THE
MAKERS OF MODERN ENGLISH.
Progress is
The law of life, man is not man as yet.
Nor shall I deem his object served, his end
Attained, his genuine strength put fairly forth,
While only here and there a star dispels
The darkness, here and there a towering mind
O'erlooks its prostrate fellows : when the host
Is out at once to the despair of night,
When all mankind alike is perfected,
Equal in full-blown powers then, not till then,
I say, begins man's general infancy.
BROWNING, Paracelsus
THE
MAKERS OF MODERN ENGLISH.
A POPULAR HANDBOOK TO THE
GREATER POETS OF THE CENTURY.
W. J. DAWSON,
AUTHOR OF
'THE THRESHOLD OF MANHOOD," " A VISION OF SOULS AND OTHER
BALLADS," " QUEST AND VISION," ETC.
THIRD EDITION.
HODDER AND STOUGHTON,
27, PATERNOSTER ROW.
MDCCCXCII.
WORKS BY THE SAME AUTHOR.
I.
THE THRESHOLD OF MANHOOD. A Young Man's
Words to Young Men. Sixth Thousand. Crown 8vo,
cloth, 33. 6d.
II.
THE REDEMPTION OF EDWARD STRAHAN
Third Thousand. Crown 8vo, cloth, 35. 6d.
III.
A VISION OF SOULS : with other Ballads and Poems.
Price 6s.
IV.
QUEST AND VISION : Essays in Life and Literature.
Price 53.
NOTE TO THE SECOND EDITION.
IS Edition remains substantially the same as the
*- first, except that dates have been corrected, and
certain misquotations rectified. In one instance I have
accepted a hint from my critics, and have replaced a
quotation by another which better expresses the
meaning of the text. Having done my best to rectify
any unintentional errors, I trust I may be permitted
to put the book itself under Mr. Leslie Stephen's
tolerant aphorism : So long as a man says sincerely
what he thinks, he tells us something worth knowing.
W. J. DAWSON.
January zist, 1891.
PREFACE,
r I ^HE purpose of this volume is sufficiently
explained in its introductory chapter. The
aim of the book is to provide within small compass
a handy guide to the chief poetry of the century,
such as the student of literature may find service-
able for the direction of thought and the acquisi-
tion of knowledge. Many names which deserve
mention have of necessity been passed over, and no
purely prose writers are included, because for them
a separate volume is needed. So far as is possible
to me, I have endeavoured to follow a continuous
plan, and to arrange the matter in the longer
studies under specific heads. This I have done for
facility of reference, but at the price of occasional
repetition, which I hope will be forgiven me.
W. J. DAWSON.
GLASGOW, March 1890.
CONTENTS.
CHAP. PAGE
I. INTRODUCTORY I
II. THE INTERVAL BEFORE THE DAWN . . 8
III. ROBERT BURNS .' I/
IV. LORD BYRON 26
V. SHELLEY 36
VI. JOHN KEATS 48
VII. SIR WALTER SCOTT 6 1
VIII. COLERIDGE /I
IX. ROBERT SOUTHEY 8 1
X. WILLIAM WORDSWORTH . . . . 9 1
XI. THE CONNECTION BETWEEN WORDSWORTH'S
LIFE AND HIS POETRY . . 99
XII. SOME CHARACTERISTICS OF WORDSWORTH'S
POETRY 108
xin. WORDSWORTH'S VIEW OF NATURE AND MAN . 117
xiv. WORDSWORTH'S PATRIOTIC AND POLITICAL
POEMS , . , 127
PREFACE,
/ TpHE purpose of this volume is sufficiently
explained in its introductory chapter. The
aim of the book is to provide within small compass
a handy guide to the chief poetry of the century,
such as the student of literature may find service-
able for the direction of thought and the acquisi-
tion of knowledge. Many names which deserve
mention have of necessity been passed over, and no
purely prose writers are included, because for them
a separate volume is needed. So far as is possible
to me, I have endeavoured to follow a continuous
plan, and to arrange the matter in the longer
studies under specific heads. This I have done for
facility of reference, but at the price of occasional
repetition, which I hope will be forgiven me.
W. J. DAWSON.
GLASGOW, March 1890.
CONTENTS.
CHAP. PAGE
I. INTRODUCTORY I
II. THE INTERVAL BEFORE THE DAWN . . 8
III. ROBERT BURNS .' I/
IV. LORD BYRON 26
V. SHELLEY 36
VI. JOHN KEATS 48
VII. SIR WALTER SCOTT 6 1
VIII. COLERIDGE /I
IX. ROBERT SOUTHEY 8 1
X. WILLIAM WORDSWORTH . . . . 9 1
XI. THE CONNECTION BETWEEN WORDSWORTH'S
LIFE AND HIS POETRY . . - 99
XII. SOME CHARACTERISTICS OF WORDSWORTH'S
POETRY 108
xin. WORDSWORTH'S VIEW OF NATURE AND MAN . 117
xiv. WORDSWORTH'S PATRIOTIC AND POLITICAL
POEMS . , 127
CONTENTS.
CHAP. PAGE
xv. WORDSWORTH'S PERSONAL CHARACTERISTICS . 137
XVI. WILLIAM WORDSWORTH CONCLUDING SURVEY 146
XVII. THE HUMANITARIAN MOVEMENT IN POETRY
THOMAS HOOD AND MRS. BROWNING . 155
XVIII. LORD TENNYSON. GENERAL CHARACTERISTICS 169
xix. TENNYSON'S TREATMENT OF NATURE t ,178
XX. TENNYSON : LOVE AND WOMAN . . . IQO
xxi. TENNYSON'S VIEW OF LIFE AND SOCIETY . 202
XXII. TENNYSON AND POLITICS . . . .214
XXIII. IDYLLS AND THE " IDYLLS OF THE KING " . 224
XXIV. TENNYSON AS A RELIGIOUS POET . .236
xxv. TENNYSON'S " IN MEMORIAM "... 247
XXVI. ROBERT BROWNING 270
xxvii. BROWNING'S PHILOSOPHY OF LIFE . . 279
XXVIII. THE SPIRIT OF BROWNING'S RELIGION . .288
xxix. BROWNING'S ATTITUDE TO CHRISTIANITY . 298
xxx. BROWNING'S SIGNIFICANCE IN LITERATURE . 307
XXXI. ROBERT BROWNING CONCLUDING SURVEY . 314
XXXII. MATTHEW ARNOLD . . , -328
XXXIII. DANTE GABRIEL ROSSETTI . . . -341
XXXIV. ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE . . -353
XXXV. WILLIAM MORRIS . . . . 363
CHAPTER I.
IN7 RODUCTOR Y.
THESE studies have a certain aim, and it is hoped
will have a certain coherence, which may make
them acceptable to the class of readers for whom they
are intended. It may be well to state in a few words
what the aim of the writer is.
In the first place, it is somewhat difficult to define
where what is called modern English literature com-
mences. In the truest sense English literature is a
unity. It has grown up out of small and semi-articulate
beginnings into a great organic whole. It may be
compared to a tree which has passed through various
stages of growth, and has at certain seasons put forth
foliage and blossom, passing through adolescence to
maturity, at last becoming rooted in a stately strength,
and bearing a perpetual harvest. Or it may be com-
pared to a river which has broadened and deepened in
its course, until at last what was a feeble and insig-
nificant stream is a mighty tideway, on which the
leviathan may float, or the craft of many and diverse
masters sail at ease.
Whichever illustration we may select as most appro-
priate, the point to be remembered is, that English
literature is an organic whole. There are no deep
dividing fissures, and the divisions which we have
I
2 THE MAKERS OF MODERN ENGLISH.
invented to help us in our survey of it are purely
arbitrary. Not the less, however, it has its periods.
A just criticism and discerning eye perceive how, at
certain eras of national life, a seemingly new force has
flowed through the old channels, or has made a new
channel for itself, and has produced distinct and definite
results. The great literary battle of Victor Hugo's
life between classicism and romanticism has had its
counterpart again and again in English literature. In
the days of Pope and Dryden we had a certain theory
of poetry which was thought to be perfect and all-
sufficient. Poetry was treated almost as an exact
science, and the laws for its manufacture were reduced
to a precise code, and stated with axiomatic clearness.
There were even certain phrases for natural facts,
which were universally adopted as current coin, and
the west wind was always spoken of as " the gentle
zephyr," and the north wind as " the blast of Boreas.''
The aim of poetry was not to startle, but to instruct.
It was to put into lucid and authentic <phrase certain
facts and teachings which the individual poet thought
it well that his generation should learn. Poetry was
not the vehicle of passion, not the expression of
imagination, not the voice of the emotions, so much
as the vehicle of philosophic thought and reflection.
To say that the poetry produced under such circum-
stances was not poetry is false; but it is poetry in
fetters. Everyone knows that Byron loved and defended
Pope, and looked upon Pope as an impeccable master;
and Pope deserved the recognition of Byron. For
lucidity, for sharpness and brilliance of phrase, for
delicate force and effect, it is hard to surpass the finest
work of Pope.
But gradually men came to see that Pope's " Essay
INTRODUCTORY.
on Man " was not the last possibility of English poetry.
The new social and political forces at work in the
world spread a revolutionary ferment through the realm
of letters also. Men were tired of the artificial glitter
of didactic poetry ; they began to yearn for the fresh-
ness and wholesomeness of a more natural style. Just
at the nick of time, in 1/26, Thomson published his
" Seasons/' which sounded the note of recall to nature.
Then, in 1765, Bishop Percy published his " Reliques
of English Ballad-Poetry/' in which the note of recall
became an imperative and irresistible voice. There
was yet to be a long pause before the tree burgeoned
with its new spring, or the river burst its old banks
into a wider channel ; but at last the ear of the world
caught the voice of a Scotch ploughman singing, at
the plough's tail, "A man's a man for a' that," and
at the brook-side to his " Mary in Heaven ; " and then,
in the fulness of the time, came Wordsworth, speaking
from the dewy calmness of the English mountains, and
Shelley from the passionate air of Italy. But all this
was not revolution : it was development. The change
was not arbitrary : it was inevitable from the nature of
things, and was part of that vast process of evolution
which in the world of letters is as distinct a law as in
the world of nature.
Where, then, modern literature may be said to begin
it is difficult to determine, and is a point one can
scarcely determine without adopting some arbitrary law
of criticism, such as the general order of history forbids.
Speaking generally, however, it may be said the old
movement exhausted itself in Pope, and from that point
a new era did begin. The poetry of Goldsmith and
Cowper is entirely different from the poetry of Pope
and Gay. Recurring again to our illustration, we may
4 THE MAKERS OF MODERN ENGLISH.
say that while the stream flows on, one and indivisible,
swelled by many rivulets and springs, yet it is quite
possible to follow its banks, and to mark certain altera-
tions in its character as it passes onward to its fuller
life. We notice differences of colour, of speed, and of
temperature. As the volume of English literature has
increased its variety has also increased. It has become
more flexible, more various in power, more complex
in its manifold results. It reflects the lights of thought
and passion more clearly, and it is readier to catch the
shifting side-lights of the times. In a thousand ways
the literature of to-day differs from, and in a hundred
ways transcends, the literature of the eighteenth century.
Into this vast subject it is not my province to enter; it
is enough for me to point out, even in this general
way, what I mean by modern English.
The second point to which I would ask attention is
the nature of the brief studies contained in this series.
The age in which we live is an age of many books and
few readers. Does this appear a paradox ? It is ex-
plained by what we mean by " a reader." The true
reader is a man who applies patience and industry to
books, and is contented with nothing less than their
actual mastery. He is in earnest in his work, and
" reads, marks, learns, and inwardly digests " his
books. How many do this? There is reading in
plenty, but digestion is rare. The very plethora of
books has produced literary dyspepsia. But there is
another reason for the growth of books and the haste
with which they are devoured not digested. The
pace of life has vastly increased since the nineteenth
century dawned. Leisure has almost disappeared.
The railway has altered everything. It is true that
he who runs may read, but much of our reading has
INTRODUCTORY.
to be taken running. The vast mass of readers have
no time to devote to intricate literary problems and the
ever-multiplying details of literary history. They are
interested in books, they feel the fascination of literature,
but they are destitute of that leisure for contemplation
in which a just criticism grows up, and a sound personal
opinion on the problems of literature can be formed.
They have " no shelter to grow ripe, no leisure to grow
wise " to quote the pregnant line of Matthew Arnold.
It follows, therefore, that for this vast mass of readers
a sort of middleman is needed, who will do for them
what they cannot do for themselves, and put their
literary fare before them, not in its uncooked bulk, but
carefully prepared in portable doses, and warranted to
digest easily. It may not be a very dignified description
of the critic to call him a " middleman ; " but that is
what he really is, the middleman of literature. But
if it is not a very dignified appellation, certainly the
function performed is a very useful one, and one that
in this age of many books and little leisure is becoming
an increasingly important office.
For instance, take in illustration of this statement
such a history as Shelley's. The Shelley literature has
now become almost a library in itself. It ranges through
every variety of detraction and adulation. To one bio-
grapher Shelley is a monster of pollution, to another
a saviour of society, who, " under favourable circum-
stances, might have become the saviour of the world."
Mr. Cordy Jeaffreson has written a huge book on the
subject, and Mr. Edward Dowden has written a still
larger. Mr. Jeaffreson's book was the unauthorised
version of Shelley & life, in which men complained that
everything against Shelley was stated with a sort of
malicious veracity, and often with a lack of insight and
6 THE MAKERS OF MODERN ENGLISH.
sympathy which led to actual perversion of the truth.
On the other hand, Mr. Dowden's critics complained
that he glossed over the really difficult points in Shelley's
strange history, and was misled by his sympathy into
an equal perversion of the truth. Then, besides these
two great representatives of the two essentially divergent
views of Shelley, there is a host of writers, essayists,
poets, and critics of the first water, who have written
with more or less acuteness, and more or less diffuse-
ness, on the same subject. Shelley has been pronounced
viler and more dangerous than Byron, and has been
pictured as a pure and holy being, whose boots Byron
was not worthy to black. Every shade of vituperation
and praise lies between these extremes. Nor is the
battle of the books over. It is very well for Mr.
Dowden to write "Last Words" on Shelley, but the
last word is not said yet. At this very moment probably
there are half-a-dozen writers who believe that they
have a fresh view of Shelley to present, and are deter-
mined to produce presently an epoch-making book
thereon.
Now, what is the plain practical man, the intelli-
gent but unleisured reader, to do amid this babble of
tongues ? Obviously he cannot for himself sort all the
evidence, and study all the books on Shelley, and yet,
perhaps, he feels a deep curiosity to know more of that
strange and visionary spirit whose winged words have
fascinated him. He wants to know what relation his
poetry has to the other poetry of his time, and what is
the true secret of his wayward life. To such a reader
the literary middleman is an ambassador of peace. He
may not know everything, for we are none of us
infallible, not even the youngest of us ; but he knows
more than the reader who can only take his literary
INTRODUCTORY.
diet by snatches. It is for him to give as fairly as
he can the result of his own reading, the impression
which a given poet's poetry has had upon him, the
general estimate which he has been led to form both of
the man and his works. Of course, it may be objected
that all the busy man gets from the critic, then, is
after all the critic's mere personal view of the matter.
But after all that is what the most accomplished critic
gives us, and he gives us no more. The worth of his
verdict, and the laws by which it is attained, depend
on the qualities of his own mind. According to his
discernment will be the worth of his judgment ; but his
own personal judgment is, when all is done, the one
gift the critic has to give.
This then is in brief the object of this book. It
is to put before the reader in a compact form what
can be said of the character and worth of writers who
have made English literature glorious. The estimate
may be imperfect, the verdict may be wrong : but it
will be honestly given, as far as the knowledge and
conviction of the writer are concerned ; to which it is
only necessary to add, that every wise reader will
reconsider the verdict for himself, and will, as far as
his opportunities allow, avail himself of those legitimate
sources of information on which any estimate of any
writer must be based. The astonishing cheapness of
books puts such sources of information within the reach
of almost all to-day, and the process of education will
in another generation leave no excuse for those who
have not read the great masterpieces of that long line of
English writers who have made the nineteenth century
famous.
CHAPTER II.
THE INTERVAL BEFORE THE DAWN.
WE have seen that in Alexander Pope one great
period of English literature found its consum-
mation and its close. He was the last master of a
style of poetry distinguished by a species of hard and
artificial brilliance, intellectual rather than emotional,
dealing with philosophic niceties rather than the great
passions and common thoughts of men, excelling in
epigrammatic force and satirical incisiveness, but desti-
tute, or nearly destitute, of tenderness and pathos, and,
above all, marked by a total indifference to nature. It
is a clipped and gravelled garden in which the poets of
Pope's school walk, never in the fresh fields and true
presence of nature. Their treatment of love is as
artificial as their treatment of nature : it is mere con-
ventional rhodomontade of " Dying swains to sighing
Delias." They hear no lark singing at heaven's gate
as did Shakespeare, and travel through no morning
meadows fresh with dew as did Chaucer.
The childlike simplicity of Chaucer, garrulous, un-
affected, bewitching by the magic of an art that
scarcely seems to be art at all, was entirely forgotten
by the men of the earlier decades of the eighteenth
century. The magnificent force of the Elizabethan
poets was even abhorrent to them. In Marlowe they
THE INTERVAL BEFORE THE DAWN. 9
saw nothing but the violent and untrained imagination
of a barbarian, and Shakespeare himself was disallowed
the full diploma of their approval. Spenser was left in
complete obscurity, and the passionate and fanciful
lyrics of Elizabethan literature, excelling as they do in
the most delicate and tender workmanship of which
poetry is capable, were wholly forgotten. Then came
the faint signs of a new era, but they were slow
and intermittent. There was an interval before the
dawn, an interval between the dying of the old and
the birth of the new. The voices that heralded the
return to nature were solitary voices, like the un-
accompanied song of the lark in the gray morning
skies, when the light is thickening and before the day
has broken. It will be well before passing to the
world of modern English to enumerate those who
stood upon its threshold, and were its heralds and its
architects.
There is, first of all, a group of writers, in which the
spirit of Pope's poetry survived, and in whose work
the ideals of the didactic school made their last stand.
Dr. Johnson's " Vanity of Human Wishes " is a sample
of this school. It is a stately and pompous poem, full
of careful phrases, polished into epigrammatic force, and
not without a certain pathos in its descriptions, which,
however, springs largely from what we know of the
early struggles of Johnson himself. Young's " Night
Thoughts" and Churchill's "Satires" belong to the
same school, but still further mark the process of dis-
integration. The poems of Gray and Collins contain a
different element, and in one sense may be said to stand
unclassed and isolated. They are among the finest
examples we possess of studious, scholarly, exquisite
workmanship in poetry. Every word is weighed in
io THE MAKERS OF MODERN ENGLISH,
the finest balances of judicious criticism, and every
phrase is turned with the utmost nicety. They breathe
the spirit of classic and artistic culture. They are not
wholly free from the affectation of their age, but their
work is so excellent that we are rarely conscious of
this defect. Goldsmith reckoned that ten lines of
poetry was a good day's work, but Gray calculated that
years were well filled in the perfecting of so short a
poem as the " Elegy."
Gray is also remarkable for another element which
was to be a very striking feature of the new school of
poets, viz., a sense of the romantic past. The old wild
stories of chivalry and daring fascinated him, as they
fatally fascinated Chatterton a little later. In Chatterton
indeed we have the first and fullest expression of the
romantic element of modern poetry. The old grandeur
of phrase which distinguished the Elizabethan writers
leaps up again in him, and the stern simplicity and
tragic force of the older ballad- writers is again exempli-
fied. And yet another writer who in no small degree
helped on the change was James Macpherson, who
published his "Ossian" in 1762. To many modern
readers " Ossian " seems a wild farrago of formless
bombast; but to the men of the latter part of the
eighteenth century it meant much. It is known that it
powerfully affected Scott, and was to him a valuable
stimulus to poetic creation. Wild and chaotic as it
was in form, it occasionally reached a grandeur of
imagination and largeness of phrase wholly astonishing
and new to those who looked upon didactic poetry as
the final consummation of all poetic form and utterance.
It was steeped in nature, it painted the impressiveness
of savage scenery, the lonely vastness of moor and
ocean, the broken magnificence of wild sea-coasts, as
THE INTERVAL BEFORE THE DAWN. n
no one had done before, and with the freshness and
frankness of an evident delight.
To poets who never ventured beyond a park or
garden, and thought that Fleet Street provided every
interest that human imagination could desire, the wild
work of Macpherson was a revelation. He had
managed to utter a need which had long been silenced
in the hearts of men, the need of communion with
nature. Not the distorted nature of trim gardens and
well-ordered parks, but nature in her solitude, her
sternness, her terror; the majesty of her scarred and
tempest-riven rocks, the pomp and splendour of her
skies and seas, the " mountain glory " and the " moun-
tain gloom," the nature that Turner was to paint, the
skies that Shelley was to picture, the sea whose
boundless and eternal freedom Byron was to sing, the
mountains whose ever-shifting pageant, ranging from
the vision of magic colouring and airy distance to the
sublimity of tempest and trailing storm-cloud, Ruskin
was to describe with unapproachable fidelity and
eloquence. Strange as it may seem to those who
disinter from their obscure grave the tiresome tirades
of James Macpherson to-day, and read them with
impatience and disdain, yet the first note of all the
wealth of work represented in such names as Turner,
Shelley, Byron, and Ruskin is struck in his forgotten
" Ossian."
There was yet another writer in whom the new spirit
was to find a still higher expression ; that writer was
William Cowper. The pathetic story of Cowper's life
is well known. What a strange contradiction the man
seems 1 The writer of " John Gilpin " and the " Olney
Hymns," the despairing suicide and the brilliant
humorist ; can the force of contrast go farther ? How
12 THE MAKERS OF MODERN ENGLISH.
incomprehensible it seems that the man who wrote
" God moves in a mysterious way " should also write
about himself thus :
Hatred and vengeance my eternal portion,
Scarce can endure delay of execution
Wait with impatient readiness to seize my
Soul in a moment.
Man disavows and Deity disowns me ;
Hell might afford my miseries a shelter,
Therefore Hell keeps her ever-hungry mouths
All bolted against me.
How tragic is the reflection that the sweet singer
who has done so much to inspire cheerfulness and
trust in others should write of himself, " I feel a wish
that I had never been, a wonder that I am, and an
ardent but hopeless desire not to be 1 " The secret of
this immense despair was in the fact that Cowper's
delicate spirit was crushed beneath the weight of
intolerable theological problems the riddle of " this
unintelligible world." It was Cowper who introduced
the theological element into English poetry, and it has
worked ill both for poetry and theology.
But Cowper also introduced another element the
utmost simplicity and unaffected naturalness of style,
and a true and beautiful love of nature. Far away
from the vexed and crowded life of cities he lived in
the heart of nature, and his own heart was ever open
to her inspiration. When he described the flowers, the
clouds, the weather, he did so with an inimitable fidelity.
He put down just what he saw with the utmost simpli-
city, one might say almost with a scientific simplicity.
In this Cowper was intensely modern. Nothing is
better worth study, or would prove more interesting,
than to trace how the scientific spirit of description
THE INTERVAL BEFORE THE DAWN. 13
has grown in English poetry. The earlier eighteenth-
century poets describe what they never saw, and what
they had never taken the trouble to identify. Hence,
because they have never really studied nature for
themselves, they perforce fall back upon the stock
phrases of artificial description. In this they stand
aloof both from the earliest English poets and the
latest. Chaucer tells us just what he sees he makes
us feel that he has seen it, and we see it too. Tenny-
son, in like manner, has brought the most vigilant
observation to bear on all natural phenomena which he
has described. The botanist cannot improve on his
description of a flower, or the naturalist on his picture
of the way in which a bird flies or a wave breaks. We
have now become used to this species of scientific
accuracy in poetic description, and we resent the loose
and inaccurate generalities of which many poets are still
guilty. But the true author of this change was Cowper.
He was the forerunner of Wordsworth. He wrote of
nature, not because it was part of the stock business of
a poet to do so, but because he loved her. He, too, had
felt the " impulse of a vernal wood," and knew that
nature, when reverently studied, has secrets to teach
which neither sage nor scholar can unfold. Few read
Cowper to-day. His "Task" has verified its title,
and men weary of it midway. Cowper is known rather
by his hymns and a few brief lyrics than by his more
serious and ambitious poems. But it was nevertheless
William Cowper who was the herald of the modern
school of poets, and who sang the glories of the day
when the dawn had scarcely broken.
Not less marked was the change effected in poetry
in relation to its human interests. Cowper loved man
as well as nature. In this he was the precursor of a
H THE MAKERS OF MODERN ENGLISH.
great line of great poets. In place of violent satire on
the follies of the great, Cowper gave us sympathetic
descriptions of the labour and sorrows of the poor.
In this he was followed by George Crab be, whose
descriptions are equally sympathetic, but more realistic.
Crabbe has even fewer readers than Cowper to-day,
and is only known to many readers as the "John
Richard William Alexander Dyer " of Horace Smith's
"Rejected Addresses;" yet he was a true poet, and
deserves a better fate. John Murray said truly that
Crabbe said uncommon things in a common way, and
perhaps it is the homeliness of his verse which has
done much to obscure its great qualities. Byron called
him " Nature's sternest painter and the best ; " Words-
worth predicted for him immortality; Scott read him
with renewed and fresh delight in old age ; Tennyson
says, " Crabbe has a world of his own ; " while Newman,
in one of his " Addresses to the Catholics of Dublin,"
tells us that he had read one of his poems " on its first
publication with extreme delight," and again, twenty
years after, with even more emotion, and yet again,
twenty years after that, with undiminished interest, and
adds that "whether for conception or execution" it is
one of the most touching poems in the language.*
It seems strange that a poet whose claims are so
unanimously endorsed by the most competent judges
should have fallen into such complete oblivion, and
perhaps the real reason lies in the deficiencies of
metrical art which appear in Crabbe's poetry, and the
carelessness of his diction as compared with the metrical
refinement of later verse. Crabbe is a poet who wears
worsted ; but, homely as he is, his writings have some
* Vide Literary Remains of Edward Fitzgerald, vol. iii., p. 490.
THE INTERVAL BEFORE THE DAWN. 15
of the qualities of the greatest poetry. It is in realism
that his force lies. He has little humour ; he is in
deadly earnest. He goes to the gaol, the workhouse,
the hospital, the half-ruined cottage, for his themes. He
pictures the shameful squalor, the hard life, the unpitied
ignorance, and the humble heroisms of the poor. He
tells his tale of shame and ruin with a grave simplicity
and directness of statement which is wholly tragic.
He is the spokesman of the ignorant and neglected
He utters their appeal against the social system of their
time, and in this Crabbe was the avant-coureur of the
great Revolution.
With the French Revolution an entirely new spirit
was breathed into European literature. The social
problems of the times were forced upon the minds of
all men of letters, and especially of the poets. This
is again one of the most distinctive features of modern
English literature. The social problem is to-day the
great problem of Europe. It engages the perpetual
thought of statesmen, and it presses heavily upon the
hearts of all imaginative writers. A large section of
the poetry of our day is full of bitter invective on the
tragedies endured by the poor, and an increasing section
of our fiction is animated by the same spirit. The
beginning of this movement is in Crabbe and Cowper.
With the dawn of the Revolution, there rose up poets
who uttered the same cry with infinitely greater bitter-
ness, and expressed the same spirit with an agonised
intensity, a passionate daring and poignancy, wholly
transcending the works of Crabbe and Cowper. But,
as we have seen, these poets lived in the interval
Between two worlds one dead,
The other powerless to be born.
1 6 THE MAKERS OF MODERN ENGLISH.
They, however, were its prophets. They struck the
first note of the new music. They perceived the drift
of thought, and watched the first trailing vapours of
the approaching storm. By the time their work was
done new spirits were at work, and Burns, Wordsworth,
Byron, and Shelley were inaugurating the new age
which is our heritage to-day.
CHAPTER III.
ROBERT BURNS.
[Born at Alloway, Ayr, 1759. His poems published, 1786. Died at
Dumfries, July 2ist, 1796.]
WE have named Robert Burns as truly the first
singer of the new era, and since Burns re-
presents so much, he demands more than the concise
brevity of a paragraph. He accepted the ideals of
Crabbe and Cowper, and carried on the revolution
they had commenced, but it was with large and
important differences. It must not be forgotten that
these great poets were contemporaries. While Crabbe
in 1783 was beginning his series of life-pictures of the
poor, and Cowper in 1785 was feeling his way towards
a more simple and unaffected style of poetry, Burns
in 1786 was rousing genuine enthusiasm in Scotland
by the publication of the first poems of genius in
Scottish dialect which had enriched the literature of
Scotland for many years. Like Cowper, he described
nature with admirable simplicity, but with a terseness
and exquisiteness of expression which Cowper never
gained. Like Crabbe, he described " the short and
simple annals of the poor," but it was with a more
moving sympathy, a deeper pathos, and a concentration
and brilliance of phrase which Crabbe never acquired.
So far the work of Burns resembles the work of
1 8 THE MAKERS OF MODERN ENGLISH.
Crabbe and Cowper, but no further. Burns brought
to his task a broad humour and incisive wit which
neither of his English rivals could emulate. He was
himself a poor man, a man of the soil, a son of labour,
and he described what such a life was, not from the
calm heights of observation, but from actual experience.
Above all, he did what neither Crabbe nor Cowper
could accomplish he sang of love. He sang of it
with a full, passionate utterance, a grace and a fire
unknown in English poetry for upwards of a century.
There was the magic of enchantment in his song. His
lyrics have a sweetness and a poignancy all their own.
They sing themselves into the universal heart. As a
love-poet he is unsurpassed and unapproachable. Such
lines as
Had we never loved sae kindly,
Had we never loved sae blindly,
Never met, and never parted,
We had ne'er been broken-hearted,
are immortal. Scott said they had the essence of
a thousand love stories in them. They utter in the
simplest but most pathetic fashion the experience of
multitudes. And in all his lyrics, whether of love or
nature, there is an abandonment and freshness which
are captivating. It is beautiful to remember, when we
read these exquisite love-verses, that the women who
inspired them were farm-girls, domestic servants
Scotch maidens met at a dance or in the harvest-field,
all of them used to toil, and born to toil, and living a
life far more akin to drudgery than romance. Yet no
heroine of ancient or mediaeval song ever had more
beautiful things said of her than this child of the
plough addressed to the comrades of his labour. In
nothing does the manliness and originality of Burns's
ROBERT BURNS. 19
genius show to better advantage. He was so truly
a child of the people that he found among the people
with whom he lived all the elements needful for the
nurture of his genius, all the materials requisite for his
immortal songs.
There is not much that is new that can be said about
the life of Burns. The story has become an epic, and
the epic is known to all the world. It is something of
a misconception which describes Burns as a plough-
man : he was rather a small yeoman, born of a race
of small farmers, hard-headed, industrious, fond of
reading, sober, religious; precisely that class which
is the strength and pride of Scotland to-day. His
father was a man considerably superior to the class in
which he moved ; and a strong taste, almost amount-
ing to a thirst, for knowledge, was one of the leading
characteristics of the home in which Burns was born.
But whatever was the precise social position of Burns,
there can be no doubt about one thing viz., his
passionate love of the people. In his poetry it is
the human element that is supreme. For the mere
picturesque side of nature, as such, he had no great
love; nature is everywhere in his poetry the back-
ground for man. Not that he did not love nature ;
he loved her as few poets have loved her. His poems
are full of those short, crisp phrases, those felicitous
touches of description, which bring before us in an
instant, with magical clearness and beauty, the aspects
of nature in all her seasons, and all her moods. But
when Burns looked at a landscape it was not to brood
over its beauty, and to invent exquisite phrases with
a laborious skill to interpret it. That is Tennyson's
method, and living and beautiful as his touches oi
natural description always are, yet they are seldom
20 THE MAKERS OF MODERN ENGLISH.
quite spontaneous. We are pretty sure they have
been corrected, sublimated, refined to the very last de-
gree before they have passed the muster of publicity.
When Burns describes nature, it is always with a
rapid and easy touch, as one who thinks less of nature
than of the human toil and passion for which nature
is the background. Nothing remains to-day of Burns's
brilliant conversation among the notables of Edinburgh,
during his first visit to that city in the early days of
his fame, but one little story which Dugald Stewart
recalls. He and Burns had climbed the Braid Hills
in the early morning, and were looking down upon the
fair plains, full of the dewy freshness of the morning
glory. Stewart expressed his admiration of the beauty
of the scene, and beautiful indeed it was. But Burns
had his eyes fixed upon the little cluster of cottages
at his feet, with the rising clouds of blue smoke trailing
in the morning air, eloquent of the labourer's early
meal, and said the worthiest object in all that fair
scene was this little cluster of labourers' cottages,
knowing as he did the wealth of true character, the
piety, and happiness, and contentment, which they
enshrined. It was a speech that was characteristic
of the man. His mission was not to describe nature,
but to sing the epic of man. He has himself given
excellent expression to this idea in his well-known
lines :
To mak a happy fireside clime
To weans and wife,
That's the true pathos and sublime
Of human life.
There are certain passages in Burns's letters which
do not exactly tally with this simplicity of nature, but
the letters Burns wrote are the only bad things he ever
ROBERT BURNS. 21
did write. They are artificial and stilted, and were
unworthy of him. For among the many weaknesses of
Burns was the temporary desire to be a polite letter-
writer, and consequently he has left a mass of letters
conceived in false sentiment, and written in false taste.
It is true these letters occasionally give us vivid insight
into the heart of the man, but upon the whole they
distort the true image of Burns. They give us an un-
pleasant feeling that under the fascination of society the
sturdiness of Burns' s character suffered some deteriora-
tion. It would not have been wonderful if it had. But
any such lapse was entirely temporary, and limited in
its results. A worshipper of wealth and power Burns
never was, nor could be. He was, indeed, at times
fiercely Republican, and got into frequent trouble for
his outspoken political views. His heart was with
poor folk, and he was happiest amongst them. How
fully he understood their ways, their noble struggles,
their social difficulties, let this passage from " The Twa
Dogs " declare :
But then to see how ye're negleckit,
How huff d an' cuff d, an' disrespeckit !
Lord, man, our gentry care as little
For delvers, ditchers, an' sic cattle,
They gang as saucy by puir folk
As I wad by a stinkin' brock.
I've noticed, on our Laird's court-day,
An' mony a time my heart's been wae,
Puir tenant bodies, scant o' cash,
How they maun thole a factor's snash ;
He'll stamp an' threaten, curse an' swear,
He'll apprehend them, poind their gear,
While they maun stan', wi' aspect humble,
An' hear it a', an' fear an' tremble ! . .
There's mony a creditable stock
O' decent, honest, fawsont folk,
22 THE MAKERS OF MODERN ENGLISH.
Are riven out baith root and branch,
Some rascal's pridefu' greed to quench,
Wha thinks to knit himsel' the faster
In favour wi' some gentle master,
Wha, aiblins, thrang a parliamentin',
For Britain's guid his saul indentin'.
Any student of Burns could cite at will a score of
passages setting forth with equal or superior force of
diction the condition of the labouring poor, and full
of honest admiration for their virtues, and sympathetic
understanding of their lot. What wonder is it that
Burns is the poet of the poor ? What wonder that he
is the singer best known in the field, the factory, the
mine, the wild settlements of distant lands, among
crowds of horny-handed men who have known nothing
but hard toil all their lives, and have found but one
poet who loves them and understands them perfectly,
and has written songs that they can comprehend, and
which bring a new light of sweetness and contentment
into their difficult lot ? Burns is the poet of the
common people, almost the only one, and the common
people receive him gladly.
Another element in Burns which had a wide influence
on literature was the mixture of jovial fun, pervasive
humour, and excellent wit and satire in which he
abounded. He commanded laughter as well as tears.
He had an irresistible power of ridicule, and knew how
to use it with consummate effect. All that he did he
seemed to do easily, without the least sense of effort,
drawing upon the resources of a rich and wholesome
nature, which never showed the remotest sign of ex-
haustion. With him a song was the joyous work of
a morning, or even of an hour, and that most match-
less example of jovial and rollicking humour, "Tarn
ROBERT BURNS. 23
o' Shanter," was written in a single day. As for the
satire of Burns, that also at its best is unsurpassable.
He knew how to strike with swift and deadly effect.
He had a wholesome hatred of cant, and a fearlessness
of conventional opinion, which were the sources of his
satirical vigour. "Holy Willie's Prayer" is the most
tremendous blow ever dealt at the Calvinistic dogma
of Predestination. Burns rushed into the theological
combat of his times with no knowledge of theology
beyond that of the ordinary yeoman, but with a splendid
endowment of common-sense and brilliant satirical
force, which enabled him to do more for the demolition
of the rigid Calvinism of Scotland than any other writer
who has assailed it.
The two forces by which poets link the hearts of
mankind to themselves are love and admiration. We
may admire, and almost worship, but not love : we may
love, and yet be unable to worship. We do not love
Shakespeare, Goethe, or Milton. They tower above us
in an inaccessible majesty. They are the mountain
heights of humanity, ^.xid are girded with a sublime
isolation. We approach them with awe and reverence,
and it is with reverence we habitually remember them.
But there is another class of poets whom we love.
Their very frailties interpret them to us and endear
them. They are not too bright and good for human
nature's daily food. We cannot revere them, for they
were full of faults and blemishes. They have no claim
to majesty, but they have the tenderer claim to sym-
pathy. Milton was scarcely the sort of man we should
have cared to live with. His own daughters found
it particularly difficult to live with him, and his first
wife found it so difficult that she ran away from him.
His friends always approached him with a solemn
24 THE MAKERS OF MODERN ENGLISH.
etiquette such as a monarch might demand. But we
should all have felt it a privilege to live in the company
of Burns. The geniality of his presence would have
filled any place with sunlight. Our love would easily
have made us " to his faults a little blind." We should
have forgiven him his excesses, and have run eagerly
upon the errands of ministration when he was sick.
His words of tenderness, his pathetic glances, his whole-
some wit, his abundant laughter, his brave struggles
with poverty and temptation, even his weaknesses,
would have endeared him to us. As a matter of fact,
they did endear him to his countrymen, and they have
endeared him to posterity. He has now the love of
countless thousands of human beings who never saw
his face, and know him only by his history. He was
so intensely human that no human heart can find it
easy to deal harshly with him. He exerts a persuasive
fascination on mankind, quite independent of his genius,
his song, his exquisite creations in poetry. It is the
fascination of a true, loving-hearted man, a man who
sinned much and suffered much, who had a hard life,
and fought it out bravely as best he could, and in the
very prime of mid-manhood lay down to die in poverty
and broken-heartedness. The secret of the fascination
of Burns, as it was with Byron, is in the man himself as
much as in his poetry, and it is the individual note in
his poetry, the strong personality which speaks through
it, which gives it so wide a mastery over the hearts of
all kinds and conditions of men.
On the other hand, genius is no apology for breaches
of the moral law. The sort of explanation which the
apologist of Burns sets up for his lapses from sobriety
and virtue to-day is an explanation which Burns himself
would have indignantly repudiated. He was under no
ROBERT BURNS. 25
delusion as to himself. He mourned his follies, and he
expiated them in bitter suffering. There is no sadder
tragedy than the closing days of Burns. Undoubtedly
it is a reproach to his time that the greatest of Scotch
poets should have worn his heart out in ineffectual
struggles with financial embarrassment. But there were
other causes also which deepened the gloom of those
dark days at Dumfries. Partly by his own errors of
conduct, partly by his injudicious violence of political
opinion, he had estranged his best friends. He was sick,
poor, and in debt. The last letter he ever wrote was
a pathetic appeal to his cousin to lend him ten pounds,
and save him from the terrors of a debtor's dungeon.
It would not have been much to expect from that
brilliant society of wealth and culture in Edinburgh
that some help might have been forthcoming to soothe
the dying hours of the man it had once received with
adulation. But no help came. There he lay, wasted
by fever, his dark hair threaded with untimely grey ;
poor, penniless, overwhelmed with difficulties, but to
the last writing songs, which won him no remuneration
then, but which are now recognised as the choicest
wealth of the nation which let him die uncomforted.
Then at last the end came. Those dark eyes, which
Sir Walter Scott said " glowed " with such an intense
fire, flamed once more, but it was with anger. His
last word was an execration on the impatient creditor
who had striven to drag him from a dying bed to
prison ; and then the troubled spirit passed. It is the
old story : we slay the prophets, and then build their
sepulchres ; to the living in their need we measure out
neglect, and reserve our praises for the dead who are
beyond our charity.
CHAPTER IV.
LORD BYRON.
[Born at Holies Street, London, January 22nd, 1788. His poems first
printed at Newark, 1807. Died at Missolonghi, Western Greece,
April iQth, 1824.]
THE later science tells us that we do not come into
this world with a nature like a sheet of white
paper, waiting for any inscriptions we may choose to
write thereon, but we carry our ancestors with us in
our brains and blood. We inherit tendencies, and are
apt to reproduce them. The laws of heredity and
environment condition all human life. If this be so,
it must be confessed, nothing could be more disastrous
than the environment of Byron's life. His father was
a ruined profligate, and his mother a woman of coarse
instincts and violent temper. It was his mother's
habit to mock his deformity, and then to smother him
with caresses. She had a tongue full of bitterness
and a hand swift to smite, and her habitual treatment
of one of the proudest and most sensitive natures ever
fashioned was a process of alternate violence and
affection. There was something to be said for the
poor woman : her profligate husband had squandered
the fortune for which alone he had married her, and
then had left her to the emptiness of an embittered and
lonely life. There was absolutely no good influence
ever shed upon the boyhood of Byron. His only reply
LORD BYRON. 27
to his mother's outbreaks of temper was a fit of silent
rage ; which occasionally frightened her into a tender-
ness as odious to him as her brutality. Then this lad,
full of strong passion and strong pride, is launched
upon University life as it was in those bad days, and
it is little wonder that he should instantly become the
leader of the fastest set the University could boast.
Full of humour and equally given to melancholy, sensi-
tive to a degree beyond the comprehension of ordinary
men, fond of all athletic sports, but debarred from
them by his deformity, with an imagination brilliant,
powerful, intense ; easily swayed by either good or evil
influences, yet also full of pride altogether morbid in
its excess, and, when once his mind was made up,
absolutely stubborn, and of indomitable will what
future could the most charitable augur for such a youth
as this? The future was precisely the future such
an endowment indicated. The only difference between
the boy of sixteen and the man of thirty was that the
good qualities had diminished while the evil qualities
had ripened. The pride, the stubbornness, the morbid
sensitiveness increased with years ; the susceptibility
to the influence of better natures decreased as his own
nature developed its own forces of will and individuality,
and that developed individuality became a power to
subdue -others by its own imperious fascination.
On the verge of manhood Byron awoke and found
himself famous. What were the sources of his fame ?
First of all there was, of course, the genius which
deserved it. He brought into poetry an intensity and
passion altogether his own. All the strength of his
own nature, and all its weakness too, were interpreted
in his poetry. No poet was ever more fearless in
putting himself into his work. He wrote with perfect
28 THE MAKERS OF MODERN ENGLISH.
self-knowledge, and he made the public the confidant
of his most secret thoughts. He had no reticence, no
self-respect in one sense ; he flung himself on the public
sympathy, and poured all his bitterness into the public
ear. He did so in language of unequalled force and
beauty. He said what he had to say with an energy
which compelled attention. He cared little for mere
felicities of construction in his verse, his heart was
surcharged with emotion, and he poured it out in
an intense and overwhelming volume. The poetry he
gave the public was intensely individual poetry. Every
character he sketched was himself in various disguises,
and the disguise deceived no one. A more undramatic
dramatist never lived. He set up a puppet and tried
hard to make it work, but it was useless : before the
first scene had ended, the puppet was always kicked
aside, and it was Byron himself who was pouring out
the story of his pride, his wrongs, his passionate hopes,
and infinite despair. And not only did he interpret
himself, but in a certain degree his times also. The
old order was perishing, and the air was full of revo-
lution. Without in the least sympathising with the
people for a prouder aristocrat never lived he caught
up the inarticulate cry of the people and uttered it.
He wrote with just that scorn, that fierce anger, that
reckless revolt against the conventional order of things,
which was seething in thousands of hearts in the last
days of George III., and the infamous period of the
Regency. Just as Swift served the Irish people, but
despised them and their plaudits, so Byron served the
democracy, but scorned them ; and just as the Irish
people made an idol of Swift, so the English people
made an idol of Byron. His books sold by thousands
on the first day of issue. They were the solace of the
LORD BYRON. 29
student, the inspiration of the democrat, the secret
delight of the school-girl ; they were read by noble
lords and needy apprentices, society beauties and
sympathetic dressmakers, atheists and Methodists, all
kinds and conditions of men. The English people love
a fight, and Byron was fighting the Reviews, the
solemn critics whose word had hitherto been as the
law of the Medes and Persians, the social proprieties,
the edicts of conventional opinion, the King and the
Court and the people cheered him on. He became,
in a word, the idol of the people, and every excess,
every audacity of opinion or of conduct, was eagerly
condoned to one so young, so brave, so famous, and so
splendidly endowed.
Then, also, we must take into account the personal
beauty of Byron himself. With that one terrible
exception of the club-foot, which was his torturing
thorn in the flesh, he had the face and figure of an
Adonis. Both face and figure were cast in the very
finest mould of manly grace. Some one spoke of his
face as being like a mask of perfect alabaster, lit up by
a great light which glowed within. The shapely head,
with its close clustering curls, was like the head of a
Greek god. Nor was his grace merely physical : there
was an exquisite charm of manner which distinguished
him. He was a perfect actor, and the sadness of sated
hope which he had set himself to write about he con-
stantly strove to personify. Of course, society was at
his feet. He was the observed of all observers. There
was a faint aroma of delightful wickedness about him
dear to many female hearts which would shudder to
confess the feeling. Byron had to deplore errors
enough in conduct which were real and circumstantial,
but he always loved to exaggerate his own wickedness,
30 7'HE MAKERS OF MODERN ENGLISH.
He called on earth and heaven to witness that it was
not his fault that he was wicked. He had never met
the heart that really loved him, or if he had, like the
young gazelle "it pined and died." All things were
against him, the fates pursued him with relentless fury.
Such an attitude in the ordinary man would simply
expose him to ridicule ; but we must remember that
Byron was not an ordinary man. When this theatrical
wickedness, this melodramatic despair, this passionate
sadness, is interpreted by a man of marvellous physical
beauty, in language of matchless force and energy, it
is not difficult to understand the success that would
attend the representation, or the applause that would
greet the consummate actor.
It is because Byron has projected so deep a shadow
of himself over all his literary work, that we are bound
to take the fullest cognisance of the conditions and
character of his life. What is the effect produced upon
the mind by his works ? It is an intense but unwhole-
some brilliance. They leave an evil taste upon the
palate. The taint of a morbid despair is on all he
has written, and on much that he has written there is
the worse taint of moral depravity. No satirist has
surpassed him in the keenness of his irony, no con-
troversialist in the violence of his invective, no humorist
in the grotesqueness of his imagination, no writer of
any age in the masculine good " sense which he can
manifest when it so pleases him; and yet in all, and
through all, there runs an element of depraved egotism,
a contempt for virtue curiously allied to a remorseful
loathing of vice, a perpetual bitterness and cynicism
which leave upon the mind the unhappiest and most
perilous deposits. In truth, Byron's was a great but
morbid genius. His character was destitute of moral
LORD BYRON. 3 1
cohesion. He was the child of impulse, never un-
conscious of higher ideals, but habitually swayed and
governed by the lower, or the lowest. His poetry
was the exact reflex of his life. He was perpetually
sinning, and blaming other people for his sin. He
lived in a hard-drinking, fast-living age, and he drank
harder and lived faster than anybody. He never
seems to have known a good woman. His views of
womanhood are simply brutal in their callous carnality.
The purity and chivalry of woman's nature had no
existence for him. It is the pure in heart who see not
only God but the God-like, and it is the genius that is
pure-hearted which scales the loftiest heights of achieve-
ment ; but to Byron such heights were impossible. The
distractions of vice disturbed and poisoned his genius.
The only form of womanly purity he ever met was
unsympathetic purity. It is needless to enter here
into the vexed controversy of Byron's relations to his
wife, but it is pretty clear that Miss Millbank was the
last woman Byron ought to have married. She was
precise, formal, and cold; he was passionate and im-
pulsive. A man with a record like Byron's,, if he is to
be reclaimed, can only be reclaimed by the most patient
sympathy, the most prudent and delicate tact. But of
this faculty Lady Byron unhappily had little. Fletcher,
Byron's valet, said that any woman could manage his
master except her ladyship. That she irritated Byron
by her coldness is beyond dispute; and that he be-
haved badly to her is equally clear. But beyond that
there is no evidence. The foul and odious myth
evolved from the lively imagination of Mrs. Beecher
Stowe has been repeatedly disproved, and may be
consigned to the shameful oblivion which is its due.
Byron was a bad man in his relations to women,
32 THE MAKERS OF MODERN ENGLISH.
beyond all question, but he was not so bad a man as
Mrs. Stowe imagined him. The chief thing for us to
note, in our attempt to estimate the significance of
Byron in poetry, is that his life coloured his poetry
absolutely, and that that life was one long series of
misadventures, follies, and errors, for the most part
conditioned by the lower instincts of his nature, and
embittered by the usual results of unbridled passions
and undisciplined desires. Byron sowed the wind ; in
his poetry the world has reaped the whirlwind.
So much in relation to the moral aspects of Byron's
worth every just critic is bound to admit. The plea
that genius is a chartered libertine was one Byron
perpetually paraded, but it is a plea which the common
sanity of the race instinctively rejects. We must repeat
of Byron, as of Burns, that genius has no more in-
herent right than dulness to break the moral law. It
is, indeed, the more bound to respect it, "because, as
genius is the highest effluence of the intellect, so its
example should be the highest manifestation of the
soul. Every man of genius ought to say with Milton,
" I am not one who has disgraced beauty of sentiment
by deformity of conduct, or the maxims of the free
man by the actions of the slave; but by the grace
of God I have kept my life unsullied." But, leaving
the question of Byron's life, what are the distinctive
features of his poetry ? They are superb force and
imaginative daring, a masculine strength of style, an
intensity of conception and vigour of execution which
few English poets have ever rivalled. He has little
play of fancy ; it is in imagination he excels. His
verse has a large and noble movement, and inspires
the mind with an exhilarating sense of freedom. He
was not a thinker, but he insensibly perceived and
LORD BYRON. 33
absorbed the new thought of his day, and gave it
courageous expression. He did much to accelerate
the decay of old institutions and the birth of new. He
swept like a storm across the mind of Europe, and uttered
in the language of the storm the new thoughts which
were then trying to liberate and express themselves.
To say that Byron is a great poet is not enough ; he
is among the greatest It is the fashion now to
depreciate his claims, and Matthew Arnold and Mr.
Swinburne have both demonstrated the looseness of his
rhymes, and his ignorance of metrical construction,
To do this is easy. Eyron aimed at force rather than
art, and art was less fastidious in his days than ours.
He wrcte careless!}' because he cared little for the
criticism of his age, and was at war with it. But
for a man ignorant of metrical construction he has
done exceedingly well. He won the praise of Goethe,
and the foremost place of influence in his time. He
alone of the writers of his time shared with Scott
a European reputation, and his reputation entirely
eclipsed Scott's. Hitherto English poetry had been
insulated ; he lifted it into a cosmopolitan currency.
In the large and startling effects of imagination few
can surpass him. What picture of a Swiss glacier, in
the early morn when the mists are rolling off, can
excel in truth of description and daiing of imagination
such lines as these ?
The mists boil up around the glaciers ; clouds
Rise curling fast beneath me, white and s Iphury,
Like foam from the roused ocean of deep hell,
Whose every wave breaks on a living shore,
Heaped with the damned, like pebbles !
It is in passages like these that the strength of
Byron is seen : it is in virtue of poetic power like this
3
34 7 HE MA KERS\OF MODERN ENGLISH.
that B ron Has -taken His place among the great poets
of all time.
The last chapters of Byron's life are familiar to
everybody. His life in Italy was one profound dis-
grace. Shelley said the best thing to hope for Byron
at that time was that he might meet with a violent arid
sudden death. But it was at this period of moral de-
cadence that some of his most extraordinary work was
done. It was in Italy he wrote " Don Juan," one of the
cleverest books the world has ev~vr seen ; one of the
saddest and most wonderful, but also one of the most
immoral. Then came the sudden kindling of patriotic
fervour for the cause of Greek independence. It seemed
as if Byron, after all, would triumph over his lower
self, and at mid-manhood begin a new and noble career
of public service. But it was not to be. On the I4th
of April, 1824, the fatal fever struck him at Missolonghi.
On the Jpth, with his last thoughts on his wife, his
sister, and his child, he died. Like a sudden shock of
sorrow the news ran round the world, " Byron is dead ! "
Tennyson, speaking many years afterward, said, "Byrvtn
was dead. 1 thought the whole world was at an end.
1 thought everything was over and finished for every
one that nothing else mattered." " I was told it,"
writes Mrs. Carlyle, " in a room full of people. Had
I heard that the sun and moon had fallen out of their
spheres, it could not have conveyed to me the feeling
of a more awful blank than did the simple words,
'Byron is dead.'" Mis. Shelley, who had known him
on his worst side, and had little cause to love him,
wrote in that hour of loss and consternation, " Beauty
sat on his countenance, and power beamed from his
eye. I knew him in the bright days of youth. Can
I forget our excursions on the lake, when he sang the
LORD BYRON. 35
Tyrolese hymn, and his voice harmonised with winds
and waves ? Can I forget his attentions and conso-
lations to me during my deepest misery? Never!"
Even Lady Byron sent for Fletcher, and was overcome
with passionate grief; but, as he observed, was "per-
fectly implacable." That indeed was the general atti-
tude of public opinion toward him : remorseful, but
implacable. Greece would have buried his remains in
the temple of Theseus ; England refused them West-
minster Abbey. The Grecian cities contended for his
body, but the country of his birth turned from him with
cold disfavour. It was therefore in the quiet church-
yard at Hucknall, on the i6th of July, 1824, that his
unquiet dust at last found rest.
In Mrs. Browning's " Vision of Poets," in which the
poets of ancient or modern fame are touched off with
a precision and beauty of phrase altogether admirable,
there is no verse more appropriate than that which
describes Byron :
And poor proud Byron ! sad as grave,
And salt as life; lorlornly brave,
And quivering with the dart he drave.
The pity which the poet-heart of Mrs. Browning felt
for Byron will always be the predominant feeling of the
world towards him. Much there was in him altogether
contemptible his vanity, his insincere vapourings, his
coarseness, his selfishness, his devotion to what he
describes as that most old-fashioned and gentlemanly
vice avarice ; but when all is said and done, Byron
attracts in no common degree the sympathy of the
world. Before we measure out hard judgment upon
him, let us consider the environment of his life, and
remember that v\ith what n.easure we mete it shall
be measured to us again.
CHAPTER V.
SHELLEY.
[Born at Field Place, Sussex, August 4th, 1792. Poems first published
1810. Meets Lord byron at Geneva, 1816. Drowned in the Bay
of Spezzia, July 8th, 1822.]
THE name of Shelley is irresistibly suggested by the
name of Byron, and the connection is a vital one.
They were contemporaries, and their lives interlaced
in many ways, and profoundly affected each other. The
influence of Byron upon Shelley was comparatively
slight ; the influence of Shelley upon Byron was high
and stimulating. In life, in habits, in modes of thought,
no two men could be more diverse, and yet both shared
a common obloquy and exile. Both were at war with
society, and each has left an imperishable inheritance
in English literature.
The main point that unites spirits so different as
Shelley's and Byron's is that they were both poets of
the Revolution. Southey, Coleridge, and Wordsworth
were equally fascinated by that immense awakening of
Europe, and in the early days of its Titanic movement
could feel that at such an hour " it was bliss to be
alive." But as the lurid light of the days of the Terror
fell upon the scene, each receded in astonishment and
horror. Coleridge watched the transformation in silent
dismay ; Southey took refuge in violent Toryism ;
Wordsworth retreated to the cloistered calm of Nature.
SHELLEY.
Byron and Shelley alone remained, and still cham-
pioned the cause of human liberty. But Byron's was
the cry of despair ; Shelley's the trumpet-voice of
perpetual hope. The one gazed like a dark spirit 'on
the general overthrow, and uttered mocking, bitter,
angry words, and felt the wild storm of the nations
akin to the storm within his own heart, and the ruin
but the picture of his life ; the other rose above the red
scenes of revolution, and built up in the realms of
fantasy a new and golden age. It is this idea that
colours Shelley's poetry throughout He really be-
lieved in an age of unrestrained personal liberty and
consequent happiness. He believed that he was help-
ing it on. The fine thrill of a rapt enthusiasm is felt in
all he said and wrote. He denounces the old with
the fervour of a prophet, and heralds the new with the
passionate joy of a poet. " Queen Mab" marks the
rise of this conception of a golden age in the mind ot
Shelley ; the " Revolt of Islam " expresses the sacri-
ficial side of the revolution he desires ; the " Prometheus
Unbound " paints the apotheosis of his thought, and i
his completed picture of a regenerated universe, the
magnificent song which ushers in a liberated world.
Shelley sets the French Revolution to music; but he
does his work with such an ethereal magic, that its
earthly and faulty aspects are forgotten, and it is lifted
into a realm of pure enchantment, where all its errors
are obliterated, and all its boundless hopes are crowned
with a more than human fulfilment
It is necessary always to recollect how controlling
was the force of these ideas upon the life of Shelley,
if we are to gain a clue to the strange vicissitudes of
his career. The circumstances of his life and the
peculiarities of his thought have been so variously
38 THE MAKERS OF MODERN ENGLISH.
represented by his biographers, that it is quite possible
to rise from the perusal of one life of Shelley with
the impression that he was a gifted madman of im-
pure mind, and to close another biography with the
feeling that of all poets he was the most spiritual, the
most unselfish, the most ideally pure-minded. In
point of fact, there is evidence to sustain both con-
clusions, that is, to the critic who has a cause to plead,
and enters on the study of Shelley in the spirit of
a special advocate. There were certain ideas which
Shelley held which almost savoured of a disturbed
sanity. The very recurrence and insistence of such
ideas leads the reader to suspect a mental twist. To
the staid and respectable people of his day, who only
knew him by his advocacy of these ideas, it is not
surprising that he was to quote his own phrase " a
monster of pollution whose very presence might infect."
When a serious and fatal error in his own conduct
added impetus to the resentment which his sentiments
bad produced, it is easy to understand the position
Shelley occupied in the opinion of his contemporaries.
Yet, on the other hand, there was about Shelley an
atmosphere of unworldliness and purity, which struck
all who knew him with surprise and admiration. It
was a sort of unearthly charm which invested him
with the purity and irresponsibility of a fairy or a
spirit. There was a boyish impulsiveness, a childlike
simplicity and unselfishness about him which he never
lost. He was in truth an eternal child. He was
unfitted for the rough shocks of life, and never grew
familiar with, or tolerant of, the compromises on which
society is built. When he believed in an idea he was
always ready to carry it to its utmost logical sequence,
and to suffer martyrdom rather than forswear it.
SHELLEY.
i Of the generosity of Shelley's impulses there can be
no question. When Harriet Westbrook, the daughter
of a London coffee-house keeper, threw herself on
him for protection from the persecutions of home, he
instantly married her. When he discovered the reck-
lessness and injustice of British government in Ireland,
he at once proceeded to Dublin to proclaim a revolution,
which should be accomplished by the moral regenera-
tion of the people. When he found a Sussex school-
mistress who sympathised with his vast schemes for
the regeneration of Ireland and the world, he instantly
persuaded her to sell ail she had, and live with him
for ever in platonic friendship. He was incapable of
prudence ; the tide of impulse always mastered him.
He never paused for the mitigating caution of the
second thought If he did an act of charity and he
did many he performed ,,it with complete se.lf-forget-
fulness. He could pinch himself to be munificent to
others, and when most in want of money always found
ways of relieving the embarrassments of his friends.
His wants were few and of the simplest. He was
perfectly content with a couple of rooms, cold water,
and a diet of bread and vegetables. Delicate and frail
as he appeared, he could endure the strain of prolonged
intellectual toil, and was absolutely happy if Homer or
Euripides shared his shabby solitude.
It was in such a lodging in Oxford Street that Leigh
Hunt discovered him, and said that, with his slight
figure, his bright colour, his flying hair, he only wanted
a green sod beneath his feet to become a sort of human
lark, pouring out in the sunlight a song of unearthly
sweetness. Everyone who knew Shelley realised
something of this feeling which Hunt expressed in his
graceful fancy. They felt that Shelley was an ethereal
40 THE MAKERS OF MODERN ENGLISH,
creature, whose life was so purely one of the imagina-
tion that he seemed outside the world of common
human action, with its customs built upon the tradi-
tions of the centuries, and its prudence taught by the
sorrows of experience.
This, then, was the sort of nature which was given
to the world on August 4th, 1792, when the first
thunders of the great Revolution were already in the
air. We can easily picture Shelley, the frail and vision-
ary child, of quick imagination, eager, resolute, and yet
brooding, moved by the strangest impulses, and acting
on them with an utter scorn of consequence. His
imagination was his life, and it took very little to set
those delicately-strung nerves of his vibrating and
tingling with ecstasy or terror. As was the child so
was the man. The first movement of his mind was
towards the supernatural, and his first published writ-
ing a worthless romance, in which the supernatural
and the terrible were the chief elements. The first
man who really influenced his mind was a Dr. Lind,
of Eton, who shared the revolutionary ferment of the
times, and dropped its fiery leaven into the inflammable
nature of Shelley. Even at Eton the wild and dreamy
lad was known as "mad Shelley." Then followed the
brief residence at Oxford, from which he was expelled
at seventeen for having published a pamphlet on the
" Necessity of Atheism." There can be little doubt
that in his expulsion from the University unnecessary
harshness was displayed. The pamphlet was a declara-
tion of ideas not of convictions, and was really a
series of logical propositions, in which Shelley chal-
lenged the first minds of the University to dispute
after the fashion of the mediaeval schoolmen. It was
one of those impracticable notions with which the mind
SHELLEY. 41
of Shelley was always teeming. The learned dons of
an ancient University did nothing, of course, to convert
the sinner from the error of his ways : their method of
conversion was expulsion. Such a course might have
been readily anticipated. But such a result had never
occurred to the unsophisticated calculations of Shelley.
The issue of his expulsion was that Shelley's mind,
already alienated from Christianity, was now embittered
against it, and that at seventeen he was master of his
own career.
Byron spoke of being " lord of himself, that heritage
of woe ; " certainly no man was ever less fitted by
natural endowment, or acquired experience, to ad-
minister the difficult heritage of himself than Shelley.
He was flung upon the world with a heart hot with
anger, a mind fermenting with revolution, and a
character destitute of the discipline of self-control, and
regulated by no knowledge of life or affairs. The
wonder is not that he erred, but that he did not err
more widely. As it was, from that hour he became
the poet of revolution. He practised what he preached
He had none of the cold selfishness which was the
underlying stratum of Byron's character. His view of
the brotherhood of man literally led him to share all he
had with the poorest, and to meet the most remote from
him in the social scale upon a level of frank equality. All
the fervour of an exceptionally ardent nature was given
to the work of spreading his ideas, and as these ideas
passed through the alembic of an extraordinary imagi-
nation, they were transformed into the^ noblest poetry.
There is nothing more remarkable in English litera-
ture than the rapid advancement of Shelley's intellect
to the highest victories of poetry. His first poem,
"Queen Mab," like his first romance, was poor stuff,
42 THE MAKERS OF MODERN ENGLISH.
flirrsy and incoherent, and it was against his expressed
wish that it was ever included in his works. " Alastor,"
his second long poem, is equally incoherent, but the
beginnings are in it of his marvellous mastery of
language, and the first bright glory of his extraordinary
imagination. Every year that Shelley wrote he wrote
better, and his style increased in purity and condensa-
tion. It reaches its highest point of splendour in such
poems as the " Prometheus Unbound," the " Adonais,"
an elegy on John Keats ; the grave and terrible drama
of " The Cenci," which is unmatched by anything since
the Elizabethan dramatists ; and lastly the " Epipsy-
chidion," which has been well described by his most
relentless censor as the greatest love-poem in the
universe. The " Prometheus Unbound" is, without
question, the mightiest and most majestic production
of modern English poetry. It stands alone in the
magnificent scale of its conception, the splendour of its
diction, the harmony and perfection of its workman-
ship. It is in itself a world of beauty, and the highest
power of word-painting and the finest gifts of word-
music which Shelley .possessed found in it a worthy
theme for their -, fullest exercise. It was written in
Italy, as were all the great poems of Shelley, and is
steeped in the light and beauty of that brightest and
most beautiful of lands. To Shelley nature was the
spirit of beauty, and he worshipped her with adoring
fidelity. He was not destitute by any means of that
minute accuracy of observation which distinguished
Wordsworth, but his power lay rather in those large
and startling effects of magnificence in nature, which
none but he could adequately paint. He has been
called the " Turner of Poetry," and the phrase is as
just as it is beautiful. Shelley's power, like Turner's,
SHELLEY. 43
was in depicting the pomp and splendour of evening
skies, the weird and changeful glory of atmospheric
effects, the terror of tempest, those rare and more awful
manifestations of nature, when she puts on a super-
natural grandeur, and seems indeed to be alive, a spirit
of strength and beauty, whose rainbows blind us, whose
ethereal loveliness awes and masters us, whose half-
dreadful charms at once inspire and subdue us.
Majesty is the keynote of Shelley's highest poetry.
Just as Wordsworth treated nature as something
alive and breathing, so did Shelley, but his conception
of nature differed from Wordsworth's. The difference
is exquisitely touched by Mr. Stopford Brooke when
he says : " While Wordsworth made the active principle
which rilled and made nature to be Thought, Shelley
made it Love." There is a passion and sensuous
* warmth of imagination in Shelley's view of nature
which is wanting in Wordsworth's, and there is a
certain indefinable exultation which rlo other poet
possesses. He speaks of nature in the tone of a
victorious lover. He does more than this ; there is
not only exultation but exaltation in the. poetry of
Shelley. He seems transformed by the stress and in-
tensity of his passion into a spiritual form, a being of
fire and air, an Ariel " of imagination all compact," a
weird and unearthly creature who dwells among " the
viewless winds," and lives in the hidden heart and
secret place of nature. This passionate adoration of
nature is nowhere so apparent as in his lyrics. They
have the true lyrical fire and sweetness. They are
the perfection of music. And through them all runs
another element, the element of a most pathetic sadness.
He pours out in his lyrics the cry of his heart, with all
its intense yearning, its disappointment, its insufficiency.
44 THE MAKERS OF MODERN ENGLISH,
Of these feelings the famous " Ode to a Skylark " is the
best example, and is in itself the most perfect lyrical
production of modern poetry. It is sweet, strong,
and tender ; perfect in sentiment, perfect in expression,
perfect in workmanship. It is known wherever the
English language is known, and if every other writing
of Shelley's were lost, would be sufficient to give him
a place among the greatest lyric poets who have used
the English language with mastery and music.
Mr. Matthew Arnold has hazarded the strange verdict
that Shelley will live by his prose rather than his
poetry, but the saying does more to illustrate the
eccentricity of the critic than to define the position of
the poet In poetry Shelley is described as " an
ineffectual angel, beating in the void his luminous
wings in vain/' but in prose Mr. Arnold describes him
as a master. The fact remains, however, that his prose
has rare qualities of force and eloquence. It reflects in
a singular degree the precision and purity of the great
classic writers of antiquity. The real value of the
assimilation of the great classics is the mastery of
language which they confer. A ripe classical knowledge
leads up to purity and justness of language ; it teaches
its students to value and discern the delicate shades of
meaning in which language abounds ; it confers that
accent of distinction upon the style of a writer, which,
in its highest manifestations, is, as Matthew Arnold has
told us, the great secret of immortality in literature.
Pre-eminently is this result to be observed in Shelley.
The English of his early romances is fustian coarse,
incoherent, turbid ; the results of his lifelong study of
the ancient classics are seen in the splendour and purity
of diction which distinguish his poetry, and which have
made his writings part of the English classics. Shelley
SHELLEY, 45
was one of the finest of classical schola r s, in the sense
not merely that he found the daily bread of his intellect
in Plato, Homer, and Lucretius, but that he has in some
respects more perfectly assimilated and reproduced the
Greek spirit than any other English poet. The great
poets of antiquity, especially Lucretius, whose breadth
of view and majesty of style fascinated Shelley as an
undergraduate, were his daily companions, and in his
coat-pocket, when dead, was found a well-worn copy of
Sophocles.
The remoteness of theme which characterises Shelley's
poetry is both a gain and a disadvantage. Often the
thread of human interest is attenuated to, the last
degree. Mrs. Shelley, than whom no poet ever had a
nobler intellectual helpmeet, felt this, and when he wrote
the " Witch of Atlas " expressed her disappointment
that he had not chosen a theme of more general human
interest. But, on the other hand, it is this remoteness
of theme \\hich does much to invest Shelley's poetry
with so unique a charm. One of his biographers * has
well said that in naming Shelley most readers feel
they name a part of everything beautiful, ethereal,
and spiritual that his words are so inextricably inter-
woven with certain phases of love and beauty as to be
indistinguishable from the thing itself. We may say
so much to-day, but the practical effect of Shelley's
insubstantiality of theme in his own day was that he had
few readers, and to write without a public for many
years is always a serious disadvantage to a poet. It
represses ambition, it discourages effort. Much of
Shelley's depression of spirits arose from this sense
that he wrote in vain. u Mine is a life of failures," he
said. " Peacock says my poetry is composed of day-
* Vide Mrs. Marshall's Life and Letters of Mrs. Shelley.
46 ThE MAKERS OF MODERN ENGLISH,
dreams and nightmares, and Leigh Hunt does not think
it fit for the Examiner. I wrote, and the critics de-
nounced me as a mischievous visionary, and my friends
said that I had mistaken my vocation." At the time
of his death there was practically no sale for his works,
and his father only acted in accordance with the general
sentiment about, them when he made the suppression
of his posthumous poems the condition of a niggardly
allowance to his widow. The very expenses of the
publication of his posthumous poems had to be
guaranteed by the generosity of private friends. Is it
wonderful that Shelley cared little to please a public
who at the best studiously ignored him, or reviewers
who received everything he wrote with virulent scorn,
and were capable of writing after his death, " He will
now find out whether there is a hell or not " ?
That the poetry of Shelley should reflect the sadness
of his life is natural, but it is noticeable that, as he
grew older, his mind became more serene and hopeful,
ust as the violence of his early opinions died away
with years, and left him writing an admiring essay on
the Christ he had hated as a youth. But it is almost
absurd to speak of Shelley as growing old, for he died
at thirty. In one sense he had lived long, for he had
lived much, and intensity of life adds age to life not
less than length of days. He himself felt this, for only
the day before his death, when he left the house of
Leigh Hunt at Pisa, he said that, if he died to-morrow,
he would be older than his father he would be ninety.
What he might have done had long life been his it is
possible only to" conjecture. It is certain that, every
year he wrote, he displayed more mastery over his own
powers, and produced results more marvellous, in
themselves/ and more vvoithy of fame, than the work
SHELLEY. 47
that went before them. But long life was not granted
him ; he died with the song on his lips, at the very
moment of its utmost power and sweetness. On July
8th, 1822, he left Leghorn for Lerici, on a sailing-boat
which he had bought from Byron, in company with
Captain Williams. No sooner had they gained the
open sea than a tremendous squall struck the boat, and
a thick darkness shut her off from the anxious watchers
on the shore. When the darkness lifted the boat was
gone for ever. A few days later the body of Shello-y
was found, and in his hand was still grasped trie
volume of Keats which he had been reading when
death came upon him. His body was burned, in the
presence of Byron, Leigh Hunt, and Trelawney, on the
shore near Lerici. From the flame the heart was
taken uninjured, and was afterwards given to Mrs.
Shelley. The ashes were buried beside the body
of John Keats, at Rome, in the English cemetery, near
the pyramid of Caius Cestius a spot so beautiful
that he himself said it may well make one fall in love
with Death. Thus, by the tragedy of fate, within
eighteen months the writer of " Adonais " was laid
side by side with the great poet whom he had thus
commemorated in the most splendid elegy wh ch the
English language possesses. " Adonais " is less the
elegy of Keats than the monument of Shelley, and it
is of Shelley rather than of Keats that we think when
we read the prophetic lines :
He has outsoared the shadow of our night ;
Envy and calumny, and hate and pain,
And that unrest which men miscall delight,
Can touch him not and torture not again ;
From the contagion of the world's slow stain
He is secure, and now can never mourn
A heart grown cold, a head grown grey in vain.
CHAPTER VI.
JOHN KEATS.
[Born in Moorflelds, London, October 29th, 1795. His poems first-
published 1817. Died in Rome, February 23rd, 1821.]
ONE of the saddest themes for consideration in the
literature of this century is the ill-starred life
and early death of four of its greatest poets. Byron
died by misadventure, one might almost say, at the
very moment when he had begun to throw off the
poisonous morbidity of earlier years, and certainly
at a time when there was no token of failing powers.
Shelley was drowned at a time when his genius had
begun to show a magnificent promise of ripening power,
and when his early errors had not only been amply
atoned for, but were repented and forsworn. Burns,
a'ter a long series of misfortunes, died at an age when
the latter poets of the Victorian epoch had scarcely
put forth their powers. John Keats completes the list
of poets of great genius and commanding influence,
overwhelmed by misfortune, and cut off in the very
prime of hope and achievement ; and in many respects
Keats' is the saddest history of them all. Byron,
Burns, and Shelley, at least, had some recognition of
their powers accorded them, and the two first had both
ample and generous awards of fame in their own time.
But Keats passed out of the world before the world
JOHN KEATS. 49
had in the least perceived the rare spirit which had
been in it. Even those who were his most intimate
friends, Hunt and Haydon, had no commensurate
understanding of the height and scope of his genius ;
both of them lectured him pretty severely, and Hunt
even aimed to instruct him in style. The rare lovable-
ness of the man, his sweetness of temper and simplicity
of nature, his straightforward honesty and contagious
enthusiasm, they both admired and acknowledged in no
stinted terms of praise, but neither the painter nor the
poet really perceived the originality and freshness ot
the genius they admired. As for the outside world, it
was both contemptuous and indifferent. The reviews
of that day were full of a wicked partisanship, and the
criticism was venomous and brutal in the extreme. It
was quite enough for the Quarterly to know that Keats
was the friend of so prominent a Radical as Leigh
Hunt; such knowledge afforded ample provocation for
attacking him with every fair and unfair weapon it could
lay its hands to. Indeed, it was not so much a matter
of weapons as of missiles. Keats was not attacked in
fair fight, but was virtually mobbed off the stage. To
taunt a young poet with his lowly birth was an offence
against every canon of gentlemanly feeling, not to speak
of the good traditions of honourable criticism ; to tell him
to go back to his gallipots and stick to his pillboxes was
an access of brutality of which even critics in that bad
age were seldom guilty. Byron said he would not have
written that article in the Quarterly for all the world was
worth ; yet even Byron at an earlier period had written
to Murray that if he did not get some one to kill and skin
Johnny Keats he would be forced to do it himself.
The brief life of Keats is soon sketched. He was
the son of a livery-stable man, and was born on the
4
50 THE MAKERS OF MODERN ENGLISH.
29th of October, 1795, at the sign of The Swan and
Hoop, Finsbury Pavement, facing the then open space
of Lower Moorfields. His father had married his
employer's daughter, and appears to have been a man
of fine integrity, and with some charm of character.
He was killed when Keats was a child, and after a
twelvemonth his widow married again. Keats received
his education at a private academy at Enfield. For
the first part of his time there he gave no promise
of anything beyond athletic power; then suddenly his
mind seems to have blossomed into life, and he became
an ardent reader and student. Spenser was the first
poet who fascinated him, and Spenser, who has been
called "the poet's poet/' was a potent influence to the
last. On leaving school Keats was apprenticed to a
doctor, and began to study medicine. But he never
really took to it. In one of his later letters he says he
could never have been a surgeon. He was far too
abstracted for the skilful exercise of surgery, and he
never could have taken fees. The fact was, his mind
was not in his profession, and he soon left it, and began
to write poetry. There was a considerable sum of
money due to him on his mother's death, and on the
interest of this, and latterly on the principal, he con-
trived to live in a frugal way sufficient for his tastes.
He soon found friends, and the love his friends bore
him is very marked and touching. He was by all
accounts a youth of singular beauty. Mrs. Proctor
said, not more finely than truthfully, that his face was
like the face of one who had looked upon a glorious
sight. It was a delicate and refined face, with large
and sensitive mouth, the eyes a brilliant hazel, the
forehead low and broad, the hair auburn, and curling
softly; a face which once seen was seldom forgotten.
JOHN KEATS.
In frame he was slightly but compactly built, and the
general testimony of his friends is that he always
struck them as one destined to long life. He was
full of vitality and energy, of enthusiasm and hope,
and had sufficient physical powers on one occasion to
administer a severe thrashing to a big butcher-lad who
was molesting a small boy. Indeed, the common idea of
Keats, so far as the first period of his life goes, is about
as far from the truth as it can well be. He was no
puling, sickly youth, but energetic, buoyant of spirit,
creating in all his friends the idea of strong vitality,
which was likely to ripen into vigorous old age. Cole-
ridge's description of him, as a slack, loosely-dressed
youth, with a thin nervous hand, of which the older
poet said when first he grasped it, " There is death in
that hand," was written long afterwards, when disease
had made serious inroads on Keats' strength. The
true picture of the Keats who wrote " Endymion " is of
a bright and brilliant youth, impressing all beholders
with an idea of great powers, a youth who was bound
to succeed in making his mark broad and deep upon
his times.
It is, however, not the Keats who wrote " Endymion "
we know most about, but the Keats who was the lover
of Fanny Brawne and the butt for the ridicule of the
Quarterly. It seems to us that there are two totally
distinct John Keatses the John Keats before decay
began, and the John Keats tortured by the sense of
great powers unappreciated and soon to be eclipsed
for ever. The impression which John Keats in the
days of health and hope produced upon his friends
we have already described. The impression one derives
from the study of the doomed and dying Keats is very
different. It is in his love-letters to Fanny Brawne,
52 THE MAKERS OF MODERN ENGLISH.
which never ought to have been published, that the
John Keats of tragedy is revealed. The letters are full
of violence, despair, jealousy : the ravings of a tortured
youth, pouring out without regard for himself all the
weakness and intemperate passion of his nature. There
is something pitiable in the display, something that
makes a sane and self-sufficient nature shrink back in
severe distaste. They are, in fact, the revelation of a
disordered nature, a nature with no strength of moral
fibre in it, and in this view the words of his contem-
poraries confirm us. Haydon, who knew him perhaps
better than any man, says emphatically, " His ruin was
owing to his want of decision of character and power
of will, without which genius is a curse." Nor does
Haydon speak in the spirit of a censorious critic. He
loved Keats. He says in another place, Keats had " an
eye that had an inward look, perfectly divine, like a
Delphian priestess who saw visions. Poor dear Keats !
had nature given you firmness as well as fineness of
nerve, you would have been glorious in your maturity
as great in your promise ! " It is difficult to sum up
the impressions such words as these create, but
unquestionably they describe a nature in which the
artistic and intellectual forces were not balanced by
the moral forces. There is not the firmness of nerve
Haydon speaks of. There is something, on the
contrary, that strikes one as sensuous and unwhole-
some. Keats says of himself, he has an " exquisite
sense of the luxurious," and writes, "Oh for a life of
sensations rather than thoughts ! " There is a story
of his once having covered his tongue with cayenne
pepper, that he might appreciate more exquisitely the
sense of the coolness of the claret he was about to
drink. The story is slight, but it appears authentic,
JOHN KEATS. 53
and it coincides with the impression of character which
Haydon's criticisms and Keats' own words convey.
How far the pressure of disease may account for these
morbid excesses it is impossible to say : but it is certain
that this touch of the morbid ran through all Keats'
later period, and occasionally gave his poetry a sort of
false and hectic splendour. It is a dying poet who
writes; and there is something of the preternatural
brilliance of disease in his poetry.
Turning from the poet to his poetry, there are con-
siderations of great interest which readily suggest
themselves. Keats is the youngest and last of the
great band of poets who laid the foundations of the
poetry of the century : but he is not of them. The
Revolution woke no echoes in his nature. He pro-
fessed, indeed, the most advanced democratic opinions,
and reverenced Voltaire ; but there is no trace either of
political or religious bias in his poetry. He is destitute
alike of love to God and enthusiasm for humanity, so
far as his poetry is concerned. Byron was never free
from the haunting presence of religious problems;
Byron and Shelley were both filled with the fervour of
the revolutionary spirit ; but in Keats there is no trace
of either. He had no interest in man. In the passion
and tragic struggle of ordinary human life he discovered
no food for poetry. To him poetry was a world of the
imagination only, a sealed and sworded paradise, a
realm of enchantment where only those might dwell
who saw visions and dreamed dreams a land of volup-
tuous languor, where magic music filled the air and life
passed like a dream, measured only by the exquisiteness
of its sensations and the intensity of its delights. In
order to create such a world, he went back to the legends
of ancient Greece and the stories of mediaeval life. To
54 THE MAKERS OF MODERN ENGLISH.
him the vision of modern life was tame and vulgar ; he
needed a realm more remote, and consequently obscured
by the haze of distance, in which his imagination could
work unhindered. The world he thus lived in was a
completely ideal world, jealously closed as far as he
could close it against the intrusion of ordinary human
affairs. So saturated did his mind become with the
imaginations of the past, that Leigh Hunt said of him,
" He never beheld the oak-tree without seeing the
Dryad." The only thought he has ever elaborated in
all his writings is that beauty is worthy of worship,
and loveliness should be worshipped for its own sake.
The worship of loveliness he thus substituted for the
worship of truth, and this seems to have satisfied all
the religious instincts of his nature.
Essentially this is the artist's view of life. The cant
of art now is that art exists for its own sake, and
has nothing whatever to do with morals. Of this
view John Keats was the true, though perhaps uncon-
scious, originator. He created the school of ornate and
artistic poetry poetry which has no human robustness
or passion about it, but which excels in the exquisite-
ness of its workmanship, and the delicacy and remote-
ness of its imagination. He himself said that a perfect
phrase delighted him with a sense of intoxication.
His view of poetry was that it should aim at the pro-
duction of perfect phrases, beautiful enough to be
welcomed for their own sake, apart from any thought
or lesson they might convey. Here is his own poetic
creed: " 1st. I think poetry should surprise by a fine
excess, and not by singularity ; it should strike the
reader as a wording of his own highest thoughts, and
appear almost a remembrance. 2nd. Its touches of
beauty should be never half-way, thereby making the
JOHN KEATS. 55
reader breathless instead of content. The rise, the
progress, the setting of imagery should, like the sun,
come natural to him, shine over him, and set soberly,
although in magnificence, leaving him in the luxury of
twilight. But it is easier to think what poetry should
be than to write it. And this leads me to another
axiom That if poetry comes not as naturally as the
leaves to a tree, it had better not come at all." This
is, in brief, Keats' creed, and his work exemplifies it.
He does little to quicken the sympathies, nothing to
liberate the moral impulses, or to instruct the intellect.
He surprises us by the " fine excess " of his imagery ;
he weaves a fabric of phrase wonderful for its colour
and beauty, and he does no more. With that he is
content ; to dazzle us with loveliness is, according to
his view of poetry, a sufficient end and aim. We have
spoken of him as helping to lay the foundations of
nineteenth-century poetry : it would be juster to say
that he waited till the foundations were laid, and then
covered the superstructure with an intricate arabesque
of strange and gorgeous beauty.
"Endymion," the first work of Keats, reveals the
artistic nature in its primal struggle to realize these
ideals. It has nothing to teach, no thought, or scheme
of thought, to unfold, no real story to tell, nothing but
its own wealth of phrase and imagery to recommend
it. Of course it pretends to have a story, but as the
poem proceeds the story is reduced to extreme tenuity.
It aims, moreover, at being a love-story : but there is
no human vigour in its love. To read it consecutively
is almost impossible. The nuggets of gold lie far apart,
and between them are dreary intervals, where the work
of reading is indescribably toilsome, and the toil yields
but the scantiest result.
56 THE MAKERS OF MODERN ENGLISH.
The cardinal fault of "Endymion" is that it is con-
fused and unequal, and is overlaid by excessive imagery.
No one felt its defects, however, more keenly than its
author, and no criticism could be more just than the criti-
cism of his own preface to it. He says, the reader "must
soon perceive great inexperience, immaturity, and every
error denoting a feverish attempt rather than a deed
accomplished. This may be speaking presumptuously,
and may deserve a punishment ; but no feeling man
will be forward to inflict it; he will leave me alone
with the conviction that there is not a fiercer hell than
the failure of a great object. The imagination of a boy
is healthy ; and the mature imagination of a man is
healthy ; but there is a space of life between in which
the soul is in a ferment, the character undecided, the
way of life uncertain, the ambition thick-sighted;
thence proceeds mawkishness, and all the thousand
bitters which those men I speak of must necessarily
taste in going over the following pages."
Nothing can be more correct, more honest, or more
beautifully expressed, than this. It exactly hits the
cardinal fault of Keats' early poetry viz., mawkish-
ness. There is a desire for mere prettinesses of diction,
an intemperate use of ornament, a straining after verbal
effect at the expense of thought, a weakness of touch,
which were only too likely to offend the sense of critical
readers. But there were also passages of such rare
and visionary beauty, of such exquisite touch and
diction, that the feeling man might well hesitate to
inflict any very severe punishment upon a genius of
such unusual promise. There are few men who have
ever formed so correct an estimate of their own power
as Keats; whatever were the confessions of present
immaturity, he had a clear sense of his own capacity,
JOHN KEATS. 57
and never doubted his ability to free himself from his
early errors, and achieve really noble and memorable
work.
In another part of this same preface he says that
while " Endymion " may dwindle into obscurity he will
be plotting and fitting himself for verses fit to live.
He said on one occasion, " I think I shall be re-
membered with the poets when I am dead/ 1 and no
bitterness of rebuke on the part of a venal press ever
dulled this clear perception of the scope and promise of
his own genius. " Endymion " is a confusion of beau-
ties and weaknesses, a tangled jungle of rich foliage,
but in it are some of the loveliest flowers and fruits of
English poetry. Its famous opening lines should have
arrested attention and regard :
A thing of beauty is a joy for ever :
Its loveliness increases ; it will never
Pass into nothingness ; but still will keep
A bower quiet for us, and a sleep
Full of sweet dreams, and health, and quiet breathing.
The touching modesty of its preface should have
saved it from the harsh handling of a careless or hostile
criticism. But neither of these results followed. The
poem was universally ridiculed, and Keats' first offering
of beauty was contemptuously flung back in his face.
Like Shelley, the rapidity with which Keats' genius
matured is astonishing. Destiny seemed anxious to
atone for the brevity of the time for work by hastening
its advance. In the later poems of Keats there is no
trace of the confusion of " Endymion." " Hyperion "
is a fragment only, but it is second in sublimity and
massiveness only to the work of Milton. In " Lamia,"
" Isabella," and the " Eve of St. Agnes" we have
workmanship which is so excellent that it is vain to
58 THE MAKERS OF MODERN ENGLISH.
hope that it can be excelled, and in the half-a-dozen
great " Odes " which Keats has written we have work
which the greatest of poets might have been proud
to claim. In the subtle magic of suggestive phrase,
such as
Magic casements, opening on the foam
Of perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn,
Keats has no master. There is a veritable enchantment
about these " Odes." They, indeed, surprise us by " a
fine excess," and intoxicate the imagination with their
beauty. They frequently reveal also a patient obser-
vation of nature, and an accuracy in describing her,
which is akin to Wordsworth. Some of his phrases, in
the delicacy and intensity of their imagination, fairly
rival Shakespeare. They fix themselves instantly in
the memory, and cannot be shaken off. And in all
there is a sense of romantic youth which is in itself
fascinating. They are the poems of adolescence, and,
if they want the firm vigour of manly completeness,
they excel in the fire and passion of young delight.
Nothing can be truer or finer than the closing sentence
of Mr. Michael Rossetti's brief biography : " By his
early death Keats was doomed to be the poet of youth-
fulness ; by being the poet of youthfulness he was
privileged to become and to remain enduringly the poet
of rapt expectation and passionate delight."
The later biographers of Keats have made it abund-
antly clear that the Quarterly criticism had nothing
whatever to do with his death. That impression is due
to Shelley's matchless dirge, " Adonais," and to Byron's
allusion in " Don Juan "-
Tis strange the mind, that fiery particle,
Should let itself be snuffed out by an article.
JOHN KEATS. 59
The fact is, Keats bore his rejection with quiet
dignity and manliness. The breakdown of his health
was due to other causes. It began with a walking-
tour to Scotland, during which his over-exertion, and
exposure to bad weather, ripened the first seeds of
disease which he had inherited from his mother.
Then came his brother Tom's death of consumption,
and then his most unfortunate love affair. Love with
John Keats was a passion of singular intensity, and the
fire consumed him. He was in a constant fever of
thought and desire, fascinated and repelled, torn by
empty jealousies and ashamed of them, living in a
constant whirlwind of excited passion, and it was more
than his overtaxed strength could endure. He lived
two years after the publication of " Endymion," but
they were years of labour and sorrow. One night he
coughed, and then called his friend Brown to bring him
the candle. " I know the colour of that blood," said
he: "it is arterial blood. I shall die." There were
temporary rallies, but the mischief was too deep-seated
for cure. He lived to write some of the noblest poems
in the English language, and never had the flame of
genius burned so brilliantly in him as in those last brief
months of disease. As a last resource he went to
Rome, and there he died in the arms of his friend
Severn. "I am dying. I shall die easy ; don't be
frightened ; be firm, and thank God it has come," said
he. They were his last words. He passed quietly
away in his twenty-seventh year, and his remains were
laid in the beautiful cemetery at Rome, where, seven-
teen months later, all of Shelley that could be rescued
from the funeral fire at Spezzia was laid beside him.
He said his epitaph should be, " Here lies one whose
name was writ in water." The truer epitaph is, " Here
60 THE MAKERS OF MODERN ENGLISH.
lies one whose name is graven in adamant. 9 Or
perhaps we may accept the fanciful transformation
of his own imagery which Shelley made, when he
wrote :
Here lieth one whose name was writ in water ;
But, ere the breath that could erase it blew,
Death, in remorse for that fell slaughter,
Death, the immortalising winter, flew
Athwart the stream, and time's mouthless torrent grew
A scroll of crystal, emblazoning the name
Of Adonais.
His influence upon the poets of his century has been
unique and abiding : there is scarcely a poet, from his
own day to the days of Tennyson and Rossetti, with
the solitary exception of Wordsworth, who does not
exhibit some trace of that influence. To them, and to
us, the work of this ill-fated lad, whose sun went
down while it was yet day, is
A thing of beauty and a joy for ever.
CHAPTER VII.
SIR WALTER SCOTT.
[Born in Edinburgh, "mine own romantic town," August I5th, 1771.
First original poem, "The Lay of the Last Minstrel," published
1805. Died at Abbotsford, 2ist September, 1832.]
AMONG the men who did most to direct the course
of literature in the beginning of the nineteenth
century the most colossal figure is certainly that of
Scott. At the time when Wordsworth had finally
renounced the world, and turned northward to the calm
retreats of Grasmere, Scott was girding himself for his
work. Scott was the lifelong friend of Wordsworth,
and there was much in their natures that was akin.
We have seen how the great force of the French Revolu-
tion acted on Southey and Coleridge, driving the one to
fierce reaction, and the other to the maze of philosophic
speculation. We have seen that it produced no effect
whatever on Keats, and that the only two great spirits
who remained true to its daring ideals were Shelley and
Byron. Wordsworth turned from its Titanic confusion
to the study of nature ; Scott to the study of the
romantic past. Indeed, it can scarcely be said that
Scott even turned from it in the sense in which
Wordsworth did, for there is no evidence that he was
ever fascinated by it. All that wild outburst, which
rilled even so calm a nature as Wordsworth's with
enthusiasm, and which made every chord of the world's
heart vibrate with its intolerable stress and passion,
62 THE MAKERS OF MODERN ENGLISH.
passed over him and left him unmoved. Scott shared
with Wordsworth his intense delight in nature, but
not his enthusiasm for humanity. It was the splendour
of the past rather than the thrilling struggles of the
present which fascinated his imagination. There was
a sobriety of temperament about Scott which unfitted
him for any active sympathy with the great movements
of the time in which his lot was cast. Nevertheless,
however unconsciously, the strong tide that was flowing
did affect him, and the impulse of his age was on him.
The result of that impulse of the age working on a
nature so deep and sober as his is seen in a species of
poetry, which was a magnificent innovation, and a long
line of glorious fictions, which have made him the true
father of the modern novel.
We have seen also that of all the great writers of the
dawn of the century, only two made their voices heard
in Europe, and achieved a cosmopolitan fame. Those
two, dissimilar in almost every respect, were Scott and
Byron. Yet few men of really great genius have been
so curiously limited in nature as Scott.
It was in the year 1805 the year in which Nelson
died in the cockpit of the Victory ; in which Austerlitz
was fought, and Napoleon was crowned King of Italy,
amid all the wild storm of trampling hosts and falling
kingdoms that Scott put forth his first poem, "The
Lay of the Last Minstrel." As it was something of an
accident that led Scott to write novels, so it was what
seemed a mere happy chance that produced the
celebrated " Lay." Lady Dalkeith had requested Scott
to write a metrical sketch of a certain old legend which
clung to the district in which she lived. Nothing could
have suited the young Sheriff-depute of Selkirkshire
better. From childhood his memory had been stored
SIR WALTER SCOTT. 63
with fantastic relics of a legendary past. Old snatches
of ballad-poetry, curious stories of second-sight, all the
odds and ends which the literary antiquary loves and
cherishes, were the natural heritage of Scott. The
grotesque, the heroic, the romantic were the diet upon
which his imagination had been fed. Upon the impulse
of this request, Scott set to work and composed a
spirited sketch of a scene of feudal festivity in the hall
of Branksome, disturbed by some pranks of a nonde-
script goblin. The sketch pleased him so well that
there flashed across his mind the idea of extending
his simple outline so as to embrace a vivid panorama
of that old border-life of war and tumult, and all ear-
nest passions, with which his researches in minstrelsy
had by degrees fed his imagination. Gradually the
sketch grew until it had expanded into a poem of six
cantos. From his friends it won little favour : from
the great Scotch critics open rebuke. The subject
seemed to them too local to win general attention, and
the octosyllabic verse which the poet had employed
entirely unsuitable for narrative verse. Both in theme
and metre Scott was attempting a daring innovation, and
innovations are rarely popular with critics. As regards
the metre, Scott pointed out later that it was the one
metre perfectly adapted for narrative poetry. He took,
as an example, the opening lines of Pope's " Iliad : "-
Achilles' wrath, to Greece the direful spring
Of woes unnumbered, heavenly goddess, sing.
The wrath which sent to Pluto's gloomy reign
The souls of mighty chiefs in battle slain,
Whose bones unburied on the desert shore,
Devouring dogs and hungry vultures tore ;
and contended that the underlined adjectives were mere
expletives, and that the verse would be much stronger
64 THE MAKERS OF MODERN ENGLISH.
and more expressive without them. This is imme-
diately apparent by comparison, -and if we want further
proof of the adaptability of octosyllabic metre to the
most vivacious, terse, and resonant narrative-poetry,
we have it in Scott's own work. According to Byron's
verdict, Scott had completely triumphed over " the fatal
facility of octosyllabic verse," and Byron in his sub-
sequent poems was not slow to profit by the lesson.
But Scott had done more than that. He had invented
a new style of poetry, and had interested the world in
an entirely new theme. The old stories of knight and
lady, monastery and castle, tournament and chivalry,
had wholly dropped out of view, and amid the immense
drama of Europe as it was in 1805 men might well
suppose there was no room for their revival.
Scott again rekindled the love of chivalry, the old
admiration of the troubadour, in the English heart.
He brought precisely the gifts needed for his work.
He had no philosophic meditativeness, but he knew
how to tell a story. He also knew how to paint a
picture. The force of his verse lies in its simplicity
and vivid directness of phrase. His imagery is seldom
very original, but it is always spontaneous, and very
frequently is striking. The idea of the wounded day
bleeding in the sky, for instance, is not novel in poetry.
Alexander Smith speaks of " bright bleeding day ; "
Shakespeare impressively paints the red dawn of the
battle of Shrewsbury" when he says,
How bloodily the sun begins to peer
Above yond' bosky hill ! the day looks pale
At his distemperature.
But Scott has surpassed both in concentration of effect
when he paints the setting sun in " Rokeby ; "
SIX WALTER SCOTT. 65
With disc like battle-target red
He rushes to his burning bed,
Dyes the wild wave with bloody light,
Then sinks at once, and all is night.
Mr. Ruskin has testified how true was Scott's sense
of colour, and with what fidelity he describes the
scenery which was familiar to him. In this quality
his outdoor life was the secret of his power. He had
himself ridden over the hills his heroes scale in mad
flight or pursuit. By birth, by natural impulse and
character, he was precisely fitted to interpret all this.
And he did interpret it, to the immeasurable delight
of his readers, in the early days of this century. The
freshness and vivacity of his style, the newness of his
theme, his obvious enthusiasm for his subject, won for
him instant attention and fame. Fox and Pitt both
read the " Lay " with intense interest, and Pitt said
that the picture it presented was " a sort of thing
which he might have expected in painting, but could
never have fancied capable of being given in poetry."
Before 1805 had ended Scott was universally recog-
nised as the first poet of his day.
It is needless for us here to follow the subsequent
poems of Scott with minute description. In essential
respects there is little difference. In each there is the
same romantic interest, the same steady hand produc-
ing sound and excellent work, the same freshness and
wholesomeness of imagination and sentiment. Never
was a poet so entirely free from the slightest trace of
the morbid. His verse is like his own Scotch rivers :
clear, full, and pleasant, suggestive of the mountains
and the open sky, and filling the ear with simple music.
But there Scott's power as a poet ends. There were
other and deeper things working in men's hearts which
5
66 THE MAKERS OF MODERN ENGLISH,
he had no power to interpret. There was an intense
feeling abroad that it was the present and not the past
which was of supreme import : the natural feeling of
men standing in a new age, and filled with a passionate
hatred of its limitations, and an equally passionate
belief in its enormous promises. It needed Byron to
interpret this ; and when Byron began to lift up his
voice of mingled cynicism and rage, his wild cry of
despairing bitterness drew men's thoughts away from
the old chivalrous lays of Scott. The sense of the
time was profoundly right. Poetry which is a repro-
duction of the past must always bow before poetry
which throbs with the actuality of the present. Men
felt that the true romance and chivalry of life was at
their doors, and that it was in the present the real
knight must ride to the redress of wrong, and the real
hero bow in his solitary vigil. " The burden of this
unintelligible world " was being felt anew ; the pres-
sure of social and theological problems was increasing,
and men wanted other singers than Scott to move
their hearts and dominate their thoughts.
It is characteristic of Scott that he knew perfectly
well that when Byron began to write his day was over.
He quietly said Byron had "bet him," and he never
sang again. Without a touch of jealousy, with simple
manliness, Scott admitted that a greater poet than
himself had come, and instead of waging a losing
battle for his lost supremacy, he praised his rival, and
then left the arena with all the honours of war. There
are few men who could have done this. That Scott
did it, and did it e'asily, is at once a proof of the sturdy
manliness of his nature, and of the robust common-
sense and generosity which marked his character.
Scott left the field of poetry with honour and dignity
SIR WALTER SCOTT. 67
but it was only to open a new chapter in a great career.
He was too ambitious and too full of energy to rest
content under his defeat. In 1805 he had commenced
a story which dealt with the history of Jacobite
Scotland. In 1814 he took up the old MS., and
thought sufficiently well of it to complete it. Lockhart
has given a vivid and memorable account of how Scott
wrote it, and Lockhart's narrative has become a classic
quotation. Scott wrote at white-heat, and with scarcely
a pause. Lockhart was assisting at a party held in a
house which exactly faced the room where Scott was
writing. One of the company suddenly rose from his
chair and said he could " endure it no longer." What
he had been enduring was the shadow of a hand,
moving hour after hour, with rhythmic regularity, be-
hind the opposite window, and piling up as it wrote
sheet after sheet of MS. "I have been watching it,"
he said. " It fascinates the eye. It never stops. Page
after page is thrown on that heap of MS. and still it
goes on unwearied; and so it will be till the candles
are brought in, and God knows how long after that.
It is the same every night." Lockhart suggested that
it was probably some stupid engrossing clerk. " No,"
said the host; I well know what hand it is. It is
Walter Scott's." ' It was thus "Waverley" was written,
and a long series of immortal fictions, called the
"Waverley Novels," commenced.
To describe the "Waverley Novels" is now needless.
Their characteristics are well known wherever the
English language is spoken. There is a confident ease
in Scott's way of telling his story, which no other
writer of English fiction has ever possessed in any-
thing like the same degree. He has made history
live, and generally speaking, his historic portraits are
68 THE MAKERS OF MODERN ENGLISH.
correct. At all events they live, and bear the impress
of reality. His characters are as truly creations of
imaginative art as Shakespeare's. Scott never strains
after effect; he accomplishes his -greatest results by
the use of the simplest means, in a manner surpassed
only by Shakespeare, and rivalled only by Goethe. It
is this simplicity of the "Waverley Novels" which
make them so unique. In almost every case they were
rapidly written. " Woodstock " was the work of three
weeks. "The Bride of Lammermoor" was dictated
during the intervals of agonising pain. Apart from
the felicity or interest of the subject, there is little
difference in the quality of the work. Sometimes
Scott chooses a subject more suitable to his genius
than at other times, but with the exception of the two
novels written after he had become a paralytic there
is little difference in the genius and power displayed.
It is a full, rich stream, flowing on with no sense of
effort, with quiet strength and majesty, sinking at will
into a placid current, or swelling into an overwhelming
torrent. Until the shadow of death fell upon Scott he
never knew what it was to wait upon inspiration. He
was always ready to write, and wrote with a keen
sense of vigour and enjoyment which made the work
a pastime and delight rather than a labour to him.
If one were asked to put into a sentence what is the
total impression Scott himself produces upon us through
his writings, we should probably reply, the impression
of a thoroughly sound and wholesome nature. There
is a genial and withal sober manliness about him which
is very noticeable. Since his day we have had many
varieties of novels, but in this quality of a genial
humanity Scott still stands unrivalled. He has none
of the analytic power of George Eliot, the subtle irony
SIR WALTER SCOTT. 69
of Thackeray, the grotesque exaggeration of Dickens,
or the base sensationalism and tendency towards the
unclean which some of our latest writers have displayed.
The native chivalry of his character works out a high
and chivalrous ideal of womanhood ; his genial health-
fulness preserves in him a cordial and sympathetic
view of life. He is free alike from the taint of scep-
ticism and the disease of sensationalism. He does not
seek bizarre effects; he does not in his effort to be
impressive or original become grotesque. Of how few
can so much as this be said ? Who has not almost
tittered at Dumas and Victor Hugo when they have
sought to be most impressive, and revolted from the
pictures in which the horrible has been expected to do
the work of the sublime ? And even in the exquisite
analysis of George Eliot, full of compassion as it is,
who has not felt sometimes a sense of intolerable pain,
a feeling that the scalpel goes too deeply, and does its
work too mercilessly ? Scott has dealt with every form
of human tragedy, but he has done so with the large and
tolerant spirit of a great master. There is a massiveness
about his work, a completeness, a large-hearted power ;
he deals with his subject with a sort of gigantic ease
and wholeness of view, which is never unconscious of
its acute points of interest, but which subordinates the
points where George Eliot or Thackeray would have
paused, and to which they would have devoted all their
powers, to the interest of the whole. Above all he is
a great humorist. He is quick to see the fun of a
situation, and his laughter is Homeric. It is this
element of health in which Scott stands supreme, and
it is precisely this quality which we most need to-day
in our contemporary fiction and poetry.
Had not disaster overtaken Scott in the fulness of
70 THE MAKERS OF MODERN ENGLISH.
his fame, and shattered his fortunes in the very moment
of their completion, it is questionable whether the
world would ever have known his true greatness. His
works had revealed the greatness of his genius; adver-
sity revealed the greatness of his character. Destiny,
which had so far apportioned him nothing but pros-
perous days, with troops of friends and golden opinions
from all sorts of men, suddenly adjusted the balance,
and made sorrow the familiar of the last period
of his life. The spirit in which Scott faced adversity
was admirable. He bore his calamity with the stoicism
of a hero. He sat down with broken powers to pay
with the earnings of his pen the enormous debt of
117,000, which the mismanagement of others had
entailed upon him. He never murmured. He wrote
his cousin, Humphry Davy, that he defied that direful
chemist, Ill-luck, to overcome him. And he was true
to his boast. The last scenes in the life of Scott are un-
surpassed by anything in literature for grandeur and
pathos. They still live before the student of literature,
and they serve to reveal the genuine nobility of the
man. The picture of Scott fighting down decay, and
dying fighting, is a memorable and unforgettable one.
He met his end with perfect calmness. His last
words to his children were tinged with the spirit of
a true and noble piety. So, amid the mourning of the
world, Scott passed away, having fought a good fight,
and won the victory. He left behind him a splendid
fame, a stainless reputation, above all a great legacy of
imperishable genius ; and in the thousands of pages he
had written there was not one that he might wish were
blotted out when he lay upon his death-bed.
CHAPTER VIII.
COLERIDGE.
[Born at Ottery St. Mary, Devon, October 2Oth, 1772. Poems first
published 1796. Died at Highgate, July 25th, 1834.]
IF the greatness of a man could be measured by the
estimate of his contemporaries, there is no man who
loomed before his age with a larger majesty of outline
than Coleridge. Wordsworth described him as the
most wonderful man he had ever known ; De Quincey,
as the man of most spacious intellect ; Hazlitt, as the
one man who completely fulfilled his idea of genius.
Carlyle's striking description of Coleridge in his last
days is likely to become as immortal as Lamb's descrip-
tion of " the inspired charity-school boy," who filled
him with wonder and astonishment, when he wrote,
" Come back into memory like as thou wert in the
dayspring of thy fancies, with hope like a fiery column
before thee the dark pillar not yet turned, Samuel
Taylor Coleridge, logician, metaphysician, bard ! "
Rarely has a man of genius received such a perfect
consensus of admiration from his contemporaries as
Coleridge. There was, indeed, about him something
of that tf ocean-mindedness " which he finely attributes
to Shakespeare ; and, apart from the fascination of his
eloquence, and the spell of an alluring individuality,
what most impressed all who knew Coleridge was the
72 THE MAKERS OF MODERN ENGLISH.
comprehensiveness of his vision, and the profundity of
his thought.
The noble friendship which existed between Lamb
and Coleridge, and the less intimate but equally beauti-
ful intimacy of Coleridge with Sou they and Words-
worth, are among the brightest chapters of literary
history. Coleridge first met Lamb at Christ's Hospital,
and the schoolboy friendship then formed lasted a life-
time. His acquaintance with Wordsworth and Southey
came later, and sprang rather out of literary comrade-
ship than spiritual fellowship. In one essential respect
Coleridge differed entirely from his great contem-
poraries. From first to last there was a certain
romantic charm about his character. He was an
idealist of the purest type, and never seemed at home
in the rough commerce of the world. Lamb humbly
submitted himself to the yoke of drudgery, and made
his literary work the luxury and solace of a life of
uncomplaining suffering heroically borne. He once
jokingly remarked that his real " works" were to be
found in the ponderous ledgers of the East India
Office, and there is something to us infinitely pathetic
in the spectacle of so rare a spirit as Lamb's chained
to the galley-oar of lifelong toil in a London office.
Wordsworth, with all his real and noble unworldliness,
had a certain shrewdness of character, which served him
well in the ultimate disposition of his life. Southey,
when once the fervour of youth, with its unconsidered
hopes and unfulfilled ambitions, settled down, became
one of the most industrious of men, toiling with a per-
tinacious energy in every walk of literature, and often
in ways that gave little scope for the exercise of his
true literary gift. But Coleridge ended as he began,
an idealist, careless of worldly fame, and unable to
COLERIDGE. 73
master the merest rudiments of worldly success. He
had none of that natural discernment which takes a
correct measurement of life, and none of that natural
pride which preserves men from the insolence and
imposition of the men of this world who have their
portion in this life. When he left Christ's he actually
asked to be apprenticed to a shoemaker; and later
on, when he left Cambridge, he enlisted as a soldier.
With an unlimited faith in human nature, a curious
childlikeness of spirit, an imagination that clothed at
will the most prosaic prospects with alluring brilliance,
he found himself in the great streets of the crowded
world, as virtually a stranger to the common order of
human life as though he had been born upon another
planet. He walked in a world of dreams, and never
bartered them for the sordid grossness of reality. If
we can imagine some angelic child, or some simple
shepherd of Grecian myth and poetry, suddenly set
down in the " central roar " of London, ignorant of
every custom of the complex civilisation of to-day,
and heedless of its forces, we have a tolerably accurate
picture of Coleridge, as he stepped into the whirl of
the million-peopled life of ordinary men. He had
every sense save common- sense, every faculty save
the faculty of worldly shrewdness. He was like some
splendid galleon, laden with a precious argosy, from
whose decks there rose the unearthly melodies of
singing-men and singing-women, and harpers harping
with their harps, but at whose helm no one stood,
to whose course upon the widening waters none paid
heed. He never learned to adjust himself to his
environment. He drew from his lofty idealism a
mystic joy, which seemed ample compensation for the
loss of worldly honour, and ignorance of the paths
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of worldly victory. Had the days of patronage still
existed, Coleridge was precisely the poet who would
have gained most from the protection they afforded
against the rude buffetings of an unsympathetic world.
When he left Cambridge, he was, in fact, thrown upon
the world, with genius indeed, with intellectual riches
incomparable and unique, with infinite literary enthu-
siasm and aptitude, but with none of those equipments
which enable lesser men of all grades to secure
advancement and success in life.
To yoke the idealist to the tasks of common life
is a difficult and almost impossible task, and the
worldly failure of Coleridge's life is mainly attributable
to this cause. It is only fair, however, to remember
that in his early career at least Coleridge did what in
him lay to harness his genius to the lowliest literary
labours. He sought drudgery as though he loved it,
and never complained of its degradations or penurious
rewards. A dreamer of dreams he might be, but a
selfish idler he was not. He never lost a chance of
work ; the fact is, he seldom had a chance. And yet
this statement needs modification, for while it is true
that he eagerly seized on every opportunity of casual
literary employment, when the one great opportunity
of competence in journalism came to him he at once re-
fused it. At the age of twenty-eight an offer was made
to him of half-shares in the Courier and Post, on con-
dition that he devoted himself entirely to these journals.
To most young men this would have been a sufficiently
brilliant offer, for it meant not less than 2000 per
annum. Coleridge rejected it, and has given us his
reasons for rejecting it. He would not give up the
country for the town, he would not spend the strength
of his brains on journalism, and, moreover, he avowed
COLERIDGE, 75
his opinion that any income beyond 350 per annum
was a real evil, and one which he dared not incur.
Yet at this period he was able to make only a modest
income from journalism, and whatever mere worldly
prudence may suggest, there is surely something very
noble in Coleridge's refusal of a munificent income which,
according to his view of things, entailed wealth which
he did not desire, at the sacrifice of higher aims
which he could not renounce. Long afterwards, in the
troubled close of life, he said that poetry had been
for him its " own exceeding great reward." And we
cannot doubt that Coleridge chose wisely, with a just
and perfect apprehension of his own powers, when he
renounced journalism for literature. It was the same
temptation which in later days was presented to Car-
lyle, and was refused with the same noble promptitude
and decision. To both men ephemeral and anony-
mous success, attended by whatsoever munificence of
present reward, seemed odious, compared with the more
remote and uncertain gain of literary fame. So each
turned calmly to the steep ways of renunciation in
which genius has always found its training, and pre-
pared to do the one thing which he was born to do.
This action of Coleridge's is significant of the sincerity
of his nature, and reveals to us a strength of manly
fibre and courage not usually associated with his name.
The cardinal defect in Coleridge's life was in one
accursed habit opium-taking. The first half of his
life is without flaw or serious blemish. He is poor,
but noble thoughts console him, noble work enchants
him, and true love sweetens all his lot, and casts above
his hours of drudgery its rainbow bridge of hope.
Coleridge had great animal spirits, unfailing buoyancy,
and even " unusual physical energy." He was amiable
76 THE MAKERS OF MODERN ENGLISH.
to a fault, and, indeed, his one cardinal fault of irresolu-
tion sprang from the sensitive tenderness of his nature.
At twenty-one he had "done the day's work of a
giant;" he had won reputation, he had fought the
world at great odds, and not altogether unsuccessfully.
Then all changes, and what Lamb pathetically calls the
"dark pillar" begins to cast its gloom on Coleridge^
and the brightness of the fiery column of hope begins
slowly to revolve, and pass away. Coleridge's first
taking of opium was accidental. He was recommended
to take for his rheumatic pains the Keswick Black
Drop. It acted like the distillation of an alchemist;
instantly his pain fled as by magic. In a few weeks
the habit had become a despotism; in six months
Coleridge was a shattered man. He was degraded,
and he knew it : his power of free-will was paralysed.
From that moment the life of Coleridge becomes a
tragedy. His power of thought was broken, his
strength for toil impaired, his joy in life poisoned, his
domestic peace shattered : his old bright buoyancy
departed, leaving only unutterable despair, the agony
of impotence, the spasmodic struggles of a will that
knows itself infirm, and which after each attempt at
freedom sinks lower in its corrupting bondage.
There is good reason for thinking that in the end
Coleridge broke his bondage, but it was not till the
treasuries of domestic love were closed to him, and
he had lost power to open those further doors of the
treasuries of wisdom to which his youthful genius had
led him. It has indeed been stupidly alleged that the
habit of opium-taking gave fineness and ethereal bril-
liancy to the poetry of Coleridge, but this is wholly
false. The noblest work of Coleridge was done before
he acquired the fatal habit. From that moment the
COLERIDGE. 77
fountain of his genius became intermittent in flow,
and deficient in quality. No one knew it, no one felt
it, more keenly than he. Years after, when he again
met Wordsworth in the zenith of his powers, and
thought of his own lost opportunities, he wrote those
pathetic lines in which we seem to hear the sighings
of a breaking heart :
O great Bard !
Ere yet that last strain dying awed the air,
With steadfast eye I viewed thee in the choir
Of ever-enduring men.
Ah ! as I listened with a heart forlorn,
The pulses of my being beat anew !
Of De Quincey's famous " Confessions " he says:
" Oh, may the God to Whom I look for mercy through
Christ, show mercy on the author of ' The Confessions
of an Opium-eater' if, as I have too strong reason to
believe, his book has been the occasion of seducing
others into the withering vice through wantonness.
From this aggravation I have, I humbly trust, been
free. Even to the author of that work I pleaded with
flowing tears, and with an agony of forewarning."
There is no mistaking the meaning of these pathetic
words. If the later life of Coleridge stands out in
painful contrast to the earlier; if it appear desultory,
aimless, brilliant only with an intermittent splendour,
the fiery pillar only at rare intervals turning its Divine
radiance towards him, there is one explanation for it all
sad, tragic, and sufficient " the accursed drug."
What of the works of Coleridge ? It may be said
briefly that it is upon his poetry that the fame of Cole-
ridge is built. His " Friend " is full of the ripest
wisdom ; his lt Biographia Literaria " of isolated pas-
sages of great beauty ; his lectures on Shakespeare have
78 THE MAKERS OF MODERN ENGLISH.
long held their place as master-pieces of critical insight ;
but it is, after all, by his poetry that future genera-
tions will know him. The " Ancient Mariner " and
"Christabel" stand alone in English literature. Cole-
ridge has an extraordinary power of interpreting the
supernatural, the night-side of Nature, that weird,
subtle, spiritual undercurrent of life which invests with
mysterious significance this hard outer world. In
doing this he has done superbly what no other has
attempted with more than partial success. He possesses
force of imagination and felicity of epithet, and each in
an extraordinary degree. His words are music, and
his power of producing on the ear the effect of fine
music merely by the assonance of words is unrivalled.
No great poet has written less, but the best of what he
has written is so perfect of its kind that there can be
no mistaking the superscription of immortality with
which it is stamped.
The real wealth of Coleridge's mind, however, was
poured out in his conversations, and of these we have
but scanty examples. Yet these are enough to indicate
that the man was greater than anything he achieved.
Coleridge's conversation was an overpowering stream :
wise, witty, profound, embracing all subjects, astonish-
ing all hearers. He once asked Lamb if he had ever
heard him preach. " I have never heard you do any-
thing else," said Lamb. It was a perfectly just de-
scription of Coleridge's conversations. Any subject gave
him a text, and, once started, he would maintain for
hours a sort of inspired monologue, often mystical,
occasionally incomprehensible, but always most impres-
sively eloquent. He needed a Boswell, and no man
since Johnson would have so well repaid the assiduity
of that prince of eavesdroppers. The few specimens
COLERIDGE. 79
of table-talk which are ours are not less marked by
their sarcastic incisiveness than by their luminous and
sorrowful wisdom. In all Coleridge's later utterances
the accent of suffering is very pronounced. We feel
that, like Dante, he is " a man who has been in hell."
He inspires in us a tenderness and sympathy which
arrest judgment, and hush the voice of censure, for
which there was but too much ground of justification.
It is impossible to think of Coleridge without a mingled
sense of pity and affection, and we may say of him, as
Mrs. Browning said of Bonaparte, but with greater
truth :
I do not praise him : but since he had
The genius to be loved, why let him have
The justice to be honoured in his grave.
He himself has appealed yet more effectually to our
sympathy in his own pathetic epitaph :
Stop, Christian passer-by ; stop, child of God,
And read with gentle breast. Beneath this sod
A poet lies, or that which once seemed he.
O lift one thought in prayer for S. T. C.,
That he who many a year with toil of breath
Found death in life, may here find life in death,
Mercy for praise, to be forgiven for fame,
He asked and hoped through Christ. Do thou the same.
The faults of Coleridge's style are its occasional tur-
gidity and diffuseness. This, however, is most apparent
in his political poems, and is probably attributable to
the fact that Coleridge found the theme uncongenial.
It was in the world of pure imagination he was most at
home, and it was there he attained his highest literary
excellence. In delicate and airy fancy, not less than in
imaginative intensity, he has few rivals. Such a poem
8o THE MAKERS OF MODERN ENGLISH.
as " Kubla Khan/' a mere dream within a dream,
may illustrate the one, and the " Ancient Mariner " the
other. His force as a thinker and metaphysician is a
waning force, but his poetic fame has never stood so
high as now. This result was accurately perceived
immediately on his death by the review that had per-
sistently ridiculed him for many years when it wrote :
" Coleridge, of all men who ever lived, was always a
poet, in all his moods, and they were many, inspired."
It is so the best poems of Coleridge still impress us,
and when the logician and the metaphysician weary us,
we turn with ever-fresh delight to the bard. The pity
of it is that Coleridge was so seldom the bard, and
so often the metaphysician ; for who would not give
all the prose writings of Coleridge for another twenty
pages of poetry like the " Ancient Mariner " ?
CHAPTER IX.
ROBERT S OUT HEY.
[Born at Bristol, August I2th, 1774. Became Poet-Laureate, 1813
Died at Greta Hall, Keswick, March 2 1st, 1843.]
WHEN we speak of those who have wrought most
nobly in the field of modern English, it is
impossible altogether to ignore Robert Southey. That
there should be any temptation to do so may seem
somewhat strange. But the reasons are not far to seek.
Southey belongs to the great brotherhood of the Lake
Poets by force of friendship, but scarcely by force
of genius. To write of Wordsworth and Coleridge,
and say nothing of Southey, would be invidious and
unjust, yet his claims as an English master are not to
be mentioned in the same breath as theirs. The man
who was the friend of Lamb, the true and faithful
counsellor of Coleridge in his difficult life, and his
most efficient helper, the first man of his time to re-
cognise at its proper worth the transcendent genius of
Wordsworth, and to maintain his cause through evil
and through good report, and in like manner the
generous critic of Scott, at least deserves a record
among those who have done so much to render the
literature of their time illustrious. But the point of
divergence between these men and Southey is that,
while he was the more perfect specimen of the man of
6
82 THE MAKERS OF MODERN ENGLISH.
letters, and has produced the most various work, they
were his superiors in all that constitutes real genius.
Indeed it may be well doubted if Southey possessed
genius at all. He possessed great talents, and he used
them with wonderful aptitude and industry. He always
wrote well, but rarely with that supreme touch and
inspiration which give immortality to literature. He
presented to his age a noble spectacle of a life of
unsurpassed literary industry, dominated by admirable
purposes, and free from faults of conduct such as dis-
figure the fame of some of his great contemporaries.
Byron has used all the resources of his wicked wit in
holding Southey up to ridicule, but even Byron recog-
nised his true character when he said, " He is the only
existing entire man of letters." There is nothing in
burlesque poetry more bitter in its humour than the
picture Byron draws of Southey, in the "Vision of
Judgment," offering to write the life of Satan since he
had written the life of Wesley, and describing how he
would publish it
In two octavo volumes nicely bound,
With notes and preface, all that most allures
The pious purchaser ; and there's no ground
For fear, for I can choose my own reviewers.
And it must be confessed that the political changes of
Southey gave an unscrupulous antagonist like Byron
only too good ground for the still bitterer stanzas
He had written praises of a regicide ;
He had written praises of all kings whatever ;
He had written for republics far and wide,
And then against them bitterer than ever ;
For pantisocracy he once had cried
Aloud a scheme less moral than 'twas clever ;
Then grew a hearty anti-Jacobin,
Had turned his coat and would have turned his skin.
ROBERT SOUTHS Y. 83
When Byron took to controversy .any weapons were
good enough : there was no man more adroit in throwing
mud, or more careful to select the most unfragrant
qualities of that peculiarly unwelcome missile. The
result of Byron's attacks on Southey is that, for vast
numbers of readers, Southey is only known through
the medium of Byron's burlesque. They see the mud-
spattered renegade of Byron's verse : they do not know
the loyal friend of Coleridge, and the perfect biographer
of Nelson.
It was as a poet Southey first challenged the atten-
tion of his countrymen, and he died wearing the bays
of laureateship. How is it then that his poetry has
so wholly fallen into desuetude to-day ? The main
cause lies in the fact that his poetry has no true relation
to human life and experience. The qualities which
give permanence to poetry are various. Poems may
be expositions of Nature, summaries of experience,
lessons in philosophy, vivid and ardent pictures of
human emotion, the quintessence of passionate hopes or
still more passionate sorrows. Or, even if they can
hardly be ranked under one or other of these heads,
they may still live by some curious felicity of phrase
which lingers on the memory and stimulates the fancy
or imagination. Southey's poetry has none of these
qualities. He has no power of phrase, none of those
concentrated and intense epithets which cannot easily
be forgotten. He has no true insight into Nature; he
does not know her at first hand, and is therefore unable
to depict her with fidelity a curious lack in the writ-
ings of a man who was the close friend of Wordsworth,
and who knew how to recognise at its proper worth
Wordsworth's power of revealing Nature when most of
his contemporaries saw nothing in his poems but idiotic
8* THE MAKERS OF MODERN ENGLISH.
simplicity and unrestrained egoism. Nor does Southey
strike any true vibrating chord of deep human experi-
ence. There is no passion in his voice ; or, if there be,
it is histrionic passion shallow, stagey, and simulated.
He teaches nothing, he reveals nothing. His whole
theory of poetry was hopelessly wrong. His themes,
for the most part, are utterly remote from human life,
and his method was a loose, rambling, rhymeless metri-
cal arrangement ; occasionally, indeed, striking a note
of real melody, but for the most part little better than
poor prose run mad. When he would be impressive
he becomes bombastic; when he aims at description
he attains only diffuseness. He pours out an immense
stream of descriptive and semi-descriptive verse, as in
such a poem as " Thalaba," in which there is scarcely
one striking epithet, one gleam of real imagination,
one note of true poetic power. In later life Coleridge
read again, at the request of Thomas Hood, Southey's
" Joan of Arc," and this is the crushing verdict which
he pronounces on a poem for some of whose lines at
least he himself was responsible. " I was really aston-
ished," says Coleridge, " (i) at the schoolboy, wretched,
allegoric machinery; (2) at the transmogrification of
the fanatic virago into a modern novel-pawing
proselyte of the ' Age of Reason/ a Tom Paine in
petticoats, but ' so lovely and in love more dear/ ' on
her rubied cheek hung pity's crystal gem;' (3) at
the utter want of all rhythm in its verse, the monotony
and dead plumb of its pauses, and the absence of all
bone, muscle, and sinew in the single lines." The
latter clause of this criticism may be fairly applied to
all the more ambitious poems of Southey. There is no
virility in them. We read them with an overwhelming
sense of wonder at their former popularity, and we have
ROBERT SOUTHEY, 85
no desire to re-read or possess them. We cheerfully
acquiesce in the fate that has consigned them to oblivion,
and we feel that no worse disservice could be done to
Southey's memory than to disinter them. However
much we may regret the spirit of Byron's brilliant
invective, we cannot help agreeing with him in the
criticism which writes down as trash the gouty hexa-
meters, the " spavined dactyls," and the " foundered
verse" of Southey's multitudinous attempts in poetry.
The chief interest of Southey's poetry, from a
literary point of view, is that with all its novelties of
rhythm it is a survival of the past. It is a curious
example of poetry which is modern in form, but is
wholly at variance with the modern spirit. It is an
interruption, the interpolation of a worn-out ideal, in
the full current of new thoughts, and new ideals of
poetry, which marked the beginning of the century.
Southey received the Laureateship on the death of Pye
in 1813, and although in all that concerns mere form
there could not be greater variance than between Pye
and Southey, yet essentially the poetic traditions of
Pye are reproduced in Southey. It was not altogether
a stroke of malicious satire, it was a genuine critical
instinct, that led Byron to identify Southey with Pye,
and exclaim
Pye come again ? No more no more of that.
There is the same lack of depth and freshness, the
same barren platitude, the same stereotyped way of
treating Nature, and entire deficiency of any real
instinct for her interpretation. To Southey Nature is
once more a mere collection of properties for the adorn-
ment of his verse. He is always on the look-out for
grandiose effects. If an immense collection of adjectives
86 THE MAKERS OF MODERN ENGLISH.
could interpret Nature, Southey might be her inter-
preter, but he entirely lacks that largeness of touch
which makes his verbal pictures impressive. It is said
that Southey regarded the rise of the ornate school of
poetry as a vice in art, and condemned it unsparingly.
We can well believe this when we remember that the
two chief distinctions of the ornate school of which
Tennyson is the undisputed master are felicity of epi-
thet, and exquisite fidelity in the depiction of natural
phenomena. Keats set the example of the one, and
Wordsworth of the other. But to the lessons of both
Southey was strikingly indifferent. Perhaps the real
reason of this indifference and lack of insight is to be
found in the character of Southey's life. He did not
give himself time to be a poet. He was an intensely
busy man :
He had written much blank verse, and blanker prose,
And more of both than anybody knows.
There was no touch of brooding contemplation about
him, no time in his laborious life for meditative calm.
He took up poetry in a thoroughly business-like way,
and applied himself to it as he would to the writing of
a review article, and with much the same results. He
writes, for instance, to one of his friends : " Last night
I began the preface [to ' Specimens of English Poets '].
And now, Grosvenor, let me tell you what I have to
do. I am writing (i) 'The History of Portugal/ (2)
< The Chronicle of the Cid,' (3) ' The Curse of Kehama/
(4) 'Espriella's Letters.' Look you, all these I am
writing. I can't afford to do one thing at a time no,
nor two neither ; and it is only by doing many things
that I contrive to do so much." Much of the explana-
tion of Southey's failure as a poet lies in this confession.
ROBERT SOU THEY. 87
Poetry was not the solitary purpose of his life ; it was
the recreation rather than the business of his intellect.
And poetry, more than any other art, demands the
entire surrender of its votaries, and the complete dedi-
cation of their powers. Southey was unable to make
that surrender. It could not but happen, therefore,
that he should fall back on trite ideas and effete
models ; that he should fail in the accurate depiction of
Nature ; that he should resent the rise of a school of
poetry which spends infinite patience on the perfection
of its form ; and that, finally, his own poetry should
become one of the most remarkable anomalies ot
modern literature, and should utterly fail in securing
anything beyond the most ephemeral and imperfect
fame.
We are chiefly concerned here with Southey's claims
as a poet, but it will be convenient to include in our
survey his numerous prose contributions to literature.
And here, again, it may be said, Southey suffers from
the excess of his industry. At the best, the stream of
his genius was not copious : concentrated within narrow
bounds, it might have worn a permanent channel for
itself; but Southey committed the error of diffusing it
over an immense area, where its best qualities are
dissipated. He certainly wrote far more "than any-
body knows." Too much of his work was really a
superior sort of hack-work, done to order, and there-
fore deficient in charm and spontaneity. Who has
read his " History of Brazil " ? Yet it is a work of
great labour, and possesses many passages of real
eloquence and force. That impartial process of natural
selection which goes on in literature has by this time
definitely rejected almost all Southey's more ambitious
works, and has left us two only of his slighter works
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as candidates for immortality his "Life of Wesley"
and his "Life of Nelson." Even the first of these has
not the hold upon the public mind it once had ; perhaps
it now owes its fame mainly to the confession of
Coleridge, that it was the favourite of his library
among many favourites, that he had read it twenty
times, and could read it when he could read nothing
else. But his "Life of Nelson" still remains as the
most perfect piece of biography, on a small scale, which
modern literature possesses. Even Byron could find
nothing but praise for so admirable an essay of literary
art. Its charm lies in its perfect lucidity, directness,
and simplicity of style. The narrative moves with
quiet power, with the ease of complete mastery, never
once becoming dull, never surprising us by unexpected
and evanescent excellences, but never failing to fill the
ear with pleasant music, or to keep the attention at a
steady poise of interest. What praise can be higher
than to say that Southey has risen without effort to
the height of the most splendid story of modern
heroism, and has reared a fitting monument to the
noblest of modern patriots ? In no other work of
Southey's is there so much that reveals the noble
qualities of his mind or of his style. He writes with a
sense of inspiration and enthusiasm which makes his
story an epic. The real poetry of his soul, never fitly
expressed in his verse, is uttered here. There are few
nobler passages in the English language than the last
pages of this brief biography, and especially its con-
clusion, so laudatory and yet so just, so measured and
yet so triumphant, that it thrills us still like a peal of
trumpets, or the last notes of some majestic organ
requiem: "Yet he cannot be said to have fallen
prematurely whose work was done; nor ought he to
ROBERT SOUTHEY. 89
be lamented who died so full of honours, and at the
height of human fame. The most triumphant death
is that of the martyr; the most awful, that of the
martyred patriot; the most splendid, that of the hero
in the hour of victory ; and if the chariots and horses
of fire had been vouchsafed for Nelson's translation,
he could scarcely have departed in a brighter blaze
of glory." Prose like this is worth many reams of
Thalabas and Curses of Kehama; and long after the
meretricious glitter of Southey's poetry is forgotten,
his "Life of Nelson" will remain as one of the few
absolutely perfect specimens of biography which we
possess.
It might also be justly added that Southey's own life
will remain as an admirable example of a career devoted
to the service of literature, and characterised through-
out by magnanimity of mind and purity of conduct.
" Is Southey magnanimous ? " asked Byron of Rogers
when he desired to meet him in 1813. Rogers replied
that he could guarantee the magnanimity of Southey,
and the two poets met. It is true that the meeting
formed no real basis for future friendship. "Don Juan "
was soon to see the light, and much as Southey valued
the friendship of Byron, he dared not let that poem
pass without a protest against the degradation of great
powers and the profanation of poetry which it displayed.
Friendship between two men so alien was virtually
impossible. There was a side of Southey's character
which Byron was incapable of appreciating, but which
for us constitutes its dignity and nobleness. He knew
how to repress himself, how to be patient under the
limitations of his lot, how to practise without murmur
daily self-sacrifice and industry for the sake of those
he loved. He knew also how to appreciate qualities
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he did not possess ; and nothing is more beautifully
conspicuous in his life than this delight in the fame
of others. He was always ready to help with pen or
purse any literary aspirant, and his geniality of tem-
perament in this respect added no inconsiderable
burden to the labour of his life. He was not a great
man, not one of those rare men who impress us by
the amplitude of their powers and the splendour of
their achievements. But if not a great man, he was a
good man, with a sincere and unostentatious goodness,
whose outward expression was found in a life of genial
sympathies, of unremitting industry, of strenuous pur-
pose. Faults of temper we may charge him with, but,
as Froude says of Carlyle, in all the graver matters of
the law he is blameless. He set a noble example of
what the life of the man of letters should be ; and if
we cannot wholly endorse the eulogy of Landor when
he says,
No firmer breast than thine hath Heaven
To poet, sage, or hero given,
we may at least agree that the pious excellence of his
life justifies Landor's concluding lines, that he was one
who shall at the last,
. . . with soul elate,
Rise up before the Eternal Throne,
And hear, in God's own voice, " Well done ! "
CHAPTER X.
WILLIAM WORDSWORTH.
[Born at Cocker-mouth, April 7th, 1770. Poems first published
1798. Became Poet-Laureate 1843. Died at Rydal Mount,
April 23rd, 1850.]
WE now come to the consideration of the
character, work, and influence of William
Wordsworth. In many respects, and those the most
essential, Wordsworth's influence is the most powerful
and abiding poetic influence of the Victorian period.
During his lifetime his fame was comparatively re-
stricted, and during the greater part of his career his
very claim to be a poet was eagerly disputed, and
widely and vehemently denied. Lord Jeffrey's verdict
that he was a drivelling idiot, and wouldn't do, has
become historical, and is a memorable example of
the ineptitude and virulence of that criticism which
prevailed in the palmy days of the Edinburgh Review.
By a curious chastisement of Fate, the ancient criti-
cism is chiefly remembered to-day by its contemptuous
hostility to Byron, its brutal attack on Keats, and
its undiscerning violence of hatred for Wordsworth.
Sydney Smith said he would be glad to be as sure
of anything as Macaulay was of everything, and the
dogmatical criticism of Macaulay was typical of the
criticism of the time. It possessed neither justice nor
urbanity; its weapons were the bludgeon and the
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tomahawk ; and it knew no mean between extravagant
laudation and merciless abuse. Some one has spoken
of Macaulay as "stamping" through the fields of
literature, and the phrase admirably pictures the
energetic Philistinism of the critical dogmatist. It
was in this spirit that England first received the
poetry of a man who has been, and is, one of the
noblest voices in the literary life of the century. The
critics simply " stamped " upon his writings ; and not
merely howled derision on them, but taught his
countrymen everywhere to receive his name with
guffaws of brutal ridicule.
In considering the works and influence of Words-
worth, we are bound to take full cognisance of the
peculiarities of his own character, and the events of his
own life. With all poets it is necessary to do this, but
with Wordsworth most of all, because everything he
has written is deeply coloured with his own indi-
viduality. He has written little that is impersonal ;
across almost every page there is projected the huge
shadow of his own peculiar personality. While other
poets have gone to history or mythology for their
themes, Wordsworth found his within himself, or in
the simple surroundings of one of the simplest and
most uneventful of lives. He brooded over the " abys-
mal deeps of personality," and from them he drew
the inspiration of his noblest poetry. Sometimes this
superb egotism of Wordsworth is irritating, and often
he becomes tedious by attaching enormous importance
to the very slightest influences which have helped to
form his mind, or the most trivial incidents which have
composed its record. " The Prelude," which is one
of his longest poems, simply describes the growth
of an individual mind, and among many passages of
WILLIAM WORDSWORTH. 93
profound thought and beauty, contains others that are
both tedious and trivial, and are tedious because they
are trivial. It is because Wordsworth always found
the impulse of poetry within himself that it is im-
possible to understand his writings without a clear
understanding of the significance of his life. He
boldly declared that he must be taken as a teacher
or as nothing. He was no fitful singer of an idle day ;
he believed he had a message to deliver, as truly as
ever ' ancient seer or prophet had. For this reason
Wordsworth fulfils, more perfectly than any other
modern poet, the ideal conception of the Bard. Accord-
ing to some philologists, " minister " and " minstrel "
spring from the same root, and convey the same idea.
The true poet is the bard, the seer, the minister ; he
has a Divine ordination, and is sacred by a Divine
anointing ; he is a consecrated spirit, selected and
commissioned for the performance of a Divine behest.
This was Wordsworth's view of the function of the
poet, and he endeavoured to fulfil it. This is what he
meant when he said that vows were made for him,
and that he must be considered as a teacher or no-
thing. This is the secret of that prophetic force which
throbs in his best verses, and which gives them a
subtle and enduring charm. They are the expression
of an austere and separated soul, of a spirit which
dwells amid inaccessible heights of devout vision, and
speaks with the accent of one who knows the peace of
lofty and satisfying purposes.
This claim of Wordsworth's to be considered as a
teacher or as nothing was a new claim to the critics
of fifty years ago, and was undoubtedly one cause, and
perhaps the main cause, of their prolonged and bitter
hostility. We shall see, hereafter, precisely what
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Wordsworth meant by the claim, and how he has
built up a philosophy which is its justification. But, in
the first instance, the claim was based almost as much
upon the literary form of his work as on its philoso-
phic qualities, and upon a theory of literary composition
which he himself has stated and developed in hie
prefaces with great fulness. What was that theory ?
Briefly put, it amounted to this : Wordsworth com-
plained that the commonly accepted theory of poetry
was both false and vicious. It had practically invented
a dialect of it own, which was as far as possible
removed from the ordinary dialect of the common
people. It was artificial and stilted the cant of a
coterie and not the language of ordinary life. Its
spirit also was wholly wrong and mistaken : it had
lost hold on common life, and scorned it as low and
mean ; it had lost hold on Nature, because it did not
know how to speak of hep except in ancient rhetorical
phrases, which were the bronze coinage of poetry,
defaced by use, and whatever might once have been
true or just about them was now depraved and muti-
lated by unthinking use. Wordsworth held that there
was sufficient interest in common life to inspire the
noblest achievements of the poet, and that Nature must
be observed with unflinching fidelity if she was to
be described with truth or freshness. He asks why
should poetry be
A history only of departed things,
Or a mere fiction of what never was ?
For the discerning intellect of Man,
When wedded to this goodly universe
In love and holy passion, shall find these
A simple produce of the common day.
I, long before the blissful hour arrives,
Would chant, in lonely peace, the spousal hour
WILLIAM WORDSWORTH. 95
Of this great consummation : and, by words
Which speak of nothing more than what we are,
Would I arouse the sensual from their sleep
Of Death, and win the vacant and the vain
To noble raptures ; while my voice proclaims
How exquisitely the individual mind
(And the progressive powers perhaps no less
Of the whole species) to the external world
Is fitted : and how exquisitely too
Theme this but little heard of among men
The external world is fitted to the mind.
In this noble passage from the " Recluse/' the gist of
Wordsworth's peculiar view of poetry is to be found.
He announces a return to simplicity, to simple themes
and simple language, and teaches that in the simplest
sights of life and Nature there is sufficient inspiration
for the true poet. He speaks of nothing more than
what we are, and is prepared to write nothing that is
not justified by the actual truth of things. He sets
himself against that species of poetry which finds its
impulse and its public in theatrical passion and mor-
bid or exaggerated sentiment. To him the "meanest
flower that blows can give thoughts that do often lie
too deep for tears," and by preserving his soul in
austere simplicity he aims at producing a species of
poetry which will affect men by its truth rather than
its passion, and will affect even the lowliest of men,
because it is expressed in the plain and unadorned
language of common life.
How truly Wordsworth adhered to the great prin-
ciples here enunciated his life and work declare, but it
will also be apparent that his theory of poetic expression
hopelessly broke down after a short trial. It may be said,
indeed, that occasionally even his theory of poetry itself
breaks down. In the attempt to be simple he becomes
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childish, and in his selection of the commonest themes
he more than once has selected themes which no
human genius could make poetic. In the main, how-
ever, the principles of thought which he enunciated he
strictly observed throughout a long life, and his noblest
effects have been produced within the limitations he
invented, and which he was contented to obey. But
when we consider the question of his literary expression,
we at once perceive that he does not use the language
of common life, nor was it possible that he should.
The vocabulary of the educated man is far wider than
the vocabulary of the illiterate, and the vocabulary of
the great poet is usually the fullest of all. Wordsworth
simply could not help himself when he used forms
of expression which the ploughman and pedlar could
never have used. It was in vain that he said : "I
have proposed to myself to imitate, and, as far as is
possible, to adopt the very language of men. I have
taken as much pains to avoid what is usually called
poetic diction as others ordinarily take to produce it."
In poems like " The Idiot Boy," or " The Thorn," he
certainly fulfils this purpose : he has so entirely suc-
ceeded in avoiding poetic diction that he has produced
verses which by no stretch of literary charity could be
called poetry at all. Wordsworth's noblest poetry is
noble in direct contravention of his own theory of
poetry, and is a pertinent illustration of the futility
of all such theories to bind men of real genius. His
theory is that true poetry should be merely "the
language really spoken by men, with metre super-
added," and he asks us, " What other distinction from
prose would we have ? " We reply that from the true
poet we expect melody and magic of phrase the gift
of musical expression which can make words a power
WILLIAM WORDSWORTH. 97
equal to music, in producing exquisite sensations on
the ear, and which is a still higher power than music,
because it can directly produce noble thoughts and
passions in the soul. If Wordsworth had only given
us the language of prose with metre superadded, we
should not be reading his pages to-day with ever-fresh
delight. It is because he discards his own theory of
poetic expression, and has given us many verses written
in language unmatched for purity and melody of phrase,
and wholly different from the " language really spoken
by men," that we have judged him a great poet.
When we consider the vehemence of that ridicule
with which Wordsworth was greeted, and the virulence
of that criticism with which he was pursued for nearly
half a century, it is necessary, therefore, to bear in
mind how absurd this theory of poetic expression is, and
how doubly absurd it must have seemed to those who
were the critical authorities of his day. And it must
also be recollected that Wordsworth pressed his theory
in season and out of season. The temper of mind
which made him attach an overweening importance to
the slightest incidents in his own intellectual develop-
ment made him also blind to the relative values of his
poems. He deliberately chose poems like " The Idiot
Boy" which were written in his worst style and
solemnly insisted on their significance as illustrative
of his theory. If he had had any sense of humour, he
would have perceived how absurd this was; but in
humour Wordsworth was singularly deficient. There
was a stiffness of controversial temper about him which
refused any parley with the enemy. The consequence
was that the more strenuously Wordsworth insisted
on the value of his worst poems, the more blind men
became to the supreme excellence of his best. They
7
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accepted his worst poems as typical of his genius, and
it was easy to turn them into ridicule. If poetry were,
indeed, only prose with metre superadded, it was
obvious that any prose-man could become a poet at
will ; and the facile retort rose to the lips that Words-
worth had justified his theory by writing prose under
the delusion that it was poetry. The astonishing thing
is that men of genuine critical ability were so slow to
recognise that among many poems which were little
better than prose cut up into metrical lengths, there
were other poems of great and enduring excellence,
which the greatest poets of all time might be proud
to claim. However, a truce has long since been
called to such contentions. No one cares much to-day
what particular poetic fads Wordsworth may have
advocated : the fact that has gradually grown clear and
clearer to the world is that in Wordsworth we possess
a poet of profound originality and of supreme genius,
and his greatness is generally recognised. It is also
generally recognised that, more than any other modern
poet, Wordsworth has expressed in his poems a noble
philosophy ; and it is to the study of that philosophy
that I invite those who would read Wordsworth with a
seeing eye and an understanding heart.
CHAPTER XL
THE CONNECTION BETWEEN WORDSWORTH'S LIPE
AND HIS POETRY.
I HAVE already said that with Wordsworth, more
than with most poets ; the life of the poet must be
considered in connection with his poetry. Let us now
look at this subject a little more closely. Wordsworth
was born on the borders of that Lake Country which he
loved so well, at Cockermouth, on April 7th, 1770. From
his boyhood he was familiar with English mountain
scenery, and the subduing spirit of its beauty touched
his earliest life. He himself tells us
Nothing at that time
So welcome, no temptation half so dear
As that which urged me to a daring feat.
Deep pools, tall trees, black chasms and dizzy crags,
And tottering towers : I loved to stand and read
Their looks forbidding, read and disobey.
It is a vivid picture of the wild child of Nature, awed,
and yet exhilarated in her presence, which Wordsworth
paints in these lines. The boyish Wordsworth de-
scribed in the " Recluse " is a true boy, touched more
perhaps than a boy should be with a sense of mystery
in Nature, but not distinguished by any unwholesome
precocity or unnatural meditativeness. The awe of
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Nature seems to have been a feeling early developed
in him, and it never left him. He tells us how one
day while nutting he penetrated into a distant solitude
of the wood, where the silence and sense of sacredness
were so profound, that he hastily retreated, with the
feeling that he had invaded a sanctuary. But in other
passages, such as the above, the idea left upon the
mind is of a sturdy youth, rejoicing in his strength
of limb and sureness of foot, and taking a thoroughly
healthy delight in outdoor life. He has the wholesome
blood of the Cumberland dalesman in his veins, and
loves the mountains as only those love them whose life
has thriven beneath their shadows ; and even as a boy
he learned to feel something of that healing serenity
which Nature breathes into the soul that loves her.
He felt that " whatever of highest he can hope, it is
hers to promise ; all that is dark in him she must purge
into purity ; all that is failing in him she must strengthen
into truth ; in her, through all the world's warfare, he
must find his peace ; " or, to quote his own memorable
words :
But me hath Nature tamed, and bade to seek
For other agitations, or be calm ;
Hath dealt with me as with a turbulent stream,
Some nursling of the mountains, which she leads
Through quiet meadows, after he has learnt
His strength, and had his triumph and his joy,
His desperate course of tumult and of glee.
The first noticeable thing, therefore, is that Words-
worth was a true " nursling of the mountains," and the
influence of natural beauty and pastoral life was one of
the earliest influences which shaped his mind. He had
no love of cities, and knew little of them. When he
WORDSWORTH'S LIFE AND POETRY. 101
spoke of them it was with reluctance and compassion ;
he brooded
Above the fierce confederate storm
Of sorrow, barricadoed ever more
Within the walls of cities,
for it seemed to him that cities were the natural homes
of sorrow, and the open fields the true abodes of peace.
He had a passionate love for an outdoor life, and his
mind naturally lent itself to that deep meditativeness
which is a common characteristic of those who spend
many hours of every day in the loneliness of Nature.
Strangely enough, in one who is known to fame as a
man of letters, it was nevertheless true that the three
things most difficult for him to do, to the very end of
his life, were reading, writing, and the toil of literary
composition. When he is a young man of thirty-three,
he writes to Sir George Beaumont that he never has
a pen in his hand for five minutes without becoming a
bundle of uneasiness, and experiencing an insufferable
oppression. " Nine-tenths of my verses," he writes
forty years later, " have been murmured out in the
open air." When a visitor at Rydal Mount asked to
see Wordsworth's study, the reply was that he could
see his "library, where he keeps his books, but his
study is out of doors." The peculiarities thus described
are the typical peculiarities of the sturdy dalesman, and
such in many respects Wordsworth was to the end of
his days. When he described the peasants and farmers
of the mountains, it was no fanciful love that attracted
him to them : he spoke of men whom he thoroughly
understood, because he was physically akin to them.
The sturdy fibre of his mind, his intellectual honesty,
his independence, his power of contemplation, his
sufficiency not the coarse sufficiency of the vulgar
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egoist, but the habitual sufficiency of a well-poised
and self-reliant nature all these were the distinguishing
characteristics of his neighbours, but touched in him
with a loftier spirit, and put to higher purposes. Even
in his face and figure in the ruggedness of the one
and the firmness and sturdiness of the other much
of this was discernible. It was a figure that showed
worst in drawing-rooms, as though consciously alien to
them ; a face that seemed almost vacant to the nimble-
minded dwellers in cities, but which glowed with true
illumination and nobility among the sounds and visions
of his native country-side. The mould in which Words-
worth was cast was a strong one. His nature was slow,
and deep, and steadfast : what he was at thirty he
practically was at seventy, save that there had been an
inevitable stiffening of ideas, and an equally inevitable
growth of self-reliant sufficiency.
Let any one try to picture to himself the leading
characteristics of the life of a Cumbrian dalesman, and,
if he pleases, let him go to the poems of Wordsworth
himself for materials, and he will find that the life so
outlined will be, above all things, independent, self-
respecting, and self-sufficient, frugal without parsimony,
pious without formality, and simple without boorish-
ness. It is a wholesome life of humble industries and
simple pleasures, and such a life was not merely to
Wordsworth the ideal life, but it was an ideal which
he himself perfectly fulfilled. And let anyone think
again of the sort of life which found favour with the
poets of his day, and the sort of life they themselves
lived Byron with his bitter misanthropy, Shelley with
his outraged sensitiveness, Keats with his recoil from
a sordid world to the ideal paradise of Greek mytho-
logy, Moore with his cockney glitter, Coleridge with
WORDSWORTH'S LIFE AND POETRY. 103
his remote and visionary splendour let him think of
this, and he will see how strange a thing it was to
such a world, that a Cumbrian dalesman's life should
have been thrust before it as an ideal human life, and
that, too, by a man who had himself chosen such a
life for himself, and had found in it tranquillity and
satisfaction. In that age there were only two poets
who had shown any genuine love of Nature in her
daily and common manifestations, and had written
verses which might have "been murmured out in
the open air." These were Burns and Scott, and it
is noticeable that for both Wordsworth felt a deep
attraction. In both there is a supreme healthful-
ness, a sense of robust enjoyment in fresh air and
simple sights. When Scott describes Nature it is
always with a true eye for colour, and Burns's poems
touch us by their artless rusticity not less than by
their artistic beauty. Wordsworth himself has told
us how " admirably has Burns given way to these
impulses of Nature, both with reference to himself and
in describing the condition of others ; " and it was the
simple humanness of the Ayrshire farmer that endeared
him to a poet who valued more than anything else
simplicity and virtue in human nature. But where
Wordsworth differed from all other poets of his day
was that he had a conscious ideal of what human life
might be made, through simplicity of desire and com-
munion with Nature, and he resolutely set himself to
the fulfilment of his ideal. Especially was the dales-
man's independence and self-sufficiency marked in him.
He knew what it was to be a law unto himself, and
found in his own nature the true impulses of action.
And so he writes : " These two things, contradictory
as they seem, must go together, manly dependence
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and manly independence, manly reliance and manly
self-reliance." And again : " Let the poet first con-
sult his own heart, as I have done, and leave the rest
to posterity to, I hope, an improving posterity. I
have not written down to the level of superficial
observers or unthinking minds." The spirit of these
words reveals the man, and the man so revealed could
only have thriven in a region where simplicity, and
manliness, and rugged honesty were the prime virtues
and common heritage of daily life.
The great turning-point in the life of Wordsworth
was the year 1795, when his sister Dora joined him,
and became henceforth the chosen comrade of his
intellectual life, not less than the confidant of his emo-
tions. The period preceding had been spent some-
what aimlessly, and is memorable only for the foreign
travel Wordsworth had indulged in, his hopes of
France, and his subsequent disillusionment and despair
Like every poet of his day, save Keats and Scott, he
was violently affected by the French Revolution, and
was caught within the whirl of its frantic fascination.
But with the Reign of Terror his hopes of world-wide
regeneration perished, and a sullen and impenetrable
despair fell upon him. He was indeed slow to give up
hope, and when England declared war upon France he
flamed out in indignant denunciation of what seemed
to him a disgraceful outrage. The effect of these
events on his poetry we shall best see when we come
to consider his patriotic poems. In the meantime, what
we have to observe is that in 1795 Wordsworth was as
unsettled as man could well be, and was without any
true aim or work in life. He was, to quote Mr. F. W.
Myers, "a rough and somewhat stubborn young man,
who, in nearly thirty years of life, had seemed alter-
WORDSWORTH'S LIFE AND POETRY. 105
nately to idle without grace and to study without
advantage, and it might well have seemed incredible that
he could have anything new or valuable to communicate
to mankind." It was from this state of lethargic aim-
lessness that Dora Wordsworth redeemed him. She
revealed to him the true bent of his nature, and dis-
covered to him his true powers. She led him back to
the healing solitude of Nature, where alone, as she
justly perceived, his mind could find a fit environment,
and his powers could ripen into greatness. She under-
stood him better than he understood himself. She
knew that he was unfitted for public life, or the conduct
of affairs, but that there was in him that which might
be of infinite service to the world, if fitting opportunity
were given for its development. And she judged that
nowhere so well as in the beloved environment of
his native mountains would that spark of ethereal fire
which possessed him be kindled into a living and ani-
mating flame. Some years were yet to elapse before
he finally settled at Grasmere, but they were years
passed in seclusion, during which he gradually gave
himself up to that appointed task of poetic toil, to
which he felt himself divinely consecrated. It meant
for him a practical renunciation of the world. He had
but the scantiest means of subsistence, and knew well
that such a life as he now contemplated must be almost
a peasant's life, lived upon a peasant's frugal fare and
in a peasant's mean surroundings. When he turned
his back upon great cities, and steadily set his face
toward the English mountains, he resolutely shut
the door upon all hopes of brilliant worldly success,
upon all the natural hopes of advancement in life,
which a man of culture and education may legitimately
entertain.
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His only guide in this most difficult hour was the
need and impulse of his own nature. He felt that in
the solitude of Nature there was peace, and there only
was a life of plain living and high thinking possible.
All he knew was that the common ideals of life did not
satisfy him, and he exclaimed
The wealthiest man amongst us is the best ;
No grandeur now in nature or in book
Delights us.
He had learned the great lesson of living, not for
things temporal, but for things eternal ; he had set him-
self above all to be true to his own self, and he had the
rare daring of being absolutely faithful to the voice of
this supreme conviction. Any greatness which attaches
to Wordsworth's character directly springs from this
spiritual honesty of purpose. The noblest qualities of
his poetry, all the qualities indeed which differentiate
and distinguish it, and give it a lofty isolation in Eng-
lish literature, were the natural result of this temper of
spirit and method of life. There, far from the fevered
life of cities, where the free winds blew, and the
spacious silence taught serenity; there, in the daily
contemplation of simple life and natural beauty among
his own mountains, the bonds of custom fell from
Wordsworth's spirit, and he became enfranchised with
a glorious liberty. Strength returned to him, clearness
and resoluteness of spirit, sanity and joy of mind.
The great lesson which he was consecrated to expound
was the nobleness of unworldly and simple life, and
such lessons could only be learned, much less taught,
by a life which was itself infinitely removed from the
vulgar scramble for wealth, and the insane thirst for
social power. It is not too much to say that it is to
WORDSWORTH'S LIFE AND POETRY. 107
Dora Wordsworth that England owes the precious gift
of her brother's genius. She recognised it when he
himself was dubious ; she taught him how to collect his
powers and develop them ; she encouraged him when
almost every other voice was hostile ; and, finally, she
taught him that serene confidence in himself, and in his
mission, which made him say to his few friends, when
the public contempt and apathy of his time seemed
universal and unbearable : " Make yourselves at rest
respecting me ; I speak the truths the world must feel
at last."
CHAPTER XII.
SOME CHARACTERISTICS OF WORDSWORTH'S POETRY.
WE have seen how Wordsworth began his poetic
career with certain clearly defined and original
views on the art of poetic expression. If he had been
a less self-contained and self-confident man, he would
hardly have dared to put -forth these views with such
perfect indifference to the current of popular taste which
prevailed in the beginning of the century. But the
truth is that Wordsworth was not a student of books.
De Quincey says that his library did not exceed three
hundred volumes, and many of these were in a very
incomplete condition. He was imperfectly acquainted
with English literature as a whole, and almost entirely
ignorant of the poets of his own day. He was acquainted
with the poetry of Scott and Southey, but he thought little
of it, At a moment when Byron was dazzling society,
and his poems were selling by thousands, Wordsworth
had scarcely glanced at them ; nor is there any sign that
the tragic force of Byron stirred so much as a ripple
in the calm of Wordsworth's mind. He certainly knew
little of Shelley, and nothing of Keats. The only poet
of his time who had anything to do with the shaping oi
his taste was Coleridge. From Coleridge he may have
learned something of the spell of melody, for a greatei
master of lyrical melody than Coleridge never lived
But in the main it may be said that Wordsworth stood
CHARACTERISTICS OF WORDSWORTITS POETRY. 109
alone. He had no mentors he copied no models.
With the solitary exceptions of "Laodamia," which
was inspired by a re-perusal of Virgil in middle life,
and the "Ode on Intimations of Immortality," which
owes its suggestion, perhaps, to certain beautiful lines
of Henry Vaughan, the Silurist, it is impossible to
trace the origin of any considerable poem of Words-
worth's to literary sources. The effects of this limitation
of literary culture in Wordsworth are twofold : we find
that both the great qualities and the great defects of
his genius are liberally displayed in his writings. A
solitary man possessed by a theory is sure to exaggerate
the importance of his theory, and to write many things
which he would not have written had his views been
corrected by a more generous commerce with the world.
Nothing else can account for the almost ludicrous com-
placency with which he calls our attention to such a
poem as the " Idiot Boy," and tells us he never " wrote
anything with so much glee." On the other hand,
the best poems of Wordsworth could only have been
written by a man nourished in solitary contemplation,
and indifferent to the literary standards of his time.
Because he owes his inspiration not to literature but
to Nature, he is able to rise into a region of profound
thought and emotion, to which the greatest of literary
guides could not have conducted him ; and, for the same
reason, all that he has written has its own distinctive
note, and bears the stamp of a dominant individuality.
When we endeavour to ascertain the characteristics
of a poet's work, what we really mean is the character-
istics of his style, and his peculiar moral and emotional
interest. Turning first, then, to the style of Words-
worth, it seems to be generally admitted that the period
in which his really memorable work was done may be
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limited to about twenty years (1798-1818). For what
Wordsworth overlooked, and what all inventors of
poetic theories and formulae have always overlooked, is
that the art of poetic expression is an indefinable gift,
which can neither be obtained by obedience to any
rules of composition, nor obscured by any defects of
literary culture. It is something in the poet which is
spontaneous and natural, which the world can neither
give nor take away. The absolute fulness of the gift
makes itself felt at once in the verses of an imperfectly
educated rustic like Burns; and the limitation and
frequent absence of the gift is equally apparent in the
brilliant lines of a thoroughly cultured poet like Pope.
When we speak of the inspiration of the poet we use
no vain phrase ; for that indefinable charm which
dwells in the poetry of a true poet is something that
the poet cannot produce at will, nor retain according
to his pleasure. It is a gift of illumination and power,
an inspiration which visits him irregularly, a sort of
diviner soul which possesses him and purges him,
and which is as independent even of character as it is
of culture or knowledge. The poet may, indeed, seek
to fit himself for the high tasks of the muse, as both
Milton and Wordsworth did; but even then it by no
means follows that when the lamp is cleansed and
trimmed the sacred flame will kindle. And in no poet
is the truth of these remarks more obvious than in
Wordsworth. During these twenty years the genius
of Wordsworth was in its prime. He is so far true to
his theory of poetry that he uses the simplest words,
and often chooses the homeliest subjects; but his
words have a compactness, a melody, a subtle charm
of emotion, which make them enter into the secret
places of the human spirit, and cling to the memory
CHARACTERISTICS OF WORDSWORTH'S POETRY, in
like an enduring fragrance. It is hard to say where
the charm lies ; indeed, we do not know. But we feel
its inspiration, we thrill before its power. The very
simplicity of the words, the sincerity and noble gravity
of the spirit which is revealed through them, fascinate
and attract us. But apart from all the moral influences
of such poems, we cannot but notice that the style of
Wordsworth is, during these twenty years, at its best.
It is direct, nervous, cogent, full of undesigned felicities,
and often full of lovely melody. During these twenty
years the genius of Wordsworth poured itself out like
a clear unfailing fountain, and it is almost possible to
say exactly where the culminating point is reached.
His last really great verses, in which the peculiar
felicities of his style are at their height, are the lines
"composed upon an evening of extraordinary splen-
dour and beauty" in the autumn of 1818. The peace
and splendour of the sunset pervade them. He says :
No sound is uttered, but a deep
And solemn harmony pervades
The hollow vale from steep to steep,
And penetrates the glades.
*****
And if there be whom broken ties
Afflict, or injuries assail,
Yon hazy ridges to their eyes
Present a glorious scale,
Climbing suffused with sunny air,
To stop no record hath told where I
And tempting fancy to ascend,
And with immortal spirits blend ;
Wings at my shoulders seem to play ;
But rooted here, I stand and gaze
On those bright steps that heavenward raise
Their practicable way.
Wordsworth lived long and wrote much after this
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memorable evening, but his magic wand was broken.
Occasionally some bright gleam of that "light which
never was on sea or shore " falls upon his later poems ;
but it is intermittent and transient. He still teaches
and instructs us, but too often a didactic dryness has
succeeded the old charm of manner, and he touches
the old string without the old music. When the sun
sank that night over Rydal water, all unknown to him-
self the " glory of his prime " was past. The light
that so long had lightened him had once more flamed
up into a Divine brilliance, and there was something
pathetically prophetic of his own future in the conclud-
ing lines of the poem
'Tis past ; the visionary splendour fades,
And Night approaches with her shades.
When we ask what are the moral characteristics of
Wordsworth's poetry, the same difficulty of a complete
and sufficing answer presents itself. He excites in us
many emotions, but they are always pure and ennobling
emotions. Those who seek for coarse and violent
excitement must not come to Wordsworth ; they must
go to Byron. The Rev. F. W. Robertson has truly
observed that " in reading Wordsworth the sensation is
as the sensation of the pure water drinker, whose palate
is so refined that he can distinguish between rill and
rill, river and river, fountain and fountain, as compared
with the obtuser sensations of him who has destroyed
the delicacy of his palate by grosser libations, and who
can distinguish no difference between water and water,
because to him all pure things are equally insipid."
There is a gravity and sweetness in Wordsworth's
poems which could only spring from a noble nature,
ruled by the daily vigilance of duty, and dedicated to
CHARACTERISTICS OF WORDSWORTH'S POETRY. 113
the daily contemplation of lofty purposes. He makes
us feel his entire remoteness from all sordid aims and
debasing passions, and he calls us to a higher, a
simpler, a serener life. He preaches to an age corrupted
with sensationalism the joy that lies in natural emotions ;
to an age stung with the hunger for impossible ideals
the attainable valour and nobility of homely life ; to an
age tormented by insatiable thirst for riches the old
Divine lesson that "a man's life consisteth not in the
abundance of things which he possesseth." To the
worldly he speaks of unworldliness ; to the perplexed,
of trust ; to the victims of vain perturbation and disquiet,
of peace. There is an ineffable, an almost saintly
charm about the voice that reaches us from these green
solitudes of lake and mountain. He breathes consola-
tion and encouragement into tired hearts and failing
spirits. He is the apostle of peace, the minister of
cleansing to his time. He has nothing new or startling
to say : he sings of love and duty, of disciplined desires
and purged and regulated passions, but he speaks as
one who has attained and knows the secret of perpetual
content. He speaks
With heart as calm as lakes that sleep,
In frosty moonlight glistening,
Or mountain-torrents, where they creep
Along a channel smooth and deep,
To their own far-off murmurs listening.
Well does Mr. F. W. Myers say, "What touch has
given to these lines their impress of an unfathomable
peace ? For there speaks from them a tranquillity
which seems to overcome one's soul ; which makes us
feel in the midst of toil and passion that we are dis-
quieting ourselves in vain ; that we are travelling to a
region where these things shall not be ; that ' so shall
8
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immoderate fear leave us, and inordinate love shall
die. ' " We cannot explain the touch, but there it is : an
unearthly and profoundly religious charm which breathes
upon us in all the best poems of Wordsworth. It is,
in truth, the voice of a great prophet, who speaks words
which are for the healing of the nations.
We might illustrate these observations by copious
quotations from the poetry of Wordsworth, but perhaps
a better mode of proof is to quote the words in which
others, and those the foremost leaders of our time, have
described the power of Wordsworth over them. Ruskin
has said that Wordsworth is " the keenest-eyed of all
modern poets for what is deep and essential in Nature."
John Stuart Mill has written in his " Autobiography : "
" What made his poems a medicine for my state of
mind was that they expressed not mere outward beauty,
but states of feeling and thought coloured by feeling,
under the excitement of beauty. I needed to be made
to feel that there was real permanent happiness in
tranquil contemplation. Wordsworth taught me this,
not only without turning away from, but with greatly
increased interest in, the common feelings and common
destiny of human beings." George Eliot read the
" Prelude " with ever-fresh delight, and declared : " I
never before met so many of my own feelings expressed
just as I should like them." It is true, indeed, as
Matthew Arnold has said, that
Wordsworth's eyes avert their ken
From half of human fate,
but that is simply saying that Wordsworth's poetry
has the defects of its qualities. He does not plumb
the depths of the more debasing and tragic passions of
humanity. His realism is not the new-fangled realism
CHAR A CTERISTICS OF WORDS WOR Tff'S POE TRY. 115
which is fascinated only by corrupt things, but the
realism that dwells upon the valours and homely pieties
of common life. And when Matthew Arnold would
embody in a phrase the secret of Wordsworth's power,
he also bears the same testimony as Mill and George
Eliot, when he speaks of Wordsworth's " healing
power." " He contests," says Mr. R. H. Hutton, " the
ground inch by inch with all despondent and indolent
humours, and often, too, with movements of incon-
siderate and wasteful joy;" for there is something
more than the steadfastness of tranquillity in Words-
worth : there is the steadfastness of strength. He
rouses us from languor, because, with all his calm,
there is mixed a strenuous and eager spirit, conscious
of a Divine mission, and bent on its fulfilment. It is
this moral pre-eminence of Wordsworth which is the
secret of his mastery over such very different minds as
Mill's and Ruskin's, George Eliot's and Arnold's. It is
largely also his moral fervour which has given him a
species of priesthood in literature, and has surrounded
his memory with a sort of sacred halo. To the passionate
heart of youth Wordsworth does not appeal; but as
life goes on, and its first fervid glow fades, men find
more and more how deep a well of consolation there is
in the writings of a poet who sang of nothing more
than what we are, and the long-neglected voice of
Wordsworth reaches us in mid-life, and haunts us with
its mild persistence, and cheers us with its friendly
hope.
To some natures, of course, Wordsworth will never
appeal. Macaulay could find nothing in him but an
" endless wilderness of twaddle," and Swinburne can
discern little save pompous dulness. Three great
writers of his own day, and only three, knew him for
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what he was : Scott honoured him, Coleridge loved
him, and Sou they praised him in the famous words
that there never was, and never will be, a greater poet.
We cannot accept this brotherly exaggeration as wholly
true, but clearly Southey is far nearer the truth than
Swinburne or Macaulay. And the more Wordsworth's
writings are read, the more distinctly is it felt that if he
is not the greatest of poets, there is no poet who has
given us a body of thought and emotion more human-
ising, more wholesome, more inspiring in its tendency.
That, at least, is the aim that Wordsworth set before
himself in his memorable criticism of his poems written
to Lady Beaumont in 1807. "Trouble not yourself,"
he says, " about their present reception; of what moment
is that compared with what I trust is their destiny?
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, and feel,
and therefore to become more actively and securely
virtuous, this is their office, which I trust they will
faithfully perform, long after we (that is, all that is
mortal of us) are mouldered in our graves." Never
have the essential moral characteristics of Words-
worth's poetry been set forth with truer insight and
completeness than in this prophetic passage, written
in the days when no indication of fame had reached
him, and when, with some few honourable exceptions,
signal contempt was awarded him by the blind and
undiscerning critics who attempted to direct the taste
and culture of their age.
CHAPTER XIII.
WORDSWORTH'S VIEW OF NATLRE AND MAN.
I have spoken of Wordsworth as having a new
and original philosophy to unfold, a new and
individual view of Nature to expound : what then,
was that view ? The love of Nature is to be found in
all the English poets, from Chaucer downward. In
Wordsworth's own day both Byron and Shelley were
writing poems thoroughly impregnated with the love
of Nature. If we eliminated from English poetry all
the passages which deal with the charm and glory of
Nature, we should have destroyed all that is sweetest,
freshest, and most characteristic in it. What is there,
then, in Wordsworth's treatment of Nature which
differs from the poetry of those who have gone before
him ? It is perilous to be too positive where many fine
and delicate distinctions are involved ; but, speaking
generally, it may be said that Wordsworth differs from
all other poets in the stress he puts upon the moral
influences of Nature. To Byron, Nature was the great
consoler in the hour of his revolt against the folly of
man, and he found in her, not merely hospitality, but
a certain exhilaration which fed the fierce defiance of
his heart, and armed him with new strength for the
fight. To Shelley, Nature is more of a personality than
to Byron, but it is an ethereal and lovely presence, a
iiS THE MAKERS OF MODERN ENGLISH.
veiled splendour, kindling sweet ardour in the heart,
and exercising an intoxicating magic on the mind.
But with Wordsworth the idea of the living personality
of Nature is a definite reality. He loves her as he
might love a mistress, and communes with her as mind
may commune with mind. To him she is a vast
embodied Thought, a Presence not merely capable of
inspiring delightful ardour, but of elevating man by
noble discipline. Take, for instance, his " Sonnet on
Calais Beach : "
It is a beauteous evening, calm and free ;
The holy time is quiet as a nun
Breathless with adoration ; the broad sun
Is sinking down in its tranquillity ;
The gentleness of heaven is on the sea :
Listen ! the Mighty Being is awake,
And doth with his eternal motion make
A sound like thunder everlastingly.
Or take his conception of human life in the presence of
the everlastingness of Nature :
Our noisy years seem moments in the being
Of the eternal silence.
Or ponder the spirit of the well-known verses :
The outward shows of sky and earth,
Of hill and valley he has viewed j
And impulses of deeper birth
Have come to him in solitude.
In common things that round us lie
Some random truths he can impart
The harvest of a quiet eye
That broods and sleeps on his own heart.
Or mark how he replies to the restlessness of life which
is divorced from habitual intercourse with Nature :
WORDSWORTH'S VIEW OF NATURE AND MAN, 119
Think you, 'mid all this mighty sum
Of things for ever speaking,
That nothing of itself will come,
But we must still be seeking ?
Nor less I deem that there are powers
Which of themselves our minds impress J
That we can feed this mind of ours
Into a wise passiveness.
And hark ! how blithe the throstle sings }
He, too, is no mean preacher ;
Come forth into the light of things,
Let Nature be your teacher.
One impulse of a vernal wood
May teach you more of man,
Of moral evil and of good,
Than all the sages can.
In these verses what most strikes us is the vividness
of Wordsworth's conception of Nature as endowed with
personality "the mighty Being/' and the emphasis
with which he declares that Nature is a teacher whose
wisdom we can learn if we will, and without which any
human life is vain and incomplete.
An artist, who is also a teacher of art, has laid down
the rule that in painting landscape what we want is not
the catalogue of the landscape, but the emotion of the
artist in painting it. This is the artistic theory of the
Impressionist school, and it may be said that in this
sense Wordsworth was an impressionist. Such a poet
as Thomson gives us in his " Seasons " the mere
catalogue of Nature, and as a catalogue it is excellent.
If the effects of Nature were to be put up to auction,
no catalogue could serve us better than Thomson's
" Seasons." But what Thomson cannot give us, and
what Wordsworth does give us, is the impression which
Nature produces on his own spirit. He teaches us that
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between man and Nature there is mutual conscious-
ness and mystic intercourse. It is not for nothing God
has set man in this world of sound and vision : it is in
the power of Nature to penetrate his spirit, to reveal
him to himself, to communicate to him Divine instruc-
tions, to lift him into spiritual life and ecstasy. The
poem of " The Daffodils " is simply a piece of lovely
word-painting till we reach the lines
They flash upon the inward eye,
Which is the bliss of solitude ;
and it is in those lines the real spirit of the poem
speaks. There was something in that sight of the
daffodils, dancing in jocund glee, that kindled a joy, an
intuition, a hope in the poet's mind, and through the
vision an undying impulse of delight and illumination
reached him. Wordsworth does not indulge in the
" pathetic fallacy." He does not take his mood to Nature
and persuade himself that she reflects it ; but he goes
to Nature with an open mind, and leaves her to create
the mood in him. He does not ask her to echo him ;
but he stands docile in her presence, and asks to be
taught of her. To persuade ourselves that Nature
mirrors our mood, giving grey skies to our grief, and
the piping of glad birds in answer to the joy-bells of
our hope, is not to take a genuine delight in Nature.
It is to make her our accomplice rather than our in-
structress ; our mimic, not our mistress. Many poets
have done this, and nothing is commoner in current
poetry. The originality of Wordsworth is that he
never thinks of Nature in any other way than as a
Mighty Presence, before whom he stands silent, like
a faithful high-priest, who waits in solemn expectation
for the whisper of enlightenment and wisdom.
WORDSWORTH'S VIEW OF NATURE AND MAN. 121
Let us turn to one of his earliest poems, the " Lines
composed at Tintern Abbey," July I3th, 1798, and we
shall see Jiow clearly defined in Wordsworth's mind
tfhis conception of Nature was, even at the commence-
ment of his career. Wordsworth was not yet thirty,
and had not yet recognised his true vocation in life ;
but,, nevertheless, all that he afterwards said about
Nature is uttered in outline in these memorable lines.
He speaks of the " tranquil restoration," the sensations
sweet, " felt in the blood, and felt along the heart," which
Nature had already wrought in him. He has peace,
While with an eye made quiet by the power
Of harmony, and the deep power of song,
We see into the life of things.
The mere boyish love of Nature, when the sounding
cataract haunted him like a passion, he characterises as
one of the "glad animal movements" of the boy; now
he has perceived how Nature not merely works delight
in the blood, but flashes illumination on the soul.
For I have learned
To look on Nature, not as in the hours
Of thoughtless youth, but hearing oftentimes
The still, sad music of humanity,
Nor harsh nor grating, though of ample power
To chasten and subdue. And I have felt
A presence that disturbs me 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. Therefore am I still
A lover of the meadows and the woods,
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And mountains ; and of all that we behold
From this round earth ; and of all the mighty world
Of eye and ear, both what they half create
And what perceive ; well pleased to recognise
In Nature and the language of the sense,
The anchor of my purest thoughts, the nurse,
The guide, the guardian of my heart, and soul,
Of all my moral being.
We have only to compare this passage with such
poems as Byron's " Address to the Ocean/' or Shelley's
" Ode to the West Wind/' to see how great is the
difference between Wordsworth's view of Nature and
theirs, and how profoundly original Wordsworth's view
is. There is a subtle power in Wordsworth's verses
which seems to breathe the very spirit of Nature, and
to interpret her. We entirely lose sight of the revealer
in the revelation ; we pass out of the sphere of Words-
worth's mood into the very mood and heart of Nature ;
we feel the presence of something deeply interfused
through all the inanimate world. The world indeed is
no longer dead to us, but animate, and we feel the
spirit and motion of Nature like the actual contact of
a living and a larger soul. Wordsworth is thus not so
much the poet as the high-priest of Nature, and the
feeling he creates in us is not so much delight as
worship.
One effect of this ardent love of Nature in Words-
worth is that he excels all other poets in the fidelity of
his descriptions, the minute accuracy of his observation
of natural beauty. His eye for nature is always fresh
and true, and what he sees he describes with an admir-
able realism. His sense of form and colour is also
perfect, and in nothing is he so great an artist as in his
power of conveying in a phrase the exact truth of the
things he sees. When he Speaks of the voice of the
WORDSWORTH'S VIEW OF NATURE AND MAN. 123
stock-dove as " buried among trees," he uses the only
word that could completely convey to us the idea of
seclusion, the remote depth of greenwood in which the
dove loves to hide herself. The star-shaped shadow of
the daisy cast upon the stone is noted also with the
same loving accuracy, and can only be the result of
direct observation. Nothing escaped his vigilance, and
his sense of sound was as perfect as his power of vision.
The wild wind-swept summit of a mountain-pass could
hardly be better painted than in this word-picture :
The single sheep, and that one blasted tree,
And the bleak music of that old stone wall.
We hear, as we read these lines, the wind whistling
through the crevices of the stone walls of Westmore-
land, and by the magic of this single phrase we feel
at nee the desolation of the scene, and we catch its
spirit. For, after all, it is not in the power of the most
accurate description of itself to create emotion in us;
it is the emotion of the poet we need to interpret for
us the spirit of what he sees, and this is just what
Wordsworth does for us. He scorned what he called
taking an inventory of Nature, and said that Nature
did not permit it. His comment on a brilliant poet
was: "He should have left his pencil and note-book
at home, fixed his eye as he walked with a reverent
attention on all that surrounded him, and taken all
into a heart that could understand and enjoy. He
would have discovered that while much of what he had
admired was preserved to him, much was also most
wisely obliterated ; that which remained the picture
surviving in his mind would have presented the
ideal and essential truth of the scene, and done so in a
large part by discarding much which, though in itself
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striking, was not characteristic." This was Words-
worth's own method. Though unsurpassed in the
fidelity of his observation, he never relies on observation
alone for his interpretation of Nature. When he has
observed he allows the picture of what he has seen to
sink quietly into the memory, and he broods above it
in silent joy. The result is that when the hour comes
to combine his materials in a poem, they are already
sifted for us, and are saturated with sentiment. Many
of the noblest passages in Wordsworth might be thus
described as observation touched with emotion ; un-
usually accurate observation touched with the finest
and purest emotion.
Another direct effect of Wordsworth's view of Nature
is his view of man. He began life with the most
ardent hopes for the moral regeneration of mankind/
and it was only with bitter reluctance he renounced
them, in the frantic recoil which the excesses of the
French Revolution produced. From the bitterness of
that trouble, as we have seen, he was rescued by his
sister Dora, and, going back to the calm of Nature,
he found a truer view of mankind. He believed that
he had put his ringer on the real secret of the unsatis-
fied passions and misery of mankind when he taught
that man, divorced from living intercourse with Nature,
could not but be restless and unhappy. Man was set
in this world of Nature because the world of Nature
was necessary, to his well-being, nor were spiritual
sanity and delight possible without contact with Nature.
In this view he was confirmed when he found that in
the remote dales of the English Lake District human
life attained a robust virtue denied to the dwellers in
great cities. He saw that the essentials of a really
lofty and happy life were few, and that they were
WORDSWORTH'S VIEW OF NATURE AND MAN. 125
found in the greatest profusion where life was simplest
and contact with Nature was habitual. His faith in
mankind returned, and man again became
An object of delight,
Of pure imagination and of love.
Set in his proper environment of Nature, breathing
clear air, looking on refreshing visions of glory and
delight, Wordsworth saw that man was at his best,
and he regarded him with genuine reverence. His
panacea for the healing of his country was a return to
Nature, and it was in pathetic reproach he wrote :
The world is too much with us ; late and soon,
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers ;
Little we see in Nature that is ours !
We have given away our hearts, a sordid boon !
There is no poet who shows so great a reverence for
man, as man. Lowliness and poverty cannot hide from
him the great qualities of heart and character, which
the selfish and unthinking never see. He sings the
homely sanctities and virtues of the poor. Human
nature is to him a sacred thing, and even in its frailest
and humblest forms is regarded with gentleness and
sympathy. And the real source of Wordsworth's
reverence for man lies in his reverence for Nature.
It is the constant and purging vision of Nature which
enables him to perceive how mean are the cares with
which those who are rich burden themselves, and how
noble, and even joyous, men can be under the stress of
penury and labour, if they let Nature lead them and
exalt them.
The spirit of this teaching is nowhere more happily
expressed than in the lovely lines which occur in the
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conclusion of the " Song at the Feast of Brougham
Castle/'
Love had he found in huts where poor men lie ;
His daily teachers had been woods and rills,
The silence which is in the starry sky,
The sleep that is among the lonely hills.
These were the agencies which had softened, soothed,
and tamed the fiery heart of Clifford, and it was by the
same simple ministration he himself had been led into
settled peace.
It may, indeed, be doubted whether it is possible to
understand the full significance of Wordsworth's poetry
in any other environment than that in which it was pro-
duced. So at least thought James Macdonell, when he
wrote : " What blasts of heavenly sunshine, as if
blown direct from the gates of some austerely Puritan
Paradise ! What gusts of air, touched with the cold
rigour of the mountain peak ! What depth of moralis-
ing, touched with the hues of a masculine gloom !
What felicity of diction, clothing in immortal brevity
of phrase the deepest aspirations of the brave ! Never
did I read Wordsworth with such full delight, because
never had I so charged my mind with the spirit of the
mountains which were the food of his soul."
What Burns did for the Scotch peasant, Wordsworth
has done for the shepherds and the husbandmen of
England. But he has done more than illustrate the
virtues of a class : from the study of peasant life, set
amid the splendour, and vivified by the influence of
Nature, he attained a profound faith in man himself,
and a reverent understanding of the inherent grandeur
of all human life.
CHAPTER XIV.
WORDSWORTH S PATRIOTIC AND POLITICAL POEMS.
AN excellent and eloquent critic, Professor Dowden,
has spoken of Wordsworth's " uncourageous
elder years," and has founded the phrase upon this
sentence of Wordsworth's : " Years have deprived me
of courage, in the sense which the word bears when
applied by Chaucer to the animation of birds in spring-
time." A little reflection will, I think, show that this
confession of the poet hardly justifies the phrase of
the critic. Nevertheless, it is a general impression that
Wordsworth began life an ardent Radical, and ended it
as a staunch Conservative. If this were all, the phrase
might be allowed to pass, but the impression such a
phrase creates is that Wordsworth not merely renounced
his early hopes and creed, but grew apathetic toward
the great human causes which stirred his blood in
youth. Browning's fine poem of the " Lost Leader "
has often been applied to Wordsworth, and it has been
assumed in many quarters, with what degree of truth
we do not know, that Browning had Wordsworth in
his mind when he wrote that powerful and pathetic
indictment. However this may be, nothing is com-
moner than the assumption that one result of Words-
worth's remote seclusion from the great stress of life
was that he lost interest in public affairs, and cared
128 THE MAKERS OF MODERN ENGLISH.
little for the great movements of his day. Than this
assumption nothing can be falser. To say nothing of
the prose writings of Wordsworth, few poets have
given us a larger body of patriotic poetry, and poetry
impregnated with politics, than Wordsworth. Perhaps
it is because the finest poems of Wordsworth are those
that deal with the emotions of man in the presence of
Nature, that comparatively little interest attaches to his
patriotic poetry. Such poetry, however, Wordsworth
wrote throughout his life, and if he was not altogether
a political force, it is quite certain that he never ceased
to take a keen interest in politics. He had national
aims, and was full of the most ardent love of country.
It may be well to recall to the minds of my readers
this aspect of Wordsworth's life and influence.
As regards the earlier part of his life, Wordsworth
has left an abundant record of his thoughts in his prose
writings. No poet, save Milton, has written with so
large a touch upon national affairs, and has displayed
so lofty a spirit. His prose does not indeed glow with
so intense a passion, nor is it so gorgeous as Milton's,
but it is animated and inspired by the same spirit.
And in its more passionate passages something of
Milton's pomp of style is discernible something of his
overwhelming force of language and cogency of
thought. Wordsworth's tract on the " Convention of
Cintra" belongs to the same class of writings as
Milton's " Areopagitica," and while not its equal in
sustained splendour of diction, it is distinguished by the
same breadth of view and eager patriotism. Words-
worth has himself defined excellence of writing as
the conjunction of reason and passion, and, judged by
this test, Wordsworth's occasional utterances on politics
attain a rare excellence. It would have been singular
PATRIOTIC AND POLITICAL POEMS. 129
in such an age if any man who possessed emotion
enough to be a poet had nothing to say upon the
great events which were altering the map of Europe.
Wordsworth from the first never concealed his opinions
on these subjects. He went as far as he could in
apologising for the errors of the French Revolution,
when he said truly that " Revolution is not the season
of true liberty." The austerity which characterised
his whole ' life characterises the very temper of his
apology for the excesses of the Revolution. He
shed no tears over the execution of Louis. He laments
a larger public calamity, " that any combination of
circumstances should have rendered it necessary or
advisable to veil for a moment the statutes of the laws,
and that by such emergency the cause of twenty-five
millions of people, I may say of the whole human race,
should have been so materially injured. Any other
sorrow for the death of Louis is irrational and weak."
He is even ardent Republican enough to argue for
equality, and to say that in the perfect state " no dis-
tinctions are to be admitted but such as have evidently
for their object the general good." This last sentence
strikes the keynote in much of the philosophy of
Wordsworth. " Simplification was," as John Morley
has observed, u the keynote of the revolutionary time."
That lesson Wordsworth thoroughly learned, and never
forgot. It is the very essence of the democratic spirit
to pierce beneath the artificial distinctions of a time,
and grasp the essential ; to take man for what he is, not
for what he seems to be ; to reverence man wherever
he is found, and to reverence not least the man who
toils in the lowliest walks of life. If this be the spirit
of democracy then Wordsworth kept the democratic
faith whole and undefiled. So far from repudiating
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the political creed of his life, he spiritualised it, and
lived in obedience to its essential elements all his life.
That in later life he manifested an incapacity for the
rapid assimilation of new ideas; that his notions stiffened,
and his perceptions failed; that he opposed Catholic
Emancipation and the Reform Bill, is merely to say, in
other words, that Wordsworth grew old. It is a rare
spectacle, perhaps the rarest, to see a great mind resist
the stiffening of age, and retain its versatility and fresh-
ness of outlook in the last decades of life. Wordsworth
was never a versatile man, and never had any marked
capacity for the assimilation of new ideas. But how
very far Wordsworth was from ever being a fossilised
Tory we may judge by his own saying in later life :
" I have no respect whatever for Whigs, but I have
a good deal of the Chartist in me." However his
political insight may have failed him in his apprehension
of the party measures of his later life, it cannot be
seriously questioned that Wordsworth always remained
true at heart to the cause of the people, and never
swerved in his real reverence for man as man.
The urgency of the political passion in Wordsworth
can be felt all through the days of the great war, and
perhaps the noblest record of that period is in the long
series of sonnets which Wordsworth wrote between the
years 1 803 and 1 8 1 6. In the year 1 809 he wrote scarcely
anything that was not related to the life of nations. It
was then that he apostrophised Saragossa, and lamented
over the submission of the Tyrolese. And if few poets
have written so largely on the current events of their
day, it may certainly be added that no poet has showed
a more cosmopolitan spirit. It was indeed a time when
England was in closer touch with the struggling nation-
alities of the Continent than ever before. A common
PATRIOTIC AND POLITICAL POEMS. 131
calamity had drawn together all the peoples of Europe
who still loved liberty. England had never breathed
the spirit of so large a life as in those troublous days.
She had never known a period of such intense suspense
and united enthusiasm. The beacon-fire was built on
every hill ; every village-green resounded to the clang
of martial drill ; every port had its eager watchers, who
swept the waste fields of sea with restless scrutiny.
Children were sent to bed with all their clothes neatly
packed beside them, in cace the alarm of war should
break the midnight silence ; and invasion was for
months an hourly fear. It was one of those moments
of supreme peril and passion which come rarely in
the life of nations: one of those great regenerating
moments when factions perish, and a nation rises into
nobler life ; and the stress of that great period is felt
in every line that Wordsworth wrote. His patriotism
was of that diviner kind which founds itself on principles
of universal truth and righteousness. It was no splendid
prejudice, no insularity of thought, no mere sentimental
love of country : it gathered in its embrace the passions
of Europe, and pleaded in its strenuous eloquence the
cause of the oppressed throughout the world. This
breadth of view which characterised Wordsworth's
patriotism is its noblest characteristic. It is a catholic
love of liberty which gives him spiritual comradeship
with every man who has toiled or suffered for his
country. And this spirit can find no fuller exempli-
fication than in his noble sonnet, written in 1802,
TO TOUSSAINT L'OUVERTURE.
Toussaint, the most unhappy man of men !
Whether the whistling Rustic tend his plough
Within thy hearing, or thy head be now
Pillowed in some dark dungeon's earless den ;
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O miserable Chieftain ! where and when
Wilt thou find patience ? Yet die not ! do thou
Wear rather in thy bonds a cheerful brow ;
Though fallen thyself, never to rise again,
Live, and take comfort ! Thou hast left behind
Powers that will work for thee ; air, earth, and skies ;
There's not a breathing of the common wind
That will forget thee. Thou hast great allies ;
Thy friends are exaltations, agonies,
And love, and man's unconquerable mind.
But catholic as Wordsworth's patriotic sympathies
were, the noblest expressions of his patriotism are his
addresses and appeals to his own countrymen. If in
later life he did not discern the true spirit of his times,
and unconsciously resisted the august spirit of pro-
gress, it was in part because his honest pride of
country grew with his growth and strengthened with
his age. He was loth to admit faults and flaws in a
form of government which seemed to meet every just
demand of liberty and order. Besides, the great
hindrance to democratic development was to Words-
worth, not discoverable in any error or defect of
government, but in the defective method of life which
his countrymen adopted. When he is called upon to
judge the political measures of his day, his touch is not
sure, nor his discrimination wise ; but when he estimates
the tendencies of the social life of England he is always
clear, cogent, and convincing. His social grasp is
always surer than his political, and his finest sonnets
are those in which he combines his social insight with
patriotic passion. Such a sonnet is this :
When I have borne in memory what has tamed
Great nations, how ennobling thoughts depart
When men change swords for ledgers, and desert
The student's bower for gold, some fear, unnamed
PATRIOTIC AND POLITICAL POEMS. 133
I had, my country ! am I to be blamed ?
Now when I think of thee, and what thou art,
Verily in the bottom of my heart
Of those unfilial fears I am ashamed.
For dearly must we prize thee ; we who find
In thee a bulwark for the cause of men ;
And I by my affection was beguiled.
What wonder if a poet now and then,
Among the many movements of his mind,
Felt for thee as a lover or a child ?
And this is a note which is struck again and again. In
the hour of peril his countrymen rose to the supreme
daring of the occasion. What he fears is that the
relaxation of that intense moral strain may mean that
national life may lose its saving salt of lofty purpose,
and sink into carnal contentment and repose. " Getting
and spending we lay waste our powers " is the thought
that frequently recurs in his later poems. He fears
the enervation of prosperity more than the buffeting
of adversity. When nations are surfeited with victory
and peace, they are too apt to lose the Spartan temper
of austere devotion to their country which made them
great in warlike days. And why Wordsworth so often
recurs to this thought, is that his pride in his country
has no bounds. For the nation which has saved the
liberties of Europe to fall into inglorious self-indulg-
ence would be the last calamity in the possible tragedy
of nations. It is in the hour when such fears beset him,
that he appeals to " Sidney, Marvel, Harrington," who
Knew how genuine glory is put on,
Taught us how rightfully a nation shone
In splendour, what strength was that would not bend
But in magnanimous meekness.
It is then also he thinks of Milton, whose " soul was as
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a star and dwelt apart/' and invokes that mighty shade
which haunts the Puritan past of England
We are selfish men ;
O, raise us up, return to us again,
And give us manners, virtue, freedom, power.
And it is when the memory of that heroic past of
England is most vivid to his mind that he touches his
highest note of dignified and haughty pride, and scorns
the thought
That this most famous stream in bogs and sands
Should perish ! and to evil and to good
Be lost for ever. In our halls is hung
Armoury of the invincible knights of old ;
We must be free or die, who speak the tongue
That Shakespeare spake : the faith and morals hold
Which Milton held. In everything we are sprung
Of earth's first blood ; have titles manifold.
The patriotism of Wordsworth is not violent or
frenzied ; it is comparatively restrained ; but, for that
very reason, in the moments of its highest utterance
there is a depth and force in it such as few writers
display. When habitually calm men break the barriers
of reserve, there is something strangely impressive
in their passion. There is nothing more impressive in
Wordsworth, as indicative of the strength of his emo-
tions, than these occasional bursts of exalted patriotism,
and their force is heightened by the contrast they
furnish to his habitual serenity of temper.
There is one poem of Wordsworth's which stands
out in particular prominence as the greatest of all his
poems which express the spirit of patriotism : that is
the " Happy Warrior." This poem was written in the
year 1806, and was inspired by the death of Nelson.
It was in the autumn of the previous year that Nelson
PATRIOTIC AND POLITICAL POEMS. 135
had fallen on the deck of the Victory, and the shock of
sorrow and consternation which passed over England
has never been equalled by any similar public calamity.
Certainly the death of no individual has ever called
forth so spontaneous and general a lamentation.
Nelson was to the England of his day the very in-
carnation of manly courage and heroic virtue. The
fascination of his name affected every class of society.
He seemed to sum up in himself that reverence for duty
which is so characteristic a feature of the English race.
Between Nelson and Wordsworth there could be little
in common, save this bond of ardent patriotism, but
that was sufficient to call forth from Wordsworth
one of his finest poems. Just as we can specify cer-
tain poems which constitute the high-water mark of
Wordsworth's genius in philosophic or lyric poetry, so
we can confidently take this poem as his maturest
word in patriotic poetry. It breathes the very spirit
of consecrated heroism. Some points of the poem
were suggested by a more private sorrow the loss at
sea of his brother John ; but it was out of the larger
emotion occasioned by the death of Nelson that the
poem originated. It is the idealised Nelson who stands
before us in these verses :
But who, if he be called upon to face
Some awful moment, to which Heaven has joined
Great issues, good or bad for human kind,
Is happy as a Lover, and attired
With sudden brightness, like a Man inspired :
And, through the heat of conflict, keeps the law
In calmness made, and sees what he foresaw ;
Or if an unexpected call succeed,
Come when it will, is equal to the need.
He who, though thus endued as with a sense
And faculty for storm and turbulence,
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Is yet a Soul whose master-bias leans
To homefelt pleasures, and to gentler scenes.
This is the Happy Warrior, this is He
That every man in arms should wish to be.
When we read these words we are reminded of a
passage in the " Recluse/' in which Wordsworth tells
us he could never read of two great war-ships grap-
pling without a thrill of emulation, more ardent than
wise men should know. It is a passage which throws
a new light upon the nature of Wordsworth. If he
was serene, it was not because he was lethargic; if
he urged the blessedness of regulated passions, it was
not because his own heart was cold : he, too, had a
passionate nature and heroic fibre in him, and that
courageous and soldierly temper is fitly vindicated and
expressed in the lofty spirit of his patriotic poems.
CHAPTER XV.
WORDSWORTH'S PERSONAL CHARACTERISTICS.
WHEN we put down the works of a poet, we are
naturally inclined to ask what the poet himself
was like in actual life, and to seek some authentic
presentment of him as he moved among men. In the
case of Wordsworth we have many partial portraits,
but it can hardly be said that we have any true and
finished picture. The seclusion of Wordsworth's life
saved him from the scrutiny of that social world where
every little trait of character is indelibly photographed
on some retentive memory, and the trifles of uncon-
sidered conversation are gathered up, and often repro-
duced after many days in diaries and reminiscences.
Considering the literary force which Wordsworth was,
few men have had such scanty dealings with the
literary circles of their time. If Wordsworth had died
at fifty, it is pretty certain that beyond the reminiscences
of personal friends, like Coleridge and Southey, there
would have been little to guide us to a true understand-
ing of his person and character. Gradually, however,
as the tide set in his favour, the quiet house at Rydal
Mount became more and more a place of pilgrimage,
and few visitors of eminence came away without noting
down certain impressions, more or less instructive, of
the great Lake Poet.
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First of all there come naturally the testimonies of
those men of letters who formed a little colony beside
the English Lakes, and whose names are inseparably
associated with Wordsworth's. Southey's sense of
Wordsworth's powers may be measured by his enthu-
siastic verdict, that there never was and never would
be a greater poet. Coleridge conveys his impression
of Wordsworth's strength of character, not less than
of his genius, in the pathetic lines written in the days of
his own eclipse and sorrow, and already quoted :
O great Bard !
Ere yet that last strain dying awed the air,
With steadfast eye I viewed thee in the choir
Of ever-enduring men.
Ah ! as I listened with a heart forlorn,
The pulses of my being beat anew.
The quality in Wordsworth which struck Coleridge
most was naturally the quality in which he himself
was most deficient the robustness and sufficiency of
the poet's nature. De Quincey, in his sketch, observes
cne same characteristic, and probably this was the first
and deepest impression which Wordsworth created.
He struck all who knew him as a solid, indomitable
man, somewhat taciturn, save when the theme inspired
him and the company was fitting ; a man who knew in
what he had believed, and knew how to stand true to
himself and his convictions, amid evil report and good
report. That there should be something of childlike
vanity and harmless egotism about him, was perhaps
the natural consequence of his lack of humour and
his secluded life. When Emerson visited him he was
much amused to see Wordsworth solemnly prepare
himself for action, and then declaim like a schoolboy
his latest sonnet on FingaPs Cave. If Wordsworth
WORDSWORTH'S PERSONAL CHARACTERISTICS. 139
had had any of the elements of humour in him, he
himself would have been too conscious of the ludicrous
side of the proceeding to have indulged in it. But
Wordsworth united in himself philosophic seriousness
and childlike simplicity, and was singularly insensible
to humour. His neighbours said they never heard
him laugh ; and remarked that you could tell from his
face there was no laughter in his poetry. He took life
seriously, and, to quote Mrs. Browning's fine phrase,
poetry was to him " as serious as life." He once told
Sir George Beaumont that in his opinion " a man of
letters, and indeed all public men of every pursuit,
should be severely frugal." The Puritan discipline
which he applied to his life moulded his character,
and a constant life of plain living and high thinking
left little room for the casual graces of persiflage and
banter. Of mere cleverness, the airy agility of shallow
brains and ready tongues, he was destitute. He was
not suave, not fascinating, scarcely prepossessing. But
if he was calm it was not with any natural coldness of
temperament ; his calm was the fruit of long discipline
and fortitude. One acute observer speaks of the fear-
ful intensity of his feelings and affections, and says
that if his intellect had been less strong they would
have destroyed him long ago. De Quincey in like
manner noted his look of premature age,* " the furrowed
and rugged countenance, the brooding intensity of the
eye, the bursts of anger at the report of evil doings "
the signs of the passionate forces which worked within
him. He himself in his many self-revelations conveys
the same impression of a nature hard to govern, of
* De Quincey says that when Wordsworth was thirty-nine his age
was guessed at over sixty.
140 THE MAKERS OF MODERN ENGLISH.
violent passions disciplined with difficulty, of wild and
tumultuous desires only conquered by incessant vigil-
ance. He bore upon himself the marks of a difficult
life : and it was a touch of genuine insight which led
Coleridge to describe him by the brief and pregnant
phrase an " ever-enduring man."
The picture which Harriet Martineau gives of
Wordsworth as she knew him in his old age does
not err on the side of adulation, but it cannot conceal
the essential nobleness of his character. Harriet
Martineau thought little of his writings, and says so
with caustic frankness. According to her view the
view be it remembered of an incessantly busy woman
Wordsworth suffered from having nothing to do ;
and he suffered yet more in his old age from the
adulation of the crowd of visitors who poured toward
Rydal Mount during the tourist season. To each of
these idle visitors, and they averaged five hundred a
season, Wordsworth behaved much in the same way.
He politely showed them round his grounds, explained
at what particular spot certain poems were written, and
then politely bowed them out. He had no reticence
cither in reciting his poems or talking of them ; indeed,
he often spoke of them in an impersonal sort of way,
as though they had no relation to himself, and he
criticised them as freely as though some one else had
written them. Thus, he told Harriet Martineau that
the " Happy Warrior " did not " best fulfil the con-
ditions of poetry, but it was a chain of extremely
valooable thoughts," a criticism which Miss Martineau
endorses as " eminently just." In these, and in many
similar proceedings, we recognise the na'ive simplicity
of the man. He solemnly advised Miss Martineau to
give nothing but tea to her visitors, and if they wanted
WORDSWORTH'S PERSONAL CHARACTERISTICS. 141
meat let them pay for it themselves, that having been
his own method of proceeding in his early days of
penury at Grasmere. That this frugal suggestion did
not spring from any inhospitable meanness is abundantly
evident from the larger generosities of Wordsworth's
life. His treatment of poor Hartley Coleridge is above
praise. Miss Martineau only met Hartley five times, and
on each occasion he was drunk. Wordsworth treated
him as an erring son, and when all hope of reclaiming
him was over, paid for his lodgings, cared for his wants,
and smoothed his passage to the grave. There are few
more touching pictures than that of the old poet standing
bareheaded by the grave of Hartley, on the bleak winter
morning when all that was mortal of that unhappy genius
was laid to rest in the quiet God's acre which was soon
to receive the dust of Wordsworth.
An equally beautiful picture is painted by Miss
Martineau of the poet as she often met him, " attended
perhaps by half-a-score of cottagers' children, the
youngest pulling at his cloak or holding by his
trousers, while he cut ash switches out of the hedge
for them." This little touch of nature may be paired
off with Mr. Rawnsley's story, of how a pastor in a far-
away parish was asked by a very refined, handsome-
looking woman on her death-bed to read over to her
and to her husband the poem of " The Pet Lamb," and
how she had said at the end, " That was written about
me; Mr. Wordsworth often spoke to me, and patted
my head when a child," and had added with a sigh,
11 Eh, but he was such a dear kind old man ! " Miss
Martineau also strongly confirms the impression of
Wordsworth's isolation from the main streams of life,
the solitary self-containedness of his character, when
she says that his life was " self-enclosed," and that he
142 THE MAKERS OF MODERN ENGLISH.
had scarcely any intercourse with other minds, in books
or conversation.
Another source of information about Wordsworth
is found in the reminiscences of him among the peas-
antry, which have been so excellently collated by
Mr. Rawnsley. These have a unique value as the only
record we possess of the impression which Wordsworth
created, not on cultivated minds, but on the minds of
the simple dales-people whose virtues he so strenuously
sang. The northern mind has two distinguishing
qualities a certain quickness of imagination which
finds expression in the use of singularly vivid phrases,
and a certain shrewd touch of humour which delights
in exaggerative travesty. Making allowance for these
conditions, we may construct a remarkably lifelike por-
trait from these observations of Wordsworth's humble
neighbours. We are face to face with Wordsworth
in the prime of his power and force, when, we are told,
he was "a plainish-faaced man, but a fine man, leish
(active), and almost always upon the road. He wasn't
a man of many words, would walk by you times enuff
wi'out sayin' owt, specially when he was in study. He
was always a-studying, and you might see his lips
a-goin' as he went along the road." Another speaks of
him as " a vara practical-eyed man, a man as seemed
to see aw that was stirrin'." He walked in later days
with "a bit of a stoop," which somewhat diminished
the sense of his real height, which was about six feet.
When he was making a poem, " he would set his head
a bit forward, and put his hands behint his back.
And then he would start a-bumming, and it was bum,
bum, bum, stop ; and then he'd set down, and git a bit
o' paper out, and write a bit. However, his lips were
always goan' whcale time he was upon gress walk.
WORDSWORTH'S PERSONAL CHARACTERISTICS. 143
He was a kind mon, there's no two words about that ;
if anyone was sick i' the plaace, he wad be off to see
til' 'em." His only recreations were walking and
skating. He was first upon the ice, and
Wheeled about
Proud and exulting like an untired horse,
That cares not for his home.
He had very little care for personal appearance. He
usually wore a wideawake and old blue cloak : " niver
seed him in a boxer in my life," says one witness with
pathetic reproach. He had even been known to ride in
a dung-cart upon his longer excursions : "just a dung-
cart, wi' a seat-board in front, and bit o' bracken in t'
bottom, comfortable as owt." He had a deep bass
voice, and when he was " bumming " away in some
remote part at nightfall, the casual passenger was
almost terrified. He constituted himself by common
consent general custodian of the beauties of the dis-
trict, and prevented many a copse from being cut
down, and superintended the building of many a
cottage. Not a companionable man, however. A
remoteness about him which awed men rather than
attracted them. Indeed, their one complaint about him
was that he had no convivial tendencies, like Hartley
Coleridge, who came very much nearer the rustic ideal
of a poet than the solitary of Rydal Mount. He was
"a desolate-minded man; as for his habits, he had
noan ; niver knew him with a pot i' his hand, or a pipe
i' his mouth." He "was not lovable in the faace, by
noa means " the face was too rugged and austere to
be fascinating. So one rustic observer after another
bears his witness, the net result being a sufficiently
luminous picture of a strong and somewhat taciturn
man, buried in his own thoughts, passing up and
M4 THE MAKERS OF MODERN ENGLISH
down among his fellows with a certain awe-inspiring
unapproachableness, and yet a man of warm heart and
quick sympathy ; not a cheerful man, but a man who,
after long battle, has won the secret of peace, and walks
a solitary path, clothed with silence, and winning from
others the reverence due to the hermit and the sage.
Stiff and awkward as Wordsworth often was in con-
versation, yet there were times when he created a
sincere admiration by his talk. Haydon says, " Never
did any man so beguile the time as Wordsworth. His
purity of heart, his kindness, his soundness of prin-
ciple, his information, his knowledge, and the intense
and eager feelings with which he pours forth all he
knows, affect, interest, and enchant one." But among
all the various literary portraits which we possess of
Wordsworth, there is none so subtle and so potent
as Carlyle's. Carlyle thought little of Wordsworth's
writings, but after he had met him he says : " He
talked well in his way ; with veracity, easy brevity,
and force. His voice was good, frank, sonorous ;
though practically clear, distinct, forcible, rather than
melodious; the tone of him business-like, sedately
confident, no discourtesy, yet no anxiety about being
courteous ; a fine wholesome rusticity, fresh as his
mountain-breezes, sat well on the stalwart veteran, and
on all he said and did. You would have said he was
a usually taciturn man, glad to unlock himself, to
audience sympathetic and intelligent, when such offered
itself. His face bore marks of much, not always peace-
ful, meditation ; the look of it not bland or benevolent
so much as close, impregnable, and hard ; a man multa
tacere loquive paratus, in a world where he had experi-
enced no lack of contradictions as he strode along.
The eyes were not very brilliant, but they had a quiet
WORDSWORTH'S PERSONAL CHARACTERISTICS. 145
clearness ; there was enough of brow, and well-shaped.
He was large-boned, lean, but still firm-knit, tall, and
strong-looking when he stood ; a right good old steel-
grey figure, with a fine rustic simplicity and dignity
about him, and a veracious strength looking through
him, which might have suited one of those old steel-
grey Mark-gmfs, whom Henry the Fowler set up to
ward the marches, and do battle with the intrusive
heathen in a stalwart and judicious manner." The
last phrase recalls to us Wordsworth's confession in
the " Prelude " to his early love of battle-histories, and
thirst for a life of heroic action. A man who had not
had something of the fighter in him could never have
defied the world as he defied it. His imaginative faculty
made him a poet ; but under all his intellectual life
there throbbed the difficult pulse of a valorous restless-
ness, and he had in him the pith and sinew of the
hero. Poets have too often been the victims of their
own sensitiveness, but Wordsworth stands among
them as a man of stubborn strength, an altogether
sturdy and unsubduable man. " Out of this sense of
loneliness," a friend once wrote to Harriet Martineau,
" shall grow your strength, as the oak, standing alone,
grows and strengthens with the storm ; whilst the ivy,
clinging for protection to the old temple-wall, has no
power of self-support." Doubtless the loneliness of
Wordsworth's life fed his strength, and no finer image
than that of the oak could be found to describe the
resolute vigour of Wordsworth's character. He cer-
tainly was no weak spray of ivy clinging to a temple
wall ; but he never forgot the temple and its sanctities
notwithstanding ; and if he was an oak, it was an oak
that had its roots in sacred soil, and cast the shadow
of its branches on the doorways of the sanctuary.
10
CHAPTER XVI.
WILLIAM WORDSWORTH CONCLUDING SURVEY.
IT is evident to the reader who has followed this
imperfect study of Wordsworth with any degree
of care that his merits and defects are alike great, and
in concluding our survey it is well to recapitulate
them. In few poets are the profound and trivial found
in such close proximity, and this is his chief defect.
Like Browning, for many years Wordsworth had few
readers, and consequently wrote more for his own
pleasure than with the artistic restraint and careful-
ness which the sense of public praise and criticism
impose. Such criticism as he received was little
better than insane or spiteful vituperation, and its
only effect was to increase in a man of Wordsworth's
temperament a stubborn dependence on himself. It
is hard to say which acts with worse effect upon a
poet, the adulation of an undiscerning or the apathy of
an indifferent public. It seems likely, however, that
if Wordsworth had received any public encourage-
ment early in life, it would have acted beneficially,
in leading him to perceive his own faults of style,
and perhaps to correct them. There are various
passages in Wordsworth's letters which prove that,
while he braced himself to endure public hostility with
uncomplaining stoicism, yet he would not the less have
WILLIAM WORDS WOR TH CONCL UDING SURVEY. 147
valued public encouragement. But as years wore away,
and his circle of readers still continued to be of the
narrowest, he cared less and less to write with any de-
finite attempt to gain the public ear. He wrote for his
own delectation, and, as we have seen, often attached
false values to his poems. He failed, as every solitary
writer must fail, to discriminate between the perfect
and imperfect work of his genius. The result is that
to-day the perfect work of Wordsworth is hampered by
its association with the imperfect. His readers often
fail to take a just measurement of the noble qualities of
his genius, because it is so easy for them to pass from
his greatest poems to passages of verse-writing which
are dull, trivial, bald, and in every way unworthy of
him. This fact has been amply recognised by Matthew
Arnold, and he has endeavoured to remedy the defect
by his admirable selection from the works of Words-
worth. Few poets bear the process of selection so well,
and certainly none have so much to gain by it.
There is something of pathos, indeed, in the recol-
lection of the relation which Wordsworth bore to the
literature of his day. He came in the wake of Byron,
and uttered a note so different that it is scarcely sur-
prising that the multitude who read Byron had no ear
for Wordsworth. For every thousand who bought
"Childe Harold," there was perhaps one who bought
the "Lyrical Ballads." When contempt and hostility
had slowly passed into grateful recognition his fame
was menaced from another quarter. By that time
Tennyson was making himself heard, and Tennyson
soon passed Wordsworth in the race for fame. Words-
worth never knew the joy of unrivalled and indisputable
pre-eminence. His star rose unperceived in the firma-
ment \\here Byron reigned in splendour, and before
148 THE MAKERS OF MODERN ENGLISH.
the fading afterglow of Byron had left a space for his
modest light to spread, it was again eclipsed by the
growing beams of Tennyson. The one poet had the
vehement personality; and the other the rich and ornate
style, which Wordsworth lacked. Each appealed to
the popular ear as he did not ; the one with a more
masterful, the other with a more musical, note. It
seemed part of the irony of fate that Wordsworth
should nurture his heart in solitary endurance to the
end, and should never know what it was to reap the
full harvest of his toils. Perhaps also there is a law of
compensation at work which has ensured to Words-
worth a more solid fame than Byron seems likely to
enjoy, or Tennyson is likely to attain. The sureness
which we usually associate with slowness has certainly
marked the growth of Wordsworth's fame ; and it may
be confidently said that at no period since the appear-
ance of the " Lyrical Ballads" has Wordsworth been
so widely read as now. Can as much be said of
Byron ? Will as much be said in a hundred years of
Tennyson ? Of Byron at least it is true that he has
decreased while Wordsworth has increased. While
the star of Byron has gradually receded, the star of
Wordsworth has risen into dominance, and burns with
an enduring and immitigable flame. If the verdict of
universal criticism goes for anything, it is clear that
Wordsworth has come to stop.
There are, of course, some dissentients to this judg-
ment, but one hardly pays much attention nowadays to
the erratic criticisms of Mr. Swinburne, and still less
to Mr. Oscar Wilde when he writes contemptuously of
" Mr. Wordsworth," or Mr. Andrew Lang, when he is
good enough to inform us that he does not care "very
much for Mr. William Wordsworth." These are merely
WILLIAM WORDSWOR TH CONCL UDING SUR VE Y. 149
the small impertinences of criticism, meant to excite
laughter, but likelier to inspire contempt, and in no
case worthy of any serious resentment. Nor can one
quarrel seriously with so genial a humorist as Edward
Fitzgerald, when he is provoked by the almost irritating
respectability of Wordsworth to write of him as " my
daddy." It is more to the purpose to recollect that
Coleridge placed Wordsworth " nearest of all modern
writers to Shakespeare and Milton, yet in a kind per-
fectly unborrowed and his own." If this be regarded
as the unconsidered praise of enthusiastic friendship,
we have also to recollect that Matthew Arnold, who
was always frugal in his praise, and never guilty of
untempered adulation, has practically endorsed this
verdict. With Shakespeare and Milton he will not
compare him, but next to these august names he ranks
Wordsworth as the man who has contributed most
to the permanent wealth of English poetry since the
Elizabethan age. Nor does Mr. John Morley, the latest
critic of Wordsworth, contest the justice of this criti-
cism. He cannot grant him Shakespeare's vastness of
compass, nor Milton's sublimity, nor Dante's " ardent
force of vision," but he admits Wordsworth's right to
comparison, and admirably states Wordsworth's pecu-
liar gift when he says, " What Wordsworth does is to
assuage, to reconcile, to fortify. Wordsworth, at any
rate, by his secret of bringing the infinite into common
life, as he invokes it out of common life, has the skill
to lead us, so long as we yield ourselves to his influence,
into inner moods of settled peace ; to touch ' the depth
and not the tumult of the soul ; ' to give us quietness,
strength, steadfastness, and purpose, whether to do or
to endure." He would be a daring man who contested
a verdict endorsed by the three most eminent names of
150 THE MAKERS OF MODERN ENGLISH.
modern criticism, and it is pretty safe to assume that
on all the main issues this verdict is decisive, and is
not likely to be seriously impugned.
Any final survey of Wordsworth's work would be
incomplete without mention of what may, after all, be
taken as his noblest single poem, the " Ode on In-
timations of Immortality from Recollections of Early
Childhood." This poem was written when Words-
worth was at the prime of his powers (1803-6), and is
rich in his peculiar excellences. It also sums up much
that is most characteristic in his philosophy. The
starting-point of his philosophy is that man has in
himself all the elements of perfect life, if he will but
learn how to adjust himself to the environment in
which he finds himself:
The Child is father of the Man,
I could wish my days to be
Bound each to each in natural piety.
The evils of life spring from the perverse disregard of
his true instincts, to which man is prone. The child
loves Nature, and is happiest in contact with Nature,
and it is for that reason Wordsworth urges the absolute
need for communion with Nature in the perfect human
life. In the natural instincts of the child's heart we
have, if we only knew it, the true indications of the
highest possible development of human nature. They
are the pointer-stars by which we can measure the
firmament of human life, and ascertain the true bear-
ings and infinite courses of human destiny. But
behind this assumption another question lies : we ask,
What is there to prove to us that these instincts are
right, and from whence do they spring ? The answer
to this question Wordsworth gives in this great ode.
WILL I A M WORDS WOR TH CONCL UDING SURVEY. 151
As usual, he probes the mystic depths of his own
experiences, and from that depth rescues the clue
which interprets to him the whole mystery and cir-
cumference of human destiny. He tells us that as a
child he had no notion of death, nor could he bring
himself to realise it as a state applicable to his own
being. He felt within himself the movements of a
spirit that knew nothing of decay or death. He even
felt it difficult to realise the fact of an external world,
so absorbed was he in the rapture of idealism. " Many
times," he says, "while going to school, have I grasped
at a wall or tree to recall myself from this abyss of
idealism to the reality. At that time I was afraid of
such processes. In later periods of life I have de-
plored, as we have all reason to do, a subjugation
of an opposite character, and have rejoiced over the
remembrances, as is expressed in the lines:
Obstinate questionings
Of sense and outward things,
Fallings from us, vanishings,
Blank misgivings of a Creature,
Moving about in worlds not recognised,
High instincts, before which our mortal nature
Did tremble like a guilty Thing surprised.
He recalls the " dream-like vividness and splendour
which invests objects of sight in childhood," and then
asks : What is the interpretation of this 'sense of
wonder and strangeness which is the earliest recollec-
tion of childhood in the presence of external nature ?
His reply is that in the child's spiritual aloofness from
the world, in his sense of the foreignness of life as he
finds it, is the intimation of his previous existence in the
purer realms of spirit, and of his ultimate return to a
spiritual existence. He is a spirit clothed with fleshy
152 THE MAKERS OF MODERN ENGLISH.
apparel for a moment, but immortal in himself, and
moving through the darkened ways of mortality with
the primal fire of immortality burning in his heart, and
trembling upwards to the source from which it sprang.
The world is his prison-house, and the great end of
life is not to be reconciled to the prison-house, but to
retain and strengthen the Divine desires which haunt
him with the sense of something lost, and something
higher. Mere shadowy recollections they may be, and
yet they are
The fountain-light of all our day,
Are yet a master-light of all our seeing ;
Uphold us, cherish, and have power to make
Our noisy years seem moments in the being
Of the eternal silence ; truths that wake
To perish never ;
Which neither listlessness, nor mad endeavour,
Nor Man nor Boy,
Nor all that is at enmity with joy
Can utterly abolish or destroy !
This poem is the noblest of all testimony to the
profound religiousness of Wordsworth's spirit. It
breathes something more than the peace, it trembles
with the rapture of the loftiest piety. It purges, it
transforms, it exalts us. We catch a spiritual glow
as we listen, we see before us the unfolding vision of
glory beyond glory, such as he saw who stood on
Patmos and beheld the heavens opened, and the in-
finite cycles of immeasurable Divine purposes fulfilling
themselves. Prisoners though we be, stifled in a
world of sense, weighed upon with fetters of ignoble
custom, yet as we climb the solitary peak of contem-
plation where Wordsworth stands like a seer lost in
vision
WILLIAM WORDSWORTH CONCLUDING SURVEY. 153
Our souls have sight of that immortal sea
Which brought us thither,
Can in a moment travel hither,
And see the children sport upon the shore,
And hear the mighty waters rolling evermore.
And last, it may be noted, that in literary finish and
pregnancy of phrase Wordsworth never surpassed this
poem. It marks the complete culmination of his power.
Phrase after phrase, such as
Faith that looks through death,
In years that bring the philosophic mind ;
or,
Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting ;
or,
To me the meanest flower that blows can give
Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears,
has passed into the currency of literature unnoticed,
by reason of some unforgettable quality of thought or
expression, which stamps itself upon the universal
memory. Longer poems, full of passages of memor-
able insight or emotion, Wordsworth has written, but
his great qualities find no nobler display than in this
poem. Nowhere does he more nearly approach to
" Milton's sublime and unflagging strength, and Dante's
severe, vivid, ardent force of vision." It is, in fact,
one of the few great odes of English literature, and
is in itself sufficient to give Wordsworth rank among
the few greatest poets who stand secure above the
transience of human taste,
the great of old,
The dead but sceptred sov'reigns, who still rule
Our spirits from their urns.
154 THE MAKERS OF MODERN ENGLISH.
Finally, we note that Wordsworth is not the poet
of youth, but of maturity. There is poetry, as there is
art, which does not dazzle us with wealth of colour,
but which deals in cool and silvery greys, unnoticed by
the taste which seeks startling and sensational effects,
but infinitely refreshing to tired eyes which have long
since turned from the sensational in resentment and
something of disgust. Perhaps it is not until we have
been surfeited with gaudy art that we learn fully to
appreciate this very different art. Then is the time for
the cool grey : then it is that these softer and soberer
tones of colour soothe the eye and satisfy the brain.
It is, in the same way, precisely when the poets of our
youth cease to allure us that the charm of Words-
worth begins to be most keenly felt. To the mature
man, who has wearied of the theatrical glitter of Byron
or the cloying sweetness of Keats, Wordsworth comes
like the presence of Nature herself. He does not
captivate the taste with casual brilliance, but he
subdues it with a sense of infinite . tranquillity and
refreshment. He satisfies the heart, he inspires and
stimulates the thought. We read him not once, but
many times, and as life advances we find that he is
one of the few poets we need not cast aside. He
ennobles and invigorates us. He advances with us
as we pass into those shadows which lie about the
doorways of mortality, and his voice never falters in
its encouragement and pious hope. He becomes to us
more than a poet he is our guide, philosopher, and
friend ; and when many other guides of youth are
shaken off, the mature mind grows more and more
sympathetic .to Wordsworth, and finds in him a
spiritual comradeship such as no other poet has it
in his power to give.
CHAPTER XVII.
THE HUMANITARIAN MOVEMENT IN POETRY-
THOMAS HOOD AND MRS. BROWNING.
[Thomas Hood, born in London, 1798. Wrote the " Song of the
Shirt," 1843. Died in London, May 1845. Mrs. Browning, born
in London, March 4th, 1809. Died in Florence, June 29th, 1861.]
ANY survey of the poets would be incomplete which
did not take into account the beginnings of a
movement in modern literature which we may call the
Humanitarian Movement. If we cared to go back far
enough in the search for its beginnings, we should clearly
have to touch again upon the work of Crabbe, who
is in many respects the father of humanitarian realism
in poetry. Crabbe had no delicacy of touch and little
refinement of mind, but he knew how to paint his
pictures of the suffering poor in a broad and effective
fashion, which secured him both attention and fame in
his day. The weak point in Crabbe's work is a certain
vitiating touch of coarseness. He sometimes excites
repulsion where he means to stimulate pity. Between
pity and repulsion the line of demarcation is often
slender, and Crabbe's power of discernment was not
sensitive and subtle enough always to observe it. There
is a certain air of deliberation about his realism, and
sometimes a tedious accumulation of detail in his
method, which hide from us the genuine, honest
156 THE MAKERS OF MODERN ENGLISH.
sympathy of his nature. In a word, Crabbe lacks
passion. His nature is too s^w and solid to kindle
into white-heat, or to kindle others. It was reserved
for two later poets, Thomas Hood and Mrs. Browning,
to take up the work which he began, and to do it with
such vehemence and passion that their writings consti-
tute a new era in modern poetry.
Dissimilar as Thomas Hood and Mrs. Browning
were in many respects, yet their lives bear a close re-
semblance in familiarity with misfortune. Hood's life
was a story of hard work faithfully done ; of frequent
sorrows borne with brave endurance and buoyant trust.
His first verses appeared in a Dundee newspaper, and
like many other men he slid into literature rather by
force of circumstances than by intention and deliberate
dedication. Like many others, he also found that
literature was an excellent crutch but a bad support.
His knowledge of engraving and his comic genius
brought him bread, but the means of living were often
sorely scanty. At one time he was virtually expatriated
by commercial losses, and took up his residence in
Germany. With weak health, often broken by periods
of acute suffering, with a family which increased with
perplexing rapidity, with constant pecuniary embarrass-
ments to depress and harass him, Hood never bated
a jot of heart or hope ; and for those who can discern
the true nobleness of such a struggle as this Hood will
wear something of the lustre of the true hero. It was
not the Byronic heroism which mouths its part upon
the stage, and invites the public to share its secrets,
but the heroism of reticence, which endures and is
quiet. Hood obeyed Carlyle's doctrine : he consumed
his own smoke. He wrote no bitter, petulant, or com-
plaining poems. To the public his mouth was always
THOMAS HOOD AND MRS. BROWNING. 157
full of jests, and his kindly face always lit with smiles.
The crowd applauded his jests, but little knew how
heavy was the heart of the jester. Hood was not the
man to let them know. Perhaps with him, as with
Abraham Lincoln, "laughter was his vent for sorrow :"
if he had not laughed he would have died of a broken
heart or frenzied brain. He so habitually practised
the art of jesting at his sorrows that his son tells us
that even when the shadow of death had fallen on him,
and a sinapism of more than usual potency was applied
to his wasted chest, he said, smilingly, " It seems a
great deal of mustard for so very little meat." And
this life-long sorrow of Hood, this daily-enacted tragedy
of " despairing hope," did not make him selfish, but
sympathetic, and led him to look with passionate insight
and pity on the sorrows of others. Perhaps it needs
a sufferer to interpret suffering, and only a man who
had found how hard it was to work for bread in London
could have written the " Song of the Shirt."
The same story of personal suffering occupies more
than half of the life of Mrs. Browning. She indeed
was opulent enough to be above the bitter fight for
bread, but her troubles came in another way. Her
first volume was published in her seventeenth year, and
bore the ambitious title " An Essay on Mind." This
was followed by a translation of the " Prometheus
Bound," of ^Eschylus, in 1833, and this again by two
volumes of original poems in 1838-9. It was at this
period that the shadow of calamity was projected over
the life of the young poet. She burst a blood vessel,
and was removed in a state of extreme debility to
Torquay. While there her brother and two other
young men were drowned by the capsizing of a sailing
boat. This tragic event completed the prostration of
158 THE MAKERS OF MODERN ENGLISH.
the sufferer. From that hour, and for many years to
come, she lived the life of a confirmed invalid a life
that hung trembling on the borders of the invisible
land, and which was never lifted out of the solemn
shadows of eternal things. The bloom of her youth
was gone, and her thoughts naturally took a deeper
and a devotional tone. The inactivity of her body
seemed to stimulate her mind to redoubled exertion.
Her close friend, Miss Mitford, has given us in a
sentence a picture of the isolated and yet intense life
which Miss Barrett as she then was spent for many
years. She was " confined to a darkened chamber, to
which only her own family and a few devoted friends
were admitted ; reading meanwhile almost every book
worth reading in almost every language, and studying
with ever-fresh delight the great classic authors in
the original." For Mrs. Browning was one of the few
women who have attained to ripe and exact classical
scholarship, and in her day that was an attainment far
rarer than it is in ours. In that darkened chamber the
great minds of all ages held converse with her, and
they alone were friends who never wearied, who never
came too early, never stayed too long, and never were
denied an audience. And in that life of languor and
suffering her feelings were liberated, and her sym-
pathies educated into an almost painful sensitiveness.
The contact of the world's sorrow was for her like a
burning iron laid upon a raw place. It was impossible
for her to speak of it save with an accent of pathos
so deep as to be almost agonised. Her power of
pathos pervaded everything she wrote. Her verses
often seem to quiver and throb with the passionate
sympathy out of which they sprang. We hear the
weeping in them, we feel the yearning. There is a
THOMAS HOOD AND MRS. BROWNING. 159
sort of heart-searching power in Mrs. Browning, which
no other poet of our times has had. She is wholly
possessed with her subject, and her intensity possesses
and overcomes her readers. It is impossible to doubt
that with her, as with Hood, suffering was an educa-
tion. The acquaintance with grief taught her the secret
of comfort, the mystery of pain the secret of trust, and
the loneliness of life the secret of insight. It was that
prolonged comradeship with sorrow which instructed
her how to touch the springs of human sympathy with
so sure a hand, and led her through the avenues of
her own suffering into a sacrificial comradeship in the
sufferings of society.
At this point, however, an essential difference between
Hood and Mrs. Browning is evident. To Mrs. Browning
poetry was not so much a purpose as a passion, whereas
Hood's serious poetry was the rare counterfoil to his
comic genius. Mrs. Browning said of her life-work,
" Poetry has been as serious to me as life itself, and
life has been very serious. I never mistook pleasure
for the final cause of poetry, nor leisure for the hour
of the poet. I have done my work so far as work;
not as mere hand and head work apart from the
personal being, but as the completest exposition of
that being to which I could attain, and as work I offer
it to the public, feeling its shortcomings more deeply
than any of my readers, because measured by the
height of my aspiration." It is feared that poor Hood
never had time to make poetry his life-work. His son
said that nothing would have surprised him more than
to have witnessed the publication of his "Serious
Poems." How finely Hood could write, when the
pressure of life left him a brief leisure for the higher
exercise of his powers, is seen in such poems as the
160 THE MAKERS OF MODERN ENGLISH.
" Haunted House," " Eugene Aram/' and in such sweet,
bird-like notes of lyric pathos and melody as "It was
the Time of Roses " and " I remember." Hood pos-
sessed a strong imagination, together with great noble-
ness of feeling and purity of diction. The "Haunted
House " is one of the most masterly studies in horror
which any literature can show. The slow, deliberate
piling-up of the imagery of horror, the association of
all that superstition can invent or cowardice can dread,
of all that past tragedy can accomplish or bequeath,
the gradual culmination of gloom and horror as the
poem passes to its conclusion, makes it in its way an
extraordinary production, such as only an artist of first-
rate excellence could have perfected. In the hands of
anyone but a master the reiteration and multiplication
of images of fear would have become absurd or mono-
tonous, but with Hood they produce the effect of
thickening gloom, and it is an unbearable and doomful
voice which utters the hoarse refrain,
O'er all there hung the shadow of a fear,
A sense of mystery the spirit daunted,
And said, as plain as whisper in the ear,
The place is haunted !
We have need to turn to poems like these to form a
true estimate of Hood's poems. In ardour of thought
and intensity of imagination he may fall very far
behind Mrs. Browning, but do not let us forget that
while Mrs. Browning had every opportunity for the
development of her genius, Hood's noblest powers
were stifled by the sordid needs of life. The kinship
between them was not intellectual, but moral. And at
one point in the development of these widely different
lives they touched and mingled, and for both poetry
THOMAS HOOD AND MRS. BROWNING.' 161
became as serious as life, and was not so. much a
purpose as a passion. That point of accord was the
humanitarian sympathy which wrung from the solitary
student of Greek poetry and mediaeval romance the
" Cry of the Children/' and from the sickly journalist
who must needs jest for bread the " Bridge of Sighs "
and the " Song of the Shirt."
Another thing worthy of notice is that it was in the
writings, and through the influence, of Thomas Hood
and Mrs. Browning, that the city in its tragic social
aspects became definitely annexed to the realm of
English poetry. The poetry of the country is easily per-
ceived: it needed a more discerning eye to recognise the
strange and moving poetry of the city. Both these poets
were Londoners, and so thoroughly was Hood a child
of the city that he might have said with a later poet :
City ! I am true child of thine !
Ne'er dwelt I where great mornings shine
Around the bleating pens ;
Ne'er by the rivulets I strayed,
And ne'er upon my childhood weighed
The silence of the glens ;
Instead of shores where ocean beats,
I hear the ebb and flow of streets.
Hood knew the "tragic heart of towns," and was
almost the first of our poets to recognise in poetry
the social problems of great cities. Until Hood wrote
it may even be said that English poets had little or
nothing to say about cities. Poetry had haunted the
quiet dales of Westmoreland and the sunny heights of
Italy, the happy places of flowers and feasting, the
solemn places of tragic gloom where world-wide histories
had been shaped, but it had shown no appreciation of
the tragic miseries of great cities. Wordsworth saw
II
1 62 THE MAKERS OF MODERN ENGLISH,
no vision from Westminster Bridge but the vision of
the dawn adding splendour and majesty to the long
lines of houses and the broad sweep of flashing river.
Even Shelley, with all his sympathy for suffering,
wrote no poem directly dealing with the slow martyrdom
of the obscure and half- famished toilers of London.
He did once say, bitterly enough, that hell must be a
city very like London but that was all. He was the
child of dreams, and in his lifelong dream of social
reconstruction was too absorbed in the splendours of
hope to take minute note of the sorrows of reality.
But Hood lived in London, and saw day by day the
open secret of its misery. He lived at the beginning
of a new social age which was fast blotting out the
hamlets of England, and replacing them by an empire of
cities. He was face to face with the social problems
which overshadowed the nineteenth century ; and what
wonder is it that behind the woven tapestry of city
splendour, the outward glory and sustained dignity of
metropolitan life, he pierced to the silent tragedy of its
multitudinous lives spent in unvictorious struggle, in
famished drudgery, and reluctant shame ? Hood re-
called men from the vision of Nature to the vision of
man ; from the vision of man in rustic innocence to the
vision of man among the sordid degradations of vast
cities. It is now generally admitted that deterioration
is the Nemesis of city life, and perhaps not merely
deterioration of physique, but of sympathy, which is
a far more serious matter. Possibly Hood would not
have gone so far as to say that a great city is a great
calamity, but when he cried,
Alas ! for the rarity
Of Christian charity
Under the sun !
THOMAS HOOD AND MRS. BROWNING. 163
he meant his rebuke to be specially applied to that
callous indifference to others which cities inevitably
breed, and his words struck the first note of a new
movement which is fast socialising poetry, and chang-
ing not merely its themes but its spirit.
And in the same spirit, if not in the same degree,
Mrs. Browning is also the poet of cities. She can
paint with Turneresque breadth and vigour the sun
pushing its way through a London fog, and can
delight in
Fair fantastic Paris ! who wears trees
Like plumes, as if man made them, spire and tower,
As if they had grown by nature ; tossing up
Her fountains in the sunshine of her squares,
As if in beauty's game she tossed the dice,
Or blew the silver down-balls of her dreams
To sow futurity with seeds of thought.
And if in her later poetry Mrs. Browning sings of
cities, it is clearly not because she has lost her fresh
and vigorous delight in Nature. Who has ever spoken
of Nature with more rapt intensity of joy ? She loves
rural England so well that she says it is
As if God's ringer touched but did not press
In making England, such an up and down
Of verdure ; nothing too much up or down ;
A ripple of land, such little hills, the sky
Can stoop to tenderly, and the wheatfields climb;
Such nooks of valleys lined with orchises,
Fed full of noises by invisible streams.
And how exquisitely she speaks of
Spring's delicious trouble in the ground,
Tormented by the quickened blood of roots,
And softly pricked by golden crocus-sheaves.
164 THE MAKERS OF MODERN ENGLISH.
And how perfectly she speaks also of herself, in that
young green world, " singing at a work apart,"
As sings the lark when sucked up out of sight
In vortices of glory and blue air.
So lost is she in a world of symbolism, that she tells us
Every natural flower which grows on earth
Implies a flower upon the spiritual side ;
and withal there is about her a spiritual imaginative-
ness, to which the whole mystery of earth and heaven
lies naked and open, which is almost unmatched for
purity and intensity among our poets. Such a woman,
had she lived all her life in the home of violets, might
have sung only of the fragrance and delight of Nature,
and she had done well. But she also lived in London,
and London weighed upon her soul. She could not
rid herself of its ghastly presences, and so the hand
that wrote these lovely passages, which seem almost to
exhale the very odour of the spring, wrote also of the
social evil which
Slurs our cruel streets from end to end
With eighty thousand women in one smile,
Who only smile at night beneath the gas.
What it cost for a woman of such delicate sensitiveness
and womanly purity as Mrs. Browning to write such
lines as these we cannot know, but we can measure by
them the depth of that impression which the horror
of cities had made upon her spirit. And we can
understand also how the spectacle of wronged and
martyred child-life in great cities moved her not less
deeply, and we realise the fierce tension of almost pro-
phetic malediction which hurled against our vaunted
civilisation the reproach of our
THOMAS HOOD AND MRS. BROWNING. 165
Ragged children, with bare feet,
Whom the angels in white raiment
Know the names of to repeat
When they come on us for payment.
With Mrs. Browning, as with Hood, it was the force of
an intense sympathy which urged her to the contem-
plation of social wrongs, and wrung from her a song of
poignant sorrow, indignation, and reproach.
And again, of Hood and Mrs. Browning it must be
added that each is a Christian humanitarian. Bitter as
is the indictment which they bring against society, yet
neither is hopeless. Mrs. Browning sometimes writes
as one who " at the cross of hope with hopeless hand
is clinging," and tells us
I was heavy then,
And stupid, and distracted with the cries
Of tortured prisoners in the polished brass
Of that Phalarian bull, Society
I beheld the world
As one great famishing carnivorous mouth,
An open mouth, a gross want, bread to fill the lips
No more
but she also hastens to add that her despair was
because she
heard the cries
Too close ; I could not hear the angels lift
A fold of rustling air, nor what they said
To help my pity.
Despair springs from want of imagination, and Mrs.
Browning had far too vivid a vision of eternal things to
be pessimistic. A Divine trust, a tender resignation,
a clear hope in a beyond, both for the individual and
society, fill her writings, and Christ is in all her thoughts
of men, and all her hopes for the future of man,
166 THE MAKERS Of MODERN ENGLISH.
In her essay on "The Great Christian Poets" she
has said : " We want the touch of Christ's hand upon
our literature as it touched other dead things ; we want
the sense of the saturation of Christ's blood upon the
souls of our poets, that it may cry through them in
answer to the ceaseless wail of the Sphinx of our
humanity, expounding agony into renovation. Some-
thing of this has always been perceived in art when its
glory was at the fullest." Something of this a hope-
fulness in the final triumph of humanity is always
to be perceived in Mrs. Browning's poetry. The agony
of the world weighs heavily upon her. The wail of
its pain and desolation vibrates incessantly upon her
heart. She not merely hears it and feels it, but
actually shares it. By force of exquisite sensitiveness,
she seems to appropriate the sum of the world's agony
to herself, till it is the agony of one who not only sees
and sympathises with sorrow, but whose own heart is
literally pierced and bleeding with the rankling barbs.
There are poems of Mrs. Browning's which could only
have been written in a flood of tears, and which cannot
be read without tears. The intensity of her yearning,
her tenderness, her compassion, is almost painful. But
she always knows how to expound agony into renova-
tion. She sees the brightness of a great hope falling
across the world like the slanting beams of a growing
sunrise, and she ever points to the dawn. And although
Hood's work in humanitarian poetry is limited to two
powerful poems, and he has nothing of Mrs. Browning's
prophetic force and vision, yet it is clear also that
while he attacks society he is not unhopeful of it. The
Christian faith which enabled him to bear his hard lot
without murmur, and to say when he was dying, " Lord,
say, Arise, take up thy Cross and follow Me," enabled
THOMAS HOOD AND MRS. BROWNING. 167
him also to believe that through the charity and sacrifice
of which the Cross is a type, and through that alone,
the healing of society would come. For in the true
social gospel there must always be something more
than vehemence, and something better than violence :
there must be the message and counsel of reconstruction,
and the hope of final triumph and millennium.
Perhaps it is a large claim to make for the writer of
the "Song of the Shirt" that he was unconsciously
a great voice in inaugurating a new movement in
poetry; but we have to remember that single poems
have more than once proved epoch-making in literature.
But it is certainly a valid contention in any case, that
the poet is frequently the secret force from which
national tendencies and purposes are born.
It takes a soul
To move a body ; it takes a high-souled man
To move the masses even to a cleaner stye ;
It takes the ideal to blow an inch aside
The dust of the actual ; and your Fouriers failed,
Because not poets enough to understand
That life develops from within.
It is the humanitarian passion of poets like Hood and
Mrs. Browning that do far more than we think to soften
life with charity, and inspire it with sacrifice and com-
passion. Of course both Hood and Mrs. Browning
were not humanitarian poets alone. Mrs. Browning
is the uncontested queen of English song, and her
work is various and wonderful. The strength of her
affections, the ardour of her thought, the devoutness
of her spirit, are qualities quite as marked as the
tenderness and breadth of her sympathies. But when
we come to estimate the most enduring force in her
poetry, we find it to be its humanitarian passion. It
1 68 THE MAKERS OF MODERN ENGLISH.
was that which inspired not only her "Cry of the
Children " and the " Song for Ragged Schools," but the
greatest, if the most unequal, of all her poems, " Aurora
Leigh." Had Hood not written the " Song of the
Shirt," he could have claimed no place among the chief
literary forces of our time. As it is, we have to estimate
the rare quality of his genius as much by its intimations
as its accomplishments. But if Mrs. Browning had
never written "Aurora Leigh" she would still have
been a great poet ; she would not have been so great
a poet, however, and she would certainly have missed
the greater portion of her fame. For it is in the power
of sympathy that Mrs. Browning stands supreme, and
the noblest outbursts of her sympathy were caused by
social inequalities, sorrows, and martyrdoms. It is for
this reason that, passing over a hundred other things
which might be said about her genius and her poetry,
we fix on this dominant aspect of her lifework, nor
perhaps would she have wished it otherwise. The
simple and sufficient epitaph which covers the dust of
Hood is, " He sang the ' Song of the Shirt,' " and to
have written the " Cry of the Children " and " Aurora
Leigh " is praise sufficient even for one of the most
rarely-gifted writers who has ever enriched the world
of English poetry.
CHAPTER XVIII.
LORD TENNYSON. GENERAL CHARACTERISTICS.
[Born at Somersby, Lincolnshire, August 5th, 1809. "Poems by
Two Brothers," published by J. Jackson, Louth, 1827. "Poems,"
chiefly lyrical, published 1830. "Poems," in two volumes
(Moxon), 1842. The "Princess," 1847. "In Memoriam," 1850.
Became Poet-Laureate in the same year. "Maud," 1855. The
"Idylls of the King," 1859: completed 1885. "Enoch Arden,"
1864. Offered and accepted a Peerage, 1883].
WHEN we come to the name of Tennyson we do
well to pause, for in his many-sidedness he
represents more fully than any other poet of our day
the complex thought and activities of the century in
which his lot has been cast. Seldom has a poet's fame
grown more slowly or securely, and never has a poet's
career been crowned with a larger degree of worldly
success. It is now more than half a century since his
first slender volume of poems appeared. At that date
Christopher North, otherwise Professor Wilson, and the
Edinburgh reviewers were in the full heyday of their
power, and exercised a dominance in criticism which it
is difficult for us to understand to-day. A new poet
in those days had to fear ridicule more than indifference,
a position which may now be said to be entirely re-
versed. By turning to that section of the complete works
of Tennyson headed Juvenilia, we can ourselves judge
what was the character of the claim which the young
poet in 1830 made upon the public attention. The
170 THE MAKERS OF MODERN ENGLISH.
volume is not merely slender in bulk, but equally slight
in quality. The influence of Keats is apparent every-
where. There is a femininity of tone and a sensuous-
ness of word-painting which are in the exact manner
of Keats. The triviality of Keats' worst style is as
apparent as the magic phrasing of his best. Take, for
instance, this stanza from "Claribel"
The slumbrous wave outwelleth,
The babbling runnel crispeth,
The hollow grot replieth,
Where Claribel low-lieth.
This is weak with the peculiar weakness of Keats ;
the straining after effect by the use of uncommon and
affected forms of speech. Nor do the other poems in
the little volume rise to anything like a high average.
There are, however, splendid indications of true and
genuine power amid much that is weak and imitative.
u Mariana " is a piece of powerful painting, done with ex-
cellent artistic taste, intention, and finish. Finer still is
the tl Recollections of the Arabian Nights." It is rich,
almost too rich indeed, in its colouring, but no one can
fail to feel the charm of words in such lines as these :
At night my shallop rustling thro'
The low and blooming foliage, drove
The fragrant glistening deeps, and clove
The citron-shadows in the blue :
By garden-porches on the brim,
The costly doors flung open wide,
Gold glittering through lamplight dim,
And broidered sofas on each side ;
In sooth it was a goodly time,
For it was in the golden prime
Of good Haroun Alraschid.
But in fineness of workmanship and depth of feeling
LORD TENNYSON. GENERAL CHARACTERISTICS. 171
the " Deserted House," the " Dying Swan," and
" Oriana " take an easy precedence. In the second of
these poems there is that which goes further to ensure
a poet the attention of the public than anything else
there is distinctiveness and originality. The " Dying
Swan " was sufficient at once to stamp Tennyson as
an original poet. In its perfectly accurate depiction of
Nature it may remind us somewhat of Wordsworth,
but it is a mere suggestion, and the style is wholly
different. Wordsworth's has been described as the
pure style in poetry ; Tennyson's as the ornate. The
bond of likeness is in the fidelity of each poet to the
actual facts of Nature. Wordsworth .never drew a
picture of mountain solitude, or lake scenery, more
simply true to fact than the picture this young Lincoln-
shire poet gives of the great open spaces of the fen-
country, with their breadth of sky and far-stretching
solitude, which is almost desolation, and their gleaming
watercourses fretting everywhere, like silver threads,
the waste of green.
The plain was grassy, wild, and bare,
Wide, wild, and open to the air,
Which had built up everywhere
An underroof of doleful grey.
* * *
Ever the weary wind went on,
And took the reed-tops as it went.
* * #
One willow o'er the river wept
And shook the wave as the wind did sigh j
Above in the wind was the swallow,
Chasing itself at its own wild will,
And far thro' the marish green, and still
The tangled watercourses slept,
Shot over with purple, and green, and yellow.
172 THE MAKERS OF MODERN ENGLISH.
The sense of desolation is complete. It is not con-
veyed to the mind by a single vivid touch, in the
manner of Wordsworth, but by a series of cumulative
effects, which are equally striking. It is not wonderful
that a poem like this should arrest the attention of a
mind like Christopher North's. The first volume of a
poet has rarely contained anything so full of conscious
strength, and so complete in its mastery of the art of
poetry, as this pathetic picture of the Dying Swan.
Christopher North " rusty, crusty Christopher"
as Tennyson afterwards called him, was perhaps more
conscious of the weakness of the young poet than of
his strength. In 1832, when the famous "Blackwood"
criticism appeared, Wordsworth was still a rock of
offence to the critics, and gibes and insult had not yet
ceased to follow him to his solitude at Grasmere. Seven
years were to elapse before Oxford was to recognise his
greatness, eleven years before the Laureateship was
his, It was an unpropitious hour for poets. There
had come a great ebb tide in poetry, perhaps a natural
result of that extraordinary outburst of lyric splendour
with which the names of Shelley and Keats are asso-
ciated. Robert Southey was Laureate, and an age
which had enthroned Southey as Laureate might well
turn a deaf ear to the voice of Tennyson. Upon the
whole it is greatly to the credit of Professor Wilson
that he had discrimination enough to see anything at
all in the humble volume of poems by Alfred Tennyson,
which was sent him for review ; and he took occasion
to give the young poet some excellent advice, for which
he had the humility and discernment to be thankful.
The cardinal error of these early poems Professor
Wilson was keen enough to discern at once. It was
what he called " puerility." There was a sort of un-
LORD TENNYSON. GENERAL CHARACTERISTICS. 173
wholesome sadness about them, a distasteful melan-
choly, a mawkishness of tone and subject. It may be
added that the note of restrained and tender melancholy
has always been one of the chief features of Tennyson's
poetry. It is not obtrusive, but it is pervasive ; it is
rarely bitter or cynical, but it is always there. It is
apparent in the choice of subject, even in these early
poems. Death and change strike the keynote of the
volume. Mariana " in the moated grange " cries
I am aweary, aweary,
Would God that I were dead !
One of the sweetest of the songs is
Of the mouldering flowers ;
* * * * *
The air is damp, and hushed, and close,
As a sick man's room when he taketh repose
An ho r before death.
The fine ballad of " Oriana " is a ballad of death,
and the " Dying Swan," although it rises into a voice
of noble music in its close, is nevertheless a poem of
desolation and sorrow. And over and above all this,
a large part of the volume, no fewer than five poems
indeed, are devoted to the depiction of various types of
womanhood. Sweetness there is in the volume, but
not strength ; and the sweetness is cloying rather than
piercing. It is not the voice of the strong and hopeful
man, but of the poet touched with an incurable melan-
choly of thought and outlook. Yet if melancholy strikes
the keynote of the whole, it is not less true that the
melody is really new and striking. The first poem
bears the under-title of "A Melody," and in the word
Tennyson shows an exact appreciation of his own
powers. Melodious he always is. No poet has ever
174 THE MAKERS OF MODERN ENGLISH.
had a profounder knowledge of the laws of metrical
music. It is the melody of his phrase that carries it
home to the memory, not less than its felicity. Any
student of Tennyson can recall at will scores of lines
which cling to the memory by the charm of their own
exquisite music.
Take such examples as these :
From " Tithonus : "
While Ilion like a mist rose into towers.
From " Ulysses:"
And drunk delight of battle with my peers
Far on the ringing plains of windy Troy.
From the " Princess : "
Myriads of rivulets hurrying thro' the lawn,
The moan of doves in immemorial elms,
And murmuring of innumerable bees.
In these last lines there is an overpowering imagina-
tive charm, something almost magical in its bewitch-
ment, which makes us think of the words of Keats,
that to him a fine phrase was an intoxicating delight.
It is melody, the finest and most magical melody of
which words are capable. There is nothing in the
early poems of Tennyson to match such exquisite
phrasing as this, but there are nevertheless sure indi-
cations of where the real power of the poet lay. It
was the advent of an intensely artistic mind, palpitat-
ingly alive to the vision and power of beauty, touched
with the artist's ecstasy, and with the artist's corre-
sponding melancholy, keen, subtle, delicately-poised,
possessing the secret of loveliness rather than of rude
vigour; it was the advent of such a mind into the
world of English poetry which was signalised by
LORD TENNYSON. GENERAL CHARACTERISTICS. 175
that slender volume of Poems by Alfred Tennyson,
published in 1830.
But bright as were the indications of poetic genius
in the earliest work of Tennyson, few could have dared
to augur from them the height of excellence to which
the poet has now attained. A yet severer critic than
Wilson was Lockhart, who reviewed the 1833 poems in
the Quarterly Review of that year, and it is noticeable
that almost every suggestion of Lockhart was here-
after adopted by Tennyson. He had the sense to take
the advice of his critics, to rid himself of puerilities, to
be patient, to dare to investigate and grapple with his
own faults, to enter upon a course of arduous labour and
invincible watchfulness, to practise not merely the ear-
nest culture of art, but also to seek the self-restraint of
art ; and he has fully justified their presage that he had
in him the making of a great poet. Poetry has not been
to him a pastime, but the supreme passion and toil of
life. Again and again he has polished and remoulded
his earlier poems, not always, perhaps, to their advan-
tage, but always with the intent of making them
more perfect in metrical harmony, and more complete
and concise in poetic workmanship. The melody has
grown with the years; it has become more subtle,
more penetrating, more magical. He has carried the
art of metrical construction to a height of perfection
never before attempted in English poetry. It is diffi-
cult to find a false rhyme, a slovenly stanza, or a halt-
ing metre in all the great bulk of his completed works.
As an example of the infinite laboriousness of true
poetic art there can be no finer example. And in
variety of subject he has but one rival. He has treated
the romantic, the antique, the domestic life of the world
with equal skill. History and theology, art and science,
1 76 THE MAKERS OP MODERN ENGLISH.
legendary lore and modern social problems find constant
reflection and presentment in his poetry. Some of his
poems are so clearly hewn that they are like mighty
fragments of the antique ; some treat of English peasant
life ; some of fairy lore, some of religious fancy, some
of social dreams and yearnings ; in some the theme is
slight, but the slightness of the theme is forgotten in
the excellence of the workmanship ; in some the theme
is as solemn as life and death, and touches issues
which are as old as human thought. " Rapt nuns," it
has been said, " English ladies, peasant girls, artists,
lawyers, farmers, in short, a tolerably complete re-
presentation of the miscellaneous public of the present
day," jostle one another in his picture galleries. True,
the cosmopolitan note of Browning is wanting ; but if
Tennyson has not the catholic sympathies of Browning,
he has succeeded in touching with the utmost felicity
many aspects of English life which his great rival has
ignored. And his mood and style are as various as his
themes. In such poems as " Dora " we have a Words-
worthian simplicity of diction, a coolness and purity of
colouring almost cold in its severity. In such poems
as " Maud " and " Locksley Hall " we have the utmost
elaboration of ornate imagery and effect. He can be
severely simple and chastely sensuous, classic and
grotesque, subtle and passionate, passing with the ease
of perfect mastery from love to dialectics, from the wail
of a sombre pessimism to the exaltation and rapture of
the triumphant lover. He can even be humorous, and
excellently humorous too, as in such a poem as the
" Northern Farmer." It is probably in this diversity of
gifts that the great secret of Tennyson's wide popularity
is to be found. He touches many classes of readers,
many varieties of mind. Of his limitations, his pecu-
LORD TENNYSON. GENERAL CHARACTERISTICS. 177
liarities of view and outlook, his attitude to religion and
politics, his pervading melancholy and the causes of it,
we shall see more as we devote more particular attention
to his works ; but enough has been said to explain why
it is that he has won not merely wide but sound
popularity ; and not merely popularity, but fame and
success such as no other English poet has ever enjoyed
in the brief period during which his work was actually
being done, and when the fruits of success were keenest
to the taste, and most alluring to the ambition.
12
CHAPTER XIX.
TENNYSON'S TREATMENT OF NATURE.
THE variety of Tennyson's work makes the task of
arranging it more than usually difficult. Certain
portions of his work are directly philosophical, and are
meant to be elucidations or solutions of some of the
deepest problems of humanity. Others are surcharged
with mournfulness, and might be called lamentations;
dirges over dead hopes, lost glories of chivalry, or the
bitter presage of future trouble travelling towards us
in the development of social perils. Others are purely
fanciful, lyrics finished with airy grace, or poems
breathing the enchantment of fairy lore. But such a
classification as this is incomplete; and fails to yield
the result which a just criticism desires. Broadly
speaking, there are certain great subjects on which
all true poets have something to say. These subjects
are nature, woman, life, politics, and religion. Nature
needs no definition ; under the head of woman we
must include all that pertains to love and chivalry;
under the head of life, the general view of human
action and society which distinguishes a poet ; under
politics, the poet's view of progress and the future of
the race ; under religion, what the poet has to say
about the devout longings of humanity, its sorrows and
their solution, the future and its promises. It will be
found that under this classification the works of all
TENNYSON'S TREATMENT OF NATURE. 179
great poets can be readily placed. It is the view of
Nature which is the distinguishing feature in Words-
worth ; it is the view of woman gross, carnal, callous
which is the damning feature in Byron; it is the
view of religion which lends such paramount interest
to the poetry of Arnold and Browning. Let us begin,
then, by examining what Tennyson has to say about
Nature.
We have already seen that to Shelley Nature was
something more than an abstract phrase; she was
something alive, a radiant and potent spirit, a glorious
power filling the mind with infinite delight, and drawing
out the spirit of man in ecstatic communion. The
first thing we note about Tennyson is that Nature is
not to him what she was to either Shelley or Words-
worth. He nowhere regards Nature as a living
presence. He at no time listens for her voice as for
the voice of God. To Shelley Nature was Love; to
Wordsworth she was Thought; to Tennyson she is
neither. He does not habitually regard Nature as the
vesture of the Highest the outward adumbration of
the invisible God. He does not even regard her with
the purely sensuous delight of Keats. And the reason
for this lies in the fact that the sympathies of Tennyson
are so various that there is no excess in any ; it is the
full play of an exquisitely-balanced mind that we see,
rather than the fine ecstasy of an enthusiastic artist.
To Wordsworth Nature was everything, and on the
solitary hills he worshipped before her altars, and in
the voice of the winds and waters he heard her breath-
ings, and caught the message of her wisdom. Apart
from men, in solemn loneliness, incurious about the
crowded life of cities, or the vast movements of the
troubled sea of human thought, he stood, silent and
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entranced, waiting for revelations of that Eternal
Power, whose splendour glowed upon the hills at
dawn, and whose mind uttered itself out of the starry
spaces of the wind-swept heavens at night. But
Tennyson has never professed himself incurious about
the progress of human opinion, or indifferent to the life
of cities. Wordsworth's was the priestly temperament,
Tennyson's is the artistic. The great drama of human
life has not been permitted to pass him unnoticed. He
has found joy in the refinements of wealth, interest in
the progress of society, passionate absorption in the
theological controversies of his time. A certain dra-
matic interest has always drawn him towards the tragic
realities of past history and of present life. He has
the quick eye of the scientific observer, or of the artistic
draughtsman, but little of the rapt contemplation of the
seer. Thus it follows that, while Nature perpetu-
ally colours his writings, he has nothing new to say
about her.
There is, however, one quality which distinguishes
his view of Nature from that of other poets, viz.,
the scientific accuracy of his observation. Nature to
him is neither Love nor Thought : she is Law. He is
full of the modern scientific spirit. He sees every-
where the movement of law, and the fulfilment of vast
purposes which are part of a universal order. He is
under no delusion as to the meaning of Nature ; so
far from being Love, she is "red in tooth and claw
with rapine." The conclusions of modern science
Tennyson has accepted with unquestioning faith, and
the only factor which preserves him from an unpoetical
view of Nature is the religious faith, which makes him
perceive Nature not as a mechanical engine of fate, but
as a process of law leading to nobler life and larger
TENNYSON'S TREATMENT OF NATURE. 181
being. That is the mission of law : not to slay, but to
make alive ; not to fulfil a blind course, but to work out
a Divine purpose, and a diviner life for man, in those
far-distant cycles which eye hath not seen, nor hath it
entered into the heart of man to conceive.
Then comes the statelier Eden back to men ;
Then reign the world's great bridals, chaste, and calm ;
Then springs the crowning race of human kind.
In other words, Tennyson sees Nature with the eye
of the evolutionist, and traces through all her processes
the fulfilment of a Divine wisdom, which means well
toward man, and all that it has made
One God, one law, one element,
And one far-off Divine event
To which the whole creation moves.
On the other hand, because Tennyson says little that
is new about Nature, it must not be assumed that he
does not love her. On the contrary, he has studied
her with unwearied fidelity, for which his knowledge
of science has probably given him sharpened instinct
and patience. It would be a curiously interesting study
to mark the wide difference between even Shelley's
broad generalisations of Nature, accurate as they are,
and the minute patience which Tennyson has devoted
to every little touch of depiction, in which clouds, or
birds, or woods are represented to us. Tennyson's
mind is not merely exquisitely sensitive to natural
beauty, but it is deeply tinged with the characteristics
of that scenery in which his early manhood was passed.
The grey hillside, the "ridged wolds," the wattled sheep-
fold, the long plain, the misty mornings on the fens,
the russet colouring of autumn this is scenery such as
England abounds in, and is especially characteristic of
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Lincolnshire. Even more distinctly drawn from the
fen scenery are such lines as these :
And the creeping mosses, and clambering weeds,
And the willow-branches, hoar and dank,
And the wavy swell of the soughing reeds,
And the silvery marish-flowers that throng
The desolate creeks and pools among
Were flooded over with eddying song.
In this single poem of the " Dying Swan," as we have
seen, there is an extraordinary accumulation of effects,
drawn from the sadness of Nature, and used with per-
fect skill to enhance the pathos of the picture ; and the
soughing of the wind in the Lincolnshire reeds is to be
heard in many another poem with equal sadness and
distinctness.
It is not without interest to remark that so great a
poet as Tennyson is educated not amid the wonderful
dawns and cloud scenery of the Lake district, but
under the " doleful underroof of grey " built up every-
where above a flat country, where no doubt the tour-
ist if such, indeed, ever ventures into such solemn
solitudes would aver that there is nothing picturesque
or striking. For a poet who was to express the sadness
and satiety of the nineteenth century, however, it may
be doubted if a more appropriate cradle-land could be
discovered.
No doubt it is in part to these natural influences
which surrounded his boyhood that the extraordinary
fidelity of Tennyson's descriptions of Nature is to be
attributed. Where there was little to describe it was
natural that the power of observation should be trained
to minute accuracy. Miss Thackeray tells us that he
once asked her to notice whether the skylark did not
come down sideways on the wing. This is extremely
TENNYSON'S TREATMENT OF NATURE.
183
characteristic of Tennyson's habit in the observation
of Nature. He never coins a false phrase about the
humblest flower that blows, for the sake of the felicity
of the phrase and at the expense of the tints of the
flower. He tells us precisely what he has seen. If he
tells us that in the spring " a fuller crimson comes upon
the robin's breast," and a " livelier iris changes on the
burnished dove/' we may be quite sure that he has
watched the robin and the dove, and written with his
eyes on them rather than on the paper. The sidelong
descent of the lark is a thing to be noted, that when he
comes to speak of it he may use a phrase that even
the scientific naturalist would approve. The conse-
quence of this fidelity to Nature is that Tennyson is
constantly startling us with the vivid accuracy of his
descriptions. We say again and again, " That is so ;
I have seen it," and the picture is ineffaceably stamped
upon the memory. Sometimes it is done with a single
phrase, or even a concentrated word. The writer will
not soon forget how throughout one autumn he was
haunted by the phrase,
All in a death-dumb, autumn-dripping gloom.
Again and again, as he climbed the Dorsetshire hills,
the line met him at the summit : for there lay the
death-dumb land, the long plain with its dim wisps of
fog already beginning to rise, without voice or sound ;
the stillness of the dying season like the silence of a
death-chamber ; and just perceptible in the near hedge-
row the constant drip of the dew, like the falling of
unavailing tears. Let anyone choose a very quiet, grey
day in late autumn, when there has been a previous
night of fog, and stand in a solitary place and listen, as
the night begins to fill the land, and he will feel how
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exquisite is the truth of the description of Arthur
coming home, and climbing slowly to his castle
All in a death-dumb, autumn-dripping gloom.
The same vivid pictorial power is illustrated in many
other passages which will readily occur to the Tenny-
sonian student. How admirable a touch of depiction
is this : it is the hour of sunset on the marshes,
when
The lone hern forgets his melancholy,
Lets down his other leg, and, stretching, dreams
Of goodly supper in the distant pools.
"A full sea, glazed with muffled moonlight/' is the
perfect vignette of what he once saw at Torquay ; a
waterfall "slow-dropping veils of thinnest lawn/' a
sketch taken on the Pyrenees ; " a great black cloud
draw inward from the deep/' an etching made upon the
top of Snowdon. From boyhood he loved the sea, and
studied it in all its moods, with the result that his
sea-pictures are always exquisitely truthful. In those
hours of " wise passiveness " he marked
The curled white of the coming wave
Glass'd in the slippery sand before it breaks,
and how
The wild wave in the wide north-sea,
Green-glimmering toward the summit, bears with all
Its stormy crests that smoke against the skies
Down on a bark, and overbears the bark
And him that helms it.
It would be difficult for words to attain to higher
pictorial art than this : these two verses are two perfect
pictures of the summer and the winter sea.
The main point to observe, therefore, about Tennyson
TENNYSON'S TREATMENT OF NATURE. 185
is, that in him we have the scientific observer and the
artist, rather than the interpreter of Nature. Words-
worth interprets ; Tennyson describes. He is vivid,
pictorial, picturesque ; but he has no fresh insight into
the soul of things, save such as his science furnishes
him. But if he has no new gospel to preach us from
the book of Nature, we may at least rejoice in the
perfect finish and enchantment of his pictures.
To this it may be added that these pictures are for
the most part essentially English in tone, atmosphere,
and subject. Now and again, but with great rareness,
he has depicted foreign scenery, as in the " Daisy : "
How faintly-flushed, how phantom-fair,
Was Monte Rosa, hanging there,
A thousand shadowy pencilled valleys
And snowy dells in a golden air.
And the picture is perfect both in glamour and fidelity.
But it is in English pictures he excels. Who that has
seen the land of Kent does not recognise this ?
The happy valleys, half in light, and half
Far shadowing from the west, a land of peace ;
Grey halls alone among their massive groves ;
Trim hamlets : here and there a rustic tower
Half lost in belts of hop and breadths of wheat ;
The shimmering glimpses of a stream ; the seas ;
A red sail or a white ; and far beyond,
Imagined more than seen, the skirts of France.
Or who does not feel the truth of this touch of rural life
in England ?
The golden autumn woodland reels
Athwart the smoke of burning weeds.
Nor is it only such peaceful scenes as these that
Tennyson can invest with the magic of his art; he
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knows how to grasp the larger effects of Nature, the
mountain-gloom, the cloud-grandeur, the dawn of day
or night of tempest, and touch them off with an
imaginative skill and power of phrase which stamp
them indelibly on the memory. For let him who has
watched the pageant of the dying day say if any human
art could more grandly fix in words the western cloud
effects than this :
Yonder cloud,
That rises upward, always higher,
And topples round the dreary west,
A looming bastion fringed with fire.
Or let him who has studied the warfare of wind and
cloud and the wild upheaval and terror of gathering
tempest say if this is not a picture such as Turner
would have delighted to paint, and only he could have
painted in all its stern magnificence :
The forest cracked, the waters curl'd,
The cattle huddled on the lea ;
And wildly dashed on tower and tree
The sunbeam strikes along the world.
Nor could an angry morning after tempest be better
painted than in this one pregnant line :
All in a fiery dawning, wild with wind.
Nor could the savage splendour of Alpine fastnesses,
where precipice and glacier rise tier above tier, in
shattered beauty and unvanquishable strength, be better
brought home to the imagination than in this touch of
solemn imagery :
The monstrous ledges slope, and spill
Their thousand wreaths of dangling water-smoke
That like a ruined purpose waste in air.
TENNYSON'S TREATMENT OF NATURE. 187
Nor has the breaking up of a stormy sky, when the
clouds suddenly lift as though withdrawn upon invisible
pulleys, and there is light at eventide, ever been repre-
sented better than in one of the eailiest of all these
poems, the immature and unequal " Eleanore : "
As thunder-clouds, that hung on high,
Roof d the world with doubt and fear,
Floating thro' an evening atmosphere,
Grow golden all about the sky.
And for imaginative intensity, such as the great Greek
poets would have delighted in, and indeed wholly in
their manner, it is hard to excel the phrase in which
Tithonus describes the glory of the dawn :
And the wild team
Which love thee, yearning for thy yoke, arise
And shake the darkness from their loosened manes,
And beat the twilight into flakes of fire.
Or the farewell of Ulysses, when he cries :
Come, my friends,
Tis not too late to seek a newer world,
Push off, and, sitting well in order, smite
The sounding furrows ; for my purpose holds
To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths
Of all the western stars until I die.
These are but random samples of the perfection to
which Tennyson has wrought his art in the faithful
and accurate depiction of Nature. Every word tells :
it tells because it is true, because it expresses- the
very spirit of the scene that he would paint, not less
than its external show. The labour and culture which
lie behind such perfect phrases as these are immense.
Not iRfrequently the source of some fine image is to be
found in some remote page of the older poets, and part
1 88 THE MAKERS OF MODERN ENGLISH.
of the charm of the Tennysonian phrase is that it is
often reminiscent a subtle echo, as it were, of a more
ancient music, which does not offend but fascinate.
Thus the image of the " ploughed sea " is one of the
very oldest since the dawn of language, and the picture
of the dawn in "Tithonus" has its counterpart in
Marston's noble lines
But see, the dapple-grey coursers of the morn
Beat up the light with their bright silver hoofs,
And chase it through the sky.*
But the more enduring element of beauty in such
lines is their delightful truthfulness. "The sounding
furrows " is an exact representation to ear and eye of
what happens when the heaving waters are suddenly
smitten with the level sweep of oars. The darkness
trampled into flakes of fire is the precise effect of the
instantaneous irruption of the splendour of the dawn,
when the thin clouds that lie across the east are broken
up into floating fragments, and hang quivering, like
golden flames, in the lucid air, when the world lies
still and windless, waiting for the day. "The fiery
dawn/' the great burst of streaming yellow, not
graduated into crimson or purple, but all vast and
lurid, like an angry conflagration in the east, is a
spectacle which the seaman knows too well, when the
night has been " wild with wind," and the storm pauses
at the dawn, only to gather strength for the riotous
havoc of the day. It is the exact truth of Nature
which is fixed in phrases like these. It is the truth
Turner painted, the vision of the miracle of Nature
which he strove with infinite toil and true inspiration
to retain in his immortal canvases. And because it is
* Vide Lamb's Specimens of Elizabethan Poetry.
TENNYSON'S TREATMENT OF NATURE. 189
true art, therefore it is fine art. Much that might be
said of Nature, Tennyson has not said ; to much that
others have said he is indifferent. But this at least he
has done : he has approached Nature, not with the hot
and hasty zeal of the impressionist, but with the cool
eye of the consummate artist; and every sketch of
Nature which he has given us, whether of the common-
place or the extraordinary, is finished with admirable
skill, and has the crowning merit of absolute fidelity,
accuracy, and truth.
CHAPTER XX.
TENNYSON: LOVE AND WOMAN
JUST as one of the most crucial points about a poet
is his treatment of NatureJ so again, his view of
Womanhood affords a key to the character of his
mind and the quality of his genius. The love-poetry
of the world is one of its most fascinating inheritances,
and ranges through many keys. Love has always
furnished the impulse to poetry, and has often been its
staple. It would be difficult to find any poet who has
nothing to say of love ; it would be easy to find many
poets who have never written exquisitely till they
became lovers. The new divine warmth of the heart
has liberated the faculties of the intellect, and has
given inspiration and insight to the soul. Even when
the warmth has been sensuous rather than divine, it
has not the less had some effect in the liberation of the
mind. Burns displays his highest genius in his love-
lyrics. Some of the Elizabethan poets are famous only
by a single stanza, or a single poem, which expresses
the passion of the human heart with such felicity, such
delicate skill, such fire and tenderness, that the world
cannot forget their phrases. Rossetti lives in the
vision of womanhood, with every sense perpetually
tingling to the keen delight of passion. Even Words-
worth kindles at the vision of love : he sees the ideal
woman glowing before him, not with any heat of
passion indeed, but with a calm and spiritual radiance,
TENNYSON: LOVE AND WOMAN. 191
which is to him as a sacred flame, searching the spirit
and purifying the heart. Perhaps the poet of our day
least affected by the enchantment of love is Matthew
Arnold. He is too reticent for passion, is too sadly
philospphical to sing the rapture of the lover. But
even Arnold has written love-verses not inspired
lyrics like Burns', but, nevertheless, verses which have
sprung from a lover's yearning. Tennyson is so far
from an exception that love forms the great motive in
all his larger poems. Everywhere he testifies to the
pre-eminence and influence of woman. He has been
an ardent student of womanhood, and has struck out
with admirable skill and genuine artistic feeling many
typical portraits of womanhood. He has mastered the
difficult secret of how to write voluptuously, and yet
retain the bloom of a delicate and almost virginal purity.
He knows how to be passionate, but his passion never
passes into that sensuous extravagance which is the
sign of weakness. There is always a gravity and
earnestness about it which preserves him from an
excess which becomes ridiculous. In this he stands
nearer to Wordsworth than to either Keats or Burns.
But whereas in Wordsworth woman has no command-
ing position, and is almost forgotten and obliterated in
the presence of Nature, in Tennyson woman is always
pre-eminent, and the fascination of woman is at least
as strong as the charm of Nature.
And here again we cannot help tracing the treatment
of woman in Tennyson's poetry to the early influences
which surrounded his boyhood. He was never cast
upon the world, to sink or swim as he could, in the
great seething whirlpools of sensual temptation. He
carried with him no evil heritage of passionate blood,
as did Byron ; he was not brought face to face with
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any daring theories of free-love, as was Shelley ; he
was not dependent on the coarse orgies of village
society for recreation, as was Burns. He breathed an
atmosphere of refinement from the very first. He was
trained by every sight and influence of early life into
that fastidious purity which characterises him. He
grew into vigour in what might be called the cloistral
calm of clerical life in a remote English village. The
baser side of human life was not seen ; the carnal mean-
ings of love never so much as named ; the coarser aspects
of passion were smothered in flowers and fragrances.
Behind all the love-lyrics of Tennyson one sees the
picture of a calmly-ordered home, where domestic love
moves like a shining presence, with hands busy in
silent ministrations, and heart full of the tenderness of
a pure devotion. The portrait of Tennyson's mother is
the key to his reverence for womanhood. It is a beauti-
ful and tender face, delicately moulded, lighted with a
spiritual radiance of sympathy and hope, and yet, too,
bearing pathetic traces of resigned sadness and sorrow-
ful experience. We can understand how Tennyson was
preserved from the fatality of recklessness, how it is
he has worn the white flower of a blameless life, and
has ruled himself with chivalrous regard for woman-
hood, when we study his mother's face. What such
a woman must have been in the home, and what sort
of home it must have been where she moved like a
ministering spirit, we can readily imagine. And how
divinely pure and penetrating may be the influence of
such a woman Tennyson has told us in a passage of the
" Princess," which might without much risk of misinter-
pretation be taken as a personal reminiscence.
I loved her ; one
Not learned, save in gracious household ways,
TENNYSON: LOVE AND WOMAN. 193
Not perfect, nay, but full of tender wants,
No angel, but a dearer being, all dipt
In angel instincts, breathing Paradise,
Who looked all native to her place, and yet
On tiptoe seemed to touch upon a sphere
Too gross to tread, and all male minds perforce
Swayed to her from their orbits as they moved,
And girdled her with music. Happy he
With such a mother ! faith in womankind
Beats in his blood, and trust in all things high
Comes easy to him, and tho' he trip and f^ll
He shall not blind his soul with clay."
The first point to be noted, therefore, in Tennyson's
treatment of love is its conspicuous purity. It is the love
of the chivalrous knight, not of the Bohemian profligate,
which he paints. His whole conception of love is rever-
ential. It is a spiritual passion, not an earthly. He
perceives it in its spiritual working, and not in its fleshly.
With rare exceptions he shuns altogether the fleshly
aspects of love. One exception is found among the
early poems in the striking ballad called " The Sisters,"
but this is an obvious imitation of the ancient ballad
poetry, in which passion is indeed a prime motive, but is
always treated with a healthy frankness. But the poem
partially fails as a perfect imitation of the ancient ballad,
simply because Tennyson cannot allude to unchaste
passion without a burst of terrible denunciation.
She died : she went to burning flame,
She mixed her ancient blood with shame,
The wind is howling in turret and tree.
He leaps upon the desecrator of human love with a
bitter wrath, and with words like the sword-flash oi
an avenging angel. The other great example or
Tennyson's treatment of the baser side of love is the
unlawful love of Guinevere. But even here again, he
manifests the same sternness of avenging purity. Not
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by one touch, one veiled hint or half a word, does he
seek to move the springs of evil concupiscence in his
reader. What he sees again is not the fleshly side of
unlawful passion, but the spiritual. From the sin of
Guinevere springs the ruin of an empire. Her outrage
upon purity is avenged in the downfall of that great
kingdom of chivalry which Arthur had built up with
infinite toil. The great purpose of that kingdom was
that it should be God's kingdom on earth. The work
of its great knights was
To ride abroad redressing human wrongs.
Their rule of conduct was
To speak no slander, no, nor listen to it,
To lead sweet lives in purest chastity,
To love one maiden only, cleave to her,
And worship her by years of noble deeds
Until they won her.
And now what happened ? Arthur tells her she has
spoilt the purpose of his life
Well is it that no child is born of thee.
The children born of thee are sword and fire,
Red ruin, and the breaking up of laws.
The carnal sin of one guilty woman has shattered into
utter ruin the noblest kingdom ever built upon the
earth. That is the one awful fact which Tennyson sees,
and that is the keynote to the whole poem. Where
other poets might have seen a subject on which they
could lavish all the wealth of sensuous imagery, he sees
not the manner of the sinning, and is not careful to paint
it, but the infinite consequences of the sin streaming
on, like a loosened flood of flame, working havoc and
infinite wreck upon every side. Just as it is the spiritual
cleansing of love which he paints when he tells us
TENNYSON: LOVE AND WOMAN. 195
Love took up the harp of Life, and struck on all the chords with
might,
Smote the chord of self, that, trembling, passed in music
out of sight,"
so it is the spiritual and moral effect of the base selfish-
ness of unchaste passion which he describes, when he
paints the breaking up of the Round Table, and Arthur
turning sadly away to lead his disheartened hosts
Far down to that great battle in the west.
It is this perfect and pellucid purity of Tennyson's
mind which has enabled him to do many things impos-
sible to others. Take, for instance, such a poem as
"Godiva." A subject more difficult of handling it
would be hard to find. The slightest prurience of
thought would have been ruinous. So difficult and
delicate is the theme, that the merest featherweight of
over-description, a word too much, a shade of colour
too warm, a hint only of human heat, would upset the
balance, and turn a poem which sparkles with a crystal
purity into a poem brilliant only with the iridescence
of corrupt conception. Such a theme could not have
been entrusted to Rossetti ; scarcely, indeed, to Keats ;
absolutely not to Swinburne. To make it acceptable
not merely the most delicate lightness of touch was
needed, but the most pellucid freshness of thought.
Both Keats and Rossetti would have over-coloured the
picture, and left upon the taste the taint of an unwhole-
some voluptuousness. What Swinburne would have
made of it needs no sort of explanation. But Tennyson,
is able to treat it nobly, with simplicity and severity of
touch, and he does so in sheer virtue of his own purity
of heart. There is about- him something of that divine
quality which Guinevere discovers in King Arthur
196 THE MAKERS OF MODERN ENGLISH.
The pure severity of perfect light.
He has no cunning eye to discern anything in the
subject which can minister to the baser man. What
he sees is a noble woman performing an heroic deed.
He describes her in imagery which clothes her as with
a garment of light :
She lingered, looking like a summer moon
Half-dipt in cloud : anon she shook her head,
And showered the rippled ringlets to her knee;
Unclad herself in haste ; adown the stair
Stole on ; and, like a creeping sunbeam, slid
From pillar unto pillar.
Then she rode forth clothed on with chastity.
It is the moral significance of the scene which fascinates
Tennyson, the spectacle of a woman sacrificing herself
for the people's good, and so building for herself an ever-
lasting name. " Godiva " is a short peom, but it is in-
valuable as an index to the purity of Tennyson's genius,
for no poet, who was not penetrated by the utmost
reverence for womanhood could have treated such a sub-
ject with such daring, or such conspicuous success.
This reverence of Tennyson for womanhood is marked
in all his poems, and is an influence more or less ap-
parent throughout his work. The early poems no less
than the later abound in evidence of its sincerity.
The very fact that somany of his poems describe
women, and bear the names of women, is in itself sig-
nificant. He bears constant testimony to the " finer
female sense," and is careful that he shall not offend it by
his " random string." Woman, as he conceives her, is
the divinely purifying element in human life. Chivalry
to woman is no mere romantic echo of the past : it is
the sign-manual of every noble soul. The apprehen-
TENNYSON: LOVE AND WOMAN. 197
sions of woman are more delicate than man's ; her in-
stincts are surer, her; intuition more certain, her spirit
more gracious, more tender, and more divine. He who
despises the intuitions of pure womanhood quenches a
light which God has set in the world for his guidance
and illumination. Of course this is no new doctrine,
either in poetry or morals. But it came upon the
world almost as a new doctrine in 1830. The women
of poetry fifty years ago the women of Byron, to wit
had no sign of any divine intuition about them.
They were warm, weak, and foolish. They never
exercised the slightest control over men, except the
sensuous control of passion. They were neither reve-
renced nor obeyed. They were the toys of desire, the
beautiful and fragile playthings of an hour. The rever-
ential chastity of Tennyson's treatment of womanhood
was nowhere found in the poetry of sixty years ago.
The revolution and emancipation of woman had not yet
come. It was easy, therefore, for writers like Bulwer
Lytton, throughout whose works there are very few
examples of reverence for woman, and in which the
prevalent conception of woman is debasingly gross and
offensive, to mock Tennyson as " school-miss Alfred."
It was easy to use the femininity of tone in the earlier
poems as a weapon of insult against him. Bulwer
Lytton had yet to discover that reverence for woman
did not imply any lack of virility in manhood. No
more stinging retort was ever made than the verse
which " Miss Alfred " fixed upon the dandy author of
" Pelham : "
What profits it to understand
The merits of a spotless shirt,
A dapper foot, a little hand,
If half the little soul be dirt I
198 THE MAKERS OF MODERN ENGLISH.
For it was not weakness of fibre which bred in
Tennyson a reverence for woman, but nobility of spirit.
And it was something more than this. It was the
outcome of pure training under the gracious eyes of
good women. The home was to Tennyson the highest
and noblest expression of human life. His sympathy
with romance and chivalry gave us exquisite sketches of
mediaeval thought, like the " Lady of Shalott," and finally
worked out the noblest series of poems in modern
literature, "The Idylls of the King." The same ro-
mantic sympathy is apparent in such a poem of fairy
fancy as the " Day Dream." But the strongest move-
ment of Tennyson's mind in the direction of woman-
worship is towards domestic life. It is in married love
the noblest blooming of love is found. It is there the
divinest dreams of love are realised. Happy he to
whom such joy is given, but the joy is not for all.
Of love that never found his earthly close
What sequel ? Streaming eyes, and breaking hearts ?
Or all the same as if he had not been ?
Not so. When Love and Duty strive together, the
victory is with Duty. Any love snatched in defiance of
Duty is not true love : because it forgets reverence to
womanhood, therefore it is base, and can only lead to
moral disintegration and corruption. Better far
Such tears as flow but once a life,
In that last kiss, which never was the last !
For to Tennyson so supreme is the passion of reve-
rence for womanhood, so infinitely high and dear is
womanly purity, that it becomes the key to everything
really noble in human life, and any outrage upon that
is the vilest of all sin such sin as shakes the pillars
''SON: LOVE AND WOMAN. 199
of society, and overthrows the majesty and might of
empire. Reverence for woman and reverence for self
go hand in hand.
Self-reverence, self-knowledge, self-control,
These three alone lead life to sov'reign power,
Yet not for power (power of herself
Would come uncalled for), but to live by law,
Acting the law we live by without fear :
And, because right is right, to follow right
Were wisdom in the scorn of consequence.
But high as Tennyson sets woman, yet he retains a
clear conception of the just and proper place of woman
in society. She may inspire and lead man, but she is
not equal with man. She may, indeed, govern men, but
it is not by the right of superior intellectual endow-
ment, but by the force of her nobility of soul. Her
passions matched with man's
Are as moonlight unto sunlight, and as water unto wine.
That is a rough and dramatic way of expressing the
truth, which Tennyson has worked out at large, with
great subtlety and skill, in the remarkable poem of
the " Princess."
The central point of the whole argument in the
" Princess " is that woman was never meant to wrestle
with man in the arena of intellectual pre-eminence or
the active business of the world. He will reverence
her to the utmost, but he will not abdicate in her
favour. In fact, his very reverence is founded on her
possession of certain qualities which man has in only a
less degree, and those qualities are the highest, because
they lead to the noblest results in the actual adminis-
tration of human life. Man rules through the brain :
woman through the heart. If man is to be ruled by
woman it can only be a spiritual rule, not an intellectual.
200 THE MAKERS OF MODERN ENGLISH.
In nothing is the reasonableness of Tennyson's mind
better seen than in this poem. It would have been
easy for him to become an impassioned advocate of
women's rights. On the contrary, his very reverence
for womanhood leads him to put certain limitations
upon woman's empire, which do not hinder its influence,
but rather intensify it. The power of woman is not
to be wasted in vulgar strife with men for social pre-
eminence : it is too rare, too subtle, too ethereal. That
power finds its highest exercise in moulding men to
morality, and penetrating nations with the spirit of
purity. The woman who is " slight-natured, miser-
able," prevents by her peevishness the growth of man.
There is no strife between man and woman
The woman's cause is man's : they rise or sink
Together, dwarfed or god-like, bond or free.
They are " distinct in individualities," and the only bond
of common life and toil is
Self-reverent each, and reverencing each.
And the noble conclusion of the whole argument once
more leads to that vision of the perfect home which
never fades from the poet's heart
For woman is not imdevelopt man
But diverse : could we make her as the man
Sweet Love were slain : his dearest bond is this,
Not like to like, but like in difference.
Yet in the long years liker must they grow ;
The man be more of woman, she of man ;
He gain in sweetness and in moral height,
Nor lose the wrestling thews that throw the world ;
She mental breadth, nor fail in childward care,
Nor lose the child-like in the larger mind :
Till at the last she set herself to man
Like perfect music unto noble words ;
And so these twain, upon the skirts of Time,
TENNYSON: LOVE AND WOMAN. 201
Sit side by side, full-summed in all their powers,
Dispensing harvest, sowing the To-be.
Finally, we may say of Tennyson's view of woman-
hood, that it is not easy to exaggerate the immense
service he has rendered to society by his constant
insistence on the nobility of purity, the Divine grace of
chastity. He has never glorified the wanton, or clothed
evil with a golden mist of glowing words. He has kept
his moral sense acute and sensitive, and has never
confused the limits of right and wrong. With a clear
and steady eye he has gazed upon the acts of unchaste
passion, but not with sympathy, not with delirious
yearning, not with any voluptuous quickening of the
pulse : but always with loathing, with hatred, with the
strenuous abhorrence of a noble heart, strong in its
virgin purity. He has known where the secret of
strength lay :
His strength was as the strength of ten,
Because his heart was pure.
There is no taint upon his page. He has followed a
high ideal, and has been consistent to it through a long
life. For him vice has had no seduction : a jealous
virtue has sat enthroned in the heart of his genius, and
preserved his mind unsullied. When we consider the
bulk of his work, the multitude of his readers, the
greatness of his influence, and when we contrast with
him the influence and work of such a poet as Byron,
we begin to understand how vast a service Tennyson
has rendered to the cause of righteousness by the
reverent ideal of womanhood he has maintained, and
the great example of purity which he has set.
CHAPTER XXI.
TENNYSON'S VIEW OF LIFE AND SOCIETY.
IT is hardly to be expected of a poet that he should
be required to define his views on sociology, or
that he should begin his work in imaginative literature
with any cut-and-dried social creed, which it is his
mission to propagate. No great poet has ever set out
with any such propaganda. Wordsworth and the Lake
poets did profess a definite creed, and drew up a state-
ment of their principles, but they were purely literary
principles. There was nothing in these principles to
lead the Lake poets towards any common view of
human life, or human society. Each took his own
course apart from the literary principles they professed
in common, and it was inevitable that he should.
Training, idiosyncrasy, environment, the social status
of the poet, the methods of his education, the oppor-
tunities he may have of knowing the world, or the
reverse all these, and a thousand other causes, contri-
bute to the shaping of his thought, and the consequent
attitude of his mind toward human life. But though a
poet may have no definite intention of drawing up any
philosophic interpretation of life, he usually succeeds
in doing so. He cannot help himself. He is bound to
furnish himself with some answer to the great problems
that press upon him hungrily, with a dreadful insistence,
TENNYSON'S VIEW OF LIFE AND SOCIETY. 203
a voice that cannot be silenced. Some ideal of human
society he must have, and he cannot help comparing
things as they are with things as he would make them.
It is the ideal which he ponders in his heart which
gives utterance to his tongue. His ideal rules him. It
is ever before him. He may be himself unconscious of
the persistence of its influence, but not the less that
influence is always with him, and is clearly traceable.
It is like a coloured glass through which the light of
the mind streams : every thought comes to us tinged
with the ideal conceptions of the thinker. When at
last the finished work of a poet lies before us, then
we perceive, and perhaps he also perceives for the first
time, that there is a unity and sharpness of outline
in his thought, which is clear and distinctive. A hint
there, a phrase here, a verse yonder and silently the
underlying thought of the poet emerges. Bone comes
to its bone, till at last, with every reticulation complete,
the skeleton rises clothed in flesh, and the ideal of
human life which was jealously hidden in the poet's
heart stands before us complete and undisguised.
Now, perhaps, the first thing that occurs to the
reader who approaches Tennyson from this point of
view is his sense of order. The tendency of his mind
is distinctly conservative. He hears, indeed, " the roll
of the ages," and he is not unconscious of the revolu-
tionary elements which seethe in society ; but he hears,
if not with unsympathetic stoicism, at least with an
equanimity too settled for disturbance. He is full of
reverence for antiquity, he is filled with an all-sufficing
sense of the perfection and indestructible stability of all
English institutions. His mind is too calm and steady
to be sympathetic towards the passionate revolts and
despairing heroisms of those who seek an immediate
204 THE MAKERS OF MODERN ENGLISH.
reform of society ; he is, indeed, too cool in temper to
catch the glow of such movements as these. The place
in which he habitually walks and meditates is like that
pathway which he has described in the " Gardener's
Daughter : "
A well-worn pathway courted us
To one green wicket in a privet-hedge ;
This, yielding, gave into a grassy walk
Thro' crowded lilac-ambush trimly pruned ;
And over many a range
Of waving limes the grey cathedral towers,
Across a hazy glimmer of the west,
Revealed their shining windows.
Now what are the details of this picture ? What is
the effect it produces on the imagination ? The chief
idea it conveys is a sense of perfect order. The path-
way is well-worn with the feet of generations ; the green
wicket is framed in a perfectly neat and symmetrical
privet-hedge ; the lilac-bush, in its utmost joy of bur-
geoning and blossom, must be allowed no licence it
is " trimly pruned ; " and finally, as if to complete the
sense of well-established use, of absolute propriety, of
faultless order and reverent conservatism, the grey
cathedral walls bound the view, and the shining windows
seem to reflect the glory of the past. In this passage
we have a not inapt illustration of the strongest
tendency of Tennyson's mind. It is from such a neat
and quiet bower of peace he looks out upon the world.
He is a recluse, shut up with his own thoughts, and
weaving the bright thread of his fancy far from the
loud commotions of the world. He loves to surround
himself with influences which minister to this studious
calm. In the garden where he walks no leaf is out of
place, no grass-blade grows awry. If the world he
TENNYSON'S VIEW OF LIFE AND SOCIETY. 205
looks upon hardly matches the spotless propriety of his
retreat, yet, at least, the world shows itself upon the
whole a very proper and well-governed world. Acci-
dents will happen in the best-regulated societies, but
in England at all events they are blessedly rare. Our
roots run deep, and we stand above the shocks of time.
We have grey cathedrals, excellent clergy, gracious
noblemen, stately homes surrounded by the greenest of
lawns, which might almost justify the eloquent eulogism
of the Cambridge gardener, who remarked that such
turf could only be got " by mowing 'em and rolling 'em,
rolling 'em and mowing 'em, for thousands of years ! "
The axiom that " Order is heaven's first law " has been
fully accepted by Tennyson, and has received addi-
tional development : to him order is also earth's best
excellence.
One has only to glance through Tennyson's poems
of modern life to see that this criticism is neither spite-
ful nor unjust. He is usually found in the company of
lords and ladies, princesses, scholars, and generally
refined people, whose place in society is fully assured.
There are exceptions to this statement, of course, which
will occur to every reader. He has studied the north-
ern farmer to good effect, and in the " May Queen "
and " Dora " we have admirable pictures of country
life. But this does not affect the general truth of the
statement. Claribel, Lilian, Isabel, Mariana, are not
daughters of the people. Lady Clara Vere de Vere
certainly receives condign chastisement, but still she
is Lady Clara Vere de Vere. Maud lives in the stately
hall, and the village where her lover meets her is the
sort of perfect village, " with blossomed gable-ends "
which we only see upon a great estate. When he
bitterly assails a lord, it is a new-made lord, with a
2c6 THE MAKERS OF MODERN ENGLISH.
gewgaw title new as his castle, "master of half a
servile shire," and clothed with the rank insolence of
recent wealth. When he alludes to trade it is with the
usual aristocratic contempt, and the ear of the merchant
Is crammed with his cotton, and rings,
Even in dreams, to the chink of his pence,
It is true that he can cry,
Ah, God, for a man with a heart, head, hand,
Like some of the simple great ones gone
For ever and ever by :
One still strong man in a blatant land,
Whatever they call him, what care I -
Aristocrat, democrat, autocrat, one
Who can rule and dare not lie !
But this is, after all, merely the wail of an angry
pessimism. It is the sort of jeremiad in which timid
minds usually indulge when the ancient order of
things seems threatened. Of true democratic feeling
Tennyson is singularly destitute. His leaning is all the
other way. It is the sustained splendour and delicate
refinement of aristocratic life which fascinate him. His
heart is with the ancient order of things, and all his
modern poems breathe the spirit of this sentiment. It
follows, therefore, that Tennyson never has been, and
never can be, in the true sense, a people's poet. That
he has written poems which the very poorest value, and
which might rejoice the heart of the peasant, we gladly
admit. Probably the " May Queen " is far and away
the most popular poem he ever wrote, and it is so
because it touches the hearts of homely people. But
in the main there is little for the common people in
Tennyson's poetry. It knocks at the door of the lady's
bower, but not at the poor man's cottage. Its troops of
TENNYSON'S VIEW OF LIFE AND SOCIETY. 207
knights and ladies, and exquisitely-dressed and admir-
ably-nurtured people, seem out of place amid the coarse
realities of grimed and toiling life. To those who stand
among the shadows of life, those who surfer or fight in
the hard battles of humanity, and feel the cruel irony
and mockery of circumstance, it may well seem that
Tennyson's laudation of order is in itself an irony, that
the puppets on his stage know little of the great throb-
bing heart of the common people, and that <their fine
talk is, after all, a little too finical to pierce into the
most secret chambers of the human memory.
A further evidence of this limitation of sympathy in
Tennyson is found in his treatment of social questions.
He does not ignore them ; he sees them indeed, and
some of his lines, such as the following from the open-
ing of " Maud," quiver with a passionate indignation :
And the vitriol madness flushes up in the ruffian's head
Till the filthy by-lane rings to the yell of the trampled wife,
And chalk and alum and plaster are sold the poor for bread,
And the spirit of murder works in the very means of life.
But it is not in mere denunciation of existing evils
that the true poet should spend himself. The true poet
seeks to probe the heart of the world's sorrow, and
we turn to him to know what verdict he can give, and
whether there is any hope. Tennyson has no distinctive
reply to such questions as these, or if any reply, it is
a hopeless one. He perceives the glorious growth of
science, he foreshadows the vast discoveries of a larger
age, he is sure that on the whole the world means pro-
gress ; but when he brings himself face to face with the
actual details of life lived in poverty, squalor, and crime
he is sullenly unhopeful. He looks upon the whole
question from the point of view of the comfortable
208 THE MAKERS OF MODERN ENGLISH.
burgess, not of the poor man himself who stands amid
the grime of the actual sacrifice. He gazes down from
his sunny vantage-ground of aesthetic refinement, where
"no wind blows roughly/' and ponders, speculates,
sympathises, but his philosophic calm is undisturbed.
He never steps down into the thick of the struggle, and
makes those who unjustly suffer feel that in him they
have a comrade and a champion. When the sudden
light of some glowing, some delusive hope is flung
across their wasted faces, he is quick to tell them that
the hope is delusive, and to rebuke them for their excess
of fond credulity. One of his characters is described as
running
A Malayan muck against the times ;
but when we wait to be told exactly in what his offend-
ing lies, we find that it simply amounts to this, that
he
Had golden hopes for France and all mankind.
This is typical of Tennyson's point of view of social
questions. There is no living heat of enthusiasm in
him : he is wrapped in a chilly mantle of reserve, and
he chills the ardent as he talks with them. When he
proposes a great concession to the poor, what is it ?
Why should not these great sirs
Give up their parks some dozen times a year
To let the people breathe ?
That is all : a mere act of justice, an imperfect recog-
nition of the truth that property has duties as well as
privileges ; but it is announced as though it were a
revolution, and as if the poet himself were astonished
at his own daring. Perhaps, however, the sense of
TENNYSON'S VIEW OF LIFE AND SOCIETY. 209
daring is not surprising when we find that the proposal
was made to a stalwart baronet,
A patron of some thirty charities,
A pamphleteer on guano and on grain,
A quarter-sessions chairman, abler none,
Fair-haired, and redder than a windy morn.
And, practically, this is as far as Tennyson ever goes
in his treatment of social questions. He does not
really grasp them. He does not understand the inten-
sity of peril, or the grave considerations of justice which
underlie them. He stands aloof, in the company of
baronets and princesses, courtly and cultured people,
whose life is perfumed with pleasure and cut off from
all intrusion of tragic misery ; those who fare sumptu-
ously every day, to whom poetry is an exquisite luxury
of the mind as fine colour is to the eye, or delicate
flavour to the appetite : and it is to these Tennyson
sings, and it is their view of life which finds the fullest
reflection in his poetry.
It is characteristic of the scientific spirit that it
rigidly attends to facts, and classifies them, finally
deducing from them great laws which appear to under-
lie and control all things. Thus, in his treatment of
Nature, Tennyson's love of science has worked in the
direction of accuracy of statement and fidelity of de-
lineation. But in his view of life it has checked
generous enthusiasm, and produced coldness of temper.
The survival of the fittest is not in truth a doctrine
likely to produce a sympathetic temper toward the
crippled and the unfortunate. It does indeed kindle a
great light in the future. It pictures the final evolution
of man into some unimagined state of strength and joy,
when he shall have attained his majority, and entered
210 THE MAKERS OF MODERN ENGLISH.
into the scientific paradise which Truth is preparing
for him.
So many a million of ages have gone to the making of man,
that we may well consider him not as having reached
his true height, but as toiling on to something higher
even than he dreams. But however bright may be
the vision of the future, the survival of the fittest is
poor comfort in the vast interval. It has nothing to
say to the halt and maimed, except that they deserve to
be halt and maimed. It can rejoice in the vast move-
ments of society which, like immense waves, carry it
onward to its infinite goal, but it has no compassion
for the lives sacrificed every day in this predetermined
progress. And as one turns over the pages of Tenny-
son, he sometimes finds himself wondering whether
Tennyson has ever suffered deeply. Personal suffering,
the agony of severed love which comes to all, he has
known ; but there is another form of sorrow, the sorrow
of early disappointment and rebuff, which does far
more to educate men into breadth and charity of
view ; and by the buffeting angels of vicissitude he has
been unvisited. Life may be too fortunate, things may
go too well with men in this world. The liquor of life
may corrupt with excess of sweetness ; and for lack of
that wholesome bitter of disappointment, which is God's
frequent medicine to the greatest, a man's heart may
stagnate in an undiscerning content. Is this absence
of vicissitude part of the reason for the comparative
limitation of sympathy which we find in Tennyson's
view of life ? He has been attended by worldly fortune
and success never before vouchsafed to any English
poet. How different the life that closed in sorrowful
isolation at Dumfries, or the life cut off by the violence
TENNYSON'S VIEW OF LIFE AND SOCIETY. 211
of tempest at Spezzia, to the close of this life in fortune,
fame, and peerage ! How different the plain life and
simple house from which came to us the " Ode on
Intimations of Immortality" to x the cultured life of
artistic ease in which the " Idylls of the King " have
been slowly fashioned and perfected in fastidious
patience ! Doubt it as we may, resent it as we do,
nevertheless the truth remains that those wtiose words
live longest in the hearts of men have " learned in
suffering what they taught in song." In them the
heart has most maintained a childlike simplicity and
sympathy : and to them it has been given to survey
life with the largest charity of hope. Is it this lack
of vicissitude in the life of the poet himself which has
dulled the larger sympathies of his nature, and narrowed
the range and spirit of his poetry ? Has he too long,
like his own Maud,
Fed on the roses and lain in the lilies of life ?
It is hard to judge : but no one can be unconscious of
the fact of this limitation. Its causes lie partly in the
order of the poet's life, but mainly in the character of
his own mind, which is dispassionate rather than
ardent, philosophic rather than sympathetic, and better
fitted to touch with subtle delicacy the fringe of a
great problem than to penetrate its gloom with true
imaginative insight.
The final impression which we take, then, from the
modern poems of Tennyson is that his view of life and
society is dull and conventional. The greater portion
of his poetry consists of reproductions : reproductions
from the antique, from the mediaeval, from the romantic.
And this is in itself significant, because it shows how
largely he has turned his mind away from the vision
212 THE MAKERS OF MODERN ENGLISH.
of the present. When he touches the mediaeval and
antique world he is at his best. All the graceful
qualities of his mind then come into play, and he
clothes the past with a glamour of words which soothes
the mind and kindles the imagination with a keen
delight. But in spite of all his attempts, laborious and
partially successful as they are, to seize the modern
spirit, he has failed in the main. He has nothing new
to say : all that he can do is to take old and well-worn
ideas, and clothe them with a novelty of phrase which
gives them fresh currency. He has little faculty of
piercing through the husk of the conventional to the
living thoughts and passions of man which throb
beneath. He passes by, as a careless tourist might
pass over a volcanic district, admiring the flowers and
colour, but not suspecting the angry fire which boils
below his feet. He finds everywhere just what con-
ventional opinion says }'ou ought to find : he has no
strength to tear aside the thin crust, and discover the
passionate possibilities and sad realities which are
decorously hidden from the thoughtless eye. He skims
the surface : he does not probe the depth. Divest his
figures of the garb of musical speech in which they
move, and there is nothing left but commonplace thought
and sentiment. Like the " passon " in the " Northern
Farmer," they say what they " ow't to 'a said," and we
come away with a convincing sense of their entire
respectability. They talk, in fact, very much like
Anthony Trollope's deans and churchmen, who look
out upon life with a curious mixture of sedate thought-
fulness and decorous conservatism. The general effect
they produce upon the mind is dulness. But if Tenny-
son's view of life is dull, and his opinions commonplace,
we cannot but admit that all that the art of the most
TENNYSON'S VIEW OF LI PR AND SOCIETY.
213
perfect phrasing can do to cover dulness Tennyson
has done. He has, indeed, so dexterously concealed
the comparative poverty of his thought in all his modern
poems with the eloquence and beauty of his language /
that many people have not yet discovered the deception.
Nevertheless it is there. The fact that so few are
aware of it is sufficient testimony to the perfection of
the artistic illusion.
CHAPTER XXII,
TENNYSON AND POLITICS.
JUST as we look through the completed works of a
poet in order to get some clue to his general view
of society, so also, with many poets at least, it
becomes necessary to ascertain their view of the larger
movements of life which go under the name of politics.
With some poets only; because some of the greatest
poets have worked so purely in the region of imagina-
tion that no outlook upon the common world has been
possible or permitted to them. Keats was one of those
who lived in a world apart, and to whom poetry was a
divine seclusion, which
Still will keep
A bower quiet for us, and a sleep
Full of sweet dreams, and health, and quiet breathing.
But Tennyson belongs to another school of thought.
Very early in his career he was attracted by the great
political movements of Europe, and the fascination of
politics has never left him. We have, therefore, in his
writings a cluster of poems, and many touches of
allusion and sentiment, which reveal a general attitude
toward politics. It will be interesting to examine these
poems.
In the first place no reader of Tennyson can miss
the note of patriotism which he perpetually sounds.
He has a deep and genuine love of country, a pride
TENNYSON AND POLITICS. 215
in the achievements of the past, a confidence in the
greatness of the future. And, as we have already
seen, this sense of patriotism almost reaches insularity
of view. He looks out upon the larger world with
a gentle commiseration, and surveys its un-English
habits and constitution with sympathetic contempt. The
patriotism of Tennyson is sober rather than glowing :
it is meditative rather than enthusiastic. Occasionally,
indeed, his words catch fire, and the verse leaps on-
ward with a sound of triumph, as in such a poem as
the " Charge of the Light Brigade," or in such a
glorious ballad as the story of the " Revenge." Neither
of these poems is likely to perish until the glory of
the nation perishes, and her deeds of a splendid and
chivalrous past sink into an oblivion which only
shameful cowardice can bring upon her. But as a
rule Tennyson's patriotism is not a contagious and
inspiring patriotism. It is meditative, philosophic,
self-complacent. It rejoices in the infallibility of the
English judgment, the eternal security of English
institutions, the perfection of English forms of govern-
ment. This is his description of England :
It is the land that freemen till,
That sober-suited Freedom chose
The land where, girt with friends or foes,
A man may speak the thing he will ;
A land of settled government,
A land of just and old renown,
Where Freedom slowly broadens down
From precedent to precedent ;
Where faction seldom gathers head,
But by degrees to fulness wrought,
The strength of some diffusive thought
Hath time and space to work and spread.
216 THE MAKERS OF MODERN ENGLISH.
In these verses we have the gist of Tennyson's
general view of English political life. Freedom is not
to him a radiant spirit, flooding the world with Divine
splendour ; nor a revolutionary spirit, moving through
the thunders of war, whose habitation is cloud, and
smoke, and the thick darkness ; nor a Godlike spirit,
putting the trumpet to his mouth, and sounding the
Divine battle-call, which vibrates through the heart of
the sleeping nations, and wakens them to victorious
endeavour ; it is " sober-suited Freedom," a " diffusive
thought," a scientific growth evolving itself through
long ages of patient struggle, a heritage only won by
patience, and only kept by sobriety of judgment and
mutual compromise. Freedom indeed makes " bright
our days and light our dreams," but she also stands
disdainfully aloof from over-much contact with common
men,
Turning to scorn with lips divine
The falsehood of extremes.
Of the falsehood of extremes Tennyson is keenly
conscious. His philosophic insight perceives the peril,
and holds him back from any unregulated enthusiasm.
There is no abandonment about his patriotism. It is
the cool and scholastic patriotism of the moralist, not
the ardent patriotism of the man standing in the full
stream of action and moving with it. And for this
reason it lacks vigour, and it does not inspire men
with any real warmth. There is little in Tennyson's
patriotism that could feed the flame of spiritual ardour
in a time when men actually had to fight and die for
liberty. It is retrospective ; it gilds the past with a
refined glory, but it does not mould the present. It
immortalises the work of the fathers
TENNYSON AND POLITICS. 217
The single note
From that deep chord which Hampden smote
Will vibrate to the doom ;
but if the work of Hampden had to be done over again
we should scarcely look to Tennyson for encourage-
ment ; and when the new Roundheads " hummed a
surly hymn " and went out to battle, we are pretty sure
Tennyson would be found with the king's armies, and
would be the accepted laureate of the ancient order.
There is no doubt room for this species of patriotism,
and it is certainly a not unpopular species. It is the
patriotism of the well-bred and cultured classes, of the
merchant who has made his fortune, the aristocrat who
lives in feudal security, the student or specialist whose
money is safely invested in the funds, and brings in its
uneventful dividends. Nothing is more common than the
praise of English institutions by men who have an im-
perfect sympathy with the processes by which they have
been created. It is the cant of after-dinner speeches, the
infallible note which always wakens thunders of applause
for the utterances of otherwise indifferent speakers.
Nor can we be surprised at the popularity of this kind
of patriotism. It produces a gentle stimulating warmth
of self-complacency which is very pleasant to the
average Englishman. It tells him what he most loves
to hear, that upon the whole he possesses the monopoly
of political wisdom, and holds the patent for the only
perfect form of political government. But we usually
find in this species of patriotism a very deficient sense
of present needs as compared with past glories. And
this is pre-eminently true of Tennyson. When he is
brought face to face with the actual conditions of
modern political life he recoils in angry dismay. It is
one thing to praise the British constitution in theory,
218 THE MAKERS OF MODERN ENGLISH.
it is quite another to approve it in fact. The spirit of
Freedom which moves in the thick turmoil of present
affairs is anything but "sober-suited." The phrase
" sober-suited Freedom " may admirably describe a
Freedom which has been tamed and domesticated, but it
does not describe the spirit of Liberty which actually
worked in the fiery clangour of the English civil wars,
or the French Revolution, or that moves in the hot
parliamentary encounters of to-day. Both there and
here, then and now, Freedom is the radiant and con-
straining spirit, inspiring stormy impulses and emotions,
trampling on ancient wrongs, ever busy and never
resting, carrying on the continual war for the rights
and heritages of man. When that actual reality of
what Freedom means is grasped, the mere connoisseurs
of a tame and domesticated Freedom, adapted to house-
hold uses, always fall back alarmed, and repudiate
Freedom in something like dismay. Tennyson does
not do this altogether, but the recoil is nevertheless
evident. He fears " the many-headed beast " the
people. He distrusts their instincts and impulses.
Their idea of liberty is not
That sober freedom, out of which there springs
Our loyal passion for our temperate kings.
The pulse of the democracy throbs too fast for him,
and liberty moves with an undignified breadth of stride
in these modern days. His contempt for trade breaks
out at every pore, and he thanks God "we are not
cotton-spinners all." And so it happens that while no
poet has had a keener patriotic sense of the greatness
of the past of England, yet Tennyson usually fails to
sympathise with the modern spirit, or to recognise the
real moral greatness of the modern England. We
TENNYSON AND POLITICS. 219
instinctively feel that he distrusts the age, and is
afraid of the growth of popular liberty. There was a
great England once, but that was long ago: over the
England of to-day, too frequently in Tennyson's vision,
the darkness of decadence gathers, and the work of
slow disruption and decay is threatening, even if it be
not already commenced.
One result of this philosophic and tempered patriotism
of Tennyson is that he naturally has little sympathy
with forlorn hopes and unpopular causes. The men
who fail, the great, eager, hasty spirits of humanity who
fling themselves with a noble impulsiveness on the
spears of custom, and gather the cruel sheaf into their
hearts, do not fascinate him. He does not see the
noble side of failure, the quickening vitality of a true
impulse, even though it be misguided, and fail wholly
of attainment. The steady growth of constitutional
liberty, " broadening slowly down from precedent to
precedent," always respecting precedent, never failing
in a proper loyalty to the reigning classes, is a drama
on which he can brood with sober pleasure ; but the
angry uprising of the multitude to whom the bitter
yoke can no longer be made tolerable does not thrill
or inspire him.
For illustration of this mood and temper, take, for
instance, his attitude to France. The French Revolu-
tion was unquestionably the turning-point in European
liberty, and it has been the sad irony of history that
every nation has had a larger share of the spoil of
freedom than France herself. It has been her unhappy
fate to undergo the martyrdom, and Europe has reaped
the victory. Two great poets, Byron and Shelley, had
a large enough conception of liberty to be true to France
in the hour of her agony, and in spite of the excess of
220 THE MAKERS OF MODERN ENGLISH.
horror which made the last stages of the Revolution a
hideous nightmare of unbridled cruelty. Two other
poets, Wordsworth and Coleridge, forsook her and fled.
It is not difficult to understand why. We can compre-
hend how the revulsion of horror fell on both, and how
in that hour of darkness the face of Liberty seemed for
ever obscured. But it is difficult to understand how a
great poet who professes a love of freedom can to-day
fling jeer and jest against the unhappy land whose
sufferings in the cause of liberty have been for the heal-
ing of the nations. Yet this is Tennyson's description
of the French :
But yonder, whiff! There comes a sudden heat,
The gravest citizen seems to lose his head,
The King is scared, the soldier will riot fight,
The little boys begin to shoot and stab,
A kingdom topples over with a shriek
Like an old woman, and down rolls the world
In mock-heroics stranger than our own :
Revolts, republics, revolutions, most
No graver than a schoolboy's barring out,
Too comic for the solemn things they are,
Too solemn for the comic touches in them.
There is nothing in this forlorn yet noble quest of
liberty which touches the higher note of sympathy in
Tennyson. His sole reflection is that such are not we,
and a pious pharisaic congratulation
God bless the narrow sea which keeps her off,
And keeps our Britain whole within herself,
A nation yet, th^.rulers and the ruled ;
God bless the narrow seas !
I wish they were a whole Atlantic broad 1
How different is this to the spirit in which Browning
regards the same spectacle ! To him there is a peren-
TENNYSON AND POLITICS. ' 221
nial nobleness in any true impulse whose aim is lofty,
and its failure of attainment simply invests it with a
pathetic grandeur, a tragic dignity, a new claim upon
our honour and admiration. Failure in a great cause
is to Browning better than victory in a mean ambition,
and to perish in the right, even when the right is dimly
comprehended, is better than to succeed with a merely
conventional success. It is not through any deficiency
of analytical penetration that Browning does not pass as
shrewd criticisms as Tennyson on the national defects
of others, but he is better employed : it is his mission
to mark the good that lurks in evil, and the high ideals
which often penetrate and underlie even the most de-
fective human action. When he goes to the French
Revolution for a subject, it is not to find a text for
British self-complacency, but to catch the dying whisper
of the patriot's soul as it passes out of this wild earthly
confusion, and to report it thus :
I go in the rain, and, more than needs,
A rope cuts both my wrists behind ;
And I think, by the feel, my forehead bleeds,
For they fling, whoever has a mind,
Stones at me for my year's misdeeds.
Thus I entered, and thus I go !
In triumphs people have dropped down dead.
" Paid by the world, what dost thou owe
Me ? " God might question ; now instead,
Tis God shall repay : I am safer so.
The difference between the two poets is precisely the
difference between an insular and cosmopolitan view of
politics. Tennyson sounds no keen clarion of hope, he
is in no sense the leader of men. Men will never go
to him for inspiration in the dark and difficult hour of
national peril. But, on the other hand, it cannot be
222 THE MAKERS OF MODERN ENGLISH.
said that the general note he strikes is pessimistic. He
says that his faith is large in time : he anticipates the
hour when
The war-drums throb no longer, and the battle-flags are furled,
In the Parliament of man, the Federation of the world.
Human progress is a Divine certainty :
This fine old world of ours is but a child
Yet in the go-cart Patience ! Give it time
To learn its limbs : there is a Hand that guides.
The work of political evolution, like the work of natural
evolution, is slow, and asks for its development the
breadth of the ages. There will be widened thoughts
with the process of the suns ; there will be steady in-
crease of strength and wisdom, and growing " har-
monies of law." Tennyson's reverence for law is
complete and absorbing: it is a temper of mind nurtured
by his knowledge of and reverence for science. Even
in his treatment of so light and delicate a fancy as the
" Day-dream " he remembers the majesty of law, and
pictures how the world may
Sleep through terms of mighty wars
And wake on science grown to more
On secrets of the brain, the stars,
As wild as aught of fairy lore.
All the defeats and renunciations of to-day are but the
Divine discipline shaping us for a great to-morrow, and
far away, in the unmeasured and immeasurable spaces
of the future, lies a fair and renovated world. He is as
one who watcheth for the morning. His vision is not
always clear, his hope is not always strong ; and often
in the dark night his faith seems to suffer sorrowful
TENNYSON AND POLITICS. 223
eclipse. In such hours, when we ask him, " Watcher,
what of the night ? " his voice is mournful and his
speech is bitter.
At last I heard a voice upon the slope
Cry to the summit, Is there any hope ?
To which an answer peal'd from that high land,
But in a tongue no man could understand.
But it is at least a high land on which the poet stands,
and, confused as his reply may often be, yet he never
fails to see far off the promise of the future, how
On the glimmering limit, far withdrawn,
God makes Himself an awful rose of dawn.
And for this noble hope we thank the poet. He does
not fight in the ranks with us, but he foresees the hour
of victory. He does not stand amid the heat and dust
of battle ; but he that is not against us is for us. He
is one of those of whom Arnold speaks, one
Who hath watched, not shared the strife ;
but at least he " knows how the day has gone," and
he waits in patient hope for the breaking of a larger
dawn.
CHAPTER XXIII.
IDYLLS AND THE "IDYLLS OF THE KING."
WE have now come to the point in our study of
Tennyson where his two greatest poems, the
"Idylls of the King" and "In Memoriam," come into
review. There are, however, certain groups of poems
which can scarcely be passed unmentioned, and before
turning to the two greatest works of Tennyson it may
be well to glance at these. Everywhere throughout
Tennyson's books there are to be found exquisite
clusters of lyrical poems, and it may be said with
confidence that in this domain of poetry his power is
unrivalled and his excellence supreme. It is this
excellence which redeems " Maud," in all other respects
the weakest and least artistic of his long poems.
The " Princess," again, wearisome and dull as it
becomes in parts, contains three or four of the most
musical lyrics Tennyson has ever written, and snatches
of melody which will bear comparison with the finest
lyrics in the language. The art in which Tennyson's
rarest excellence lies, the art of musical expression, the
subtle cadence of rhythm which produces a recurring
and never-forgotten sweetness in the memory, is seen
at its very best in these short and lovely lyrics. The
lines in the " Princess " commencing,
The splendour falls on castle walls,
IDYLLS AND THE "IDYLLS OF THE KING." 225
may be mentioned in this category as the nearest
approach to the effect of fine music which language is
able to produce, and in glamour and sweetness they
are unapproached by any modern poet. Of poems like
these nothing can be said but praise. They have gone
far to constitute the charm of Tennyson. They have
found their way into the general memory without effort,
by virtue of an enchantment all their own. They will
probably be remembered when much of his more am-
bitious work is forgotten. Indeed, it may be said that
already this process has been accomplished in part, and
the chief thing which preserves " Maud " from oblivion
is the famous garden-song, " Come into the garden,
Maud," one of the most finished and impassioned lyrics
that is to be found in the whole range of modern English.
In lyrical power and sweetness, in the power of uttering
that " lyrical cry," as it has been called, that species of
poem which is, in truth, not so much a poem as a cry,
a voice x a gust of thrilling music in this art Tennyson
has few rivals and no peer.
To another class of poems in which Tennyson has
attained high excellence he has himself given an
appropriate title when he calls them English Idylls.
The more famous is " Enoch Arden," the most
exquisite is " Dora." When " Enoch Arden " was
published great exception was taken to its method and
structure, and its obvious want of simplicity in diction
was held to disqualify its title to be called an English
zdyll. In subject it is purely idyllic, in diction it is
elaborately ornate. One of the acutest and most
brilliant of English critics, Mr. Walter Bagehot, has
pointed out the fact that in no single instance throughout
the poem is Tennyson content to speak in the language
of simplicity. The phrases are often happy, often
15
226 THE MAKERS OF MODERN ENGLISH.
expressive, but always stiff with an elaborate word-
chiselling. To express the very homely circumstance
that Enoch Arden was a fisherman and sold fish, we
are told that he vended "ocean-spoil in ocean-smelling
osier." The description of the gateway of the Hall
is almost pretentious in its combination of complex
phrases: " portal-warding lion-whelp, and the peacock
yew-tree." This is no doubt an excellent description
of tropic scenery :
The sunrise broken into scarlet shafts,
Among the palms and ferns and precipices ;
The blaze upon the waters to the east,
The blaze upon his island over head,
Then the great stars that globed themselves in Heaven,
The hollower-bellowing ocean, and again
The scarlet shafts of sunrise but no sail.
But this is not a shipwrecked sailor's description 01
what he would see, nor is there a single phrase such
as a homely seaman would be likely to use in all this
elaborate passage. " The hollower-bellowing ocean "
is a combination such as an ornate poet, anxious to
combine his impressions in a complex phrase, might
use ; but it would not by any possibility be the phrase
of Enoch Arden. As an English idyll, therefore,
" Enoch Arden " fails. As a poem of the ornate school
it is excellent. But in " Dora " we have the simplest
story of country life told in the simplest words, and
with an almost Wordsworthian austerity of phrase.
There is nothing to disturb the charm of perfect veri-
similitude. It is, however, a poem almost by itself.
Nowhere else does Tennyson work so high an effect by
such simple means. In the main he is an ornate poet,
and errs in over-elaboration of phrase. In the " Idylls
of the King" the same strength and weakness are
IDYLLS AND THE "IDYLLS OF THE KING?' 227
always associated, and the excellence and defect run
side by side. As his narrative rises in passion the
phraseology becomes terser, clearer, less involved ;
when his invention slackens, and his poetic impulse
ebbs, he always falls back upon elaborate phrase-coin-
ing to cover his defect. The result is a curious com-
bination such as exists in no other poet. In a score of
pages we pass a dozen times from the noble severity
of Wordsworth to the fanciful conceit of Keats. It is
never difficult to know how the tide of poetic impulse
runs in Tennyson : when the impulse is strong the style
clarifies into nervous simplicity ; when weak, it abounds
in ornate decoration and scholastic word-mongering.
The " Idylls of the King " are the work of Tennyson's
mature manhood, and give us the ripest result of his
art. The history of their inception and completion
is curious ; it covers fifty years, beginning with a lyric ;
" then with an epical fragment and three more lyrics ;
then with a poem, ' Enid and Nimue,' which is sup-
pressed as soon as it is written ; then with four
romantic idylls, followed ten years later by four others,
and two years later by two others, and thirteen years
later by yet another idyll, which is to be placed not
before or after the rest, but in the very centre of the
cycle." Thus the world of Arthurian romance is first
touched in the " Lady of Shalott," published in 1832;
and last, in "Balin and Balan," published in 1885.
Since the completion of the " Idylls " Tennyson has
written little of really first-rate excellence or gravity.
His finest thoughts and finest lines are here. They are
his magnum opus, and on them his claim to fame must
largely rest. In the life of every great poet there comes
a time when a desire seizes him to accomplish some great
design, a poem on a scale of magnitude which shall give
228 THE MAKERS OF MODERN ENGLISH.
scope to all his qualities. As a rule such ambitions have
resulted in failure. Wordsworth is not known after all
by his " Excursion," but by his lyrics, and his " Ode
on Immortality." Mrs. Browning's " Drama of Exile "
cannot contest the awards of fame with the " Lines on
Cowper's Grave." The only long poem by an English
author which has held an uncontested place in memory
is Milton's " Paradise Lost," and it has been pointed
out that this is largely owing to the fact that it is
written in sections, and each section can be read at a
sitting. No doubt Tennyson was fully conscious of the
peril of his task, and the warning of these great ex-
amples, when he began to work upon the " Idylls."
He began at the end of his theme, with the " Morte
d' Arthur," as though to judge of his chances of success
by an experiment on the public taste. He was fortu-
nate also in the choice of a subject. In the noble myths
which had gathered round King Arthur there was a
vast field of poetry which was wholly unworked. Over
and above their moral and poetic elements they pos-
sessed a national value. For Tennyson they had
always had a peculiar charm; and we are told that in his
solitary boyhood at Somersby, a favourite recreation
was to enact scenes from the Round Table with his
brothers. These myths provided him with precisely
what he was least able to provide himself, a splendid
story, or series of stories, ready to his hand. No critical
reader can help noticing that in the power of pure
invention Tennyson is singularly weak. It is the
weakness of his invention which led to the vicious elabo-
ration of style which we have remarked in " Enoch
Arden." But in the old chronicle of Sir Thomas Malory
of the fabulous deeds of the Knights of the Round
Table, there is a series of stories complete in every
IDYLLS AND THE "IDYLLS OF THE KING." 229
incident and detail. The chronicle is full of graphic
force and poetic merit. It is indeed so full of the genuine
elements of poetry that many persons, who have care-
fully read Sir Thomas Malory, refuse to think that
Tennyson has improved upon him. In many senses
he has not. He has often failed where Malory is
strongest, necessarily perhaps, because to make Malory
acceptable to modern ears it was needful to smooth over
a good many awkward details. But what Tennyson
has done is to imbue the old chronicle with new life
and spirit, to interpret it by a Christian insight, and to
apply its ancient lessons to the complex conditions of
modern life and thought.
Probably one reason why Tennyson chose Sir Thomas
Malory's famous chronicle for his greatest experiment
in verse was that it exactly coincided with his own
natural bent toward romantic allegory. We have to
remember the force of the pre-Raphaelite movement,
as it was called, if we are to understand the reasons of
Tennyson's choice. From the simple nature-worship of
Wordsworth, and the more ethereal and ecstatic nature-
worship of Shelley, there had come a revulsion toward
the glowing spectacle of mediaeval life and the chivalrous
bent of mediaeval thought. Just as the publication of
the " Reliques of English Ballad Poetry," by Bishop
Percy, in the end of the eighteenth century, worked a
revival of mediaeval sentiment, whose best fruit is found
in the great romances of Sir Walter Scott, so the
experiments of Rossetti and Morris worked a similar
revival in our own. Among the weird half-lights of
mediaeval history there lay a land of old romance, full
of material for the poet. Tennyson's " Lady of Shalott,"
11 Sir Galahad," and " St. Agnes " were early experi-
ments in this field of poetry, and indicate how deeply
2 3 o THE MAKERS OF MODERN ENGLISH,
he had felt its fascination. It was only natural that he
should pursue the clue which he had thus discovered.
In the mediaeval England of knight and lady, tourna-
ment and battle, spell and incantation, adventure and
romance, Tennyson found an atmosphere entirely
suited to his genius. It was the land of glamour and
enchantment. There the imagination and fancy could
move untrammelled. Every knight was brave and every
lady fair. Magnificent spectacles continually passed
before the imagination, and afforded a decorative artist
like Tennyson the finest possible opportunity for the
exercise of that species of art in which lie most excelled.
And over and above all this, there ran throughout the
record of the history a strong moral sentiment, a deep
religious bias. The fall of King Arthur's Round Table
was the fall of a kingdom, and the causes of its fall
were moral causes. In this respect it was more than
a mere mediaeval record : it was an eternal parable of
human life. It touched the moral sense in Tennyson,
which had always been quick and sensitive. What
theme was there more likely to stimulate his genius than
this, and more suitable for a great epic ? The greatest
of all themes Milton had taken, but even if he had
not, it was too late to write a religious epic. The
" Paradise Lost " could only have been written in a
theological age an age like the Puritan, deeply satu-
rated with the theological spirit. To hit the taste of
the nineteenth century an epic might be a morality,
but it needed also human sentiment and passion in all
their fulness. With that perfect artistic insight which
has rarely failed him, Tennyson saw the value of
his theme, and the result is that he has produced the
only long poem which has been read by multitudes since
{( Paradise Lost," and a poem which, in parts at least,
IDYLLS AND THE "IDYLLS OF THE XING." 231
may fairly challenge comparison with the noblest work
of Milton.
The " Idylls of the King," as Tennyson handles them,
are a very different thing from the simple chronicle of
Malory. It is extremely interesting to compare passages
and see how far Tennyson has followed and where he
has left Malory. As regards the story itself, he has
inserted many poetic fancies, but he has invented little
or nothing. The incidents run parallel. In some
points, as we have said, there is a graphic force in
Malory which we miss in Tennyson, and the short,
simple words of the mediaeval chronicler produce a
deeper effect upon the mind than the rich and subtle
diction of the modern poet. It is the difference between
the rude but thrilling ballad-tune and the skilful varia-
tions made upon it by a great musical composer. In
Malory we think of the theme ; in Tennyson more
frequently of the artist. But if anyone desires to see
how finely a poetic fancy can breathe life into a bald
history, he has only to mark how faithfully Tennyson
has seized upon the salient points of Malory, and what
a wealth of artistic skill he has lavished on them. For
the chief fact to be observed in Tennyson's use of
Malory is that to the plain facts of the chronicler he
always gives an allegorical significance. He never
loses sight of the moral lesson. King Arthur stands
out as a mystic incarnation, a Christ-man pure, noble,
unerring : coming mysteriously into the world, and
vanishing mysteriously, according to the prophecy of
Merlin :
From the great deep to the great deep he goes.
He is the perfect flower of purity and chivalry, and the
kingdom he seeks to found is the very kingdom of
232 THE MAKERS OF MODERN ENGLISH
Christ upon the earth. Lancelot, in many respects
the more subtle and powerful study, is of the earth
earthy, and by turns base and noble, and rightly
describes himself in the hour of his remorse :
In me there dwells
No greatness, save it be some far-off touch
Of greatness to know well I am not great :
There is the man.
It is round these two men and Guinevere that the great
interest of the poem culminates. The very over-noble-
ness of Arthur works disaster, and Guinevere cries :
He is all fault who has no fault at all,
For who loves me must have a touch of earth ;
The low sun makes the colour.
The pathos of the whole poem is that in Arthur we
have the incarnation of a high ideal which men vainly
strive after, and its tragedy is that men do strive vainly,
and that all the noble work of Arthur is undone by
the weakness and folly of his followers. In the lesser
characters of the epic the allegorical bent is more fully
developed. Sir Galahad is the type of glorified ascetism,
visionary aims, spirit triumphant over flesh, but after
all following wandering fires in a vain quest, and
" leaving human wrongs to right themselves." " Gareth
and Lynette " is but a variation of the story of Arthur
and Guinevere, and it points to the severity of struggle
which awaits him who overcomes the flesh. In this
poem the allegory is more distinct and beautiful than
in either of the others, and Tennyson has given us no
nobler conception of victory over death than this :
The huge pavilion slowly yielded up
Thro' those black foldings that which housed within ;
High on a night-black horse, in night-black arms,
IDYLLS AND THE "IDYLLS OF THE KING:' 233
In the half-light, thro' the dim dawn, advanced
The monster, and then paused, and spake no word.
It is the King of Terrors, the spectral form of the last
enemy. But when Gareth rides forth to the combat,
and strikes the helm of his grisly foe
Out from this
Issued the bright face of a blooming boy,
Fresh as a flower new born.
And this is immortality, the life which springs out of
death.
Of the tenderness of " Lancelot and Elaine," with
its immortal picture of the dead Elaine sailing to her
last home, oared by the dumb servitor ; the grandeur
of the " Last Tournament," with its ever-present sense
of desolation ; the unapproachable pathos of " Guine-
vere," increasing stanza by stanza in passionate depth
and tragic force, till we reach the parting with Arthur in
the misty darkness, amid the faint blowing of the un-
happy trumpets ; and of the solemnity of the " Passing
of Arthur," with its dramatic fulness, its farewell
counsels of neglected wisdom, its tragic mixture of
human despair and mystic heavenly hope, of these
poems it is needless to speak, if we had to choose
the greatest poem of Tennyson, we should choose
" Guinevere ; " if the most solemnly impressive, the
" Passing of Arthur." Nothing which he has written
rivals these two, or approaches them in the highest
qualities of poetry. They are the mature work of a
great poet. They express his deepest convictions, and
sum up his best wisdom. Such passages as
More things are wrought by prayer
Than this world dreams of. Wherefore let thy voice
Rise like a fountain for me night and day ;
234 THE MAKERS OF MODERN ENGLISH.
For what are men better than sheep or goats
That nourish a blind life within the brain,
If, knowing God, they lift not hands of prayer
Both for themselves and those who call them friend ?
For so the whole round earth is every way
Bound by gold chains about the feet of God,
or-
The old order changeth, yielding place to new,
And God fulfils Himself in many ways,
Lest one good custom should corrupt the world,
have already passed into the permanent currency of
literature. They contain noble truths nobly expressed.
And among the artistic lessons of the " Idylls of the
King " none is better worth marking than the perfection
of Tennyson's blank verse. Blank verse is the one
distinctively English measure, and the most difficult of
all. Apparently it is easy of attainment; in reality
there is nothing harder. There is no form of verse
which so severely tests the ear and musical faculty of
a great poet. Keats attempted it in " Hyperion " with
magnificent success, but he gave it up after that one
supreme effort. Wordsworth's success is only partial,
and there are many passages in the " Excursion "
which are little better than prose cut up into metrical
lengths. Byron never touched it without complete
failure. Milton only has chosen it as his supreme
method of utterance for epic poetry, and he has used it
as only a giant could use it. Next to Milton stands
Tennyson. He sinks far below Milton in grandeur,
but he excels him in musical modulation. He does not
fill the air with the wave-like majesty of sound and
movement which characterise Milton, but he soothes it
with an unfailing melody of phrase. It is so distinctive
that the merest tyro could not fail to recognise the
IDYLLS AND THE "IDYLLS OF THE KING." 235
peculiar charm of Tennyson's blank verse, and distin-
guish it at once in any company. Often it is mannered,
and mannerism is always a vice. But in the finest
qualities of assonance and resonance Tennyson rarely
fails. His verse moves with perfect ease, with perfect
music, with perfect strength ; and apart from the charm
of thought and subject, the " Idylls of the King " show
his metrical talent in its finest operation. But the
theme also is great and solemn, and in the " Idylls of
the King," we have his noblest work, and work such as
the very greatest poets might have been proud to
produce and covetous to claim.
CHAPTER XXIV.
TENNYSON AS A RELIGIOUS POET.
WHILE Tennyson has touched, with more or less
success, almost every stop in the great organ
of poetry, yet perhaps the strongest impression which
ne leaves upon the mind is that he is essentially a
religious poet, and it is in the realm of religious poetry
that his noblest work is to be found. It may be said,
indeed, that the religious spirit pervades all that he
has written. He might almost be called an ecclesias-
tical poet, for his writings abound in references to the
familiar sanctities of the Church, the font, the altar,
the church clock measuring out the lives of men, the
graveyard with its yews whose roots grasp the bones
of the dead, the sacrament, where
The kneeling hamlet drains
The chalice of the grapes of God.
How deep a reverence he has had for the Bible may
be inferred from the fact that no fewer than three
hundred Scripture quotations have been discovered in
his poetry. He has played with agnosticism, and
expressed its doubts and ponderings, but he has never
become an agnostic. " Poetry is faith " was the saying
of a great critic, and assuredly without living faith the
highest poetry is impossible. One may fairly suppose
that the religious tendency in Tennyson was hereditary,
and every influence of his life has conserved that
TENNYSON AS A RELIGIOUS POET. 237
tendency and strengthened it. There is a remarkable
passage in a recently published letter of Tennyson's,
which throws considerable light upon this side of his
character, and which it is interesting to compare with
Wordsworth's similar confession of his early inability
to realize the potency of death. The letter is dated
Farringford, Isle of Wight, May /th, 1874, and is
written in reply to a gentleman who had communicated
to him certain strange experiences he had undergone
under the effects of anaesthetics. Tennyson says : " I
have never had any revelations through anaesthetics, but
a kind of waking trance (this for lack of a better name)
I have frequently had, quite up from boyhood, when I
have been all alone. This has often come upon me
through repeating my own name to myself silently
till, all at once as it were, out of the intensity of the
consciousness of individuality, the individuality itself
seemed to dissolve and fade away into boundless being ;
and this not a confused state, but the clearest of the
clearest, the surest of the surest, utterly beyond words,
where death was an almost laughable impossibility, the
loss of personality (if so it were) seeming no extinction,
but the only true life. I am ashamed of my feeble
description. Have I not said the state is utterly beyond
words ? "
This is a perfect description of the philosophic and
religious dreamer, and narrates an experience commoner
in the East than in the West. The deduction which
Tennyson himself makes from his experience is that
it verifies the truth of the separate existence of the
human spirit, and that that spirit "will last for aeons
and aeons." Something of the same state and experi-
ence is described in " In Memoriam," and especially in
the " Ancient Sage/'
238 THE MAKERS OF MODERN ENGLISH.
And more, my son ! for more than once when I
Sat all alone, revolving m myself
The word that is the symbol of myself,
The mortal limit of the Self was loosed
And passed into the Nameless, as a cloud
Melts into Heaven. I touched my limbs the limbs
Were strange, not mine and yet no shade of doubt,
But utter clearness, and through loss of Self
The gain of such large life as matched with ours
Were Sun to spark unshadowable in words,
Themselves but shadows of a shadow world.
A poet so sensitively constituted, and liable to such
moments of spiritual trance as this, could hardly fail to
be a religious poet. To him the unseen world would
be an ever-present reality, and he would live as seeing
that which is invisible. Gazing into what he himself
has called "the abysmal deeps of personality," he
would be always conscious of the greatness of the soul,
and the thought of final annihilation would be to him
impossible. For him death would be already abolished,
and his vision would be of life for evermore.
'Tis life whereof our nerves are scant,
More life and fuller, that we want,
is his own utterance of his own desire. And from this
calm and steadfast belief in immortality, this infallible
assurance of the eternity of personal life, all that is
noblest and serenest in the poetry of Tennyson has
risen.
But from personal belief in immortality to the embodi-
ment of religious beliefs in religious forms, it is a long
step, and Tennyson has shown considerable antagonism
to religious forms. If we glance over his writings,
leaving out the " In Memoriam," which is the greatest
TENNYSON AS A RELIGIOUS POET. 239
achievement in religious poetry which our age has pro-
duced, we see that he has carefully studied religious
problems, and has reached certain memorable conclu-
sions. First of all> we find in the three poems of " St.
Simeon Stylites," " Sir Galahad," and "St. Agnes' Eve,"
Tennyson's statement of, and judgment upon, religious
mysticism. " St. Simeon Stylites " is something more
than a historical portrait : it is a satire upon the
monastic spirit and ideal of life. The figure of St. Simeon
on his pillar, alternately coveting and cursing the world,
sighing for the shade of comfortable roofs, warm clothes,
and wholesome food, and then dilating with pride at his
own heroic renunciation, as he cries :
I wake ; the chill stars sparkle, I am wet
With drenching dews, or stiff with crackling frost,
is a monument of all that is harshest, grossest, and
most repellent in the monastic ideal of life. The very
humility of the man is loathsome ; it is the pride which
apes humility. He may be all he says he is,
The basest of mankind,
From scalp to sole one slough and crust of sin,
Unfit for earth, unfit for heaven, scarce meet
For troops of devils, mad with blasphemy ;
but his depth of self-humiliation is farcical when it
becomes a plea for sainthood, and when the secret hope
of his life is that
A time may come, yea, even now,
When you may worship me without reproach,
And burn a fragrant lamp before my bones,
When I am gathered to the glorious saints.
The most virulent poison of monasticism is in the
man's blood, and one knows not which is more loathsome,
240 THE MAKERS OF MODERN ENGLISH.
the humiliation or the ambition of St. Simeon. Yet in
the main it is a just and true portraiture, and appearing,
as it did, at a time when the public mind was being
roused into frenzy over the revival of mediaevalism in
the Church of England, it was a tremendous rebuke.
Tennyson marks in St. Simeon his utter abhorrence of
the monastic ideal of life. Self-renunciation he can
preach, but renunciation which despises and forsakes
the glad activities of daily life, as in themselves foul
and unclean, he will not regard as other than a form
of ecclesiastical madness.
Nor is his sense of the imperfection of religious
mysticism less strong in such poems as " St. Agnes'
Eve " and " Sir Galahad." Just as St. Simeon expresses
all that is most degrading in monasticism, these two
beautiful poems express all that is loveliest and most
tender in its forms of life. In St. Simeon the mediaeval
religious spirit is intense self-consciousness, sinking
into uttermost degradation ; in St. Agnes it is renun-
ciation of self, rising into rapture and beatific vision.
It is the pure and yearning spirit of a true woman-saint
which sighs for the heavenly Bridegroom, and cries, as
the trance of ecstasy deepens into the vision of death,
He lifts me to the golden doors ;
The flashes come and go ;
All heaven bursts her starry floors,
And strovvs her light below,
And deepens on and up ! The gates
Roll back, and far within
For me the Heavenly Bridegroom waits
To make me pure from sin.
The Sabbaths of Eternity,
One Sabbath deep and wide
A light upon the shining sea
The Bridegroom with His bride.
TENNYSON AS A RELIGIOUS POET. 241
Not merely is the expression of the sentiment in these
verses beautiful, but the sentiment itself is beautiful.
It is the essence of all that is most devout in conventual
piety. It is the sentiment we can fancy floating forth
in silence from the half-opened lips of St. Helena, as she
sleeps on that memorable summer afternoon, in that atti-
tude of pathetic weariness which a great artist has so
exquisitely interpreted, when she sees in dreams the de-
scending cross, and her soul smiles to greet the solemn
presage of approaching martyrdom.
The picture of Sir Galahad, going forth in his pure and
noble youth upon his life-long quest of the Holy Grail,
is not less touching in its aspect of saintly consecration.
He, too, moves in his vision of holy things :
A gentle sound, an awful light ;
Three angels bear the Holy- Grail ;
With folded feet in stoles of white,
On sleeping wings they sail.
The clouds are broken in the sky,
And through the mountain-walls
A rolling organ-harmony
Swells up, and shakes and falls.
Then move the trees, the copses nod,
Wings flutter, voices hover clear :
" O just and faithful Knight of God,
Ride on ! the prize is near ! "
This is a noble picture of the religious knight, the
ideal knight of chivalry, but not the less his religious
mysticism is his weakness. This does not appear in
this poem, because here Tennyson only attempts to re-
produce in accurate form and outline what the spirit of
religious mysticism in the days of chivalry had to say
of itself, and in so far the poem is a dramatic persona-
tion; but when, in later life, Tennyson touches the
16
242 THE MAKERS OF MODERN ENGLISH.
same theme, it is with a difference of handling, or
rather a fuller handling. It is mysticism not less than
wrong-doing which helps to break up the knightly
Order of the Round Table. And this is the reproach
of King Arthur when he says :
Was I too dark a prophet when I said,
To those who went upon the Holy Quest,
That most of them would follow wandering fires,
Lost in the quagmire ?
And out of those to whom the vision came,
My greatest hardly will believe he saw ;
Another hath beheld it afar off,
And leaving human wrongs to right themselves
Cares but to pass into the silent life ;
And one hath had the vision face to face,
And now his chair desires him here in vain,
However they may crown him otherwhere.
That is the reply of Tennyson to religious mysticism.
For some it is a wandering fire, dying down at last
in darkness and confusion ; for some a pious cheat, a
beautiful delusion which in saner moments they them-
selves cannot accept ; for the purest spirits of all,
capable of the highest and devoutest religious ecstasy,
it is after all only something seen afar off a fitful and
capricious radiance, as though one dreamed he dreamed,
and hoped he hoped, but held no certainty or assurance
of either faith or vision. Its effect is to produce in
men that fatal " other- worldliness," which cares but to
pass into the silent life, and passes through the evil
gloom of this world with blinded eyes, leaving human
wrongs to right themselves. It is not the solitary
rapture of the idealist which helps the world, and if
human piety has no help in it for the world, wherein
lies its virtue, and what title has it to our reverence ?
It is, after all, a sort of sublimated selfishness, and on
TENNYSON AS A RELIGIOUS POET. 243
that ground Tennyson condemns it, and dismisses it as
wholly ineffectual to meet the real needs of the human
soul. And it is almost with a touch of mournful scorn
he adds that the mystic may be crowned in other worlds,
but it is clear that he has neither won nor merited a
coronation here.
Two other poems of Tennyson deserve mention here,
as still further illustrating his religious attitude. In
the "Vision of Sin" he describes the perversion of
nature which follows the pursuit of carnal lusts, and its
bitter end in despairing infidelity and cynicism. That
which a man sows he also reaps, and the wages of sin
is death. The man he paints is already a dead man,
though he moves still with some ghastly semblance of
life. He is "grey and gap-toothed," a cold wind of
death comes with him, a ruined inn receives him; a
mocking merriment, which jeers at all things sacred
and Divine, is the one temper which survives in him.
His memory is stored only with sensual recollections,
leprous delights, unclean and hateful pictures. He has
no faith left in anything.
Friendship ! to be two in one.
Let the canting liar pack ;
Well I know, when I am gone,
How she mouths behind my back.
Virtue ! to be good and just
Every heart, when sifted well,
Is a clot of warmer dust
Mixed with cunning sparks of hell.
He has sown the wind, and reaps the whirlwind. He
has gone to the farthest opposite of religious mysticism,
and has sunk in gross and unredeemed animalism.
The sated voluptuary usually developes into tho aged
244 THE MAKERS OF MODERN ENGLISH.
cynic, and, having outraged purity and virtue through a
long life, finally brings himself to believe that neither
has any real existence. And it is thus, with true insight,
Tennyson moralises on the portrait he paints :
Then some one spake : " Behold, it was a crime
Of sense avenged by sense that wore with time,"
for the senses carry in themselves their own secure
retribution.
Another said, " The crime of sense became
The crime of malice, and is equal blame ; "
And one, " He had not wholly quenched his power,
A little grain of conscience made him sour."
In the last suggestion only is there any hope, but
Tennyson confesses it is at best but a shadowy and
inarticulate hope. So far as we can see the man has
slain himself, and there is no escape from the retribution
he has merited. The failure of mysticism is great, but
infinitely greater is the failure of materialism ; for while
one errs by overstrained yearning after Divine things,
falling into credulous fantasy and rapture, the other
errs by love of carnal things, and falls at last into such
a depth of moral debasement that it can hardly be said
the spirit lives at all. The one may be crowned other-
where ; it is at least certain that the other is avenged
even here.
The other poem, which completes Tennyson's view
of the religious needs of life, is the " Palace of Art."
There is a sort of midway house which men seek, a
halting-place between the material and the mystical.
They turn from the mystical in incredulity, and revolt
from the carnal in disgust. They retain spiritual purity
and intellectual integrity, and are quick to respond to
the promptings of the sesthetic temper, which con-
TENNYSON AS A RELIGIOUS POET. 245
tinually begets in them vague dissatisfactions. Why
not then find rest in Art ? Why not gratify the reli-
gious instinct in the worship of Beauty ? Is not the
worship of beauty the only real religion ? As for the
world, full as it is of unredeemed animalism, let that
be forsaken and forgotten, as an impure vision which
is best ignored and put out of sight. There is splen-
dour in the sunrise, glory in the flower, grace in the
statue, delicate suggestion and subtle pleasure in the
tapestry and the picture, infinite delight and solace in
the revelations of art ; let it be ours to seek these, and
find in these our peace. So the soul builds herself
a lordly pleasure-house wherein at ease for aye to
dwell.
It realizes the utmost dreams of beauty. Before it
streams the rainbow's "orient bow;" the light aerial
gallery, golden-railed, "burns like a fringe of fire;"
the air is sweetened with perpetual incense, and made
musical with the chiming of silver bells; slender shaft,
rich mosaic, wreaths of light and colour, "rivers of
melodies," singing of nightingales, and fragrance of
" pure quintessences of precious oils " are everywhere,
and it is a veritable palace of delight, which poets only
build, and human eyes have never seen. The world
lies far beneath the huge crag- platforms, and the men
labouring in it are as
Darkening droves of swine,
That range o'er yonder plain.
Creeds have ceased to perplex the mind
I take possession of man's mind and deed,
I care not what the sects may brawl.
I sit as God, holding no form of creed,
But contemplating all.
246 THE MAKERS OF MODERN ENGLISH.
And in what does it all end ? It ends in the bitter cry
of Vanitas vanitatum, as all such experiments must
always end. Dull stagnation closes on the soul, and
the pursuit of selfish ease ends in agonising despair.
Beauty becomes loathsome, and its daily vision is as a
fire which frets the flesh, until at last the soul exclaims :
I am on fire within ;
What is it that will take away my sin,
And save me lest I die ?
And the only answer is
Make me a cottage in the vale, she said,
Where I may mourn and pray.
It is a great and memorable lesson memorably
taught. Human responsibility cannot be ignored,
whether in the monastery, the tavern, or the palace of
art. The first duty of man is to his brothers, and that
is the soul of all religion. Society annexes obligations
to its privileges, and the one must be shared with the
other. These poems represent the religious attitude
of Tennyson, and it is an attitude eminently sane and
noble. They breathe the spirit of a rational and ser-
viceable human piety. They rebuke at once asceticism
and sensuality. They pierce to the essential hollowness
of all mere art-worship as a substitute for the worship
of God, and they contain teachings which were never
more needed than in the generation which Tennyson
has addressed.
CHAPTER XXV.
TENNYSON'S "IN MEMORIAM."
WE now come to the most distinctive, and, in many
essential characteristics, the greatest of Tenny-
son's poems, " In Memoriam." Published in 1850, it is
the work of his prime, and contains the most perfect
representation of his genius. The personal history on
which it is founded is well known. It commemorates
one of the noblest of human friendships, and one of the
noblest of men. Arthur Hallam, the son of Henry
Hallam, the celebrated historian, was born in Bedford
Place, London, on the 1st of February, 1811. The
family afterwards removed to Wimpole Street, which
is thus described in " In Memoriam
Dark house, by which once more I stand,
Here in the long, unlovely street,
Doors, where my heart was wont to beat
So quickly, waiting for a hand.
In October 1828 Arthur Hallam went into residence
at Cambridge, and it was there he met Tennyson. The
affection which sprang up between them must have
been immediate, for in 1830 we find them discussing a
plan for publishing conjointly a volume of poems. One
of Tennyson's most striking phrases in the " Palace of
Art," " the abysmal deeps of personality," is directly
borrowed from a phrase of Hallam's : " God with
248 THE MAKERS OF MODERN ENGLISH.
whom alone rest the abysmal secrets of personality." It
was one of those rare and beautiful friendships which
sometimes visit the morning hours of life, in which
intellectual sympathy, not less than love, plays a fore-
most part. On the 1 5th of September, 1833, Arthur
Hallam lay dead. On the 3rd of January, 1834, his
body was brought over from Vienna, where he died,
and was interred in manor aisle, Clevedon Church,*
Somersetshire
The Danube to the Severn gave
The darkened heart that beat no more ;
They laid him by the pleasant shore,
And in the hearing of the wave.
There twice a day the Severn fills ;
The salt sea-water passes by,
And hushes half the babbling Wye,
' And makes a silence in the hills.
When and where " In Memoriam " was conceived or
commenced it is impossible for us to know, but it will
thus be seen that seventeen years elapsed between the
death of Arthur Hallam and the publication of Tenny-
son's exquisite elegy. It is quite possible that the
poem was actually in process of construction during the
whole of this long period, for it bears in itself marks
of slow growth, of gradual accretion and elaboration.
Probably the work was begun with one or two of the
earlier sections, which simply bewail in poignant verse
Tennyson's sense of unspeakable loss, and which pos-
sess the solemnity and self-containedness of separate
funeral hymns, rather than the consecutiveness of
an elaborate poem. The history and character of
* In the first edition of " In Memoriam " Tennyson says in " the
chancel." This was not strictly correct, and is altered in subsequent
editions to " dark Church."
TENNYSON'S "IN MEMORIAM." 249
the poem sustain this view. In seventeen years the
anguish of the deepest sorrow must needs show signs
of healing. Grief grows less clamant, and more
meditative. It passes somewhat out of the region of
personal bitterness into the realms of philosophic
reflection and religious resignation. Time does not
destroy the sense of loss, but it lifts the soul to a place
of broader outlook and calmer vision. As we read " In
Memoriam" this process is clearly detailed, and there
is much in the structure of the poem to suggest that
from a few mournful verses, cast off in the bitterest
hour of bereavement as a solace to the wounded spirit,
Tennyson gradually enlarged his plan, till he had
woven into it all the philosophic doubts, the religious
hopes, the pious aspirations, which the theme of human
loss could suggest to a thoughtful mind and noble
spirit.
Concerning the general structure and character of the
poem, one or two things are worth remark. It differs
essentially from any other elegy in the English language,
both as to metrical arrangement and artistic colour. Eng-
lish literature is not rich in elegy, but it possesses in
Milton's " Lycidas," in Gray's famous poem, in Shelley's
" Adonais," and perhaps in Arnold's noble lamentation
for his father and his " Thyrsis," isolated specimens of
elegiac poetry as fine as any literature can boast. Of
these great elegies, Shelley's " Adonais " is the longest
and the noblest ; Milton's " Lycidas " the most classic
in gravity and sweetness; Gray's " Elegy in a Country
Churchyard " the most perfectly polished ; Arnold's
" Lines in Rugby Chapel " the most effective in moral
view and spirit. But of the last two it will be at once
perceived that neither aims at the constructive breadth
of a prolonged poem, nor would the metrical form
250 THE MAKERS OF MODERN ENGLISH.
sustain the burden of great length. The constant evil
which menaces elegy is monotony, and it is the most
difficult to be avoided by the very nature of the theme.
Gray avoids it by aiming at aphoristic brevity, and
by polishing every phrase with the most consummate
artistic skill and patience. Arnold adopts for his pur-
pose a peculiar unrhymed metre, which stimulates the
ear without wearying it, but which could not be sus-
tained except within the limits of brevity which he has
set for himself. Milton is similarly brief, and " Lycidas"
reads more like a noble fragment of the antique than
an English poem written for English readers. No
doubt Milton's genius would have served him perfectly
if he had attempted a " Lycidas " of thrice the length,
for he has attempted no form of poetry without absolute
success ; but, however that may be, he was taught by
his artistic instincts in writing elegy to compress within
the narrowest limits of space his lament for the noble
dead. Shelley does indeed write at length, but there
are two things to sustain him in his daring effort ; first,
he uses a metre singularly pliable and resonant; and,
secondly, he leaves his theme at will, and weaves into
his poem a hundred exquisite suggestions of natural
beauty and imaginative vision, so that while his theme
is mournful his poem is often ecstatic, and monotony
is avoided by richness of fancy and variety of theme.
In what respects does " In Memoriam " differ from these
great masterpieces ? Wherein does its distinctive
charm and greatness lie ?
In the first place it differs entirely in metrical form
and arrangement. Properly speaking, it is hymnal in
form. Some of its stanzas are admirably suited for
Christian worship, and no doubt will appear, with slight
alterations, in the hymnal collections of the future.
TENNYSON'S "IN MEMO RI AM," 251
In this respect it is distinctively English, and appeals
strongly to English tastes. But what is there that
could be conceived as more monotonous than a hymn of
a thousand stanzas ? The hymnal form may be excel-
lently suited for elegy, but how is it possible to com-
bine a form in itself monotonous with a theme whose
chief peril is monotony without producing a poem
which would be insufferably dull and tedious ? That
was the problem Tennyson had to solve, and he solved
it in two ways. Instead of the ordinary hymnal
quatrain, he adopted a form, not unknown indeed in
English literature, but virtually new to modern readers,
in which the first and last and the two middle lines of
the verses rhyme. Anyone who will take the trouble
to compare these forms will at once see how greatly
Tennyson's variation gains in modulation and flexibility.
He had already attempted it in one of his earlier poems,
" Love thou thy land with love far brought," and had no
doubt been struck with its power of musical expression.
If, as we surmise, "In Memoriam" grew slowly from cer-
tain fragmentary stanzas, thrown off in the first agony of
grief, no doubt that was the metrical form in which they
were written. A form more perfect for elegiac poetry
could not be conceived ; but how could it be applied to
an elaborate poem of many hundreds of lines ? This
Tennyson answered by dividing his poem into short sec-
tions, each one complete in itself, and expressing some
particular thought or sentiment. It is to this division
of the poem, in part at least, that much of its popularity
must be attributed. I have already quoted the saying of
an acute critic that the reason why people read " Paradise
Lost " is that it is arranged in sections, and can therefore
be put down and resumed at will. This is eminently
true of " In Memoriam." It is a brilliant constellation
252 THE MAKERS OF MODERN ENGLISH.
of short poems, held together in rhythmic order by one
great sustaining sentiment. We can open it where we
will, read as much as we wish, and put it down again,
without any perplexing sense of having missed the
poet's meaning, or destroyed his clue of thought. Of
course this is not the student's method of reading " In
Memoriam/' but it is a method often forced upon busy
men by the necessities of their position ; and the fact
that " In Memoriam " is as truly a cluster of small
poems as a great poem in itself, has no doubt helped its
popularity, and has fully justified the artistic instinct
which suggested its division into sections.
Another point worthy of special remark is that not
merely in form, but in all its colouring, " In Memoriam "
is a distinctively English poem. Milton's noble elegy
we have already spoken of as a fragment of the antique,
and its whole conception and spirit is severely classic.
Shelley goes to the same source to find inspiration for
his elegy on Keats. Save the passages which directly
touch on the unhappy fate of Keats, there is nothing in
the poem which is distinctively English. Its allusions
are classic ; its sky is the sky of Italy ; its scenery has
a gorgeousness of colour and a pomp unknown in the
grey latitudes of the north. Over the dead body of
Keats, Shelley builds a glorious and fantastic tomb
a sepulchre of foreign splendours, and the earth that
holds him in her bosom is a warmer and more glorious
earth than that land of sombre skies and grey seas
where his genius was suffered to blossom and decay
unheeded. Gray, indeed, is English ; Arnold is English,
but with the trace of Greek culture always perceptible ;
but Milton and Shelley both go boldly to the classics
for their inspiration, and have written elegies which are
English in name indeed, but classical in spirit and design.
TENNYSON'S " IN MEMORIAL 253
It is the charm of " In Memoriam " that it is steeped in
English thought and spirit. Its sights and sounds are
the familiar sights and rounds of rural life in England.
It is England, and no other land, that is described in
lines like these :
Now fades the last long streak of snow,
Now burgeons every maze of quick
About the flowery squares, and thick
By ashen roots the violets grow.
Now rings the woodland loud and long,
The distance takes a lovelier hue,
And, drowned in yonder living blue,
The lark becomes a sightless song.
Now dance the lights on lawn and lea,
The flocks are whiter down the vale,
And milkier every milky sail,
On winding stream or distant sea :
Where now the sea-mew pipes, or dives
In yonder gleaming green, and fly
The happy birds, that change their sky
To build and brood.
All the colour of the pictures drawn from life and nature
is English, and can be mistaken for no other. It is
the Christmas Eve we all have known which he thus
describes for us :
The time draws near the birth of Christ ;
The moon is hid, the night is still :
A single church below the hill
Is pealing, folded in the mist.
It is the English summer, whose mellow eventides we
all have rejoiced in, when " returning from afar : "
And brushing ankle-deep in flowers,
We heard behind the woodbine veil
The milk that bubbled in the pail,
And buzzings of the honeyed hours.
254 THE MAKERS OF MODERN ENGLISH.
Nowhere in Tennyson's works will there be found
more perfect pictures of English scenery and seasons
executed with more artistic delicacy and skill than in
" In Memoriam." They are all exquisitely finished,
with something of the laboured patience of pictures on
ivory or porcelain, and each is perfect in its way. The
effects are often gained in single phrases, so happy, so
luminous, so exact, that we feel it is impossible to
surpass them. This, at least, is one of the qualities
which have made "In Memoriam" famous. It is not
merely a noble threnody upon a dead Englishman, but
it is one of the most distinctively English poems in the
language, expressing universal sentiments indeed, but
with a perpetual reference to national scenery, customs,
and life.
One other point should not be overlooked in esti-
mating such a poem as " In Memoriam." To its many
other great qualities, it adds one of the rarest of all
it is the most perfect expression we have of the
spirit of the age. It is a poem of the century ; indeed,
we may say, the poem of the century. It sums up as
no other work of our time has done the characteristic
intellectual and religious movements of the Victorian
epoch. Nowhere has Tennyson borrowed so largely
from modern science as here. The well-known lines,
Break thou deep vase of chilling tears
That grief hath shaken into frost,
afford an excellent specimen of these obligations ; the
metaphor is very beautiful, but it cannot be understood
without a knowledge of elementary chemistry. At first
this was esteemed a startling innovation, and was used
against him as a reproach, but if the great poet is he
who concentrates in his poetry the spirit of his time,
TENNYSON'S "IN MEMORIAM." 255
Tennyson was bound to take account of the scientific
tendency, which is one of the most marked features of
the century. But he has done more than this. He has
stated not merely scientific arguments and facts, but
also the religious doubts, the perplexities, the philo-
sophic difficulties of the day, with equal skill and force.
He has perceived the intellectual and religious drift of
his age with unerring accuracy. He himself has passed
through its various stages of doubtful illumination, of
dark misgiving, of agonising search for light, and lastly
of clear and even triumphant faith. Like another
poet of our time, Arthur Hugh Clough, Tennyson has
known what it is
To finger idly some old Gordian knot,
Unskilled to sunder and too weak to cleave,
And with much toil attain to half-believe.
But he has done what Clough could not do, he has cut
the Gordian knot, and found "a. surer faith his own."
The process by which he has attained this victory we
shall see in the analysis of " In Memoriam." In the
meantime, it is sufficient to observe that the hold which
this poem has taken on the minds of men must be
attributed not only to its literary genius, but to its
prophetic qualities. Not merely is it original in
metrical design, and thoroughly English in colour, but
it is also an interpretation of the deepest religious
yearnings and philosophic problems of our time, and as
such has become the indispensable companion of all
who share, and seek to understand, or to direct, the
intellectual life of the century.
A great poem should interpret itself, and, in the larger
sense, " In Memoriam " needs no comment or elucida-
tion. But there is another sense in which elucidation
is needed, and cannot but be useful. Because the " In
256 THE MAKERS OF MODERN ENGLISH.
Memoriam," is, as we have seen, not merely a great
poem in itself, but really a series of short poems held
together by a common sentiment, it is not always easy
to perceive the thread of thought that binds each to
each. The transitions of thought and theme are always
subtle, and often sudden. The various suggestions of
loss crowd thickly on the mind of the poet, and it is
sometimes difficult to perceive the link which connects
them into an organic whole. It may be well, therefore,
to attempt, not an elaborate analysis, for that has been
ably done by others, but a sort of indicatory comment
whereby we may perceive the course and current of the
poem.
The opening poem of the series is an after-thought,
and sums up much that is said hereafter in detail. It
is a final confession of religious faith, " Believing
where we cannot prove," in which Tennyson craves for-
giveness for " the wild and wandering cries " of the
poem, which he terms " confusions of a wasted youth."
The poem proper then begins. From i. to v. we have
a statement of those common states of mind which
attend all great bereavements. There is a sacred-
ness in loss (v.) which almost makes it a sacrilege to
embalm the sorrow of the heart in words, and yet there
is a use in measured language, for at least the labour of
literary production numbs the pain. Then follows (vi.)
a beautiful and pathetic vision of what loss means to
others beside himself. Such a sorrow as his is not
peculiar : at the moment while the father pledges his
gallant son, he is shot upon the battle-field, and while
the mother prays for her sailor-lad, his
Heavy- shotted hammock-shroud
Drops in his vast and wandering grave.
Memory wakens (vii.-viii.), and then Fancy (ix.-x.) ;
TENNYSON'S "IN MEMORIAM." 257
the one recalling ended joys of fellowship, the other
picturing the ship that bears homeward the dead body
of his friend; and fancy suggests that it at least is
something to be spared an ocean burial, and to sleep
in English earth, that
From his ashes may be made
The violet of his native land. Cxviii.)
Nature is calm (xi.), but if the poet has any calm it is
a calm despair. Yet while he pictures the processes of
death, he marks it as curious that it is almost impossible
to believe his friend is dead. If again they struck hand
in hand, he would not feel it strange (xiv.), for death
seems unimaginable. Then again the light fades, and
he pictures the final obsequies and place of rest (xix.).
Pain may be meant to produce in him the firmer mind
(xviii.). Perhaps some will say that this brooding over
grief is unmanly, the pastime of the egotist, the vain
torture of a morbid mind ; to which he can only reply
they know neither him nor his friend.
I do but sing because I must,
And pipe but as the linnets sing.
(xxi.)
Again he recalls lost days, and how on the " fifth
autumnal slope " of those brief ended years, Death met
and parted them (xxii.). Let those mock who will.
He has no envy of those more callous of heart than he,
who have never known the joy of a perfect love, and,
therefore, cannot understand what its loss may mean.
A man's capacity of agony is his capacity of rapture :
I hold it true, whate'er befall,
I feel it, when I sorrow most ;
Tis better to have loved and lost
Than never to have loved at all.
258 THE MAKERS OF MODERN ENGLISH.
The time of happy family gatherings draws near, and
Christmas bells from hill to hill
Answer each other in the mist.
To him it is a sad time of forced mirth and empty joy.
But there is something in the very season that suggests
nobler thoughts :
Our voices took a higher range ;
Once more we sang : " They do not die
Nor lose their mortal sympathy,
Nor change to us, although they change. (xxx.)
That, at least, is the promise of faith, and with a cry
to the Divine Father, who lit " the light that shone
when Hope was born," the first great halting-place in
the poem is reached.
In the next section of the poem (xxxi.) a new line
of thought begins with the touching picture of Lazarus
redeemed from the grave's dishonours ? and seated once
more among the familiar faces of Bethany. During
those four days of sojourn in the realm of death, did
Lazarus yearn for human love, or miss it ? Did he
retain a conscious identity, and know where and what
he was ? If he had willed, surely he could have solved
all the deep mystery of death for us. But if such
questions were proposed to him " there lives no record
of reply," or, if he answered them, " something sealed
the lips of that evangelist," and the world will never
know the secrets of the prison-house. At this point
Tennyson begins to state and combat the doubts that
perplex him. Yet he half hesitates to do so. Simple
faith is so beautiful and rare, that he may well ask
himself what right he has to disturb its serenity with
his uneasy questionings. Let any who, after toil and
TENNYSON'S "IN MEMORIAM." 259
storm, think that they have reached a higher freedom
of truth, be careful how .they disturb the faith of simple
souls, who have nothing but their faith to sustain
them, and whose "hands are quicker unto good" than
ours (xxxii.). Yet we cannot help asking : " Is man
immortal ? " If he is not, then
Earth is darkness at the core,
And dust and ashes all that is.
The thought of God is lost, and the best fate were to
drop
Head-foremost in the jaws
Of vacant darkness and to cease. (xxxiv.)
In the hour of such awful questionings the heart in~
stinctively turns to Christ, who wrought
With human hands the creed of creeds,
In loveliness of perfect deeds
More strong than all poetic thought. (xxxvi.)
Doubt and hope now alternate like shadow and light in
the poet's mind. When he sees the sun sink on the
wide moor, a spectral doubt makes him cold with the
suggestion that so his friend's life has sunk out of sight,
and he will see his "mate no more" (xli.). Perhaps
his friend is as the maiden who has entered on the
new toils of wedded days, and is content to forsake
the home of childhood : yet even she returns some-
times to
Bring her babe, and make her boast,
Till even those who missed her most
Shall count new things as dear as old. (xl.)
" How fares it with the happy dead ? " (xliv.) May
not death be in itself a new birth, the entrance upon
260 THE MAKERS OF MODERN ENGLISH.
fuller life ? (xlv.) Only it were hard to accept the
suggestion literally, for that would mean forgetful ness
of that which preceded the entrance on eternal life.
" In that deep dawn behind the tomb " will not " the
eternal landscape of the past " be clear " from marge
to marge ? " (xlvi.) With those who speak of death
as re-absorption into the universal soul he has no
sympathy. It is " faith as vague as all unsweet ; " it
means destruction of identity, and his hope about his
dead friend is that he
Shall know him when we meet,
And we shall sit in endless feast,
Enjoying each the other's good. (xlvii.)
With the glow of that thought burning in him he calls
upon the dead ever to be near him when the light is
low, when the heart is sick, when the pangs of pain
conquer trust, when the folly and emptiness of human
life appal him, and, finally, when he fades away on that
low dark verge of life which is
The twilight of eternal day. (1.)
Yet even this wish he is keen to question a moment
later ; do we really desire our dead to be near us in
spirit, and is there no baseness we would hide from
their purged and piercing vision ? (li.) In fact, his
soul has become so sick with sorrow, that he now only
suggests hopes to himself that he may fight against
them, He philosophises on his own errors of conduct,
but rebukes his conclusions with the fear that he may
push Philosophy beyond her mark, and make her
" Procuress to the Lords of Hell ! (liv.) Yet in the
moment of the uttermost darkness, full of distemper
and despair, he breaks forth into one of the noblest
confessions of faith,
TENNYSON'S "IN MEMORIAM? 261
That nothing walks with aimless feet,
That not one life shall be destroyed,
Or cast as rubbish to the void,
When God hath made the pile complete. (liv.)
It is true that Nature teaches no such doctrine ; she is
careless of the single type, and cries,
A thousand types are gone ;
I care for nothing, all shall go. (Iv.-vi.)
Yet will he stretch lame hands of faith, and " faintly
trust the larger hope." Nay, it seems a sin against the
dead to doubt that it is for ever and for ever well with
them (Ivii.). The lost Arthur is in a " second state
sublime ; " and he has carried human love with him
there. Will he still love his friend on earth ? (Ixi.)
Will he not still love the earth and earthly ways ?
It is a question Emily Bronte answered in her daring
picture of a spirit in heaven sighing unceasingly for the
purple moors she loved below, until the angels in anger
cast her out, and she wakes, sobbing for joy, on the
wild heather, with a skylark singing over her. Tenny-
son pictures the great statesman who still yearns for
the village-green of childhood, and consoles himself that
Love cannot be lost :
Since we deserved the name of friends,
And thine effect so lives in me,
A part of mine may live in thee,
And move thee on to nobler deeds. (Ixiv.-v.)
He dreamed there would be Spring no more, but now he
perceives that his life begins to quicken again (Ixix.).
So many worlds, so much to do,
So little done, such things to be, (Ixxiii.)
is his reflection on the premature ending of his friend's
262 THE MAKERS OF MODERN ENGLISH.
life, but it also marks an awakening of purpose in his
own. Here again, upon the verge of another Christmas,
the poem seems to pause with the personal reflections of
the seventy-seventh section, on the possibility that what
he has written of his friend may never find readers, nor
touch any heart but his own. There is a virility and
spirit in this section which marks the movement of a
healthier mind. That he can begin to think about the
publication of his own verses is significant of the re-
kindling of human ambition in him, and is the token that
the lethargy of grief is broken. He has not recovered
his strength yet ; but the crisis of the disease is over.
From this point the poem moves in a clearer and less
grief-laden atmosphere ; the assurance of faith becomes
stronger, and a note of triumph breathes in the music,
gradually heightening and deepening to its majestic
close. He can bear now to pass in review the lost
possibilities of earthly felicity which were in his friend
(Ixxxiv.), because he has learned to believe that a diviner
felicity is his. He holds sacred " commune with the
dead," and asks
How is it ? Canst thou feel for me
Some painless sympathy with pain ? (Ixxxv.^
He gives us a portrait of his friend ; he pictures him
eager in debate, a master-bowman cleaving the centre
of the profoundest thought, quick and impassioned in
oratory,
And over those ethereal eyes
The bar of Michael Angelo ; (Ixxxvii.)
that is, the deep furrow between the eyebrows,* which
* This is a disputed point. According to Dr. Gatty the reference
is the straightness and prominence of Hallam's forehead, in which it
resembled Michael Angelo's.
TENNYSON'S "IN MEMORIAM." 263
was indicative of individuality in the great Italian artist.
He recollects how he left " the dusty purlieus, of the
law," and joined in simple rural sports with boyish
glee (Ixxxix.) ; and how they talked together, and in
prolonged and eager converse
Discussed the books to love or hate,
Or touched the changes of the state,
Or threaded some Socratic dream.
This portraiture of Arthur Hallam is completed later
on, in the striking stanza of the hundred and eleventh
section, when Tennyson exclaims,
And thus he bore without abuse
The grand old name of gentleman,
Defamed by every charlatan,
And soiled with all ignoble use.
Again he implores his presence, and he will have no
fear ; for whereas he once thought of him as lost for
ever, now he feels his presence, "Spirit to Spirit,
Ghost to Ghost," and actually believes that in dream or
vision his friend does visit him
So word by word, and line by line,
The dead man touched me from the past,
And all at once it seemed at last
The living soul was flashed on mine. (xci.-v.)
It is mind breathing on mind from the past; he feels
that whatever is lost, that survives, and is with him
alway. It is true that his friend has doubted, but it was
honest doubt, which he defends in the famous lines,
There lives more faith in honest doubt,
Believe me, than in half the creeds. (xcvi.)
He draws a lovely picture of a wife who lives with a
husband whose intellectual life is beyond her appre-
264 THE MAKERS OF MODERN ENGLISH.
hension, but who can say at least, as he has learned to
say, " I cannot understand ; I love " (xcvii.). It is the
only outcome from bewilderment ; he will follow not
the reason but the heart; a truth stated with yet
greater force and fulness in section cxxiv. :
If e'er when faith had fallen asleep,
I heard a voice, " Believe no more,"
A warmth within the tfreast would melt
The freezing reason's colder part,
And like a man in wrath the heart
Stood up, and answered, " I have felt."
He recalls how he and his friend travelled together in
unforgotten summer days, and that leads to a series of
those beautiful cabinet pictures of scenery which lend
so great a charm to the poem (xcviii.-ci.). He relates
how he has dreamed, and saw in dreams the glory of
his friend ; how " thrice as large as man he bent to
greet us " a symbol of the larger manhood which he
has inherited ; and how he stood upon the deck of some
great ship with shining sides, that sailed o'er floods of
" grander space " than any earthly a pathetic reference
to the ship that bore his dead body home to England,
and again a symbol of that voyage of life on which his
spirit now passes through an ever-broadening glory
(ciii.). Then again the Christmas comes : charged
still with too great memories of sorrow to allow the
dance and wassail-song, but yet bringing a genial
change in him, for he has abandoned wayward grief,
and "broke the bond of dying use" (cv.). This
Christmas is spent in " the stranger's land," away from
home, and the bells are not the bells he knows. The
Christmas bells peal " folded in the mist " as before :
but when the New Year is near its dawning there is
a new music in the bells, a hope and triumph in their
TENNYSON'S "IN MEMORIAM." 265
chime, which sets his heart vibrating with a new
and wholesome vigour, and he breaks out into that
memorable apostrophe :"
Ring out, wild bells, to the wild sky,
The flying cloud, the frosty light,
The year is dying in the night.
Ring out, wild bells, and let him die. ( cv i-)
The happy clangour of the New Year bells celebrates
his final emancipation from the perplexities of doubt,
his final recovery of healthful life, the sanctification of
his sorrow, the triumph of his faith. It is the anniver-
sary of Arthur Hallam's birth, the bitter February
weather, which "admits not flowers or leaves to deck
the banquet," yet the day shall be kept with festal
cheer
With books and music ; surely we
Will drink to him, whate'er he be,
And sing the songs he loved to hear. (cvii.)
He has soared into the mystic heights of perplexed
speculation, only to find his " own phantom singing
hymns ; " henceforth, he says,
I will not shut me from my kind ;
And lest I stiffen into stone,
I will not eat my heart alone,
Nor feed with sighs a passing wind. (cviii.)
Science, which teaches him how the world and
human life have grown out of the fierce shocks of
age-long discipline, the cleansing fire and cyclic storm,
may also teach him that sorrow is to man a sacred
discipline, and that fear, and weeping, and the shocks
of doom, do but batter him to shape and use (cxviii.).
Natural science can tell us much, but not all; we are
not "magnetic mockeries," nor " cunning casts in clay."
266 THE MAKERS OF MODERN ENGLISH,
There is a spiritual science also which the wise man
seeks to learn, and which unfolds a truer map of the
mysterious nature of man (cxx.). It is the reality of
spiritual existence that his sorrow has revealed to him.
Love is immortality, and through his love he has
already entered on eternal life. The knowledge that
his lost friend is really alive for evermore ; that death
for him has been simply emancipation and enfranchise-
ment; that all which he loved in him, not merely
survives, but is perfected in excellence, freed from all
human blemish or limitation, this fills him with an
almost ecstatic joy. In the early morning, when the
city is asleep, he again stands before those dark doors
in Wimpole Street, but it is no longer with agonised
upbraidings of fate. The calmness and hope of morn-
ing are with him, as they were with that forlorn
woman who long since sought her Master, when it was
yet early, in an Eastern garden, and found not a corpse
within the tomb, but a shining Figure walking in the
dewy freshness of the day, and he says :
And in my thoughts with scarce a sigh
I take the pressure of thy hand. (cxix.)
It is more than resignation, it is more than hope. It is
the voice of living certainty, of an entire and undivided
triumph, which lifts itself above the dark confusions of
the past, and sings,
Far off thou art, but ever nigh,
I have thee still and I rejoice ;
I prosper, circled with thy voice,
I shall not lose thee tho' I die. (cxxx.)
The long anguish has done its work in the purification
of the soul and the strengthening of the faith ; all the
TENNYSON'S "IN MEMORIAM? 267
bitter sounds of wailing and distress die away, and it is
with a perfect Hallelujah Chorus of glory in the highest,
and peace upon earth, that the poem ends.
There is, however, annexed to it one other section,
and not the least lovely ; the epithalamion on his
sister's marriage. We learn that this marriage took
place "some thrice three years" after Arthur Hallam's
death, but whether the bride was the sister Hallam
hoped to marry we have no means of knowing. This
epithalamion is one of those happy after-touches in
which Tennyson displays so perfectly his artistic skill.
It is suggestive of how life goes on, and must go on,
in spite of the gaps made in our ranks by death ; and
"the clash and clang" of the wedding bells, carried on
the warm breeze, is a noble contrast to that mournful
pealing of bells through the mist which is heard so
often in the earlier stages of the poem. The winter is
over and gone, the time of the singing of birds is come,
and the voice of the turtle is heard in the land. And
now, whether life bring joy or sorrow, funeral chimes
or marriage bells, the poet has an all-sustaining and
purifying faith in God
That God, which ever lives and loves,
One God, one law, one element,
And one far-off divine event,
To which the whole creation moves.
That " one far-off divine event " can be no other than the
perfecting of love in human life, the complete recogni-
tion by every living soul of the love of God, and the
final vindication of that perfect Divine love in all its
varied dealings with men, in things past, in things
present, and in things that are to come. This is the
vaguely sketched, yet noble vision, which crowns with
268 THE MAKERS OF MODERN ENGLISH.
spiritual glory the completion of his thought and labour.
He has led us through the darkest valleys of Apollyon,
but we reach with him the Beulah land at last. We
hear the trumpets pealing on the other side, and behold
it is morning ! Fair and sweet the light shines, and
heavenly voices tell us we shall walk in night no more.
It is morning; the morning of a deep and clear-eyed
faith ; and doubt and sorrow, fear and pain, are past
for ever. They are not forgotten indeed ; but we see
them now only as distant clouds touched with glories
of celestial colour, lying far and faint behind us on the
radiant horizon, transfigured and transformed by the
alchemy of God. The phantoms of the night are slain,
the anguish of the night is ended ; the true light shineth
with healing in its wings, and the soul rejoices. It may
well rejoice with joy unspeakable, for
Out of the shadow of night
The world rolls into light,
It is daybreak everywhere.
We here conclude our study of Tennyson. What
his ultimate position in the ranks of fame may be it
is impossible to decide. We are yet too fully under his
immediate influence for our discernment to be just, or
our judgment to be wise. That he is among the few
great creative poets of humanity, no one will assert ;
that he is nevertheless a poet of great and varied ex-
cellence, none will deny. He has been compared with
Milton, and has been set so high above Wordsworth,
that one of his critics has ventured to say that in the
future, when men call the roll of poets, " they will
begin with Shakespeare and Milton and who shall
have the third place if it be not Tennyson ? " But
Emerson, whose judgment is worthy of general defer-
TENNYSON'S "IN ME MORI AM." 269
ence, has said that Wordsworth is the poet of modern
England, and that "otljer writers have to affect what
to him is natural." And that pregnant saying illu-
mines at once the whole question, laying bare at one
stroke the secret of Wordsworth's supremacy and of
Tennyson's deficiency. We cannot but feel that he
lacks the massive ease of Wordsworth and the deep
interior strength of Milton. If we still hesitate to grant
him equality with the foremost poets of his own century,
it is for the sound reason that while in Tennyson
artistic culture has never been surpassed, yet the
original poetic impulse is weaker in him than in either
of these great poets. But happily it is not necessary
for us to determine the rank, before we can discern
the genius, of our masters ; it is enough for us to re-
ceive with thankfulness and admiration the writings
of a great poet, who for sixty years has fed the mind
of England with visions of truth and beauty, and who,
through all that length of various years, has never
ceased to be a source of inspiration and delight to that
diffused and dominant race who
Speak the tongue that Shakespeare spake.
CHAPTER XXVI.
ROBERT BROWNING.
[Born at Camberwell, London, May 7th, 1812. "Pauline" published
1832. Marries Elizabeth Barrett September 12th, 1846* "The
Ring and the Book" published 1868. " Asolando," his last volume,
1889. Died in Venice, December I2th, 1889. Buried in West-
minster Abbey, December 3ist, l!
THE two greatest figures in the world of modern
poetry are Tennyson and Browning. To each
has been accorded old age : both have been keenly
alive to the intellectual and social movements of their
time, and have endeavoured to reflect them. Each also
has been an observant student of life, as all true poets
must be, and each has constructed a huge gallery of
human portraits, representing many types, and arranged
with artistic instinct and consummate skill. But while
Tennyson has proved himself the greater artist, Brown-
ing has proved himself the greater mind. He has
brought to the work of the poet a keen and subtle
intellect, a penetrating insight, the experience of a
citizen of the world, and in all things the original force
of a powerful individuality. The result of his artistic
deficiency is that he has entirely failed to obtain popu-
larity. He has not known how to deliver his message
to the popular ear, and it may be doubted if he has
ever cared to try. With a touch of justifiable scorn he
has declared that he never intended his poetry to be
ROBERT BROWNING. 271
a substitute for a cigar or a game of dominoes to an idle
man. The grace and music of Tennyson's verse have
compelled delight, but in Browning there is no attempt
at verbal music. It is with him an unstudied, perhaps
an uncoveted, art. When David sought to express the
consummate union of the opposite qualities which con-
stitute perfection he said, " Strength and beauty are in
His sanctuary." In Browning we have the strength,
in Tennyson the beauty. And the result of this artistic
deficiency, this inability to clothe his thoughts in forms
of grace, is, that Browning has failed in any large degree
to charm the ear of that wide public who care less for
the thought that is uttered than for the manner of its
utterance.
It is, however, necessary to remember another fact
about Browning's poetry, viz., that to the first minds of
the age, the men who lead and govern the world of
thought, Browning has been and is a potent and in-
spiring force. He has disseminated ideas, he has per-
vaded the literature of his time with his influence. He
has found an audience, few but fitting, and to them has
addressed himself, knowing that through them he could
effectually reach the world at large. The test of
popularity is at all times an imperfect test, and in
Browning's case is wholly inadequate and unsatisfactory
as an index of his true position in the literature of his
day. The influence of a poet is often out of all pro-
portion to his popularity, and is by no means to be
measured by the number of his readers, or the poverty
or copiousness of public praise. If mere popularity
were to become the solitary test of influence, we should
have to rank Longfellow above Dante, and Martin
Tupper above Tennyson. But while popularity is in it-
self a testimony to the possession of certain serviceable
272 THE MAKERS OF MODERN ENGLISH.
qualities, or a certain happy combination of qualities,
it fails wholly as a just measurement of the real for-
mative force which a writer may be able to exercise
upon his time, and still more hopelessly as an indica-
tion of the position such a writer may take up in the
unknown judgments of posterity. A man may catch
the ear of the public, and win its empty plaudits, with-
out touching in more than an infinitesimal degree the
public conscience or the public thought.
The deeper and diviner waves of intellectual life
indeed have more often than not owed their origin to
men who have quarrelled with their age, and received
from their contemporaries little but the thorn-cfown
of derision and the sponge of gall and vinegar men
wandering in the bitterness of exile like Dante, or starv-
ing in the scholar's garret like Spinoza. Most truly
great writers, to whom has been committed the creative
genius which opens new wells of thought and new
methods of utterance, have had need to steel themselves
against the indifference of their time, and to learn how
to say : " None of these things move me." They
have appealed from the contemptuous ignorance of their
contemporaries to the certain praises of posterity, and
not in vain. Where such men find readers they make
disciples, and each heart upon which the fire of their
genius falls becomes consecrated to their service.
Theirs it is to found a secular apostolate, a school of
prophets united by a common faith, and pledged by the
sacredness of an intense conviction to urge on the
teaching of the new doctrine and the new name, till
the world acknowledges the claim and gives adhesion
to the master whom they love and reverence.
Let us grant, then, that we have in Robert Browning
undoubtedly a great poet, but also an undoubtedly un-
ROBERT BROWNING. 273
popular poet. With the exception of the " Ride from
Aix to Ghent/' the " Pied Piper of Hamelin," and the
tender and pathetic " Evelyn Hope/' few or none of his
poems have won the ear of the general public. Yet he
has produced no fewer than twenty-four volumes, the
latest of which was not long since everywhere dis-
cussed. No writer of our time has manifested greater
fecundity of genius, versatility of style, or capacity of
industry. Few writers have ever had a firmer faith in
themselves, and have trusted more fully to the secure
awards of time. Now that the poetry of Browning has
become a cult, his less known works have probably
found readers ; but at the time of their publication
few but the reviewers had the courage to read them.
There is a story told of Douglas Jerrold's having
" Sordello " sent him for review at a time when he was
in weak health and low spirits. After an hour's fruit-
less effort, he flung the book aside, crying : " My brain
is failing ! I must be mad ! I have not understood a
word." His wife then took the book up, and it was
agreed that upon the test of her ability to understand
it the question of her husband's sanity must turn. She
at length flung it down, saying : " My dear, don't be
alarmed. You're not mad ; but the man who wrote it
is ! " Many persons have closed " Sordello " .with the
same angry comment, and there are isolated passages
in Browning more difficult than anything in " Sordello."
How is it, then, that the man whose mastery of humour
is so finely displayed in the " Pied Piper," whose pathos
and power of narrative have such splendid attestations
as " Evelyn Hope " and the " Ride from Aix," who can
write with such terseness, simplicity, and vigour as these
poems display, is, nevertheless, to the bulk of English
readers a stone of stumbling and a rock of offence ?
18
274 THE MAKERS OF MODERN ENGLISH.
The answer to this question is not difficult. Let it
at once be granted that Robert Browning can write as
clearly as any English poet when he likes, for he has
done it. Open Browning at random, and it will be
hard if, in half-an-hour, you do not come upon a score
of noble thoughts, admirably expressed in clear ringing
English, with delicate attention to phrase and perfect
adherence to the laws of construction. Yet it must be
owned that in the same half-hour it is quite possible to
alight on passages where the nominative has lost its
verb beyond hope of recovery, and phrases seem to
have been jerked out haphazard, in a sort of volcanic
eruption of thought and temper. What is the under-
lying cause of these defects of style ?
There are two main causes. The first springs from
Browning's theory of poetry. Browning's theory of
poetry is a serious one. Like all truly great artists, he
has uniformly recognised the dignity and responsibility
of art. With him poetry is not the manufacture of a
melodious jingle, nor the elaboration of pretty conceits ;
it is as serious as life, and is to be approached with
reverent and righteous purpose. It is, moreover, the
noblest of all intellectual labours, and should therefore
minister to the intellect not less than to the emotion.
Into his poetry Browning has put his subtlest and
deepest thought, and he uniformly puts a higher value
on the thought than the method or manner of its ex-
pression. In " Pauline," his earliest poem, published
in 1832, he says, with a true forecast of his own powers
and limitations,
So will I sing on, fast as fancies come ;
Rudely, the verse being as the mood it paints.
With him the sense is more than the sound, the sub-
ROBERT BROWNING. 275
stance is more than the form, the moral significance is
more than the rhetorical adornment. He has. some-
thing to say, something of infinite moment and solemn
import, and he is comparatively careless of how he says
it. He is the Carlyle of poetry : the message is every-
thing, the verbal vesture nothing. It is in this respect
that Browning's divergence from all other modern
poets is greatest. He is not indifferent to the art and
music of words, but he habitually treats them as of
secondary importance. Naturally, the growth of this
temper has led Browning into extravagances of style,
as it did Carlyle ; many a fine thought is hopelessly
embedded in insufficient and faulty phrases ; and there-
fore, to the mass of readers, who do not approach poetry
with the patient spirit of scientific research, is hope-
lessly lost.
The second cause of the occasional obscurity of
Browning's poetry is found in the condensation of his
style. When " Paracelsus " was published it was
declared unintelligible, and John Sterling, one of the
acutest critics of his day, accused it of " verbosity."
This saying of Sterling's was reported to Browning
by Miss Caroline Fox, who went on to ask : " Doth he
know that Wordsworth will devote a fortnight or more
to the discovery of a single word that is the one fit for
his sonnet ? "
This criticism filled Browning with a dread of diffuse-
ness, and henceforth he set himself never to use two
words where one would do. The result of this resolve
is that often he does not use words enough to express
his meaning. He uses one word, and expects his
reader to supply two. It is this which makes "Sor-
dello " the puzzle it is. It is a vast web of words, in
which the filaments are dropped, confused, tangled,
276 THE MAKERS OF MODERN ENGLISH.
like the crumpled gossamer of a spider's web hastily
detached and more than half-ruined by the touch of
carelessness.
There are beautiful thoughts and passages in
" Sordello," but they savour so much of bookishness,
and demand so much antiquarian knowledge in the
reader, that few are likely to disinter and appreciate
them. For instance, take this passage from Book the
Third : " Factitious humours " fall from Sordello, and
turn him pure
As some forgotten vest
Woven of painted byssus, silkiest,
Tufting the Tyrrhene whelk's pearl-sheeted lip,
Left welter where a trireme let it slip
I' the sea and vexed a satrap : so the stain
O' the world forsakes Sordello : how the tinct
Loosening escapes, cloud after cloud.
Now what is -the picture painted here ? Analyze it,
and this is the result : An eastern satrap, sailing upon
a galley or trireme, wears a vest of byssus, dyed with
Tyrian purple. He lets it fall overboard, and as he
looks down through the clear sea sees the purple
dye escaping and clouding the water. So Sordello is
cleansed from the stain of the world. It is a very
beautiful illustration ; but its beauty is not perceived
till we recollect that purple is taken from the tuft of
the "whelk's pearl-sheeted lip," and that a garment
so dyed, if cast into the sea, throws off its colour in
tremulous clouds. Does any one see the meaning at
first sight ? And how many might read it and never
see any meaning in it at all ? This is an example of
Browning in his worst mood ; and we cannot wonder,
when we consider it, that simple-minded poets like
Charles Mackay called him the " High Priest of the
ROBERT BROWNING. 277
Unintelligible ; " or that Browning societies have had to
be invented to reduce his recondite fancies to lucidity.
These, then, are the two main sources of all that
is obscure in Browning's writings. The very fact that
for many years he was a solitary worker, writing
almost for his own pleasure, naturally confirmed the
defects of his style. The obscurity is never of the
thought; that, indeed, is so clear and luminous to him
that he seems incapable of conceiving it as confused in
the vision of his reader. The thought is clear as the
sun ; but the atmosphere of words through which we
perceive it is murky, and the body of the thought looms
through it dim and strange. And so Mr. Swinburne has
spoken with equal felicity and truth of Browning's faculty
of " decisive and incisive thought," and has said, " He
is something too much the reverse of obscure; he is
too brilliant and subtle for the ready readers of a ready
writer." The case cannot be better put than in the
words of one of his most earnest and intelligent
students : " He has never ignored beauty, but he has
neglected it in the desire for significance. He has
never meant to be rugged, but he has become so in the
striving after strength. He never intended to be
obscure, but he has become so from the condensation
of style which was the excess of significance and
strength." This should constantly be remembered, if
we are to approach Browning's poetry with the in-
telligence which interprets, and the sympathy which
appreciates.
Were Browning not a great poet it would be difficult
to forgive him such defects as these. We should be
inclined to dismiss him with the brief aphorism of
the Swedish poet, Tegner, who said, "The obscurely
uttered is the obscurely thought." But Browning is
278 THE MAKERS OF MODERN ENGLISH.
one of the greatest of poets, and has so profoundly
affected the thought of his time, that however the
ordinary reader may be repelled by the grotesqueness
of his style, it is eminently worth the while even of
that distinguished individual to endeavour to under-
stand him. We freely grant that poets should not
need interpreters; but where there is something of
infinite moment to be interpreted it is well to set aside
fixed rules and habitual maxims. Genius is so rare a
gift that we must take it on its own terms, and we
cannot afford to quarrel with the conditions it may
impose on us. It speaks its own language, and is
indifferent alike to the reproach or desire of those
whom it addresses. The only question for us is,
whether it is worth our while to endeavour to penetrate
the meaning and ascertain the teaching of any writer
who, through natural limitations or wilful indifference,
renders the study of his works difficult and perplexing ?
In the case of Browning I reply that no more re-
munerative study can be found than in the careful
reading of his works. He embodies some of the most
curious and pervasive tendencies of nineteenth-century
literature, and in subsequent chapters I shall endeavour
to show what Browning's teaching is, and to estimate
his influence in literature.
CHAPTER XXVII.
BROWNINGS PHILOSOPHY OF LIFE.
ONE of the most interesting facts about Robert
Browning is that he has no touch of the recluse
about him ; he is the child of cities, not of solitudes.
In the writings of Wordsworth and Tennyson, dis-
similar as they are in many respects, there is this bond
of likeness they breathe the air and silence of seclusion.
With the one it is the silence of the mountains, with
the other the ordered calm of English rural life. All
that Wordsworth has written is steeped in the very
spirit of solitude, and the mighty silence of the hills
has lent a majesty to his conceptions an atmosphere,
as it were, of dignified simplicity. In Tennyson, also,
one is always conscious of the presence of Nature.
The wind that blows across his page is full of the dewy
freshness of green lawns and rustling trees. The city,
with its moil and grime, its passionate intensity of life
and action, is far away. He sees its distant lights
flaring like a dusky dawn : but he has little care to
penetrate its mysteries. And in most modern poets
the same remoteness from the passionate stress of life
is felt. What is true of Wordsworth and Tennyson is
equally true of Keats and Morris. The fundamental
idea in each seems to be that the life of the recluse is
alone favourable to poetry, and that the life of action
280 THE MAKERS OF MODERN ENGLISH.
in the great centres of civilisation is fatal to works
of imagination.
To this temper Browning furnishes a spendid excep-
tion. Born a Londoner, and proud to own himself a
citizen of the greatest city upon earth, it is with London,
Florence, and Venice that his name is imperishably
interwoven : not the Lake district of Wordsworth, nor
the Geneva of Byron, nor the Spezzia of Shelley. In
continental travel he is evidently more familiar with the
bookstalls of Florence than the snow-solitudes of the high
Alps. He was a familiar figure in society for many years.
He does not shun the crowd : he seeks and loves it.
The sense of numbers quickens his imagination. The
great drama of human life absorbs him. The glimpses
of pure nature he gives us are curiously few. He can
describe a lunar rainbow : but he saw it not among
the Alps, but from the dull greensward of a London
common. Practically, he has little to say about Nature
as such. When he does describe any bit of scenery
he does it with scientific accuracy, His pictures of
Italy are full of the very spirit of Italian scenery, and
have an almost photographic exactitude. But they are
the mere by-play of his mind. It is Italian life which
fascinates him, not Italian scenery. It is life every-
where that moves him to utterance, and in the crowd
of men, and in the tangled motives of men, and the
constant dramas and tragedies bred by the passions
and instincts of the human heart, Browning has found
the food upon which his genius has thriven. In this
respect Browning occupies an entirely unique portion
among modern poets. He concerns himself so little
with the message of nature, and so much with the
soul of man, that his whole poetry may be called the
Poetry of the Soul : its
BROWNING'S PHILOSOPHY OF LIFE. 281
Shifting fancies and celestial lights,
With all its grand orchestral silences
To keep the pauses of the rhythmic sounds.
If Wordsworth's was the priestly temperament, and
Tennyson's is the artistic, it may be said that Brown-
ing's was something broader than both : the nobly
human temperament, which cleaves to man, and seeks
to understand his hopes and fears, and judges him by
the standard of a catholic charity. In this respect it
is no exaggeration to say that Browning more nearly
resembles Shakespeare than any poet of the last three
hundred years; for we can imagine Shakespeare as
having moved among men with the same genial and
understanding sympathy, and as interpreting the men
of his day with an insight similar to, if broader and
more profound than, Browning's.
The immediate result of this temper in Browning is
that no poet has exhibited such variety, and this
variety springs from the multiplicity of subjects in
which he is interested His poems cover dissertations
on art and music, stories of adventure, strangely vivid
and exact reproductions of mediaeval life and thought,
glimpses of the authentic life of the ancient world not
less than of the modern, yet all touched with that pre-
cision which marks the student and the scholar. In
the company of Robert Browning you see from the
prosaic eminence of a London common the overthrow
of Sodom, and the dread vision of the Last Judgment, as
in the wonderful poem called " Easter Day ; " you sail
in Venetian gondolas witnessing the drama of passion
and crime; you hide with conspirators in the ruined
aqueducts of modern Italy ; the scene changes from the
Ghetto to the Morgue ; from the by-ways of London to
the deserts of Arabia; from the tent of Saul to the
282 THE MAKERS OF MODERN ENGLISH.
plains of " glorious guilty Babylon;" from the Shambles'
Gate, where the patriot rides out to death upon his
hurdle, to the splendid chambers of the connoisseur,
crowded with the spoils of Renaissance art, where the
Bishop orders his tomb in St. Praxed's. Nothing in
the drama of human life seems to escape Browning ;
its minutest by-play rivets his attention not less than
its master passions. He writes, in fact, like a citizen
of the world, with a shrewd, hard, piercing intelligence,
which goes straight to the heart of things, touching
them off with gentle cynicism, or laying them bare
with the lightning flash of inspired insight. He is
essentially dramatic that is to say, he habitually loses
himself in the individuality of the person he represents,
his main question being, " Now, what did this man
think, that he acted thus?" He frequently labours
with minute care to build up his picture of the man's
condition, till we begin to be impatient of his patience ;
then suddenly, with some short, sharp flash of thought,
the whole soul of the man is revealed as by lightning,
and the poem ends. What, then, is Browning's view
of life ? His view of religion we may conveniently
leave for a separate chapter. Let us ask now, What is
his view of life ?
The first and chief point in Browning's view of life
is his intense sense of the reality of God and the
human soul.
He glows above
With scarce an intervention, presses close
And palpitatingly, His soul o'er ours.
These are the twin Pharos-lights of earthly life ; the wild
surge of circumstance breaks and darkens on all sides,
but these abide. It matters not what is lost if God be
found, or how much is swept down into the roaring
BROWNING'S PHILOSOPHY OF LIFE. 283
wells of the hungry sea of oblivion if the soul be
saved.
In man's self arise
August anticipations, symbols, types
Of a dim splendour ever, on before,
In that eternal circle run by life.
In all moments of supreme passion and impulse we
feel how thin is that veil which shuts us from eternity.
The lover in the " Last Ride " utters this thought when
he cries,
Who knows but the world may end to-night ?
These moments of exaltation are the true index to the
greatness of the soul of man, and therefore are to be
sought and cherished above all other gain. What are
progress, science, knowledge, love, art, in the light of
these higher thoughts? They are simply so many
golden roads which lead to God, so many shining stairs
on which the half-visible shapes of spiritual presences
go up and down. There is a world of spirit as of sense,
and the gleams of spiritual knowledge which visit us
Were meant
To sting with hunger for full light.
Art is not to be praised for what it achieves, but for
what it aspires to. It is the yearning of the spirit, not
the skill of the hand, which gives it its real value.
Progress, man's distinctive mark alone,
Not God's, and not the beasts' ; God is, they are,
Man partly is, and wholly hopes to be.
No English poet has written so fully upon art and
music, or has shown more conclusively an exact know-
ledge and delicate taste in both ; but no poet is less of
284 THE MAKERS OF MODERN ENGLISH.
a dilettante. Art is simply an aspiration ; when the
artist is satisfied with his work, then he has renounced
all that made his art true and worthy. The mere
visible results of art are worthless in themselves, and
the passion of accumulating them an ignoble passion,
if it has no higher purposes. Contempt can go no
farther than to picture such a connoisseur, who
Above all epitaphs
Aspires to have his tomb describe
Himself as sole among the tribe
Of snuff-box fanciers who possessed
A Grignon with the Regent's crest.
On the other hand, it is in the pursuit of true art that
Abt Vogler gets his vision of truth itself, and cries :
All we have willed and hoped or dreamed of good shall exist,
Not in semblance, but in itself; no beauty, nor good, nor power
Whose voice has gone forth, but each survives for the melodist,
When eternity affirms the conception of an hour.
The high that proved too high, the heroic for earth too hard,
The passion that left the ground to lose itself in the sky,
Are music sent up to God by the lover and the bard.
Enough that He heard it once ; we shall hear it by-and-bye.
Upon the general text of this view of life Browning
perpetually engrafts other lessons. For instance, he is
fond of showing that it is better and grander to fail
in great things than to succeed in little ones. What
though the patriot goes out at the Shambles' Gate,
remembering, as he rides, the flags flung wide for him
a year before ?
Thus I entered, and thus I go !
In triumphs people have dropped down dead.
" Paid by the World what dost thou owe
Me ? " God might question ; now instead
"Fis God shall repay! I am safer so.
BROWNING'S PHILOSOPHY OF LIFE. 285
So, again, in the " Grammarian's Funeral," Browning
puts into four terse and epigrammatic lines the same
truth :
This low man seeks a little thing to do,
Sees it and does it ;
This high man, with a great thing to pursue,
Dies ere he knows it.
A point which Browning is never weary of illus-
trating is that to all men there come moments of half-
inspired insight, the keen and, perhaps, momentary
thrill of great impulses, and that a man's whole eternity
hangs upon the use of such visitations. The revelation
may be made in human love; it may be a vision of
knowledge, or of duty ; but it is imperative that when
such transfiguring moments come we should be ready
to seize them. In such Divine moments we see the
narrow way that leads to life eternal.
There are flashes struck from midnights,
There are fire-flames noondays kindle,
Whereby piled-up honours perish,
Whereby swoln ambitions dwindle ;
While just this or that poor impulse,
Which for once had play unstifled,
Seems the whole work of a lifetime,
That away the rest has trifled.
What if it be said such moments are transient, that
ecstasy is rare, that such high visions fade as soon as
born ? The vision may perish, but the lesson it reveals
remains. Life which is not vivified by faith and emo-
tion is scarcely life at all. The worst of all woes is
worldliness; to sink down in tranquil acquiescence
before the customs of a low-pitched life, and never to
break through into that eternal world which invests
the visible world like an invisible atmosphere, this is
286 THE MAKERS OF MODERN ENGLISH.
spiritual death, and there is no death to be feared but
that. Why, the very grasshopper
Spends itself in leaps all day
To reach the sun, you want the eyes
To see, asjthey the wings to rise
And match the noble hearts of them.
Would the grasshopper, with his " passionate life "
change estate with the mole that gropes in his " veri-
table muck " ? Thus the vision of life which shapes
itself to Browning is the vision of a great world in
which the spiritual is ever in peril of being throttled
by the sordid.
The general issue of Browning's philosopy of life is,
then, that life is probation and education. Nothing is
of value in itself, but for what it leads to, for the help
that it may yield the spirit in its long battle to gain
enfranchisement from the flesh, and inheritance with
God. Just as the utmost spoil of knowledge only serves
to sting us with hunger for fuller light, so the utmost
wealth of love only reveals to us the infinite possibilities
of the love of God. There is " no pause in the leading
and the light:"
There's heaven above, and night by night
I look right through its gorgeous roof ;
For I intend to get to God.
Life has manifold sweet and pleasant uses; let the
odour of the April, and the freshness of the sea, the
miracle of science, the ineffable yearning of perfect
music, or the spell of perfect art, find their just and
proper place in the category of life ; and be accepted
with no ascetic scruple, but genial gratitude. But they
are nothing more than broken hints, by which men
learn the alphabet of better life. And it is because to
BROWNING'S PHILOSOPHY OF LIFE. 287
rest in these things is death that Browning so eagerly
applauds any life that flings itself away in endeavours
after the distant and unattainable, and is at all times
so merciful toward earthly failure. He loves to show
us that beneath the rough husk of lives which seem
wasted, there lies hidden the true seed of a life which
will one day bloom consummate in beauty. He loves
equally to take up some apparently successful life, and
pierce it with his caustic humour, and point out its essen-
tial emptiness with an irony so keen and stern that it
would be bitter were it not softened by the pathos of
a human-hearted pity. Above all, there is no touch 01
pessimism in him ; he looks undismayed above present
evils to the brightening of a diviner day.
Therefore, to whom turn I, but to Thee, the ineffable Name ?
Builder and Maker, Thou, of houses not made with hands !
What, have fear of change from Thee, who art ever the same ?
Doubt that Thy power can fill the heart that Thy power
expands ?
There shall never be one lost good ! What was, shall live
as before.
The evil is null, is nought, is silence implying sound ;
On the earth, the broken arcs ; in the heaven, a perfect
round.
CHAPTER XXVIII.
THE SPIRIT OF BROWNING'S RELIGION.
HAVING said so much as I have about Brown-
ing's intense interest in life, it naturally follows
that something should be said about his attitude
to religion, and the spirit of his religious teaching.
The great poet is necessarily a great believer. The
faculty which pierces to the unseen, and works in
constant delicate contact with the invisible, is a faculty
absolutely necessary to the equipment of a true poet.
The poetry of faithlessness is an abnormal growth. It
has little range or vitality. It never attains to really
high and memorable results. When the spring of faith
is broken, every faculty of the mind seems to share
in the vast disaster. And especially do the faculties
of imagination, spiritual insight, and tender fancy,
which are the master-architects of poetry, suffer. The
loss of faith strikes a chill to the central core of being,
and robs the artist of more than half the material from
which the highest poetry is woven.
On the other hand, the power of spiritual apprehen-
sion is one of the surest signs whereby we know a
great poet. It is the function of the great poet to be a
seer and interpreter. He sees farther, deeper, and
higher than ordinary men, and interprets for the
common man what he dimly feels but does not fully
THE SPIRIT OF BROWNING'S RELIGION. 289
apprehend. It is quite possible that the message of
the poet, the result of his spiritual insight, may not
shape with our preconceived notions and theories ;
but where the spiritual insight is sure and real, the
true poet never fails to quicken insight in his reader.
Perhaps no man has done more in our generation
to quicken and sharpen the spiritual insight of men
than Browning. Pre-eminently he is a religious poet.
Religion enters into all his work, like a fragrance or
a colour which clings to some delicate and lovely
fabric, and, while occasionally subdued or modified, is
never lost. Browning's vast knowledge of the world
never degenerates into worldliness. He seeks to know
the world in all its aspects, all its strange and vague
contradictions, and seeks rather than shuns its sad and
seamy side. If he is an optimist it is not because he
is an idealist, and the most striking thing about his
optimism is that it thrives in the full knowledge of
the baseness and evil of the world. But the curiosity
which impels Browning to investigate the darker side
of life is never altogether an artistic curiosity : it is
a religious curiosity. What then is the net result ?
What are the great facts on which he builds his faith ?
What are the sources of the religious buoyancy which
is so remarkable in so thorough a citizen of the world,
and especially in an age when so many of the foremost
writers and thinkers have given themselves over to
agnosticism or despair ?
Now, the actual religion of a man can usually be
reduced to a few simple truths which are grasped with
entire belief, and thus become the working principles
of his life. Few men believe with equal conviction all
the various dogmas of religious truth ; but while many
may remain obscure, there are others which are revealed
290 TH.E MAKERS OF MODERN ENGLISH.
with a vividness of light and force which constitute
them henceforth the pillars of a man's real life. Thus,
for instance, St. James has defined what pure religion
and undefiled meant to him in one simple and sufficing
formula charity and unworldliness, visiting the father-
less, and keeping the soul unspotted from the world.
So Browning has grasped, with all his force, certain
religious truths which appear to him the soul and
marrow of Christianity, and these constitute the spirit
of his religion.
The best illustration of the working of Browning's
genius in the realm of religious truth may be found in
such a poem as " Easter Day." This poem is a wonder-
ful poem in more respects than one : it is wonderful
in its imagery, its intensity of insight, its daring, its
vividness, the closeness of its reasoning, the sustained
splendour of its diction, the prophetic force of its con-
clusions. It begins with the discussion of two speakers,
who agree " How very hard it is to be a Christian."
But each speaker utters the phrase in a different sense :
the one finds Christianity hard as a matter of faith,
unproved to the intellect ; the other as a matter of
practice, unrealised in the life. It would not be
difficult to be a martyr, and find a Hand plunged
through the flame to pluck the soul up to God, if,
indeed, one could be certain of any such result ; it is
hard to believe on less than scientific evidence. To re-
nounce the world on such evidence as we have would
be folly. Suppose, after such renunciation, a man
found he had given up the only world there was for
him ? Then ensues the poem itself, which consists of
the description of a vision of the final judgment which
the man of faith received, and which shook him out of
the very web of negation in which his friend struggle?,
THE SPIRIT OF BROWNING'S RELIGION. 291
Suddenly, as he crossed a common at midnight, occupied
with these very thoughts, all the midnight became " one
fire." There shot across the dome of heaven, "like
horror and astonishment,"
A fierce vindictive scribble of red,
And straight I was aware
That the whole rib-work round, minute
Cloud touching cloud beyond compute
Was tinted, each with its own spot
Of burning at the core, till clot
Jammed against clot, and spilt its fire
Over all heaven.
This awful vision burned away all darkness from
his spirit, and he knew that he had chosen not God,
but the World. Instantly he resolved to defend and
applaud his choice. God had created him to appreciate
the beauties of life, and he had not put aside the boon
unused that was lit But at that instant there came
a final belch of fire, and he saw God
Like the smoke
Pillared o'er Sodom when day broke
I saw Him.
Then God spoke. He had chosen the World; let
him glut his sense upon the World, but remember he
was shut out from the heaven of spirit. But what was
the World, with all its brave show of beauty ? Merely
one rose of God's making, flung
Out of a summer's opulence,
Over the Eden barrier, whence
Thou art excluded.
Well, then, he would choose Art, to which the voice
of God replies yet more sternly that Art is less than
292 THE MAKERS OF MODERN ENGLISH.
Nature ; and its highest trophies the shame and despair
of artists, who sought therein to express the invisible
whole of which they perceived but a part. Then he
will choose Mind, the joys of Intellect ; but what again,
replies the Judge, is Mind but a gleam which to the
devout thinker
Makes bright the earth an age
Now, the whole sun's his heritage !
Lastly, he perceives there is nothing left but Love,
and that shall be his choice.
God is : thou art the rest is hurled
To nothingness.
He has doubted the story of Christ because he could
n Dt conceive so great love in God
Upon the ground
That in the story had been found
Too much love ! How could God love so ?
He, who in all His works below,
Adapted to the needs of man,
Made love the basis of His plan,
Did love, as was demonstrated.
In that moment he saw that God's love was the
solution of all intellectual difficulties, and then, as he
lay prone and overwhelmed,
The whole God within his eyes
Embraced me.
So the poem ends a vision of Divine unalterable
love as the solution of the mystery of the universe.
The infinite issue of human choice is, again, one of
those strong beliefs which with Browning form the
THE SPIRIT OF BROWNING'S RELIGION. 293
spirit of his religion. He reiterates persistently and in
many forms that any .choice which falls short of God is
ruinous in its sequence. For instance, the speaker in
"Easter Day" is taught the folly of choosing Mind by
perceiving that the highest genius of man is but a
gleam from the unexhausted sun which pours light
through an eternal world. But Browning, in one of
his greatest poems, "Paracelsus," has gone much
farther than this. In that poem he has shown that
Intellect without Love, without Morality, without Char-
acter, is of all forces the most perilous. Paracelsus has
sought to Know. What has his desire brought him
but bitterness and disappointment ? So poignant is his
sense of failure that he even cries :
Mind is nothing but disease,
And natural health is ignorance.
And in the final pathetic scene he derides the folly of
such intellectual passions as those which have consumed
him, and sees clearly that to Love is better than to
Know.
No, no ;
Love, hope, fear, faith these make humanity,
These are its sign and note and character,
And these I have lost.
Indeed, throughout his writings Browning shows
himself inexorably opposed to the modern theistic
philosophy which makes the individual the centre of
the universe, and steadily teaches the more ancient
doctrine of Him who, being rich, for our sakes became
poor, that we, by His poverty, might become rich
Renounce joy for my fellow's sake ? That's joy
Beyond joy.
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But this all-present sense of God's love implies also
such truths as communion, prayer, providence; and
these also are incorporated in Browning's religion. The
noblest example of Browning's expression of these
doctrines is found in the short but splendid poem,
" Instans Tyrannus." It is the Tyrant who speaks.
Out of the million or two of men he possesses there is
one man not at all to his mind. He struck him, of
course, but though pinned to the earth with the persist-
ence of so great a hate he neither moaned nor cursed.
He is nothing but a toad or a rat, but nevertheless the
Tyrant cannot eat in peace while he lives to anger him
with his abominable meekness. So he soberly lays his
last plan to extinguish the man
When sudden . . . how think ye ? the end
Did I say " without friend " ?
Say, rather, from marge to blue marge,
The whole sky grew his targe,
With the sun's self for visible boss,
While an arm ran across !
Do you see ? Just my vengeance complete,
The man sprang to his .feet,
Stood erect, caught at God's skirts, and prayed 1
So 7 was afraid ?
The poem is a sort of magnificent version of the
familiar hymn-lines :
Strong to deliver, and good to redeem
The weakest believer who hangs upon Him.
The centre of Browning's whole world of religious
thought lies in his abiding sense and conviction that
God is Love. It reconciles him to the mysteries of
faith, it casts a bright Bridge of gleaming hope across
the profound gulfs of human error, and like the lunar
THE SPIRIT OF BROWNINGS RELIGION. 295
rainbow he describes, a second and mightier bow springs
from the first, and stands vast and steady above the
mysterious portals of human destiny, on whose strain-
ing topmost arc he sees emerge the foot of God
Himself. " God is good, God is wise, God is love," is
the perpetual whisper of spiritual voices, floating over
him, and piercing with their divine sweetness the evil
darkness of the tortuous way he threads in tracking
out the strange secrets of human impulse and achieve-
ment. All knowledge is but the shadow of God's light ;
all purity and constancy of human passion but the hint
of His love ; all beauty but the fitful gleam of His
raiment as He passes us that King in His beauty
whose very face itself we shall at last behold in the
land that is very far off. If Browning stands amid the
ruins of that mighty city, which in a single year sent
its million fighters forth, and
Marks the basement whence a tower in ancient time
Sprang sublime,
And a burning ring, all round, the chariots traced
As they raced,
it is to turn at last from the vision of that domed and
daring palace, the splendid spectacle of power and pomp,
to cry :
Shut them in,
With their triumphs, and their glories, and the rest;
Love is best !
If he considers the failing of human power in the
presence of death, it is only to exclaim, with a sense of
triumphant gladness :
Grow old along with me I
The best is yet to be,
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The last of life for which the first was made ;
Our times are in His hand,
Who saith : " A whole I planned,
Youth shows but half; trust God ; see all, nor be afraid ! "
He has infinite faith in God, that His love will, in
ways unknown to us, work out ultimate blessedness for
His children, and that the world will not pass out in
darkness, but in the end of the ages it will be daybreak
everywhere. Not only is there no despair : there is no
touch of disheartenment even in Browning
Languor is not in his heart,
Weakness is not in his word,
Weariness not on his brow.
He awaits the revelation of eternity ; then all will
be made clear. The lost leader, who has forsaken the
great cause of progress: " just for a handful of silver
he left us " may never be received back save in doubt,
hesitation, and pain by his old comrades ; but the
estrangement of earth will not outlast earth
Let him receive the new knowledge and wait us
Pardoned in heaven, the first by the throne !
Caponsacchi, the great and noble priest, the " soldier-
saint" of "The Ring and the Book," must needs
henceforth pass through life with the shadow of Pom-
pilia's sweet presence laid across his heart, and all
the purest aspiration of his life covered in her grave.
Well, is there not a further world, where they neither
marry nor are given in marriage ?
Oh, how right it is ! how like Jesus Christ
To say that !
So let him wait God's instant, men call years ;
Meanwhile hold hard by truth and his great soul,
Do out the duty !
THE SPIRIT OF BROWNING'S RELIGION. 297
The dying Pompilia sees how the love of souls like
his , interprets the meaning of the love of God, and
cries :
Through such souls alone
God, stooping, shows sufficient of His light
For us i' the dark to rise by. And I rise.
Even when Browning stands in such a place as
the Morgue, amid the ghastliness of tragic failure and
despair, touched though he be with mournfulness, yet
this strong and living hope does not leave him, and he
still can write :
It's wiser being good than bad,
It's safer being meek than fierce,
It's fitter being sane than mad.
My own hope is, a sun will pierce
The thickest cloud earth ever stretched ;
That, after Last, returns the First,
Though a wide compass first be fetched ;
That what began best can't end worst,
Nor what God blest once prove accurst.
In other words, whatever dreary intervals there may be
of folly, darkness, misery, the world God blessed in the
beginning will roll round into the light at last ; and when
His purpose is complete, there will be a new heaven
and a new earth wherein dwelleth righteousness.
CHAPTER XXIX.
BROWNINGS ATTITUDE TO CHRISTIANITY.
IN the last chapter we noticed that one of the abnor-
mal growths of modern poetry is a poetry of nega-
tion. We may add that this, in its last development,
has become a poetry of despair. And the source of
that despair is inability to receive the truths of Chris-
tianity. Since the advent of Goethe a movement very
similar to the Renaissance in Italy has passed over the
whole of Europe. There has been a return to Paganism,
concurrently with a widespread revival in art and
culture. The dogmas of the Church have been vehe-
mently assailed, and the ethical teachings of Christianity
disputed. The movement initiated by Goethe has
spread throughout the world. It has received impulse
from strange quarters, and given impulse in strange
directions. Its legitimate outcome in Germany is found
in the long line of great scholars who have devoted
indefatigable genius and patience to the work of de-
.structive Biblical criticism. There may appear to be a
wide enough gulf between the calm paganism of Goethe
and the vehement controversial temper of German theo-
logical scholarship, but nevertheless the one is a true
child of the other.
Added to this, there must be reckoned the extraordi-
nary growth of natural science during the present
BROWNING'S ATTITUDE TO CHRISTIANITY. 299
century. The minds of the greatest thinkers have
been riveted on the problem of the origin of things.
The results of their investigations have been published
with the hardihood and confidence of complete convic-
tion. In their researches as to the working of natural
law they have completely ignored all that is super-
natural. Their temper toward the supernatural has
been one of contemptuous indifference or embittered
hostility. Thus, then, two forces of immense strength
have been steadily at work upon the structure of re-
ceived opinion ; the one force, fearless rationalism, the
other, fearless paganism. Culture has been preached
as the true substitute for Christianity, Art and Beauty as
the all-sufficient gospels for human life. We have only
to turn to the literature of the last half-century to see
how far these influences have permeated. The essayist
and poet have alike conspired to preach the new doc-
trine. The stream of tendency thus created has sufficient
examples in the beautiful paganism of Keats and the
garrulous mediaevalism of Morris.
But there is another class of writers who have not
been able so easily to dismiss the great beliefs by which
centuries of men and women have lived and striven.
They have been allured, fascinated, and repelled alter-
nately ; they have hoped and doubted ; in their voices
is the sound of weeping, in their words the vibration
of long suffering ; for whatever attitude they may have
taken toward Christianity they have never relapsed into
reckless indifference. This eager scrutiny of religious
dogmas by the best and keenest minds of the age is,
at least, a proof that such men have been alive, and
even agonisingly alive, to the tremendous importance
of those dogmas. Poetry in the nineteenth century has
sought to be the minister of theological truth not less
300 THE MAKERS OF MODERN ENGLISH.
than of artistic beauty, and as a consequence the theo-
logical problems of the century, and in less degree the
scientific problems also, have been inextricably inter-
woven with its fine warp and woof of exquisite creation.
So that let what will be said about the faithlessness
of the nineteenth century, nevertheless the presence of
Jesus Christ in nineteenth-century literature is one of its
most remarkable and indisputable characteristics.
But the solitary issue of this intermingling of theology
with poetry is not perplexity or sadness. There is
found a very different culmination in one poet at least,
and that poet is Browning. Browning has attacked
theology with the zeal and fervour of a born disputant.
He is not merely a great religious poet, but is distinc-
tively a theological poet. He has deliberately chosen
for the exercise of his art the most subtle problems of
theology, and has made his verse the vehicle for the
statement of theological difficulties and personal beliefs.
The historical evidences and arguments of Christianity
have exercised upon him a deep and enduring fascina-
tion. In " Pauline," his earliest poem, the vision of
Christ has visited Browning, and he cries
Thou pale form, so dimly seen, deep-eyed,
1 have denied Thee calmly do I not
Pant when I read of Thy consummate deeds,
And burn to see Thy calm pure ruths out-flash
The brightest gleams of earth's philosophy ?
Do I not shake to hear ought question Thee ?
If I am erring, save mc madden me,
Take from me powers nd pleasures, let me die
Ages, so I see Thee !
That vision of Christ has been not only an ever-
present, but an ever-growing, vision with Browning.
This spirit of passionate reverence for Christ, which
BROWNING'S ATTITUDE TO CHRISTIANITY. 301
Browning thus expresses in his first considerable poem,
is the spirit which dominates his entire writings. The
deepest mystery of Christianity is Christ Himself; that,
indeed, is its one mystery. Browning has been quick
to realise this, and habitually perceives and teaches,
with unerring keenness, that in Christ all mysteries
have solution, or without Him are left for ever dark
and impenetrable. The method of argument he pur-
sues is peculiarly his own. He ranks himself for
the moment with the Rationalist, and having detailed
his conclusions, goes on to probe them. For this
purpose dialectic skill, irony, humour, and the subtlest
analysis are his weapons. He refuses to be content
with negation ; it is not enough to say what you do
not believe, you must realise what you do believe. He
pushes back the burden of proof upon the doubter, and
says men have an equal right to demand the demonstra-
tion of a doubt as of a creed. When every shred of
evidence has been weighed and tested, then comes
the moment to ask what is left, and the final verdict
depends not on the letter of the evidence, but the spirit ;
not on any body of oral attestation, but on the soul which
witnesses within a man. This, with many variations
and differences, is, upon the whole, a fair statement of
Browning's method of argument, and the result is
never left in doubt. In "A Death in the Desert,"
where St. John is supposed to utter his last words of
belief, the verdict, not indeed of the man Cerinthus,
who hears the great confession, but of the man who
adds the final note, is :
If Christ, as thou affirmest, be of men,
Mere man, the first and best, but nothing more,
Account Him, for reward of what He was,
Now and for ever, wretchedest of all,
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Can a mere man do this ?
Yet Christ saith this He lived and died to do.
Call Christ then the illimitable God,
Or lost !
and he significantly adds
But 'twas Cerinthus that is lost.
In the " Epistle of Karshish," in which the strange
story of Lazarus is debated from the physician's point
of view, the writer finally rises into a very ecstasy
of faith, and the poem closes with this passionate
exclamation :
The very God ! think, Abib ; dost thou think ?
So, the All-Great were the All-Loving too
So, through the thunder comes a human voice,
Saying, " O heart I made, a heart beats here !
Face, My hands fashioned, see it in Myself!
Thou hast no power, nor may conceive of Mine.
But love I gave thee, with Myself to love,
And thou must love Me who have died for thee."
It cannot be said that there is the faintest touch of
intolerance or scorn for honest doubt in Browning's
poetry. Yet no man of our days has pierced it with
so many telling shafts of irony and reason. He ac-
knowledges the difficulties of belief, and it is plain to
every reader that Browning has wrestled sorely with
the angel in the night, with that impalpable and dreadful
shape which has all but overwhelmed him. But the
morning has broken and brought its benediction. If
the difficulties of belief are great, the difficulties of
unbelief are greater. He assumes that there must be
many unexplored remainders in the world of thought.
Well, what then ? Because some things are hidden, are
there none revealed ?
BROWNING'S ATTITUDE TO CHRISTIANITY. 3^3
What, my soul ? See so far and no farther ? When doors
great and small,
Nine-and-ninety flew ope at our touch, should the hundredth
appal ?
In the least things have faith, yet distrust in the greatest of all ?
That were the last unreasonableness of ignorance, the
final folly of imbecility. No ; the wiser act is to trust
where actual knowledge fails. Faith is a very fine
word ; but
You must mix some uncertainty
With faith if you would have faith be.
If a scientific faith is absurd, and " frustrates the very
end 'twas meant to serve," he will rest content with a
mere probability
So long as there be ust enough
To pin my faith to, though it hap
Only at points ; from gap to gap,
One hangs up a huge curtain so,
Grandly, nor seeks to have it go
Foldless and flat along the wall.
What care I if some interval
Of life less plainly may depend
On God ? I'd hang there to the end.
Moreover, it is part of God's good discipline to educate
us by illusion ; the point of victory, the prize of the
high calling, perpetually recedes to the man who presses
toward the mark.
We do not see it, where it is
At the beginning of the race ;
As we proceed, it shifts its place,
And where we looked for crowns to fall,
We find the tug's to come that's all.
Thus the uncertainties of knowledge are in themselves
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a beneficent training for the spirit of man ; they sting
him with this Divine hunger for full light, they soften
him to childlike blessedness of mere trust, arid tend to
the more real and vivid hold upon the creed itself, by
shaking from it " the torpor of assurance."
No poet of our time has so consistently attacked the
darker and more tangled problems of human conduct.
He confesses that " serene deadness " puts him out of
temper. His sympathies, on the other hand, go out
irresistibly toward any sort of life, however strangely
mistaken or at variance with custom, which has real,
throbbing, energetic vitality in it. To him there is an
overwhelming fascination in misunderstood men, and
the more tangled and intricate is the problem of char-
acter and action the more eagerly does he approach it.
Not unnaturally this tendency of Browning's genius
has led him through many of the darker labyrinths
of human motive, and occasionally, as in " Mr. Sludge,
the Medium," the riddle has not been worth the pro-
longed application he has devoted to it. But in no class
of poems is Browning's intense religious conviction
more remarkably displayed. The same retreat upon
mere faith which he makes in subtle questions of theo-
logy he observes also in dealing with the mysteries of
human conduct. His method of treatment is twofold.
The majority of his poems which deal with character
and conduct deal with character and conduct more or
less imperfect. In all such cases the blemish is laid
bare with unerring accuracy. There are no glozing
words to cover moral lapses, no spun purple of fine
phrases to hide the hideousness of spiritual leprosy.
But Browning describes such lives not to display their
corruption, but to discover some seed of true life which
may yet be hidden in them. Few lives are so evil but
BROWNING'S ATTITUDE TO CHRISTIANITY. 305
that some golden threads are woven in the coarse fabric ;
some impulses are left which, if followed, may be the
clue to life eternal.
Oh, we're sunk enough, God knows !
But not quite so sunk that moments,
Sure, though seldom, are denied us
When the spirit's true endowments
Stand out plainly from its false ones,
And apprise it, if pursuing
On the right way or the wrong way,
To its triumph or undoing.
The " poor impulse," the one obscure, true instinct,
which vibrates under a smothered or sinful nature, may
be the starting-point towards ideal goodness. But, if
mar, be evil, God is good, and the soul of the universe
is just. Browning is bound to admit that some natures
seem hopelessly corrupt ; at all events he fails to find
the germ of renovation in them. They have chosen
the evil part which cannot be taken away from them.
They have had their choice
The earthly joys lay palpable
A taint, in each distinct as well ;
The heavenly flitted, faint and rare,
Above them, but as truly were
Taintless, so, in their nature best.
Thy choice was earth ; thou didst attest
'Twas fitter spirit should subserve
The flesh.
When Browning confronts such natures, his second
method comes into play ; he falls back upon faith
faith in the wise order and infinite goodness of God.
The most marked example of this method is in that
splendid dramatic sketch, " Pippa Passes." No more
awful picture of guilt triumphing in its guiltiness,
20
306 THE MAKERS OF MODERN ENGLISH.
of corruption intoxicated with the abandonment and
depraved joy of its own wickedness, has any poet given
us than the " Ottima " of that poem. There stands the
villa, with its closed shutters ; within it the murdered
man, and the guilty woman pouring out her confessions
of passion to the man who slew him. Can human action
produce a more hideous combination ? Yet the sun
shines fair, and " God has not said a word." Has God's
good government of things broken down, then ? No,
indeed. Pippa passes Pippa, the poor girl with her
one day's holiday in the whole year, yet happy, cheer-
ful, trustful ; and as she pauses she sings rebuke to
our doubts of God, and terror to the black heart of
Ottima :
The year's at the spring,
And day's at the morn ;
Morning's at seven ;
The hillside's dew-pearled ',
The lark's on the wing,
God's in His heaven,
All's right with the world.
It is thus Browning, like many a great spirit before
him, falls back upon faith in God, saying in effect what
Abraham said when confronted with the corruption of
man and the judgment of God : " Shall not the Judge
of all the earth do right ? "
CHAPTER XXX.
BROWNING'S SIGNIFICANCE IN LITERATURE.
T) ROWNING stands utterly alone in English poetry ;
D he has no prototype, and he can have no successor.
He has created his style, as he has also created his
readers. In almost every other poet of our day we
can trace the course of influences, more or less defined,
which have shaped the poetic form and moulded the
poetic thought. Browning has had no model. If we
except the faintest possible trace of Shelley's influence,
which, like an ethereal fragrance, haunts the pages of
" Pauline," we may say that he shows no sign of the
influence of any of the elder bards upon his style. He
is unique in his rugged individuality, the subtlety of
his analysis, the suggestiveness and intensity of his
thought, the originality of his phrases, and, if one may
use the term, the extraordinary agility of his intellect.
His intuitions go by bounds and leaps, so that it taxes
all our energy occasionally to keep pace with him.
His pages are literally crammed full of thought. All
the living poets of the English language taken together
have produced nothing like the body of thought which
he has produced. Moreover, of great latter day poets
he is the most genuine humorist when it suits his pur-
pose. "Humour/' it has been said, "originally meant
3o3 THE MAKERS OF MODERN ENGLISH.
moisture, a signification it metaphorically retains, for it is
the very juice of the mind, oozing from the brain, and
enriching and fertilising wherever it falls." Humour
is, in fact, based on sympathy a large, genuine, noble
sympathy, which embraces all kinds and conditions of
human life like a genial atmosphere. This gift Brown-
ing distinctly possesses, and it explains the variety of
his poems. Nothing that pertains to man is foreign to
him. But the humour of Browning does not manifest
itself so much in individually ludicrous forms as in a
general humorous attitude toward all sorts of forms.
To quote a portion of the famous definition of humour
given by Dr. Barrow, and which, according to Mack-
intosh, affords the greatest " proof of mastery over
language ever given by an English writer," it may
be said of Browning's humour, " Sometimes it lurketh
under an odd similitude, sometimes it is lodged in a sly
expression, in a smart answer, in a quirkish reason, in
a shrewd intimation, in cunningly diverting or cleverly
retorting an objection ; sometimes it is couched in a
bold scheme of speech, in a tart irony, in a lusty
hyperbole, in a startling metaphor, in a plausible recon-
ciling of contradictions, or in acute nonsense."
The worst form which Browning's humour has taken
is in the purposed grotesqueness of his rhymes, and it
is impossible to suppose that some of his verses could
have been written without some sense on the part of
their author of their extraordinary ludicrousness. What
can one say to such verbal contortions as these : Wit-
anagemot rhyming to bag 'em hot, cub licks to Republics,
vociference to stiffer hence, corrosive to O Sieve, spirito to
weary toe ? Or what mortal ingenuity is equal to the
task of unravelling the meaning which may possibly
be found in such a verse as this ?
BROWNING'S SIGNIFICANCE IN LITERATURE. 309
One is incisive, corrosive ;
Two retorts, nettled, curt, crepitant ;
Three makes rejoinder, expansive, explosive ;
Four overbears them all, strident and strepitant ;
Five . . . O Danaides, O Sieve !
Even Browning seems to have had some conscious-
ness of the obscurity of his enigma, for he remarks in the
next verse, and his readers will heartily agree with hum-
On we drift ; where looms the dim port ?
One, Two, Three, Four, Five contribute their quota ;
Something is gained, if one caught but the import.
When Browning produces verses such as these, we
can hardly help suspecting him of perpetrating an
elaborate joke. Nor can we discern any really welcome
humour in the " acute nonsense." If there be humour
it is after the pattern of the celebrated German Baron,
who wished to be humorous, and accordingly took to
dancing on the dining-table. It is grotesque, eccentric,
curious, even ridiculous, but not humorous. It is
Browning amusing himself with conundrums, and slyly
laughing at the confusion of tongues they are likely to
produce among the critics, to say nothing of the depth
of imbecility to which they will reduce his friends who
are devoted enough to seek their " import."
It is necessary to consider Browning in these his
most wilful moods if we are to estimate his significance
as a stylist in literature. Poetry depends upon expres-
sion far more than prose ; it is noble thought clothed
in beautiful language. It is, therefore, impossible
wholly to disregard the defects of style, the maimed
metres, the verbal somersaults, the unique grotesque-
ness of rhyme which Browning unquestionably dis-
plays. It is only a great poet who could have survived
3io THE MAKERS OF MODERN- ENGLISH.
such literary escapades. But having survived them,
in virtue of the immense genius of which they are but
the excrescence, they nevertheless remain as part and
parcel of his works, and have their influence. What is
the significance of Browning, then, in a literary sense ?
Chiefly this that he has introduced into English poetry
a new, strong, fresh, and intensely masculine style.
He is a transcendentalist in philosophy, but a realist
in style. No word is too common for him, no phrase
too hackneyed, or too idiomatic, or too scholastic, or too
bizarre if it will carry his thought home. Wordsworth
aimed at writing poetry in the language of prose, but
Browning has ventured further, and has used verna-
cular prose. He makes his men and women speak as
they would have spoken if alive. In this respect
Browning is in line with the development of his age.
We are becoming less idealistic and more realistic
every day. The modern imagination is less concerned
with the bright dreams of old chivalry than the present
mysteries of sad humanity. It finds sufficient food for
sorrow, wonder, faith, and passion in the things of the
day. It fixes its piercing gaze on man rather than on
Nature, knowing that he is of more value than many
sparrows building in the summer eaves, or many lilies
whitening happy hillsides in the spring. Browning is
the interpreter of all that is highest, noblest, and most
moral in this realism of to-day. His style is a protest
against euphemism, as his poetry is a plea for realism.
His significance as a man of letters is that he has
enlarged the possibilities of English poetry by adding
to it a bold, nervous, masculine vocabulary, and by
using it as it was never used before, save by Shake-
speare himself, for the analysis and portrayal of human
character and motive.
BROWNING'S SIGNIFICANCE IN LITERATURE. 311
But the moral significance of Browning in literature
entirely eclipses the literary. Browning's literary
method must have its effect upon the future of English
poetry, and that effect will be in the direction of a less
trammelled and ornate, a freer and more realistic, use
of words. But where one reader catches some new
inspiration from his method, a thousand will feel the
overwhelming current of moral force which he has
created. Here is a man who has tracked Nature home
to her
Inmost room,
With lens and scalpel ;
who has been animated by vivid and potent interest
in every form of human life, every mystery of human
conduct; who has sought knowledge of man, alike in
the splendid chambers where kings live delicately and
in the deserts where great spirits nerve themselves to
strenuous heroism ; in the study of the artist, the organ-
loft of the musician, the garret of the toiler, the warren
of the outcast, the tents of great soldiers, and the cells
of great mystics ; among the flower-like purities of little
children, the shrewd schemings of characters half sordid
and half lofty, the soiled grandeurs of great spirits
overthrown, the shameful secrets of souls plunged deep
in infamies who has, in fact, acknowledged no height
too high and no depth too low for the demand of his
noble curiosity. And at what result has he arrived ?
He himself has told us
I have gone the whole round of creation : I saw and I spoke :
I, a work of God's hand for that purpose, received in my brain
And pronounced on the rest of His handwork returned Him
again
His creation's approval or censure ; I spoke as I saw,
I report as a man may on God's work all's love, yet all's law.
312 THE MAKERS OF MODERN ENGLISH.
He alone of our great latter-day poets has performed
this great pilgrimage of inquiry, and has returned with
absolute and happy assurances of hope. He has de-
scended, like another Dante, through all the dreadful
circles of flame and darkness, amid the woe and travail
of mankind, but has never lost his vision of God's
immortal love and tenderness. Where others have
been overwhelmed, their voices reaching us from the
thick blackness only in wild cries of anguish, rage,
sorrow, and despair, he has stood firm, and has sung
out of the deeps a song of limitless faith. He has
passed out of the Purgatory and Inferno into the
Paradise. Is there any other of our great poets of
whom so much can be affirmed ? Is not one of the
latest bequests of the most melodious, famous, and
successful poet of our time a bequest of bitterness
and despair ? But where Tennyson has found food for
hopelessness, Browning has found the seed, if not the
fruit, of hope ; where the one has been overwhelmed,
the other has triumphed. Browning has not cast away
faith because creeds are confused ; nor expectation for
his race because the haggard human army has been
defeated oft and again in its onward march ; nor
patriotic hope because great movements and great re-
forms have failed, or seemed to fail to our bounded
human vision. He teaches that each good deed done
dies perhaps, but afterwards revives, and goes on. to
work endless blessing in the world. He believes that
To only have conceived,
Planned your great works, apart from progress
Surpasses little works achieved.
O, never star
Was lost here but it rose afar 1
And, believing thus, his voice rings out like a clarion-
BROWNING'S SIGNIFICANCE IN LITERATURE. 313
blast of courage across the blank misgivings and con-
fusions of our time, and it may be said of him as it was
of Cromwell, " He was a strong man in the dark perils
of war, and in the high places of the field hope shone
in him like a pillar of fire, when it had gone out in
others."
The significance of Browning in literature is, then,
that he is a strong, resolute, believing teacher, who,
amid the sick contentions of a doubting generation, has
bated no jot of heart or hope. He has had the courage
of his originality in creating his own style a style
which, for reasons already indicated, sometimes becomes
obscure and not seldom is eccentric, but which is, never-
theless, wonderfully strong, nervous, and powerful, pos-
sessed of a vast vocabulary, idiomatic, free, resonant,
and striking. He has had the courage of individuality
also in resisting the Agnostic tendencies of his time,
and amid the dismayed and doubtful has consistently
delivered a testimony of hope. When the arrears of
fame are paid, and the debts of praise are liquidated, as
they will be in the just hands of Time, this and every
succeeding generation will surely be acknowledged
under heavy obligations to Robert Browning. The
songs of mere loveliness charm us for a while, but it
is the outpourings and upsoarings of the strong men of
humanity which become the real marching songs of the
race in the long run. What Browning has missed in
melody he has gained in thought, and if he be deficient
in form he possesses a far nobler efficiency the inspira-
tion and moral power of the noble thinker.
CHAPTER XXXI.
ROBERT BROWNING CONCLUDING SURVEY.
THE prevalent impression which the work of
Browning leaves upon the reader is twofold : he
makes us feel the greatness of his mind, and the in-
tensity and breadth of his sympathies. It is a vast
world of thought to which Browning introduces his
reader. He claims from him absolute attention, the
entire absorption of the neophyte, whose whole moral
earnestness is given to his task. Like all neophytes
we have to submit to a process of initiation. In the
world of Browning's thought there is much that is
strange, much that is new, much that is grotesque.
There is no problem of life that he does not attempt
to solve, no mystery of life that he is not ready to
explain or reconcile. He insists that we take him
seriously, for he himself is profoundly serious and
earnest. He is not a singer, but a seer. In every
line that he has written there is the vigorous move-
ment of a strong and eager intellect. If his reader is
incapable of sustained thought, or too indolent to rise
into something like intensity of attention, then Brown-
ing has nothing to say to him. He demands our faith
in him as a master-teacher ; he will work no miracle
for him who has no belief. Sometimes this sense of
the power of mind in Browning is almost oppressive.
ROBERT BROWNING: CONCLUDING SURVEY. 315
We long for a little rest in the arduous novitiate he
imposes on us. We feel that the vehicle he uses for
the exposition of his thought is unequal to the vast
strain he imposes on it. The verse moves stiffly
beneath the tremendous weight of thought. The forms
of poetry seem to cramp and fetter him. We feel that
an occasional lapse into the loose and liberated style
of Whitman's rhapsodies would be of equal service
to Browning and ourselves. No poet who has ever
written has ever so tired the minds of his readers.
If Browning had possessed a less subtle and power-
ful intellect, if he had held a narrower view of life,
he would have written with infinitely greater ease, and
would have doubled and quadrupled his popularity.
But the compensating gain of this breadth of view
is a corresponding breadth of sympathy. There is a
perfectly unique catholicity in his affinities. Life in its
shame as well as its splendour, life in its baseness, its
distorted aims, its tragic failures, its limitless follies,
is still life to him, and is worthy of his compassionate
scrutiny. His unconventionality is startling to ordinary
readers ; they never know where to find Browning, or
can anticipate what he will say or teach. Thus, even
for the Jew in the Roman Ghetto he has a good word.
He interprets what may be the unspoken thought in
the heart of many a Hebrew outcast. The Jew has
slain Christ, and so has missed the one vast oppor-
tunity of Jewish history : but is there no excuse ? Is
there no room for pity or apology ? This is what
Browning makes the Jew in the Ghetto think and say
and no better example of the unconventional breadth
of his sympathies could be found :
Thou ! if Thou wast He, who at mid-watcn came
By the starlight, naming a dubious Name !
316 THE MAKERS OF MODERN ENGLISH.
And if, too heavy with sleep, too rash
With fear, O Thou, if that martyr gash
Fell on Thee coming to take Thine own,
And we gave the Cross, when we owed the Throne
Thou art the Judge ! We are bruised thus,
But, the judgment over, join sides with us !
Thine too is the cause ! and not more Thine
Than ours, is the work of these dogs and swine,
Whose life laughs through, and spits at their creed,
Who maintain Thee in word, and defy Thee in deed !
The poet whose sympathies illumine the foul darkness
of the Ghetto and the Morgue may well be a stone of
stumbling and rock of offence to the careless and
conventional reader.
Force, faith, and thought, the vigour of a strong
intellect, the vitality of a victorious faith, the subtlety
and logic of an acute insight, are, as we have seen,
the dominating qualities in Browning's poetry. In so
much all criticism must agree ; and M. Taine, the
famous French critic, has recently acknowledged, not
only that England is far ahead of France in the great-
ness of her poets, but that Browning stands first among
modern English poets the most excellent where excel-
lence is greatness, the most gifted where genius is a
common dower. When, however, we come to particu-
larise certain poems as the greatest in the qualities of
genius, probably opinions will differ. After all, there is
no such thing as systematic or judicial criticism, and
the efforts of such criticism to systematise itself have
uniformly failed, and deservedly. Shakespeare defies
the unities of the drama, and is great in spite of them,
because he is the creator of a richer unity, which is
based on the exposition of a richer and more complex
life. Genius perpetually fashions new moulds for
ROBERT BROWNING: CONCLUDING SURVEY. 317
itself, and the history of criticism is in great part a list
of defeats suffered by the critics at the hands of genius.
Criticism ascertains qualities and describes them. The
critic is an explorer who goes first with the lighted
torch into the stalactite chamber roofed with gems,
and in his most beneficent function only calls the
public to admire that which he has illumined, but not
created. His special preference for this or that par-
ticular form of beauty is, after all, his own affair, and
is dictated by personal taste. An agreeable man,
according to Lord Beaconsfield, was one who agreed
with him ; the poem a critic calls the best is simply
the one that agrees best with him. When, therefore,
I state the work of Browning's which seems finest, no-
blest, weightiest in quality, I simply specify that which
seems so to me, and can claim only the prerogative
of a personal preference.
Lord Jeffrey, in almost the only well-known passage
of his writings, has moralised on the perishable fame
of poets, and has mournfully recounted how little of
work famous in its day contrives ultimately to escape
the devouring maw of oblivion. Lovelace lives by a
single stanza, Wolfe by a single poem, and Jeffrey
was probably too generous when he pictured pos-
terity receiving with rapture the half of Campbell,
the fourth of Byron, the sixth of Scott, the scattered
tithes of Crabbe, and the three per cent, of Southey.
The best way of sifting the perfect from the im-
perfect in Browning's work would be to ask what
we should care least to lose, and what we would most
willingly forget. If we had to submit to an ideal justice
for the final jurisdiction of immortality the poems most
likely to win him the award of age-long fame, which
should we choose to support the claim ?
3i8 THE MAKERS OF MODERN ENGLISH
When we apply this test to Browning's poetry the
result is soon reached. First of all stands the " Ring
and the Book." In force of conception, skill and
delicacy of treatment, subtlety of thought, purity,
power, and passion, the " Ring and the Book " is
Browning's masterpiece. Wandering in Florence,
Browning discovers on a bookstall an old manuscript
volume containing the pleadings of a murder-trial at
Rome in 1698. The whole case is one of those strange
tangles of evidence which dull people usually discredit
until the passions of human life flame forth, and the
thing is a dramatic actuality, done before their very
eyes. The murdered woman is Pompilia, who has fled
from her husband with the priest Caponsacchi ; the
murderer is the husband. At first sight this appears
merely a low drama of vicious passion and brutal
revenge ; but as Browning pores over the pleadings
and unravels the tangled skein of evidence it reveals
itself in a very different way. As he reads, the dark
shadows of crime recede, revealing in transfiguring
brightness the figure of Pompilia, " young, good, beau-
tiful," clothed upon with the raiment which is from
heaven, the beauty of holiness, the Divine dignity of
goodness, the touching, inimitable freshness and purity
of childlike innocence. A mere child in years, she is
the spoil of her husband's avarice, then the victim of
his malignity and disappointed cupidity, until at last
she flies, to save her babe's life, with the 'young priest
who has promised to defend her. Browning's method
is to let each witness tell his own tale, making the
written report his basis of fact, on which he casts his
own quick, penetrating light of interpretation. This is
accomplished in twelve books. The o.ne-half of Rome
gives its opinion, takes merely the outward appearance
ROBERT BROWNING: CONCLUDING SURVEY. 319
of the facts, and judges Guido justified in the murder.
The other half of Rome accepts Pompilia's innocence, and
perceives that from first to last she has been a victim.
Then follow the chief actors in the drama. Guido
makes his defence the defence of a man thoroughly
shrewd, with more than a touch of fanaticism, alive to
his position, and alert to use every waft of popular
prejudice in his favour. After him Caponsacchi tells
his tale ; how he came to enter the Church, and was
urged by great priests to put only an easy interpreta-
tion on the vows which seemed to him so strenuously
solemn; how he came to recognise in Pompilia a
womanhood he had never before imagined so sadly
sweet, so grave, so pure, that he felt lifted into higher
thoughts as by the vision of a saint ; how God and
Pompilia kept company in his thoughts, so that when
the hour came that he could serve her he seized it with
a simple chivalry, and did it as God's plain duty, then
and there made clear to him. Then Pompilia herself,
dying fast, in broken snatches tells the story of her life.
Finally, the old Pope sums up the case, giving verdict
of death against Guido, and Guido himself pours out
his last despairing utterances, which reach their tragic
climax in the cry to his murdered wife to save him, thus
unconsciously witnessing to the purity he had defamed
and despised
Abate Cardinal Christ Maria God -
Pompilia, will you let them murder me !
It is not too much to say that there is nothing like
this in English poetry, and for certain parts of it we
may claim that there is nothing since Shakespeare to
surpass it. The form is unique one which Shake-
speare would not have used but, cumbrous as it is,
320 THE MAKERS OF MODERN ENGLISH.
it exactly suits Browning. The " Ring and the Book "
is the work of a giant. We could spare, perhaps, the
pleadings of the advocates and the opinions of Rome,
but the speeches of the great actors in the drama have
the mintage of immortality upon them. Shakespeare
himself has given us no more exquisite creation of
womanhood made lovely by simplicity and purity than
Pompilia. She has grown like " an angel- watered lily "
born in polluted soil, but only the sweetness and the
light have been gathered up into her being, and the sin
of others has left no smirch on her. The spoiled and
blackened life of Guido only serves the better to set
forth the grace and dignity of her purity. Whenever
any of the speakers mention Pompilia, a hush of rever-
ence seems to fall upon their words, and even Guido, at
the last, turns to her in his extremity, as to a guardian
saint, for help. It is impossible to read her own story
of her life without tears. Her memories of early child-
hood, ever shadowed with the mysterious sense of God ;
her sad married life, with its silent forgiveness of hateful
wrongs ; the most pathetic tenderness with which she
describes the rapture of her motherhood ; the joy she
had in her babe how she seems now like that poor
Virgin she often pitied as a child,
At our street-corner in a lonely niche,
The babe that sat upon her knees broke off;
her sad hope that people will teach her babe to think
well of her when she is dead ; her acknowledgment of
that sense within her which makes her know that she
loves Caponsacchi indeed, but with that spiritual love
only which Christ foreshadowed as the joy of that
world where they neither marry nor are given in
marriage ; and always that deep abiding thankfulness to
ROBERT BROWNING: CONCLUDING SURVEY. 321
God that for a fortnight He has let her have her babe
to love,
In a life like mine
A fortnight filled with bliss is long and much :
I never realised God's birth before,
How He grew likest God in being born,
all this forms one of the loveliest and most pathetic
creations which English poetry has ever produced. And
not less pathetic is Caponsacchi's account of his long
ride to Rome with Pompilia, and her simple wonder at
a kindness in him to which she was all unused :
She said a long while later in the day,
When I had let the silence be abrupt
" Have you a mother ? " " She died, I was born."
11 A sister, then ? " " No sister." " Who was it
What woman were you used to serve this way,
Be kind to, till I called you and you came ? "
And in the whole realm of English poetry it would be
hard to match for intensity and passion the concluding
passage of Caponsacchi's address to the judges, in
which he pictures Guido, not so much dying as " slid-
ing out of life," "parted by the general horror and
common hate from all honest forms of life," until upon
creation's verge he meets one other like himself,
Judas, made monstrous by much solitude,
and there teaching and bearing malice and all detest-
ability, indissolubly bound, the two are linked in a
frightful fellowship of evil,
In their one spot out of the ken of God,
Or care of man for ever and evermore.
The " Ring and the Book " is the most astonishing
work of genius of our time, and if the narrations
21
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324 THE MAKERS OF MODERN ENGLISH.
English literature ; and when we read it we cannot
wonder that one of the first organs of literary opinion
in England does not hesitate to set Browning close be-
side Shakespeare. Browning has written as grandly in
other poems, but nowhere has he so fully expressed the
scientific spirit of the time, or written with completer
power of thought and utterance.
In sustained splendour of thought and imagery, but
upon a lesser scale, "Saul" is also one of the poems
which men will not readily let die ; and one might class
with "Saul" such wonderful studies as "A Death in
the Desert" and the "Epistle of Karshish." In
" Saul " Browning has attained the rare achievement
of perfect form and harmony. There is a magnificent
music in the billowy cadences of " Saul ; " it seems to
rise and fall not so much to the harp of David as to
the melodious thunder and trumpet-calls of some great
organ which floods the universe with invisible delight.
But such poems as these owe their true greatness to
the thought which informs them. There is no writer
of our day, whether of prose or poetry, who will so
well repay the attention of the theological student as
Browning. He has so vivid a vision of invisible things,
so intense a grasp on spiritual facts, that he pierces
into the heart of religious mystery as no other man of
our time has done, and it is impossible to rise from a
course of Browning without a sense of added or invigo-
rated faith. The literature of Christian evidence has
received, in our time, no more important contributions
than " Easter Day " and " Christmas," the " Death in
the Desert" and the " Epistle of Karshish." The
method is Browning's own, but it is used with con-
summate skill and effect ; it is a sword which no other
man can wield save the craftsman who forged it, but
ROBERT BROWNING: CONCLUDING SURVEY. 325
in his hand it pierces to the dividing asunder of
the bone and marrow of current scepticism. As poet
and thinker Browning secures a double advantage, and
annexes realms to his dominion which are not often
brought under the sway of a common sceptre. The
fashion of the world may change, and the old doubts
may wear themselves out and sink like shadows out of
sight in the morning of a stronger faith ; but even so the
world will still turn to the finer poems of Browning for
intellectual stimulus, for the purification of pity and of
pathos, for the exaltation of hope, and will revere him
who, in the night of the world's doubt, still sang :
This world's no blot for us,
Nor blank, it means intensely and means good,
To find its meaning is my meat and drink.
Or, if the darkness still thickens, all the more will
men turn to this strong man of the race, who has
wrestled and prevailed ; who has illumined with imagin-
ative insight the deepest problems of the ages; who
has made his poetry not merely the vehicle of pathos,
passion, tenderness, fancy, and imagination, but also
of the most robust and masculine thought. He has
written lyrics which must charm all who love, epics
which must move all who act, songs which must cheer all
who suffer, poems which must fascinate all who think ;
and when 'Time hath sundered shell from pearl,'
however stern may be the scrutiny, it may be safely
said that there will remain enough of Robert Browning
to give him rank among the greatest of poets, and
secure for him the sure reward of fame.
So I close what I have to say of Browning. It would
be unseemly to detail what has been sufficiently evident
to the reader the deep indebtedness which I personally
326 THE MAKERS OF MODERN ENGLISH.
feel to Browning for the illumination and delight he has
afforded me. But the object of these studies would
not be achieved if I did not express the hope that
some, to whom Browning is a name and a shadow only,
may be led to turn from these imperfect criticisms to the
study of the man himself. To Browning's work I may
apply, without conscious impertinence, the noble words
spoken of the Apollo Belvidere : " Go and study it ;
and if you see nothing to captivate you, go again ; go
until you find it, for be assured it is there."
Since these criticisms were written, and while this
book was being prepared for the press, Robert Browning
has passed away. He retained to the last his genial
faith, his resolute optimism, his intellectual vigour and
subtlety. The last poem of his last volume is a sort of
summing up of himself and his life-work : nor could a
more discerning summary be found than in the words,
One who never turned his back, but marched breast forward,
Never doubted clouds would break,
Never dreamed, though right were worsted, wron** would
triumph,
Held we fall to rise, are baffled to fight better.
Sleep or wake.
Upon the announcement of his death the press was
flooded with reminiscences from many who had known
him slightly and more who had known him well, but
all alike testifying to his simplicity, veracity, and
kindliness of nature, and not less to the vigour of his
mind and the breadth of his human and religious
sympathies. " Never say of me that I am dead " was
one of his last recorded observations to a friend, and
it was eminently characteristic of the man and his
ROBERT BROWNING: CONCLUDING SURVEY. 327
philosophy. He died with the knowledge that his
last book was a triumphant success ; and his nation by
common acclamation rewarded his life-work with the
highest honour it can accord to its illustrious dead,
a grave in that great Abbey which is the Campo Santo
of English genius. The greatest men of his generation
by their presence and by their pens eagerly paid their
tribute of honour to his genius, and it is still more touch-
ing to record that as his coffin was carried through
the streets of London many of his more obscure
disciples lined the streets, and cast upon it flowers
and leaves of laurel. He was buried on the last day of
the year 1889, and, to apply the words which Ruskin
has written on the death of Turner, we may say that
perhaps in the far future the year 1889 will "be re-
membered less for what it has displayed than for what
it has withdrawn " in Robert Browning.
CHAPTER XXXII.
MA TTHE W ARNOLD.
[Born in Laleham, December 24th, 1822. The "Strayed Reveller,"
his first poem, published in 1848. Died in Liverpool, April I5th,
1888.]
FEW men of letters in our time have filled a larger
place in public attention than Matthew Arnold.
During the greater portion of his life he was in the
thick of perpetual controversy. He seemed to live and
move in the arena of contention, and delighted in its
keen and eager atmosphere. No controversialist had a
happier knack of phrase, a sharper wit, a surer thrust
than he. It was he who first used the word " Philistine "
as a term of reproach, a symbol of all that was insular
in politics, vulgar in manners, and ignorant in art.
To Dean Swift's phrase " sweetness and light " he gave
a new meaning and a new lease of life. He had a
felicitous art of picking out some expressive word and
charging it with wider meanings, thus making it the
rally ing-cry of his controversial disquisitions. It was in
this way that the words " lucidity " and " distinction "
became symbols of a literary doctrine, which he ela-
borated with unwearied self-satisfaction. No one feared
less to repeat himself than Arnold. When he had hit
upon a really good phrase he used it again and again,
and it was the reiteration of the phrase as much as its
MATTHEW ARNOLD. 329
aptness which did much to fix it in the public memory.
With Matthew Arnold as the essayist most thinking
people have an adequate acquaintance ; but, after all, it
was neither in literary nor controversial essays that his
true excellence lay. What a few regarded as certain
before his death has been generally admitted since, viz.,
that all the best qualities of Arnold's genius are mani-
fested in his comparatively unknown poetry ; and that
it is by his poetry, rather than his prose, that he will
claim attention from the next generation.
We may even go further than this, and express a
regret that Matthew Arnold was ever drawn into the
conflicts of controversy at all. That he was a delightful
controversialist we all admit. The very sufficiency of
his egoism is amusing. He took a sort of perverse
delight in intellectual isolation, and lectured his anta-
gonists with the serene positiveness of one who was
perfectly convinced that he knew everything better
than anybody else knew anything. He is never so
happily ironical, so wittily satiric, so complacently sar-
castic, as when he is engaged in proving the general
obtuseness of the public, and the bright particular
luminousness of his own ideas.
There is indeed a touch of literary dandyism in all
Arnold's prose. He always figures, as some one has
well said, as " a superior person " talking down to the
intellectual incapacities of his inferiors. He is a master
of ironical reasoning, and loves nothing so well as to
put his antagonist in the witness-box, and convict him
out of his own mouth. He never uses the literary
bludgeon : he delights rather in the sharp rapier-thrust,
the swift retort, the quiet ironical smile which is so much
harder to bear than the loud, derisive laughter of a
Johnson or Carlyle. And so far as distinction of style
330 THE MAKERS OF MODERN ENGLISH.
can preserve what is, after all, fugitive literary work,
Arnold's controversial writings are safe. He has origin-
ality, grace, sweetness : a style of the utmost lucidity
and of frequent force. The paragraphs seem to move
with such graceful ease that we begin to fancy it takes
small art to produce them, until suddenly we perceive
the master in some felicitous or stinging phrase, in the
stroke of wit, or the quiet ripple of ironical humour.
The very audacity with which Arnold quotes himself is
a part of his style. He has a definite system of opinions,
a scale of assured axioms, and he returns to them again
and again as to the fundamentals of his faith. When
he has polished to the last degree of artistic finish a
definition or a phrase, it is no part of his purpose to
leave it in modest retirement till the discernment of his
reader discovers it. He has so little faith in the dis-
cernment of the public that he emphatically points out
what a perfect phrase he has invented, and, lest it should
be forgotten, makes it the pivot on which paragraph
after paragraph revolves. These and many other
characteristics of his prose make it delightful reading,
and redeem the most barren themes of theological con-
troversy with a casual grace. But not the less Arnold
was out of his true sphere in theological debate. The
urbanity, the coolness, the patience of the accomplished
critic of literature forsake him when he enters the arena
of theological controversy. He becomes as discourteous
and unreasonable as the worst type of the narrowest
bigot usually succeeds in being when he argues for
some immeasurably insignificant detail of dogma. That
the influence of Arnold on theology has been consider-
able must be granted, and his theological essays have
secured him an attention which otherwise he would not
have gained. But it is not, after all, as a theologian
MATTHEW ARNOLD. 331
that he will be remembered, nor is it as an apostle of
ideas, nor is it as a critic of literature. More or less
these are each fugitive forms of literature. But he who
sums up something of the spirit of an age in poetry has
chosen the most imperishable mould for his thoughts
which literature affords : and it is in his poetry that
Arnold best expresses his own genius, and has ren-
dered his highest service to the ages.
I have spoken of Arnold as an apostle of ideas, by
which I mean that he sowed the minds of men with
thoughts which have had a wide influence on the times.
In the same way, we may say of his poetry that it is
the poetry of ideas. He is a poet of the intellect, and
his force as a poet is purely intellectual. He has no
passion, no kindling flame of fervour, no heart-force ;
he speaks from the mind to the mind, and the grace
and beauty of his poetry is mainly the result of
intellectual art. The graces of his style do not consist
in those sudden intensities of sentiment or emotion
which clothe themselves in flashing and unforgettable
phrases ; they are the fine result of laborious art. He
never surprises us ; but he powerfully attracts us, not-
withstanding, with the gracious symmetry and com-
pleteness of his work. His gift of lucidity controls his
poetry as it does his prose, and the same observation
may be made of his gift of restraint. He never loses
himself in the turbulence of his own passion ; he is
grave, sad, deeply moved and deeply moving, but
always restrained. He is never obscure ; he says what
he has to say with admirable definiteness and precision
of phrase. Indeed, the definiteness is too great : it
affects one at times like a fault. It leaves no room for
the play of imagination; it requires no sympathy of
understanding from the reader. There is a poetry
332 THE MAKERS OF MODERN ENGLISH.
which affects us like the spectacle of a great Gothic
cathedral. We never really see a perfect specimen of
the Gothic ; we never fully exhaust it ; we never grasp
its whole meaning and significance. It gives us room
for infinite thought; it calls forth the interpreting
powers of our own imagination, and makes them
vigilant. We gaze untired into the dimness of the lofty
roof, where a hundred delicate branching lines of grace
seem to interlace and meet ; we mark " the height, the
space, the gloom, the glory;" a burst of sunlight
kindles " the giant windows' blazon' d fires ; " a passing
cloud darkens the vaulted aisles with awe-inspiring
shadows ; and in the delicate traceries of its stonework,
the fantastic carvings, the touches of inspired art which
everywhere reveal themselves to the studious eye, not
less than in the grandeur of it as a whole, we find food
for continual delight, and revelations of inexhaustible
significance. But there is no such mingling of mystery
and beauty in the poetry of Arnold. It is rather like
looking at some piece of perfect statuary cool, proud,
pure; the lines are gracious and symmetrical indeed,
but very definite, and requiring no help from the casual
spectator to interpret what is beautiful in them. It
may be that the Gothic delights in a barbaric splendour :
but it is splendour, it is the fruit of a fertile and fervent
imagination, and irresistibly appeals to the imagination.
It may be that a Greek temple, with its long lines of
polished columns and exquisitely modelled friezes, is
also beautiful: but it does not refresh the eye or
stimulate the mind, as does the Gothic. The Gothic is
the work of men who dreamed, the Grecian of men who
thought. Matthew Arnold never dreamed. He lived
a strenuous intellectual life, and his poetry is the out-
come of his thinking. In its own way it is perfect, but
MATTHEW ARNOLD. 333
it is not with the perfection which most delights men.
For in poetry as in art it is the dreamers who fascinate
men, who hold them spell-bound with the vision of
beauty, and whose spell never fails, whose charm never
wearies, whose power of stimulating the fancy and
refreshing the heart is broken by no change of time
or transience of ruaman taste.
From a literary point of view one of the most
remarkable things about Arnold's poetry is its classi-
cism. The rise of romanticism which so powerfully
affected Tennyson, and which found its fullest ex-
pression in Rossetti, Swinburne, and Morris, did not
so much as touch Arnold. He trifles once with the
Arthurian Legends in " Tristram and Iseult," but
unsuccessfully. He had not the emotional abandon-
ment nor the warmth of imagination of the romanticist.
He approached in many ways nearer to the spirit of
Wordsworth than any other recent poet. He has
something of the same gravity and philosophic calm,
though he is far enough removed from Wordsworth's
religious serenity. In the last lines of the "Buried
Life " he recalls the very phrases of Wordsworth :
And there arrives a lull in the hot race
Wherein he does for ever chase
The flying and elusive shadow, rest.
An air of coolness plays upon his face,
And an unwonted calm pervades his breast.
And then he thinks he knows
The hills whence his life rose,
And the sea where it goes.
But in his general disapproval of modern life and
opinion, he was forced in literary ideals much further
back than Wordsworth. He drew his real inspiration
from the great masters of antiquity. In the preface to
334 THE MAKERS OF MODERN ENGLISH,
his poems published in 1854 he tells us: "In the
sincere endeavour to learn and practise, amid the
bewildering confusion of our times, what is sound and
true in poetical art, I seemed to myself to find the only
sure guidance, the only solid footing, among the
ancients. They, at any rate, knew what they wanted
in art, and we do not." We can perfectly understand
how a man of Arnold's temperament and culture should
find his only sure footing among the ancients. The
very lucidity and gravity of his mind inclined him,
if early education and culture had not, to intense
sympathy with the great classical authors. And the
result, so far as the history of modern poetry is con-
cerned, is remarkable. In the full stream of romanticism
Arnold stands immovable, turning his face away from
modern methods of expression and vagaries of style, to
those alone who, according to him, knew what they
wanted in art and found it. He too knew what he
wanted in art and found it. He wanted verse as the
best vehicle for his best thoughts. He had no profound
deeps of emotion to be broken up, or, if he had, his
natural reticence was too great to permit the outflow to
find its way into poetry. He had no violent passions
to which the winged words of poetry were an ecstatic
relief. He had not the lyrical faculty: that gift of
melody which enchants us by its mere musical sweet-
ness and beauty. But he had a message to utter, and
he knew how to utter it with a certain sustained and
stately music of phrase which was impressive. The
spirit of the antique penetrates and elevates all his best
poetry. In his "Thyrsis" he has produced one of the
noblest of elegies since the " Lycidas " of Milton. In
his " Empedocles on Etna " he has written a fine poem,
full of classic gravity and beauty. In his purely
MA TTHE W ARNOLD. 335
didactic work, such as the memorable poems on
" Obermann," he has succeeded in expressing the most
modern of thoughts and philosophic emotions, with the
same classic lucidity and charm. It is only when he
touches the questions of the heart that he fails. There
he is weak, because, he has not the emotional abandon-
ment requisite for the finest lyrical work, and because
in fact his natural gift of melody was slight, and what
melodiousness of expression he possessed was rather
the laborious result of culture than of nature.
The perfect culture of Arnold reveals itself every-
where in the delicate and finished workmanship of his
verse. Whatever lack of spontaneity and emotion we
may accuse him of, we can find no fault with the form
of his work. A born critic of others, he has exercised
a severe vigilance over himself, and the result is an
admirable terseness of phrase and distinctness of ex-
pression. There are no metrical lapses, no slurred and
slovenly passages, in his poems ; he consistently does
his best, and is content with nothing less than the best.
He emphatically knows what he wants in art, and finds
it. He is conscious of his own limitations, and is
careful not to exceed them. He has the clearest pos-
sible conception of his own powers, and he cultivates
them with an unsparing studiousness. His verse
reminds us of some lofty upland farm, shut in by the
purity of snowy heights, where the soil yields a rich
reward, but only at the price of infinite industry. It is
the art and daring of man which have made the soil
rich ; its natural tendency is towards sterility. It is
cultivated to the last degree, because without watchful-
ness no crop were possible. All is green and beautiful ;
but it is not the rank fulness of Nature, it is the
precious gain of art. In the same way Arnold's verse
336 THE MAKERS OF MODERN ENGLISH.
impresses not with artificiality that would be a wrong
impression but with a sense of admiration for his art.
He cannot be lavish, because he is not wealthy. Nature
has imposed upon him the need of frugality, and he
shows us how culture can enlarge the comparative
narrowness of endowment into noble fruitfulness. And
the atmosphere of his verse, like the air that passes
over a mountain farm, is clear and cold, and almost
chilly. It is scarcely in human nature that the mass
of men should care to live in it. At the mountain's
foot the thick vines cluster, and the warm sunlight
ripples on the lake, and it is there most men prefer
to dwell. They love poetry full of fragrant heat, in
which the nightingale can sing. Arnold is too cold,
too severe, for those whose emotions are quick and
sensitive, for the young, the tender-hearted, the un-
wearied, whose days are filled with careless happiness.
But not the less it does men good to climb sometimes,
and sojourn in a keener air. The mountain wind also
has its fragrance, and it can both cool and invigorate.
So far as the art of poetry goes, Arnold's is a cooling
and invigorating presence. He recalls us to simplicity,
to the love of perfection for perfection's sake, to the
love of wisdom instead of the love of beauty : and his
poetry has a classic gravity of touch at all times, united
to a classic art of workmanship.
Yet it must not be supposed that Arnold has no
melody of his own, no natural freshness and distinc-
tion. On the contrary, there is a frequent breadth of
tone in his poetry, such as few of our later poets have
reached. It would be possible to mention many fine
narrative poems before we came to one half so fine as
Arnold's tl Sohrab and Rustum." It is one of the few
poems which have the stamp of perfection on them.
MATTHEW ARNOLD. 337
It may not be popular, it may never be popular; but
those who read it once will care to have it by them,
and will find its solemn heroic tones deepening on the
ear at each fresh reading. As a specimen of modern
blank verse it is in itself remarkable. It has not,
indeed, the melodiousness of Tennyson's, but it pos-
sesses a stately music of its own, and has a breadth of
touch which Tennyson has scarcely excelled. It might
be too much to say that it is the finest blank verse of
modern times ; but it is certainly among the finest,
and recalls to us the severe grace of Landor in its air
of impressive stateliness and the purity of its diction.
In the concluding passage Arnold is more moved than
is his wont, and exhibits a power of expression which
many greater poets might covet.
But the majestic river floated on,
Out of the mist and hum of that low land,
Into the frosty starlight, and there moved,
Rejoicing, through the hushed Chorasmean waste
Under the solitary moon : he flowed
Right for the Polar star, past Orgunje,
Brimming and bright and large. Then sands begin
To hem his watery march, and dam his streams,
And split his currents ; that for many a league
The shorn and parcelled Oxus strains along
Through beds of sand and matted rushy isles,
Oxus, forgetting the bright speed he had
In his high mountain cradle in Pamere,
A foiled circuitous wanderer : till at last
The longed-for dash of waves is heard, and wide
His luminous home of waters open-3, bright
And tranquil, from whose floor the new-bathed stars
Emerge, and shine upon the Aral sea.
There is, indeed, no magical and haunting resonance
in these lines; but they are an admirable illustration
22
338 THE MAKERS OF MODERN ENGLISH.
of the two qualities in which Arnold most excelled, the
qualities of simplicity and severity.
But, after all, the best known work of Arnold, and
in most respects the most memorable, is that section of
his poetry which expresses the weariness and religious
disquiet of the times. It is here the deepest breathings
of his heart are heard. He is a spirit loosed upon the
sunless seas of doubt, and ever wearily scanning the
grey horizon for a desired but undiscovered haven.
He is full of an incommunicable grief, and in the effort
to express what he suffers, he reaches an intensity of
utterance which we find nowhere else in his poetry.
The most characteristic poems Arnold ever wrote are
the " Stanzas from the Grande Chartreuse," and the
"Obermann" poems. In each of these there occur
striking lines which have passed into current quota-
tions, as felicitous expressions of human thought and
sentiment. He accurately describes his own religious
position when he pictures the Greek
Wandering between two worlds, one dead,
The other powerless to be born,
and his own unsatisfied desire, mingled with a charac-
teristic touch of critical pessimism, when he says :
Here leave us to die out with these
Last of the people who believe !
Silent, while years engrave the brow,
Silent the best are silent now.
Equally felicitous are such phrases as these :
But we, brought forth and reared in hours*
Of change, alarm, surprise
What shelter to grow ripe is ours ?
What leisure to grow wise ?
MATTHEW ARNOLD. 339
Too fast we live, too much are tried,
Too harassed, to attain
Wordsworth's sweet calm, or Goethe's wide
And luminous view to gain.
It would be easy to quote widely from this section of
Arnold's poetry, because in interest and expression it
is the most characteristic of all his work. It is indeed
a painful interest He cannot conceal from us that there
is no peace in culture. A pervading sadness and de-
spair are its most memorable features. There breathe
throughout the sadness of failure, the distress of faith-
lessness. Occasionally it is a deeper note than regret
which is struck : it is the iron chord of a militant, yet
despairing pessimism, which vibrates in such satiric
verses as these :
Creep into thy narrow bed,
Creep, and let no more be said !
Vain thy onset ! all stands fast,
Thou thyself must break at last.
Let the long contention cease !
Geese are swans, and swans are geese.
Let them have it how they will !
Thou art tired : best be still.
But this belongs rather to the domain of religious truth
than of literary criticism. It is enough for us to note
lastly, concerning Matthew Arnold, that in power to
interpret the spirit of his age, in intellectual candour,
and in the prevailing sadness of all his poetry which
deals with modern life and thought, he is the most
representative man of the culture of the latter half of
the nineteenth century. A profound melancholy borne
with pathetic stoicism is the spirit of all his latter-day
poetry. It is the poetry of a man who has lost faith,
340 THE MAKERS OF MODERN ENGLISH.
but who passionately wishes that he could believe. It
is a long wail after the golden age when the cross was
in its first triumph :
Oh ! had I lived in that great day,
How had its glory new
Filled earth and heaven, and caught away
My ravished spirit too.
More than any other poet of our time, Matthew Arnold
is imbued with the religious spirit : but less than any
other who has felt the force of religious truth, has he
gained the secret of serenity, the mind that knows the
calm of certitude, the heart that rests in the tranquillity
of faith.
CHAPTER XXXIII.
DANTE GABRIEL ROSSETTI.
[Born in London, May I2th, 1828. First volume of Poems appeared
1870, and second volume, 1880. Died at Birchington, April
9th, 1882.]
WITH Tennyson and Browning in the long line
of great modern poets there are other names
which cannot escape mention, and foremost is Dante
Gabriel Rossetti. In point of quantity Rossetti has
added comparatively little to the store of modern
poetry ; his chief praise is that what he has given us
is distinguished by high and sustained artistic quality.
It may also be said that his influence on literature has
been out of all proportion greater than his achievement.
Years before he had himself published a single volume,
William Morris had dedicated a book to him, and both
Morris and Swinburne were accustomed to regard him
as their master. And with Rossetti also the artist was
inalienably associated with the poet. More than any
other modern he has brought the art of painting and
poetry both arts of expression into harmony. His
poems were often suggested by his pictures ; his pic-
tures were an expression of the same ideas which
dominated his poetry. Both as artist and poet his
position is unique, and it is a matter of somewhat
complex criticism to discern rightly the true bearings
of his work, and the exact degree of his influence.
342 THE MAKERS OF MODERN ENGLISH.
The environment of Rossetti's life explains to some
extent this position. He was born in an artistic atmo-
sphere. The whole Rossetti family were singularly
gifted, and probably no house in England possessed
such an atmosphere of artistic culture as that in which
Rossetti was reared. For every power of imagination
or fancy which Rossetti possessed there was the genial
sunshine of a fostering sympathy. Not unnaturally
the dream of the young Rossetti was to be an artist,
and it was as an artist he began his life. But he was
very soon to develop original ideas and methods in art.
He observed that two things seemed to have utterly
departed from English art, viz., the temper of religious
wonder, and the power of perfect fidelity and reverence
in following nature. In the earlier painters both these
great qualities were supreme. Rossetti determined to
reproduce them. His ideas found good soil in the en-
thusiasm of Millais and Holman Hunt, both of whom
at this time were on the threshold of their artistic
careers. The first outcome of this enthusiasm was the
formation of what was known as the Pre-Raphaelite
Brotherhood, and the picture of each artist bore the
magic letters P.R.B. The object of this brotherhood
cannot be better stated than in the words which
Rossetti used in starting the Germ, which was a small
magazine devoted to the exposition of the new creed :
" The endeavour held in view throughout the writings
on art," he said, " will be to encourage and enforce an
entire adherence to the simplicity of Nature."
Himself an Italian, with the southern sensuousness
of temperament, intensity of passion, and love of art,
when Rossetti began to write poetry these qualities of
nature at once manifested themselves. To the colder
English taste there is a warmth in the poetry of
DANTE GABRIEL 'ROSSETTI. 343
Rossetti which is not always pleasant, and which to
the fastidious might even be offensive. English poetry
presents no more curious study than Rossetti's treat-
ment of woman. He approaches her with consistent
chivalry, with an almost religious reverence, and yet
with a frank and sensuous admiration of her mere
physical charms which would have been impossible
to a correcter taste and more masculine mind. It is
difficult to express the exact feeling that this peculiar
tendency of Rossetti's poetry excites in us. The older
poets, Shakespeare pre-eminently, did not scruple to
touch the same difficult theme with breadth and daring.
But what we always mark in Shakespeare is that
peculiar justness of vision which perceives all things
in their natural apportionments and adjustments ; that
divine innocence which can gaze without shame on
things which, to a prurient mind, would suggest no-
thing but impulses of impurity. Had Rossetti's been a
more masculine mind, he would have been saved from
certain errors of taste which -unquestionably disfigure
his poetry. Just as the healthy appetite rejects lus-
cious and over-ripe fruit, and prefers a sharper flavour,
so the healthy mind is soon surfeited with the over-
ripe descriptions of female charms in which Ros-
setti's sonnets abound. We turn away when Rossetti
lifts the nuptial curtain ; we grow tired of " emulous
ardours," " abandoned hair," and " flagging pulses."
We feel that it is bad art, if nothing else ; for true
art is accurate art, which does not exaggerate details
at the expense of general truth, and this perpetual
recurrence of the mind to one theme, and that a
morally enervating theme, is an evidence of a lack of
intellectual poise, of an effeminating defect of character ;
and it is in this moral effeminacy that Rossetti's great
344 THE MAKERS OF MODERN ENGLISH.
defect lies. One cannot speak of one who treats woman
with chivalrous and almost pious reverence as immoral;
but it must be admitted that Rossetti permits himself
a licence of expression which a more robust nature
would have rejected. His world is dominated by the
" eternal feminine." He sings of woman, not of man ;
the praise of beauty, not the praise of courage. His
sweetness is a cloying sweetness. When we enter the
world of his poetry, it is like entering that sleeping-
room of Rossetti's which Mr. Hall Caine so strikingly
describes : a funereal apartment, full of black oak
furniture carved in quaint designs, of velvets and
faded tapestries, of antique lamps that shed a drowsy
light upon the heavy air, a room of charms and mys-
teries, remote and hidden from the busy life of men.
At first we are irresistibly fascinated. We breathe a
perfumed air, and hear the sweetest music; but pre-
sently we begin to long for the open heavens, the fresh
wind, the " multitudinous laughter of the sea," the
reassuring tramp of human feet. Beautiful as Rossetti's
poetry is, we feel that it is something of an exotic, and
that in its supersensuousness there is something ener-
vating to the vigour of the taste and the fibre of the
moral nature.
This defect of Rossetti's poetry is probably due to
the fact that his life was to a large degree a morbid one.
The great romance and tragedy of his history lay in his
love and marriage. He was first attracted to his future
wife by her remarkable beauty ; it was a beauty of a
very unusual type, full of stately purity and dignity, and
yet characterised also by a sort of gracious sensuous-
ness. After an engagement of many years they were
married, and twelve months later she died. From that
hour the glory and vivacity of life were gone for Rossetti ;
DANTE GABRIEL ROSSETTL 345
he became practically a recluse, a brooding and uncom-
forted man, whose days were passed in the shadow of
the dead. How fully his wife's beauty filled his mind
is seen in the long array of his pictures. It was her
face which dominated the thirty years of his artistic toil.
The features of his dead wife look out of every female
face he painted ; she is the Francesca and the dead
Beatrice, the lady of love and the lady of sorrow. Into
her coffin he thrust his poems in token of his passionate
abandonment of earthly ambitions, and there for a con-
siderable period they remained. Later on there came
the terrible shadow of insomnia, and with it the con-
firmed habit of chloral-taking. It seemed as though
Rossetti had become the living embodiment of the
unhappy hero of Poe's poem of the " Raven." The
rooms he inhabited were rich with the curious collec-
tions of an artistic taste ; the lamplight streamed upon
the "tufted floor," but "just above the bust of Pallas,
just above the chamber-door," was seated the bird
of evil omen, recalling vainly in his mournful cry
the perished splendours of the past. Sensuous in all
things, Rossetti was sensuous in his grief, and culti-
vated sorrow as other men cultivate happiness. The
shadow that had fallen on his soul was " lifted never
more." Can we be surprised that there is a lack of
healthy vitality in his poems ? Melody and imagination
there always is ; a charm that is at once weird and
powerful ; a heart-piercing sadness, a gloomy force, a
memorable pregnancy of phrase ; but there is not the
robust spontaneity of a healthy mind. We are always
conscious of a feverish intensity and strain. The gloom
of sorrow is overpowering, and even when the theme
is not in itself sorrowful, there is something in the tone
of the poet's voice that lets us know that he suffers.
346 THE MAKERS OF MODERN ENGLISH.
In other words, Rossetti's poetry has a morbid taint in
it which is deep-rooted and pervasive, and, for this
reason more than any other, it has failed to lay hold of
the popular taste in any marked degree.
Turning from the easily discernible defects of Ros-
setti, we are first struck with his great power as a
melodist. He brings the laborious patience of the true
artist to his work, and is satisfied with nothing less
than the best which his genius can achieve. He is
frugal of words ; he passes them through the fieriest
assay of criticism that he may gain the pure gold of
a perfect phrase, and extract the utmost expression of
which language is capable. There is no slovenly work
in Rossetti. Indeed, his very laboriousness almost
impresses us like a fault at times. In his aim at preg-
nancy he becomes obscure ; in his love of melody he
becomes mannered. His mannerism lies largely in his
use of mediaeval forms of speech, and in his peculiar
scheme of rhythm. He adopts " novel inversions and
accentual endings," and the effect upon the reader is
often a somewhat painful sense of artificiality. But
when we have made full allowance for the mannerism
of Rossetti, the most hostile critic is bound to admit
the artistic excellence of his work. It is this point
that Mr. Stedman fixes on, when he says that " through-
out his poetry we discern a finesse, a regard for detail,
and a knowledge of colour and sound. His end is
gained by simplicity and sure precision of touch. He
knows exactly what effect he desires, and produces it
by a firm stroke of colour, a beam of light, a single
musical tone. Herein he surpasses his comrades, and
exhibits great tact in preferring only the best of a
dozen graces which either of them would introduce.
In terseness he certainly is before them all." It will
DANTE GABRIEL ROSSETTI. 347
be observed that Mr. Stedman, in his criticism, cannot
help remembering that Rossetti was an artist as well
as a poet. Upon the whole it is a true instinct which
declines to discuss Rossetti's poetry altogether apart
from his paintings. The " beam of light/' and the
" single musical tone ; " the laborious ingenuity which
characterises both his pictures and his poems, sprang
from the common source of an intensely artistic nature.
In art, his carefulness of detail made him a Pre-
Raphaelite, in poetry an original and mannered melodist.
But the great merit of Rossetti is in the fact, that he
struck afresh in English poetry the note of the romantic
and supernatural. He reproduced the temper of
religious wonder which filled the mediaeval poets.
His " Blessed Damozel," is one of those few poems
which surprise and delight us at first reading, and
never afterwards lose their charm. It is a poem
absolutely original in style, sentiment, and rhythm,
something that stands alone in literature. The imagery
is new, peculiar, impressive ; the whole poem a unique
combination of daring and reverence, of sensuous
warmth and spiritual remoteness.
Two verses stand out with a peculiar vividness and
beauty of imagery : the description of God's house
It lies in Heaven, across the flood
Of ether, like a bridge.
Beneath the tides of day and night
With flame and darkness ridge
The void, as low as where this earth
Spins like a fretful midge :
and the description of the ended day
The sun was gone now ; the curled moon
Was like a little feather,
348 THE MAKERS OF MODERN ENGLISH.
Fluttering far down the gulf ; and now
She spoke through the still weather
Her voice was like the voice the stars
Had when they sang together.
All the qualities of Rossetti's poetry are in this one
wonderful poem, which he wrote at eighteen. He
speaks alternately like a seer and an artist ; one who
is now bewitched with the vision of beauty, and now
is caught up into Paradise, where he hears unutterable
things. To him the spiritual world is an intense
reality. He hears the voices, he sees the presences
of the supernatural. As he mourns beside the river of
his sorrow, like Ezekiel, he has his visions of winged
and wheeling glory, and leaning over the ramparts of
the world his gaze is fixed on the uncovered mysteries
of a world to come. There is no poet to whom the
supernatural has been so much alive. Religious doubt
he seems never to have felt. But the temper of religious
wonder, the old, child-like, monkish attitude of awe and
faith in the presence of the unseen, is never absent in
him. The artistic force of his temperament drives him
to the worship of beauty ; the poetic and religious
forces to the adoration of mystery.
In his reproductions of the mediaeval ballad, Rossetti's
success varies. In common with Swinburne he was
powerfully attracted by the bizarre genius of Villon,
and the best translations we have of Villon's curious
ballads are his. No one has reproduced so accurately
the temper and spirit of the old ballad as Rossetti :
where he most frequently fails is in the introduction of
complexities of thought and fancy where the very key
to excellence is absolute simplicity. Perhaps he aimed
less at the reproduction of form than of temper. His
tl Rose Mary/' for instance, is a marvellous reproduction
DANTE GABRIEL ROSSETTL 349
of the mediaeval spirit; but in its elaborateness of
structure, its subtlety of suggestion, and its ingenuity
of fancy, is as far as possible removed from the direct-
ness of the old balladists. On the other hand, in the
brief and pathetic poem of " John of Tours," we have
the form as well as the temper of the old ballad
perfectly rendered. With what flashing simplicity the
ballad opens :
John of Tours is back with peace,
But he comes home ill at ease.
" Good morrow, mother." " Good morrow, son ;
Your wife has borne you a little one."
" Go now, mother, go before,
Make me a bed upon the floor :
" Very low your foot must fall,
That my wife hear not at all."
As it neared the midnight toll,
John of Tours gave up his soul.
And with what tragic directness and pathos does the
poem end :
11 Tell me though, my mother dear,
What's the knocking that I hear ? "
" Daughter, it's the carpenter,
Mending planks upon the stair."
" Nay, but say, my mother, my dear,
Why do you fall weeping here ? "
" Oh, the truth must be said
It's that John of Tours is dead."
" Mother, let the sexton know
That the grave must be for two ;
350 THE MAKERS OF MODERN ENGLISH.
" Aye, and still have room to spare,
For you must shut the baby there."
In work like this we have something absolutely new
in modern poetry. The strange world of medisevalism,
with all its chivalrous ardours, its awe-struck faith, its
simple movements of human passion, its frank revela-
tions of feeling, its glory and romance, lives again for
us. It is as though the figures on some piece of faded
tapestry began to move, and the gateways of their
quaint turreted towns opened, and gave egress to the
knights and ladies, the troubadours and artificers, of
the days of chivalry. Tennyson was touched with the
same spirit when he wrote the " Lady of Shalott ; " but
Tennyson's mediaevalism has a modern veneer of moral
adaptation Rossetti's is the thing itself. Tennyson's
is the mediaevalism of Wardour-street with Rossetti
we actually move again in the times of Agincourt and
Poictiers.
Perhaps the word which best describes Rossetti's
poetry is the word "glamour." In common with
Coleridge and Keats he possesses a curious power of
exciting the imagination into intensity of vision. There
is a sense of wizardry in the charm which Rossetti
wields over us. He never fails, even in his simplest
verses, to cast over us the spell of the supernatural.
He affects us powerfully by his own intensity of vision
and feeling, and lifts us completely out of the atmo-
sphere of common life into that world of subtle sensa-
tion and imagination in which he habitually dwelt.
Take, for instance, so simple a poem as " My Sister's
Sleep." Its theme is purely modern : it pictures the
dying of his sister, amid the common surroundings of
ordinary life. It is Christmas Eve : his mother has her
little work-table with work to finish set beside her.
DANTE GABRIEL ROSSETTL 351
Her needles, as she laid them down,
Met lightly, and her silken gown
Settled : no other noise than that.
But in an instant Rossetti has invested the whole scene
with glamour when he writes :
Without, there was a cold moon up,
Of winter radiance, sheer and thin ;
The hollow halo it was in
Was like an icy crystal cup.
Through the small room, with subtle sound
Of flame, by vents the fireshine drove
And reddened. In its dim alcove
The mirror shed a clearness round.
I had been sitting up some nights,
And my tired mind felt weak and blank :
Like a sharp strengthening wine it drank
The stillness and the broken lights.
Twelve struck, that sound, by dwindling years
Heard in each hour, crept oft ; and then
The ruffled silence spread again,
Like water that a pebble stirs.
All this is exquisitely simple, and exquisitely realistic.
Yet there is a subtlety, a magic, a charm of imagination
investing it all, which rivets the attention and fascinates
the fancy. It affects us like some pungent and. perva-
sive perfume. We may analyse the verses as we will ;
the essence is too volatile to be captured by any such
means as these. And there is the same indefinable
charm in all Rossetti's poetry ; a quality original and
bewitching, which is all his own, and is like nothing else
in modern poetry. " Glamour " best describes it : some-
thing beautiful and unearthly, that lays its restraint
upon us, and cannot be shaken off. It is a rare gift,
352 THE MAKERS OF MODERN ENGLISH.
one of the very rarest in English poetry, but it is unques-
tionably the special note of Rossetti's poetry, and the
real secret of his influence.
There can be no doubt that Rossetti has exercised a
wide influence over modern poetry, and an influence
that does not seem likely to decline. He set a new
fashion, but he did more than this: he struck a new
note. He has had many imitators ; many have followed
the fashion, but scarcely any has struck the note.
William Morris comes nearest in his early ballads ;
then perhaps Bell Scott ; lastly Mr. Swinburne. But
neither has the same intensity of vision and terseness
of diction. If Rossetti had only set a fashion of poetry,
if he had invented only an aesthetic craze for mediaeval-
ism, we might doubt the permanence of his influence.
All mere fashions pass away, and are forgotten. But
he has done much more than this. He is an original
poetic artist, who has produced original work. He has
a message, an idea, a mission to communicate. He
opens the closed doors of the past, and leads us into
fresh fields of romance. He has furnished poets with
a new set of artistic impulses and motives. And he
has exercised a wide influence on the forms of poetry,
in giving back to us forgotten rhythmic movements,
and setting an example of the most careful literary
workmanship. When we have made all possible de-
ductions for defects of taste and diction, we have still
left in Rossetti that rare combination of genius and
originality which alone can constitute the true poet,
and claim prolonged fame.
CHAPTER XXXIV.
ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE.
[Born in London, April 5th, 1837. His first productions, the "Queen
Mother" and "Rosamond," were published in 1861.]
THERE can be no doubt that Swinburne is a fine
poet ; there can be as little that he is an extremely
unequal poet, who has not wholly fulfilled the promise
of his youth. His earliest poems aroused intense
interest and enthusiasm, and from the first his unique
powers received the most ample recognition. This
chorus of praise, however, did not last. It was suc-
ceeded by a fierce critical warfare, which split the literary
world into two camps, and liberated the most violent
passions. It was natural that the world should recog-
nise the greatness and nobility of such a poem as
"Atalanta in Calydon." No reproduction from the
antique since the " Prometheus Unbound " of Shelley,
had been cast in so large a mould, had struck so full
and lofty a note, had given such ample evidence or
power and skill. As an embodiment of the antique
spirit, in some ways it was superior even to the master-
piece of Shelley. It had more of classic gravity and
restraint, and it was almost equal in its superb power
of musical utterance. Nothing grander than the
choruses in " Atalanta" has been given us by the genius
of any living poet. They have fire and stateliness,
23
354 THE MAKERS OF MODERN ENGLISH.
dignity and passion, tragic depth and intensity, and a
certain overwhelming music of their own, which the
greatest masters of poetical expression might covet. It
was this grandeur of musical utterance which took the
world by storm, and roused something like amazement
in readers who had listened to the sweet flute-notes
of Tennyson, and had given up hope of any further
development in the art of verbal music. Swinburne's
music was like the full sweep of a great wind, or the
organ-clamour of the sea. It overwhelmed and it ex-
hilarated ; it came like a resistless force, before which
criticism was bowed and futile, and it conveyed also a
sense of immense power and resource in the poet. He
seemed to produce the most magnificent effects of dic-
tion without effort, and to be able to go on producing
them without weariness or exhaustion. The poem was,
indeed, the first full utterance of a poet in the first
freshness and glory of his genius. On the day which
followed the completion of " Chastelard," "Atalanta"
was commenced. His genius was in full flow, and it
seemed to his readers of a quarter of a century ago
that there was no point of achievement or crown of
fame that might not well be his.
Two years after the publication of " Atalanta in
Calydon " Swinburne published his " Poems and
Ballads." For the moment there was a shock of pained
surprise, and then the storm of anger and disappoint-
ment broke. The " Poems and Ballads " was not
really a new work ; it was a collection of poems, most
of which had been written at an earlier date. They
represented the " storm and stress " period of the poet's
development, the passionate fermenting and clearing of
his genius. The themes were perilous, the spirit sen-
suous. The entire atmosphere of the book was morbid,
ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE. 355
if not immoral. The poet in the madness of his turbid
thoughts seemed to have no respect for the decencies
of life ; he even took a violent and savage pleasure in
defying them. Sensuous passion was treated with a
frankness unknown in modern poetry, and the reticence
of natural modesty was flung to the winds. The out-
cry that arose reproduced the passionate vituperation
of the attacks made on Byron. Just as Southey attacked
the t( Satanic School of Poetry," so another poet, of
about equal calibre, attacked Rossetti, and by im-
plication Swinburne, in an anonymous article on the
" Fleshly School of Poetry." * It can serve no useful
purpose to fight these battles over again. Foolish and
regrettable things were said on both sides. There,
however, the book stands, and its influence has been
widespread. The damage it inflicted on Swinburne's
reputation has been irreparable. Its effects are seen in
the productions of a swarm of minor poets, who have
seemed to imagine that the purveying of moral poison
was the highest duty of the poet, and that the nearer a
poet came to sheer indecency the truer was his gift.
Critics also arose who made it the first article of a
sound poetic faith that for the poet Nature had no
reticencies, and that in art moral considerations had no
weight, and were of no account. It is possible that the
wisdom of maturer life has often led Mr. Swinburne
himself to wish that he had burned some of these
erotic verses of his youth. The very charm and music
of them constitutes a perennial peril. They have a
secret and subtle sweetness as of forbidden fruit which
begets in us unspoken covetings. To read them is like
sitting at some enchanted feast, where lamps glitter,
and voluptuous music trembles on the ear, where the
air is heavy with odour, and the senses gradually are
* " The Fleshly School of Poetry," by " Thomas Maitland " (Robert
Buchanan), in the Contemporary Review for October 1871.
356 THE MAKERS OF MODERN ENGLISH.
overcome by potent charms, as the moral sense is
slackened, and the resoluteness of manhood is dissolved
in evil languor ; and it is only when the clear dawn
shines in, and the fresh breath of Nature wakes us
from our heavy sleep, that we see it is a poisoned
banquet we have shared, and we pay the penalty of
abiding disgust for the short-lived enchantment of the
hour. No mature man of pure life can read these
poems without revulsion. We may even say more :
that all moral considerations apart, these poems are
bad art. It is not true art which fixes on the sensuous
side of life alone, and forgets the thousandfold nobler
and wholesomer aspects which exist. There is nothing
so monotonous as sin. There is nothing that sooner
wearies the discerning mind than the perpetual strum-
ming on the one vulgar chord of fleshly affinities.
Sunk as man may be, he covets something better than
this ; and if he feed on the swine-husks he does not
want lyrics of the swine-trough. When we compare
the gravity and beauty of the " Atalanta " with the mor-
bid, turbid, unwholesome imagination of the "Poems
and Ballads," we can scarcely be surprised at the
vehemence of the public resentment.
It would be a mistake, however, to suppose that in
the two volumes of his " Poems and Ballads " Swin-
burne touches only such themes as I have alluded to.
There are powerful evidences of other influences than
those which find utterance in the erotic lyrics of his
unripe youth. Like Rossetti, he had carefully studied
the mediaeval manner, and reproduces it with great
effect in " St. Dorothy " and the " Masque of Queen
Bersabe." There is also an Hebraic influence, a close
observance of the vivid utterance of the Hebrew
prophets, which is reproduced with terrible force in the
ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE. 357
poem "Aholibah." In the second volume of "Poems
and Ballads" much that was most distasteful in the
first volume disappears. True it contains many trans-
lations of Villon, whose poetry never fails to leave a
bad taste in the mouth, but the general tone of the book
is altogether stronger and more normal. The heavy
intoxicating fragrance of evil is still there, but is sub-
dued and i* in part dissipated by fresh draughts of air
that blow to us from the world of Nature. In pomp
and splendour of diction, and in richness of musical
harmony, both books excel. The chief characteristic of
the harmony is its surprising originality. New lyrical
effects, new and perfect rhymes, bewitching assonances
and undertones, meet us at every turn, and once heard
take possession of the memory. Music itself could
scarcely produce a more exquisite sensation on the
ear than lines like these :
If love were what the rose is,
And I were like the leaf,
Our lives would grow together
In sad or singing weather ;
Blown fields or flovverful closes,
Green pleasure or grey grief;
If love were what the rose is,
And I were like the leaf.
It is the subtle solemn music of the verse also which
arrests the ear in these lines :
Could'st thou not watch with me one hour ? Behold,
Day skims the sea with flying feet of gold,
With sudden feet that graze the gradual sea.
Could'st thou not watch with me ?
Lo, far in heaven the web of night undone,
And on the sudden sea the gradual sun ;
358 THE MAKERS OF MODERN ENGLISH.
Wave to wave answers, tree responds to tree.
Could'st thou not watch with me ?
Or, again, in this cry to the sea :
Save me and hide me with all thy waves,
Find me one grave of thy thousand graves,
Those pure cold populous graves of thine,
Wrought without hand in a world without stain.
Or in the passage of the Ave atque Vale,
For always thee, the fervid, languid glories,
Allured of heavier suns in mightier skies ;
Thine ears knew all the wandering watery sighs
Where the sea sobs round Lesbian promontories,
The barren kiss of piteous wave to wave,
That knows not where is that Leucadian grave
That hides too deep the supreme head of song.
There are indeed here and there fine images, such as,
Behold,
Cast forth from heaven with feet of awful gold
And plumeless wings that make the bright air blind,
Lightning, with thunder for a hound behind,
Hunting through fields unfurrowed and unsown;
but in Swinburne it is not the imagery, and still less
the thought, that moves us : it is the metrical charm and
sweetness. Many of the highest qualities of poetry are
not his, but in metrical affluence he takes rank with the
highest; and if he have any claim to prolonged re-
membrance as one of the makers of modern English,
it is that in the grasp of his genius the English language
becomes so supple and sensitive that no language could
well excel it as a vehicle of lyrical expression.
On the other hand, it is impossible to overlook the
fact that Mr. Swinburne's great gift of expression is
ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE. 359
altogether out of proportion to other gifts which are
necessary to permanence in poetry. Nothing can be
truer than Mr. Coventry Patmore's saying, that in
reading Swinburne's poetry it is " impossible not to feel
that there has been some disproportion between his
power of saying things and the things he has to say."
And so also in Ar. Patmore's description of Swinburne's
relation to Nature. " It must be confessed that flowers,
stars, waves, flames, and three or four other entities of
the natural order come in so often as to suggest some
narrowness of observation and vocabulary. For ex-
ample, in a passage of thirteen lines we have ' flowing
forefront of the year/ 'foam-flowered strand/ ' blossom-
fringe/ ' flower-soft face/ and ' spray-flowers.' " The
same fault occurs in all Mr. Swinburne's poetry. His
effects are kaleidoscopic : the subject is changed, but
the sets of words and images are always the same. To
have an overwhelming flow of words is one thing ; to
have a large vocabulary is another ; and very often Mr.
Swinburne's torrent of speech reminds us not so much
of a natural fountain whose springs are deep and
abundant, as of an artificial fountain, which is always
ready to shoot aloft its glittering spray, and always re-
absorbs itself for some further service; so that while
the fashion of the jet may differ, the water is pretty
much the same. He is too good an artist to let us hear
the creaking of the force-pump, but all the same we
know that it is there, and for that reason he readily
lends himself to imitation. His trick of alliteration is
soon caught, and his peculiarity of cadence proves itself
an artifice. Men cannot go behind Shakespeare and
steal the patent of his mechanism, because his poetry
is not a thing of mechanism, but of Nature, and has its
springs deep down in the living heart of things. The
360 THE MAKERS OF MODERN ENGLISH.
more mannered a poet is, the sooner is his method
mastered, and the sooner does he weary us ; but the
greatest art is always the simplest, and the noblest
works of art are those which are most allied to the
simplicity of Nature.
And, again, it is a true criticism which discovers in
Mr. Swinburne little genuine observation of Nature.
He loves Nature in a fashion, but it is not the fashion
of the true lover. He has not studied her with minute
attention, and, consequently, he tells us little new about
her. He has not lived in the solitary joy of her pre-
sence, as Wordsworth did ; he has not been subdued
and penetrated with her charm, as Shelley was. For
while Shelley's grasp of Nature was vague, yet his
adoration of her was passionately sincere, and his
sincerity atoned for his lack of detailed observation.
But Swinburne touches only the surface of her reve-
lation, and loves her rather for her worth to him as
artistic ware than for herself. If he had been more
deep-hearted and sincere in his love he would not have
dwelt with monotonous insistence on one or two aspects
of her glory, nor would thirteen lines of his poetry
have contained five adaptations of the same image.
It is the limitation of his power, or his impatience of
the drudgery of observation, which makes it possible
for. us to say that he is kaleidoscopic rather than various
in his artistic effects.
And, finally, he is often not so much a master of
words as their slave. His adjectival opulence may
surprise us, but it also wearies us. There is a total
lack of concentration in his speech. He rarely attains
to the art of putting in some one flashing phrase the
whole spirit or thought of a poem. It is this which
makes his dramas so essentially undramatic : he ob-
ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE. 361
scures in a flood of gorgeous rhetoric a situation which
ought to concentrate itself in a sentence. His sur-
passing gift of melody enchants us ; but when it ends
we are like men who have heard a Wagnerian opera,
and find it difficult to recall a single air. No one is
so difficult to quote, because his poetry contains so
few lines which are distinguished by their concentra-
tion of phrase. He never seems to have used the
pruning-knife ; he flings down his opulent verses in
all their original unrestrained luxuriance, and not
infrequently mistakes abundance for opulence. He
surfeits us, but does not satisfy us. A prolonged
course of Swinburne leaves us bewildered with a
sense of riches, but in reality none the richer. His
poetry is like fairy-gold : we dream that we are wealthy,
but our wealth perpetually eludes us. For that which
makes poetry a real possession is not only the art of
expression, but the gift of thought, and Mr. Swin-
burne never was, and never will be, a thinker. We
always feel that he has no message, that his very
vehemence is a sign of weakness, and that his seeming
power of words conceals an actual feebleness of thought.
There are, of course, poets who live by their exquisite
power of expression alone, and who have contributed
little to the intellectual impulses of the world. Keats
was such a poet, but Keats had in a supreme degree
that gift of concentrated phrase which Mr. Swinburne
lacks. So that when we carefully consider Mr. Swin-
burne's claims to permanent remembrance, they are
all narrowed down into the fact that he is a great
metrical artist, and he must stand or fall upon that one
indisputable quality. Perhaps it seems little to say ;
yet when we consider how difficult it is to introduce
into a literature of poetry so enormous as the English
362 THE MAKERS OF MODERN ENGLISH.
any new form of expression, any metrical originality, it
is not so little as it appears. That, at all events, is
Mr. Swinburne's solitary claim ; and it is in virtue of
that we must rank him among those who have helped
to mould and develop modern English letters.
CHAPTER XXXV.
WILLIAM MORRIS
[Born at Walthamstow, Essex, 1834. The "Defence of Guinevere"
published 1858. Joined the Socialistic League 1884.]
WILLIAM MORRIS is the third great name
connected with the revival of Romanticism in
modern poetry. His " Defence of Guinevere," published
in 1858, and dedicated to Rossetti, is marked by that
same return to the mediaeval spirit which so strikingly
distinguished Rossetti, and which bore partial fruit in
the early poems of Swinburne. The chief thing to
be noticed about all three poets is that their poetry
disdains modern thought and purpose, and deliberately
seeks its inspiration in other times, and more ancient
sources of emotion. Rossetti alone remained absolutely
true to the mediaeval spirit: his last poems had as
distinctly as his first the impress and mould of mediaeval
Romanticism. Swinburne, as we have seen, did his
best work under the shadows of Greek Classicism, and
has besides grown more modern in spirit as he has
grown older, handling purely modern themes, as in his
"Songs before Sunrise," with all his early vehemence
and metrical skill. With William Morris the fascination
of present-day life is a thing of very recent growth,
and it can scarcely be said that it has done anything
to help his poetry. As a poet he has three distinct
364 THE MAKERS OF MODERN ENGLISH.
periods. First comes the period when, in common
with Rossetti, the fascination of ballad-romance was
strong upon him, and its fruit is the thirty poems
contained in his earliest volume. When he next
appealed to the public he had cast off the glamour of
mediaevalism, and had become an epic poet. This is
the period of " Jason" and the "Earthly Paradise."
The last period, if such it may be called, is marked by
an awakening to the actual conditions of modern life,
and is signalised by a series of " Chants for Socialists,"
which are remarkable rather for political passion than
poetic power. It may be well for us briefly to glance
at these three periods.
William Morris's first volume, the " Defence of
Guinevere," is a remarkable book. It is not only
significant for its revival of mediaeval feeling, but also
for its artistic feeling, its sense of colour, its touches of
frank yet inoffensive sensuousness, its simplicity and
directness of poetic effect. As a matter of fact, the
question whether Morris should devote his life to art or
literature for a long time hung in the balance, and it is
only natural that his poetry should be remarkable for
richness of colour and objective effect. The " Defence
of Guinevere" is a fragment, but its very abruptness
and incompleteness are effective. Its involution of
thought, its curious touches of indirect introspection,
its vivid glow of colour, its half-grotesque yet powerful
imagery, are essentially mediaeval. Such lines as the
following at once recall the very method of Rossetti,
and bear in themselves the marks of their relationship to
the " Blessed Damozel : "
Listen : suppose your time were come to die,
And you were quite alone and very weak :
Yea, laid a-dying, while very mightily
WILLIAM MORRIS. 365
The wind was ruffling up the narrow streak
Of river through your broad lands running well :
Suppose a hush should come, then someone speak:
" One of those cloths is heaven, and one is hell,
Now choose one cloth for ever, which they be
I will not tell you, you must somehow tell
Of your own strength and mightiness : here, see ! "
Yea, yea, my lord, and you to ope your eyes,
At foot of your familiar bed to see
A great God's angel standing, with such dyes
Not known on earth, on his great wings, and hands,
Held out two ways, light from the inner skies
Showing him well, and making his commands
Seem to be God's commands ; moreover, too,
Holding within his hands the cloths on wands :
And one of these strange choosing-cloths was blue
Wavy and long, and one cut short and red ;
No man could tell the better of the two.
After a shivering half-hour you said
" God help ! heaven's colour, the blue ; " and he said,
11 Hell."
Perhaps you then would roll upon your bed,
And cry to all good men who loved you well,
"Ah Christ ! if only I had known, known, known."
It is characteristic of mediaeval imagination to dwell
in the borderland of spiritual mystery, and to utter itself
with perfect unrestraint, much as a child speaks of such
things, with a fearlessness which is unconscious of
wrong, and a quaintness which gives a touch of sublimity
to what in other lips would sound simply grotesque.
It is precisely this frank and fascinating quaintness
which William Morris has admirably reproduced in this
remarkable poem. His description of the angel is the
366 THE MAKERS OF MODERN ENGLISH.
description of a mediaeval artist, who notices first the
celestial dyes upon hands and wings, and the colour of
the choosing-cloths, and afterwards ponders the spiritual
mystery of his presence. The chief quality in both
Morris's and Rossetti's poetry is its sensitive apprecia-
tion of colour ; each has carried to its furthest point
the art of painting in words. And just as Rossetti was
a painter as well as a poet, and infused into each art
the spirit and something of the method of the other, so
Morris never resigned art when he took to literature.
As a designer he has done more than any living man
to make the homes of English citizens tasteful. He has
always dwelt in the House Beautiful. He has dis-
covered in decorative art a new field for genius, and one
of which genius has no need to be ashamed. When the
history of the modern mediaeval revival comes to be
written, perhaps it will be found that its most practical
results are the art-designs of William Morris, and the
historian will note how the sense of colour which dis-
tinguishes his earliest poetry is the real quality out of
which the activities of his social life have sprung.
There are other poems in this slight volume which
are equally remarkable with the " Defence of Guinevere."
The " Haystack in the Floods " is one of the most
realistic poems in modern literature. All the troubled
terror of the Middle Ages, the fierce passions and hasty
vengeances, the barbaric strength and virility of love,
the popular ignorance and cruelty, are brought home
to us with an intense vividness in this brief poem.
Every line of the poem is simple and direct, and it is by
a score or so of natural touches of description that the
whole scene is put before us. It is a piece of grim
tragedy, painted, rather than told, with realistic fidelity
and force. The landscape is as clear to us as the
WILLIAM MORRIS. 367
figures of the actors ; we see the whole episode in its
tragic misery and rudeness when we read the opening
lines
Along the dripping, leafless woods,
The stirrup touching either shoe,
She rode astride as troopers do,
With kirtle kilted to her knee,
To which the mud splashed wretchedly ;
And the wet dripped from every tree
Upon her head and heavy hair,
And on her eyelids broad and fair ;
The tears and rain ran down her face.
It is so Jehane rides on into the deepening shadows
of fate. Her lover
Seemed to watch the rain : yea, too,
His lips were firm ; he tried once more
To touch her lips ; she reached out, sore
And vain desire so tortured them,
The poor grey lips.
But the vision she sees through the dripping forest
glades is
The court at Paris : those six men,
The gratings of the Chatelet ;
The swift Seine on some rainy day
Like this, and people standing by,
And laughing, while my weak hands try
To recollect how strong men swim.
One would have supposed that poetry so original and
powerful as this would have been sure of recognition.
The book, however, fell dead from the press. Little of
it is even now known save the spirited ballad, " Riding
Together." It was not until twenty-five years later
that the significance of this first volume of Morris's
was realised. By that time he had reached his second
period ; he had outgrown much of his early medisevalism,
368 THE MAKERS OF MODERN ENGLISH.
or rather he had " worked out for himself a distinct and
individual phrase of the mediaeval movement."
Eight years after his first volume William Morris
published the "Life and Death of Jason," and this was
followed in 1 868 by the first instalment of the " Earthly
Paradise." Of the first poem it is enough to say that
it is a noble epic, full of sustained narrative power,
but too long, and occasionally too deficient in interest,
to obtain the highest honours of the epic. It marks,
however, his emancipation from the spell of mediaeval
minstrelsy. He had now entered a larger world,
where pleasant sunlight had taken the place of tragic
shadows of terror, and where his genius moved freely
with a sense of conscious power. It was evident also
that his mind had developed new and unsuspected
qualities. The old simplicity and directness are here,
the old keen sense of colour is still predominant ; but
there is something new a gift of larger utterance, a
power of word-painting, . inimitably fresh and truthful,
a sort of child-like joy in dreams, and a corresponding
power of setting them forth, which interests and fasci-
nates us. And there is the same sort of childlike
delight in Nature. He sees her with a fresh eye, and
tells us what he sees in the simplest phrases. We
rarely meet an epithet which surprises us by the keen-
ness of its observation, or the intensity of its vision,
but we never meet a description of Nature that is not
truthful and sincere. We are never startled into de-
light, but we are always soothed and refreshed. " The
art of William Morris," said Mary Howitt, "is Nature
itself, rough at times, but quaint, fresh, and dewy
beyond anything I ever saw or felt in language."
The scenery Morris loves to paint, and which he
paints best, is familiar scenery ; the dewy meads, the
WILLIAM MORRIS. 369
orchards with their snowy bloom, the white mill with
its cosy quiet, the flower-gardens where the bee sucks,
and where the soft wet winds murmur in the leaves of
" immemorial elms." The charm of such pictures is in
their unintentional art, the entire absence of any effort
to be fine. The breaking day has been described a
thousand times, and often the most laboured descrip-
tions have been most admired ; yet there is still delight
to be found in so simple a sketch as this :
So passed the night ; the moon arose and grew,
From off the sea a little west wind blew,
Rustling the garden leaves like sudden rain,
And ere the moon had 'gun to fall again
The wind grew cold, a change was in the sky,
And in deep silence did the dawn draw nigh.
How clearly is the colourist seen also in this companion
picture :
The sun is setting in the west, the sky
Is clear and hard, and no clouds come anigh
The golden orb, but further off they lie,
Steel-grey and black, with edges red as blood,
And underneath them is the weltering flood
Of some huge sea, whose tumbling hills, as they
Turn restless sides about, are black, or grey,
Or green, or glittering with the golden flame :
The wind has fallen now, but still the same
The mighty army moves, as if to drown
This lone bare rock, whose sheer scarped sides of brown
Cast off the weight of waves in clouds of spray.
Sometimes there is a flash of imaginative intensity, as
in the lines :
And underneath his feet the moon-lit sea
Went shepherding his waves disorderly ;
but such touches are rare. William Morris has the
infrequent gift of using commonplace phrases in a
24
370 THE MAKERS OF MODERN ENGLISH.
way that is not commonplace. Tennyson would
scarcely deign to use so well-worn a phrase as " the
golden orb ; " he would probably have invented some
felicitous double adjective which would strike us as
much by its ingenuity as its truth. Morris is never
troubled by any such scruples. He uses the handiest
phrases, and somehow he makes us feel that they are
after all the truest. He is always pictorial, and his
pictures are painted with so great a breadth that the
absence of any delicate filigree work of ingenious
phrase-making is not remarked. Perhaps this also is
part of his charm. While almost every other poet of
our day aims at the invention of new phrases which
shall allure us by their originality, Morris is simply
intent upon telling us his story ; and the very absence
of pretension in his style fills us with a new delight,
and strikes us as a new species of genius.
The aim and scope of the " Earthly Paradise "
Morris has himself set forth in his "Apology" and
"L'Envoi."
Of heaven and hell I have no power to sing ;
I cannot ease the burden of your fears,
Or make quick-coming death a little thing,
Or bring again the pleasure of past years ;
Nor for my words shall ye forget your tears,
Or hope again for aught that I can say
The idle singer of an empty day.
Dreamer of dreams, born out of my due time,
Why should I strive to set the crooked straight ?
Let it suffice me that my murmuring rhyme
Beats with light wing against the ivory gate,
Telling a tale not too importunate
To those who in the sleepy region stay,
Lulled by the singer of an empty day.
In "L'Envoi" he boldly claims Geoffrey Chaucer as
WILLIAM MORRIS. 371
his master, and sounds the same note of gentle pes-
simism as regards the fortunes of his own day. From a
moral point of view this pessimism is the most striking
thing about the " Earthly Paradise." He turns to
dreamland, and bids us travel with him into the realms
of faery, because he cannot unravel the mystery of
human life, and believes that any attempt to do so
can only end in bewilderment and despair. When he
ventures upon any counsel it is simply the old pagan
counsel of carpe diem. The thought of death is always
with him, and the true wisdom of life is to gather the
roses while we may. Death, the great spoliator, will
soon be upon us, and the days will come all too soon
when we have no pleasure in them.
In the white-flowered hawthorn brake,
Love, be merry for my sake :
Twine the blossoms in my hair,
Kiss me where I am most fair
Kiss me, love ! for who knoweth
What thing cometh after death ?
This is the note which sounds throughout the " Earthly
Paradise." Ogier the Dane, at the bidding of the fairy,
renounces life just when its consummation is at hand,
and puts aside the crown of Charlemaine, saying :
Lie there, O crown of Charlemaine,
Worn by a mighty man and worn in vain.
Because he died, and all the things he did
Were changed before his face by earth was hid.
Ambition, the fierce race for wealth, the battle even
for what seem to be great causes and sufficing ideals,
are all in vain, and end in disillusionment and sorrow.
It is better still to dream. In dreams everything is
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beautiful ; in actual life the sordid and the vulgar
intrude at every turn. It is better still to dream,
because dreams never disappoint us. There, at least,
we can forget the shadow of death and wander in the
meads of a perpetual spring ; and so far as dreams
bring the jaded mind refreshment and release it is wise
to dream. The imaginative faculty needs exercise as
well as the practical, and no full or fair life can be
lived where it is stunted or ignored. We are only too
ready to hail a singer who bids us
Forget six counties overhung with smoke,
Forget the snorting steam and piston-stroke,
Forget the spreading of the hideous town ;
Think rather of the pack-horse on the down,
And dream of London small, and white, and clean
The clear Thames bordered by its gardens green.
But, after all, he is not the highest poet who only bids
us dream. The highest poet is he who, knowing life
and death, bids us not ignore the one nor fear the
other, but prepares us equally for both b} r the inspiration
of his courage and the serenity of his faith. This
William Morris does not do in his greatest poems, and
has not sought to do. He knows the limitations of his
nature, and confesses his inability to sing the songs
which humanity has ever counted the noblest. He has
left to others the battles of faith and philosophy. He
has sought only to be the singer of an empty day, the
dreamer of dreams, in whose bright spells weary men
may rest awhile, and those who are vexed by life's
disasters may find a brief refreshment and repose. Nor
is this a slight aim nor a contemptible achievement.
It is something to have amid the fierce strain of modern
life one poet who does not excite, but soothe us ; who
WILLIAM MORRIS. 373
does not make us think, but bids us enjoy ; who lures us
back again into the simplicities of childhood, and who,
in all his writings, has not written a page that a child
might not read, and has written many with so lucid an
art that a child might enjoy and comprehend them.
Of the third period of William Morris it is only
necessary to add a sentence or two. The dreamer of
the " Earthly Paradise" at last wakes from his dream,
and casts away his spells, and breaks his magic wand.
He discovers that the nineteenth century is not an
empty day, nor is it a time when any man who has
helpful hands may dare to be idle or unserviceable.
The social problem, which is the great and real pro-
blem of our time, has powerfully affected Mr. Morris's
mature life. With his socialistic harangues at street
corners, his " wrestles with policemen, or wrangles
with obtuse magistrates about freedom of speech," we
have nothing to do here. Here we have only to deal
with his work in literature, and with the exception of a
few spirited verses such as these :
Then a man shall work and bethink him, and rejoice in the
deeds of his hand,
Nor yet come home in the even, too faint and weary to stand.
For that which the worker winneth shall then be his indeed,
Nor shall half be reaped for nothing by him that sowed no
seed.
Then all mine and thine shall be ours, and no more shall any
man crave
For riches that serve for nothing but to fetter a friend for a
slave,
the socialistic propaganda has gained nothing by his
poetic art. Perhaps it is too late in life for Mr. Morris
to catch the true lyric fire of the revolutionary poet.
It is, however, profoundly interesting to remark how the
374 THE MAKERS OF MODERN ENGLISH.
huge shadow of this social problem has been gradually
projected over the entire field of literature, politics, and
philosophy. What contributions Mr. Morris may yet
make to its solution it would be foolish to predict ; but
it is at least safe to say that his ultimate fame must
rest rather upon the work of his past than of his future.
No writer since Chaucer has displayed so masterly a
power of continuous narrative, or has rested his fame
so completely upon the arts of simplicity and lucidity.
In this he occupies a unique place among modern poets.
He has imitators, but he has no real competitor. He
has drunk deep of the well of English undefiled, and
has again taught the old lesson of the potency of plain
and idiomatic Saxon as an unrivalled vehicle of poetic
utterance. If he has added nothing new to the wealth
of metrical expression he has enriched modern litera-
ture by the re-coining of ancient forms of speech, and
by the recurrence to the free simplicity of our older
poetry. If he falls far behind Rossetti in the art of
beautiful expression, and behind Swinburne in vehe-
mence and lyric fire, he is the superior of both in the
more enduring qualities of strength and breadth of
style, and has a nobler inventiveness and a wholesomer
view of life. To be the modern Chaucer is a far
greater thing than to be an English Baudelaire or
Villon, simply because Chaucer was an infinitely
greater man than either, and carried in his sweet and
sunny nature the secret seed of a more enduring
immortality. This William Morris is the nearest
approach to Chaucer which the nineteenth century can
produce, or that any intervening period has produced.
This is much to say, but it is not too much to say of
the author of the " Life and Death of Jason " and
the " Earthly Paradise," Separated as they are by a
WILLIAM MORRIS. 375
vast stretch of time, different as they are by so much as
five centuries of civilisation can constitute of difference,
still they are alike in spirit ; and Chaucer is indeed
the master of William Morris's art, and he is the most
faithful and successful of his disciples.
THE END.
Printed by Hazell, Watson, & Viney, Ld., London and Aylcsbury.