To a certain extent, indeed, this undervaluation is justified, and Scott himself, who was more free from literary vanity than any man of letters of whom we have record, pleaded guilty again and again. Dropping as he did almost by accident on a style which had absolutely no forerunners in elaborate formal literature, a style almost absolutely dest.i.tute of any restrictions or limits, in which the length of lines and stanzas, the position of rhymes, the change from narrative to dialogue, and so forth, depended wholly and solely on the caprice of the author, it would have been extremely strange if a man whose education had been a little lacking in scholastic strictness, and who began to write at a time when the first object of almost every writer was to burst old bonds, had not been somewhat lawless, even somewhat slipshod. _Christabel_ itself, the first in time, and, though not published till long afterwards, the model of his _Lay_, has but a few score verses that can pretend to the grand style (whatever that may be). Nor yet again can it be denied that, acute as was the sense which bade Scott stop, he wrote as it was a little too much in this style, while he tried others for which he had far less apt.i.tude.
Yet it seems to me impossible, on any just theory of poetry or of literature, to rank him low as a poet. He can afford to take his trial under more than one statute. To those who say that all depends on the subject, or that the handling and arrangement of the subject are, if not everything, yet something to be ranked far above mere detached beauties, he can produce not merely the first long narrative poems in English, which for more than a century had honestly enthralled and fixed popular taste, but some of the very few long narrative poems which deserve to do so. Wordsworth, in a characteristic note on the _White Doe of Rylstone_, contrasts, with oblique depreciation of Scott, that poem and its famous predecessors in the style across the border; but he omits to notice one point of difference--that in Scott the _story_ interests, and in himself it does not. For the belated "cla.s.sical" criticism of the _Edinburgh Review_, which thought the story of the _Last Minstrel_ childish, and that of _Marmion_ not much better, it may have been at least consistent to undervalue these poems. But the a.s.sumptions of that criticism no longer pa.s.s muster. On the other hand, to those who pin their poetical faith on "patches," the great ma.s.s of Scott"s poetical work presents examples of certainly no common beauty. The set pieces of the larger poems, the Melrose description in _The Lay_, the battle in _Marmion_, the Fiery Cross in the _Lady of the Lake_, are indeed inferior in this respect to the mere s.n.a.t.c.hes which the author scattered about his novels, some of which, especially the famous "Proud Maisie," have a beauty not inferior to that of the best things of his greatest contemporaries. And in swinging and dashing lyric, again, Scott can hold his own with the best, if indeed "the best" can hold _their_ own in this particular division with "Lochinvar" and "Bonnie Dundee," with Elspeth"s ballad in the _Antiquary_, and the White Lady"s comfortable words to poor Father Philip.
The most really damaging things to be said against Scott as a poet are two. First, that his genius did not incline him either to the expression of the highest pa.s.sion or to that of the deepest meditation, in which directions the utterances of the very greatest poetry are wont to lie.
In the second place, that the extreme fertility and fluency which cannot be said to have improved even his prose work are, from the nature of the case, far more evident, and far more damagingly evident, in his verse.
He is a poet of description, of action, of narration, rather than of intense feeling or thought. Yet in his own special divisions of the simpler lyric and of lyrical narrative he sometimes attains the exquisite, and rarely sinks below a quality which is fitted to give the poetical delight to a very large number of by no means contemptible persons. It appears to me at least, that on no sound theory of poetical criticism can Scott be ranked as a poet below Byron, who was his imitator in narrative and his inferior in lyric. But it may be admitted that this was not the opinion of most contemporaries of the two, and that, much as the poetry of Byron has sunk in critical estimation during the last half century, and slight as are the signs of its recovery, those who do not think very highly of the poetry of the pupil do not, as a rule, show much greater enthusiasm for that of the master.
Byron, it is true, was only half a pupil of Scott"s, and (oddly enough for the poet, who, with Scott, was recognised as leader by the Romantic schools of all Europe) had more than a hankering after the cla.s.sical ideals in literature. Yet how much of this was due to wilful "pose" and a desire not to follow the prevailing school of the day is a question difficult to answer--as indeed are many connected with Byron, whose utterances, even in private letters, are very seldom to be taken with absolute confidence in their sincerity. The poet"s character did no discredit to the doctrines of heredity. His family was one of considerable distinction and great age; but his father, Captain John Byron, who never came to the t.i.tle, was a _roue_ of the worst character, and the cousin whom the poet succeeded had earned the name of the Wicked Lord. His mother, Catherine Gordon of Gight, was of an excellent Scotch stock, and an heiress; though her rascally husband made away with her money. But she had a most violent temper, and seems to have had absolutely no claims except those of birth to the t.i.tle of lady. Byron was born in Holles Street, Cavendish Square, on 22nd January 1788; and his early youth, which was spent with his mother at Aberdeen, was one of not much indulgence or happiness. But he came to the t.i.tle, and to an extremely impoverished succession, at ten years old, and three years later was sent to Harrow. Here he made many friends, distinguishing himself by obtruding mentions and memories of his rank in a way not common with the English aristocracy, and hence, in 1805, he proceeded to Trinity College, Cambridge. He spent about the usual time there, but took no degree, and while he was still an undergraduate printed his _Hours of Idleness_, first called _Juvenilia_. It appeared publicly in March 1807, and a year later was the subject of a criticism, rather excessive than unjust, in the _Edinburgh Review_. Byron, who had plenty of pluck, and who all his life long inclined in his heart to the Popian school, spent a considerable time upon a verse-answer, _English Bards and Scotch Reviewers_, in which he ran amuck generally, but displayed ability which it was hopeless to seek in his first production. Then he went abroad, and the excitement of his sojourn in the countries round the Mediterranean for the next two years not only aroused, but finally determined and almost fully developed, his genius.
On his return home he took his seat and went into society with the success likely to attend an extremely handsome young man of twenty-three, with a vague reputation both for ability and naughtiness, a fairly old t.i.tle, and something of an estate. But his position as a "lion" was not thoroughly a.s.serted till the publication, in February 1812, of _Childe Harold_, which with some difficulty he had been induced by his friend Dallas, his publisher Murray, and the critic Gifford to put before some frigid and trivial _Hints from Horace_. Over _Childe Harold_ the English public went simply mad, buying seven editions in five weeks; and during the next three years Byron produced, in rapid succession, _The Giaour_, _The Bride of Abydos_, _The Corsair_, _Lara_, _The Siege of Corinth_, and _Hebrew Melodies_. He could hardly write fast enough for the public to buy. Then the day after New Year"s Day 1814, he married Miss Milbanke, a great heiress, a future baroness in her own right, and handsome after a fashion, but of a cold, prim, and reserved disposition, as well as of a very unforgiving temper. It probably did not surprise any one who knew the pair when, a year later, they separated for ever.
The scandals and discussions connected with this event are fortunately foreign to our subject here. The only important result of the matter for literature is that Byron (upon whom public opinion in one of its sudden fits of virtuous versatility threw even more of the blame than was probably just) left the country and journeyed leisurely, in the company of Mr. and Mrs. Sh.e.l.ley for the most part, to Venice. He never returned alive to England; and Venice, Ravenna, Pisa, and Genoa were successively his headquarters till 1823. Then the Greek Insurrection attracted him, he raised what money he could, set out for Greece, showed in the distracted counsels of the insurgents much more practical and untheatrical heroism than he had hitherto been credited with, and died of fever at Missolonghi on the 19th of April 1824. His body was brought home to England and buried in the parish church of Hucknall Torkard, near Newstead Abbey, his Nottinghamshire seat, which, however, he had sold some time before. The best of Byron"s poems by far date from this latter period of his life: the later cantos of _Childe Harold_, the beautiful short poems of _The Dream_ and _Darkness_, many pieces in dramatic form (the chief of which are _Manfred_, _Cain_, _Marino Faliero_, and _Sardanapalus_), _Mazeppa_, a piece more in his earlier style but greatly superior to his earlier work, a short burlesque poem _Beppo_, and an immense and at his death unfinished narrative satire ent.i.tled _Don Juan_.
Although opinions about Byron differ very much, there is one point about him which does not admit of difference of opinion. No English poet, perhaps no English writer except Scott (or rather "The Author of Waverley"), has ever equalled him in popularity at home; and no English writer, with Richardson and Scott again as seconds, and those not very close ones, has equalled him in contemporary popularity abroad. The vogue of Byron in England, though overpowering for the moment, was even at its height resisted by some good judges and more strait-laced moralists; and it ebbed, if not as rapidly as it flowed, with a much more enduring movement. But abroad he simply took possession of the Continent of Europe and kept it. He was one of the dominant influences and determining causes of the French Romantic movement; in Germany, though the failure of literary talent and activity of the first order in that country early in this century made his school less important, he had great power over Heine, its one towering genius; and he was almost the sole master of young Russia, young Italy, young Spain, in poetry.
Nor, though his active and direct influence has of course been exhausted by time, can his reputation on the Continent be said to have ever waned.
These various facts, besides being certain in themselves, are also very valuable as guiding the inquirer in regions which are more of opinion.
The rapidity of Byron"s success everywhere, the extent of it abroad (where few English writers before him had had any at all), and the decline at home, are all easily connected with certain peculiarities of his work. That work is almost as fluent and facile as Scott"s, to which, as has been said, it owes immense debts of scheme and manner; and it is quite as faulty. Indeed Scott, with all his indifference to a strictly academic correctness, never permitted himself the bad rhymes, the bad grammar, the slipshod phrase in which Byron unblushingly indulges. But Byron is much more monotonous than Scott, and it was this very monotony, a.s.sisted by an appearance of intensity, which for the time gave him power. The appeal of Byron consists very mainly, though no doubt not wholly, in two things: the lavish use of the foreign and then unfamiliar scenery, vocabulary, and manners of the Levant, and the installation, as princ.i.p.al character, of a personage who was speedily recognised as a sort of fancy portrait, a sketch in cap and yataghan, of Byron himself as he would like to be thought. This Byronic hero has an ostentatious indifference to moral laws, for the most part a mysterious past which inspires him with deep melancholy, great personal beauty, strength, and bravery, and he is an all-conquering lover. He is not quite so original as he seemed, for he is in effect very little more than the older Romantic villain-hero of Mrs. Radcliffe, the Germans, and Monk Lewis, costumed much more effectively, placed in scheme and companionship more picturesquely, and managed with infinitely greater genius. But it is a common experience in literary history that a type more or less familiar already, and presented with striking additions, is likely to be more popular than something absolutely new. And accordingly Byron"s b.a.s.t.a.r.d and second-hand Romanticism, though it owed a great deal to the terrorists and a great deal more to Scott, for the moment altogether eclipsed the pure and original Romanticism of his elders Coleridge and Wordsworth, of his juniors Sh.e.l.ley and Keats.
But although the more extreme admirers of Byron would no doubt dissent strongly from even this judgment, it would probably be subscribed, with some reservations and guards, by not a few good critics from whom I am compelled to part company as to other parts of Byron"s poetical claim.
It is on the question how much of true poetry lies behind and independent of the scenery and properties of Byronism, that the great debate arises. Was the author of the poems from _Childe Harold_ to _Don Juan_ really gifted with the poetical "sincerity and strength" which have been awarded him by a critic of leanings so little Byronic in the ordinary sense of Matthew Arnold? Is he a poetic star of the first magnitude, a poetic force of the first power, at all? There may seem to be rashness, there may even seem to be puerile insolence and absurdity, in denying or even doubting this in the face of such a European concert as has been described and admitted above. Yet the critical conscience admits of no transaction; and after all, as it was doubted by a great thinker whether nations might not go mad like individuals, I do not know why it should be regarded as impossible that continents should go mad like nations.
At any rate the qualities of Byron are very much of a piece, and, even by the contention of his warmest reasonable admirers, not much varied or very subtle, not necessitating much a.n.a.lysis or disquisition. They can be fairly p.r.o.nounced upon in a judgment of few words. Byron, then, seems to me a poet distinctly of the second cla.s.s, and not even of the best kind of second, inasmuch as his greatness is chiefly derived from a sort of parody, a sort of imitation, of the qualities of the first. His verse is to the greatest poetry what melodrama is to tragedy, what plaster is to marble, what pinchbeck is to gold. He is not indeed an impostor; for his sense of the beauty of nature and of the unsatisfactoriness of life is real, and his power of conveying this sense to others is real also.
He has great, though uncertain, and never very _fine_, command of poetic sound, and a considerable though less command of poetic vision. But in all this there is a singular touch of illusion, of what his contemporaries had learnt from Scott to call gramarye. The often cited parallel of the false and true Florimels in Spenser applies here also.
The really great poets do not injure each other in the very least by comparison, different as they are. Milton does not "kill" Wordsworth; Spenser does not injure Sh.e.l.ley; there is no danger in reading Keats immediately after Coleridge. But read Byron in close juxtaposition with any of these, or with not a few others, and the effect, to any good poetic taste, must surely be disastrous; to my own, whether good or bad, it is perfectly fatal. The light is not that which never was on land or sea; it is that which is habitually just in front of the stage: the roses are rouged, the cries of pa.s.sion even sometimes (not always) ring false. I have read Byron again and again; I have sometimes, by reading Byron only and putting a strong constraint upon myself, got nearly into the mood to enjoy him. But let eye or ear once catch sight or sound of real poetry, and the enchantment vanishes.
Attention has already been called to the fact that Byron, though generally ranking with the poets who have been placed before him in this chapter as a leader in the nineteenth century renaissance of poetry, was a direct scholar of Scott, and in point of age represented, if not a new generation, a second division of the old. This was still more the case in point of age, and almost infinitely more so in point of quality, as regards Sh.e.l.ley and Keats. There was nothing really new in Byron; there was only a great personal force directing itself, half involuntarily and more than half because of personal lack of initiative, into contemporary ways. The other two poets just mentioned were really new powers. They took some colour from their elders; but they added more than they took, and they would unquestionably have been great figures at any time of English literature and history. Scott had little or no influence on them, and Wordsworth not much; but they were rather close to Coleridge, and they owed something to a poet of much less genius than his or than their own--Leigh Hunt.
Percy Bysshe Sh.e.l.ley, the elder of the two, was Byron"s junior by four years, and was born at Field Place in Suss.e.x in August 1792. He was the heir of a very respectable and ancient though not very distinguished family of the squirearchy; and he had every advantage of education, being sent to Eton in 1804, and to University College, Oxford, six years later. The unconquerable unconventionality of his character and his literary tastes had shown themselves while he was still a schoolboy, and in the last year of his Etonian and the first of his Oxonian residence he published two of the most absurd novels of the most absurd novel kind that ever appeared, _Zastrozzi_ and _St. Irvyne_, imitations of Monk Lewis. He also in the same year collaborated in two volumes of verse, _The Wandering Jew_ (partly represented by _Queen Mab_), and "_Poems_ by Victor and Cazire" (which has vindicated the existence of reviewers by surviving only in its reviews, all copies having mysteriously perished).
His stay at Oxford was not long; for having, in conjunction with a clever but rather worthless friend, Thomas Jefferson Hogg (afterwards his biographer), issued a pamphlet on "The Necessity of Atheism" and sent it to the heads of colleges, he was, by a much greater necessity, expelled from University on 25th March 1811. Later in the same year he married Harriet Westbrook, a pretty and lively girl of sixteen, who had been a school-fellow of his sister"s, but came from the lower middle cla.s.s. His apologists have said that Harriet threw herself at his head, and that Sh.e.l.ley explained to her that she or he might depart when either pleased. The responsibility and the validity of this defence may be left to these advocates.
For nearly three years Sh.e.l.ley and his wife led an exceedingly wandering life in Ireland, Wales, Devonshire, Berkshire, the Lake District, and elsewhere, Sh.e.l.ley attempting all sorts of eccentric propagandism in politics and religion, and completing the crude but absolutely original _Queen Mab_. Before the third anniversary of his wedding-day came round he had parted with Harriet, against whose character his apologists, as above, have attempted to bring charges. The fact is that he had fallen in love with Mary G.o.dwin, daughter of the author of _Political Justice_ (whose writings had always had a great influence on Sh.e.l.ley, and who spunged on him pitilessly) and of Mary Wollstonecraft. The pair fled to the Continent together in July 1814; and two years later, when the unhappy wife, a girl of twenty-one, had drowned herself in the Serpentine, they were married. Meanwhile Sh.e.l.ley had wandered back to England, had, owing to the death of his grandfather, received a considerable independent income by arrangement, and in 1815 had written _Alastor_, which, though not so clearly indicative of a new departure when compared with _Queen Mab_ as some critics have tried to make out, no other living poet, perhaps no other poet, could have written. He was refused the guardianship, though he was allowed to appoint guardians, of his children by the luckless Harriet, and was (for him naturally, though for most men unreasonably) indignant. But his poetical vocation and course were both clear henceforward, though he never during his life had much command of the public, and had frequent difficulties with publishers, while the then att.i.tude of the law made piracy very easy.
For a time he lived at Marlow, where he wrote or began _Prince Athanase_, _Rosalind and Helen_, and above all _Laon and Cythna_, called later and permanently _The Revolt of Islam_. In April 1818 he left England for Italy, and never returned.
The short remains of his life were spent chiefly at Lucca, Florence, and Pisa, with visits to most of the other chief Italian cities; Byron being often, and Leigh Hunt at the last, his companion. All his greatest poems were now written. At last, in July 1821, when the Sh.e.l.leys were staying at a lonely house named Casa Magni, on the Bay of Spezia, he and his friend Lieutenant Williams set out in a boat from Leghorn. The boat either foundered in a squall or was run down. At any rate Sh.e.l.ley"s body was washed ash.o.r.e on the 19th, and burnt on a pyre in the presence of Byron, Hunt, and Trelawny.
Little need be said of Sh.e.l.ley"s character. If it had not been for the disgusting efforts of his maladroit adorers to blacken that not merely of his hapless young wife, but of every one with whom he came in contact, it might be treated with the extremest indulgence. Almost a boy in years at the time of his death, he was, with some late flashes of sobering, wholly a boy in inability to understand the responsibilities and the burdens of life. An enthusiast for humanity generally, and towards individuals a man of infinite generosity and kindliness, he yet did some of the cruellest and some of not the least disgraceful things from mere childish want of realising the _pacta conventa_ of the world.
He, wholly ignorant, would, if he could, have turned the wheel of society the other way, reckless of the horrible confusion and suffering that he must occasion.
But in pure literary estimation we need take no note of this. In literature, Sh.e.l.ley, if not of the first three or four, is certainly of the first ten or twelve. He has, as no poet in England except Blake and Coleridge in a few flashes had had before him for some century and a half, the ineffable, the divine intoxication which only the _di majores_ of poetry can communicate to their worshippers. Once again, after all these generations, it became unnecessary to agree or disagree with the substance, to take interest or not to take interest in it, to admit or to contest the presence of faults and blemishes--to do anything except recognise and submit to the strong pleasure of poetry, the charm of the highest poetical inspiration.
I think myself, though the opinion is not common among critics, that this touch is unmistakable even so early as _Queen Mab_. That poem is no doubt to a certain extent modelled upon Southey, especially upon _Kehama_, which, as has been observed above, is a far greater poem than is usually allowed. But the motive was different: the sails might be the same, but the wind that impelled them was another. By the time of _Alastor_ it is generally admitted that there could or should have been little mistake. Nothing, indeed, but the deafening blare of Byron"s brazen trumpet could have silenced this music of the spheres. The meaning is not very much, though it is pa.s.sable; but the music is exquisite. There is just a foundation of Wordsworthian scheme in the blank verse; but the structure built on it is not Wordsworth"s at all, and there are merely a few borrowed strokes of _technique_, such as the placing of a long adjective before a monosyllabic noun at the end of the line, and a strong caesura about two-thirds through that line. All the rest is Sh.e.l.ley, and wonderful.
It may be questioned whether, fine as _The Revolt of Islam_ is, the Spenserian stanza was quite so well suited as the "Pindaric" or as blank verse, or as lyrical measures, to Sh.e.l.ley"s genius. It is certainly far excelled both in the lyrics and in the blank verse of _Prometheus Unbound_, the first poem which distinctly showed that one of the greatest lyric poets of the world had been born to England. _The Cenci_ relies more on subject, and, abandoning the lyric appeal, abandons what Sh.e.l.ley is strongest in; but _h.e.l.las_ restores this. Of his comic efforts, the chief of which are _Swellfoot the Tyrant_ and _Peter Bell the Third_, it is perhaps enough to say that his humour, though it existed, was fitful, and that he was too much of a partisan to keep sufficiently above his theme. The poems midway between, large and small--_Prince Athanase_, _The Witch of Atlas_ (an exquisite and glorious fantasy piece), _Rosalind and Helen_, _Adonais_, _Epipsychidion_, and the _Triumph of Life_--would alone have made his fame. But it is in Sh.e.l.ley"s smallest poems that his greatest virtue lies. Not even in the seventeenth century had any writer given so much that was so purely exquisite. "To Constantia Singing," the "Ozymandias"
sonnet, the "Lines written among the Euganean Hills," the "Stanzas written in Dejection," the "Ode to the West Wind," the hackneyed "Cloud," and "Skylark," "Arethusa," the "World"s Wanderers," "Music, when soft voices die," "The flower that smiles to-day," "Rarely, rarely, comest thou," the "Lament," "One word is too often profaned," the "Indian Air," the second "Lament," "O world! O life! O time!" (the most perfect thing of its kind perhaps, in the strict sense of perfection, that all poetry contains), the "Invitation," and the "Recollection,"--this long list, which might have been made longer, contains things absolutely consummate, absolutely unsurpa.s.sed, only rivalled by a few other things as perfect as themselves.
Sh.e.l.ley has been foolishly praised, and it is very likely that the praise given here may seem to some foolish. It is as hard for praise to keep the law of the head as for blame to keep the law of the heart. He has been mischievously and tastelessly excused for errors both in and out of his writings which need only a kindly silence. In irritation at the "chatter" over him some have even tried to make out that his prose--very fine prose indeed, and preserved to us in some welcome letters and miscellaneous treatises, but capable of being dispensed with--is more worthy of attention than his verse, which has no parallel and few peers. But that one thing will remain true in the general estimate of competent posterity I have no doubt. There are two English poets, and two only, in whom the purely poetical attraction, exclusive of and sufficient without all others, is supreme, and these two are Spenser and Sh.e.l.ley.
The life of John Keats was even shorter and even less marked by striking events than that of Sh.e.l.ley, and he belonged in point of extraction and education to a somewhat lower cla.s.s of society than any of the poets. .h.i.therto mentioned in this chapter. He was the son of a livery stable keeper who was fairly well off, and he went to no school but a private one, where, however, he received tolerable instruction and had good comrades. Born in 1795, he was apprenticed to a surgeon at the age of fifteen, and even did some work in his profession, till in 1817 his overmastering pa.s.sion for literature had its way. He became intimate with the so-called "c.o.c.kney school," or rather with its leaders Leigh Hunt and Hazlitt--an intimacy, as far as the former was concerned, not likely to chasten his own taste, but chiefly unfortunate because it led, in the rancorous state of criticism then existing, to his own efforts being branded with the same epithet. His first book was published in the year above mentioned: it did not contain all the verse he had written up to that time, or the best of it, but it confirmed him in his vocation.
He broke away from surgery, and, having some little means, travelled to the Isle of Wight, Devonshire, and other parts of England, besides becoming more and more familiar with men of letters. It was in the Isle of Wight chiefly that he wrote _Endymion_, which appeared in 1818. This was savagely and stupidly attacked in _Blackwood_ and the _Quarterly_; the former article being by some attributed, without a t.i.ttle of evidence, to Lockhart. But the supposed effect of these attacks on Keats" health was widely exaggerated by some contemporaries, especially by Byron. The fact was that he had almost from his childhood shown symptoms of lung disease, which developed itself very rapidly. The sense of his almost certain fate combined with the ordinary effects of pa.s.sion to throw a somewhat hectic air over his correspondence with Miss f.a.n.n.y Brawne. His letters to her contain nothing discreditable to him, but ought never to have been published. He was, however, to bring out his third and greatest book of verse in 1820; and then he sailed for Italy, to die on the 23rd of February 1821. He spoke of his name as "writ in water." Posterity has agreed with him that it is--but in the Water of Life.
Nothing is more interesting, even in the endless and delightful task of literary comparison, than to contrast the work of Sh.e.l.ley and Keats, so alike and yet so different. A little longer s.p.a.ce of work, much greater advantages of means and education, and a happier though less blameless experience of pa.s.sion, enabled Sh.e.l.ley to produce a much larger body of work than Keats has to his name, even when this is swollen by what Mr.
Palgrave has justly stigmatised as "the incomplete and inferior work"
withheld by Keats himself, but made public by the cruel kindness of admirers. And this difference in bulk probably coincides with a difference in the volume of genius of the two writers. Further, while it is not at all improbable that if Sh.e.l.ley had lived he would have gone on writing better and better, the same probability is, I think, to be more sparingly predicated of Keats.
On the other hand, by a not uncommon connection or consequence, Keats has proved much more of a "germinal" poet than Sh.e.l.ley. Although the latter was, I think, by far the greater, his poetry had little that was national and very little that was imitable about it. He has had a vast influence; but it has been in the main the influence, the inspiration of his unsurpa.s.sed exciting power. No one has borrowed or carried further any specially Sh.e.l.leian turns of phrase, rhythm, or thought. Those who have attempted to copy and urge further the Sh.e.l.leian att.i.tude towards politics, philosophy, ethics, and the like, have made it generally ludicrous and sometimes disgusting. He is, in his own famous words, "something remote and afar." His poetry is almost poetry in its elements, uncoloured by race, language, time, circ.u.mstance, or creed. He is not even so much a poet as Poetry accidentally impersonated and incarnate.
With Keats it is very different. He had scarcely reached maturity of any kind when he died, and he laboured under the very serious disadvantages, first of an insufficient acquaintance with the great masters, and secondly of coming early under the influence of a rather small master, yet a master, Leigh Hunt, who taught him the fluent, gushing, slipshod style that brought not merely upon him, but upon his mighty successor Tennyson, the harsh but not in this respect wholly unjust lash of conservative and academic criticism. But he, as no one of his own contemporaries did, felt, expressed, and handed on the exact change wrought in English poetry by the great Romantic movement. Coleridge, Wordsworth, Scott, and even Southey to some extent, were the authors of this; but, being the authors, they were necessarily not the results of it. Byron was fundamentally out of sympathy with it, though by accidents of time and chance he had to enlist; Sh.e.l.ley, an angel, and an effectual angel, of poetry, was hardly a man, and still less an Englishman. But Keats felt it all, expressed what of it he had time and strength to express, and left the rest to his successors, helped, guided, furthered by his own example. Keats, in short, is the father, directly or at short stages of descent, of every English poet born within the present century who has not been a mere "sport" or exception. He begat Tennyson, and Tennyson begat all the rest.
The evidences of this are to be seen in almost his earliest poems--not necessarily in those contained in his earliest volume. Of course they are not everywhere. There were sure to be, and there were, mere echoes of eighteenth century verse and mere imitations of earlier writers. But these may be simply neglected. It is in such pieces as "Calidore" that the new note is heard; and though something in this note may be due to Hunt (who had caught the original of it from Wither and Browne), Keats changed, enriched, and refashioned the thing to such an extent that it became his own. It is less apparent (though perhaps not less really present) in his sonnets, despite the magnificence of the famous one on Chapman"s _Homer_, than in the couplet poems, which are written in an extremely fluent and peculiar verse, very much "enjambed" or overlapped, and with a frequent indulgence in double rhymes. Hunt had to a certain extent started this, but he had not succeeded in giving it anything like the distinct character which it took in Keats" hands.
_Endymion_ was written in this measure, with rare breaks; and there is little doubt that the lusciousness of the rhythm, combined as it was with a certain lusciousness both of subject and (again in unlucky imitation of Hunt) of handling, had a bad effect on some readers, as also that the attacks on it were to a certain extent, though not a very large one, prompted by genuine disgust at the mawkishness, as its author called it, of the tone. Keats, who was always an admirable critic of his own work, judged it correctly enough later, except that he was too harsh to it. But it is a delightful poem to this day, and I do not think that it is quite just to call it, as it has been called, "not Greek, but Elizabethan-Romantic." It seems to me quite different from Marlowe or the author of _Britain"s Ida_, and really Greek, but Greek mediaeval, Greek of the late romance type, refreshed with a wonderful new blood of English romanticism. And this once more was to be the note of all the best poetry of the century, the pouring of this new English blood through the veins of old subjects--cla.s.sical, mediaeval, foreign, modern.
We were to conquer the whole world of poetical matter with our English armies, and Keats was the first leader who started the adventure.
The exquisite poetry of his later work showed this general tendency in all its latest pieces,--clearly in the larger poems, the fine but perhaps somewhat overpraised _Hyperion_, the admirable _Lamia_, the exquisite _Eve of St. Agnes_, but still more in the smaller, and most of all in those twin peaks of all his poetry, the "Ode on a Grecian Urn"
and "La Belle Dame sans Merci." He need indeed have written nothing but these two to show himself not merely an exquisite poet but a captain and leader of English poetry for many a year, almost for many a generation to come. Wordsworth may have given him a little, a very quiet hint for the first, the more Cla.s.sical masterpiece; Coleridge something a little louder for the second, the Romantic. But in neither case did the summons amount to anything like a cue or a call-bell; it was at best seed that, if it had not fallen on fresh and fruitful soil, could have come to nothing.
As it is, and if we wish to see what it came to, we must simply look at the whole later poetry of the nineteenth century in England. The operations of the spirit are not to be limited, and it is of course quite possible that if Keats had not been, something or somebody would have done his work instead of him. But as it is, it is to Keats that we must trace Tennyson, Rossetti, Mr. Swinburne, Mr. Morris; to Keats that even not a little of Browning has to be affiliated; to Keats, directly or indirectly, that the greater part of the poetry of nearly three generations owes royalty and allegiance.
Of him, as of Sh.e.l.ley, some foolish and hurtful things have been said.
In life he was no effeminate "aesthetic" or "decadent," divided between sensual gratification and unmanly _Katzenjammer_, between paganism and puerility, but an honest, manly Englishman, whose strength only yielded to unconquerable disease, whose impulses were always healthy and generous. Despite his origin,--and, it must be added, some of his friendships,--there was not a touch of vulgarity about him; and if his comic vein was not very full-pulsed, he had a merry laugh in him. There is no "poisonous honey stolen" from anywhere or extracted by himself from anything in Keats; his sensuousness is nothing more than is, in the circ.u.mstances, "necessary and voluptuous and right." But these moral excellences, while they may add to the satisfaction with which one contemplates him, hardly enhance--though his morbid admirers seem to think that the absence of them would enhance--the greatness and the value of his poetical position, both in the elaboration of a new poetic style and language, and still more in the indication of a new road whereby the great poetic exploration could be carried on.
Round or under these great Seven--for that Byron was great in a way need not be denied; Southey, the weakest of all as a poet, had a very strong influence, and was one of the very greatest of English men of letters--must be mentioned a not inconsiderable number of men who in any other age would have been reckoned great. The eldest of these, both in years and in reputation, holds his position, and perhaps always held it, rather by courtesy than by strict right. Samuel Rogers[7] was born in London on 30th July 1763, and was the son of a dissenting banker, from whom he derived Whig principles and a comfortable fortune. It is said that he once, as a very young man, went to call on Dr. Johnson, but was afraid to knock; but though shyness accompanied him through life, the amiability which it is sometimes supposed to betoken did not. He published a volume of poems in 1786, and his famous _Pleasures of Memory_, the piece that made his reputation, in 1792. Twenty years afterwards _Columbus_ followed, and yet two years later, in 1814, _Jacqueline_; while in 1822 _Italy_, on which, with the _Pleasures of Memory_, such fame as he has rests, was published, to be reissued some years afterwards in a magnificent ill.u.s.trated edition, and to have a chance (in a cla.s.sical French jest) _se sauver de planche en planche_.
He did not die till 1855, in his ninety-third year: the last, as he had been the first, of his group.
Rogers had the good luck to publish his best piece at a time when the general and popular level of English poetry was at the lowest point it has reached since the sixteenth century, and to be for many years afterwards a rich and rather hospitable man, the acquaintance if not exactly the friend of most men of letters, of considerable influence in political and general society, and master of an excessively sharp tongue. A useful friend and a dangerous enemy, it was simpler to court or to let him alone than to attack him, and his fame was derived from pieces too different from any work of the actual generation to give them much umbrage. It may be questioned whether Rogers ever wrote a single line of poetry. But he wrote some polished and pleasant verse, which was vigorous by the side of Hayley and "correct" by the side of Keats. In literature he has very little interest; in literary history he has some.
_Felix opportunitate_ in the same way, but a far greater poet, was Thomas Campbell, who, like Rogers, was a Whig, like him belonged rather to the cla.s.sical than to the romantic school in style if not in choice of subject, and like him had the good luck to obtain, by a poem with a t.i.tle very similar to that of Rogers" masterpiece, a high reputation at a time when there was very little poetry put before the public. Campbell was not nearly so old a man as Rogers, and was even the junior of the Lake poets and Scott, having been born at Glasgow on the 27th July 1777.
His father was a real Campbell, and as a merchant had at one time been of some fortune; but the American War had impoverished him, and the poet was born to comparative indigence. He did, however, well at the college of his native city, and on leaving it took a tutorship in Mull. His _Pleasures of Hope_ was published in 1799 and was extremely popular, nor after it had its author much difficulty in following literature. He was never exactly rich, but pensions, legacies, editorships, high prices for his not extensive poetical work, and higher for certain exercises in prose book-making which are now almost forgotten, maintained him very comfortably. Indeed, of the many recorded ingrat.i.tudes of authors to publishers, Campbell"s celebrated health to Napoleon because "he shot a bookseller" is one of the most ungrateful. In the last year of the eighteenth century he went to Germany, and was present at (or in the close neighbourhood of) the battle of Hohenlinden. This he afterwards celebrated in really immortal verse, which, with "Ye Mariners of England" and the "Battle of the Baltic," represents his greatest achievement. In 1809 he published _Gertrude of Wyoming_, a short-long poem of respectable _technique_ and graceful sentiment. In 1824 appeared a volume of poems, of which the chief, _Theodric_ (not as it is constantly misspelled _Theodoric_), is bad; and in 1842 another, of which the chief, _The Pilgrim of Glencoe_, is worse. He died in 1844 at Boulogne, after a life which, if not entirely happy (for he had ill-health, not improved by incautious habits, some domestic misfortunes, and a rather sour disposition), had been full of honours of all kinds, both in his own country, of where he was Lord Rector of Glasgow University, and out of it.
If Campbell had written nothing but his longer poems, the comparison above made with Rogers would be wholly, instead of partly, justified.
Although both still retain a sort of conventional respect, it is impossible to call either the _Pleasures of Hope_ or _Gertrude of Wyoming_ very good poetry, while enough has been said of their successors. Nor can very high praise be given to most of the minor pieces. But the three splendid war-songs above named--the equals, if not the superiors, of anything of the kind in English, and therefore in any language--set him in a position from which he is never likely to be ousted. In a handful of others--"Lochiel," the exquisite lines on "A Deserted Garden in Argyleshire," with, for some flashes at least, the rather over-famed "Exile of Erin," "Lord Ullin"s Daughter," and a few more--he also displays very high, though rather unequal and by no means unalloyed, poetical faculty; and "The Last Man," which, by the way, is the latest of his good things, is not the least. But his best work will go into a very small compa.s.s: a single octavo sheet would very nearly hold it, and it was almost all written before he was thirty. He is thus an instance of a kind of poet, not by any means rare in literature, but also not very common, who appears to have a faculty distinct in cla.s.s but not great in volume, who can do certain things better than almost anybody else, but cannot do them very often, and is not quite to be trusted to do them with complete sureness of touch. For it is to be noted that even in Campbell"s greatest things there are distinct blemishes, and that these blemishes are greatest in that which in its best parts reaches the highest level--"The Battle of the Baltic." Many third and some tenth rate poets would never have left in their work such things as "The might of England flushed _To antic.i.p.ate the scene_,"
which is half fustian and half nonsense: no very great poet could possibly have been guilty of it. Yet for all this Campbell holds, as has been said, the place of best singer of war in a race and language which are those of the best singers and not the worst fighters in the history of the world--in the race of Nelson and the language of Shakespeare. Not easily shall a man win higher praise than this.
In politics, as well as in a certain general kind of literary att.i.tude and school, another Thomas, Moore, cla.s.ses himself both historically and naturally with Rogers and Campbell; but he was a very much better poet than Rogers, and, though he never reached quite the same height as Campbell at his narrow and exceptional best, a far more voluminous verse writer and a much freer writer of good verse of many different kinds. He was born in Dublin on 28th May 1779; his father being a grocer, his mother somewhat higher in social rank. He was well educated, and was sent to Trinity College, Dublin, where he had but surmounted political difficulties; for his time as an undergraduate coincided with "Ninety-eight," and though it does not seem that he had meddled with anything distinctly treasonable, he had "Nationalist" friends and leanings. Partly to sever inconvenient a.s.sociations, partly in quest of fortune, he was sent to London in that year, and entered at the Temple.
In a manner not very clearly explained, but connected no doubt with his leaning to the Whig party, which was then much in need of literary help, he became a protege of Lord Moira"s, by whom he was introduced to the Prince of Wales. The Prince accepted the dedication of some translations of Anacreon, etc., which Moore had brought over with him, and which were published in 1800; while two years later the _Poems of Thomas Little_, a punning pseudonym, appeared, and at once charmed the public by their sugared versification and shocked it by their looseness of tone--a looseness which is not to be judged from the comparatively decorous appearance they make in modern editions. But there was never much harm in them. Next year, in 1803, Moore received a valuable appointment at Bermuda, which, though he actually went out to take possession of it and travelled some time in North America, he was allowed to transfer to a deputy. He came back to England, published another volume of poems, and fought a rather famously futile duel with Jeffrey about a criticism on it in the _Edinburgh Review_. He began the _Irish Melodies_ in 1807, married four years later, and from that time fixed his headquarters mostly in the country: first near Ashbourne in Derbyshire, then near Devizes in Wiltshire, to be near his patrons Lord Moira and Lord Lansdowne. But he was constantly in London on visits, and much in the society of men of letters, not merely of his own party. In particular he became, on the whole, Byron"s most intimate friend, and preserved towards that very difficult person an att.i.tude (tinged neither with the servility nor with the exaggerated independence of the _parvenu_) which did him a great deal of credit. He was rather a strong partisan, and, having a brilliant vein of poetical satire, he wrote in 1813 _The Twopenny Post Bag_--the best satiric verse of the poetical kind since the _Anti-Jacobin_, and the best on the Whig side since the _Rolliad_.
Nor did he fail to take advantage of the popular appet.i.te for long poems which Scott and Byron had created; his _Lalla Rookh_, published in 1817, being very popular and very profitable. It was succeeded by another and his best satirical work, _The Fudge Family_, a charming thing.
Up to this time he had been an exceedingly fortunate man; and his good luck, aided it must be said by his good conduct,--for Moore, with all his apparent weaknesses, was thoroughly sound at the core,--enabled him to surmount a very serious reverse of fortune. His Bermuda deputy was guilty of malversation so considerable that Moore could not meet the debt, and he had to go abroad. But Lord Lansdowne discharged his obligations; and Moore paid Lord Lansdowne. He returned to England in 1823, and was a busy writer for all but the last years of the thirty that remained to him; but the best of his work was done, with one exception. Byron left him his _Memoirs_, which would of course have been enormously profitable. But Lady Byron and others of the poet"s connections were so horrified at the idea of the book appearing that, by an arrangement which has been variously judged, but which can hardly be regarded as other than disinterested on Moore"s part, the MS. was destroyed, and instead of it Moore brought out in 1830 his well-known _Life of Byron_. This, some not incompetent judges have regarded as ranking next to Lockhart"s _Scott_ and Boswell"s _Johnson_, and though its main attraction may be derived from Byron"s very remarkable letters, still shows on the part of the biographer very unusual dexterity, good feeling, and taste. The lives of _Sheridan_ and _Lord Edward Fitzgerald_ had, and deserved to have, less success; while a _History of Ireland_ was, and was bound to be, an almost complete failure. For, though a very good prose writer, Moore had little of the erudition required, no grasp or faculty of political argument, and was at this time of his life, if not earlier, something of a trimmer, certain to satisfy neither the "ascendency" nor the "nationalist" parties. His prose romance of _The Epicurean_ is much better, and a really remarkable, piece of work; and though the _Loves of the Angels_, his last long poem, is not very good, he did not lose his command either of sentimental or of facetious lyric till quite his last days. These were clouded; for, like his contemporaries Scott and Southey, he suffered from brain disease for some time before his death, on 25th February 1852.
During his lifetime, especially during the first half or two-thirds of his literary career, Moore had a great popularity, and won no small esteem even among critics; such discredit as attached to him being chiefly of the moral kind, and that entertained only by very strait-laced persons. But as the more high-flown and impa.s.sioned muses of Wordsworth, of Sh.e.l.ley, and of Keats gained the public ear in the third and later decades of the century, a fashion set in of regarding him as a mere melodious trifler; and this has accentuated itself during the last twenty years or so, though quite recently some efforts have been made in protest. This estimate is demonstrably unjust. It is true that of the strange and high notes of poetry he has very few, of the very strangest and highest none at all. But his long poems, _Lalla Rookh_ especially, though somewhat over-burdened with the then fashionable deck cargo of erudite or would-be erudite notes, possess merit which none but a very prejudiced critic can, or at least ought to, overlook. And in other respects he is very nearly, if not quite, at the top of at least two trees, which, if not quite cedars of Lebanon, are not mere gra.s.s of Parna.s.sus. Moore was a born as well as a trained musician. But whereas most musicians have since the seventeenth century been exceedingly ill at verbal numbers, he had a quite extraordinary knack of composing what are rather disrespectfully called "words." Among his innumerable songs there are not one or two dozens or scores, but almost hundreds of quite charmingly melodious things, admirably adjusted to their music, and delightful by themselves without any kind of instrument, and as said not sung. And, what is more, among these there is a very respectable number to which it would be absolutely absurd to give the name of trifle. "I saw from the beach" is not a trifle, nor "When in death I shall calm recline," nor "Oft in the stilly night," nor "Tell me, kind sage, I pray thee," nor many others. They have become so hackneyed to us in various ways, and some of them happen to be pitched in a key of diction which, though not better or worse than others, is so out of fashion, that it seems as if some very respectable judges could not "focus" Moore at all. To those who can he will seem, not of course the equal, or anything like the equal, of Burns or Sh.e.l.ley, of Blake or Keats, but in his own way,--and that a way legitimate and not low,--one of the first lyrical writers in English. And they will admit a considerable addition to his claims in his delightful satirical verse, mainly but not in the least offensively political, in which kind he is as easily first as in the sentimental song to music.
Something not dissimilar to the position which Moore occupies on the more cla.s.sical wing of the poets of the period is occupied on the other by Leigh Hunt. Hunt (Henry James Leigh, who called himself and is generally known by the third only of his Christian names) was born in London on the 19th October 1784, was educated at Christ"s Hospital, began writing very early, held for a short time a clerkship in a public office, and then joined his brother in conducting the _Examiner_ newspaper. Fined and imprisoned for a personal libel on the Prince Regent (1812), Hunt became the fashion with the Opposition; and the _Story of Rimini_, which he published when he came out of gaol, and which was written in it, had a good deal of influence. He spent some years in Italy, to which place he had gone with his family in 1822 to edit _The Liberal_ and to keep house with Byron--a very disastrous experiment, the results of which he recorded in an offensive book on his return. Hunt lived to 18th August 1859, and was rescued from the chronic state of impecuniosity in which, despite constant literary work, he had long lived, by a Crown pension and some other a.s.sistance in his latest days. Personally, Leigh Hunt was an agreeable and amiable being enough, with certain foibles which were rather unfairly magnified in the famous caricature of him as Harold Skimpole by his friend d.i.c.kens, but which were accompanied by some faults of taste of which Mr. Skimpole is not accused.
In letters he was a very considerable person; though the best and far the largest part of his work is in prose, and will be noticed hereafter.
His verse is not great in bulk, and is perhaps more original and stimulating than positively good. His wide and ardent study of the older English poets and of those of Italy had enabled him to hit on a novel style of phrase and rhythm, which has been partly referred to above in the notice of Keats; his narrative faculty was strong, and some of his smaller pieces, from his sonnets downwards, are delightful things. "Abou ben Adhem" unites (a rare thing for its author) amiability with dignity, stateliness with ease; the "Nile" sonnet is splendid; "Jenny kissed me,"
charming, if not faultless; "The Man and the Fish," far above vulgarity.