "Le Morte Darthur. By Syr

Thomas Malory," three vols., London, 1889-91.

[29] Two of them, however, had been printed privately in 1857 under the

title of "Enid and Nimuë": the true and the false. "Nimuë" was the first

form of Vivien.

[30] Matthew Arnold writes in one of his letters; "I have a strong sense

of the irrationality of that period [the Middle Ages] and of the utter

folly of those who take it seriously and play at restoring it; still it

has poetically the greatest charm and refreshment possible for me. The

fault I find with Tennyson, in his 'Idylls of the King,' is that the

peculiar charm of the Middle Age he does not give in them. There is

something magical about it, and I will do something with it before I have

done."