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Main Currents in Nineteenth Century Literature - 4. Naturalism in England

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Title: Main Currents in Nineteenth Century Literature - 4. Naturalism in England

Author: Georg Brandes

Translator: Mary Morison
        Diana White


        
Release date: January 6, 2015 [eBook #47892]
                Most recently updated: October 24, 2024

Language: English

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK MAIN CURRENTS IN NINETEENTH CENTURY LITERATURE - 4. NATURALISM IN ENGLAND ***
MAIN CURRENTS IN NINETEEN CENTURY LITERATURE

BY

GEORGE BRANDES

IN SIX VOLUMES


VOLUME IV.


NATURALISM IN ENGLAND



NEW YORK: THE MACMILLAN COMPANY

LONDON: WILLIAM HEINEMANN

1906



[Illustration: WILLIAM WORDSWORTH]



CONTENTS

       I. COMMON CHARACTERISTICS OF THE PERIOD
      II. NATIONAL CHARACTERISTICS
     III. THE POLITICAL BACKGROUND
      IV. THE BEGINNINGS OF NATURALISM
       V. STRENGTH AND SINCERITY OF THE LOVE OF NATURE
      VI. RURAL LIFE AND ITS POETRY
     VII. NATURALISTIC ROMANTICISM
    VIII. THE LAKE SCHOOL'S CONCEPTION OF LIBERTY
      IX. THE LAKE SCHOOL'S ORIENTAL ROMANTICISM
       X. HISTORICAL NATURALISM
      XI. ALL-EMBRACING SENSUOUSNESS
     XII. THE POETRY OF IRISH OPPOSITION AND REVOLT
    XIII. EROTIC LYRIC POETRY
     XIV. THE BRITISH SPIRIT OF FREEDOM
      XV. REPUBLICAN HUMANISM
     XVI. RADICAL NATURALISM
    XVII. BYRON: THE PASSIONATE PERSONALITY
   XVIII. BYRON: THE PASSIONATE PERSONALITY--(CONTINUED)
     XIX. BYRON: HIS SELF-ABSORPTION
      XX. BYRON: THE REVOLUTIONARY SPIRIT
     XXI. COMIC AND TRAGIC REALISM
    XXII. CULMINATION OF NATURALISM
   XXIII. BYRON'S DEATH
    XXIV. CONCLUSION




LIST OF PORTRAITS

    WORDSWORTH
    COLERIDGE
    SCOTT
    KEATS
    MOORE
    SHELLEY
    BYRON



                        "_I am as a spirit who has dwelt_
    _Within his heart of hearts; and I have felt_
    _His feelings, and have thought his thoughts, and known_
    _The inmost converse of his soul, the tone_
    _Unheard but in the silence of his blood,_
    _When all the pulses in their multitude_
    _Image the trembling calm of summer seas._
    _I have unlocked the golden melodies_
    _Of his deep soul as with a master-key,_
    _And loosened them, and bathed myself therein--_
    _Even as an eagle in a thunder-mist_
    _Clothing his wings with lightning_."
    --SHELLEY (Fragment).



INTRODUCTION


It is my intention to trace in the poetry of England of the first
decades of this century, the course of the strong, deep, pregnant
current in the intellectual life of the country, which, sweeping away
the classic forms and conventions, produces a Naturalism dominating
the whole of literature, which from Naturalism leads to Radicalism,
from revolt against traditional convention in literature to vigorous
rebellion against religious and political reaction, and which bears
in its bosom the germs of all the liberal ideas and emancipatory
achievements of the later periods of European civilisation.

The literary period which I now proceed to describe is a vigorous,
highly productive one. It has authors and schools of the most
dissimilar types, sometimes not merely unlike, but antagonistic to,
each other. Though the connection between these authors and schools is
not self-evident, but only discernible to the understanding, critical
eye, yet the period has its unity, and the picture it presents, though
a many-coloured, restless one, is a coherent composition, the work of
the great artist, history.






NATURALISM IN ENGLAND




I


UNIVERSAL CHARACTERISTICS OF THE PERIOD


One of the first and chief things observable in this English literary
group, is that it has certain characteristics in common with the whole
European intellectual tendency of the period. These characteristics
are universal because of the universal existence of their cause.
Napoleon was threatening Europe with a world-wide Empire. To escape
annihilation, all the threatened nationalities either instinctively
or deliberately re-invigorated themselves from the sources of their
national life. The national spirit is awakened and spreads and grows in
Germany during the War of Liberation; in Russia it bursts into flames
along with the ancient capital of the country; in England it inspires
enthusiasm for Wellington and Nelson, and vindicates in bloody battles,
from the Nile to Waterloo, the ancient English claim to the sovereignty
of the sea; in Denmark the cannonade of the battle of Copenhagen
awakens a new national spirit and produces a new literature. It is this
patriotic spirit which leads all the different nations to the eager
study of their own history and their own customs, their own legends and
folk-lore. The devotion to everything national incites to the study and
the literary representation of the "people"--that is to say, the lower
classes of society, with whom the literature of the eighteenth century
had not concerned itself. The reaction against French as a universal
language brings even dialect into high repute.

In _Germany_, as we have already seen, patriotism led to enthusiasm
for the country's past, for the Middle Ages--their faith, their
superstitions, and their social order. In _Italy_ we have, in Manzoni's
religious verse, an apparent return to Catholicism. The faith which
had petrified into dogma, and meant renunciation of the flesh, is
upheld as synonymous with poetry and morality; it is transformed from
a religion into an art _motif_. Manzoni's religious enthusiasm is the
same enthusiasm as that which accompanied the Pope back to Rome and
inspired Alexander with the idea of the Holy Alliance. Even _France_,
the country which had produced Napoleon, was driven by the spirit of
the age into a path leading in much the same direction as that taken
by Germany; the new French literary movement was directed against
the Academy, against the so-called classical, _i.e._, universal,
cosmopolitan literature; the age of Louis XIV. was neglected, and the
poets of the sixteenth century, Du Bellay, Ronsard, nay, even the poor
grotesque poets whom Boileau had scoffed at and rejected, came into
vogue again. (Victor Hugo's attack on the literary opinions of the
period previous to his own; Sainte-Beuve's earliest literary criticism;
Théophile Gautier's _Les Grotesques_.) In _Denmark_ at the beginning of
the century it was mainly in the wake of the German current that men's
minds moved. They assumed an antagonistic attitude to French culture.
But in the second and equally important stage of the literary movement,
the antagonism becomes an antagonism to everything foreign, and more
especially to Germany, which had for so long played the part of the
oppressor in Denmark.[1]

In _England_ we find the same essential features which distinguish the
movement in all the other countries. The influence of France, which
in the eighteenth century had been paramount in the upper classes of
society, was shaken off. Pope, the last poet of the classical school,
did not long remain a master in the eyes of the younger generation.
They began to pluck at the little man's elaborate wig and trample over
the trim beds of his garden. And now it became apparent what a powerful
intellectual reserve force the British nation possessed in those
countries which lay remote from the centre of political life, fresh,
unexhausted by civilisation. Ireland, which in the eighteenth century
had produced such a thinker as Swift and such a writer as Goldsmith,
owned a treasury of lovely melodies which, as soon as a great lyric
poet lent them words, were poured forth by all the singing throats of
Europe. The Welsh collected and published their old songs and poems.
And in Scotland, to which country the mean, depressing conditions
prevailing among the English industrial classes had not as yet spread,
but where a people, proud of its past and its land, preserved its
national songs, its superstitions, and its political peculiarities,
there appeared in the second half of the eighteenth century, as a
protest against cold reason and artificiality in poetry, Macpherson's
_Ossian_. The influence of _Ossian_ was alike great upon Alfieri
and Foscolo in Italy, upon Herder and Goethe in Germany, and upon
Chateaubriand in France. On it follow in England Percy's collection
of old English, and in Scotland Walter Scott's collection of Scotch,
ballads.

But in the interval between these two publications our attention is
demanded by one of those literary currents flowing from one country to
another and back again, which it is our chief aim to trace, and which
in this case is remarkably plain. Not long after Percy's _Reliques_
appeared, a luckless young German lawyer in Government employ, Bürger
by name, was appointed to a small post in Göttingen, where he lived
in straitened circumstances and in unhappy and demoralising marital
relations with two sisters. Into this man's house Percy's book finds
its way. It makes a powerful impression on him, and fires him with
the desire to write something which had long been proscribed by the
rules of poetical art, but which he himself calls (to Baggesen, see
_The Labyrinth_) poetry proper, namely, a ballad. He begins the
famous _Lenore_ and works at it slowly, week after week, with such a
conviction of the importance of the step he is taking that his letters
to his friends are full of nothing else. The ballad appears, and is
soon read in every country in Europe. In the year 1795 an Edinburgh
young lady introduces it to the notice of another lawyer in Crown
employ; and this young man, Walter Scott by name, who was also to be an
author, and a very much greater one, makes his literary _début_ with
a translation of _Lenore_ and another ballad of Bürger's, _The Wild
Huntsman_. His translations meeting with a favourable reception, Scott
began to regard himself as a poet. And it was upon the basis of these
translations and that of _Götz von Berlichingen_, which he published in
1799, that the national Scottish Romanticism of his poetry was founded.

There is, then, originally in this literature a distinct trace of the
general European reaction against the eighteenth century. The strong
national feeling which superseded the feeling of cosmopolitanism is to
be found in England in Wordsworth in the form of patriotic poetical
description, in Southey in the form of eulogy (at times partly, at
times purely, official) of the Royal Family and the national exploits,
in the Scottish-born Campbell in the form of passionately British
songs of liberty and war; whilst Scott and Moore are positive literary
personifications of Scotland and Ireland. The universal return to the
popular has its chief representative and spokesman in Wordsworth,
whose special theme is the life of the lower and lowest classes. The
predilection for the Middle Ages is strongest in Scott, who combines
the antiquarian's delight in memories and survivals of the past with
the Tory politician's desire to represent the traditional in the most
attractive light. The Romanticism of superstition finds its poet in
Coleridge, whose studied childishness and simplicity are near of
kin to Tieck's; and it is Coleridge, too, who, thoroughly imbued
with the doctrines of the German philosophy of the day, enters a
general scientific protest against those of the age of enlightenment.
His philosophy is quite un-English; it is, in contradiction to the
experimental nature of English science, purely transcendental; it is
conservative, pious, and historical, because the philosophy preceding
it had been radical, infidel, and metaphysical; it is a "Schellingism,"
which at first endeavours to preserve as many of the philosophic
conclusions of the preceding century as possible, but which, ever more
obstinate and ever more narrow-minded, hastens towards the opposite
extreme from that which had proved fatal to the preceding period. The
confusedly fantastic side of Romanticism is represented by Southey with
his Oriental narrative poems; and as for the passionate, despairing
heroes of Chateaubriand and Romanticism generally, we find them, more
passionate and more manly, in the works of Byron; whilst Shelley's
spiritualism and dissolution of all solid form into ethereal music
recalls the ardour and vagueness of Novalis.


[1] This "oppression" was what today would be called "cultural
imperialism". It should be remembered that the Danish kings were also
German dukes (of Schleswig and Holstein) and very properly patronised
German artists. In Denmark proper there was after 1800 a reaction
against the German influence. Also Brandes is bitter because of the
German annexation of the Danish part of Schleswig in 1864, but that
happened half a century later and Denmark was not exactly an innocent
victim.--Transcriber's note.




II


NATIONAL CHARACTERISTICS


But these general and most marked characteristics of the period are
modified in a very perceptible manner by certain peculiarly English
characteristics, which, observable nowhere else, are to be found in all
the English authors of the day, however little resemblance there may be
between them in other respects.

These English characteristics can all be traced back to one original
distinctive quality, namely vigorous _Naturalism_. As we have observed,
the first advance in the new literary movement is the inspiration of
the authors of every country by a national spirit. Now in England this
meant becoming a Naturalist, just as in Germany it meant becoming a
Romanticist, and in Denmark a devotee of the Old-Scandinavian. The
English poets, one and all, are observers, lovers, worshippers of
nature. Wordsworth, who loves to parade his propensities as ideas,
inscribes the word _nature_ on his banner, and paints pictures,
grand in spite of their minute detail, of the hills, the lakes, the
rivers, and the rustic population of the North of England. Scott's
descriptions of nature, based upon close observation, are so accurate
that a botanist might acquire a correct idea of the vegetation of the
district from them. Keats, with all his devotion to the antique and
to Greek mythology, is a sensualist, who, gifted with the keenest,
widest, most delicate perceptions, sees, hears, feels, tastes, and
inhales all the varieties of glorious colour, of song, of silky
texture, of fruit flavour, of flower fragrance, which nature offers.
Moore is the personification of spiritualised sensuality; the
pampered, pampering poet, he seems to live surrounded by all that
is rarest and most beautiful in nature; he dazzles our minds with
sunshine, deafens them with the song of the nightingale, drowns them
in sweetness; we live with him in endless dreams of wings, flowers,
rainbows, smiles, blushes, tears, kisses--always kisses. The strongest
tendency even of works like Byron's _Don Juan_ and Shelley's _Cenci_
is in reality Naturalism. In other words, Naturalism is so powerful
in England that it permeates Coleridge's Romantic supernaturalism,
Wordsworth's Anglican orthodoxy, Shelley's atheistic spiritualism,
Byron's revolutionary liberalism, and Scott's interest in the past. It
influences the personal beliefs and the literary tendencies of every
author.

This realism, so full of sap and vigour, is a result of various
strongly-marked and almost universal English characteristics. There is,
in the first place, the English love of the country and of the sea.
Almost all the English poets of this period are either countrymen or
seamen. The English Muse of poetry has from time immemorial frequented
the country seat and the farm. Wordsworth's genuinely English poetry
is in exact keeping with the well-known paintings and engravings
representing English country life, which produce an impression of
health and tranquillity, and, when such subjects as family worship or
the country clergyman's fatherly ministrations are portrayed, also of
piety. Burns, the ploughman poet, Scotland's greatest poetic genius,
early dedicated Scottish poetry to the country; and there is truth in
Emerson's caustic remark that Scott, in his narrative poems, simply
wrote a rhymed guide-book to Scotland. That the same idea had occurred
to the poet's own contemporaries is evident from the satirical manner
in which Moore writes of Scott's "doing" the one country-seat after the
other.[1]

And what an important part country seats play in the lives of two
such antipodal literary characters as Byron and Scott! Newstead Abbey
is as inseparably connected with Byron's name as Abbotsford is with
Sir Walter Scott's. The old abbey, with its medieval and fantastic
architecture, is to Byron the indispensable accompaniment of his
peerage and the pledge of his English citizenship. He does not dispose
of it until he has turned his back on his native land for ever. Scott's
proprietorship is not so ancient and venerable; but he buys Abbotsford
when the desire to own land, which has always been strong in him,
becomes irresistible, and, during the happy period of his life passed
there, lives as if he had grown up with no other prospect before him
than that of exercising the regal hospitality of an old Scottish landed
proprietor and living his hardy out-of-door life. His greatest delight
is in such perilous amusements as wading through a raging stream--with
a bridge not fifty yards off, riding a horse unmanageable by any one
else, spearing salmon by torch-light, soaked with rain or shivering
in the cold night air. And is not every reader of Byron's life here
reminded of that poet's love of wild rides and daring swimming exploits?

Nevertheless there is in the attitude of the two authors to their
estates a difference, characteristic of their different natures.
Byron's love for Newstead Abbey had its origin in his aristocratic
proclivities, Scott's for Abbotsford in his historic instincts. Just
as Sir Walter's estate had Ettrick Forest for its background, Newstead
had Sherwood Forest, with its memories of Robin Hood and his merry
men. But these memories exercised no perceptible influence on Byron's
poetry, though we have an admirable description of the Abbey itself in
the Thirteenth Canto of _Don Juan_. The whole of Scott's poetry, on
the contrary, is pervaded, as by a refrain, by the memories of Ettrick
Forest; and it is Scott, instead of Byron, who (in _Ivanhoe_) brings
the poetry of Sherwood Forest to life again.

Another English qualification for Naturalism is the love of the poets
for the nobler animals, and their intimacy with the animal world in
general. They have that affection for all domestic animals which is
a result of their English love of home. When they travel they carry
home and their domestic animals with them. Almost all the authors
of our period are devoted to manly exercises, and in particular to
riding. And in observing this we must not fall into the common error
of mistaking a thoroughly national characteristic for a personal and
rare one. It is not without its significance that the English race
traces its descent from two mystic heroes bearing the names of horses
(Hengist and Horsa). The love of horses, dogs, and all kinds of wild
animals, which is so often mentioned as a peculiar characteristic of
Byron, the misanthropical exile, is quite as marked a characteristic
of Scott, living at home in the happiest domestic circumstances.
Matthew's well-known letter describing the life at Newstead Abbey shows
us Byron, the youth, surrounded by a whole menagerie, including a bear
and a wolf; in Medwin's account of the poet's life in Italy we read
that he took with him when he left Ravenna in 1821, "seven servants,
five carriages, nine horses, a monkey, a retriever, a bull-dog, two
cats, three Guinea fowls, and other birds." One is apt to think this
an exhibition of purely personal singularity, until one reads, in
Lockhart's Life, Scott's own description of the removal to Abbotsford.
"The neighbours have been much delighted with the procession of my
furniture, in which old swords, bows, targets, and lances made a
very conspicuous show. A family of turkeys was accommodated within
the helmet of some _preux_ chevalier of ancient Border fame; and the
very cows, for aught I know, were bearing banners and muskets. I
assure your ladyship that this caravan, attended by a dozen of ragged
rosy peasant children, carrying fishing-rods and spears, and leading
poneys, greyhounds, and spaniels, would, as it crossed the Tweed, have
furnished no bad subject for the pencil." The only difference is that
the old curiosity shop of the collector is added to the menagerie.
Byron's love for his dog, Boatswain, and the solemn inscription
engraved on the stone marking the favourite's grave, are apt to be
instanced as signs of the poet's rooted melancholy. But it helps us
to a more correct appreciation of such feelings to remember that the
cheerful-minded Scott had his favourite dog, Camp, solemnly buried in
the garden at Abbotsford, the whole family standing weeping round the
grave.

But even more characteristically English than the attachment to
horses and dogs and land, and the witness in literature to the same,
is the love of the sea. The Englishman is an amphibious animal. A
considerable part of the description of nature in the literature of
this period is marine painting. It was an ancient tradition, gloriously
maintained at this particular time, that England was the mistress of
the sea; and English writers have always been the best delineators and
interpreters of the sea. There is a breath of its freshness and freedom
in all the best poetry of the country. To the Englishman the sea has
always been the great symbol of liberty, as the Alps have been to the
freedom-loving Swiss. Wordsworth exclaims with truth in one of his
_Sonnets Dedicated to Liberty_:--

    "Two Voices are there; one is of the Sea,
     One of the Mountains; each a mighty voice:
     In both from age to age thou didst rejoice,
     They were thy chosen music, Liberty!"

We understand, therefore, how it was that the long-dormant Viking
spirit re-awoke in the best poets of the country during this remarkable
period of English literature. In Coleridge's _Ancient Mariner_ we
have all the terror and horror of the sea; Campbell's _Mariners of
England_ is an entrancingly melodious and manly glorification of
the heroism and might of the English seamen; Byron's Vikinglike
expeditions are mirrored in the exploits of Childe Harold and Don Juan;
Shelley's passion for the sea and sailing lives and breathes in the
billowy rhythm of his verse and in all the poems which extol wind and
wave--above all others that masterpiece, the _Ode to the West Wind_.

Transferred to the domain of society, Naturalism becomes, as it did
in Rousseau's case, revolutionary; and beneath that attachment to the
soil, and that delight in encountering and mastering the fitful humours
of the sea, which are the deep-seated causes of Naturalism, there is
in the Englishman the still deeper-seated national feeling, which,
under the peculiar historical conditions of this period, naturally led
the cleverest men of the day in the direction of Radicalism. No nation
is so thoroughly penetrated by the feeling of personal independence
as England. This is best seen in the Englishman abroad; it is with a
flourish of trumpets that he proclaims himself to be an Englishman.
It is the transmission of this independence and self-sufficiency
to English literature which has at decisive moments made its art a
"character-art"; and at the period under consideration it is this
peculiar quality which, asserting itself, actually produces the new
movement in the literature of Europe. It took an Englishman to do what
Byron did, stem alone the stream which flowed from the fountain of the
Holy Alliance--in the first place, because only an English author would
have had the audacity to do it, in the second, because at that time
only English literary men had the strong political tendency and the
keen political intelligence which have always distinguished the first,
possibly the only, parliamentary nation. And an Englishman, too, was
needed to fling the gauntlet boldly and defiantly in the face of his
own people. Only in the haughtiest of nations were there to be found
great men haughty enough to defy the nation.

This personal independence which distinguishes the country's most
eminent authors is the outcome of a genuinely English peculiarity.
These men are the followers of no particular doctrines; they rarely
profess any artistic principles, and certainly never any philosophical
creed. The great German authors, Lessing, Goethe, Schiller, all do most
important services to science; but amongst the Englishmen there is not
a single scientist. And a still more remarkable fact is that they never
even consult one another. Goethe and Schiller carry on an interminable
correspondence on the subject of the nature and proper treatment
of the different varieties of poetic themes; they even sometimes
discuss at great length the propriety of the addition or suppression
of a single stanza. Heiberg, the Dane, and his school follow certain
definite artistic principles which they have agreed to observe, and
are almost as critical as they are productive. But Scott and Byron and
Moore, in spite of the cordial friendship subsisting between them,
are perfectly isolated as regards authorship; each produces his works
without receiving or desiring any suggestion or advice whatever from
his brother authors. Even in the very exceptional case when one is
influenced by another--as Byron, for instance, occasionally is by
Wordsworth, and still more perceptibly by Shelley--the thing happens,
as it were, secretly, quite insensibly, so that it is not alluded to,
or at any rate not acknowledged as influence by the recipient. An
American author has aptly described this characteristic of the race in
the words: "Each of these islanders is himself an island."

We have already spoken of intelligent interest in politics. Just as
there is not one among these authors who is a scientist, so there
is hardly one among them who is not a politician. This interest in
politics is a direct product of the national practicality. The opinions
held by the different authors may be very dissimilar, but they are
all party men; Scott is a Tory, Wordsworth a Monarchist, Southey and
Coleridge are first supporters, then antagonists, of the democratic
ideas of the day; Moore is on the side of the Irishmen; Landor,
Campbell, Byron, and Shelley, as Radicals, side with all the oppressed
nations. In excepting such an author as Keats, who may almost be said
to have been devoted to art for art's sake, we must not forget that he
died at the age of twenty-five.

The intense interest taken in practical matters explains why purely
literary questions (such as that of the respective merits of Classicism
and Romanticism), in their utter disconnectedness with life, never
became of such exaggerated importance in English as they did at this
period in German, Danish, and even French literature. It is, however,
amusing to observe how our authors combine the Englishman's impulse
towards practical action with the fantastic proclivities of the poet.
Scott carried his antagonism to the Revolution to a perfectly Quixotic
length. He arranged with one of his friends, a duke, that, if the
French landed in England, they two would take to the woods and live
the life of Robin Hood and his followers. And it was about the same
time that Southey and Coleridge, in the first Jacobinical ardour of
their youth, informed their acquaintances that it was their intention
to emigrate to a scantily populated part of America; the banks of the
Susquehanna were chosen because the name of this river struck the young
men as being peculiarly _beautiful and melodious_; they proposed to
found a community there, a pantisocrasy, with community of goods and
equality of all the members under natural conditions. Landor, who, as
a soldier in Spain, proved that he was prepared to risk his life for
his opinions, as a youth cherished the idea of reviving, at home in
Warwickshire, the Arcadian idyllic age; he is the literary counterpart
of Owen, the Socialist. Shelley, as politician, showed such keenness of
perception that, studying him as such, we are constantly reminded of
the characterisation in _Julian and Maddalo_:

    "_Me_, who am as a nerve o'er which do creep
     The else unfelt oppressions of this earth."

He foresaw many a political revolution that actually came to pass.
But the same Shelley who, half a century before the passing of the
Reform Bill of 1867, published an accurate draft of it in a political
pamphlet, and who in his drama, _Hellas_, prophesied the success of the
revolt of the Greeks at a time when their cause seemed hopeless, is
an utter fantast as soon as he begins to enlarge on the coming Golden
Age of humanity. Read his description of it in a youthful work, _Queen
Mab_. The Polar icebergs melt, the deserts are cultivated, the basilisk
licks the infant's feet, the hurricane blasts become melodious, the
fruits of the earth are always ripe and its flowers always in bloom, no
animal is killed and eaten by man, the birds no longer fly from him,
fear no longer exists. We cannot but be reminded of some of the wildest
dreams of the French Socialists of the same period. The spread of the
_Phalansteries_ devised by Fourier was expected to bring about such
a change in the whole economy of the world that at last even natural
conditions would be entirely altered; an immense aurora borealis,
perpetually suspended above the North Pole, would make Siberia as
warm as Andalusia; man would deprive the sea of its salt and give it
in return a flavour of lemonade; and the monsters of the deep would
allow themselves to be harnessed, like sea-horses, to our ships. The
invention of the steam-engine fortunately rendered this species of
traction superfluous. Even Byron, who is decidedly the most practical
of these poets, is often the poet in his politics. It hardly admits of
doubt that he had the crown of Greece before his eyes as the recompense
of his exertions in the cause of that country.

There was plenty of fantasticalness in practical matters in the English
poets, too; but there undoubtedly is more practicality in their
morality and their view of life than in those of the poets of other
nations. There are a few more grains of sound sense in their works.
They are, one and all, distinguished by a strong _desire for justice_.
Wordsworth inherits it from Milton; Campbell, Byron, and Shelley feel
it intuitively, and are ready in the strength of the feeling to defy
the world. It plays no part, this feeling, in the life of Byron's great
German predecessor, Goethe, or of his richly gifted French successor,
De Musset. Neither of these ever summoned monarchs and governments
before the tribunal of justice. But what is peculiarly English is, that
this justice of which the Englishmen dream is not, like that which
Schiller, for instance, worships, a cherished, preconceived idea, but
a child of utility. To prove this let us take a poet as ethereally
idealistic as Shelley, and we shall see that even his morality is as
distinctly utilitarian as Bentham's and John Stuart Mill's. Here is a
striking passage taken from the second chapter of his _Speculations on
Morals_:--"If a man persists to inquire _why_ he ought to promote the
happiness of mankind, he demands a mathematical or metaphysical reason
for a moral action. The absurdity of this scepticism is less apparent,
but not less real than the exacting a moral reason for a mathematical
or physical fact." In the maxim, "the greatest happiness of the
greatest number," and in the profound, practical desire for justice,
which is its psychological basis, we have the real point of departure
of the Radicalism of English poetry during the period of the great
European reaction.


[1]

    Should you feel any touch of poetical glow
    We've a Scheme to suggest--Mr. Scott, you must know,
    Having quitted the Borders, to seek new renown
    Is coming, by long Quarto stages, to Town.
    And beginning with Rokeby (the job's sure to pay)
    Means to _do_ all the Gentlemen's Seats on the way.
    Now the Scheme is (though none of our hackneys can beat him)
    To start a fresh Poet through Highgate to meet him;
    Who, by means of quick proofs--no revises--long coaches,
    May do a few Villas, before Scott approaches.
    Moore: _Intercepted Letters_, No. 7.





III


THE POLITICAL BACKGROUND


The English being at once the most persevering and the most
enterprising people, the nation which is most attached to home and
fondest of travel, the slowest to make changes and yet, in matters
political, the most broad-minded, the thinking men of the country
naturally fall into two great political groups, the one representing
the jealously conservative, the other the daringly liberal tendency.
The English parties have no resemblance to the French. It may be
exaggeration to say, with Taine, that France has only two parties--the
party of the men of twenty and the party of the men of forty; yet this
division is perhaps the essential one, which the other acknowledged
party names merely modify. The English division is determined by
the national character; and in the stirring literary period under
consideration, Wordsworth is the representative of the one set of
qualities, Byron the type of the other.

In the first years of the century there was another source of political
division in the dual nature of the chief event of the period. This
great event was the war with France. Of the German War of Liberation I
have already remarked that it was certainly revolt against a terrible
despotism, but a despotism which was an expression of the ideas of the
Revolution; that it was a fight for hearth and home, but undertaken
at the command of the old reactionary reigning houses. And if such a
remark is applicable to Germany's struggle, how much more applicable
is it to the war waged by England. The independence of England was not
assailed, but its interests were seriously threatened; and during the
lengthy war, and for long afterwards, there were not, as in Germany,
liberty-loving men at the head of affairs, but all power was given into
the hands of the most determinedly reactionary Tory government that the
country had ever known.

Hence it is that the background of this whole period of literature is
so dark. The clouds which form it are heavy and black, "sunbeam-proof"
Shelley would have called them. England itself, as the background of
the panorama which I am about to unroll, is like a night landscape.
The _great_ qualities of the nation were misguided; its extraordinary
resoluteness was applied to the suppression of another nation's desires
for liberty; its own noble love of liberty was first utilised to
overthrow the despotism of Napoleon and then misapplied in re-erecting
all the old mouldering thrones which, under cover of the gunpowder
smoke of Waterloo, were run up in as great haste as scaffolds are.
The _neutral_ qualities of the nation were educated into bad ones.
Self-esteem and firmness were nursed into that hard-heartedness of
the aristocratic, and that selfishness of the commercial classes
which always distinguish a period of reaction; loyalty was excited
into servility, and patriotism into the hatred of other nations which
is apt to develop during long wars. And the national _bad_ qualities
were over-developed. The desire for outward decorum at any price,
which is the shady side of the moral impulse, was developed into
hypocrisy in the domain of morality; and that determined adherence
to the established religion which is the least attractive outcome of
a practical and not profoundly reasoning turn of mind, was fanned
either into hypocrisy or active intolerance. No period was ever more
favourable to the development of hypocrisy and fanaticism than this,
during which the nation was actually encouraged by its leaders to boast
of its religious superiority to free-thinking France.

Those who suffered most were the country's greatest authors. It is
out of fashion now to talk of the cant which drove Byron from his
home; and many scrupulous critics are disposed to give the name of
honest, if narrow-minded, conviction to what used to be frankly
called hypocrisy. But this view of the matter is untenable. A piety
which behaves as English piety did to Byron and Shelley is not mere
stupidity, but narrow-minded, repulsive hypocrisy. The dicta upon
this subject of the keen American observer, Ralph Waldo Emerson, are
of value; for as America's most eminent critic, as England's greatest
admirer, and as judge of his own race, he has every claim to credence.
He says:--"The torpidity on the side of religion of the vigorous
English understanding shows how much wit and folly can agree in one
brain. Their religion is a quotation, their church is a doll, and any
examination is interdicted with screams of terror. In good company,
you expect them to laugh at the fanaticism of the vulgar; but they
do not; they are the vulgar.... The English, abhorring change in all
things, abhorring it most in matters of religion, cling to the last
rag of form, and are dreadfully given to cant. The English (and I wish
it were confined to them, but 'tis a taint in the Anglo-Saxon blood
in both hemispheres), the English and the Americans cant beyond all
other nations. The French relinquish all that industry to them. What is
so odious as the polite bows to God in our books and newspapers? The
popular press is flagitious in the exact measure of its sanctimony, and
the religion of the day is a theatrical Sinai, where the thunders are
supplied by the property-man.... The Church at this moment is much to
be pitied. She has nothing left but possession. If a bishop meets an
intelligent gentleman and reads fatal interrogations in his eyes, he
has no resource but to take wine with him."[1] This description is of
the England of 1830, so we can imagine what the condition of matters
must have been twenty years earlier.

The most lamentable national failing, the inclination to oppression,
was positively reduced to a system, and was more conspicuous during
this period of the country's history than any other. England, Scotland,
and Ireland combine to oppress the distant colonies; England and
Scotland, making common cause, oppress Ireland--keep down the Irish
Church and repress Irish industry and commerce; England does what she
can to repress Scotland; and in England itself the rich man oppresses
the poor man, and the ruling class all the others. Of the thirty
million inhabitants of the country only one million possessed the
franchise. And any one who cares to read the attack on the English
landed proprietors in Byron's _Age of Bronze_ will see how shamelessly
the landowners enriched themselves at the expense of the other classes
during the war, and how their whole political aim was to insure the
continuance of their power to do so.

Such are the conditions which exercise a partly pernicious, partly
inspiring and stimulating influence on the country's authors. In those
of them in whose breasts the sacred fire burns feebly it is soon
extinguished, and they become reactionary supporters of the existing
conditions. But those of them whose lightning-charged spirits were
fitted to defy the direction of the wind, develop under the oppression
of these conditions an emancipatory literary force which communicates
a shock to the political atmosphere. To these latter England seems a
very "Gibraltar of custom" and they leave their native land that they
may attack and bombard their home with all the artillery of satire and
indignation.

In order to arrive at a proper understanding of the soil from which the
Naturalistic literature springs, and to understand the principles (not
artistic, but political, social, and religious principles) which divide
the authors into antagonistic groups, we must enter a little more into
detail with regard to the political conditions prevailing in this home.
At the beginning of the century there sat on the throne of England the
king who had reigned since 1760, George the Third. From his earliest
childhood George's mother had endeavoured to inoculate him with the
exaggerated and un-English notions of sovereignty which prevailed on
the Continent, and she had succeeded so well that one after another
of the eminent noblemen who were chosen to be governors to the Prince
resigned the office because their influence was counteracted. One of
these, Lord Waldegrave, who was not merely a shrewd observer, but
also a devoted adherent of the House of Hanover, has drawn a portrait
of his royal pupil which is anything but attractive. He is described
as not altogether deficient in ability, but wholly without power of
application; as honest, but without the frank and open behaviour which
makes honesty amiable; as sincerely pious, but rather too attentive
to the sins of his neighbours; resolute, but obstinate and strong in
prejudices. The tutor tells how, when his pupil is displeased, his
anger does not break out with heat and violence, but produces a fit
of sullenness and silence. And, "when the fit is ended, unfavourable
symptoms very frequently return, which indicate on certain occasions
that his Royal Highness has too correct a memory." And this same King,
who had such a lively recollection of injuries, had a more than royal
forgetfulness of services. But perhaps his greatest fault as a public
personage and a ruler was his absolute petrifaction in prejudices. In
private life he was honest, respectable, and reliable, and inspired his
subjects with great esteem, though the defects in his education were
never supplied. When he began to reign he had little or no knowledge of
either books or men, and to the end of his life he remained perfectly
ignorant as regarded literature and art. But in his selfish court he
was not long in acquiring a considerable knowledge of human nature; the
man to whom all, great and small, held out their hands whenever they
saw him, soon learned to ascertain every man's price and to calculate
his value. His naturally sound understanding was enlarged neither by
study, nor travel, nor conversation; but on matters the discussion of
which does not require much cultivation of mind he generally went to
the point, and acquitted himself with as much ability as was necessary
in a ruler who was very unwilling to be a king only in name.[2]

George III. was England's Frederick VI. He was a true patriarchal
ruler, who felt himself to be the father of his people. During his
reign England lost the North American colonies, as Denmark under
Frederick VI. lost Norway, without this loss, or the foolish policy
which had led to it, damaging the personal popularity of the sovereign.
King George's household was a model of an English gentleman's
household. Early rising was its first rule. Simplicity, order,
frugality, a real bourgeois spirit, reigned. It was boring to a degree
which its historian Thackeray "shuddered to contemplate."

Often, we are told, the King rose before any one else was up, ran
upstairs and awoke all the equerries, and then went for an early walk,
and had a talk with every one he met. He was in the habit of poking his
nose into every cottage; now he would give a child a silver coin, now
present an old woman with a hen. One day, when the King and Queen were
walking together, they met a little boy and talked to him. At last the
King said, "This is the Queen; kneel down, and kiss her hand." But this
the little fellow obstinately declined to do, out of consideration for
his new breeches; and the thrifty King was so delighted with such a
sign of youthful prudence that he pressed the child to his heart.

The days passed at this court with a dreary monotony which drove the
young princes from home, and was in part responsible for their turning
out so badly. In the evening the King either played his game of
backgammon or had his evening concert, during which he always nodded,
while the gentlemen-in-waiting almost yawned themselves to death in the
ante-room.

The family took their daily walk in Windsor Park; the people crowded
round quite familiarly, and the Eton boys thrust their chubby cheeks
under the crowd's elbows. The open-air music over, the King never
failed to take his cocked hat off and salute his band, and say, "Thank
you, gentlemen."

What Dane can fail to be reminded by these scenes of Frederick VI.'s
walks and sails as Chief Admiral in the grounds of Frederiksberg! Like
our Danish monarch, George III. won the affections of the people by
the simplicity of his habits and his shabby coat. Equally applicable
to King George is Orla Lehmann's remark about Frederick VI., "that his
simplicity, both of mind and behaviour, and his kindly interest in
the well-being of individuals were regarded as compensations for his
failings as a statesman and ruler." But indeed there were not many who
detected these last. To the great majority of his subjects old George
seemed a very wise statesman and very powerful sovereign. There is a
famous print of him (by Gillray) which represents him--in the old wig,
in the stout old hideous Windsor uniform--as the King of Brobdingnag,
peering at a little Gulliver, whom he holds up in one hand, whilst in
the other he has an opera-glass, through which he surveys the pigmy.
And who, think you, is the little Gulliver? He wears a cocked-hat and
the little grey Marengo coat.

Danish readers will remember an old picture, a photographic
reproduction of which was very popular some years ago. It was called
"The Well-beloved Family," and represented Frederick VI. taking a walk
with his whole family, from eldest to youngest. Is not the following
picture (from the pages of Miss Burney) of one of the afternoon walks
at Windsor its exact counterpart? "It was really a mighty pretty
procession. The little Princess Amelia, just turned of three years
old, in a robe-coat covered with fine muslin, a dressed close cap,
white gloves, and fan, walked on alone and first, highly delighted
with the parade, and turning from side to side to see everybody as
she passed; for all the terracers stand up against the walls, to make
a clear passage for the royal family the moment they come in sight.
Then followed the King and Queen, no less delighted with the joy of
their little darling. The Princess Royal leaning on Lady Elizabeth
Waldegrave, the Princess Augusta holding by the Duchess of Ancaster,
the Princess Elizabeth led by Lady Charlotte Bertie, followed. General
Bude and the Duke of Montague, and Major Price as equerry, brought
up the rear of the procession." What a charming picture! exclaims
Thackeray. Whilst the procession passes, the band plays its old music,
the sun lights up the ancient battlements, the rich elms, the royal
standard drooping from the great tower, and the loyal crowd, whom the
charming infant caresses with her innocent smiles.

This is the domestic idyll which in public life has its counterpart in
the King's passionate determination to oppress North America, oppose
the French Revolution, annihilate the Irish Church, and maintain
negro slavery with all its horrors. But the idyllic family life was
at an end before the century was out. In 1788 the King had his first
attack of insanity, and even then the question of the Regency of the
Prince of Wales, which was not finally determined until 1810, was
discussed with an extraordinary display of passion. The Opposition
believed that if they could procure the appointment of the Prince of
Wales as Regent, they would be able to keep the Tories out of power
for a lengthy period. But the character and morals of the Prince were
so repugnant to the great majority of the nation that his accession
to power was regarded with dread. However, before the Regency Bill
was actually proceeded with, Pitt was in a position to lay before
Parliament a medical bulletin informing his subjects of the probable
speedy and complete restoration of their King's health. The Prince's
disappointment was great, and his having displayed anything but proper
filial feeling during the King's illness made it difficult for him to
disguise it. He had a talent for mimicry, and had amused the witty and
profligate men and women who were his constant companions by _taking
off_, as the saying was, the gestures and actions of his insane father.
This alone is sufficient to show his character--the character of the
man who, on account of a certain outward polish, went by the name of
"the first gentleman in Europe."

Even though he retained it only for a short time, one cannot but admire
the cleverness with which this Prince managed to win the friendship
of many of the most gifted men of the day. Burke and Fox and Sheridan
were his associates. Certainly, as Thackeray says, it was not his
opinions about the constitution, or about the condition of Ireland,
which they cared to hear--_that_ man's opinions, indeed! But he talked
with Sheridan of dice, and with Fox of wine; those were interests which
the fool and the geniuses had in common; and Beau Brummell's friend and
rival was an authority among the fashionable men of the day on such
questions as the suitable button for a waistcoat and the best sauce
for a partridge. He even attached Moore to himself for a short time.
From the tone of a letter which Moore writes to his mother in June 1811
(_Memoirs_, i. 225), we understand plainly that he feels flattered by
the Prince Regent's "cordial familiarity." And the same is true for a
moment of Byron; his letter of reconciliation to Sir Walter Scott shows
how susceptible he was to the Regent's flatteries on the subject of
_Childe Harold_. And Scott himself! Good, honourable gentleman though
he was, in his capacity of obstinate Tory he was always the Regent's
faithful liegeman. And when the latter, as King George the Fourth, came
to Scotland (where he figured in the dress of a Highland chief, with
his fat legs bared and a kilt round his enormous body, as satirically
described by Byron at the end of _The Age of Bronze_), Scott went on
board the royal yacht to welcome him, seized a glass from which his
Majesty had just drunk, begged to be allowed to keep it, vowed that it
should remain for ever as an heirloom in his family, clapped it in his
pocket, and, finding an unexpected guest when he went home, sat down
upon it, and was quickly and painfully reminded of the royal keepsake.
Scott continued faithful to George IV. long after Moore had riddled
him with the darts of his wit, and Byron lashed him with his savage
epigrams, and after even Brummell, walking in Hyde Park, had looked at
him through his eye-glass and asked the Prince's companion, "Who is
_your fat friend_?"

For the insinuating heir-apparent in time became extremely corpulent.
The life he led, the perpetual feasting and drinking bouts, produced
such a habit of body that at last he could not walk. When he was to
drive out, a board was put out at the window, and down it he was slid
into his carriage. While the starving weavers in Glasgow and Lancashire
were crying aloud to Heaven, he was arranging magnificent festivities,
and receiving the exiled Bourbon as Louis XVIII. "The child is father
of the man," says Wordsworth. George IV. signalised his entrance
into society by a feat worthy of his future life. He invented a new
shoe-buckle. It was an inch long and five inches broad. "It covered the
whole instep, reaching down to the ground on either side of the foot."
At his first appearance at a court ball his coat was, we read, of pink
silk, with white cuffs; his waistcoat, white silk, embroidered with
various-coloured foil, and adorned with a profusion of French paste.
His hat was ornamented with a profusion of steel beads, five thousand
in number, with a button and loop of the same metal, and cocked in a
new military style.

A military style, indeed! It exactly suited the head that wore it.
This head was full, at the time its owner began housekeeping in his
splendid new palace of Carlton House, of vague projects of encouraging
literature, science, and the arts; and for a moment it seemed as if
they were really to be carried out--when at the Prince Regent's table
Sir Walter Scott, the best _raconteur_ of his time, with loyal devotion
and real generosity poured forth humorous, whimsical stories from his
inexhaustible store, or Moore sang some of his sweet Anacreontic songs,
or Grattan, Ireland's proud leader, contributed to the entertainment
his wondrous eloquence, fancy, and feeling. But how soon did these men
make way for a company much better suited to the Prince--French cooks,
French ballet-dancers, horse-jockeys, buffoons, procurers, tailors,
boxers, jewellers, and fencing-masters! With such people he spent the
time left him by his mistresses and his bacchanalian orgies. He showed
his love for art and his taste by purchasing at extravagant prices
whole cart-loads of Chinese monstrosities. It was but natural that this
royal _bel esprit_, when he came into power, should quarrel with the
clever Whigs whose society he had sought. He suddenly wheeled round and
became a Tory.

Four of the European monarchs of the first half of this century--Ludwig
I. of Bavaria, Frederick William IV. of Prussia, Christian VIII. of
Denmark, and this English Prince Regent--bear a strong resemblance
to each other. They are the four reigning reactionary dilettanti. In
England, as in Denmark, literary dilettantism succeeds patriarchal
simplicity. In the case we are at present considering, it was combined
with shocking morals and an almost incredible indolence. In March
1816, fifty-eight prisoners under sentence of death were lying in
Newgate prison waiting until the Prince Regent's amusements and
distractions should allow him time to sign their death-warrants or
their pardons, and many of them had lain there since December. In
vain did Brougham make his terrible attack in Parliament upon those
"who, when the gaols were filled with wretches, could not suspend for
a moment their thoughtless amusements to end the sad suspense between
life and death." In connection with this subject, Moore's satires in
_The Twopenny Post-Bag_ are well worth reading. They show plainly that
the sweet Irish song-bird had beak and claws. In _The Life of Sir
Walter Scott_ we read with what a good-humoured smile the Regent, in
1815, could refer to and quote the verses by Moore which describe his
table as loaded with fashion-journals on the one side and unsigned
death-warrants on the other. The satire of the verses was only too well
deserved, but was of little avail. As early as 1812 Castlereagh had
said, in a speech in Parliament: "It would be impossible for his Royal
Highness to disengage his person from the accumulating pile of papers
that encompass it." In "The Insurrection of the Papers," Moore puts it
thus:--

    "On one side lay unread Petitions,
     On t'other hints from five Physicians;
     _Here_ tradesmen's bills,--official papers,
     Notes from my Lady, drams for vapours--
     _There_ plans of saddles, tea and toast,
     Death-warrants, and the _Morning Post_."

Four years later, the Regent had actually allowed fifty-eight
death-warrants to accumulate.

As already mentioned, he was hardly invested with the signs of power
before he quarrelled with his Whig friends and became a Tory. The
great, long-lasting Tory Government was formed. At its head was the
Earl of Liverpool, an obstinate, but lazy and good-natured reactionary;
the displeasure of the public never fell upon him, but always on his
colleagues; he was, as Prime Minister, a kind of monarch with limited
power, honest intentions, and modest abilities. He and his colleague,
Lord Sidmouth, the Home Secretary, enjoyed the privilege of not being
envied and feared for the force of their characters or the splendour of
their talents. The most notable and most fiercely criticised member of
the ministry was Lord Castlereagh, a moderately gifted man of energetic
character, whom Wilberforce once declared to be as cold-blooded as a
fish. He had a handsome face and a commanding voice, and to these added
the outward show of honours which had not been bestowed on a commoner
since the days of Sir Robert Walpole. He was "the noble lord in the
blue ribbon." He had a natural leaning towards arbitrary principles,
and his intercourse with the irresponsible rulers of the continent
tended to strengthen him in ideas which were extremely dangerous for
a constitutional minister. No consciousness of the narrowness of his
intellect and the defects of his education prevented him from pouring
out torrents of unformed sentences and disjointed arguments. These
often aroused the laughter of the House; but he withstood all attacks
with unflinching determination; none of the hostility or suspicions
expressed moved him a hair's-breadth from his path; in his intercourse
with Parliament, he again and again adopted the standpoint of
absolutism: "We alone know." Byron, Shelley, and Moore all flagellate
him in their poetry. There remains to be named Lord Chancellor Eldon,
the personification of Toryism, whose thought by day and dream by
night was the maintenance of what he called the constitution. In his
opinion the man who attempted to do away with any ancient privilege,
any antiquated restriction of the liberty of the subject, and still
more the man who attempted to repeal any cruel penal law, was laying
his hand on the constitution. Yet no one was more ready than he himself
to suspend the laws of the country whenever they stood in his way.
The suspension of the Habeas Corpus Act, the gagging of the press,
&c.--such amputations as these were life to the constitution; to infuse
new blood was death.

This was the ministry which, in 1814, astonished Alexander of Russia
by its ardour in re-asserting and re-establishing the principles which
had been shaken by the Revolution. He slighted it by expressing pity
for its reactionary tendencies and cultivating the acquaintance of the
leaders of the Opposition in London. The first tidings of the French
Revolution had been received with approval by the English Government
and nation. The antagonists Pitt and Fox united in hailing it as one
of the greatest and most beneficent events in the history of humanity.
But hardly had blood been shed on the other side of the Channel, before
the mass of the people, including even the majority of the Opposition,
saw their whole national inheritance--monarchy, religion, the rights of
property--endangered, and formed an enormous party of order. Amongst
the Whigs, Burke was the first to condemn the Revolution violently,
and as violently to condemn his friend and political ally, Fox, for
defending its spirit. The old Whigs sided with Burke. Pitt, who had
planned a whole series of necessary reforms, took alarm, dared not even
make any alterations in the disgraceful election system, and, on being
challenged, confessed that, though fully persuaded of the necessity
of Parliamentary reform, the time was not a favourable one for such
a daring attempt. Jacobinism was scented in every liberal movement,
however innocent and justifiable. When Wilberforce began his agitation
against the negro slave-trade, he was supported both by the Government
and the Opposition. He had against him only the King, the shipowners,
and the House of Peers. But when, in 1791, he tried the temper of the
nation for the second time, the revulsion had been so great that the
champions of the abolition of the slave-trade were almost regarded as
Jacobins, and Wilberforce's bill was rejected by a majority of 163 to
88.

The impression produced in Ireland by the Revolution was another
cause of affright in England. The Irish hailed the tidings of the
Revolution as slaves and serfs hail the news of emancipation.
Although the Irish nation, under the leadership of the noble Henry
Grattan (so enthusiastically eulogised by Byron), had succeeded in
1782 in obtaining the absolute independence and supremacy of its own
Parliament, both the commerce and the religion of the country were
still oppressed. Thomas Moore, a very moderate man, writes that, as the
child of Catholic parents, he came into the world with the yoke of the
slave round his neck. He tells how, when a boy, he was taken, in 1792,
by his father to a public dinner in Dublin, at which one of the toasts
was: "May the breezes of France blow our Irish oak into verdure!" In
his _Memoirs_ we have a description of the movement amongst the youth
of the country. He knew and admired its leader, Robert Emmet. When,
in the Dublin Debating Society, of which he was the moving spirit and
chief ornament, Emmet gave an eloquent description of the doings of the
French Republic--when, with an allusion to the story of Cæsar swimming
across the river with his sword in one hand and his _Commentaries_
in the other, he said: "Thus France at this time swims through a sea
of blood, but, while in one hand she wields the sword against her
aggressors, with the other she upholds the interests of literature
uncontaminated by the bloody tide through which she struggles"--his
young countryman listened not only to the literal meaning of the
speech, but for every little allusion or remark which he might apply to
Ireland. And such allusions were forthcoming. "When a people," cried
Emmet one day, "advancing rapidly in civilisation and the knowledge of
their rights, look back after a long lapse of time, and perceive how
far the spirit of their Government has lagged behind them, what then,
I ask, is to be done by them in such a case? What, but to pull the
Government up to the people."

The day was not far off when Robert Emmet was to pay dearly for all his
bold words. In 1798 the long-prepared-for explosion took place; and,
as Byron puts it, Castlereagh "dabbled his sleek young hands in Erin's
gore." The fury with which the Government set to work to crush the
rebellion and the rebels was so animal and ferocious, that the horrors
accompanying the proceeding are almost unequalled in the history of
rebellion-suppressing in modern times.

The hatred of the Revolution prolonged itself into hatred of Napoleon.
This last went beyond all reasonable bounds. Thackeray tells an
anecdote which gives an idea of its character. "I came," he writes,
"from India as a child, and our ship touched at an island on the way
home, where my black servant took me a long walk over rocks and hills
until we reached a garden, where we saw a man walking. 'That is he',
said the black man: 'That is Bonaparte! He eats three sheep every
day, and all the little children he can lay hands on.'" And Thackeray
adds: "There were people in the British dominions, besides that poor
Calcutta servingman, with an equal horror of the Corsican ogre." We
have it strong in Wordsworth's sonnets, Southey's poems, and in Scott's
notorious "Life of Napoleon." The wars with France inaugurated the
great British reaction--repeated suspension of the Habeas Corpus Act,
extension of the definitions of treason contained in the old statutes
of Edward III., encroachments on the right of public discussion and
petition, and also on the virtual liberty of the press. In Scotland,
more particularly, barbarous old statutes were revived, and highly
cultured men were banished as common convicts to the Australian penal
settlements. Those in power were not afraid, in addressing the English
republicans and advocates of equality, to talk of the absolute power of
the sovereign, and of the comparative insignificance of Parliament and
the representatives of the people. An all-powerful party was formed,
with the watchword: The King and the Church!

The King himself was insane, the Prince Regent worse than insane, and
the Church hypocritical. In 1812 came floods, a failure of the harvest,
and famine. Starvation drove crowds of the poor classes from their
homes, to wander aimlessly about the country. Expression is given to
their mood in Shelley's _Masque of Anarchy_. The workmen of Nottingham,
in their despair, broke into the lace-factories and destroyed the
frames. It was in defence of these men that Byron made his well-turned
maiden speech in Parliament.

We see from Romilly's Journal how impossible it was for the few
liberally inclined politicians to pass even the smallest measure of a
reformatory nature. Romilly was universally revered as the reformer of
the barbarous English penal code, but is best known nowadays as the
legal adviser of the Princess of Wales and of Lady Byron. In 1808 he
writes: "If any person be desirous of having an adequate idea of the
mischievous effects which have been produced in this country by the
French Revolution and all its attendant horrors, he should attempt some
legislative reform on humane and liberal principles. He will then find,
not only what a stupid dread of innovation, but what a savage spirit
it has infused into the minds of many of his countrymen." When Romilly
brought in a bill to repeal the Act of William III. which made death
the punishment for shop-lifting, Lord Ellenborough, actively supported
by Lord Eldon, opposed the bill, along with two others of a similar
nature, declaring that "they went to alter those laws which a century
had proved to be necessary, and which were now to be overturned by
speculation and modern philosophy." And it was not the Government alone
which appeared to be, as it were, possessed by the lust of hanging;
it was widely spread among the members of Parliament. Romilly tells
how one of the young members answered all his arguments and objections
with the one monotonous retort: "I am for hanging all." And yet one
would have imagined that in the nineteenth century the time had come
to put an end to that partiality for hanging which in England still
bore lamentable witness to the amount of savagery existing in the
national character. In the reign of Henry VIII, 72,000 thieves were
hanged, and under George III. they were still hanged by the dozen.
In 1817, a regular system of suppression of free-thought and liberty
of publication was evolved during the different prosecutions of the
old bookseller, William Hone, who, with a rare combination of honesty
and shrewdness, time after time defeated every attempt to convict him
of blasphemy. In 1819 occurred the Manchester riots, when a cavalry
charge was ordered, and the poor unarmed rioters were maltreated by
the soldiers. The impression produced by the events of the immediately
preceding years is preserved in Shelley's poems of the year 1819.

The political background of the intellectual life of this period is,
thus, undoubtedly a dark one--dark with the terror produced in the
middle classes by the excesses of the liberty movement in France, dark
with the tyrannic lusts of proud Tories and the Church's oppressions,
dark with the spilt blood of Irish Catholics and English artisans.
And on the pinnacle of society the crown is set on the insanity in
George the Third's head, and the sceptre is placed in the hands of the
careless lewdness which, in the person of the Prince Regent, occupies
the throne as proxy for the narrow-mindedness which had occupied it
in the person of his father. And it is this throne which Lord Eldon
supports with the six "gagging bills" into which he has transformed
England's ancient constitution--this throne which is lauded and
glorified in Castlereagh's ungrammatical, anti-liberal speeches, and
in Southey's unmelodious, highly-paid adulatory verse--until the
horrible, incredible scandals of George IV.'s divorce suit, spreading
like a great sewer from the tribunal of the Upper House, drown the
glory of the throne and the dignity of the court in a flood of mire,
and the revolutions of Spain, Greece, and South America, following on
each other without intermission, clear the air, and Castlereagh cuts
his throat ("slits a goose-quill," as Byron says), and England, under
Canning, recognises the South American republics, and paves the way for
the battle of Navarino.

The writings of Shelley, Landor, Byron, and Campbell, have political
equivalents in Canning's actions as minister. Indeed, Canning's
speeches complement these authors' works. Castlereagh's invertebrate
speeches and his dull, meagre official letters (the more meagre
because, as a good business man of the school of Metternich, he
preferred verbal communications) were at once succeeded by Canning's
frank and glowing eloquence. Castlereagh, like his surviving colleagues
of the ignominious Congress of Vienna, endeavoured, under the guise of
evangelic peace, to maintain silence and darkness in Europe; Canning's
speeches shone through the dark night of the Holy Alliance like a
forest conflagration. The great idea that inspired him was the belief
in the right of a people to free action. He died on the 8th of August
1827; but on the 10th of October of the same year was fought the battle
of Navarino, which was, as it were, the last will of the dead man, and
which to our generation is the political symbol of the awakening of the
new spirit in Europe.[3]


[1] Emerson: _English Traits_, chap. xiii.

[2] Massey: _History of England_, i 59, &c.

[3] Miss Martineau: _The History of England during the Thirty Years'
Peace_, I., II. Massey: _History of England during the Reign of George
III_, I-IV. Thackeray: _The Four Georges_. Reinhold Pauli: _Geschichte
Englands seit den Friedensschlüssen 1814 and 1815_. Emerson: _English
Traits_.




IV


THE BEGINNINGS OF NATURALISM


During the summer of 1797, the talk of the inhabitants of a village
on the coast of Somersetshire ran much on the subject of two young
men who had lately taken up their residence there, and were daily to
be seen walking together, absorbed in eager, endless discussions, in
which foreign words and foreign names, unintelligible to the natives,
were of frequent occurrence. The elder of the two was twenty-seven. The
expression of his face was profoundly serious, his manner dignified,
almost solemn; he was not unlike a young Methodist parson, and had a
monotonous and fatiguing voice. His companion, who was a year or two
younger, and whose words, accompanied by much violent gesture, flowed
in an unceasing stream, had a large round head (the shape of which
indicated remarkable gifts), flatfish features, and deep hazel eyes,
as full of confused depression as of inspiration. The whole figure
and air might be called flabby and irresolute, expressive of weakness
with a curious possibility of strength. The youth's voice was musical,
and his eloquence seemed to entrance even his reserved auditor and
friend. Who and what were these two young men, who desired acquaintance
with no one in the place or neighbourhood? This was the question the
inhabitants put to themselves. What could they be discussing so eagerly
but politics? and if so, what could they be but conspirators, possibly
Jacobins hatching treasonous plots?

The rumour soon spread that the elder of the two friends, Mr.
Wordsworth, had been in France at the beginning of the Revolution,
and had amply shared the enthusiasm of the day for social reform;
and that the younger, Mr. Coleridge, had distinguished himself as a
keen democrat and Unitarian, had written a drama called _The Fall
of Robespierre_, and two political pamphlets entitled _Conciones ad
populum_, and had even formed the plan of founding, with others holding
the same opinions, a socialistic community in the backwoods of America.
No further confirmation of the suspicions entertained was required.
A kind neighbour communicated with the authorities in London, and a
detective with a Bardolph nose promptly appeared on the scenes, and,
himself unobserved, followed the two gentlemen closely. Seeing them
with papers in their hands, he made no doubt that they were drawing
maps of the neighbourhood. He occasionally addressed them, and he hid
himself for hours at a time behind a sandbank at the seaside, which was
their favourite seat. According to Coleridge's account of the affair,
which is, however, not entirely to be relied on, he at first thought
that the two conspirators were aware of their danger, for he often
heard them talk of one Spy-nosy, which he was inclined to interpret as
a reference to himself; but he was speedily convinced that it was the
name of a man who had made a book and lived long ago. Their talk ran
most upon books, and they were perpetually desiring each other to look
at _this_ and to listen to _that_; but he could not catch a word about
politics, and ere long gave up the attempt and took himself off.

There was, as a matter of fact, nothing alarming to discover. The two
friends had long ago slept off their revolutionary intoxication, and
even with the Spinoza about whom they talked so much they had only a
second-hand acquaintance; they discussed him without understanding
him, much less assimilating him. Coleridge had made acquaintance with
Spinozism in the course of his study of Schilling's early works,
and he now initiated his friend, who was unlearned in philosophy,
into his newly-acquired wisdom. But the name of Spinoza was in these
conversations merely the symbol of a mystic worship of nature; Jacob
Böhme's was to be heard in peaceful conjunction with it. The matter
under consideration was not science, but poetry; and if, during these
long discussions, there was any mention of a revolution, it was a
purely literary and artistic revolution, with respect to which the two
friends, from very different starting-points, had arrived at remarkably
similar conclusions.

What was really accomplished in the course of these conversations was
nothing less than that _conscious_ literary rupture with the spirit of
the eighteenth century, which, assuming different forms in different
countries, took place at this time all over Europe.

Coleridge was of an inquiring nature. His antipathy to French Classical
powder and paint dated from his schooldays, when a teacher of
independent opinions had warned his intelligent pupil against harps,
lutes, and lyres in his compositions, demanding pen and ink instead;
had bid him beware of Muses, Pegasus, Parnassus, and Hippocrene in
poetry, affirming everything of the sort to be nothing but rococo
style and convention. Coleridge, therefore, refused the title of poet
to Pope and his successors, and swore by Bowies' sonnets. He decried
Pope in the same manner as Oehlenschläger's young friends in Denmark
soon afterwards decried Baggesen. His Germanic temperament made him
the born enemy of _esprit_, epigram, and points. It appeared to him
that the excellence of the school which had its origin in France had
nothing to do with poetry. "The excellence consisted in just and acute
observations on men and manners in an artificial state of society, as
its matter and substance; and in the logic of wit, conveyed in smooth
and strong epigrammatic couplets, as its form. Even when the subject
was purely fanciful the poet appealed to the intellect; nay, even in
the case of a consecutive narration, a _point_ was looked for at the
end of each second line, and the whole was, as it were, a chain of
epigrams." In other words, the compositions of this school consisted,
according to Coleridge, not of poetic thoughts, but of unpoetic
thoughts translated into a language which was, by convention, called
poetic. In the conception of the poem there was nothing fanciful; nay,
so little imagination did the author possess, that "it depended on the
compositor's putting or not putting _a small capital_, whether the
words should be personifications or mere abstracts." England's great
poets, Spenser for example, had been able to express the most fanciful
ideas in the purest, simplest of English; but these newer writers could
not express common, everyday thoughts except in such an extraordinarily
bad and fantastic style that it seemed as if Echo and Sphinx had laid
their heads together to produce it. Coleridge turned with aversion from
these attempts to conceal want of imagination under affectation of
style. He detested Odes to Jealousy, Hope, Forgetfulness, and all such
abstractions. They reminded him of an Oxford poem on the subject of
vaccination, which began: "Inoculation! heavenly maid, descend!" Even
in the best English poetry of a later day the bad habit of personifying
abstractions was too long adhered to. (Shelley, for example, presents
us with "the twins Error and Truth.") All these affectations appeared
to Coleridge to arise from the custom of writing Latin verses in the
public schools. The model style, according to him, was that which
expressed natural thoughts in natural language, "neither bookish
nor vulgar, neither redolent of the lamp nor of the kennel." The
old English ballads in Percy's collection, with their unadulterated
natural, popular tone, seemed to him excellent guides. He, too, would
fain write in such a tone.

It was at this stage that Coleridge was initiated into all Wordsworth's
ideas and projects. Wordsworth's was one of those natures which
find satisfaction and a sense of security in dogmatic and strongly
condemnatory verdicts. His idea of the whole of English poetry after
Milton was, that the nation, after producing that great man, had lost
the poetic power it, formerly possessed and had preserved only a form
of composition, so that poetry had come to mean the art of diction--the
poet being judged by the degree of mastery he had attained in that
art. Hence there had been an ever more marked departure in metrical
composition from the rules of prose. The poet's aim now must be to
retrace the path that had been taken, and produce verse which should
be distinguished only by its metrical form from the language of daily
life. Whilst Coleridge was all for natural melody, Wordsworth went the
length of demanding that poetry should be simply rhymed conversation.

And with this naturalistic conception of form was combined a similar
naturalistic conception of the subject matter of poetry. One of
Wordsworth's favourite assertions and one of the most bitter reproaches
he levelled at the prevailing literary taste was, that hardly one
original image or new description of nature had been introduced into
English verse in the age between Milton and Thomson. Himself endowed
with an extraordinary receptivity for all the phenomena of external
nature, he took the cry: "Nature! nature!" for his watchword--and by
nature he meant the country as opposed to the town. In town life men
forgot the earth on which they lived. They no longer really knew it;
they remembered the general appearance of fields and woods, but not
the details of the life of nature, not its varying play of smiling,
sober, glorious, and terrible scenes. Who nowadays could tell the names
of the various forest trees and meadow flowers? who knew the signs
of the weather--what the clouds say when they hurry so, what those
motions of the cattle mean, and why the mists roll down the hill?
Wordsworth had known all these signs from the time when he played as
a child among the Cumberland hills. He had a familiar acquaintance
with all the varieties of English nature, at all seasons of the year;
he was constituted to reproduce what he saw and felt, and to meditate
profoundly over it before he reproduced it--was fitted to carry out,
with full consciousness of what he was undertaking, the reformation of
poetry which had been begun by poor Chatterton, "the sleepless soul,"
and by the peasant Burns, a much more gifted poet than himself. Though
he was but one of the numerous exponents of that love of nature which
at the beginning of the century spread like a wave over Europe, he had
a stronger, more profound consciousness than any man in the United
Kingdom of the fact that a new poetic spirit was abroad in England.

The friends agreed that there were three distinct periods of English
poetry--the period of poetic youth and strength, from Chaucer to
Dryden; the period of poetic barrenness, from (and including) Dryden
to the end of the eighteenth century; and the period of regeneration,
which was now beginning with themselves, after being heralded by their
predecessors. Like the men of the new era in Germany and Denmark, these
young Englishmen sought for imposing terms to express the difference
between themselves and those whom they attacked; and the terms they
found were exactly the same as those adopted by their Continental
contemporaries. They credited themselves with _imagination_--in other
words, with the true creative gift, and wrote page upon page of vague
eulogy of it as opposed to _fancy_; exactly as Oehlenschläger and his
school eulogised imagination and allowed Baggesen at best only humour.
They themselves were distinguished by _reason_, their predecessors
had only had _understanding_; they had genius, their predecessors had
only had talent; they were creators, their predecessors had only been
critics. Even an Aristotle, not being a poet, could lay claim to no
more than talent. In England, too, Noureddin[1] was belittled; the new
men were conscious of the infinite superiority of their methods to his
"un-natural" procedure.


[1] A character in the Danish poet Oehlenschläger's play, _Aladdin_,
who represents talent as opposed to genius, which is embodied in
Aladdin.




V


STRENGTH AND SINCERITY OF THE LOVE OF NATURE


Wordworth's real point of departure, then, was the conviction that in
town life and its distractions men had forgotten nature, and that they
had been punished for it; constant social intercourse had dissipated
their energy and talents and impaired the susceptibility of their
hearts to simple and pure impressions. Amongst his hundreds of sonnets
there is one which is peculiarly eloquent of this fundamental idea. It
is the well-known:--

    "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 our hearts away, a sordid boon!
     This Sea that bares her bosom to the moon,
     The winds that will be howling at all hours
     And are up-gather'd now like sleeping flowers,
     For this, for everything we are out of tune;
     It moves us not.--Great God! I'd rather be
     A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn,--
     So might I, standing on this pleasant lea,
     Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn;
     Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea;
     Or hear old Triton blow his wreathèd horn."

These are remarkable words to have come from Wordsworth's
pen--remarkable, because they show what all sincere naturalism really
is, let it be decked with as many theistic trappings as it will. In its
inmost essence it is akin to the old Greek conception of nature, and
antagonistic to all the official creeds of modern days; it is vitally
impregnated with the pantheism which reappears in this century as the
dominating element in the feeling for nature in every literature. In
a preceding volume of this work (_The Romantic School in Germany_) we
made acquaintance with the pantheism which lay concealed under Tieck's
Romantic view of nature. Now we come upon it in the form of the human
being's self-forgetful and half unconscious amalgamation with nature,
as a single tone in the great harmony of the universe. This idea has
found expression in a curious little poem:--

    "A slumber did my spirit seal;
     I had no human fears:
     She seem'd a thing that could not feel
     The touch of earthly years.

     No motion has she now, no force;
     She neither hears nor sees;
     Roll'd round in earth's diurnal course
     With rocks, and stones, and trees."

If we transport ourselves into the mood which gave birth to such
a poem as this, we are conscious that it is the outcome of purely
pantheistic ideas; unconscious life is regarded as the basis and source
of conscious life, and every earthly being is conceived of as having
lain in nature's womb, an inseparable part of her until the moment when
consciousness began. One of the germs of the poetry of the new century
lies in this little poem; for here, in place of the cultivated human
being as developed and extolled by the eighteenth century, we have the
human being as seen by the new era in the circle of his kin--birds
and wild beasts, plants and stones. Christianity commanded men to
love their fellow-men; pantheism bade them love the meanest animal.
_Hart-Leap Well_, undoubtedly one of Wordsworth's finest poems, a
simple little romance in two parts, is a movingly eloquent plea for a
poor, ill-used animal, a hunted stag--that is to say, a creature in
whom the classical poets would have been interested only in the shape
of venison, and belonging to the species which the admirers of the age
of chivalry, including Scott himself, would have allowed their heroes
to kill by the hundred. Deeply affecting, in spite of the comparative
insignificance of its subject, grandly simple in its style, the little
poem is a noble evidence of the heartfelt _piety_ towards nature which
is Wordsworth's patent of nobility.

This piety in his case consists mainly in reverence for the childlike,
and for the child. And this same reverence for the human being who
in his unconsciousness is nearest to nature, is another of the
characteristic features of the new century. In a little poem with which
Wordsworth himself introduces all the rest, he writes:--

    "My heart leaps up when I behold
        A rainbow in the sky:
     So was it when my life began,
     So is it now I am a man,
     So be it when I shall grow old,
        Or let me die!
     The Child is father of the Man:
     And I could wish my days to be
     Bound each to each by natural piety."

Here we have reverence for the child developed to such an extent that
it supplants reverence for age. But this conferring of his natural
poetic rights on the child is, as the history of every country shows
us, only one of the many signs of the reaction against the eighteenth
century's worship of the enlightened, social human being, and its
banishment of the child to the nursery. Wordsworth carries the reaction
inaugurated by the nineteenth century to its logical conclusion. In
one of his sonnets he describes a walk which he takes on a beautiful
evening with a little girl. After describing the tranquil evening mood--

    "The holy time is quiet as a nun
     Breathless with adoration;"

he turns to the child beside him, and says:

    "Dear child! dear girl! that walkest with me here,
     If thou appear untouched by solemn thought
     Thy nature is not therefore less _divine_;
     Thou liest in Abraham's bosom all the year,
     And worship'st at the Temple's _inner shrine_,
     God being with thee when we know it not."

The pious ending is inevitable with Wordsworth; but, as any intelligent
reader may see for himself, it is only tacked on to the main idea, that
of the child's own divine nature. In his famous _Ode on Intimations of
Immortality_ Wordsworth develops this idea with a fervour of enthusiasm
which carried him too great a length for even such a devotee of naïveté
as Coleridge. A child of six he apostrophises thus:--

    "Thou, whose exterior semblance doth belie
             Thy soul's immensity;
     Thou best philosopher, who yet dost keep
     Thy heritage; thou eye among the blind.
     That, deaf and silent, read'st the eternal deep,
     Haunted for ever by the eternal Mind,--
             Mighty Prophet! Seer blest!
             On whom those truths do rest
     Which we are toiling all our lives to find."

These assertions are, doubtless, explained away in a
poetico-philosophical manner by the subsequent attribution of the
child's greatness to the fact that it stands nearer than we do to
the life before birth, and, consequently, to the "intimations of
immortality"; but even this is not to be taken as Wordsworth's literal
meaning, if we are to believe an assertion of Coleridge's which
remained uncontradicted by the author. The child is revered as earth's
"foster-child," and

    "The Youth, who daily farther from the east
           Must travel, still is Nature's priest."

In numerous poems Wordsworth refers to the strong impression made upon
him as a youth by the pageantry of nature. In one of them, to which,
according to his frequent custom, he gave a prolix title, _Influence
of Natural Objects in Calling Forth and Strengthening the Imagination
in Boyhood and Early Youth_, he thanks the Spirit of the Universe for
having from the first dawn of his childhood intertwined for him

    "The passions that build up our human soul;
      Not with the mean and vulgar works of man,--
       But with high objects, with enduring things,
     With life and nature, purifying thus
      The elements of feeling and of thought
      . . . . . . . . until we recognise
      A grandeur in the beatings of the heart."

Observe the vivid, delicate perception of nature in the following
description:--

    "Nor was this fellowship vouchsafed to me
     With stinted kindness. In November days,
     When vapours rolling down the valleys made
     A lonely scene more lonesome; among woods
     At noon; and 'mid the calm of summer nights,
     When, by the margin of the trembling lake,
     Beneath the gloomy hills, I homeward went
     In solitude, such intercourse was mine:
     Mine was it in the fields both day and night,
     And by the waters, all the summer long;
     And in the frosty season, when the sun
     Was set, and visible for many a mile,
     The cottage windows through the twilight blazed,
     I heeded not the summons:--happy time
     It was indeed for all of us; for me
     It was a time of rapture!--Clear and loud
     The village clock tolled six--I wheeled about,
     Proud and exulting like an untired horse
     That cares not for his home.--All shod with steel
     We hissed along the polished ice, in games
     Confederate, imitative of the chase
     And woodland pleasures,--the resounding horn,
     The pack loud-chiming, and the hunted hare.
     So through the darkness and the cold we flew,
     And not a voice was idle: with the din
     Smitten, the precipices rang aloud;
     The leafless trees and every icy crag
     Tinkled like iron; while the distant hills
     Into the tumult sent an alien sound
     Of melancholy, not unnoticed, while the stars,
     Eastward, were sparkling clear, and in the west
     The orange sky of evening died away.

     Not seldom from the uproar I retired
     Into a silent bay,--or sportively
     Glanced sideway, leaving the tumultuous throng,
     To cut across the reflex of a star,
     Image, that, flying still before me, gleamed
     Upon the glassy plain: and oftentimes,
     When we had given our bodies to the wind,
     And all the shadowy banks on either side
     Came sweeping through the darkness, spinning still
     The rapid line of motion, then at once
     Have I, reclining back upon my heels
     Stopped short; yet still the solitary cliffs
     Wheeled by me--even as if the earth had rolled
     With visible motion her diurnal round!
     Behind me did they stretch in solemn train,
     Feebler and feebler, and I stood and watched
     Till all was tranquil as a summer sea."

This is a picture of nature which it would be difficult to match in
later English poetry.

In one of his most beautiful and profound poems, _Lines Composed a few
Miles above Tintern Abbey_, Wordsworth has described his own feeling
for nature in expressions which he declared that he recognised again in
the most famous and most poetical passages of Byron's _Childe Harold_,
and which, in any case, were indisputably epoch-making in English
poetical art. He writes:--

                               "For nature then
        (The coarser pleasures of my boyish days,
        And their glad animal movements all gone by)
        To me was all in all.--I cannot paint
        What then I was. The sounding cataract
        Haunted me like a passion: the tall rock,
        The mountain, and the deep and gloomy wood,
        Their colours and their forms, were then to me
        An appetite: a feeling and a love,
        That had no need of a remoter charm,
        By thought supplied, nor any interest
        Unborrowed from the eye."

Granted that it was very absurd of Wordsworth to talk (to Moore
in 1820) of Byron's plagiarisms from him, and to declare that the
whole Third Canto of _Childe Harold_ was founded on his style and
sentiments--and granted that Lord John Russell is right when he remarks
drily in this connection that if Wordsworth wrote the Third Canto of
_Childe Harold_, it is his best work--it is, nevertheless, easy to
understand that Wordsworth could not but feel as if, in the chief
passages in that canto, and the celebrated passages about solitude in
the earlier cantos, what was naturally expressed by him had been worked
by Byron into a laboured and antithetical sort of declamation.[1] It
is not difficult to discern, in these outbursts, the wounded vanity
of a narrow mind which felt itself eclipsed; but it cannot be denied
that it really was Wordsworth who first struck the chord which Byron
varied with such skill, nor that single striking and vivid lines of
Wordsworth's had impressed themselves on Byron's memory. Who can read,
for example, the following lines of _Childe Harold_ (Canto iii. 72):--

[1] See Thomas Moore: _Memoirs_, iii. 161.

    "I live not in myself; but I become
     Portion of that around me; and to me
     High mountains are a feeling,"

without thinking of Wordsworth's verses just quoted? And who can deny
that Byron, as it were, adopted Wordsworth's idea, and added thoughts
of his own to it when he wrote (_Childe Harold_, iii. 75):--

    "Are not the mountains, waves, and skies, a part
     Of me and of my soul, as I of them?
     Is not the love of these deep in my heart
     With a pure passion? should I not contemn
     All objects, if compared with these?"

Wordsworth, in _Tintern Abbey_, describes his passion for nature as
something past, as something which only lasted for a moment during
an age of transition, and very soon turned into reflection and
questioning; but Byron's passion is a permanent feeling, the expression
of his nature. In his case the Ego in its relations with nature is not
forced into the strait-jacket of orthodox piety; no obstruction of
dogma is set up between nature and him; in his mystical worship of it
he feels himself one with it, and this without the help of any _deus ex
machine_.

Passion is not the special characteristic of Wordsworth's attitude to
nature. The distinguishing quality in his perception and reproduction
of natural impressions is of a more delicate and complex kind. The
impression, although it is received by healthy, vigorously perceptive
senses, is modified and subdued by pondering over it. It does not
directly attune the poet to song. If Wordsworth can say, with Goethe:
"I sing like the bird that sits on the bough," it is, at any rate, not
like the nightingale that he sings; his is not the love-song which
streams forth, rich and full, telling of the intoxication of the soul
and breaking and mocking at the silence of the night. He himself, after
describing the song of the nightingale in similar terms to these, adds
(_Poems of Imagination_, x.):--

    "I heard a stock-dove sing or say
     His homely tale this very day;
     His voice was buried among trees,
     Yet to be come at by the breeze;
     He did not cease; but cooed--and cooed;
     And somewhat pensively he wooed:
     He sang of love with quiet blending,
     Slow to begin, and never ending;
     Of serious faith and inward glee;
     That was the song--the song for me!"

It was himself that Wordsworth tried to paint in describing the
pensive, serious wooer. According to the custom of so many poets, he
attempted to formulate his methods into a theory and to prove that all
good poetry must possess the qualities of his own. All good poetry
is, he says, "the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings. But
poems to which any value can be attached were never produced on any
variety of subjects but by a man who, being possessed of more than
usual organic sensibility, had also _thought long and deeply_." This
theory he supports by the argument that a "our continued influxes of
feeling are directed and modified by our thoughts, which are indeed the
representatives of all our past feelings"--a profound and striking,
if not scientifically satisfactory utterance, as well as an excellent
characterisation of his own poetic thought and deliberation.

His method consists, exactly defined, in storing up natural
impressions, in order to dwell on and thoroughly assimilate them. Later
they are brought forth from the soul's store-house and gazed on and
enjoyed again. To understand this peculiarity of Wordsworth's is to
have the key to his originality. In _Tintern Abbey_ he tells how the
direct, passionate joy in the beauties of nature which he felt in his
youth turned, in his riper years, into this quiet assimilation of the
human-like moods of nature:--

                         "That time is past,
    And all its aching joys are now no more,
    And all its dizzy raptures. Not for this
    Faint I, nor mourn, nor murmur; other gifts
    Have followed; for such loss, I would believe,
    Abundant recompense. For I have learned
    To look on nature, not as in the hour
    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."

In this passage Wordsworth has delimited his territory, has poetically
yet plainly indicated his special province. What a contrast to Byron,
who seldom or never heard the human voice in nature, and certainly
never except in harsh and grating tones--the man who in _Childe Harold_
actually calls human life "a false nature--not in the harmony of
things!"

But we have not yet come to the most remarkable lines in _Tintern
Abbey_, namely those in which Wordsworth describes the silent influence
on the mind of the hoarded, carefully preserved impressions of nature.
He writes:--

                  "These beauteous forms,
    Through a long absence, have not been to me
    As is a landscape to a blind man's eye:
    But oft, in lonely rooms, and 'mid the din
    Of towns and cities, I have owed to them,
    In hours of weariness, sensations sweet,
    Felt in the blood, and felt along the heart,
    And passing even into my purer mind,
    With tranquil restoration:--feelings, too,
    Of unremembered pleasure: such, perhaps,
    As have no slight or trivial influence
    On that best portion of a good man's life,
    His little, nameless, unremembered acts
    Of kindness and of love."

And he asserts that he is indebted to the influence of nature for yet
another gift,

    "Of aspect more sublime; that blessed mood
     In which the burthen of the mystery,
     In which the heavy and the weary weight
     Of all this unintelligible world
     Is lightened";

and his train of thought reaches its conclusion in the feeling of
assurance that this happiness produced in him by the sight of the
familiar places is not mere momentary pleasure, but _life and food for
future years_.

Again and again this last idea recurs in Wordsworth's poetry. We have
it very marked, for instance, in No. xv. of the _Poems of Imagination_,
in which he tells of the impression produced on him, during a lonely
walk, by the sudden sight of "a host of golden daffodils,"

    "Beside the lake, beneath the trees,
     Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.
        . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
     I gazed--and gazed--but little thought
     What wealth the show to me had brought.

     For oft when on my couch I lie
     In vacant or in pensive mood,
     They flash upon that inward eye
     Which is the bliss of solitude,
     And then my heart with pleasure fills,
     And dances with the daffodils."

Nothing could be more unlike the lyric poet's usual habit of living in
the present, than this lyric poet's conscious saving of the present for
future use. He himself tells us that he is of a saving disposition;
he collects a winter store of bright summer moments; and there is in
this something genuinely human, which is too often overlooked. But
there is, above all, something national in it; it is not surprising
that _English_ Naturalism should begin by carefully and economically
providing itself with a store, a capital, of impressions of nature.

We are all familiar with the feelings that might lead to the attempt.
Many of us, gazing on the boundless blue ocean, sparkling in the
sunlight, have felt that to have this sight before our eyes every day
would widen the soul and cleanse it of all its little meannesses;
and we have turned away unwillingly and with the conscious desire to
preserve the impression so as to be able to renew its effect. Or with
beautiful landscapes before our eyes, especially those which we have
seen in the course of travel, with the certainty of not being able
to enjoy their beauty soon again, we have tried to be as passive as
possible, so as to allow the picture to impress itself firmly on our
memory. And we have often instinctively recalled the beautiful scene
to mind; for the soul involuntarily calls up bright memories to draw
strength and courage from them. But in us such impressions have been
almost effaced by stronger ones. We have not been able to preserve
them efficaciously for the future, or to ruminate over them again and
again. The preoccupations of society and of our own passions have made
it impossible for us to find our deepest and most inspiring joy in
memories of sunlight falling upon flowers, or of entwisted giant trees.
But the soul of the English poet, whose mission it was to re-awaken
the feeling for all these elementary moods and impressions, was of a
different stamp; unagitated by any practical activity, it vegetated
in these day-dreams of natural beauty. And it is undeniable that this
constant occupation of himself with the simplest natural impressions,
kept his soul pure and free to perceive and to feel beauty in its
simple, earthly manifestations, without fancifulness and without
excitement.

How rare is this capacity! how often wanting in the very greatest
and best minds! And how quickly was it lost again in English poetry!
It displays itself most exquisitely and completely in the few
lightly-sketched female figures of the short poems. The heroes and
heroines of the narrative poems, some of them portrayed with the design
of arousing sympathy with the rural population and the lowest classes,
others with the intention of edifying, are of distinctly inferior
quality. But these few delicately-drawn figures, seen with the same
tranquil and yet loving eyes with which Wordsworth looked at trees and
birds, are nature itself. They are the English feminine nature; and
never have the essential qualities of this nature been more exactly
expressed. Take as an example of what I mean, the following little
poem:--

    "She was a phantom of delight
     When first she gleamed upon my sight;
     A lovely apparition, sent
     To be a moment's ornament;
     Her eyes as stars of twilight fair;
     Like twilight's too, her dusky hair:
     But all things else about her drawn
     From May-time and the cheerful dawn;
     A dancing shape, an image gay,
     To haunt, to startle, and waylay.

     I saw her upon nearer view,
     A spirit, yet a woman too!
     Her household motions light and free,
     And steps of virgin liberty;
     A countenance in which did meet
     Sweet records, promises as sweet;
     A creature not too bright or good
     For human nature's daily food;
     For transient sorrows, simple wiles,
     Praise, blame, love, kisses, tears, and smiles.

     And now I see with eye serene
     The very pulse of the machine;
     A being breathing thoughtful breath,
     A traveller between life and death;
     The reason firm, the temperate will,
     Endurance, foresight, strength, and skill;
     A perfect woman, nobly planned,
     To warn, to comfort, and command;
     And yet a spirit still, and bright
     With something of angelic light."

This is a genuine, faithful portrait of the pattern English woman; and
to compare this sober, truthful description with the ideal women whom
the greatest English poets a few years later found satisfaction in
depicting, is to prepare an easy victory for Wordsworth. Take Shelley's
description, in _The Sensitive Plant_, of the ethereal protectress of
flowers and insects. The picture of the fairy-like beauty is charming,
as everything is that comes from Shelley's pen; her tenderness for the
plants and her touching compassion for all the small, ugly, despised
animals, "the poor banished insects, whose intent, although they did
ill, was innocent," are genuine human traits; and yet she is not a real
human being, any more than the Witch of Atlas is, or the dim heroine
of _Epipsychidion_. Shelley, like the lark he sang of, was a "scorner
of the ground." Or take the passionate Oriental heroines of Byron's
earliest poetic narratives--Medora, Gulnare, Kaled. They never attain
to the beautiful simplicity of this woman described by Wordsworth.
Their passionateness is the principal quality impressed upon us; their
love, their devotion, their determination know no bounds. They are
heroines invented for readers in whom the numbing life of crowded
London and the constant occupation with contemporary great historical
events, have induced a kind of nervous craving for the strongest
intellectual stimulants. But from the very beginning Wordsworth
regarded it as a pleasant and profitable task to show how profoundly
men's minds may be moved without the employment of coarse or violent
stimulants. He knew that those who were accustomed to striking effects
would be unlikely at first to appreciate works the distinguishing
feature of which was their soft and natural colouring; but he resolved
that he would turn the reader's expectations in the matter of the
agencies of a poem back into the natural track.




VI


RURAL LIFE AND ITS POETRY


It is impossible thoroughly to understand Wordsworth's poetic strength
and limitations without a glance at his life. We discover it to have
been an unusually idyllic and comfortable one. Belonging to the
well-to-do middle class (his father was an attorney), he studied at
Cambridge and then travelled. In 1795, not long after his return from
abroad, he received a legacy of £900 from an admirer of his genius,
which, added to his share of a debt of £8500 due to his father by an
English nobleman, and paid to the family about this time, placed him
in a position to live without taking up any profession. In 1802 he
married; in 1813 he settled at Rydal Mount in the Lake district. He
held the appointment of Distributor of Stamps, which was practically a
sinecure, from 1813 to 1842, when he resigned in favour of one of his
sons. The salary of this appointment was £500. In 1843 he succeeded
Southey as Poet Laureate, and as such enjoyed a pension of £300 a year
till his death, which occurred in 1850, when he had just completed his
eightieth year. Sheltered on every side from the outward vicissitudes
of life, he regarded them from a Protestant-philosophical point of view.

A career such as this was not calculated to stir the passions; nor
is passion discoverable either in Wordsworth's life or his poetry.
In the lives of most eminent authors we find some preponderant
circumstance, one or more turning-points, one or other ostensible
source of melancholy, or of strength of character, or of productivity;
in Wordsworth's nothing of the kind is to be found. No congenital
misfortune crippled him, no implacably violent animosity goaded him
and set its mark on his spirit. The critics did not spare him with
mockery and contempt, and they continued their attacks for a long time.
From 1800 to 1820 his poetry was trodden underfoot; from 1820 to 1830
it struggled; after 1830 it received universal recognition. But the
animosity was not stupid and violent enough, the struggle was not hot
enough, the victory not brilliant enough, to give colour and lustre to
his career, or to make it a subject of song. His inmost, personal life
was never so intense that it could absorb his poetry or provide it with
subjects. On the contrary, it led him to look outwards. The wars on
the Continent, the natural surroundings of his home, and the little,
insignificant set of human beings amongst whom he lived, engrossed his
thoughts. He was not, like Byron, too much absorbed in his own affairs
to have tranquillity of mind to dwell upon the small things and the
small people whom he exhibits and describes with tender sympathy.

He undoubtedly felt himself the centre of his world. From his retired,
idyllic home there issued from time to time collections of short poems
or single long ones, provided with explanatory prefaces which, piling
example on example, demonstrated to the reader that all great poets
have been misunderstood or despised by their contemporaries; that every
author, in so far as he is great and at the same time original, is
obliged to create the taste by means of which his works can be enjoyed.
His predecessors have, no doubt, smoothed the way for all that he has
in common with them; but for what is peculiarly his own he is in the
condition of Hannibal among the Alps. (Preface of 1815.)

Wordsworth was well aware that no intellectual pioneer can expect
complete recognition from any but his younger contemporaries. But
the criticism meted out to him, which was not aggressive enough to
rouse in him a recklessly bellicose spirit like Byron's, made him
self-absorbed and arrogant. The one variety in his daily life was
provided by occasional visits from admirers who were making a tour
in the neighbourhood and had letters of introduction to him. These
strangers he received surrounded by his admiring family; he conversed
with them in a cold and dignified manner, and not unfrequently repelled
them by the egotism with which he quoted and praised his own works, the
indifference he manifested to everything else, the rigour with which
he insisted on every outward sign of respect being shown him, and the
solemnity with which he repeated even the most insignificant things
that had been said in his praise.

A number of anecdotes illustrating his egotism have been preserved.
Thomas Moore (_Memoirs_, iii. 163) tells how one day, in a large
party, Wordsworth, without anything having been previously said to
introduce the subject, called out suddenly from the top of the table to
the bottom: "Davy, do you know the reason why I published the 'White
Doe' in quarto?" "No, what was it?" "To show the world my opinion of
it." He never read any works aloud but his own. At the time when _Rob
Roy_, which has a motto taken from one of his poems, was published,
he happened to be visiting a family who received the book the day it
came out. They were all looking forward with eagerness to the new
tale. Wordsworth seized the book, and every one expected him to read
the first chapters aloud; but instead of doing this, he went to the
bookcase, took out a volume of his own poetry, and read his poem aloud
to the company.

We have Emerson's notes written immediately after two different visits
to Wordsworth, paid with a year's interval. After the second, he
writes: "He was nationally bitter on the French: bitter on Scotchmen
too. No Scotchman, he said, can write English.... His opinions of
French, English, Irish, and Scotch seemed rashly formalised from little
anecdotes of what had befallen himself and members of his family, in
a diligence or stage-coach." After his first visit (in 1833) Emerson
writes: "He had much to say of America, the more that it gave occasion
for his favourite topic--that society is being enlightened by a
superficial tuition, out of all proportion to its being restrained
by moral culture. Schools do no good. Tuition is not education....
He wished to impress on me and all good Americans to cultivate the
moral, the conservative, &c.... He proceeded to abuse Goethe's _Wilhelm
Meister_ heartily. It was full of all manner of fornication. It was
like the crossing of flies in the air. He had never gone farther than
the first part; so disgusted was he that he threw the book across
the room.... He cited his sonnet 'On the Feelings of a High-minded
Spaniard' which he preferred to any other (I so understood him),
and 'The Two Voices'; and quoted, with evident pleasure, the verses
addressed to the Skylark." These jottings give us an excellent idea of
what Wordsworth was in ordinary intercourse: the contemptuous verdicts
passed on all foreign races, the objection to modern civilisation (the
same which the Mohammedans in Asia and Africa prefer against it to
this day) that it is compatible with great immorality; the eulogy on
conventional morality as the society-preserving element (true morality
being the most radical element in existence), the displeasure with
Goethe (which reminds us of Novalis), and the recital of his own verses
as finale!

Emerson sums up his impressions in the following words: "His face
sometimes lighted up, but his conversation was not marked by special
force or elevation.... He honoured himself by his simple adherence to
truth, and was very willing not to shine; but he surprised by the hard
limits of his thought. To judge from a single conversation, he made the
impression of a narrow and very English mind; of one who paid for his
rare elevation by general tameness and conformity."

In 1843 Wordsworth and Dickens met for the first time. Wordsworth had
a great contempt for all young men, and the mutual friend at whose
house the meeting took place was, consequently, curious to learn his
impression of the great humorist. "After pursing up his lips in a
fashion peculiar to him, and swinging one leg over the other, the
bare flesh of his ankles appearing over his socks, Wordsworth slowly
answered, 'Why, I am not much given to turn critic on people I meet;
but, as you ask me, I will candidly avow that I thought him a very
talkative, vulgar young person--but I dare say he may be very clever.
Mind, I don't want to say a word against him, for I have never read a
line he has written." Some time after this the same querist guardedly
asked Dickens how he had liked the Poet Laureate? "Like him? Not at
all. He is a dreadful old ass."[1]

The reader will naturally refuse to subscribe to so sweeping a
judgment. But so much is certain, that in private intercourse there
must have been something extremely irritating about Wordsworth. A
contemporary declares that when he spoke he blew like a whale, and
uttered truisms in an oracular tone. The word "truism" is applicable
to more than his verbal utterances; it applies to the whole reflective
and didactic side of his poetry. In it there is no remarkable force or
passion, but a Hamlet-like dwelling upon the great questions of "to be
or not to be." "Birth, death, the future, the sufferings and misdeeds
of man in this life, and his hopes of a life to come; the littleness
of us and our whole sphere of knowledge, and the awful relations in
which we stand to a world of the supernatural--these, if any," says
Masson, "are the permanent and inevitable objects of all human, as they
were peculiarly of Wordsworth's, contemplation and solicitude."[2] But
these ideas, lying, as they do, rather at the circumference of the
sphere of our knowledge than within it, unfortunately tempt us into
certain ancient and well-worn tracks of thought that lead nowhere;
they go round in a ring, and we can follow them with a tranquil and
dignified melancholy, but without much benefit either to ourselves or
others. The fact that Wordsworth is perpetually finding his way to this
said circumference of the sphere of our knowledge, which adherents of
the so-called revealed religions regard as the natural centre of our
thoughts, has contributed more than anything else to prevent his fame,
great as it is in England, from spreading to any considerable extent in
other countries.

When Coleridge made Wordsworth's personal acquaintance, the latter
had already written enough to show plainly what was the nature of his
originality. What struck Coleridge in Wordsworth's poetry "was the
union of deep feeling with profound thought; the fine balance of truth
in observing, with the imaginative faculty in modifying the objects
observed; and, above all, the original gift of spreading the tone, the
atmosphere of the ideal world around forms, incidents, and situations
of which, for the common view, custom had bedimmed all the lustre."

Wordsworth and Coleridge's first conversations turned upon what to them
appeared the two cardinal points of poetry, the power of exciting the
sympathy of the reader by a faithful adherence to the truth of nature,
and the power of giving the interest of novelty by the modifying
colours of imagination. The sudden charm which accidents of light and
shade, which moonlight or sunset, diffuse over a known and familiar
landscape, appeared to represent the practicability of combining both.
These are the poetry of nature, and these were to be reproduced. It was
not simply nature that was to be imitated, but the poetry of nature.

The thought suggested itself that a series of poems might be composed
of two sorts. In the one the incidents and agents were to be, in part
at least, supernatural, and the excellence aimed at was to consist
in the interesting of the affections by the dramatic truth of such
emotions as would naturally accompany such situations, supposing them
real. And real in this sense they have been to every human being who,
from whatever source of delusion, has at any time believed himself
to be under supernatural agency. The execution of this part of the
undertaking fell to Coleridge's share, and there can be no doubt
whatever that the successful accomplishment of it was due to him. Any
one at all well acquainted with European literature sees at once how
closely related this task is to those which German Romanticism set
itself and accomplished. The only thing peculiarly English is, that the
emphasis is not laid upon the supernatural and fantastic, but upon the
realistic element, so that Romanticism in this case becomes simply one
of the forms of Naturalism.

In the poems of the other sort the themes were to be chosen from real
life. But Wordsworth, to whose share this division fell, resolved to
communicate to the commonest and most natural events an unusual, new,
almost supernatural colour by awakening the mind from the slumber of
custom, and forcing it to direct its attention to the beauty and the
marvels which the natural world is constantly offering to heedless
man. He made the attempt for the first time in the _Lyrical Ballads_,
which in the preface are designated an "Experiment"--an experiment
intended to prove the possibility of making themes unsuited to ornate
representation attractive, even when presented to the reader in the
language of real life--and he repeated it in hundreds of poems of
extremely varied quality, whose heroes and heroines all belong to the
lower and lowest classes, have followed rural avocations from their
youth, and are represented on a background of rural life.

In Danish literature there is no series of poems of this description;
but the careful student of Wordsworth will every now and then be
reminded, by the form given to a poetic anecdote or by the tone of
the narrator, of (the Swedish poet) Runeberg's _Fänrik Stål_. There
is occasionally even a resemblance of rhythm and metre. It would
be interesting to know if Runeberg had any acquaintance with the
works of the English poet. Possibly the whole faint resemblance is
due to the fact that the incidents in the poems of both writers all
occur in one small district--the neighbourhood of the English, and
the neighbourhood of the Finnish Lakes. The difference is far more
striking than the resemblance. In Runeberg we have a warlike background
and mood, a fiery lyric style, patriotic ardour; in Wordsworth,
stagnant, rurally peaceful life, an epic attitude, and a purely local
patriotism--attachment to the life and history of a couple of parishes.
Runeberg's is a soldier's feeling for the army; Wordsworth's, a parish
priest's for his flock.

_Resolution and Independence_, one of Wordsworth's most characteristic,
though certainly not one of his best poems, is a good example of his
capacity and manner of casting over the most everyday incidents and
phenomena a tinge of almost supernatural colour. The poet describes his
walk on a summer morning--the glistening of the dew, the song of the
birds, the fleet racing of the hare across the moor. Then it occurs to
him that he himself has lived as thoughtlessly as the beasts of the
field and the birds of the air, and that such a life is only too likely
one day to bring its own punishment. He calls to mind how many great
poets have ended in misery, and the most prosaic fears for the future
depress him. Then suddenly, in that lonely place, he comes upon an old
man:--

    "The oldest man he seemed that ever wore grey hairs.

     As a huge stone is sometimes seen to lie
     Couched on the bald top of an eminence;
     Wonder to all who do the same espy,
     By what means it could thither come and whence;
     So that it seems a thing endued with sense:
     Like a sea-beast crawled forth, that on a shelf
     Of rock or sand reposeth, there to sun itself;

     Such seemed this man, not all alive nor dead,
     Nor all asleep--in his extreme old age:
     His body was bent double, feet and head
     Coming together in life's pilgrimage;
     As if some dire constraint of pain, or rage
     Of sickness felt by him in times long past,
     A more than human weight upon his frame had cast.
           . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
     Motionless as a cloud the old man stood,
     That heareth not the loud winds when they call;
     And moveth all together, if it move at all."

How clever the double simile is, and what a feeling of mystery it
produces! The old man is like the gigantic stone on the top of the
hill; and the stone in its turn resembles some sea-beast which must
have crawled up there. The impression of great age is most forcibly
produced. This old man seems the oldest man that has ever lived. If we
were in Germany or any other territory of Romanticism, we should not be
surprised to learn that we had the shoemaker of Jerusalem before us.
But we are in England, and our guide is Wordsworth; and the old man
turns out to be a most ordinary human being, by trade a leech-gatherer,
an occupation suited to the capacity of the frail old inhabitants of a
marshy district. The old man's confident, piously resigned words, his
tranquillity of mind even in extreme loneliness and poverty, allay the
young man's fears for the future; and he resolves, whenever such fears
beset him, to think of the leech-gatherer on the lonely moor. "This
is not ode-flight," as Ewald[3] remarks somewhere or other; but it is
a good specimen of Wordsworth's power of giving a certain imprint of
fantasy and grandeur to the most everyday, most realistic material by
his manner of treating it.

The attempt to exercise this capacity has, in not a few of Wordsworth's
poems, resulted in caricature. It has always done so when he has tried
to produce a mystically religious or terrifying effect by endowing
some simply painful or odd incident with the so-called supernatural
quality. We can call it nothing but childish when, in the poem entitled
_The Thorn_, the narrator (whose position in life is not indicated,
but whom Wordsworth himself told Coleridge he had imagined as an old
ship captain, almost in his dotage) tells in the strain of horror with
which one relates a ghost story, the tale of the poor mad woman who
sits at night in a scarlet cloak, weeping and wailing, under the thorn
tree. And _Peter Bell_, the poem which Wordsworth presented to the
public with such a flourish of trumpets, but which, had it not been for
Shelley's satire of the same name, would have been forgotten by this
time, produces the effect of a parody. It tells of the terror induced
in a coarse, cruel man by the supernatural fortitude with which a poor
ass bears the most terrible blows rather than move--a terror which, in
combination with the excited imaginings due to the darkness, brings
about a complete change in the man. Time showed the reason of the ass's
fortitude to have been its desire to draw attention to the fact that
its master had fallen into the river at the spot where it was standing.
We have here a striking contrast--the moral greatness of the brute and
the brutish stupidity of the man--and Wordsworth, who had no sense of
the comic, did not fail to enlarge on the subject.

And that he does so is not a mere accident, but a characteristic
trait. The new school, with its dislike of the brilliant and its love
of the simple and plain, felt a real attraction towards asses, these
obstinate, patient, and peculiarly misunderstood children of nature,
which are always outshone by less contented animals. Coleridge,
in his poem, _To a Young Ass--its mother being tethered near it_,
allowed himself to be carried away by his enthusiasm to the extent
of exclaiming: "I hail thee Brother!" and declaring that if it were
granted him in a better and more equitably ordered state of society to
provide peaceful pasture for this ass, its joyful bray would sound more
melodious in his ears than the sweetest music. It is not surprising
that the scoffer Byron promptly made merry over this fraternal greeting
in his first satire, _English Bards and Scotch Reviewers_. But in
Coleridge this extreme Naturalism did not go deep; he himself was the
first to denounce his own excesses. Wordsworth, on the contrary, who
was by nature consistent, not to say obstinate, carried purely literary
Naturalism to its final and extreme conclusions.

He almost always chose his themes from humble and rustic life; and this
he did, not for the same reason as the French writers of the previous
century, who, themselves elegant and cultivated, enjoyed inelegance and
uncultivatedness with a feeling of superiority, but because he believed
that in that condition of life the essential passions of the heart find
a better soil in which they can attain their maturity, are less under
restraint, and speak a plainer language. He was of opinion that in
that condition our elementary feelings co-exist in a state of greater
simplicity, and consequently may be more accurately contemplated than
in town life; and he was also persuaded that constant association with
the beautiful and permanent forms of nature, in combination with the
necessary and unchanging character of rural occupations, must make all
feelings more durable and strong.

Here, at the moment of the century's birth, we find the germs of
the æsthetic movement, which, spreading from country to country,
continued for more than fifty years to produce, in Germany, France, and
Scandinavia, peasant poetry and peasant tales, and in several countries
a cult of the peasant dialect. By dissecting these germs in the manner
of the botanist, we shall learn the complete natural history of the
plant.

Wordsworth's point of departure is purely _topographical_. There is
more topography, taking the word in its widest sense, in his works
than even in Scott's. His life-task was to describe English nature and
English natures as he saw them, face to face. He would never describe
anything with which he was not perfectly familiar, and he finally
evolved the theory that it was necessary for every poet to associate
himself closely with some one particular spot. He associated himself
with the English Lake district, which provided him with backgrounds for
most of his poems. He went so far as to assert that the birthplace of
the individual is the place best suited to be the scene of the activity
of his whole life.

Thus it was that he became the painter specially of English nature, and
that his descriptions have an essentially local interest. Ruskin was
right when he called Wordsworth the great poetical landscape painter of
the period. Whilst Byron time after time escaped from his own country
to paint the nature of Greece and the East in glowing foreign colours;
whilst Shelley shrank from the climate of England as death to a man of
his delicate constitution, and never wearied of extolling the coast and
rivers of Italy; whilst Scott sang the praises of Scotland, and Moore
tirelessly proclaimed the beauty of green Erin, Wordsworth stood alone
as the pure-bred Englishman, deep-rooted in his native soil as some old
spreading oak. His ambition was to be a true English descriptive poet.
He had the most intimate, circumstantial acquaintance with the life of
the lower classes, and the rural life generally, of the district in
which he had his home, walked, sailed, went to church, and received
visits from his admirers. He has the same eye for it as a worthy and
benevolent parish priest of the type he describes in _The Excursion_.
To his special province belong all the events and calamities of common
occurrence in an English country parish--the return of a totally
forgotten son of the place, to find his home gone and the names of
those dear to him carved on gravestones (_The Brothers_); the fate of a
deceived and deserted girl (_Ruth_); an idiot boy's night ride for the
doctor, with its mischances (_The Idiot Boy_); the strange adventure of
a blind Highland boy, with its fortunate ending (_The Blind Highland
Boy_); the sorrow caused to an excellent father by the degeneracy of
his son (_Michael_); the unfortunate carouse of a carrier beloved
by the whole district, and his consequent dismissal from his post
(described in four cantos under the title _The Waggoner_).

The only thing un-English about the manner in which these events, even
the more cheerful and amusing ones, are communicated to us, is the
complete absence of humour. In the place of humour Wordsworth has,
as Masson aptly puts it, "a hard, benevolent smile." But the pathos
with which he relates the tragic or serious among these simple local
stories is pure and heartfelt. It has neither the Pythian tremor nor
modern fervour, but its effect is all the more powerful in the case
of the great majority of readers, who prefer that the poet should not
rise too high above their level, and are conscious of the helpful,
healing quality in the compassion which is the source of the pathos--a
compassion which resembles that of the clergyman or the doctor, and
which, though less spontaneous than professional, moves us by the
perfection of its expression.

Nowhere more beautiful is this expression than in such poems as _Simon
Lee_ and _The Old Cumberland Beggar_. The former tells of an old
huntsman who in his youth had surpassed all others in his skill with
hounds and horn, his fleetness on foot and on horseback, but who has
become so feeble that when the poet meets him one day he is struggling
in vain to unearth the rotten root of an old tree.

    "You're overtasked, good Simon Lee,
     Give me your tool," to him I said;
     And at the word right gladly he
     Received my proffered aid.
     I struck, and with a single blow
     The tangled root I severed,
     At which the poor old man so long
     And vainly had endeavoured.

     The tears into his eyes were brought,
     And thanks and praises seemed to run
     So fast out of his heart, I thought
     They never would have done.
     I've heard of hearts unkind, kind deeds
     With coldness still returning;
     Alas! the gratitude of men
     Hath oftener left me mourning."

Few poets have shown such beautiful reverence as Wordsworth for those
humble ancients of the human race who, from no fault of their own, are
helpless and useless. Of this _The Old Cumberland Beggar_ is the best
example. The poet tells how this man, whom every one knows, goes round
the neighbourhood calling at every house.

    "Him from my childhood have I known; and then
     He was so old, he seems not older now:
     He travels on, a solitary man,
     So helpless in appearance, that for him
     The sauntering horseman-traveller does not throw
     With careless hand his alms upon the ground,
     But stops,--that he may safely lodge the coin
     Within the old man's hat; nor quits him so,
     But still, when he has given his horse the rein,
     Watches the aged beggar with a look
     Sidelong--and half-reverted. She who tends
     The toll-gate, when in summer at her door
     She turns her wheel, if on the road she sees
     The aged beggar coming, quits her work,
     And lifts the latch for him that he may pass.
     The post-boy, when his rattling wheels o'ertake
     The aged beggar in the woody lane,
     Shouts to him from behind; and, if thus warned
     The old man does not change his course, the boy
     Turns with less noisy wheels to the road-side,
     And passes gently by--without a curse
     Upon his lips or anger in his heart.
           . . . . . . . . . . . . .
     But deem not this man useless.--Statesmen! Ye
     Who are so restless in your wisdom, ye
     Who have a broom still ready in your hands
     To rid the world of nuisances; ye proud,
     Heart-swoln, while in your pride ye contemplate
     Your talents, power, and wisdom, deem him not
     A burthen of the earth! Tis nature's law
     That none, the meanest of created things,
     Of forms created the most vile and brute,
     The dullest or most noxious, should exist
     Divorced from good--a spirit and pulse of good,
     A life and soul; to every mode of being
     Inseparably linked.
           . . . . . . . . . . . . .
     Where'er the aged beggar takes his rounds,
     The mild necessity of use compels
     To acts of love; and habit does the work
     Of reason; yet prepares that after-joy
     Which reason cherishes. And thus the soul,
     By that sweet taste of pleasure unpursued,
     Doth find itself insensibly disposed
     To virtue and true goodness. . . .
     . . . . . . . . . The easy man
     Who sits at his own door,--and, like the pear
     That overhangs his head from the green wall,
     Feeds in the sunshine; the robust and young,
     The prosperous and unthinking, they who live
     Sheltered, and flourish in a little grove
     Of their own kindred;--all behold in him
     A silent monitor, which on their minds
     Must needs impress a transitory thought
     Of self-congratulation."

Though it must be confessed that this is a sermon, it is a sermon
in the very best style. In that same Naturalism which in due time
consistently developed into pure humanism and revolt against
convention, there was at first an inclination to admonition and to
evangelic piety. It sought out the simple-hearted, the poor, the
mean in the eyes of the world--for this was Gospel morality. It
rejected the highly cultured, and chose as its heroes fishermen and
peasants--in this also following Gospel example. Hence it is that we
have in Wordsworth perfectly consistent worship of nature along with
the exhortatory and evangelically homiletic element which finds such
favour in England. And even his purely didactic poems are not to be
indiscriminately rejected. There is often a peculiar grandeur in the
manner in which the simple lesson is enforced. There is, for instance,
real sublimity in the passage in _Laodamia_ in which it is impressed
upon the sorrowing wife that, instead of craving for the return of her
husband, she ought to renounce her desire, and purify herself through
her love to enjoy another, nobler, more spiritual life:--

    "Learn by a mortal yearning to ascend
     Towards a higher object.--Love was given,
     Encouraged, sanctioned, chiefly for that end:
     For this the passion to excess was driven--
     That self might be annulled."

Even the abstract _Ode to Duty_, which is inspired by an enthusiasm of
the nature of Kant's, contains a couple of magnificent lines which are
as contrary to reason as one of the sublime paradoxes of the Fathers of
the Church. It is to Duty that the poet cries:

    "Thou dost preserve the Stars from wrong;
     And the most ancient Heavens, through thee, are fresh and strong."

From all the poems of this species, however, the reader will quickly
turn again to Wordsworth's specialty, his idylls.

Let us cast another glance at these, and at the theory which their
author intended them to illustrate. It is quite certain that Wordsworth
attributed more poetical importance to the representation of rural
life than is really its due. His surroundings were calculated to
produce this theoretical overvaluation. The possibility of making
heroes of the shepherd-farmers of Cumberland and Westmoreland was due
to the fact that these men (who, though they were independent enough
not to be compelled to work for others, were nevertheless obliged to
lead an industrious, frugally simple life) possessed real poetical
qualifications. The theory that rural life in itself improves and
ennobles, is a superstition; it is quite as apt to dull and blunt.
Coleridge has, for example, pointed out that when the manner in which
the poor-laws were administered in Liverpool, Manchester, and Bristol,
was compared with the manner in which relief was distributed in the
country, the result was distinctly in favour of the towns.

Wordsworth has, further, over-estimated the importance of the part
which the representation of rural occupations plays in his own poetry.
Not only do we observe that many of the principal personages in his
best poems (such as _Ruth, Michael, The Brothers_) are not expressly
peasants or dwellers in the country; but we are also conscious that
his passion for Naturalism and, in close connection with this, his
inclination to try to edify by glorification of the lower classes,
have often led him to attribute to a man or woman of low position,
qualities and powers which there is little probability of his or her
possessing. A paradox which he enounces with evident satisfaction in
_The Excursion_ is, that many a gifted poet exists, unsuspected, among
the lower classes.[4] It is satisfactory to a man with Wordsworth's
religious tendencies to believe that talent is independent of wealth
and outward position. But even allowing this to be true, would it
not still be absurd to make the poet-hero of a poem a chimney-sweep
by profession, and then explain in a carefully invented biography
how it came to pass that he was, at one and the same time, poet,
philosopher, and sweep? Only in real biography are such phenomena
permissible; in fiction, Naturalism carried to such an extreme repels
by its unlikeliness. And what difference is there between this and
the many cases in which Wordsworth puts into the mouth of a pedlar, a
leech-gatherer, a labourer, words which we cannot but be astonished
to hear from such lips? Hence, to justify and explain his characters,
he is obliged to introduce numbers of accidental, subordinate details
of the kind required to prove the possibility of a fact in real life,
but of the kind which we willingly forgo in poetry. The excessive
attention paid to probability, the petty anxiety to explain the
reason of everything, have a fatiguing effect--especially in the long
introductions and descriptions in _The Excursion_, which Byron wittily
calls Wordsworth's "eternal: Here we go up, up, and up, and here we go
down, down, and here round about, round about!"

Wordsworth's choice of themes leads him, moreover, to a singularity
in the matter of language which may be termed the extreme literary
issue of this Naturalism. It was his theory that the language spoken
by the class which he described was, when purified from its defects,
the best of all, "because such men hourly communicate with the best
objects from which the best part of language is originally derived; and
because, from their rank in society and the sameness and narrow circle
of their intercourse, being less under the influence of social vanity,
they convey their feelings and emotions in simple and unelaborated
expressions." It is, consequently, his opinion, that it is impossible
for any author to find a better manner of expression, no matter
whether he is writing in prose or in verse. And this leads him to the
enunciation of his famous and interesting paradox: _that there neither
is nor can be any essential difference between the language of prose
and metrical composition_. If this only meant disapprobation of all the
tiresome and foolish distortions of language, to which the scarcity of
rhymes and the lack of the gift of rhythm have driven so many of even
the most eminent poets, we should heartily agree with him. Théodore de
Banville has, with reason on his side--though it is the severe reason
which demands the impossible--given as contents to the chapter in
his _Petit Traité de Poésie française_ entitled _Licentia poetica_,
simply the words: "Il n'y en a pas." But it is an entirely different
meaning which Wordsworth intends his maxim to convey. He maintains
not only that the language of a large portion of every good poem must
necessarily, except with reference to the metre, in no respect differ
from that of good prose, but likewise that some of the most interesting
parts of the very best poems will be found to be strictly the language
of prose. For, however lively and truthful the poet's language may be,
there cannot be a doubt, says Wordsworth, that it must, in liveliness
and truth, fall far short of that which is uttered by men in real life;
in other words--it can never surpass, and only at its best approach,
the prose of reality. This theory he defended with genuine English
obstinacy against the attacks made upon it from every direction. He
quotes, as a specimen of the parodies of poetry in which the language
closely resembles that of life and nature, Dr. Johnson's stanza:

    "I put my hat upon my head
     And walked into the Strand,
     And there I met another man,
     Whose hat was in his hand."

This is not poetry, says the public. Granted! says Wordsworth. But
the proper thing to be said is not: This is not poetry; but: This is
wanting in meaning; it is neither interesting in itself, nor can it
lead to anything interesting; consequently it cannot excite thought
or feeling in the reader. "Why take pains to prove that an ape is not
a Newton, when it is self-evident that he is not a man?" The accepted
idea is, according to Wordsworth, that an author, by the act of writing
in verse, makes a formal engagement that he will gratify certain known
habits of association, that certain classes of idea and expression will
be found in his book, but that others will be carefully excluded. This
doctrine Wordsworth opposes with the declaration of his conviction of
the similarity of good poetry and good prose, a conviction which was
founded on dislike of poetic affectation, but which led him in his own
poetry, now to the narrowest limitation, now to the utmost possible
flattening out of his own in many respects masterly and model style.

There is more than one argument against the extremely high estimation
of the language of the rural population which forms Wordsworth's
starting-point, and which is not without its resemblance to the cult of
the peasant language initiated in Denmark by Grundtvig and in Norway
by the "Maalstrævere" (agitators for the universal employment of a
Norwegian based on the peasant dialects). The principal one is, that
the language of the peasant, purified, as Wordsworth demands, from
provincial expressions and subjected to the rules of grammar, is not
different from that of any other sensible man, except in this, that the
peasant's ideas are fewer and vaguer. By reason of its inferior degree
of development, his mind dwells only upon single, isolated facts, drawn
from his own narrow experience, or from the records of traditional
belief, whereas the educated man sees the connection between things,
and seeks for universal laws. Wordsworth is of opinion that the
_best_ part of language is derived from the objects which surround
and occupy the peasant. But the ideas connected with food, shelter,
safety, comfort, are surely not those which provide the best part of
language. Nor can we agree with him when he asserts that nothing but
the infusion of a certain degree of passion into this language is
required to entitle it to be called poetic; for passion neither creates
new thoughts nor new provision of words; it only increases the force of
those already in existence; it cannot be expected to make the language
of daily intercourse poetry, when it is hardly capable of making it
prose.

What strikes us from the very first in Wordsworth's vindication of
Naturalism is his confounding of two things--prose, and what he calls
"ordinary language" terms which he applies indiscriminately. Good prose
is language which has been purified from the vain and meaningless
repetitions and the uncertain, halting phraseology which are the
inevitable outcome of the confusion due to insufficient education.
Wordsworth has too frequently neglected this purifying process,
when introducing dramatic dialogue into his own poems. It is this
unfortunate passion for the most grovellingly exact imitation, which
produces the sudden and disagreeable transitions from passages in a
noble, elevated style, to passages with no style at all. See, for
example, _The Blind Highland Boy_.

"Poetry," says Wordsworth, "takes its origin from emotion recollected
in tranquillity." The aim of the poet is the truthful imitation of
nature, with the one restriction, that of the necessity of giving
pleasure--not merely the straightforward, direct truth; therefore he
employs the metrical form of composition, which provides the reader
with small, but continual and regular impulses of pleasurable surprise.
Metre produces its effect by continually arousing and satisfying
curiosity, but in such a simple manner that it does not draw any
separate attention to itself. It acts powerfully but unobservedly upon
the mind, like artificially altered air, or the wine drunk during an
eager discussion. By its steady recurrence it tempers and modifies
the excitement or pain produced by the intelligence communicated;
and by its tendency to divest language of its reality, it throws a
sort of half consciousness of unsubstantial existence over the whole
composition. Except for this, declares Wordsworth, even the best poetry
can in no respect differ from prose. He forgets to ask himself if
there are not numbers of common phrases and expressions which, though
they are perfectly allowable in prose, would produce a most unpleasant
effect in poetry; and forgets, too, to ask if it is not possible that
in every serious poem there may occur, without any artificiality,
sentences of a construction, and imagery of a kind, which would be
impossible in prose.

The only way in which the best poetry corresponds with "the very
language of men," is in its expressions resembling those which some
few of the most highly cultivated would use on the rarest occasions.
In daily converse language wanders unrestrainedly; in public speech it
is restrained by imperative connection and continuity of thought; in
the prose work, the carefully elaborated sentence progresses naturally
through all its twists and turnings; in verse, the form cannot be too
exquisite or too compact. Here the doctrine applies which Théophile
Gautier preached in his splendid poem, _L'Art_:--

    "Oui, l'œuvre sort plus belle
     D'une forme au travail
     Rebelle,
     _Vers_, marbre, onyx, émail!

     Point de contraintes fausses!
     Mais que pour marcher droit
     Tu chausses,
     Muse, un cothurne étroit!"

But, however much there is to be said against Wordsworth's poetics, or
"prosaics," as they might more correctly be called--against theories
which were at first accepted as synonymous with the "Fair is foul, and
foul is fair" of the witches in Macbeth--they are in the highest degree
interesting to the student of literature to-day as an accurate and
unambiguous expression of the first literary extreme to which English
Naturalism went.


[1] R. S. Mackenzie: _Life of Dickens_, p. 243.

[2] Masson: _Wordsworth, Shelley, Keats, and other Essays_.

[3] Johannes Ewald, a Danish poet.--Transcriber's note.

[4]

    Oh! many are the poets that are sown
    By nature! men endowed with highest gifts,
    The vision and the faculty divine,
    Yet wanting the accomplishment of verse.
    --_Excursion_: Book I.





VII


NATURALISTIC ROMANTICISM


We have for a moment lost sight of Coleridge. When Wordsworth and he
divided the new kinds of poetry between them, there fell to his share,
as the reader will remember, a task which was the exact opposite of
Wordsworth's, namely, the treating of supernatural subjects in a
natural manner. He fulfilled it in his contributions to the volume
published under the title of _Lyrical Ballads_, and indeed in the
greater proportion of the little collection of poems which entitles him
to rank high among English poets.

[Illustration: S. T. COLERIDGE]

Samuel Taylor Coleridge was a country boy, the son of a Devonshire
clergyman. He was born in October 1772. From 1782 to 1790 he was at
school in London. It was during those school-days, spent at Christ's
Hospital, that his friendship with another English Romanticist, his
warm admirer, Charles Lamb, was formed. From 1791 to 1793 he studied
at Cambridge. He had neither means nor prospects, and in a fit of
despair, occasioned either by his debts or by an unhappy love affair,
he suddenly enlisted in the 15th Regiment of Light Dragoons, under the
name of Silas Titus Cumberback.[1] It certainly does not seem to have
been ambition (as in the case of Johannes Ewald a few years earlier)
which prompted him to try his fortune as a soldier, but simply want of
any other means of subsistence. He was only four months a dragoon. On
the stable wall underneath his saddle, he one day scribbled the Latin
lament:--

     "Eheu quam infortuni miserrimum est fuisse felicem!"

This was discovered by his captain, who inquired into the position
of affairs, and arranged with Coleridge's family for his return to
Cambridge. On this followed the short period during which the young
poet was an anti-orthodox democrat. As such he could expect no
advancement in the University. His and Southey's glorification of
Robespierre (the first act of _The Fall of Robespierre_ was written
by Coleridge, the second and third are Southey's) and their wild
project of a communistic settlement have been already mentioned. The
little emigrant society they founded consisted only of themselves and
two other members, a young Quaker named Lovell, and George Burnet, a
school friend of Southey's. But the God Hymen had decided that the
year 1795 should witness the wreck of the plans which boded so ill
for society. In 1795 Coleridge went to lecture at Bristol, where he
displayed the eloquence which (as in the case of the similarly eloquent
and persuasive Welhaven) seems to have sapped his power of poetic
production. A young lady in the town of Bristol won his heart; and
before the year was over, Sara Fricker was married to Coleridge, her
sisters, Edith and Mary, to Lovell and Southey--and the emigration plan
was abandoned. Coleridge, who was without will-power all his life,
could never have carried out a plan laid so long beforehand. He never
succeeded in doing anything except what he had not determined to do, or
what, from its nature, could not be determined beforehand.

In 1796 the young man, who was still an enthusiastic Unitarian, allowed
himself to be persuaded by some other philanthropists--he is always
"persuaded"--to publish a weekly magazine called _The Watchman_, which
was to consist of thirty-two pages, large octavo, and to cost the
reasonable price of fourpence. Its flaming prospectus bore the motto,
"Knowledge is power." With the object of enlisting subscribers, the
young and ardent propagandist undertook a tour of the country between
Bristol and Sheffield, preaching in most of the great towns, "as an
hireless volunteer, in a blue coat and white waistcoat, that not a rag
of the woman of Babylon might be seen on me." The description he has
given of this, his Odyssey, shows us the young English Romanticist as
he was then and as he continued to be--imprudent in worldly matters,
enthusiastic in behalf now of this, now of that religious or political
half-truth, yet with a humorous appreciation of his own and others'
ridiculousness.

"My campaign commenced at Birmingham; and my first attack was on a
rigid Calvinist, a tallow-chandler by trade. He was a tall, dingy man,
in whom length was so predominant over breadth that he might almost
have been borrowed for a foundry poker. O that face! I have it before
me at this moment. The lank, black, twine-like hair, _pinguinitescent_,
cut in a straight line along the black stubble of his thin gunpowder
eyebrows, that looked like a scorched after-math from a last week's
shaving. His coat collar behind in perfect unison, both of colour and
lustre, with the coarse yet glib cordage that I suppose he called
his hair, and which with a bend inward at the nape of the neck (the
only approach to flexure in his whole figure) slunk in behind his
waistcoat; while the countenance, lank, dark, very hard, and with
strong perpendicular furrows, gave me a dim notion of some one looking
at me through a used gridiron, all soot, grease, and iron! But he was
one of the thorough-bred, a true lover of liberty, and (I was informed)
had proved to the satisfaction of many, that Mr. Pitt was one of
the horns of the second beast in the Revelation, _that spoke like a
dragon_." For half-an-hour Coleridge employed all the resources of his
eloquence--argued, described, promised, prophesied, beginning with the
captivity of nations and ending with the millennium. "My taper man of
lights listened with perseverance and praiseworthy patience, though (as
I was afterwards told on complaining of certain odours that were not
altogether ambrosial) it was a melting-day with him. 'And what, sir,'
he said, after a short pause, 'might the cost be?' 'Only fourpence,
only fourpence, sir, each number, to be published on every eighth day.'
'That comes to a good deal of money at the end of the year. And how
much did you say there was to be for the money?' 'Thirty-two pages,
sir! large octavo, closely printed.' 'Thirty and two pages? Bless me,
why, except what I does in a family way on the Sabbath, that's more
than I ever reads, sir! all the year round. I am as great a one as
any man in Brummagem, sir! for liberty and truth and all them sort of
things, but as to this, no offence, sir, I must beg to be excused.'"

Thus ended Coleridge's first attempt at recruiting for the war against
the Holy Trinity. His second he made in Manchester, where he tried to
enlist a stately and opulent wholesale dealer in cottons. This man
measured him from top to toe, and asked if he had any bill or invoice
of the thing. Coleridge presented him with the prospectus. He rapidly
skimmed and hummed over the first side, and still more rapidly the
second and concluding page, then most deliberately and significantly
rubbed and smoothed one part against the other, put it in his pocket,
turned his back with an "Overrun with these articles!" and retired into
his counting-house.

After these unsuccessful attempts, the young man gave up the plan of
canvassing from house to house, but nevertheless returned from this
memorable tour with almost a thousand names on his list of subscribers.
But, alas! the publication of the very first number was, as any one
knowing Coleridge might have expected, delayed beyond the day announced
for its appearance; the second, which contained an essay against
fast-days, lost him nearly five hundred subscribers at a blow; and the
two following numbers, which were full of attacks on French philosophy
and morals, and directed against those "who pleaded to the poor and
ignorant instead of pleading for them," made enemies of all his Jacobin
and democratic patrons. Coleridge, who communicates all these details
himself, does not seem to have any suspicion that he was only receiving
a natural punishment for his indecision--an indecision which consisted
in never being prepared to accept the consequences of his own theories.
He was undecided in politics, undecided in religion. Writing, as an old
man, of this time, he himself says: "My head was with Spinoza, though
my whole heart remained with Paul and John;" and he hastens to provide
his readers with those convincing proofs of the existence of God and
the Holy Trinity which he had not been capable of perceiving in his
youth.[2] After the appearance of about a dozen numbers, _The Watchman_
had to be given up, and Coleridge took to writing for the newspapers.
He began by attacking Pitt's Government, but in course of time, his
opinions tending ever more in a conservative direction, he became
its ardent supporter, and also, after the occupation of Switzerland
by the French, an enemy of France. So hostile to that country were
his articles in the _Morning Post_, that they even attracted the
attention of Napoleon, and Coleridge became the object of the First
Consul's special enmity. He would probably have been arrested during
his residence in Italy, if he had not received timely warning from the
Prussian ambassador, Wilhelm von Humboldt, and, through an inferior
official, from Napoleon's own uncle, Cardinal Fesch.

The year 1797, in the course of which Coleridge became acquainted with
Wordsworth, was, as regards his poetry, the most important in his life;
for it was in this year that he wrote his famous ballad, _The Ancient
Mariner_, and _Christabel_, the fragment which marks a new era in
English poetry.

_Christabel_ was planned as the first of a series of poetical romances,
the remainder of which never came into being. It is, without doubt, the
first English poem which is permeated by the genuine Romantic spirit;
and the new cadences, the new theme, the new style of versification,
the novelty generally, made a powerful impression on contemporary
poets. The irregular and yet melodious metre appealed so strongly to
Scott that he employed it in his first Romantic poem, _The Lay of the
Last Minstrel_. He frankly confesses how much he owed to the beautiful
and tantalising fragment, _Christabel_, which he, like the other poets
of the period, made acquaintance with in manuscript; for Coleridge
read it aloud in social gatherings for twenty years before it saw the
light as public property. Byron, too, heard it first on one of these
occasions. Before hearing it he had, in one of his longer poems (_The
Siege of Corinth_, xix.), written some lines which were not unlike some
in _Christabel_. To these lines he, on a future occasion, appended a
note in which he praises Coleridge's "wild and singularly original
and beautiful poem." But we see from Moore's _Life and Letters_ that
there were critics who refused the meed of admiration accorded to
_Christabel_ by Scott and Byron, and still more freely by Wordsworth.
Jeffrey and Moore himself consider it affected (_Memoirs_, ii 101;
iv. 48). Danish critics, thoroughly initiated into the mysteries of
this style by Tieck and the brothers Schlegel, and by their own poet
Ingemann, cannot possibly attach so much importance to this fragment.
Its excessive naïveté and simplicity, the intentional childishness
in style and tone, are to us what buns are to bakers' children. The
chief merit of the poem, apart from its full-toned, sweet melody, lies
in the peculiar power with which the nature of the wicked fairy is
presented to us, the _dæmonic_ element, which had never been present
in such force in English literature before. We must, however, remember
that, though the first part of the poem was written in 1797, the second
was written and the first revised in 1800--that is to say, _after_
Coleridge had travelled with Wordsworth in Germany, and there made
acquaintance with contemporary German poetry, its medieval ground-work,
and its latest tendency.

Coleridge's one other poem of any length, _The Ancient Mariner_, which
is even more artificially naïve in style than _Christabel_, and is
provided, in the manner of the medieval ballads retailed in the little
shops in back streets, with a prose index of contents on the margin
of the pages, is now the most popular of all his poems, although it
was fiercely attacked on its first appearance. On a very unnatural
introduction (three guests on their way to a wedding are stopped,
and one of them is led to forget his destination, so eloquent is the
ancient mariner--"and on the street, too," as Falstaff says) follows a
story of all the horrors, ghostly and material, which ensue, because
one of the sailors on a ship has been thoughtless enough to kill an
albatross which had alighted on the rigging. The whole crew, with
the exception of this one man, die, as a punishment for the act of
inhospitality. Swinburne tells that, when the poem was new, the English
critics were greatly occupied with the question whether its moral (that
one should not shoot albatrosses) was not so preponderant that it
destroyed the fantastic effect of the poem; whilst others maintained
that the defect of the poem was its want of a practical moral. Long
afterwards the same matter formed the subject of a dispute between
Freiligrath and Julian Schmidt. Modern criticism would willingly excuse
the absence of any moral in the ballad if it could find a poetic
central idea in it.

A comparison may serve to show its chief shortcoming. In a collection
of poems by the Austrian lyric poet, Moritz Hartmann, entitled
_Zeitlosen_, there is to be found one which, although it does not
profess to owe its origin to _The Ancient Mariner_, at first sight
strikes the reader as being a direct imitation of it. The metrical form
is the same, and in the theme there is a close resemblance. _Der Camao_
is the title of the poem. The Camao, which answers to Coleridge's
albatross, is a bird which, in the Middle Ages, was kept in every
house in the Pyrenean Peninsula, and treated with a reverence which
had its source in a widespread superstition. It was believed, namely,
that this bird could not thrive in a house on which rested the stain
of a wife's infidelity; it died if there was even the slightest spot
on the honour of its master. Its beautiful cage generally hung in the
entrance chamber. In Hartmann's poem the old, deranged man who answers
to Coleridge's demented mariner, tells how he, as a page, was seized
with a violent passion for his master's wife, and how, every time he
rushed from her presence, in despair at her coldness and displeasure,
he was tortured as he left her apartments by the bird's song in honour
of the chastity of the lady to whom it owed its life. The master of the
house returns from the war bringing with him his friend, a handsome
young minstrel and hero, whom the lady honours with her friendship, and
who is, in consequence, soon hated by the jealous page. Quite beside
himself, the young man denounces the lady and her friend to his master;
but the latter calmly answers that Camao is still alive, and at that
moment singing in his mistress's honour. In his jealous, vindictive
rage the page kills the bird; Vasco kills his wife; and thenceforward
the criminal wanders, demented and restless, from country to country,
seeking rest, but finding it nowhere.

As regards virtuosity and originality in the matter of diction, _Der
Camao_ is not for a moment to be compared with _The Ancient Mariner_;
but as regards the poetic central idea, the German poem is not only
much superior to its English model, but is in itself a complete,
satisfactory criticism of Coleridge's ballad and all the artificial
English theories which it represents. In _Der Camao_ the slaughter of
the bird is a real human action performed with a real human motive; the
punishment is not a caprice, but a just and natural consequence of the
misdeed. The misfortune which the killing of the bird brings to Vasco
and his wife has a natural cause and effect connection with that deed,
whilst the death of the whole ship's crew, as the result of the cruelty
shown to the albatross, is folly. The comparison assists us to a clear
understanding of the difference between a true poetical conception of
the superstitious idea and a Romantic treatment of it. The story in
both poems is founded on a superstition. Hartmann has no desire to
submit the superstition to the criticism of reason; but he forces it
upon no one; the beauty of his poem is quite independent of the belief
or disbelief of his reader in the miraculous susceptibility of the
Camao. Romantic extravagance, on the other hand, proclaims reverence
for the marvellous and inexplicable to be the sum and substance of all
wisdom and of all poetry.

But though _The Ancient Mariner_ may not take a high place when
compared with poetry which has extricated itself from Romantic
swaddling-bands, it stands high above most of the kindred productions
of German Romanticism. In spite of all its Romantic fictitiousness, it
breathes of the sea, the real, natural sea, whose changing moods and
whose terrifying, menacing immensity it describes. The fresh breeze,
the seething foam, the horrible fog, and the hot, copper-coloured
evening sky with its blood-red sun--all these elements are nature's
own; and the misery of the men tossing helplessly on the ocean, the
starvation, the burning thirst that drives them to suck the blood from
their own arms, the pallid countenances, the terrible death-rattle, the
horrible putrefaction--all these elements are realities, represented
with English realistic force.

And it is a very English trait that Coleridge himself should have
been thoroughly capable of seeing the weak points of such a poem as
his own famous ballad. The national quality of humour assisted him to
this independence of judgment. We have the following anecdote from his
own pen. "An amateur performer in verse expressed a strong desire to
be introduced to me, but hesitated in accepting my friend's immediate
offer, on the score that he was, he must acknowledge, the author of a
confounded severe epigram on my _Ancient Mariner_, which had given me
great pain. I assured my friend that if the epigram was a good one, it
would only increase my desire to become acquainted with the author, and
begged to hear it recited, when, to my no less surprise than amusement,
it proved to be one which I had myself inserted in the _Morning Post_."
When Coleridge tells us, too, that he himself wrote three sonnets
expressly for the purpose of exciting a good-natured laugh at the
artificial simplicity and doleful egotism of the new poetical tendency,
and that he took the elaborate and swelling language and imagery of
these sonnets from his own poems, we cannot deny that his endeavours to
keep free from the entanglement in theories which was the weak point in
German Romanticism, bespeak rare intellectual superiority.

It was, nevertheless, from Germany that Coleridge's intellect received
its most invigorating and essential nourishment. He was the first
Englishman who penetrated into the forest of German literature, which
was as yet unexplored by foreigners; he made his way into it about
the same time as Madame de Staël, the pioneer of the Latin races.
Whilst he was producing the famous poems just described, he began the
study of German. Schiller and Kant attracted him first. In 1798 he
and Wordsworth went to Germany on a literary voyage of discovery. In
Hamburg they visited the patriarch Klopstock, who praised Bürger to
them, but spoke coldly and disparagingly of the rest of the younger
literary men, and especially of Coleridge's idols, Kant and Schiller.
The latter's _Die Räuber_ he professed himself unable to read. But
he had plenty to say on the subject of _The Messiah_ and his extreme
satisfaction with the English translations of it. While in Germany,
Coleridge studied the Gothic language, and read the Meistersingers and
Hans Sachs; and on his return he published a translation of Schiller's
_Wallenstein_, the play which Benjamin Constant was soon afterwards to
adapt for the French stage.

It was about this time that Coleridge settled in the _Lake_ district,
where Wordsworth and Southey had already taken up their abode--the
district which gave its name to the literary school constituted, as
their contemporaries chose to consider, by these three poets. The
name, as a matter of fact, does not mean much more than if, in Denmark
in 1830, Hauch, Ingemann, Wilster, and Peder Hjort, had been dubbed
Sorists. The English poets of the Lake School were quite as unlike
each other in their gifts as were these Sorö professors[3] But the
criticism of the day always coupled Coleridge's name with Wordsworth's
and Southey's because it was known that he was on intimate and friendly
terms with them, because he never missed an opportunity of praising
them, nor they of praising him, and because he and the other Lakists
were crowned every three months with fresh laurels in the _Quarterly
Review_, whilst the sinner Byron was chastised with fresh scorpions.
Though Coleridge published almost nothing, Wordsworth and Southey were
hardly ever under the cascade of criticism without some drops of it
falling upon him. The circumstance that the Lake poets aimed (in much
the same manner as the Pre-Raphaelite and the Nazarene painters) at
poetic intensity, a childlike disposition and a childlike faith, pious
blandness and priestly unction, exposed the man who could not but be
regarded as the teacher of the school to much satire and derision. As
a youth, in his poem _Fire, Famine, and Slaughter_, Coleridge had made
all the horrors, one by one, reply to the question: Who bid you rage?
with the following refrain, applying to Pitt:--

    "Who bade you do't?
          The same! the same!
     Letters four do form his name.
     He let me loose, and cried Halloo!
     To him alone the praise is due."

Now he was Mr. Pitt's journalistic henchman, and, like all the other
members of the Lake School, a strict Tory, the enemy of liberal
opinions in everything relating to church and state. What wonder that
he was classed along with the others in the constant party attacks made
by the Liberals! And yet it would have been so easy and so natural
to distinguish him as a poet from all the others, and to pay him the
honour which was due to his originality. The few poems which he wrote
in the course of a comparatively long life are distinguished by the
exquisite melodiousness of their language; their harmonies are not only
delicate and insinuating like Shelley's, but contrapuntally constructed
and rich; they have a peculiar, ponderous sweetness; each line has
the taste and weight of a drop of honey. In poems such as _Love_ and
_Lewti_, which are the two sweetest, and in an Oriental fantasy like
_Kubla Khan_, which was inspired by a dream, we hear Coleridge flute
and pipe and sing with all the changing cadences of the most exquisite
nightingale voice. It is Swinburne who makes the apt remark that, in
the matter of harmonies, Shelley is, compared with Coleridge, what a
lark is compared with a nightingale.

But Coleridge's poetry is as unplastic as it is melodious, and as
unimpassioned as it is mellifluous. It is of the fantastic Romantic
order; that is to say, it neither expresses strong, personally
experienced emotions, nor reproduces what the author has observed in
the surrounding world. In this last connection it is interesting to
know that Coleridge's long tour in the south was altogether without
results as far as his poetry was concerned. The only poem he brought
home with him, the _Hymn Before Sunrise in the Vale of Chamouni_, a
valley in which he never set foot, was composed with the assistance
of the description of the locality given by the well-known Danish
authoress, Friederike Brun. His historic sense was as defective as his
sense of locality. He says himself: "Dear Sir Walter Scott and myself
are exact, but harmonious opposites in this--that every old ruin,
hill, river, or tree called up in his mind a host of historical or
biographical associations ... whereas for myself, I believe I should
walk on the plain of Marathon without taking more interest in it than
in any other plain of similar features.... Charles Lamb wrote an essay
on a man who lived in past time:--I thought of adding another to it
on one who lived not _in time_ at all, past, present, or future--but
beside or collaterally."[4] His poetry is, thence, in the literal sense
of the word, visionary; the poem which the best critics consider the
finest, he composed in a dream.

In his own life there was as little of will and plan as in a dream.
Somewhat indolent by nature, he became more and more procrastinating
as years went on; and the result of his procrastination was an
accumulation of difficulties which he had not energy and application
enough to overcome. To relieve physical suffering he had recourse to
opium, and soon became a confirmed opium-eater, thereby increasing his
incapacity to carry out any plan. After a period of wandering, living
first in one, then in another friend's house, and either writing for
magazines or giving lectures on the history of literature, he decided
that he was unfit to manage himself and his affairs, and from 1816
onwards he lived at Highgate in the house and under the control of a
doctor named Gillman--separated from his own family, whom he left to
the care of his friend and brother-in-law, Southey.

On the indulgence in opium followed remorse and self-reproach and
increasingly orthodox piety. Most of what Coleridge now wrote was
written with the object of refuting the heresies of his youth and
defending the doctrine of the Trinity and the Church of England against
all attacks.[5] Emerson, who paid him a visit, describes him as "old
and preoccupied"; enraged by the effrontery with which a handful of
Priestleians dared to attack the doctrine of the Trinity propounded
by Paul and accepted unchallenged for centuries; and falling in his
talk into all manner of commonplaces. Eighteen years passed, spent
in dreaming, talking, and composing edifying essays. His influence
during this period was due much less to his productive power than to
the manner in which he incited to production. He stimulated and goaded
others to the pitch of expressing themselves publicly. Residing close
to London, and constantly visited, because of his conversational
powers, by the best writers of the day--Charles Lamb, Wordsworth,
Southey, Leigh Hunt, Hazlitt, Carlyle--he was a looker-on on life
during the years when the great representatives of the opposite
intellectual tendency to his, Shelley and Byron, were pouring forth
their fiery denunciations of the order of society and state which he
considered so excellent. Without will of his own, under control, and
himself protected like a child, Coleridge became ever more and more the
would-be protector of society, whilst the two great poets of liberty,
banished from their homes and thrown entirely on their own resources,
developed an independence unexampled in the history of literature, and,
protected neither by themselves nor any one else, were shattered long
before their time by the ardour of conflict. The right of personal
investigation and personal liberty were as precious treasures to them
as the Church of England was to Coleridge.


[1] "Being at a loss, when suddenly asked my name, I answered
Cumberback; and verily my habits were so little equestrian, that my
horse, I doubt not, was of that opinion."

[2] See _Biographia Literaria_.


[3] Sorö Akademi is a Danish public school. (Transcriber's note.)

[4] _Specimens of the Table Talk of the Late Samuel T. Coleridge_, ii
225.

[5] "On the Constitution of Church and State according to the Ideal of
Each": _Lay Sermons_.




VIII


THE LAKE SCHOOL'S CONCEPTION OF LIBERTY


Coleridge and the other members of the Lake School would never have
dreamt of calling themselves anything but warm friends of liberty; the
days were past when the reactionaries called themselves by another
name. Coleridge wrote one of his most beautiful poems, the _Ode to
France_, in the form of a hymn to liberty, to his constant love for
which he calls clouds, waves, and forests to testify; and Wordsworth,
who dedicated two long series of his poems to liberty, regarded himself
as her acknowledged champion. A cursory glance at the works of these
poets might well leave us with the impression that they were as true
lovers of liberty as Moore, or Shelley, or Byron. But the word liberty
in their mouths meant something different from what it did in Moore's,
or Shelley's, or Byron's. To understand this we must dissect the word
by means of two simple questions: freedom, from what?--liberty, to do
what?

To these conservative poets freedom is a perfectly definite thing,
a right which England has and the other countries of Europe have
not--the right of a country to govern itself, un-tyrannised over by
an autocratic ruler of foreign extraction. The country which has this
privilege is free. By liberty, then, the men in question understood
freedom from foreign political tyranny; there is no thought of liberty
of action in their conception at all. Look through Wordsworth's
_Sonnets Dedicated to Liberty_, and see what it is they celebrate.
It is the struggle of the different nations against Napoleon, who is
described as a species of Antichrist. (Scott calls him "the Devil on
his burning throne.")

The poet mourns the conquest of Spain, Switzerland, Venice, the Tyrol,
by the French; he chants the praises of Hofer, the undaunted, of brave
Schill, and daring Toussaint L'Ouverture, the men who ventured to face
the fierce conquerors; and he sings with quite as great admiration
of the King of Sweden, who with romantically chivalrous folly threw
down the gauntlet to Napoleon, and proclaimed his longing for the
restoration of the Bourbons. (Ere long Victor Hugo and Lamartine, in
their character of supporters of the Legitimist monarchy, followed
suit in singing the praises of the Swedish king and his son, Prince
Gustavus Vasa.) Hatred of Napoleon becomes aversion for France. In one
of the sonnets ("Inland, within a hollow vale, I stood") Wordsworth
tells how the "barrier flood" between England and France for a moment
seemed to him to have dwindled to the dimensions of a river, and how he
shrank from the thought of "the frightful neighbourhood"; in another he
rejoices in the remembrance of the great men and great books England
has produced, and remarks that France has brought forth "no single
volume paramount ... no master spirit," that with her there is "equally
a want of books and men."

He always comes back to England. His sonnets are one long declaration
of love to the country for which he feels "as a lover or a child," the
country of which he writes: "Earth's best hopes are all with thee." He
follows her through her long war, celebrating, like Southey, each of
her victories; and it is significant of his attitude that, appended
to the _Sonnets Dedicated to Liberty_, we find the great, pompous
thanksgiving ode for the battle of Waterloo. We of to-day ask what kind
of liberty it was that Waterloo gained; but we know full well that the
group of poets whose heroes were the national heroes--Pitt, Nelson, and
Wellington, and who sang the praises of the English constitution as
being in itself liberty, and lauded England as the model nation, won a
degree of favour with the majority of their countrymen to which their
great poetic antagonists have not even yet attained. Wordsworth and his
school considered the nation ideal as it was, whereas the others tried
to compel it to turn its eyes towards an ideal, not only unattained,
but as yet unrecognised; the former flattered it, and were rewarded
with laurels; the latter educated and castigated it, and were spurned
by it. Scott was offered the post of Poet Laureate, and Southey and
Wordsworth in turn occupied it; but to this day the English nation has
shown no public recognition of what it owes to Shelley and Byron.[1]
And the reason is, that these men's conception of liberty was utterly
different from that of the Lake School. To them it was not realised in
a nation or a constitution--for it was no accomplished, finished thing;
neither was their idea of the struggle for liberty realised in a highly
egoistic war against a revolutionary conqueror. They felt strongly what
an absence of liberty, political as well as intellectual, religious as
well as social, there might be under a so-called _free_ constitution.
They had no inclination to write poems in honour of the glorious
attainments of the human race, and more especially of their own
countrymen; for in the so-called land of freedom they felt a terrible,
oppressive want of freedom--of liberty to think without consideration
of recognised dogmas, to write without paying homage to public opinion,
to act as it was natural to men of their character to act, without
injury from the verdict of those who, because they had no particular
character of their own, were the most clamorous and unmerciful
condemners of the faults which accompanied independence, originality,
and genius. They saw that in this "free" country the ruling caste
canted and lied, extorted and plundered, curbed and constrained quite
as much as did the one great autocrat with his absolute power--and
without his excuse, the authority of intellect and of genius.

To the poets of the Lake School, coercion was not coercion when it
was _English_, tyranny was not tyranny when it was practised under a
_constitutional monarchy_, hostility to enlightenment was not hostility
to enlightenment when it was displayed by a _Protestant_ church. The
Radical poets called coercion coercion, even when it proceeded to
action with the English flag flying and the arms of England as its
policemen's badge; they cherished towards monarchs generally, the
objection of the Lake School poets to absolute monarchs; they desired
to free the world not only from the dominion of the Roman Catholic
priesthood, but from priestly tutelage of every description. When they
heard poets of the other school, who in the ardour of youth had been
as progressive as themselves, extolling the Tory Government of England
with the fervour which distinguishes renegades, they could not but
regard them as enemies of liberty. Therefore it is that Shelley, in his
sonnet to Wordsworth, writes:--

    "In honoured poverty thy voice did weave
     Songs consecrate to truth and liberty.
     Deserting these, thou leavest me to grieve,
     Thus having been, that thou shouldst cease to be."

Therefore it is that Byron is tempted again and again "to cut up
Southey like a gourd." And therefore it is that the love of liberty
of the Radical poets is a divine frenzy, a sacred fire, of which not
a spark is to be found in the Platonic love of the Lake School. When
Shelley sings to liberty:--

    "But keener thy gaze than the lightning's glare,
     And swifter thy step than the earthquake's tramp;
     Thou deafenest the rage of the ocean; thy stare
     Makes blind the volcanoes; the sun's bright lamp
                 To thine is a fen-fire damp;"

we feel that this liberty is not a thing which we can grasp with our
hands, or confer as a gift in a constitution, or inscribe among the
articles of a state-church. It is the eternal cry of the human spirit,
its never-ending requirement of itself; it is the spark of heavenly
fire which Prometheus placed in the human heart when he formed it, and
which it has been the work of the greatest among men to fan into the
flame that is the source of all light and all warmth in those who feel
that life would be dark as the grave and cold as stone without it. This
liberty makes its appearance in each new century with a new name. In
the Middle Ages it was persecuted and stamped out under the name of
heresy; in the sixteenth century it was championed and opposed under
the name of the Reformation; in the seventeenth it was sentenced to
the stake as witchcraft and atheism; in the eighteenth it became first
a philosophical gospel, and then, through the Revolution, a political
power; in the nineteenth it receives from the champions of the past the
new nickname of Radicalism.

What the poets of the Lake School extolled was a definite, actually
existing _sum of liberties_--not liberty. What the revolutionary poets
extolled was undoubtedly true liberty; but their conception was so
extremely ideal, that in practical matters they too often shot beyond
the mark. In the weakening of all established government they saw
only the weakening of bad government; in the half-barbaric revolts of
oppressed races they saw the dawn of perfect liberty. Shelley had so
little knowledge of his fellow-men that he thought the great victory
would be won if he could exterminate kings and priests at a blow;
and Byron's life was almost over before he learned by experience how
few republican virtues the European revolutionists leagued together
in the name of liberty possessed. The poets of the Lake School were
safeguarded against the generous delusions and overhastiness of the
Radical poets; but posterity has derived more pleasure and profit from
the aberrations due to the love of liberty in the latter than from the
carefully hedged in and limited Liberalism of the former.


[1] This year (1875) Disraeli, as Chairman of the Byron Memorial
Committee, has started a subscription for the erection of a statue to
Byron on some prominent site in London.




IX


THE LAKE SCHOOL'S ORIENTAL ROMANTICISM


This is the time to notice the man who was Byron's and Shelley's worst
enemy and Coleridge's best friend, and who, inferior as his productions
are to those of his friend, deserves also to have his name coupled with
Coleridge's as a famous English Romanticist.

Robert Southey, born in Bristol in 1774, was the son of a linen-draper
there, and to the end of his life a man who produced the impression
that he had been born in narrow circumstances, in a corner of the world
with a narrow spiritual horizon. After studying a short time at Oxford,
he, like the other poets of the Lake School, became infected by the
spirit of the Revolution. In 1794 he wrote an extremely Jacobinical
poem, _Wat Tyler_. About the same time he composed the following
inscription for the room in which Martin, the regicide, had been
confined:--

    "For thirty years secluded from mankind
     Here Martin linger'd. Often have these walls
     Echo'd his footsteps, as with even tread
     He paced around his prison. Not to him
     Did Nature's fair varieties exist;
     He never saw the sun's delightful beams,
     Save when through yon high bars he pour'd a sad
     And broken splendour. Dost thou ask his crime?
     _He had rebell'd against the King, and sat_
     _In judgment on him_; for his ardent mind
     Shaped goodliest plans of happiness on earth,
     And peace and liberty. Wild dreams! but such
     As Plato lov'd...."

The following rather clever parody was inserted by Mr. Canning in the
_Anti-Jacobin_:--

"INSCRIPTION FOR THE DOOR OF THE CELL IN NEWGATE, WHERE MRS. BROWNRIGG,
THE 'PRENTICE-CIDE, WAS CONFINED, PREVIOUS TO HER EXECUTION.

    "For one long term, or ere her trial came,
     Here Brownrigg linger'd. Often have these cells
     Echo'd her blasphemies, as with shrill voice
     She scream'd for fresh geneva. Not to her
     Did the blithe fields of Tothill, or thy street,
     St. Giles, its fair varieties expand;
     Till at the last in slow-drawn cart she went
     To execution. Dost thou ask her crime?
     _She whipp'd two female 'prentices to death,_
     _And hid them in the coal-hole._ For her mind
     Shaped strictest plans of discipline. Sage schemes!
     Such as Lycurgus taught...."

After Southey, too, had given up his project of emigration and won
the hand of _his_ Miss Fricker, he settled in London, in 1797. From
1807 onwards the Government granted him an annual allowance of £150,
and after Pye's death he became Poet Laureate, with a salary of £300.
This post, which entailed the obligation to compose a poem on the
occasion of every special event in the royal family, had first been
offered by the Prince Regent to Scott, who asked his friend and patron,
the Duke of Buccleuch, for advice in the matter. The Duke wrote:
"Only think of being chanted and recitatived by a parcel of hoarse
and squeaking choristers on a birthday, for the edification of the
bishops, pages, maids of honour, and gentlemen-pensioners! Oh horrible!
thrice horrible!" &c., &c. Scott declined the proffered honour, and
suggested Southey, a loyal and needy poet, as a fit recipient. For the
greater part of his life Southey was obliged to live by his pen, and
consequently often wrote under compulsion. Industrious, economical, a
model of all the domestic virtues, he amassed a capital of £12,000.
With him, as with the Germans, Romanticism, instead of precluding the
bourgeois virtues, throve along with them. It had, after all, so little
connection with real life. His respectable Philistinism did not forbid
of his allowing his imagination to take the wildest Oriental flights.

During the first, the liberal-minded, stage of Southey's career, we are
conscious of a sympathetic ardour in his writing. He possessed both
enthusiasm and courage. His epic, _Joan of Arc_, published in 1797, is
a poem inspired by as fervent an admiration for the heroine of France
as that displayed by Schiller five years later in his _Jungfrau von
Orleans_. Southey's work is, like Schiller's, of an exactly opposite
character to Voltaire's _Pucelle_, which, the English poet in his
preface informs his readers, is a book he has "never been guilty of
looking into." In _Joan of Arc_ Southey is not yet the Romanticist.
Once or twice he projects his vision as far as his own day. In the
Third Book he extols Madame Roland as "the martyred patriot," in the
Tenth he refers to Lafayette's as "the name that Freedom still shall
love." And in his representation of Jeanne's exploits we have not, as
in Schiller, any reference to witchcraft. At a decisive moment, when
the Maid is being questioned as to her beliefs, she (and through her,
her poet) makes such a frank confession of her faith in nature that
we feel satisfied that in Southey's case too, the Naturalism which
dominates the English poetry of the day is the foundation upon which
everything rests.

"Woman," says a priest to Joan of Arc,--

           "Woman, thou seem'st to scorn
    The ordinances of our holy Church;
    And, if I rightly understand thy words,
    Nature, thou say'st, taught thee in solitude
    Thy feelings of religion, and that now
    Masses and absolution and the use
    Of the holy wafer, are to thee unknown.
    But how could Nature teach thee true religion,
    Deprived of these? Nature doth lead to sin,
    But 'tis the priest alone can teach remorse,
    Can bid St. Peter ope the gates of Heaven,
    And from the penal fires of purgatory
    Set the soul free."

The Maid replies:--

                      "Fathers of the holy Church,
    If on these points abstruse a simple maid
    Like me should err, impute not you the crime
    To self-will'd reason, vaunting its own strength
    Above eternal wisdom. True it is
    That for long time I have not heard the sound
    Of mass high-chaunted, nor with trembling lips
    Partook the holy wafer: yet the birds
    Who to the matin ray prelusive pour'd
    Their joyous song, methought did warble forth
    Sweeter thanksgiving to Religion's ear
    In their wild melody of happiness,
    Than ever rung along the high-arch'd roofs
    Of man: ... yet never from the bending vine
    Pluck'd I its ripen'd clusters thanklessly,
    Or of that God unmindful, who bestow'd
    The bloodless banquet. Ye have told me, Sirs,
    That Nature only teaches man to sin!
    If it be sin to seek the wounded lamb,
    To bind its wounds, and bathe them with my tears,
    This is what Nature taught! No, Fathers, no!
    It is not Nature that doth lead to sin:
    Nature is all benevolence, all love,
    All beauty! In the greenwood's quiet shade
    There is no vice that to the indignant cheek
    Bids the red current rush; no misery there;
    No wretched mother, who with pallid face
    And famine-fallen hangs o'er her hungry babes,
    With such a look, so wan, so woe-begone,
    As shall one day, with damning eloquence
    Against the oppressor plead!..."[1]

In this little harangue the attentive reader is conscious, not only of
the echo of the revolutionary cries on the other side of the Channel,
repeated in the language of English nature-worship, but also of the
young poet's want of ability to give his subject the proper local
colouring or to impart to it the spirit of the age. France and the
Middle Ages are to him here what the East and the world of legend were
to become--a costume in which his English and Protestant ideas figure.
Of one thing, however, there is no doubt, namely, that it required
courage to sing the praises of the French national heroine at a moment
when the animosity to France was so strong; and the poem, in spite of
its aridity both as regards feeling and colour, is a work which does
honour to a young poet. But the brave spirit which elevated his talent
was soon to disappear from his writings.

The lower the flood of unselfish enthusiasm for the great tasks and
dreams of humanity ebbed in Southey's soul, the stronger became
the impulse to remedy the aridity by pouring in a stream of purely
external Romanticism. He had by degrees attained to a certain mastery
over the resources of language, had acquired the art of writing
loosely constructed but melodious verse, expressive in spite of its
vagueness and monotony. Employing this melodious, flexible metre in the
representation of the superstitions of Arabia and the most fantastic
dreams of the Oriental races, he now produced his two principal works,
_The Curse of Kehama_ and _Thalaba the Destroyer_. The Oriental
tendency is common to Romanticism in every country. Oehlenschläger,
the Dane, displays it simultaneously with Southey; it reaches France
a little later, when Victor Hugo writes _Aly et Gulhyndi_ and _Les
Orientales_. But in the case of the English poets, the colourless,
Protestant life of their own country, with its severe, cold propriety,
must have invested the East with a peculiarly attractive charm. It
required an Irishman, however--Thomas Moore, a colourist with Celtic
blood in his veins--to arrive at anything resembling an understanding
of a race like the ancient Persians and of their legends, and to
reproduce the nature of the East in a style loaded with jewels and
barbaric ornaments. _Lalla Rookh_ is no masterpiece; its personages
and ideas are far too European and tame; but _Thalaba_, a work which
enjoyed a certain amount of celebrity in its day, is tame in comparison
with _Lalla Rookh_, and as moral as an English sermon. It suffers from
the sharp contrast between the gaudy tinsel of the scenery and the
sober modesty of the feelings represented. We are transplanted into a
world which is not less marvellous than that of the _Thousand and One
Nights_, but a world in which, nevertheless, love of our fellow-men
and faith in one God are perpetually inculcated. The hero's life is
presided over by the most special providence. When the fit time has
arrived for him to leave his foster-father's house, the flight of a
swarm of Syrian grasshoppers, pursued by a flock of birds, is directed
so as to pass above the house. A grasshopper which one of the birds
drops from its bill bears on its forehead in minute letters the
inscription:--

    "When the sun shall be darkened at noon,
           Son of Hodeirah, depart!"

But even though the poet employs such miraculous machinery as this, he
can no more refrain here than he did in _Joan of Arc_ from safeguarding
his reader against the erroneous religious ideas of the period and the
country. All his chief characters are rationalists in so far as their
Oriental religion is concerned, and do not fall far short of being
good Protestants. When the swarm of grasshoppers comes, Thalaba's
foster-father, Moath, says:--

                              "Deemest thou
    The scent of water on some Syrian mosque
    Placed with priest mummery and fantastic rites
    Which fool the multitude, hath led them here
    From far Khorassan? Allah who appoints
    Yon swarms to be a punishment of man,
    These also hath he doomed to meet their way."

A pure-bred Arabian could not well view things in a more rationalistic
light than this. And we have the same sort of thing throughout. Southey
piles up fantastic edifices, only to topple them over with the help of
some Gospel text when he is tired of them, or thinks that his reader
requires an admonition.

Upon his finger Thalaba wears a ring which is a talisman against evil
spirits. One day the evil spirit, Lobaba, who is determined to rob him
of it, tries to draw it off his finger while he is asleep. But one of
the good genii sends a wasp which stings Thalaba's finger close to the
edge of the ring, making it impossible for the evil one to slip the
ring over the swollen part. All Lobaba's plans are defeated in some
such manner. At last the dread sorcerer, Mohareb, succeeds in ensnaring
the youth. After Thalaba has defeated Mohareb repeatedly, the latter
jeers at him because he defeats his enemies, not in open conflict, but
with the aid of a talisman. He barbs his jeers so successfully that at
last Thalaba casts the ring into an abyss. Then the struggle begins
anew. We expect that Thalaba, now defenceless against the supernatural
power of his foes, will be overcome. Not at all! He conquers. How,
and why? A voice from heaven informs us. The ring was not the true
talisman: "The Talisman is Faith!" Why, then, all the machinery?

The poet conducts us into subterranean caves, where human heads have to
be thrown to the serpents who guard the entrances, where the taper can
only be carried in the hewn-off hand of a hanged murderer, &c, &c.--in
short, into a world which has no points of resemblance with Great
Britain. But the whole is nothing but a ballet; the scene suddenly
changes; the Oriental garments and trappings vanish, and the prompter
reads aloud one of the Thirty-nine Articles. After this the ballet
begins again. The scene represents a banquet, with costly dishes, with
delicious wines in golden goblets--"ruby and amber, ro

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