From Chaucer to Tennyson Part 11

Those were the days in which Wordsworth, then an under-graduate at Cambridge, spent a college vacation in tramping through France, landing at Calais on the eve of the very day (July 14, 1790) on which Louis XVI.

signalized the anniversary of the fall of the Bastile by taking the oath of fidelity to the new const.i.tution. In the following year Wordsworth revisited France, where he spent thirteen months, forming an intimacy with the republican general, Beaupuis, at Orleans, and reaching Paris not long after the September ma.s.sacres of 1792. Those were the days, too, in which young Southey and young Coleridge, having married sisters at Bristol, were planning a "Pantisocracy," or ideal community, on the banks of the Susquehannah, and denouncing the British government for going to war with the French Republic. This group of poets, who had met one another first in the south of England, came afterward to be called the Lake Poets, from their residence in the mountainous lake country of Westmoreland and c.u.mberland, with which their names, and that of Wordsworth, especially, are forever a.s.sociated. The so-called "Lakers"

did not, properly speaking, const.i.tute a school of poetry. They differed greatly from one another in mind and art. But they were connected by social ties and by religious and political sympathies. The excesses of the French Revolution, and the usurpation of Napoleon disappointed them, as it did many other English liberals, and drove them into the ranks of the reactionaries. Advancing years brought conservatism, and they became in time loyal Tories and orthodox churchmen.

William Wordsworth (1770-1850), the chief of the three, and, perhaps, on the whole, the greatest English poet since Milton, published his _Lyrical Ballads_ in 1798. The volume contained a few pieces by his friend Coleridge--among them the _Ancient Mariner_--and its appearance may fairly be said to mark an epoch in the history of English poetry.

Wordsworth regarded himself as a reformer of poetry; and in the preface to the second edition of the _Lyrical Ballads_, he defended the theory on which they were composed. His innovations were twofold: in subject-matter and in diction. "The princ.i.p.al object which I proposed to myself in these poems," he said, "was to choose incidents and situations from common life. Low and rustic life was generally chosen, because, in that condition, the essential pa.s.sions of the heart find a better soil in which they can attain their maturity...and are incorporated with the beautiful and permanent forms of nature." Wordsworth discarded, in theory, the poetic diction of his predecessors, and professed to use "a selection of the real language of men in a state of vivid sensation." He adopted, he said, the language of men in rustic life, "because such men hourly communicate with the best objects from which the best part of language is originally derived."

In the matter of poetic diction Wordsworth did not, in his practice, adhere to the doctrine of this preface. Many of his most admired poems, such as the _Lines written near Tintern Abbey_, the great _Ode on the Intimations of Immortality_, the _Sonnets_, and many parts of his longest poems, _The Excursion_ and _The Prelude_, deal with philosophic thought and highly intellectualized emotions. In all of these and in many others the language is rich, stately, involved, and as remote from the "real language" of Westmoreland shepherds as is the epic blank verse of Milton. On the other hand, in those of his poems which were consciously written in ill.u.s.tration of his theory, the affectation of simplicity, coupled with a defective sense of humor, sometimes led him to the selection of vulgar and trivial themes, and the use of language which is bald, childish, or even ludicrous. His simplicity is too often the simplicity of Mother Goose rather than of Chaucer. Instances of this occur in such poems as _Peter Bell_, the _Idiot Boy_, _Goody Blake and Harry Gill_, _Simon Lee_, and the _Wagoner_. But there are mult.i.tudes of Wordsworth's ballads and lyrics which are simple without being silly, and which, in their homeliness and clear profundity, in their production of the strongest effects by the fewest strokes, are among the choicest modern examples of _pure_, as distinguished from decorated, art. Such are (out of many) _Ruth_, _Lucy_, _She was a Phantom of Delight_, _To a Highland Girl_, _The Reverie of Poor Susan_, _To the Cuckoo_, _The Solitary Reaper_, _We Are Seven_, _The Pet Lamb_, _The Fountain_, _The Two April Mornings_, _Resolution and Independence_, _The Thorn_, and _Yarrow Unvisited_.

Wordsworth was something of a Quaker in poetry, and loved the sober drabs and grays of life. Quietism was his literary religion, and the sensational was to him not merely vulgar, but almost wicked. "The human mind," he wrote, "is capable of being excited without the application of gross and violent stimulants." He disliked the far-fetched themes and high-colored style of Scott and Byron. He once told Landor that all of Scott's poetry together was not worth sixpence. From action and pa.s.sion he turned away to sing the inward life of the soul and the outward life of nature. He said:

To me the meanest flower that blows can give Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears.

And again:

Long have I loved what I behold.

The night that charms, the day that cheers; The common growth of mother earth Suffices me--her tears, her mirth, Her humblest mirth and tears.

Wordsworth's life was outwardly uneventful. The companions.h.i.+p of the mountains and of his own thoughts, the sympathy of his household, the lives of the dalesmen and cottagers about him furnished him with all the stimulus that he required.

Love had he found in huts where poor men lie; His only teachers had been woods and rills, The silence that is in the starry sky, The sleep that is among the lonely hills.

He read little, but reflected much, and made poetry daily, composing, by preference, out of doors, and dictating his verses to some member of his family. His favorite amanuensis was his sister Dorothy, a woman of fine gifts, to whom Wordsworth was indebted for some of his happiest inspirations. Her charming _Memorials of a Tour in the Scottish Highlands_ records the origin of many of her brother's best poems.

Throughout life Wordsworth was remarkably self-centered. The ridicule of the reviewers, against which he gradually made his way to public recognition, never disturbed his serene belief in himself, or in the divine message which he felt himself commissioned to deliver. He was a slow and serious person, a preacher as well as a poet, with a certain rigidity, not to say narrowness, of character. That plastic temperament which we a.s.sociate with poetic genius Wordsworth either did not possess, or it hardened early. Whole sides of life were beyond the range of his sympathies. He touched life at fewer points than Byron and Scott, but touched it more profoundly. It is to him that we owe the phrase "plain living and high thinking," as also a most n.o.ble ill.u.s.tration of it in his own practice. His was the wisest and deepest spirit among the English poets of his generation, though hardly the most poetic. He wrote too much, and, attempting to make every petty incident or reflection the occasion of a poem, he finally reached the point of composing verses _On Seeing a Harp in the shape of a Needle Case_, and on other themes more worthy of Mrs. Sigourney. In parts of his long blank-verse poems, _The Excursion_, 1814, and _The Prelude_--which was printed after his death in 1850, though finished as early as 1806--the poetry wears very thin and its place is taken by prosaic, tedious didacticism. These two poems were designed as portions of a still more extended work, _The Recluse_, which was never completed. _The Excursion_ consists mainly of philosophical discussions on nature and human life between a school-master, a solitary, and an itinerant peddler. _The Prelude_ describes the development of Wordsworth's own genius. In parts of _The Excursion_ the diction is fairly Shaksperian:

The good die first, And they whose hearts are dry as summer dust Burn to the socket;

a pa.s.sage not only beautiful in itself but dramatically true, in the mouth of the bereaved mother who utters it, to that human instinct which generalizes a private sorrow into a universal law. Much of _The Prelude_ can hardly be called poetry at all, yet some of Wordsworth's loftiest poetry is buried among its dreary wastes, and now and then, in the midst of commonplaces, comes a flash of Miltonic splendor--like

Golden cities ten months' journey deep Among Tartarian wilds.

Wordsworth is, above all things, the poet of nature. In this province he was not without forerunners. To say nothing of Burns and Cowper, there was George Crabbe, who had published his _Village_ in 1783--fifteen years before the _Lyrical Ballads_--and whose last poem, _Tales of the Hall_, came out in 1819, five years after _The Excursion_. Byron called Crabbe "Nature's sternest painter, and her best." He was a minutely accurate delineator of the harsher aspects of rural life. He photographs a Gypsy camp; a common, with its geese and donkey; a salt marsh, a shabby village street, or tumble-down manse. But neither Crabbe nor Cowper has the imaginative lift of Wordsworth,

The light that never was, on sea or land, The consecration, and the poet's dream.

In a note on a couplet in one of his earliest poems, descriptive of an oak-tree standing dark against the sunset, Wordsworth says: "I recollect distinctly the very spot where this struck me. The moment was important in my poetical history, for I date from it my consciousness of the infinite variety of natural appearances which had been unnoticed by the poets of any age or country, and I made a resolution to supply, in some degree, the deficiency." In later life he is said to have been impatient of any thing spoken or written by another about mountains, conceiving himself to have a monopoly of "the power of hills." But Wordsworth did not stop with natural description. Matthew Arnold has said that the office of modern poetry is the "moral interpretation of Nature." Such, at any rate, was Wordsworth's office. To him Nature was alive and divine. He felt, under the veil of phenomena,

A presence that disturbs me with the joy Of elevated thought: a sense sublime Of something far more deeply interfused.

He approached, if he did not actually reach, the view of pantheism which identifies G.o.d with Nature; and the mysticism of the Idealists, who identify Nature with the soul of man. This tendency was not inspired in Wordsworth by German philosophy. He was no metaphysician. In his rambles with Coleridge about Nether Stowey and Alfoxden, when both were young, they had, indeed, discussed Spinoza. And in the autumn of 1798, after the publication of the _Lyrical Ballads_, the two friends went together to Germany, where Wordsworth spent half a year. But the literature and philosophy of Germany made little direct impression upon Wordsworth. He disliked Goethe, and he quoted with approval the saying of the poet Klopstock, whom he met at Hamburg, that he placed the romanticist Burger above both Goethe and Schiller.

It was through Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834), who was pre-eminently the _thinker_ among the literary men of his generation, that the new German thought found its way into England. During the fourteen months which he spent in Germany--chiefly at Ratzburg and Gottingen--he had familiarized himself with the transcendental philosophy of Immanuel Kant and of his continuators, Fichte and Sch.e.l.ling, as well as with the general literature of Germany. On his return to England, he published, in 1800, a free translation of Schiller's _Wallenstein_, and through his writings, and more especially through his conversations, he became the conductor by which German philosophic ideas reached the English literary cla.s.s.

Coleridge described himself as being from boyhood a bookworm and a day-dreamer. He remained through life an omnivorous, though unsystematic, reader. He was helpless in practical affairs, and his native indolence and procrastination were increased by his indulgence in the opium habit. On his return to England, in 1800, he went to reside at Keswick, in the Lake Country, with his brother-in-law, Southey, whose industry supported both families. During his last nineteen years Coleridge found an asylum under the roof of Mr. James Gilman, of Highgate, near London, whither many of the best young men in England were accustomed to resort to listen to Coleridge's wonderful talk. Talk, indeed, was the medium through which he mainly influenced his generation. It cost him an effort to put his thoughts on paper. His _Table Talk_--crowded with pregnant paragraphs--was taken down from his lips by his nephew, Henry Coleridge. His criticisms of Shakspere are nothing but notes, made here and there, from a course of lectures delivered before the Royal Inst.i.tute, and never fully written out.

Though only hints and suggestions, they are, perhaps, the most penetrative and helpful Shaksperian criticisms in English. He was always forming projects and abandoning them. He projected a great work on Christian philosophy, which was to have been his _magnum opus_, but he never wrote it. He projected an epic poem on the fall of Jerusalem. "I schemed it at twenty-five," he said, "but, alas! _venturum expectat_."

What bade fair to be his best poem, _Christabel_, is a fragment. Another strangely beautiful poem, _Kubla Khan_--which came to him, he said, in sleep--is even more fragmentary. And the most important of his prose remains, his _Biographia Literaria_, 1817, a history of his own opinions, breaks off abruptly.

It was in his suggestiveness that Coleridge's great service to posterity resided. He was what J.S. Mill called a "seminal mind," and his thought had that power of stimulating thought in others which is the mark and the privilege of original genius. Many a man has owed to some sentence of Coleridge's, if not the awakening in himself of a new intellectual life, at least the starting of fruitful trains of reflection which have modified his whole view of certain great subjects. On every thing that he left is set the stamp of high mental authority. He was not, perhaps, primarily, he certainly was not exclusively, a poet. In theology, in philosophy, in political thought and literary criticism he set currents flowing which are flowing yet. The terminology of criticism, for example, is in his debt for many of those convenient distinctions--such as that between genius and talent, between wit and humor, between fancy and imagination--which are familiar enough now, but which he first introduced or enforced. His definitions and apothegms we meet every-where. Such are, for example, the sayings: "Every man is born an Aristotelian or a Platonist." "Prose is words in their best order; poetry, the best words in the best order." And among the bits of subtle interpretation that abound in his writings may be mentioned his estimate of Wordsworth, in the _Biographia Literaria_, and his sketch of Hamlet's character--one with which he was personally in strong sympathy--in the _Lectures on Shakspere_.

The Broad Church party, in the English Church, among whose most eminent exponents have been W. Frederic Robertson, Arnold of Rugby, F.D.

Maurice, Charles Kingsley, and the late Dean Stanley, traces its intellectual origin to Coleridge's _Aids to Reflection_, to his writings and conversations in general, and particularly to his ideal of a national clerisy, as set forth in his essay on _Church and State_. In politics, as in religion, Coleridge's conservatism represents the reaction against the destructive spirit of the 18th century and the French Revolution. To this root-and-branch democracy he opposed the view that every old belief, or inst.i.tution, such as the throne or the Church, had served some need, and had a rational idea at the bottom of it, to which it might be again recalled, and made once more a benefit to society, instead of a curse and an anachronism.

As a poet, Coleridge has a sure, though slender, hold upon immortal fame. No English poet has "sung so wildly well" as the singer of _Christabel_ and the _Ancient Mariner_. The former of these is, in form, a romance in a variety of meters, and in substance, a tale of supernatural possession, by which a lovely and innocent maiden is brought under the control of a witch. Though unfinished and obscure in intention, it haunts the imagination with a mystic power. Byron had seen _Christabel_ in ma.n.u.script, and urged Coleridge to publish it. He hated all the "Lakers," but when, on parting from Lady Byron, he wrote his song,

Fare thee well, and if forever, Still forever fare thee well,

he prefixed to it the n.o.ble lines from Coleridge's poem, beginning

Alas! they had been friends in youth.

In that weird ballad, the _Ancient Mariner_, the supernatural is handled with even greater subtlety than in _Christabel_. The reader is led to feel that amid the loneliness of the tropic-sea the line between the earthly and the unearthly vanishes, and the poet leaves him to discover for himself whether the spectral shapes that the mariner saw were merely the visions of the calenture, or a glimpse of the world of spirits. Coleridge is one of our most perfect metrists. The poet Swinburne--than whom there can be no higher authority on this point (though he is rather given to exaggeration)--p.r.o.nounces _Kubla Khan_, "for absolute melody and splendor, the first poem in the language."

Robert Southey, the third member of this group, was a diligent worker, and one of the most voluminous of English writers. As a poet, he was lacking in inspiration, and his big oriental epics, _Thalaba_, 1801, and the _Curse of Kehama_, 1810, are little better than wax-work. Of his numerous works in prose, the _Life of Nelson_ is, perhaps, the best, and is an excellent biography.

Several other authors were more or less closely a.s.sociated with the Lake Poets by residence or social affiliation. John Wilson, the editor of _Blackwood's_, lived for some time, when a young man, at Elleray, on the banks of Windermere. He was an athletic man of outdoor habits, an enthusiastic sportsman, and a lover of natural scenery. His admiration of Wordsworth was thought to have led him to imitation of the latter, in his _Isle of Palms_, 1812, and his other poetry.

One of Wilson's companions, in his mountain walks, was Thomas De Quincey, who had been led by his reverence for Wordsworth and Coleridge to take up his residence, in 1808, at Grasmere, where he occupied for many years the cottage from which Wordsworth had removed to Allan Bank.

De Quincey was a shy, bookish man, of erratic, nocturnal habits, who impresses one, personally, as a child of genius, with a child's helplessness and a child's sharp observation. He was, above all things, a magazinist. All his writings, with one exception, appeared first in the shape of contributions to periodicals; and his essays, literary criticisms, and miscellaneous papers are exceedingly rich and varied.

The most famous of them was his _Confessions of an English Opium Eater_, published as a serial in the _London Magazine_, in 1821. He had begun to take opium, as a cure for the toothache, when a student at Oxford, where he resided from 1803 to 1808. By 1816 he had risen to eight thousand drops of laudanum a day. For several years after this he experienced the acutest misery, and his will suffered an entire paralysis. In 1821 he succeeded in reducing his dose to a comparatively small allowance, and in shaking off his torpor so as to become capable of literary work. The most impressive effect of the opium habit was seen in his dreams, in the unnatural expansion of s.p.a.ce and time, and the infinite repet.i.tion of the same objects. His sleep was filled with dim, vast images; measureless cavalcades deploying to the sound of orchestral music; an endless succession of vaulted halls, with staircases climbing to heaven, up which toiled eternally the same solitary figure. "Then came sudden alarms, hurrying to and fro; trepidations of innumerable fugitives; darkness and light; tempest and human faces." Many of De Quincey's papers were autobiographical, but there is always something baffling in these reminiscences. In the interminable wanderings of his pen--for which, perhaps, opium was responsible--he appears to lose all trace of facts or of any continuous story. Every actual experience of his life seems to have been taken up into a realm of dream, and there distorted till the reader sees not the real figures, but the enormous, grotesque shadows of them, executing wild dances on a screen. An instance of this process is described by himself in his _Vision of Sudden Death_. But his unworldliness and faculty of vision-seeing were not inconsistent with the keenness of judgment and the justness and delicacy of perception displayed in his _Biographical Sketches_ of Wordsworth, Coleridge, and other contemporaries: in his critical papers on _Pope_, _Milton_, _Lessing_, _Homer and the Homeridae_: his essay on _Style_; and his _Brief Appraisal of the Greek Literature_. His curious scholars.h.i.+p is seen in his articles on the _Toilet of a Hebrew Lady_, and the _Casuistry of Roman Meals_; his ironical and somewhat elaborate humor in his essay on _Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts_. Of his narrative pieces the most remarkable is his _Revolt of the Tartars_, describing the flight of a Kalmuck tribe of six hundred thousand souls from Russia to the Chinese frontier: a great hegira or anabasis, which extended for four thousand miles over desert steppes infested with foes, occupied six months' time, and left nearly half of the tribe dead upon the way. The subject was suited to De Quincey's imagination. It was like one of his own opium visions, and he handled it with a dignity and force which make the history not altogether unworthy of comparison with Thucydides's great chapter on the Sicilian Expedition.

An intimate friend of Southey was Walter Savage Landor, a man of kingly nature, of a leonine presence, with a most stormy and unreasonable temper, and yet with the courtliest graces of manner, and with--said Emerson--"a wonderful brain, despotic, violent, and inexhaustible." He inherited wealth, and lived a great part of his life at Florence, where he died in 1864, in his ninetieth year. d.i.c.kens, who knew him at Bath, in the latter part of his life, made a kindly caricature of him as Lawrence Boythorn, in _Bleak House_, whose "combination of superficial ferocity and inherent tenderness," testifies Henry Crabb Robinson, in his _Diary_, was true to the life. Landor is the most purely cla.s.sical of English writers. Not merely his themes, but his whole way of thinking was pagan and antique. He composed indifferently in English or Latin, preferring the latter, if any thing, in obedience to his instinct for compression and exclusiveness. Thus, portions of his narrative poem, _Gebir_, 1798, were written originally in Latin and he added a Latin version, _Gebirius_, to the English edition. In like manner his _h.e.l.lenics_, 1847, were mainly translations from his Latin _Idyllia Heroica_, written years before. The h.e.l.lenic clearness and repose which were absent from his life, Landor sought in his art. His poems, in their restraint, their objectivity, their aloofness from modern feeling, have something chill and artificial. The verse of poets like Byron and Wordsworth is alive; the blood runs in it. But Landor's polished, clean-cut _intaglios_ have been well described as "written in marble."

He was a master of fine and solid prose. His _Pericles and Aspasia_ consists of a series of letters pa.s.sing between the great Athenian demagogue; the hetaira, Aspasia; her friend, Cleone of Miletus; Anaxagorus, the philosopher, and Pericles's nephew, Alcibiades. In this masterpiece, the intellectual life of Athens, at its period of highest refinement, is brought before the reader with singular vividness, and he is made to breathe an atmosphere of high-bred grace, delicate wit, and thoughtful sentiment, expressed in English "of Attic choice." The _Imaginary Conversations_, 1824-1846, were Platonic dialogues between a great variety of historical characters; between, for example, Dante and Beatrice, Was.h.i.+ngton and Franklin, Queen Elizabeth and Cecil, Xenophon and Cyrus the Younger, Bonaparte and the president of the Senate.

Landor's writings have never been popular; they address an aristocracy of scholars; and Byron--whom Landor disliked and considered vulgar--sneered at him as a writer who "cultivated much private renown in the shape of Latin verses." He said of himself that he "never contended with a contemporary, but walked alone on the far Eastern uplands, meditating and remembering."

A school-mate of Coleridge at Christ's Hospital, and his friend and correspondent through life, was Charles Lamb, one of the most charming of English essayists. He was a bachelor, who lived alone with his sister Mary, a lovable and intellectual woman, but subject to recurring attacks of madness. Lamb was "a notched and cropped scrivener, a votary of the desk;" a clerk, that is, in the employ of the East India Company.

He was of antiquarian tastes, an ardent playgoer, a lover of whist and of the London streets; and these tastes are reflected in his _Essays of Elia_, contributed to the _London Magazine_ and reprinted in book form in 1823. From his mousing among the Elizabethan dramatists and such old humorists as Burton and Fuller, his own style imbibed a peculiar quaintness and pungency. His _Specimens of English Dramatic Poets_, 1808, is admirable for its critical insight. In 1802 he paid a visit to Coleridge at Keswick, in the Lake Country; but he felt or affected a whimsical horror of the mountains, and said, "Fleet Street and the Strand are better to live in." Among the best of his essays are _Dream Children_, _Poor Relations_, _The Artificial Comedy of the Last Century_, _Old China_, _Roast Pig_, _A Defense of Chimneysweeps_, _A Complaint of the Decay of Beggars in the Metropolis_, and _The Old Benchers of the Inner Temple_.

The romantic movement, preluded by Gray, Collins, Chatterton, Macpherson, and others, culminated in Walter Scott (1721-1832). His pa.s.sion for the mediaeval was excited by reading Percy's _Reliques_ when he was a boy; and in one of his school themes he maintained that Ariosto was a greater poet than Homer. He began early to collect ma.n.u.script ballads, suits of armor, pieces of old plate, border-horns, and similar relics. He learned Italian in order to read the romancers--Ariosto, Ta.s.so, Pulci, and Boiardo--preferring them to Dante. He studied Gothic architecture, heraldry, and the art of fortification, and made drawings of famous ruins and battle-fields. In particular he read eagerly every thing that he could lay hands on relating to the history, legends, and antiquities of the Scottish border--the vale of Tweed, Teviotdale, Ettrick Forest, and the Yarrow, of all which land he became the laureate, as Burns had been of Ayrs.h.i.+re and the "West Country." Scott, like Wordsworth, was an outdoor poet. He spent much time in the saddle, and was fond of horses, dogs, hunting, and salmon-fis.h.i.+ng. He had a keen eye for the beauties of natural scenery, though "more especially," he admits, "when combined with ancient ruins or remains of our forefathers'

piety or splendor." He had the historic imagination, and, in creating the historical novel, he was the first to throw a poetic glamour over European annals. In 1803 Wordsworth visited Scott at La.s.swade, near Edinburgh; and Scott afterward returned the visit at Grasmere.

Wordsworth noted that his guest was "full of anecdote, and averse from disquisition." The Englishman was a moralist and much given to "disquisition," while the Scotchman was, above all things, a _raconteur_, and, perhaps, on the whole, the foremost of British story-tellers. Scott's Toryism, too, was of a different stripe from Wordsworth's, being rather the result of sentiment and imagination than of philosophy and reflection. His mind struck deep root in the past; his local attachments and family pride were intense. Abbotsford was his darling, and the expenses of this domain and of the baronial hospitality which he there extended to all comers were among the causes of his bankruptcy. The enormous toil which he exacted of himself, to pay off the debt of 117,000, contracted by the failure of his publishers, cost him his life. It is said that he was more gratified when the Prince Regent created him a baronet, in 1820, than by the public recognition that he acquired as the author of the Waverley Novels.

Scott was attracted by the romantic side of German literature. His first published poem was a translation made in 1796 from Burger's wild ballad, _Leonora_. He followed this up with versions of the same poet's _Wilde Jager_, of Goethe's violent drama of feudal life, _Gotz Von Berlichingen_, and with other translations from the German, of a similar cla.s.s. On his horseback trips through the border, where he studied the primitive manners of the Liddesdale people, and took down old ballads from the recitation of ancient dames and cottagers, he ama.s.sed the materials for his _Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border_, 1802. But the first of his original poems was the _Lay of the Last Minstrel_, published in 1805, and followed, in quick sucession by _Marmion_, the _Lady of the Lake_, _Rokeby_, the _Lord of the Isles_, and a volume of ballads and lyrical pieces, all issued during the years 1806-1814. The popularity won by this series of metrical romances was immediate and wide-spread. Nothing so fresh or so brilliant had appeared in English poetry for nearly two centuries. The reader was hurried along through scenes of rapid action, whose effect was heightened by wild landscapes and picturesque manners. The pleasure was a pa.s.sive one. There was no deep thinking to perplex, no subtler beauties to pause upon; the feelings were stirred pleasantly, but not deeply; the effect was on the surface. The spell employed was novelty--or, at most, wonder--and the chief emotion aroused was breathless interest in the progress of the story. Carlyle said that Scott's genius was _in extenso_, rather than _in intenso_, and that its great praise was its healthiness. This is true of his verse, but not altogether so of his prose, which exhibits deeper qualities. Some of Scott's most perfect poems, too, are his shorter ballads, like _Jock o' Hazeldean_, and _Proud Maisie is in the Wood_, which have a greater intensity and compression than his metrical tales.

From 1814 to 1831 Scott wrote and published the _Waverley_ novels, some thirty in number; if we consider the amount of work done, the speed with which it was done, and the general average of excellence maintained, perhaps the most marvelous literary feat on record. The series was issued anonymously, and takes its name from the first number: _Waverley, or 'Tis Sixty Years Since_. This was founded upon the rising of the clans, in 1745, in support of the Young Pretender, Charles Edward Stuart, and it revealed to the English public that almost foreign country which lay just across their threshold, the Scottish Highlands.

The _Waverley_ novels remain, as a whole, unequaled as historical fiction, although here and there a single novel, like George Eliot's _Romola_, or Thackeray's _Henry Esmond_, or Kingsley's _Hypatia_, may have attained a place beside the best of them. They were a novelty when they appeared. English prose fiction had somewhat declined since the time of Fielding and Goldsmith. There were truthful, though rather tame, delineations of provincial life, like Jane Austen's _Sense and Sensibility_, 1811, and _Pride and Prejudice_, 1813; or Maria Edgeworth's _Popular Tales_, 1804. On the other hand, there were Gothic romances, like the _Monk_ of Matthew Gregory Lewis, to whose _Tales of Wonder_ some of Scott's translations from the German had been contributed; or like Anne Radcliffe's _Mysteries of Udolpho_. The great original of this school of fiction was Horace Walpole's _Castle of Otranto_, 1765; an absurd tale of secret trap-doors, subterranean vaults, apparitions of monstrous mailed figures and colossal helmets, pictures that descend from their frames, and hollow voices that proclaim the ruin of ancient families.

Scott used the machinery of romance, but he was not merely a romancer, or an historical novelist even, and it is not, as Carlyle implies, the buff-belts and jerkins which princ.i.p.ally interest us in his heroes.

_Ivanhoe_ and _Kenilworth_ and the _Talisman_ are, indeed, romances pure and simple, and very good romances at that. But, in novels such as _Rob Roy_, the _Antiquary_, the _Heart of Midlothian_, and the _Bride of Lammermoor_, Scott drew from contemporary life, and from his intimate knowledge of Scotch character. The story is there, with its entanglement of plot and its exciting adventures, but there are also, as truly as in Shakspere, though not in the same degree, the observation of life, the knowledge of men, the power of dramatic creation. No writer awakens in his readers a warmer personal affection than Walter Scott, the brave, honest, kindly gentleman; the n.o.blest figure among the literary men of his generation.

Another Scotch poet was Thomas Campbell, whose _Pleasures of Hope_, 1799, was written in Pope's couplet, and in the stilted diction of the 18th century. _Gertrude of Wyoming_, 1809, a long narrative poem in Spenserian stanza, is untrue to the scenery and life of Pennsylvania, where its scene is laid. But Campbell turned his rhetorical manner and his clanking, martial verse to fine advantage in such pieces as _Hohenlinden_, _Ye Mariners of England_, and the _Battle of the Baltic_.

These have the true lyric fire, and rank among the best English war-songs.

When Scott was asked why he had left off writing poetry, he answered, "Byron _bet_ me." George Gordon Byron (1788-1824) was a young man of twenty-four when, on his return from a two years' sauntering through Portugal, Spain, Albania, Greece, and the Levant, he published, in the first two cantos of _Childe Harold_, 1812, a sort of poetic itinerary of his experiences and impressions. The poem took, rather to its author's surprise, who said that he woke one morning and found himself famous.

_Childe Harold_ opened a new field to poetry: the romance of travel, the picturesque aspects of foreign scenery, manners, and costumes. It is instructive of the difference between the two ages, in poetic sensibility to such things, to compare Byron's glowing imagery with Addison's tame _Letter from Italy_, written a century before. _Childe Harold_ was followed by a series of metrical tales, the _Giaour_, the _Bride of Abydos_, the _Corsair_, _Lara_, the _Siege of Corinth_, _Parisina_, and the _Prisoner of Chillon_, all written in the years 1813-1816. These poems at once took the place of Scott's in popular interest, dazzling a public that had begun to weary of chivalry romances with pictures of Eastern life, with incidents as exciting as Scott's, descriptions as highly colored, and a much greater intensity of pa.s.sion.

So far as they depended for this interest upon the novelty of their accessories, the effect was a temporary one. Seraglios, divans, bulbuls, Gulistans, Zuleikas, and other oriental properties deluged English poetry for a time, and then subsided; even as the tide of moss-troopers, sorcerers, hermits, and feudal castles had already had its rise and fall.

But there was a deeper reason for the impression made by Byron's poetry upon his contemporaries. He laid his finger right on the sore spot in modern life. He had the disease with which the time was sick, the world-weariness, the desperation which proceeded from "pa.s.sion incapable of being converted into action." We find this tone in much of the literature which followed the failure of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic wars. From the irritations of that period, the disappointment of high hopes for the future of the race, the growing religious disbelief, and the revolt of democracy and free thought against conservative reaction, sprang what Southey called the "Satanic school,"

which spoke its loudest word in Byron. t.i.tanic is the better word, for the rebellion was not against G.o.d, but Jupiter; that is, against the State, Church, and society of Byron's day; against George III., the Tory cabinet of Lord Castlereagh, the Duke of Wellington, the bench of bishops, London gossip, the British const.i.tution, and British cant. In these poems of Byron, and in his dramatic experiments, _Manfred_ and _Cain_, there is a single figure--the figure of Byron under various masks--and one pervading mood, a restless and sardonic gloom, a weariness of life, a love of solitude, and a melancholy exaltation in the presence of the wilderness and the sea. Byron's hero is always represented as a man originally n.o.ble, whom some great wrong, by others, or some mysterious crime of his own, has blasted and embittered, and who carries about the world a seared heart and a somber brow. Harold--who may stand as a type of all his heroes--has run "through sin's labyrinth," and feeling the "fullness of satiety," is drawn abroad to roam, "the wandering exile of his own dark mind." The loss of a capacity for pure, unjaded emotion is the constant burden of Byron's lament;

No more, no more, O never more on me The freshness of the heart shall fall like dew: