The opening years of the eighth decade of the eighteenth century saw, in unusually close conjunction, the births of the men who were to be the chief exponents, and in their turn the chief determining forces, of the new movement. The three greatest were born, Wordsworth in 1770, Scott in 1771, and Coleridge in 1772; Southey, who partly through accident was to form a trinity with Wordsworth and Coleridge, and who was perhaps the most typical instance of a certain new kind of man of letters, followed in 1774; while Lamb and Hazlitt, the chief romantic pioneers in criticism, Jeffrey and Sydney Smith, the chief cla.s.sical reactionaries therein, were all born within the decade. But the influence of Scott was for various reasons delayed a little; and critics naturally come after creators. So that the time-honoured eminence of the "Lake Poets"--Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Southey--need not be disturbed.
The day of the birth of William Wordsworth was the 7th of April, the place c.o.c.kermouth. His father was an attorney, and, as Lord Lonsdale"s agent, a man of some means and position; but on his death in 1783 the eccentric and unamiable character of the then Lord Lonsdale, by delaying the settlement of accounts, put the family in considerable difficulties.
Wordsworth, however, was thoroughly educated at Hawkshead Grammar School and St. John"s College, Cambridge, where he took his B.A. degree in 1791. He travelled in France, and for a time, like many young men, was a fervent Republican; but, like all the n.o.bler of those who had "hailed the dawn of the French Revolution," he lived to curse its noon. He published early, his first volume of poems bearing the date 1793; but, though that attention to nature which was always his chief note appeared here, the work is not by any means of an epoch-making character. He was averse from every profession; but the fates were kind to him, and a legacy of 900 from his friend Raisley Calvert made a man of such simple tastes as his independent, for a time at least. On the strength of it he settled first at Racedown in Dorset, and then at Alfoxden in Somerset, in the companionship of his sister Dorothy; and at the second of the two places in the neighbourhood of Coleridge. Ma.s.sive and original as Wordsworth"s own genius was, it is almost impossible to exaggerate the effect, both in stimulus and guidance, of the influence of these two; for Dorothy Wordsworth was a woman of a million, and Coleridge, marvellous as were his own powers, was almost more marvellous in the unique Socratic character of his effect on those who possessed anything to work upon. The two poets produced in 1798 the _Lyrical Ballads_, among the contents of which it is sufficient to mention _Tintern Abbey_ and _The Ancient Mariner;_ and they subsequently travelled together in Germany. Then Wordsworth returned to his native lakes and never left them for long, abiding first at or near Grasmere, and from 1813 at his well-known home of Rydal Mount. When Lord Lonsdale died in 1802, his successor promptly and liberally settled the Wordsworth claims. The poet soon married his cousin Mary Hutchinson; and Lord Lonsdale, not satisfied with atoning for his predecessor"s injustice, procured him, in the year of his migration to Rydal, the office of Distributor of Stamps for Westmoreland--an office which was almost a sinecure, and was, for a man of Wordsworth"s tastes, more than amply paid. It is curious, and a capital instance to prove that the malignity of fortune has itself been maligned, that the one English poet who was const.i.tutionally incapable of writing for bread never was under any necessity to do so. For full sixty years Wordsworth wandered much, read little, meditated without stint, and wrote, though never hurriedly, yet almost incessantly. The dates of his chief publications may be best given in a note.[3] For some years his poems were greeted by the general public and by a few of its critical guides with storms of obloquy and ridicule; but Wordsworth, though never indifferent to criticism, was severely disdainful of it, and held on his way. From the first the brightest spirits of England had been his pa.s.sionate though by no means always undiscriminating admirers; and about the end of the first quarter of the century the public began to come round. Oxford, always first to recognise, if not always first to produce, the greatest achievements of English literature, gave him its D.C.L. in 1839. He received a pension of 300 a year in 1842 from Sir Robert Peel, who, unlike most English Prime Ministers, cared for men of letters; the laureateship fell to him in right of right on Southey"s death in 1843, and he died on the 23rd of April 1850, having come to fourscore years almost without labour, and without many heavy sorrows.
Of his character not much need be said. Like that of Milton, whom he in many ways resembled (they had even both, as Hartley Coleridge has pointed out, brothers named Christopher), it was not wholly amiable, and the defects in it were no doubt aggravated by his early condition (for it must be remembered that till he was two and thirty his prospects were of the most disquieting character), by the unjust opposition which the rise of his reputation met with, and by his solitary life in contact only with worshipping friends and connections. One of these very worshippers confesses that he was "inhumanly arrogant"; and he was also, what all arrogant men are not, rude. He was entirely self-centred, and his own circle of interests and tastes was not wide. It is said that he would cut books with a b.u.t.tery knife, and after that it is probably unnecessary to say any more, for the fact "surprises by itself" an indictment of almost infinite counts.
But his genius is not so easily despatched. I have said that it is now as a whole universally recognised, and I cannot but think that Mr.
Matthew Arnold was wrong when he gave a contrary opinion some fifteen years ago. He must have been bia.s.sed by his own remembrance of earlier years, when Wordsworth was still a bone of contention. I should say that never since I myself was an undergraduate, that is to say, for the last thirty years, has there been any dispute among Englishmen whose opinion was worth taking, and who cared for poetry at all, on the general merits of Wordsworth. But this agreement is compatible with a vast amount of disagreement in detail; and Mr. Arnold"s own estimate, as where he compares Wordsworth with Moliere (who was not a poet at all, though he sometimes wrote very tolerable verse), weighs him with poets of the second cla.s.s like Gray and Manzoni, and finally admits him for his dealings with "life," introduces fresh puzzlements into the valuation.
There is only one principle on which that valuation can properly proceed, and this is the question, "Is the poet rich in essentially poetical moments of the highest power and kind?" And by poetical moments I mean those instances of expression which, no matter what their subject, their intention, or their context may be, cause instantaneously in the fit reader a poetical impression of the intensest and most moving quality.
Let us consider the matter from this point of view.[4]
The chief poetical influences under which Wordsworth began to write appear to have been those of Burns and Milton; both were upon him to the last, and both did him harm as well as good. It was probably in direct imitation of Burns, as well as in direct opposition to the prevailing habits of the eighteenth century, that he conceived the theory of poetic diction which he defended in prose and exemplified in verse. The chief point of this theory was the use of the simplest and most familiar language, and the double fallacy is sufficiently obvious. Wordsworth forgot that the reason why the poetic diction of the three preceding generations had become loathsome was precisely this, that it had become familiar; while the familiar Scots of Burns was in itself unfamiliar to the English ear. On the other hand, he borrowed from Milton, and used more and more as he grew older, a distinctly stiff and unvernacular form of poetic diction itself. Few except extreme and hopeless Wordsworthians now deny that the result of his attempts at simple language was and is far more ludicrous than touching. The wonderful _Affliction of Margaret_ does not draw its power from the neglect of poetic diction, but from the intensity of emotion which would carry off almost any diction, simple or affected; while on the other hand such pieces as "We are Seven," as the "Anecdote for Fathers," and as "Alice Fell," not to mention "Betty Foy"
and others, which specially infuriated Wordsworth"s own contemporaries, certainly gain nothing from their namby-pamby dialect, and sometimes go near to losing the beauty that really is in them by dint of it.
Moreover, the Miltonic blank verse and sonnets--at their best of a stately magnificence surpa.s.sed by no poet--have a tendency to become heavy and even dull when the poetic fire fails to fuse and shine through them. In fact it may be said of Wordsworth, as of most poets with theories, that his theories helped him very little, and sometimes hindered him a great deal.
His real poetical merits are threefold, and lie first in the inexplicable, the ultimate, felicity of phrase which all great poets must have, and which only great poets have; secondly, in his matchless power of delineating natural objects; and lastly, more properly, and with most special rarity of all, in the half-pantheistic mysticism which always lies behind this observation, and which every now and then breaks through it, puts it, as mere observation, aside, and blazes in unmasked fire of rapture. The summits of Wordsworth"s poetry, the "Lines Written at Tintern Abbey" and the "Ode on Intimations of Immortality,"--poems of such astonishing magnificence that it is only more astonishing that any one should have read them and failed to see what a poet had come before the world,--are the greatest of many of these revelations or inspirations. It is indeed necessary to read Wordsworth straight through--a proceeding which requires that the reader shall be in good literary training, but is then feasible, profitable, and even pleasant enough--to discern the enormous height at which the great Ode stands above its author"s other work. The _Tintern Abbey_ lines certainly approach it nearest: many smaller things--"The Affliction of Margaret,"
"The Daffodils," and others--group well under its shadow, and innumerable pa.s.sages and even single lines, such as that which all good critics have noted as lightening the darkness of the _Prelude_--
Voyaging through strange seas of thought, alone--
must of course be added to the poet"s credit. But the Ode remains not merely the greatest, but the one really, dazzlingly, supremely great thing he ever did. Its theory has been scorned or impugned by some; parts of it have even been called nonsense by critics of weight. But, sound or unsound, sense or nonsense, it is poetry, and magnificent poetry, from the first line to the last--poetry than which there is none better in any language, poetry such as there is not perhaps more than a small volume-full in all languages. The second cla.s.s of merit, that of vivid observation, abounds whereever the poems are opened. But the examples of the first are chiefly found in the lyrics "My Heart Leaps up," "The Sparrow"s Nest"; the famous daffodil poem which Jeffrey thought "stuff," which some say Dorothy wrote chiefly, and which is almost perfect of its kind; the splendid opening of the "Lines to Hartley Coleridge," which connect themselves with the "Immortality Ode"; the exquisite group of the "Cuckoo," the best patches of the Burns poems, and the three "Yarrows"; the "Peel Castle" stanzas; and, to cut a tedious catalogue short, the hideously named but in parts perfectly beautiful "Effusion on the Death of James Hogg," the last really masterly thing that the poet did. In some of these we may care little for the poem as a whole, nothing for the moral the poet wishes to draw.
But the poetic moments seize us, the poetic flash dazzles our eyes, and the whole divine despair or not more divine rapture which poetry causes comes upon us.
One division of Wordsworth"s work is so remarkable that it must have such special and separate mention as it is here possible to give it; and that is his exercises in the sonnet, wherein to some tastes he stands only below Shakespeare and on a level with Milton. The sonnet, after being long out of favour, paying for its popularity between Wyatt and Milton by neglect, had, princ.i.p.ally it would seem on the very inadequate example of Bowles (see _infra_), become a very favourite form with the new Romantics. But none of them wrote it with the steady persistence, and none except Keats with the occasional felicity, of Wordsworth. Its thoughtfulness suited his bent, and its limits frustrated his prolixity, though, it must be owned, he somewhat evaded this benign influence by writing in series. And the sonnets on "The Venetian Republic," on the "Subjugation of Switzerland," that beginning "The world is too much with us," that in November 1806, the first "Personal Talk," the magnificent "Westminster Bridge," and the opening at least of that on Scott"s departure from Abbotsford, are not merely among the glories of Wordsworth, they are among the glories of English poetry.
Unfortunately these moments of perfection are, in the poet"s whole work, and especially in that part of it which was composed in the later half of his long life, by no means very frequent. Wordsworth was absolutely dest.i.tute of humour, from which it necessarily followed that his self-criticism was either non-existent or constantly at fault. His verse was so little facile, it paid so little regard to any of the common allurements of narrative-interest or varied subject, it was so necessary for it to reach the full white heat, the absolute instant of poetic projection, that when it was not very good it was apt to be scarcely tolerable. It is nearly impossible to be duller than Wordsworth at his dullest, and unluckily it is as impossible to find a poet of anything like his powers who has given himself the license to be dull so often and at such length. The famous "Would he had blotted a thousand"
applies to him with as much justice as it was unjust in its original application; and it is sometimes for pages together a positive struggle to remember that one is reading one of the greatest of English poets, and a poet whose influence in making other poets has been second hardly to that of Spenser, of Keats, or of the friend who follows him in our survey.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge was born in Devonshire, at Ottery St. Mary, of which place his father was vicar, on the 21st October 1772. The family was merely respectable before his day, but since it has been of very unusual distinction, intellectual and other. He went to Christ"s Hospital when he was not quite ten years old, and in 1791 was admitted to an exhibition at Jesus College, Cambridge, with his thoughts already directed to poetry by the sonnets of Bowles above mentioned, and with a reputation, exaggerated perhaps, but certainly not invented, in Lamb"s famous "Elia" paper on his old school. Indeed, high as is Coleridge"s literary position on the strength of his writing alone, his talk and its influence on hearers have been unanimously set higher still. He did very well at first, gaining the Browne Medal for Greek Verse and distinguishing himself for the Craven Scholarship; but he speedily fell in love, in debt, it is suspected in drink, and it is known into various political and theological heresies. He left Cambridge and enlisted at Reading in the 15th Light Dragoons. He obtained his discharge, however, in three or four months, and no notice except a formal admonition appears to have been taken of his resuming his position at Cambridge.
Indeed he was shortly after elected to a Foundation Scholarship. But in the summer of 1794 he visited Oxford, and after he had fallen in with Southey, whose views were already Jacobinical, the pair engaged themselves to Pantisocracy[5] and the Miss Frickers. This curious and often told story cannot be even summarised here. Its immediate result was that Coleridge left the University without taking a degree, and, though not at once, married Sarah Fricker on October 1795. Thenceforward he lived on literature and his friends, especially the latter. He tried Unitarian preaching and newspaper work, of which at one time or another he did a good deal. The curious ins and outs of Coleridge"s strange though hardly eventful life have, after being long most imperfectly known, been set forth in fullest measure by Mr. d.y.k.es Campbell. It must suffice here to say that, after much wandering, being unable or unwilling to keep house with his own family, he found asylums, first with some kind folk named Morgan, and then in the house of Mr. Gillman at Hampstead, where for years he held forth to rising men of letters, and where he died on the 25th June 1834. His too notorious craving for opium had never been conquered, though it had latterly been kept in some check.
Despite this unfortunate failing and his general inability to carry out any schemes of work on the great scale, Coleridge"s literary production was very considerable, and, except the verse, it has never been completely collected or systematically edited. He began verse-writing very early, and early found a vent for it in the _Morning Chronicle_, then a Radical organ. He wrote _The Fall of Robespierre_ in conjunction with Southey in 1794, and published it. Some prose pamphlets followed, and then Cottle, the Bristol providence of this group of men of letters, offered thirty guineas for a volume of poems, which duly appeared in 1796. Meanwhile Coleridge had started a singular newspaper called _The Watchman_, which saw ten numbers, appearing every eighth day. The _Lyrical Ballads_ followed in 1798, and meanwhile Coleridge had written the play of _Osorio_ (to appear long afterwards as _Remorse_), had begun _Christabel_, and had contributed some of his best poems to the _Morning Post_. His German visit (see _ante_) produced among other things the translation of _Wallenstein_, a translation far above the original. Some poetry and much newspaper work filled the next ten years, with endless schemes; but in 1807 Coleridge began to lecture at the Royal Inst.i.tution--a course somewhat irregularly delivered, and almost entirely unreported. 1809 saw his second independent periodical venture, _The Friend_, the subsequent reprint of which as a book is completely rewritten. In 1811-12 he delivered his second course of lectures, this time on his own account. It was followed by two others, and in 1813 _Remorse_ was produced at Drury Lane, had a fair success, and brought the author some money. _Christabel_, with _Kubla Khan_, appeared in 1816, and the _Biographia Literaria_ next year; _Zapolya_ and the rewritten _Friend_ the year after, when also Coleridge gave a new course of lectures, and yet another, the last. _Aids to Reflection_, in 1825, was the latest important work he issued himself, though in 1828 he superintended a collection of his poems. Such of the rest of his work as is in existence in a collected form has been printed or reprinted since.
A more full account of the appearance of Coleridge"s work than is desirable or indeed possible in most cases here has been given, because it is important to convey some idea of the astonishingly piecemeal fashion in which it reached the world. To those who have studied the author"s life of opium-eating; of constant wandering from place to place; of impecuniousness so utter that, after all the painstaking of the modern biographer, and after full allowance for the ravens who seem always to have been ready to feed him, it is a mystery how he escaped the workhouse; of endless schemes and endless non-performance--it is only a wonder that anything of Coleridge"s ever reached the public except in newspaper columns. As it was, while his most ambitiously planned books were never written at all, most of those which did reach the press were years in getting through it; and Southey, on one occasion, after waiting fifteen months for the conclusion of a contribution of Coleridge"s to _Omniana_, had to cancel the sheet in despair. The collection, after many years, by Mr. Ernest Coleridge of his grandfather"s letters has by no means completely removed the mystery which hangs over Coleridge"s life and character. We see a little more, but we do not see the whole; and we are still unable to understand what strange impediments there were to the junction of the two ends of power and performance. A rigid judge might almost say, that if friends had not been so kind, fate had been kinder, and that instead of helping they hindered, just as a child who is never allowed to tumble will never learn to walk.
The enormous tolerance of friends, however, which alone enabled him to produce anything, was justified by the astonishing genius to which its possessor gave so unfair a chance. As a thinker, although the evidence is too imperfect to justify very dogmatic conclusions, the opinion of the best authorities, from which there is little reason for differing, is that Coleridge was much more stimulating than intrinsically valuable.
His _Aids to Reflection_, his most systematic work, is disappointing; and, with _The Friend_ and the rest, is princ.i.p.ally valuable as exhibiting and inculcating an att.i.tude of mind in which the use of logic is not, as in most eighteenth century philosophers, destructive, but is made to consist with a wide license for the employment of imagination and faith. He borrowed a great deal from the Germans, and he at least sometimes forgot that he had borrowed a great deal from our own older writers.
So, too, precise examination of his numerous but fragmentary remains as a literary critic makes it necessary to take a great deal for granted.
Here, also, he Germanised much; and it is not certain, even with the aid of his fragments, that he was the equal either of Lamb or of Hazlitt in insight. Perhaps his highest claim is that, in the criticism of philosophy, of religion, and of literature alike he expressed, and was even a little ahead of, the n.o.bler bent and sympathy of his contemporaries. We are still content to a.s.sign to Coleridge, perhaps without any very certain t.i.tle-deeds, the invention of that more catholic way of looking at English literature which can relish the Middle Ages without doing injustice to contemporaries, and can be enthusiastic for the seventeenth century without contemning the eighteenth.[6] To him more than to any single man is also a.s.signed (and perhaps rightly, though some of his remarks on the Church, even after his rally to orthodoxy, are odd) the great ecclesiastical revival of the Oxford movement; and it is certain that he had not a little to do with the abrupt discarding of the whole tradition of Locke, Berkeley and Hartley only excepted. Difficult as it may be to give distinct chapter and verse for these a.s.signments from the formless welter of his prose works, no good judge has ever doubted their validity, with the above and other exceptions and guards. It may be very difficult to present Coleridge"s a.s.sets in prose in a liquid form; but few doubt their value.
It is very different with his poetry. Here, too, the disastrous, the almost ruinous results of his weaknesses appear. When one begins to sift and riddle the not small ma.s.s of his verse, it shrinks almost appallingly in bulk. _Wallenstein_, though better than the original, is after all only a translation. _Remorse_ (either under that name or as _Osorio_) and _Zapolya_ are not very much better than the contemporary or slightly later work of Talfourd and Milman. _The Fall of Robespierre_ is as absurd and not so amusing as Southey"s una.s.sisted _Wat Tyler_. Of the miscellaneous verse with which, after these huge deductions, we are left, much is verse-impromptu, often learned and often witty, for Coleridge was (in early days at any rate) abundantly provided with both wit and humour, but quite occasional. Much more consists of mere Juvenilia. Even of the productions of his best times (the last l.u.s.trum of the eighteenth century and a lucid interval about 1816) much is not very good. _Religious Musings_, though it has had its admirers, is terribly poor stuff. _The Monody on the Death of Chatterton_ might have been written by fifty people during the century before it. _The Destiny of Nations_ is a feeble rant; but the _Ode on the Departing Year_, though still unequal, still conventional, strikes a very different note.
_The Three Graves_, though injured by the namby-pambiness which was still thought inc.u.mbent in ballads, again shows no vulgar touch. And then, omitting for the moment _Kubla Khan_, which Coleridge said he wrote in 1797, but of which no mortal ever heard till 1816, we come to _The Rime of the Ancient Mariner_ and the birth of the new poetry in England. Here the stutters and flashes of Blake became coherent speech and steady blaze; here poetry, which for a century and a half had been curbing her voice to a genteel whisper or raising it only to a forensic declamation, which had at best allowed a few wood-notes to escape here and there as if by mistake, spoke out loud and clear.
If this statement seems exaggerated (and it is certain that at the time of the appearance of the _Ancient Mariner_ not even Wordsworth, not even Southey quite relished it, while there has always been a sect of dissidents against it), two others will perhaps seem more extravagant still. The second is that, with the exception of this poem, of _Kubla Khan_, of _Christabel_, and of _Love_, all of them according to Coleridge written within a few months of each other in 1797-98, he never did anything of the first cla.s.s in poetry. The third is that these four--though _Christabel_ itself does not exceed some fifteen hundred lines and is decidedly unequal, though the _Ancient Mariner_ is just over six hundred and the other two are quite short--are sufficient between them to rank their author among the very greatest of English poets. It is not possible to make any compromise on this point; for upon it turns an entire theory and system of poetical criticism. Those who demand from poetry a "criticism of life," those who will have it that "all depends on the subject," those who want "moral" or "construction"
or a dozen other things,--all good in their way, most of them compatible with poetry and even helpful to it, but none of them essential thereto,--can of course never accept this estimate. Mrs.
Barbauld said that _The Ancient Mariner_ was "improbable"; and to this charge it must plead guilty at once. _Kubla Khan_, which I should rank as almost the best of the four, is very brief, and is nothing but a dream, and a fragment of a dream. _Love_ is very short too, and is flawed by some of the aforesaid namby-pambiness, from which none of the Lake school escaped when they tried pa.s.sion. _Christabel_, the most ambitious if also the most unequal, does really underlie the criticism that, professing itself to be a narrative and holding out the promise of something like a connected story, it tells none, and does not even offer very distinct hints or suggestions or what its story, if it had ever been told, might have been. A thousand faults are in it; a good part of the thousand in all four.
But there is also there something which would atone for faults ten thousand times ten thousand; there is what one hears at most three or four times in English, at most ten or twelve times in all literature--the first note, with its endless echo-promise, of a new poetry. The wonderful cadence-changes of _Kubla Khan_, its phrases, culminating in the famous distich so well descriptive of Coleridge himself--
For he on honey dew hath fed, And drunk the milk of Paradise,
the splendid crash of the
Ancestral voices prophesying war,
are all part of this note and cry. You will find them nowhere from Chaucer to Cowper--not even in the poets where you will find greater things as you may please to call them. Then in the _Mariner_ comes the gorgeous metre,--freed at once and for the first time from the "b.u.t.ter-woman"s rank to market" which had distinguished all imitations of the ballad hitherto,--the more gorgeous imagery and pageantry here, the simple directness there, the tameless range of imagination and fancy, the fierce rush of rhythm:--
The fair breeze blew, the white foam flew, The furrow followed free: We were the first that ever burst Into that silent sea.
And thereafter the spectre of Life-in-Death, the water-snakes, the rising of the dead men, the snapping of the spell. There had been nothing like all this before; and in all the hundred years, for all the great poetry we have seen, we have seen nothing so _new_ as it. _Love_ gave the magnificent opening stanza, the motto and defence at once of the largest, the most genuine, the most delightful part of poetry. And _Christabel_, independently of its purple patches, such as the famous descant on the quarrels of friends, and the portents that mark the pa.s.sage of Geraldine, gave what was far more important--a new metre, destined to have no less great and much more copious influence than the Spenserian stanza itself. It might of course be easy to pick out antic.i.p.ations in part of this combination of iambic dimeter, trochaic, and anapaestic; but it never had taken thorough form before. And how it seized on the imagination of those who heard it is best shown by the well-known anecdote of Scott, who, merely hearing a little of it recited, at once developed it and established it in _The Lay of the Last Minstrel_. In verse at least, if not in prose, there is no greater _master_ than Coleridge.
Robert Southey, the third of this curiously dissimilar trio whom partly chance and partly choice have bound together for all time, was born at Bristol on 12th August 1774. His father was only a linen-draper, and a very unprosperous one; but the Southeys were a respectable family, ent.i.tled to arms, and possessed of considerable landed property in Somerset, some of which was left away from the poet by unfriendly uncles to strangers, while more escaped him by a flaw in the entail. His mother"s family, the Hills, were in much better circ.u.mstances than his father, and like the other two Lake Poets he was singularly lucky in finding helpers. First his mother"s brother the Rev. Herbert Hill, chaplain to the English factory at Lisbon, sent him to Westminster, where he did very well and made invaluable friends, but lost the regular advancement to Christ Church owing to the wrath of the head-master Dr.
Vincent at an article which Southey had contributed to a school magazine, the _Flagellant_. He was in fact expelled; but the gravest consequences of expulsion from a public school of the first rank did not fall upon him, and he matriculated without objection at Balliol in 1793.
His college, however, which was then distinguished for loose living and intellectual dulness, was not congenial to him; and developing extreme opinions in politics and religion, he decided that he could not take orders, and left without even taking a degree. His disgrace with his own friends was completed by his engaging in the Pantisocratic scheme, and by his attachment to Edith Fricker, a penniless girl (though not at all a "milliner at Bath") whose sisters became Mrs. Coleridge and Mrs.
Lovell. And when the ever-charitable Hill invited him to Portugal he married Miss Fricker the very day before he started. After a residence at Lisbon, in which he laid the foundation of his unrivalled acquaintance with Peninsular history and literature, he returned and lived with his wife at various places, nominally studying for the law, which he liked not better but worse than the Church. After divers vicissitudes, including a fresh visit (this time not as a bachelor) to Portugal, and an experience of official work as secretary to Corry the Irish Chancellor of the Exchequer, he at last, at the age of thirty, established himself at Greta Hall, close to Keswick, where Coleridge had already taken up his abode. This, as well as much else in his career, was made possible by the rare generosity of his friend of school-days and all days, Charles Wynn, brother of the then Sir Watkin, and later a pretty well known politician, who on coming of age gave him an annuity of 160 a year. This in 1807 he relinquished on receiving a government pension of practically the same amount. The Laureateship in 1813 brought him less than another hundred; but many years afterwards Sir Robert Peel, in 1835, after offering a baronetcy, put his declining years out of anxiety by conferring a further pension of 300 a year on him. These declining years were in part unhappy. As early as 1816 his eldest son Herbert, a boy of great promise, died; the shock was repeated some years later by the death of his youngest and prettiest daughter Isabel; while in the same year as that in which his pension was increased his wife became insane, and died two years later. A second marriage in 1839 to the poetess Caroline Bowles brought him some comfort; but his own brain became more and more affected, and for a considerable time before his death on 21st March 1843 he had been mentally incapable.
Many morals have been drawn from this melancholy end as to the wisdom of too prolonged literary labour, which in Southey"s case had certainly been prodigious, and had been carried so far that he actually read while he was taking const.i.tutional walks. It is fair to say, however, that, just as in the case of Scott the terrible shock of the downfall of his fortunes has to be considered, so in that of Southey the successive trials to which he, a man of exceptionally strong domestic affections, was exposed, must be taken into account. At the same time it must be admitted that Southey"s production was enormous. His complete works never have been, and are never likely to be collected; and, from the scattered and irregular form in which they appeared, it is difficult if not impossible to make even a guess at the total. The list of books and articles (the latter for the most part written for the _Quarterly Review_, and of very great length) at the end of his son"s _Life_ fills nearly six closely printed pages. Two of these entries--_the Histories of Brazil_ and of the _Peninsular War_--alone represent six large volumes. The Poems by themselves occupy a royal octavo in double columns of small print running to eight hundred pages; the correspondence, very closely printed in the six volumes of the _Life_, and the four more of _Letters_ edited by the Rev. J. W. Warter, some five thousand pages in all; while a good deal of his early periodical work has never been identified, and there are large stores of additional letters--some printed, more in MS. Nor was Southey by any means a careless or an easy writer. He always founded his work on immense reading, some of the results of which, showing the laborious fashion in which he performed it, were published after his death in his _Commonplace Book_. He did not write very rapidly; and he corrected, both in MS. and in proof, with the utmost sedulity. Of the nearly 14,000 books which he possessed at his death, it is safe to say that all had been methodically read, and most read many times; while his almost mediaeval diligence did not hesitate at working through a set of folios to obtain the information or the corrections necessary for a single article.
It is here impossible to mention more than the chief items of this portentous list. They are in verse--_Poems_, by R. Southey and R.
Lovell, 1794; _Joan of Arc_, 1795; _Minor Poems_, 1797-99; _Thalaba_, 1801; _Metrical Tales_ and _Madoc_, 1805; _The Curse of Kehama_, 1810; _Roderick_, 1814; with a few later volumes, the chief being the unlucky _Vision of Judgment_, 1821, in hexameters. A complete edition of the Poems, except one or two posthumously printed, was published by himself in ten volumes in 1837, and collected into one ten years later with the additions. This also includes _Wat Tyler_, a rhapsody of the poet"s youth, which was (piratically and to his infinite annoyance) published in 1817.
In prose Southey"s most important works are the _History of Brazil_, 1810-19 (this, large as it is, is only a kind of off-shoot of the projected _History of Portugal_, which in a way occupied his whole life, and never got published at all); the _History of the Peninsular War_, 1822-32; the _Letters from England by Don Manuel Espriella_, 1812; the _Life of Nelson_ (usually thought his masterpiece), 1813; the _Life of Wesley_, 1820; _The Book of the Church_, 1824; _Colloquies on Society_ (well known, if not in itself, for Macaulay"s review of it), 1829; _Naval History_, 1833-40; and the great humorous miscellany of _The Doctor_ (seven volumes), 1834-47; to which must be added editions, often containing some of his best work, of Chatterton, Amadis of Gaul, Palmerin of England, Kirke White, Bunyan, and Cowper, with divers _Specimens_ of the British Poets, the charming prose and verse _Chronicle of the Cid_, the miscellany of _Omniana_, half-way between table- and commonplace-book, the _Commonplace Book_ itself, and not a little else, besides letters and articles innumerable.
Certain things about Southey are uncontested and uncontestable. The uprightness and beauty of his character, his wonderful helpfulness to others, and the uncomplaining way in which he bore what was almost poverty,--for, high as was his reputation, his receipts were never a t.i.the of the rewards not merely of Scott or Byron or Tom Moore, but of much lesser men--are not more generally acknowledged than the singular and pervading excellence of his English prose style, the robustness of his literary genius, and his unique devotion to literature. But when we leave these accepted things he becomes more difficult if not less interesting. He himself had not the slightest doubt that he was a great poet, and would be recognised as such by posterity, though with a proud humility he reconciled himself to temporary lack of vogue. This might be set down to an egotistic delusion. But such an easy explanation is negatived by even a slight comparison of the opinions of his greatest contemporaries. It is somewhat staggering to find that Scott, the greatest Tory man of letters who had strong political sympathies, and Fox, the greatest Whig politician who had keen literary tastes, enjoyed his long poems enthusiastically. But it may be said that the eighteenth century leaven which was so strong in each, and which is also noticeable in Southey, conciliated them. What then are we to say of Macaulay, a much younger man, a violent political opponent of Southey, and a by no means indiscriminate lover of verse, who, admitting that he doubted whether Southey"s long poems would be read after half a century, had no doubt that if read they would be admired? And what are we to say of the avowals of admiration wrung as it were from Byron, who succeeded in working himself up, from personal, political, and literary motives combined, into a frantic hatred of Southey, lampooned him in print, sent him a challenge (which luckily was not delivered) in private, and was what the late Mr. Mark Pattison would have called "his Satan"?
The half century of Macaulay"s prophecy has come, and that prophecy has been fulfilled as to the rarity of Southey"s readers as a poet. Has the other part come true too? I should hesitate to say that it has. Esteem not merely for the man but for the writer can never fail Southey whenever he is read by competent persons: admiration may be less prompt to come at call. Two among his smaller pieces--the beautiful "Holly Tree," and the much later but exquisite stanzas "My days among the dead are past"--can never be in any danger; the grasp of the grotesque-terrific, which the poet shows in the "Old Woman of Berkley"
and a great many other places, antic.i.p.ates the _Ingoldsby Legends_ with equal ease but with a finer literary gift; some other things are really admirable and not a little pleasing. But the longer poems, if they are ever to live, are still dry bones. _Thalaba_, one of the best, is spoilt by the dogged craze against rhyme, which is more, not less, needed in irregular than in regular verse. _Joan of Arc_, _Madoc_, _Roderick_, have not escaped that curse of blank verse which only Milton, and he not always, has conquered in really long poems. _Kehama_, the only great poem in which the poet no longer disdains the almost indispensable aid to poetry in our modern and loosely quantified tongue, is much better than any of the others. The Curse itself is about as good as it can be, and many other pa.s.sages are not far below it; but to the general taste the piece suffers from the remote character of the subject, which is not generally and humanly interesting, and from the ma.s.s of tedious detail.
To get out of the difficulty thus presented by indulging in contemptuous ignoring of Southey"s merits has been attempted many times since Emerson foolishly asked "Who is Southey?" in his jottings of his conversation with Landor, Southey"s most dissimilar but constant friend and panegyrist. It is extremely easy to say who Southey is. He is the possessor of perhaps the purest and most perfect English prose style, of a kind at once simple and scholarly, to be found in the language. He has written (in the _Life of Nelson_) perhaps the best short biography in that language, and other things not far behind this. No Englishman has ever excelled him in range of reading or in intelligent comprehension and memory of what he read. Unlike many book-worms, he had an exceedingly lively and active humour. He has scarcely an equal, and certainly no superior, in the rare and difficult art of discerning and ranging the material parts of an historical account: the pedant may glean, but the true historian will rarely reap after him. And in poetry his gifts, if they are never of the very highest, are so various and often so high that it is absolutely absurd to pooh-pooh him as a poet.
The man who could write the verses "In my Library" and the best parts of _Thalaba_ and _Kehama_ certainly had it in his power to write other things as good, probably to write other things better. Had it been in his nature to take no thought not merely for the morrow but even for the day, like Coleridge, or in his fate to be provided for without any trouble on his own part, and to take the provision with self-centred indifference, like Wordsworth, his actual production might have been different and better. But his strenuous and generous nature could not be idle; and idleness of some sort is, it may be very seriously laid down, absolutely necessary to the poet who is to be supreme.
The poet who, though, according to the canons of poetical criticism most in favour during this century, he ranks lower than either Wordsworth or Coleridge, did far more to popularise the general theory of Romantic poetry than either, was a slightly older man than two of the trio just noticed; but he did not begin his poetical career (save by one volume of translation) till some years after all of them had published. Walter Scott was born in Edinburgh on the 15th of August 1771. His father, of the same name as himself, was a Writer to the Signet; his mother was Anne Rutherford, and the future poet and novelist had much excellent Border blood in him, besides that of his direct ancestors the Scotts of Harden. He was a very sickly child; and though he grew out of this he was permanently lame. His early childhood was princ.i.p.ally spent on the Border itself, with a considerable interval at Bath; and he was duly sent to the High School and University of Edinburgh, where, like a good many other future men of letters, he was not extremely remarkable for what is called scholarship. He was early imprisoned in his father"s office, where the state of relations between father and son is supposed to be pretty accurately represented by the story of those between Alan Fairford and his father in _Redgauntlet_; and, like Alan, he was called to the bar. But even in the inferior branch of the profession he enjoyed tolerable liberty of wandering about and sporting, besides sometimes making expeditions on business into the Highlands and other out-of-the-way parts of the country.
He thus acquired great knowledge of his fatherland; while (for he was, if not exactly a scholar, the most omnivorous of readers) he was also acquiring great knowledge of books. And it ought not to be omitted that Edinburgh, in addition to the literary and professional society which made it then and afterwards so famous, was still to no small extent the headquarters of the Scotch n.o.bility, and that Scott, long before his books made him famous, was familiar with society of every rank. His first love affair did not run smooth, and he seems never to have entirely forgotten the object of it, who is identified (on somewhat more solid grounds than in the case of other novelists) with more than one of his heroines. But he consoled himself to a certain extent with a young lady half French, half English, Miss Charlotte Carpenter or Charpentier, whom he met at Gilsland and married at Carlisle on Christmas Eve 1797.
Scott was an active member of the yeomanry as well as a barrister, an enthusiastic student of German as well as a sportsman; and the book of translations (from Burger) above referred to appeared in 1796. But he did nothing important till after the beginning of the present century, when the starting of the _Edinburgh Review_ and some other things brought him forward; though he showed what he could do by contributing two ballads, "Glenfinlas" and "The Eve of St. John," to a collection of terror-pieces started by Monk Lewis, and added Goethe"s _Gotz von Berlichingen_ to his translations. He had become in 1799 independent, though not rich, by being appointed Sheriff of Selkirkshire.
His beginnings as an author proper were connected, as was all his subsequent career, partly for good but more for ill, with a school friendship he had early formed for two brothers named Ballantyne at Kelso. He induced James, the elder, to start a printing business at Edinburgh, and unfortunately he entered into a secret partnership with this firm, which never did him much good, which caused him infinite trouble, and which finally ruined him. But into this complicated and still much debated business it is impossible to enter here. James Ballantyne printed the _Border Minstrelsy_, which appeared in 1802,--a book ranking with Percy"s _Reliques_ in its influence on the form and matter of subsequent poetry,--and then Scott at last undertook original work of magnitude. His task was _The Lay of the Last Minstrel_, published in 1805. It may almost be said that from that day to his death he was the foremost--he was certainly, with the exception of Byron, the most popular--man of letters in Great Britain. His next poems--_Marmion_ (1808) and _The Lady of the Lake_ (1810)--brought him fame and money such as no English poet had gained before; and though Byron"s following--for following it was--for the time eclipsed his master, the latter"s _Rokeby, The Lord of the Isles_, and others, would have been triumphs for any one else.
How, when the taste for his verse seemed to cool, he struck out a new line in prose and achieved yet more fame and yet more money than the verse had ever given him, will concern us in the next chapter. But as it would be c.u.mbrous to make yet a third division of his work, the part of his prose which is not fiction may be included here, as well as the rest of his life. He had written much criticism for the _Edinburgh_, until he was partly disgusted by an uncivil review of _Marmion_, partly (and more) by the tone of increasing Whiggery and non-intervention which Jeffrey was imposing on the paper; and when the _Quarterly_ was founded in opposition he transferred his services to that. He edited a splendid and admirably done issue of Dryden (1808) and another not quite so thoroughly executed of Swift (1814), and his secret connection with the Ballantynes induced him to do much other editing and miscellaneous work.
In the sad last years of his life he laboured with desperation at a great _Life of Napoleon_, which was a success pecuniarily but not in many other ways, produced the exquisite _Tales of a Grandfather_ on Scottish history, and did much else. He even wrote plays, which have very little merit, and, except abstract philosophy, there is hardly a division of literature that he did not touch; for he composed a sermon or two of merit, and his political pamphlets, the _Letters of Malachi Malagrowther_, opposing what he thought an interference with Scottish privileges in currency matters, are among the best of their kind.
His life was for many years a very happy one; for his marriage, if not pa.s.sionately, was fairly successful, he was extremely fond of his children, and while his poems and novels began before he had fully reached middle life to make him a rich man, his Sheriffship, and a Clerkship of Session which was afterwards added (though he had to wait some time for its emoluments), had already made him secure of bread and expectant of affluence. From a modest cottage at La.s.swade he expanded himself to a rented country house at Ashestiel on the Tweed, having besides a comfortable town mansion in Edinburgh; and when he was turned out of Ashestiel he bought land and began to build at Abbotsford on the same river. The estate was an ill-chosen and unprofitable one. The house grew with the owner"s fortunes, which, founded in part as they were on the hardest and most honest work that author ever gave, were in part also founded on the quicksand of his treacherous connection with men, reckless, ill-judging, and, though perhaps not in intention dishonest, perpetually trading on their secret partner"s industry and fame. In the great commercial crash of 1825, Constable, the publisher of most of the novels, was involved; he dragged the Ballantynes down with him; and the whole of Scott"s fortune, except his appointments and the little settled on his wife and children, was liable for the Ballantynes" debts.
But he was not satisfied with ruin. He must needs set to work at the hopeless task of paying debts which he had never, except technically, incurred, and he actually in the remaining years of his life cleared off the greater part of them. It was at the cost of his life itself. His wife died, his children were scattered; but he worked on till the thankless, hopeless toil broke down his strength, and after a fruitless visit to Italy, he returned, to die at Abbotsford on 21st September 1832.
Scott"s poetry has gone through various stages of estimate, and it can hardly be said even now, a hundred years after the publication of his first verses, to have attained the position, practically accepted by all but paradoxers, which in that time a poet usually gains, unless, as the poets of the seventeenth century did in the eighteenth, he falls, owing to some freak of popular taste, out of really critical consideration altogether. The immense popularity which it at first obtained has been noted, as well as the fact that it was only ousted from that popularity by, so to speak, a variety of itself. But the rise of Byron in the long run did it far less harm than the long-delayed vogue of Wordsworth and Coleridge and the success even of the later schools, of which Tennyson was at once the pioneer and the commander-in-chief. At an uncertain time in the century, but comparatively early, it became fashionable to take Scott"s verse as clever and spirited improvisation, to dwell on its over-fluency and facility, its lack of pa.s.sages in the grand style (whatever the grand style may be), to indicate its frequent blemishes in strictly correct form and phrase. And it can hardly be said that there has been much reaction from this tone among professed and competent critics.