There are two distinct sides to Byron and his poetry, one good, the other

bad; and those who write about him generally describe one side or the other

in superlatives. Thus one critic speaks of his "splendid and imperishable

excellence of sincerity and strength"; another of his "gaudy charlatanry,

blare of brass, and big bow-wowishness." As both critics are fundamentally

right, we shall not here attempt to reconcile their differences, which

arise from viewing one side of the man's nature and poetry to the exclusion

of the other. Before his exile from England, in 1816, the general

impression made by Byron is that of a man who leads an irregular life,

poses as a romantic hero, makes himself out much worse than he really is,

and takes delight in shocking not only the conventions but the ideals of

English society. His poetry of this first period is generally, though not

always, shallow and insincere in thought, and declamatory or bombastic in

expression. After his exile, and his meeting with Shelley in Italy, we note

a gradual improvement, due partly to Shelley's influence and partly to his

own mature thought and experience. We have the impression now of a

disillusioned man who recognizes his true character, and who, though

cynical and pessimistic, is at least honest in his unhappy outlook on

society. His poetry of this period is generally less shallow and

rhetorical, and though he still parades his feelings in public, he often

surprises us by being manly and sincere. Thus in the third canto of _Childe

Harold_, written just after his exile, he says:

In my youth's summer I did sing of one,

The wandering outlaw of his own dark mind;

and as we read on to the end of the splendid fourth canto--with its poetic

feeling for nature, and its stirring rhythm that grips and holds the reader

like martial music--we lay down the book with profound regret that this

gifted man should have devoted so much of his talent to describing trivial

or unwholesome intrigues and posing as the hero of his own verses. The real

tragedy of Byron's life is that he died just as he was beginning to find

himself.

LIFE. Byron was born in London in 1788, the year preceding the French

Revolution. We shall understand him better, and judge him more charitably,

if we remember the tainted stock from which he sprang. His father was a

dissipated spendthrift of unspeakable morals; his mother was a Scotch

heiress, passionate and unbalanced. The father deserted his wife after

squandering her fortune; and the boy was brought up by the mother who

"alternately petted and abused" him. In his eleventh year the death of a

granduncle left him heir to Newstead Abbey and to the baronial title of one

of the oldest houses in England. He was singularly handsome; and a lameness

resulting from a deformed foot lent a suggestion of pathos to his make-up.

All this, with his social position, his pseudo-heroic poetry, and his

dissipated life,--over which he contrived to throw a veil of romantic

secrecy,--made him a magnet of attraction to many thoughtless young men and

foolish women, who made the downhill path both easy and rapid to one whose

inclinations led him in that direction. Naturally he was generous, and

easily led by affection. He is, therefore, largely a victim of his own

weakness and of unfortunate surroundings.

At school at Harrow, and in the university at Cambridge, Byron led an

unbalanced life, and was more given to certain sports from which he was not

debarred by lameness, than to books and study. His school life, like his

infancy, is sadly marked by vanity, violence, and rebellion against every

form of authority; yet it was not without its hours of nobility and

generosity. Scott describes him as "a man of real goodness of heart, and

the kindest and best feelings, miserably thrown away by his foolish

contempt of public opinion." While at Cambridge, Byron published his first

volume of poems, _Hours of Idleness_, in 1807. A severe criticism of the

volume in the _Edinburgh Review_ wounded Byron's vanity, and threw him into

a violent passion, the result of which was the now famous satire called

_English Bards and Scotch Reviewers_, in which not only his enemies, but

also Scott, Wordsworth, and nearly all the literary men of his day, were

satirized in heroic couplets after the manner of Pope's _Dunciad_. It is

only just to say that he afterwards made friends with Scott and with others

whom he had abused without provocation; and it is interesting to note, in

view of his own romantic poetry, that he denounced all masters of romance

and accepted the artificial standards of Pope and Dryden. His two favorite

books were the Old Testament and a volume of Pope's poetry. Of the latter

he says, "His is the greatest name in poetry ... all the rest are

barbarians."

In 1809 Byron, when only twenty-one years of age, started on a tour of

Europe and the Orient. The poetic results of this trip were the first two

cantos of _Childe Harold's Pilgrimage_, with their famous descriptions of

romantic scenery. The work made him instantly popular, and his fame

overshadowed Scott's completely. As he says himself, "I awoke one morning

to find myself famous," and presently he styles himself "the grand Napoleon

of the realms of rhyme." The worst element in Byron at this time was his

insincerity, his continual posing as the hero of his poetry. His best works

were translated, and his fame spread almost as rapidly on the Continent as

in England. Even Goethe was deceived, and declared that a man so wonderful

in character had never before appeared in literature, and would never

appear again. Now that the tinsel has worn off, and we can judge the man

and his work dispassionately, we see how easily even the critics of the age

were governed by romantic impulses.

The adulation of Byron lasted only a few years in England. In 1815 he

married Miss Milbanke, an English heiress, who abruptly left him a year

later. With womanly reserve she kept silence; but the public was not slow

to imagine plenty of reasons for the separation. This, together with the

fact that men had begun to penetrate the veil of romantic secrecy with

which Byron surrounded himself and found a rather brassy idol beneath,

turned the tide of public opinion against him. He left England under a

cloud of distrust and disappointment, in 1816, and never returned. Eight

years were spent abroad, largely in Italy, where he was associated with

Shelley until the latter's tragic death in 1822. His house was ever the

meeting place for Revolutionists and malcontents calling themselves

patriots, whom he trusted too greatly, and with whom he shared his money

most generously. Curiously enough, while he trusted men too easily, he had

no faith in human society or government, and wrote in 1817: "I have

simplified my politics to an utter detestation of all existing

governments." During his exile he finished _Childe Harold, The Prisoner of

Chillon_, his dramas _Cain_ and _Manfred_, and numerous other works, in

some of which, as in _Don Juan_, he delighted in revenging himself upon his

countrymen by holding up to ridicule all that they held most sacred.

In 1824 Byron went to Greece to give himself and a large part of his

fortune to help that country in its struggle for liberty against the Turks.

How far he was led by his desire for posing as a hero, and how far by a

certain vigorous Viking spirit that was certainly in him, will never be

known. The Greeks welcomed him and made him a leader, and for a few months

he found himself in the midst of a wretched squabble of lies, selfishness,

insincerity, cowardice, and intrigue, instead of the heroic struggle for

liberty which he had anticipated. He died of fever, in Missolonghi, in

1824. One of his last poems, written there on his thirty-sixth birthday, a

few months before he died, expresses his own view of his disappointing

life:

My days are in the yellow leaf,

The flowers and fruits of love are gone:

The worm, the canker, and the grief

Are mine alone.

WORKS OF BYRON. In reading Byron it is well to remember that he was a

disappointed and embittered man, not only in his personal life, but also in

his expectation of a general transformation of human society. As he pours

out his own feelings, chiefly, in his poetry, he is the most expressive

writer of his age in voicing the discontent of a multitude of Europeans who

were disappointed at the failure of the French Revolution to produce an

entirely new form of government and society.

One who wishes to understand the whole scope of Byron's genius and poetry

will do well to begin with his first work, _Hours of Idleness_, written

when he was a young man at the university. There is very little poetry in

the volume, only a striking facility in rime, brightened by the devil-may-

care spirit of the Cavalier poets; but as a revelation of the man himself

it is remarkable. In a vain and sophomoric preface he declares that poetry

is to him an idle experiment, and that this is his first and last attempt

to amuse himself in that line. Curiously enough, as he starts for Greece on

his last, fatal journey, he again ridicules literature, and says that the

poet is a "mere babbler." It is this despising of the art which alone makes

him famous that occasions our deepest disappointment. Even in his

magnificent passages, in a glowing description of nature or of a Hindoo

woman's exquisite love, his work is frequently marred by a wretched pun, or

by some cheap buffoonery, which ruins our first splendid impression of his

poetry.

Byron's later volumes, _Manfred_ and _Cain_, the one a curious, and perhaps

unconscious, parody of _Faust_, the other of _Paradise Lost_, are his two

best known dramatic works. Aside from the question of their poetic value,

they are interesting as voicing Byron's excessive individualism and his

rebellion against society. The best known and the most readable of Byron's

works _Mazeppa, The Prisoner of Chillon_, and _Childe Harold's Pilgrimage_.

The first two cantos of _Childe Harold_ (1812) are perhaps more frequently

read than any other work of the same author, partly because of their

melodious verse, partly because of their descriptions of places along the

lines of European travel; but the last two cantos (1816-1818) written after

his exile from England, have more sincerity, and are in every way better

expressions of Byron's mature genius. Scattered through all his works one

finds magnificent descriptions of natural scenery, and exquisite lyrics of

love and despair; but they are mixed with such a deal of bombast and

rhetoric, together with much that is unwholesome, that the beginner will do

well to confine himself to a small volume of well-chosen selections.[227]

Byron is often compared with Scott, as having given to us Europe and the

Orient, just as Scott gave us Scotland and its people; but while there is a

certain resemblance in the swing and dash of the verses, the resemblance is

all on the surface, and the underlying difference between the two poets is

as great as that between Thackeray and Bulwer-Lytton. Scott knew his

country well,--its hills and valleys which are interesting as the abode of

living and lovable men and women. Byron pretended to know the secret,

unwholesome side of Europe, which generally hides itself in the dark; but

instead of giving us a variety of living men, he never gets away from his

own unbalanced and egotistical self. All his characters, in _Cain, Manfred,

The Corsair, The Giaour, Childe Harold, Don Juan_, are tiresome repetitions

of himself,--a vain, disappointed, cynical man, who finds no good in life

or love or anything. Naturally, with such a disposition, he is entirely

incapable of portraying a true woman. To nature alone, especially in her

magnificent moods, Byron remains faithful; and his portrayal of the night

and the storm and the ocean in _Childe Harold_ are unsurpassed in our

language.

PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY (1792-1822)

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 this fragment, from the "Ode to the West Wind," we have a suggestion of

Shelley's own spirit, as reflected in all his poetry. The very spirit of

nature, which appeals to us in the wind and the cloud, the sunset and the

moonrise, seems to have possessed him, at times, and made him a chosen

instrument of melody. At such times he is a true poet, and his work is

unrivaled. At other times, unfortunately, Shelley joins with Byron in

voicing a vain rebellion against society. His poetry, like his life,

divides itself into two distinct moods. In one he is the violent reformer,

seeking to overthrow our present institutions and to hurry the millennium

out of its slow walk into a gallop. Out of this mood come most of his

longer poems, like _Queen Mab, Revolt of Islam, Hellas_, and _The Witch of

Atlas_, which are somewhat violent diatribes against government, priests,

marriage, religion, even God as men supposed him to be. In a different

mood, which finds expression _Alastor, Adonais_, and his wonderful lyrics,

Shelley is like a wanderer following a vague, beautiful vision, forever sad

and forever unsatisfied. In the latter mood he appeals profoundly to all

men who have known what it is to follow after an unattainable ideal.

SHELLEY'S LIFE. There are three classes of men who see visions, and all

three are represented in our literature. The first is the mere dreamer,

like Blake, who stumbles through a world of reality without noticing it,

and is happy in his visions. The second is the seer, the prophet, like

Langland, or Wyclif, who sees a vision and quietly goes to work, in ways

that men understand, to make the present world a little more like the ideal

one which he sees in his vision. The third, who appears in many forms,--as

visionary, enthusiast, radical, anarchist, revolutionary, call him what you

will,--sees a vision and straightway begins to tear down all human

institutions, which have been built up by the slow toil of centuries,

simply because they seem to stand in the way of his dream. To the latter

class belongs Shelley, a man perpetually at war with the present world, a

martyr and exile, simply because of his inability to sympathize with men

and society as they are, and because of his own mistaken judgment as to the

value and purpose of a vision.

Shelley was born in Field Place, near Horsham, Sussex, in 1792. On both his

father's and his mother's side he was descended from noble old families,

famous in the political and literary history of England. From childhood he

lived, like Blake, in a world of fancy, so real that certain imaginary

dragons and headless creatures of the neighboring wood kept him and his

sisters in a state of fearful expectancy. He learned rapidly, absorbed the

classics as if by intuition, and, dissatisfied with ordinary processes of

learning, seems to have sought, like Faustus, the acquaintance of spirits,

as shown in his "Hymn to Intellectual Beauty":

While yet a boy, I sought for ghosts, and sped

Through many a listening chamber, cave and ruin,

And starlight wood, with fearful steps pursuing

Hopes of high talk with the departed dead.

Shelley's first public school, kept by a hard-headed Scotch master, with

its floggings and its general brutality, seemed to him like a combination

of hell and prison; and his active rebellion against existing institutions

was well under way when, at twelve years of age, he entered the famous

preparatory school at Eton. He was a delicate, nervous, marvelously

sensitive boy, of great physical beauty; and, like Cowper, he suffered

torments at the hands of his rough schoolfellows. Unlike Cowper, he was

positive, resentful, and brave to the point of rashness; soul and body rose

up against tyranny; and he promptly organized a rebellion against the

brutal fagging system. "Mad Shelley" the boys called him, and they chivied

him like dogs around a little coon that fights and cries defiance to the

end. One finds what he seeks in this world, and it is not strange that

Shelley, after his Eton experiences, found causes for rebellion in all

existing forms of human society, and that he left school "to war among

mankind," as he says of himself in the _Revolt of Islam_. His university

days are but a repetition of his earlier experiences. While a student at

Oxford he read some scraps of Hume's philosophy, and immediately published

a pamphlet called "The Necessity of Atheism." It was a crude, foolish piece

of work, and Shelley distributed it by post to every one to whom it might

give offense. Naturally this brought on a conflict with the authorities,

but Shelley would not listen to reason or make any explanation, and was

expelled from the university in 1811.

Shelley's marriage was even more unfortunate. While living in London, on a

generous sister's pocket money, a certain young schoolgirl, Harriet

Westbrook, was attracted by Shelley's crude revolutionary doctrines. She

promptly left school, as her own personal part in the general rebellion,

and refused to return or even to listen to her parents upon the subject.

Having been taught by Shelley, she threw herself upon his protection; and

this unbalanced couple were presently married, as they said, "in deference

to anarch custom." The two infants had already proclaimed a rebellion

against the institution of marriage, for which they proposed to substitute

the doctrine of elective affinity. For two years they wandered about

England, Ireland, and Wales, living on a small allowance from Shelley's

father, who had disinherited his son because of his ill-considered

marriage. The pair soon separated, and two years later Shelley, having

formed a strong friendship with one Godwin,--a leader of young enthusiasts

and a preacher of anarchy,--presently showed his belief in Godwin's

theories by eloping with his daughter Mary. It is a sad story, and the

details were perhaps better forgotten. We should remember that in Shelley

we are dealing with a tragic blend of high-mindedness and light-headedness.

Byron wrote of him, "The most gentle, the most amiable, and the least

worldly-minded person I ever met!"

Led partly by the general hostility against him, and partly by his own

delicate health, Shelley went to Italy in 1818, and never returned to

England. After wandering over Italy he finally settled in Pisa, beloved of

so many English poets,--beautiful, sleepy Pisa, where one looks out of his

window on the main street at the busiest hour of the day, and the only

living thing in sight is a donkey, dozing lazily, with his head in the

shade and his body in the sunshine. Here his best poetry was written, and

here he found comfort in the friendship of Byron, Hunt, and Trelawney, who

are forever associated with Shelley's Italian life. He still remained

hostile to English social institutions; but life is a good teacher, and

that Shelley dimly recognized the error of his rebellion is shown in the

increasing sadness of his later poems:

O world, O life, O time!

On whose last steps I climb,

Trembling at that where I had stood before;

When will return the glory of your prime?

No more--oh, never more!

Out of the day and night

A joy has taken flight;

Fresh spring, and summer, and winter hoar,

Move my faint heart with grief, but with delight

No more--oh, never more!

In 1822, when only thirty years of age, Shelley was drowned while sailing

in a small boat off the Italian coast. His body was washed ashore several

days later, and was cremated, near Viareggio, by his friends, Byron, Hunt,

and Trelawney. His ashes might, with all reverence, have been given to the

winds that he loved and that were a symbol of his restless spirit; instead,

they found a resting place near the grave of Keats, in the English cemetery

at Rome. One rarely visits the spot now without finding English and

American visitors standing in silence before the significant inscription,

_Cor Cordium_.

WORKS OF SHELLEY. As a lyric poet, Shelley is one of the supreme geniuses

of our literature; and the reader will do well to begin with the poems

which show him at his very best. "The Cloud," "To a Skylark," "Ode to the

West Wind," "To Night,"--poems like these must surely set the reader to

searching among Shelley's miscellaneous works, to find for himself the

things "worthy to be remembered."

In reading Shelley's longer poems one must remember that there are in this

poet two distinct men: one, the wanderer, seeking ideal beauty and forever

unsatisfied; the other, the unbalanced reformer, seeking the overthrow of

present institutions and the establishment of universal happiness.

_Alastor, or the Spirit of Solitude_ (1816) is by far the best expression

of Shelley's greater mood. Here we see him wandering restlessly through the

vast silences of nature, in search of a loved dream-maiden who shall

satisfy his love of beauty. Here Shelley is the poet of the moonrise, and

of the tender exquisite fancies that can never be expressed. The charm of

the poem lies in its succession of dreamlike pictures; but it gives

absolutely no impressions of reality. It was written when Shelley, after

his long struggle, had begun to realize that the world was too strong for

him. _Alastor_ is therefore the poet's confession, not simply of failure,

but of undying hope in some better thing that is to come.

_Prometheus Unbound_ (1818-1820), a lyrical drama, is the best work of

Shelley's revolutionary enthusiasm, and the most characteristic of all his

poems. Shelley's philosophy (if one may dignify a hopeless dream by such a

name) was a curious aftergrowth of the French Revolution, namely, that it

is only the existing tyranny of State, Church, and society which keeps man

from growth into perfect happiness. Naturally Shelley forgot, like many

other enthusiasts, that Church and State and social laws were not imposed

upon man from without, but were created by himself to minister to his

necessities. In Shelley's poem the hero, Prometheus, represents mankind

itself,--a just and noble humanity, chained and tortured by Jove, who is

here the personification of human institutions.[228] In due time Demogorgon

(which is Shelley's name for Necessity) overthrows the tyrant Jove and

releases Prometheus (Mankind), who is presently united to Asia, the spirit

of love and goodness in nature, while the earth and the moon join in a

wedding song, and everything gives promise that they shall live together

happy ever afterwards.

Shelley here looks forward, not back, to the Golden Age, and is the prophet

of science and evolution. If we compare his Titan with similar characters

in _Faust_ and _Cain_, we shall find this interesting difference,--that

while Goethe's Titan is cultured and self-reliant, and Byron's stoic and

hopeless, Shelley's hero is patient under torture, seeing help and hope

beyond his suffering. And he marries Love that the earth may be peopled

with superior beings who shall substitute brotherly love for the present

laws and conventions of society. Such is his philosophy; but the beginner

will read this poem, not chiefly for its thought, but for its youthful

enthusiasm, for its marvelous imagery, and especially for its ethereal

music. Perhaps we should add here that _Prometheus_ is, and probably always

will be, a poem for the chosen few who can appreciate its peculiar

spiritlike beauty. In its purely pagan conception of the world, it

suggests, by contrast, Milton's Christian philosophy in _Paradise

Regained_.

Shelley's revolutionary works, _Queen Mab_ (1813), _The Revolt of Islam_

(1818), _Hellas_ (1821), and _The Witch of Atlas_ (1820), are to be judged

in much the same way as is _Prometheus Unbound_. They are largely

invectives against religion, marriage, kingcraft, and priestcraft, most

impractical when considered as schemes for reform, but abounding in

passages of exquisite beauty, for which alone they are worth reading. In

the drama called _The Cenci_ (1819), which is founded upon a morbid Italian

story, Shelley for the first and only time descends to reality. The

heroine, Beatrice, driven to desperation by the monstrous wickedness of her

father, kills him and suffers the death penalty in consequence. She is the

only one of Shelley's characters who seems to us entirely human.

Far different in character is _Epipsychidion_ (1821), a rhapsody

celebrating Platonic love, the most impalpable, and so one of the most

characteristic, of all Shelley's works. It was inspired by a beautiful

Italian girl, Emilia Viviani, who was put into a cloister against her will,

and in whom Shelley imagined he found his long-sought ideal of womanhood.

With this should be read _Adonais_ (1821), the best known of all Shelley's

longer poems. _Adonais_ is a wonderful threnody, or a song of grief, over

the death of the poet Keats. Even in his grief Shelley still preserves a

sense of unreality, and calls in many shadowy allegorical figures,--Sad

Spring, Weeping Hours, Glooms, Splendors, Destinies,--all uniting in

bewailing the loss of a loved one. The whole poem is a succession of dream

pictures, exquisitely beautiful, such as only Shelley could imagine; and it

holds its place with Milton's _Lycidas_ and Tennyson's _In Memoriam_ as one

of the three greatest elegies in our language.

In his interpretation of nature Shelley suggests Wordsworth, both by

resemblance and by contrast. To both poets all natural objects are symbols

of truth; both regard nature as permeated by the great spiritual life which

animates all things; but while Wordsworth finds a spirit of thought, and so

of communion between nature and the soul of man, Shelley finds a spirit of

love, which exists chiefly for its own delight; and so "The Cloud," "The

Skylark," and "The West Wind," three of the most beautiful poems in our

language, have no definite message for humanity. In his "Hymn to

Intellectual Beauty" Shelley is most like Wordsworth; but in his "Sensitive

Plant," with its fine symbolism and imagery, he is like nobody in the world

but himself. Comparison is sometimes an excellent thing; and if we compare

Shelley's exquisite "Lament," beginning "O world, O life, O time," with

Wordsworth's "Intimations of Immortality," we shall perhaps understand both

poets better. Both poems recall many happy memories of youth; both express

a very real mood of a moment; but while the beauty of one merely saddens

and disheartens us, the beauty of the other inspires us with something of

the poet's own faith and hopefulness. In a word, Wordsworth found and

Shelley lost himself in nature.

JOHN KEATS (1795-1821)

Keats was not only the last but also the most perfect of the Romanticists.

While Scott was merely telling stories, and Wordsworth reforming poetry or

upholding the moral law, and Shelley advocating impossible reforms, and

Byron voicing his own egoism and the political discontent of the times,

Keats lived apart from men and from all political measures, worshiping

beauty like a devotee, perfectly content to write what was in his own

heart, or to reflect some splendor of the natural world as he saw or

dreamed it to be. He had, moreover, the novel idea that poetry exists for

its own sake, and suffers loss by being devoted to philosophy or politics

or, indeed, to any cause, however great or small. As he says in "Lamia":

... Do not all charms fly

At the mere touch of cold philosophy?

There was an awful rainbow once in heaven:

We know her woof, her texture; she is given

In the dull catalogue of common things.

Philosophy will clip an Angel's wings,

Conquer all mysteries by rule and line,

Empty the haunted air, and gnomed mine--

Unweave a rainbow, as it erewhile made

The tender-person'd Lamia melt into a shade.

Partly because of this high ideal of poetry, partly because he studied and

unconsciously imitated the Greek classics and the best works of the

Elizabethans, Keats's last little volume of poetry is unequaled by the work

of any of his contemporaries. When we remember that all his work was

published in three short years, from 1817 to 1820, and that he died when

only twenty-five years old, we must judge him to be the most promising

figure of the early nineteenth century, and one of the most remarkable in

the history of literature.

LIFE. Keats's life of devotion to beauty and to poetry is all the more

remarkable in view of his lowly origin. He was the son of a hostler and

stable keeper, and was born in the stable of the Swan and Hoop Inn, London,

in 1795. One has only to read the rough stable scenes from our first

novelists, or even from Dickens, to understand how little there was in such

an atmosphere to develop poetic gifts. Before Keats was fifteen years old

both parents died, and he was placed with his brothers and sisters in

charge of guardians. Their first act seems to have been to take Keats from

school at Enfield, and to bind him as an apprentice to a surgeon at

Edmonton. For five years he served his apprenticeship, and for two years

more he was surgeon's helper in the hospitals; but though skillful enough

to win approval, he disliked his work, and his thoughts were on other

things. "The other day, during a lecture," he said to a friend, "there came

a sunbeam into the room, and with it a whole troop of creatures floating in

the ray; and I was off with them to Oberon and fairyland." A copy of

Spenser's _Faery Queen_, which had been given him by Charles Cowden Clark,

was the prime cause of his abstraction. He abandoned his profession in

1817, and early in the same year published his first volume of _Poems_. It

was modest enough in spirit, as was also his second volume, _Endymion_

(1818); but that did not prevent brutal attacks upon the author and his

work by the self-constituted critics of _Blackwood's Magazine_ and the

_Quarterly_. It is often alleged that the poet's spirit and ambition were

broken by these attacks;[229] but Keats was a man of strong character, and

instead of quarreling with his reviewers, or being crushed by their

criticism, he went quietly to work with the idea of producing poetry that

should live forever. As Matthew Arnold says, Keats "had flint and iron in

him"; and in his next volume he accomplished his own purpose and silenced

unfriendly criticism.

For the three years during which Keats wrote his poetry he lived chiefly in

London and in Hampstead, but wandered at times over England and Scotland,

living for brief spaces in the Isle of Wight, in Devonshire, and in the

Lake district, seeking to recover his own health, and especially to restore

that of his brother. His illness began with a severe cold, but soon

developed into consumption; and added to this sorrow was another,--his love

for Fannie Brawne, to whom he was engaged, but whom he could not marry on

account of his poverty and growing illness. When we remember all this

personal grief and the harsh criticism of literary men, the last small

volume, _Lamia, Isabella, The Eve of St. Agnes, and Other Poems_ (1820), is

most significant, as showing not only Keats's wonderful poetic gifts, but

also his beautiful and indomitable spirit. Shelley, struck by the beauty

and promise of "Hyperion," sent a generous invitation to the author to come

to Pisa and live with him; but Keats refused, having little sympathy with

Shelley's revolt against society. The invitation had this effect, however,

that it turned Keats's thoughts to Italy, whither he soon went in the

effort to save his life. He settled in Rome with his friend Severn, the

artist, but died soon after his arrival, in February, 1821. His grave, in

the Protestant cemetery at Rome, is still an object of pilgrimage to

thousands of tourists; for among all our poets there is hardly another

whose heroic life and tragic death have so appealed to the hearts of poets

and young enthusiasts.

THE WORK OF KEATS. "None but the master shall praise us; and none but the

master shall blame" might well be written on the fly leaf of every volume

of Keats's poetry; for never was there a poet more devoted to his ideal,

entirely independent of success or failure. In strong contrast with his

contemporary, Byron, who professed to despise the art that made him famous,

Keats lived for poetry alone, and, as Lowell pointed out, a virtue went out

of him into everything he wrote. In all his work we have the impression of

this intense loyalty to his art; we have the impression also of a profound

dissatisfaction that the deed falls so far short of the splendid dream.

Thus after reading Chapman's translation of Homer he writes:

Much have I travelled in the realms of gold,

And many goodly states and kingdoms seen;

Round many western islands have I been

Which bards in fealty to Apollo hold.

Oft of one wide expanse had I been told

That deep-browed Homer ruled as his demesne;

Yet did I never breathe its pure serene

Till I heard Chapman speak out loud and bold:

Then felt I like some watcher of the skies

When a new planet swims into his ken;

Or like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes

He stared at the Pacific--and all his men

Looked at each other with a wild surmise--

Silent, upon a peak in Darien.

In this striking sonnet we have a suggestion of Keats's high ideal, and of

his sadness because of his own ignorance, when he published his first

little volume of poems in 1817. He knew no Greek; yet Greek literature

absorbed and fascinated him, as he saw its broken and imperfect reflection

in an English translation. Like Shakespeare, who also was but poorly

educated in the schools, he had a marvelous faculty of discerning the real

spirit of the classics,--a faculty denied to many great scholars, and to

most of the "classic" writers of the preceding century,--and so he set

himself to the task of reflecting in modern English the spirit of the old

Greeks.

The imperfect results of this attempt are seen in his next volume,

_Endymion_, which is the story of a young shepherd beloved by a moon

goddess. The poem begins with the striking lines:

A thing of beauty is a joy forever;

Its loveliness increases; it will never

Pass into nothingness; but still will keep

A bower quiet for us; and a sleep

Full of sweet dreams, and health, and quiet breathing,

which well illustrate the spirit of Keats's later work, with its perfect

finish and melody. It has many quotable lines and passages, and its "Hymn

to Pan" should be read in connection with Wordsworth's famous sonnet

beginning, "The world is too much with us." The poem gives splendid

promise, but as a whole it is rather chaotic, with too much ornament and

too little design, like a modern house. That Keats felt this defect

strongly is evident from his modest preface, wherein he speaks of

_Endymion_, not as a deed accomplished, but only as an unsuccessful attempt

to suggest the underlying beauty of Greek mythology.

Keats's third and last volume, _Lamia, Isabella, The Eve of St. Agnes, and

Other Poems_ (1820), is the one with which the reader should begin his

acquaintance with this master of English verse. It has only two subjects,

Greek mythology and mediæval romance. "Hyperion" is a magnificent fragment,

suggesting the first arch of a cathedral that was never finished. Its theme

is the overthrow of the Titans by the young sun-god Apollo. Realizing his

own immaturity and lack of knowledge, Keats laid aside this work, and only

the pleadings of his publisher induced him to print the fragment with his

completed poems.

Throughout this last volume, and especially in "Hyperion," the influence of

Milton is apparent, while Spenser is more frequently suggested in reading

_Endymion_.

Of the longer poems in the volume, "Lamia" is the most suggestive. It is

the story of a beautiful enchantress, who turns from a serpent into a

glorious woman and fills every human sense with delight, until, as a result

of the foolish philosophy of old Apollonius, she vanishes forever from her

lover's sight. "The Eve of St. Agnes," the most perfect of Keats's mediæval

poems, is not a story after the manner of the metrical romances, but rather

a vivid painting of a romantic mood, such as comes to all men, at times, to

glorify a workaday world. Like all the work of Keats and Shelley, it has an

element of unreality; and when we read at the end,

And they are gone; aye, ages long ago

These lovers fled away into the storm,

it is as if we were waking from a dream,--which is the only possible ending

to all of Keats's Greek and mediæval fancies. We are to remember, however,

that no beautiful thing, though it be intangible as a dream, can enter a

man's life and leave him quite the same afterwards. Keats's own word is

here suggestive. "The imagination," he said, "may be likened to Adam's

dream; he awoke and found it true."

It is by his short poems that Keats is known to the majority of present-day

readers. Among these exquisite shorter poems we mention only the four odes,

"On a Grecian Urn," "To a Nightingale," "To Autumn," and "To Psyche." These

are like an invitation to a feast; one who reads them will hardly be

satisfied until he knows more of such delightful poetry. Those who study

only the "Ode to a Nightingale" may find four things,--a love of sensuous

beauty, a touch of pessimism, a purely pagan conception of nature, and a

strong individualism,--which are characteristic of this last of the

romantic poets.

As Wordsworth's work is too often marred by the moralizer, and Byron's by

the demagogue, and Shelley's by the reformer, so Keats's work suffers by

the opposite extreme of aloofness from every human interest; so much so,

that he is often accused of being indifferent to humanity. His work is also

criticised as being too effeminate for ordinary readers. Three things

should be remembered in this connection. First, that Keats sought to

express beauty for its own sake; that beauty is as essential to normal

humanity as is government or law; and that the higher man climbs in

civilization the more imperative becomes his need of beauty as a reward for

his labors. Second, that Keats's letters are as much an indication of the

man as is his poetry; and in his letters, with their human sympathy, their

eager interest in social problems, their humor, and their keen insight into

life, there is no trace of effeminacy, but rather every indication of a

strong and noble manhood. The third thing to remember is that all Keats's

work was done in three or four years, with small preparation, and that,

dying at twenty-five, he left us a body of poetry which will always be one

of our most cherished possessions. He is often compared with "the marvelous

boy" Chatterton, whom he greatly admired, and to whose memory he dedicated

his _Endymion_; but though both died young, Chatterton was but a child,

while Keats was in all respects a man. It is idle to prophesy what he might

have done, had he been granted a Tennyson's long life and scholarly

training. At twenty five his work was as mature as was Tennyson's at fifty,

though the maturity suggests the too rapid growth of a tropical plant which

under the warm rains and the flood of sunlight leaps into life, grows,

blooms in a day, and dies.

As we have stated, Keats's work was bitterly and unjustly condemned by the

critics of his day. He belonged to what was derisively called the cockney

school of poetry, of which Leigh Hunt was chief, and Proctor and Beddoes

were fellow-workmen. Not even from Wordsworth and Byron, who were ready

enough to recommend far less gifted writers, did Keats receive the

slightest encouragement. Like young Lochinvar, "he rode all unarmed and he

rode all alone." Shelley, with his sincerity and generosity, was the first

to recognize the young genius, and in his noble _Adonais_--written, alas,

like most of our tributes, when the subject of our praise is dead--he spoke

the first true word of appreciation, and placed Keats, where he

unquestionably belongs, among our greatest poets. The fame denied him in

his sad life was granted freely after his death. Most fitly does he close

the list of poets of the romantic revival, because in many respects he was

the best workman of them all. He seems to have studied words more carefully

than did his contemporaries, and so his poetic expression, or the harmony

of word and thought, is generally more perfect than theirs. More than any

other he lived for poetry, as the noblest of the arts. More than any other

he emphasized beauty, because to him, as shown by his "Grecian Urn," beauty

and truth were one and inseparable. And he enriched the whole romantic

movement by adding to its interest in common life the spirit, rather than

the letter, of the classics and of Elizabethan poetry. For these reasons

Keats is, like Spenser, a poet's poet; his work profoundly influenced

Tennyson and, indeed, most of the poets of the present era.

II. PROSE WRITERS OF THE ROMANTIC PERIOD

Aside from the splendid work of the novel writers--Walter Scott, whom we

have considered, and Jane Austen, to whom we shall presently return--the

early nineteenth century is remarkable for the development of a new and

valuable type of critical prose writing. If we except the isolated work of

Dryden and of Addison, it is safe to say that literary criticism, in its

modern sense, was hardly known in England until about the year 1825. Such

criticism as existed seems to us now to have been largely the result of

personal opinion or prejudice. Indeed we could hardly expect anything else

before some systematic study of our literature as a whole had been

attempted. In one age a poem was called good or bad according as it

followed or ran counter to so-called classic rules; in another we have the

dogmatism of Dr. Johnson; in a third the personal judgment of Lockhart and

the editors of the _Edinburgh Review_ and the _Quarterly_, who so violently

abused Keats and the Lake poets in the name of criticism. Early in the

nineteenth century there arose a new school of criticism which was guided

by knowledge of literature, on the one hand, and by what one might call the

fear of God on the other. The latter element showed itself in a profound

human sympathy,--the essence of the romantic movement,--and its importance

was summed up by De Quincey when he said, "Not to sympathize is not to

understand." These new critics, with abundant reverence for past masters,

could still lay aside the dogmatism and prejudice which marked Johnson and

the magazine editors, and read sympathetically the work of a new author,

with the sole idea of finding what he had contributed, or tried to

contribute, to the magnificent total of our literature. Coleridge, Hunt,

Hazlitt, Lamb, and De Quincey were the leaders in this new and immensely

important development; and we must not forget the importance of the new

periodicals, like the _Londen Magazine,_ founded in 1820, in which Lamb, De

Quincey, and Carlyle found their first real encouragement.

Of Coleridge's _Biographica Literaria_ and his _Lectures on Shakespeare_ we

have already spoken. Leigh Hunt (1784-1859) wrote continuously for more

than thirty years, as editor and essayist; and his chief object seems to

have been to make good literature known and appreciated. William Hazlitt

(1778-1830), in a long series of lectures and essays, treated all reading

as a kind of romantic journey into new and pleasant countries. To his work

largely, with that of Lamb, was due the new interest in Elizabethan

literature, which so strongly influenced Keats's last and best volume of

poetry. For those interested in the art of criticism, and in the

appreciation of literature, both Hunt and Hazlitt will well repay study;

but we must pass over their work to consider the larger literary interest

of Lamb and De Quincey, who were not simply critics of other men's labor,

but who also produced some delightful work of their own, which the world

has carefully put away among the "things worthy to be remembered."

CHARLES LAMB (1775-1834)

In Lamb and Wordsworth we have two widely different views of the romantic

movement; one shows the influence of nature and solitude, the other of

society. Lamb was a lifelong friend of Coleridge, and an admirer and

defender of the poetic creed of Wordsworth; but while the latter lived

apart from men, content with nature and with reading an occasional moral

lesson to society, Lamb was born and lived in the midst of the London

streets. The city crowd, with its pleasures and occupations, its endless

little comedies and tragedies, alone interested him. According to his own

account, when he paused in the crowded street tears would spring to his

eyes,--tears of pure pleasure at the abundance of so much good life; and

when he wrote, he simply interpreted that crowded human life of joy and

sorrow, as Wordsworth interpreted the woods and waters, without any desire

to change or to reform them. He has given us the best pictures we possess

of Coleridge, Hazlitt, Landor, Hood, Cowden Clarke, and many more of the

interesting men and women of his age; and it is due to his insight and

sympathy that the life of those far-off days seems almost as real to us as

if we ourselves remembered it. Of all our English essayists he is the most

lovable; partly because of his delicate, old-fashioned style and humor, but

more because of that cheery and heroic struggle against misfortune which

shines like a subdued light in all his writings.

LIFE. In the very heart of London there is a curious, old-fashioned place

known as the Temple,--an enormous, rambling, apparently forgotten

structure, dusty and still, in the midst of the endless roar of the city

streets. Originally it was a chapter house of the Knights Templars, and so

suggests to us the spirit of the Crusades and of the Middle Ages; but now

the building is given over almost entirely to the offices and lodgings of

London lawyers. It is this queer old place which, more than all others, is

associated with the name of Charles Lamb. "I was born," he says, "and

passed the first seven years of my life in the Temple. Its gardens, its

halls, its fountain, its river... these are my oldest recollections." He

was the son of a poor clerk, or rather servant, of one of the barristers,

and was the youngest of seven children, only three of whom survived

infancy. Of these three, John, the elder, was apparently a selfish

creature, who took no part in the heroic struggle of his brother and

sister. At seven years, Charles was sent to the famous "Bluecoat" charity

school of Christ's Hospital. Here he remained seven years; and here he

formed his lifelong friendship for another poor, neglected boy, whom the

world remembers as Coleridge.[230]

When only fourteen years old, Lamb left the charity school and was soon at

work as a clerk in the South Sea House. Two years later he became a clerk

in the famous India House, where he worked steadily for thirty-three years,

with the exception of six weeks, in the winter of 1795-1796, spent within

the walls of an asylum. In 1796 Lamb's sister Mary, who was as talented and

remarkable as Lamb himself, went violently insane and killed her own

mother. For a long time after this appalling tragedy she was in an asylum

at Hoxton; then Lamb, in 1797, brought her to his own little house, and for

the remainder of his life cared for her with a tenderness and devotion

which furnishes one of the most beautiful pages in our literary history. At

times the malady would return to Mary, giving sure warning of its terrible

approach; and then brother and sister might be seen walking silently, hand

in hand, to the gates of the asylum, their cheeks wet with tears. One must

remember this, as well as Lamb's humble lodgings and the drudgery of his

daily work in the-big commercial house, if he would appreciate the pathos

of "The Old Familiar Faces," or the heroism which shines through the most

human and the most delightful essays in our language.

When Lamb was fifty years of age the East India Company, led partly by his

literary fame following his first _Essays of Elia_, and partly by his

thirty-three years of faithful service, granted him a comfortable pension;

and happy as a boy turned loose from school he left India House forever to

give himself up to literary work.[231] He wrote to Wordsworth, in April,

1825, "I came home _forever_ on Tuesday of last week--it was like passing

from life into eternity." Curiously enough Lamb seems to lose power after

his release from drudgery, and his last essays, published in 1833, lack

something of the grace and charm of his earlier work. He died at Edmonton

in 1834; and his gifted sister Mary sank rapidly into the gulf from which

his strength and gentleness had so long held her back. No literary man was

ever more loved and honored by a rare circle of friends; and all who knew

him bear witness to the simplicity and goodness which any reader may find

for himself between the lines of his essays.

WORKS. The works of Lamb divide themselves naturally into three periods.

First, there are his early literary efforts, including the poems signed "C.

L." in Coleridge's _Poems on Various Subjects_ (1796); his romance

_Rosamund Gray_ (1798); his poetical drama _John Woodvil_ (1802); and

various other immature works in prose and poetry. This period comes to an

end in 1803, when he gave up his newspaper work, especially the

contribution of six jokes, puns, and squibs daily to the _Morning Post_ at

sixpence apiece. The second period was given largely to literary criticism;

and the _Tales from Shakespeare_ (1807)--written by Charles and Mary Lamb,

the former reproducing the tragedies, and the latter the comedies--may be

regarded as his first successful literary venture. The book was written

primarily for children; but so thoroughly had brother and sister steeped

themselves in the literature of the Elizabethan period that young and old

alike were delighted with this new version of Shakespeare's stories, and

the _Tales_ are still regarded as the best of their kind in our literature.

In 1808 appeared his _Specimens of English Dramatic Poets Contemporary with

Shakespeare_. This carried out the splendid critical work of Coleridge, and

was the most noticeable influence in developing the poetic qualities of

Keats, as shown in his last volume.

The third period includes Lamb's criticisms of life, which are gathered

together in his _Essays of Elia_ (1823), and his _Last Essays of Elia_,

which were published ten years later. These famous essays began in 1820

with the appearance of the new _London Magazine_[232] and were continued

for many years, such subjects as the "Dissertation on Roast Pig," "Old

China," "Praise of Chimney Sweepers," "Imperfect Sympathies," "A Chapter on

Ears," "Mrs. Battle's Opinions on Whist," "Mackery End," "Grace Before

Meat," "Dream Children," and many others being chosen apparently at random,

but all leading to a delightful interpretation of the life of London, as it

appeared to a quiet little man who walked unnoticed through its crowded

streets. In the first and last essays which we have mentioned,

"Dissertation on Roast Pig" and "Dream Children," we have the extremes of

Lamb's humor and pathos.

The style of all these essays is gentle, old-fashioned, irresistibly

attractive. Lamb was especially fond of old writers and borrowed

unconsciously from the style of Burton's _Anatomy of Melancholy_ and from

Browne's _Religio Medici_ and from the early English dramatists. But this

style had become a part of Lamb by long reading, and he was apparently

unable to express his new thought without using their old quaint

expressions. Though these essays are all criticisms or appreciations of the

life of his age, they are all intensely personal. In other words, they are

an excellent picture of Lamb and of humanity. Without a trace of vanity or

self-assertion, Lamb begins with himself, with some purely personal mood or

experience, and from this he leads the reader to see life and literature as

he saw it. It is this wonderful combination of personal and universal

interests, together with Lamb's rare old style and quaint humor, which make

the essays remarkable. They continue the best tradition of Addison and

Steele, our first great essayists; but their sympathies are broader and

deeper, and their humor more delicious than any which preceded them.

THOMAS DE QUINCY (1785-1859)

In De Quincey the romantic element is even more strongly developed than in

Lamb, not only in his critical work, but also in his erratic and

imaginative life. He was profoundly educated, even more so than Coleridge,

and was one of the keenest intellects of the age; yet his wonderful

intellect seems always subordinate to his passion for dreaming. Like Lamb,

he was a friend and associate of the Lake poets, making his headquarters in

Wordsworth's old cottage at Grasmere for nearly twenty years. Here the

resemblance ceases, and a marked contrast begins. As a man, Lamb is the

most human and lovable of all our essayists; while De Quincey is the most

uncanny and incomprehensible. Lamb's modest works breathe the two essential

qualities of sympathy and humor; the greater number of De Quincey's essays,

while possessing more or less of both these qualities, are characterized

chiefly by their brilliant style. Life, as seen through De Quincey's eyes,

is nebulous and chaotic, and there is a suspicion of the fabulous in all

that he wrote. Even in _The Revolt of the Tartars_ the romantic element is

uppermost, and in much of De Quincey's prose the element of unreality is

more noticeable than in Shelley's poetry. Of his subject-matter, his facts,

ideas, and criticisms, we are generally suspicious; but of his style,

sometimes stately and sometimes headlong, now gorgeous as an Oriental

dream, now musical as Keats's _Endymion_, and always, even in the most

violent contrasts, showing a harmony between the idea and the expression

such as no other English writer, with the possible exception of Newman, has

ever rivaled,--say what you will of the marvelous brilliancy of De

Quincey's style, you have still only half expressed the truth. It is the

style alone which makes these essays immortal.

LIFE. De Quincey was born in Manchester in 1785. In neither his father, who

was a prosperous merchant, nor his mother, who was a quiet, unsympathetic

woman, do we see any suggestion of the son's almost uncanny genius. As a

child he was given to dreams, more vivid and intense but less beautiful

than those of the young Blake to whom he bears a strong resemblance. In the

grammar school at Bath he displayed astonishing ability, and acquired Greek

and Latin with a rapidity that frightened his slow tutors. At fifteen he

not only read Greek, but spoke it fluently; and one of his astounded

teachers remarked, "That boy could harangue an Athenian mob better than you

or I could address an English one." From the grammar school at Manchester,

whither he was sent in 1800, he soon ran away, finding the instruction far

below his abilities, and the rough life absolutely intolerable to his

sensitive nature. An uncle, just home from India, interceded for the boy

lest he be sent back to the school, which he hated; and with an allowance

of a guinea a week he started a career of vagrancy, much like that of

Goldsmith, living on the open hills, in the huts of shepherds and charcoal

burners, in the tents of gypsies, wherever fancy led him. His fear of the

Manchester school finally led him to run away to London, where, without

money or friends, his life was even more extraordinary than his gypsy

wanderings. The details of this vagrancy are best learned in his

_Confessions of an English Opium-Eater_, where we meet not simply the facts

of his life, but also the confusion of dreams and fancies in the midst of

which he wandered like a man lost on the mountains, with storm clouds under

his feet hiding the familiar earth. After a year of vagrancy and starvation

he was found by his family and allowed to go to Oxford, where his career

was marked by the most brilliant and erratic scholarship. When ready for a

degree, in 1807, he passed his written tests successfully, but felt a

sudden terror at the thought of the oral examination and disappeared from

the university, never to return.

It was in Oxford that De Quincey began the use of opium; to relieve the

pains of neuralgia, and the habit increased until he was an almost hopeless

slave to the drug. Only his extraordinary will power enabled him to break

away from the habit, after some thirty years of misery. Some peculiarity of

his delicate constitution enabled De Quincey to take enormous quantities of

opium, enough to kill several ordinary men; and it was largely opium,

working upon a sensitive imagination, which produced his gorgeous dreams,

broken by intervals of weakness and profound depression. For twenty years

he resided at Grasmere in the companionship of the Lake poets; and here,

led by the loss of his small fortune, he began to write, with the idea of

supporting his family. In 1821 he published his first famous work, the

_Confessions of an English Opium-Eater_, and for nearly forty years

afterwards he wrote industriously, contributing to various magazines an

astonishing number of essays on a great variety of subjects. Without

thought of literary fame, he contributed these articles anonymously; but

fortunately, in 1853, he began to collect his own works, and the last of

fourteen volumes was published just after his death.

In 1830, led by his connection with _Blackwood's Magazine_, to which he was

the chief contributor, De Quincey removed with his family to Edinburgh,

where his erratic genius and his singularly childlike ways produced enough

amusing anecdotes to fill a volume. He would take a room in some place

unknown to his friends and family; would live in it for a few years, until

he had filled it, even to the bath tub, with books and with his own chaotic

manuscripts, allowing no one to enter or disturb his den; and then, when

the place became too crowded, he would lock the door and go away and take

another lodging, where he repeated the same extraordinary performance. He

died in Edinburgh in 1859. Like Lamb, he was a small, boyish figure,

gentle, and elaborately courteous. Though excessively shy, and escaping as

often as possible to solitude, he was nevertheless fond of society, and his

wide knowledge and vivid imagination made his conversations almost as

prized as those of his friend Coleridge.

WORKS. De Quincey's works may be divided into two general classes. The

first includes his numerous critical articles, and the second his

autobiographical sketches. All his works, it must be remembered, were

contributed to various magazines, and were hastily collected just before

his death. Hence the general impression of chaos which we get from reading

them.

From a literary view point the most illuminating of De Quincey's critical

works is his. _Literary Reminiscences_. This contains brilliant

appreciations of Wordsworth, Coleridge, Lamb, Shelley, Keats, Hazlitt, and

Landor, as well as some interesting studies of the literary figures of the

age preceding. Among the best of his brilliant critical essays are _On the

Knocking at the Gate in Macbeth_ (1823), which is admirably suited to show

the man's critical genius, and _Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts_

(1827), which reveals his grotesque humor Other suggestive critical works,

if one must choose among such a multitude, are his _Letters to a Young Man_

(1823), _Joan of Arc_ (1847), _The Revolt of the Tartars_ (1840), and _The

English Mail-Coach_ (1849). In the last-named essay the "Dream Fugue" is

one of the most imaginative of all his curious works.

Of De Quincey's autobiographical sketches the best known is his

_Confessions of an English Opium-Eater_ (1821). This is only partly a

record of opium dreams, and its chief interest lies in glimpses it gives us

of De Quincey's own life and wanderings. This should be followed by

_Suspiria de Profundis_ (1845), which is chiefly a record of gloomy and

terrible dreams produced by opiates. The most interesting parts of his

_Suspiria_, showing De Quincey's marvelous insight into dreams, are those

in which we are brought face to face with the strange feminine creations

"Levana," "Madonna," "Our Lady of Sighs," and "Our Lady of Darkness." A

series of nearly thirty articles which he collected in 1853, called

_Autobiographic Sketches_, completes the revelation of the author's own

life. Among his miscellaneous works may be mentioned, in order to show his

wide range of subjects, _Klosterheim_, a novel, _Logic of Political

Economy_, the _Essays on Style and Rhetoric, Philosophy of Herodotus_, and

his articles on Goethe, Pope, Schiller, and Shakespeare which he

contributed to the _Encyclopedia Britannica_.

De Quincey's style is a revelation of the beauty of the English language,

and it profoundly influenced Ruskin and other prose writers of the

Victorian Age. It has two chief faults,--diffuseness, which continually

leads De Quincey away from his object, and triviality, which often makes

him halt in the midst of a marvelous paragraph to make some light jest or

witticism that has some humor but no mirth in it. Notwithstanding these

faults, De Quincey's prose is still among the few supreme examples of style

in our language. Though he was profoundly influenced by the seventeenth-

century writers, he attempted definitely to create a new style which should

combine the best elements of prose and poetry. In consequence, his prose

works are often, like those of Milton, more imaginative and melodious than

much of our poetry. He has been well called "the psychologist of style,"

and as such his works will never be popular; but to the few who can

appreciate him he will always be an inspiration to better writing. One has

a deeper respect for our English language and literature after reading him.

SECONDARY WRITERS OF ROMANTICISM. One has only to glance back over the

authors we have been studying--Wordsworth, Coleridge, Southey, Byron,

Shelley, Keats, Scott, Lamb, De Quincey--to realize the great change which

swept over the life and literature of England in a single half century,

under two influences which we now know as the French Revolution in history

and the Romantic Movement in literature. In life men had rebelled against

the too strict authority of state and society; in literature they rebelled

even more vigorously against the bonds of classicism, which had sternly

repressed a writer's ambition to follow his own ideals and to express them

in his own way. Naturally such an age of revolution was essentially

poetic,--only the Elizabethan Age surpasses it in this respect,--and it

produced a large number of minor writers, who followed more or less closely

the example of its great leaders. Among novelists we have Jane Austen,

Frances Burney, Maria Edgeworth, Jane Porter, and Susan Ferrier,--all

women, be it noted; among the poets, Campbell, Moore, Hogg ("the Ettrick

Shepherd"), Mrs. Hemans, Heber, Keble, Hood, and "Ingoldsby" (Richard

Barham); and among miscellaneous writers, Sidney Smith, "Christopher North"

(John Wilson), Chalmers, Lockhart, Leigh Hunt, Hazlitt, Hallam, and Landor.

Here is an astonishing variety of writers, and to consider all their claims

to remembrance would of itself require a volume. Though these are generally

classed as secondary writers, much of their work has claims to popularity,

and some of it to permanence. Moore's _Irish Melodies_, Campbell's lyrics,

Keble's _Christian Year_, and Jane Porter's _Thaddeus of Warsaw_ and

_Scottish Chiefs_ have still a multitude of readers, where Keats, Lamb, and

De Quincey are prized only by the cultured few; and Hallam's historical and

critical works are perhaps better known than those of Gibbon, who

nevertheless occupies a larger place in our literature. Among all these

writers we choose only two, Jane Austen and Walter Savage Landor, whose

works indicate a period of transition from the Romantic to the Victorian

Age.

JANE AUSTEN (1775-1817)

We have so lately rediscovered the charm and genius of this gifted young

woman that she seems to be a novelist of yesterday, rather than the

contemporary of Wordsworth and Coleridge; and few even of her readers

realize that she did for the English novel precisely what the Lake poets

did for English poetry,--she refined and simplified it, making it a true

reflection of English life. Like the Lake poets, she met with scanty

encouragement in her own generation. Her greatest novel, _Pride and

Prejudice_, was finished in 1797, a year before the appearance of the

famous _Lyrical Ballads_ of Wordsworth and Coleridge; but while the latter

book was published and found a few appreciative readers, the manuscript of

this wonderful novel went begging for sixteen years before it found a

publisher. As Wordsworth began with the deliberate purpose of making poetry

natural and truthful, so Miss Austen appears to have begun writing with the

idea of presenting the life of English country society exactly as it was,

in opposition to the romantic extravagance of Mrs. Radcliffe and her

school. But there was this difference,--that Miss Austen had in large

measure the saving gift of humor, which Wordsworth sadly lacked. Maria

Edgeworth, at the same time, set a sane and excellent example in her tales

of Irish life, _The Absentee_ and _Castle Rackrent;_ and Miss Austen

followed up the advantage with at least six works, which have grown

steadily in value until we place them gladly in the first rank of our

novels of common life. It is not simply for her exquisite charm, therefore,

that we admire her, but also for her influence in bringing our novels back

to their true place as an expression of human life. It is due partly, at

least, to her influence that a multitude of readers were ready to

appreciate Mrs. Gaskell's _Cranford_, and the powerful and enduring work of

George Eliot.

LIFE. Jane Austen's life gives little opportunity for the biographer,

unless, perchance, he has something of her own power to show the beauty and

charm of commonplace things. She was the seventh child of Rev. George

Austen, rector of Steventon, and was born in the parsonage of the village

in 1775. With her sisters she was educated at home, and passed her life

very quietly, cheerfully, in the doing of small domestic duties, to which

love lent the magic lamp that makes all things beautiful. She began to

write at an early age, and seems to have done her work on a little table in

the family sitting room, in the midst of the family life. When a visitor

entered, she would throw a paper or a piece of sewing over her work, and

she modestly refused to be known as the author of novels which we now count

among our treasured possessions. With the publishers she had little

success. _Pride and Prejudice_ went begging, as we have said, for sixteen

years; and _Northanger Abbey_ (1798) was sold for a trivial sum to a

publisher, who laid it aside and forgot it, until the appearance and

moderate success of _Sense and Sensibility_ in 1811. Then, after keeping

the manuscript some fifteen years, he sold it back to the family, who found

another publisher.

An anonymous article in the _Quarterly Review_, following the appearance of

_Emma_ in 1815, full of generous appreciation of the charm of the new

writer, was the beginning of Jane Austen's fame; and it is only within a

few years that we have learned that the friendly and discerning critic was

Walter Scott. He continued to be her admirer until her early death; but

these two, the greatest writers of fiction in their age, were never brought

together. Both were home-loving people, and Miss Austen especially was

averse to publicity and popularity. She died, quietly as she had lived, at

Winchester, in 1817, and was buried in the cathedral. She was a bright,

attractive little woman, whose sunny qualities are unconsciously reflected

in all her books.

WORKS. Very few English writers ever had so narrow a field of work as Jane

Austen. Like the French novelists, whose success seems to lie in choosing

the tiny field that they know best, her works have an exquisite perfection

that is lacking in most of our writers of fiction. With the exception of an

occasional visit to the watering place of Bath, her whole life was spent in

small country parishes, whose simple country people became the characters

of her novels. Her brothers were in the navy, and so naval officers furnish

the only exciting elements in her stories; but even these alleged heroes

lay aside their imposing martial ways and act like themselves and other

people. Such was her literary field, in which the chief duties were of the

household, the chief pleasures in country gatherings, and the chief

interests in matrimony. Life, with its mighty interests, its passions,

ambitions, and tragic struggles, swept by like a great river; while the

secluded interests of a country parish went round and round quietly, like

an eddy behind a sheltering rock. We can easily understand, therefore, the

limitations of Jane Austen; but within her own field she is unequaled. Her

characters are absolutely true to life, and all her work has the perfection

of a delicate miniature painting. The most widely read of her novels is

_Pride and Prejudice;_ but three others, _Sense and Sensibility, Emma_, and

_Mansfield Park_, have slowly won their way to the front rank of fiction.

From a literary view point _Northanger Abbey_ is perhaps the best; for in

it we find that touch of humor and delicate satire with which this gentle

little woman combated the grotesque popular novels of the _Udolpho_ type.

Reading any of these works, one is inclined to accept the hearty

indorsement of Sir Walter Scott: "That young lady has a talent for

describing the involvements and feelings and characters of ordinary life

which is to me the most wonderful I ever met with. The big bowwow strain I

can do myself, like any now going; but the exquisite touch which renders

ordinary commonplace things and characters interesting from the truth of

the description and the sentiment, is denied to me. What a pity such a

gifted creature died so early!"

WALTER SAVAGE LANDOR (1775-1864)

While Hazlitt, Lamb, De Quincey, and other romantic critics went back to

early English literature for their inspiration, Landor shows a reaction

from the prevailing Romanticism by his imitation of the ancient classic

writers. His life was an extraordinary one and, like his work, abounded in

sharp contrasts. On the one hand, there are his egoism, his unncontrollable

anger, his perpetual lawsuits, and the last sad tragedy with his children,

which suggests _King Lear_ and his daughters; on the other hand there is

his steady devotion to the classics and to the cultivation of the deep

wisdom of the ancients, which suggests Pindar and Cicero. In his works we

find the wild extravagance of _Gebir_, followed by the superb classic style

and charm of _Pericles and Aspasia_. Such was Landor, a man of high ideals,

perpetually at war with himself and the world.

LIFE. Lander's stormy life covers the whole period from Wordsworth's

childhood to the middle of the Victorian Era. He was the son of a

physician, and was born at Warwick, in 1775. From his mother he inherited a

fortune; but it was soon scattered by large expenditures and law quarrels;

and in his old age, refused help by his own children, only Browning's

generosity kept Landor from actual want. At Rugby, and at Oxford, his

extreme Republicanism brought him into constant trouble; and his fitting

out a band of volunteers to assist the Spaniards against Napoleon, in 1808,

allies him with Byron and his Quixotic followers. The resemblance to Byron

is even more strikingly shown in the poem _Gebir_, published in 1798, a

year made famous by the _Lyrical Ballads_ of Wordsworth and Coleridge.

A remarkable change in Lander's life is noticeable in 1821, when, at

forty-six years of age, after having lost his magnificent estate of

Llanthony Abbey, in Glamorganshire, and after a stormy experience in Como,

he settled down for a time at Fiesole near Florence. To this period of calm

after storm we owe the classical prose works for which he is famous. The

calm, like that at the center of a whirlwind, lasted but a short time, and

Landor, leaving his family in great anger, returned to Bath, where he lived

alone for more than twenty years. Then, in order to escape a libel suit,

the choleric old man fled back to Italy. He died at Florence, in 1864. The

spirit of his whole life may be inferred from the defiant farewell which he

flung to it:

I strove with none, for none was worth my strife;

Nature I loved, and next to Nature Art;

I warmed both hands before the fire of life;

It sinks, and I am ready to depart.

WORKS. Landor's reaction from Romanticism is all the more remarkable in

view of his early efforts, such as _Gebir_, a wildly romantic poem, which

rivals any work of Byron or Shelley in its extravagance. Notwithstanding

its occasional beautiful and suggestive lines, the work was not and never

has been successful; and the same may be said of all his poetical works.

His first collection of poems was published in 1795, his last a full half

century later, in 1846. In the latter volume, _The Hellenics_,--which

included some translations of his earlier Latin poems, called _Idyllia

Heroica,--_one has only to read "The Hamadryad," and compare it with the

lyrics of the first volume, in order to realize the astonishing literary

vigor of a man who published two volumes, a half century apart, without any

appreciable diminution of poetical feeling. In all these poems one is

impressed by the striking and original figures of speech which Landor uses

to emphasize his meaning.

It is by his prose works, largely, that Landor has won a place in our

literature; partly because of their intrinsic worth, their penetrating

thought, and severe classic style; and partly because of their profound

influence upon the writers of the present age. The most noted of his prose

works are his six volumes of _Imaginary Conversations_ (1824-1846). For

these conversations Landor brings together, sometimes in groups, sometimes

in couples, well-known characters, or rather shadows, from the four corners

of the earth and from the remotest ages of recorded history. Thus Diogenes

talks with Plato, Æsop with a young slave girl in Egypt, Henry VIII with

Anne Boleyn in prison, Dante with Beatrice, Leofric with Lady Godiva,--all

these and many others, from Epictetus to Cromwell, are brought together and

speak of life and love and death, each from his own view point.

Occasionally, as in the meeting of Henry and Anne Boleyn, the situation is

tense and dramatic; but as a rule the characters simply meet and converse

in the same quiet strain, which becomes, after much reading, somewhat

monotonous. On the other hand, one who reads the _Imaginary Conversations_

is lifted at once into a calm and noble atmosphere which braces and

inspires him, making him forget petty things, like a view from a hilltop.

By its combination of lofty thought and severely classic style the book has

won, and deserves, a very high place among our literary records.

The same criticism applies to _Pericles and Aspasia_, which is a series of

imaginary letters, telling the experiences of Aspasia, a young lady from

Asia Minor, who visits Athens at the summit of its fame and glory, in the

great age of Pericles. This is, in our judgment, the best worth reading of

all Landor's works. One gets from it not only Landor's classic style,

but--what is well worth while--a better picture of Greece in the days of

its greatness than can be obtained from many historical volumes.

SUMMARY OF THE AGE OF ROMANTICISM. This period extends from the war with

the colonies, following the Declaration of Independence, in 1776, to the

accession of Victoria in 1837, both limits being very indefinite, as will

be seen by a glance at the Chronology following. During the first part of

the period especially, England was in a continual turmoil, produced by

political and economic agitation at home, and by the long wars that covered

two continents and the wide sea between them. The mighty changes resulting

from these two causes have given this period the name of the Age of

Revolution. The storm center of all the turmoil at home and abroad was the

French Revolution, which had a profound influence on the life and

literature of all Europe. On the Continent the overthrow of Napoleon at

Waterloo (1815) apparently checked the progress of liberty, which had

started with the French Revolution,[233] but in England the case was

reversed. The agitation for popular liberty, which at one time threatened a

revolution, went steadily forward till it resulted in the final triumph of

democracy, in the Reform Bill of 1832, and in a number of exceedingly

important reforms, such as the extension of manhood suffrage, the removal

of the last unjust restrictions against Catholics, the establishment of a

national system of schools, followed by a rapid increase in popular

education, and the abolition of slavery in all English colonies (1833). To

this we must add the changes produced by the discovery of steam and the

invention of machinery, which rapidly changed England from an agricultural

to a manufacturing nation, introduced the factory system, and caused this

period to be known as the Age of Industrial Revolution.

The literature of the age is largely poetical in form, and almost entirely

romantic in spirit. For, as we have noted, the triumph of democracy in

government is generally accompanied by the triumph of romanticism in

literature. At first the literature, as shown especially in the early work

of Wordsworth, Byron, and Shelley, reflected the turmoil of the age and the

wild hopes of an ideal democracy occasioned by the French Revolution. Later

the extravagant enthusiasm subsided, and English writers produced so much

excellent literature that the age is often called the Second Creative

period, the first being the Age of Elizabeth. The six chief characteristics

of the age are: the prevalence of romantic poetry; the creation of the

historical novel by Scott; the first appearance of women novelists, such as

Mrs. Anne Radcliffe, Jane Porter, Maria Edgeworth, and Jane Austen; the

development of literary criticism, in the work of Lamb, De Quincey,

Coleridge, and Hazlitt; the practical and economic bent of philosophy, as

shown in the work of Malthus, James Mill, and Adam Smith; and the

establishment of great literary magazines, like the _Edinburgh Review_, the

_Quarterly_, _Blackwood's_, and the _Athenaeum_.

In our study we have noted (1) the Poets of Romanticism: the importance of

the _Lyrical Ballads_ of 1798; the life and work of Wordsworth, Coleridge,

Scott, Byron, Shelley, and Keats; (2) the Prose Writers: the novels of

Scott; the development of literary criticism; the life and work of the

essayists, Lamb, De Quincey, Landor, and of the novelist Jane Austen.

SELECTIONS FOR READING. Manly's English Poetry and Manly's English Prose

(each one vol.) contain good selections from all authors studied. Ward's

English Poets (4 vols.), Craik's English Prose Selections (5 vols.),

Braithwaite's The Book of Georgian Verse, Page's British Poets of the

Nineteenth Century, and Garnett's English Prose from Elizabeth to Victoria,

may also be used to advantage. Important works, however, should be read

entire in one of the inexpensive school editions given below. (Full titles

and publishers may be found in the General Bibliography at the end of this

book.)

_Wordsworth_. Intimations of Immortality, Tintern Abbey, best lyrics and

sonnets, in Selections, edited by Dowden (Athenaeum Press Series);

selections and short poems, edited by M. Arnold, in Golden Treasury Series;

Selections, also in Everyman's Library, Riverside Literature Series,

Cassell's National Library, etc.

_Coleridge_. Ancient Mariner, edited by L. R. Gibbs, in Standard English

Classics; same poem, in Pocket Classics, Eclectic English Classics, etc.;

Poems, edited by J. M. Hart, in Athenæum Press (announced, 1909);

Selections, Golden Book of Coleridge, in Everyman's Library; Selections

from Coleridge and Campbell, in Riverside Literature; Prose Selections

(Ginn and Company, also Holt); Lectures on Shakespeare, in Everyman's

Library, Bohn's Standard Library, etc.

_Scott_. Lady of the Lake, Marmion, Ivanhoe, The Talisman, Guy Mannering,

Quentin Durward. Numerous inexpensive editions of Scott's best poems and

novels in Standard English Classics, Pocket Classics, Cassell's National

Library, Eclectic English Classics, Everyman's Library, etc.; thus, Lady of

the Lake, edited by Edwin Ginn, and Ivanhoe, edited by W. D. Lewis, both in

Standard English Classics; Marmion, edited by G. B. Acton, and The

Talisman, edited by F. Treudly, in Pocket Classics, etc.

_Byron_. Mazeppa and The Prisoner of Chillon, edited by S. M. Tucker, in

Standard English Classics; short poems, Selections from Childe Harold,

etc., in Canterbury Poets, Riverside Literature, Holt's English Readings,

Pocket Classics, etc.

_Shelley_. To a Cloud, To a Skylark, West Wind, Sensitive Plant, Adonais,

etc., all in Selections from Shelley, edited by Alexander, in Athenæum

Press Series; Selections, edited by Woodberry, in Belles Lettres Series;

Selections, also in Pocket Classics, Heath's English Classics, Golden

Treasury Series, etc.

_Keats_. Ode on a Grecian Urn, Eve of St. Agnes, Hyperion, Lamia, To a

Nightingale, etc., in Selections from Keats, in Athenæum Press; Selections

also in Muses' Library, Riverside Literature, Golden Treasury Series, etc.

_Lamb_. Essays: Dream Children, Old China, Dissertation on Roast Pig, etc.,

edited by Wauchope, in Standard English Classics; various essays also in

Camelot Series, Temple Classics, Everyman's Library, etc. Tales from

Shakespeare, in Home and School Library (Ginn and Company); also in

Riverside Literature, Pocket Classics, Golden Treasury, etc.

_De Quincey_. The English Mail-Coach and Joan of Arc, in Standard English

Classics, etc.; Confessions of an English Opium-Eater, in Temple Classics,

Morley's Universal Library, Everyman's Library, Pocket Classics, etc.;

Selections, edited by M. H. Turk, in Athenæum Press; Selections, edited by

B. Perry (Holt).

_Landor_. Selections, edited by W. Clymer, in Athenæum Press; Pericles and

Aspasia, in Camelot Series; Imaginary Conversations, selected (Ginn and

Company); the same, 2 vols., in Dutton's Universal Library; selected poems,

in Canterbury Poets; selections, prose and verse, in Golden Treasury

Series.

_Jane Austen_. Pride and Prejudice, in Everyman's Library, Pocket Classics,

etc.

BIBLIOGRAPHY.[234]

_HISTORY. Text-book_, Montgomery, pp. 323-357; Cheyney, 576-632. _General

Works_. Green, X, 2-4, Traill, Gardiner, Macaulay, etc. _Special Works_.

Cheyney's Industrial and Social History of England; Warner's Landmarks of

English Industrial History; Hassall's Making of the British Empire;

Macaulay's William Pitt; Trevelyan's Early Life of Charles James Fox;

Morley's Edmund Burke; Morris's Age of Queen Anne and the Early

Hanoverians.

_LITERATURE. General Works._ Mitchell, Courthope, Garnett and Gosse, Taine

(see General Bibliography). _Special Works_. Beers's English Romanticism in

the Nineteenth Century; A. Symons's The Romantic Movement in English

Poetry; Dowden's The French Revolution and English Literature, also Studies

in Literature, 1789-1877; Hancock's The French Revolution and the English

Poets; Herford's The Age of Wordsworth (Handbooks of English Literature);

Mrs. Oliphant's Literary History of England in the End of the Eighteenth

and Beginning of the Nineteenth Centuries; Saintsbury's History of

Nineteenth Century Literature; Masson's Wordsworth, Shelley, Keats, and

Other Essays; Poets and Poetry of the Nineteenth Century, vols. 1-3;

Gates's Studies and Appreciations; S. Brooke's Studies in Poetry;

Rawnsley's Literary Associations of the English Lakes (2 vols.).

_Wordsworth_. Texts: Globe, Aldine, Cambridge editions, etc.; Poetical and

Prose Works, with Dorothy Wordsworth's Journal, edited by Knight, Eversley

Edition (London and New York, 1896); Letters of the Wordsworth Family,

edited by Knight, 3 vols. (Ginn and Company); Poetical Selections, edited

by Dowden, in Athenaeum Press; various other selections, in Golden

Treasury, etc.; Prose Selections, edited by Gayley (Ginn and Company).

Life: Memoirs, 2 vols., by Christopher Wordsworth; by Knight, 3 vols.; by

Myers (English Men of Letters); by Elizabeth Wordsworth; Early Life (a

Study of the Prelude) by E. Legouis, translated by J. Matthews; Raleigh's

Wordsworth; N.C. Smith's Wordsworth's Literary Criticism; Rannie's

Wordsworth and His Circle. Criticism: Herford's The Age of Wordsworth;

Masson's Wordsworth, Shelley, and Keats; Magnus's Primer of Wordsworth;

Wilson's Helps to the Study of Arnold's Wordsworth; Essays, by Lowell, in

Among My Books; by M. Arnold, in Essays in Criticism; by Hutton, in

Literary Essays; by L. Stephen, in Hours in a Library, and in Studies of a

Biographer; by Bagehot, in Literary Studies; by Hazlitt, in The Spirit of

the Age; by Pater, in Appreciations; by De Quincey, in Essays on the Poets;

by Fields, in Yesterdays with Authors; by Shairp, in Studies in Poetry and

Philosophy. See also Knight's Through the Wordsworth Country, and

Rawnsley's Literary Associations of the English Lakes.

_Coleridge_. Texts: Complete Works, edited by Shedd, 7 vols. (New York

1884); Poems, Globe, Aldine, and Cambridge editions, in Athenaeum Press

(announced, 1909), Muses' Library, Canterbury Poets, etc.; Biographia

Literaria, in Everyman's Library; the same, in Clarendon Press; Prose

Selections, Lectures on Shakespeare, etc. (see Selections for Reading,

above); Letters, edited by E.H. Coleridge (London, 1895). Life: by J.D.

Campbell; by Traill (English Men of Letters); by Dykes; by Hall Caine

(Great Writers Series); see also Coleridge's Biographia Literaria, and

Lamb's essay, Christ's Hospital, in Essays of Elia. Criticism: Brandl's

Coleridge and the English Romantic Movement. Essays, by Shairp, in Studies

in Poetry and Philosophy; by Woodberry, in Makers of Literature; by J.

Forster, in Great Teachers; by Dowden, in New Studies; by Swinburne, in

Essays and Studies; by Brooke, in Theology in the English Poets; by

Saintsbury, in Essays in English Literature; by Lowell in Democracy and

Other Essays; by Hazlitt, and by Pater (see Wordsworth, above). See also

Beers's English Romanticism; Carlyle's chapter on Coleridge, in Life of

John Sterling.

_Southey_. Texts: Poems, edited by Dowden (Macmillan); Poetical Works

(Crowell); Selections in Canterbury Poets; Life of Nelson, in Everyman's

Library, Temple Classics, Morley's Universal Library, etc. Life: by Dowden

(English Men of Letters). Essays, by L. Stephen, in Studies of a

Biographer; by Hazlitt and Saintsbury (see above).

_Scott_. Texts: Numerous good editions of novels and poems. For single

works, see Selections for Reading, above. Life: by Lockhart, 5 vols.

(several editions; best by Pollard, 1900); by Hutton (English Men of

Letters); by A. Lang, in Literary Lives; by C. D. Yonge (Great Writers); by

Hudson; by Saintsbury (Famous Scots Series). Criticism: Essays, by

Stevenson, Gossip on Romance, in Memories and Portraits; by Shairp, in

Aspects of Poetry; by Swinburne, in Studies in Prose and Poetry; by

Carlyle, in Miscellaneous Essays; by Hazlitt, Bagehot, L. Stephen, Brooke,

and Saintsbury (see Coleridge and Wordsworth, above).

_Byron_. Texts: Complete Works, Globe, Cambridge Poets, and Oxford

editions; Selections, edited by M. Arnold, in Golden Treasury (see also

Selections for Reading, above); Letters and Journals of Byron, edited by

Moore (unreliable). Life: by Noel (Great Writers); by Nichol (English Men

of Letters); The Real Lord Byron, by J. C. Jeaffreson; Trelawny's

Recollections of Shelley and Byron. Criticism: Hunt's Lord Byron and His

Contemporaries; Essays, by Morley, Macaulay, Hazlitt, Swinburne, and M.

Arnold.

_Shelley_. Texts: Centenary Edition, edited by Woodberry, 4 vols.; Globe

and Cambridge Poets editions; Essays and Letters, in Camelot Series (see

Selections for Reading, above). Life: by Symonds (English Men of Letters);

by Dowden, 2 vols.; by Sharp (Great Writers); by T. J. Hogg, 2 vols.; by W.

M. Rossetti. Criticism: Salt's A Shelley Primer; Essays, by Dowden, in

Transcripts and Studies; by M. Arnold, Woodberry, Bagehot, Forster, L.

Stephen, Brooke, De Quincey, and Hutton (see Coleridge and Wordsworth,

above).

_Keats_. Texts: Complete Works, edited by Forman, 4 vols. (London, 1883);

Cambridge Poets Edition, with Letters, edited by H. E. Scudder (Houghton,

Mifflin); Aldine Edition, with Life, edited by Lord Houghton (Macmillan);

Selected Poems, with introduction and notes by Arlo Bates (Ginn and

Company); Poems, also in Everyman's Library, Muses' Library, Golden

Treasury, etc.; Letters, edited by S. Colvin, in Eversley Edition. Life: by

Forman, in Complete Works; by Colvin (English Men of Letters); by W. M.

Rossetti (Great Writers); by A. E. Hancock. Criticism: H. C. Shelley's

Keats and His Circle; Masson's Wordsworth, Shelley, Keats, and Other

Essays; Essays, by M. Arnold, in Essays in Criticism, also in Ward's

English Poets, vol. 4; by Hudson, in Studies in Interpretation; by Lowell,

in Among My Books, or Literary Essays, vol. 2; by Brooke, De Quincey, and

Swinburne (above).

_Lamb_. Texts: Complete Works and Letters, edited by E. V. Lucas, 7 vols.

(Putnam); the same, edited by Ainger, 6 vols. (London, 1883-1888); Essays

of Elia, in Standard English Classics, etc. (see Selections for Reading);

Dramatic Essays, edited by B. Matthews (Dodd, Mead); Specimens of English

Dramatic Poets, in Bohn's Library. Life: by E. V. Lucas, 2 vols.; by Ainger

(English Men of Letters); by Barry Cornwall; Talfourd's Memoirs of Charles

Lamb. Criticism: Essays, by De Quincey, in Biographical Essays; by F.

Harrison, in Tennyson, Ruskin, Mill, and Other Literary Estimates; by

Pater, and Woodberry (see Wordsworth and Coleridge, above). See also

Fitzgerald's Charles Lamb, his Friends, his Haunts, and his Books.

_De Quincey_. Texts: Collected Writings, edited by Masson, 14 vols.

(London, 1889-1891); Confessions of an Opium-Eater, etc. (see Selections

for Reading). Life: by Masson (English Men of Letters); Life and Writings,

by H. A. Page, 2 vols.; Hogg's De Quincey and his Friends; Findlay's

Personal Recollections of De Quincey; see also De Quincey's

Autobiographical Sketches, and Confessions. Criticism: Essays, by

Saintsbury, in Essays in English Literature; by Masson, in Wordsworth,

Shelley, Keats, and Other Essays; by L. Stephen, in Hours in a Library. See

also Minto's Manual of English Prose Literature.

_Landor_. Texts: Works, with Life by Forster, 8 vols. (London, 1876);

Works, edited by Crump (London, 1897); Letters, etc., edited by Wheeler

(London, 1897 and 1899); Imaginary Conversations, etc. (see Selections for

Reading). Life: by Colvin (English Men of Letters); by Forster. Criticism:

Essays, by De Quincey, Woodberry, L. Stephen, Saintsbury, Swinburne,

Dow-den (see above). See also Stedman's Victorian Poets.

_Jane Austen_. Texts: Works, edited by R. B. Johnson (Dent); various other

editions of novels; Letters, edited by Woolsey (Roberts). Life: Austen-

Leigh's Memoir of Jane Austen; Hill's Jane Austen, her Home and her

Friends; Mitton's Jane Austen and her Times. Life, by Goldwin Smith; by

Maiden (Famous Women Series); by O. F. Adams. Criticism: Pollock's Jane

Austen; Pellew's Jane Austen's Novels; A. A. Jack's Essay on the Novel as

Illustrated by Scott and Miss Austen; H. H. Bonnell's Charlotte Brontë,

George Eliot, and Jane Austen; Essay, by Howells, in Heroines of Fiction.

_Maria Edgeworth_. Texts: Tales and Novels, New Langford Edition, 10 vols.

(London, 1893) various editions of novels (Dent, etc.); The Absentee, and

Castle Rackrent, in Morley's Universal Library. Life: by Helen Zimmerman;

Memoir, by Hare.

_Mrs. Anne Radclife_. Romances, with introduction by Scott, in Ballantynes'

Novelists Library (London, 1824); various editions of Udolpho, etc.;

Saintsbury's Tales of Mystery, vol. i. See Beers's English Romanticism.

_Moore_. Poetical Works, in Canterbury Poets, Chandos Classics, etc.;

Selected poems, in Golden Treasury; Gunning's Thomas Moore, Poet and

Patriot; Symington's Life and Works of Moore. Essay, by Saintsbury.

_Campbell_. Poems, Aldine edition; Selections, in Golden Treasury. Life, by

Hadden.

_Hazlitt_. Texts: Works, edited by Henley, 12 vols. (London, 1902);

Selected Essays, in Temple Classics, Camelot Series, etc. Life: by Birrell

(English Men of Letters); Memoirs, by W. C. Hazlitt. Essays, by Saintsbury;

by L. Stephen.

_Leigh Hunt_. Texts: Selected essays, in Camelot Series, also in Cavendish

Library (Warne); Stories from the Italian Poets (Putnam). Life: by

Monkhouse (Great Writers). Essays, by Macaulay; by Saintsbury; by Hazlitt.

See also Mrs. Field's A Shelf of Old Books.

SUGGESTIVE QUESTIONS. (NOTE. In a period like the Age of Romanticism, the

poems and essays chosen for special study vary so widely that only a few

general questions on the selections for reading are attempted.)

1. Why is this period of Romanticism (1789-1837) called the Age of

Revolution? Give some reasons for the influence of the French Revolution on

English literature, and illustrate from poems or essays which you have

read. Explain the difference between Classicism and Romanticism. Which of

these two types of literature do you prefer?

2. What are the general characteristics of the literature of this period?

What two opposing tendencies are illustrated in the novels of Scott and

Jane Austen? in the poetry of Byron and Wordsworth?

3. _Wordsworth_. Tell briefly the story of Wordsworth's life, and name some

of his best poems. Why do the _Lyrical Ballads_ (1798) mark an important

literary epoch? Read carefully, and make an analysis of the "Intimations of

Immortality"; of "Tintern Abbey." Can you explain what political conditions

are referred to in Wordsworth's "Sonnet on Milton"? in his "French

Revolution"? Does he attempt to paint a picture in his sonnet on

Westminster Bridge, or has he some other object in view? What is the

central teaching of the "Ode to Duty"? Compare Wordsworth's two Skylark

poems with Shelley's. Make a brief comparison between Wordsworth's sonnets

and those of Shakespeare and of Milton, having in mind the thought, the

melody, the view of nature, and the imagery of the three poets. Quote from

Wordsworth's poems to show his belief that nature is conscious; to show the

influence of nature on man; to show his interest in children; his

sensitiveness to sounds; to illustrate the chastening influence of sorrow.

Make a brief comparison between the characters of Wordsworth's "Michael"

and of Burns's "The Cotter's Saturday Night." Compare Wordsworth's point of

view and method, in the three poems "To a Daisy," with Burns's view, as

expressed in his famous lines on the same subject.

4. _Coleridge_. What are the general characteristics of Coleridge's life?

What explains the profound sympathy for humanity that is reflected in his

poems? For what, beside his poems, is he remarkable? Can you quote any

passages from his poetry which show, the influence of Wordsworth? What are

the characters in "The Ancient Mariner"? In what respect is this poem

romantic? Give your own reasons for its popularity. Does the thought or the

style of this poem impress you? If you have read any of the _Lectures on

Shakespeare_, explain why Coleridge's work is called romantic criticism.

5. _Scott_. Tell the story of Scott's life, and name his chief poems and

novels. Do you recall any passage from his poetry which suggests his own

heroism? Why was he called "the wizard of the North"? What is the general

character of his poetry? Compare _Marmion_ with one of the old ballads,

having in mind the characters, the dramatic interest of the story, and the

style of writing. In what sense is he the creator of the historical novel?

Upon what does he depend to hold the reader's attention? Compare him, in

this respect, with Jane Austen. Which of his characters impress you as

being the most lifelike? Name any novels of the present day which copy

Scott or show his influence. Read _Ivanhoe_ and the _Lady of the Lake_;

make a brief analysis of each work, having in mind the style, the plot, the

dramatic interest, the use of adventure, and the truth to nature of the

different characters.

6. _Byron_. Why is Byron called the revolutionary poet? (Illustrate, if

possible, from his poetry.) What is the general character of his work? In

what kind of poetry does he excel? (Quote from _Childe Harold_ to

illustrate your opinion.) Describe the typical Byronic hero. Can you

explain his great popularity at first, and his subsequent loss of

influence? Why is he still popular on the Continent? Do you find more of

thought or of emotion in his poetry? Compare him, in this respect, with

Shelley; with Wordsworth. Which is the more brilliant writer, Byron or

Wordsworth? Which has the more humor? Which has the healthier mind? Which

has the higher ideal of poetry? Which is the more inspiring and helpful? Is

it fair to say that Byron's quality is power, not charm?

7. _Shelley_. What are the chief characteristics of Shelley's poetry? Is it

most remarkable for its thought, form, or imagery? What poems show the

influence of the French Revolution? What subjects are considered in "Lines

written among the Euganean Hills"? What does Shelley try to teach in "The

Sensitive Plant"? Compare Shelley's view of nature, as reflected in "The

Cloud" or "The West Wind," with Wordsworth's view, as reflected in "The

Prelude," "Tintern Abbey," "Daffodils," etc. To what class of poems does

"Adonais" belong? What is the subject of the poem? Name others of the same

class. How does Shelley describe himself in this poem? Compare Shelley's

"Adonais" and Milton's "Lycidas" with regard to the view of life after

death as expressed in the poems. What kinds of scenes does Shelley like

best to describe? Compare his characters with those of Wordsworth; of

Byron. Do you recall any poems in which he writes of ordinary people or of

ordinary experiences?

8. _Keats_. What is the essence of Keats's poetical creed, as expressed in

the "Ode on a Grecian Urn"? What are the remarkable elements in his life

and work? What striking difference do you find between his early poems and

those of Shelley and Byron? What are the chief subjects of his verse? What

poems show the influence of the classics? of Elizabethan literature? Can

you explain why his work has been called literary poetry? Keats and Shelley

are generally classed together. What similarities do you find in their

poems? Give some reasons why Keats introduces the old Bedesman in "The Eve

of Saint Agnes." Name some of the literary friends mentioned in Keats's

poetry.

Compare Keats's characters with those of Wordsworth; of Byron. Does Keats

ever remind you of Spenser? In what respects? Is your personal preference

for Wordsworth, Byron, Shelley, or Keats? Why?

9. _Lamb_. Tell briefly the story of Lamb's life and name his principal

works. Why is he called the most human of essayists? His friends called him

"the last of the Elizabethans." Why? What is the general character of the

_Essays of Elia_? How is the personality of Lamb shown in all these essays?

Cite any passages showing Lamb's skill in portraying people. Make a brief

comparison between Lamb and Addison, having in mind the subjects treated,

the style, the humor, and the interest of both essayists. Which do you

prefer, and why?

10. _De Quincey_. What are the general characteristics of De Quincey's

essays? Explain why he is called the psychologist of style. What accounts

for a certain unreal element in all his work. Read a passage from _The

English Mail-Coach_, or from _Joan of Arc_, or from _Levana, Our Lady of

Sorrows_, and comment freely upon it, with regard to style, ideas,

interest, and the impression of reality or unreality which it leaves.

11. _Landor_. In what respect does Landor show a reaction from Romanticism?

What qualities make Landor's poems stand out so clearly in the memory? Why,

for instance, do you think Lamb was so haunted by "Rose Aylmer"? Quote from

Landor's poems to illustrate his tenderness, his sensitiveness to beauty,

his power of awakening emotion, his delicacy of characterization. Do you

find the same qualities in his prose? Can you explain why much of his prose

seems like a translation from the Greek? Compare a passage from the

_Imaginary Conversations_ with a passage from Gibbon or Johnson, to show

the difference between the classic and the pseudo-classic style. Compare

one of Landor's characters, in _Imaginary Conversations_, with the same

character in history.

12. _Jane Austen_. How does Jane Austen show a reaction from Romanticism?

What important work did she do for the novel? To what kind of fiction was

her work opposed? In what does the charm of her novels consist? Make a

brief comparison between Jane Austen and Scott (as illustrated in _Pride

and Prejudice_ and _Ivanhoe_), having in mind the subject, the characters,

the manner of treatment, and the interest of both narratives. Do Jane

Austen's characters have to be explained by the author, or do they explain

themselves? Which method calls for the greater literary skill? What does

Jane Austen say about Mrs. Radcliffe, in _Northanger Abbey_? Does she make

any other observations on eighteenth-century novelists?

CHRONOLOGY

_End of the Eighteenth and Beginning of the Nineteenth Century_

============================================================================

HISTORY | LITERATURE

----------------------------------------------------------------------------

1760-1820. George III |

| 1770-1850. Wordsworth

| 1771-1832. Scott

1789-1799. French Revolution |

| 1796-1816. Jane Austen's novels

| 1798. Lyrical Balads of Wordsworth

| and Coleridge

1800. Union of Great Britain and |

Ireland |

1802. Colonization of Australia | 1802. Scotts Minstrelsy of the Scottish

| Border

1805. Battle of Trafalgar | 1805-1817. Scotts poems

| 1807. Wordsworth's Intimations of

1807. Abolition of slave trade | Immortality. Lamb's Tales

| from Shakespeare

1808-1814. Peninsular War |

| 1809-1818. Byron's Childe Harold

1812. Second war with United States | 1810-1813. Coleridge's Lectures on

| Shakespeare

1814. Congress of Vienna | 1814-1831. Waverley Novels

1815. Battle of Waterloo |

| 1816. Shelley's Alastor

| 1817. Coleridge's Biographia Literaria

| 1817-1820. Keats's poems

| 1818-1820. Shelley's Prometheus

1819. First Atlantic steamship |

1820. George IV (_d_. 1830) | 1820. Wordsworth's Duddon Sonnets

| 1820-1833. Lamb's Essays of Elia

| 1821. De Quincey's Confessions

| 1824-1846. Landor's Imaginary

| Conversations.

1826. First Temperance Society |

1829. Catholic Emancipation Bill |

1830. William IV (_d_. 1837) | 1830. Tennyson's first poems

First railway |

| 1831. Scott's last novel

1832. Reform Bill |

1833. Emancipation of slaves | 1833. Carlyle's Sartor Resartus

| Browning's Pauline

1834. System of national education |

1837. Victoria (_d_. 1901) |

| 1853-1861. De Quincey's Collected

| Essays

============================================================================

* * * * *

CHAPTER XI

THE VICTORIAN AGE (1850-1900)

THE MODERN PERIOD OF PROGRESS AND UNREST

When Victoria became queen, in 1837, English literature seemed to have

entered upon a period of lean years, in marked contrast with the poetic

fruitfulness of the romantic age which we have just studied. Coleridge,

Shelley, Keats, Byron, and Scott had passed away, and it seemed as if there

were no writers in England to fill their places. Wordsworth had written, in

1835,

Like clouds that rake, the mountain summits,

Or waves that own no curbing hand,

How fast has brother followed brother,

From sunshine to the sunless land!

In these lines is reflected the sorrowful spirit of a literary man of the

early nineteenth century who remembered the glory that had passed away from

the earth. But the leanness of these first years is more apparent than

real. Keats and Shelley were dead, it is true, but already there had

appeared three disciples of these poets who were destined to be far more

widely, read than were their masters. Tennyson had been publishing poetry

since 1827, his first poems appearing almost simultaneously with the last

work of Byron, Shelley, and Keats; but it was not until 1842, with the

publication of his collected poems, in two volumes, that England recognized

in him one of her great literary leaders. So also Elizabeth Barrett had

been writing since 1820, but not till twenty years later did her poems

become deservedly popular; and Browning had published his _Pauline_ in

1833, but it was not until 1846, when he published the last of the series

called _Bells and Pomegranates_, that the reading public began to

appreciate his power and originality. Moreover, even as romanticism seemed

passing away, a group of great prose writers--Dickens, Thackeray, Carlyle,

and Ruskin--had already begun to proclaim the literary glory of a new age,

which now seems to rank only just below the Elizabethan and the Romantic

periods.

HISTORICAL SUMMARY. Amid the multitude of social and political forces of

this great age, four things stand out clearly. First, the long struggle of

the Anglo-Saxons for personal liberty is definitely settled, and democracy

becomes the established order of the day. The king, who appeared in an age

of popular weakness and ignorance, and the peers, who came with the Normans

in triumph, are both stripped of their power and left as figureheads of a

past civilization. The last vestige of personal government and of the

divine right of rulers disappears; the House of Commons becomes the ruling

power in England; and a series of new reform bills rapidly extend the

suffrage, until the whole body of English people choose for themselves the

men who shall represent them.

Second, because it is an age of democracy, it is an age of popular

education, of religious tolerance, of growing brotherhood, and of profound

social unrest. The slaves had been freed in 1833; but in the middle of the

century England awoke to the fact that slaves are not necessarily negroes,

stolen in Africa to be sold like cattle in the market place, but that

multitudes of men, women, and little children in the mines and factories

were victims of a more terrible industrial and social slavery. To free

these slaves also, the unwilling victims of our unnatural competitive

methods, has been the growing purpose of the Victorian Age until the

present day.

Third, because it is an age of democracy and education, it is an age of

comparative peace. England begins to think less of the pomp and false

glitter of fighting, and more of its moral evils, as the nation realizes

that it is the common people who bear the burden and the sorrow and the

poverty of war, while the privileged classes reap most of the financial and

political rewards. Moreover, with the growth of trade and of friendly

foreign relations, it becomes evident that the social equality for which

England was contending at home belongs to the whole race of men; that

brotherhood is universal, not insular; that a question of justice is never

settled by fighting; and that war is generally unmitigated horror and

barbarism. Tennyson, who came of age when the great Reform Bill occupied

attention, expresses the ideals of the Liberals of his day who proposed to

spread the gospel of peace,

Till the war-drum throbb'd no longer, and the battle-flags were furled

In the Parliament of Man, the Federation of the world.

Fourth, the Victorian Age is especially remarkable because of its rapid

progress in all the arts and sciences and in mechanical inventions. A

glance at any record of the industrial achievements of the nineteenth

century will show how vast they are, and it is unnecessary to repeat here

the list of the inventions, from spinning looms to steamboats, and from

matches to electric lights. All these material things, as well as the

growth of education, have their influence upon the life of a people, and it

is inevitable that they should react upon its prose and poetry; though as

yet we are too much absorbed in our sciences and mechanics to determine

accurately their influence upon literature. When these new things shall by

long use have became familiar as country roads, or have been replaced by

newer and better things, then they also will have their associations and

memories, and a poem on the railroads may be as suggestive as Wordsworth's

sonnet on Westminster Bridge; and the busy, practical workingmen who to-day

throng our streets and factories may seem, to a future and greater age, as

quaint and poetical as to us seem the slow toilers of the Middle Ages.

LITERARY CHARACTERISTICS. When one is interested enough to trace the

genealogy of Victoria he finds, to his surprise, that in her veins flowed

the blood both of William the Conqueror and of Cerdic, the first Saxon king

of England; and this seems to be symbolic of the literature of her age,

which embraces the whole realm of Saxon and Norman life,--the strength and

ideals of the one, and the culture and refinement of the other. The

romantic revival had done its work, and England entered upon a new free

period, in which every form of literature, from pure romance to gross

realism, struggled for expression. At this day it is obviously impossible

to judge the age as a whole; but we are getting far enough away from the

early half of it to notice certain definite characteristics. First, though

the age produced many poets, and two who deserve to rank among the

greatest, nevertheless this is emphatically an age of prose. And since the

number of readers has increased a thousandfold with the spread of popular

education, it is the age of the newspaper, the magazine, and the modern

novel,--the first two being the story of the world's daily life, and the

last our pleasantest form of literary entertainment, as well as our most

successful method of presenting modern problems and modern ideals. The

novel in this age fills a place which the drama held in the days of

Elizabeth; and never before, in any age or language, has the novel appeared

in such numbers and in such perfection.

[Moral Purpose] The second marked characteristic of the age is that

literature, both in prose and in poetry, seems to depart from the purely

artistic standard, of art for art's sake, and to be actuated by a definite

moral purpose Tennyson, Browning, Carlyle, Ruskin,--who and what were these

men if not the teachers of England, not vaguely but definitely, with superb

faith in their message, and with the conscious moral purpose to uplift and

to instruct? Even the novel breaks away from Scott's romantic influence,

and first studies life as it is, and then points out what life may and

ought to be. Whether we read the fun and sentiment of Dickens, the social

miniatures of Thackeray, or the psychological studies of George Eliot, we

find in almost every case a definite purpose to sweep away error and to

reveal the underlying truth of human life. So the novel sought to do for

society in this age precisely what Lyell and Darwin sought to do for

science, that is, to find the truth, and to show how it might be used to

uplift humanity. Perhaps for this reason the Victorian Age is emphatically

an age of realism rather than of romance,--not the realism of Zola and

Ibsen, but a deeper realism which strives to tell the whole truth, showing

moral and physical diseases as they are, but holding up health and hope as

the normal conditions of humanity.

It is somewhat customary to speak of this age as an age of doubt and

pessimism, following the new conception of man and of the universe which

was formulated by science under the name of involution. It is spoken of

also as a prosaic age, lacking in great ideals. Both these criticisms seem

to be the result of judging a large thing when we are too close to it to

get its true proportions, just as Cologne Cathedral, one of the world's

most perfect structures, seems to be a shapeless pile of stone when we

stand too close beneath its mighty walls and buttresses. Tennyson's

immature work, like that of the minor poets, is sometimes in a doubtful or

despairing strain; but his _In Memoriam_ is like the rainbow after storm;

and Browning seems better to express the spirit of his age in the strong,

manly faith of "Rabbi Ben Ezra," and in the courageous optimism of all his

poetry. Stedman's _Victorian Anthology_ is, on the whole, a most inspiring

book of poetry. It would be hard to collect more varied cheer from any age.

And the great essayists, like Macaulay, Carlyle, Ruskin, and the great

novelists, like Dickens, Thackeray, George Eliot, generally leave us with a

larger charity and with a deeper faith in our humanity.

So also the judgment that this age is too practical for great ideals may be

only a description of the husk that hides a very full ear of corn. It is

well to remember that Spenser and Sidney judged their own age (which we now

consider to be the greatest in our literary history) to be altogether given

over to materialism, and to be incapable of literary greatness. Just as

time has made us smile at their blindness, so the next century may correct

our judgment of this as a material age, and looking upon the enormous

growth of charity and brotherhood among us, and at the literature which

expresses our faith in men, may judge the Victorian Age to be, on the

whole, the noblest and most inspiring in the history of the world.

I. THE POETS OF THE VICTORIAN AGE

ALFRED TENNYSON (1809-1892)

O young Mariner,

You from the haven

Under the sea-cliff,

You that are watching

The gray Magician

With eyes of wonder,

_I_ am Merlin,

And _I_ am dying,

_I_ am Merlin

Who follow The Gleam.

. . . . . . .

O young Mariner,

Down to the haven

Call your companions,

Launch your vessel,

And crowd your canvas,

And, ere it vanishes

Over the margin,

After it, follow it,

Follow The Gleam.

One who reads this haunting poem of "Merlin and The Gleam" finds in it a

suggestion of the spirit of the poet's whole life,--his devotion to the

ideal as expressed in poetry, his early romantic impressions, his

struggles, doubts, triumphs, and his thrilling message to his race.

Throughout the entire Victorian period Tennyson stood at the summit of

poetry in England. Not in vain was he appointed laureate at the death of

Wordsworth, in 1850; for, almost alone among those who have held the

office, he felt the importance of his place, and filled and honored it. For

nearly half a century Tennyson was not only a man and a poet; he was a

voice, the voice of a whole people, expressing in exquisite melody their

doubts and their faith, their griefs and their triumphs. In the wonderful

variety of his verse he suggests all the qualities of England's greatest

poets. The dreaminess of Spenser, the majesty of Milton, the natural

simplicity of Wordsworth, the fantasy of Blake and Coleridge, the melody of

Keats and Shelley, the narrative vigor of Scott and Byron,--all these

striking qualities are evident on successive pages of Tennyson's poetry.

The only thing lacking is the dramatic power of the Elizabethans. In

reflecting the restless spirit of this progressive age Tennyson is as

remarkable as Pope was in voicing the artificiality of the early eighteenth

century. As a poet, therefore, who expresses not so much a personal as a

national spirit, he is probably the most representative literary man of the

Victorian era.

LIFE. Tennyson's life is a remarkable one in this respect, that from

beginning to end he seems to have been dominated by a single impulse, the

impulse of poetry. He had no large or remarkable experiences, no wild oats

to sow, no great successes or reverses, no business cares or public

offices. For sixty-six years, from the appearance of the _Poems by Two

Brothers_, in 1827, until his death in 1892, he studied and practiced his

art continually and exclusively. Only Browning, his fellow-worker,

resembles him in this; but the differences in the two men are world-wide.

Tennyson was naturally shy, retiring, indifferent to men, hating noise and

publicity, loving to be alone with nature, like Wordsworth. Browning was

sociable, delighting in applause, in society, in travel, in the noise and

bustle of the big world.

Tennyson was born in the rectory of Somersby, Lincolnshire, in 1809. The

sweet influences of his early natural surroundings can be better understood

from his early poems than from any biography. He was one of the twelve

children of the Rev. George Clayton Tennyson, a scholarly clergyman, and

his wife Elizabeth Fytche, a gentle, lovable woman, "not learned, save in

gracious household ways," to whom the poet pays a son's loyal tribute near

the close of _The Princess_. It is interesting to note that most of these

children were poetically inclined, and that two of the brothers, Charles

and Frederick, gave far greater promise than did Alfred.

When seven years old the boy went to his grandmother's house at Louth, in

order to attend a famous grammar school at that place. Not even a man's

memory, which generally makes light of hardship and glorifies early

experiences, could ever soften Tennyson's hatred of school life. His

complaint was not so much at the roughness of the boys, which had so

frightened Cowper, as at the brutality of the teachers, who put over the

school door a wretched Latin inscription translating Solomon's barbarous

advice about the rod and the child. In these psychologic days, when the

child is more important than the curriculum, and when we teach girls and

boys rather than Latin and arithmetic, we read with wonder Carlyle's

description of his own schoolmaster, evidently a type of his kind, who

"knew of the human soul thus much, that it had a faculty called memory, and

could be acted on through the muscular integument by appliance of birch

rods." After four years of most unsatisfactory school life, Tennyson

returned home, and was fitted for the university by his scholarly father.

With his brothers he wrote many verses, and his first efforts appeared in a

little volume called _Poems by Two Brothers_, in 1827. The next year he

entered Trinity College, Cambridge, where he became the center of a

brilliant circle of friends, chief of whom was the young poet Arthur Henry

Hallam.

At the university Tennyson soon became known for his poetical ability, and

two years after his entrance he gained the prize of the Chancellor's Medal

for a poem called "Timbuctoo," the subject, needless to say, being chosen

by the chancellor. Soon after winning this honor Tennyson published his

first signed work, called _Poems Chiefly Lyrical_ (1830), which, though it

seems somewhat crude and disappointing to us now, nevertheless contained

the germ of all his later poetry. One of the most noticeable things in this

volume is the influence which Byron evidently exerted over the poet in his

early days; and it was perhaps due largely to the same romantic influence

that Tennyson and his friend Hallam presently sailed away to Spain, with

the idea of joining the army of insurgents against King Ferdinand.

Considered purely as a revolutionary venture, this was something of a

fiasco, suggesting the noble Duke of York and his ten thousand men,--"he

marched them up a hill, one day; and he marched them down again." From a

literary view point, however, the experience was not without its value. The

deep impression which the wild beauty of the Pyrenees made upon the young

poet's mind is reflected clearly in the poem "Oenone."

In 1831 Tennyson left the university without taking his degree. The reasons

for this step are not clear; but the family was poor, and poverty may have

played a large part in his determination. His father died a few months

later; but, by a generous arrangement with the new rector, the family

retained the rectory at Somersby, and here, for nearly six years, Tennyson

lived in a retirement which strongly suggests Milton at Horton. He read and

studied widely, cultivated an intimate acquaintance with nature, thought

deeply on the problems suggested by the Reform Bill which was then

agitating England, and during his leisure hours wrote poetry. The first

fruits of this retirement appeared, late in 1832, in a wonderful little

volume bearing the simple name _Poems_. As the work of a youth only

twenty-three, this book is remarkable for the variety and melody of its

verse. Among its treasures we still read with delight "The Lotos Eaters,"

"Palace of Art," "A Dream of Fair Women," "The Miller's Daughter,"

"Oenone," and "The Lady of Shalott"; but the critics of the _Quarterly_,

who had brutally condemned his earlier work, were again unmercifully

severe. The effect of this harsh criticism upon a sensitive nature was most

unfortunate; and when his friend Hallam died, in 1833, Tennyson was plunged

into a period of gloom and sorrow. The sorrow may be read in the exquisite

little poem beginning, "Break, break, break, On thy cold gray stones, O

Sea!" which was his first published elegy for his friend; and the

depressing influence of the harsh and unjust criticism is suggested in

"Merlin and The Gleam," which the reader will understand only after he has

read Tennyson's biography.