A HISTORY OF ENGLISH ROMANTICISM IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY.
A HISTORY OF ENGLISH ROMANTICISM IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY
BY
HENRY A; BEERS
A uthtre/ "A Sttturten fasta-at," " The Wajt of Yale," etc.
NEW YORK
HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY
SEEN 8 •
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ROMANCE
My love dwelt in a Northern land.
A grey tower in a forest green Was hers, and far on either hand
The long wash of the waves was seen, And leagues on leagues of yellow sand,
The woven forest boughs between.
And through the silver Northern light The sunset slowly died away,
And herds of strange deer, lily-white, Stole forth among the branches grey;
About the coming of the light,
They fled like ghosts before the day.
I know not if the forest green
Still girdles round that castle grey;
I know not if the boughs between The white deer vanish ere the day;
Above my love the grass is green, My heart is colder than the clay.
ANDREW LANG.
COPYRIGHT, 1901
BY HENRY HOLT & CO.
PRINTED IN THE U. S. A BY
QUINN & BODEN COMPANY. INC.
RAHWAY. N. J.
PREFACE.
THE present volume is a sequel to " A History of Eng- lish Romanticism in the Eighteenth Century" (New York: Henry Holt & Co., 1899). References in the footnotes to " Volume I." are to that work. The difficul- ties of this second part of my undertaking have been of a kind just opposite to those of the first. As it concerns my subject, the eighteenth century was an age of begin- nings; and the problem was to discover what latent ro- manticism existed in the writings of a period whose spirit, upon the whole, was distinctly unromantic. But the tem- per of the nineteenth century has been, until recent years, prevailingly romantic in the wider meaning of the word. And as to the more restricted sense in which I have chosen to employ it, the mediaevalising literature of the nineteenth century is at least twenty times as great as that of the eighteenth, both in bulk and in value. Ac- cordingly the problem here is one of selection ; and of selection not from a list of half-forgotten names, like Warton and Kurd, but from authors whose work is still the daily reading of all educated readers.
As I had anticipated, objection has been made to the narrowness of my definition of romanticism. But every writer has aright to make his own definitions; or, at least, to say what his book shall be about. I have not
vi Preface.
written a history of the " liberal movement in English literature"; nor of the "renaissance of wonder"; nor of the " emancipation of the ego." Why not have called the book, then, " A History of the Mediaeval Revival in Eng- land " ? Because I have a clear title to the use of ro- mantic in one of its commonest acceptations ; and, for my- self, I prefer the simple dictionary definition, " pertaining to the style of the Christian and popular literature of the Middle Ages," to any of those more pretentious explana- tions which seek to express the true inwardness of ro- mantic literature by analysing it into its elements, select- ing one of these elements as essential, and rejecting all the rest as accidental.
M. Brunetiere. for instance, identifies romanticism with lyricism. It is the "emancipation of the ego." This formula is made to fit Victor Hugo, and it will fit Byron. But M. Brunetiere would surely not deny that Walter Scott's work is objective and dramatic quite as often as it is lyrical. Yet what Englishman will be satisfied with a definition of romantic which excludes Scott ? Indeed, M. Brunetiere himself is respectful to the traditional meaning of the word. " Numerous definitions," he says, " have been given of Romanticism, and still others are continually being offered; and all, or almost all of them, contain a part of the truth. Mme. de Stael was right when she asserted in her ' Allemagne ' that Paganism! and Christianity, the North and the South, antiquity and the Middle Ages, having divided between them the his-41 tory of literature, Romanticism in consequence, in con- trast to Classicism, was a combination of chivalry, the Middle Ages, the literatures of the North, and Christian- ity. It should be noted, in this connection, that some
vii
thirty years later Heinrich Heine, in the book in which he will rewrite Mme. de StaeTs, will not give such a very different idea of Romanticism." And if, in an analysis of the romantic movement throughout Europe, any single element in it can lay claim to the leading place, that ele- ment seems to me to be the return of each country to its national past; in other words, mediaevalism.
A definition loses its usefulness when it is made to connote too much. Professor Herford says that the " organising conception " of his " Age of Wordsworth " is romanticism. But if Cowper and Wordsworth and Shelley are romantic, then almost all the literature of the years 1798-1830 is romantic. I prefer to think of Cow- per as a naturalist, of Shelley as an idealist, and of Wordsworth as a transcendental realist, and to reserve the name romanticist for writers like Scott, Coleridge, and Keats; and I think the distinction a serviceable one. Again, I have been censured for omitting Blake from my former volume. The omission was deliberate, not accidental, and the grounds for it were given in the preface. Blake was not discovered until rather late in the nineteenth century. He was not a link in the chain of influence which I was tracing. I am glad to find my justification in a passage of Mr. Saintsbury's " History of Nineteenth Century Literature " (p. 13): "Blake ex- ercised on the literary history of his time no influence, and occupied in it no position. . . . The public had little opportunity of seeing his pictures, and less of reading his books. . . . He was practically an unread man."
But I hope that this second volume may make more clear the unity of my design and the limits of my subject*
viii Preface.
It is scarcely necessary to add that no absolute estimate is attempted of the writers whose works are described in this history. They are looked at exclusively from a sin- gle point of view. H. A. B. APRIL, 1901.
TABLE OF CONTENTS.
CHAPTER
I. WALTER SCOTT,
II. COLERIDGE, BOWLES, AND THE POPE CONTROVERSY, 48
III. KEATS, LEIGH HUNT, AND THE DANTE REVIVAL, 90
IV. THE ROMANTIC SCHOOL IN GERMANY, . . . 132 V. THE ROMANTIC MOVEMENT IN FRANCE, . . 173
VI. DIFFUSED ROMANTICISM IN THE LITERATURE OF
THE NINETEENTH CENTURY, .... 227
VII. THE PRE-RAPHAELITES, ..... 282
VIII. TENDENCIES AND RESULTS, * . 352
A HISTORY OF ENGLISH ROMANTICISM.
CHAPTER I. Walter Scott.*
IT was reserved for Walter Scott, " the Ariosto of the North," "the historiographer royal of feudalism," to ac- complish the task which his eighteenth-century forerun- ners had essayed in vain. He possessed the true en- chanter's wand, the historic imagination. With this in his hand, he raised the dead past to life, made it once more conceivable, made it even actual. Before Scott no genius of the highest order had lent itself wholly or mainly to retrospection. He is the middle point and the culmination of English romanticism. His name is, all in all, the most important on our list. " Towards him all the lines of the romantic revival converge."! The popu- lar ballad, the Gothic romance, the Ossianic poetry, the
* Scott's translations from the German are considered in the author' s earlier volume, " A History of English Romanti- cism in the Eighteenth Century. " Incidental mention of Scott occurs throughout the same volume ; and a few of the things there said are repeated, in substance though not in form, in the present chapter. It seemed better to risk some repetition than to sacrifice fulness of treatment here.
f "The Development of the English Novel," by Wilbur L. Cross, p. 131.
History of English Romanticism.
new German literature, the Scandinavian discoveries, these and other scattered rays of influence reach a focus in Scott. It is true that his delineation of feudal society is not final. There were sides of mediaeval life which he did not know, or understand, or sympathize with, and some of these have been painted in by later artists. That his pictures have a coloring of modern sentiment is no arraignment of him but of \hzgenre. All romanticists are resurrectionists; their art is an elaborate make-be- lieve. It is enough for their purpose if the world which they re-create has the look of reality, the verisimile if not the verum. That Scott's genius was in extenso rather than in intenso ; that his work is largely improvisation; that he was not a miniature, but a distemper painter, splashing large canvasses with a coarse brush and gaudy pigments, all these are commonplaces of criticism. Scott's handling was broad, vigorous, easy, careless, healthy, free. He was never subtle, morbid, or fantastic, and had no niceties or secrets. He was, as Coleridge said of Schil- ler, " master, not of the intense drama of passion, but the diffused drama of history." Therefore, because his qual- ities were popular and his appeal was made to the people, the general reader, he won a hearing for his cause, which Coleridge or Keats or Tieck, with his closer workman- ship, could never have won. He first and he alone popu- larised romance. No literature dealing with the feudal past has ever had the currency and the universal success of Scott's. At no time has mediaevalism held so large a place in comparison with other literary interests as dur- ing the years of his greatest vogue, say from 1805 to 1830. The first point to be noticed about Scott is the thor- oughness of his equipment. While never a scholar in
Walter Scott. 3
the academic sense, he was, along certain chosen lines, a really learned man. He was thirty-four when he pub- lished "The Lay of the Last Minstrel" (1805), the first of his series of metrical romances and the first of his poems to gain popular favour. But for twenty years he had been storing his mind with the history, legends, and ballad poetry of the Scottish border, and was already a finished antiquarian. The bent and limitations of his genius were early determined, and it remained to the end wonderfully constant to its object. At the age of twelve he had begun a collection of manuscript ballads. His education in romance dated from the cradle. His lulla- bies were Jacobite songs; his grandmother told him tales of moss-troopers, and his Aunt Janet read him ballads from Ramsay's " Tea-table Miscellany," upon which his quick and tenacious memory fastened eagerly. The bal- lad of " Hardiknute," in this collection, he knew by heart before he could read. " It was the first poem I ever learnt — the last I shall ever forget." Dr. Blacklock in- troduced the young schoolboy to the poems of Ossian and of Spenser, and he committed to memory " whole duans of the one and cantos of the other." " Spenser," he says, 41 1 could have read forever. Too young to trouble myself about the allegory, I considered all the knights and ladies and dragons and giants in their outward and exoteric sense, and God only knows how delighted I was to find myself in such society." A little later Percy's "Rel- iques" fell into his hands, with results that have already been described.*
As soon as he got access to the circulating library in Edinburgh, he began to devour its works of fiction, char- * Vol. i., p. 300.
4 *A History of English Romanticism.
acteristically rejecting love stories and domestic tales, but laying hold upon " all that was adventurous and ro- mantic," and in particular upon "everything which touched on knight-errantry." For two or three years he used to spend his holidays with his schoolmate, John Irving, on Arthur's Seat or Salisbury Crags, where they read together books like " The Castle of Otranto " and the poems of Spenser and Ariosto; or composed and nar- rated to each other " interminable tales of battles and enchantments " and " legends in which the martial and the miraculous always predominated." The education of Edward Waverley, as described in the third chapter of Scott's first novel, was confessedly the novelist's own education. In the " large Gothic room " which was the library of Waverley Honour, the young book- worm pored over " old historical chronicles " and the writings of Pulci, Froissart, Brantome, and De la Noue ; and became " well acquainted with Spenser, Drayton, and other poets who have exercised themselves on romantic fiction — of all themes the most fascinating to a youthful imagination."
Yet even thus early, a certain solidity was apparent in Scott's studies. " To the romances and poetry which I chiefly delighted in," he writes, " I had always added the study of history, especially as connected with military events." He interested himself, for example, in the art of fortification; and when confined to his bed by a child- ish illness, found amusement in modelling fortresses and " arranging shells and seeds and pebbles so as to repre- sent encountering armies. ... I fought my way thus through Vertot's * Knights of Malta ' — a book which, as it hovered between history and romance, was exceedingly dear to me."
Walter Scott. 5
. Every genius is self-educated, and we find Scott from the first making instinctive selections and rejections among the various kinds of knowledge offered him. At school he would learn no Greek, and wrote a theme in which he maintained, to the wrath of his teacher, that Ariosto was a better poet than Homer. In later life he declared that he had forgotten even the letters of the Greek alphabet. Latin would have fared as badly, had not his interest in Matthew Paris and other monkish chroniclers "kept up a kind of familiarity with the lan- guage even in its rudest state." " To my Gothic ear, the * Stabat Mater,' the * Dies Irae,' * and some of the other hymns of the Catholic Church are more solemn and af- fecting than the fine classical poetry of Buchanan." In our examination of Scott's early translations from the German, f it has been noticed how exclusively he was at- tracted by the romantic department of that literature, passing over, for instance, Goethe's maturer work, to fix upon his juvenile drama "Gotz von Berlichingen." Similarly he learned Italian just to read in the original the romantic poets Tasso, Ariosto, Boiardo, and Pulci. When he first went to London in 1 799, " his great anx- iety," reports Lockhart, "was to examine the antiquities of the Tower and Westminster Abbey, and to make some researches among the MSS. of the British Museum." From Oxford, which he visited in 1803, he brought away only " a grand but indistinct picture of towers and chapels and oriels and vaulted halls " ; having met there a recep-
* The sixth canto of the " Lay" closes with a few lines trans- lated from the "Dies Irae " and chanted by the monks in Mel- rose Abbey.
fVol. i., pp. 389-404.
6 <A History of English Romanticism.
tion which, as he modestly acknowledges, " was more than such a truant to the classic page as myself was entitled to expect at the source of classic learning." Finally, in his last illness, when sent to Rome to recover from the effects of a paralytic stroke, his ruling passion was strong in death. He examined with eagerness the remains of the medieval city, but appeared quite indifferent to that older Rome which speaks to the classical student. It will be remembered that just the contrary of this was true of Ad- dison, when he was in Italy a century before.* Scott was at no pains to deny or to justify the one-sidedness of his culture. But when Erskine remonstrated with him for rambling on
"through brake and maze With harpers rude, of barbarous days, "
and urged him to compose a regular epic on classical lines, he good-naturedly but resolutely put aside the ad- vice.
" Nay, Erskine, nay — On the wild hill Let the wild heath-bell f flourish still .... Though wild as cloud, as stream, as gale. Flow forth, flow unrestrained, my tale ! " \
* Vol. i., pp. 48-49.
f "Scott was entirely incapable of entering into the spirit of any classical scene. He was strictly a Goth and a Scot, and his sphere of sensation may be almost exactly limited by the growth of heather." — Ruskin, "Modern Painters," vol. iii., p. 317.
^"Marmion": Introduction to Canto third. In the pref- ace to "The Bridal of Triermain," the poet says : "According to the author's idea of Romantic Poetry, as distinguished from Epic, the former comprehends a fictitious narrative, framed and combined at the pleasure of the writer ; beginning and ending as he may judge best ; which neither exacts nor refuses the use of supernatural machinery ; which is free from the technical rules of the Epee. ... In a word, the author is absolute master of his country and its inhabitants."
Walter Scott. 7
Scott's letters to Erskine, Ellis, Leyden, Ritson, Miss Seward, and other literary correspondents are filled with discussions of antiquarian questions and the results of his favourite reading in old books and manuscripts. He communicates his conclusions on the subject of " Arthur and Merlin " or on the authorship of the old metrical ro- mance of " Sir Tristram." * He has been copying manu- scripts in the Advocates' Library at Edinburgh. In 1791 he read papers before the Speculative Society on " The Origin of the Feudal System," "The Authenticity of Os- sian's Poems," " The Origin of the Scandinavian Mythol- ogy." Lockhart describes two note-books in Scott's hand- writing, with the date 1792, containing memoranda of ancient court records about Walter Scott and his wife, Dame Janet Beaton, the " Ladye " of Branksome in the " Lay " ; extracts from " Guerin de Montglave " ; copies of " Vegtam's Kvitha " and the " Death-Song of Regner Lodbrog," with Gray's English versions; Cnut's verses on passing Ely Cathedral; the ancient English "Cuckoo Song," and other rubbish of the kind.f When in 1803 he began to contribute articles to the Edinburgh Review, his chosen topics were such as " Amadis of Gaul," Ellis'
•Scott's ascription of "Sir Tristram" to Thomas the Rhymer, or Thomas of Erceldoune, was doubtless a mistake. His edition of the romance was printed in 1804. In 1800 he had begun a prose tale, "Thomas the Rhymer," a fragment of which is given in the preface to the General Edition of the Waverley Novels (1829). This old legendary poet and prophet, who flourished circa 1280, and was believed to have been carried off by the Queen of Faerie into Eildon Hill, fas- cinated Scott's imagination strongly. See his version of the "True Thomas'" story in the " Minstrelsy, " as also the editions of this very beautiful romance in Child's "Ballads," in the publications of the E. E. Text So. ; and by Alois Brandl, Ber- lin: 1880. f See vol. i., p. 390.
8 <A History of English Romanticism.
"Specimens of Ancient English Poetry," Godwin's "Chaucer," Sibbald's "Chronicle of Scottish Poetry," Evans' " Old Ballads," Todd's " Spenser," " The Life and Works of Chatterton," Southey's translation of "The Cid," etc.
Scott's preparation for the work which he had to do was more than adequate. His reading along chosen lines was probably more extensive and minute than any man's of his generation. The introductions and notes to his poems and novels are even overburdened with learn* ing. But this, though important, was but the lesser part of his advantage. "The old-maidenly genius of anti- quarianism " could produce a Strutt * or even perhaps a Warton ; but it needed the touch of the creative imagi- nation to turn the dead material of knowledge into works of art that have delighted millions of readers for a hun- dred years in all civilised lands and tongues.
The key to Scott's romanticism is his intense local feeling. f That attachment to place which, in most men, is a sort of animal instinct, was with him a passion. To set the imagination at work some emotional stimulus is required. The angry pride of Byron, Shelley's revolt against authority, Keats' almost painfully acute sensitive- ness to beauty, supplied the nervous irritation which was wanting in Scott's slower, stronger, and heavier tempera- ment. The needed impetus came to him from his love of country. Byron and Shelley were torn up by the roots and flung abroad ; but Scott had struck his roots deep
* See the General Preface to the Waverley Novels for some remarks on " Queenhoo Hall " which Strutt began and Scott completed.
f C/. vol. i., p. 344-
Walter Scott. 9
into native soil. His absorption in the past and rever- ence for everything that was old, his conservative prej- udices and aristocratic ambitions, all had their source in this feeling. Scott's Toryism was of a different spring from Wordsworth's and Coleridge's. It was not a reac- tion from disappointed radicalism ; nor was it the result of reasoned conviction. It was inborn and was nursed into a sentimental Jacobitism by ancestral traditions and by an early prepossession in favour of the Stuarts — a Scottish dynasty — reinforced by encounters with men in the Highlands who had been out in the '45. It did not interfere with a practical loyalty to the reigning house and with what seems like a somewhat exaggerated defer- ence to George IV. Personally the most modest of men, he was proud to trace his descent from " auld Wat of Harden " * and to claim kinship with the bold Buccleuch. He used to make annual pilgrimages to Harden Tower, " the incunabula of his race " ; and " in the earlier part of his life," says Lockhart, "he had nearly availed himself of his kinsman's permission to fit up the dilapidated/^/ for his summer residence."
Byron wrote : " I twine my hope of being remembered in my line with my land's language." But Scott wished to associate his name with the land itself. Abbotsford was more to him than Newstead could ever have been to Byron; although Byron was a peer and inherited his domain, while Scott was a commoner and created his. Too much has been said in condemnation of Scott's
* " I am therefore descended from that ancient chieftain whose name I have made to ring in many a ditty, and from his fair dame, the Flower of Yarrow— no bad genealogy for a Border minstrel."
A History of English Romanticism.
weakness in this respect; that his highest ambition was to become a laird and found a family ; that he was more gratified when the King made him a baronet than when the public bought his books; that the expenses of Ab- botsford and the hospitalities which he extended to all comers wasted his time and finally brought about his bankruptcy. Leslie Stephen and others have even made merry over Scott's Gothic,* comparing his plaster-of- Paris 'scutcheons and ceilings in imitation of carved oak with the pinchbeck architecture of Strawberry Hill, and intimating that the feudalism in his romances was only a shade more genuine than the feudalism of " The Castle of Otranto." Scott was imprudent; Abbotsford was his weakness, but it was no ignoble weakness. If the ideal of the life which he proposed to himself there was scarcely a heroic one, neither was it vulgar or selfish. The artist or the philosopher should perhaps be superior to the am- bition of owning land and having " a stake in the coun- try," but the ambition is a very human one and has its good side. In Scott the desire was more social than personal. It was not that title and territory were feathers in his cap, but that they bound him more closely to the dear soil of Scotland and to the national, historic past.
The only deep passion in Scott's poetry is patriotism, the passion of place. In his metrical romances the rush of the narrative and the vivid, picturesque beauty of the
* " He neither cared for painting nor sculpture, and was to- tally incapable of forming a judgment about them. He had some confused love of Gothic architecture because it was dark, picturesque, old and like nature ; but could not tell the worst from the best, and built for himself probably the most incon- gruous and ugly pile that gentlemanly modernism ever de- vised."— Ruskin, "Modern Painters," vol. iii., p. 271.
Walter Scott. n
descriptions are indeed exciting to the imagination ; but it is only when the chord of national feeling is touched that the verse grows lyrical, that the heart is reached, and that tears come into the reader's eyes, as they must have done into the poet's. A dozen such passages occur at once to the memory ; the last stand of the Scottish nobles around their king at Flodden ; the view of Edinburgh—- " mine own romantic town " — from Blackford Hill :
"Fitz-Eustace' heart felt closely pent: As if to give his rapture vent, The spur he to his charger lent,
And raised his bridle-hand. And, making demi-volte in air, Cried, 'Where's the coward that would not dare
To fight for such a land?'"
and the still more familiar opening of the sixth canto in the "Lay"— "Breathes there the man," etc.:
" O Caledonia ! stern and wild, Meet nurse for a poetic child ! Land of brown heath and shaggy wood, Land of the mountain and the flood, Land of my sires ! what mortal hand Can e'er untie the filial band That knits me to thy rugged strand? "
In such a mood geography becomes poetry and names are music.* Scott said to Washington Irving that if he did not see the heather at least once a year, he thought he would die.
Lockhart tells how the sound that he loved best of all sounds was in his dying ears — the flow of the Tweed over its pebbles.
Significant, therefore, is Scott's treatment of landscape, and the difference in this regard between himself and
* See vol. i. , p. 200.
i2 <A History of English Romanticism.
his great contemporaries. His friend, Mr. Morritt of Rokeby, testifies: "He was but half satisfied with the most beautiful scenery when he could not connect it with some local legend." Scott had to the full the romantic love of mountain and lake, yet " to me," he confesses, " the wandering over the field of Bannockburn was the source of more exquisite pleasure than gazing upon the celebrated landscape from the battlements of Stirling Castle. I do not by any means infer that I was dead to the feeling of picturesque scenery. . . . But show me an old castle or a field of battle and I was at home at once." And again : " The love of natural beauty, more especially when combined with ancient ruins or remains of our fathers' piety * or splendour, became with me an insati- able passion." It was not in this sense that high moun- tains were a " passion " to Byron, nor yet to Wordsworth. In a letter to Miss Seward, Scott wrote of popular poetry : " Much of its peculiar charm is indeed, I believe, to be attributed solely to its locality. ... In some verses of that eccentric but admirable poet Coleridge f he talks of
' An old rude tale that suited well The ruins wild and hoary. '
I think there are few who have not been in some de- gree touched with this local sympathy. Tell a peasant an ordinary tale of robbery and murder, and perhaps you
* The Abbey of Tintern was irrelevant to Wordsworth. — Herford, "The Age of Wordsworth," Int., p. xx.
f " Dear Sir Walter Scott and myself were exact, but harmo- nious, 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 over the plain of Marathon without taking more interest in it than in any other plain of similar features."— Coleridge, '* Table Talk," August 4, 1833.
Walter Scott. 13
may fail to interest him ; but, to excite his terrors, you assure him it happened on the very heath he usually crosses, or to a man whose family he has known, and you rarely meet such a mere image of humanity as remains entirely unmoved. I suspect it is pretty much the same with myself."
Scott liked to feel solid ground of history, or at least of legend, under his feet. He connected his wildest tales, like " Glenfinlas " and "The Eve of St. John," with definite names and places. This Antaeus of romance lost strength, as soon as he was lifted above the earth. With Coleridge it was just the contrary. The moment his moonlit, vapory enchantments touched ground, the con- tact " precipitated the whole solution." In 1813 Scott had printed " The Bridal of Triermain " anonymously, with a preface designed to mislead the public ; having contrived, by way of a joke, to fasten the authorship of the piece upon Erskine. This poem is as pure fantasy as Tennyson's "Day Dream," and tells the story of a knight who, in obedience to a vision and the instructions of an ancient sage " sprung from Druid sires," enters an enchanted castle and frees the Princess Gyneth, a natural daughter of King Arthur, from the spell that has bound her for five hundred years. But true to his instinct, the poet lays his scene not in vacua, but near his own beloved borderland. He found, in Burns' "Antiquities of West- moreland and Cumberland " mention of a line of Rolands de Vaux, lords of Triermain, a fief of the barony of Gils- land; and this furnished him a name for his hero. He found in Hutchinson's "Excursion to the Lakes" the description of a cluster of rocks in the Vale of St. John's, which looked, at a distance, like a Gothic castle ; this
*A History of English Romanticism.
supplied him with a hint for the whole adventure. Mean- while Coleridge had been living in the Lake Country. The wheels of his " Christabel " had got hopelessly mired, and he now borrowed a horse from Sir Walter and hitched it to his own wagon. He took over Sir Roland de Vaux of Triermain and made him the putative father of his mysterious Geraldine, although, in compliance with Scott's romance, the embassy that goes over the mountains to Sir Roland's castle can find no trace of it. In Part I. Sir Leoline's own castle stood nowhere in particular. In Part II. it is transferred to Cumberland, a mistake in art almost as grave as if the Ancient Mar- iner had brought his ship to port at Liverpool.
Wordsworth visited the " great Minstrel of the Border " at Abbotsford in 1831, shortly before Scott set out for Naples, and the two poets went in company to the ruins of Newark Castle. It is characteristic that in " Yarrow Revisited," which commemorates the incident, the Bard of Rydal should think it necessary to offer an apology for his distinguished host's habit of romanticising nature — that nature which Wordsworth, romantic neither in temper nor choice of subject, treated after so dif- ferent a fashion.
"Nor deem that localised Romance
Plays false with our affections ; Unsanctifies our tears — made sport
For fanciful dejections : Ah no ! the visions of the past
Sustain the heart in feeling Life as she is — our changeful Life,
With friends and kindred dealing."
The apology, after all, is only half-hearted. For while Wordsworth esteemed Scott highly and was careful to
Walter Scott. 15
speak publicly of his work with a qualified respect, it is well known that, in private, he set little value upon it, and once somewhat petulantly declared that all Scott's poetry was not worth sixpence. He wrote to Scott, of " Marmion " : "I think your end has been attained. That it is not the end which I should wish you to propose to yourself, you will be aware." He had visited Scott at Lasswade as early as 1803, and in recording his impres- sions notes that " his conversation was full of anecdote and averse from disquisition." The minstrel was a raconteur and lived in the past; the bard was a moralist and lived in the present.
There are several poems of Wordsworth's and Scott's touching upon common ground which serve to contrast their methods sharply and to illustrate in a striking way the precise character of Scott's romanticism. "Helvel- lyn" and "Fidelity" were written independently and celebrate the same incident. In 1805 a young man lost his way on the Cumberland mountains and perished of exposure. Three months afterwards his body was found, -his faithful dog still watching beside it. Scott was a lover of dogs — loved them warmly, individually; so to speak, personally; and all dogs instinctively loved Scott*
Wordsworth had a sort of tepid, theoretical benevo- lence towards the animal creation in general. Yet as between the two poets, the advantage in depth of feeling
* See the delightful anecdote preserved by Carlyle about the little Blenheim cocker who hated the "genus acrid-quack" and formed an immediate attachment to Sir Walter. Words- worth was far from being an acrid quack, or even a solemn prig — another genus hated of dogs — but there was something a little unsympathetic in his personality. The dalesmen liked poor Hartley Coleridge better.
1 6 <A History of English Romanticism.
is, as usual, with Wordsworth. Both render, with per* haps equal power, though in characteristically different ways, the impression of the austere and desolate grandeur of the mountain scenery. But the thought to which Wordsworth leads up is the mysterious divineness of in- stinct
"... that strength of feeling, great Above all human estimate :" —
while Scott conducts his story to the reflection that Na- ture has given the dead man a more stately funeral than the Church could have given, a comparison seemingly dragged in for the sake of a stanzaful of his favourite Gothic imagery.
" When a Prince to the fate of the Peasant has yielded,
The tapestry waves dark round the dim-lighted hall ; With 'scutcheons of silver the coffin is shielded,
And pages stand mute by the canopied pall : Through the courts at deep midnight the torches are gleam- ing,
In the proudly arched chapel the banners are beaming, Far adown the long aisle sacred music is streaming, Lamenting a chief of the people should fall. "
Wordsworth and Landor, who seldom agreed, agreed that Scott's most imaginative line was the verse in "Helvellyn":
" When the wind waved his garment how oft didst thou start ! "
In several of his poems Wordsworth handled legendary subjects, and it is most instructive here to notice his avoidance of the romantic note, and to imagine how Scott would have managed the same material. In the prefa- tory note to " The White Doe of Rylstone," Wordsworth himself pointed out the difference. " The subject being;
Walter Scott. 17
taken from feudal times has led to its being compared to some of Sir Walter Scott's poems that belong to the same age and state of society. The comparison is inconsid- erate. Sir Walter pursued the customary and very natu- ral course of conducting an action, presenting various turns of fortune, to some outstanding point on which the mind might rest as a termination or catastrophe. The course I attempted to pursue is entirely different. Every- thing that is attempted by the principal personages in * The White Doe ' fails, so far as its object is external and substantial. So far as it is moral and spiritual it succeeds."
This poem is founded upon "The Rising in the North," a ballad given in the "Reliques," which re- counts the insurrection of the Earls of Northumberland and Westmoreland against Elizabeth in 1569. Richard Norton of Rylstone, with seven stalwart sons, joined in the rising, carrying a banner embroidered with a red cross and the five wounds of Christ. The story bristled with opportunities for the display of feudal pomp, and it is obvious upon what points in the action Scott would have laid the emphasis; the muster of the tenantry of the great northern Catholic houses of Percy and Neville; the high mass celebrated by the insurgents in Durham Cathe- dral ; the march of the Nortons to Brancepeth ; the eleven days' siege of Barden Tower; the capture and execution of Marmaduke and Ambrose; and — by way of episode — the Battle of Neville's Cross in 1346.* But in conform- ity to the principle announced in the preface to the
* Scott could scarcely have forborne to introduce the figure of the Queen of Scots, to insure whose marriage with Norfolk •was one of the objects of the rising.
2
1 8 <A History of English Romanticism.
"Lyrical Ballads"— that the feeling should give impor- tance to the incidents and situation, not the incidents and situation to the feeling — Wordsworth treats all this out- ward action as merely preparatory to the true purpose of his poem, a study of the discipline of sorrow, of ruin and bereavement patiently endured by the Lady Emily, the only daughter and survivor of the Norton house.
"Action is transitory — a step, a blow. . . . Suffering is permanent, obscure and dark, And has the nature of infinity. Yet through that darkness (infinite though it seem And irremoveable) gracious openings lie. . . . Even to the fountain-head of peace divine."
With the story of the Nortons the poet connects a local tradition which he found in Whitaker's " History of the Deanery of Craven " ; of a white doe which haunted the churchyard of Bolton Priory. Between this gentle crea- ture and the forlorn Lady of Rylstone he establishes the mysterious and soothing sympathy which he was always fond of imagining between the soul of man and the things of nature.*
Or take again the " Song at the Feast of Brougham Castle," an incident in the Wars of the Roses. Lord Clifford, who had been hidden away in infancy from the vengeance of the Yorkists and reared as a shepherd, is restored to the estates and honours of his ancestors. High in the festal hall the impassioned minstrel strikes his harp and sings the triumph of Lancaster, urging the shepherd lord to emulate the warlike prowess of his fore- fathers.
* For a full review of "The White Doe " the reader should consult Principal Shairp's "Aspects of Poetry," 1881.
Walter Scott. 19
" Armour rusting in his halls On the blood of Clifford calls ; ' Quell the Scot, ' exclaims the Lance — Bear me to the heart of France Is the longing of the Shield."
Thus far the minstrel, and he has Sir Walter with him ; for this is evidently the part of the poem that he liked and remembered, when he noted in his journal that " Wordsworth could be popular * if he would — witness the ' Feast at Brougham Castle '—' Song of the Cliffords/ I think, is the name." But the exultant strain ceases and the poet himself speaks, and with the transition in feeling comes a change in the verse ; the minstrel's song was in the octosyllabic couplet associated with metrical romance. But this Clifford was no fighter — none of Scott's heroes. Nature had educated him.
" In him the savage virtue of the Race " was dead.
" Love had he found in huts where poor men lie ; His daily teachers had been woods and rills, The silence that is in the starry sky, The sleep that is among the lonely hills."
Once more, consider the pronounced difference in sen- timent between the description of the chase in " Hart- leap Well "and the opening passage of "The Lady of the Lake":
"The stag at eve had drunk his fill. Where danced the moon on Monan's rill," etc.f
* Scott averred that Wordsworth offended public taste on system.
fThis is incomparable, not only as a masterpiece of ro- mantic narrative, but for the spirited and natural device by which the hero is conducted to his adventure. R. L. Steven- son and other critics have been rather hard upon Scott's de- fects as an artist. He was indeed no stylist : least of all a precieux. There are no close-set mosaics in his somewhat
t/f History of English Romanticism.
Scott was a keen sportsman, and his sympathy was with the hunter.* Wordsworth's, of course, was with the quarry. The knight in his poem — who bears not unsug- gestively the name of " Sir Walter " — has outstripped all his companions, like Fitz James, and is the only one in at the death. To commemorate his triumph he frames a basin for the spring whose waters were stirred by his victim's dying breath; he plants three stone pillars to mark the creature's hoof-prints in its marvellous leap from the mountain to the springside; and he builds a pleasure house and an arbour where he comes with his paramour to make merry in the summer days. But Na- ture sets her seal of condemnation upon the cruelty and vainglory of man. "The spot is curst"; no flowers or grass will grow there; no beast will drink of the fountain. Part I. tells the story without enthusiasm but without comment. Part II. draws the lesson
" Never to blend our pleasure or our pride With sorrow of the meanest thing that feels."
The song of Wordsworth's " Solitary Reaper " derives a pensive sorrow from " old, unhappy, far-off things and battles long ago." But to Scott the battle is not far off, but a vivid and present reality. When he visited the
slip-shod prose, and he did not seek for the right word "with moroseness," like Landor. But, in his large fashion, he was skilful in inventing impressive effects. Another instance is the solitary trumpet that breathed its "note of defiance" in the lists of Ashby-de-la-Zouch. which has the genuine melo- dramatic thrill — like the horn of Hernani or the bell that tolls in "Venice Preserved."
* See the " Hunting Song" in his continuation of "Queen- hooHall"—
"Waken, lords and ladies gay, On the mountain dawns the day."
Walter Scott. 21
Trosachs glen, his thought painly was, " What a place for a fight ! " And when James looks down on Loch Katrine his first reflection is, " What a scene were here . . .
"For princely pomp or churchman's pride ! On this bold brow a lordly tower ; In that soft vale a lady's bower; On yonder meadow, far away, The turrets of a cloister grey," etc.
The most romantic scene was not romantic enough for Scott till his imagination had peopled it with the life of a vanished age.
The literary forms which Scott made peculiarly his own, and in which the greater part of his creative work was done, are three: the popular ballad, the metrical romance, and the historical novel in prose. His point of departure was the ballad.* The material amassed in his Liddesdale "raids" — begun in 1792 and continued for seven successive years — was given to the world in the "Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border" (Vols. I. and II. in 1802; Vol. III. in 1803), a collection of ballads histori- cal, legendary, and romantic, with an abundant apparatus in the way of notes and introductions, illustrating the history, antiquities, manners, traditions, and superstitions of the Borderers. Forty-three of the ballads in the " Minstrelsy " had never been printed before ; and of the remainder the editor gave superior versions, choosing with sureness of taste the best among variant readings, and with a more intimate knowledge of local ways and language than any previous ballad-fancier had com- manded. He handled his texts more faithfully than Percy, rarely substituting lines of his own. "From
* See vol. i., pp. 277 and 390.
22 <A History of English Romanticism.
among a hundred corruptions," says Lockhart, " he seized, with instinctive tact, the primitive diction and imagery, and produced strains in which the unbroken energy of half-civilised ages, their stern and deep passions, their daring adventures and cruel tragedies, and even their rude wild humour are reflected with almost the brightness of a Homeric mirror."
In the second volume of the " Minstrelsy " were in- cluded what Scott calls his "first serious attempts in verse," viz., "Glenfinlas" and "The Eve of St. John," which had been already printed in Lewis' "Tales of Wonder." Both pieces are purely romantic, with a strong tincture of the supernatural ; but the first — Scott himself draws the distinction — is a " legendary poem," and the second alone a proper " ballad." " Glenfmlas," * founded on a Gaelic legend, tells how a Highland chieftain while hunting in Perthshire, near the scene of " The Lady of the Lake," is lured from his bothie at night and torn to pieces by evil spirits. There is no attempt here to pre- serve the language of popular poetry ; stanzas abound in a diction of which the following is a fair example:
"Long have I sought sweet Mary's heart, And dropp'd the tear and heaved the sigh: But vain the lover's wily art Beneath a sister's watchful eye."
" The Eve of St. John " employs common ballad stuff, the visit of a murdered lover's ghost to his lady's bedside —
"At the lone- midnight hour, when bad spirits have power" —
but the poet, as usual, anchors his weird nightmares
firmly to real names and times and places, Dryburgh
* The Glen of the Green Women.
Walter Scott. 23
Abbey, the black rood of Melrose, the Eildon-tree, the bold Buccleuch, and the Battle of Ancram Moor (1545). The exact scene of the tragedy is Smailholme Tower, the ruined keep on the crags above his grandfather's farm at Sandynowe, which left such an indelible impression on Scott's childish imagination.* "The Eve" is in bal- lad style and verse :
"Thou liest, thou liest, them little foot page, Loud dost thou lie to me !
For that knight is cold, and low laid in the mould, All under the Eildon tree."
In his " Essay on the Imitation of Popular Poetry," Scott showed that he understood the theory of ballad composition. When he took pains, he could catch the very manner as well as the spirit of ancient minstrelsy; but if his work is examined under the microscope it is easy to detect flaws. The technique of the Pre-Raphael- ites and other modern balladists, like Rossetti and Mor- ris, is frequently finer; they reproduce more scrupulously the formal characteristics of popular poetry : the burden,
* "And still I thought that shattered tower
The mightiest work of human power ;
And marvelled as the aged hind
With some strange tale bewitched my mind,
Of foragers who, with headlong force,
Down from that strength had spurred their horse,
Their Southern rapine to renew,
Far in the distant Cheviots blue ;
And, home returning, filled the hall
With revel, wassail-rout and brawl." — "Marmion." In- troduction to Canto Third. See Lockhart for a de- scription of the view from Smailholme, Apropos of the stanza in "The Eve of St. John" :
" That lady sat in mournful mood ;
Looked over hill and vale : O'ver Tweed's fair flood, and Mertoun's wood, And all down Teviot dale. "
24 e/f History of English Romanticism.
the sing-song repetitions, the quaint turns of phrase, the imperfect rimes, the innocent, childlike air of the me- diaeval tale-tellers. Scott's vocabulary is not consist- ently archaic, and he was not always careful to avoid locutions out of keeping with the style of Volkspoesie* He was by no means a rebel against eighteenth-century usages, f In his prose he is capable of speaking of a lady as an " elegant female." In his poetry he will begin a ballad thus :
"The Pope he was saying the high, high mass All on St. Peter's day " ;
and then a little later fall into this kind of thing:
"There the rapt poet's step may rove,
And yield the muse the day : There Beauty, led by timid Love, May shun the tell-tale ray," etc. \
It is possible to name single pieces like " The Ancient Mariner," and " La Belle Dame sans Merci," and " Rose- Mary," of a rarer imaginative quality and a more perfect workmanship than Scott often attains ; yet upon the whole and in the mass, no modern balladry matches the success of his. The Pre-Raphaelites were deliberate artists, con- sciously reproducing an extinct literary form ; but Scott had lived himself back into the social conditions out of which ballad poetry was born. His best pieces of this class do not strike us as imitations but as original, spon-
* See vol. i., pp. 394-395-
f Scott's verse "is touched both with the facile redundance of the mediaeval romances in which he was steeped, and with the meretricious phraseology of the later eighteenth century, which he was too genuine a literary Tory wholly to put aside." — "The Age of Wordsworth," C. H. Herford, London, 1897.
$"The Gray Brother" in vol. iii. of the "Minstrelsy."
Walter Scott. 25
taneous, and thoroughly alive. Such are, to particularise but a few, "Jock o' Hazeldean," "Cadyow Castle," on the assassination of the Regent Murray ; " The Reiver's Wedding," a fragment preserved in Lockhart's " Life " ; "Elspeth's Ballad" ("The Red Harlow") in "The An- tiquary"; Madge Wildfire's songs in "The Heart of Mid-Lothian," and David Gellatley's in "Waverley"; besides the other scraps and snatches of minstrelsy too numerous for mention, sown through the novels and longer poems. For in spite of detraction, Walter Scott remains one of the foremost British lyrists. In Mr. Pal- grave's " Treasury " he is represented by a larger number of selections than either Milton, Byron, Burns, Campbell, Keats, or Herrick ; making an easy fourth to Wordsworth, Shakspere, and Shelley. And in marked contrast with Shelley especially, it is observable of Scott's contribu- tions to this anthology that they are not the utterance of the poet's personal emotion ; they are coronachs, pibrochs, gathering songs, narrative ballads, and the like — objec- tive, dramatic lyrics touched always with the light of his- tory or legend.
The step from ballad to ballad-epic is an easy one, and it was by a natural evolution that the one passed into the other in Scott's hands. " The Lay of the Last Minstrel " (1805) was begun as a ballad on the local tradition of Gilpin Horner and at the request of the Countess of Dal- keith, who told Scott the story. But his imagination was so full that the poem soon overflowed its limits and ex- panded into a romance illustrative of the ancient manners of the Border. The pranks of the goblin page run in and out through the web of the tale, a slender and some- what inconsequential thread of diablerie. Byron had his
26 c/7 History of English Romanticism.
laugh at it in " English Bards and Scotch Reviewers " ; * and in a footnote on the passage, he adds : " Never was any plan so incongruous and absurd as the groundwork of this production." The criticism was not altogether undeserved ; for the " Lay " is a typical example of ro- mantic, as distinguished from classic, art both in its strength and in its weakness; brilliant in passages, faulty in architechtonic, and uneven in execution. Its super- natural machinery — Byron said that it had more " gram- arye" than grammar — is not impressive, if due exception be made of the opening of Michael Scott's tomb in Canto Second.
When the " Minstrelsy " was published, it was remarked that it " contained the elements of a hundred historical romances." It was from such elements that Scott built up the structure of his poem about the nucleus which the Countess of Dalkeith had given him. He was less con- cerned, as he acknowledged, to tell a coherent story than to paint a picture of the scenery and the old warlike life of the Border; that tableau large de la vie which the French romanticists afterwards professed to be the aim of their novels and dramas. The feud of the Scotts and Carrs furnished him with a historic background; with this he enwove a love story of the Romeo and Juliet pat- tern. He rebuilt Melrose Abbey, and showed it by moon- light; set Lords Dacre and Howard marching on a Warden-raid, and roused the border clans to meet them; threw out dramatic character sketches of " stark moss-
* "And goblin brats, of Gilpin Homer's brood, Decoy young border-nobles through the wood, And skip at every step, Lord knows how high, And frighten foolish babes, the Lord knows why."
Walter Scott. 27
riding Scots " like Wat Tinlinn and William of Deloraine; and finally enclosed the whole in a cadre most happily invented, the venerable, pathetic figure of the old min- strel who tells the tale to the Duchess of Monmouth at Newark Castle.
The love story is perhaps the weakest part of the poem. Henry Cranstoun and Margaret of Branksome are noth- ing but lay figures. Scott is always a little nervous when the lover and the lady are left alone together. The fair dames in the audience expect a tender scene, but the harper pleads his age, by way of apology, gets the busi- ness over as decently as may be, and hastens on with comic precipitation to the fighting, which he thoroughly enjoys.* The " light-horseman stanza" which Scott employed in his longer poems was caught from the recitation by Sir John Stoddart of a portion of Coleridge's " Christabel," then still in manuscript. The norm of the verse was the eight-syllabled riming couplet used in most of the Eng- lish metrical romances of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. It is a form of verse which moves more swiftly than blank verse or the heroic couplet, and is perhaps better suited for romantic poetry.f But it is liable to grow monotonous in a long poem, and Coleridge's un- surpassed skill as a metrist was exerted to give it free- dom, richness, and variety by the introduction of ana- paestic lines and alternate rimes and triplets, breaking up the couplets into a series of irregular stanzas.
* " Now leave we Margaret and her knight To tell you of the approaching fight. "
—Canto Fifth, xiii.
f Landor says oddly of Warton that he "had lost his ear by laying it down on low swampy places, on ballads and son- nets."
28 *A History of English Romanticism.
With " The Lay of the Last Minstrel " romanticism came of age and entered on its career of triumph. One wishes that Collins and Tom Warton might have lived to hail it as the light, at last, towards which they had struggled through the cold obstruction of the eighteenth century. One fancies Dr. Johnson's disgust over this new Scotch monstrosity, which had every quality that he disliked except blank verse; or Gray's delight in it, tem- pered by a critical disapproval of its loose construction and irregularity. Scott's romances in prose and verse are still so universally known as to make any review of them here individually an impertinence. Their impact on contemporary Europe was instantaneous and wide- spread. There is no record elsewhere in literary history of such success. Their immense sales, the innumerable editions and translations and imitations of them, are mat- ters of familiar knowledge. Poem followed poem, and novel, novel in swift and seemingly exhaustless succes- sion, and each was awaited by the public with unabated expectancy. Here once more was a poet who could tell the world a story that it wanted to hear ; a poet
"Such as it had In the ages glad, Long ago. "
The Homeric * quality which criticism has attributed or denied to these poems is really there. The difference, the inferiority is obvious of course. They are not in the grand style; they are epic on a lower plane, ballad-epic, bastard-epic perhaps, but they are epic. No English verse
* Does not the quarrel of Richard and Philip in "The Tal- isman " remind one irresistibly of Achilles and Agamemnon in the "Iliad"?
Walter Scott. 29
narrative except Chaucer's ranks, as a whole, above Scott's. Chaucer's disciple, William Morris, has an equal flow and continuity, and keeps a more even level of style; but his story-telling is languid compared with Scott's. The latter is greater in the dynamic than in the static department — in scenes of rapid action and keen excitement. His show passages are such as the fight in the Trosachs, Flodden Field, William of Deloraine's ride to Melrose, the trial of Constance, the muster on the Borough Moor, Marmion's defiance to Douglas, the com- bat of James and Roderick Dhu, the summons of the fiery cross, and the kindling of the need-fires — those romantic equivalents of the Xap.Kady<p6poi in the " Agamemnon."
In the series of long poems which followed the "Lay," Scott deserted the Border and brought in new subjects of romantic interest, the traditions of Flodden and Bannock- burn, the manners of the Gaelic clansmen, and the wild scenery of the Perthshire Highlands, the life of the Western Islands, and the rugged coasts of Argyle. Only two of these tales are concerned with the Middle Ages, strictly speaking: "The Lord of the Isles" (1813), in which the action begins in 1307 ; and " Harold the Dauntless" (1817), in which the period is the time of the Danish settlements in Northumbria. "Rokeby" (1812) is concerned with the Civil War. The scene is laid in Yorkshire. "Marmion" (1808), and "The Lady of the Lake" (1810), like "The Lay of the Last Minstrel," had to do with the sixteenth century, but the poet imported mediaeval elements into all of these by the frankest an- achronisms. He restored St. Hilda's Abbey and the monastery at Lindisfarne, which had been in ruins for centuries, and peopled them again with monks and nuns,
30 <A History of English Romanticism.
He revived in De Wilton the figure of the palmer and the ancient custom of pilgrimage to Palestine. And he transferred " the wondrous wizard, Michael Scott " from the thirteenth century to the end of the fifteenth. But, indeed, the state of society in Scotland might be de- scribed as mediaeval as late as the middle of the sixteenth century. It was still feudal, and in great part Catholic. Particularly in the turbulent Borderland, a rude spirit of chivalry and a passion for wild adventure lingered among the Eliots, Armstrongs, Kerrs, Rutherfords, Homes, John- stons, and other marauding clans, who acknowledged no law but march law, and held slack allegiance to "the King of Lothian and Fife." Every owner of a half-ruin- ous " peel " or border keep had a band of retainers within call, like the nine-and-twenty knights of fame who hung their shields in Branksome Hall ; and he could summon them at short notice, for a raid upon the English or a foray against some neighbouring proprietor with whom he was at feud.
But the literary form under which Scott made the deep- est impression upon the consciousness of his own genera- tion and influenced most permanently the future literature of Europe, was prose fiction. As the creator of the his- torical novel and the ancestor of Kingsley, Ainsworth, Bulwer, and G. P. R. James; of Manzoni, Freytag, Hugo, Merimee, Dumas, Alexis Tolstoi, and a host of others, at home and abroad, his example is potent yet. English fiction is directly or indirectly in his debt for " Romola," " Hypatia," " Henry Esmond," and " The Cloister and the Hearth." In several countries the historical novel had been trying for centuries to get itself born, but all its attempts had been abortive. "Waverley" is not only
Walter Scott. 31
vastly superior to "Thaddeus of Warsaw" (1803) and " The Scottish Chief s " (1809); it is something quite dif- ferent in kind.* The Waverley Novels, twenty-nine in number, appeared in the years 1814-31. The earlier numbers of the series, "Waverley," "Guy Mannering," "The Antiquary," "Old Mortality," " The Black Dwarf," "Rob Roy," "The Heart of Mid-Lothian," "The Bride of Lammermoor," and "A Legend of Montrose," were Scotch romances of the seventeenth and eighteenth cen- turies. In "Ivanhoe" (1819) the author went to England for his scene, and back to the twelfth century for his period. Thenceforth he ranged over a wide region in time and space ; Elizabethan England (" Kenilworth "), the France and Switzerland of Louis XI. and Charles the Bold ("Quentin Durward" and "Anne of Geier- stein"), Constantinople and Syria ("Count Robert of Paris," "The Betrothed," and "The Talisman") in the age of the Crusades. The fortunes of the Stuarts, in- terested him specially and engaged him in "Wood- stock," " The Fortunes of Nigel," " The Monastery," and its sequel, " The Abbot." He seems to have had, in the words of Mr. R. H. Hutton, "something very like per- sonal experience of a few centuries."
Scott's formula for the construction of a historical romance was original with himself, and it has been fol- lowed by all his successors. His story is fictitious, his hero imaginary. Richard I. is not the hero of " Ivan- hoe," nor Louis XL of "Quentin Durward." Shak- spere dramatised history; Scott romanticised it. Still
*For a review of English historical fiction before Scott, con- sult Professor Cross' "Development of the English Novel," pp. 110-114,
32 *A History of English Romanticism.
it is history ; the private story is swept into the stream of large public events ; the fate of the lover or the ad- venturer is involved with battles and diplomacies, with the rise and fall of kings, dynasties, political parties, nations. Stevenson says, comparing Fielding with Scott, that " in the work of the latter ... we become suddenly conscious of the background. ... It is curious enough to think that * Tom Jones' is laid in the year '45, and that the only use he makes of the rebellion is to throw a troop of soldiers in his hero's way." * And it is this- background which is, after all, the important thing in Scott — the leading impression; the broad canvas, the swarm of life, the spirit of the age, the reconstitution of an extinct society. This he was able to give with seem- ing ease and without any appearance of " cram." Chron- icle matter does not lie about in lumps on the surface of his romance, but is decently buried away in the notes. In his comments on " Queenhoo Hall " he adverts to the danger of a pedantic method; and in his "Journal" (October i8th, 1826) he writes as follows of his own nu- merous imitators: "They have to read old books and consult antiquarian collections, to get their knowledge. I write because I have long since read such works and possess, thanks to a strong memory, the information which they have to seek for. This leads to a dragging in his- torical details by head and shoulders, so that the interest of the main piece is lost in minute description of events which do not affect its progress."
Of late the recrudescence of the historical novel has revived the discussion as to the value of the genre. It
* "Familiar Studies of Men and Books," by R. L. Steven- son. Article, "Victor Hugo's Romances."
Walter Scott. 33
may be readily admitted that Scott's best work is realis- tic, and is to be looked for in such novels as " The An- tiquary," " Old Mortality," " The Heart of Mid-Lothian," and in characters like Andrew Fairservice, Bailie Nicol Jarvie, Dandie Dinmont, Dugald Dalgetty, Jeanie Deans, Edie Ochiltrie, which brought into play his knowledge of men, his humour, observation of life, and insight into Scotch human nature. Scott knew these people; he had to divine James I., Louis XL, and Mary Stuart. The historical novel is a tour deforce. Exactly how knights- templars, burgomasters, friars, Saracens, and Robin Hood archers talked and acted in the twelfth century, we cannot know. But it is just because they are strange to our experience that they are dear to our imagination. The justification of romance is its unfamiliarity — "strangeness added to beauty" — "the pleasure of sur- prise" as distinguished from "the pleasure of recogni- tion." Again and again realism returns to the charge and demands of art that it give us the present and the actual ; and again and again the imagination eludes the demand and makes an ideal world for itself in the blue distance.
Two favourite arts, or artifices, of all romantic schools, are " local colour " and "the picturesque." "Vers 1'an de grace 1827," writes Prosper Merime'e, "jMtais roman- tique. Nous disions aux dassiques • vos Grecs ne sont pas des Grecs, vos Romains ne sont pas des Romains; vous ne savez pas donner a vos compositions la coukur locale. Point de salut sans la couleur locale." *
*"Le Roman Historique a 1'Epoque Romantique." Essai sur 1' influence de Walter Scott. Par Louis Maigron. Paris (Hachette), 1898, p. 331, note. And ibid., p. 330: "Au
34
History of English Romanticism.
As to the picturesque — a word that connotes, in its critical uses, some quality in the objects of sense which strikes us as at once novel, and characteristic in its nov- elty— while by no means the highest of literary arts, it is a perfectly legitimate one.* Crecj is not, at bottom, a more interesting battle than Gettysburg because it was
lieu que les classiques s'efforsaient toujours, a travers les modifications que les pays, les temps et les circonstances peuvent apporter aux sentiments et aux passions des hommes, d'atteindre a ce que ces passions et ces sentiments conservent de permanent, d'immuable et d'eternel, c'est au contraire a 1' expression de 1'accidentel et du relatif que les novateurs de- vaient les efforts de leur art. Plus simplement, a la place de la v6rite humaine, ils devaient mettre la yerite locale." Pro- fessor Herford says that what Scott "has in common with the Romantic temper is simply the feeling for the picturesque, for colour, for contrast." "Age of Wordsworth," p. 121.
* De Quincey defines picturesque as "the characteristic pushed into a sensible excess." The word began to excite discussion in the last quarter of the eighteenth century. See vol. i., p. 185, for Gilpin's "Observations on Picturesque Beauty. " See also Uvedale Price, " Essays on the Picturesque as Compared with the Sublime and the Beautiful," three vols., 1794-96. Price finds the character of the picturesque to consist in roughness, irregularity, intricacy, and sudden vari- ation. Gothic buildings are more picturesque than Grecian, and a ruin than an entire building. Hovels, cottages, mills, interiors of old barns are picturesque. " In mills particularly, such is the extreme intricacy of the wheels and the wood work : such is the singular variety of forms and of lights and shadows, of mosses and weather stains from the constant moisture, of plants springing from the rough joints of the stones — that, even without the addition of water, an old mill has the greatest charm for a painter" (i., 55). He mentions, as a striking example of picturesque beauty, a hollow lane or by-road with broken banks, thickets, old nej
neglected pollards, its, tangled trailers
fantastic roots bared by the winter torrents, and wild plants, and infinite variety of tints and shades (i., 23-29) . He denounces the improvements of Capability Brown (see "Romanticism," vol. i., p. 124) : especially the clump, the belt and regular serpentine walks with smooth turf edges, the made water with uniformly sloping banks — all as insip- idly formal, in their way, as the old Italian gardens which Brown's landscapes displaced.
Walter Scott. 35
fought with bows and arrows, but it is more picturesque to the modern imagination just for that reason. Why else do the idiots in "MacArthur's Hymn" complain that " steam spoils romance at sea " ? Why did Ruskin lament when the little square at the foot of Giotto's Tower in Florence was made a stand for hackney coaches? Why did our countryman Halleck at Alnwick Towers resent the fact that " the Percy deals in salt and hides, the Douglas sells red herring " ? And why does the pic- turesque tourist, in general, object to the substitution of naphtha launches for gondolas on the Venetian canals? Perhaps because the more machinery is interposed be- tween man and the thing he works on, the more imper- sonal becomes his relation to nature.
Carlyle, in his somewhat grudging estimate of Scott, declares that " much of the interest of these novels results from contrasts of costume. The phraseology, fashion of arms, of dress, of life belonging to one age is brought suddenly with singular vividness before the eyes of an- other. A great effect this ; yet by the very nature of it an altogether temporary one. Consider, brethren, shall not we too one day be antiques and grow to have as quaint a costume as the rest? . . . Not by slashed breeches, steeple hats, buff belts, or antiquated speech can romance- heroes continue to interest us; but simply and solely, in the long run, by being men. Buff belts and all manner of jerkins and costumes are transitory; man alone is perennial." * Carlyle's dissatisfaction with Scott arises from the fact that he was not a missionary nor a transcen- dental philosopher, but simply a teller of stories. Heine was not troubled in the same way, but he made the iden- * "Essay on Walter Scott."
36 *A History of English Romanticism.
tical criticism. " Like the works of Walter Scott, so also do Fouque^s romances of chivalry* remind us of the fantastic tapestries known as Gobelins, whose rich texture and brilliant colors are more pleasing to our eyes than edifying to our souls. We behold knightly pageantry, shepherds engaged in festive sports, hand-to-hand com- bats, and ancient customs, charmingly intermingled. It is all very pretty and picturesque, but shallow; brilliant superficiality. Among the imitators of Fouque, as among the imitators of Walter Scott, this mannerism of portray- ing— not the inner nature of men and things, but merely the outward garb and appearance — was carried to still greater extremes. This shallow art and frivolous style is still [1833] in vogue in Germany as well as in England and France. ... In lieu of a knowledge of mankind, our recent novelists evince a profound acquaintance with clothes." f
* Andrew Lang reminds us that, after all, only three of the Waverley Novels are "chivalry romances." The following are the only numbers of the series that have to do with the Middle Ages : " Count Robert of Paris," circa 1090 A. D. ; " The Betrothed," 1187; "The Talisman." 1193: "Ivanhoe," 1194; "The Fair Maid of Perth,1' 1402; "QuentinDurward," 1470; "Anne of Geierstein," 1474-77.
: f " The Romantic School in Germany," p. 187. Cf. Stendhal, "Walter Scott et la Princesse de Cleves." "Mes reflexions seront mal accueilles. Une immense troupe de litterateurs est interessee a porter aux nues Sir Walter Scott et sa mani- ere. L'habit et le collier de cuivre d'un serf du moyen age sont plus facile a decrire que les mouvements du coeur hu- main. . . . N'oublions pas un autre avantage de 1'ecole de Sir Walter Scott: la description d'un costume et Impose d'un personnage . . . prennent au moins deux pages. Les mouve- ments de Tame fourniraient a peine quelques lignes. Ouvrez au hazard un des volumes de la ' Princesse de Cleves, ' prenez ;dix pages au hasard, et ensuite comparez les aux dix pages d" Ivanhoe ' ou de ' Quentin Durward ' : cesderniers ouvrages tont un mtrite historique. Us apprennent quelques petites
Walter Scott. 37
Elsewhere Heine acknowledges a deeper reason for the popularity of the Scotch novels. " Their theme . . . is the mighty sorrow for the loss of national peculiarities swallowed up in the universality of the newer culture — a sorrow which is now throbbing in the hearts of all peo- ples. For national memories lie deeper in the human breast than is generally thought." But whatever rank may be ultimately assigned to the historical novel as an art form, Continental critics are at one with the British in crediting its invention to Scott. "It is an error," says Heine, " not to recognise Walter Scott as the founder of the so-called historical romance, and to endeavour to trace it to German imitation." He adds that Scott was a Protestant, a lawyer and a Scotchman, accustomed to action and debate, in whose works the aristocratic and democratic elements are in wholesome balance; "where- as our German romanticists eliminated the democratic element entirely from their novels, and returned to the ruts of those crazy romances of knight-errantry that flour-
choses sur 1'histoire aux gens qui 1'ignorent ou qui le savent mal. Ce m£rite historique a cause" un grand plaisir : je ne le nie pas, mais c'est ce mirite historique qui se fanera le pre- mier. . . . Dans 146 ans, Sir Walter Scott ne sera pas a la hauteur ou Corneille nous apparait 146 ans apres sa mort." " To write a modern romance of chivalry, " says Jeffrey, in his review of "Marmion " in the Edinburgh, "seems to be much such a phantasy as to build a modern abbey or an English pagoda. . . . [Scott's] genius, seconded by the omnipo- tence of fashion, has brought chivalry again into temporary favor. Fine ladies and gentlemen now talk, indeed, of donjons, keeps, tabards, 'scutcheons, tressures, caps of maintenance, portcullises, wimples, and we know not what besides ; just as they did, in the days of Dr. Darwin's popu- larity, of gnomes, sylphs, oxygen, gossamer, polygynia, and polyandria. That fashion, however, passed rapidly away, and Mr. Scott should take care that a different sort of ped- antry," etc.
3-o eA History of English Romanticism.
ished before Cervantes." * " Quel est 1'ouvrage litte'- raire," asks Stendhal in 1823,! "qui a *e Plus reussi en France depuis dix ans? Les romans de Walter Scott. ... On s'est moque' a Paris pendant vingt ans du roman historique; 1'Acade'mie a prouve doctement le ridicule de ce genre; nous y croyions tous, lorsque Walter Scott a paru, son Waverley a la main; et Balantyne, son libraire vient de mourir millionaire." J
Lastly the service of the Waverley Novels to history was an important one. Palgrave says that historical fic- tion is the mortal enemy of history, and Leslie Stephen adds that it is also the enemy of fiction. In a sense both sayings are true. Scott was not always accurate as to facts and sinned freely against chronology. But he rescued a wide realm from cold oblivion and gave it back to human consciousness and sympathy. It is treat- ing the past more kindly to misrepresent it in some par- ticulars, than to leave it a blank to the imagination. The eighteenth-century historians were incurious of life. Their spirit was general and abstract; they were in search of philosophical formulas. Gibbon covers his subject with a lava-flood of stately rhetoric which stiffens into a uniform stony coating over the soft surface of life. Scott is primarily responsible for that dramatic, picturesque
*For an exhaustive review of Scott' s influence on the evo- lution of historical fiction in France, consult Maigron, "Le Roman Historique, " etc. A longish passage from this work will be found at the end of the present chapter. For English imitators and successors of the Waverley Novels, see Cross, "Development of the English Novel," pp. 136-48. See also De Quincey's "Literary Reminiscences," vol. iii., for an amusing account of "Walladmor" (1824), a pretended Ger- man translation of a non-existent Waverley novel.
f " Racine et Shakespeare. " \ " Don Quixote. "
Walter Scott. 39
treatment of history which we find in Michelet and Car- lyle. " These historical novels,'7 testifies Carlyle, " have taught all men this truth, which looks like a truism, and yet was as good as unknown to writers of history and others, till so taught ; that the bygone ages of the world were actually filled by living men, not by protocols, state papers, controversies, and abstractions of men. ... It is a great service, fertile in consequences, this that Scott has done ; a great truth laid open by him." * In France, too, historians like Barante and Augustin Thierry, were Scott's professed disciples. The latter confesses, in a well-known passage, that " Ivanhoe " was the inspirer of his " Conquete d'Angleterre," and styles the novelist " le plus grand maitre qu'il y ait jamais eu en fait de divi- nation historique." f
Scott apprehended the Middle Ages on their spectacu- lar, and more particularly, their military side. He ex- hibits their large, showy aspects: battles, processions, hunts, feasts in hall, tourneys,! sieges, and the like. The motley mediaeval world swarms in his pages, from the king on his throne down to the jester with his cap and bells. But it was the outside of it that he saw ; the noise, bustle, colour, stirring action that delighted him. Into its spiritualities he did not penetrate far; its scholasticisms, strange casuistries, shuddering faiths, grotesque distor-
*" Sir Walter Scott."
f Dix ans d' etudes historiques" : preface.
J Walter Bagehot says that "Ivanhoe " "describes the Mid- dle Ages as we should have wished them to be, " ignoring their discomforts and harsh barbarism. "Every boy has heard of tournaments and has a firm persuasion that in an age of tournaments life was thoroughly well understood. A martial society where men fought hand to hand on good horses with large lances," etc. ("The Waverley Novels").
40 <A History of English Romanticism.
tions of soul; its religious mysticisms, asceticisms, agonies; the ecstactic reveries of the cloister, terrors of hell, and visions of paradise. It was the literature of the knight, not of the monk, that appealed to him. He felt the awfulness and the beauty of Gothic sacred archi- tecture and of Catholic ritual. The externalities of the mediaeval church impressed him, whatever was pictur- esque in its ceremonies or august in its power. He pic- tured effectively such scenes as the pilgrimage to Melrose in the " Lay " ; the immuring of the renegade nun in " Marmion " ; the trial of Rebecca for sorcery by the Grand Master of the Temple in " Ivanhoe." Ecclesiasti- cal figures abound in his pages, jolly friars, holy hermits, lordly prelates, grim inquisitors, abbots, priors, and priests of all descriptions, but all somewhat conventional and viewed ab extra. He could not draw a saint* Sig- nificant, therefore, is his indifference to Dante, the poet par excellence of the Catholic Middle Age, the epitomizer of mediaeval thought. " The plan " of the " Divine Com- edy," "appeared to him unhappy; the personal malignity and strange mode of revenge presumptuous and uninter- esting." Scott's genius was antipathetic to Dante's; and he was as incapable of taking a lasting imprint from his intense, austere, and mystical spirit, as from the nebulous gloom of the Ossianic poetry. Though conservative, he was not reactionary after the fashion of the German " throne-and-altar " romanticists, but remained always a good Church of England man and an obstinate opponent
* " Of enthusiasm in religion Scott always spoke very se- verely. ... I do not think there is a single study in all his romances of what may be fairly called a pre-eminently spiri- tual character" (R. H. Hutton: "Sir Walter Scott," p. 126).
Walter Scott. 41
of Catholic emancipation.* "Creeds are data in his novels," says Bagehot; "people have different creeds but each keeps his own."
Scott's interest in popular superstitions was constant. As a young man — in his German ballad period — they affected his imagination with a " pleasing horror." But as he grew older, they engaged him less as a poet than as a student of Cultur geschichte.
A wistful sense of the beauty of these old beliefs — a rational smile at their absurdity — such is the tone of his "Letters on Demonology and Witchcraft" (1830), a pas- sage or two from which will give his attitude very pre- cisely; an attitude, it will be seen, which is after all not so very different from Addison's, allowing for the dis- tance in time and place, and for Scott's livelier imagina- tion, f Scott had his laugh at Mrs. Radcliffe, and in his
* " Unopposed, the Catholic superstition may sink to dust, with all its absurd ritual and solemnities. Still it is an awful risk. The world is in fact as silly as ever, and a good com- petence of nonsense will always find believers " (" Diary " for 1829).
t See vol. i., p. 42. "We almost envy the credulity of those who, in the gentle moonlight of a summer night in Eng- land, amid the tangled glades of a deep forest, or the turfy swell of her romantic commons, could fancy they saw the fairies tracing their sportive ring. But it is in vain to regret illusions which, however engaging, must of necessity yield their place before the increase of knowledge, like shadows at the advance of morn " ("Demonology," p. 183). "Tales of ghosts and demonology are out of date at forty years of age and upward. ... If I were to write on the subject at all, it should have been during a period of life when I could have treated it with more interesting vivacity. . . . Even the pres- ent fashion of the world seems to be ill-suited for studies of this fantastic nature ; and the most ordinary mechanic has learning sufficient to laugh at the figments which in former times were believed by persons far advanced in the deepest knowledge of the age " (Ibid., p. 398).
42 *A History of English Romanticism.
reviews of Hoffmann's "Tales" and Maturin's "Fatal Revenge " * he insists upon the delicacy with which the supernatural must be treated in an age of disbelief. His own management of such themes, however, though much superior to Walpole's or Mrs. Radcliffe's, has not the subtle art of Coleridge. The White Lady of Avenel, e.g., in " The Abbot," is a notorious failure. There was too much daylight in his imagination for spectres to be quite at home. " The shapes that haunt thought's wilder- nesses77; the "night side of things"; the real shudder are not there, as in Hawthorne or in Poe. Walter Pater f says that Meinhold's " Amber Witch " has more of the true romantic spirit than Tieck, who was its professional representative. On the contrary, it has less of the ro- mantic spirit, but more of the mediaeval fact. It is a literal, realistic handling of the witch superstition, as Balzac's "Succube," in the "Contes Drolatiques" is a satirical version of similar material. But Tieck's " Marchen " are the shadows thrown by mediaeval beliefs across a sensitive, modern imagination, and are in result, therefore, romantic. Scott's dealing with subjects of the kind is midway between Meinhold and Tieck. He does not blink the ugly, childish, stupid, and cruel features of popular superstition, but throws the romantic glamour over them, precisely as he does over his "Charlie over the water " Jacobites. \
Again Scott's apprehension of the spirit of chivalry, though less imperfect than his apprehension of the spirit
* See vol. i., pp. 249 and 420.
f "Postscript" to "Appreciations."
\ For the rarity of the real romantic note in mediaeval writ- ers see vol. i., pp. 26-28, and Appendix B to the present chapter.
Walter Scott. 43
of mediaeval Catholicism, was but partial. Of the themes which Ariosto sang —
"le donne, i cavalier, 1'arme, gli amori, Le cortesie, 1'audaci imprese io canto " —
the northern Ariosto sang bravely the arme and the audaci imprese ; less confidently the amori and the cortesie. He could sympathise with the knight-errant's high sense of honour and his love of bold emprise ; not so well with his service of dames. Mediaeval courtship or "love- drurye," the trembling self-abasement of the lover before his lady, the fantastic refinements and excesses of gal- lantry, were alien to Scott's manly and eminently practi- cal turn of mind. It is hardly possible to fancy him reading the "Roman de la Rose" with patience — he thought " Troilus and Creseyde " tedious, which Rossetti pronounces the finest of English love poems; or selecting for treatment the story of Heloise or Tristram and Iseult, or of " Le Chevalier de la Charette " ; or such a typical mediaeval life as that of Ulrich von Liechtenstein.* These were quite as truly beyond his sphere as a church legend like the life of Saint Margaret or the quest of the Sangreal. In the " Talisman " he praises in terms only less eloquent than Burke's famous words, "that wild spirit of chivalry which, amid its most extravagant and fantastic flights, was still pure from all selfish alloy — generous, devoted, and perhaps only thus far censurable, that it proposed objects and courses of action inconsistent with the frailties and imperfections of man." In " Ivan- hoe," too, there is something like a dithyrambic lament
* See "Studies in Mediaeval Life and Literature," by Ed- ward T. McLaughlin, p. 34.
44 <^ History of English Romanticism.
over the decay of knighthood — "The 'scutcheons have long mouldered from the walls," etc. ; but even here, en- thusiasm is tempered by good sense, and Richard of the Lion Heart is described as an example of the "brilliant but useless character of a knight of romance." All this is but to say that the picture of the Middle Age which Scott painted was not complete. Still it was more nearly complete than has yet been given by any other hand ; and the artist remains, in Stevenson's phrase, " the king of the Romantics."
APPENDIX A.
" Jamais homme de genie n'a eu 1'honneur et le bon- heur d'etre imite' par plus d'hommes de genie, si tous les grands e'crivains de 1'epoque romantique depuis Victor Hugo jusqu'a Balzac et depuis Alfred de Vigny jusqu'a Me'rime'e, lui doivent tous et se sont tous glorifies de lui devoir quelque chose. ... II doit nous suffire pour 1'instant d'affirmer que Pinfluence de Walter Scott est a la racine meme des grandes ceuvres qui ont donne' au nouveau genre tant d'eclat dans notre litterature; que c'est elle qui les a inspirees, suscitees, fait e'clore; que sans lui nous n'aurions ni * Hans d'Islande,' ni ' Cinq- Mars,' ni * Les Chouans,' ni la * Chronique de Charles IX.,' ni * Notre Dame de Paris,' . . . Ce n'est rien moins que le romantisme lui-meme dont elle a hate' 1'incubation, facilit^ 1'eclosion, aide le developpement." — MAIGRON, "Le Roman Historique," p; 143.
" II nous faut d'abord constater que c'est veritablement de Walter Scott, et de Walter Scott seul, que commence cette fureur des choses du moyen dge, cette manie de
Walter Scott. 45
couleur locale qui s^vit avec tant d'intensite quelque temps avant et longtemps apres 1830, et done qu'il reste, au moms pour ce qui est de la description, le principal initiateur de la generation nouvelle. Sans doute et de toute part, cette resurrection du moyen age etait des long- temps pre'pare'e. Le * G^nie du Christianisme,' le ' Cours de litte'rature dramatique ' de Schlegel, r'Allemagne ' de Mme. de Stael avaient fait des moeurs chr^tiennes et chevaleresques le f ondement et la condition de renouvelle- ment de Tart frangais. Et, en effet, des 1802, le moyen ige dtait decouvert, la cathddrale gothique restaur^e, 1'art chr^tien remis a la place ^minente d'ou il aurait fallu ne jamais le laisser choir. Mais ou sont les ceuvres execu- tes d'apres ce modele et ces principes? S'il est facile d'apercevoir et de determiner la cathddrale religieuse de Chateaubriand, est il done si aisd de distinguer sa cathe'- dralepoe'tique? . . . Un courant vigoureux, quele* Genie du Christianisme ' et les ' Martyrs ' ont puissamment contribue a determiner, fait deliver les imaginations vers les choses gothiques; volontiers, 1 'esprit frangais se re- tourne alors vers le passd comme vers la seule source de poe'sie; et voici qu'un etranger vient se faire son guide et fait miroiter, devant tous les yeux ^blouis, la fantas- magorie du moyen age, donjons et cr^neaux, cuirasses et belles armures, haquene'es et palefrois, chevaliers re- splendissants et mignonnes et dedicates chatelaines. . . . Sur ses traces, on se pre'cipita avec furie dans la voie qu'il venait subitement d'elargir. Ce moyen age, jusqu'a lui si convoite et si infecond, devinait enfin une source in^puisable demotions et de productions artistiques. La * cath^drale ' ^tait bien restauree cette fois. Elle le f ut meme trop, et borda trop obstinement tous les sentiers
46 *A History of English Romanticism.
litte'raires. Mais de cet exces, si vite fatigant, c'est Walter Scott et non Chateaubriand, quoi qu'il en ait pu dire, qui reste le grand coupable. II fit plus que de'- couvrir le moyen age; il le mit a la mode parmi les Fran9ais." — Ibid., pp.
APPENDIX B.
" The magical touch and the sense of mystery and all the things that are associated with the name romance, when that name is applied to ' The Ancient Mariner/ or ' La Belle Dame sans Merci,' or * The Lady of Shalott,' are generally absent from the most successful romances of the great mediaeval romantic age. . . . The true roman- tic interest is very unequally distributed over the works of the Middle Ages, and there is least of it in the au- thors who are most representative of the ' age of chivalry.7 There is a disappointment prepared for any one who looks in the greater romantic authors of the twelfth cen- tury for the music of * The Faery Queene ' or ' La Belle Dame sans Merci/ . . . The greater authors of the twelfth century have more affinity to the * heroic romance ' of the school of the * Grand Cyrus ' than to the dreams of Spenser or Coleridge. . . . The magic that is wanting to the clear and elegant narrative of Benoit and Chrestien will be found elsewhere; it will be found in one form in the mystical prose of the * Queste del St. Graal ' — a very different thing from Chrestien's * Perceval ' — it will be found, again and again, in the prose of Sir Thomas Malory; it will be found in many ballads and ballad burdens, in * William and Margaret,' in ' Binnorie/ in the * Wife of Usher's Well,' in the * Rime of the Count
Walter Scott. 47
Arnaldos,' in the * Konigskinder ' ; it will be found in the most beautiful story of the Middle Ages, * Aucassin and Nicolette,' one of the few perfectly beautiful stories in the world."—" Epic and Romance," W. P. KER, London, P-
CHAPTER II. Colerf&ge, JBowles, and tbe pope Controversy,
WHILE Scott was busy collecting the fragments of Border minstrelsy and translating German ballads,* two other young poets, far to the south, were preparing their share in the literary revolution. In those same years (1795-98) Wordsworth and Coleridge were wandering to- gether over the Somerset downs and along the coast of Devon, catching glimpses of the sea towards Bristol or Linton, and now and then of the skeleton masts and gos- samer sails of a ship against the declining sun, like those of the phantom bark in " The Ancient Mariner." The first fruits of these walks and talks was that epoch-making book, the " Lyrical Ballads " ; the first edition of which was published in 1798, and the second, with an addi- tional volume and the famous preface by Wordsworth, in 1800. The genesis of the work and the allotment of its parts were described by Coleridge himself in the " Bio- graphia Literaria" (1817), Chapter XIV.
" During the first year that Mr. Wordsworth and I were neighbours our conversations turned frequently on the two cardinal points of poetry, the power of exciting the sympathy of the reader by a faithful adherence to the truth
*For Coleridge's relations with German romance, see vol. i., pp. 419-21. For his early interest in Percy, Ossian, and Chatterton, ibid., pp. 299, 328, 368-70.
48
Coleridge, Tiowles, and the 'Pope Controversy. 49
of nature, and the power of giving the Interest of novelty by the modifying colours of imagination. . . . 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 ; . . . for the second class, subjects were to be chosen from ordinary life. . . . It was agreed that my endeavours should be directed to persons and characters supernatural, or at least romantic. . . . With this view I wrote ' The Ancient Mariner,' and was preparing, among other poems, ' The Dark Ladie ' and the * Christabel/ in which I should have more nearly realized my ideal than I had done in my first attempt."
Coleridge's contributions to romantic poetry are few though precious. Weighed against the imposing array of Scott's romances in prose and verse,* they seem like two or three little gold coins put into the scales to bal- ance a handful of silver dollars. He stands for so much in the history of English thought, he influenced his own and the following generation on so many sides, that his romanticism shows like a mere incident in his intellectual history. His blossoming time was short at the best, and ended practically with the century. After his return from Germany in 1799 and his settlement at Keswick in 1800, he produced little verse of any importance beyond the second part of " Christabel " (written in 1800, published in 1816). His creative impulse failed him, and he be- came more and more involved in theology, metaphysics, political philosophy, and literary criticism.
*" There is as much difference between Coleridge's brief poem * Christabel' and all the narrative poems of Walter Scott ... as between a precious essence and a coarse imita- tion of it got up for sale" (Leigh Hunt's "Autobiography," p. 197).
50 <A History of English Romanticism.
It appears, therefore, at first sight, a little odd that Coleridge's German biographer, Professor Brandl, should have treated his subject under this special aspect,* and attributed to him so leading a place in the romantic movement. Walter Scott, if we consider his life-long and wellnigh exclusive dedication of himself to the work of historic restoration — Scott, certainly, and not Cole- ridge was the " high priest of Romanticism." f Brandl is dissatisfied with the term Lake School, or Lakers, com- monly given to Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Southey, and proposes instead to call them the Romantic School, Ro- manticists (Romantiker), surely something of a misnomer when used of an eclectic versifier like Southey, or a poet of nature, moral reflection, and humble life like Words- worth. Southey, in casting about him for a theme, some- times became for the nonce and so far as subject goes, a romancer; as in " Joan of Arc " (1799), "Madoc" (1805), and " Roderick the Goth " (1814) ; not to speak of trans- lations like " Amadis of Gaul," " Palmerin of England," and "The Chronicle of the Cid." But these were not due to the compelling bent of his genius, as in Scott. They were miscellaneous jobs, undertaken in the regular
* "Samuel Taylor Coleridge und die Englische Romantik,"' Alois Brandl, Berlin, 1886.
t It is in view of his critical attitude, not of his poetry, that Saintsbury applies this title to Coleridge. "The attitude was that of a medievalism inspired by much later learning, but still more by that intermediate or decadent Greek philosophy which had so much influence on the Middle Ages themselves. This is, in other words, the Romantic attitude, and Coleridge was the high priest of Romanticism, which, through Scott and Byron, he taught to Europe, reproaching it even to Ger- many, from which it had partly come " ("A Short History of English Literature," by George Saintsbury, London, 1898, p. 656).
Coleridge, 'Bowles, and the *Pope Controversy. 5 1
course of his business as a manufacturer of big, irregu- lar epics, Oriental, legendary, mythological, and what not; and as an untiring biographer, editor, and hack writer of all descriptions. Southey was a mechanical poet, with little original inspiration, and represents noth- ing in particular. Wordsworth again, though innovating in practice and theory against eighteenth-century tradi- tion, is absolutely unromantic in contrast with Scott and Coleridge.
But it will be fair to let the critic defend his own nomenclature ; and the passage which I shall quote will serve not only as another attempt to define romanticism, but also to explain why Brandl regards the Lake poets as our romantic school par excellence. " * Lake School ' is a name, but no designation. This was felt in England, where many critics have accordingly fallen into the oppo- site extreme, and maintained that the members of this group of poets had nothing in common beyond their per- sonal and accidental conditions. As if they had only lived together, and not worked together! In truth they were bound together by many a strong tie, and above all by one of a polemical kind, namely, by the aversion for the monotony that had preceded them, and by the strug- gle against merely dogmatic rules. Unbending uniform- ity is death ! Let us be various and individual as life itself is. ... Away with dry Rationalism! Let us fight it with all the powers we possess; whether by bold Pla- tonism or simple Bible faith; whether by enthusiastic hymns, or dreamy fairy tales; whether by the fabulous world of distant times and zones, or by the instincts of the children in the next village. Let us abjure the ever- recommended nostrum of imitation of the old masters in
5« <A History of English 'Romanticism.
poetry, and rather attach ourselves to homely models, and endeavour, with their help, lovingly and organically to develop their inner life. These were the aims of Walter Scott and his Scotch school, only with such changes as local differences demanded. Individuality in person, nationality, and subject, and therefore the emphasis of all natural unlikeness, was the motto on both sides of the Tweed. And, as these men, when confronted by ele- ments peculiar, rare, and marvellous, designated such elements as * romantic/ so may they themselves be justly called the * Romantic School.' But the term is much misused, and requires a little elucidation. Shakespeare is usually called a romantic poet. He, however, never used the expression, and would have been surprised if any one had applied it to him. The term presupposes opposition to the classic style, to rhetorical deduction, and to measured periods, all of which were unknown in the time of the Renaissance, and first imported in that of the French Revolution. On the other hand, Words- worth, Coleridge, Southey, Lamb, and Walter Scott's cir- cle all branched off from the classical path with a direct- ness and consistency which sharply distinguish them from their predecessors, contemporaries, and successors. Their predecessors had not broken with the Greek and Latin school, nor with the school of Pope ; Chatterton copied Homer; Cowper translated him; Burns in his English verses, and Bowles in his sonnets, adhered to what is called the * pig-tail period ' ! The principal poems com- posed in the last decennium of the eighteenth century . . . adhered still more to classic tradition. In London the satires of Mathias and Gifford renewed the style of the * Dunciad,' and the moral poems of Rogers that of
Coleridge, "Bowles, and ibe Tope Controversy. 53
the * Essay on Man.' Landor wrote his youthful * Gebir f in the style of Virgil, and originally in Latin itself. The amateur in German literature, William Taylor of Nor- wich, and Dr. Sayers, interested themselves especially for those works by Goethe which bear an antique character — for * Iphigenia,' 'Proserpina/ 'Alexis and Dora.' Only when the war with France drew near was the classical feeling interrupted. Campbell, the Scotchman, and Moore, the Irishman, both well schooled by translations from the Greek, recalled to mind the songs of their own people, and rendered them popular with the fashionable world — though only by clothing them in classic garb. How different to the ' artificial rust ' of ' Christabel ' ; to the almost exaggerated homeliness of ' We Are Seven ' ; and to the rude ' Lay of the Last Minstrel ' ! When at last, with the fall of Napoleon, the great stars — Byron, Shelley, Keats, and later the mature Landor — rose in the hemisphere, they had all imbibed from the Romantic school a warmer form of thought and feeling, and a num- ber of productive impulses; though, Euphorion-like, they still regarded the antique as their parent. They expressed much appreciation of the Romantic school, but their hearts were with ^Eschylus and Pindar. They contended for national character, but only took pleasure in planting it on classic soil. Byron's enthusiasm for Pope was not only caprice ; nor was it mere chance that Byron should have died in Greece, and Shelley and Keats in Italy. Compared with what we may call these classical mem- bers of the Romantic school, Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Scott . . . may be said to have taken nothing, whether in the form of translation or imitation, from classical literature; while they drew endless inspiration from the
54 td History of English ^Romanticism.
Middle Ages. In their eyes Pope was only a lucid, able, and clever journeyman. It is therefore fair to con- sider them, and them alone, as exponents of the Romantic school." *
As to Byron and Shelley this criticism may do; as to Chatterton and Keats it is misleading. Wordsworth more romantic than Chatterton! More romantic than Keats, because the latter often, and Wordsworth seldom, treats subjects from the antique! On the contrary, if " the name is graven on the workmanship," " Michael " and " The Brothers " are as classical as " Hyperion " or " Laodamia " or " The Hamadryad " ; " bald as the bare mountain-tops are bald, with a baldness full of grandeur." Bagehot expressly singles Wordsworth out as an example of pure or classic art, as distinguished from the ornate art of such poets as Keats and Tennyson. And Mr. Colvin hesitates to classify him with Landor only be- cause of his " suggestive and adumbrative manner " — not, indeed, he acknowledges, a romantic manner, and yet " quite distinct from the classical " ; *>., because of the transcendental character of a portion of his poetry. But whatever may be true of the other members of the group, Coleridge at his best was a romantic poet. " Christabel " and "The Ancient Mariner," creations so exquisite sprung from the contact of modern imagination with mediaeval beliefs, are enough in themselves to justify the whole romantic movement.
Among the literary influences which gave shape to Coleridge's poetry, Percy's ballads and Chatterton's
*" Samuel Taylor Coleridge and the English Romantic School," by Alois Brandl. Lady Eastlake's translation, London, 1887, PP- 219-23.
Coleridge, ''Bowles, and the "Pope Controversy. 55
"Rowley Poems" are obvious and have already been mentioned. In his first volume of verse (1796), there is manifest a still stronger impulse from the sonnets of the Rev. William Lisle Bowles. We have noticed the reap- pearance of this discarded stanza form in the work of Gray, Mason, Edwards, Stillingfleet, and Thomas Warton, about the middle of the last century.* In 1782 Mrs. Charlotte Smith published a volume of sonnets, treating motives from Milton, Gray, Collins, Pope's " Eloisa " and Goethe's " Werther." But the writer who — through his influence upon Wordsworth more especially — contributed most towards the sonnet revival, was Bowles. In 1789 he had published a little collection of fourteen sonnets,f which reached a second edition with six pieces additional, in the same year. " His sonnets came into Wordsworth's hands (1793)," says Brandl, "just as he was leaving London with some friends for a morning's excursion ; he seated himself in a recess on Westminster Bridge, and was not to be moved from his place till he had finished the little book. Southey, again, owned in 1832 that for forty years, he had taken the sweet and artless style of Bowles for a model." J In the first chapter of his " Bio- graphia Literaria" (1817) Coleridge tells how, when he had just entered on his seventeenth year, "the sonnets of Mr. Bowles, twenty in number and just then published in a quarto pamphlet, were first made known and presented " to him by his school-fellow at Christ's Hospital, Thomas
* See vol. i., pp. 160-61.
f " Fourteen Sonnets, written chiefly on Picturesque Spots," Bath, 1789.
| "Samuel Taylor Coleridge," p. 37. Cf. Wordsworth's Sonnets "Upon Westminster Bridge" (1802) and "Scorn Not the Sonnet. "
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Middleton, afterwards Bishop of Calcutta. "It was a double pleasure to me ... that I should have received, from a friend so revered, the first knowledge of a poet by whose works, year after year, I was so enthusiastically delighted and inspired. My earliest acquaintances will not have forgotten the undisciplined eagerness and im- petuous zeal with which I laboured to make proselytes, not only of my companions, but of all with whom I con- versed, of whatever rank and in whatever place. As my school finances did not permit me to purchase copies, I made, within less than a year and a half, more than forty transcriptions, as the best presents I could offer to those who had in any way won my regard. And with almost equal delight did I receive the three or four following publications of the same author." To Bowies' poems Coleridge ascribes the credit of having withdrawn him from a too exclusive devotion to metaphysics and also a strengthened perception of the essentially unpoetic char- acter of Pope's poetry. " Among those with whom I con- versed there were, of course, very many who had formed their taste and their notions of poetry from the writings of Pope and his followers; or, to speak more generally, in that school of French poetry, condensed and invigo- rated by English understanding, which had predominated from the last century. I was not blind to the merits of this school, yet ... they gave me little pleasure. . . . I saw that the excellence of this kind consisted in just and acute observations on men and manners in an artifi- cial state of society, as its matter and substance ; and in the logic of wit, conveyed in smooth and strong epigram- matic couplets, as its form. . . . The matter and diction seemed to me characterized not so much by poetic
Coleridge, Bowles, and the "Pope Controversy. 57
thoughts as by thoughts translated into the language of poetry." Coleridge goes on to say that, in a paper written during a Cambridge vacation, he compared Darwin's " Botanic Garden " to a Russian ice palace, " glittering, cold, and transitory " ; that he expressed a preference for Collins' odes over those of Gray; and that in his "de- fence of the lines running into each other, instead of closing at each couplet ; and of natural language . . . such as / will remember thee, instead of
. . . Thy image on her wing Before my fancy's eye shall memory bring"
he had continually to appeal to the example of the older English poets from Chaucer to Milton. " The reader," he concludes, " must make himself acquainted with the general style of composition that was at that time deemed poetry, in order to understand and account for the effect produced on me by the sonnets, the ' Monody at Matlock ' and the * Hope ' of Mr. Bowles ; for it is peculiar to origi- nal genius to become less and less striking, in proportion to its success in improving the taste and judgment of its contemporaries. The poems of West, indeed, had the merit of chaste and manly diction, but they were cold, and, if I may so express it, only dead-coloured; while in the best of Warton's, there is a stiffness which too often gives them the appearance of imitations from the Greek. Whatever relation, therefore, of cause or impulse, Percy's collection of ballads may bear to the most popular poems of the present day, yet in the more sustained and elevated style of the then living poets, Cowper and Bowles were, to the best of my knowledge, the first who combined natural thoughts with natural diction ; the first who reconciled
$8 *A History of English Romanticism.
the heart with the head." Coleridge adds in a note that he was not familiar with Cowper's "Task" till many years after the publication of Bowies' sonnets, though it had been published before them (1785).
It would be hard to account for the effect of Bowies' sonnets on Coleridge, did we not remember that it is not necessarily the greatest literature that comes home to us most intimately, but that which, for some reason, touches us where we are peculiarly sensitive. It is a familiar experience with every reader, that certain books make an appeal to him which is personal and individual, an ap- peal which they make to few other readers — perhaps to no other reader — and which no other books make to him. It is something in them apart from their absolute value or charm, or rather it is something in him, some private experience of his own, some occult association in depths below consciousness. He has a perfectly just estimate of their small importance in the abstract ; they are not even of the second or third rank. Yet they speak to him ; they seem written to him — are more to him, in a way, than Shakspere and Milton and all the public library of the world. In the line of light bringers who pass from hand to hand the torch of intelligential fire, there are men of most unequal stature, and a giant may stoop to take the precious flambeau from a dwarf. That Scott should have admired Monk Lewis, and Coleridge rever- enced Bowles, only proves that Lewis and Bowles had something to give which Scott and Coleridge were pecul- iarly ready to receive.
Bowies' sonnets, though now little read, are not un- readable. They are tender in feeling, musical in verse, and pure in diction. They were mostly suggested by
Coleridge, T^owles, and the *Pope Controversy. 59
natural scenery, and are uniformly melancholy. Bowles could suck melancholy out of a landscape as a weasel sucks eggs. His sonnets continue the elegiac strain of Shenstone, Gray, Collins, Warton, and the whole "II Penseroso " school, but with a more personal note, ex- plained by a recent bereavement of the poet. " Those who know him," says the preface, " know the occasions of them to have been real ; to the public he might only mention the sudden death of a deserving young woman with whom
Sperabat longos heu ! ducere soles, Et fido acclinis consumuisse sinu. . . .
This is nothing to the public ; but it may serve in some measure to obviate the common remark on melancholy poetry, that it has been very often gravely composed, when possibly the heart of the writer had very little share in the distress he chose to describe. But there is a great difference between natural and fabricated feelings even in poetry." Accordingly while the Miltonic group of last-century poets went in search of dark things — grots, caverns, horrid shades, and twilight vales; Bowies' mood bestowed its color upon the most cheerful sights and sounds of nature. The coming of summer or spring; the bells of Oxford and Ostend ; the distant prospect of the Malvern Hills, or the chalk cliffs of Dover; sunrise on the sea, touching " the lifted oar far off with sudden gleam " ; these and the like move him to tears equally with the glimmer of evening, the sequestered woods of Wensbeck, the ruins of Netley Abbey,* or the frowning battlements of Bamborough Castle, where
* Cf. vol. i., p. 182.
60 c/7 History of English Romanticism.
" Pity, at the dark and stormy hour Of midnight, when the moon is hid on high, Keeps her lone watch upon the topmost tower."
In " English Bards and Scotch Reviewers " Byron calls Bowles "the maudlin prince of mournful sonneteers," whose
"... muse most lamentably tells What merry sounds proceed from Oxford bells."*
Bowies' attitude had thus something more modern than that of the eighteenth-century elegiacs, and in unison with Coleridge's doctrine, that
"... we receive but what we give, And in our life alone does nature live : Ours is her wedding garment, ours her shroud. " f
A number of Bowies' sonnets were addressed to rivers, the Tweed, the Cherwell at Oxford, the Wensbeck, and the Itchin near Winton, poems which stand midway be- tween Thomas Warton's "To the River Lodon" and Cole- ridge's " To the River Otter," with Wordsworth's sonnet sequence, " On the River Duddon." A single sonnet of
* See Sonnet xvii., "On Revisiting Oxford." See also Sonnet xi., "At Ostend : "
"The mournful magic of their mingled chimes First waked my wondrous childhood into tears."
And Cf. Francis Mahony's "The Bells of Shandon"—
"Whose sounds so wild would, in the days of childhood, Fling round my cradle their magic spells."
And Moore's "Those Evening Bells." The twang of the wind-harp also resounds through Bowies' Sonnets. See for the ^Eolus' harp, vol. i., p. 165, and Cf. Coleridge' s poem, "The Eolian Harp."
f" Dejection: An Ode " (1802).
Coleridge, 'Bowles, and tie 'Pope Controversy. 61
Bowles will be enough to give a taste of his quality and to show what Coleridge got from him.*
Bowles was a disciple in the " School of Warton." He was " one of Joseph Warton's Winchester wonders," says Peter Cunningham, in a note in the second edition of Campbell's "Specimens of the British Poets"; "and the taste he imbibed there for the romantic school of poetry was strengthened and confirmed by his removal to Trin- ity College, Oxford, when Tom Warton was master there." Bowles was always prompt to own that he had learned his literary principles from the Wartons; and among his poems is a monody written on the death of his old teacher, the master of Winchester College. His verses abound in Gothic imagery quite in the Wartonian manner; the " castle gleaming on the distant steep " ; " the pale moon- light in the midnight aisle " ; " some convent's ancient walls," along the Rhine. Weak winds complain like spirits through the ruined arches of Netley Abbey:
"The beam
Of evening smiles on the gray battlement, And yon forsaken tower that time has rent."
* SONNET XX. November, 1792.
There is strange music in the stirring wind When lowers the autumnal eve, and all alone To the dark wood's cold covert thou art gone Whose ancient trees, on the rough slope reclined, Rock, and at times scatter their tresses sear. If in such shades, beneath their murmuring, Thou late hast passed the happier hours of spring, With sadness thou wilt mark the fading year ; Chiefly if one with whom such sweets at morn Or eve thou'st shared, to distant scenes shall stray. O Spring, return ! return, auspicious May ! But sad will be thy coming, and forlorn, If she return not with thy cheering ray, Who from these shades is gone, gone far away."
62 *A History of English 'Romanticism.
His lines on Shakspere recall Collins in their in- sistence upon the " elvish " things in the plays : " The Tempest," " Midsummer Night's Dream/' the weird sis- ters in "Macbeth," Ophelia's songs, the melancholy Jacques. The lines to Burke on his " Reflections on the Revolution in France," echo his celebrated dirge over fallen chivalry:
" Though now no more proud chivalry recalls The tourneys bright and pealing festivals ; Though now on high her idle spear is hung, Though time her mouldering harp has half unstrung," etc.*
The " Hymn to Woden " alludes to Gray's " Fatal Sis- ters." " St. Michael's Mount " summons up the forms of the ancient Druids, and sings how Fancy,
"Sick of the fluttering fancies that engage The vain pursuits of a degenerate age, . . . Would fain the shade of elder days recall, The Gothick battlements, the bannered hall ; Or list of elfin harps the fabling rhyme ; Or, wrapt in melancholy trance sublime, Pause o'er the working of some wondrous tale, Or bid the spectres of the castle hail ! "
Bowies' influence is traceable in Coleridge's earliest volume of verse (1796) in a certain diffused softness and gentle sensibility. This elegiac tone appears particularly in effusions like "Happiness," "The Sigh," "To a Young Ass," " To the Autumnal Moon," " Lines on an Autumnal Evening," "To the Nightingale"; in "Melan- choly: A Fragment" and "Elegy; imitated from Aken- side," both in the " Sibylline Leaves " (1797); and in numerous "lines," "monodies," "epitaphs," "odes," and
*Cf. Scott's "Harp of the North, that mouldering long hast hung," etc. "Lady of the Lake," Canto I.
Coleridge, Ttowles, and the T^ope Controversy. 63
" stanzas." * Coleridge soon came to recognise the weak- ness of his juvenile verses, and parodied himself — and incidentally Bowles — in three sonnets printed at the end of Chapter I. of the " Biographia Literaria," de- signed to burlesque his own besetting sins, a " doleful egotism," an affected simplicity, and the use of "elabo- rate and swelling language and imagery." He never attained much success in the use of the sonnet form. A series of twelve sonnets in his first collection opens with *>ne to Bowles :
"My heart has thanked thee, Bowles ! for those soft strains Whose sadness soothes me, like the murmuring Of wild bees in the sunny showers of spring, " etc.
More important to our inquiries than the poetry of Bowles is the occasion which he gave to the revival, under new conditions, of the Pope controversy. For it was over the body of Pope that the quarrel between classic and romantic was fought out in England, as it was fought out in France, a few years later, over the question of the dramatic unities and the mixture of tragedy and comedy in the drame. In 1806, just a half century after Joseph Warton published the first volume of his "Essay on Pope," Bowies' edition of the same poet appeared. In the life of Pope which was prefixed, the editor made some severe strictures on Pope's duplicity, jealousy, and other disagreeable traits, though not more severe than have been made by Pope's latest editor, Mr. Elwin, who has backed up his charges with an array of evidence fairly overwhelming. The edition contained likewise an
* "Shall gentle Coleridge pass unnoticed here, To turgid ode and tumid stanza dear? "
—"English Bards and Scotch Reviewers."
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essay on "The Poetical Character of Pope," in which Bowles took substantially the same ground that had been taken by his master, Joseph Warton, fifty years before. He asserted in brief that, as compared with Spenser, Shakspere, and Milton, Pope was a poet of the second order; that in his descriptions of nature he was inferior to Thomson and Cowper, and in lyrical poetry to Dryden and Gray ; and that, except in his " Eloisa " and one or two other pieces, he was the poet of artificial manners and of didactic maxims, rather than of passions. Bowles7 chief addition to Warton's criticism was the following paragraph, upon which the controversy that ensued chiefly hinged : " All images drawn from what is beautiful or sublime in the works of nature are more beautiful and sublime than any images drawn from art, and they are therefore per se (abstractedly) more poetical. In like manner those passions of the human heart, which belong to nature in general, are/^r se more adapted to the higher species of poetry than those derived from incidental and transient manners."
The admirers of Pope were not slow in joining issue with his critic, not only upon his general estimate of the poet, but upon the principle here laid down. Thomas Campbell, in his " Specimens of the British Poets "(1819), defended Pope both as a man and a poet, and maintained that " exquisite descriptions of artificial objects are not less characteristic of genius than the description of sim- ple physical appearances." He instanced Milton's de- scription of Satan's spear and shield, and gave an ani- mated picture of the launching of a ship of the line as an example of the " sublime objects of artificial life." Bowles replied in a letter to Campbell on " The Inv'ari-
Coleridge, Tlowles, and the Tope Controversy. 65
able Principles of Poetry." He claimed that it was the appearances of nature, the sea and the sky, that lent sub- limity to the launch of the ship, and asked: "If images derived from art are as beautiful and sublime as those derived from nature, why was it necessary to bring your ship off the stocks?" He appealed to his adversary whether the description of a game of ombre was as poet- ical as that of a walk in the forest, and whether " the sylph of Pope, * trembling over the fumes of a chocolate pot/ be an image as poetical as that of delicate and quaint Ariel, who sings * Where the bee sucks, there lurk (sic) I.1" Campbell replied in the New Monthly Magazine, of which he was editor, and this drew out another rejoin- der from Bowles. Meanwhile Byron had also attacked Bowles in two letters to Murray (1821), to which the in- defatigable pamphleteer made elaborate replies. The elder Disraeli, Gifford, Octavius Gilchrist, and one Mar- tin M'Dermot also took a hand in the fight — all against Bowles — and William Roscoe, the author of the " Life of Lorenzo de Medici, " attacked him in an edition of Pope which he brought out in 1824. The rash detractor of the little Twitnam nightingale soon found himself engaged single-handed against a host; but he was equal to the occasion, in volubility if not in logic, and poured out a series of pamphlets, covering in all some thousand pages, and concluding with " A Final Appeal to the Literary Public" (1825), followed by "more last words of Baxter," in the shape of "Lessons in Criticism to William Ros- coe" (1825).
The opponents of Bowles maintained, in general, that in poetry the subject is nothing, but the execution is all ; that one class of poetry has, as such, no superiority over
66 *A History of English 'Romanticism.
another ; and that poets are to be ranked by their excel- lence as artists, and not according to some imaginary scale of dignity in the different orders of poetry, as epic, didactic, satiric, etc. " There is, in fact," wrote Roscoe, " no poetry in any subject except what is called forth by the genius of the poet. . . . There are no great subjects but such as are made so by the genius of the artist." Byron said that to the question " whether * the description of a game of cards be as poetical, supposing the execution of the artists equal, as a description of a walk in a forest/ it may be answered that the materials are certainly not equal, but that the artist who has rendered the game of cards poetical is by far the greater of the two. But all this * ordering ' of poets is purely arbitrary on the part of Mr. Bowles. There may or may not be, in fact, different * orders ' of poetry, but the poet is always ranked accord- ing to his execution, and not according to his branch of the art." Byron also contended, like Campbell, that art is just as poetical as nature, and that it was not the water that gave interest to the ship but the ship to the water. "What was it attracted the thousands to the launch? They might have seen the poetical ' calm water ' at Wap- ping or in the London lock or in the Paddington Canal or in a horse-pond or in a slop-basin." Without natural accessories — the sun, the sky, the sea, the wind — Bowles had said, the ship's properties are only blue bunting, coarse canvas, and tall poles. " So they are," admits Byron, "and porcelain is clay, and man is dust, and flesh is grass; and yet the two latter at least are the subjects of much poesy. . . . Ask the traveller what strikes him as most poetical, the Parthenon or the rock on which it stands. . . . Take away Stonehenge from Salisbury plain
Coleridge, TSowles, and the T^ope Controversy. 67
and it is nothing more than Hounslow Heath or any other unenclosed down. . . . There can be nothing more poet- ical in its aspect than the city of Venice; does this de- pend upon the sea or the canals? ... Is it the Canal Grande or the Rialto which arches it, the churches which tower over it, the palaces which line and the gondolas which glide over the waters, that render this city more poetical than Rome itself ? . . . Without these the water would be nothing but a clay-coloured ditch. . . . There would be nothing to make the canal of Venice more poet- ical than that of Paddington."
There was something futile about this whole discus- sion. It was marked with that fatally superficial and mechanical character which distinguished all literary criticism in Europe before the time of Lessing in Ger- many, and of Wordsworth and Coleridge in England. In particular, the cardinal point on which Pope's rank as a poet was made to turn was really beside the question. There is no such essential distinction as was attempted to be drawn between "natural objects" and "objects of artificial life," as material for poetry. In a higher syn- thesis, man and all his works are but a part of nature, as Shakspere discerned:
"Nature is made better by no mean But nature makes that mean : so over that art Which you say adds to nature, is an art That nature made : the art itself is nature. "
Shakspere, as well as Pope, dealt with artificial life, i.e., with the life of man in society, but how differently! The reason why Pope's poetry fails to satisfy the heart and the imagination resides not in his subjects — so far Campbell and Byron were right— but in his mood; in his
68 *A History of English ^Romanticism.
imperfect sense of beauty and his deficiency in the high- est qualities of the poet's soul. I may illustrate this by an arrow from Byron's own quiver. To prove how much poetry may be associated with "a simple, household, ' indoor,' artificial, and ordinary image," he cites the famous stanza in Cowper's poem to Mrs. Unwin:
"Thy needles, once a shining store, For my sake restless heretofore, Now rust disused and shine no more, My Mary."
Let us contrast with this a characteristic passage from " The Rape of the Lock," which also contains an artificial image :
" On her white breast a sparkling cross she wore Which Jews might kiss and infidels adore."
What is the difference ? It is in the feeling of the poet. Pope's couplet is very charming, but it is merely gal- lantry, a neatly turned compliment, playful, only half sincere, a spice of mockery lurking under the sugared words; while in Cowper's lines the humble domestic im- plement is made sacred by the emotions of pity, sorrow, gratitude, and affection with which it is associated. The reason why Pope is not a high poet — or perhaps a poet at all in the best sense of the word — is indicated by Cole- ridge with his usual acuteness and profundity in a sen- tence already quoted ; that Pope's poetry both in matter and diction was " characterised not so much by poetic thoughts, as by thoughts translated into the language of poetry."
Bowles, on the whole, had hold of the right end of the controversy; his instinct was correct, but he was a wretched controversialist. As a poet in the minor key,
Coleridge, 'Bowles, and the 'Pope Controversy. 69
he was tolerable ; but as a prose writer, he was a very dull person and a bore. He was rude and clumsy ; he tried to be sarcastic and couldn't; he had damnable iter- ation. Lowell speaks of his " peculiarly helpless way," and says : " Bowles, in losing his temper, lost also what little logic he had, and though, in a vague way, aestheti- cally right, contrived always to be argumentatively wrong. Anger made worse confusion in a brain never very clear, and he had neither the scholarship nor the critical faculty for a vigorous exposition of his own thesis. Never was wilder hitting than his, and he laid himself open to dread- ful punishment, especially from Byron, whose two letters are masterpieces of polemic prose." Indeed, the most interesting feature of the Pope controversy is Byron's part < in it and the light which it sheds on his position in rela-* tion to the classic and romantic schools. Before the defi nite outbreak of the controversy, Byron had attacked Bowles for his depreciation of Pope, in " English Bards and Scotch Reviewers" (1809), in a passage in which he wished that Bowles had lived in Pope's time, so that Pope might have put him into the " Dunciad."
It seems at first sight hard to reconcile Byron's evi- dently sincere admiration for Pope with the ultra-roman- tic cast of his own poetry — romantic, as Pater says, in mood if not in subject. In his early fondness for Ossian, his intense passion, his morbid gloom, his ex- altation in wild and solitary places, his love of night and storm, of the desert and the ocean, in the careless and irregular outpour of his verse, in his subjectivity, the continual presence of the man in the work — in all these particulars Byron was romantic and would seem to have had little in common with Pope. But there was another
70 *A History of English Romanticism.
side to Byron — and William Rossetti thinks his most characteristic side — viz., his wit and understanding; and this side sympathised heartily with Pope. It is well known that when Byron came back from the East he had in his trunk besides the manuscript of " Childe Harold," which he thought little of, certain "Hints from Horace " which the world thinks less of, but which he was eager to have published, while Dallas was urging him to print "Childe Harold." "English Bards and Scotch Re- viewers" is a thoroughly Popeian satire; and "The Vision of Judgment," though not in couplets but in ottava rima, is one of the best personal satires in English. It has all of Pope's malicious wit, with a sweep and glow, which belonged to Byron as a poet rather than as a satirist, and which Pope never had. Lowell thinks, too, that what Byron admired in Pope was "that patience in careful fin- ish which he felt to be wanting in himself and in most of his contemporaries."
With all this there probably mingled something of perversity and exaggeration in Byron's praises of Pope. He hated the Lakers, and he delighted to use Pope against them as a foil and a rod. He at least was every- thing that they were not. Doubtless in the Pope contro- versy, his " object was mainly mischief," as Lowell says. Byron loved a fight; he thought the Rev. W. L. Bowles an ass, and he determined to have some fun with him. Besides the two letters to Murray in 1821, an open letter of Byron's to Isaac Disraeli, dated March 15, 1820, and entitled " Some Observations upon an article in Black- wood's Magazine" * contains a long passage in vindica- tion of Pope and in denunciation of contemporary poetry * No. xxix., August, 1819, "Remarks on Don Juan."
Coleridge, TZowles, and the Tope Controversy. 7 1
— a passage which is important not only as showing Byron's opinions, but as testifying to the very general change in taste which had taken place since 1756, when Joseph Warton was so discouraged by the public hostility to his "Essay on Pope" that he withheld the second vol- ume for twenty-six years. " The great cause of the pres- ent deplorable state of English poetry," writes Byron, "is to be attributed to that absurd and systematic deprecia- tion of Pope in which, for the last few years, there has been a kind of epidemical concurrence. Men of the most opposite opinions have united upon this topic." He then goes on to praise Pope and abuse his own contemporaries, especially the Lake poets, both in the most extravagant terms. Pope he pronounces the most perfect and harmo- nious of poets. " Southey, Wordsworth, and Coleridge," he says, " had all of them a very natural antipathy to Pope . . . but they have been joined in it by ... the whole heterogeneous mass of living English poets except- ing Crabbe, Rogers, Gifford, and Campbell, who, both by precept and practice, have proved their adherence ; and by me, who have shamefully deviated in practice, but have ever loved and honoured Pope's poetry with my whole soul." There is ten times more poetry, he thinks, in the " Essay on Man " than in the " Excursion " ; and if you want passion, where is to be found stronger than in the "Epistle of Eloisa to Abelard"? To the sneer that Pope is only the "poet of reason" Byron replies that he will undertake to find more lines teeming with imagina- tion in Pope than in any two living poets. " In the mean time," he asks, "what have we got instead? . . . The Lake school," and "a deluge of flimsy and unintelligible romances imitated from Scott and myself." He proph-
72 tA History of English 'Romanticism.
esies that all except the classical poets, Crabbe, Rogers, and Campbell, will survive their reputation, acknowl- edges that his own practice as a poet is not in harmony with his principles, and says: "I told Moore not very long ago, * We are all wrong except Rogers, Crabbe, and Campbell/ " In the first of his two letters to Murray, Byron had taken himself to task in much the same way. He compared the romanticists to barbarians who had " raised a mosque by the side of a Grecian temple of the purest architecture " ; and who were " not contented with their own grotesque edifice unless they destroy the prior and purely beautiful fabric which preceded, and which shames them and theirs for ever and ever. I shall be told that amongst those I have been (or it may be still am) conspicuous — true, and I am ashamed of it. I have been amongst the builders of this Babel . . . but never among the envious destroyers of the classic temple of our predecessor." " Neither time nor distance nor grief nor age can ever diminish my veneration for him who is the great moral poet of all times, of all climes, of all feelings, and of all stages of existence. The delight of my boyhood, the study of my manhood, perhaps he may be the consolation of my age. His poetry is the Book of Life." *
* "Time was, ere yet in these degenerate days Ignoble themes obtained mistaken praise. When sense and wit with poesy allied, No fabled graces, flourished side by side. . . . Then, in this happy isle, a Pope's pure strain Sought the rapt soul to charm, nor sought in vain ; A polished nation's praise aspired to claim, And raised the people's, as the poet's fame. . . . [But] Milton, Dryden, Pope, alike forgot, Resign their hallowed bays to Walter Scott."
—"English Bards and Scotch Reviewers.*
Coleridge, "Bowles, and the Tope Controversy. 73
Strange language this from the author of "Childe Harold " and " The Corsair " ! But the very extravagance of Byron's claims for Pope makes it plain that he was pleading a lost cause. When Warton issued the first vol- ume of his " Essay on Pope," it was easy for leaders of literary opinion, like Johnson and Goldsmith, to pooh- pooh the critical canons of the new school. But when Byron wrote, the aesthetic revolution was already accom- plished. The future belonged not to Campbell and Gif- ford and Rogers and Crabbe, but to Wordsworth and Scott and Coleridge and Shelley and Keats; to Byron himself, the romantic poet, but not to Byron the laudator temporis acti. The victory remained with Bowles, not because he had won it by argument, but because opinion had changed, and changed probably once and for all.*
*For the benefit of any reader who may wish to follow up the steps of the Pope controversy, I give the titles of Bowies' successive pamphlets. " The Invariable Principles of Poetry : A Letter to Thomas Campbell, Esq.," 1819. "A Reply to an 'Unsentimental Sort of Critic,'" Bath, 1820. [This was in answer to a review of "Spence's Anecdotes" in the Quarter- ly for October, 1820.] "A Vindication of the Late Editor of Pope's Works," London, 1821, second edition. [This was also a reply to the Quarterly reviewer and to Gilchrist's letters in the London Magazine, and was first printed in vol. xvii., Nps. 33, 34, and 35 of the Pamphleteer, ,] "An Answer to Some Observations of Thomas Campbell, Esq., in his Specimens of British Poets" (1822). "An Address to Thomas Campbell, Esq., Editor of the New Monthly Maga- zine, in Consequence of an Article in that Publication" (1822). " Letters to Lord Byron on a Question of Poetical Criticism, " London, 1822. "A Final Appeal to the Literary Public Rel- ative to Pope, in Reply to Certain Observations of Mr. Ros- coe," London, 1825. "Lessons in Criticism to William Ros- coe, Esq., with Further Lessons in Criticism to a Quarterly Reviewer," London, 1826. Gilchrist's three letters to Bowles were published in 1820-21. M'Dermot's "Letter to the Rev. W. L. Bowles in Reply to His Letter to Thomas Campbell, Esq., and to His Two Letters to Lord Byron," was printed at London, in 1822.
74 *d History of English ^Romanticism.
Coleridge's four contributions to the " Lyrical Ballads " included his masterpiece, " The Ancient Mariner." This is the high-water mark of romantic poetry; and, familiar as it is, cannot be dismissed here without full examina- tion. As to form, it is a long narrative ballad in seven " fyts " or parts, and descends from that " Bible of the romantic reformation," Bishop Percy's " Reliques." The verse is the common ballad stanza — eights and sixes — enriched by a generous use of medial rhyme and alliter- tion:
"The fair breeze blew, the white foam flew,
The furrow followed free : We were the first that ever burst Into that silent sea " ;
varied and prolonged, moreover, by the introduction of additional lines with alternate riming, with couplets and sometimes with triplets. There are many five-lined and six-lined stanzas, and one — the longest in the poem — of nine lines. But these metric variations are used with temperance. The stanza form is never complex; it is built up naturally from the ballad stanza upon which it rests and to which it constantly returns as its norm and type. Of the one hundred and forty-two stanzas in the poem, one hundred and six are the ordinary four-lined stanzas of popular poetry. The language, too, is not obtrusively archaic as it is in Chatterton and some of the Spenserians; at most an occasional "wist" or "eftsoons"; now and then a light accent, in ballad fashion, on the final syllable of a rime-word like mar- iner or countrie. There is no definite burden, which would have been out of place in a poem that is narrative and not lyrical ; but the ballad habits of phrase repeti-
Coleridge, TSowles, and tbe Tope Controversy. 75
tion and question and answer are sparingly employed. * In reproducing the homely diction of old popular minstrelsy, Coleridge's art was nicer than Scott's and more perfect at every point. How skilfully studied, e.g., is the sim- plicity of the following:
"The moving moon went up the sky And nowhere did abide : Softly she was going up."
" Day after day, day after day We stuck"
"The naive artlessness of the Middle Ages," says Brand!, " became in the hands of the Romantic school, an intentional form of art." The impression of antiquity is heightened by the marginal gloss which the poet added in later editions, composed in a prose that has a quaint beauty of its own, in its mention of " the creatures of the calm " ; its citation Of " the learned Jew Josephus and the Platonic Constantinopilitan, Michael Psellus," as au- thorities on invisible spirits; and in passages like that Dantesque one which tells how the mariner " in his lone- liness and fixedness yearneth towards the journeying moon, and the stars that still sojourn, yet still move on- wards; and everywhere the blue sky belongs to them, and
* "With throats unslaked, with black lips baked, We could not laugh nor wail," etc.
"With throats unslaked, with black lips baked, Agape they heard me call," etc.
" Are those her sails that glance in the sun
Like restless gossamers? Are those her ribs, " etc. Cf. "Christabel":
"Is the night chilly and dark?
The night is chilly, but not dark." And see vol. i., p. 271.
76 tA History of English ^manticism.
is their appointed rest, and their native country, and their own natural homes, which they enter unannounced, as lords that are certainly expected, and yet there is a silent joy at their arrival."
In " The Ancient Mariner " there are present in the highest degree the mystery, indefiniteness, and strange- ness which are the marks of romantic art. The period is not strictly mediaeval, for mariners in the Middle Ages did not sail to the south polar regions or lie becalmed in the equatorial seas. But the whole atmosphere of the poem is mediaeval. The Catholic idea of penance or ex- piation is the moral theme enwrought with the story. The hermit who shrives the mariner, and the little vesper bell which biddeth him to prayer are Catholic touches, and so are the numerous pious oaths and ejaculations:
" By him who died on cross " : "Heaven's mother send us grace " :
"The very deep did rot. O Christ That ever this should be ! "
The albatross is hung about the mariner's neck instead of the crucifix, and drops off only when he blesses the creatures of the calm and is able to pray. The sleep which refreshes him is sent by " Mary Queen " from heaven. The cross-bow with which he shoots the bird is a mediaeval property. The loud bassoon and the bride's garden bower and the procession of merry minstrels who go nodding their heads before her are straight out of the old land of balladry. One cannot fancy the wedding guest dressed otherwise than in doublet and hose, and perhaps wearing those marvellous pointed shoes and hanging sleeves which are shown in miniature paintings of the fifteenth century. And it is thus that illustrators
Coleridge, Tlowles, and the 'Pope Controversy. 77
of the poem have depicted him. Place is equally indefi- nitewith time. What port the ill-fated ship cleared from we do not know or seek to know ; only the use of the word kirk implies that it was somewhere in " the north countree " — the proper home of ballad poetry.
Coleridge's romances were very differently conceived from Scott's. He wove them out of "such stuff as dreams are made on." Industrious commentators have indeed traced features of "The Ancient Mariner" to various sources. Coleridge's friend, Mr. Cruikshank. had a dream of a skeleton ship. Wordsworth told him the incident, which he read in Shelvocke's voyages, of a certain Captain Simon Hatley who shot a black albatross south of Terra del Fuego, in hopes that its death might bring fair weather. Brandl thinks that the wedding ban- quet in Monk Lewis' " Alonzo the Brave and the Fair Imogene," furnished a hint; and surmises — what seems unlikely — that Coleridge had read a certain epistle by Paulinus, a bishop of the fourth century, describing a vessel which came ashore on the coast of Lucania with only one sailor on board, who reported that the ship had been deserted, as a wreck, by the rest of the crew, and had since been navigated by spirits.
But all this is nothing and less than nothing. " The Ancient Mariner " is the baseless fabric of a vision. We are put under a spell, like the wedding guest, and carried off to the isolation and remoteness of mid-ocean. Through the chinks of the narrative, the wedding music sounds unreal and far off. What may not happen to a man alone on a wide, wide sea? The line between earthly and un- earthly vanishes. Did the mariner really see the spec- tral bark and hear spirits talking, or was it all but the
78 *A History of English 'Romanticism.
phantasmagoria of the calenture, the fever which attacks the sailor on the tropic main, so that he seems to see green meadows and water brooks on the level brine? No one can tell; for he is himself the only witness, and the ship is sunk at the harbour mouth. One conjectures that no wreckers or divers will ever bring it to the top again. Nay, was not the mariner, too, a spectre? Now he is gone, and what was all this that he told me, thinks the wedding guest, as he rises on the morrow morn. Or did he tell me, or did I only dream it? A light shadow cast by some invisible thing swiftly traverses the sunny face of nature and is gone. Did we see it, or imagine it? Even so elusive, so uncertain, so shadowy and phantom- like is the spiriting of this wonderful poem. " Poetry," says Coleridge, " gives most pleasure when only gener- ally and not perfectly understood. It was so by me with Gray's * Bard ' and Collins' odes. ' The Bard ' once in- toxicated me, and now I read it without pleasure."* There is no danger that his own poem will ever lose its attractiveness in this way. Something inexplicable will remain to tease us, like the white Pater Noster and St. Peter's sister in Chaucer's night-spell.|
*"Anima Poetse," 1895, p. 5. This recent collection of marginalia has an equal interest with Coleridge's well-known "Table Talk." It is the English equivalent of Hawthorne's "American Note Books, "full of analogies, images, and re- flections— topics and suggestions for possible development in future romances and poems. In particular it shows an abiding prepossession with the psychology of dreams, appa- ritions, and mental illusions of all sorts.
f " Jesu Crist and Seint Benedight
Blisse this hous from every wicked wight, Fro the nightes mare, the white Pater Noster ; Where wonest thou, Seint Peter's suster."
—"The Miller's Tale."
Coleridge, 'Bowles, and the 'Pope Controversy. 79
Pater subtly connects Coleridge's poetic method with his philosophical idealism. " The too palpable intruders from a spiritual world, in almost all ghost literature, in Scott and Shakespeare even, have a kind of coarseness or crudeness. ... * The Rime of the Ancient Mariner ' has the plausibility, the perfect adaptation to reason and life, which belongs to the marvellous, when actually pre- sented as part of a credible experience in our dreams. . . . The spectral object, so crude, so impossible, has become plausible, as ' the spot upon the brain that will show itself without,' and is understood to be but a condi- tion of one's own mind, for which — according to the scep- ticism latent at least in so much of our modern philos- ophy— the so-called real things themselves are but spectra after all. It is this finer, more delicately marvellous supernaturalism, the fruit of his more delicate psychol- ogy, which Coleridge infuses into romantic narrative, itself also then a new or revived thing in English literature; and with a fineness of weird effect in ' The Ancient Mar- iner ' unknown in those old, more simple, romantic legends and ballads. It is a flower of mediaeval, or later German romance, growing up in the peculiarly compounded atmos- phere of modern psychological speculation, and putting forth in it wholly new qualities."
In " The Ancient Mariner," as in most purely romantic poetry, the appeal is more to the imagination than to the heart or the conscience. Mrs. Barbauld complained that it was improbable and had no moral. Coleridge ad- mitted its improbability, but said that it had too much moral ; that, artistically speaking, it should have had no more moral than a fairy tale. The lesson of course is that of kindness to animals — " He prayeth well who lov-
8o \A History of English Romanticism.
eth well," etc. But the punishment of the mariner, and still more of the mariner's messmates, is so out of pro- portion to the gravity of the offence as to be slightly ludicrous when stated by Leslie Stephen thus: "People who approve of the unnecessary killing of an albatross will die a lingering death by starvation." The moral, as might be guessed, was foisted upon the poem by Words- worth, and is identical with that of " Hart-Leap Well." Wordsworth and Coleridge started to write "The. An- cient Mariner" jointly; and two or three lines in the poem, as it stands, were contributed by Wordsworth. But he wanted to give the mariner himself " character and profession"; and to have the dead seamen come to life and sail the ship into port; and in other ways laid so heavy a hand upon Coleridge's airy creation that it be- came plain that a partnership on these terms was out of the question, and Wordsworth withdrew altogether. If we must look for spiritual sustenence in the poem, we shall find it perhaps not so much in any definite warning against cruelty to creatures, as in the sentiment of the blessedness of human companionship and the omnipres- ence of God's mercy; in the passage, e.g.,
"O wedding guest ! this soul hath been Alone on a wide, wide sea," etc. —
•where the thought is the same as in Cowper's " Soliloquy of Alexander Selkirk," even to the detail of the " church- going bell."
The first part of M Christabel n was written in 1797; the second in 1800; and the poem, in its unfinished state, was given to the press in 1816. Meanwhile it had be- come widely known in manuscript. Coleridge used to
Coleridge, TSowles, and the "Pope Controversy. 81
read it to literary circles, and copies of it had got about. We have seen its influence upon Scott. Byron too ad- mired it greatly, and it was by his persuasion that Cole- ridge finally published it as a fragment, finding himself unable to complete it, and feeling doubtless that the public regarded him much as the urchins in Keats' poem regarded the crone
" Who keepeth close a wondrous riddle book, As spectacled she sits in chimney nook."
"Christabel" is more distinctly mediaeval than "The Ancient Mariner/7 and is full of Gothic elements: a moated castle, with its tourney court and its great gate
. . . "ironed within and without, Where an army in battle array had marched out " :
a feudal baron with a retinue of harpers, heralds, and pages; a lady who steals out at midnight into the moon- lit oak wood, to pray for her betrothed knight; a sorceress who pretends to have been carried off on a white palfrey by five armed men, and who puts a spell upon the maiden.
If "The Ancient Mariner" is a ballad, "Christabel" is, in form, a roman d'aventures, or metrical chivalry tale, written in variations of the octosyllabic couplet. These variations, Coleridge said, were not introduced wantonly but " in correspondence with some transition, in the na- ture of the imagery or passion." A single passage will illustrate this:
" They passed the hall that echoes still, Pass as lightly as you will. The brands were flat, the brands were dying Amid their own white ashes lying ;
82 *A History of English 'Romanticism.
But when the lady passed, there came
A tongue of light, a fit of flame ;
And Christabel saw the lady's eye,
And nothing else saw she thereby,
Save the boss of the shield of Sir Leoline tall,
Which hung in a murky old niche in the wall.
O softly tread, said Christabel,
My father seldom sleepeth well."
When, after the hurrying anapaests, the verse returns to the strict iambic measure in the last couplet, the effect is a hush, in harmony with the meaning of the words.*
" Christabel " is not so unique and perfect a thing as " The Ancient Mariner," but it has the same haunting charm, and displays the same subtle art in the use of the supernatural. Coleridge protested that it " pretended to be nothing more than a common fairy tale." f But Lowell asserts that it is "tantalising in the suggestion of deeper meanings than were ever there." There is, in truth, a hint of allegory, like that which baffles and fascinates in Christina Rossetti's " Goblin Market " ; a hint so elusive that the comparison often made between Geraldine and Spenser's Duessa, is distressing to a reader of sensitive nerves. That mystery which is a favourite weapon in the romanticist armoury is used again here with consummate skill. What was it that Christabel saw on the lady's bosom? We are left to conjecture. It was " a sight to dream of, not to tell," { and the poet keeps his secret. Lamb, whose taste was very fine in these matters, advised Coleridge never to finish the poem. Brandl thinks that the idea was taken from the curtained
*Vide supra, p. 27. | "Biographia Literaria," chap. xxiv.
j Keats quotes this line in a letter about Edmund Kean. Forman's ed., vol. iii., p. 4.
Coleridge, Howies, and the 'Pope Controversy. 83
picture in the "Mysteries of Udolpho"; and he also con- siders that the general situation — the castle, the forest, the old father and his young daughter, and the strange lady — are borrowed from Mrs. Radcliffe's "Romance of the Forest"; and that Burger's "Lenore," Lewis' "Alonzo," and some of the Percy ballads contributed a detail here and there. But Quelknforschungen of this kind are very unimportant. It is more important to note the superior art with which the poet excites curiosity and suspends — not simply, like Mrs. Radcliffe, postpones — the gratification of it to the end, and beyond the end, of the poem. Was Geraldine really a witch, or did she only seem so to Christabel ? The angry moan of the mastiff bitch and the tongue of flame that shot up as the lady passed — were they omens, or accidents which popular superstition interprets into omens? Was the malignant influence which Geraldine exerted over the maiden super- natural possession, or the fascination of terror and repug- nance? Did she really utter the words of a charm, or did her sweet bedfellow dream them ? And once more, what was that upon her breast — " that bosom old — that bosom cold " ? Was it a wound, or the mark of a ser- pent, or some foul and hideous disfigurement — or was it only the shadows cast by the swinging lamp?
That isolation and remoteness, that preparation of the reader's mind for the reception of incredible things, which Coleridge secured in " The Ancient Mariner " by cutting off his hero from all human life amid the solitude of the tropic sea, he here secured — in a less degree, to be sure — by the lonely midnight in Sir Leoline's castle. Geral- dine and her victim are the only beings awake except the hooting owls. There is dim moonlight in the wood,
84 *A History of English ^Romanticism.
dim firelight in the hall, and in ChristabePs chamber " the silver lamp burns dead and dim."
The second part of the poem was less successful, partly for the reason, as the reviewers pointed out, that it un- dertakes the hardest of tasks, " witchery by daylight." But there were other reasons. Three years had passed since the poem was begun. Coleridge had been to Ger- many and had settled at Keswick. The poet had been lost in the metaphysician, and he took up his interrupted task without inspiration, putting force upon himself. The signs of effort are everywhere visible, and it is painfully manifest that the poet cannot recover the genial, creative mood in which he had set out. In particular it is ob- servable that, while there is no mention of place in the first part, now we have frequent references to Windermere, Borrowdale, Dungeon Ghyll, and other Lake Country localities familiar enough in Wordsworth's poetry, but strangely out of place in " Christabel." It was certainly an artistic mistake to transfer Sir Leoline's castle from fairyland to Cumberland.* There is one noble passage in the second part, the one which Byron prefixed to his " Farewell " to Lady Byron :
"Alas ! they had been friends in youth," etc.
But the stress of personal emotion in these lines is not in harmony with the romantic context. They are like a patch of cloth of gold let into a lace garment and strain- ing the delicate tissue till it tears.
The example of "The Ancient Mariner," and in a still greater degree of " Christabel," was potent upon all sub- sequent romantic poetry. It is seen in Scott, in Byron,
* Vide supra, p. 14.
Coleridge, TBowles, and the Tope Controversy. 85
and in Keats, not only in the modelling of their tales, but in single lines and images. In the first stanza of the ** Lay " Scott repeats the line which occurs so often in "Christabel"— "Jesu Maria shield her well!" In the same poem, the passage where the Lady Margaret steals out of Branksome Tower at dawn to meet her lover in the wood, gliding down the secret stair and passing the bloodhound at the portal, will remind all readers of "Christabel." The dialogue between the river and mountain spirits will perhaps remind them of the ghostly antiphonies which the "Mariner" hears in his trance. The couplet
"The seething pitch and molten lead Reeked like a witch's caldron red."
is, of course, from Coleridge's
"The water, like a witch's oils, Burned green and blue and white."
In "The Lord of the Isles" Scott describes the "elvish lustre " and " livid flakes " of the phosphorescence of the sea, and cites, in a note, the description, in "The An- cient Mariner," of the sea snakes from which
"The elvish light Fell off in hoary flakes."
The most direct descendant of " Christabel " was " The Eve of St. Agnes." Madeline's chamber, "hushed, silken, chaste," recalls inevitably the passage in the older poem:
"The moon shines dim in the open air, And not a moonbeam enters here. But they without its light can see The chamber carved so curiously,
86 *A History of English 'Romanticism.
Carved with figures strange and sweet, All made out of the carver's brain, For a lady's chamber meet : The lamp with twofold silver chain Is fastened to an angel's feet."
The rest of Coleridge's ballad work is small in quan- tity and may be dismissed briefly. " Alice du Clos " has good lines, but is unimportant as a whole. The very favourite poem " Love " is a modern story enclosing a mediaeval one. In the moonshine by the ruined tower the guileless Genevieve leans against the statue of an armed man, while her lover sings her a tale of a wan- dering knight who bore a burning brand upon his shield and went mad for the love of " The Lady of the Land." * The fragment entitled " The Dark Ladie " was begun as a " sister tale " to " Love." The hero is a " knight that wears the griffin for his crest." There are only fif- teen stanzas of it, and it breaks off with a picture of an imaginary bridal procession, whose " nodding minstrels " recall "The Ancient Mariner," and incidentally some things of Chatterton's. Lines of a specifically romantic colouring are of course to be found scattered about nearly every where in Coleridge; like the musical little song that follows the invocation to the soul of Alvar in " Remorse " :
"And at evening evermore, In a chapel on the shore, Shall the chanters sad and saintly — Yellow tapers burning faintly — Doleful masses chant for thee, Miserere Domine ! "
* Brandl thinks that this furnished Keats with a hint or two for his "Belle Dame sans Merci." Coleridge's "Dejection: An Ode " is headed with a stanza from "the grand old ballad of Sir Patrick Spence. "
Coleridge, "Bowles, and the Tope Controversy. 87
or the wild touch of folk poesy in that marvellous opium dream, " Kubla Khan " — the "deep romantic chasm ":
41 A savage place, as holy and enchanted As e'er beneath a waning moon was haunted By woman wailing for her demon lover. "
Or the well-known ending of "The Knight's Grave":
"The knight's bones are dust, And his good sword rust ; His soul is with the saints, I trust."
In taking account of Coleridge's services to the cause of romanticism, his critical writings should not be over- looked. Matthew Arnold declared that there was some- thing premature about the burst of creative activity in English literature at the opening of the nineteenth cen- tury, and regretted that the way had not been prepared, as in Germany, by a critical movement. It is true that the English romantics put forth no body of doctrine, no authoritative statement of a theory of literary art. Scott did not pose as the leader of a school, or compose prefaces and lectures like Hugo and Schlegel.* As a
*"The English Romantic critics did not form a school. Like everything else in the English Romantic movement, its criticism was individual, isolated, sporadic, unsystematised. It had no official mouthpiece, like Sainte-Beuve and the Globe; its members formed no compact phalanx like that which, towards the close of our period, threw itself upon the 'classiques' of Paris. Nor did they, with the one exception of Coleridge, approach the Romantic critics of Germany in range of ideas, in grasp of the larger significance of their own move- ment. It was only in Germany that the ideas implicit in the great poetic revival were explicitly thought out in all their many-sided bearing upon society, history, philosophy, relig- ion ; and that the problem of criticism, in particular, was pre- sented in its full depth and richness of meaning. ... As English Romanticism achieved greater things on its creative than on its critical side, so its criticism was more remarkable
88 ,-A History of English ^Romanticism.
contributor to the reviews on his favourite topics, he was no despicable critic; shrewd, good-natured, full of spe- cial knowledge, anecdote, and illustration. But his crit- icism was never polemic, and he had no quarrel with the classics. He cherished an unfeigned admiration for Dryden, whose life he wrote and whose works he edited. Doubtless he would cheerfully have admitted the inferiority of his own poetry to Dryden's and Pope's. He had no programme to announce, but just went ahead writing romances; in practice an innovator, but in theory a literary conservative.
Coleridge, however, was fully aware of the scope of the new movement. He represented, theoretically as well as practically, the reaction against eighteenth-century academicism, the Popean tradition* in poetry, and the maxims of pseudo-classical criticism. In his analysis and vindication of the principles of romantic art, he brought to bear a philosophic depth and subtlety such as had never before been applied in England to a merely belletristic subject. He revolutionised, for one thing, the critical view of Shakspere, devoting several lecture courses to the exposition of the thesis that " Shak- spere's judgment was commensurate with his genius." These lectures borrowed a number of passages from A. W. von Schlegel's " Vorlesungen iiber Dramatische Kunst
on that side which is akin to creation — in the subtle apprecia- tion of literary quality — than in the analysis of the principles on which its appreciation was founded " (C. H. Herford : " The Age of Wordsworth, " p. 50).
* See " Bio'graphia Literaria," chap. i. "From the com- mon opinion that the English style attained its greatest per- fection in and about Queen Anne's reign, I altogether dis- sent " (Lecture "On Style," March 13, 1818).
Coleridge, Howies, and the Tope Controversy. 89
und Litteratur," delivered at Vienna in 1808, but en- grafted with original matter of the highest value. Com- pared with these Shakspere notes, with the chapters on Wordsworth in the " Biographia Literaria," and with the obiter dicta sown through Coleridge's prose, all previous English criticism appears crude and superficial, and the contemporary squabble over Pope like a scolding match in the nursery.
Coleridge's acute and sympathetic insight into the principles of Shaksperian drama did not save him from producing his abortive " Zapolya " in avowed imitation of the " Winter's Tale." What curse is on the English stage that men who have done work of the highest grade in other departments, as soon as they essay playwriting, become capable of failures like " The Borderers " and "John Woodville" and "Manfred" and "Zapolya"? As for "Remorse," with its Moorish sea-coasts, wild mountains, chapel interiors with painted windows, torch- light and moonlight, dripping caverns, dungeons, daggers and poisoned goblets, the best that can be said of it is that it is less bad than " Zapolya." And of both it may be said that they are romantic not after the fashion of Shakspere, but of those very German melodramas which Coleridge ridiculed in his " Critique on Bertram." *
* See vol. i., p. 421 if.
CHAPTER III.
fteata, Xeigb 1bunt, anD tbe Dante
IN the interchange of literary wares between England and Germany during the last years of the eighteenth cen- tury, it is observable that the English romantics went no further back than to their own contemporaries for their knowledge of the Deutsche Vergangenheit. They trans- lated or imitated robber tragedies, chivalry tales, and ghost ballads from the modern restorers of the Teutonic Mittelalter ; but they made no draughts upon the original storehouse of German mediaeval poetry. There was no such reciprocity as yet between England and the Latin countries. French romanticism dates, at the earliest, from Chateaubriand's "Genie du Christianisme " (1802), and hardly made itself felt as a definite force, even in France, before Victor Hugo's "Cromwell" (1828). But in the first quarter of the nineteenth century, Italy, Spain, and France began to contribute material to the English movement in the shape of translations like Gary's " Di- vine Comedy" (1814); Lockhart's "Spanish Ballads" (1824); Southey's " Amadis of Gaul " (1803), "Palmerin of England" (1807), and "The Chronicle of the Cid" (1808); and Rose's* "Partenopex of Blois" (1807). By far the most influential of these was Cary's " Dante."
* Scott's friend, William Stewart Rose — to whom the first verse epistle in "Marmion " is addressed. He also translated the "Orlando Furioso" (1823-31). His "Partenopex" was made from a version in modern French.
Keats, Leigh Hunt, and the T)ante 'Revival. 91
Hitherto the Italian Middle Age had impressed itself upon the English imagination not directly but through the richly composite art of the Renaissance schools of painting and poetry ; through Raphael and his followers ; through the romances of Ariosto and Tasso and their English scholar, Spenser. Elizabethan England had been supplied with versions of the "Orlando Furioso"* and the " Gierusalemme Liberata," by Harrington and Fair- fax— the latter still a standard translation and a very ac- complished piece of versification. Warton and Hurd and other romanticising critics of the eighteenth century were perpetually upholding Ariosto and Tasso against French detraction :
"In face of all his foes, the Cruscan quire, And Boileau, whose rash envy could allow No strain which shamed his country's creaking lyre, That whetstone of the teeth — monotony in wire ! " f
Scott's eager championship of Ariosto has already been mentioned. J But the stuff of the old Charlemagne epos is sophisticated in the brilliant pages of Ariosto, who follows Pulci and Boiardo, if not in burlesquing chivalry outright, yet in treating it with a half irony. Tasso is serious, but submits his romantic matter — Godfrey of Boulogne and the First Crusade — to the classical epic mould. It was pollen from Italy, but not Italy of the Middle Ages, that fructified English poetry in the six-
* A new translation of the " Orlando, " by Hoole, appeared in 1773-83; of Tasso's "Jerusalem " in 1763; and of Metasta- sio's dramas in 1767. These were in the heroic couplets of Pope.
f "Childe Harold," Canto iv., xxxviii. And Cf. vol. i., pp. 25, 49, TOO, 170, 219, 222-26.
| Vide supra, p. 5.
92 *A History of English Romanticism.
teenth century. Two indeed of gli antichi, "the all Etruscan three," communicated an impulse both earlier and later. Love sonneteering, in emulation of Petrarca, began at Henry VIII.'s court. Chaucer took the sub- stance of " Troilus and Creseyde " and " The Knightes Tale" from Boccaccio's "Filostrato" and "Teseide"; and Dryden, who never mentions Dante, versified three stories from the "Decameron." But Petrarch and Boccaccio were not mediaeval minds. They represent the earlier stages of humanism and the new learning. Dante was the genuine homme du moyen age, and Dante was the latest of the great revivals. " Dante," says Carlyle, "was the spokesman of the Middle Ages; the thought they lived by stands here in everlasting music."
The difficulty, not to say obscurity, of the " Divine Comedy " ; its allusive, elliptical style ; its scholasticism and allegorical method ; its multitudinous references to local politics and the history of thirteenth-century Italy, defied approach. Above all, its profound, austere, mys- tical spirituality was abhorrent to the clear, shallow rationalism of the eighteenth century, as well as to the religious liberalism of the seventeenth and the joyous sensuality of the sixteenth. Goethe the pagan disliked Dante, no less than Scott the Protestant.* In particular, deistic France, arbiter elegantiarum, felt with a shiver of repulsion,
" How grim the master was of Tuscan song. "
"I estimate highly," wrote Voltaire to an Italian cor- respondent, "the courage with which you have dared to
*Vide sttpra, p. 40. Goethe pronounced the "Inferno" abominable, the " Purgatorio " doubtful, and the " Paradiso " tiresome (Plumptre's "Dante," London, 1887, vol. ii., p 484).
Keats, Leigh Hunt, and the 'Dante ^vtval. 93
say that Dante was a madman * and his work a monster. . . . There are found among us and in the eighteenth century, people who strive to admire imaginations so stupid and barbarous." A French translation of the " Divine Comedy " had been printed by the Abbe* Gran- giert at Paris in 1596; but Rivarol, whose "Inferno" was published in 1783, was the first Frenchman, says Lowell, to divine Dante's greatness. The earliest Ger- man version was Bachenschwanz's prose translation of the "Commedia" (Leipsic, 1767-69),}; but the German romantic school were the first to furnish a sympathetic interpretation of Dante to their countrymen.
Chaucer was well acquainted with the work of " the grete poet of Florence," and drew upon him occasionally, though by no means so freely as upon Boccaccio. Thus in " The Monkes Tale " he re-tells, in a very inferior fashion, the tragedy of Ugolino. In " The Parliament of Foules " and " The Hous of Fame " there are distinct imitations of Dante. A passage from the " Purgatory " is quoted in the " Wif of Bathes Tale," etc. Spenser probably, and Milton certainly, knew their Dante. Mil- ton's sonnet to Henry Lawes mentions Dante's en- counter with the musician Casella " in the milder shades of Purgatory." Here and there a reference to the " Di- vine Comedy " occurs in some seventeenth-century Eng- lish prose writer like Sir Thomas Browne or Jeremy Tay- lor. It is thought that the description of Hell in Sackville's "Mirror for Magistrates" shows an acquaint-
* See Walpole's opinion, vol. i., p. 235.
f For early manuscript renderings see " Les Plus Anciennes Traductions Fran§aises de la Divine Com6die, " par C. Morel, Paris, 1897.
\ Lowell says Kannegiesser's, 1809.
94 ^ History of English ^Romanticism.
ance with the " Inferno." But Dante had few readers in England before the nineteenth century. He was prac- tically unknown there and in all of Europe outside of Italy. "His reputation," said Voltaire, "will go on in- creasing because scarce anybody reads him." And half a century later Napoleon said the same thing in the same words: "His fame is increasing and will continue to in- crease because no one ever reads him."
In the third volume of his " History of English Poetry " (1781), Thomas Warton had spoken of the "Divine Com- edy " as " this wonderful compound of classical and ro- mantic fancy, of pagan and Christian theology, of real and fictitious history, of tragical and comic incidents, of familiar and heroic manners, and of satirical and sub- lime poetry. But the grossest improprieties of this poem discover an originality of invention, and its absurdities often border on sublimity. We are surprised that a poet should write one hundred cantos on hell, paradise, and purgatory. But this prolixity is partly owing to the want of art and method, and is common to all early com- positions, in which everything is related circumstantially and without rejection, and not in those general terms which are used by modern writers." Warton is shocked at Dante's " disgusting fooleries " and censures his de- parture from Virgilian grace. Milton "avoided the childish or ludicrous excesses of these bold inventions . . . but rude and early poets describe everything." But Warton felt Dante's greatness. "Hell," he wrote, "grows darker at his frown." He singled out for special mention the Francesca and Ugolino episodes.
If Warton could write thus it is not surprising to dis- cover among classical critics either a total silence as to
Keats, Leigh Hunt, and the T>ante ^Revival. 95
Dante, or else a systematic depreciation. Addison does not mention him in his Italian travels; and in his "Sat- urday papers " misses the very obvious chance for a com- parison between Dante and Milton such as Macaulay afterwards elaborated in his essay on Milton. Gold- smith, who knew nothing of Dante at first hand, wrote of him with the usual patronising ignorance of eighteenth- century criticism as to anything outside of the Greek and Latin classics : " He addressed a barbarous people in a method suited to their apprehension ; united purga- tory and the river Styx, St. Paul and Virgil, heaven and hell together; and shows a strange mixture of good sense and absurdity. The truth is, he owes most of his reputation to the obscurity of the times in which he lived." *
In 1782, William Hayley, the biographer of Cowper and author of that very mild poem " The Triumphs of Temper," published a verse "Essay on Epic Poetry" in five epistles. In his notes to the third epistle, he gave an outline of Dante's life with a translation of his sonnet to Guido Cavalcanti and of the first three can- tos of the " Inferno." " Voltaire," he says, has spoken of Dante " with that precipitate vivacity which so fre- quently led the lively Frenchman to insult the reputation of the noblest writers." He refers to the "judicious and spirited summary " of the " Divine Comedy " in Warton, and adds, " We have several versions of the celebrated story of Ugolino; but I believe no entire canto of Dante has hitherto appeared in our language. . . . The author has been solicited to execute an entire translation of Dante, but the extreme inequality of this poet would *" Present State of Polite Learning " (1759).
*A History of English Romanticism.
such a work a very laborious undertaking; and it appears very doubtful how far such a version would interest our country. Perhaps the reception of these cantos may dis- cover to the translator the sentiments of the public." Hayley adopted "triple rhyme," /.*., the terza rima, and said that he did not recollect it had ever been used before in English. His translation is by no means con- temptible— much better than Boyd's, — but fails entirely to catch Dante's manner or to keep the strange precision and picturesqueness of his phrase. Thus he renders
" Chi per lungo silenzio parea fioco, " " Whose voice was like the whisper of a lute " ;
and the poet is made to address Beatrice— O donna di virtu — as " bright fair," as if she were one of the belles in " The Rape of the Lock." In this same year a version of the " Inferno " was printed privately and anonymously by Charles Rogers, a book and art collector and a friend of Sir Joshua Reynolds. But the first complete transla- tion of the " Comedy " into English was made by Henry Boyd, a clergyman of the Irish Church; the "Inferno" in 1785 (with a specimen f rom Ariosto) ; the whole in 1802. Boyd was a quite obscure person, author among other things of a Spenserian poem entitled " The Wood- man's Tale," and his translation attracted little notice. In his introduction he compares Dante with Homer, and complains that " the venerable old bard . . . has been long neglected " ; perhaps, he suggests, because his poem could not be tried by Aristotle's rules or submitted to the usual classical tests.
" Since the French, the restorers of the art of criticism, cast a damp upon original invention, the character of
Keats, Leigh Hunt, and the 'Dante Ifywval. 97
Dante has been thrown under a deeper shade. That agreeable and volatile nation found in themselves an insuperable aversion to the gloomy and romantic bard, whose genius, ardent, melancholy, and sublime, was so different from their own."
Boyd used a six-lined stanza, a singularly ill chosen medium for rendering the terza rima ; and his diction was as wordy and vague as Dante's is concise and sharp of edge. A single passage will illustrate his manner:
"So full the symphony of grief arose, My heart, responsive to the lovers' woes,
With thrilling sympathy convulsed my breast. Too strong at last for life my passion grew, And, sickening at the lamentable view,
I fell like one by mortal pangs oppressed." *
The first opportunity which the mere English reader had to form any real notion of Dante, was afforded by Henry Francis Gary's translation in blank verse (the "Inferno," with the Italian text in 1805; the entire "Commedia" in 1814, with the title "The Vision of Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise "). This was a work of talent, if not of genius; and in spite of the numerous versions in prose and verse that have since appeared, it continues the most current and standard Dante in Eng- land, if not in America, where Longfellow naturally challenges precedence. The public was as yet so un- prepared to appreciate Dante that Gary's work received little attention until brought into notice by Coleridge; and the translator was deeply chagrined by the indiffer-
* " Mentre che 1'uno spirto questo disse, L'altro piangeva si, che di pietade I venni men, cosi com' io morisse ; E cadde come corpo morte cade. "
— " Inferno, " Canto v.
98 *A History of English Romanticism.
ence, not to say hostility, with which his labours were acknowledged. In the memoir * of Gary by his son there is a letter from Anne Seward — the Swan of Lichfield — which throws a singular light upon the critical taste of the "snug coterie and literary lady" of the period. She writes : " How can you profess to be charmed with the few faint outlines of landscape painting in Dante, who are blind to the beautiful, distinct, and profuse scenery in the pages of Ossian?" She goes on to complain that the poem, in its English dress, is vulgar and obscure. Coleridge devoted to Dante a part of his series of lec- tures given at London in 1818, reading copious selections from Gary's version. The translator had claimed, in his introduction, that the Florentine poet " leaves to Homer and Shakespeare alone the power of challenging the pre- eminence or equality." Coleridge emphasized the " end- less, subtle beauties of Dante"; the vividness, logical connection, strength, and energy of his style. In this he pronounced him superior to Milton ; and in picturesque- ness he affirmed that he surpassed all other poets ancient or modern. With characteristic penetration he indicated the precise position of Dante in mediaeval literature; his poetry is "the link between religion and philosophy"; it is "christianized, but without the further Gothic acces- sion of proper chivalry " ; it has that " inwardness which . . . distinguishes all the classic from all the modern poetry." It was perhaps in consequence of Coleridge's praise that Gary's translation went into its second edition in 1819, the year following this lecture course. A third was published in 1831. Italians used to complain that the foreign reader's knowledge of the " Divine Comedy " * Vol. i., p. 236.
Keats, Leigh Hunt, and the ^Dante 'Revival. 99
was limited to the " Inferno," and generally to the Ugolino and Francesca passages. Coleridge's quotations are all from the "Inferno," and Lowell thinks that he had not read beyond it. He testified that the Ugolino and Fran- cesca stories were already " so well known and admired that it would be pedantry to analyse them." Sir Joshua Reynolds had made a painting of the former subject. In 1800 William Blake produced a series of seven engrav- ings in illustration of the "Inferno." In 1817 Flaxman began his illustrations of the whole " Commedia," ex- tending to a hundred plates.*
In 1819-20 Byron was living at Ravenna, the place of Dante's death and burial f and of the last years of his exile. He used to ride for hours together through Ra- venna's " immemorial wood," J and the associations of the scene prompted him to put into English (March, 1820) the Francesca episode, that " thing woven as out of rain- bows on a ground of eternal black." In the letter to Murray, sent with his translation, he wrote : " Enclosed you will find, line for line, in third rhyme (terza rima), of which your British blackguard reader as yet under- stands nothing, Fanny of Rimini. You know that she was born here, and married and slain, from Gary, Boyd, and such people." In his diary, Byron commented scorn- fully on Frederick Schlegel's assertions that Dante had never been a favourite with his own countrymen; and
* Plumptre's "Dante," vol. ii., p. 439. f " Ungrateful Florence ! Dante sleeps afar, Like Scipio, buried by the upbraiding shore. "
— "Childe Harold," iv., 57. JSee vol. i., p. 49; and " Purgatorio, " xxviii., 19-20.
" Tal, qual di ramo in ramo si raccoglie Per la pineta in sul lito di Chiassi."
ioo <>A History of English Romanticism.
that his main defect was a want of gentle feelings. " Not a favourite! Why they talk Dante — write Dante — and think and dream Dante at this moment (1821) to an ex- cess which would be ridiculous, but that he deserves it. . . . Of gentle feelings ! — and Francesca of Rimini — and the father's feelings in Ugolino — and Beatrice — and * La PiaM Why there is a gentleness in Dante beyond all gentleness." Byron had not the patience to be a good translator. His rendering is closer and, of course, more spirited than Hay ley's ; but where long search for the right word was needed, and a delicate shading of phrase to reproduce without loss the meaning of this most mean- ing and least translatable of masters, Byron's work shows haste and imperfection.
" Love, who to none beloved to love again Remits."
is neither an idiomatic nor in any way an adequate eng- lishing of
"Amor, che a nullo amato amar perdona."
Nor does
"Accursed was the book and he who wrote,"
fully give the force of the famous
"Galeotto fu il libro, e chi lo scrisse." *
The year before Byron had composed " The Prophecy ot Dante," an original poem in four cantos, in terza rima,
* He did better in free paraphrase than in literal transla- tion. Cf. Stanza cviii., in "Don Juan," Canto iii.—
"Soft hour ! which wakes the wish and melts the heart "— with its original in the " Purgatorio, " viii., 1-6.
Keats, Leigb Hunt, and tbe *Dante Revival. 101
"... imitative rhyme, Harsh Runic copy of the South 'a sublime." *
The poem foretells " the fortunes of Italy in the ensuing centuries," and is a rheotorical piece, diffuse and de- clamatory, and therein quite the opposite of Dante. It manifests Byron's self-conscious habit of submitting his theme to himself, instead of losing himself in his theme. He is Dante in exile, and Gemma Donati is Lady Byron —
"That fatal she,
Their mother, the cold partner who hath brought Destruction for a dowry — this to see And feel and know without repair, hath taught A bitter lesson ; but it leaves me free : I have not vilely found nor basely sought, They made an exile not a slave of me."
Dante's bitter and proud defiance found a response in Byron's nature, but his spirit, as a whole, the English poet was not well fitted to interpret. In the preface to " The Prophecy," Byron said that he had not seen the terza rima tried before in English, except by Hayley, whose translation he knew only from an extract in the notes to Beckford's " Vathek."
Shelley's knowledge and appreciation of Dante might be proved from isolated images and expressions in many parts of his writings. He translated the sonnet to Guido Cavalcanti with greater freedom and elegance than Hay- ley, and wrote a short copy of verses on the Hunger Tower at Pisa, the scene of Ugolino's sufferings. In the preface to " Epipsychidion " he cites the " Vita Nuova " as the utterance of an idealised and spiritualised love like that which his own poem records. In the " Defence of Poetry " he pays a glowing tribute to Dante as thes
* Dedication to La Guiccioli.
102 *A History of English Romanticism.
second of epic poets and " the first awakener of entranced Europe." His poetry is the bridge "which unites the modern and the ancient world." Contrary to the prevail- ing critical tradition, Shelley preferred the " Purgatory " and the " Paradise " to the " Hell." Shelley also em- ployed terza rima in his fragmentary pieces, " Prince Athanase," "The Triumph of Life," "The Woodman and the Nightingale," and in one of his best lyrics, the " Ode to the West Wind," * written in 1819 "in a wood that skirts the Arno, near Florence." This linked measure, so difficult for the translator and which gives a hampered movement to Byron's and Hayley's specimens of the " In- ferno," Shelley may be said to have really domesticated in English verse by his splendid handling of it in orig- inal work:
" Make me thy lyre even as the forest is : What if my leaves are falling, like its own? The tumult of thy mighty harmonies Will take from both a deep autumnal tone, Sweet though in sadness. Be thou, spirit fierce, My spirit ! Be thou me, impetuous one ! "
Shelley expressed to Medwin his dissatisfaction with all English renderings from Dante — even with Gary — and announced his intention, or desire, to translate the whole of the " Divine Comedy " in terza rima. Two specimens of this projected version he gave in "Ugolino," and "Matilda Gathering Flowers" ("Purg.," xxviii., 1-51). He also made a translation of the first canzone of the " Convito."
After the appearance of Gary's version, critical com-
*But in this poem each thirteenth and fourteenth line make a couplet, thus breaking up the whole into a series of loose sonnets.
Keats, Leigh Hunt, and the ^Dante Revival. 103
prehension of Dante grew rapidly. In the same year when Coleridge gave his lectures, Hallam published his " Middle Ages," which contained a just though somewhat coldly worded estimate of the great Italian. This was amplified in his later work, "The Literature of Europe" (1838-39). Hallam said that Dante was the first name in the literature of the Middle Ages, the creator of his nation's poetry, and the most original of all writers, and the most concise. But he blamed him for obscurity, forced and unnatural turns of expression, and barbarous licenses of idiom. The " Paradise " seemed to him tedi- ous, as a whole, and much of the " Purgatory " heavy. Hallam repeated, if he did not originate that nice bit of discernment, that in his "Paradise" Dante uses only three leading ideas — light, music, and motion. Then came Macaulay's essay " Milton," in the Edinburgh for 1825, with the celebrated parallel between the "Divine Comedy " and the " Paradise Lost," and the contrast be- tween Dante's " picturesque " and Milton's " imaginative " method. Macaulay's analysis has been questioned by Ruskin and others; some of his positions were perhaps mistaken, but they were the most advanced that English Dante criticism had as yet taken up. And finally came Carlyle's vivid piece of portrait painting in " Hero Wor- ship" (1841). The first literal prose translation of any extent from the "Commedia" was the "Inferno" by Carlyle's brother John (1849).
Since the middle of the century Dante study and Dante literature in English-speaking lands have waxed enor- mously. Dante societies have been founded in England and America. Almost every year sees another edition, a new commentary or a fresh translation in prose, in blank
ro4 e/7 History of English 'Romanticism.
verse, in terza rima, or in some form of stanza. It is not exaggerating to say that there is more public mention of Dante now in a single year than in all the years of the eighteenth century together. It would be interesting, if it were possible, to count the times that Dante's name occurs in English writings of the eighteenth and then of the nineteenth century ; afterwards to do the same with Ariosto and Tasso and compare the results. It would be found that, while the eighteenth century set no very high value on Ariosto and Tasso, it ignored Dante altogether; and that the nineteenth has put aside the superficial medi- aeval ism of the Renaissance romancers and gone back to the great religious romancer of the Italian Middle Age. There is no surer plummet than Dante's to sound the spiritual depth of a time. It is in the nineteenth century first that Shakspere and Dante took possession of the European mind. In 1800 Shakspere was an English, or at most an English and German poet, and Dante exclusively an Italian. In 1900 they had both become world poets. Shakspere's foreign conquests were the earlier and are still the wider, as wide perhaps as the expanse —
"That deep-browed Homer ruled as his demesne."
But the ground that Dante has won he holds with equal secureness. Not that he will ever be popular, in Shak- spere's way ; and yet it is far gone when the aesthete in a comic opera is described as a " Francesca da Rimini young man."
As a stimulus to creative work the influence of Dante, though not entirely absent, is not conspicuous in the first half of the century. It is not until the time of the Ros-
Keats, Leigh Hunt, and the *Dante Revival. 105
settis in England and of Longfellow and Dr. Parsons in America that any poetry of a really Dantesque inspira- tion and, at the same time, of high original value was added to our literature.*
The first fruits of the Dante revival in England, in the shape of original production, was Leigh Hunt's " Story of Rimini" (1816)— "Mr. Hunt's smutty story of Ri- mini," as the Tory wits of Blackwood were fond of calling it in their onslaughts upon the Cockney school. This was a romaunt in four cantos upon the already familiar episode of Francesca, that " lily in the mouth of Tartarus." Hunt took Dryden's " Fables " as his model in versifica- tion, employing the heroic couplet with the frequent va- riation of the triplet and the alexandrine. The poem is not at all Dantesque in its lax and fluent sweetness, and in that colloquial, familiar manner which is constant in all Hunt's writing, both prose and verse; reminding one, at its best, of Chaucer, who was, indeed, one of his favourite masters. Hunt softens the ferocity of the tale as given by Boccaccio, according to whom the husband Giovanni Malatesta was a cripple, and killed the lovers in flagrante delicti. Hunt makes him a personable man, though of proud and gloomy temper. He slays his brother Paolo in chivalrous fashion and in single combat, and Francesca dies of a broken heart. The descriptive portions of the " Story of Rimini" are charming: the
* T. W. Parsons' "Lines on a Bust of Dante" appeared in the Boston Advertiser in 1841. His translation of the first ten cantos of the " Inferno" was published in 1843: later in- stalments in 1867 and 1893. Longfellow's version of the " Divine Comedy " with the series of sonnets by the translator came out in 1867-70. For the Dante work of the Rossettis, vide infra, pp. 282 ff.
106 <iA History of English Romanticism.
feudal procession with trumpeters, heralds, squires, and knights, sent to escort home the bride; the pine forest outside Ravenna; and the garden at Rimini in which the lovers used to meet —
"Places of nestling green for poets made."
Hunt had a quick eye for colour; a fondness, not al- together free from affectation, for dainty phrases; and a feminine love of little niceties in dress, tapestry, needlework, and furnishings. The poem was written mostly in prison where its author spent two years for a libel on the Prince Regent. Byron used to visit him there and bring him books bearing on Francesca's his- tory. Hunt brought into the piece romantic stuff from various sources, including a summary of the book which betrayed the lovers to their fatal passion, the romance of 41 Lancelot du Lac." And Giovanni speaks to his dying brother a paraphrase of the celebrated eulogy pronounced over Lancelot by Sir Ector in the "Morte Darthur":
" And, Paulo, thou wert the completest knight That ever rode with banner to the fight ; And thou wert the most beautiful to see, That ever came in press of chivalry : And of a sinful man thou wert the best That ever for his friend put spear in rest ; And thou wert the most meek and cordial That ever among ladies eat in hall ; And thou wert still, for all that bosom gored, The kindest man that ever struck with sword. "
Hunt makes the husband discover his wife's infidelity by overhearing her talking in her sleep. In many other particulars he enfeebles, dandifies, and sentimentalises Dante's fierce, abrupt tragedy ; holding the reader by the
Keats, Leigh Hunt, and tbe *Dante 'Revival. 107
button while he prattles in his garrulous way of Paulo's " taste "—
"The very nose, lightly yet firmly wrought,
Showed taste " — and of
"The two divinest things in earthly lot,
A lovely woman in a rural spot ! "
a couplet which irresistibly suggests suburban picnics.
Yet no one in his generation did more than Leigh Hunt to familiarise the English public with Italian ro- mance. He began the study of Italian when he was a schoolboy at Christ Hospital, being attracted to Ariosto by a picture of Angelica and Medoro, in West's studio. Like his friend Keats, on whose " Eve of St. Agnes " he wrote an enthusiastic commentary,* Hunt was eclectic in his choice of material, drawing inspiration impartially from the classics and the romantics ; but, like Keats, he became early a declared rebel against eighteenth-century traditions and asserted impulse against rule. " In anti- quarian corners," he says, in writing of the influences of his childish days, " Percy's 'Reliques ' were preparing a nobler age both in poetry and prose." At school he fell passionately in love with Collins and Gray, composed a "Winter" in imitation of Thomson, one hundred stanzas of a " Fairy King " in emulation of Spenser, and a long poem in Latin inspired by Gray's odes and Malet's "Northern Antiquities." In 1802 [aetate 18] he pub- lished a volume of these juvenilia — odes after Collins and Gray, blank verse after Thomson and Akenside, and a " Palace of Pleasure " after Spenser's " Bower of Bliss." f
*"The Seer."
f He named a daughter, born while he was in prison, after Spenser's Florimel.
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It was in this same year that on a visit to Oxford, he was introduced to Kett, the professor of poetry, who expressed a hope that the youthful bard might be inspired by " the muse of Warton," whom Hunt had never read. There had fallen in Hunt's way when he was a young man, Bell's edition of the poets, which included Chaucer and Spenser. "The omission of these in Cooke's edition," he says, " was as unpoetical a sign of the times as the present familiarity with their names is the reverse. It was thought a mark of good sense ; as if good sense, in matters of literature, did not consist as much in knowing what was poetical poetry, as brilliant wit." Of his " Feast of the Poets " (1814) he writes: * " I offended all the critics of the old or French school, by objecting to the monotony of Pope's versification, and all the critics of the new or German school by laughing at Wordsworth." In the preface to his collected poems [1832] occurs the following interesting testimony to the recentness of the new criticism. " So long does fashion succeed in palm- ing its petty instincts upon the world for those of a nation and of nature, that it is only of late years that the French have ceased to think some of the most affecting passages in Shakespeare ridiculous. . . . Yet the English them- selves, no great while since, half blushed at these criti- cisms, and were content if the epithet ' bizarre ' (' votre bizarre Shakespeare ') was allowed to be translated into * a wild, irregular genius.' Everything was wild and irregular except rhymesters in toupees. A petty con- spiracy of decorums took the place of what was becoming to humanity." In the summer of 1822 Hunt went by sailing vessel through the Mediterranean to Italy. The *" Autobiography," p. 200 (ed. of 1870).
Keats, Leigh Hunt, and the 'Dante ^Revival. 109
books which he read chiefly on board ship were " Don Quixote," Ariosto, and Berni; and his diary records the emotion with which he coasted the western shores of Spain, the ground of Italian romance, where the Pay- nim chivalry used to land to go against Charlemagne: the scene of Boiardo's " Orlando Inamorato " and Ari- osto's " Orlando Furioso." " I confess I looked at these shores with a human interest, and could not help feeling that the keel of our vessel was crossing a real line, over which knights and lovers had passed. And so they have, both real and fabulous ; the former not less roman- tic, the latter scarcely less real. . . . Fair speed your sails over the lucid waters, ye lovers, on a lover-like sea! Fair speed them, yet never land; for where the poet has left you, there ought ye, as ye are, to be living forever — forever gliding about a summer sea, touching at its flow- ery islands and reposing beneath its moon."
Hunt's sojourn in Italy, where he lived in close asso- ciation with Byron and Shelley, enabled him tofereciser his knowledge of the Italian language and literature. In 1846 he published a volume of " Stories from the Italian Poets," containing a summary or free paraphrase in prose of the " Divine Comedy " and the poems of Pulci, Boi- ardo, Ariosto, and Tasso, " with comments throughout, occasional passages versified and critical notices of the lives and genius of the authors." Like our own roman- ticist poet Longfellow, who rediscovered Europe for America, Leigh Hunt was a sympathetic and interpreta- tive rather than a creative genius; and like Longfellow, an admirable translator. Among his collected poems are a number of elegant and spirited versions from various mediaeval literatures. " The Gentle Armour " is a play-
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ful adaptation of a French fabliau " Les Trois Chevaliers et la Chemise," which tells of a knight whose hard-hearted lady set him the task of fighting his two rivals in the lists, armed only in her smock; and, in contrition for this harsh imposure, went to the altar with her faith- ful champion, wearing only the same bloody sark as her bridal garment. At least this is the pretty turn which Hunt gave to the story. In the original it had a coarser ending. There are also, among these translations from mediaeval sources, the Latin drinking song attributed to Walter Map—
Mihi est propositum in taberna mori—
and Andrea de Basso's terrible " Ode to a Dead Body," in fifteenth-century Italian; which utters, with extraor- dinary power, the ascetic thought of the Middle Age, dwelling with a kind of gloomy exultation on the foulness of the human frame in decay.
In the preface to his " Italian Poets," Hunt speaks of " how widely Dante has re-attracted of late the attention of the world." He pronounces him " the greatest poet for intensity that ever lived," and complains that his metri- cal translators have failed to render his " passionate, practical, and creative style — a style which may be said to write things instead of words." Hunt's introduction is a fine piece of critical work. His alert, sparkling, and nimble intellect — somewhat lacking in concentration and seriousness — but sensitive above all things to the pic- turesque, was keenly awake to Dante's poetic greatness. On the other hand, his cheerful philosophy and tolerant, not to say easy-going moral nature, was shocked by the Florentine's bitter pride, and by what he conceives to be
Keats, Leigh Hunt, and the ^Dante 'Revival. 1 1 1
his fanaticism, bigotry, superstition, and personal vindic- tiveness, when
" Hell he peoples with his foes, Dark scourge of many a guilty line. "
Hunt was a Universalist, and Dante was a Catholic Calvinist. There was a determined optimism about Hunt, and a buoyancy as of a cork or other light body, sometimes a little exasperating to men of less sanguine temperament.* He ends by protesting that Dante is a semi-barbarian and his " Divine Comedy " too often an infernal tragedy. " Such a vision as that of his poem (in a theological point of view) seems no better than the dream of an hypochondriacal savage." It was some years before this, in his lecture on " The Hero as Poet," delivered in 1840, that a friend of Leigh Hunt, of a tem- perament quite the opposite of his, had spoken a very different word touching this cruel scorn — this sava indig- natio of Dante's. Carlyle, like Hunt, discovered intensity to be the prevailing character of Dante's genius, em- blemed by the pinnacle of the city of Dis; that "red-hot cone of iron glowing through the dim immensity of gloom." Hunt, the Universalist, said of Dante, "when he is sweet-natured once he is bitter a hundred times." "Infinite pity," says Carlyle, the Calvinist, "yet also in- finite rigour of law; it is so nature is made; it is so Dante discerned that she was made. What a paltry no- tion is that of his ' Divine Comedy's ' being a poor sple- netic, impotent terrestrial libel; putting those into hell whom he could not be avenged upon on earth ! I suppose
* See Dickens' caricature of him as Harold Skimpole in * Bleak House."
112
History of English Romanticism.
if ever pity tender as a mother's was in the heart of any man, it was in Dante's. But a man who does not know rigour cannot pity either. His very pity will be cowardly, egoistic — sentimentality, or little better. . . . Morally great above all we must call him; it is the beginning of all. His scorn, his grief are as transcendent as his love; as, indeed, what are they but the inverse or converse of his love?"
It is interesting to note that, antipathetic as Hunt's nature was, in many ways, not only to the individual Dante but to the theological thought of which he was the spokesman, in his view of the sacred art of the Italian Middle Age he anticipated the Pre-Raphaelites and the modern interpreters of Dante. Here is a part of what he says of the paintings in the Campo Santo at Pisa: "The best idea, perhaps, which I can give an English- man of the general character of the painting is by refer- ring him to the engravings of Albert Durer and the seri- ous parts of Chaucer. There is the same want of proper costume — the same intense feeling of the human being, both in body and soul — the same bookish, romantic, and retired character — the same evidences, in short, of antiq- uity and commencement, weak (where it is weak) for want of a settled art and language, but strong for that very reason in first impulses, and in putting down all that is felt. . . . The manner in which some of the hoary saints in these pictures pore over their books and carry their decrepit old age, full of a bent and absorbed feeble- ness— the set limbs of the warriors on horseback — the sidelong unequivocal looks of some of the ladies playing on harps and conscious of their ornaments — the people of fashion seated in rows, with Time coming up unawares
Keats, Leigh Hunt, and the 'Dante ^vival. 113
to destroy them — the other rows of elders and doctors of the Church, forming part of the array of heaven— the uplifted hand of Christ denouncing the wicked at the day of judgment — the daring satires occasionally intro- duced against monks and nuns — the profusion of atti- tudes, expressions, incidents, broad draperies, ornaments of all sorts, visions, mountains, ghastly looking cities, fiends, angels, sibylline old women, dancers, virgin brides, mothers and children, princes, patriarchs, dying saints; it would be simply blind injustice to the superabundance and truth of conception in all this multitude of imagery not to recognize the real inspirers as well as harbingers of Raphael and Michael Angelo, instead of confining the honour to the Masaccios and Peruginos, [who] . . . are no more to be compared with them than the sonneteers of Henry VIII. 's time are to be compared with Chaucer. Even in the very rudest of the pictures, where the souls of the dying are going out of their mouths, in the shape of little children, there are passages not unworthy of Dante and Michael Angelo. . . . Giotto, be thou one to me hereafter, of a kindred brevity, solidity, and stateli- ness with that of thy friend, Dante ! " *
Among all the writers of his generation, Keats was most purely the poet, the artist of the beautiful. His
* " When I was last at Haydon's," wrote Keats to his brother George in 1818-19, "I looked over a book of prints taken from the fresco of the church at Milan, the name of which I forget. In it were comprised specimens of the first and second age of art in Italy. I do not think I ever had a greater treat out of Shakespeare ; full of romance and the most tender feeling ; magnificence of drapery beyond everything I ever saw, not excepting Raphael's— but grotesque to a curious pitch— yet still making up a fine whole, even finer to me than more ac- complished works, as there was left so much room for imagi- nation."
ii4 *d History of English ^Romanticism.
sensitive imagination thrilled to every touch of beauty from whatever quarter. That his work is mainly retro- spective and eclectic in subject is because a young poet's mind responds more readily to books than to life, and this young poet did not outlive his youth. In the Greek mythology he found a world of lovely images ready to his hand ; in the poetry of Spenser, Chaucer, and Ariosto he found another such world. Arcadia and Faeryland — "the realms of gold" — he rediscovered them both for himself, and he struck into the paths that wound through their enchanted thickets with the ardour of an explorer. This was the very mood of the Renaissance — this genial heat which fuses together the pagan and the Christian systems — this indifference of the creative imagination to the mere sources and materials of its creations. Indeed, there is in Keats' style a " natural magic " which forces us back to Shakspere for comparison ; a noticeable like- ness to the diction of the Elizabethans, when the classics were still a living spring of inspiration, and not a set of copies held in terrorem over the head of every new poet. Keats' break with the classical tradition was early and decisive. In his first volume (1817) there is a piece en- titled " Sleep and Poetry," composed after a night passed at Leigh Hunt's cottage near Hampstead, which contains his literary declaration of faith. After speaking of the beauty that fills the universe, and of the office of Imag- ination to be the minister and interpreter of this beauty, as in the old days when " here her altar shone, even in this isle," and "the muses were nigh cloyed with honours," he asks:
"Could all this be forgotten? Yes, a schism Nurtured by foppery and barbarism,
Keats, Leigh Hunt, and tbe <Dante Revival. 115
Made great Apollo blush for this, his land.
Men were thought wise who could not understand
His glories: with a puling infant's force,
They swayed about upon a rocking horse
And thought it Pegasus. Ah, dismal-souled !
The winds of heaven blew, the ocean rolled
Its gathering waves — ye felt it not. The blue
Bowed its eternal bosom, and the dew
Of summer night collected still, to make
The morning precious. Beauty was awake !
Why were ye not awake? But ye were dead
To things ye knew not of — were closely wed
To musty laws, lined out with wretched rule
And compass vile : so that ye taught a school
Of dolts to smooth, inlay and clip and fit ;
Till, like the certain wands of Jacob's wit,
Their verses tallied. Easy was the task :
A thousand handicraftsmen wore the mask
Of Poesy. Ill-fated, impious race !
That blasphemed the bright Lyrist to his face,
And did not know it, — no, they went about,
Holding a poor decrepit standard out,
Marked with most flimsy mottoes, and, in large,
The name of one Boileau ! "
This complaint, so far as it relates to the style of the rule-ridden eighteenth-century poetry, had been made before : by Cowper, by Wordsworth, by Coleridge. But Keats, with his instinct for beauty, pierces to the core of the matter. It was because of Pope's defective sense of the beautiful that the doubt arose whether he was a poet at all. It was because of its
"... forgetting the great end Of Poetry, that it should be a friend To soothe the cares and lift the thoughts