THE LIBRARY OF THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA LOS ANGELES GIFT OF Blake R. Nevius /*= ?6 K a ESSAYS ON POETRY AND POETS ES SAYS ON POETRY AND POETS HON. RODEN NOEL author of 'a little child's monument," "songs of the heights and deeps,' " house of ravensburg," etc. LONDON KEGAN PAUL, TRENCH & CO., i, PATERNOSTER SQUARE 1886 (The rights of translation and o/ reproduction are rese>''t:d.) TO MY FRIEND JOHN ADDINGTON SYMONDS, POET, ESSAYIST, HISTORIAN, IN MEMORY OF "AUI.D LANG SYNF.," I DEDICATE THIS BOOK. PREFACE These Essays, with all their faults, were carefully composed, but, since a (cw of them were written some time ago, all have been scrupulously revised, the information involved, moreover, being brought, as far as possible, up to date : those that are republished have also been occasionally altered, in accordance with modified conviction on the part of the writer ; others are recent, and published now for the first time. All deal with modern, romantic poetry. The keynote of more than one of them is to be found in my opening essay on the " Poetic Interpretation of Nature," for a very marked characteristic of the best poetry of our century is the worship, and faithful, though idealized, delineation of external nature. In the last paper I print an experience of English travel, because, though hardly indeed covered by the book's designation, it forms a kind of return to this " dominant theme," being an attempt of my own at some measure of that descriptive interpretation, the general principles of which I have discussed in my first paper ; this is a record of the experience on which was partly founded my poem " Thalatta," in " Songs of the Heights and Deeps." The only poet not of our centur)- included in the present viii I'REFACE. volume is Chatterton. My brief essay on him appeared many years ago, but I quite agree with Mr. Theodore Watts, who has an excellent (and comparatively recent) introductory article on him in Ward's " British Poets," that, young as he was, Chatterton may be regarded as the father of that revived romantic poetry, now established amongst us. The other more pronounced characteristics of the poets here discussed are, I think, generally speaking, broad and deep human sympathies, a salient and original personality, strength and sincerity of feeling and conviction, as well as some poetic distinction of utterance, or style, whether that be rugged and robust, or subtle, delicate, and refined. Between Chatterton and Byron, I could have wished to say a word on Blake, and Burns, poets, each in his way, so genuine, simple, sincere, and distinguished ; nor ought Coleridge, and Mrs. Browning to have been forgotten. But, alas ! " Hell is paved with good intentions." My thanks are due to the proprietors of the Contem- porary, Fortnightly, Britisii Quarterly, and Indian Rnnezus, as also to those of the Spectator, JSI acniillan s,2lX\^ Gentleman's Magazines, ior permission to reprint essays, which, however, while originally appearing in their columns, have been very considerably altered, not only as regards form, but also in respect of substance. R. X. CONTENTS, On the Poetic Interpretation of Nature ... ... i ClIATTERTON ... ... ... ... ... ... 36 Lord Byron and his Times ... ... ... ... 50 Shelley ... ... ... ... .. ... 114 Wordsworth ... ... ... ... ... ... 132 Keats ... ... ... ... ... ... 150 Victor Hugo ... ... ... ... ... ... 172 The Poetry of Tennyson .. ... ... ... 223 Robert Browning ... ... ... ... ... 256 Robert Buchanan's Poetry ... ... ... ... 283 A Study of Walt Whitman ... ... ... ... 304 Rambles By Cornish Seas ... ... ... ... 342 ESSAYS ON POETRY AND POETS. ON THE POETIC INTERPRETATION OF NATURE. I CANNOT follow that fine poet and critic, Matthew Arnold, in his apparent depreciation of Nature-poetry, when he dismisses Shelley as the poet of clouds and sun- sets, and says he had not got hold of the right subject- matter for poetry. It is distinctively a modern subject, no doubt ; but, I should have thought, one newly reclaimed for beneficent poetic ends, — so much more fertile possession made over to the Muse, in addition to that purely human interest which has been hers from of old. I believe that Rousseau, Wordsworth, Byron, Shelley, Keats, Coleridge, were verily prophets, to whom a new revelation was entrusted. In a time when all secrets were at length supposed to be laid bare before man's microscopic understanding, all superstitions exploded, all mysteries explained ; when the universe emptied of ancient awe seemed no longer venerable, but a hideous lazar-house rather, made visible to all human eyes in every ghastly corner of it ; before the Circe-wand of materialism. Love metamorphosed into a sensation, Man shrivelled to a handful of dust, the Body of God's own breathing world ESSAYS ON POETRY AND POETS. with familiar irreverence laid upon the board of some near- sighted professor to be dissected ; when the angels of Faith and Hope seemed to be deserting for ever the desecrated shrines of mankind — then it was that these Prophet-Poets, as very ministers of Heaven, pointed men to the World- Soul, commanding them once more to veil their faces before the swift subtle splendour of Universal Life. The moods of Nature do mysteriously respond to the moods of Man. To the sensitive spirit the sea, the mountains, and the stars are ver>' types and symbols of permanence, order, eternity. Nature and man are elder sister and younger brother ; she wakes intelligence and will in him ; he knows himself in knowing her. She seems to him a dumb and blind elder sister, whose laws inexorably bind him, while he imposes himself upon her, reading spiritual meanings in her face. The chaos of our own soul, individual human degradation, of which we in the midst can but dimly divine the issue, receives a mystic interpretation from what seems the unconscious innocence of a sphere which yet manifests evil and good, strength and weakness — though, withal, the grand universality of a Kosmos. Thence we can look up with greater trust than before even for the worms that " sting one another in the dust." Why do the Arab in the desert, the Persian on his mountain, bow before the all-beholding sun? In him is no sin, no vanity, falsehood, or vain ambition, himself the veritable incarnation of one invisible Sun. He who loses his own personality in Nature, who lays down before her, the universal mother and tomb of humanity, his own private wrongs and griefs and fevered aspirations, hereby redresses the balance so unduly weighted with the self-will and momentary longings of one restless man. For she is one who toils not nor dreams, errs not nor supposes, raves not nor repents, but calmly fulfils herself for ever. In her general aspects. Nature, if we do not peer too closely into the minutiae of her painful strife and struggle. ON THE POETIC INTERPRETATION OF NATURE. 3 looks inevitable and calm, not in perpetual spiritual conflict like ourselves ; and hence she seems to offer rest to those who love her. The harmony of inviolable laws appears in her cooperant to an end. But I think that this inevitablencss of a universal order implicitly involves the idea of rightness, that of some fulfilled obligation tinged with morality, or what is akin to it. I know this cannot be proved, but I think it may be felt. The individual, in so far as he can assert himself against, or regard himself as out of relation with, the whole Kosmos, is wrong, evil ; but in harmony with all he is right. And though, indeed, external nature may be really composed of individuals, yet if it be so, we are not, except in some small degree as respects the animal world, in the secret of their subjectivity, and therefore cannot know them for such. Intelligences who should be unable to put themselves in conscious communication with ours might well regard human bodies as part of a fixed order of inflexible laws, without private volition or caprice, just as we now regard the inorganic. For even by ourselves private volitions are capable of being reduced to a law of averages through statistical science, which points to a real eternal order beyond and beneath our discords, resolving them into harmony. And however this be, to merge our personality in quiet or rapturous contemplation of a universal natural order proves indeed heavenly relief from the too often intolerable burden of an isolated self-life. AH that is profound, eternal, impersonal in us, goes forth to wed with the profound, eternal, impersonal Heart of all. It is beyond our good and right, more than our ideal, yet justifies, sanctions, transcends, absorbs it. Uni- versal Nature, who is one with us, constitutes, nourishes, creates us ; while we in her constitute, nourish, create our- selves, one another, and her. If it be true that we form her in our image, it is also true that from her we derive the power so to form her ; we are her creatures, living in and ESSAYS ON POETRY AND POETS. by her. Verily, it is our privilege to know conflict, and bewilderingly to realize some fundamental inner freedom, which is more than mere inanimate law ; but the seemingly inanimate order is a revelation of still higher privilege — that of inevitable Will, at one with unhesitating Wisdom ; and this surely is the inmost verity of things, our defect and disharmony being but an isolated chord in the grand music. Therefore, I repeat : " the light that never was on sea or land, the consecration and the poet's dream," is indeed a new revelation, made peculiarly in the modern poetry of true spiritual insight, and of this Poetry of Nature Words- worth is the High Priest. Not only does it pour fresh illuminating light upon Nature herself, but it also deepens and enlarges our comprehension of man. By means of their analogues in Nature, the human heart and mind may be more profoundly understood. Human emotions win a double dearness, or an added sorrow from their fellowship and association with outward scenes. While Nature can be fathomed only through her analogies with the desires, fears, and aspirations of the human soul, these again can scarcely become defined and articulate save through the mystic and multifoim appearances of Nature. We have here then a new poetic product of priceless value ; neither the external scene alone, nor man alone, but rather some spiritual child of their espousals. It is really almost puerile nowadays to suppose that there is an absolute Nature, which science and the land- surveyor are alone competent correctly to know — while poetry invents a world of her own wherewith to amuse herself and other people. Spiritual imagination alone knows Nature ; I don't say adeqiiately, even she — but with any approach to adequacy ; though, of course, the common constitution of our senses and understanding presents to us an external world which, so far as superficial characteristics are concerned, is pretty well the same for all, and which ON THE POETIC INTERPRETATION OF NATURE. 5 quite sufficiently serves the purposes alike of science, of common intercourse, and of practical utility. But since Berkeley, Kant, and modern physiolo<;y, it is no longer permissible to doubt that even these superficial qualities, and what we call " laws of nature," are merely the interpre- tation which our sensible and mental constitution enables us to put upon the language of the Kosmos, wherein a great deal more is meant than meets the ear. Of course, one must be insane to deny that the sea is a vast quantity of salt water, or that a primrose is indeed a yellow primrose, as Peter Bell with his plain common sense assumes it to be. But it is quite compatible with sanity to believe that both sea and primrose are a great deal more also. Only one must have other faculties, or faculties more highly trained, to discern the more. Poetry does not tell pretty lies for the sake of amusement, but penetrates to the heart of things. Therefore, I cannot altogether agree with Mr. Ruskin about " pathetic fallacy," — although no doubt there 2S a " false " way of looking at things as well as a true. The nimble fancy may suggest mere points of superficial resemblance, hardly vital or essential to the objects, which the poet endows with animation and soul, rather perhaps conveying an erroneous conception of their proper and peculiar character. So far I can agree ; but what I urge is, that to endow them with animation and soul is not necessarily to falsify ; may rather be to see more to the very root of them. I don't pretend that the poet speaks with precise accuracy in his metaphors and similes, but he suggests an inner truth of things, to which the unimagina- tive are simply blind. Indeed, precise accuracy belongs to the region of the understanding, which is b}- itself incapable of the higher truth. So that when Mr. Arnold tells us to conceive dogmas in the light of poetr}-, if he means with elasticity, in no hard and fast, cast-iron fashion, I can follow ; but if he means as mere graceful, unveracious fables, I cannot. 6 ESSAYS ON POETRY AND POETS. For instance, nothing could be more realistically de- scriptive than Wordsworth's magnificent lines on the Yew- trees of Borrowdale : — " each particular trunk a growth Of intertwisted fibres serpentine Upcoiling, and inveterately convolved ; " but the imaginative touches are equally true ; nay, penetrate more to the heart of things : — " Nor uninformed with phantasy, and looks That threaten the profane ; " Then those wonderful personifications — less fanciful than Shelley's in " Adonais," but more imaginative — how deep they go, how grand and solemn the mystery they unveil ! — ' ' beneath whose sable roof ghostly shapes May meet at noontide ; Fear and trembling Hope, Silence and Foresight : Death the skeleton, And Time the shadow." To meditative imagination, in the umbrageous atmosphere of the yew-trees, these august Presences verily abide — more actually than their ancient boughs with coral berries. The cuckoo is no mere cuckoo, but " a wandering voice ; " a voice of dear memories, and coming summer. "Yellow bees in the ivy bloom " are to the poet " forms more real than living man, nurslings of immortality." Nay, those outer things are because these inner realities are ; the former would not be without the latter — they are images and shadows only ; the leaping lamb is on earth because the Lamb of God is in Heaven, in the inner Holy of Holies of Humanity. Light is in the sense, in outer space, be- cause Light is in the spirit, in the understanding. The perishing bread that sustains the body is by virtue of the Bread of Life. To the opened inner eye there is indeed a Real Presence in the elements of the Eucharist. I do not mean to say that the animism of savages is a correct creed, for they simply deify phenomena without ON THE POETIC INTERPRETATION OF NATURE. 7 analysis, or suspicion that these are largely subjective ; nor even do I say that the Pagan poets were correct in their mythological beliefs ; or the mediaevals in their fairy-lore ; yet I think they were not far from the truth when they formulated their conviction that our spiritual kinship with Nature testifies to some spiritual beings like ourselves behind the phenomena of Nature — the elements, and so- called inanimate objects, being only their expression, body, or vesture. Nor do I deem such a belief at all incompatible with a full recognition of that ever-widening kingdom of physical law, to which modern Science introduces us : only let Science " stick to her own last ! " Quite certainly the ancients were never guilty of deliberately, in cold blood, inventing a quasi-poetic, or metaphorical diction, which the vulgar were so foolish as to take for literal fact, as our pseudo-scientific insincerity of unbelief, and incapacity for comprehending other modes of thought and feeling, now complacently assume. On the contrary, modern Nature- poetry is reverting, though in its own fashion, and in accordance with other altered convictions of our age, to this primal conception of the ancients. For as Science — though furnishing in her fairy tales new material for poetry — affords no help to the poetic feeling of life and spirit in Nature, so neither does a theology which teaches that there is a God external to the world, who once made, and still possibly sustains it. Poetry demands God immanent in Man and Nature. So that the author of Ecclesiastical Sonnets, the High Priest of this special poetry, yet hesi- tating and bewildered by his dogmatic creed, as by his habit of inherited thought, startles us out of our propriety by exclaiming : — " Great God ! I'd rather be A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn, So might I, standing on this pleasant lea, Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn ; Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea ; Or hear old Triton blow his wreathed horn I " 8 ESSAYS ON POETRY AND POETS. But the philosophy of idealism supplies for the logical faculty the conception needed to lift it into some harmony with the vision of children, poets, and the more primitive, less sophisticated races. Wordsworth, however, and Cole- ridge seem scarcely to dare credit what to the inmost core of them they feel true. You will remember the strange passage, in one of Coleridge's philosophical poems, where he apologizes to his wife for giving utterance to his con- viction ! Schiller, in his " Gods of Greece," makes a melan- choly lament over their extinction. And I confess that, dearly as I love Mrs. Browning, her poem in reply to Schiller appears to me in all respects the least felicitous of her works. Pan is not dead — save in this sense — that God manifest in Nature is now, since the revelation of our Blessed Lord Jesus Christ, felt to be less worshipful than God manifest in Divine Humanity. There would seem to be three elements, which, combined, create the world as we know it — the God in Man, the God in Nature, and the Defect in both. We and the world have a common reason, and a common heart, or we could not know the world. The richer and deeper our own life, the more can we enter into the life of the world ; and the more fully we enter into that, the more universal and profound becomes our own. Not only is our mental life developed through perception, but physiology shows the close correlation of our external and internal lives, so that without the nourishment and sustainment of our bodies by earth and sun, our soul-life in its present form would be impossible. Yet the Divine Reality is deeper than plummet of human understanding ever sounded : eye hath not seen, nor ear heard. The outer world is but symbol and parable, the imperfect self- manifestation to our defective apprehension of eternal Ideas, which are substantial. That is a truth familiar to mystics of all ages, which in recent times has been virtually re-stated by two notable teachers, one a man of science, James Hinton, the other a theologian, Cardinal Newman. ON THE POETIC INTERPRETATION OF NATURE. 9 The world, says Hinton, seems to us dead, only on account of our own deadness. And therefore, in proportion as we are made alive, will the life of the world become manifest to us. Therefore also I conceive Wordsworth's position in the immortal "Ode on Immortality" to be thoroughly justified. Fresh from the Fountain of his being, the Child- spirit sees most truly. The gleam of the sanctuary is upon him, and around "Meadow, grove, and stream, The earth, and every common sight. To him do seem. Apparelled in celestial light, The glory and the freshness of a dream." " Heaven lies about us in our infancy ! Shades of the prison-house begin to close Upon the growing Boy. The Youth, who daily farther from the east Must travel, still is Nature's priest, And by the vision splendid Is on his way attended ; At length the Man perceives it die away. And fade into the light of common day." But— " The clouds that gather round the setting sun Doth take a sober colouring from an eye That hath kept watch o'er man's mortality ; ***** Thanks to the human heart l)y which we live. Thanks to its tenderness, its joys, and fears, To me the meanest flower that blows can give Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears." The Child-spirit is alone immortal ; yet the Divine Child in his eternal youth looks often forth from the sadder and wiser eyes of man. The old mystics believed that when Adam and Eve sinned, the gods or angels they talked with became hidden from them, and appeared to them as trees and flowers, and common earth or sky, ■ — beautiful indeed, but hardly animate, and they quite unable to hold intelligent converse with them as before. 10 ESSAYS ON POETRY AND POETS, To Blake the sun was no mere ball of fiery vapours, but a glorious company of the Heavenly Host praising God. Yet to me it appears that James Hinton was wrong in his assumption that Man alone is fallen or defective, while Nature remains perfect. The impression one derives is rather that we have shared in her fall, or she in ours. Between us there can be no such chasm. Nay, she is " red in tooth and claw with ravine." A formidable indictment, indeed, has been drawn up against her in the outraged names of justice and of love ! She has her moods as we have — good and evil, grave and gay, desolate and happy, cruel and kind, terrible and gentle, while we respond to her varying humour according to our own. Hence it is that poets interpret her differently, according to their own characters. The grand and gloomy, the Titanic and diabolic, find their expression in Byron, but the tranquil and tender chiefly in Wordsworth. I really do not think there is much " pathetic fallacy " in the ascription by poets of their own moods to Nature. It is rather that in these dominant moods of theirs they are able to feel the corresponding note in Nature. There is indeed in her, as there is also in ourselves, a deep foundation of tranquillity and calm under all the roaring and unrest of her loud waves — a region of repose, an inner haven of peace ; and the pro- foundest poet abides, or is anchored there, however he may be tossed to and fro on the upper surge. And very often have her loud paeans of rejoicing been felt by the sorrowful to be out of harmony with their sorrow. Or again, the overflowing, multitudinous joy of her springs and summers may carry consolation and conviction that all is well, into the arid recesses of a mourner's heart. Or once again, the dreariness and desolation of her dark seas and shores, her mountains and barren plains, may unbearably overwhelm an already overburdened soul. I have admitted with Mr. Ruskin that there is a false and vicious metaphorical diction used by poetasters, in- ON THE POETIC INTERPRETATION OF NATURE. II sincerely, as a kind of " current coin ; " frigid conceits, cold artifices of mere talent, or mere jingling babble for effect, from which precisely Wordsworth came to deliver us. A true poet is ever a loving and faithful observer of the external features and deportment of his mistress. But just because his look is the long look of a lover — no passing glance — he sees more than that. Real feeling, I hold, must put us into some vital relation with the actuality of things, though the expression of it may be but a tentative striving to body forth the truth about them. Thus, when Kingslcy, in his beautiful ballad, " The Sands of Dee," calls the foam of the wave that drowned Mary " cruel," though, indeed, the foam itself may not be cruel, he gives utterance to a feeling that is inevitable, and therefore, in all proba- bility, justified ; for behind those engulfing seas there surely must be some pitiless and murderous power, some prince, or princes, of a world that " lieth in the wicked," however that power may be directed and overruled by a Paternal Master-Love. And when Keats, in describing the slow movement of spent shredding foam along the back of a heavy wave, characterizes it by the phrase " wayward in- dolence," he fixes and determines the idiosyncrasy of this movement in a manner simply impossible to a poet who should cither fail to perceive, or else resolve not to allow himself the language of analogy. There is some occult identity between spent foam and our " wayward in- dolence." The heart of Wordsworth beats in S}'mpathy with the sea's when he sings — " Listen ! the mighty being is awake, And doth with his eternal motion make A sound like thunder everlastingly." The great Apocalypse of Dante is one colossal translation of the inner truths of heart and soul into the corresponding imagery and environment of sense. When Milton calls the boat that wrecked Lycidas — 12 ESSAYS ON POETRY AND POETS. " That fatal and perfidious bark, Built in the eclipse and rigg'd with curses dark, That sunk so low that sacred head of thine." how unlitcral, inaccurate, and true to the inmost fact is he ! " Stone him with hardened hearts, harder than stones," sings Shakespeare in " Lucrece." Stones are hard because hearts are, not hearts hard because stones are, though that is not the common opinion. To arrive at the true spiritual order, you must reverse the order of experience. Metaphor is the interpretation of one thing through another. And one thing is through another. Seeing it as isolated, we see it, through our own defect, imperfectly. It ever fulfils itself by analogy, developed and discerned, as by passing on into some other phase or form of existence. Every- thing is a Proteus. But as Keats attributes the bright mail of fish to the kisses of lovers, Wordsworth assigns to Duty the guardianship of the Ancient Heavens, and the laughter of fragrant flowers. Nor is this graceful falsehood, but vital truth. We have in " The Thorn " — not, on the whole, a very in- spired poem — some minute, faithful description, character- istic of Wordsworth. His graphic delineations of landscape place a vivid imagery before the sense, which must ever be dear to true lovers of Nature, dearer than the often vaguer and more confused reminiscences, or too phantasmal, nebu- lous, and unarticulated, however gorgeous, inventions of Shelley. But still the imaginative touch in that poem goes deeper than all the realism — "And she is known to every s*ar, And every wind that blows." Yet if that is false, if it hints not, in the only or best way possible, at a vital reality, why should it give peculiar de- light ? Can what is known to be the most utterly fantastic and irrational element in the whole composition boast such a prerogative ? Surely not, though it be quite unnecessary to define this imaginative truth more precisely. Again, ON THE POETIC INTERPRETATION OF NATURE. 1 3 do we not thank our poet when he calls the Wye " thou wanderer through the woods," and tells us of the Than:ies " wandering at its own sweet will ? " Shelley is hardly so close an observer as Wordsworth ; or, when he is so, his observation is more limited in range. It is a dissolving view of cloud, and wood, and water, and flower. While Wordsworth spiritualizes the results of loving observation, Shelley rather etherealizes vague im- pressions, as of trance or dream. The former is like an inductive philosopher, setting in order — indeed, often trans- figuring into sacred glory — common experience ; the latter like a schoolman of the Middle Ages, expatiating in phe- nomena deduced a priori from his inner consciousness. While Shelley volatilizes sense, Wordsworth conducts us through its homely portal into a heavenlier and more abiding realm. Wordsworth and Byron, Anta^us-like, win new strength from contact with Mother Earth. I love Shelley too well to compare him with Icarus, or with Phaeton ; for, if he does not soar with us to the highest, he flies with us through a very lovely, however insubstantial, dreamland of his own fair vision.* How should the uncertain motion of mist about a mountain be defined better than by the lines of Words- worth ? — " Sucli gentle mists as glide, Curling -mth unconfirmed intent On that green mountain-side." Whatever corresponds to that " unconfirmed intent," the kinship there is in the mist to the more vital and essential characteristics of the human soul, this surely is as much there as mechanical laws of motion in space, which are themselves but systematized perceptions of our sensuous understanding, though doubtless corresponding to some * But I have just read Mr. Stopford Brooke's introduction to Shellej', which, so far as I know, is assuredly the most pregnant and illuminating criticism of him extant. The comparison of his nature-poetry with that of Wordsworth deserves careful study. 14 ESSAYS ON POETRY AND POETS. reality of sensuous perception outside ; but the very essence of those material qualities is that they are distantly akin, that they are mysteriously symbolical of more human, more intellectual, more ethical behaviour. For, as Schelling and Coleridge pointed out, a symbol is itself the superior being under inferior conditions : it is the higher essence, one may say, deprived of its ethereal vesture, and become incarnate, yet radiant still, and redolent of veiled Divinity. As regards the dramatic interpretation of Man and Nature through mutual influence upon one another, what would the Leechgatherer in Wordsworth's poem be without the " lonely moor .'' " They coalesce to one moving image. In the meditative imagination of the poet the poor con- tented old man becomes transfigured, and appears as a heavenly minister, an angel from God, sent to console him, upon whom weighed "the weary burden, and the mystery of all this unintelligible world." Often indeed does the meditative rapture of Shelley and Wordsworth pass into a kind of mystic disembodiment before the face of Nature ; they are caught up into some third heaven, where sense- limits are confounded, and our poor earth -language falters " with the burden of an honour unto which she was not born." What would the wonderful pathos of "Michael " be without the unfinished sheepfold, or the equally wonderful pathos of " Margaret" without the neglected garden, once so trim, the red stains and tufts of wool on the corner-stone of the cottage porch, where the sheep were now permitted to come and "couch unheeded .'* " In that loveliest of lyrics, "Three }-ears she grew," we have the picture of Lucy, to whom Nature was " law and impulse," "an overseeing power to kindle or restrain," to whom the cloud lent state, and the willow grace ; into whose face from the rivulets passed " beauty, born of murmuring sound," to whom belonged " the silence and the calm of mute insensate things." Remember too that beautiful passage in " The Excursion," M-here the old man corrects the ON THE POETIC INTERPRETATION OF NATURK. 15 wanderer's despondency by pointing him to the spear-grass on the wall, with the dew on it, as testifying to the clear- hearted peace that abides in the bosom of things. There is the magical poem about the boy, into whose heart a voice of mountain torrents was borne, in those intervals of blowing mimic hootings to the owls, under the starlight, by the lake ; there is the dancing of the poet's heart with the daffodils, and that picture in " Nutting," wherein "the green and mossy bower, deformed and sullied, patiently gave up its quiet being." The voices of sea, mountain torrent, and forest, are indeed the voice of Liberty, as Coleridge in the Ode, Wordsworth in the Sonnet, and Longfellow in the "Slave's Dream" declare. Every flower "enjoys the air it breathes ; " the budding twigs spread out their fan " to catch the breezy air," and can we doubt that there is pleasure .'' We ought indeed " to move among the shades with gentleness of heart, and with gentle hand touch, for there is a spirit in the woods." In all sobriety, it is true that what the poet saw in the Simplon Pass was " like the workings of one mind, features of one face, characters of the great Apocalypse ; " in all sobriety it is true that Nature "can so inform The mind that is within us, so impress With quietness and beauty, and so feed With lofty thoughts, that neither evil tongues, Rash judgments, nor the sneers of selfish men, Nor greetings where no kindness is, nor all The dreary intercourse of daily life, Shall e'er prevail against us, or disturb Our cheerful faith, that all which we behold Is full of blessings. " While with an eye made quiet by the power Of harmony, and the deep power of joy, We see into the life of things." Now if there be a great fundamental principle, the slow recognition of which by modern art we owe to Mr. Ruskin, it is this, that " nothing can be good or useful or ultimately 1 6 ESSAYS ON POETRY AND POETS. pleasurable which i.s untrue." (Modern Painters, vol. iii. p. 1 60.) Yet here, he proceeds, in metaphor and pathetic fallacy, " is something pleasurable in written poetry which is nevertheless untrue." For, according to him, these forms of thought result from the " extraordinary or false appear- ances of things to us, when we are under the influence of emotion or contemplative fancy — false appearances, as being entirely unconnected with any real power or character in the object, and only imputed to it by us" (p. 159). Mr. Ruskin further adds, that " the greatest poets do not often admit this kind of falseness — that it is only the second order of poets who much delight in it." Yet he admits that " if we think over our favourite poetry we shall find it full of this kind of fallacy, and that we like it all the more for being so." Now there is here a contradiction which is well worthy of attentive examination. This attribution by metaphor of spiritual qualities to material objects is eminently characteristic of modern poetry — notably of Tennyson's — and has been made a ground of serious objec- tion to it, as fatal to any claim it might put forward to be accounted first-rate, by more than one critic following in the wake of Mr. Ruskin. And so far as such criticism has been a protest against the undiscriminating admiration for mere pretty disconnected freaks of fancy, which at one time threatened to break up our poetry into so many foam- wreaths of loose luxuriant images, the effect of it has been beneficial. There is danger, on the other hand, that this criticism may beget a blind dogmatism, very injurious to the natural and healthy development of the poetic art which may be proper to our own present age. For the intellectual and aesthetic developments of each different race and age will have a characteristic individuality of their own. And criticism ought to point us to the great models of the past, not that we may become their cold and servile imitators, but that we may nourish on them our own creative genius. The classification of artists as first, second, ON THE POETIC INTERPRETATION OF NATURE. 1 7 and third rate, must always be somewhat arbitrary ; but the criticism which disposes of a quahty that is essential to such poetry as Tennyson's, by calling it a weakness and a " note " of inferiority, may itself be suspected of shallowness. Let us examine a little more closely that instance of mct.iphor which Mr. Ruskin takes from Keats : — "Down whose green back the .shortlived foam, all hoar, Bursts gradual with a 7iiay7varci indolence ," Now, salt water cannot be either wayward or indolent ; on this plain fact the charge of falsehood in the metaphor is grounded. Yet this expression is precisely the most ex- quisite bit in the picture. Can plain falsehood then be truly poetic and beautiful? Many people will reply, "certainly," believing that poetry is essentially pleasing by the number of pretty falsehoods told or suggested. I believe with Mr. Ruskin that poetry is only good in proportion to its truth. Now, we must first inquire what the poet is here intending to describe. If a scientific man were to explain to us the nature of foam by telling us that it is a wayward and indolent thing, this would clearly be a falsehood. But does the poet profess to explain what the man of science would profess to explain, or something else ? What are the physical laws according to which water becomes foam, and foam falls along the back of a wave — that is one question ; and what impression does this condition of things produce on a mind that observes closely, and feels with exquisite delicacy of sense the beauty in the movement of the foam, and its subtle relations to other material things, as well as to certain analogues in the sphere of spirit, to functions and states of the human spirit — this is a totally different question. I submit that the office of tJic poet in this connection is to answer the latter question, and that of the scientific man to answer the former. But observe that this is not granting licence of scientific ignorance or wanton inaccuracy to the poet which some critics are disposed to grant. For if the poet ignorantly or wantonly contradicts C 1 8 ESSAYS ON POETRY AND POETS. such results of scientific inquiry as are generally familiar to the cultivated minds of his age, he puts himself out of harmony with them, and does not announce truth, which can commend itself to them as such. But the poetic aspects of a circumstance do not disappear when the circumstance is regarded according to the fresh light scientific inquiry has thrown upon it. Such poetic aspects are increased as know- ledge increases. Keats, in this instance, contradicts no legitimate scientific conclusion. The poet who does so wantonly, shows little of the true poet's reverence for Nature. The poet undertakes to teach what the man of science does not undertake to teach : their provinces are different ; but if they contradict one another, they are so far bunglers in their respective trades. One source of error in this matter is, that in the popular use of the words, we " fancy " and " imagine " what is not the fact. I can here only afford room to refer the reader to Mr. Ruskin's own fine dissertations on the respective func- tions of true imagination and fancy — one of his definitions of imagination being that it is the faculty of " taking things by the heart," and as such, certainly not a faculty of seeing things falsely. The question is, does the metaphor of Keats express the poetic truth forcibly to kindred imagi- native minds, or does it not .' If, as is the case with so many fine-sounding metaphorical expressions, this expres- sion when examined should prove inaccurate, far-fetched, affected, disturbing, and degrading, not intensifying and ennobling to the harmonious presentment of that which the poet intended to represent, then is the metaphor false, and because false, therefore bad as art. Yet poetry is groundlessly accused of mixing and confusing incongruous metaphors, by men of cold prosaic temperament, when several vital characteristics of an object are hinted at by more than one metaphor, which is permissible even in the same sentence. But there is a vicious, because a cold and insincere mixing of metaphors. Wisdom is justified of ON THE POETIC INTERPRETATION OF NATURE. 1 9 her children. The inspired poets — men like Pindar, Shake- speare, ^schylus, and Shelley — constantly blend their metaphors in the legitimate fashion that justifies itself to kindred spirits by the result attained. But you might multiply vague epithets for ever, and not hit it off — not transfix the core of a thing's individuality — as you can do by a single happy metaphor. There are correspondences between spirit and matter, and it is in seizing these that we find each analogue in spirit and matter becoming suddenly luminous, intelligible, real. It would not, as is assumed, be more accurate to say, " the foam falls gradually." These terms arc too abstract : other things also fall gradu- ally ; and therefore they do not give the individuality of the phenomenon in question. There is, indeed, some error involved in the use of Keats' metaphor ; but this error is allowed for, and it is the most accurate expression possible of the fact ; for the error of poverty and vagueness which the more abstract epithets would involve is a far more radical error ; so that they are erroneously supposed to be more scientific and exact. The commonest terms in use for expressing mental and moral qualities are derived from conditions and qualities of matter — that is, are used meta- phorically ; and yet we do not call them " fallacies." We talk of an " upright man " in the moral sense as readily as we talk of an upright man in the bodily. Our most graphic and vigorous prose must share the fate of our best poetry if metaphor be simply falsehood. How are you to avoid speaking of a tortuous, crooked policy ? The splendid vigour of Mr. Ruskin's own prose-poetry is largely due to his felicitous use of metaphor. Mr. Ruskin, indeed, remarks justly that Homer "would never have written, never have thought of" such a meta- phor as this of Keats'. He will call the waves " over-roofed," " full-charged," " monstrous," " compact-black," " wine- coloured," and so on. These terms are as accurate, as incisive, as terms can be, but they never show the slightest 20 ESSAYS ON POETRY AND POETS. feeling of anything animated in the ocean. Now, this faculty of seeing and giving the external appearance of a thing precisely is eminently Homeric, and is one without which a man can hardly be a poet at all. The " ideal " on which poetasters pique themselves, means but a feeble, in- secure grasp of reality ; they do not know that to find the ideal they must first hold fast and see into the common external thing which they deem so despicable. But the fellowship of the external thing with certain spiritual things is an additional though latent quality in it, the perception of which may result from a keen gaze into that external appearance. Does Keats, then, see more than Homer ? Mr. Ruskin replies that Homer had a faith in the anima- tion of the sea much stronger than Keats'. But " all this sense of something living in it he separates in his mind into a great abstract image of a sea power. He never says the waves rage or are idle. But he says there is somewhat in, and greater than, the waves, which rages and is idle, and that he calls a god " (vol. iii. p. 174). We must remark upon this that the early poets of a people have seldom displayed so great a care for the beau- ties of external Nature in general as their later poets have done. Compare Homer and Theocritus, Chaucer and Tennyson. The earlier poetry will deal chiefly with the outward, active life of man— his wars, hunting, passion for women and other excitements, with all the intrigues and adventures to which this may give rise ; and the noblest songs have been sung about these simple universally interesting themes. But the criticism which insists on the poetry of a later age being squared on the model of that of an earlier may surely be reminded that the earlier poetry is so great and good precisely because it is sponta- neous, the perfect expression of the age in which it was produced. As men come to lead more artificial, quiet lives, they reflect more on themselves and on the nature around them, they stand in new relationships to external things, ON THE POETIC INTERPRETATION OF NATURE. 2 1 they acquire new habits of fcehng, acting, thinking, and external Nature becomes the mirror of their own more highly organized existence ; so that the earlier poet cannot see those subtle meanings in the face of Nature which the later poet sees. If the external features of Nature remain the same, the spirit of men in relation with them changes ever. Even the senses, or some of them, become more subtle, as Mr. Gladstone has shown in his essay on the colour-sense of Homer and the Greeks. But if we admitted, with Mr. Ruskin, that Homer was as sensitively alive to the delicate play of expression on the mobile countenance of Nature as Keats was, only that he ascribed it to some god, and that Keats did not, we should be constrained to ask, does Mr. Ruskin mean that Homer's was a more correct mode of embodying that animation than was the meta- phorical mode of Keats ? Are we to believe in the Pagan nature-divinities } I am not denying it. But if not, and if yet Mr. Ruskin admits the animation in question, it is hard to see why he praises Homer, and deems the metaphor of Keats a pleasant falsehood, a characteristic of the vicious modern manner. Surely we owe the restoration of our faith in the glorious animation of Nature very largely to Mr. Ruskin's own teaching, which makes his inconsistent doctrine on this subject of metaphor the more to be regretted. What renders the language of our poets often incorrect, confused, affected, is that while they cannot help feeling that there is a life and a spirit in Nature, they are instructed by our teachers of authority that this feeling is but a pretty super- stition, allowable, indeed, in poetry, yet not to be mistaken for a true belief. Poetry, therefore, becomes an " elegant pastime," by no means the expression of our deepest and most earnest insight. The result last century was that in our poetry " mountains nodded drowsy heads," and " flowers sweated beneath the night dew." For if images of this kind be delusions, with no basis in truth, the elegance of them resolves itself into a mere matter of taste. And 22 ESSAYS ON POETRY AND POETS. people at that time (drinking cockneys especially) thought those ideas very lovely and poetic indeed. Even now, many of our most intelligent minds believe that, as Clough sings, " Earth goes by chemic forces, Heaven's A mecanique celeste. And heart and mind of human kind A watch work as the rest." Others of us believe that there is a deity indeed, but one who, having made all this, only watches it go, and occasion- ally interferes with the order of it to prove to us that it did not make itself, and to remind us of his own existence. But of the God of St. Paul, " in whom we (and all other things) live, move, and have our being," we hear very little. If, however, it were permitted in so enlightened an age as the present to broach so old-world an idea, we might yet believe with Homer that there is a great Sea-power, a Divinity in the sea, as well as a deal of salt-water ; then we might still believe with the great modern poet, with whom it was no pretty lie, but a profound faith, that — " There is a spirit in the pathless woods, A presence tliat disturbs us with the joy Of elevated thoughts, a sense sublime Of something far more deeply interfused, Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns, And the round ocean, and the living air. And the blue sky, and in the mind of man, A motion and a spirit that impels All thinking things, all objects of all thought. And rolls through all things." I think it especially important to examine the position which Mr. Ruskin has taken up on this question in his third volume of" Modern Painters," because it tends to neutralize the noble teaching of the second, to which our art owes incalculable benefit. We have only to turn to the chapter on " Imagination Penetrative" (vol. ii. p. 163) to be assured of the inconsistency of his doctrine on this subject. As an ON THE I'OETIC 1NTER1'K1:TATI0N OE NATURI'.. 23 instance of what he means by Imagination Penetrative, he quotes from Milton — " Bring the rathe primrose that forsaken dies, With cowslips wan that hang the pensive head, And every flower tliat sad embroidery wears." How can a primrose be forsaken, or cowslips hang pensive heads ? According to the chapter on " Pathetic Fallacy," only a poet of the secondary order would indulge in such pretty fallacies, illusions ; though I must confess that these particular images hardly seem to me quite in harmony with spring, or with the gladsome cowslip. He goes on, how- ever, to quote Shakespeare's image of "pale primroses dying unmarried, before they can behold bright Phoebus in his strength ; " yet what is his comment here ? " Observe how the imagination goes into the very inmost soul of every flower," and " never stops on their spots or bodily shape," which last remark implies a half-censure of Milton for describing " the pansy freaked with jet," which being merely a touch of inferior fancy, mingles with, and mars the work of imagination. Again, " the imagination sees the heart and inner natui"e, and makes them felt, but is often obscure, mysterious, and interrupted in its giving of outer detail." Even in the case of elaborate imaginative structures, such as those of Dante and Milton, the poet's work, I would contend, is the product of sheer insight, whose keen, long, ardent gaze into the eyes of Nature, human and material, has drawn the very soul out of her. From that central point to which the seer has pierced, all parts are seen in their own relative proportion, harmony, hidden meaning, and purpose ; while the several parts that are chosen and united in his work form a perfect organic whole, because married, not according to the accidental juxtaposition in which the vulgar eye may chance to behold them at the surface, but according to the eternal affinities they have in nature for one another. The parts of such a work are not pieced arbitrarily together ; they have vital 24 ESSAYS ON POETRY AND I'ol IS. unison ; and they grow up into a grand symphony in the creative mind of the poet, which process is just a repro- duction in small of the vast organic evolution of the universe. Men see things in isolated, broken pieces ; but the poet, like the comparative anatomist, brings to- gether the fragments that indeed belong to one another, and so forms for us living models of the universal kosmos. In this manner, true artists have positively created new individualities — or at least gone to the verge of creating them. If the idea of an imaginary living creature were perfectly sufficient and self-consistent, it would actually live. Meanwhile, great imaginations ap- proach such a goal. There is the Dragon of Turner in the Jason of his Liber Studiorum ; the terrible Lombard Griffin, so intensely pourtrayed by Ruskin ; the Satan of Milton ; the Caliban of Shakespeare ; the Mephistopheles of Goethe ; the Quasimodo of Hugo. These may have actually breathed, or may actually breathe some day, they seem so real, so possible. This doctrine that all true poetry tells the most fundamental truth about things, instead of being merely a play of pretty or pathetic fallacies, an elegant relaxation for after dinner, as modern critics seem to conceive, I venture to propound as having the sanction of no mean critic — Aristotle. For Aristotle, while defining poetry " viewed generally " as /iifxi'img, yet explains that he does not mean such imitation as modern photography might make. " Poetry," he explains, " represents actions less ordinary and interchanged, and endows them with more rareness," than is found in Nature. The poet's business is " not to tell events as they have actually happened, but as they might possibly happen." " Poetry is more sublime and more philosophical than history." I contend, then, for Aristotle's definition of poetry as fiifxiiaig, the imitative or, as one might prefer to paraphrase it, the reproductive art, as on the whole best and most helpful. And I have merely wished here in passing to strengthen my argu- ON THE POETIC INTERPRETATION OF NATURE. 25 mcnt by showing that the principles I apply to defend the use of metaphor arc of universal application in all depart- ments of poetry. Thus I might proceed to point out that there is more essential truth in the few lines embodying Spenser's symbolic impersonations of the vices (envy, gluttony, jealousy, etc.), than could be expressed in as many pages of abstract dissertation. It is unfortunate that Wordsworth, in the course of those few discussions of his on the principles of Poetry, which are worth their weight in gold (considering how little scientific standard criticism our language can boast, in comparison with the portentous amount of smart, conceited, futile Babel-utterances, with which the weekly and daily press teems to our bewilderment and confusion) — it is unfortunate that Wordsworth himself should have used some unguarded language, relative to the question we are here discussing. He says that imagination "confers additional properties on an object, or abstracts from it some of those which it actually possesses." (Preface to Edition of 181 5, of Poetical Works.) He gives several instances of this, w^hich it may be well for us to examine. First, from Milton — " As when far off at sea a fleet descried Hangs in the clouds." No fleet hangs in the clouds. But the poet, professing to describe the appearance of a fleet far out at sea, describes it exactly by these terms, and adds nothing to the picture that does not belong to the actual appearance. Words- worth next quotes from his own perfect descriptive poetry, *' Over his own sweet voice the stock-dove broods." The word "broods," Wordsworth himself remarks, conveys the manner in which the bird reiterates and prolongs the soft note, as if participating in a still and quiet satisfaction, like that which may be supposed inseparable from the con- tinuous process of incubation. Now it is probably true, scientifically as well as poetically, that the bird delights in, 26 ESSAYS ON POETRY AND POETS. and broods over its own note, while his mate is sitting near upon their eggs. Again — " O cuckoo, shall I call thee bird, Or but a wandering voice ?" If the poet, looking up at the grey cuckoo in the tree, were to address it as a voice rather than a bird, the thought would not be pleasing, but absurd, because untrue and affected. But we may conceive him wandering medita- tively about Rydal, as was his wont, lying upon the fresh green grass, and listening to that beloved voice of the spring, with all its old, sweet, sad associations. Has not that cuckoo-voice become part of ourselves, a link of our hearts to some long and lovely past ? Has not that quiet, happy voice, falling into the hearts of lovers, beating very close to one another, thrilled them into yet dearer union ? And when such lovers have been parted, has not this gentle voice united them in spirit again as they listened ? Is not the cuckoo voice indeed all this, the very spirit of our English spring, the voice of our childhood, as of the well-beloved sister, or child, or mother, who used to hear it with us, and is no more — all this quite as much, nay, how very much more, than the love-call of one individual cuckoo ? The poet has told us one truth, and the naturalist may tell us another. The one "lies" and "alters Nature" quite as little as the other. Wordsworth's genius steals like moonlight, silent and unaware, into many a hidden nook that seemed barren and formless before, but now teems with shy and rare loveliness, as of herb and flower ; yet the moonlight only reveals what is already there. Creative, indeed, are these isolated images and metaphors, having a vital truth and coherence of their own, quite as real as that of the vaster completed works of mighty art ; and while in the highest work these inferior features will have their meaning in strict sub- ordination to the whole, yet criticism is wrong to ignore and decry beauty of detail, which, if genuine, is itself the offspring of the same quickening, creative spark, fusing ON THE POETIC INTERPRETATION OF NATURE. 2/ diverse elements into one. Though Keats was no weakling of the Kirke White stamp, to be " snuffed out by an article," one pain more might have been spared him on his con- sumptive deathbed, could his critic have been less malig- nant, and intelligent enough to comprehend that if unity of plan were all in all, and the character of the details of no importance, then a symmetrical periwig, or a sensation story, or a smart review, would be nobler than " Endy- mion," — which is absurd. Again, take more particularly that instance from Kingslcy of what Mr. Ruskin calls " pathetic fallacy." Of Mary, who was drowned in calling the cattle home across the sands of Dee, he sings — " They rowed her in across the rolling foam, The cruel crawling foam." Now, how can foam be cruel ? Mr. Ruskin admits there is a dramatic propriety in the expression ; I mean, that the feeling with which a spectator would regard the foam in these circumstances is correctly expressed ; but he contends that the reason in this condition is unhinged by grief: foam is not cruel, whether we fancy it so or not. He admits that a person feeling it so will probably be higher in nature than one who should feel nothing of the kind, but contends that there is a third order of natures, higher than either — natures which control such fallacious feelings by the force of their intellects. Such men know and feel too much of the past and future, and all things beside and around that which immediately affects them, to be shaken by it. Thus the high creative poet might be thought impassive (shallow people think Dante stern) because he has a great centre of reflection and knowledge in which he stands serene, and watches the feeling, as it were, from far off. I must admit that there is much truth in this fine criticism ; but must remark that it is one thing to be washed awav from our anchorage of reason — which, how- 28 ESSAYS ON POETRY AND POETS. ever, as Mr. Ruskin admits, there are circumstances wherein we should not think it a proof of men's nobleness not to be — and another to be tossed up and down on the strong billows of feeling, holding yet fast to the anchor of reason, I mean that the influence of feeling on our intellects need not necessarily be a distorting influence ; feeling may teach us what we could not learn without it. Love, e.g.^ may often blind us to the defects of a beloved person, and so far confuse our judgment ; yet since love puts us en rapport, in sympathy with that person, it imparts insight, giving wider and more essential data for the exercise of the understanding. The man to whom a primrose is " a yellow primrose and nothing more," by no means knows it correctly, because he does not feel any love for it or interest in it. He knows nothing at all about it except the name. A "dispassionate" judgment means too often a blind, undiscriminating judgment formed by men who want those fine inner organs of sensibility, without which the data for a true judgment are necessarily wanting ; and the stupid judgment of a cynic is infinitely more mis- chievous than that of a warm partizan, because it has the credit of exceptional " impartiality," and freedom from " prejudice." Let us examine this special instance of pathetic fallacy from Kingsley. What and whence is this impression of cruelty in the foam .'' Is it not the appropriate expression of a sense that comes over us in such-like terrible circumstances that there is on the outside of our weak wills and impotent understandings some mysterious Destiny manifesting itself, especially in that fixed and iron-bound order of Nature so implacable toward men if, in often innocent ignorance, they happen to be caught into the blind whirl of its relentless machinery } For then it whirls on and crushes, not the living flesh and blood only itself has wrought so cunningly, but too often, alas ! as it seems, very human reason — the tenderest and holiest of human sensibilities. In the coolest ON THE POETIC INTERPRETyVTION OE NATURE. 29 blood regarding such a spectacle, I ask how shall vvc express the fact of it ? The ancients had their cruel gods and their blind fate. Our faith, on the other hand, if faith we have at all, is in a Supreme Being, whose nature we can best conceive by naming Him Love. And yet he who does not feel the weary burden and the mystery of all this unin- telligible world — he who does not confess what a feeble glimmer is all our boasted light — that he is an infant crying in the dark, and with no language but a cry — he has not had the data upon which to form a real philosophy. What, then, is it worth ? As men, as wise men, we must feel these terrible realities in the core of our beings. If we still retain our faith, after this, well and good. But how shall we express the bewildered anguish of the spirit in such seasons of calamity .■' To me it seems as inevitable, and therefore as proper as it is natural, that we should upbraid the instrument — the second cause — the cruel, crawling sea- foam, that swallowed up the innocent we loved. Let the philosopher at least furnish us with correcter formulai for the expression of the feeling due from us as human beings on such an occasion as this. Behind those engulfing seas is there not, indeed, some pitiless, murderous power, some prince, or princes of a world that lieth in the wicked, however that power may be overruled by a supreme Maternal Love ? Mr. Ruskin again quotes a very affecting ballad from Casimir de la Vigne, as an instance of what he thinks the highest manner, where the poet refuses to let himself be carried away by the horror of the incident he relates, and simply pictures the dreadful, naked, physical fact of it without any comment, impressing us far more than if he had indulged in any pathetic fancies of his own about it. There is to be a ball at the French ambassador's, and a fair young girl is dressing for it. All the little nothings she babbles to her maid while beautifying herself — she is to meet her lover — are told just as she would say them, 30 ESSAYS ON rOETRV AND POETS. when a spark catches her dress, and she is burnt to death. What is the result ? The poet only tell us — " On disait, pauvre Constance ! Et on dansait jusqu'au jour Chez I'ambassadeur de France." Now I do not believe with Mr. Ruskin that dark fallacious thoughts occurred to the poet here, and that he resolutely put them by because he philosophically held them to be false. I do not believe that the highest poet is " unpartici- pating in the passions " he depicts, as Coleridge affirms of Shakespeare ; he is by turns in the situations of the cha- racters he represents ; and here the emotion is so genuine, that the poet's philosophy would have been torn to tatters by it, for indeed such a philosophy would only have waited the rending of reality. But in cases of sudden, intense emotion, metaphor, which implies some degree of reflection on the circumstance, is for the most part out of place. Thought is overwhelmed by feeling — the bare, fearful fact, that alone we see and know, we can but relate that. We are dazed, crushed, annihilated by the shock of a great fall, of a great woe. But Time, the healer, comes, and though we may not thank him, now the anguish tinges every experience, every move- ment, later it seems a pregnant necessity, and yet some relief, to remember, to reflect, to utter forth our sorrow. The poet here feels and relates just as a witness fresh from the incident would do. This bare relation is the most appro- priate to the incident related. But when meditation upon an afflicting circumstance is possible and natural, then metaphor and brief comment may be most appropriate to the fullest impression derivable from the circumstance. Wordsworth, therefore, comments a good deal on what he relates (sometimes unduly, but usually with efi'ect), because he docs not love violent passion, rapid action, stirring, over- whelming situations. And yet it is true that the most exalted and maddened feeling does sometimes burst forth ON THE POETIC INTERPRETATION OF NATURE. 3 1 into wild and tremendous hyperbole — which justifies Shake- speare, but I think only in a measure ; surely this is apt to be overdone, and exaggerated by the Elizabethans, as even by our greatest poet. Partly, however, the dramatic poet gives his own interpretation in words of what the person may only vaguely feel — but is it an appropriate one .-* — that is the question. One more striking instance where what seems to be merely fallacy may be argued to be philosophically true — though to the poet himself the revelation was made rather through feeling and imagination than through reasoning — we may take from Keats. Instead of treating our true poets as amusing liars, I would often rather go to them for solid intellectual food than to the professed dealers in that article. In the " Endymion," Keats says — " For I have ever thought that (love) might bless The world with benefits unknowingly." And again — " Who of men can tell That flowers would bloom, or that green fruit would swell To melting pulp, that fish would have bright mail, The earth its dower of river, wood, and vale, The meadows runnels, runnels pebble-stones, The seed its harvest, or the lute its tones. Tones ravishment, or ravishment its sweet, If human souls did never kiss and greet ? " Now I will only briefly indicate the principle that it is our human love, our power of loving, that gives these beautiful things a being as we know them ; for their being, though partly external to us, is also partly engendered by contact with human minds and hearts. Are not the forces which seem to constitute material things, with all their strength, healthfulness, and beauty, forces cognate to Love, which is the affinity and attraction of diverse spirits for one another ? Physical attraction, which implies also dif- ference and repulsion, is love in its lowest stage of develop- ment. And what is the order, the law, according to which 32 ESSAYS ON POETRY AND POETS. the highest human love is developed? We pass upward from cohesion to chemical affinities, but it is in the first faint fringes of the organic world that love dawns in her own proper form. There are sexes in plants, and often the pistil of one flower needs to be fertilized by the pollen from another before it can become productive ; in animals, the lower love is literally present, till in man it becomes transfigured into its own proper spiritual and heavenly being ; and without this for an end and aim, where would cohesion and all the lower forces be ? The poet says this in a different way. Looking at things as they are in life, in the concrete, his quick .sympathetic insight has discerned this essential truth. Philosophical analysis may reach it in another manner. When, therefore, we attribute to Nature a sympathy with our moods, whether of joy or sorrow, we are not under an amiable delusion ; the intuition is true, although the shape it assumes may not always be scienti- fically correct. Nature, like man, has her bright, rich, joyous, and her desolate, decaying phases ; in joy we feel the former most, in sorrow we feel and discern more espe- cially the latter. We may indulge these feelings to a morbid degree, and see things too brightly or too gloomily ; but the sense of a sympathy in Nature has its basis in fact. In concluding, I must touch for a moment on Mr. Ruskin's assertion that metaphor and pathetic fallacy arc characteristic rather of the secondary than of the primary order of poets — an assertion which I do not think the facts of the case will bear out. I have already given a reason for the rarity of such forms of thought in very early poetry ; but for their rarity in classical poetry another reason may be given. In Oriental poetry they are v^ery usual, because such modes of conceiving are much more appro- priate to the Oriental genius. Look at the profound and mystic symbolism of Egyptian, Persian, Phoenician, or In- dian mythology ; to those races the material ever appeared as a film floating upon the deeps of spirit — a film not merely ON THE POETIC INTERPRETATION OF NATURE. 33 transparent, but itself very spirit, only cooled as it were, solidified, and become gross. The bold hyperbole of Hebrew, Arabic, Persian love and war poetry is essential to the i^enius of the Oriental nature. But in the classical temper there is little sense of the infinite, vague, mysterious : the diftcrent subject-matters on which intelligence can be exercised are viewed apart, not in their occult relationships : all delight is in the sunny actual life, in that which is pleasant, symmetrical, clear, definite. What palpable, com- plete, satisfying symmetry ! what bright beauty of material and structure in those consummate temples, fragments though they be, on and about the Acropolis at Athens ! How full is the sunlight blaze] upon their golden peristyles, under the blue sky, overlooking the blue sea ! how black and sharp-cut the shadows beside them ! There is sorrow or fate with the Greeks, as with others ; but it stands by itself, quite apart from joy. In a Gothic cathedral all is dusk, sublime, mysterious, teeming with vague symbol — at once secretion and food of the imagination. Light and shadow are married and mingled ; the light is dim and religious ; derives a spiritual glory from its very fellowship with darkness ; counterfeits a gloom ; while the dark be- comes half luminous and opalescent from its fellowship with light. "Our sweetest songs," the modern poet sings, "are those that tell of saddest thought," And yet, with respect to Homer, does not even Homer take the heart- broken old man, when he leaves the tent of Agamemnon empty-handed, back by the shore of the iroXv(p\oi(TJioio OaXaamig? Has this magnificent epithet for the sea no reference to the lonely, stormful, sorrowful spirit of the old man as he walked by the long, lone surges of it ? This surely is not a purely physically-descriptive epithet, like oh'OTra Trovrov. But go on to v^Ischylus, and what will Mr. Ruskin say to his av^ipiOfiov ytXacriua, the innumerable smile or laughter of the sea ? In Theocritus, again, assuredl}' metaphor and pathetic fallacy may be found (notabl)- in D 34 ESSAYS 0\ I'OETKV AND POETS. the first idyl). The pathetic fallacy in Shakespeare's ex- quisite poem, "Venus and Adonis," "No grass, herb, leaf, or weed but stole his blood and seemed with him to bleed ; this solemn sympathy poor Venus noteth," etc., is adapted directly from the Sicilian poet Bion's " Lament for Adonis." Again, that beautiful lament of Moschus — the " Epitaph of Bion " — (third idyl) abounds in similar pathetic fallacy. Are not Virgil and Catullus (no mean poets, surely) rich in graphic and appropriate poetic metaphors? Mr. Tenny- son's "dividing the swift mind in act to throw," in " Morte d'Arthur," is of course from Virgil. Let us pass to Chris- tian poetry. I have shown that we shall be more likely to find these types of idea in modern than in classical poetry, and that by no means because modern taste is more vicious, but because the very conditions of life and thought are changed. In the early mediaeval poets, indeed, we have more allegory, and elaborate symbolism than metaphor and pathetic fallacy. But science, and popular theology alike setting themselves in opposition to poetic insight and aspiration, our poets, striving to link the two spheres of the universe together, do it in a confused, halting manner, like children stealing a forbidden pleasure, when the eye of the governing intellect is for a moment turned away. Yet the stupendous poem of Dante forms, we may say, one grand sustained metaphor. And realistic Chaucer too, has he not written " The House of Fame," " The Flower and the Leaf," " The Romaunt of the Rose ? " But Pe- trarch, and Lorenzo de Medici are full of metaphor and - pathetic fallacy proper, as, had I space, I might prove. Coming on to Shakespeare, in him these tendencies of thought and feeling already assume their modern expres- sion. Confining myself to his sonnets and poems, I open them almost at random ; and in " The Rape of Lu- crecc " I find " a voice dammed up with woe ; " " sorrow ebbs, being blown with wind of words." In the description of the hare-hunt in " Venus and Adonis," — as incisive, as ON THE rOETIC INTEUrRETATION OF NATURE. 35 clear-cut in its workmanship as any gem intaglio, — the phrase occurs, " Each envious briar." In the sonnets we have " The earth doth weep the sun being set." Endless instances might be quoted from Ben Jonson, Eletcher, Drayton, Drummond, and the lesser Elizabethans. But in some of these, legitimate outgrowth of metaphor degene- rates into parasitic conceit, as it did too often in our own so-called "spasmodic" poets; and yet in neither case did our literature touch the base and frigid affectations of such writers as are lashed in the " Dunciad " of Pope. It seems, however, as if our criticism had of late too much con- founded legitimate and genuine metaphor, illustrative of the poet's main design, with mere arbitrary quirks of a nimble, ingenious fancy. But we have only to compare two poems, alike sensuous and rich in imagery, to feel the difference — the "Venus and Adonis" of Shakespeare, and the "Hero and Lcander" of Marlowe, beautiful as Mar- lowe's portion of that may be. CHATTERTON. It is to be hoped that, since the publication of the Rev. Walter Skeat's edition, people may now read Chatterton ; for he has long been to the majority a mere name. The Rowley poems ought to be read, and they are now very easy reading. Mr. Skeat has preserved their peculiar flavour by retaining enough of their antique phraseology, but where rhythm and rhyme arc not involved he has often modern- ized it, while the Rowleian words are translated at the bottom of the page. I advisedly adopt Mr. Skeat's phrase, " Rowleian," because he has made it, in his preliminary essay, if possible more certain than before that the poems are not written in fifteenth-century English ; that they are not by the pseudo-monk Rowley, but by " the marvellous boy" himself. Mr. Skeat makes one very important re- mark. It is a most significant fact that Chatterton 's words in the foot-notes frequently suit the scansion of the line better than his words in the Rowley text, and this made the re-writing of the poems more easy. But why is the fact so? Because they were first written in modern English. That a boy of fifteen or sixteen should have produced such poems is certainly startling, but that any one should have produced the works of Shakespeare is also start- ling. This is a question of what genius can or cannot do ; but that these poems should have been written in the fifteenth century involves many more inconceivable diffi- culties, of a different kind altogether. In fact, the only CHATTERTON. 37 plausible ari^umcnt on this side was the alleged inferiority of Chatterton's acknowledged poems. But this — partly from a certain glamour cast over the Rowley series by their supposed origin and archaic form, and partly from a spirit of partisanship introduced into the controversy — has been very greatly exaggerated. They are not so good as the others, taken as a whole ; but if they had stood alone, they would have proved the child who wrote them — who poured them forth in profusion, partly under the pres- sure of want — to be a unique literary phenomenon. We have lines like these, — on a good organist : — " He keeps the passions with the sound in jilay, And the soul trembles with the tremljling key." Again : — " Conscience, the soul-chameleon's varying hue, Rellects all notions, to no notion true." But what strikes one most of all through these acknow- ledged poems is the boy's almost ghastly precocity, though there is also doubtless a good deal of swagger and hobbede- hoyish assumption of worldly wisdom and immoral know- ledge. Professor Masson, in his brief but beautiful memoir (which we always associate with that other little gem of poetical biography. Lord Houghton's " Life of Keats "), well describes the impetuous young fellow, who had just come off the Bristol coach, leaving his luggage at Mrs. Ballance's in Shoreditch (where he first lodged), and setting off instantly, though it was between five and six on a cold, dusk April evening, to call on no less than four publishers, who lived a long way off and in different directions ; seeing them all, moreover, and " going through each interview without any unnecessary degree of bashfulness." The " Revenge," his little burletta which was written for Mary- lebone Gardens, and probably performed there after his death, is perfectly charming for gaiety and sprightliness ; and the satirical humour of two pieces where he ridicules the affected dilettante of Strawberry Hill is of the highest 38 ESSAYS ON POETRY AND I'OETS. promise (" The Woman of Spirit " and " Memoirs of a Sad Dog"). It has been well observed that Chatterton lived two distinct lives, and produced literary work accordingly. He had two distinct moods : in the graver, more imaginative mood most of the Rowley series, prose and verse, are written ; nevertheless, there arc humour and sprightliness in them too, which have not been sufficiently remarked. How excellent the humour of " The De Bergham Pedigree," with which he hoaxed Bergum, the pewterer, whose arms were supposed to include " two cat-a-mountains ermine," etc. ! Yet the pewterer, like Oliver Twist, positively "asked for more," and straightway Chatterton brought it. But what I wish to make clear is that in the finer serious pas- sages of the modern series, the same manner is distinctly discernible as in corresponding passages of the ancient ; there is notably the strong Spenserian tendency \.o personi- fication. Thus we have — " Self-frighted Fear creeps silent through the gloom, Starts at the rustling leaf and rolls his eyes ; " " Pale rugged Winter, bending o'er his tread. His grizzled hair bedropt with icy dew, His eyes a dusky light congealed and dead, His robe a tinge of bright ethereal blue, — ** His train a motleyed, sanguine, sable cloud. He limps along the russet dreary moor, \Vhilst rising whirlwinds, blasting keen, and loud Roll the white surges to the sounding shore." How do the s's hiss in the last couplet, as the sense de- mands ! How large and open the vowel-sounds ! The elegy on the death of his great friend, Phillips, is full of these personifications. Very beautiful are the follow- ing lines ! — " The darksome ruins of some sacred cell, Where erst the sons of Superstition trod, Tottering upon the mossy meadow, tell We better know, but less adore our God. and- CIIATTKRTON. 39 " Now as T mournful tread the gloomy nave, Through the wide window, once with mysteries dight, The distant forest, and the darkened wave Of the swohi Avon ravishes my sight." Again, the noble " Elegy at Stanton Drew," in which there is a stately majesty of thought, imagery, and language, if it had been translated into the Rowley dialect, would have been hailed as among the best of that series, and seems even now to be out of place among the juvenile, alloyed, and insincere verses which (finding they paid better) the boy wrote, chiefly at the later period, when he had lost his faith in God and man, and had felt more of the muddy passions, venal aspirations, and dreary disappointments of life. Alas ! how young was he for such experience ; but, notev/orthy fact, in this elegy he touches upon that ancient world which he loved. He is in a ruin, and he beholds the Druid beside the altar. The " African Eclogues " also con- tain beautiful poetry. As to the Rowley series, I do not hesitate to say that they contain some of the finest poetry in our language, though they arc unequal, just as the modern poems are. They are jewels set in the prose-romance of ancient Bristol as imagined by Chatterton ; though Canynge, the old mayor, who is the central figure, was an actual person of importance. Let us for a moment glance at the earlier history of the boy-poet who conceived all this. For, splendid as his poetry often is, there is no doubt that it derives much of its interest for us from our knowledge of the marvellous child who wrote it. There is a per- sonal fascination [^about this prodigy of genius, and his strange, grim, half-humorous, half-awful history. Even some full-grown writers will always be associated with their writings in our imagination ; their magic influence seems to flash as much out of their lives as out of their works ; such a one was Dante; such another Johnson; such another Byron ; but of the child Chatterton it is, of course, more 40 ESSAYS ON POETRY AND POETS. eminently true. Until he was six years old he was sup- posed to be deficient in intellect, for he would sit alone for "hours, crying and moody. The utter inability of those at home, and even of his acquaintances at Bristol, to appreciate him, deepened his natural reserve, as Professor Wilson observes, into habitual secretiveness ; and that love of mystery and mystifying which he displayed is to some degree thus accounted for. As to his literary patrons at Bristol, the Catcotts and Barretts, etc., they were such a curious compound of literary or bibliomaniacal taste, consummate vanity, and portentous duncehood, that one can feel, if one gets to know the boy at all, what a rare, grim, lonely bit of fun it must have been to mystify them. Suddenly, however, the illuminated capitals of an old musical folio of his father's, which his mother was tearing up, attracted the child, and he straightway fell in love with them ; henceforth he began to learn, and she taught him to read out of an old black- letter Bible, "so that he only turned in later years from mediaeval illumination and antique typography, to the unfamiliar aspect of contemporary literature." The corner rounded, he devoured knowledge with insatiable voracity, studying all day and all night up till quite early in the morning, as his bedfellow in Shoreditch told Croft. Then he shut himself up in an attic with a great piece of ochre, pounce-bags full of charcoal-dust, and parchments (which he mostly used for copying old heraldic devices, and other architectural antique drawings). He was the descendant of a long line of sextons, who had in former times paced along the old aisles of St. Mary Redcliffe, jangling its ponderous keys, and talking with stony effigies of knights and saints buried below ; his father was a wild, clever, drunken sub-chaunter, who died before Thomas was born. The child, therefore, living close to the church as he did (both at his mother's, and Colston's School — the Bristol Bluecoat School, to which he went at seven years old), would have constant access to it ; and as a CHATTERTON. 4 I matter of fact, it was the master-spell that dominated his passionate imagination ; it was the nucleus of the whole Rowley romance. There was one spot in Redcliffe meadows, in full view of the church, where a companion tells us he delighted to lie ; and after fixing his eyes on the church in a kind of trance, he would at last break out with " that steeple was struck by lightning ; that was the place where they formerly acted plays." The poems arc full of allusions to the church : — " Thou seest this maestrie of a human hand, The pride of Bristovve and the Western land." And to any one who has seen the church, its weird effect upon this wonderful child who loved to haunt it will not appear surprising. It is one of the most glorious old churches in Europe ; the airy, solemn harmony of its nave, aisles, pierced arches, groined roof, stained windows, and monumental effigies of old worthies lying upon their tombs is certainly unsurpassed. It is specially interesting now, since unhappy genius has breathed life into these stone figures and bidden them arise. Chatterton, in one of his poems, says, if you prayed long enough, surely a crusader or other worthy in the attitude of prayer would move, and repeat the Ave Mary. I knew a child to whom an imaginary history of his own creation was for many years quite as real as the actual events of his life. So it was with Chatterton. Only with him these conceptions formed a whole of transcendent poetic beauty. To ac- knowledge to himself and others that the monk Rowley did not write the poems would have broken the spell that entranced him in his magical, beautiful world. As to the manufacture of parchments, he never produced more than one or two, when very much pressed by the dunderheads, who would not believe him, even when he confessed to writing some of the poems. Over the north porch of St. Mary's there is a room called the muniment-room, in which the celebrated old chests, full of parchments and deeds 42 ESSAYS ON POETRY AND POETS. relating to the church, were placed ; they had been ran- sacked, and all that was valuable removed before the poet's birth, his father having appropriated much of what remained as mere waste -paper. Some of the mouldering chests are still there ; and the spot appears to the present writer a sacred one, well worthy of a pilgrimage. Through the mullions you see the old tower, with its beautiful tracery ; birds cawing about it ; the sunshine streaming out of the blue sky, over antique chests, and dim, dusty floor ; if you pause, reverent and silent, the boy Chatterton himself seems to muse once more there beside you. Chatterton's mother's house was full of the old parch- ments, and certainly some of these may have been actually engrossed by old dead lawyers who lived in the time of the Wars of the Roses. That Chatterton even got some of his names out of them seems to me probable, perhaps the very name of Rowley ; did he get any information, any history? Possibly. It was in this media;val world of his imagination, at any rate, that he breathed most freely — all that was noblest, most reverent, most tender, and most beauty-loving in his soul assumed as by instinct the garb of a long-past age ; like this dim and venerable church, it was aloof from the vulgarity, meanness, trivialit}', and grossness of his contemporary life. Johnson stood in that muniment- room, a little while after the suicide, with Bozzy, and with that pewterer, who sold the Rowley poems which he had got from Chatterton, partly by free gift, partly by paltry doles of pocket-money, for ^50 ; the man who, though the poet's mother was in great indigence, put her off with the sum of five guineas. The account of the coroner's inquest furnished by Mr. Gutch seems of doubtful authenticity, though Masson accepts it ; but it is a curiously poetical invention, if it be not the truth. When he came into Mrs. Angell's, in Brooke Street, on the last evening of his weary wanderings in London, after buying the arsenic from Cross and walking about all day with his hands in his pocket, no one knows CIIATTERTON. 43 where, he would not cat, but sat moping by the fire wilh his chin on liis knees, muttering rhymes in some old un- known language. He then kissed Mrs. Angell — he had never done so before — and went upstairs to his garret, stamping on every stair as he went slowly up, as though he would break it, locking the door of his room behind him. If this account be true, the proof that his reason had failed seems complete ; but even then, here he was turning back at the last moment to the old home of his imagination, to a bygone England peopled with figures of noble stature, and St. Mary Rcdcliffc in the midst. At any rate, it is note- worthy that here in Brooke Street about a month before his death, he wrote one of the finest of the Rowley poems, "The Ballad of Charity."* It is overshadowed with his own deepening doom ; but it is in his highest region of pure, tender, stately solemnity, abounding with the most graphic touches of natural description he ever penned. It seems to me perhaps his most Jiniforuily excellent poetical work, and speaks volumes for the stupendous height to which his genius might have attained, seeing that it showed no signs of declining, but rather maturing mastery, even at the last, notwithstanding all the disadvantages, moral, intellectual, and physical, which threatened and assailed it. But the editor of the magazine to whom he sent this Rowley poem would not take it ; slipshod scurrilities or ephemeral stories were more to the taste of himself and his readers. A notice appeared in the magazine after Chatterton had gi\en up the battle of life in disgust, addressed to him (its anonymous contributor) to the effect that the poem " might have been improved." And to think of the vapid, stilted stuff that was thought fine poetry then ! * This essay was written in 1872. But only the other day I read Mr. Theodore Watts's subtle and suggestive preface to Chatterton in Ward's "British Poets," and must advert, with entire agreement, to his contention that Chatterton may be named father of the romantic movement in England, both in point of matter and manner. He points out the remarkable com- binations of iambic and anapKst in the " Ballad of Charity," a metre adopted subsequently by Coleridge in " Christabel," and stolen from him by Scott. 44 ESSAYS ON POETRY AND I'OETS. In looking back along the line of our very foremost poets after Milton, we see Pope arise, and after Pope who but the boy Chatterton deserves the laurel-wreath of highest poet, until Burns has risen above the horizon ? But after him we have a galaxy of no less than seven between whom the kingdom has to be divided — Shelley, Byron, Coleridge, Wordsworth, Keats, Scott, Landor — even if we put Crabbc, Campbell, Moore, and Hood into the secondary rank.* In fact, Goldsmith, Collins, Thomson, Gray, and Cowper were the only considerable contemporary poets ; and Chatterton at sixteen was more than their equal, promising very un- mistakably to rise much higher still. "/Ella" is a drama worthy of the Elizabethans ; there is, of course, no intricate knowledge of human nature, such as only a longer ex- perience could have given ; nevertheless, there is a great dramatic faculty unmistakably announced; the plot is good, the movement is unembarrassed, and carries you along. The character of Bertha is slightl}-, but tenderly and dis- tinctly drawn ; those of /Ella and Celmonde are vigorously conceived and discriminated, while the working out is specifically /<7^/zV. The often-quoted song, " Oh ! sing unto my roundelay," though very touching, is too obviously borrowed from Ophelia's lovely ditty; but there are two other airy, sprightly songs sung by " the minstrels." A girl says to her lover — " Once I heard my grandame say Youthful damsels should not be In the pleasant month of May Withyoung men by the greenwood tree." " Goddwyn," which is a mere fragment, is a splendid torso, for it contains " The Ode to Freedom." But fancy a sonorous Pindaric ode in the reign of Henry VI. ! Else- where Rowley writes in blank verse, anticipating Lord Surrey. There is a passage in Byron's " Childe Harold " that has been much admired, a personification of war ; but this * I am not blinil, however, to the merit of Parnell, Young, Shenstone, Dyer, and Falconer. CIIATTERTON. 45 ode appears to me the orij^inal of it, and at any rate is finer. Again, in this fragment a most Shakespearian dramatic genius appears to be rising. King Edward the Confessor, Harold, and Goddwyn are touched in by the hand of one who had read history to some purpose, having a dramatic imagination of his own. In the "Battle of Hastings" we find many passages of the highest merit for distinctness of vision, and nervous appropriateness of language ; they arc resonant with the din of battle. There is often a direct Homeric force that startles one as with a blow, and withal a sublime heroic atmosphere tempers the long, and some- times tedious series of physical encounters described. There is a brief, but graphic description of Stonehenge. (Chat- terton was hardly ever over-luxuriant — in that too very mature.) We find true poetry in the third eclogue, and in " The Parliament of Sprytes," where we hear the ghosts of former " Bristowans " longing to be alive that they may better see St. Mary's, which, however, they gaze upon on misty moonlight nights, and describe as it is at service- time, together with the dresses of canons and singers, " in crimson chapeaux and scarfs of woaden blue." But one of Chatterton's masterpieces is the " Song to yElla, Lord of the Castle of Bristol." There seems to me a something in- definite, but very grand about it ; the poet addresses the spirit of /Ella in stately and sonorous language — " Drawn by thy weapon fell, Down to the depth of hell Thousands of Dacians went. . . . O thou ! where'er — thy bones at rest — Thy sprite to haunt delighteth best, — Whether upon the blood-enibrued plain, Or where thou kenst from far The dismal cry of war ; Or seest some mountain made of corse of slain. . . . Or in black armour stalk around Embattled Bristowe, once thy ground, And glow ardurous on the Castle stair ; Or fiery round the Minster glare, Let Bristowe still be made thy care ; 46 ESSAYS ON POETRY AND POETS. Guard it from foemen and consuming fire, Like Avon's stream encirc it round. Nor let a flame enharm the ground, Till in one flame all the whole world expire." As for Horace Walpole, he was only a link in the chain of ignoble circumstances that led up to the suicide — for which act, however, it is absurd to make any one so respon- sible as the boy himself. Why should this conceited literary sybarite have been so very forward to befriend a sucking author who had hoaxed him ? It is all fair for a nobleman to amuse himself by elaborately concocting a scries of gossipy letters to be passed off as the offspring of unpre- meditated friendly intercourse — and to tell lies about a trumpery " Otranto," writing when he is detected, "the author flatters himself he shall appear excusable " — but when a poor attorney's clerk plays similar pranks in a work of stupendous genius, then the noble "forger" bethinks him that " all of the house of forgery are relations," and \\\7i.\. his younger brother in "forgery" " viiist be a eoiisiun- inate villain." {! !) However, the publishers who profited by the boy's inex- perience and obscurity in London were the more immediate authors of his loss to the world. They paid him little doles now and then ; but for much of his work he was never paid at all, though his pieces kept coming out in the magazines of these gentlemen long after the boy had been crammed like a dead dog into a pauper's shell. " Hamilton," he said one day, "was using him very badly." And to think with what an ardent spirit he came to London ; going to the coffee-houses among the celebrated wits, buying better clothes, and sending home little presents of teacups and fans and snuff to a mother and sister (of whom he was de- votedly fond) out of his scanty earnings ! I fancy his few letters home are among the most graphic, and cheerful, and melancholy in all the world ; we are with him on the coach journey in the snow over Marlborough Down ; we are his ClIATTERTON. 47 fcllow-passcnf^crs ; and how vivid the letter about his catch- ing a cold looking out of his garret window at a drunkx-n woman and a man with a movable fish-stall one night in lirooke Street ! His political letters are not a quarter so interesting to us now, though they served his turn well enough. Was he mad or not when he killed himself? If there was a predisposition — his sister had been in a madhouse — circumstances were very favourable to its fruition. He worked his brain — a brain truly of almost abnormal capacity — without mercy ; and he did not take sufficient nourish- ment. Even before he was compelled to live on next to nothing in London because the fat booksellers would not pay him, all agree that he starved on bread and water and tea. Whether he burnt the candle at both ends, and was profligate in morals, we do not know ; but I suspect that at any rate he devoted very little time to profligacy ; cer- tainly he never drank. His anxieties, when he once began to despond, must have been of the gravest ; for he was doggedly determined never to write to Bristol for assistance, lest his acquaintance there should triumph, seeing how much he had boasted of what he could do, and what a great name he would make. Ninetcen-twentieths of his composi- tion consisted ol pride, as he says in his letter to Mr. Clay- field ; we have it in his own handwriting in the British Museum, and the word is underlined. He had evidently the consciousness of his transcendent genius, and had come into contact with no equal. Cross, the apothecary, says that latterly his memory seemed to fail him when talking rapidly. Cross once persuaded Chatterton to dine with him, and then he devoured some oysters voraciously, so that he was evidently starving ; but for the most part he would accept even a morsel of bread from no one. How- ever, he had always been dallying with the idea of suicide ; men did at that time if they had no religious belief, and the boy had lost his. In Bristol he was on the verge of 48 ESSAYS ON POETRY AND POETS. committing it, and wrote a half-serious, half-burlesque will, which so scared Lambert, the attorne)', that he turned the boy out of his office. The mistaken idea that it is de- grading to receive help from others — an idea due partly to the exaggerated individualism of the time — is pretty well enough to account for his conduct, whereas a man or woman ought to be ready to accept help with dignity, and with no sense of subserviency, as also to give it in a brotherly spirit and kindly, with no arriere pensce of estab- lishing a claim thereby. Whether, however, there was not some madness in the dogged refusal to accept the smallest favour from any one at the last is a difficult question ; only wc do not knew how far such favours were offi:red, and he was too proud to beg for them. It is strange that the landlady, Mrs. Angell, would never show herself to Croft when he went to inquire about Chatterton. But anyhow this is the boy " who," according to Walpolc, " might have been led to those more facile imitations of prose, promis- sory notes ! " Well, England, after having spurned from her one of her greatest geniuses (as other nations, by the agency of their blockheads, have spurned theirs, the follies and sins of genius itself conspiring to help them), had many years after the misfortune to lose Horace Walpole also ; and indignant denunciations seem absurd after so long, considering, too, how much fair-minded people always have to say on the other side of every question ! There is some evidence that our great boy-poet was not carted away with other sour bodies when the graves at Shoe Lane Workhouse were filled up to make room for Farringdon Market, but that his mother had him sent down to Bristol, and privately buried in Redcliffc churchyard, where now he rests. Is there any authentic portrait of the poet ? Sir H. Taylor has a very striking one, which he tells me he considers authentic. The boy is described as having magnificent grey eyes. Even Barrett said that " he used to send for him and differ from him on purpose to make them flash fire ; fire CHATTERTON. 49 seemed to roll at the bottom of them." And Mrs. Ballance remarked that when he stared you in the face without appearing to see you "it was something awful." Of all the poetical tributes to him, perhaps Shelley's few lines are the finest. He comes forward in the realms of death to meet Keats : — "The inheritors of unfulfilled renown Rose from their thrones, built beyond mortal thought, Far in the Unapparent. Chatterton Rose pale, his solemn agony had not Yet faded from him. " LORD BYRON AND HIS TllMES.* " Sorrow seems half of his immortality." — Cain. Byron is not an exhausted subject. For he, though one of our greatest poets, has of late years been under- estimated and neglected in England — a new school of poetry being in the ascendant, mainly an outgrowth from Keats, Words- worth, Shelley, and foreign schools, Italian or French. It is remarkable that, whereas on the Continent neither of these last-named poets (except in some small degree Shelley) has to any extent influenced literature, while Byron has influenced it more than any other English poet except Shakespeare and Pope, among his own Anglo-Saxon people the reverse is true ; for I know not any artist of note, English or American, unless it be Edgar Poe, Bulwer Lytton, Disraeli, Joaquin Miller, Mr. Alfred Austin, whom we may affiliate upon Byron ; and these very partially. Of course he has had scores of imitators ; but imitators, how- ever popular for a moment, soon perish. I speak of original poets who are generally nurtured in some degree upon their predecessors. Hugo, Heine, de Musset, Beranger, and Lamartine occur at once as instances. But the Slavonic races also have heard his fiery tones, and responded in their poetry. Thus " the Russian poet, Puschkin, has stirred the ardent youth of Russia with a lyre attuned to that of Byron, and the most important Spanish poet of recent times has been * By far the best thing I know on Byron (except Moore's Life) is Professor J. Nichol's book in the English Men of Letters series. LORD BYRON AND HIS TIMES. 51 termed the Spanish Byron." In England, however, such Byronic growths as may be traced in htcrature (and there are few) have taken their nourishment from the more morbid elements in him. Notwithstanding his inordinately inorganic form, Mr. Dobell is a very genuine poet ; but in the spasmodic school to which he belongs, a strange, half- tragic, half-grotesque figure seems always painfully pro- minent — the poet namely — at once admiring and bemoan- ing himself, torn asunder by his own passions, and loudly arraigning his Maker, as it were in the market-place, for making him so very disagreeable a person both to himself and to his neighbours. There is little response in our literature, as there is in that of the Continent, to what is strongest and highest in Byron. He is pre-eminently the poet of revolution, and of what the Germans call " world-sorrow." But England is not a congenial home of revolution. There is implied in the Puritanism and Protestantism which dominated our two English rebellions a most conservative and law-abiding principle — one of obedience to authority. If the principle of private judgment as vindicated by Luther, Wyclif, Cranmer, and the Reformers, opened the door to what is now termed Rationalism, yet between them and the later rationalists there is a great gulf fixed ; the former only shifted and restored the fulcrum of that lever which they held to have been displaced by human corruption, the lever of Supernatural authority ; the latter threw away that lever altogether. In England, religion and the political con- stitution have been slowly and gradually liberalized ; the Bible, however, remained (how far may we say, remains ?) the fulcrum of authority, the rule of faith and conduct. In France, in Italy, in Spain, both religious and political re- forms have met with less success, have been crushed in the bud ; hence the tendency is to violent explosions in ex- tremes of theory and practice, to what we moderns mean by the principle of revolution. 52 ESSAYS ON POETRY AND POETS. With respect to Welt-Schmcrtz, Goethe affirms that Byron introduced it into literature ; but I think that is say- ing too much. Rousseau rather is the father of it, though I am not sure we should not say Shakespeare in " Hamlet." Goethe himself in " Werther " and in " Faust " may likewise be regarded as one main source of the same spirit ; Jean Paul also, and other contemporaries of Goethe. But there has been so much of it since Byron, in France and Ger- many, that it is difficult now to recognize Byron as a grand fountain thereof in our more recent English literature. It is in Shelley, in Novalis, Obermann, Heine, Musset, Leopardi, George Sand. In Carlyle, Clough, Matthew Arnold, and Tennyson's " In Memoriam," how different a semblance it wears! In these it is a. reflecting, brooding, rcclusc-like sorrow, serene Wordsworth even traceable therein ; we be- hold the half-bewildering, half-apocalyptic suggestions of an ever developing natural science seething in strange specu- lations ! Access since Byron has also been attained to the great systematic metaphysicians of Germany, whose thought has penetrated, at least by infiltration, through their German and French popularizers, to the stolid, practical, but rather obtuse English mind— these metaphysicians, together with Schiller, Goethe, and the German critics, constituting the Teutonic element in that vast intellectual and moral upheaval, which characterized the opening of the grand European era we name Revolutionary ; and as German ideas permeated France and England, so, thank Heaven ! are French and English principles of social change now conquering Germany, in spite of Bismarcks, Moltkes, and Emperors William. Moreover, Orientalists have made known to us the great religious philosophies of the East. Carlyle is a prophet of welt-schmertz and of individualism too, though he is most severe on Byron because of his lamentations. Yet Mr. Morley, with some reason, calls Carlyle " Byron with shaggy breast." He has been one of the strongest and most purifying prophets of our age, to LORD BYRON AND HIS TIMES. 53 whom the gratitude of any t^cncrous pupil must be unfail- ing. Ikit his stern and solitary Stoic pride passed into something of crabbed harshness. He has ever held up to us Goethe as the great modern hero in life and in literature While of Byron, hear what he says: — "A strong man of recent time fights little for any good cause anywhere, works weakly as an English lord, weakly delivers himself from such working, with weak despondency endures the cackling of plucked geese at St. James', and sitting in sunny Italy in his coach and four, writes over many reams of paper the following sentence with variations, ' Saw ever the world one greater or unhappier ? ' This was a sham strong man." Now, if Byron's actual career be remembered — and I shall presently remind my readers of it — this will seem nothing but a marvellous and most unwarranted caricature. Yet even when Byron is most absorbed in his own sorrow — and very surely he is not always so absorbed— he is un- consciously and by force of genius the mouthpiece and representative of those who (like our own selves, how often in this epoch of weary individualism !) feel " the weight and burden of all this unintelligible world " pressing upon their heart. He is the Human Soul, with infinite longings, that nothing finite can satisfy, yet finding nought that it can recognize as indeed infinite to rest upon. Cease your vain whinings after enjoyment ! says Carlyle ; if you suffer, like the Spartan boy conceal the ravening agony and say no- thing. What right hast thou to happiness, even to being ? Possess thy soul in patience and work ! This is noble and well ; so far as it goes better than Byron But this in Carlyle rests on a faith, such a faith as Byron had not. And there are, perhaps, objections to this too stoical re- pudiation of happiness. May it not tend to some undue acquiescence in the unhappiness of others ? May it not tend to repress that " enthusiasm of humanity," which must at least include the desire of imparting happiness to all ? It at any rate rather suggests fox and grapes. This ascetic 54 ESSAYS ON POETRY AND POETS. independence of human sympathy and approbation, as of all innumerable nature-provided external springs of enjoy- ment, this haughty, assiduous self-culture, may possibly result in a certain lonely callousness of heart, ungladdened and ungraced with tenderly humane sensibilities, in a certain stern self-satisfaction which may not really be more noble than the self-loathing of a Manfred. " Thus I trample on the pride of Plato," said Diogenes, treading on the philosopher's purple robe. " With greater pride, Diogenes," replied the sage. In Carlyle, surely the bitter wailings over man's present condition are even deeper than Byron's — and fully as mis- anthropic — while he hardly manifests the same generous ardour of sympathy toward the efforts of mankind, however ineffectual, to free themselves from oppression, and enter upon the heritage of their manhood. Byron was a miserable man amongst miserable men, but their helpful brother in the blind groping toward light. This latter, indeed, Carlyle strives and means to be ; and he is miserable enough ; but perhaps he too much ignores the common and irrepressible instincts of human nature, calling man to impossible heights of renunciation and self-centred contentment, refusing to aid them in attaining humbler human happiness more with- in their reach, and the general development of those human faculties, which they have a right to claim. A school- master's rod for the foolish, naughty masses of men ! Surely the moral dragonnades of Carlyle's fierce invectives against the criminal classes (in " Latter-Day Pamphlets ") are almost inhuman in their undiscriminating pitilessness — further from Christ's " God be merciful to me, a sinner ! " than anything of Byron's. But happiness is, though not the ivhole of our being's end and aim, an integral part of it. What Byron lacked was a sane mind in a sane body. He thirsted unduly after pure enjoyment, without that neces- sary shadow of pain which must accompany it ; and he did not, as Carlyle justly points out, face that pain so LORD 15YRON AND HIS TIMES. 55 couraL,reou.sly as he should have done. Yet a more iron nature must allow for the acute sensibilities of such a man ; he was one nerve for pleasure or for pain to travel over — and surely such a nature is not without its rare uses in the world. But the truth is (as we have lately learned) that Carlyle did most of his cursing- and swearing in private, and Byron a good deal of his in public. That was, on the whole, the difference between them. Besides, albeit too ostentatiously, and with too much weeping, he did defy and endure his anguish after all, as do his heroes ; he, in addition, silencing it altogether at the last, in order to set right the time " out of joint " (which necessity, laid on him by Duty, this contemplative man, like Hamlet, must have felt to be " a cursed spite "), actually laying down the pen and taking up the sword — nay, more than the sword, for which he had some love, the prosaic entanglement of practical politics also, for which he had none, and showing therein admirable good sense. I do not find that Goethe, for instance, had the smallest inclination to do anything of the sort — showed any keen interest even in the piteous struggles of his fellow-men — that he left to his great rival, Schiller, to Fichte, and Theodor Korner ; though indeed Goethe, in his most im- mortal work, " Faust," as in " Werther," and his best drama, " Goetz," is not the serene Olympian, the pure artist, which is apparently what Mr. Carlyle admires in him. But Byron knew not moderation or self-restraint ; he was so spiritually infirm as to gratify every whim ; thus came satiety and remorse. Mazzini, the illustrious Duty-loving apostle of these latter days, whose life was one long sacrifice for human welfare, and who yet never pandered for his own advantage to popular errors, takes a far juster view of Byron, and in spite of all his faults reverences in him not only the great poet, but the noble man. Of his characters, Mazzini says, " They are gifted with ability they know not how to use ; with a power and energy they know not how 56 ESSAYS ON POETRY AND POETS. to apply ; with a life whose purpose and aim they com- prehend not. They arc alone ; this is the secret of their wretchedness and impotence. They thirst for good, but cannot achieve it ; for they have no mission, no belief, no comprehension of the world around them. They have never realized the conception of Jinmanity ; the continuity of labour that unites all the generations into one whole ; the common end and aim only to be realized by the com- mon effort. The emptiness of the life and death of solitary individuality has never been so powerfully and efficaciously summed up as in the pages of Byron. His intuition of the death of a form of society, men call wounded self-love ; his sorrow for all, is misinterpreted as cowardly egotism. Whilst Byron withered and suffered under a sense of the wrong and evil around him, Goethe attained the calm — I cannot say of victory — but of indifference. * Religion and politics,' said he, ' are a troubled element for art. I have always kept myself aloof from them as much as possible.' The day will come when democracy will remember what it owes to Byron. I know no more beautiful symbol of the future destiny and mission of Art than the death of Byron in Greece. The holy alliance of poetry with the cause of the people — the union, still so rare, of thought and action — the grand solidarity of all nations in the conquest of the rights ordained by God for all his children — all that is now the religion and the hope of the party of progress in Europe, is gloriously typified in this image." Indirectly, Kepler, Galileo, Descartes, Newton, Locke, and Bacon ; more directly, Hobbes, Spinoza, and Pope ; later still, Helvetius, Hume, Gibbon, Voltaire, Rousseau, and the Encyclopaedists, had, as spokesmen of their time, rudely shaken the venerable but decrepit fabrics of religion and society — because in truth the Divine Life once in them was no longer there, was secretly creating for itself newer and sounder habitations. The structure was unsound at heart, eaten to the core, though it still micrht stand LORD BYRON AND HIS TIMES. 57 externally whole and fair^ Religion took the side of evil, the side of the powerful oppressor, of the tyrant ; she imposed dogmas, moreover, upon men, that daily grew more incredible with the progress of discovery, and hoped still to stunt the intellect and conscience of mankind with bands and swaddling-clothes belonging to their infancy. Europe felt the shock of revolution, and trembled. Never- theless, when the allied nations had overthrown the mighty dictator. Napoleon — that Titan sprung from the loins of revolution, governing in the name of the people, and at least ostensibly in their interest, disposing of Europe in his own anarchic fashion, with little regard to the consecrated pretensions of ancient priests or ancient kings — there came a reaction, and lo ! the old orthodox spirit returned with seven others more oppressive than itself. "The Holy Alliance considered it not unholy to leave unfulfilled the promise given to nations in the hour of trial, to beat down by force of arms their right to self-government, which had been bought at the price of much precious blood, and to treat nations at their congresses like herds of cattle." " When the Holy Alliance (says Gervinus) believed that it had arrested for ever the aberrations of the spirit of revolu- tion by the subjugation of France, then this English poet knit again the thread, which a million of soldiers had been called forth to sever for ever." The state of the world was one great dissonance, and Byron, who possessed the special organ of its expression, became the poet of this crisis. That he had sacrificed his life for Greece and freedom, surrounded his name with a halo of glory : this martyr- death became an inspiring theme for poetry and passion. And what, after all, if in this and other acts of his life, there was some imaginative taste for artistic effect, some desire, it may be, of applause } Is that so very shocking .'' Human motives are mixed, and by mixed motives human progress is secured. There are aspects of human affairs other than the moral. 58 KSSAYS ON POETRY AND POETS. Byron stood prominently before mankind, a man of high social position, and even with aristocratic proclivities — in this, too, meeting his time half-way, for the reformers of the Continent were often aristocratic like himself — with romantic and fascinating personality, a man of the world as well as a cosmopolitan poet, obtruding his defiant revolt and uncompromising individuality no less in life than in poetry. An exile from England, Byron openly assisted the Carbonari of Italy, and in every way proved himself the friend of human freedom all over the world. No wonder that the liberal youth of the Continent were stirred profoundly by his words and example. Italy and Greece arc free. But how disappointing often were the results of youthful enthusiasm and aspirations ! More fruit was expected from sweeping political changes than could in the slow growth of human history possibly result — even if the changes themselves were found practicable or beneficial, and even if an ideal state could be created by any external arrangement whatsoever. The kingdom of God is within. A king may be a pauper in spirit, and a pauper may be a king of men. Healthy desire for self-government was repressed under tyrannical rulers where these retained or regained the power, and here intelligent youth was forced to champ the bit, resorting perforce to more animal, selfish, and sordid outlets of activity. The boundless spirit of discontent let loose over the world caused more unhappi- ness than the former submissive acquiescence in any lot, however degraded. The old world was passing from under men's feet — but where was the promised land .'* Shouting " freedom," men but " wore the name engraven on a heavier chain. The sensual and the dark rebel in vain." The right of private judgment, as vindicated by the Renaissance and Reformation, was pushed to such an extreme, that not so much the higher individual, with his own special, rational idea, in essential harmony with all others, was enthroned, but rather the capricious, anti-social, LORD BYRON AND 1 1 IS TIMES. 59 disorganiziiif^ individual — which exaggeration by inevitable reaction leads to the riveting of new dogmatic chains upon the limbs of unemancipatcd humanity, and so to renewed triumph of corrupt hierarchies. In proportion to a man's enlargement of intellect and intensity of sympathy was his sorrow ; man was — nay, still is — a discord and burden to himself — that is, if he be more than a mere animal, or selfish member of the privileged classes — if his mind march in harmony with the progress of the " world-spirit." So far as in Byron's day the general conclusions of modern science, born in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, shone for all, they only served to flicker dim distrust from afar upon time-honoured convictions and serviceable beliefs. For Byron all is still doubt, negation, and despair. Nor can he whistle, and chatter, and grin more or less complacently and comfortably over the human welter, like a Voltaire or a Diderot : in fact, the storm has burst since then ; one can no longer nestle in old cosy nooks of courts that one is helping to shake about the ears of one's children; "After us, the deluge," but the deluge has come. " Let us eat and drink, for to-morrow we die," will not quite satisfy Rousseau and Byron. Yet negation and despair have never in any general sense been so unmixed in England as they were with Byron.* Since German criticism, and the development of modern science, our scepticism is more profound and common than before ; still it is more philosophical, quiet, and discriminating than his, feeling its way, in however tentative a manner, to a reconstruction of religion, not on the whole attempting to shatter it altogether. Shelley, Cole- ridge, Wordsworth, and Tennyson, for instance, poets of faith, though they were ignored as long as possible, have now * Those most distinguished poets, James Thomson, and Edgar Poe, are distinctly exceptional in their tone. But we have become much more pessi- mistic, dogmatic in denial, blank in agnosticism of late years. Idiosyncrasy of temper, habit, and circumstance, however, explains much in the cases of Leopardi, Schopenhauer, Poe, and Thomson. 6o ESSAYS ON POETRY AND POETS. more influence over our spiritual life than Byron. Byron's mocking, half-earnest, half-eighteenth-century temper is ill in accordance with our present attitude ; scepticism is reverent in an age, which has produced such earnest and illustrious Christians as Newman and Maurice. But the English public of Byron's own day were less tolerant of his irreligion than the same public is now. The legal authori- ties were on the point of refusing to protect his publisher's copyright in the case of " Cain " and the " Vision of Judg- ment." If Christianity is by our leading thinkers politely ignored, at least it is ignored politely. Our tendency to vindicate the glory and dignity of the body as against orthodox asceticism is, ho\\ever, a return in Byron's direc- tion. And there are symptoms of reaction against that elaborate, artificial affectation of poetic style, which is characteristic of an age in England that calls \X.sq\.{ practical — fairly domestic, devoted heart and soul to those material gains, which involve, on the one hand, a population of grimy native helots, who, being degraded from their higher humanity, murmur, yet forbear from violence, and, on the other, a population of Judases, ready to sell their very Master (in the " dearest market ") for thirty pieces of silver, or less — each individual, and the w^hole nation being careless of the rights or wrongs of any neighbour. From this sort of public life our poets withdraw themselves into studies and studios, there by the help of culture, criticism, and re- vived antiquity, elaborating their native tongue, as a recent critic in the Quarterly observes, into the most celestial of Chinese ; in which I think we partly discern, indeed, the result of richer thought and more complex imaginative feeling, but chiefly that of deficient interest in action, and deficient variety of true passion. Feeling and thought lose themselves in tortuous labyrinths of wordy filigree, osten- sibly provided for their habitat ; one sickly sentiment is diluted homoeopathically in oceans of what is called "exquisite expression." The literary influences at work to LORD BYRON AND HIS TIMES. 6l produce this result may be traced up to the sources I in- dicated at the beginning. Though Lord Tennyson's lyrics are among the most beautiful in the language, and he himself is a master of true expression — for he has much to express — indeed, his sovereignty over language and metre is wonderful — yet he has an occasional mannerism which is dangerously catching, and which inferior writers are sure to exaggerate. His high Miltonic standard, both of poetic substance and artistic workmanship, however, has raised the whole general tone of English writers and readers, and to him we owe all grateful allegiance. But Byron had formed his style on Pope and Drydcn, two great models of clear, nervous English ; and it would certainly be well if we studied them more, together with Milton, Wordsworth, Scott, and Byron himself Another word as to this element of welt-schmertz, which the continental critics justly conceive to be so eminently characteristic of Byron. Nearly all great writing, we must remember, nearly all great art, has been sorrowful or tragic. Even the favoured youthful Greeks, with their healthful unconsciousness and exquisite instinct, in harmony with their surroundings, once out of Homer's heroic age (and there is high tragedy in Homer), have their great dramatists composing terrible dramas of relentless, over- whelming Fate. Turn to the grand Hebrew poets. What of Isaiah, Jeremiah, Solomon .? Then, if we except our own early poet, Chaucer, and examine the most illustrious of Christian poets, we shall be led to the same conclusion. Take Shakespeare, Dante, and Milton — Shakespeare, with all his rich humanity, and buoyant humour, how profoundly sorrowful, how terribly tragic ! " Wo du das genie erblickst erblickst du aiicJi die martyr kroner It was the Olympian Goethe who said that. But our gods are not the pagan Olympians. Our God is the Man of Sorrows ; and we hold His life and death to be more godlike than any Greek contentment with any present lot, however enviable. We 62 ESSAYS ON POETRY AND POETS. ourselves suffer more ; new ideas, new imaginings, new endeavours entail a heritage of more complex pain, bewil- derment, and disappointment ; we can no longer lead the gay, healthful life of a Greek ; and if we were ever so favoured, how, since Christ, shall we be happy when so vast a proportion of our brethren are miserable, for has not Christ taught us that even helots and barbarians are our brethren ? " Une immense espt^rance a traverse la terre " — henceforth unrest is the law of our existence ; and what if the Star of Hope have set ? It is here, we believe ; but for Byron, labouring in the deep trough of a dark billow of the world-ocean, the huge travelling wave of sorrow had blotted it away ! And how, asks Mr. Symonds, in his brilliant poet's book on the Greek poets, shall a race in its maturity, with centuries of sad history behind it, be joyful } Yet is there much of glory and joy in this history. Nor are we in our old age. For see how in Byron's day Nelson and Wellington fought ; how we have taken and held India, and colonized the world ; how Livingstone and our great explorers penetrate the heart of mysterious continents ; while ghostly ramparts of the old world's seclusion fall at our mere presence, as those strong walls of Jericho fell before the trumpet-blast of Israel ! * But in advanced civilizations, with over-swollen luxury of the few, and contrasted misery of the many, the noblest must be saddest — especially students, who live that unhealthy life which exaggerated division of labour, and a sedentary habit, has entailed upon them. To this must be added a peculiar, wild, melancholy characteristic of Northern peoples in their damp, chill atmosphere, and dark, romantic scenery — that melancholy which we feel in solemn purple mountains, umbrageous forests, turbulent grey seas, and which has passed alike into the primitive national songs, into the glory of Gothic cathedrals, into the taciturn, rugged character of our common * Franklin, Gordon, Lawrence, Havelock, Edwardes, Watt, Stevenson, these also are names for a nation to be proud of ! LORD liVRUN AND HIS TIMKS, 63 people. Moreover, in Byron there was a lingering belief in that very distinctive orthodoxy which he denied — even in the doctrine of everlasting punishment, and a revengeful God, which he denounced so vehemently — those Pagan monstrosities which the world will be well rid of at what- ever cost. Good service as he has done us herein, these dogmas still manifestly haunted him. Nor had Byron the power of thought necessary for shaping for himself our eternal Christianity anew ; but in the form of some illogical semi-theistic fatalism, Calvinism still appears in his writings, in his conversations, in his conduct. The concentrated gloom of many Puritan generations on the one hand, and many half-insane lonely barbaric nobles on the other, haunted his brain like some phantom mist, waiting only to be summoned into palpable Horror by individual experiences of the man — which assuredly were not wanting ! In the very face of his unbelief, nay, in the very face of his personally unsensitive conscience as to those carnal excesses which Christianity brands with severest reprobation, his sense of guilt is in some moods manifestly overwhelming ; almost equal to that of St. Paul — or, if you prefer it, reminding one of Judas. Of Byron personally we have but to remember that his own early youth was nourished by stern, dark influences of Northern sea and sky, and heath-clad rocky mountain, in a land haunted by weird legend ; pride of race was in his blood — pride of the old Barons Byron, and the yet more illustrious ancestry of his impoverished mother ; she who taught the sullen, brooding child to be so conscious of his high position, and to resent the disproportion between his fallen fortunes and the greatness of his house ; she who, while injudiciously fond, yet taunted him with his lameness when angry — a lameness that so treated might well help to make him bitter. What an education was this boy's, who needed such extrajudicious and kindly moral training ! But fierce and ungovernable as his mother's moods were, 64 ESSAYS ON POETRY AND POETS. his grandfather's had been the same— he who killed his neighbour in a savage duel by candle-light, and lived after- wards, grimly secluded in the old abbey at Newstead, shunned and gloomy, and accused of half-insane eccentri- cities (himself a very Lara), as the boy heard when he and his mother arrived at their ancestral abode, so ancient, lonely, and ruinous. With dim traditions and ghost-tales of old monks hovering about the place, and emblazoned arms of warriors on the windows, what wonder if this boy poet imbibed an air of mystery and mediaeval romance ? / A very exquisite description has he given of his early home in " Don Juan," showing how profoundly it had im- pressed him. As for his father, he was a handsome roue, like Don Juan himself. How must the modern revolu- tionary spirit have contended in this man for mastery with the temper of a haughty English aristocrat — the haughtier for his poverty — with the epicurean tastes, moreover, of a beautiful dandy, and petted child of high society 1 * But he needed the stimulus of insult, of rejection, of opprobrium, to rouse the slumbering lion, to develop his m-ighty genius in the direction proper to it. The " Hours of Idleness " are melancholy and querulous, but they have no concentrated bitterness or agony. He * There was indeed the feudal independence of a lawless baron piercing through his post-revolutionary humanitarianism, both in conduct and in poetry. It is true that he hated the stupid traditional orthodoxy of Legitimists, but he sincerely liked those imposing despotisms that are on one side the modern offspring of old tyrannies. He admired Napoleon ; loved to imitate and be compared with him ; also Ali Pacha, and thought of setting up a Pachalik himself on some Greek island ; if he had been offered the crown of Greece at the congress of Salona, to attend which he was on the point of setting out when he died, Trelawny and Dr. Elze both think he would have accepted it. He burst out crying from flattered vanity when his name was first read out with " Dominus " before it at Harrow — and hated people to call him by his name without the "Lord." He quarrelled with our ambassador at Constantinople on a point of precedence — would not land at Malta because he expected a salute from the forts, and finally sneaked into La Valetta without it, as Gait relates with a chuckle. The pomp of his travelling arrangements after the separation was excessive and worse than absurd, for the meanest thing he ever did was to use his wife's fortune after that event. LORD BYRON AND HIS TIMES. 65 says himself, he should " never have worn the motley mantle of the poet, if some one had not told him to forego it." The taste of his true quality comes out first in the " English Bards ; " though even that is chiefly noticeable for wounded vanity, and talent in the region of sarcasm. After this he travelled, on his return publishing successively the " Tales," and " Childe Harold." In these he put him- self forward under thin literary disguises as a melancholy hero of romance, and a roiu^ : the result being, that he " woke one morning and found himself famous." Never was there such sudden and general popularity, partly due, no doubt, to the fact that he was a peer, and a^ parti who mixed freely in society, with the special recommendations of beautiful face and figure, " interesting " genius, spirituel conversation, and the vague reputation of being charmingly wicked ; so he got as much petting as any reigning belle, and gave himself airs accordingly. But he was soon to pay the penalty of good fortune. He had been over- praised for the work actually performed, and he had, moreover, made enemies among men and women by his successes, and his affectations, though chiefly, no doubt, by his sterling merits, which men, and especially literary men, were not likely to forgive. He had married a truly excellent and noble lady, who perhaps wished to reform him, but soon retired in disgust from a task vvdiich she found so far beyond her powers. This marriage, with little affection, and with no mutual comprehension or toleration, was soon broken up ; and then, no one knows exactly how, the darkest rumours gathered about the husband, bursting anon over his head in a tempest of most virtuous execra- tion, wherein the notoriously sensitive holiness of English society in the days of the Regency showed itself, like Hamlet's father, " much offended." Byron, indeed, fancied there might be some cant in all that, having himself seen something of this holiness when it sat knee to knee with him, cheek by jowl with him, drinking, and ogling — though F 66 ESSAYS ON POETRY AND POETS. Mrs. Stowc appears to believe in it. The fact is, he had no business to be a genius, and to sin out of the regular grooves in which it is proper and respectable for good .society to sin. So villainous fashionable seducers, and fraudulent tradesmen, " compounded for sins they were inclined to, by damning those they had no mind to," waving him aside as less pious than themselves. And he who confessed that the meanest thing's blame gave him more pain than the highest man's praise gave him pleasure — how must he have winced under the insult and oppro- brium that raged around him, even though in his heart he contemned most of the amateur inquisitors who inflicted punishment. The finest skins are the most sensi- tive — what a triumph for vermin ! No doubt there are men of cold, serene, self-possessed temperament, who are as thoroughly independent of their fellows as Byron pro- fessed to be, but, as has been said, these do not print so many passionate cantos to inform their fellows of the fact. Why, he winced even when a nameless jackass donned the lion's-skin of some ephemerally popular review, and brayed at his poetr>' from under it. He could not be content with enduring fame, and the consciousness of good work done ; but must needs clutch at immense and immediate reputa- tion, though that was to be shared with him by jugglers and acrobats, literary or otherwise. Hence in part the blot of sensationalism, to catch the uneducated taste for gaudiness of effect, in his work. Byron, moreover, burnt the candle at both ends. Think what an amount of intellectual labour — and that of a creative kind — of a fierce, emotional, imaginative kind — this man went through before he was thirty-seven ! How bulky are his works ; and in addition we have the long destroyed memoirs, the innumerable letters sparkling with wit, teeming with observation. Besides, he lived always, and lived moreover in early youth, the life of a roi//. These conditions alone are sufficient, when we take into account LORD BYRON AND HIS TIMES. 6/ his hifrhly nervous, excitable, delicate organization, and the deleterious amount of spirits he drank, to explain his fits of depression, his moments of anguish. He was subject, moreover, to constant fevers, than which nothing is more depressing. So that on the whole, considering the utterly different nature and circumstances of the two men, it does not seem as if Mr. Carlyle's reiterated reproach to Byron, that he was no stoic, amounted to very much. I own I think the " Tales " are underrated by modern critics. All their defects may be granted — they are frag- mentary, the plots are ill-constructed, sometimes almost nil, they are monotonous, and, above all, there is a certain theatrical hollowness about them, which is indeed the vulnerable Achilles'-heel of Byron for his modern detractors. Nevertheless, the episodes, even if they be only episodes, are in themselves wonderfully astir with wild life and turbulent passion ; the verse is generally musical and rapid, while often we have a pause of softer lyrical beauty with an exquisite perfume of its own, to which Scott far more rarely attains. Thus almost all the passages (though they can be detached and recited as separate lyrics) in the " Giaour " are beautiful, and how lovely are the opening lines about the lovers in " Parisina " as well as that incident of the page bending over dying Lara ! The " Corsair," on the whole, seems to me the finest and most spirited of this series ; it has in it all the freshness of youth and buoyant enjoyment, as well as the very spirit of romance and troubadour love ; it has women, charming, beautiful, tender, and passionate, pathetic passages, and some of the finest lines that have ever been written about the sea, even by Byron, the bounding clarion notes of the pirate's opening song — " O'er the glad waters of the dark blue sea." By some able modern critics, indeed, accustomed to our thoughtful, metaphysical, academic, or domestic strains, all except one phase of Byron's mighty genius (that of " Don Juan," and " Vision of Judgment ") has been abandoned, 68 ESSAYS ON POETRY AND POETS. on the ground that it is theatrical, and conventional ; that his heroes are not heroic. Now this has a great deal of truth in it, and Byron acknowledges himself that these early works were too sentimental and stagey. Still, for all that, something may be said even in favour of their general conception, in favour of that central ideal which gave them such unity as they possess. It does not follow, because a myriad dunces have mouthed, and still mouth in the trappings of a great actor, and we weary of these trappings, that he was not a great actor. What astonished Walter Scott was this — that Byron, though in " Childe Harold," and we may even say in "Cain" and " Manfred," as well as in the " Tales," he continued to represent only one human figure as the centre of all, could still succeed in forcibly arresting men's attention. In truth, he wears the tragic mask of an actor in old Greek tragedy — set to one monotonous, terrible, or sorrowful expression : his heroes are ideals of human misfortune, sin, woe, and passionate power, that partly recall those of Greek drama. This gloomy Byronic hero is now the favourite type of low melodrama in cheap fiction and on the stage — a capital sub- ject, moreover, for burlesque. Nevertheless, he was at that time a perfectly legitimate and fascinating hero of romance, by virtue of certain obvious and indestructible tendencies to admire, very common in human nature. He was, in fact, a personage of the same order as Hamlet, Timon, Faust, Wagner's Tannhauser, and Fouque's magical creation, Sin- tram. He must be accepted as a modern descendant of mediaeval Barons and Minstrels — truly an evil modern Knight, with conscience restless from remorse, with high gifts of intellect and imagination, thirsting for joy and for pure love, yet clogged with satiety, withered with disap- pointment, endowed, however, with many knightly virtues, in all the pride of blasted beauty and high lineage degraded ; even in the bosom of Nature, the Healer whom he adores as Divine, haunted by melancholy wrecks of his own spiritual LORD HYRON AND HIS TIMES. 69 life. This semi-knight, and semi-Miltonic Satan, is an em- bodiment of rebellion against God and man ; yet of recon- ciliation with both through love of Mercy and Justice ; half in harmony with the modern spirit, half in harmony with the ancient that is passing away ; it has, moreover, even a moral beauty of its own, as of a human ruin stern and lonely in proud decay, festooned with some of Nature's fairest perennial flowers. But it is eminently romantic and picturesque — Gothic, fantastic, all light and shadow, mystery, and vast space, flushed here with gorgeous colours, there grey and severe — neither "classical," nor flippant, courtly, and didactic, like poetry of the eighteenth century ; nor moralized, and beginning to be reconciled in its own fashion with the old faith, like Lord Tennyson's and some of our best poetry now — a transition poetry of tumult and revolt, of volcanic, aggressive individualism, half reverting to the lawlessness and anarchy of primaeval societies ; to the Ishmaelite whose hand is against every man ; the child of Nature asserting himself against the decadence of an artificial, decrepit, tyrannical civilization, wrongfully usurp- ing the titles and thunders of the Most High. This is as truly romantic as Spenser, Walter Scott, Ariosto, or the Minnesingers. " Faust," and " Manfred " are in fact the legitimate descendants of this mediaeval poetry — even of the early Mysteries and Miracle-Plays. Moreover, Spenser, and the Italian romantic poets, are quite as luscious in description as Byron ; tJiat element they owe in common to the study of later classical literature — Theocritus, Virgil, Ovid — and some of it to that of the East, Byron personally having a good deal of the soft, luxurious Eastern in him, developed by personal experience in eastern climes. It must be recollected further that the old heroes of romance, for the most part sans pcur, were very seldom satts 7-cprocJie. But the elements of moral mystery, tragical destiny, high gifts rendered abortive and a curse to the possessor, and what may be termed the more superficial graces of these 70 ESSAYS ON POETRY AND POETS. heroes, all these, wrought up with the skill of a Byron, whose " own " the " song " was, form a fine subject for artistic presentation in the romantic region of art ; they appeal to the imagination of mankind, to such imaginations as those of Goethe, Shelley, Coleridge, and Scott ; although, indeed, the perpetual repetition of such portraitures showed the narrow range at that period of the poet's power. His, indeed, were not self-possessed, self-sacrificing heroes of the highest type, like Schiller's William Tell, But it is not necessary to hold them up as models for imitation, even though Byron may have a vain, self-conscious weakness for these violent, ill-regulated, selfish characters. At any rate, however low morally his poetic ideal might be (and one of his ideals was Washington, as he tells us in a splendid stanza of " Childe Harold," and as we might know by his life), the question for criticism is how far his figures are portrayed with the hand of a master ; and it was certainly because he could identify himself with them in some moods that he portrayed them so well. Whatever an artist can render artistically interesting by art, that is a proper subject for art ; it becomes imaginative truth ; but the error of certain writers has been to distort some lower elements of human nature by making them relatively too prominent, and not duly contrasting them with other elements. Byron made himself in " Childe Harold," not too obtrusively, the centre of his graphic and imaginative descriptions of coun- tries over which centuries of stirring and splendid history expand wings of dusky glory, and surely the brooding, melancholy figure was no inappropriate centre ; a beautiful genius of death, of sorrow, and of unrest. Ever he held up before the world a vast and lurid Human Image, but too thoroughly aware of its own dignity, and contemning others — herein reverting to the philosophic pride of elect spirits as inculcated by Paganism, and adapted thence by doctors of theology into Christianity, under the guise of religious Pharisaism (but retrograding from the true Christian ideal LORD BYRON AND I IIS TIMES. 7 1 of election to universal service), and now reappearing in Academic halls under the name of" Culture," as intellectual pride — scarcely malignant, yet formed to be the ruin of all who approached ; like Job, deserted in his calamity, yet justifying himself in the face of Heaven as against hypo- critical moral verdicts of his fellows ; communing alone in whirlwind and cloud with phantoms of departed heroes, and vanished empires — Harold, in starlit palaces of the Caesars, among ivied rents of ruin, or upon the solitary seashore — Manfred upon some desolate Alp, conversing familiarly with spirits of the elements ; for whom the very countenance of Love herself has been contorted into the Gorgon-face of Crime — Crime with fury features and snaky hair. In what terrible harmony is this figure, half-man, half-demon, with these blasted crags that surround him, born of old in throes of earthquake and in fire, snowed upon out of the slow centuries, shrouded in oceans of implacable ice! So looms this awful Image out of the storm-cloud, as though stricken with the curse of a hateful immortality ; wandering through all lands, bearing the burden of a world's sorrow, wailing the wail of human misery, like Prometheus on Caucasus, scarred with Heaven's lightning, and blistered with His frost, agonizing for sins inherited and imposed ; but, alas ! bearing no message for human redemption ; no conscious martyr-conqueror of sacred fire from divine altars, wherewithal to regenerate the race ; only lifting ever a red right hand with Cain, and huge scowling armies of the outcast — rebel leader of all who are miserable, fate-stricken, and oppressed — testifying in the face of God and men that all is not well, as the com- fortable have decreed, though they feast with a smile over buried bodies of their victims. It seems to me uncritical to draw too broad a line of demarcation between the early and later works of Byron, though it is unquestionably right to prefer the later ; but the same identical, intense, passionate, susceptible, scornful 72 ESSAYS ON POETRY AND POETS. soul appears in all. And it is part of the very essence of this strange shroud of romantic, half-chivalrous mystery wherewith Byron loves to invest his characters, and through them indirectly his own personality, that there should glow, as it were, doubtfully through the folds thereof a certain deadly lurid light of guilt unnameable, whose inborn fatality overwhelms the soul with despair, and leaves the man no rest. This is especially the element that is now inveighed against as poisonous and satanic — now indicated as clap- trap and humbug. But it may be argued that as Byron has used the blood- red hue, it is a perfectly legitimate, as well as effective, element of tragic interest in his work of art. Toned down to harmony with other features of the picture, represented as in some sense a mysterious doom — guilt, and the misery which it works in a soul not destitute of virtue and aspira- tions after a higher life — these elements in Byron appear to me neither immoral, nor inartistic, nor ridiculous. Is it the duty of the artist always to hold up before us models of excellence for imitation ? If so, of course we must con- demn Byron, and enthrone Miss Edgeworth or Mr. Tupper. But then, what of Othello and lago, Macbeth, Lady Mac- beth, the Duchess of Malfi, and most of those other mixed humanities of Elizabethan drama ? What of GEdipus and Medea? indeed, of all the greatest masters in imaginative creation } Byron's representations do not, I think, ignore the dijference between good and evil, any more than those of Shakespeare do, though they may indicate laxity in his own estimate of what is right and wrong, in certain respects. I do not see, for instance, that he violates the conditions under which evil may be represented, even as laid down in the essays of Mr. R. H. Hutton ; only that Mr. Hutton perhaps insists too much (by implication) on the moral aspect of a subject being always prominently presented That Byron dzvells too much on the passionate, and so far weak class of characters, and that these arc not sufficiently LORD BYRON AND HIS TIMES. 73 balanced by other types may be admitted. Merein he proves himself an artist inferior to the greatest. But his heroes may point a moral while they adorn a tale. There certainly arose at that time — Byron and Rousseau contributing much to the phenomenon — a kind of priesthood, which, claiming to displace the old, showed itself scarcely more tolerant and tender in its bearing toward the common people, in favour of whose rights its members had ostensibly arisen, than that traditional priesthood against whose tyranny they so iconoclastically declaimed. Every "man of genius" became a sort of supreme pontiff without a faith, whose whims, and weaknesses, and peculiar fancies were to be held as sacred — a pretension perhaps more dangerous than those of a regular priesthood, since these were at least defined and confirmed by venerable authorities in the world's face. Sensitive young persons, moreover, persuaded themselves too easily that they were within this privileged indefinable circle, being naturally eager to claim a right of participating in such agreeable immunities ; so that the ranks of this new priesthood did not want for candidates, whose credentials there existed unfortunately no recognized bishop once for all to verify. Doubtless, then, too much emphasis was laid by Rousseau, Byron, and Shelley, upon mere sentiment, impulse, and passion, as distinguished from conscience, reason, and deliberate self-control. So far as Byronism is to be regarded as an ideal, it is certainly a low one ; though, at the same time, it is unquestionably a higher than that of the average Mammon-worshipping Briton, and on the whole advantageous as a corrective of his ; while Byron sets before the Englishman, assuredly, certain high qualities for which the elite of his nation have been deservedly celebrated, and not least that aristocracy to which the poet belonged. Nor is it amiss that the average man should learn to reverence genius and superiority, and the glories of external Nature. If Byron lays undue stress on such advantages as those of rank and high lineage — on those of beauty, strength, 74 ESSAYS ON POETRY AND POETS. prowess, or refinement — methinks his work is full of counter- balancing influences ; and these things themselves may not be quite so despicable as commonplace, levelling-down democracy supposes. Science is teaching us not unduly to despise race, as instinct had taught us before ; moreover, since soul and body are but reverse faces of the same living man or woman, I doubt beauty of body being so execrable a thing as ill-favoured Methodism would persuade us. Then, again, though the protest is a healthy one which vigorous moralists, like Mr. Kingsley, have made against that foolish, mischievous notion, that men of genius are privileged in their errors and weaknesses, instead of possess- ing their high gifts for purposes of human service, we must not altogether forget that virtue is not knowledge or sensi- bility, but rather, a due balance of the faculties under a moral sense. Artistic genius is, on the other hand, a very uncommon sensibility and corresponding faculty dominating the possessor : it would certainly be well if with this were always associated that balance and moral sense we call virtue. But is it always so, and is it likely to be generally so .-' In proportion as sympathies and susceptibilities are acute in one direction, must there be danger of undue pre- dominance ; and in proportion to their variety will be the probability of some one interfering now and again with the claims of another. When a man feels a multitude of con- flicting impulses, aspirations, and longings, he must be endowed with an exceptionally virtuous spirit in order for him to keep the middle path of virtue as securely and invariably as another. But it does not follow that he must be so endowed. He sees life, and a special phase of life haloed with the aureole of imagination ; the reality disap- points him : he then revolts against his condition, and seeks some other, not always with due regard for the claims of a partner, nor with the tender long-suffering he owes her. His mobility of temperament, and ardour of imagination are in arms against his constancy and duty. LORD BYRON AND IILS TIMES. 75 That men of genius have, for the most part, been un- happy in their domestic relations has been often affirmed and explained, and perhaps cannot well be denied. Happy are they who have proved exceptions ! happy in the noble, gentle partners God gave them, and possibly in their own highly gifted moral natures. But I do not see why sinners of genius should be inveighed against as ipso facto greater sinners than average men. Shakespeare, for instance, gives one the notion of complete sanity, and balanced universality in genius ; yet what we know of his history, and what we read in the Sonnets does not favour the idea of a perfectly proper person, who could have written perfectly proper articles in the Saturday Review. There is no use blinking the fact, moreover, that riot, self-indulgence, and the irregular life Byron lived made him just the great specific poetic personality he was — the very interpreter of his time. He drew more than any poet from personal ex- perience, and his strongly marked passionate, wandering career gave him the materials of his strongest and intensest poetry. What would this man have done if he had " lived at home and at ease ? " if he had gone out shooting all his life with Sir Ralph Milbanke, and only listened over his wine to " that damnable monologue which elderly gentle- men are pleased to call conversation } " He might have gone to church at Kirkby Mallory on Sunday, fulfilling in every way the decalogue, and the whole duty of an English- man ; but he would not have written the concluding cantos of " Childe Harold," " Cain," " Manfred," or " Don Juan ; " he would not have been Byron ; for Sorrow and Sin trod his spirit as their wine-press, and lo ! the blood-red wine of Genius, with omnipotent aroma, expressed in bitter anguish and boundless despair. " They learn in sorrow what they teach in song." All honour to " deaneries," and " angels " in bal morals, and clerical lawns for croquet. But volcanoes and earthquakes too are needed, or they would not de. " Wrong " we may brand the volcano, with its devastation ^6 ESSAYS ON POETRY AND POETS. of human cereals, dwelling-houses, and properties in general — very wrong indeed ; still " stormy wind," as well as gentle breeze, " fulfillcth His word." All are not fitted for the domestic ideal, though only fools or knaves fail to feel that, when fulfilled by high human natures, it is the very noblest, as, surely with one dear woman and sweet children, it is happiest ; the obvious and true ideal of our civilized majority. But in some there remains the wild blood of the nomade, and dweller in tents of Ishmael ; these, whether they be artists or explorers, soldiers or sailors, have their true Bohemian function elsewhere, and are simply thrown away upon drawing-rooms and deaneries, however decorous. There are, too, for that matter, women who must be single, and are better so ; Aspasias here and there it may be ; students and devotees of knowledge, monks, ascetics, and such-like abnormal persons ; hero-martyrs on occasion of some ideal cause ; none of them fitted for the honourable encumbrance of a family ; yet it may easily happen that some of these will mistake their vocation, or perish in the vain attempt to reconcile vocations that prove incompatible. Let not, however, what one has called our " unlovely temple of comfort " be regarded as though it were the very temple of God ! But it must have been with some sense of triumphant humour that Byron (he was a wag, and this must always be borne in mind) proceeded to dispose his magician's robe of stormful misanthropy in becoming folds around him, and, positively by flaunting it all sulphurous with the crime he had been banished for in the face of implacable society, brought this stern stepmother to his feet dissolved in re- pentant tears ! Now, I am far from believing that this remorseful guilt was merely invented for purposes of art ; it is so essential to the personality he generally delineates, which is substantially his own. Byron is chiefly a lyrical poet ; and I cannot think that he was either immaculate, or the fiend which Mrs. Stowe, and other virtuous writers LORD BYRON AND Ills TIMES. TJ have delineated. But an artist differs from others, in that he Hvcs a double life of experience and imagination, the first proving so much material for the second. When a man's life is so much before us, as he evidently intended it should be, when he has deliberately put his life into his poetry, we cannot ignore it. If the editor of Macmillaji's Magazine had not expressed himself so happy to introduce Mrs. Stowe's " strange story " to the British public, that might have been left alone ; but Dr. Elzc, and even Saturday Reviewers have discussed it ; so I shall here allude to it in passing. Byron avers that he never seduced a woman, by which I understand that he never took advantage of a young girl's innocence, deceiving her to her injury. But it is conceivable that he did not feel, any more than Shelley, precisely the same instinctive attractions and repulsions as the majority of mankind in sexual regions. Shelley deliberately defends incest, and Byron certainly does some- thing of the same sort in " Cain." I think with Mr. Rossetti that the evidence on this head is so conflicting that we cannot condemn him. Mrs. Stowe says Lady Byron told her that he confessed and justified the crime to her. I cannot help thinking that Lady Byron unwittingly exag- gerated this and many other circumstances of their unfortu- nate union, in talking matters over with intimate friends, and brooding over her wrongs. So admirable a man of genius, our national glory, and a noble lady of such rare excellence, with so many admirable gifts, as all who knew her agree (who but fool or knave dare deny them .?), alas ! what an irony of Fate to bring just these two together ! Ascetic purity face to face with sensuality incarnate ! If she " wanted one sweet weakness, to forgive," how much self- restraint, and chivalrous, affectionate service did he not want ? His ideas and actions were revolting to her, his very passionate impulsiveness was so ; when he broke a valuable watch out of vexation at their pecuniary embar- 78 ESSAYS ON POETRY AND POETS. rassmcnt, this seemed to her one symptom of madness, as did his other eccentricities also ; he, because she persistently rubbed his fur the wrong way, and was so rigidly implacable, became exasperated, painted himself to her in the blackest of colours, and delighted the more to shock her. The Guiccioli allows that he confessed to an unusual warmth of manner towards his sister even in the presence of Lady Byron, which familiarity is, it will be noticed, the ox\\y proof Lady Byron gave to Mrs. Stowe (for the nonsense about a child, since so amply refuted, I cannot but suppose Mrs. Stowe must have misunderstood). This unusual warmth in a fiery nature like his, where the ordinary demarcations of affection and passion arc not so definitely marked as in most men, is conceivable, and would perfectly explain Lady Byron's charge, especially as there were arguments between them, and he would be likely obstinately to justify himself — even accuse himself of actions he had not committed. His own heated imagination even may have magnified his offence — especially when he viewed it under the influence of Lady Byron, he himself not clearly distinguishing his strong affection from passion under the lurid horror re- flected from the conscience of society. For Lady Byron evidently did possess influence over him ; he respected her greatly, and it is probable even that he drew her likeness in one of the most exquisite descriptions ever penned of a pure woman, that of Aurora Raby in " Don Juan." He was eminently mobile and susceptible, and had there not been too much mutual repulsion in these two natures, had there been true love, she might have permanently influ- enced him ; but she had her own reasons for giving up the task so soon. He seems to have been often cold and cruel to her — at any rate her own instinctive aversions, and perhaps fear for her daughter, worked powerfully upon her ; but when her influence was upon him, he would feel as she did. This, and the execration of society, if only unbridled imagination had ever transgressed normal limits, would LORD BYRON AND HIS TIMES. 79 suffice to fill him with very hcU-fiic of anguish and remorse, especially as he never succeeded in shaking off that orthodox creed against which he rebelled. Thus in " Manfred " we have the most absorbing love (what can be more intense than the passionate invocation of Manfred to the spirit of his sister Astarte ?) steeped in self-accusing despair unutter- able for the injury he may have done her, for the doom he may have brought upon her in the other life, yea, for her very love which he may have forfeited, that human love which is his all in all ! His infinite is the finite, and on the bosom of the finite he falls with infinite yearning — a bosom that crumbles in his embrace, so that he falls, falls ever in the void ! But, in sooth, the mere accusation and ban of civilized society might be sufficient to inflame Byron's imagination with the idea of such a situation ; while his own morbid pleasure in self-accusations of uncommon guilt might have been almost enough originally to rivet such charges upon himself, till he at last deluded even himself into believing them. Mrs. Stowe's version of his reasons for circulating stories about the separation only among his intimates is surely very uncharitable. He might be too in- continent to suppress these altogether, and yet might, out of lingering regard for his wife, wish to imitate her quasi- reticence, which, after all, was a ^;/(?j-/- reticence chiefly ; when he worked himself into a fury about his " wrongs," he would, indeed, say anything, but, knowing he exaggerated, with caution. He was a libertine — and such men are not as delicate as they should be — a literary libertine, who habitually made reprehensible confidences about his own most private affairs. At times, from his fear of further public ignominy if these charges became still more definite than they were, knowing what Lady Byron believed, whether truly or falsely, and had told to some persons, he might even act in the spirit of such a threat as that which he is reported to have used, alluding to " Caleb Williams," that she should bear all the blame of their separation. Yet, on the other 8o ESSAYS ON rOETRY AND POETS. hand, he constantly affirmed that she was not to blame ; but he naturally shrank from such definite charges as would have been brought against him in a public court, knowing that it might be difllicult to refute them beyond controversy. Here, as everywhere, he was made up of contradictions insufficiently harmonized : he was a child of impulse, yet could often give impulse and emotion a calculated turn. What could be more inconsistent than to poison the public mind by dark innuendoes against himself, in order to make people stare, and be " interesting," and then to rant, and rave, and lament in the most eloquent poetry when the public took him at his word ? " Self-torturing sophist" he was, like Rousseau. How he longed for love and tran- quillity, and profound affection, and home, and children, and how the demons within him drove him ever out of sight of shore ! Such spiritual weakness arising from want of harmony and balance must ever produce misery. A recent writer has said that what proves him a thoroughly bad man is his abusing one mistress to another ; but these intrigues must not be judged like profound affairs of the heart ; a libertine's mistress is not likely to spare her lover after the connection is over, any more than her lover to spare her. Byron was not spared in " Glenarvon," for instance. Byron somewhere enumerates the crimes of which rumour had accused him, wonderful to say, with a curious mixture of complacency, amusement, and yet by no means affected indignation ; among others he mentions those of Tiberius, and Heliogabalus. Assuredly some of his own expressions, taken together with certain incidents of his career, may quite as easily have exposed him to scandal and exaggerations of this nature also. A cynical, unsocial person is never very leniently regarded by his neighbours, and genius seems " something uncanny " to the million. All his friendships, he affirms, were passionate. The " Hours of Idleness " abound with passionate addresses to his friends. LORD BYRON AND HIS TIMES. 8 1 "Shall fair Euryalus pass by unsung?" " Thy mind, in union with thy beauteous form, Was gentle, but unfit to stem the storm," etc. Of Lord Clare, who spent whole summer afternoons with him on the tomb in Harrow churchyard, he writes in 1 82 1, "I never hear the word Clare without a beating of the heart even now ; " and his record of their unexpected meeting on the road between Imola and Bologna that year may well be unintelligible to persons of less intense and fiery temperament. At Cambridge he was deeply attached to a young chorister, and wore a cornelian heart which the boy had given him. At Newstead, also, he felt more than usually warm friendship for the son of one of his tenants ; and on his second visit to Athens we hear nothing of the " maid," his " life," but his heart went forth to a poor youth named Nicolo Giraud, the son of a widow ; while there are some curious expressions in a letter of Shelley about his life at Venice. We can imagine what malevolent gossip might make of all this ; but is there any proof that it in- dicates more than the extravagances of a nature far more impulsive and comprehensive in its range of emotions, than is to be met with every day ? Then again, while on the one hand, he was brave and manly, much addicted to, and skilled in physical exercises, devoted to outdoor and athletic pursuits, on the other, he had a very feminine element in his character, as in his person. Hunt sneers at the rings he loved to display upon his fingers, and Ali Pacha pleased him by praising his curling hair, together with the aristo- cratic delicacy of his small ears and white hands. He was once taken for a woman in disguise, and in " Don Juan " he draws an attractive picture of the beautiful hero dressed as an Eastern princess. Not only women, but even men could not escape the magic of his fascination, and Lord Holland's little son called him " the gentleman with the beautiful voice." His countenance, like his spirit, was extra- femininely mobile, says a lady, and he could look positively G 82 ESSAYS ON POETRY AND POETS. beautiful one moment, but positively ugly the next ; surely herein his face was a reflex of his soul ! I fancy the English were a little unreasonable to cry out when Countess Guiccioli took up the cudgels for Byron, just after such very damaging statements about him had been published, ostensibly on the authority of his wife. If he turned different sides of himself to the two ladies, it seems hard if both may not be shown. The Guiccioli in her old age, having married an Anglophobe marquis, writes that she found Byron a perfect angel during the six years he was with her ; and Lady Byron herself, while analyzing his character somewhat sternly and harshly to one of her friends (she even says he only feigned enthusiasm, in which case he ought to have been a great dramatist, for he feigned enthusiasm to the life) wept when she heard of his death, owning there was an angel in him. But alas ! the Guiccioli loved him, and he loved her, as well, at least, as so libertine and disillusioned a nature could love. The picture is a touching one of him at Ravenna, when she had returned with her husband to Bologna, visiting her garden and rooms at their wonted hour of meeting, reading in her favourite books, and bursting into tears before the fountain in the garden, as he reflected what evil his love might bring upon her. This lady reclaimed him from his de- baucheries — as long as he lived he was faithful to her — and I think the charge against him of making no provision for her is one quite susceptible of a favourable explanation. Byron loved two — Mary Chaworth, and the Guiccioli. Would that he could have married his first love ! In that beautiful poem, " The Dream," he confesses that her image was in his soul, even when he stood at the altar with another — that was the crime of his life in the sight of Heaven, and a black one, however shocking his fleshly vagaries may appear to us ; but that is a crime against which civilized society has no conscience. Yet an ideal marriage demands a constancy and stability of soul, of LORD BYRON AND HIS TIMES. 83 which, alas ! men like Byron and Shelley possess little, chivalrous protectiveness, generosity, magnanimity, memory of the past, faith in the future. And what if Love dies, killed by the fading of early rose-colour, intrusion of fret- ting trivialities, familiarity that breeds contempt, habitual failure in mutual duties, great or small, ever-increasing divergence of temperament, irritability. Love's own inani- tion ? Even sadder than the death of an adored child is the death of Love. Yet surely Love, if he be Love, may sleep, may feign death, but cannot die. I verily believe it ! In two of Mr. Robert Browning's works, he attacks Byron with a strange fury, that seems to me far less psycho- logically discriminating than might have been expected from him. He pokes fun at Byron's slip of " lay " for " lie " in the deservedly celebrated passage of Childe Harold about the sea — a slip which Shelley also makes in his splendid lines on the " Apennine." We have heard a good deal about this in the newspapers, and it is all very well there ; for Byron was apt to be careless and rude in diction, as well as in rhythm ; but it seems a httle strange for Mr. Browning (of whose genius I am a very warm admirer) to pitch into him on this score, his own language being as difficult to construe as the French of Rabelais, the German of Hegel, or Bohme. However, the substance of the passage is his grand object of attack. In " Hohenstiel-Schwangau " he denies apparently that Byron was a worshipper of Nature at all ; in " Fifine " he argues that to exalt Nature so highly as Byron does is false philosophy. He affirms, however, that in his admira- tion for the sea and mountains Byron was insincere, and only meant to attract attention to himself as an admirer of the sea more than other men, using the sea merely as convenient for " hitching into a stanza." In the latter work he argues (if I rightly comprehend him) that the sea and mountains, etc., are themselves constituted by what we men please to think and feel about them. However, even on Mr. 84 ESSAYS ON POETRY AND POETS. Browning's own showing, Byron was hardly the " flatfish," and " the cackling goose " he ventures to call him. For if the sea be sublime only because a man thinks so, then, as the average tourist who crosses from Dover to Calais, even when not sick, thinks nothing of the sort, Byron, who made the sea sublime by feeling and expressing its sublimity, must be so far superior to the average man, and quite as distinguished a person as he supposed himself. In fact, however conceited, he would hardly have known himself in this tremendous role of Creator, which his philosophical antagonist by implication assigns to him. But really it is news that Byron was a humbug also in this Nature-worship, of which we had all supposed him one of the principal founders and priests ! — whose burning words of passionate adoration kindled one's own soul in boyhood to behold and worship ; whose magnificent music, sonorous with storm and ocean and all that is free, illimitable, and enduring, thrilled the very heart of Europe, compelling it as at a god's command to bow down once more, when the angels of Faith and Hope seemed to be deserting for ever the desecrated shrines of mankind. Byron felt his own soul akin to all that was wild and stormful and immense, the moods of Nature solemnly and mysteriously responding to the moods in man. What though the soul be higher than the sea ? To the sensitive and reflective spirit, the sea, the mountains, and the stars are very types and symbols of permanence, order, eternity. Nature and man are elder sister and younger brother ; she wakes intelligence and will in him ; he knows himself in knowing her ; she is a dumb and blind elder sister, whose laws inexorably bind him, while he imposes his spirit upon her, and reads spiritual meanings in her face. Man and his own soul were a chaos to Byron ; yet in heroes and good women, but above all in the order of everlasting Nature, he found again the grandeur and divinity of a Kosmos. Individual human degradation, of which we in the midst can but dimly see the issue. LORD RYRON AND HIS TIMES. 85 receives a mystic interpretation from the unconscious inno- cence of a Divine Sphere, that seems evil and good, strong and weak, not individual but universal, and which is a veiled Humanity. Thence one can look up with greater trust than before even for the worms that sting one another in the dust. Why do the Arab in the desert, the Persian on his mountain, bow before the all-beholding Sun.-* In him is no sin, no vanity, folly, falsehood, or vain ambition ; he gives life and light to all ; himself the veritable incarnation of one Invisible Sun. Surely for Byron and such as he, in the absence of revelation and philosophy, this was the best school of morality. He who loses his own personality in Nature, who lays down before her, the universal mother and tomb of humanity, his own private wrongs and griefs and fevered aspirations, hereby redresses the balance so unduly weighted with the self-will and momentary longings of one restless, passionate man. For she is one who toils not nor dreams, errs not nor supposes, raves not nor repents, but calmly fulfils herself for ever.* Mr. Browning would be impossible in those vast primeval realms where Nature still proudly asserts her dominion — where she oppresses men with creatures " burning bright in the forests of the night," shakes them from their bubble habitations in her delirium, decimates them with the breath of pestilence and famine, overwhelms them in torrents of devastating fire ! In a time when all secrets were at length supposed to be laid bare before man's microscopic understanding, all superstitions exploded, all mysteries explained ; when the universe emptied of ancient awe seemed no longer vener- able, but a hideous lazar-house rather, made visible to all human eyes in every ghastly corner of it ; before the Circe- wand of materialism, Love metamorphosed into a sensa- * I have ventured here to repeat a passage in my essay on " the inter- pretation of Nature," because it is peculiarly applicable to Byron and Words worth. 86 ESSAYS ON POETRY AND POETS. tion, and Man shrivelled to a handful of dust ; when the Body of God's own breathing world was laid with familiar irreverence upon the board of a near-sighted professor to be dissected — then the Prophet- poets, Rousseau and Byron, pointed men to the World-Soul, commanding them once more to veil their faces before the swift, subtle splendour of Life ; this they named Nature ; we may name it God ! The reaction in favour of Nature, and common humanity was indeed commenced in the generation preceding Byron — by the three great poets, Chatterton, Burns, and Blake; by the genuine poets, Shenstone, Goldsmith, Gray, Thomson, and Cowper. It was developed in its distinctively modern form equally by Byron's contemporaries, Shelley, Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Keats. Still none of Byron's contemporaries filled the European role as Nature-poets that Byron filled, though the four I have named are equally eminent in this capacity, and in some respects even his superiors. Thus Byron has not, like Wordsworth, distilled for us the very essence of Nature's gentler moods ; has not listened at her very heart, and beheld all the subtle changes of her countenance in sunshine or other tranquil joy ; has not associated these with gentle women walking along life's cool, sequestered vale, and fading quietly heavenward, nor the stern, strong power of northern mountains (which this great poet equally felt) with calm, faithful, heroic men, in however humble a guise ; while there was less in Byron of the mystical clement so hard to define, which was present with magical effect in all those I have named, and is equally present in Tennyson — though with "^Manfred " and "Heaven and Earth " before me, I cannot say that in its own form it was altogether absent. But in Wordsworth, on the other hand, there is an absence of the Titanic, diabolic element ; there is a certain hardness, or obstinate dulness, a sober, cautious rationality, a serene self-complacency begotten of good inherited physical and moral constitution, together with general comfortableness of condition, that prevented LORD BYRON AND HIS TIMES. 87 his responding fully to the mighty impulses of his time, so wise, and unwise. The people about him were con- tentedly orthodox, and he was as their fatherly minister : he viewed his own venerable image in the lakes, and smiled benignant ; very pleasant also seemed to him the stately park of Lord Lonsdale, and he thanked Providence for all Lonsdales, and stately parks. " Strong passions mean weak will," sings Mr. Patmorc ; but these are axioms that, like certain toys, will stand equally well on either end. Strong will may mean weak passions — mere fluttering impulses of a student, hardly needing the rock-built citadel of virtue to withstand them ; there is a real giant strength in a Byron, though it be ill-regulated. Nevertheless, so high-souled a poet as Wordsworth must needs break forth, ever and anon, into " a sadder and a wiser man ; " his genius was too real not to be sorrowful, too reflective not to give its own poetic, and distinctively modern colouring to the accepted creed ; while in his reconstruction of the hollow conven- tional poetic diction, as also in his resolute turning, with Crabbe, toward " the humble annals of the poor," he showed himself also in his measure a child of the Revolution, though his political sympathies might be conservative. But this Diabolic (not Revolutionary) element is far more pro- nounced in Tennyson than in Wordsworth. His range is a wide one, whatever poetlings, and criticasters may say ; witness those haunting and terrible poems, " The Vision of Sin," " Lucretius," and " Rizpah," to say nothing of " Maud." In Byron, again, there is less of what we feel in so much of Shelley, wherever Shelley is at his best — harmonious marriage of consummate feeling, imagery, and expression ; perfect poetic music, equal to that of Shakespeare, and Milton in their highest flights. We seldom feel in B3'ron's as in Shelley's lyrics, the very quintessence of ethereal spiritualization, the very soul of absolutely faultless verbal melodies, rising, falling, way\^'ard, and untameable as a fountain blown ever by the wind, subject to no law but the ESSAYS ON POETRY AND POETS. law of their own lawless and superhuman loveliness. At the same time, Shelley's Protean, impalpable, superabundant splendours of imagery and diction are on the verge of vanishing into a spray of mere verbal effects, and some- times his poetry unsuccessfully usurps the function of music proper. There was a certain absence in Shelley of that sustained architectonic creative faculty, which is akin to Reason ; an absence which, were it not for his transcendent excellence in other respects, might even militate against his claim to be considered one of our country's greatest poets. There is, however, a rare transfused fragrance, a pervading air or tone, that gives a certain unity to his brilliant compositions ; but in Byron's best work, it is a complex organic whole, with members of differentiated function, that emerges — no mere roods of floating prismatic substance, with every part, as in low organizations, equally fulfilling the function of every other. Yet he never gives an impression of mostly mechanical ingenuity, as does Southey ; his work is nourished upon passionate rational insight. Herein he is akin to the great creators ; he is clear, luminous, incisive, coherent in his descriptions ; healthy vision of a sane human creature never deserts him ; his strokes are few, yet sharp as those of a graving-tool, while Shelley's vision seems often blurred and confused. But it is only the general character of an object Byron gives ; and where he tries to be delicate and feathery in his touches, like Wordsworth, Keats, or Shelley, he frequently becomes merely tame and conventional. Moreover, in justice to Wordsworth, it must be allowed that there are tedious lengths of somewhat commonplace verse even in the early tales, as likewise in the early parts of Childe Harold — plenty of them assuredly in the dramas. In seeking for a tiote of this peculiar modern Nature- worship, I think we must set down as a principal one. Pantheism, either overt or implicit. For it is a worship — precisely as the Scandinavian and Greek Mythologies are LORD BYRON AND HIS TIMES. 89 worships — only in a modern form ; and there was less of this in Spenser, Shakespeare, the Fletchers, Browne, Drayton, or Milton, although in these poets delight in external nature was most fresh and genuine. But no less in Byron, Wordsworth, and Coleridge than in Shelley, there was worship of the creature ; though in Byron, because he had less metaphysical grasp of thought, in Wordsworth because by conviction he was a theist, the Pantheism was implicit ; while in Shelley, as in Goethe, it was overt. In Tennyson, a theist, it is again implicit. Goldsmith, and his genera- tion, have not more of it than Chaucer. The fifth great nature-worshipper, Keats, is so far not pantheistic, because he is to all intents and purposes a polytheistic Greek myth- maker, born out of due time. He personified Nature — as, indeed, to a large extent did Spenser, and the other Eliza- bethans, and Chatterton ; where he does not, he endows her with animation akin to the human, which again reveals in him implicit pantheism. But Goldsmith (like the lesser Georgian poets, Rogers, Milman, etc.) regards the external world as the creation of a personal God, simply recording what he sees, and the pleasure it gives him, together with its remoter associations ; always putting Nature well outside himself, humanity, and God, as something just created to be perceived, and give us emotions — or food and raiment. Byron's tales are delightfully steeped in a sunny Eastern atmosphere — though, perhaps, they are hardly equal in this respect to the few wonderful lines depicting Eastern travel in his own " Dream," to Eothen, or Beckford's " Vathek." Byron's later story, " The Island," is, however, deliciously suffused with the tropical glow, though the versification and diction of it are in his most curiously careless, and objec- tionable manner. Like the best lyrics of Heine, Burns, and Scott, Byron's are more alive with warm humanity, go more to the heart of mankind, than those lovely dissolving phantasmal ones of Shelley ; though it is to be admitted that there is a vein go ESSAYS ON POETRY AND POETS. of coarse earthliness and commonness about Byron that makes many of his lyrics poor and wooden, as Shelley's never are. But his best are rich with a masculine sorrow, often graceful, and tenderly musical in the highest degree. One need name only " Bright be the place of thy soul," " When we two Parted," " The Wild Gazelle," the poems to his sister, and Thyrza, Yet the most original and dis- tinguished of Byron's lyrical work is certainly that in which his manifold wrath, his passion for wild life, and his ardour for human freedom, are embodied. How glorious the " Isles of Greece," how fine " Sennacherib," and "The Song of Saul ;" how powerful the " Ode on Bonaparte," and the "Ode from the French ! " The most concentrated venom of hate is distilled into the lyric, " When the Moon is on the Wave," in " Manfred." But his odes, on the whole, are not equal to Shelley's, whose passion for human liberty was quite as ardent, and more spiritual than Byron's ; purified by his longing for a reign of Love and Peace ; so that he breaks ever and anon into heavenly seraphic strains, as in " Hellas," and " Prometheus," borne aloft upon the strong wings of varied l}'rical measures that never fail him. Shelley's fury of indignation in face of armed oppression is at white-heat and tremendous ; but there is a want of steadfast distinctness of thought, and aim, and feeling, even here. . Byron may droop his pinion and flounder ; but he never lacks this manful grasp of his theme ; rejoicing, more- over, like AntJEus, in the touch of his mother earth, in the coarse common human effort, and mixed stormy strife by which deliverance and the age of gold must be fought for sternly, inch by inch. Hence, men in general will always feel his poetry more germane to them and to the real world. Shelley, the Peri, like his own skylark, sings to us from the sky. The finest of the " Tales," to my mind (it belongs to his later period), is " The Prisoner of Chillon ; " that is in perfect harmony, and unutterably beautiful, with its LORD BYRON AND HIS TIMES. 9I solemn organ-peal of the " Sonnet to Liberty " as overture. There is all Scott's unity of effect here, and more than his aroma of poetry indefinable. For Scott, it should be remembered, deliberately gave up the field of verse-poetry to his younger rival ; he felt, and felt rightly, that they had much in common as poets, but that there was a je ne sais qtioi about Byron's metrical work that made it for the most part rarer and higher in quality ; they were both romantic poets, delighting in themes of love, and strife, and pageantry — with the supernatural, mysterious element toning down the brilliancy of their work here and there. Scott had more of the plot-constructing faculty than Byron, and far more dramatic power : accordingly, he became the greatest writer of prose fiction in the English language. For I can- not think (with all our abundant talent in this region) that, regarding him as a spontanco7is creative poet, in the wider sense of that word, any English man or woman has ever rivalled him — except the man who surpasses all, Shakes- peare — though Dickens and Charlotte Bronte have their own place apart, and Thackeray runs Scott very near. In the " Bride of Lammermoor," by the way, Scott has achieved, I think, a finer work of art than Byron himself, in Byron's own literary vein. Moreover, Scott's feeling of the supernatural in Nature comes out especially in his novels, notably in the " Monastery." This is very real and magical, and quite the feeling of mediaeval romance, allowing for the difference of intellectual belief; but all that was in his blood, and the traditions upon which he had been nourished. It is quite akin to Pagan Poly- theism, and is just the Nature-worship that could not be expelled altogether by the crude carpenter-theory, which the established religion had made orthodox. The old gods might be devils and witches, as had been decreed ; but, anyhow, they would not be expelled altogether ; there they were mysteriously animating or inhabiting certain elements of Nature. The clouds were full of angels or 92 ESSAYS ON POETRY AND POETS. demons, the white light was God's throne, while fairies peopled the woods and streams. This feeling of physical elements as a Jiabitat for spiritual beings is always associated with an instinctive fancy (or rather intuition) that they are a natiiral/y fit habitation for them ; such spirits are virtually the souls corresponding to the bodies of these elements, the ideas, or spiritual essences of them personified — a concep- tion justified even by Science, when she teaches that man is a final cause and consummation, a more perfectly developed truth, as it were, implicit in physical agencies ; this Humanity repeating in a higher sphere the life of Nature, which is under one aspect that higher life in the forming, and repeating more emphatically in some personalities than in others the special type of certain physical agencies — flowing stream in one man, stolid mountain in another. But the Polytheistic feeling that these agencies are distinct though living powers, in communion with man, and influ- encing him, seems more essentially true. Thus in Dante's colossal poem, all the material imagery is informed with spiritual significance ; it is the elaborate embodiment of great moral and spiritual ideas ; and Dante evidently looked with his earnest eyes upon the visible universe as God's grand symbol ; though, of course, his creed was Catholic and Theistic. In " Childe Harold " there are passages which must hold their own for ever in the ranks of English poetry : — "Once more upon the waters ! yet once more ! And the waves bound beneath me as a steed That knows his rider ! Welcome to their roar ! Swift be their guidance wheresoe'er they lead ! Though the strained mast should quiver as a reed, And the rent canvas fluttering strew the gale, Still must I on, for I am as a weed Flung from the rock on ocean's foam to sail, Where'er the surge may sweep, the tempest's breath prevail ! " The exquisite lines that refer to Waterloo can hardly be forgotten, nor those sweet, peaceful ones about Lake LORD BVRON AND HIS TIMES. 93 Lcman, that breathe the twin influence of Leman and of Shelley, nor the magnificent reverberation in clanging words of an Alpine thunderstorm : — " Lausanne ! and Feiney 1 ye have been the abodes Of names vvhicli unto you bequeathed a name ! " Ay, and what of Rousseau's Clarens ; of Geneva, the city of Calvin, that other great Genevese reformer, and now of De Stael's Coppet and Byron's Diodati ? These all, with Bonnivard, are a felt presence by Leman — consecrating her shores and her waters. I went to Diodati lately. It was deserted, and we wandered through the rooms and about the garden where Byron and Shelley had sat con- versing — where Milton too had set his foot in days gone by ! When Byron returned to Diodati, after sitting late into the night with Shelley on the opposite shore, the Shelleys from their chamber used to hear his rich voice singing across the water in his boat. Like Julie and St. Preux, he and Shelley were once nearly wrecked in a boat off Meillerie. This was the period at which one loves to think of the two poets together, and after- wards at Venice, when they rode daily on the Lido. The fourth Canto, however, is grandest of all, has some of the finest descriptive poetry in our language. It opens wor- thily with Venice in her sad glory. How^ splendidly is the poet Tasso contrasted with his princely oppressor, Alphonso of Ferrara ! How the thunder and lightning of Terni's Cataract have passed into the shouting stanzas ! All the noble verses concerning Rome and her departed glories, her ruins and her triumphs of art, are worthy of the great subject. But what misery ! — " P'or all are meteors with a different name ; And Death the sable smoke where vanishes the flame ! " With that " Marah of misanthropy and despair within," whom couldst thou trust, who could trust thee ? Not even God to trust in, or the Divine All, which is self-reconciled, 94 ESSAYS ON POETRY AND POETS. and of which thou wast one Age's world-agonizing Spirit ! After a stately and most pathetic lamentation over Princess Charlotte, there grow upon the soul and resound those ocean murmurs, which are the conclusion and crowning poetry of a poem that will be forgotten only with its native tongue. Vanishes here the " Pilgrim of Eternity" : — " B^ SaKewf irapa ffivd iro\v\oli0oio BaKaffaris." But since Byron, let us remember that the Age is awakening to new life — " The age of ruins is past." It is full of Devil and Mammon worship, death, agony, and vulgar fever ; but he is no great poet who daintily hides himself from it in the study or the studio. The people are awake ; each must enter into the life of the rude giant ; he only who does so dare pretend to see beyond. There are great wars, and national movements, wonderful inven- tions, terrible conflict of principles ; the world is recreated at the breath of science ; our explorers visit all countries, and Columbus-like discover new continents : " Pioneers ! O Pioneers ! " Byron, in " Don Juan " especially, has shown a boundless creative imagination of the realistic order. Where men and women of a certain type are concerned —and that type is by no means so limited as Macaulay and some other critics have maintained — where the grander elements of Nature are in question, as also, in the evocation of high thoughts and feelings of a definite range in connection with these, he is first-rate, as frequently in tenderness. But for the creation of ideal worlds and their denizens, governed by lofty, reflec- tive, imaginative purpose, and requiring sustained flights in high spiritual atmospheres, we must turn to Dante, Milton, or Shakespeare. In Byron fine typical personifications are rare, such as we find in Spenser, or Chatterton — Byron's " War," in " Childe Harold," being adapted from a finer personification in the " Marvellous Boy." Yet the strangely beautiful "dramatic mystery," " Heaven and Earth," might f.ORD BYRON AND HIS TIMES. 95 almost be excepted from this criticism, for here the gloom of coming Deluge and its deepening terrors are palpably, yet with appropriate indistinctness of visionary imagery, rolled around mystic loves of " woman wailing for her demon lover." Here there is much of the fine sweep of a great idealistic artist's brush : still even this required imagination of a far less idealistic order than the construction of a Pan- demonium, a Hell, or a Purgatory. Bring that sea, and those mountains, which the poet knew so well, together — the great spectacular phenomena of mountain, cloud, and ocean — and there looms the Deluge. Byron's wonted range of subject and treatment is hardly here self-surpassed. His personages, even his immortals, are still embodiments of the same feelings, thoughts, and desires. Yet the dim out- lines of those exulting demons in the twilight ; those angel- forms, and the women who call them, Aholibamah, and tender Anah ; the good men, Japhet and Noah ; Raphael appearing to summon the new rebel angels to their duty ; the welter of common mortals struggling with doom — all this forms a magnificent lurid picture of a " world before the flood," that is almost worthy of our loftier spiritual masters. Still there is little here of sustained imaginative incarnation, and realization of spiritual things, with wizard flashings of weird, yet appropriate detail, helping to impress the Daedal individualities sprung from the brain of their creator upon us. The Melancholia of Durer, Sin and Death, Caliban, those apocalyptic souls in the Doom- circles of the Florentine, the regions wherein they dwell awfully aware with populous imagery, whereunto they appear as native — think of these ! and again of fantastic dream-worlds, self-involved and subtly infinite like the rose — " Midsummer Night's Dream," " The Tempest," Shelley's " Prometheus," visions of Calderon, Keats, and Coleridge. Nevertheless, there is a harmonious lyrical atmosphere pervading this grand shadowy creation, which sets it by itself as a great ideal work of a master, who is perhaps 96 ESSAYS ON rOETRY AND POETS. greatest as a realistic poet. There is also one magnificent verse in the " Vision of Judgment " describing Satan, which, if it were not somewhat a reminiscence of Milton, one might pronounce Miltonic. But although I hold with Shelley, Goethe, Scott, and Wilson, that " Cain " is one of the finest poems in our language, the early portion of the poem, wherein Byron may be said to enter into direct competition with Milton, is surely a failure. There is no soul-overwhelming gran- deur at all in those queer regions of space to which he conducts Lucifer and Cain, while the verse halts terribly. In the long discourse of Lucifer with Cain we discern little difference between them, while we do painfully feel here, as elsewhere in Byron where thought is wanted, that if Byron had been a thinker like Dante, or Milton, or Goethe, he might have sat beside the three greatest poets of Europe — Homer, Dante, and Shakespeare ; but the lucubrations of Cain and Lucifer lack vigour and point, as those of Faust and Mephistopheles never do. It is in the human element, however, that Cain is so magnificent, as a great dramatic picture. And I cannot but think that though Byron is not a great dramatist, he is a great dramatic painter. I believe it is Wilson who says, that his groups and personages are as statuesque bronzes cast in the fire. It is to be recol- lected that Goethe, who ought to be an authority, most highly praised his dramas. Certainly he has not the won- derful skill in dramatic dialogue of Landor ; nor in dramatic monologue of Mr. Browning. But where Byron is effective in drama, it is by lyrically pouring the quintessence of his characters into the mould of one supreme situation, capable of realizing them with the utmost intensity. This seems to be somewhat true of Hugo also, though Hugo has more plot-constructing faculty — arranges and dovetails his inci- dents with all the skill of Calderon — and heightens his effects by varying, as it were, and multiplying with tremen- dous prodigality of power such great effective situations. LORD BVRON AND HIS TIMES. 97 Rut there is little Shakespearian development of character in Byron, yet I should maintain, as against the ordinary criticism, that Byron can realize characters of a type opposite to that one type most congenial to his genius, sufficiently to present these as truly and vitally influ- encing one another, especially in certain supreme scenes or situations. That is not so in " Manfred," which is a mere monologue ; but it is so in " Cain," " Marino Faliero," and " Sardanapalus." From the third act onward, Cain becomes and continues magnificent — from where Cain mutters forebodings over little Enoch, his own and his sister Adah's child, while she gently remonstrates, to where Cain is contrasted with Abel, as the spirit of revolt and denial with that of tranquil faith, rising to utmost heights of moral dignity and wrath, where Abel confronts the blasphemer who would overthrow the chosen altar of Jeho- vah, his own proud offering lying unaccepted, his own altar smitten to the dust. There is nothing in English poetry finer for tragic intensity and pathos, than the supreme scene where Cain strikes his brother dead with a brand snatched from the altar, then bows in horrified remorse over the corpse — he who so sullenly arraigned the fated Doom, fated through his own passions, half-righteous and half-evil, to bring himself that dreaded Doom into the world ; Eve, the mother of all, cursing with terrific energy her own eldest- born, slayer of her well-beloved son ; gentle Zillah, Abel's wife, lamenting over him ; and Adah, one of the most perfect types of holy womanhood in literature — Adah, when the dark smitten murderer bids her leave him alone, only answering with troubled wonder, " Why, all have left thee ! " Then Cain, the brand upon his brow, wanders forth with Adah into the wilderness, she leading their little Enoch by the hand, kissing Abel's cold clay, and praying " Peace be with him ! " to which Cain in the last words of this great poem responds, " But with vie ! " Byron's Cain is by no means a very wicked man ; he is surprised as it H 98 ESSAYS ON POETRY AND POETS. were into the murder, and, as matters are here represented, we feel that he did well to be angry. He with becoming dignity makes an offering appropriate to him, according to his light, which he may well hope that the all-seeing, just God will accept ; he is throughout half-doubtful about his God, half-defiant of what seems to himself evil in that God. His very objection to the sacrifice of innocent animals proves him to be humane, and a foe to all cruel oppression, as also his abhorrence of human vengeance, even in Deity, if it were true that Deity needed to be propitiated by bloody sacrifice. Need Christians any longer think this poem very blasphemous? That there are ";/^ ideas" in Byron, moreover, Mr. Arnold in the face of this poem should scarcely maintain ; and Goethe goes a little too far when he says, " He is a child when he begins to reflect." I conceive " Cain " to be the philosophico-imaginative con- summation to which the " Tales," " Manfred," and " Childe Harold " tended. Together with " Manfred," moreover, it proves Mr. Browning's objection as to Byron's unduly exalting Nature over men, a somewhat unfortunate one. If you must judge a poet as you would a didactic philo- sopher, I should say that Byron's error is, on the contrary, in unduly exalting the individual human spirit ; in a lack of humility and resignation. Cain, like Faust, is insatiably curious, and chafes against the limitations of human know- ledge ; yet he represents a faithless, desultory time, which ours still is, moreover ; for in this region of the intellect, he rather seems angry at not knowing without being at the trouble of learning ; he takes no laborious pains reverently to seek truth. In that, too, Byronism represents an age of rather shallow scepticism, that sneers and sighs over the insolubility of problems, which it is too weak and idle man- fully to grasp — but with a doom overshadowing himself, his beloved ones, and all mankind, which seems to him unintelligible and unjust, he refuses to be meekly happy and content, even though he loves Adah and hi? child. He LORD BYRON AND HIS TIMES. 99 is the genius of speculative yearning, oppressed and over- cliargcd with evil within, the curse of hereditary sin ; mor- bidly sensitive to evil without ; overclouding- all past, present, and prospective good with the gloom of his own sullen frown, out of which must inevitably spring the lightning of his crime ; even by the side of his own true wife and his own sweet boy, alone! In a fine sonorous invective Lucifer avers that God Himself, however powerful, must be most miserable of all — for He is the most alone. Could He but annihilate Himself and all ; but alas for His and our imniortality ! Of such a God — proud, capricious, re- vengeful, apart — had Byron heard from accredited teachers. Cain finds too that " the tree of knoivledge is not that of life." Byron's is the wail of baffled human understanding, with- out faith, hope, resignation, self-control, inward harmony. But if in " Cain " he defies heaven, in " Manfred " he defies hell, and denies the power of any evil spirits over him, asserting proudly, and with truly sublime daring, his own spiritual independence and dignity. He is a Pagan, not a Christian, though with some genuine Christian sympa- thies, and a Hebrew creed still hanging about him. But he never holds up self-sacrifice, humility, or patience ; is always haughty and aggressive ; he endures, indeed, but somewhat less than a Pagan — he more actively despairs and rebels. Christianity has taught him discontent with this life, but he cannot accept the solutions of her theologians ; so with tenfold more bitterness than Atrides exclaiming to Zeus, when his sword broke in his hand, " There is no God more evil-minded than thou " — than the Neapolitan fisher- man beating the image of his Saint, who sends storms instead of fine weather — Byron defies and rails against his Deity. But of course he had only a lingering notion that the popular representation might be true, and that there was really a Creator, who, having created immortal spirits, tyrannically forbids them, as Lucifer finely phrases it, " A' lOO ESSAYS ON POETRY AND POETS. ?isi' tJicir immortality^' their reason, their conscience, and their heart. It is against this God, formed in the image of priests and kings, that Lucifer and Cain rebel, rather than against the true Author and Essence of Things. Of this true Author and Essence of Things Byron had un- fortunately, from the circumstances of his time, and his own want of philosophic grasp, very little idea ; yet he believed in a God ; and very naturally, however irrationally, confounded the true God with the current orthodox con- ception of Him, against which he inveighed — if vaguely, still with enlightened soul, knowing that God was by theology caricatured, and that the vulgar conception was monstrous, and to be fought against. But after all, this was a dominant conception, one that had always been dominant more or less ; the force of education, authority, universal conviction, practically moulding all the relations of society, together with the poet's own ineffectual habit of thought, forced the idea on him as a kind of reality ; but his better, yet audacious self, dared to wrestle with it, even on this basis of its dubious reality ; so Job ventures to argue with the Lord. In fact, a half-truth this belief must be, and for long it has been to mankind as a whole truth ; " the times of this ignorance God winked at ; " but the idea of Him must be slowly purified. Acquiescence in evil is not altogether desirable, and to pronounce evil good, because divinely appointed, may be to fetter our- selves, the human race, and its destiny of progress. The established fact, the conventional morality, the existing order of society — none of these are final. Good at one time, they may become evil at another. Then God is no longer in them, but rather in rebellion against them. There might even be an evil Demiurgus, God of this world, as some Gnostics believed ; if so, Byron will not worship him. Byron holds the human spirit, or at least the elect human spirit, with its eternal reason and sense of justice, essentially equal to any gods or devils whatsoever, however LORD HVRON AND HIS TIMIiS. lOI powerful these may be. And here he is right. A God who should gag and degrade our reason and conscience by mere externally imposed authority cannot be the true, or the fully revealed God. He is within — the substantial reason and conscience of Humanity — most manifest in Christ, the Human God, the Divine Man. So is brought to light a higher eternal self in conscious solidarity with the Divine universal will. Both Manfred and Cain hurl defiance at the very skies. What makes Cain sound blasphemous is that Cain believes in Jehovah, yet defies him ; this is pre- cisely as Shelley's Prometheus defies Zeus ; but we have been brought up to call this apparent wrong of theology right, because we are assured that it is divinely revealed, whereas we should have asked ourselves, hoiv can doctrines be revealed unless by an anti-Christ or tisurping God, if they are irratioiial or immoral? Lucifer and Cain, like Pro- metheus, are champions of human liberty. The ultimate arbiter. Fate, will dethrone the unjust Zeus in the end. To this true God they virtually appeal, and they cannot be disappointed ; or in other words, they really appeal from God in His partial, to God in His fuller revelation of Him- self, which He is indeed making through themselves. Yet their shallow presumption and irreverence He disapproves and punishes ; still it is He, the incarnate World-Spirit, striving in them to free Himself, though he justifies also the humble, holy Abels. If the evil cannot be destroyed, it can be chained down ; the good, and just, and rational is lord over the evil and inane ; that is a slave, a drudge, essential indeed, yet subordinate and to be subordinated. One can indeed only sympathize /^/'//y with this revolt ; it is in part directed against the very nature of things, against the true Sovereign God, who must be beyond our right and wrong — right in a manner and degree to which our rectitude cannot attain. Neither Byron nor Shelley were possessed with that aive which becomes a mortal before the unfathomable mystery. Even in his beloved storms Byron felt little 102 ESSAYS ON POETRY AND POETS. spiritual awe, was chiefly "sharer in their fierce and far de- light," or recklessly contemptuous of humanity's weakness- Cain's sullen hatred of effort and labour, his want of patient faith, his obstinate self-will, his ignorance of how to conquer Fate by calmly accepting it, or circumventing it by fertility of resource, this is truly evil and folly, and miserable weak- ness ; such, for instance, are some recent insane develop- ments of anarchic irreligion. Like the later pessimists, Leopardi and Schopenhauer, Byron cannot see that the higher blessedness may be — so far as we know can only be — born out of sorrow and pain, even out of experience of moral evil. Macaulay says Byron can only paint one man, and one woman — a gross exaggeration ; for Don Juan, and Sardana- palus are so different from Cain that they cannot be con- founded ; and as to women, it is mere confusion of thought to confound Adah, Angiolina, Zarina, Donna Julia, Haidee, Gulnare, and IMyrrha, wonderfully realized, and thoroughly feminine types all of them. Gulnare is the passionate, fierce beautiful southern woman, of which type Byron has given us many brilliant portraitures. Haidee is a loving, passionate girl, but a thoroughly innocent, albeit fieiy-natured one — she might indeed become Gulnare, but she is something totally distinct. Adah is not to be surpassed for heavenly, yet human, tender, unsullied perfection of womanliness — a perfect sister, mother, wife ; she is not surpassed in Shakes- peare, Victor Hugo, George Sand, Walter Scott ; even the Marguerite of Goethe is only equal to her. Then we have Zarina in " Sardanapalus," Angiolina in " Marino Faliero," skilfully painted women of a totally different order — noble women too — both evidently intended for idealized por- traitures of Lady Byron — self-possessed, stately, somewhat cold, yet excellent and affectionate. In " Don Juan," how marvellously good is Donna Julia — and her letter, how immortally inimitable ! We have again Lady Adelaide Amundeville, a very clever sketch of an English lady of LORD BYRON AND MIS TIMES. IO3 fashion, and the sweet seraphic Aurora Raby, a sort of English Adah. " Aurora Raby, a young star who shone O'er life, too sweet an image for such glass, A lovely being scarcely formed or moulded, A rose with all its sweetest leaves yet folded. She gazed upon a world she scarcely knew. As seeking not to know it ; silent, lone. As grows a flower, thus quietly she grew, And kept her heart secure within its zone. There was awe in the homage which she drew ; Her spirit seemed as seated on a throne Apart from the surrounding world, and strong In its own strength." Myrrha in " Sardanapalus " is a heroine of the antique type, beautiful and splendid-souled, rousing the luxurious monarch to lofty action. If Byron had possessed the instincts of a great dramatist (but remember he was still young, and developing when he died), he could never have surrendered himself to the bondage of the so-called " unities." Yet on the whole he may instinc- tively have felt that these laws furnished him with certain artificial restraints, helpful to his desultory though intense genius ; serving as a kind of blowpipe to concentrate its flame upon one supreme moment. It is indeed difficult to deliver a verdict on the dramas. For " Sardanapalus " is a very fine play, and " Marino Faliero " shows real dramatic power, yet is scarcely a good drama ; while the " Two Foscari " is dull and wooden, and " Werner " a mere plagiarism. The blank verse of Byron's dramas is probably the v/orst ever written by a great poet ; the lines end in the awkwardest of monosyllabic parts of speech, "ands""ofs," etc. There is no harmonious flexibility and resonance in the metre at all ; and there is a quantity of tedious prose cut up into lengths. His ear was indeed most uncertain. The motive in " Marino Faliero " strikes one as inadequate to support the play's action, as Byron has represented that motive ; he has not skilfully made us feel the mixed half- 104 ESSAYS ON POETRY AND POETS. unconscious influences that probably prompted the old Doge. Yet the fiery old man is finely drawn, and the scene where he reveals himself to the conspirators in their midnight meeting is full of stormy power, and thoroughly true to nature, the conflict of feelings in the Doge as an aristocrat in such a position being subtly realized. Here again Byron draws from within. The concluding scene (the execution) is eminently picturesque. But " Sardana- palus " is certainly a very fine play — a great dramatic success, though it is, perhaps, hardly equal to Otway, " The Cenci," Sheridan, or to a great English play of recent times. Sir Henry Taylor's "Philip van Artevelde." In " Sardanapalus " however, we behold (so far as the " unities " allow) the march of tragic historic events, and these have a palpable influence in developing the character of a luxurious, .effeminate, yet amiable, generous, and ultimately heroic monarch. Myrrha, moreover, the grand Greek maiden, together with Salemenes, the stern, honest warrior, who, though but a sketch, is lifelike and well-realized, have a noble influence upon the king, who can appreciate their elevated characters. There is a weak side to the play, no doubt, as Bishop Hebcr pointed out — in the group of Arbaces, and Beleses the priest, who arc not dramatically represented in their mutual relations with one another. Admirable, however, is the scene wherein Sardanapalus surprised feasting in his summer pavilion by those rebels, whom with indolent good-nature he has half-pardoned, starts forth, worthy of his ancestors, an avenging warrior, though too late ; calling, in his vanity, for a mirror while arming, and for his most bejewelled helmet, as lighter, more becoming to his delicate beauty, and also more conspicuous to friends and foes, even though it expose him to a death which he half-recklessly courts. Excellent too are the battle scenes, full of lusty movement and all the din of onset. Nowhere has Byron so fully dramatized himself as here, I suspect, though the gloomy phase of his LORD BYRON AND HIS TIMES. 105 character is suppressed ; but the hero is a half-sceptical epicurean, masculine and brave, yet with many a feminine trait. Whatever our verdict on Byron as dramatist, it remains to be remarked that he was one of the greatest satirists England has produced — three only (if so many) can be elevated to stand beside him — Swift, Pope, and Butler. Thackeray can hardly be placed so high, nor Dryden — though as wit he has no doubt other rivals, and as a humorist he is surpassed by Shakespeare and Dickens. But in scathing, savage, half-playful banter — playful as a tiger — in master- ful, annihilating strokes of witty indignation — he has again a song, as Goethe says, " all his own " — in spite of Pulci and Whistlecraft ; he is Apollo discharging his arrows at the Python, Michael with his proud foot upon the body of Satan. The scornful wit of the " Vision of Judgment" is Titanic — as where "Turncoat Southey" offers to Satan to write his life, and Satan declining with a bow, Southey glibly appeals to Michael the Archangel with the same tempting offer. Here is George III. — " a]id amidst them an old man with an old soul, and both extremely blinds Then what terrific lines those are on the Prince Regent, on occasion of his presence at the opening of the coffins of Charles I. and Henry VHI. ! But I admit that " Don Juan " is on the whole Byron's greatest work. Byron had a good deal of the eighteenth century, and also of the Restoration period about him, after all. The era of the Regency was, for scoffing profli- gacy, not at all unlike that of the Restoration, and the con- genial literary influence on him, not only of Pope, Dryden, and their bitter personal animosities, but of licentious Restoration dramatists, and of light, cynical men, such as Rochefoucauld, Grammont, and Horace Walpole, is very palpable. He was moulded also by English writers like Smollett and Fielding ; certain libertine French novels too reappear in his works. Yet I own " Don Juan " seems to I06 ESSAYS ON POETRY AND POETS. mc morality itself compared to a rotten whitcd sepulchre of a book like " Chesterfield's Letters." Still the immoral laxity of tone is not to be denied. If Byron had not led the dissipated life he did, and moved for some time in "good society" also, he could certainly not have written this " man of the world's " poem, which is that, though something more. But whatever advantage he and Moore may have derived from " knowing life," it was not a moral one, and there is an odour by no means of sanctity, a rather sulphurous odour indeed, a certain conventional humbug and hollowness and disbelief in good, that clings both to the man and to his writings, simply because, while he spurned the whole lot of enamelled corpses as poet, free- man,_ and idealist, yet as aristocrat and man of fashion he was half one of them, and even looked up with envy to creatures like Beau Brummell, and " the first gentleman in Europe." This taint has made Byron distasteful to some who should have taken a more comprehensive view ; but assuredly Byron has not quite shaken off the polite cere- ments he spurns. In Burns and Shelley you breathe a purer atmosphere. Shelley is a sort of volatile seraph ; Burns is inconstant, but ever a true passionate man, as Walter Scott is also. If Byron's head was of gold, his feet were of cla}-. For all this, " Don Juan " is one of the world's great poems. Byron himself claimed that he had therein pro- duced a true epic ; and I have always thought with some reason. Is it not the epic of that transition period in Europe } The poem reflects faithfully that age's varying moods, grave and gay, moods of stirring strife and battle, of enterprize and revelry — its appetite for pleasure, its cynical, epicurean scepticism, denial, and mockery — together with the opposite mood of sentiment, pathos, bitter despair, as well as nature-worship — reverence for feudalism, refine- ment, and tradition — revolt in favour of simplicity, plain goodness, and common humanity. It revels in war, yet LORD BYRON AND HIS TIMES. 107 inveighs against the tyranny and barbarism thereof ; it reverences the ideal, yet refuses to behold it in life — chiefly on account of its own wanton pcrverseness, and half blasc^, half childish irreverence of soul. Even in the poem's very want of artistic proportion, of beginning, middle, or ending proper, in its daringoriginality of form, metre, and language, it is faithful to the spirit of the time. For Auerbach justly remarks that World- Sorrow, and we should add Negation, or Heine's " Weltsvernichtung," cannot produce the perfect work of art. Byron in fact never did. But Don Juan was a well-known modern European Type, of which Byron made his own use : the poet had pitched at last upon the very subject and very manner perfectly adapted to develop his transcendent powers : — " I rattle on exactly as I'd talk With anybody in a ride or walk. " He needed not here to be always up on the heroic stilts, whether raised aloft by his theme or no ; and in his graver work the small critics often caught him getting off the high horse in those inevitable intervals of flight when Pegasus desires to crop the earthly grass. And then they assembled shouting that this was a poet with a " bad ear," a careless, uncertain poet, with inadequate powers of expression ; for in moments of less lofty emotion a flrst-rate poet, they tell us, should make mouths and beat the air, and s^iy pudding, prunes, and prism, and many " blessed words " like " Meso- potamia" to make the vulgar believe that he is always at the boiling-point of inspiration. If he cannot be ever moving, he can at least blow the steam off ostentatiously when he stops. But what perfect English is " Don Juan ! " — it has always the right word ready. Alas ! how^ icw poets write English now ! In " Don Juan " the measure and language seem to shape themselves out of the sense and intent of the narrative ; here the style is to the matter what the foam and impetus and tumult are to the wave. " Don I08 ESSAYS ON POETRY AND POETS. Juan " is diffuse ; its egotistic, half-chaffy gossip is often empty enough, occasionally even a little tiresome ; but we have always to admire its facile masterfulness of rhyme and metre, while it is always relieved by endless versatility of matter, and changeableness of mood. Cynical it is certainly, and world-weary ; but half its paradox is chaff There is a vein of rollicking buffoonery through the whole, which by ponderous moralists is always missed. " I rattle on exactly as I'd talk " — ^just so, and we know the half-grave, half-gay nonsense Byron talked. The man was half an Aristophanes, half a Rabelais. His buffoonery at Newstead with the monk's skull for drinking cup, and monk's robes of sack- cloth — his dressing up the statues of Neville's Court at Trinity with surplices — his popping with his pistol at those stone ornaments on the house-roof opposite his own at Missolonghi, till all the old women came howling out to remonstrate with this eccentric Milordo, who had arrived to deliver Greece, and leave his weary life in their fever jungles — his hilarious practical jokes — all showed the grown-up schoolboy. If you weep too much over this man, fair ladies and sad young gentlemen, even though he bid you weep, he will look up laughing in your faces, and overwhelm you with mockery : you must not take all he sings for gospel ; in the very heart of this there is a hollowness and a jeer ; and surely he who has laid his hand upon the very heart of God's universe must be, like Byron, both a weeping, and a laughing philosopher ! Writers have become indeed more radically miserable since Byron. I can hear no merriment in the ghastly " Contes Drolatiques" of Balzac, none in the hollow spectral mockery of Heine, none in the despair of Leopardi. After all, Byron is no hysteric young French- man to be manipulated by a mistress, and shoot himself! His intellectual and emotional range is vast ; he can thunder and rave and laugh like the sea. For the rest, as he says himself, if he laughs, it is often that he may not weep. LORD BYRON AND I IIS TIMES. IO9 And there is indeed much of bitterness and disappointment in his hilarity ; he is still misanthropic, and incredulous of human excellence ; but he will try now to disburthen himself of his sorrow by a jest or an epigram. Reckless dis- sipation, and carnal excesses, may have dimmed his ideal, and he comes before us more as a roii(! man of the world, or light-hearted sceptic ; but after all he cannot always keep the mask on, and when he removes it we behold a great and true man in tears — " Childe Harold " himself, but less egotistic in his thoughts and aims and interests, less inclined to "pose," with maturer digested knowledge of men and things than before ; on one side of his face, indeed, a hoary, world-weary sinner, but on the other a still generous, adventurous, high-spirited boy. Nowhere in Byron can I, for my part, discern, the " fiend gloating triumphantly over human frailties," which some profess to see. Rousseau, let alone the Bible, would have taught him better than that, and did teach him better. In clear, graphic, realistic narrative power, as well as in humour, Byron in " Don Juan " reminds one of Chaucer and Boccaccio, while his descriptions of human loveliness have all the luscious, luminous colouring of Ovid, or Cor- reggio ; nay, there never were, and never will be such descriptions. The harem scenes are in this respect un- rivalled. Is there anything quite equal to that lovely idyl of Haidee and Juan's love after the shipwreck on the beautiful island ? Such incidents as those of the shipwreck, the siege of Ismail, and the intrigue with Donna Julia, have all the verve and narrative power of Homer, all his direct reality and breathing life ; though there is not here, as in the Iliad, one great action dominating all the incidents. But there are certainly traces of development and change in the charming dandy — events and persons are transforming him slowly into the man of the world, though the bloom of generous youth is still on him ; he is consummately life- like. Granted that type of character, mobile, eager, super- no ESSAYS ON POETRY AND POETS. ficial, events and persons would have just the kind, and amount of influence they have over him.* Here, moreover, there is no longer any question of delineating a proud, morose, melancholy genius : all men, if not all women, can sympathize with this hero ; he is one of themselves, idealized indeed, but only with the more ordinary popular qualities furbished up and augmented ; commonplace, not more than usually intellectual, emotional, or imaginative. This is one of the notable merits of the poem, as a work of art. What though Byron found this petted, spoiled personage in him- self .-• Yet no other qualities of his own very heterogeneous personalty, none of those he is accused of being able alone to represent, has he attributed to this pleasant, handsome boy. He never makes Juan moralise, or mock, or moan ; though he drops him occasionally, and does that himself. The fact is, that genius must akvays be, in some mysterious manner, whatever it represents to the life. Goethe only makes his women, and one or two types of man live ; the rest he skilfully imitates. Shakespeare, on the other hand, was an intellectual and moral miracle. He lives in innu- merable human types. But we cannot pause to speak of the inexhaustible wit, the pointed epigrams, the scathing scorn, the numerous pithy couplets such as this, in the cantos about English society : — " There was the Honourable Mrs. Sleep, Who seemed a white lamb, and was a black sheep." In our intellectual, competitive-examination, tradesman- like, priggish age, it is perhaps possible a little to underrate this Alcibiades kind of hero — natural, adventurous, subtle and supple as a Greek, beautiful, daring, courteous, athletic, tender, half-feminine, fascinating — who enjoys life in a buoyant, dare-devil way ; is not too wise, self-conscious, or * Macaulay's dictum that Juan is a poor copy of the page in " Figaro" seems to be absurd, though hints from there, and from "Faublas" are not wanting. LORD r.YRON AND HIS I'IMES. Ill scrupulous, to kiss any sweet mouth, which beauty, youth, health, and i^ood fortune may raise to his own ; nor so afflicted with metaphysical hypochondria, as to lament very long or very loud, when Dame Fortune for a change turns capricious and smites him.* I am far from sure that it is all loss for ordinary men that they should be got to look for a moment at the world — at life, other countries and other persons, all the nooks and corners of this wonderful young world of ours — through so magical and exhilarating an atmosphere as this of Byron's — should unlearn for awhile the commonness, cant, ennui, and grey, sordid vapidity of their own poor selves — even of what is ostensibly highest and holiest in their existence, yet often circumscribed, dead, and conventional, after all ; though, of course, I acknowledge the danger of so much explosive material being stored where youthful blood is burning. But, at any rate, a poet who could throw himself so thoroughly into this youthful gaiety of tem- perament cannot have been, even at this time, the played- out, ruined devil, which excellent and reverend persons made out — even if he had not proved the contrary by writing the most ideal cantos of Childe Harold, and many other of his most ideal works, at the same time ; and those profoundly pathetic verses on his birthday, only a few days before he died for human freedom. * This commonness, or somewhat theatrical attractiveness of Byron's heroes does in some measure, as has been truly remarked, account for their so swift and unparalleled universal popularity ; these heroes appealed, in some de"-ree, to the less-elevated instincts of admiration among men — as did Schiller's Robbers. The British public, in fact, with its accustomed generosity and dis- crimination, are ready to condone Byron's merits for the sake of his faults. Nevertheless, viewed with any seriousness, the tragic heroes of Byron have a moral and spiritual significance quite as deep as that of Wallenstein, Macbeth, or Coriolanus. After all, however, his tragic figures are rather ideal types than real men, more like Moliere's than like Shakespeare's. And while Harold, Manfred, and Cain are embodied types of fate-stricken human passion, and illimitable imaginative yearning, Pen Juan represents "omnivorous appetite for pleasure," which must soon end in satiety and despair. I F 2 ESSAYS ON POETRY AND POETS. On the whole, then, Byron is probably a greater English poet than any of his great contemporaries, except Shelley, Keats, and Wordsworth ; though I do not know that it is profitable, or even really possible, to make such comparisons. I have no patience with people who, because they admire Byron, cannot, or say they cannot, admire Tennyson, and vice versa. Tennyson, by no means wanting in passion, glowing, rich, rare, intellectual, has given us much Byron did not give. But, assuredly, Shakespeare only towers above Byron. Mr. Browning, who believes in Shelley, might remember that Shelley would not have called Byron a " flat-fish," or " cackling goose ; " and Mr. Carlyle, who believes in Goethe, might have remembered that Goethe said, — " Byron alone I place by my side ; Scott is nothing to him." (If we take in Scott's prose, however, then Scott must stand by our very highest below Shakespeare.) " There were giants in those days." Byron, though he had small sympathy with his countrymen, and their foreign politics, for they took the Legitimist orthodox side in continental strife, was still an illustrious " Roman," and proud of being the citizen of no mean city. He inveighed against "Villainton" and his battles ; but yet the brilliant and gigantic struggles in Europe and in India, out of which his country emerged splendidly victorious, doubtless helped to mould his poetry of warlike strife and fiery action. On his tra\'cls, and in his foreign abodes, moreover, he was constantly in the very focus of civil and international commotion. Byron was English, however, in many respects, notably in his frag- mentariness and self-contradiction, in his illogical intellect, in his unsystematic, unfinished ruggedness both of mind and style ; I do not think he will ever be long out of favour with us. He is a rude mountain-mass, tropically gorgeous, not perfectly symmetrical, a mighty ocean ever and anon bursting through the dykes of our proprieties, and devas- tating our plains ; superfine academic critics will always prefer the dainty finish of men who are lesser poets, LORD BYRON AND HIS TIMKS. II3 though defter craftsincn. Perhaps most of what Byron thought, wrote, and did, was, hkc his beauty, mutilated ; but he was a glorious torso, worth a milh'on smirking, wTiy^QW petits-t)iatt res ; he has the splendid imperfection of an yEschylus, a Shakespeare, a Dante, and a Hugo. Of what strange and variously mingled elements was this man formed ! the breath of Genius descending from on high upon him, angels and demons perchance having also some unguessed concurrence in so vast a personality. I am often reminded of Chatterton. For was not that child one of the first I'^nglish prophets of " world-sorrow," after all } Study his modern poems, and those " antiques," with the modern wail piercing through so many of them ! conceived as they were in the mystic shadow of old St. Mary's Church. Consider his awful supernatural life of seventeen years — can it be that the sub-chaunter's boy of Bristol did not altogether disappear from earth after that dark mad agony of Brooke Street ? Dear Chatterton ! the only great dramatic poet since Massinger, save Otway. Wandering one day in the cemetery of Ferrara, Byron found two epitaphs that struck him forcibly. " Martini Luigi Imploia Pace." " Lucrezia Picini Iniplora eteina quiele." These few words, he comments in a letter, say all that can be said or sought : the dead have had enough of life ; all they want is rest, and this they implore. Here is all the helplessness, and humble hope, and death-like prayer that can arise from the grave. " I hope," he continues, " that whoever may survive me, and shall see me put in the foreigners' burying-ground at the Lido, within the fortress of the Adriatic, will have those two words and no more put over me — ' Implora Pace ! ' " May he now find what he sought — not the sleep of the grave, but the " peace which passeth understanding " ! I SHELLEY. Shelley has been termed the most poetical of poets, and with some reason. He more seldom probably than any poet, except Shakespeare, lapses into prose. A living, original poetic diction seems to flow perennially from him ; metaphor and imagery never fail him ; his ear for melody and harmony of measure, not too obtrusive and artificial, but spontaneous, varied, and charming, was unsurpassed ; he is one of the great modern brotherhood of prophets, or interpreters of Nature ; and the substance of his message to us as seer concerning truth and life is of high value, whatever may be its error and limitation. Mr. Matthew Arnold, indeed, has lately pronounced a severe judgment on Shelley, even venturing to affirm that he will be remembered by his prose rather than his poetry. In an essay, with which otherwise I often gravely disagreed, Mr. Swinburne replied that few critical reputations could survive such a judgment. But Mr. Arnold appeared to found his indictment against Shelley on the fact that he was the poet of clouds and sunsets rather than of man. Considering Shelley's ardent aspirations for human good, and for a more ideal condition of society, in which the majority should enjoy fuller opportunities of developing our common humanity, to say nothing of one of the most intense dramas of modern days, " The Cenci," that assertion is very questionable. Man, indeed, not men, Shelley cared SHELLEY, 115 for. His men and women are mostly thin shadows, appari- tions of dream or reverie, somewhat hectic and hysterical ; they are usually idealized self-portraitures. Mis was a recluse and solitary soul. No doubt Shelley is the poet of clouds and sunsets — the poet of Nature — more distinc- tively. But docs not he who makes this a reproach to a poet fail to comprehend a characteristic note of all the best and most movinf^ modern poetry? I shall venture to repeat here and elsewhere the sub- stance of a few sentences from my first essay, since that gives, as it were, the keynote and leading motif oi my book ; but some of the remarks in it apply more specifically to particular poets. Certainly man has always been a great subject-matter for the muse ; but what if a new field has been added to her triumphs, a new realm reclaimed from chaos for her achievements ? That I believe is a fact. This is an age of material science, as former ages were not. It is also the age of Nature-poetry. That is indeed the note of all great recent verse — of Byron, Wordsworth, Keats, Coleridge, and Tennyson, quite as much as of Shelley. It is the right and duty of modern men to interrogate and inter- pret Nature. Science has furnished much material ; but her own province as interpreter of Nature is quite distinct ; she is minister for abstract knowledge, and practical utility ; whereas poetry communes with Nature as living, and in living fellowship with humanity — as spiritual symbol, the key to which lies hidden in the heart and imagination of man, in the analogies that blend and unify the twin spheres of thought and sense. But the poetic soul is not more needed thus to find the clue to external nature than is external nature needed to reverberate light (with a new measure and manner of it added) upon the inmost recesses of intellect and emotion. " Stone him with hardened hearts harder than stones," sings Shakespeare in " Lucrece." How is the hardness of the callous heart understood a thousand- Il6 ESSAYS ON POETRY AND POETS. fold by that image of the lesser hardness, the derived, the merely phantasmal hardness in the stone ! I look upon a few lines in Shelley's " Mont Blanc " as some of the finest he ever wrote : — " Thou hast a voice, great mountain, to repeal Large codes of fraud and woe. " This is the outcome of a deep penetration into the very heart and essence of that magnificent calm of the snow- spirit communing with eternal constellations, that journey " oJuic hast, und ohne rastT The pageant of imagery is but as avenues of sounding glory, whereby we approach the king. The yellow primrose that was only a yellow primrose and nothing more to Peter Bell, was, as I have said, less truly seen by Peter Bell than by Words- worth, to whom it was also a yellow primrose, more accu- rately perceived, indeed, by more delicate and cultivated senses, but also a very infinitude beyond, only to be realized by emotion, thought, and imagination. There is no more reason that I can discover why those higher faculties should be excluded from their share and function in the revelation of truth than there is why the senses and the understanding should be so excluded. The man of science, the practical agriculturist, the engineer, have to tell us one thing, very good in its way ; but the poet has to tell us something quite different, and also good in its way. Hence, I cannot enter into Mr. Ruskin's preference of Scott over Shelley as a poet, which is founded on this distinction between them. Scott (our great humanist, and romance-writer — as such next to Shakespeare) certainly had the eye of a painter, an eye for picturesque presentation of the externals of a landscape ; but to him, as to most of the elder poets, it was a background and no more ; while even Thomson fails to spiritualize it ; that is, to feel, and make us feel its spirituality through the material veil, which is also a symbol, as do Wordsworth and Shelley. Railroads and machines, and the goods they manufacture, arc well, ccr- SllKLLKY. I 17 tainly ; but mental and emotional furniture is perhaps worth even a little more than the decorative furniture of drawing-rooms. Emotion may help us to discern in Nature features, analogies, moods that are indeed hers, though not all can discern them ; yet, of course, I fully admit that such characteristics may be more superficial and transitory, or more essential, vital, and abiding. The imagination, as distinguished by Ruskin himself, will take hold of the heart of things, while the fancy will glance from one surface similitude to the other — may even dis- tort truth by seizing only on these, leading away from profounder analogies, and structural homologues, more essential. But he who uses the so-called poetic diction which he has picked up by reading, without personal feeling, who deals, moreover, in frigid conceits and artifices that attract attention only to his own technical skill, has touched the lowest deep, and is no seer, but a mere clever writer of verses. As to the value of this modern poetry of Nature as a revelation, not of Nature only, but also of man, I have already asked what Wordsworth's Leech- gatherer would be without the lonely moor, and the lonely moor without the Leech -gatherer ; they form together one vital unity. The Leech-gatherer is no common old man, but a very messenger of God to the poet, revealing to him the beauty of resignation and contentment. But he is dis- embodied, as it were, in the poet's meditative imagination ; he becomes a spiritual being of high order. That is not the way Shakespeare, or Moliere, or Homer would have represented him ; but it may be a true, and not a false way notwithstanding ; it may illuminate to the depths of him as no other method could do, and shew him as he essentially is. What would Margaret in the " Excursion " be without the cottage on the moor, and her neglected garden once so trim and tidy ? What would Shelley's Alastor be without the magnificent scenery of mountain and stream amid which he moves onward to the close ? They are Il8 ESSAYS ON POETRY AND POETS. one. They have joined hands, and interpret one another. The result of the poet's meditation is neither man alone, nor Nature alone, but some fair, spiritual child of their espousals. This, I maintain, is somewhat distinctively new and precious added to our intellectual and emotional treasure ; we cannot afford to lose it ; we are ungrateful not to thank the poet who procures it. The imaginative abstractions of Shelley are often grand, worthy of a poet of the first order, to be placed beside Milton's magnificent abstraction, "Far off His coming shone." What can be finer in this line than the periphrasis for, and personification of, earthquake in " Mont Blanc " .•* " Is this the scene Where the old earthquake demon taught her young Ruin ? " How lovely is the personification in " Adonais ! " a passage worthy to be placed beside the " Stone him with har- dened hearts," which I quoted from Shakespeare. " Out of her secret paradise she sped, Through camps and cities, rough with stone and steel And human hearts, which, to her aeiy tread Yielding not, wountled the invisible Palms of her tender feet where'er they fell ; And barbed tongues, and thoughts more sharp than they Rent the soft form they never could repel, Whose sacred blood, like the young tears of May, Paved with eternal flowers that undeserving way." Could dissertations, or sermons say so well how love is wounded by want of love, and the spectacle of hard in- difference or cruclt}' .■* But yet we have to note something on the other side, that may be justly urged against Shelley as poet. His perennial afHucnce of imagery, metaphor, beautiful phrase, and lovely rhythm, sometimes prevails to the injury of his substance, which is in danger of vanishing in a mere spray of verbal effects. His meaning is apt to be beaten out very thin. A peculiarity in him is that, whereas his power SJIELLKY. 119 of interpreting, and making us feel the life in Nature — often through personifications — is so remarkable (as in "The Cloud," the "Ode to the West Wind," and the " Hymn to Pan "), he sometimes endeavours to give a semblance of independent vitality to abstractions, which do not lend themselves readily to such endeavour. Thus, greatly as I admire " Adonais," the elegy on the .death of Keats, I do think there is a certain frigidity and unreality in parts ; I will not say a want of sincerity, because there is an atmosphere of true poetry in the very subtlest and most impalpable of the Shelleyan abstractions. He breathed in rare atmospheres, where none but himself could breathe ; he delighted in disporting himself in a region between heaven and earth, in what occultism terms the astral region, or ether, among the phantasmal shadows, or more refined volatilizations of mundane solidities. At such times, as in " The Witch of Atlas " (which is an exquisite iridescence of the fancy, and no more), he did not penetrate to the heart of things, but played, as it were, with the ghosts or wraiths of them only ; more beautiful, indeed, or as beautiful as any earthly appearance to sense, but not more spirit-sustaining or substantial. He dwells often in some nebulous region of rainbows, which corresponds not to the laws of Nature as known by sense, or understanding ; nor to the deeper spiritual laws in which these have their being. Thus when he sings of Dawn — " On the brink of the night and the morning My coursers are wont to respire ; But the earth has just whispered a warning That their flight must be swifter than fire." this seems a mere gambol of fantasy, not true to the actual fact, and not suggesting anything more essential than the outward fact. In "Adonais" I think most of us refuse to realize the personification of the Dreams and Splendours, winged Persuasions and veiled Destinies, Desires and Adorations, adapted from Bion, but which, with the Sicilian I20 ESSAYS ON I'OETRV AND POETS. poet, were pretty, and ver}' conceivable Cupids. Compare and contrast Wordsworth's wonderfully imaginative per- .sonifications in the " Yew Trees," that solemnize and sub- due the soul. But then to Shelle}' thoughts easily took palpable form, got themselves incarnated in some concrete image, more or less distinct, and thus he leaves his readers behind. He smv his thoughts. And, indeed, if we would pierce to the reality, w'e must remain in, or rather return to, the concrete, for that alone is real. It is a lovely realm of faery, all- harmonious in itself, that the poet bodies forth. But the stanzas about Spring, Summer, Autumn, and Echo lament- ing Adonais, seem almost extravagant in their sentiment, however beautiful. Only it was rather the ideal poet that Shelley was thinking of; Keats had become one with him. What lover of poetry has not wandered spell- bound in the lush bowers of " Prometheus," all woven of luxuriant trailers, and flushed over with rarest bloom ? Most exquisite inventions of Paradisal loveliness ! Think of the childlike spirit of the Earth asleep, in the light of his own smiles, and pillowed on his alabaster arms ! The martyrdom of the demi-god, Prometheus, benefactor of man, is the noble central motive ; but it is overgrown with entangled episode, imagery, and musical song. The poetry of Shelley wanders away at its own sweet will ; there is an absence of concentrating, architectonic, moulding power, giving unity ; although we find, generally, unity of mood, and l)Tical feeling. The poet fades away down every lovely avenue of fresh suggestion opened out to him by his posi- tion of the moment. And so we arc affected with a cloying excess of sweetness and profusion. But " fe// me zvhere the senses mix" sings Tenn^'son. Shelley can. His metaphors, his epithets and similitudes, make you feel their essential kinship and unity ; how they melt into and blend with one another, like odours of many flowers in the still ijarden of the soul. But in such odes as the "Ode SIIELLEV. 121 to Liberty," I do think there is no little confusion of imaj^cry, and substitution of sounding words for definite thought, or representation, an error so fatally reproduced and intensified in some of the poet's disciples. Even the music is not always present. But what faults are not atoned for by such beauties as those in the utterances of Panthca ? And while Shelley is bold and extravagant, it is an .^schylean extravagance, that of genius, often magnificent. All through "Prometheus" he displays the mythopoeic faculty of the world's primaeval poets, a faculty shared with him by Keats. That passage about the orb which typifies the Earth, and the childlike spirit asleep in it, the lovely picture of the Chariot of the Hours, the Songs of the Earth and Moon, are instances ; also his visions of the fairies, or nature- spirits, as sung by the fawns, with the delicious nightingale passage, all which Mr. Brooke has called " Music of the woods." The " Mother of the months " is " borne in her thin boat, floating up from her interlunar cave," " that orbed maiden, with white fire laden, whom mortals name the moon." One might almost be looking, as I have done, at those sacred pictures in the temple-tombs of Thebes, painted so many thousands of years ago. He tells us stories about the sun, moon, and stars ; he narrates their adventures. Of course I don't vouch for the strict accuracy of all that ; still I fancy it is much more true than to regard them as dead machines. We are told, indeed, by prosaists, and Dryasdusts, that all religion, including Nature-worship, arises from the mistake savages make in taking dreams of their dead friends for ghosts of them, which ghosts are afterwards stupidly supposed to animate natural objects. Well, I wonder what Shelley and Keats would have said to that ? But we need not discuss it here and now ! The truth is, that Nature is animate to the child, the primaeval man, and the true poet. She was animate to Hesiod, and Homer, though they had their own way of 122 ESSAYS UN POETRY AND POETS. expressing their conviction ; and we have ours. Certainly the new birth of inductive science, and our modern habit of observing details minutely, enable us to regard Nature more truly, as more aloof from man, more as she is in her- self. Shelley saw trance-visions with shut eyes ; they are ideal landscapes that he mostly paints us, hardly the land- scapes of earth ; these he beheld with inward eye, as he saw the vision of the child in the bay of Lerici, when his out- ward eye was open — the child, who may have been his own little William, beckoning him from the sea ; and shortly after, we know how his beloved friend, the sea, received him into her bosom. But in the pageantry of sky and cloud and sea and forest and flowers he is at home, in these he revels, the very Turner of poetry. "The Sensitive Plant " reveals the essential soul of flowers. All the feminine sensitiveness of the poet, his gentleness, his almost irresponsible muvetc' of incontrollably childlike impulse, made him feel with the pure, cool, passive, meek-blooded world of flowers, as with the world of infancy and animal life. Well did he call himself Ariel. He was a kind of elf, but semi-human — an yEolian lyre, breathed upon by every wandering wind, and yielding sweetest melody. As an instance at once of his strong, clangorous, inspiring verbal music, so germane to the song of glorious aspiration for humanity that lifts him, and of many other excellences too, I need refer only to the chorus from " Hellas," where note especially the fine phrase, "fed with morning,'' applied to the eagle. Then, as an example of sonorous blank verse, and of the happy employment of sounding geographical names — one of the notes of great contemplative poets, for instance, of Milton — we may take many passages from " Alastor," and again, others from that poem to show the poet's tender gentleness with all his brothers and sisters, the lower animals. The lines about Ethiopia powerfully appeal to one who has seen the temple of Dendcrah in Egypt : — SHELLEY. 123 "His waiulcrirg step, Obedient to liigh thoughts, has visited The awful ruins of the days of old, Athens, and Tyre, and Baalbek, and the waste Where stood Jerusalem, the fallen towers Of Babylon, the eternal pyramids, Memphis, and Thebes, and whatsoe'er of strange, Sculptured on alabaster obelisk. Or jasper tomb, or mutilated sphinx. Dark Ethiopia in her desert hills Conceals. Among the ruined temples there, Stupendous columns, and wild images Of more than man, where marble demons watch The Zodiac's brazen mystery, and dead men Hang their mute thoughts on the mute walls around. He lingered, poring on memorials Of the world's youth ; through the long burning day Gazed on those speechless shapes ; nor when the moon Filled the mysterious halls with floating shades. Suspended be the task, but ever gazed And gazed, till meaning on his vacant mind Flashed like strong inspiration, and he saw The thrilling secrets of the birth of time." A good example of Shelley's grand mountain land- scapes we may find in " Prometheus," where he paints the Alps at dawn. He loves the sublime, grandiose, vague ; but in depicting clouds, and wood, and sky, and flower, he was exquisitely minute, and true to fact. The noble lines written among the Eugancan Hills are too long to quote ; but these, as also "Julian and Maddalo," contain great pictures of sunset. The brief lyrics, which after all are perhaps the most inestimable of Shelley's gifts to us, merely as poetry, for perfection of form, and exquisite feeling, express for the most part indefinable unsatisfied longing, inconsolable regret, tender but poignant sorrow for the transitoriness of earthly things, beauty, love, and all delight ; also an oppressive sense of the perversity and hard-heartedncss of men. They are as the low outweeping of a heart overweighted with the misery of the world. The delicate evanescent grace of them is like nothing else in literature : — 124 ESSAYS OX POETRY AND POETS. " WTien the lamp is shattered, The light in the dust lies dead ; When the cloud is scattered, The rainbow's glory is shed ; When the lute is broken, Sweet notes are remembered not ; When the lips have spoken, Loved accents are soon forgot. "As music and splendour Survive not the lamp and the lute, The heart's echoes render No song when the spirit is mute : No song but sad dirges, Like the wind in a ruined cell. Or the mournful surges That ring the dead seaman's knell. " When hearts have once mingled, Love first leaves the well-built nest ; The weak one is singled To endure what it once possessed. O Love, who bewailest The frailty of all things here, Why choose you the frailest For your cradle, your home, and your bier?" Now I can say but a word on the poet's philosophy. That we get in many poems — in " Epipsychidion," " Mont Blanc," " The Hymn to Intellectual Beauty ; " also in " Prometheus," " Hellas," and " Adonais." The negative and materialistic stage of " Queen Mab," written when he was a boy, was soon transcended and left behind. Shelley is an idealist in philosophy. The world is a phantasma- goria of impressions and ideal, belonging to the soul, or spirit ; and Love, or Ideal Beauty, the essential nature of that spirit, the pervading principle of the universe. But all is one, and diversity, variety, are but passing manifesta- tions of that One. This, briefly and meagrely, is the idea that runs through the poctr}\ He deifies impulse, in- stinct, and resents constraint or law imposed ab extra by the State, or even by conscience within. He would urge that the law of Love is the highest law ; yet it is pretty SHELLEY. 125 well impossible in our present condition to merge the sense of Duty altogether in that, though in the ideal and future existence even the sense of Duty may be transcended. But swift transition was the keynote of Shelley's impres- sionable nature, and it has been truly said that he thirsted for rapture, highly-strung enjoyment, the only condition of which is change. So no one laments the fading of our joys more pathetically. On the whole, Shelley was, and is, our most inspired and possessed poet, the most spontaneous and demonic — best example of that madness which Plato ascribes to the true bard. He is carried out of himself indeed, and reflects the world ; yet his is an intense and rich personality ; it is in one very distinct personality that the world is thus reflected ; the poet is full of elaborate self-pourtrayals, though idealized, and therefore represen- tative. Yet I think he had not strength and grip enough, condensation and fusion enough, to make him grasp the idea of will, of personality, of individual identity, nor does he make us feel it. That is to me the defect of his idealism ; for ideas and phenomena can only be in thinking persons of given character ; and that leaves him the poet of some delicious thrill or shimmer of ever-varying impressions or appearances, as also of impermanence and inconstancy. And, indeed. Nature-worship is related to impulse, pas- sion, instinct, though there is a Nature beyond and beneath nature, beyond mere appearance. There is a nature for sense and feeling, as well as a Nature for conscience, affec- tion, and reason. The fawn and the satyr, the nymph, the naiad, and the elf, laugh and play there. But beyond and behind them are angels, children, spirits of the just made perfect, and God Himself. There was a certain lack of stability, backbone, and prehensile grasp in what Shelley wrote, even as in what he did. Love can only be in lovers ; if you are to have noble constancy and permanence, }'ou must be individual, as well as universal and impersonal. Perhaps the most beautiful expression of Shelley's idealism 126 ESSAYS ON POETRY AND POETS. is put into the mouth of the mysterious Ahasuerus in " Hellas." " Adonais," besides philosophy, sublimated by imagina- tion and feeling into poetry, contains a strange longing prophesy of the manner of the poet's own death. " Made one with nature ! " he sings, concerning the dead ; and who does not know that those we call dead may be made one with man — be felt as a presence in the home and abroad, to strengthen and sustain, to elevate and to bless — may even look out with their own dear eyes from eyes we name living ? " Adonais " is not more about Keats than about Shelley. It is altogether in that sphere of the ideal and beautiful into which the poet ever lifted any special subject and person when he touched them. And thus, too, " Epipsy- chidion " hardly concerns Emilia Viviani, but rather that supernal, celestial loveliness for which his spirit thirsted, and with which, for a moment, he identified that particular lady. Shelley was, indeed, as Mrs. Browning named him, " in his white ideal, statue-blind." He would exhaust and drain all to the dregs, which must end in satiet)' and dis- illusion ; if you will worship your idol in its passing, momentary aspect, then you will assuredly have to break it. As one critic observes, Shelley would leave no veils on, brook no reticences. Psyche will behold Cupid with her bodily eyes, and retain him in all his visible beauty. But the god will not have it so, and vanishes from her. For Shelley the ideal is naked, but he invests it with the rosy hue and glory of imagination ; (there is no poet less gross or sensual, all is shadowy and ethereal ;) and so, when the reality mocks the dream, like a wilful babe, in petu- lant disappointment, he flings the toy away. Poor Emilia Viviani ! poor Harriett ! But that rosy hue and glory belong not to the phenomenon — to the passing appearance and temporary semblance ; they belong to the eternal idea SlIKLLKY. 127 and reality underlyincr these. Now, in order to arrive there it behoves mortals to respect modesties, mysteries, con- cealments. ^^ Noli Jiie tangcre !" "/ ascend to the Father." Take not the part for the whole ; be willing to renounce the arc, that you may follow after and dwell in the full orb. The raptures of " Epipsychidion " (a poem of wonder- ful beauty) seem presumptuously to overleap eternal boundaries, and violate those awful penetralia of indivi- duality, aspiring to lose distinction in a unit, which would be neither unity, nor possession, nor knowledge through love and sympathy, but rather the blank chaos and non- being of an unorganized, inharmonious, and essentially unrealizable absorption. Such, too, was his theory of government. Men in the ideal condition were to be tribeless, classless, unobedient to law ; and yet he too could anathematize impulses, when they did not tend in the direction of his personal taste (see the " Witch of Atlas"). But this removal of all distinctions, and differentiations would not of itself furnish any higher form of society — beautiful, organized body politic, or civitas Dei. It is hardly wise to break abruptly with that past, which, entering into our very blood and constitution, encompasses us as an atmosphere — even though Nature herself may always contrive to grow something out of whatever ruins man may take upon him to sow with salt. A poet, however, is not bound to suggest details ; rather, his function is to see, feel, and body forth ideals. Otherwise, one might be disposed to remark that universal love, and the mere abolition of all forms of government are prescrip- tions sufficiently vague and unfruitful, perhaps mainly avail- able for the founding of constitutions in cloud-cuckoo-land. There is, indeed, little of practical suggestion about Shelley. Nor need }'ou ask a poet for it ; only his more thorough- going admirers tell us that we may look to him for that, as well as everything else. And if you do not insist on casting all his burning exhortations and asseverations in 128 ESSAYS ON POETRY AND POETS. sober prose, reducing them to dogmas and propositions for the understanding, then are they pregnant, and vivifying enough for the initiated. It has been disputed whether a poet (but let me explain, once for all, that I never mean by this term a mere writer of verse) is, or is not in advance of his time. There seems little evidence that he is so in respect of remoulding and anticipating future institutions, or particular discoveries, such flashes of insight as that of Goethe concerning colour being rare enough to start forth as exceptions. Dante was an indifferent political prophet, judging by the " De Monarchia ; " yet it is true that a poet has often profounder insight into principles, human character, or Nature, than a dry philosophical reasoner, or hard prosaic observer ; and he throws all into living words for us. But as to details, though he may be in advance of his time — in which case he will be unpopular, and only appre- ciated later — he is more often interpreter of the dominant ideas of his generation, and not rarely flings himself back passionately upon the past, vindicating what has been for the moment forgotten, but will have to be vivified again in a fairer growth of more comprehensive .synthesis. Shelley was indeed a standard-bearer in the van of free- dom, a pioneer in the emancipated front of human thought. But as regards detail, he was only the organ of his day's iconoclasm. All will be perfect when you have pulled down kings, and priests, and existing institutions. And yet these are the outgrowth of human nature. Perhaps, therefore, it might be well to improve and reform that also ; then possibly it may grow better institutions. Still, outworn institutions assuredly are hindrances to free and healthy growth. The " Divine Comedy " was rather behind than in ad- vance of the dawning religious philosophies of that age. And yet Dante's "Apocalypse" is in substance for all time. Remember the magnificent symbolism of the white, and dark, and blood-red steps of Purgatory ! SHELLEY. 129 With respect to Shelley's celebrated teaching in " Epipsy- chidion," that in love "to divide is not to take away," I quite believe that this is the true ideal to be aimed at. It ought to be, and will be thus ; in varied friendships, in general kindness and mutual help, approximations should be made thereto. Yet one must confess that Shelley himself was scarcely successful in his own life realizations. To divide, with him, zvas apparently to take away ; at least one would be glad to hear poor Harriett Wcstbrook's opinion on the subject. I cannot agree with Kingslcy that genius should be expected to be more moral than talent. It is possession, absorption, dominant sensibility, and power of expression ; does what it must do, and has its own individual manner of doing. In some respects, that is more allied to weakness than to strength. We " have this treasure in earthen vessels." It is an organ of the universal soul. But if wq pardon the errors of genius for what it gives — even ad- mitting that it could hardly be without them — allow the dcfaiits de ses qiialitc^s, let us not proceed to confound the errors with the virtues, and confuse good and evil in one blind hysterical indiscriminate worship. Shelley has been by some admirers compared to Christ. But the grand distinction of Christ is calm patience, chivalrous generosity, the sublime forbearance of a magnanimity that forgives and still believes ; charity that creates a spirit under the ribs of death, engenders and sustains life by divining it yet warm and dormant where all but love assumes it absent, pours forth freely of its own life till, by inbreathing and blood transfusion, a living soul is roused, and dead Lazarus comes forth. The love and ardour of Pygmalion called a warm Galatea from cold marble. And so would a greater and stronger have found the ideal in that kind and homely, but weak child, Harriett, whom once the poet loved, and who loved him. Fate and circumstance had thrown this girl upon his protection ; nay, eagerly and voluntarily had he K 130 ESSAYS ON POETRY AND POETS. assumed the responsibility ; whatever her faults, it was not one to be shaken off with a light heart. But suddenly he left her, for days even uninformed of his whereabouts, and with inadequate means, until she learned that, having found his " affinity," he would return to her no more. That was like the conduct of Lady Byron, whether better or worse, Shelley being a man who professed, and certainly felt, profound sympathy with human wrong, burning indig- nation with human injustice, I will not take upon myself to determine. But I do think that to condone such an action, is to condone the worst kind of aristocratic arro- gance — the intolerant arrogance of intellectual superiority. Are the intellectual commonalty indeed but as an orange for their superiors to suck and throw away ? It is not men of the first order who think so, though that appears to have been the opinion of Goethe. I do not believe it was that of our own " glorious Willy," any more than of Sakya-muni. And it could scarcely have been the delibe- rate conviction of a sincere and genuine democrat like Shelley. His life does- not suggest it ; and yet a curious light is thrown upon the poet's democratic principles by what he said to Trelawney on board the Greek man-of-war, when the latter asked him, " Is this your idea of Hellas ? " and he answered, " No ; but it is of hell," because, forsooth, the loud rough swearing sea-dogs of modern Greece offended the fastidious delicacy of his private taste. And yet these were the men who fought and died at Missolonghi. But the poet could not see through to the ideal in them, that burst forth later. However, this may have been only from an almost womanly shyness and refinement. An Ariel, an angel, an inspired babe, full of sweet impulses, rather than a man ! By all means let us reverence and pardon our dear poet, but not call his follies and human lapses supreme wisdom and virtue, because they are his ! That his be- haviour to Harriett was chivalric and manly, not all the pretty tremors, or shrill shrieks of " uncircumcised Philistine " SHELLEY. 131 from the nco-Israelite camp of aesthetic culture, upon the evidence now before us, can make me ever admit. The young and weak girl he took from her father, and from school, and swore to cherish, he soon abandoned for a prey to some cruel domination of hereditary foes within, and yet more cruel mercy of a callous world without. Nor does it appear that the deed weighed too heavily upon him. His very personal poems reveal little of a Manfred's or a Cain's remorse. His own example, therefore, proves that humanity is hardly yet lifted high enough for " love " to be " an unerring light, and joy its own security." The indictment of Mr, Jeaffreson, though readable, minute, and careful, is rather conventional, and malignant. Rut one awaits with anxious interest the further and authorized revelations of Professor Dowden. WORDSWORTH. It is doubtful if Wordsworth is as much read and pon- dered as he ought to be. He is commonly regarded as a describer and interpreter of Nature. And of course that he is. But on studying carefully the chief part of his best work, one certainly derives the impression rather of what Matthew Arnold especially calls attention to — his fertile application of ideas to human life. The mass and main weight of impression is, I think, ethical. You are braced in the mountain atmosphere of this poet. You become stronger, more hopeful, encouraged to do your own work vigorously and well. It is an air of faith — stimu- lating, healthful, with no miasma of luxurious languor, oppression, or despair. There is an outlook from it, as from a snow-peak or a strong tower, upon fair infinite horizons, however veiled in vapour and dim with distance. It is a Puritan poetry, breathing comfort and courage, yet I think, with little of the Puritan intolerance, and blas- phemy of the good God. Being of old a lover of Words, worth, yet having laid him aside for some years, I had somehow thought of him as a serene recluse, withdrawn from the terrible world, and refusing to face its deadly problems — living by preference among virtuous Dalesmen, cheerful, frugal, prosperous, content. Now this view has assuredly a measure of truth. This was the life he did elect to live, and his outlook on human nature had con- sequently limitations : — WORDSWORTH. 133 " The moving; accident is not my trade ; To freeze the blood I have no ready arts ; 'Tis my dehght alone in summer shade To pipe a simj)le song for thinking hearts." The male characters he depicts arc very much his own, and those he found at his own doors. He, and Byron, who was equally limited in his way, could not understand each other, and Wordsworth never even appreciated Keats. But we may turn to other poets for other treasures. And this view has only a degree of truth ; for you may find a deal of human nature in your own soul, in your own house, and at your own door, if you know how to look for it. Charlotte Bronte did ; and Wordsworth is full of s}'mpathy with sorrow. There is no pathos profounder than his. Some one speaks of the iron pathos of Crabbe. The phrase seems to apply to Wordsworth. It is a kind of inarticulate, still-life pathos. That of the episode of Margaret in the " Excursion " would be crushing but for the old narrator's own calm faith. Our poet is austere, self-restrained : the storm and whirlwind of passion are not for him, as they are for Byron — nor fierce negation and revolt, which are the birth-pangs of the Time-spirit, labouring to engender a new and larger life, casting off an old form as the snake sloughs his skin. Certainly Wordsworth is one of our very great poets, for he can both soar with dignity, and stoop with grace. His good and enduring work is not only ample in quantity, but varied in scope. I say this in spite of recent detraction from writers who might have been expected to know better, but who have elected to make themselves the mouthpiece of ignorant prejudice. Wordsworth could hardly hope to escape the universal depreciation of Carlyle, but to Mr. Ruskin he might have exclaimed: '^ Et tn, Brute !" One may be sorry indeed, but one ought hardly to be surprised that Mr. Rossetti should have told his biographer that he grudged Wordsworth " every vote he got." For, although 134 ESSAYS ON POETRY AND POETS. he himself has done some ver>' fine work, yet he was the head of a school which is the natural enemy of Words- worth, and which would seem to have aspired to force us back into those old bad paths whence Wordsworth came to deliver us — one which can have little in common with a poet whose mission, as he conceived it, was to " console the afflicted, to add sunshine to daylight by making the happy happier, to teach the young and the gracious of every age to see, to think, to feel, and therefore become more actively and securely virtuous." The beautiful lines on the "Feast of Brougham Castle" describe him perfectly : — " Love had he found in huts where poor men lie, His daily teachers had been woods and rills, The silence that is in the starry sky, The sleep that is among the lonely hills." But Wordsworth expresses the conviction that his poetry "will co-operate with the benign tendencies of human nature and society, and will in its degree be efficacious in making men better, wiser, and happier." Cheerful wisdom, and a prevailing inward happiness, be- long to him, very stimulating and refreshing in these days when languor, pessimism, despondency, and doubt have invaded so many hearts, and so much literature. Once he contrasts the nightingale, that " creature of a fiery heart," with the stockdove, rather to the disadvantage of the former : — " She sang of love with quiet blending, Slow to begin, and never ending. Of serious faith, and inward glee ; That wxs the song, the song for me ! " How enviable the disposition of that man who could .say, sweet-natured through all harsh judgment and neglect — "I've heard of hearts unkind, kind deeds With coldness still returning ; Alas, the gratitude of men Hath oftener left me mourning ! " WORDSWORTH. 1 35 Politically otic may regret that the excesses and failures of the Revolution should have thrown back this " lost leader" so far into the arms of blind reaction and dull convention. Still it is not to be denied that the relic^ious, reverential, ancestral elements needed a poetic champion and interpreter. For the profane, all-dissolving understand- ing would tear remorselessly away all our mosses and lichens, all our herbage and flowers, laying us bare to the very stones ; nay, threatens to take the solid earth from under our feet, if that were possible ! Scott and Words- worth were formidably matched with Shelley and Byron ; and all these powers alike had a great work to do. More- over, Wordsworth was himself essentially a child and pro- duct of the Revolution. For he glorified, or rather taught us to recognize the glory in so-called ordinary persons and ordinary things, forbidding us to call anything common or unclean. Think of Michael, Margaret, the Old Leech- gatherer, the Brothers, the Old Cumberland Beggar, Matthew, Ruth, Lucy Gray, the Mad Mother, the woman in " The Thorn," — figures chosen from the crowd, ennobled by misfortune or simple virtues, not refined or cultured with conventional refinement or culture, elementary and grand, dumbly pathetic in their pain, or innocent, sweet, and true, transfigured in the solemn light of imaginative charity, and deep pitiful contemplation. Herein, as in his interpretation of Nature, he proved himself a poet of the utmost originality, although the honour of this glorification of our common humanity must be shared with him by Burns. Nor is it fair to ascribe the revival of our poetry from the degradation entailed on it by Pope's school ex- clusively to these. For we remember Goldsmith, Gray, Covvper, Chattcrton, Blake ; even Shenstone, Dyer, and Parnell. Still there was a distinctly new element in Words- worth's interpretation of Nature, upon which I shall speak later. Mr. Myers, in his admirable study of Wordsworth, well -i 136 ESSAYS ON POETRY AND POETS. says : " The maxims of Wordsworth's form of natural religion were uttered before Wordsworth only in the sense in which the maxims of Christianity were uttered before Christ. The essential spirit of the lines on Tintern Abbey was for practical purposes as new to mankind as the essential spirit of the Sermon on the Mount. Not the isolated expression of ideas, but the fusion into a whole in one memorable personality is that which connects them for ever with a single name." This is excellent. My only doubt would be how far Rousseau must share with him this honour. But I repeat that the range of Wordsworth is wide, for, besides those fine narrative sketches already spoken of — austere statues hewn out of grey granite — we have delicate lyrics of childhood and dumb animals, occasional lyrics of rare perfume, also some of the noblest reflective sonnets in the language, together with the most faithful, yet spiritualized descriptive verse, added to philo- sophical poetry of very high order ; though of the latter there is perhaps only a little of supreme excellence. In the fullest sense Wordsworth lacked dramatic power, but he did throw himself, into, and graphically present the essen- tials of certain characters. As to the intrusion of his own personality — must not every great lyric meditative poet intrude his personality, and has he not done so ? Do not Byron, Shelley, Burns, Leopardi, Tennyson, Victor Hugo ? But it is a typical, a more or less representative personality which he " obtrudes " — one that feels more intensely the common feelings, one that sees more clearly and deeply the common visions, expressing these more perfectly in the supreme, royal, melodious utterance of song. And be- yond this, he may be endowed with a prophet's revealing power. That Wordsworth may on rare occasions have mis- taken his own superficial, transient idiosyncrasy for that personality which is of eternal worth is probably true. And this seems partly due to Wordsworth's very excellence WORDSWORTH. 1 37 The spectacle of this poet, Hving on and greatcninf,^, se- renely confident, unshaken, unsourcd, benignant, amid per- sistent neglect, ridicule, defamation, is noble and unique. Yet he must have known that he, like all original men of genius, could only be addressing an audience " fit though few," and that he had necessarily to mould his own public. Still not many artists have been so little sensitive to external sympathy or the want of it. There must have been some happy domination of calm and balanced tempera- ment ; over his House of Life presided chaste and peace- ful stars ; while within him lived a deep well-spring of religious faith. He was fortunate in his domestic surround- ings, but none of these can avail a genius of inharmonious nature, harassed by ill-health. But this temper, together with his own immovable self-approval, his seclusion from the world, and the slight response vouchsafed by it to the deep accents of his soul, are perchance responsible for a certain opinionative hardness, and undue accentuation of his less amiable peculiarities ; he was thrown too much upon himself, and the standards of his immediate circle, and so wrote with scarce sufficient reference to universal human feeling, emphasizing unduly the petty details of his ex- perience ; caring chiefly to satisfy the desire for self-expres- sion, even that engendered by casual moods of merely passing interest. We feel this in the grave sonnets commencing "Jones, as from Calais," and " Spade, with which Wilkinson ; " also in the earnest copy of verse addressed to the landlady of his lodgings. But we feel it equally in the bald and pompous metrical prose he poured forth so abundantly, quite unconscious of its demerit ; nor can it be denied that some of his pieces are trivial, though I am disposed to agree with Mrs. Owen when she contends in her paper read be- fore the Wordsworth Society that there is far less trivial verse in Wordsworth than is commonly supposed. Even the " Idiot Boy," and " Peter Bell," have fine motives ; there 138 ESSAYS ON POETRY AND POETS. is, I think, a certain triviality about these poems ; but that is rather because the materials are imperfectly fused in the poet's imagination, insufficiently penetrated by it, than because the subjects are trivial. There is truth, however, in the criticism that Words- worth poured forth verse too incessantly, and on too slender a provocation. It will not do even for a great poet to break into verse on every possible occasion, from the sing- ing of a tea-kettle to the opening of a Mechanics' Institute, or the marriage of a princess, however excellent and respectable such occurrences may be. In other words, a poet must be strongly moved to write if he would write well. There is something in the Demonic inspiration, in the Divine Afflatus after all, nor will that always breathe when it is whistled for. You may summon spirits from the vasty deep — but will they come ? Then no doubt there are occasional jars ; gratings of harsh or inharmonious ideas, and pedestrian words. Words- worth was not a perfect artist, but perhaps he was some- thing better! Remember Browning's " Andea del Sarto, the faultless painter." Wordsworth, Byron, and Shelley were far greater poets than man}- a more faultless one. What, again, of Shakespeare ? But after all I deny that the so-called faultless ones arc faultless. Gray, and Campbell wrote vcr>^ little, and yet a good deal that they wrote is very indifferent poetry in- deed, however correct and "elegant " as mere diction it may be. Of " Don Juan " Byron writes to Murray : " You may think yourself lucky if half of it is good. What poem is all good?" Dare we tell the truth about Dante or Milton.^ If so one may be bold enough to aver that there is almost as much dull and dry reading in the " Divina Commcdia," or in " Paradise Lost" and " Regained," as there is in the " Pre- lude" and the "Excursion :" but there is also much magnifi- cent poetry ; and I believe there is a great deal of that in Wordsworth. As regards triviality, there are few subjects WORDSWORTH. 1 39 that remain trivial after a true poet has laid his hand upon the heart of them. When he breathes over them words of consecration, the ijreat transubstantiation takes place. Nay, rather, he has just opened our eyes to what they arc. Instead of trivial, for all their simplicity of theme and treatment, the poems about Lucy, the " Reverie of Poor Susan," "We are Seven," the "Blind Highland Boy," the " Childless Father," and many another like them are perfect poetry. In his ballad-anecdotes, and narrative poems, Words- worth deliberately elected to write in homely phrase, and in simple, direct, inornate language. In revolting against the tawdry frippery, the cold, insincere, uninspired, conventional diction then in vogue, appealing to no heart and no vision whatsoever, perchance he went a little too far : but " The Waggoner," for instance, would have been the worse, not the better, for ornamental, inappropriate phrasemongery There Wordsworth made too much of mere insignificant details of every day. Good expression, a fine style, is that best adapted to heighten, and interpret the substance of what is said or sung ; and this may be either dignified, elaborate, metaphorical, or homely and direct. Words- worth commanded both styles. I maintain that for inter- penetration of form and matter, which is style, he has no superior. That is true of the " Ode on Immortality," " Yew Trees," " There was a Boy," " Tintern," and equally so of " Michael," " Margaret," " We are Seven." In proof of it listen to this, but listen to it also for proof that the poet's heart, to whatever party he professed to belong, beat in deep sympathy with human rights. It is addressed to Toussaint, the defeated slave, imprisoned by the tyrant Napoleon : — ' ' Thou hast left behind Powers that will work for thee, earth, air, and skies : There's not a breathing of the common wind That will forget thee ; thou hast great allies ; Thy friends are exultations, agonies, And love, and man's unconquerable mind." 140 ESSAYS ON POETRV AND POETS. This is superb in matter and form, severe, majestic and unlaboured. Other bards have been equal to writing antique poems like " Dion " and " Laodamia," fine as they are ; these have perhaps some of the inevitable academic coldness of all such verse, or I should instance them also. But what can be greater than the bald simplicity of the larger part of " Michael " — " a baldness as of mountain tops," as Matthew Arnold well says ? What can be more pro- found in pathos ? The story is briefly that Michael and his wife, having been well-to-do mountaineers, suffered reverses of fortune, and at last, with much heart-sorrow, resolved to send their boy, Luke, adored by them both, away to seek his fortune in the great city where others had prospered before him. He had been his father's constant companion on the hills, learning from him the shepherd's trade. And before he goes, his father wishes him to lay the first stone of the new sheepfold they were to have built together, ere the necessity arose for sending the boy away : — " But lay one stone — Here, lay it for me, Luke, with thine own hands. Nay, boy, be of good hope ; -we both may live To see a better day. * » * « * Now fare thee well — When thou returnest, thou in this place wilt see A work which is not here : a covenant 'Twill be between us. But, whatever fate Befall thee, I shall love thee to the last, And bear thy memory with me to the grave. " The boy went wrong, and the father's heart broke ; but he worked still at the unfinished sheepfold, only now alone. " 'Tis believed by all That many and many a day he thither went, And never lifted up a single stone." I do not envy the heart that cannot feel the marvellous pathos of the conclusion. Akin to it, for the deep humanity of its interest, is " The Leech-gatherer ; " but here you have WORDSWORTH. 141 a style replete with dignity, because it is a meditative poem, dealing with general principles, only illustrated by the Leech-gatherer himself as he is contemplated by the poet. Note here too the strange other-world abstraction into which Wordsworth sometimes fell, while in face of the homely external fact, which from opaque becomes a trans- parent medium for him, letting in the too dazzling sun — a loophole, a portal opening upon the mysteries of eternity. The ordinary old man grows disembodied for him, and appears as God's angel, like the beggar leper in the legend for her who received him. Then note the serene faith of the conclusion, the lesson preached here unconsciously by the aged man's example, as by the old Cumberland beggar ; the same lesson that is preached consciously by a similarly simple intellectual nature, though one very rich in moral and spiritual gifts, in the conclusion of " Margaret." Next, I come to some of the poems referring to the period of childhood — " We are Seven," and one of the poems on Lucy. With these two I shall connect the great " Ode on Immortality," for these three all refer, not only to childhood, but to death. They are simply perfect, each in its own delightful way. Most sad, but wonderful verses : — " A slumber did my spirit seal ; I had no human fears : She seemed a thing that could not feel The touch of earthly years. " No motion has she now, no force, She neither hears nor sees, Rolled round in earth's diurnal course, With rocks, and stones, and trees." Here the terrible outward appearance of death mesme- rises with strong eyes, and clasps to its own cold breast, as in a death-trance, with no outlook beyond, the sensitive soul of this poet, as it often did that of Shakespeare before him. Contrast this with " We are Seven," where the child over whom the glory of its immortality " broods like the 142 ESSAYS ON rOETRY AND POETS. day," feeling her life in every limb, knows not, understands not, calmly overlooks death, while cheerily sitting on the green mound of the very grave ; — herein related to the spiritual man or woman, who sees through and dwells not on the appearance, but builds a wondrous fabric of divine significance on the assumption of an immortality, which he stays not, nor condescends to prove. Let me now quote one short passage from the magnifi- cent " Ode : "— " Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting : The soul that rises with us, our life's star, Hath had elsewhere its setting And Cometh from afar. Not in entire forgetfulness. And not in utter nakedness, But trailing clouds of glory do we come From God, who is our home : Heaven lies about us in our infancy ! " .What can be more stately in expression .-' How well married are sense, phrase, and sound ! Mr. Matthew Arnold, found fighting often so nobly, against the prejudices of to-day, yet in this instance per- chance partaking the repugnance of his Zeit-Geist, of the spirit of his generation to Divine Philosophy, looks askance at the Ode, as at other philosophical poetry of Wordsworth. But, as Milton tells us, " divine philosophy is not harsh and crabbed, as dull fools suppose, but musical as is Apollo's lute " — musical especially when the cold lyre of it is played upon by lambent flames from a poet's heart ; by such ^olian airs as wander from his soul. Too often indeed it is far otherwise, when not so transformed, in the mere uninspired verse even of Wordsworth ; as more recently also in the harsh, too crabbed, metrical dissertations of another philosophical poet, who at his best is yet powerful and profoundly poetic. There is, no doubt, a good deal of polemical, prosy, quasi-clerical moralizing in Wordsworth, justifying Mr. Arnold's amusing allusion to " the bold bad WORDSWORTH. [43 men and women who haunt social science congresses," and quote therefrom only for the correctness of the sentiments. But I venture to think the great "Ode on Immortah'ty" a transcendent expression of profound primary truths, of highest import for all. Wherever the child came from immediately before birth, the auroral freshness of his dewy joy, so innocent and so pure, his guileless unquestioning trust, the glory that all things wear to him, the confiding humbleness, all prove that "their angels behold the face of the Father," that the gleam of the sanctuary is upon him — though the glory may return even more glorious when dark experience grows as fuel in the fire, when the Divine Child looks forth in his eternal youth from the sadder and wiser eyes of man. The child-spirit is alone in the highest sense immortal. " Except ye be converted and become as little children " we know the rest. But the philosophy of imagination suffers detriment when translated into the language of understanding. In the sonnets we read : — " Plain living, and high thinking are no more ; The homely beanty of the good old cause Is gone ; our peace, our fearful innocence, And pure religion breathing household laws. "' And now wc come finally to the poetry of external Nature. But in doing so we do not take leave, you will find, of the human and philosophical poetry. They are intermingled in Wordsworth. His rendering of Nature is a spiritualized rendering, the presentment of some spiritual offspring which she engenders in a poetic soul ; of the light — " That never was on sea or land, The consecration, and the poet's dream." Our poet, indeed, has been accused of too great minute- ness in his delineations of Nature. No doubt there may be too much minuteness, if the general impression is interfered with by the laborious attention required for the appreciation of detail ; but this will be only, I think, when there is a 144 ESSAYS ON POETRY AND POETS. want of unity in the mood or emotion with which the scene is contemplated by the poet. The objection probably owes its origin to a criticism of Lessing's, which I have never thought well-founded, though it has met with very marked approval. Substantially it is, that word-painting of co- existing details is inadmissible, because, whereas in a land- scape or picture the eye takes in the whole effect at once, words being only successively pronounced and understood, there cannot be the simultaneity of effect in a verbal description ; you have to piece the parts together, as you would in a puzzle. That of course is true ; but then it is not true that in a landscape or picture, either the eye or the mind can take in the whole effect at once : on the contrary, you must travel over and realize the parts in succession, though this may doubtless be done in a painting with more rapidity, and in the former case you have to translate the sound symbols of one sense into their visual equivalents. The difficulty is that most persons only observe external nature occasionally and vaguely. To them, as to Peter Bell, "a primrose is a yellow primrose, and nothing more." It is, therefore, very difficult for them to realize a scene from the verbal description of it. But in any case the intelligence, the sensibility, the sympathy must be there ; we must be able to synthesize, to recreate the whole for our own selves. Neither Nature, nor painter, nor poet, can save us the trouble of doing that. But the poet can express, or suggest the analogies and affinities that add so much charm to the visible scene. The painter and the landscape leave much more to be done by the spectator himself. He must furnish a much larger contribution from his own spiritual stores, in order to arrive at the same rich result ; for the poet can relate the past history of natural objects, and, ministering to all the inlets of sensation, can blend space and colour with odour and with sound, all being obedient to his so potent Art. Is the ordinary man sure to have in readiness these materials for WORDSWORTH. 1 45 use in the interpretation of landscape or picture? If not, he may resort with advantage to the poet. Even then, however, trained faculties are implied. Neither Nature, nor painter, nor poet, can speak with profit to the lazy, the worldly-minded, or the unprepared. There is, indeed, a " wise passiveness," but it must be responsive and ready, if it is to reap what Wordsworth beautifully terms " the harvest of a quiet eye." We see what we bring the power to see. And hence descriptive poetry of an elevated order is unpopular. People do care for scenery in a general way. Therefore, Scott's descriptions are not unpopular, nor were those of Thomson before him. As a rule, they describe the surface and general look of things with accuracy, and in Scott's case with a good eye for broad effects. There is even an unrealized influence of scenery upon the uncultured, espe- cially on mountaineers. But the great majority, who give a passing glance at the landscape, can scarcely understand that rapt contemplation of Nature, which is as the long look of a lover. And when these are called on to translate elaborate word-pictures, not only into their visual equiva- lents, but even into some spiritual imagery begotten in the poet from his intimate familiarity with Nature, it is as if a man born blind were called upon to realize a scene. And how can this be poetry for after dinner, or for reading in an express train ? The man makes you think too in all sorts of ways ! He has a meaning — thoughts of his own — and his own way of putting them, moreover. It is a kind of thing that " no fellow " of either sex can be expected to put up with, or care for ! Away with a poet who makes upon us such demands ! We turn, with what relief, to the last exciting novel from Mudie's. But to the elect, how dear in all ages will such a poet be ! The shy, subtle, delicate emotion, the ever-varying play of fine evanescent expression on the face of Nature, few, indeed, have noted with the same loving fidelity. Byron L 146 ESSAYS ON POETRY AND POETS. is great when he interprets her large, massive effects, her sublime and stormy language, in harmony with his own moods, but his touch is coarse, and his colour crude in comparison with those of his rival. Coleridge came near him, and the landscapes of Shelley and Keats, but they are hardly of the earth. " Such gentle mists as glide Curling with iinconjirincd intent On that green mountain side." " Over his own sweet voice the stockdove btoods." " The swan on still St. Mary's lake Floats double, swan and shadow." " His voice is buried among trees, But to be come at by the breeze." And those exquisite lines on the green linnet : — " There ! ^Vhere the flutter of his wings Upon his back and body flings Shadows and sunny glimmerings, That cover him all over. While thus before my eyes he gleams, A brother of the leaves he seems." But when I say that Wordsworth spiritualizes Nature, do not suppose I mean that he puts into her what is not there ! A lover is the only person who sees his mistress trul}-. When he is disappointed, it is because cloudy storms have drifted over her true self, and that is hidden from view, or because his own eye is dulled. Only a loving eye can see. Transfiguration by love ! What is it but revelation of the hidden truth .-• As I have already said, the meditative rapture of Wordsworth and Shelley passes at times into a kind of mystic disembodiment. The poet seems caught up into some third heaven, where the boun- daries of sense are confounded, and our poor earth-language falters — "With the burden of an honour, Unto which she was not born." There is nothing of this in Chaucer, Goldsmith, or Gray, WORDSWORTH. 1 47 and less of it even in the great imaginations of Shakespeare or Milton. This difference belongs rather to the age than to the man. Landscape of old was a background, hardly a friend, still less, one passionately adored, or an apocalyptic symbol. In our recent great poets of Nature, there is an element we may call Pantheism. The soul of Nature is as distinctly felt and recognized as it was in the old-world religions of Polytheism, though, in accordance with our modified religion and philosophy, the expression of this takes a different form. With Keats the gods verily live again. He is a mythopoeist. And even the Tory author of " Ecclesiastical Sonnets " passionately exclaims that he " would rather be a Pagan suckled in a creed outworn, if he might have glimpses that should make him less forlorn ; and hear old Triton blow his wreathed horn." With the shattering of the hard orthodox conceptions of an un- spiritual Christianity at the Renaissance, which culminated in the Revolution, and the substitution for them of a pseudo-scientific and soulless materialism, there heaved in poetic souls a revulsion toward more ancient faiths, which had discerned a Divinity not apart from, but pervading, the very life and substance, alike of humanity, and ex- ternal Nature. And though Wordsworth was more or less orthodox in creed, yet in the presence of Nature, aye, and of the great facts of human life, his spirit refuses to be fettered by any rigid dogmas whatsoever. He felt, he saw — he little cared to understand. In such "access of high moods," even " the imperfect offices of prayer and praise " were transcended; "thought was not; in enjoyment it expired." I have said that Wordsworth represents chiefly the effect and influence of Nature on poetic souls. Of course he must. But that is not altogether so. In " Peter Bell " a rude nature begins to be regenerated by the external scene it had formerly despised. There is always a danger of a poet's imputing himself to others. But nothing can 148 ESSAYS ON POETRY AND POETS. be more lovely and true than the poem commencing " Three years she grew," where the insensible influence of Nature in moulding a beautiful, innocent young girl's character is celebrated in such sweet song : — " Beauty born of murmuring sound Shall pass into her face. " She shall be sportive as the fawn That, wild with glee, across the lawn Or up the mountain springs ; And hers shall be the breathing balm, And hers the silence and the calm Of mute insensate things. " The floating clouds their state shall lend To her, for her the willow bend, Nor shall she fail to see Even in the motions of the storm Grace that shall mould the maiden's form By silent sympathy." There are many " silent poets," only " lacking the art and accomplishment of verse." Those who possess that indeed often lack the far more essential poet's heart ; and these are far less truly poets than are those "silent ones." The " finest natures," Wordsworth tells us, " are often those of whom the noisy world hears least." What happy sym- pathies and sensibilities are implied in such words as these : — " It is my faith that every flower Enjoys the air it breathes. " The budding twigs spread out their fan, To catch the breezy air, And I must think, do all I can. That there was pleasure there." " Then dearest maiden, move among these shades In gentleness of heart ; with gentle hand Touch — for there is a spirit in the woods." If such refinement of feeling adds to pain as well as to pleasure, at all events it unbrutalizes and uplifts. In the Margaret of " The Excursion " we find first noted the WORDSWORTH. 1 49 tokens of sympathy which Nature may give with a deep human sorrow, in the neglect and disorder that befell the once trim cottage garden of the poor woman, whose loving and beloved husband, her sole stay and support, has left her to enlist as a soldier, in consequence of overwhelming misfortune that befell both, and of whom, after long dreary suspense, she can gain no tidings ; a fellow-feeling to be noted also in the circumstance that those very sheep which fed upon the common now seemed to come unheeded and couch at her very threshold, for dull red stains and tufts of wool discoloured the corner stones of the cot ; but finally, when the listlessness and languor of hope long deferred have bowed their victim to the grave, we hear of the en- couragement this same Nature may infuse in correction of a too hopeless despondency, for the poet traces " with interest more mild " — "That secret spirit of humanity Which 'mid the calm obhvious tendencies Of nature, 'mid her plants and weeds and flowers And silent overgrowings, still survived." Having incidentally spoken much of Wordsworth in my first essay and elsewhere, I shall not say more here. KEATS. Our theme is Adonais, one who deserves the name of " marvellous boy," fully as well as Chatterton, to whom Coleridge gave it, whose glorious extinguished youth may almost be characterized in that terribly pathetic sentence of an old dramatist — " 'Tis not a life — 'Tis but a piece of childhood thrown away." who desired that there might be inscribed on his grave — " Here lies one whose name was writ in water." Yet, as Shelley beautifully says — " Ere the breath that could erase it blew, Death, in remorse for that fell slaughter, Death the immortalizing winter flew Athwart the stream, and time's monthless torrent grew A scroll of crystal, blazoning the name Of Adonais." Having re-read twice the little " Study " of my dear friend, the late Mrs. John Owen, on Keats, I have become convinced that she is, to a great extent at least, right ; and to her certainly belongs the credit of being the first to see the deeper meaning that underlies the young poet's work, though, as she herself admits, but half-consciously. I have no doubt that the spiritual significance was but dimly present to the poet in " Endymion." It was characteristic of his youth at least, that he allowed his luxuriant fancy to overlay the central conception, whether that was fair KEATS. 151 mythologic story only, or allegory also, with lush wreaths of episode and image, that assuredly make it almost impossible for a reader to determine it. Had this been otherwise, indeed, so many competent lovers of Keats would not have failed to recognize the unity, and main thought of the poem. It is entanglement within entangle- ment, very delicious, like tendriled mazes of a creeper, but wandering mazes, nevertheless. Certainly, there is much more articulated structure, and bony framework in " Hyperion," than in the earlier poems ; a far more distinct vision, both spiritual and inventive. Mrs. Owen, indeed, admits that Keats was less consciously a teacher than Wordsworth. In fact, he saw imaginatively rather than intellectually. His vision was of concrete images, or living creatures, rather than abstractions. Only these are preg- nant with a life more real and profound than that of the senses ; yet because they are of the senses also, we may easily miss the soul in the body of them. This, however, is the distinctively poetic manner of vision. He might, or might not have modified that profession of faith which has become celebrated, that " Beauty is Truth, and Truth Beauty." But he would hardly have thus expressed himself at all, if he had not been uttering a deliberate intellectual conviction. And the saying is capable of ample vindication. It is Platonic, if only you take into your conception elements not in themselves beautiful, but capable of being eventually harmonized with others into a higher ideal of beauty than were at all realizable without them. In fact, the full truth is concrete rather than abstract. It must be that which corresponds to all our faculties, not to one or two of them only. Hence, fuller vision is vision of the more rich, full, concrete, and alive. The perfectly developed spiritual Individualities are the truth, and this is the justification of our Lord's saying, " I am the Truth." But that the sensuous element was the most consummate in Keats can hardly be denied. 152 ESSAYS ON POETRY AND POETS. Mrs. Owen says, " the sensuous faculties are the first to be developed ; and in Keats they were developed to an un- usual extent, probably by reason of the large scale of his whole nature ; for it must never be forgotten that his life was an arrested one, that his poetry remains to us a Titanic fragment of that which might have been the unrivalled work of genius of our age, and that the three small volumes of verse which he left us with the memory of his twenty- five years of life, are but a prelude to the music which never was played." I shall indicate what, as it seems to me now, Mrs. Owen has justly discovered to be the leading thought in " Endy- mion," before passing to the particular beauties of detail in the poetry — which are assuredly the most characteristic feature of it — after a word on the mythology of " Hyperion." Mrs. Owen dwelt particularly on a letter, which she quotes in full, from Keats to his friend, Mr. Reynolds, in 1818, as proving that Keats, like all greater poets, was seer as well as singer. And in the early verses, entitled " Sleep and Poetry," he clearly indicates that his own conception of what was needed for high poetry was, indeed, in accord- ance with that of his commentator. The leading thought, then, of " Endymion " is the unity of life. Cynthia is the ideal mistress, Love and Beauty, whom Endymion, through so many wanderings, adventures, and vicissitudes, seeks and, at last, finds — " He ne'er is crowned with immortality, Who fears to follow where airy voices lead." The prophesying is of the ideal beauty, which shall com- prise not only the beauty already realized, but even the seeming ugliness and loss, and which will have had fused into its glowing splendour all reality. Through suffering only, and through sympathy with suffering, can this per- fection of vision be attained. Endymion, in the deep ocean-world, rouses the dead lovers ; and by this Mrs. KEATS. 153 Owen understands that he lays the spell of his trust in eternal love and beauty on the cold, dead hearts, and shut eyes of his brothers and sisters ; then is heard the voice of harmony ; then do they spring to one another, whose love has been not dead, but sleeping. Yet now he finds a new love, a dark princess, and in finding her Endymion loses sight of his ideal, contenting himself with a limited apprehension of real beauty, and becoming blind to all beyond. The soul that is absorbed in the external, or in one phase of an object, becomes untrue to higher aspira- tions, and a great bewildering unrest fills it. The ideal fades, and disbelief in that supernal loveliness succeeds : " I have clung to nothing, nothing seen, or felt but a great dream." " There never lived a mortal man, who bent His appetite beyond his natural sphere, But starved and died. Caverns lone, farewell ! And air of visions, and the monstrous swell Of visionary seas ! No, never nxore Shall airy voices cheat me to the shore Of tangled wonder ! " But if he contents himself with life as it is, he is lost. Yet, at the end of all, the Indian Princess herself turns to him with the very face and aspect of Cynthia, his soul's beloved — for in reverting to the ideal love, even the lower beauty of the senses shall ultimately find true fulfilment and reali- zation, since the higher involves, is, and constitutes the lower, however that may seem to be lost and sacrificed for awhile. But is it not, then, also necessary to know and love that lower princess, I wonder .<* If " Endymion " be a parable of the development of the individual soul, " Hyperion " refers to the evolution and progress of the world. Hyperion, the Titan god of the sun, must be dethroned by Apollo, the Olympian, as exceeding him in worth and beauty ; " yet he himself should live in his very successor, should indeed be fulfilled and perfected in him, his ethereal presence passing into 154 ESSAYS ON POETRY AND POETS. other forms, and living eternally, though heaven and earth might pass away." The very fine speech of Oceanus in the council of the gods is really conclusive proof that we have all mistaken in holding Keats to have no grasp of philosophical problems, young as he was, and not to have embodied some solution of them in his poetry : — " So on our heels a fresh perfection treads, A power more strong in beauty born of us. And fated to excel us, as we pass In glory that old darkness." What profound practical wisdom is summed in the lines : " Now comes the pain of truth, to whom 'tis pain. O folly ! for to bear all naked truths. That is the top of sovereignty. " Again, " Receive the truth, and let it be your balm." Rut there is also a passage in " Endymion," which I had noted long since, and which might have convinced me that my friend was right, and we had all been wrong. It contains vital truth, indeed, perhaps the very last word to be said in philosophy, though expressed in poetic language. The beauty and use in Nature is here declared to be dependent on the kisses of human lovers. After illustrating yet a little further the conception of " Hyperion," and the original myth, I shall turn to individual beauties of the two longer poems, and then touch some of the shorter. The " Hymn to Pan " affords evidence of the freshness of individual conviction with which Keats recon- structed and vivified anew the conceptions of Greek mytho- logy, even though he could not read the original Greek. But Nature to him was so verily alive and spiritual that, when he read about the worship of Nature in Greek poets, he understood them, and with enthusiasm embraced their idea ; for him, indeed, Proteus did rise from the sea, and Triton did blow his wreathed horn. Scientific modes of thinking have provisional value ; they teach the reign of order, the beauty of law ; but Keats pretty plainly KKATS. 155 expressed what he thought of these, when they were taken to be the ultimate truth of things, in his " Lamia : " — " Do not all cliarms fly At the mere touch of coUl philosophy ? There was an awful rainbow once in heaven ; We know her woof, her texture ; she is given In the dull catalogue of common things." It is with the imagination, he says in a letter, that we grasp truth ; in other words, the ideal is truth ; the emotions, moral, aesthetic, and affectional, are concerned in the com- prehension of the universe quite as much as the senses and understanding : while as communicating the sublimest, most delicious, and enchanting feelings to the human heart adapted to receive them, Nature surely must herself be spiritual, not material, or rather the material must be spiritual if truly apprehended. Indeed the material may be proved philosophically to be only an ideal construction in and through the spirit comprehending it ; it is also a symbol of profoundcr and more vital reality ; so that Nature, as ex- ternal to us, must be spiritual power, or powers. And is not that very much what the Greeks meant by gods ? But man, though not necessarily higher in the scale of creation than the powers of Nature, when adequately comprehended, is assuredly higher than those powers, regarded either as " fetish," vaguely alive, with the infantile savage, or as mechanical forces with the modern man of science. The change and succession in the dynasties of gods, according to the Greek, and other mythologies, may therefore repre- sent a progress in our — in the human — conception of Divinity. Nature, as it appears to most of us, is inferior to man ; man is the more worshipful. And, therefore, to assimilate the Divine powers at the root of Nature, to the Greek, or Olympian type of manhood, is to advance on the conception of them as Titanic, comparatively blind, elemental, dim, vast, and shadowy, however potent. But does not man make this advance in proportion as he himself 156 ESSAYS ON POETRY AND POETS. makes progress in moral, emotional, and intellectual cha- racter ? Moreover, man seems to be manifested on the stage of the world chronologically later than external Nature — presents himself, indeed (so our men of science now say), as evolved from inorganic elements, from earth, water, fire, through lower vegetable and animal lives, his more imme- diate progenitors. And may not this correspond to another and primary evolution in the heavenlies, or unseen sphere? Some such idea seems to be expressed in the noble speech of Oceanus. After all, humanity is the highest we know ; we can know nothing else. Our notion of animal and vegetable, even of the inorganic realm, is but formed, if you will consider closely, by a subtraction from the human True, we can dimly imagine something higher than man as he is now, but only by taking hints from men and women as they are in their highest and best moments, in their noblest and most illustrious examples. And that is but to conceive an ideal of the highest possibilities of Divine humanity. Hence, the Greek conception was not final. Physical loveliness, courage, serene tranquillity, sensuous life, scorn, pride, power, are but transitional characteristics, comparative virtues, of a grand superior race ; as of Epicu- rean gods, also, whom those races worship. Yet this religion was a justifiable Anthropomorphism, if indeed the very essence of Nature herself must be human ; but if this were not so, we could have no knowledge, comprehension, or sympathy with Nature at all. Whereas, she is, indeed, our mother, and we her children ; she is the all-con- taining, all-nourishing parent. Certainly, then, she is human, as well as divine. The idea of Christ, however, was more divine than that of Pan, or Apollo, as the Olympian was more divine than the Titan. Hence the cry went forth in the hearing of those mariners in the ^gean, " Pan is dead ! great Pan is dead ! " Yet Pan, or universal Nature, still lived ; the idea of her was, indeed, much nearer consummation in Jesus KEATS. 1 57 Christ, His Divine Humanity being far nearer to the very fact of Nature ; though the pagan thought — toward which there was so eager a recoil in JuHan, and Hypatia, at the mcdiaival Renaissance, and now again in the nco-pagan- ism of our own Nature-worship, and care for bodily beauty — may need and receive conciliation with the Christian in a yet profounder apocalypse, or coming again of the Christ, or Divine Word ; for Nature is infinite, as well as sacred, ever removing boundaries, and inspiring her votaries through genius. It may be that low, inferior orders of intelligence — part and parcel of the Kosmic system — are really dethroned from human allegiance, while higher orders suc- ceed them in authority over us, as we ourselves advance ethically and intellectually ; but they themselves are not unconcerned in securing for the human race such advance- ment. The Orb of Day is a grand, sensible phenomenon, producing innumerable benefits, nay, the very life and heart of our visible system ; but to the spiritual mystery thereof who has penetrated ? The Sun is the outward body, wor- shipped by many races and epochs ; but he expresses to them a very different influence and idea according to their own intellectual and moral condition. That is true, indeed, of every visible religious symbol, or worshipped personality. The Mary, or Christ, of the Abruzzi brigand, of the in- quisitor, is not the Mary, or Christ, of Madame Guyon, the Cure d'Ars, Fletcher of Madeley, or Melancthon. What divine character we are capable of apprehending and living up to, that is the vital question ; not what name we may chance to give some mean religious conception, which is but an idol after all. Now and again Apollo dethrones the Titan, who becomes henceforth a Satan, an evil adversary. So the Christians called the pagan divinities devils. However, it seems probable that these wars of the gods point also to the wars of rival races, severally under the protection of rival gods : for instance, those of Zeus and the Titans may indicate the strife of the Hellenes with those ancient I5ii ESSAYS ON POETRY AND POETS. inhabitants, who built the Cyclopean walls of Tir^ns and Mycenae ; but, then, this may indeed have involved an actual contest between principalities and powers — invisible tute- lary deities, and guardians of these races. For evidently the nation is gathered round the altar of the tribal god. This may indeed be some ancestor, or hero. But are such essentially different from gods of nature, if such there be ? Not necessarily, if Shelley was justified in affirming, " he is made one with Nature ; " and do not souls come forth from what we name Nature into human birth ? Verily " we receive but what we give." Nature is ever formed in our image. And in proportion to our own stature does the stature of Nature appear to us. The music of universal reason can only utter itself according to the organ and the chord. The green, teeming, blossoming mother Earth is verily Cybelc, Demeter, Isis, Hertha ; the warm, radiant, creative, overflowing, orgiastic energy of the world is Dionysos, Pan, and the corresponding receptive feminine element is Aphrodite ; the Orb of Day is Hyperion, Apollo ; that innumerable sea-smile is from the glad heart of Oceanus, or Oceanides ; Oread and Hamadryad whisper in woodland leaves ; ruffled lakes are lustrous with luminous looks of nymph or naiad ; the Corybantic, Dithyrambic impulse of Bacchic Maenad is crossed, bound in law, and wrought to harmony by the grave innocence, high wisdom, severe serenity of holy natures, represented by Ourania, Mel- pomene, or Athena. For an idealist ought to believe that these ideas or aspects are not really abstractions, at least, in their essen- tial nature, but may well be distinctively and peculiarly characteristic of certain concrete spiritual individualities with wider scope and influence than our own, concealed from us, yet involving, ensphering, dominating both our- selves and the world, even as the cells of our body are ordered and dominated by the Idea of our human organism. I have sometimes thought the truth may be a hierarchy KEATS. 159 of spirit, one higher and wider sphere comprehending another, Hke Chinese ivory balls, if only these were able to interpenetrate and communicate. We ourselves help to form the order of Nature by our innate moulds of thought and sense ; but there is something in her beyond this, external to ourselves ; only that cannot be blind, dead matter. It must be conscious spirit in harmony with ours. What is this, then, but gods, or angels, who have the rule over, and peculiar commerce with certain departments, or elements we name Nature, whose thought, emotion, imagi- nation, sense, together with our own human reason, verily and indeed constitute these kingdoms } For what are they, if not thought ? Even the idiosyncrasy of men is in more special harmony with certain animals, and certain natural elements or kingdoms than with others, as Jacob Behmcn has already observed, some with water, some with air, some with earth, some with fire, and some with ether, or stars, according to temperament or com- plexion. So also there arc " principalities and powers " of light and love, balanced by principalities and powers of hate and darkness, the higher heavenly Eros, and the wanton Cupid, Uranian and Pandemian Aphrodite, angel and devil, the one very shadow, mocking mimic, and impish counterpart of the other. All Avatars are double, say the Druses. Thus Jesus evokes His adversary, Satan, Eros his Anteros ; so that the latter typifies, exists through, and is even capable of transformation into the other. Thus it is equally credible that gods, or angels, or saints, inferior dignities, have authority also over the various departments of human affairs, and over particular races ; neither necessarily to the prejudice of our own liberty, unless we, or our ancestors have either yielded it, or have not }'et attained thereto from a condition of moral nonage, or moral infancy, nor to that order of fixed law, which natural and psychological science has discovered. For such an order of fixed law is always an order of thought and reason, l6o ESSAYS ON POETRY AND POETS. whether in our own minds, or in the external world of objects. Now, the laws of reason are in the nature of things permanent, necessary, and harmonious throughout the many and various provinces of intelligent existence, having their root and substance in the eternal, spiritual intuition of that Divine Being, who is one with all. So much, perhaps too digressively, has been said concerning the general idea involved in the myth of " Hyperion," hewn into so grand a torso-poem by Keats. And now turn to some individual beauties. The open- ing lines of " Endymion," " A thing of beauty is a joy for ever," I need scarcely quote, they are so well known, their beauty so unquestionable and allowed. In the succeeding paragraph we may note the poet's skill in clothing with concrete beauty the most abstract idea, here, that of distance : — "And now as deep into a wood as we Might mark a lynx's eye, there glimmered light, Fair faces, and a rush of garments white." The suggestion of the lynx's eye being eminently in har- mony with the objects actually visible, and the wood in which they became so. Thus again, in " Lamia " we have — " On the moth-time of that evening dim." And once more — " There she stood. About a young bird's flutter from a wood." Of the paragraph succeeding, the opening is especially happy for variety of pause, choice of phrase, and felicitous arrangement of vowel-sound : — " Leading the way, young damsels danced along, Bearing the burden of a shepherd's song, Each having a white wicker, overbrimmed With April's tender younglings ; next, well trimmed, A crowd of shepherds, with as sunburnt looks As may be read of in Arcadian books." Passing over the exquisite description of Adonis in his KEATS. l6l bower, where he has been put to sleep by Venus, and is carefully tended by the little loves (Adonis the Sun, and his sleep Winter), we come to the waking of Adonis by the descent of Venus — (or Love awakening Nature ; here Adonis is rather the beautiful Earth, young with spring- time) — Venus in her car drawn by doves, " with silken traces lightened in descent" — first, her silver car-wheels spinning off a drizzling dew, that " fell chill on soft Adonis' shoulders, making him nestle, and turn uneasily about ; " then the goddess " leaning downward open-armed " — *' Her shadow fell upon his breast, and charmed A tumult to his heart, and a new life Into his eyes." What a delightful description of Spring ! — " Then there was a hum Of sudden voices, echoing, Come, come ! Arise, awake, clear summer has forth walked Unto the clover sward, and she has talked Full soothingly to every nested finch." The short description of Cybele is also most pictorial ; nor am I going to defend this from the criticism of Lessing, that poetry should not be pictorial, for I have spoken of this elsewhere. I am strongly convinced that all great poetry has been so, and will be. There is another beautiful expression a little further — " To his capable ears Silence was music from the golden spheres." And this, as describing the bottom of the sea, or some shadowy sea-cave — " One faint eternal eventide of gems." It must, however, be confessed that there is a great deal in this poem most crude, even affected, and in bad taste ; there are conceits, occasional ugliness of expression, and wanton liberties taken with the language. What can be worse than where Endymion calls his lady love's lips " slippery blisses ? " All this belonged to the " cockney school " of Leigh Hunt, M l62 ESSAYS ON POETRY AND POETS. though it was soon left behind. So far the abominable creatures who embittered the already too short and bitter daysof Keats were not entirely without justification, as, indeed, what abuse, or abomination, is altogether wanting in fair excuses ? In Keats' early poems there was much that ought not to have passed unreprehended by a judicious and sym- pathetic censor. But, then, these bloodhounds either were, or pretended to be, blind to all the positive and salient original merits of the boy-poet ; his originality, however, was almost their justification — for mediocrity must ever mi.sapprehend that ; it has no palate or discernment of its own ; merit for it must be labelled legibly with the appro- bation of past times, or present, publicly proclaimed " meri- torious" by the general voice, or, better still, by the shrill consent of their own puny clique, before these Laura Bridge- mans of SEsthctic can distinguish its savour from demerit ; and yet such are too frequently the afflicted creatures who offer themselves as caterers, and literary tasters for the public ! Read the " Cobwebs of Criticism " by Mr. Hall Caine, if }'ou wish to know what the most pretentious censors of their day said, and refrained from saying (the "conspiracy of silence") about all the poets without exception, around whose brow posterity has entwined the bay, and how they beslavered pretentious nonentities long since consigned to everlasting obscurity. These things tried, after their kind, to stifle one full throat of song, as if song were too common. Let their memories be dragged for a moment from that darkness, which is only not a sink of infamy, because it is a pit of oblivion, for one passing spurn from the foot of scorn, and then non ragionavi di lor\ ma gttarda, c passa ! We do but haul them from their grave, to kick them into it again. Posterity reversed their verdict, and though they could deprive the poet of his " porridge," they could not cancel the fact that he did " fish the murex up," and that was the essential for hivi. A noble, picturesque lyric is the " Triumph of Bacchus ; " KEATS. 163 the scene is all before you — worthy of a place beside that glorious lyric of Redi, " Bacchus in Tuscany." But now let us turn again to " Hyperion." Byron said it was " inspired by the Titans, and sublime as yEschylus." " Hy- perion " assuredly is one of the grandest word-torsos in the language. In it blank verse has attained consummate dignity, though certainly it owes something to Milton, as " I£ndymion " does to Spenser, Browne of the " Pastorals " and Elizabethan Masques. But what poet does not owe much to his predecessors ? Keats was, however, one of the truly original generative powers of that great harvest-time of English poetry. The debt of Tennyson to him is incalculable. The invention and imagination of " Hyperion " are of the highest order. The opening picture is noble, and strikes the key-note worthily: — " Deep in the shady sadness of a vale, Far sunken from the healthy breath of morn, Far from the fiery noon, and eve's one star, Sat grey-haired Saturn, quiet as a stone, Still as the silence round about his lair ; Forest on forest hung about his head. Like cloud on cloud. . . . Along the margin-sand large footmarks went No further than to where his feet had strayed, And slept there since. Upon the sodden ground His old right hand lay nerveless, listless, dead, Unsceptred ; and his realmless eyes were closed, While his bow'd head seemed listening to the earth, His ancient mother, for some comfort yet." Note the splendid phrase " realmless," as supremely ima- ginative, and expressing the whole situation in a word. A few lines on occurs the line, which has been elevated to the dignity of proverbial quotation — " O how frail To that large utterance of the early gods ! " Then there is the extremely beautiful forest similitude which haunts us ever after in all forest depths — " As when upon a tranced summer night, Those green-robed senators of mighty woods, 1 64 ESSAYS ON POETRY AND POETS. Tall oaks, branch -charmed by the earnest stars, Dream, and so dream all night without a stir. Save from one gradual solitary gust, Which comes upon the silence and dies ofif. As if the ebbing air had but one wave." Worthy of the greatest poets is the vague suggestion of awful portents in the sun-palace of Hyperion before his fall. And how fine the characterization of Saturn's address commencing with the sonorous lines — " There is a roaring in the bleak-grown pines, When Winter lifts his voice " — a line further on repeated with great effect, the r's, and the large open vowel-sounds giving some of the audible effect of wind among pines. That picture of the dethroned, and forlorn Titans is also great — " Scarce images of life, one here, one there. Lay vast and edgeways ; like a dismal cirque Of Druid stones upon a forlorn moor. When the chill rain begins at shut of eve In dull November, and their chancel vault. The heaven itself, is blinded throughout night." But the opening of Book III., concerning the coming of Apollo, or rather his awakening to a consciousness of his own native dignity and lordly function as very destined sun-god, alone worthy to assume royal insignia, and wield imperial thunder, is perhaps most beautiful of all. There is here an indefinable, unfathomable magic, and witchery of words. They are indeed, as Leigh Hunt says, " Swan- like, in love with the progress of their own beauty." The cadence of them, the vowel-harmony, pauses, felicitous phrase, clear, luminous picture, with all its beauty of god- like form, and delicious concordant scene, combine to poetry most exquisite indeed. The reticence and reserve, too, of the passage as compared to the treatment in Endymion, show that the poet, though so young, was already mature: — " Throughout all the isle There was no covert, no retired cave KEATS. 165 Unhaunted by the murmurous noise of waves, Though scarcely heard in many a green recess. He Hslened and he wept, and his bright tears Went triciiling down the golden bow he held. Thus with half-shut, suffused eyes he stood, While from beneath some cumbrous boughs hard by, With solemn step an awful goddess came." " And there was purport in her look for him, Which he with eager guess began to read, Perplcx'd, the while melodiously he said, ' How earnest thou over the unfooted sea ? ' " Note the happy word "purport" here, and the accurately pictorial " cumbrous boughs." Delicious the mere sound of the lines commencing " Perplex'd, the while." These gods and goddesses are so realized through the poet's sensitive perception and spiritual interpretation of Nature herself, of whom they are the animate and appro- priate expression, that we are almost bound to believe in them ; they are so much the soul, essence, and inevitable denizens of the scenes and surroundings in the midst of which we find them. Keats was the born mythopoeist of these later days, Landor being rather a colder, though, indeed, as to external form, a more classical reproducer of ancient tales, and fair humanities of old religion. But Keats was the more unfettered in this function from the fact of his attitude being one of comparative detachment from the distinctive religious beliefs, as also equally from the negations of his day and generation. He had a posi- tive faith, but very little formulated creed, or formulated antagonism to the established creed. The other great poets, his contemporaries, were Nature-worshippers also ; only with him this cult presented itself invested with the beautiful and delicate forms of Greek mythology. I do not say that his own belief was precisely that of Greece ; yet, when he was poetically inspired, it was not essentially different, allowing for the difference of his age and educa- tion, and for that melancholy yearning toward the infinite, which is Christian and modern. The Greeks were mere 1 66 ESSAYS ON POETRY AND POETS. charming story-tellers, not allegorical, and moral at all ; and so far, no doubt, our Keats was not Greek. Through strange suffering, wonder, bewilderment, and convulsion, which makes " Quiver all the immortal fairness of his limbs," does Apollo (" most like the struggle at the gate of death "), grow into his inheritance of glory, and then the wondrous fragment breaks off abruptly. Now turn to the lesser poems. " Lamia " and " Isabella " are admirably-told stories, and there is no excess in the manner over the matter, all which promised excellently for a future that never arrived — at least, on this earth of ours. "Lamia" is clearly allegorical, or at least representative of wider issues. It means passion, or impulse versus reason, or philosophy. And here, again, we have the extraordinary power of realizing the primitive mythological modes of thought and feeling, notably in the transformation of the serpent into the woman. These fairy, or " astral " regions, are as palpable to Keats as the solid, visible world is to any of us ; tinged they are indeed with the Gothic, or mediaeval romance-feeling, that weird inflexion, which is notable also in Coleridge, in the " Ancient Mariner," and " Christabel." In " Isabella " we have the charming fancy — " Come down, we pray thee, ere the hot sun covint His dewy rosary on the eglantine ! " And this brief imaginative touch of genius in a phrase, which shows the great poet — " So the two brothers and their murdered man Rode past fair Florence." " Murdered " already, so inevitably had Death branded him for slaughter. And then the pathos of the line — " There in that forest did his great love cease." The lamentation of the poor lover's ghost, who appears to Isabella in vision, is exquisitely pathetic too. The lovely poem, " Eve of St. Agnes," is one of those KEATS. 167 best known. What a Shakespearian, and startlin^f unex- pectedness of phrase is here : — "Sudden a thought came lilce a full-blown rose, Flushing his brow, and in his pained heart Made purple riot." For magic of epithet, so utterly alien to the cold inge- nuities and conceits of the false and vicious fantastic school, it is not easy to rival Keats out of Shakespeare, once he has outgrown the bad taste which disfigured the lush prodi- gality of " Endymion." His vocabulary is extraordinarily wealthy and varied for so very young a man. The luscious richness of his description cannot be better illustrated than by those two stanzas from this poem, wherein the lover, Porphyro, views the beloved maiden in her chamber. The poem ends with just a touch of that pathos, so full of human-heartedness, which is also one of the traits that makes Keats beloved : — " And they are gone ; aye, ages, long ago, These lovers fled away into the storm." It is really impossible to exaggerate the debt of Tennyson's style to this poem. The " Ode to Psyche " shows excellently well that so characteristic trait, the soul of the Greek turning as naturally to that bright and beautiful mythology in the young son of the London livery-stableman as in any fair poet of Hellas, nurtured in her delicate air. Thus Chatterton, too, lived in the illumined world of mediaeval romance, how much more truly than in those dingy streets of modern Bristol ! Only here there is a tender regret for the old days. Exquisite are the personifications in the " Ode to Autumn," and these are precisely what we should expect from so mythopoeic a soul. Of all the poems of Mrs. Browning, delightful as many of them are to me, the one I care for least is her answer to Schiller's " Gotter Griechen-lands," commencing " Gods of Hellas." It seems to me that the mistaken sentiment of that poem finds for itself a righteous Nemesis 1 68 ESSAYS ON POETRY AND POETS. in the slovenly rhymes of it — " Gods of Hellas, will you tell us ?" But then she wrote another poem called " Pan," later in life, whose beauty, and truth of mythological per- sonification almost atone for the one called "The Dead Pan." Remember that crowned personification of the " Ode to Melancholy " — " And Joy, whose hand is ever at his lips, Bidding adieu." In his " Sleep and Poetry," an early work, Keats tells us what in his view was the chief end of poetry — " Forgetting the great end Of Poesy, that it should be a friend To soothe the cares, and lift the thoughts of man." While, a few lines further, he says — " They shall be accounted poet -kings. Who simply tell the most heart-easing things." Not a pessimist this Keats, nor a mere sensualist either. And he concludes the clause with the line so fraught v.ith sadness to us who know the event — " O may these joys be ripe before I die ! " There is a beautiful sonnet to the sea, and one contain- ing a strange — to me, very fascinating — image concerning the sea : — " Tiie moving waters at their priest-like task Of pure ablution round earth's human shores." Of " La Belle Dame sans merci " Mr. Watts has well spoken ; to it Mr. G. Rossetti is largely indebted. It is mediaeval. Some noble sonnets were also written by the young poet. "On first looking into Chapman's Homer" is one of the finest. And now, in conclusion, we pass to the two loveliest of Keats' shorter poems — two that have their calm celestial KEATS. 169 faces set steadily toward immortality — the " Ode on a Grecian Urn," and the " Ode to a Nightingale." The " Ode on a Grecian Urn " wonderfully enshrines the poet's kinship with Greece, and with the spirit of her wor- ship. There is all the Greek measure and moderation about it also ; a calm and classic grace, with severe loveliness of outline. In form it is perfect. There is an cxquisiteness of expression — not that which is often mistakenly so de- signated, but a translucence, as of silver air, or limpid water, that both reveals and glorifies all fair plants, or pebbles, or bathing lights. In the " Ode to a Nightingale," how admirable are those abstractions of the second stanza ! — " O for a draught of vintage that hath been Cool'd a long age in the deep-delved earth, Tasting of Flora, and the country-green, Dance, and Provencal song, and sun-burnt mirth ! O for a beaker full of the warm South, Full of the true, the blushful Hippocrene, With beaded bubbles winking at the brim, And purpled-stained mouth. " That I might drink, and leave the world unseen, And with thee fide away into the forest dim." What poetic genius is implied in the choice of such epithets ; how bold, yet felicitous the " tasting " of these things that yet cannot be "tasted" — but so blended are all sensations with memory, imagination, and the higher faculties, that we may scarcely discriminate what is appro- priate to each when association sets off one image, and notion, and feeling after another, and fuses all into one ! And then "sun-burnt mirth" — how easih- would an inferior talent pass the line of the ridiculous in attempting such periphrases ! But as Nelson, with the instinct of genius, at the battle of the Nile, knew that it was only just not impossible to pass between the enemy's line of battleships and the shore, so here also, the not impossible in descrip- tion has been divined and dared. Not that the best poet I70 ESSAYS ON POETRY AND POETS. can remain always at this altitude ; sometimes even his often unerring intuition will fail him. Whenever I enter a forest, this line haunts me — " And with thee fade away into the forest dim." It is night, and the particular flower or fruit unseen that breathes so delicate an aroma, and so we have the beautiful generic " incense " — "Nor what soft incense hangs upon tlie boughs." Again, note — "To cease upon the midnight with no pain." Such periphrases, which are apt to brand a mere versifier indelibly with the brand of inferiority, if coined in cold blood, and with palpable design of drawing attention to the writer's own cleverness, are in Keats true inspirations of infinite delight. " The same that oft times hath Charmed magic casements, opening on the foam Of perilous seas, in fairy lands forlorn." Here we seem altogether lost in some ethereal supermun- dane region of the phantasy, where all is intangible, indefinite, but wonderfully lovely — phrase, cadence, and image. But the inspiration of " Ruth amid the alien corn',' has a touch of human pathos, that causes the dim and fleeting generations to link hand with hand, and makes that delightful story of the Bible very near. Yet with all this immense sense of the beauty and glory of life, of the world and its wonderful shows, he had known many a disappointment, and suffered much — love unfulfilled, malignant scorn, cold indifference, painful death near, and work half done ; there was ever a melancholy yearning after some unrealized, unrealizable ideal ; his vision of the infinite, beyond and beneath sense, deepened toward the close — KEATS. I 7 I " I know this being's lease ; My fancy to its utmost blisses spreads ; Yet would I on this very midnight cease, And the world's gaudy ensigns see in shreds. Verse, form, and beauty are intense indeed, But Death intenser — Death is Life's high meed." How we love young Severn, his painter friend, who nursed him like a woman in his last lingering illness and agony ! In Shelley's noble words — " He lives, he wakes ; 'tis death is dead, not he ! " VICTOR HUGO. Is he whom Tennyson calls " Victor in song, Victor in romance," indeed only a clever, but eccentric, and voluminous creator of monsters ? That, though not the opinion of poets, seems to be the opinion of some critics, English and foreign. In the Spectator, a journal which, when it happens to be in sympathy with the work criticized, unquestionably shows insight, Hugo was lately characterized as colossal, but not great ; and the dictum was hazarded that some reflective lines of " In Memoriam " were worth all he had written put together. That the present writer feels completely at fault when such statements are made, he freely confesses. He hears them as empty wind, without meaning ; for, though not blind to the great poet's faults, and to all objections that may be urged against him, he is nevertheless disposed to regard Hugo as the greatest European poet of our century. The latest romance of this veteran of literature, " Ouatre-vingt-treize," is surely enough to prove it. That a poet of Hugo's years should retain all the fire and intensity of youthful genius, while conquering for himself also the moderation and artistic restraint of maturity, is a phe- nomenon rare enough to be remarkable. We have not in "Ouatre-vingt-treize" the lurid, concentrated, and often grotesque horror of some of the dramas, or of " L'Homme qui rit." Nor, on the other hand, have we the episodical and digressive voluminousness of that magnificent romance " Les Misdrables." VICTOR HUGO. 173 It may be well, however, to premise that I have spoken advisedly of Hugo as a poet. Those among us who appear to regard poetry as rhythmic sound of a special and very elaborate sort, into which (unfortunately) some semblance of idea and feeling has, if possible, also to find its hinder- ing way, such persons may demur to Hugo being called a poet. For I hold that some of his greatest poetic crea- tions are in prose ; and that if you want dainty devices of epithet and sound, you must rather go to mediaeval trouba- dours and tnmveres, to men like Marini or Baudelaire, or again, to sundry infusorial homologucs of these in England and America. That the French language does not admit of melodious poetry indeed is a dictum of some critics to which I, who love Berangcr, Dc Musset, and Ronsard, cannot subscribe. There is beauty, too, in the verse of Lamartine ; it abounds, moreover, in that of Hugo. But by poets I mean imaginative creators, expressors of great imaginative types, or ideas in appropriate verbal form ; or, again, singers with the heart's true lyrical cry. To those who hold the Art for Art theory Hugo can hardly seem a poet. He is one who, like Homer, Shakespeare, .^schylus, Dante, Milton, is lifted high in the sphere of art by stress and storm of great ideas and aspirations ; he is in full sympathy with all the noblest ideals and tendencies of his time ; to him there is in man and Nature nothing common or unclean ; he is no bloodless spectre of study or studio, inventing, or adapting quaint feiix d' artifices of syllabic euphony. He cannot understand that an artist must be indifferent to humanity, to religion, to politics, to moral and metaphysical problems ; that an artist must work regardless of eternal distinctions in Nature, of high and low, good and bad, hideous and beautiful ; or that art, which may distinguish between beautiful and ugly in the region of sense, must lose all such discrimination in dealing with the higher sphere of spirit. To him such a creed, whatever might be its adv^antages, would seem inhuman, inartistic, degraded, and absurd. 174 ESSAYS ON POETRY AND POETS. Let us then proceed to examine one or two of tlie chefs- (Voetivres of this poet. In " Quatre-vingt-treize " all is, on the whole, restrained within the classic limits of highest art. But some seem to suppose that for art to be classical it must be cold and pale. Hugo is certainly never that. And neither are any of the world's masterpieces. Not those of Homer, ^schylus, Sophocles, Sappho, Chaucer, Dante, Shakespeare, Milton, Shelley, Byron, Scott, Hawthorne, Charlotte Bronte, George Sand, Tennyson. If these poets had not high genius, they would be justly reproached as " sensational." Cold and pale works are either pseudo- classical imitations, or utterly insignificant as literature. Racine was a true poet with fine sense of form ; but so far as he was cold and pale, he was not classical. David is cold, and pseudo-classical. Raphael, Michael Angclo, and Titian radiate life, fire, and colour from their canvas, true classics of pictorial art. Poor modern statues are very dead and cold ; Apollo Belvedere, and Diana in the Louvre, are gods that breathe, and ever do undying deeds in stone. Death is pale, and cold, and rigid ; but the touch of art makes alive ! And life is all varying complexity of subtle curve and colour. All this, of course, does not mean that there are not certain general laws valid for, and to be found in great art, whatever the variety of shapes it may assume. There is a more complex and subtle, but as real a pervading unity in a perfect Gothic cathedral like Salisbury as in the Pagan Parthenon of Athens. The vital variety and rich- ness of detail may sometimes overpower the sense of unity ; but this is a fault less grave than that the unity should be mechanical, dead, and barren, without vital variety to inform it. Indeed, while there is hope of perfection in the first case, there is no such hope in the last. Moreover, these beautiful artistic creations of detail, episode, and phrase, have organic unity of their own, or they would not be beautiful at all, although there be still wanting the VICTOR HUGO. 175 Divine breath to mould them into one consummate spirit. But the carving.s and festoonings of marble and jasper, and oaken fruit or flower, the flamboyance of mullion, jewelled, dim radiance of .silver lamp-lit shrine or altar, the high, solemn interflucnce of dark pillared arches — all these may form high poetry, though the style of the whole cathedral be not absolutely one and harmonious. We admit the turbid, yet glorious faultiness of Hugo, as of Shake- speare, the rich, wavering, incompleted ascent of Gothic genius toward the twilight of infinity. But theirs is a splendid cathedral for all its imperfection. And however imperfect, however erring the worship, it is a fane dedicated to the true God ; to Jesus Christ, His Son, our Lord. There men may worship the Father in spirit and in truth, according to the more or less light that is always vouch- safed to those who sincerely seek it. There may be per- chance grotesque images of superstition ; there may even be altars to the Unknown ; but on the whole, the atmo- sphere and the ritual are Christian, elevated, advanced, and ennobling. There is nothing overtly, deliberately, debasing or impure ; all the fair lines of the high arches ascend and marry far above our heads ; the spaces are large and ample ; we behold man in his heaven-helped progress toward the higher ideal of our Lord and Saviour, toward the coming of His kingdom, toward human brotherhood in One — the spirit of these ideas informs the highest art of Christian time, whether the artist's formal creed be strictly orthodox or not. Nay, it informs the iconoclasm of Hugo and Ivamennais more than it does the orthodoxy of Chateau- briand, or Boileau. " Other foundation can no man lay than that is laid." But the poetry of despair, and material- ism is in a temporary side-eddy merely ; for the craze of scientific materialism is only that. In one .sense it is doubtless part of the main stream ; still the grand current trends elsewhere. And the Ezvigkeit-gcist views tranquilly these inevitable vagaries of the Time-spirit, his daughter. 1/6 ESSAYS ON POETRY AND POETS. Victor Hugo has written some splendid verse-poetry. But in this region he is perhaps more unequal, and falls more below himself, than in any other. Much of it is merely declamatory and rhetorical, as French verse is so apt to be. That is especially true of " L'Annee Terrible." Yet you are never long without startling thrusts of genius in felicitous condensed epithet or line, that almost take away your breath with their memorable, incisive appro- priateness and force. In " L'Annee Terrible " we have these concluding lines respecting the surrender at Sedan : — " Alors la Gaule, alors la France, alors la gloire, Alors Brennus, I'audace, et Clovis, la victoire. . . . Et tons les chefs de guerre, — Heristal, Charlemagne, Charles Martel, Turenne, effroi de TAllemagne, Napoleon, plus grand que Cesar et Pompee, Par la main d'un bandit rendirent leurs epees." And here we have also that exquisite poem about Hugo's little grandchild — "La Petite Jeanne" — written during the siege of Paris : — " Et vous venez, et moi je m'en vais, et j'adore, N'ayant droit qu'a la nuit, votre droit a Taurore. Votre blond frere George et vous, vous suffisez A mon ame, et je vois vos jeux, et c'est assez ; Et je ne veux, apres mes epreuves sans nombres, Qu'un tombeau, sur lequel se decoupera I'ombre De vos berceaux dores par le soleil levant. " Oh ! quand je vous entends, Jeanne, et quand je vous vois Chanter, et me parlant avec votre humble voix, Tendre vos douces mains au dessus de nos tetes, II me semble que I'ombre ou grondent les tempetes Tremble, et s'eloigne avec des rugissements sourds, Et que Dieu fait donner a la ville aux cents tours, Desemparee ainsi qu'un navire qui sombre, . . . A I'univers qui penche, et que Paris defend, Sa benediction par un petit enfant." There are beautiful things about children, too, in the great old poet's last volume of verse, " L'Art d'etre Grand- pere," notably "Jeanne endormie," and " Le Jardin des Plantes." In fact, he is never higher and more wonderful VICTOR HUGO. 177 than when writing about little children. The glory of the man's large, loving heart overflows whenever he beholds those innocents, whom the Lord took in His arms, and blessed with most peculiar blessing. And this is the writer of the scathing " Chatimcnts." " J'ai fait pair mix petits hommes" he says in " L'Art d'etre Grandp^re, ^^ jamais aux petits enfants^ The design of the " L^gende des Si6cles " is grandiose, and there are some grand representative pictures in it, notably " Canute " and " Eviradnus." Certainly the can- vases and designs of this master are colossal. He seems to demand vast spaces for the free sweep of his magic brush, nor can we always claim for] him perfect delicacy of touch, and perfect refinement of taste. Still his vast pictures are akin rather to the colossal works of Michael Angelo, Tintoret, and Orcagna, than to the colossal works of Haydon, Cornelius, or Horace Vernet ; for in the prose romances there is little, enormous as they are, that is not stamped with the impress of the master. And yet the execution in small things is sometimes delicate, with all the rare felicity of Heine, or De Musset. But the felicity is rather the unforeseen felicity of Nature, as in Burns and Beranger. This is the song of the dying and half-wandering girl, Fantine, longing to see her child before she dies, in " Les Mis6rables " — a cradle-song, that comes to her, dying, which she used to sing in happier days to her baby : — " Nous acheterons de bien belles choses, En nous promenant le long des faubourgs ! Les bleuets sont bleus, les roses sont roses, Les bleuets sont bleus, j'aime mes amours. La vierge Marie aupres de mon poele Est venue hier en nianteau brode, Et ni'a dit : voici, cache sous mon voile, Le petit qu'un jour tu m'as demande ! Courez ^ la ville, ayez de la toile, Achetez du fil, achetez un de ! Nous acheterons de bien belles choses. En nous promenant le long des faubourgs ! N 178 ESSAYS ON POETRY AND POETS. " Bonne sainte vierge, aupres de mon poele J'ai mis un berceau de rubans orne ; Dieu me donnerait sa plus belle etoile, J'aime mieux I'enfant que tu m'as donne. Madame, que faire avec cette toile ? Faites un trousseau pour mon nouveau ne. Les bleuets sont bleus, les roses sont roses, Les bleuets sont bleus, j'aime mes amours, " Lavez cette toile — ou ? Dans la riviere Faites en, sans rien gater ni salir, Une belle jupe avec sa brassiere. Que je veux broder et de fleurs emplir. . . . L'enfant n'cst plus la ; Madame, qu'en faire ? Faites en un drap pour m'ensevelir ! Nous acheterons de bien belles choses En nous promenant le long des faubourgs ! Les bleuets sont bleus, les roses sont roses, Les bleuets sont bleus, j'aime mes amours." Still, the Cyclopean scale on which the master loves to work is most characteristic ; the breadth of his touch, the rapidity and profusion of his style — a profusion as of starry worlds ; a style resembling waves of the sea, sometimes, indeed, weltering dark, opaque, and massive, but ever and anon flashing with the foamy light of genius. The finish, and rich accurate perfection of our own great living poet, Tennyson, are absent. Hugo is far more akin to Byron, but his range is vaster than Byron's, He has Byron's fierce satire, and more than Byron's humour, though it is the fashion to generalize, and say that the French have none. To this point we shall return. He is both a lyrical and epic poet. He is a greater dramatist than Byron ; and whether in the dramas, or in the prose romances, he shows that vast sympathy with, and knowledge of, human nature, which neither Byron, Shelley, Coleridge, nor Wordsworth had. Scott could be his only rival. For in France they have lived dramatic lives for the last ninety years : we have lived much more quietly in England. And in France there is a real living drama. We need not repeat the old story of Hugo's long battle VICTOR HUCO. 179 as champion of so-called Romanticism against the pseudo- classical Philistinism of academic prigs. In that battle he simply incarnated the genius of his age, emancipating itself from the fetters of simpering incapacity, masquerad- ing in the guise of " correct taste." No capable person can deny the genius of Racine, Corncille, Voltaire, Beau- marchais. Still, Corneille was greater than Racine ; yet the self-laureled, mumbling, official imbeciles of criticism, or puppies fresh from school, whom they hired as their bravoes, looked askance at Corneille, in proportion as his great limbs could not be confined within old-fashioned court uniforms, then officially prescribed for poets. Voltaire was a power by the cold, keen, sparkling edge of his supple raillery and denial ; Beaumarchais by the salt of life, and grace of humour that belonged to him. But none of these men travailed with the rich and sor- rowful humanity of an art, whose creators had passed through tremendous fires of an epoch-marking age. In Germany, Goethe and Schiller, in France, two men and one woman, have since stood forth as far greater art- creators than either of them — namely, Victor Hugo, Balzac, George Sand. One solitary figure indeed, by sheer force of native genius, rose to equality with these, and with the greatest of all time — Molierc. And one great writer before them foreshadowed the future — Rousseau. But these spirits of our epoch, like Byron, Shelley, Scott, Keats, and Wordsworth, in England, having fresh, original things to say, necessarily made for themselves a more or less original way of saying them. And such things originating in a deepened, broadened current of human life, as in a fuller comprehension of mankind than was possible to men of the corrupt, artificial, and exclusive, however nationally- stirring time of Louis-Quatorze — also in a heightened appreciation of external Nature — the new creators found themselves drinking at the deep, ever fresh, though ancient wells of Shakespeare and his contemporaries. Moreover, I So ESSAYS ON POETRY AND POETS. they felt and saw in Greek poetry what they brought the power to feel and see ; that which their predecessors had no faculty for perceiving. Hence the imperious need to them, wrestling with great problems, palpitating with strange new prophecies and perceptions, of the large, free Shakespearian form in art. We shall quote one or two instances of the master's satire from that tremendous book, " Les Chatiments." Here is a poem called " Confrontations : " — "O cadavres, parlez ! quels sont vos assassins? Quelles mains ont plonge ces stylets dans vos seins ? Toi d'abord que je vois dans cette ombre apparaltre, Ton nom ? — Religion — Ton meurtrier? — Le pretre. Vous, vos noms ? — Probite, Pudeur, Raison, Vertu. Et qui vous egorgez? L'Eglise — Toi, qu'es-tu ? Je suis la Foi publique — et qui t'a poignardee ? Le Serment — Toi, qui dors de ton sang inondee? Mon nom etait Justice — et quel est ton bourreau ? Le juge — et toi, geant, sans glaive en ton fourreau, Et dont la boue eteint I'aureole enflammee? Je m'appelle Austerlitz. Qui ta tue ? L'armee. "Ad majorem Dei gloriam " is fierce, .scathing, annihilating as Swift, Juvenal, or Byron. It is an arraignment of the Church of Rome and her priests: — " Nous garroterons I'ame au fond d'une caverne. . , . Alors dans I'ame humaine obscurite profonde ! Sur le neant des cceurs le vrai pouvoir se fonde ! Tout ce que nous voudrons, nous le ferons sans bruit. Pas un souffle de voix, pas un battement d'aile Ne remuera dans I'ombre, et notre citadelle Sera comme une tour plus noire que la nuit. " Nous regnerons. La tourbe obeit comme I'onde. Nous serons tout-puissants, nous regirons le monde Nous possederons tout, force, gloire, et bonheur ; Et nous ne craindrons rien, n'ayant ni foi, ni regies. . . . Quand vous habiteriez la montagne des aigles, Je vous arracherais de la, dit le Seigneur ! To the dead of the fourth of December, he cries : — "Grace au quatre Decembre, aujourdhui, sans pensee, Vous gisez etendus dans la fosse glacee. Sous les linceuls epais. VICTOR HUGO. l8l O morts, I'herbe sans bruit croit sur vos catacombes ; Dormez dans vos cercueils ! taisez-vous dans vos tombes ! ' L'Empire, c'est la paix.' " And again, every word of " Le Te Deum " is a thunderbolt. These are the two last verses, addressed to the priest who chanted the Te Deum of ist January, 1852 : — "Ton diacre est Trahison, et ton sous-diacre est Vol : Vends ton Uieu, vends ton ame 1 Allons, coifFe ta mitre, allons, mets ton licol, Chante, vieux pretre infame I " Le Meurtre h. tes cotes suit I'ofifice divin, Criant : feu sur qui bouge ! Satan tient la burette, et ce n'est pas de vin Que ton ciboire est rouge." " A un martyr " shows the poet's perfect reverence for our Saviour, while he slings syllables of fire at the Church, which accepted "the bandit "for its patron. It is, we think, in these brief eagle-swoops of fierce song that the sound of the poet's verse is most striking. It has the resonant, quick tramp of irresistible battalions. In "L'Homme a ri," and elsewhere, he reveals how he believes in the power, and survival for great ends of his own verse. And to those who fancy Hugo is always over- verbose, or invertebrate, we commend the " Chatiments," and the dramas. The former are short, swift, concentrated, and deadly as a flash of light- ning. See the teiTific sev^erity, where every word tells, and none is merely for effect — a stern brief severity as of Con- science herself speaking — in " Sacer esto." But it is the loftiest moral indignation that burns and scalds in this poetry ; no feigned false fire of artificial rhyme-mongery. Warm, generous human blood is in this poet. Read " A un qui veut se detacher ! " In the dramas, however, you have also complete vital concentration. That they are justly open to other charges we think is true. They are sometimes French, rather than human — seeking too ostentatiously striking melodramatic situations, sometimes laying bare a horror that is too raw 1 82 ESSAYS ON POETRY AND POETS. and thrilling, sometimes revealing a Dora's love of the mon- strous and grotesque. From this point of view some excep- tion might be taken to " Marie Tudor," even to " Ruy Bias," " Hernani," and " Lucretia Borgia," three of the most powerful dramas. But the finest in my judgment arc " Le Roi s'amuse " and " Marion Dclorme." Yet the impression left by " Le Roi s'amuse " is too thrillingly horrible, like that of " Lucretia Borgia." Its power and fascination, however, can hardly be surpassed : indeed, the unity of motive and action in all Hugo's plays is generally perfect, and they are admirably fitted for the modern stage, their movement being rapid and stirring, the most minute directions also being given by the author for the inise en scene, with an admirable eye to pictorial and scenic effects. For reading, truly, the many startling surprises seem often too calcu- latedly theatrical. There is very little so-called "poetic diction " in the dramas ; that is to be remarked : in the eyes of our neo-fantastic ornate school of decadence in England they must seem too natural, too direct, too human. All the personages do not talk the same sonorous euphuism. Hugo dares to write what penny-a-liners call " bald," when he sees it to be appropriate. Perhaps it may be partly owing to this that the naked realism of his horror sometimes shocks, as an equal horror does not in Shakespeare, whose fault, however, as Matthew Arnold has dared to say, is, though not of course to the same extent as in our modern writers, a somewhat indiscriminate euphuism of diction. For the most part, indeed, Shakespeare varies rhythm and diction with the situation, and sense. But there is a helpless wounding sense of cruel, overwhelming destiny for the good, and rampant, triumphant e\il, in " Le Roi s'amuse," which prevents its attaining rank among the highest works of art. For we will not admit the new-fangled doctrine, that, so long as the form is good, the substance is of no consequence, and that art may say anything, however absurd, false, or atrocious, provided she says it prettily. Art falls below VICTOR HUGO. 183 herself, and unduly narrows her own scope, if she become a prude ; yet if she distort Nature, or the grand spiritual laws that underlie and form Nature, she is no longer Art at all, but at best a harlot masquerading in the guise of Art. She may not so one-sidedly and persistently misrepresent things as virtually, even if not by set phrase, to become pander for " the ape and tiger " in humanity. The Divine Artist, who speaks through conscience and the human heart, does not ignore morality ; he who does so remains for ever outside the domain of high art, however swiftly his deft fingers may travel over the whole gamut of men's lusts, hatreds, and chicaneries. Nor may she, like the later Realism, fix our stare, as by some photographic head-rest, too persistently on loathsome, or sordid details of life, bid- ding us look only at these, as if they, forsooth, were all the world — nor stifle us through her own near-sightedness, and mad monstrous appetite for offal, with the hopeless and desperate sense that this low dank vault of theirs, without egress, lit only by some occasional corpse-candle, wherein they have confined us, is indeed the universe, beyond which there is nothing at all. Yet I admit the great imaginative power of Zola. Art is a handmaid of heaven ; and however solicitous her professed friends may be to obtain for her the situation, she respectfully declines to become procuress of hell. All this does not touch Hugo, though it was indirectly suggested by " Le Roi s'amuse." The subject of that play is briefly as follows. The gallant and handsome Francis I. has seduced the daughter of an old nobleman, and the hideous court dwarf, Triboulet, has encouraged this, as well as the rest of his master's vices, mocking openly the father's agony and tears. He is deformed in body and soul, and thus avenges himself on the more favoured fellow-mortals who cast him out. The father curses Triboulet ; and it happens that he has one tender place, one link indeed to virtue and salvation, his own daughter. Now the king, who spares none, spares not 1 84 ESSAYS ON POETRY AND POETS. her. Triboulct keeps her carefully concealed from the king, but the latter finds her out, and corrupts her also. Then Triboulet burns with hatred against his master, and plots his destruction. He is to be lured into a coupe-gorge and murdered. The sister of the bravo, however, takes pity on the sleeping king, persuading her brother to murder the first comer instead, and to hand the body to Triboulet in a sack, as the object of his revenge. Now Triboulet's daughter loves her seducer, and overhearing this, she resolves to save the king at the cost of her own life. She is killed, and handed over to her father, who gloats over what he supposes to be the corpse of his child's betrayer. But a flash of lightning reveals to him the corpse of his child ; and his maddened agony now, as before his bitter- ness, misery, fiendish rage, and satiate revenge are wonder- fully depicted — as also the beautiful light cruelty of Francis. Yet we have a pained sense of innocence made victim, of the prosperous tyrant laughing on, of the consummation of nature's hatred wreaked on this deformed man, who might be redeemed, one had hoped, through this one love. True, the retribution on him for having scoffed at the other father is just, and one's hatred changes to pity. There is nothing really immoral here. This is the effect the poet intended ; there is indeed hope even for this Triboulet, while there is retribution also. Certainly what is called " poetical justice " is an utterly mistaken contrivance ; substituting our own shallow justice for God's — though even that has its justifi- cation in a healthy artistic as well as moral instinct. More- over, it may be said there is the same oppressive sense of doom in " King Lear," or " Hamlet." Yet in Shakespeare there is, I think, a certain large air, a light and heat of essential poetry, that clears this atmosphere of oppression, we scarce know how. There is a palpable suggestion of infinite horizons beyond the slaughter-house of this world ; a feeling conveyed, however indistinctly, of a holy Mystery that surrounds and sanctifies — this mortal scene beingf but VICTOR HUGO. 185 the antechamber of God's eternity. The rest is silence ; but an awe falls upon us, and we put our shoes from our feet, for we stand upon holy ground. Around the sublime anguish of Lear and Cordelia there abides a dim, tranquil aureole, as around those piteous natural casts of distorted Pompeian corpses, when lately brought to light, there brooded the blue heaven, and warm, hazy horizons of Southern landscape. Such an impression, somehow, though nothing be overtly stated, can supreme genius give, so truly does it see even the bare fact. Over its nudity is cast the royal robe of Art. Hugo too often concludes with a ter- rible mad shriek of helpless anguish — a discord : the agony is too crude, too harrowing, too poignant. The emotions are hardly " purified ; " they are only lacerated through " pity and terror." I can just endure the horror of Lear and Othello, but hardly that of Marlowe's Edward II L Those other inferior, though still potent Elizabethans, they likewise do not rise to these Shakesperian, Sophoclean heights of moving, yet tranquilizing tragedy — not even Webster, nor Marlowe. Whatever the great world-poet's creed, and whatever the fierce writhings of his strong nature in doubt and revolt, he had faif/i in the Divine order : the greatest Greeks had it also ; and so has Hugo. But the breath of faith does not seem here to dominate his art. Yet there is necessary for high art some kind of " Katharsis," some kind of reconciliation of moral elements, or upward tendency, to give that restful sense of harmony which art demands. We cannot bear to finish upon a discord. If there be no " morality " indeed, the whole work is apt to seem one long series of discords, and there can only be harmony in the strange sense that between a series of discords there must of course be some kind of agreement. Here is no permanent material out of which to frame a permanently satisfying work of art. We have at best an elaborate structure with sugar, or with cards, rife with all bias toward disintegration. Lower elements are certainly needed to give variety and 1 86 ESSAYS ON POETRY AND POETS. movement ; but the binding, transforming power is still more needed. We cannot dispense with the loftiest, most satisfying harmony man is capable of conceiving. As reli- gion and philosophy, practically and dogmatically, so art imaginatively, supplements the bewildering moral mysteries of life. This is not, of course, to endorse the strange opinion of some German critics, that Shakespeare had a series of copybook maxims in his head, which he wrote his plays to illustrate. Yet the more reflective, analytical, philosophical bias of our own day will necessarily influence our greatest poets, and perhaps not altogether to their advantage as artists. You may learn from the artist, albeit indirectly ; the image, the story, and the type, or teaching, grow up together as one vital unity in his soul. " Marion Delorme," however, seems to me among the greatest of extant dramas. Marion is a woman of light love, a celebrated courtezan. A young man of high and austere character meeting her, without knowing who she is, but taking her for a chaste maiden, indeed creating around her the ideal of young love, believes in and adores her. She is at first half amused, half astonished ; the experience is something new to her, but she conceals from him her real character ; in fact, without being aware of it, for the first time she loves. That love is her salvation ; but through what anguish and difficulty must she pass ! When a work of this order is objected to as " immoral," the artist may well refuse to be judged by the prurient incompetence of literary prudes. The heroine is a woman originally of loose character — therefore, forsooth, the work is immoral ! Mary Magdalene, however, was also such. But Marion should not, nay, she could not repent, or it would interest us in her too much if she did. Cynics, or Pharisees may say so ; but if the grace of God, and the story of the Mag- dalene be not fables, we dare not say so. Let it not be averred, however, that we admire this work because it chimes in with our theology, or our deepest convictions — VICTOR HUGO. 187 there may be thousands of books which do so, without being works of art at all. Still, we prefer to see a great subject greatly treated to seeing a mean subject ever so skilfully handled. The former requires greater faculties, greater character, greater genius in the artist. Is Denner, the painter of wrinkles, though wrinkles imply no de- gradation, really equal to Leonardo, the painter of Christ and His apostles at the Last Supper .? Art " gives form ; " but whether she gives form to excrement, or gold can hardly be pronounced indifferent, especially since her materials themselves are spiritual, belonging to the artist's own nature, and that of the persons to whom his work appeals. Art " gives pleasure." But there is pleasure in brothels — and clseivJiere. The play opens with a scene in which a young gallant, Saverny, is talking lightly to Marion, and reproaching her with having a new lover. She, in fear and trembling, en- treats him to go, without telling him the truth about her pure lover, Didier (an enfant tronvc- — adopted and brought up by a good woman of the people). Saverny goes, and Didier enters ; but the former is attacked in the dim lamp- lit street by murderers, and Didier hastens to the rescue. Saverny, returning to thank him, too boldly gazes at Marion. This Didier resents, and later takes the first opportunity of picking a quarrel with Saverny, who fights (nearly in the dark) without recognizing his rescuer. Now, duels have been forbidden on pain of death by Richelieu, the master of France, and of the weak King Louis XI IL Marion, by her cries, inadvertently attracts police-agents to the place, who arrest Didier, Saverny feigning death. Marion, however, contrives to deliver him from prison, and they join a band of strolling players. The transition of Marion's feelings from light to true love, traversed as they are by the dread of discovery on the part of Didier — t he horror of pain, bewilderment, and fear with which she be- holds the light of his pure avowals, and lofty sentiments 188 ESSAYS ON POETRY AND POETS. Streaming into her impure spirit, revealing her own un- worthiness of him — how she shrinks from his chaste and loyal offer of marriage — to her, a courtezan, who dare not tell him her name — all this is given with exquisite subtlety and truth. One day he sees a book on her table, gallant verses written to " Marion Delorme," and he up- braids her for reading it, bursting forth into invective against the vile woman of whom he has heard. He sup- poses that she rejects him because of his mean birth and fortune, which makes him bitter. When they are with the strolling players, he bids her leave him, and not bring upon herself his miserable fate ; but discovery is at hand. The development of the plot here is somewhat involved and improbable. Suffice it that both Didier, and Saverny are re-arrested by a stratagem of Laffemas, the infamous " lieutenant-criminal " of Richelieu, and that, without intend- ing it, Saverny betrays the identity of Marion to her lover. His disappointment and rage — together with his fierce, cutting rebuffs to her affectionate attentions, so shocking to her before she knows she is discovered — are well given. But she resolves to save him again, and for this purpose makes her way into the presence of the king, Louis the Chaste, as his courtiers nickname him. He refuses to grant her request ; but this leads to scenes that admirably portray the king's pitiably weak, vacillating character, as mere puppet in the hands of the proud and cruel cardinal-minister, yet secretly chafing under his un- worthy condition of tutelage. He lets the feeling escape him in private converse with the fool, D'Angely, and the Due de Bellegarde, an old courtier. The venerable pro- vincial baron, who comes to plead for Saverny, his nephew, and the courtier duke, are excellently drawn. The wily courtier, invited by the king (who knows how Richelieu is hated by the nobles) to give his frank opinion of the cardinal, dares not do so openly even then, well aware of the king's unreliable character ; but while Louis rails VICTOR HUGO. 189 against his minister, Bellegarde lashes him into rage by insinuating the shame of the king's position, though overtly justifying and praising the priest. With profound know- ledge of human nature, the poet afterwards makes the irritated king reject the old baron's prayer for his nephew, to a great extent through anger at the baron's having brought an armed escort into the royal presence, which the baron, imprudently asserting his feudal privileges at such a moment, has proceeded to justify. The king, being governed by Richelieu, is proportionately tenacious of his rights with others — even sullenly threatening Bellegarde to repeat their private conversation to the cardinal. Later, the fool, D'Angely, partly by an amusing stratagem depending on the king's prudery, partly also by touching Louis' weakness for the chase, and averring the duel was caused by a dispute about falconry, induces him to pardon the two prisoners. The conclusion shows them in prison. Marion, on her way with the pardon, meets Laffemas, who actually holds a revocation of it in his hand, which he has wrung the moment after from the poor royal tool. Laffemas will only allow Marion to save her lover (by him- self conniving at the escape) on one infamous condition. After a desperate moral struggle, she yields, for time presses. The execution is to take place at once. But Didier refuses to go with her. He upbraids her with the bitterest vehemence for deceiving him, and divines that, in order to get at him, she must have prostituted her person. Before she knows he has discovered her secret, with all a woman's affectionate wiles she entreats him to fly, reminding him of old times, and of his protestations of love to her.* The loveliness of this poor creature's regenerated and self- devoting soul is given with utmost fulness and beauty. She wonders, dismayed, at his hardness ; she feels that, if he will not come at once, he is lost, and she implores : " Parle mot, voyoiis, park, appelle moi Marie ! " Then he interrupts — " Marie, ou Marion ? " — upon which she falls I90 ESSAYS ON POETRY AND POETS. horror-stricken to the ground. And yet in her despair, urging him to tread on her, confessing her sin and un- worthiness, she reminds him he once asked her to be his wife. Then they hear the cannon, the death-signal ! But he still loves her after all. As he is going, and taking leave of his friend, she entreats him to kiss and forgive her. At last he melts into tears, and falls into her arms. He for- gives, and recognizing all the nobility of her soul, the truth of her love, he asks her to forgive him. There is one hope more — the cardinal. He is coming to see the execution. As he passes in his litter, she throws herself before it, en- treating grace. But a voice comes from between the closed red curtains, " Pas de grace ! " Senseless, she lets the crowd and the victims pass by her, and in the end stands alone, half-mad, upon the stage, pointing to the cardinal's retreat- ing litter : " Regarded tons! Voila riiovinic rouge qui passe!'' One feels, horrible as it is, that Didier's pure love, and this earthly hell have saved her soul. Though the plot is in parts somewhat crude and involved (for it is an early work), yet the tremendous passion, the tragic situations, the movement of the action through contrasted develop- ment of characters mutually influencing one another, all this makes a tragedy of the first order. Is the creator of Louis Xni., of the light, hare-brained, gallant French nobleman, Saverny, of the wonderful Marion, of Bellegarde the courtier, of the noble Didier — is this man merely an eccentric creator of monsters ? We had one dramatist living in England, and only one, who could be compared to Hugo, and that was Richard Hengist Home. But his plays are of course too good to be much known, or read, or acted in this country. He indeed has written some noble poetic dramas, that are both poetry and drama. We need name only " Cosmo dei Medici," and the " Death of Marlowe." And to find an English dramatist of the same order before him you must go back to Sheridan, if not to Otway ; though the " Blot on the Scutcheon," and one or two early VICTOR HUGO. 191 pieces of Browning, may perchance make us hesitate before we speak so sweepingly. Still Victor Hugo has written three magnificent ro- mances, that transcend the dramas, and all the other works. All his romances indeed display the genius of the master. " L'Homme qui rit " is about the perversest and strangest, though there are passages in it of extra- ordinary power. But his detailed, persistent, dogmatic errors about England, and things English are what has attracted most attention here. This betrays, no doubt, an amusing weakness. And touching upon his weak points — (though we feci, in the presence of such a man, that it is somewhat irreverent to do so, and too much like one who, brought in front of Salisbury Cathedral, and remaining awhile in open-mouthed contemplation, observed at last to the enthusiastic but disappointed friend who brouglit him, that he thought he saw a window broken high up among the clerestories) — we may admit that often his political speeches seem to an English taste strangely high-flown and bombastic. He is not without his sins either as a French politician, I sympathize strongly with his enlightened liberalism, but not with his flattery of the national vanity, and shallow love of military " glory." He is blinded by Napoleon's genius, and condones the infinite mischief he wrought, far greater than that of his nephew, and " monkey " in the crooked paths of crime. Yet the career of the old exile of Guernsey is a grand one. Exiled to those melancholy seas of the islands for his un- dying hostility to the crime of December ; beloved there by all the poor, especially by little children ; refusing to return to his dear land with those who were amnestied in the latter time of Louis Napoleon's reign — returning only when the enemy invaded France, and Bonaparte fell ; at Paris during the terrible days of the siege ; in his old age — his deep, affectionate heart suffering irreparable domestic losses — consoling himself with tiny innocent grandchildren! 192 ESSAYS ON POETRY AND POETS. " L'Histoire cl'un Crime," is the story of the Coup d'etat by one who may with pride say, Quorum pars magna fui. These minute details concerning one of the foulest crimes in history, disgracefully condoned in England because successful, came very opportunely when France seemed, how lately ! to be on the verge of the same dark experience. The circulation of this work there has been enormous. There is a good deal about the vexata qucestio of passive obedience in the army, when the army is called on by Presidents in jackboots to commit treason against the State, and cut the throats of fellow-citizens. It does seem fortunate, on the whole, that the great French poet has not been sitting for the last seventy years like an idol with its arms folded, " holding no form of creed, but con- templating all." What with the " Chatiments," " Napoldon le Petit," and this book, posterity will be able to form a good notion of M. Louis Bonaparte. However, it may modify the impression, if it pleases, after the fancy portraits drawn by Mr. Browning, and Mr. B. Jerrold. The auto- biographic value of this work is at all events great. Hugo did all the most reckless and energetic personal daring could do to overthrow the military dictatorship set up by Bonaparte on the bloodstained ruins of the French Re- public, and his pen at any rate has had no small share in actually overthrowing that dictatorship. There can be no doubt, moreover, that now and again his " so potent art " has paralyzed other Ultramontane " saviours of society," in their impious hope of adding another to the black catalogue of crimes perpetrated in the name of the long-suffering Prince of Peace. " L'Homme qui rit " is a monster, no doubt. So are Quasimodo in " Notre Dame," Triboulet in " Le Roi s'amuse," and Lucretia Borgia. But after all, Hugo is not always making characters of this kind. And when he makes them, does he make them from a pure love of the monstrous .? Emphatically, no. On the contrary. He VICTOR HUGO. 193 has intense sympathy with the oppressed, rejected, and outcast of humanity. He behcvcs there is even in them a certain Divine brotherhood with Christ. And some of our great theologians have thought the same, have seen it in the Bible, in the utterances of our Lord Himself. In Jean Valjean the convict, in Triboulct, in Lucrctia Borgia, in Quasimodo, in the fallen woman, Marion, the poet shows you the Divine discipline of circumstances leading these dark, despised, damaged sinners up to higher life and light, albeit through fiery waves of terrible suffering, the dis- cipline laying hold of one clue, one hidden thread of holier natural feeling, and by this drawing them out of the dark- ness of their spiritual catacomb. Then Hugo, great dramatic interpreter of human nature, as in duty bound, if only for the sake of contrast, and the play of moral forces, paints all ; but he puts all in its own place ; he does not insist on the evil from dislike of, or personal incapacity for believing, discerning, and sympathizing with the good : he puts it beneath, in its own place, not above ; nor represents it as if it stood alone. Evil, surely, is too prominent in the mar- vellous realism of Balzac (" sacraments of adultery and divorce," Carlyle says), as in the neo-paganism of other inferior, though clever modern writers. But Hugo has painted Josiane in " L'Hommc qui rit," and a portrait of richest colour it is. Still our poet is doubtless an idealist. I do not, in fact, just now remember more than three great portrayers of humanity who are not — to wit, Fielding, Balzac, and Thackeray; for writers like Smollett cannot "be ranked among the highest. Hugo represents men as they usually are ; but sometimes also men as they might be. Indeed, of Fielding, Balzac, and Thackera)', that they are realists in art, is only true in a limited sense. For no true artist reproduces individuals. But it will be asked. Does he not create them ? Yes, certainly ; and the only question there- fore is. Whether his individuals are more or less like the O 194 ESSAYS OF POETRY AND POETS. ordinary people one meets about ? Is an artist bound to confine himself to these? or may he not rather create indi- viduals of a rarer, more ideal type, persons who might be, who may have been, who will be ? so carrying us away from the vulgar levels of cvcry-day existence, interesting •our imaginations in remote mysterious regions, bearing us toward grander, stranger, or higher possibilities, by means of these very creations, one day to become realities ? May not these be the more " real " after all ? " Forms more real than living man, Nurslings of immortality ? " What we have a right to demand is that art-creations shall be self -consistent, living with their own proper, native harmony of life. Then these are indeed shadows of the types, according to which men and the worlds are ever created by the Divine Artist. The Hamlet of Shakespeare's spirit is himself a living spirit, whether in Shakespeare, or in those who make friends with the offspring of Shake- speare. It is remarked, indeed, how often an artist differs from his own ideals. Fundamentally, perhaps, he differs not, but for the nonce and superficially he does differ. Pcrugino paints saintly pictures, and is apparently not a saintly person. Arc not, then, other spirits uttering them- selves through his spirit ? He is inspired ; even as Balaam, who came to curse, was constrained to bless. For the rest, what we insist on as specially 'Weal" is, in fact, contingent phenomenon of sense, is least real of all. Such grand creations as CEdipus, Agamemnon, Achilles, Clytemnestra, Hamlet, Lady Macbeth, Othello, Jean Valjean, Gilliatt, Consuclo, Faust, stand towering above mortals, like colossal images on cloud cast by veritable forms of gods standing high upon the temple-wall of their own eternal habitation. As for those characters that first strike us as types, rather than as individuals, they are impersonations of particular qualities, and only a genius like Moliere's can make them VICTOR HUGO. 195 tolerable. The abstracting intellect is too much at work here. Some say, however, that Valjcan is not self -consistent ; the illiterate, rude convict could never become the Made- leine of later times. Yet those who know something of the history of " conversions " will never admit this. There was a desperately bad character, coarse, violent, brutal, ap- parently lost to all good feeling, in the Home of Mrs. Vickers at Brighton — Miss Ellice Hopkins has written about her — no love, no preaching seemed to affect her. But she is now the most trusted and most trustworthy of the matrons there. Tant pis pour les faits, a theorist or a cynic may say. We say, Tant pis pour les theories! The very point, moreover, of Valjean's history is that he was made bad by the radically unjust, undiscriminating punish- ment of society. He stole a bit of bread in a mad moment of poignant anxiety, not for himself, but for those dear to him, who were reduced to the last extremity through no fault of his. Fate pressed this outcast hard from the beginning ; he was one of the " Mis^rables ; " then, sorely tempted, rightly, or wrongly, he stole. His punishment was to be confined and herded with the worst of criminals. The sense of doom, of injustice, rankled in him ; associated with the worst and most desperate of his fellow-men, he became bad. Released at length from prison, he was the sullen foe of well-to-do, comfortable society. A good old bishop houses him, and, though he knows his story, treats him with the utmost confidence, as if his character were undamaged, leaving silver candlesticks within his reach, and placing him in a guest-chamber near his own. He is astonished ; but in the middle of the night he is tempted to make off with the candlesticks : and one of the most powerful scenes of the book is where he passes with them through the bishop's room, and sees the moonlight resting on the placid face of his kind and saintly host, whom, had he wakened, Valjean might ha\e murdered. 196 ESSAYS ON POETRY AND POETS. He is arrested and brought back (not by the bishop's order), and, to screen him, the bishop says that he has given him the candlesticks. (Here, no doubt, the writers of virtuous EngHsh novels may raise a point of casuistry.) He dismisses Valjean with the solemn words, " Jean Val- jean, mon frcre, vous n'appartcnez plus au mal, mais au bien. C'est votre ame que jc vous achete ; je la retire au pensees noires, et a I'esprit de perdition, et je la donne a Dieu ! " But after this he met a little Savoyard, as he was tramping along, who dropped a piece of money in the gathering twilight. Valjean instinctively, and savagely put his foot on it, refusing to give it up, though the boy scolded and cried. So the child went off sobbing. Yet this brutality was the beast's expiring effort in Valjean, and the tears of the boy, together with the Christ-like conduct of the bishop toward him, did their holy work. So years after we meet him as M. Madeleine, the self- educated, upright, benevolent mayor of a country town, beloved and trusted by all. He has dropped the old name with the old nature. There is no verisimilitude in this, we have been told. In whose eyes, we reply .'* Not, we believe, in the eyes of those unblinded by theory, who know most of the history and profound secrets of human nature. Is he represented, however, as perfect, as having no stain, as free from all necessity to struggle with sin ? Not at all. The very contrar)-. One of the most powerful passages in all literature is the chapter called " Une tempete sous un crane " — wherein, another man having been arrested as Valjean for the robbery of the Savoyard, Madeleine debates all one night whether he shall giv^e himself up or not, so relinquishing the excellent and needful work he is doing as mayor, leaving, moreover, the poor lost woman, Fantine, who is expecting him to bring her child, Cosette, to her on her death-bed, and whom he has already influenced for good. But he must go the very next morning to Arras, if he decides to surrender himself, where the man's trial will VICTOR HUGO. 197 be taking place: he might even now be too late. But shall he, must he go back to the horrible convict life, losing the respect and love of men, now so dear to him in his new existence ? He decides to go. The accidents of his journey, the delays, his entry into the judgment hall of Arras, where he can only make his way through the crowd by sending a message to the judge that the (well-known) Mayor Made- leine requests he may have a seat on the bench ; his hesi- tation when alone in the corridors leading thither as to whether he shall push the old door or not ; his emergence into the dirty, crowded hall, badly lighted by guttering candles ; his bewildered observation of the scene ; the judge's bow to him ; his own voice startling even himself, as he announces himself to the incredulous court for the true Jean Valjcan ; Javert's — the police-officer's — recognition of him — all is told with a marvellous imaginative realism of detail, that lays hold upon the soul and never lets it go. This Javert, a very incarnation of the French detective police, is a portrait painted with such solidity and perfection that one seems to have known him in the flesh, as one does the original of a portrait by Titian. He is at once type and individual, as Othello is. He is the implacable foe of Valjean throughout — embodiment of formal law blindly carrying out the (roughly moral and necessarj^) edict of human society upon a branded criminal, who is indeed criminal no longer — right from its own limited point of view, yet wrong and blundering in this instance — as in many — fulfilling, how- ever, in the end, grand purposes of God by inflicting life- suffering on this upward-tending human spirit. The figure of poor Fantine, too, another victim of society and hard circumstances, is quite imperishable. She dies, singing that song of yearning for her child, whom in this world, alas ! she is not to see. Still more exquisite and imperishable, if possible, is Cosette, the young girl whose life and fate are bound up so incxtricabl}- with those of Valjean. The 198 ESSAYS ON rOETRY AND POETS. latter, again a convict, his chains having been struck off, saves a drowning man in the harbour of Toulon, by an extraordinary exertion of strength, courage, and agility ; but he himself never reappears to the authorities, and is supposed to be drowned. He has really dived, and swum a long way under cover of darkness ; and we meet him far off, seeking for the child Cosette, whom Fantine had entreated him to seek out at the Thenardiers', where she had placed the girl. They are publicans, and there the poor child has been sadly ill-treated. The Thenardiers seem to start out of the book as repulsive, mean, veritably living persons. They are both bad, man and wife, but how well-contrasted in their diverse, mutually reacting villainy ! Ngt a trace of exaggeration or caricature is there, though Hugo is by some supposed always to exaggerate. The effect is produced by depicting subtle nuances of word, gesture, and action — not by the author's reflective analysis, as in George Eliot, or by that reflective analysis often inappropriately put into the character's own mouth, as in Mr. Browning. Hugo's is certainly the more dramatic method, though he can analyze when he pleases with all the psychological subtlety of either author. The misery of the poor, neglected, overworked child, and all her ways in that family, arc described with unrivalled force and pathos — as she sits in the chimney corner of the cabaret, with nervous, lifelong fear expressed in every lineament and gesture, ragged, ugly, pale, thin. Thenardier is a small man, popularly supposed to be ruled by his big, loud- spoken wife ; but the contrary is true. The woman has one good point— she is fond of her own little girls. But she " has not time " to teach Cosette to pray, or to take her to church. One evening these little girls are playing with the cat, and every one's attention being diverted, Cosette ventures to drop the leaden sword she habitually nurses for a doll, and furtively takes up the real one, belonging to the other children. It is twilight, and she is in the shadow, VICTOR HUGO. 199 sitting on the floor ; but the firelight happening to fall upon a rosy leg of the wax doll, the children, looking round at the moment, see what she has dared to do. They make an exclamation ; and then the woman calls to her in a voice of thunder, threatening to beat her. Jean Valjean (in his soiled, tattered clothes) is sitting there, and he, who has come in with the child and asked for lodgings, thereupon walks out, returning soon with a wonderful doll, which Cosette had been admiring open-mouthed in a shop window when Mother Thenardier sent her that very evening to the spring in the wood for water with a bucket. There Valjean first met her. The shop-window lighted up had seemed Paradise to the poor neglected child, with that large, lovely lady doll in the midst ; and now, to the indignant astonish- ment of all, Valjean presents Cosette with this very doll ! The child's despair at having to leave the town alone in the chill evening, and enter the wood, is terribly felt and rendered. When she enters the dark forest, she fancies ghosts pursuing her, and at last, with beating heart, she sits down exhausted at the spring. " A cote d'elle I'eau agitde faisait des cercles, qui ressemblaient des serpents de feu bleu. Au dessus de sa tete le ciel 6tait couvert de vastes nuages noirs, qui etaient comme des pans de fumee, Le tragique masque de I'ombre semblait se pencher vague- ment sur cet enfant. Jupiter se couchait dans les profon- deurs. L'enfant regardait d'un ceil egare cette grosse etoile qu'elle ne connaissait pas, et qui lui faisait peur. La planete en ce moment etait pres de I'horizon, et traversait une ^paisse couche de brume, qui lui donnait une rongeur horrible. La brume lugubrement empourpree elargissait I'astre." Then he describes the fearful branches of the trees, and the dismal sounds of the chilly wind in them — pro- ceeding with his own extraordinary power to enlarge on the strange weird living horrors of the twilit forest. Every touch tells, though the mind is almost oppressed with the multiplicity of detail. But he, and Charles Dickens have a 200 ESSAYS ON POETRY AND POETS. similar faculty of feeling and expressing the dim, veiled, spiritual life in Nature, which we can only discern through a glass darkly, but which is there, and has so deep a spiritual influence upon men. (Elsewhere, though not here, Hugo injures his impressivencss by ov^erloading his canvas, and unduly multiplying epithets ; by a want of self- restraint ; by the volubility, and sometimes alloyed appro- priateness of his adjectives or similes ; by an almost artificial, strained grotesqueness, and passion for lurid effects.) " Cette penetration des tenebres est inexprimablement sinistra dans un enfant. Les forets sont des apocalypses ; et le battement d'aile d'une petite ame fait un bruit d'agonie sous leur voiitc monstrueuse." At last she takes courage to fill the bucket, and goes, counting " one, two, three," to dissipate her horror, with the heavy iron bucket freezing her hands, spilling its water on them, and her poor naked legs. " C'etait un enfant de huit ans ; il n'y avait que Dieu en ce moment qui voyait cette chose triste. Et sans doute la mere helas ! Car il est des choses qui font ouvrir les yeux aux mortes dans leur tombeau. Elle soufflait avcc une sorte de ralement douloureux ; des sanglots lui serraient la gorge." And she reflected the Thenardiers would beat her when she got back ! She often stops to rest. The misery is almost too terrible here. " Cependant le pauvre petit etre diisespere ne put s'empecher de s'^crier : O mon Dieu ! mon Dieu ! En ce moment elle sentit tout a coup que le seau ne pesait plus ricn ! " Valjean had come behind, and was carrying the bucket for her ! Valjean again takes another name, and lives retired in Paris with Cosctte. But he is tracked by his old enemy, Javert, and the story of his escape with Cosette up a water- pipe, with Cosette on his back, by help of a rope, into the garden of a convent, is one of the sensational parts of the book, reminding one of Dumas the Elder, or Eugene Sue, and equally good as their admirable writing about such things. There is a dash of the boy, of the gamin, about this great VICTOR HUGO. 201 poet, and he is not above a spice of adventure, excitement, and romance. Let the reverend seniors shake their heads at him then ! For his part the present writer hkes it. Of this sort, too, is Valjean's extraordinary exit from the convent garden in a coffin, by the help of an old sexton, who only knew him as Madeleine, in order that he may re-enter it to put Cosette to school there. Another similar episode is his bearing the senseless young Marius on his back through the sewers of Paris, after he (Marius) has been shot on the barricades of 1832. Extremely fascinating is his account of this convent and its inmates. Here, as elsewhere, he shows a perfect dramatic ability to understand and sym- pathize with characters or modes of thought diametrically opposed to his own, and to do them justice. There is, moreover, one of the curious episodical dissertations here with which the book abounds, and which no doubt interferes with its technical perfection as a work of art, by breaking up the unity of its impression ; but these could just be bodily removed elsewhere, as wantonly stuck on, though admirable enough in themselves, and then there would stand forth one of the masterpieces of human genius in all its own sublimely massive integrity. He has in this part a chapter on prayer, which is refutation sufficient of bigots or ignoramuses who have charged him, forsooth ! with " atheism." He contends, on the contrary, for a personal God, and for the necessity of prayer to Him. Nothing can be further from the blind and bigoted sciolism that hurls itself foaming against, or makes mouths of a monkey at, or dismisses with a gesture of conceited contempt, the pro- foundest and most universal religious convictions of man- kind. His poetic humanity is too broad and deep for that. But then he has the first requisite of the poet — though one scarcely necessary to the versifier, or the critic— namely, manhood. Before being poet, one must be man. " II y a une philosophic qui nie I'infini. II y a aussi une classee pathologiquement qui nie le soleil ; cette philosophic 202 ESSAYS ON POETRY AND POETS. s'appcllc a'citt'. Erigcr un sens qui nous manque en source de verity c'est un bel aplomb d'aveugle." Speaking of the self-satisfied airs of atheists, he says : " On croit entendre une taupe s'ecricr ; ils me font pitie avec leur solcil ! " We have also a most brilliant account of Waterloo, and Napoleon — apropos of Marius and Thenardier — and a detailed dissertation about the Paris sewers ! In that part there is, indeed, an almost morbid propensity to enlarge unduly on the horrible. But though the political history of events preceding 1832 is too long, the story of the bar- ricades and their defenders, Enjolras, Gavroche, etc., is admirable, and a quite legitimate episode from the point of view of perfect art. The characters here are lightly sketched, are connected with the main personages, and by their side-eddies give relief to the intense strain of the grand current. The sketch of the little Paris gamin, Gav- roche, is a master-sketch for all time. Behold him finding the poor little lost children in the Luxembourg gardens, talking to them patronizingly, and taking them home with him to sleep in his hole under an old broken statue of an elephant ; making them comfortable ; a mite full of impu- dence, and resource, and premature knowledge ; pure and kindl}', in spite of his bad human surroundings ! See the awe of the small, gentle, carefully protected children in his presence ! The humour of the talk between these three is equal to any humour whatsoever. And here we stop to note what absurd general statements are made upon insuf- ficient data : e.g. that the French have no humour, only wit. This, and much else in Hugo, shows most genuine humour, and fills us with astonishment at the immense range of his gifts. And those two lost boys in the Luxem- bourg Gardens, before they met their powerful protector. Master Gavroche ! There was a bourgeois with his little boy feeding swans in the pond. \\' hen they left, the other lost boys approached, and the elder reached a bit of bread, VICTOR HUGO. 203 which the ripple of water (made by the swans swimming to it) had pushed within reach ; this he gave to his hungry brother of five years old. Meanwhile, the noise of distant fighting at the barricades is borne towards them. As for Gavroche, he dies on the barricades, receiving first one bullet, then another ; gaily singing light songs between each wound, and making " vulgar signs," as Thackeray calls them, after his kind, at the soldiers. When Cosette leaves the convent, she lives quietly with Valjean, and grows up into a woman. All this part is literature of the very highest quality — the girl's opening nature is subtly and delicately unfolded — nothing here is heavy, or laboured, or difficult, but the tender touches are worthy of so tender and sweet a rose. Except Juliet, in Shakespeare, and Marguerite, in Goethe, we know of no similar portrait to equal this. The love of Cosette for the old man, and his infinitely greater love for her, wlio is the only human object he has to love ; the ennobling, strength- ening effect of this love upon him when his old nature threatens to rule him again, feeling as he does the chaos, flie injustice, and blindness of society, the miserable spec- tacle of human mistakes, and sins, and disappointments : all this is unique, and intensely original, the climax being when another love comes in between him and this child as she grows up, her love for a young man, Marius Pontmercy, and his love for her. Then begins in earnest again the struggle of good and evil in this great chastised nature. How can he yield her to another, who is the very channel of God's grace to him, as well as his only little flower, bringing sweetness and colour into his life? See then, reader, that Valjean is no monster of perfection ! They were living in an old retired house together ; and here, by the side of his misery, obscurity, hateful memory of the past, and dread lest she should know it, feeling himself ever liable to be tracked and recaptured, Cosette grew from a plain child into a pretty girl. She only began to be 204 ESSAYS ON POETRY AND POETS. aware of her beauty when she heard some passer say, " Jolic, mais mal mise." Though she could not fancy he meant her, she began to look in the glass, and attend to her dress after that. Valjcan was sorry when she became pretty ; " a mother would have been glad." Before, she had been content with their retired life together ; now she began to want to go out in the streets, and to need some amusements. A slight sense of separation grows up insensibly between them. Then Marius appears on the scene — a good-looking, but untidy and studious youth, reading on a bench in the Luxembourg Gardens, as Cosette and the old man pass of a morning. Marius and she only gradually begin to take notice of one another. When Cosette began to care about him, it was only as a kind of charming distant vision ; and the girl really thought she was expressing all she felt in saying to Valjean, " Quel delicieux jardin que le Luxembourg ! " There is also much humour in the account of Marius's budding love — his put- ting on a new coat and gloves, but always pretending to read as the couple passed. Jean Valjean cordially detests him, as a possible lover, and says to Cosette one day, " Que ce jeune homme a I'air pedant ! " to which she replies with supreme calm, " Ce jeune homme la ? " as if she had noticed him for the first time in her life. Then, " How stupid I am ! " thought Valjean : " she had not remarked him. C'est moi qui le lui montre! O! simplicite dcs \'ieux ! profon- deur dcs enfants ! " At length he determines to remove ; and she, albeit very tender to him whom she regards as her father, seems silent and sorrowful, though (educated in a convent) she scarce knows yet that she indeed loves Marius. One morning the girl and Valjean go out to see the sun rise. " Elle regardait les papillons sur Ics fleurs, mais ne les prenait pas ; les mansuetudes, et les attcndrissements naissent avec I'amour, et la jeune fille qui a en elle un ideal tremblante et fragile a pitie de I'aile d'un papillon." At last she meets Marius, and he avows his love. Then follows VICTOR HUGO. 205 an cxciuisite idyl, and here with equal perfection are de- scribed the young loves of their fresh souls, and the spring- tide of the beautiful garden, so harmonious with them, where they used to steal their brief meetings. " Foliis ac Frondibus " is unsurpassed for tenderness of natural de- scription : every feature and tint and tone in the spiritual and the natural are here soft echoes of one another. But Marius, one of the republicans, has to go to the barricades, and Valjean goes also, though only to attend to the wounded. As related, he saves Marius's life, and moreover Javert's, who becomes his prisoner. But Marius was all the time insensible, and does not know who his deliverer is. Valjean consents to the marriage of the lovers, but his heart is broken, for he feels he ought to reveal his true history and position to them, separating himself from them for ever. Yet this resolution causes him a fearful struggle. This combat of the flesh and spirit could not be more religiously described. " Combicn de fois, terrassee par la lumi^re, lui avait il crid grace ! Cette lumiere implacable, allumee en lui et sur lui par I'evcque, I'avait il ebloui de force, lorsqu'il souhaitait etre aveugle ! Combien de fois s'etait il releve sanglant, meurtri, brise, eclaire, le desespoir au coeur, la st^renite dans I'ame ! Et vaincu il se sentait vainqueur ! et sa conscience lui disait : maintenant va en paix ! " The prose epithalamium on the first bridal night of Marius and Cosette is a piece of chaste and lovely poetry. But the climax of all modern poetry, as it seems to the present writer, is in the chapter where Valjean leaves the happy wedding supper, and goes alone to the old house where the girl and he had lived so long. There he locks himself into Cosette's empty room, and by candlelight un- fastens an old box that he had always preserved, contain- ing the childish frocks and stockings and trinkets that he had given her when he took her away from the Thenardiers at Montfermeil. These he arranges on her bed, one by 206 ESSAYS ON TOETRV AND TOETS. one, calling to mind the far-away night when he found her first ; and then their walk together through the wood on leaving Montfermeil. The trees were without leaves, the sky without sun or birds, but ah ! " Elle netait pas plus haute que cela, elle avait sa grande poupde dans ses bras, elle avait mis son louis d'or dans la poche de ce tablier : elle riait ; ils marchaient tous les deux se tenant la main, elle n'avait que lui au mondc ! Alors sa vendrable tete blanche tomba sur le lit, ce vieux cceur stoique se brisa, sa face s'abima dans les vetements de Cosette, et si quelqu'nn cut passd dans I'escalier, on cut entendu d'effrayants sang- lots." And here all night in the cold, with his head on the bed, kissing the little child's things, he debates with himself whether he dare do as the young husband and wife have both entreated, go and live with them, and so run the risk of inflicting his infamy upon them, should he be dis- covered. This agony the poet calls, " Le septieme cercle, ct le huitieme ciel." Finally he denounces himself to Marius. "Vous demandez pourquoi je parle ! je ne suis ni denoncd, ni poursuivi, ni traque. Si ! par qui ? par moi ! II faut si on veut etre heureux, monsieur, ne jamais com- prendre le devoir ; car des qu'on la compris, il est implac- able ; on dirait qu'il vous punit de le comprendre, mais non ; il vous recompense, car il vous met dans un enfer, ou Ton sent a cote de soi Dieu." But Marius, though he shrinks from him at first, feels his grandeur, and Thenar- dier, while trying to injure him in the eyes of Marius, unintentionally reveals Valjean as the heroic deliverer he has longed to discover. All the heroism of his life and character becomes little by little as clear to the husband as it is to Cosette ; but the end is near. Now that his angel child is taken from him, he sinks in his lonely dwell- ing, so full of memories of her. There is nothing in Shakespeare, or Sophocles, more intensely pathetic than his death, with Marius and Cosette, whom he has sent for, kneeling b}- the bedside. This may stand as a companion VICTOR HUGO. 207 picture to the death of Lear, or that of CEdipus. As Madeleine, the mayor, he saved a Httle money, made by discovery of a process of manufacture, which he, in broken phrases, explains to the lovers : this money will be theirs. He has placed a crucifix near him. To that he points. "Behold," he says, "the Great Martyr!" Other tender, loving, and beautiful things he speaks brokenly to his children. " Cosette et Marius tombcrent a genoux, dper- dus, etouffcs de larmes, chacun sur une des mains de Jean Valjean. Ces mains augustes ne remuaient plus. La nuit (ftait sans etoiles, ct profonddment obscure. Sans doute dans I'ombre quelquc ange immense etait debout, les ailes deployees, attendant I'ame." That angel, the poet suggests, may have been the bishop. " La mort, c'est I'entree dans la grande lucur." Truly God hath chosen the weak, and foolish, and despised things of this world to confound the wise and powerful ; and things that are not, to bring to nought those that are, that no flesh should glory in His presence. Here is no less than the story of the human soul, travelling from darkness and through darkness up to light eternal, "kept by the power of God unto salvation." And tJiougJi it has the misfortune to be elevating and ennobling, we believe that it may almost be described as (^pace a recent school of critics) " a work of art." We must not be tempted to linger over that other great romance, the " Travaillcurs de la Mer." Here is man in presence of Nature, wrestling with her, as Jacob wrestled with the angel, and overcoming. The colossal will and energy of GilHatt, the hero, are striving against the tre- mendous and overwhelming infinitude of Nature's indignant and infuriated legions. Baffled, thrown back, working on to achieve the impossible, he at last achieves it. May not this poem be described as the distinctively modern epic desiderated by Carl)'le } It celebrates " tools and tJie ;//