FROM THE FRENCH REVOLUTION TO THE DEATH OF SCOTT.
1789-1832.
The burst of creative activity at the opening of the 19th century has but
one parallel in English literary history, namely, the somewhat similar
flowering out of the national genius in the time of Elisabeth and the
first two Stuart kings. The later age gave birth to no supreme poets,
like Shakspere and Milton. It produced no _Hamlet_ and no _Paradise
Lost_; but it offers a greater number of important writers, a higher
average of excellence, and a wider range and variety of literary work
than any preceding era. Wordsworth, Coleridge, Scott, Byron, Shelley,
and Keats are all great names; while Southey, Landor, Moore, Lamb, and De
Quincey would be noteworthy figures at any period, and deserve a fuller
mention than can be here accorded them. But in so crowded a generation,
selection becomes increasingly needful, and in the present chapter,
accordingly, the emphasis will be laid upon the first-named group as not
only the most important, but the most representative of the various
tendencies of their time.
{223}
The conditions of literary work in this century have been almost unduly
stimulating. The rapid advance in population, wealth, education, and the
means of communication has vastly increased the number of readers. Every
one who has any thing to say can say it in print, and is sure of some
sort of a hearing. A special feature of the time is the multiplication
of periodicals. The great London dailies, like the _Times_ and the
_Morning Post_, which were started during the last quarter of the 18th
century, were something quite new in journalism. The first of the modern
reviews, the _Edinburgh_, was established in 1802, as the organ of the
Whig party in Scotland. This was followed by the _London Quarterly_, in
1808, and by _Blackwood's Magazine_, in 1817, both in the Tory interest.
The first editor of the _Edinburgh_ was Francis Jeffrey, who assembled
about him a distinguished corps of contributors, including the versatile
Henry Brougham, afterward a great parliamentary orator and
lord-chancellor of England, and the Rev. Sydney Smith, whose witty
sayings are still current. The first editor of the _Quarterly_ was
William Gifford, a satirist, who wrote the _Baviad_ and _Maeviad_ in
ridicule of literary affectations. He was succeeded in 1824 by James
Gibson Lockhart, the son-in-law of Walter Scott, and the author of an
excellent _Life of Scott_. _Blackwood's_ was edited by John Wilson,
Professor of Moral Philosophy in the University of Edinburgh, who, under
the pen-name of "Christopher North," contributed to his magazine a series
{224} of brilliant, imaginary dialogues between famous characters of the
day, entitled _Noctes Ambrosianae_, because they were supposed to take
place at Ambrose's tavern in Edinburgh. These papers were full of a
profuse, headlong eloquence, of humor, literary criticism, and
personalities interspersed with songs expressive of a roystering and
convivial Toryism and an uproarious contempt for Whigs and cockneys.
These reviews and magazines, and others which sprang up beside them,
became the _nuclei_ about which the wit and scholarship of both parties
gathered. Political controversy under the Regency and the reign of
George IV. was thus carried on more regularly by permanent organs, and no
longer so largely by privateering, in the shape of pamphlets, like
Swift's _Public Spirit of the Whigs_, Johnson's _Taxation No Tyranny_,
and Burke's _Reflections on the Revolution in France_. Nor did politics
by any means usurp the columns of the reviews. Literature, art, science,
the whole circle of human effort and achievement passed under review.
_Blackwood's_, _Fraser's_, and the other monthlies, published stories,
poetry, criticism, and correspondence--every thing, in short, which
enters into the make-up of our magazines to-day, except illustrations.
Two main influences, of foreign origin, have left their trace in the
English writers of the first thirty years of the 19th century, the one
communicated by contact with the new German literature of the latter half
of the 18th century, and in particular {225} with the writings of Goethe,
Schiller, and Kant; the other springing from the events of the French
Revolution. The influence of German upon English literature in the 19th
century was more intellectual and less formal than that of the Italian in
the 16th and of the French in the 18th. In other words, the German
writers furnished the English with ideas and ways of feeling rather than
with models of style. Goethe and Schiller did not become subjects for
literary imitation as Moliere, Racine, and Boileau had become in Pope's
time. It was reserved for a later generation and for Thomas Carlyle to
domesticate the diction of German prose. But the nature and extent of
this influence can, perhaps, best be noted when we come to take up the
authors of the time one by one.
The excitement caused by the French Revolution was something more obvious
and immediate. When the Bastile fell, in 1789, the enthusiasm among the
friends of liberty and human progress in England was hardly less intense
than in France. It was the dawn of a new day: the shackles were stricken
from the slave; all men were free and all men were brothers, and radical
young England sent up a shout that echoed the roar of the Paris mob.
Wordsworth's lines on the _Fall of the Bastile_, Coleridge's _Fall of
Robespierre_ and _Ode to France_, and Southey's revolutionary drama, _Wat
Tyler_, gave expression to the hopes and aspirations of the English
democracy. In after life Wordsworth, looking back regretfully to those
years of promise, {226} wrote his poem on the _French Revolution as it
appeared to Enthusiasts at its Commencement_.
"Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive,
But to be young was very heaven. Oh times
In which the meager, stale, forbidding ways
Of custom, law, and statute took at once
The attraction of a country in romance."
Those were the days in which Wordsworth, then an under-graduate at
Cambridge, spent a college vacation in tramping through France, landing
at Calais on the eve of the very day (July 14, 1790) on which Louis XVI.
signalized the anniversary of the fall of the Bastile by taking the oath
of fidelity to the new Constitution. In the following year Wordsworth
revisited France, where he spent thirteen months, forming an intimacy
with the republican general, Beaupuis, at Orleans, and reaching Paris not
long after the September massacres of 1792. Those were the days, too, in
which young Southey and young Coleridge, having married sisters at
Bristol, were planning a "Pantisocracy," or ideal community, on the banks
of the Susquehannah, and denouncing the British government for going to
war with the French Republic. This group of poets, who had met one
another first in the south of England, came afterward to be called the
Lake Poets, from their residence in the mountainous lake country of
Westmoreland and Cumberland, with which their names, and that of
Wordsworth, especially, are forever associated. The so-called "Lakers"
{227} did not, properly speaking, constitute a school of poetry. They
differed greatly from one another in mind and art. But they were
connected by social ties and by religious and political sympathies. The
excesses of the French Revolution, and the usurpation of Napoleon
disappointed them, as it did many other English liberals, and drove them
into the ranks of the reactionaries. Advancing years brought
conservatism, and they became in time loyal Tories and orthodox Churchmen.
William Wordsworth (1770-1850), the chief of the three, and, perhaps, on
the whole, the greatest English poet since Milton, published his _Lyrical
Ballads_ in 1798. The volume contained a few pieces by his friend
Coleridge--among them the _Ancient Mariner_--and its appearance may
fairly be said to mark an epoch in the history of English poetry.
Wordsworth regarded himself as a reformer of poetry; and in the preface
to the second volume of _Lyrical Ballads_, he defended the theory on
which they were composed. His innovations were twofold, in
subject-matter, and in diction. "The principal object which I proposed
to myself in these poems," he said, "was to choose incidents and
situations from common life. Low and rustic life was generally chosen,
because, in that condition, the essential passions of the heart find a
better soil in which they can attain their maturity . . . and are
incorporated with the beautiful and permanent forms of nature."
Wordsworth discarded, in theory, the poetic diction of his predecessors,
{228} and professed to use "a selection of the real language of men in a
state of vivid sensation." He adopted, he said, the language of men in
rustic life, "because such men hourly communicate with the best objects
from which the best part of language is originally derived."
In the matter of poetic diction Wordsworth did not, in his practice,
adhere to the doctrine of this preface. Many of his most admired poems,
such as the _Lines written near Tintern Abbey_, the great _Ode on the
Intimations of Immortality_, the _Sonnets_, and many parts of his longest
poems, _The Excursion_ and _The Prelude_, deal with philosophic thought
and highly intellectualized emotions. In all of these and in many others
the language is rich, stately, involved, and as remote from the "real
language" of Westmoreland shepherds, as is the epic blank verse of
Milton. On the other hand, in those of his poems which were consciously
written in illustration of his theory, the affectation of simplicity,
coupled with a defective sense of humor, sometimes led him to the
selection of vulgar and trivial themes, and the use of language which is
bald, childish, or even ludicrous. His simplicity is too often the
simplicity of Mother Goose rather than of Chaucer. Instances of this
occur in such poems as _Peter Bell_, the _Idiot Boy_, _Goody Blake and
Harry Gill_, _Simon Lee_, and the _Wagoner_. But there are multitudes of
Wordsworth's ballads and lyrics which are simple without being silly, and
which, in their homeliness and clear {229} profundity, in their
production of the strongest effects by the fewest strokes, are among the
choicest modern examples of _pure_, as distinguished from decorated, art.
Such are (out of many) _Ruth_, _Lucy_, _A Portrait, To a Highland Girl_,
_The Reverie of Poor Susan_, _To the Cuckoo_, _The Reaper_, _We Are
Seven_, _The Pet Lamb_, _The Fountain_, _The Two April Mornings_, _The
Leech Gatherer_, _The Thorn_, and _Yarrow Revisited_.
Wordsworth was something of a Quaker in poetry, and loved the sober drabs
and grays of life. Quietism was his literary religion, and the
sensational was to him not merely vulgar, but almost wicked. "The human
mind," he wrote, "is capable of being excited without the application of
gross and violent stimulants." He disliked the far-fetched themes and
high-colored style of Scott and Byron. He once told Landor that all of
Scott's poetry together was not worth sixpence. From action and passion
he turned away to sing the inward life of the soul and the outward life
of Nature. He said:
"To me the meanest flower that blows can give
Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears."
And again:
"Long have I loved what I behold,
The night that calms, the day that cheers;
The common growth of mother earth
Suffices me--her tears, her mirth,
Her humblest mirth and tears."
Wordsworth's life was outwardly uneventful. The companionship of the
mountains and of his {230} own thoughts; the sympathy of his household;
the lives of the dalesmen and cottagers about him furnished him with all
the stimulus that he required.
"Love had he found in huts where poor men lie:
His only teachers had been woods and rills,
The silence that is in the starry sky,
The sleep that is among the lonely hills."
He read little, but reflected much, and made poetry daily, composing, by
preference, out of doors, and dictating his verses to some member of his
family. His favorite amanuensis was his sister Dorothy, a woman of fine
gifts, to whom Wordsworth was indebted for some of his happiest
inspirations. She was the subject of the poem beginning "Her eyes are
wild," and her charming _Memorials of a Tour in the Scottish Highlands_
records the origin of many of her brother's best poems. Throughout life
Wordsworth was remarkably self-centered. The ridicule of the reviewers,
against which he gradually made his way to public recognition, never
disturbed his serene belief in himself, or in the divine message which he
felt himself commissioned to deliver. He was a slow and serious person,
a preacher as well as a poet, with a certain rigidity, not to say
narrowness, of character. That plastic temperament which we associate
with poetic genius Wordsworth either did not possess, or it hardened
early. Whole sides of life were beyond the range of his sympathies. He
{231} touched life at fewer points than Byron and Scott, but touched it
more profoundly. It is to him that we owe the phrase "plain living and
high thinking," as also a most noble illustration of it in his own
practice. His was the wisest and deepest spirit among the English poets
of his generation, though hardly the most poetic. He wrote too much,
and, attempting to make every petty incident or reflection the occasion
of a poem, he finally reached the point of composing verses _On Seeing a
Harp in the shape of a Needle Case_, and on other themes more worthy of
Mrs. Sigourney. In parts of his long blank-verse poems, _The Excursion_,
1814, and _The Prelude_--which was printed after his death in 1850,
though finished as early as 1806--the poetry wears very thin and its
place is taken by prosaic, tedious didacticism. These two poems were
designed as portions of a still more extended work, _The Recluse_, which
was never completed. _The Excursion_ consists mainly of philosophical
discussions on nature and human life between a school-master, a solitary,
and an itinerant peddler. _The Prelude_ describes the development of
Wordsworth's own genius. In parts of _The Excursion_ the diction is
fairly Shaksperian.
"The good die first,
And they whose hearts are dry as summer dust
Burn to the socket."
A passage not only beautiful in itself, but dramatically true, in the
mouth of the bereaved mother {232} who utters it, to that human instinct
which generalizes a private sorrow into a universal law. Much of _The
Prelude_ can hardly be called poetry at all, yet some of Wordsworth's
loftiest poetry is buried among its dreary wastes, and now and then, in
the midst of commonplaces, comes a flash of Miltonic splendor--like
"Golden cities ten months' journey deep
Among Tartarian wilds."
Wordsworth is, above all things, the poet of Nature. In this province he
was not without forerunners. To say nothing of Burns and Cowper, there
was George Crabbe, who had published his _Village_ in 1783--fifteen years
before the _Lyrical Ballads_--and whose last poem, _Tales of the Hall_,
came out in 1819, five years after _The Excursion_. Byron called Crabbe
"Nature's sternest painter, and her best." He was a minutely accurate
delineator of the harsher aspects of rural life. He photographs a Gypsy
camp; a common, with its geese and donkey; a salt marsh, a shabby village
street, or tumble-down manse. But neither Crabbe nor Cowper has the
imaginative lift of Wordsworth,
"The light that never was on sea or land
The consecration and the poet's dream."
In a note on a couplet in one of his earliest poems, descriptive of an
oak tree standing dark against the sunset, Wordsworth says: "I recollect
distinctly the very spot where this struck me. {233} The moment was
important in my poetical history, for I date from it my consciousness of
the infinite variety of natural appearances which had been unnoticed by
the poets of any age or country, and I made a resolution to supply, in
some degree, the deficiency." In later life he is said to have been
impatient of any thing spoken or written by another about mountains,
conceiving himself to have a monopoly of "the power of hills." But
Wordsworth did not stop with natural description. Matthew Arnold has
said that the office of modern poetry is the "moral interpretation of
Nature." Such, at any rate, was Wordsworth's office. To him Nature was
alive and divine. He felt, under the veil of phenomena,
"A presence that disturbs me with the joy
Of elevated thought: a sense sublime
Of something far more deeply interfused."
He approached, if he did not actually reach, the view of Pantheism, which
identifies God with Nature; and the mysticism of the Idealists, who
identify Nature with the soul of man. This tendency was not inspired in
Wordsworth by German philosophy. He was no metaphysician. In his
rambles with Coleridge about Nether Stowey and Alfoxden, when both were
young, they had, indeed, discussed Spinoza. And in the autumn of 1798,
after the publication of the _Lyrical Ballads_, the two friends went
together to Germany, where Wordsworth spent half a year. But the
literature {234} and philosophy of Germany made little direct impression
upon Wordsworth. He disliked Goethe, and he quoted with approval the
saying of the poet Klopstock, whom he met at Hamburg, that he placed the
romanticist Burger above both Goethe and Schiller.
It was through Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834), who was pre-eminently
the _thinker_ among the literary men of his generation, that the new
German thought found its way into England. During the fourteen months
which he spent in Germany--chiefly at Ratzburg and Goettingen--he had
familiarized himself with the transcendental philosophy of Immanuel Kant
and of his continuators, Fichte and Schelling, as well as with the
general literature of Germany. On his return to England, he published,
in 1800, a free translation of Schiller's _Wallenstein_, and through his
writings, and more especially through his conversations, he became the
conductor by which German philosophic ideas reached the English literary
class.
Coleridge described himself as being from boyhood a book-worm and a
day-dreamer. He remained through life an omnivorous, though
unsystematic, reader. He was helpless in practical affairs, and his
native indolence and procrastination were increased by his indulgence in
the opium habit. On his return to England, in 1800, he went to reside at
Keswick, in the Lake Country, with his brother-in-law, Southey, whose
industry supported both families. During his last nineteen {235} years
Coleridge found an asylum under the roof of Mr. James Gilman, of
Highgate, near London, whither many of the best young men in England were
accustomed to resort to listen to Coleridge's wonderful talk. Talk,
indeed, was the medium through which he mainly influenced his generation.
It cost him an effort to put his thoughts on paper. His _Table
Talk_--crowded with pregnant paragraphs--was taken down from his lips by
his nephew, Henry Coleridge. His criticisms of Shakspere are nothing but
notes, made here and there, from a course of lectures delivered before
the Royal Institute, and never fully written out. Though only hints and
suggestions, they are, perhaps, the most penetrative and helpful
Shaksperian criticism in English. He was always forming projects and
abandoning them. He projected a great work on Christian philosophy,
which was to have been his _magnum opus_, but he never wrote it. He
projected an epic poem on the fall of Jerusalem. "I schemed it at
twenty-five," he said, "but, alas! _venturum expectat_." What bade fair
to be his best poem, _Christabel_, is a fragment. Another strangely
beautiful poem, _Kubla Khan_--which came to him, he said, in sleep--is
even more fragmentary. And the most important of his prose remains, his
_Biographia Literaria_, 1817, a history of his own opinions, breaks off
abruptly.
It was in his suggestiveness that Coleridge's great service to posterity
resided. He was what J. S. Mill called a "seminal mind," and his thought
{236} had that power of stimulating thought in others, which is the mark
and the privilege of original genius. Many a man has owed to some
sentence of Coleridge's, if not the awakening in himself of a new
intellectual life, at least the starting of fruitful trains of reflection
which have modified his whole view of certain great subjects. On every
thing that he left is set the stamp of high mental authority. He was
not, perhaps, primarily, he certainly was not exclusively, a poet. In
theology, in philosophy, in political thought, and literary criticism, he
set currents flowing which are flowing yet. The terminology of
criticism, for example, is in his debt for many of those convenient
distinctions--such as that between genius and talent, between wit and
humor, between fancy and imagination--which are familiar enough now, but
which he first introduced, or enforced. His definitions and apothegms we
meet every-where. Such are, for example, the sayings: "Every man is born
an Aristotelian or a Platonist." "Prose is words in their best order;
poetry, the best words in the best order." And among the bits of subtle
interpretation, that abound in his writings, may be mentioned his
estimate of Wordsworth, in the _Biographia Literaria_, and his sketch of
Hamlet's character--one with which he was personally in strong
sympathy--in the _Lectures on Shakspere_.
The Broad-Church party, in the English Church, among whose most eminent
exponents have been Frederic Robertson, Arnold of Rugby, {237} F. D.
Maurice, Charles Kingsley, and the late Dean Stanley, traces its
intellectual origin to Coleridge's _Aids to Reflection_; to his writings
and conversations in general, and particularly to his ideal of a national
Clerisy, as set forth in his essay on _Church and State_. In politics,
as in religion, Coleridge's conservatism represents the reaction against
the destructive spirit of the eighteenth century and the French
revolution. To this root-and-branch democracy he opposed the view, that
every old belief, or institution, such as the throne or the Church, had
served some need, and had a rational idea at the bottom of it, to which
it might be again recalled, and made once more a benefit to society,
instead of a curse and an anachronism.
As a poet, Coleridge has a sure, though slender, hold upon immortal fame.
No English poet has "sung so wildly well" as the singer of _Christabel_
and the _Ancient Mariner_. The former of these is, in form, a romance in
a variety of meters, and in substance, a tale of supernatural possession,
by which a lovely and innocent maiden is brought under the control of a
witch. Though unfinished and obscure in intention, it haunts the
imagination with a mystic power. Byron had seen _Christabel_ in MS., and
urged Coleridge to publish it. He hated all the "Lakers," but when, on
parting from Lady Byron, he wrote his song,
"Fare thee well, and if forever,
Still forever fare thee well,"
{238} he prefixed to it the noble lines from Coleridge's poem, beginning
"Alas! they had been friends in youth."
In that weird ballad, the _Ancient Mariner_, the supernatural is handled
with even greater subtlety than in _Christabel_. The reader is led to
feel that amid the loneliness of the tropic sea, the line between the
earthly and the unearthly vanishes, and the poet leaves him to discover
for himself whether the spectral shapes that the mariner saw were merely
the visions of the calenture, or a glimpse of the world of spirits.
Coleridge is one of our most perfect metrists. The poet Swinburne--than
whom there can be no higher authority on this point (though he is rather
given to exaggeration)--pronounces _Kubla Khan_, "for absolute melody and
splendor, the first poem in the language."
Robert Southey, the third member of this group, was a diligent worker and
one of the most voluminous of English writers. As a poet, he was lacking
in inspiration, and his big Oriental epics, _Thalaba_, 1801, and the
_Curse of Kehama_, 1810, are little better than wax-work. Of his
numerous works in prose, the _Life of Nelson_ is, perhaps, the best, and
is an excellent biography.
Several other authors were more or less closely associated with the Lake
Poets by residence or social affiliation. John Wilson, the editor of
_Blackwood's_, lived for some time, when a young man, at Elleray, on the
banks of Windermere. He was an {239} athletic man of out-door habits, an
enthusiastic sportsman, and a lover of natural scenery. His admiration
of Wordsworth was thought to have led him to imitation of the latter, in
his _Isle of Palms_, 1812, and his other poetry.
One of Wilson's companions, in his mountain walks, was Thomas De Quincey,
who had been led by his reverence for Wordsworth and Coleridge to take up
his residence, in 1808, at Grasmere, where he occupied for many years the
cottage from which Wordsworth had removed to Allan Bank. De Quincey was
a shy, bookish little man, of erratic, nocturnal habits, who impresses
one, personally, as a child of genius, with a child's helplessness and a
child's sharp observation. He was, above all things, a magazinist. All
his writings, with one exception, appeared first in the shape of
contributions to periodicals; and his essays, literary criticisms, and
miscellaneous papers are exceedingly rich and varied. The most famous of
them was his _Confessions of an English Opium Eater_, published as a
serial in the _London Magazine_, in 1821. He had begun to take opium, as
a cure for the toothache, when a student at Oxford, where he resided from
1803 to 1808. By 1816 he had risen to eight thousand drops of laudanum a
day. For several years after this he experienced the acutest misery, and
his will suffered an entire paralysis. In 1821 he succeeded in reducing
his dose to a comparatively small allowance, and in shaking off his
torpor so as to become capable of literary work. {240} The most
impressive effect of the opium habit was seen in his dreams, in the
unnatural expansion of space and time, and the infinite repetition of the
same objects. His sleep was filled with dim, vast images; measureless
cavalcades deploying to the sound of orchestral music; an endless
succession of vaulted halls, with staircases climbing to heaven, up which
toiled eternally the same solitary figure. "Then came sudden alarms,
hurrying to and fro; trepidations of innumerable fugitives; darkness and
light; tempest and human faces." Many of De Quincey's papers were
autobiographical, but there is always something baffling in these
reminiscences. In the interminable wanderings of his pen--for which,
perhaps, opium was responsible--he appears to lose all trace of facts or
of any continuous story. Every actual experience of his life seems to
have been taken up into a realm of dream, and there distorted till the
reader sees not the real figures, but the enormous, grotesque shadows of
them, executing wild dances on a screen. An instance of this process is
described by himself in his _Vision of Sudden Death_. But his
unworldliness and faculty of vision-seeing were not inconsistent with the
keenness of judgment and the justness and delicacy of perception
displayed in his _Biographical Sketches_ of Wordsworth, Coleridge, and
other contemporaries: in his critical papers on _Pope, Milton, Lessing,
Homer and the Homeridae_: his essay on _Style_; and his _Brief Appraisal
of the Greek Literature_. His curious scholarship is seen in his
articles on the _Toilet of a {241} Hebrew Lady_, and the _Casuistry of
Roman Meals_; his ironical and somewhat elaborate humor in his essay on
_Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts_. Of his narrative pieces the
most remarkable is his _Revolt of the Tartars_, describing the flight of
a Kalmuck tribe of six hundred thousand souls from Russia to the Chinese
frontier: a great hegira or anabasis, which extended for four thousand
miles over desert steppes infested with foes; occupied six months' time,
and left nearly half of the tribe dead upon the way. The subject was
suited to De Quincey's imagination. It was like one of his own opium
visions, and he handled it with a dignity and force which make the
history not altogether unworthy of comparison with Thucydides's great
chapter on the Sicilian Expedition.
An intimate friend of Southey was Walter Savage Landor, a man of kingly
nature, of a leonine presence, with a most stormy and unreasonable
temper, and yet with the courtliest graces of manner and with--said
Emerson--a "wonderful brain, despotic, violent, and inexhaustible." He
inherited wealth, and lived a great part of his life at Florence, where
he died, in 1864, in his ninetieth year. Dickens, who knew him at Bath,
in the latter part of his life, made a kindly caricature of him as
Lawrence Boythom, in _Bleak House_, whose "combination of superficial
ferocity and inherent tenderness," testifies Henry Crabb Robinson, in his
_Diary_, was true to the life. Landor is the most purely classical of
English writers. Not merely his themes {242} but his whole way of
thinking was pagan and antique. He composed, indifferently, in English
or Latin, preferring the latter, if any thing, in obedience to his
instinct for compression and exclusiveness. Thus portions of his
narrative poem, _Gebir_, 1798, were written originally in Latin, and he
added a Latin version, _Gebirius_, to the English edition. In like
manner his _Hellenics_, 1847, were mainly translations from his Latin
_Idyllia Heroica_, written years before. The Hellenic clearness and
repose which were absent from his life, Landor sought in his art. His
poems, in their restraint, their objectivity, their aloofness from modern
feeling, have something chill and artificial. The verse of poets like
Byron and Wordsworth is alive; the blood runs in it. But Landor's
polished, clean-cut _intaglios_ have been well described as "written in
marble." He was a master of fine and solid prose. His _Pericles and
Aspasia_ consists of a series of letters passing between the great
Athenian demagogue, the hetaira, Aspasia, her friend, Cleone of Miletus,
Anaxagorus, the philosopher, and Pericles's nephew, Alcibiades. In this
masterpiece the intellectual life of Athens, at its period of highest
refinement, is brought before the reader with singular vividness, and he
is made to breathe an atmosphere of high-bred grace, delicate wit, and
thoughtful sentiment, expressed in English "of Attic choice." The
_Imaginary Conversations_, 1824-1846, were Platonic dialogues between a
great variety of historical characters; between, for example, Dante and
Beatrice, Washington {243} and Franklin, Queen Elisabeth and Cecil,
Xenophon and Cyrus the Younger, Bonaparte and the President of the
Senate. Landor's writings have never been popular; they address an
aristocracy of scholars; and Byron--whom Landor disliked and considered
vulgar--sneered at the latter as a writer who "cultivated much private
renown in the shape of Latin verses." He said of himself that he "never
contended with a contemporary, but walked alone on the far eastern
uplands, meditating and remembering."
A schoolmate of Coleridge, at Christ's Hospital, and his friend and
correspondent through life, was Charles Lamb, one of the most charming of
English essayists. He was an old bachelor, who lived alone with his
sister Mary a lovable and intellectual woman, but subject to recurring
attacks of madness. Lamb was "a notched and cropped scrivener, a votary
of the desk," a clerk, that is, in the employ of the East India Company.
He was of antiquarian tastes, an ardent play-goer, a lover of whist and
of the London streets; and these tastes are reflected in his _Essays of
Elia_, contributed to the _London Magazine_ and reprinted in book form in
1823. From his mousing among the Elisabethan dramatists and such old
humorists as Burton and Fuller, his own style imbibed a peculiar
quaintness and pungency. His _Specimens of English Dramatic Poets_,
1808, is admirable for its critical insight. In 1802 he paid a visit to
Coleridge at Keswick, in the Lake Country; but he felt or {244} affected
a whimsical horror of the mountains, and said, "Fleet Street and the
Strand are better places to live in." Among the best of his essays are
_Dream Children_, _Poor Relations_, _The Artificial Comedy of the Last
Century_, _Old China_, _Roast Pig_, _A Defense of Chimney-sweeps_, _A
Complaint of the Decay of Beggars in the Metropolis_, and _The Old
Benchers of the Inner Temple_.
The romantic movement, preluded by Gray, Collins, Chatterton, Macpherson,
and others, culminated in Walter Scott (1771-1832). His passion for the
medieval was first excited by reading Percy's _Reliques_, when he was a
boy; and in one of his school themes he maintained that Ariosto was a
greater poet than Homer. He began early to collect manuscript ballads,
suits of armor, pieces of old plate, border-horns, and similar relics.
He learned Italian in order to read the romancers--Ariosto, Tasso, Pulci,
and Boiardo, preferring them to Dante. He studied Gothic architecture,
heraldry, and the art of fortification, and made drawings of famous ruins
and battle-fields. In particular he read eagerly every thing that he
could lay hands on relating to the history, legends, and antiquities of
the Scottish border--the vale of Tweed, Teviotdale, Ettrick Forest, and
the Yarrow, of all which land he became the laureate, as Burns had been
of Ayrshire and the "West Country." Scott, like Wordsworth, was an
out-door poet. He spent much time in the saddle, and was fond of horses,
dogs, hunting, and salmon-fishing. He had a keen {245} eye for the
beauties of natural scenery, though "more especially," he admits, "when
combined with ancient ruins or remains of our forefathers' piety or
splendor." He had the historic imagination, and, in creating the
historical novel, he was the first to throw a poetic glamour over
European annals. In 1803 Wordsworth visited Scott at Lasswade, near
Edinburgh; and Scott afterward returned the visit at Grasmere.
Wordsworth noted that his guest was "full of anecdote and averse from
disquisition." The Englishman was a moralist and much given to
"disquisition," while the Scotchman was, above all things, a _raconteur_,
and, perhaps, on the whole, the foremost of British story-tellers.
Scott's Toryism, too, was of a different stripe from Wordsworth's, being
rather the result of sentiment and imagination than of philosophy and
reflection. His mind struck deep root in the past; his local attachments
and family pride were intense. Abbotsford was his darling, and the
expenses of this domain and of the baronial hospitality which he there
extended to all comers were among the causes of his bankruptcy. The
enormous toil which he exacted of himself, to pay off the debt of 117,000
pounds, contracted by the failure of his publishers, cost him his life.
It is said that he was more gratified when the Prince Regent created him
a baronet, in 1820, than by all the public recognition that he acquired
as the author of the Waverley Novels.
Scott was attracted by the romantic side of {246} German literature. His
first published poem was a translation made in 1796 from Burger's wild
ballad, _Leonora_. He followed this up with versions of the same poet's
_Wilde Jaeger_, of Goethe's violent drama of feudal life, _Goetz Van
Berlichingen_, and with other translations from the German, of a similar
class. On his horseback trips through the border, where he studied the
primitive manners of the Liddesdale people, and took down old ballads
from the recitation of ancient dames and cottagers, he amassed the
materials for his _Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border_, 1802. But the
first of his original poems was the _Lay of the Last Minstrel_, published
in 1805, and followed, in quick succession, by _Marmion_, the _Lady of
the Lake_, _Rokeby_, the _Lord of the Isles_, and a volume of ballads and
lyrical pieces, all issued during the years 1806-1814. The popularity
won by this series of metrical romances was immediate and wide-spread.
Nothing so fresh, or so brilliant, had appeared in English poetry for
nearly two centuries. The reader was hurried along through scenes of
rapid action, whose effect was heightened by wild landscapes and
picturesque manners. The pleasure was a passive one. There was no deep
thinking to perplex, no subtler beauties to pause upon; the feelings were
stirred pleasantly, but not deeply; the effect was on the surface. The
spell employed was novelty--or, at most, wonder--and the chief emotion
aroused was breathless interest in the progress of the story. Carlyle
said that Scott's genius was _in extenso_, {247} rather than _in
intenso_, and that its great praise was its healthiness. This is true of
his verse, but not altogether so of his prose, which exhibits deeper
qualities. Some of Scott's most perfect poems, too, are his shorter
ballads, like _Jock o' Hazeldean_, and _Proud Maisie is in the Wood_,
which have a greater intensity and compression than his metrical tales.
From 1814 to 1831 Scott wrote and published the _Waverley_ novels, some
thirty in number; if we consider the amount of work done, the speed with
which it was done, and the general average of excellence maintained,
perhaps the most marvelous literary feat on record. The series was
issued anonymously, and takes its name from the first number, _Waverley,
or 'Tis Sixty Years Since_. This was founded upon the rising of the
clans, in 1745, in support of the Young Pretender, Charles Edward Stuart,
and it revealed to the English public that almost foreign country which
lay just across their threshold, the Scottish Highlands. The _Waverley_
novels remain, as a whole, unequaled as historical fiction, although,
here and there a single novel, like George Eliot's _Romola_, or
Thackeray's _Henry Esmond_, or Kingsley's _Hypatia_, may have attained a
place beside the best of them. They were a novelty when they appeared.
English prose fiction had somewhat declined since the time of Fielding
and Goldsmith. There were truthful, though rather tame, delineations of
provincial life, like Jane Austen's _Sense and Sensibility_, 1811, and
{248} _Pride and Prejudice_, 1813; or Maria Edgeworth's _Popular Tales_,
1804. On the other hand, there were Gothic romances, like the _Monk_ of
Matthew Gregory Lewis, to whose _Tales of Wonder_ some of Scott's
translations from the German had been contributed; or like Anne
Radcliffe's _Mysteries of Udolpho_. The great original of this school of
fiction was Horace Walpole's _Castle of Otranto_, 1765, an absurd tale of
secret trap-doors, subterranean vaults, apparitions of monstrous mailed
figures and colossal helmets, pictures that descend from their frames,
and hollow voices that proclaim the ruin of ancient families.
Scott used the machinery of romance, but he was not merely a romancer, or
a historical novelist even, and it is not, as Carlyle implies, the
buff-belts and jerkins which principally interest us in his heroes.
_Ivanhoe_ and _Kenilworth_ and the _Talisman_ are, indeed, romances pure
and simple, and very good romances at that. But, in novels such as _Rob
Roy_, the _Antiquary_, the _Heart of Midlothian_, and the _Bride of
Lammermoor_, Scott drew from contemporary life, and from his intimate
knowledge of Scotch character. The story is there, with its entanglement
of plot and its exciting adventures, but there are also, as truly as in
Shakspere, though not in the same degree, the observation of life, the
knowledge of men, the power of dramatic creation. No writer awakens in
his readers a warmer personal affection than Walter Scott, the brave,
honest, kindly gentleman, the noblest {249} figure among the literary men
of his generation.
Another Scotch poet was Thomas Campbell, whose _Pleasures of Hope_, 1799,
was written in Pope's couplet, and in the stilted diction of the
eighteenth century. _Gertrude of Wyoming_, 1809, a long narrative poem
in Spenserian stanza, is untrue to the scenery and life of Pennsylvania,
where its scene is laid. But Campbell turned his rhetorical manner and
his clanking, martial verse to fine advantage in such pieces as
_Hohenlinden_, _Ye Mariners of England_, and the _Battle of the Baltic_.
These have the true lyric fire, and rank among the best English war-songs.
When Scott was asked why he had left off writing poetry, he answered,
"Byron _bet_ me." George Gordon Byron (1788-1824) was a young man of
twenty-four, when, on his return from a two years' sauntering through
Portugal, Spain, Albania, Greece, and the Levant, he published, in the
first two cantos of _Childe Harold_, 1812, a sort of poetic itinerary of
his experiences and impressions. The poem took, rather to its author's
surprise, who said that he woke one morning and found himself famous.
_Childe Harold_ opened a new field to poetry, the romance of travel, the
picturesque aspects of foreign scenery, manners, and costumes. It is
instructive of the difference between the two ages, in poetic sensibility
to such things, to compare Byron's glowing imagery with Addison's tame
_Letter from Italy_, written a century before. _Childe {250} Harold_ was
followed by a series of metrical tales, the _Giaour_, the _Bride of
Abydos_, the _Corsair_, _Lara_, the _Siege of Corinth_, _Parasina_, and
_Prisoner of Chillon_, all written in the years 1813-1816. These poems
at once took the place of Scott's in popular interest, dazzling a public
that had begun to weary of chivalry romances, with pictures of Eastern
life, with incidents as exciting as Scott's, descriptions as highly
colored, and a much greater intensity of passion. So far as they
depended for this interest upon the novelty of their accessories, the
effect was a temporary one. Seraglios, divans, bulbuls, Gulistans,
Zuleikas, and other Oriental properties, deluged English poetry for a
time, and then subsided; even as the tide of moss-troopers, sorcerers,
hermits, and feudal castles had already had its rise and fall.
But there was a deeper reason for the impression made by Byron's poetry
upon his contemporaries. He laid his finger right on the sore spot in
modern life. He had the disease with which the time was sick, the
world-weariness, the desperation which proceeded from "passion incapable
of being converted into action." We find this tone in much of the
literature which followed the failure of the French Revolution and the
Napoleonic wars. From the irritations of that period, the disappointment
of high hopes for the future of the race, the growing religious
disbelief, and the revolt of democracy and free thought against
conservative reaction, sprang what Southey called the "Satanic {251}
school," which spoke its loudest word in Byron. Titanic is the better
word, for the rebellion was not against God, but Jupiter, that is,
against the State, Church, and society of Byron's day; against George
III., the Tory cabinet of Lord Castlereigh, the Duke of Wellington, the
bench of Bishops, London gossip, the British Constitution, and British
cant. In these poems of Byron, and in his dramatic experiments,
_Manfred_ and _Cain_, there is a single figure--the figure of Byron under
various masks--and one pervading mood, a restless and sardonic gloom, a
weariness of life, a love of solitude, and a melancholy exaltation in the
presence of the wilderness and the sea. Byron's hero is always
represented as a man originally noble, whom some great wrong, by others,
or some mysterious crime of his own, has blasted and embittered, and who
carries about the world a seared heart and a somber brow. Harold--who
may stand as a type of all his heroes--has run "through sin's labyrinth"
and feeling the "fullness of satiety," is drawn abroad to roam, "the
wandering exile of his own dark mind." The loss of a capacity for pure,
unjaded emotion is the constant burden of Byron's lament.
"No more, no more, O never more on me
The freshness of the heart shall fall like dew."
and again,
"O could I feel as I have felt--or be what I have been,
Or weep as I could once have wept, o'er many a vanished scene;
{252}
As springs in deserts found seem sweet, all brackish tho' they be,
So, midst the withered waste of life, those tears would flow to me."
This mood was sincere in Byron; but by cultivating it, and posing too
long in one attitude, he became self-conscious and theatrical, and much
of his serious poetry has a false ring. His example infected the minor
poetry of the time, and it was quite natural that Thackeray--who
represented a generation that had a very different ideal of the
heroic--should be provoked into describing Byron as "a big, sulky dandy."
Byron was well fitted by birth and temperament to be the spokesman of
this fierce discontent. He inherited from his mother a haughty and
violent temper, and profligate tendencies from his father. He was
through life a spoiled child, whose main characteristic was willfulness.
He liked to shock people by exaggerating his wickedness, or by perversely
maintaining the wrong side of a dispute. But he had traits of bravery
and generosity. Women loved him, and he made strong friends. There was
a careless charm about him which fascinated natures as unlike each other
as Shelley and Scott. By the death of the fifth Lord Byron without
issue, Byron came into a title and estates at the age of ten. Though a
liberal in politics he had aristocratic feelings, and was vain of his
rank as he was of his beauty. He was educated at Harrow and at Trinity
College, Cambridge, where he was idle and {253} dissipated, but did a
great deal of miscellaneous reading. He took some of his Cambridge
set--Hobhouse, Matthews, and others--to Newstead Abbey, his ancestral
seat, where they filled the ancient cloisters with eccentric orgies.
Byron was strikingly handsome. His face had a spiritual paleness and a
classic regularity, and his dark hair curled closely to his head. A
deformity in one of his feet was a mortification to him, though it did
not greatly impair his activity, and he prided himself upon his powers as
a swimmer.
In 1815, when at the height of his literary and social _eclat_ in London,
he married. In February of the following year he was separated from Lady
Byron, and left England forever, pursued by the execrations of outraged
respectability. In this chorus of abuse there was mingled a share of
cant; but Byron got, on the whole, what he deserved. From Switzerland,
where he spent a summer by Lake Leman, with the Shelleys; from Venice,
Ravenna, Pisa, and Rome, scandalous reports of his intrigues and his wild
debaucheries were wafted back to England, and with these came poem after
poem, full of burning genius, pride, scorn, and anguish, and all hurling
defiance at English public opinion. The third and fourth cantos of
_Childe Harold_, 1816-1818, were a great advance upon the first two, and
contain the best of Byron's serious poetry. He has written his name all
over the continent of Europe, and on a hundred memorable spots has made
the scenery his own. On the field of Waterloo, on "the castled {254}
crag of Drachenfels," "by the blue rushing of the arrowy Rhone," in
Venice, on the Bridge of Sighs, in the Coliseum at Rome, and among the
"Isles of Greece," the tourist is compelled to see with Byron's eyes and
under the associations of his pilgrimage. In his later poems, such as
_Beppo_, 1818, and _Don Juan_, 1819-1823, he passed into his second
manner, a mocking cynicism gaining ground upon the somewhat stagy gloom
of his early poetry--Mephistophiles gradually elbowing out Satan. _Don
Juan_, though morally the worst, is intellectually the most vital and
representative of Byron's poems. It takes up into itself most fully the
life of the time; exhibits most thoroughly the characteristic
alternations of Byron's moods and the prodigal resources of wit, passion,
and understanding, which--rather than imagination--were his prominent
qualities as a poet. The hero, a graceless, amorous, stripling, goes
wandering from Spain to the Greek islands and Constantinople, thence to
St. Petersburg, and finally to England. Every-where his seductions are
successful, and Byron uses him as a means of exposing the weakness of the
human heart and the rottenness of society in all countries. In 1823,
breaking away from his life of selfish indulgence in Italy, Byron threw
himself into the cause of Grecian liberty, which he had sung so
gloriously in the _Isles of Greece_. He died at Missolonghi, in the
following year, of a fever contracted by exposure and overwork.
Byron was a great poet but not a great literary {255} artist. He wrote
negligently and with the ease of assured strength, his mind gathering
heat as it moved, and pouring itself forth in reckless profusion. His
work is diffuse and imperfect; much of it is melodrama or speech-making
rather than true poetry. But on the other hand, much, very much of it,
is unexcelled as the direct, strong, sincere utterance of personal
feeling. Such is the quality of his best lyrics, like _When We Two
Parted_, the _Elegy on Thyrza_, _Stanzas to Augusta_, _She Walks in
Beauty_, and of innumerable passages, lyrical and descriptive, in his
longer poems. He had not the wisdom of Wordsworth, nor the rich and
subtle imagination of Coleridge, Shelley, and Keats when they were at
their best. But he had greater body and motive force than any of them.
He is the strongest personality among English poets since Milton, though
his strength was wasted by want of restraint and self-culture. In Milton
the passion was there, but it was held in check by the will and the
artistic conscience, made subordinate to good ends, ripened by long
reflection, and finally uttered in forms of perfect and harmonious
beauty. Byron's love of Nature was quite different in kind from
Wordsworth's. Of all English poets he has sung most lyrically of that
national theme, the sea, as witness among many other passages, the famous
apostrophe to the ocean, which closes _Childe Harold_, and the opening of
the third canto in the same poem,
"Once more upon the waters," etc.
{256} He had a passion for night and storm, because they made him forget
himself.
"Most glorious night!
Thou wert not sent for slumber! Let me be
A sharer in thy fierce and far delight,
A portion of the tempest and of thee!"
Byron's literary executor and biographer was the Irish poet, Thomas
Moore, a born song-writer, whose _Irish Melodies_, set to old native
airs, are, like Burns's, genuine, spontaneous, singing, and run naturally
to music. Songs such as the _Meeting of the Waters_, _The Harp of Tara_,
_Those Evening Bells_, the _Light of Other Days_, _Araby's Daughter_, and
the _Last Rose of Summer_ were, and still are, popular favorites.
Moore's Oriental romance, _Lalla Rookh_, 1817, is overladen with ornament
and with a sugary sentiment that clogs the palate. He had the quick
Irish wit, sensibility rather than passion, and fancy rather than
imagination.
Byron's friend, Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822), was also in fiery
revolt against all conventions and institutions, though his revolt
proceeded not, as in Byron's case, from the turbulence of passions which
brooked no restraint, but rather from an intellectual impatience of any
kind of control. He was not, like Byron, a sensual man, but temperate
and chaste. He was, indeed, in his life and in his poetry, as nearly a
disembodied spirit as a human creature can be. The German poet, Heine,
said that liberty was the religion of this century, {257} and of this
religion Shelley was a worshiper. His rebellion against authority began
early. He refused to fag at Eton, and was expelled from Oxford for
publishing a tract on the _Necessity of Atheism_. At nineteen, he ran
away with Harriet Westbrook, and was married to her in Scotland. Three
years later he deserted her for Mary Godwin, with whom he eloped to
Switzerland. Two years after this his first wife drowned herself in the
Serpentine, and Shelley was then formally wedded to Mary Godwin. All
this is rather startling, in the bare statement of it, yet it is not
inconsistent with the many testimonies that exist, to Shelley's singular
purity and beauty of character, testimonies borne out by the evidence of
his own writings. Impulse with him took the place of conscience. Moral
law, accompanied by the sanction of power, and imposed by outside
authority, he rejected as a form of tyranny. His nature lacked
robustness and ballast. Byron, who was at bottom intensely practical,
said that Shelley's philosophy was too spiritual and romantic. Hazlitt,
himself a Radical, wrote of Shelley: "He has a fire in his eye, a fever
in his blood, a maggot in his brain, a hectic flutter in his speech,
which mark out the philosophic fanatic. He is sanguine complexioned and
shrill voiced." It was, perhaps, with some recollection of this
last-mentioned trait of Shelley the man, that Carlyle wrote of Shelley
the poet, that "the sound of him was shrieky," and that he had "filled
the earth with an inarticulate wailing."
{258}
His career as a poet began characteristically enough, with the
publication, while at Oxford, of a volume of political rimes, entitled
_Margaret Nicholson's Remains_, Margaret Nicholson being the crazy woman
who tried to stab George III. His boyish poem, _Queen Mab_, was
published in 1813; _Alastor_ in 1816, and the _Revolt of Islam_--his
longest--in 1818, all before he was twenty-one. These were filled with
splendid, though unsubstantial, imagery, but they were abstract in
subject, and had the faults of incoherence and formlessness which make
Shelley's longer poems wearisome and confusing. They sought to embody
his social creed of Perfectionism, as well as a certain vague Pantheistic
system of belief in a spirit of love in nature and man, whose presence is
a constant source of obscurity in Shelley's verse. In 1818 he went to
Italy, where the last four years of his life were passed, and where,
under the influences of Italian art and poetry, his writing became deeper
and stronger. He was fond of yachting, and spent much of his time upon
the Mediterranean. In the summer of 1822, his boat was swamped in a
squall off the Gulf of Spezzia, and Shelley's drowned body was washed
ashore, and burned in the presence of Byron and Leigh Hunt. The ashes
were entombed in the Protestant cemetery at Rome, with the epitaph, _Cor
cordium_.
Shelley's best and maturest work, nearly all of which was done in Italy,
includes his tragedy, _The Cenci_, 1819, and his lyrical drama,
_Prometheus {259} Unbound_, 1821. The first of these has a unity, and a
definiteness of contour unusual with Shelley, and is, with the exception
of some of Robert Browning's, the best English tragedy since Otway.
_Prometheus_ represented to Shelley's mind the human spirit fighting
against divine oppression, and in his portrayal of this figure, he kept
in mind not only the _Prometheus_ of Aeschylus, but the Satan of
_Paradise Lost_. Indeed, in this poem, Shelley came nearer to the
sublime than any English poet since Milton. Yet it is in lyrical, rather
than in dramatic, quality that _Prometheus Unbound_ is great. If Shelley
be not, as his latest editor, Mr. Forman, claims him to be, the foremost
of English lyrical poets, he is at least the most lyrical of them. He
had, in a supreme degree, the "lyric cry." His vibrant nature trembled
to every breath of emotion, and his nerves craved ever newer shocks; to
pant, to quiver, to thrill, to grow faint in the spasm of intense
sensation. The feminine cast observable in Shelley's portrait is borne
out by this tremulous sensibility in his verse. It is curious how often
he uses the metaphor of wings: of the winged spirit, soaring, like his
skylark, till lost in music, rapture, light, and then falling back to
earth. Three successive moods--longing, ecstasy, and the revulsion of
despair--are expressed in many of his lyrics; as in the _Hymn to the
Spirit of Nature_, in _Prometheus_, in the ode _To a Skylark_, and in the
_Lines to an Indian Air_--Edgar Poe's favorite. His passionate desire to
lose {260} himself in Nature, to become one with that spirit of love and
beauty in the universe, which was to him in place of God, is expressed in
the _Ode to the West Wind_, his most perfect poem:
"Make me thy lyre, even as the forest is;
What if my leaves are falling like its own!
The tumult of thy mighty harmonies
Will take from both a deep autumnal tone.
Sweet, though in sadness, be thou, Spirit fierce,
My spirit! be thou me, impetuous one!"
In the lyrical pieces already mentioned, together with _Adonais_, the
lines _Written in the Euganean Hills_, _Epipsychidion_, _Stanzas Written
in Dejection near Naples_, _A Dream of the Unknown_, and many others,
Shelley's lyrical genius reaches a rarer loveliness and a more faultless
art than Byron's ever attained, though it lacks the directness and
momentum of Byron.
In Shelley's longer poems, intoxicated with the music of his own singing,
he abandons himself wholly to the guidance of his imagination, and the
verse seems to go on of itself, like the enchanted boat in _Alastor_,
with no one at the helm. Vision succeeds vision in glorious but
bewildering profusion; ideal landscapes and cities of cloud "pinnacled
dim in the intense inane." These poems are like the water-falls in the
Yosemite, which, tumbling from a height of several thousand feet, are
shattered into foam by the air, and waved about over the valley. Very
beautiful is this descending spray, and the rainbow dwells in its {261}
bosom; but there is no longer any stream, nothing but an irridescent
mist. The word _etherial_, best expresses the quality of Shelley's
genius. His poetry is full of atmospheric effects; of the tricks which
light plays with the fluid elements of water and air; of stars, clouds,
rain, dew, mist, frost, wind, the foam of seas, the phases of the moon,
the green shadows of waves, the shapes of flames, the "golden lightning
of the setting sun." Nature, in Shelley, wants homeliness and relief.
While poets like Wordsworth and Burns let in an ideal light upon the
rough fields of earth, Shelley escapes into a "moonlight-colored" realm
of shadows and dreams, among whose abstractions the heart turns cold.
One bit of Wordsworth's mountain turf is worth them all.
By the death of John Keats (1796-1821), whose elegy Shelley sang in
_Adonais_, English poetry suffered an irreparable loss. His _Endymion_,
1818, though disfigured by mawkishness and by some affectations of
manner, was rich in promise. Its faults were those of youth, the faults
of exuberance and of a tremulous sensibility, which time corrects.
_Hyperion_, 1820, promised to be his masterpiece, but he left it
unfinished--"a Titanic torso"--because, as he said, "there were too many
Miltonic inversions in it." The subject was the displacement, by Phoebus
Apollo, of the ancient sun-god, Hyperion, the last of the Titans who
retained his dominion. It was a theme of great capabilities, and the
poem was begun by Keats, {262} with a strength of conception which leads
to the belief that here was once more a really epic genius, had fate
suffered it to mature. The fragment, as it stands--"that inlet to severe
magnificence"--proves how rapidly Keats's diction was clarifying. He had
learned to string up his looser chords. There is nothing maudlin in
_Hyperion_; all there is in whole tones and in the grand manner, "as
sublime as Aeschylus," said Byron, with the grave, antique simplicity,
and something of modern sweetness interfused.
Keats's father was a groom in a London livery-stable. The poet was
apprenticed at fifteen to a surgeon. At school he had studied Latin, but
not Greek. He, who of all English poets had the most purely Hellenic
spirit, made acquaintance with Greek literature and art only through the
medium of classical dictionaries, translations, and popular mythologies;
and later through the marbles and casts in the British Museum. His
friend, the artist Haydon, lent him a copy of Chapman's Homer, and the
impression that it made upon him he recorded in his sonnet, _On First
Looking into Chapman's Homer_. Other poems of the same inspiration are
his three sonnets, _To Homer_, _On Seeing the Elgin Marbles_, _On a
Picture of Leander_, _Lamia_, and the beautiful _Ode on a Grecian Urn_.
But Keats's art was retrospective and eclectic, the blossom of a double
root; and "golden-tongued Romance with serene lute" had her part in him,
as well as the classics. In his seventeenth year he {263} had read the
_Faery Queene_, and from Spenser he went on to a study of Chaucer,
Shakspere, and Milton. Then he took up Italian and read _Ariosto_. The
influence of these studies is seen in his poem, _Isabella, or the Pot of
Basil_, taken from a story of Boccaccio; in his wild ballad, _La Belle
Dame sans Merci_; and in his love tale, the _Eve of Saint Agnes_, with
its wealth of medieval adornment. In the _Ode to Autumn_, and _Ode to a
Nightingale_, the Hellenic choiceness is found touched with the warmer
hues of romance.
There is something deeply tragic in the short story of Keats's life. The
seeds of consumption were in him; he felt the stirrings of a potent
genius, but knew that he could not wait for it to unfold, but must die
"Before high-piled books, in charactry
Hold like rich garners the full-ripened grain."
His disease was aggravated, possibly, by the stupid brutality with which
the reviewers had treated _Endymion_; and certainly by the hopeless love
which devoured him. "The very thing which I want to live most for," he
wrote, "will be a great occasion of my death. If I had any chance of
recovery, this passion would kill me." In the autumn of 1820, his
disease gaining apace, he went on a sailing vessel to Italy, accompanied
by a single friend, a young artist named Severn. The change was of no
avail, and he died at Rome a few weeks after, in his twenty-sixth year.
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Keats was, above all things, the _artist_, with that love of the
beautiful and that instinct for its reproduction which are the artist's
divinest gifts. He cared little about the politics and philosophy of his
day, and he did not make his poetry the vehicle of ideas. It was
sensuous poetry, the poetry of youth and gladness. But if he had lived,
and if, with wider knowledge of men and deeper experience of life, he had
attained to Wordsworth's spiritual insight and to Byron's power of
passion and understanding, he would have become a greater poet than
either. For he had a style--a "natural magic"--which only needed the
chastening touch of a finer culture to make it superior to any thing in
modern English poetry and to force us back to Milton or Shakspere for a
comparison. His tombstone, not far from Shelley's, bears the inscription
of his own choosing: "Here lies one whose name was writ in water." But
it would be within the limits of truth to say that it is written in large
characters on most of our contemporary poetry. "Wordsworth," says
Lowell, "has influenced most the ideas of succeeding poets; Keats their
forms." And he has influenced these out of all proportion to the amount
which he left, or to his intellectual range, by virtue of the exquisite
quality of his technique.
1. Wordsworth's Poems. Chosen and edited by Matthew Arnold. London,
1879.
2. Poetry of Byron. Chosen and arranged by Matthew Arnold. London, 1881.
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3. Shelley. Julian and Maddalo, Prometheus Unbound, The Cenci, Lyrical
Pieces.
4. Landor. Pericles and Aspasia.
5. Coleridge. Table Talk, Notes on Shakspere, The Ancient Mariner,
Christabel, Love, Ode to France, Ode to the Departing Year, Kubla Khan,
Hymn before Sunrise in the Vale of Chamouni, Youth and Age, Frost at
Midnight.
6. De Quincey. Confessions of an English Opium Eater, Flight of a Tartar
Tribe, Biographical Sketches.
7. Scott. Waverley, Heart of Midlothian, Bride of Lammermoor, Rob Roy,
Antiquary, Marmion, Lady of the Lake.
8. Keats. Hyperion, Eve of St. Agnes, Lyrical Pieces.
9. Mrs. Oliphant's Literary History of England, 18th-19th Centuries.
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