ESSAYS ON
POETRY AND POETS
ESSAYS
ON
POETRY AND POETS
BY THE
HON. RODEN NOEL
AUTHOR OF
'A LITTLE CHILD'S MONUMENT," "SONGS OF THE HEIGHTS AND DEEPS,
" HOUSE OF RAVENSBURG," ETC.
LONDON
KEGAN PAUL, TRENCH & CO., i, PATERNOSTER SQUARE
1886
I
(The rights of translation and of reprodwtion are reserved.)
TO MY FRIEND
JOHN ADDINGTON SYMONDS,
POET, ESSAYIST, HISTORIAN,
IN MEMORY OF " AULD LANG SYNE,"
I DEDICATE THIS BOOK.
PREFACE.
THESE Essays, with all their faults, were carefully composed,
but, since a few of them were written some time ago, all
have been scrupulously revised, the information involved,
moreover, being brought, as far as possible, up to date :
those that are republished have also been occasionally
altered, in accordance with modified conviction on the
part of the writer ; others are recent, and published now
for the first time.
All deal with modern, romantic poetry. The keynote
of more than one of them is to be found in my opening
essay on the " Poetic Interpretation of Nature," for a_vejry
marked characteristic of the best poetry of our century
is the worship, and faithful, though idealized, delineation of
external nature^ In the last paper I print an experience
of English travel, because, though hardly indeed covered
by the book's designation, it forms a kind of return to this
" dominant theme," being an attempt of my own at some
measure of that descriptive interpretation, the general
principles of which I have discussed in my first paper ;
this is a record of the experience on which was partly
founded my poem "Thalatta," in "Songs of the Heights
and Deeps."
The only poet not of our century included in the present
viii 1'REFACE.
volume is Chatterton. My brief essay on him appeared
many years ago, but I quite agree with Mr. Theodore
Watts, who has an excellent (and comparatively recent)
introductory article on him in Ward's "British Poets,"
that, young as he was, Chatterton may be regarded as the
father of that revived romantic poetry, now established
amongst us.
The other more pronounced characteristics of the poets
here discussed are, I think, generally speaking, broad and
deep human sympathies, a salient and original personality,
strength and sincerity of feeling and conviction, as well as
some poetic distinction of utterance, or style, whether that
be rugged and robust, or subtle, delicate, and refined.
Between Chatterton and Byron, I could have wished to
say a word on Blake, and Burns, poets, each in his way,
so genuine, simple, sincere, and distinguished ; nor ought
Coleridge, and Mrs. Browning to have been forgotten.
But, alas ! " Hell is paved with good intentions."
My thanks are due to the proprietors of the Contem-
porary, Fortnightly y British Quarterly, and Indian Reviews,
as also to those of the Spectator, Macmillaris, and Gentleman's
Magazines, for permission to reprint essays, which, however,
while originally appearing in their columns, have been
very considerably altered, not only as regards form, but
also in respect of substance.
R. N.
CONTENTS
ON THE POETIC INTERPRETATION OF NATURE ... ... i
CHATTERTON ... ... ... ... ... ... 36
LORD BYRON AND HIS TIMES ... ... ... ... 50
SHELLEY . ... ... ... ... .. ... 114
WORDSWORTH ... ... ... ... ... ... (132 }
KEATS ... ... ... ... 150
VICTOR HUGO ... ... ... ... ... ... 172
THE POETRY OF TENNYSON ... ... ... ... 223
ROBERT BROWNING ... ... ... ... ... 256
ROBERT BUCHANAN'S POETRY ... ... ... ... 283
A STUDY OF WALT WHITMAN ... ... ... ... 304
RAMBLES BY CORNISH SEAS ... ... ... ... 342
ESSAYS ON POETRY AND
POETS.
ON THE POETIC INTERPRETATION
OF NATURE.
I CANNOT follow that fine poet and critic, Matthew
Arnold, in his apparent depreciation of Nature-poetry,
when he dismisses Shelley as the poet of clouds and sun-
sets, and says he had not got hold of the right subject-
matter for poetry. It is distinctively a modern subject, no
doubt ; but, I should have thought, one newly reclaimed for
beneficent poetic ends, so much more fertile possession
made over to the Muse, in addition to that purely human
interest Mhich has been hers from of old.
I believe that Rousseau, Wordsworth, Byron, Shelley,
Keats, Coleridge, were verily prophets, to whom a new
revelatioixwas entrusted. In a time when all secrets were
at length supposed to be laid bare before man's microscopic
^/understanding, all superstitions exploded, all mysteries
explained ; when the universe emptied of ancient awe
seemed no longer venerable, but a hideous lazar-house
rather, made visible to all human eyes in every ghastly
corner of it ; before the Circe-wand of materialism, Love
metamorphosed into a sensation, Man shrivelled to a
handful of dust, the Body of God's own breathing world
B
ESSAYS ON POETRY AND POETS.
with familiar irreverence laid upon the board of some near-
sighted professor to be dissected ; when the angels of Faith
and Hope seemed to be deserting for ever the desecrated
shrines of mankind then it was that these Prophet-Poets,
as very ministers of Heaven, pointed men to the World-
Soul, commanding them once more to veil their faces
before the swift subtle splendour of Universal Life. The
moods of_Natiire do .mysteriously, respond to thejnoods of
Man. To the sensitive spirit the sea, the mountains, and
the stars areyerv type and symbol? of permanence, order,
eternity. Nature and man are elder sister and younger
brotHer ; she wakes intelligence and will in him ; he knows
himself in knowing her. She seems to him a dumb and
blind elder sister, whose laws inexorably bind him, while
he imposes himself upon her, reading spiritual meanings in
her face. The chaos of our own soul, individual human
degradation, of which we in the midst can but dimly divine
the issue, receives a mystic interpretation from what seems
the unconscious innocence of a sphere which yet manifests
evil and good, strength and weakness though, withal, the
grand universality of a Kosmos. Thence we can look up
with greater trust than before even for the worms that
" sting one another in the dust."
Why do the Arab in the desert, the Persian on his
mountain, bow before the all-beholding sun? In him is
no sin, no vanity, falsehood, or vain ambition, himself the
veritable incarnation of one invisible Sun. He who loses
his own personality in Nature, who lays down before her,
the universal mother and tomb of humanity, his own
private wrongs and griefs and fevered aspirations, hereby
redresses the balance so unduly weighted with the self-will
and momentary longings of one restless man. For she is
one who toils not nor dreams, errs not nor supposes, raves
not nor repents, but calmly fulfils herself for ever.
In her general aspects, Nature, if we do not peer too
closely into the minutiae of her painful strife and struggle,
ON THE POETIC INTERPRETATION OF NATURE. 3
looks inevitable and calm, not in perpetual spiritual
conflict like ourselves ; and hence she seems to offer rest
to those who love her. The harmony of inviolable laws
appears in her cooperant to an end. But I think that this
inevitableness of a universal order implicitly involves the
idea of Tightness, that of some fulfilled obligation tinged
with morality, or what is akin to it. I know this cannot
be proved, but I think it may be felt.
The individual, in so far as he can assert himself
against, or regard himself as out of relation with, the whole
Kosmos, is wrong, evil ; but in harmony with all he is
right. And though, indeed, external nature may be really
composed of individuals, yet if it be so, we are not, except
in some small degree as respects the animal world, in the
secret of their subjectivity, and therefore cannot know
them for such. Intelligences who should be unable to put
themselves in conscious communication with ours might
well regard human bodies as part of a fixed order of
inflexible laws, without private volition or caprice, just as
we now regard the inorganic. For even by ourselves
private volitions are capable of being reduced to a law of
averages through statistical science, which points to a real
eternal order beyond and beneath our discords, resolving
them into harmony. And however this be, to merge our
personality in quiet or rapturous contemplation of a
universal natural order proves indeed heavenly relief from
the too often intolerable burden of an isolated self-life.
All that is profound, eternal, impersonal in us, goes
forth to wed with the profound, eternal, impersonal Heart
of all. It is beyond our good and right, more than our
ideal, yet justifies, sanctions, transcends, absorbs it. Uni-
versal Nature, who is one with us, constitutes, nourishes,
creates us ; while we in her constitute, nourish, create our-
selves, one another, and her. If it be true that we form her
in our image, it is also true that from her we derive the
power so to form her ; we are her creatures, living in and
ESSAYS ON POETRY AND POETS.
by her. Verily, it is our privilege to know conflict, and
bewilderingly to realize some fundamental inner freedom,
which is more than mere inanimate law ; but the seemingly
inanimate order is a revelation of still higher privilege-
that of inevitable Will, at one with unhesitating Wisdom ;
and this surely is the inmost verity of things, our defect
and disharmony being but an isolated chord in the grand
music.
Therefore, I repeat : " the light that never was on sea
or land, the consecration and the poet's dream," is indeed a
new revelation, made peculiarly in the modern poetry of
true spiritual insight, and of this Poetry of Nature Words-
worth is the High Priest. Not only does it pour fresh
illuminating light upon Nature herself, but it also deepens
and enlarges our comprehension of man. ^By means of
their analogues in Nature, the human heart and mind may
beTmore profoundly understood. Human emotions win a
double dearness". or an added sorrow from their fellowship
and association with outward scenes. While Nature can
be"fathomed only through her analogies with the desires,
fears, and aspirations of the human soul, these again can
scarcely become defined an^ articulate save through the
mystic and rnultiforrn appearances of Nature. We have
here then a new poetic product of priceless value ; neither
the external scene alone, nor man alone, but rather some
spiritual child of their espousals.
It is really almost puerile nowadays to suppose that
there is an absolute Nature, which science and the land-
surveyor are alone competent correctly to know while
poetry invents a world of her own wherewith to amuse
herself and other people. Spiritual imagination alone
knows Nature ; I don't say adeqttately, even she but with
any approach to adequacy ; though, of course, the common
constitution of our senses and understanding presents to us
an external world which, so far as superficial characteristics
are concerned, is pretty well the same for all, and which
ON THE POETIC INTERPRETATION OF NATURE. 5
quite sufficiently serves the purposes alike of science, of
common intercourse, and of practical utility. But since
Berkeley, Kant, and modern physiology, it is no longer
permissible to doubt that even these superficial qualities,
and what we call " laws of nature," are merely the interpre-
tation which our sensible and mental constitution enables
us to put upon the language of the Kosmos, wherein a
great deal more is meant than meets the ear. Of course,
one must be insane to deny that the sea is a vast quantity
of salt water, or that a primrose is indeed a yellow primrose,
as Peter Bell with his plain common sense assumes it to be.
But it is quite compatible with sanity to believe that both
sea and primrose are a great deal more also. Only one
must have other faculties, or faculties more highly trained,
to discern the more. Poetry does not tell pretty lies for
the sake of amusement, but penetrates to the heart of
things. Therefore, I cannot altogether agree with Mr.
Ruskin about " pathetic fallacy," although no doubt there
is a " false " way of looking at things as well as a true.
The nimble fancy may suggest mere points of superficial
resemblance, hardly vital or essential to the objects, which
the poet endows with animation and soul, rather perhaps
conveying an erroneous conception of their proper and
peculiar character. So far I can agree ; but what I urge
is, that to endow them with animation and soul is not
necessarily to falsify ; may rather be to see more to the
very root of them. I don't pretend that the poet speaks
with precise accuracy in his metaphors and similes, but he
suggests an inner truth of things, to which the unimagina-
tive are simply blind. Indeed, precise accuracy belongs to
the region of the understanding, which is by itself incapable
of the higher truth. So that when Mr. Arnold tells us to
conceive dogmas in the light of poetry, if he means with
elasticity, in no hard and fast, cast-iron fashion, I can
follow ; but if he means as mere graceful, unveracious fables,
I cannot.
ESSAYS ON POETRY AND POETS.
For instance, nothing could be more realistically de-
scriptive than Wordsworth's magnificent lines on the Yew-
trees of Borrowdale :
" each particular trunk a growth
Of intertwisted fibres serpentine
Upcoiling, and inveterately convolved ; "
but the imaginative touches are equally true ; nay, penetrate
more to the heart of things :
" Nor uninformed with phantasy, and looks
That threaten the profane ; "
Then those wonderful personifications less fanciful than
Shelley's in " Adonais," but more imaginative how deep
they go, how grand and solemn the mystery they unveil !
' ' beneath whose sable roof
ghostly shapes
May meet at noontide ; Fear and trembling Hope,
Silence and Foresight ; Death the skeleton,
And Time the shadow."
To meditative imagination, in the umbrageous atmosphere
of the yew-trees, these august Presences verily abide more
actually than their ancient boughs with coral berries. The
cuckoo is no mere cuckoo, but " a wandering voice ; " a
voice of dear memories, and coming summer. " Yellow
bees in the ivy bloom " are to the poet " forms more real
than living man, nurslings of immortality." Nay, those
outer things are because these inner realities are ; the
former would not be without the latter they are images
and shadows only ; the leaping lamb is on earth because
the Lamb of God is in Heaven, in the inner Holy of Holies
of Humanity. Light is in the sense, in outer space, be-
cause Light is in the spirit, in the understanding. The
perishing bread that sustains the body is by virtue of the
Bread of Life. To the opened inner eye there is indeed a
Real Presence in the elements of the Eucharist.
I do not mean to say that the animism of savages is a
correct creed, for they simply deify phenomena without
ON THE POETIC INTERPRETATION OF NATURE. J
analysis, or suspicion that these are largely subjective ; nor
even do I say that the Pagan poets were correct in their
mythological beliefs ; or the mediaevals in their fairy-lore ;
yet I think they were not far from the truth when they
formulated their conviction that our spiritual kinship with
Nature testifies to some spiritual beings like ourselves
behind the phenomena of Nature the elements, and so-
called inanimate objects, being only their expression, body,
or vesture. Nor do I deem such a belief at all incompatible
with a full recognition of that ever-widening kingdom of
physical law, to which modern Science introduces us : only
let Science " stick to her own last ! " Quite certainly the
ancients were never guilty of deliberately, in cold blood,
inventing a quasi-poetic, or metaphorical diction, which the
vulgar were so foolish as to take for literal fact, as our
pseudo-scientific insincerity of unbelief, and incapacity for
comprehending other modes of thought and feeling, now
complacently assume. On the contrary, modern Nature-
poetry is reverting, though in its own fashion, and in
accordance with other altered convictions of our age, to
this primal conception of the ancients. For as Science
though furnishing in her fairy tales new material for poetry
affords no help to the poetic feeling of life and spirit in
Nature, so neither does a theology which teaches that there
is a God external to the world, who once made, and still
possibly sustains it. Poetry demands God immanent in
Man and Nature. So that the author of Ecclesiastical
Sonnets, the High Priest of this special poetry, yet hesi-
tating and bewildered by his dogmatic creed, as by his
habit of inherited thought, startles us out of our propriety
by exclaiming :
" Great God ! I'd rather be
A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn,
So might I, standing on this pleasant lea,
Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn ;
Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea ;
Or hear old Triton blow his wreathed horn ! "
8 ESSAYS ON POETRY AND POETS.
But the philosophy of idealism supplies for the logical
faculty the conception needed to lift it into some harmony
with the vision of children, poets, and the more primitive,
less sophisticated races. Wordsworth, however, and Cole-
ridge seem scarcely to dare credit what to the inmost core
of them they feel true. You will remember the strange
passage, in one of Coleridge's philosophical poems, where
he apologizes to his wife for giving utterance to his con-
viction ! Schiller, in his " Gods of Greece," makes a melan-
choly lament over their extinction. And I confess that,
dearly as I love Mrs. Browning, her poem in reply to
Schiller appears to me in all respects the least felicitous
of her works. Pan is not dead save in this sense that
God manifest in Nature is now, since the revelation of our
Blessed Lord Jesus Christ, felt to be less worshipful than
God manifest in Divine Humanity. There would seem to
be three elements, which, combined, create the world as we
know it the God in Man, the God in Nature, and the
Defect in both. We and the world have a common reason,
and a common heart, or we could not know the world.
The richer and deeper our own life, the more can we enter
into the life of the world ; and the more fully we enter into
that, the more universal and profound becomes our own.
Not only is our mental life developed through perception,
but physiology shows the close correlation of our external
and internal lives, so that without the nourishment and
sustainment of our bodies by earth and sun, our soul-life
in its present form would be impossible. Yet the Divine
Reality is deeper than plummet of human understanding
ever sounded: eye hath not seen, nor ear heard. The
outer world is but symbol and parable, the imperfect self-
manifestation to our defective apprehension of eternal
Ideas, which are substantial. That is a truth familiar to
mystics of all ages, which in recent times has been virtually
re-stated by two notable teachers, one a man of science,
James Hinton, the other a theologian, Cardinal Newman.
ON THE POETIC INTERPRETATION OF NATURE. 9
The world, says Hinton, seems to us dead, only on account
of our own deadness. And therefore, in proportion as we
are made alive, will the life of the world become manifest
to us. Therefore also I conceive Wordsworth's position
in the immortal "Ode on Immortality" to be thoroughly
justified. Fresh from the Fountain of his being, the Child-
spirit sees most truly. The gleam of the sanctuary is upon
him, and around
'Meadow, grove, and stream,
The earth, and every common sight,
To him do seem,
Apparelled in celestial light,
The glory and the freshness of a dream."
' ' Heaven lies about us in our infancy !
Shades of the prison-house begin to close
Upon the growing Boy.
*****
The Youth, who daily farther from the east
Must travel, still is Nature's priest,
And by the vision splendid
Is on his way attended ;
At length the Man perceives it die away,
And fade into the light of common day."
But
''The clouds that gather round the setting sun
Doth take a sober colouring from an eye
That hath kept watch o'er man's mortality ;
*****
Thanks to the human heart by which we live,
Thanks to its tenderness, its joys, and fears,
To me the meanest flower that blows can give
Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears."
The Child-spirit is alone immortal ; yet the Divine
Child in his eternal youth looks often forth from the sadder
and wiser eyes of man. The old mystics believed that
when Adam and Eve sinned, the gods or angels they
talked with became hidden from them, and appeared to
them as trees and flowers, and common earth or sky,
beautiful indeed, but hardly animate, and they quite
unable to hold intelligent converse with them as before.
10 ESSAYS ON POETRY AND POETS.
To Blake the sun was no mere ball of fiery vapours,
but a glorious company of the Heavenly Host praising
God. Yet to me it appears that James Hinton was wrong
in his assumption that Man alone is fallen or defective,
while Nature remains perfect. The impression one derives
is rather that we have shared in her fall, or she in ours.
Between us there can be no such chasm. Nay, she is " red
in tooth and claw with ravine." A formidable indictment,
indeed, has been drawn up against her in the outraged
names of justice and of love ! She has her moods as we
have good and evil, grave and gay, desolate and happy,
cruel and kind, terrible and gentle, while we respond to
her varying humour according to our own. Hence it is
that poets interpret her differently, according to their own
characters. The grand and gloomy, the Titanic and diabolic,
find their expression in Byron, but the tranquil and tender
chiefly in Wordsworth. I really do not think there is much
" pathetic fallacy " in the ascription by poets of their own
moods to Nature. It is rather that in these dominant
moods of theirs they are able to feel the corresponding
note in Nature. There is indeed in her, as there is also
in ourselves, a deep foundation of tranquillity and calm
under all the roaring and unrest of her loud waves a
region of repose, an inner haven of peace ; and the pro-
foundest poet abides, or is anchored there, however he
may be tossed to and fro on the upper surge. And very
often have her loud paeans of rejoicing been felt by the
sorrowful to be out of harmony with their sorrow. Or
again, the overflowing, multitudinous joy of her springs and
summers may carry consolation and conviction that all is
well, into the arid recesses of a mourner's heart. Or once
again, the dreariness and desolation of her dark seas and
shores, her mountains and barren plains, may unbearably
overwhelm an already overburdened soul.
I have admitted with Mr. Ruskin that there is a false
and vicious metaphorical diction used by poetasters, in-
ON THE POETIC INTERPRETATION OF NATURE. II
sincerely, as a kind of " current coin ; " frigid conceits, cold
artifices of mere talent, or mere jingling babble for effect,
from which precisely Wordsworth came to deliver us.
A true poet is ever a loving and faithful observer of the
external features and deportment of his mistress. But just
because his look is the long look of a lover no passing
glance he sees more than that. Real feeling, I hold,
must put us into some vital relation with the actuality of
things, though the expression of it may be but a tentative
striving to body forth the truth about them. Thus, when
Kingsley, in his beautiful ballad, " The Sands of Dee," calls
the foam of the wave that drowned Mary u cruel," though,
indeed, the foam itself may not be cruel, he gives utterance
to a feeling that is inevitable, and therefore, in all proba-
bility, justified ; for behind those engulfing seas there surely
must be some pitiless and murderous power, some prince,
or princes, of a world that " lieth in the wicked," however
that power may be directed and overruled by a Paternal
Master-Love. And when Keats, in describing the slow
movement of spent shredding foam along the back of a
heavy wave, characterizes it by the phrase " wayward in-
dolence," he fixes and determines the idiosyncrasy of this
movement in a manner simply impossible to a poet who
should either fail to perceive, or else resolve not to allow
himself the language of analogy. There is some occult
identity between spent foam and our " wayward in-
dolence."
The heart of Wordsworth beats in sympathy with the
sea's when he sings
" Listen ! the mighty being is awake,
And doth with his eternal motion make
A sound like thunder everlastingly."
The great Apocalypse of Dante is one colossal translation
of the inner truths of heart and soul into the corresponding
imagery and environment of sense. When Milton calls the
boat that wrecked Lycidas
12 ESSAYS ON POETRY AND POETS.
" That fatal and perfidious bark,
Built in the eclipse and rigg'd with curses dark,
That sunk so low that sacred head of thine."
how unliteral, inaccurate, and true to the inmost fact is he !
" Stone him with hardened hearts, harder than stones," sings
Shakespeare in " Lucrece," Stones are hard because hearts
are, not hearts hard because stones are, though that is not
the common opinion. To arrive at the true spiritual order,
you must reverse the order of experience. Metaphor is
the interpretation of one thing through another. And
one thing is through another. Seeing it as isolated, we
see it, through our own defect, imperfectly. It ever fulfils
itself by analogy, developed and discerned, as by passing
on into some other phase or form of existence. Every-
thing is a Proteus. But as Keats attributes the bright mail
of fish to the kisses of lovers, Wordsworth assigns to Duty
the guardianship of the Ancient Heavens, and the laughter
of fragrant flowers. Nor is this graceful falsehood, but
vital truth.
We have in " The Thorn " not, on the whole, a very in-
spired poem some minute, faithful description, character-
istic of Wordsworth. His graphic delineations of landscape
place a vivid imagery before the sense, which must ever be
dear to true lovers of Nature, dearer than the often vaguer
and more confused reminiscences, or too phantasmal, nebu-
lous, and unarticulated, however gorgeous, inventions of
Shelley. But still the imaginative touch in that poem goes
deeper than all the realism
"And she is known to every s^ar,
And every wind that blows."
Yet if that is false, if it hints not, in the only or best way
possible, at a vital reality, why should it give peculiar de-
light ? Can what is known to be the most utterly fantastic
and irrational element in the whole composition boast such
a prerogative ? Surely not, though it be quite unnecessary
to define this imaginative truth more precisely. Again,
ON THE POETIC INTERPRETATION OF NATURE. 13
do we not thank our poet when he calls the Wye " thou
wanderer through the woods," and tells us of the Thames
" wandering at its own sweet will ? "
Shelley is hardly so close an observer as Wordsworth ;
or, when he is so, his observation is more limited in range.
It is a dissolving view of cloud, and wood, and water, and
flower. While Wordsworth spiritualizes the results of
loving observation, Shelley rather etherealizes vague im-
pressions, as of trance or dream. The former is like an
inductive philosopher, setting in order indeed, often trans-
figuring into sacred glory common experience ; the latter
like a schoolman of the Middle Ages, expatiating in phe-
nomena deduced a priori from his inner consciousness.
While Shelley volatilizes sense, Wordsworth conducts us
through its homely portal into a heavenlier and more abiding
realm. Wordsworth and Byron, Antaeus-like, win new
strength from contact with Mother Earth. I love Shelley
too well to compare him with Icarus, or with Phaeton ; for,
if he does not soar with us to the highest, he flies with us
through a very lovely, however insubstantial, dreamland of
his own fair vision.*
How should the uncertain motion of mist about a
mountain be defined better than by the lines of Words-
worth ?
" Such gentle mists as glide,
Curling with unconfirmed intent
On that green mountain-side."
Whatever corresponds to that " unconfirmed intent," the
kinship there is in the mist to the more vital and essential
characteristics of the human soul, this surely is as much
there as mechanical laws of motion in space, which are
themselves but systematized perceptions of our sensuous
understanding, though doubtless corresponding to some
* But I have just read Mr. Stopford Brooke's introduction to Shelley,
which, so far as I know, is assuredly the most pregnant and illuminating
criticism of him extant. The comparison of his nature-poetry with that of
Wordsworth deserves careful study.
14 ESSAYS ON POETRY AND POETS.
reality of sensuous perception outside ; but the very
essence of those material qualities is that they are distantly
akin, that they are mysteriously symbolical of more human,
more intellectual, more ethical behaviour. For, as Schelling
and Coleridge pointed out, a symbol is itself the superior
being under inferior conditions : it is the higher essence,
one may say, deprived of its ethereal vesture, and become
incarnate, yet radiant still, and redolent of veiled Divinity.
As regards the dramatic interpretation of Man and
Nature through mutual influence upon one another, what
would the Leechgatherer in Wordsworth's poem be without
the " lonely moor ? " They coalesce to one moving image.
In the meditative imagination of the poet the poor con-
tented old man becomes transfigured, and appears as a
heavenly minister, an angel from God, sent to console him,
upon whom weighed " the weary burden, and the mystery
of all this unintelligible world." Often indeed does the
meditative rapture of Shelley and Wordsworth pass into a
kind of mystic disembodiment before the face of Nature ;
they are caught up into some third heaven, where sense-
limits are confounded, and our poor earth -language falters
" with the burden of an honour unto which she was not
born." What would the wonderful pathos of "Michael " be
without the unfinished sheepfold, or the equally wonderful
pathos of " Margaret" without the neglected garden, once so
trim, the red stains and tufts of wool on the corner-stone
of the cottage porch, where the sheep were now permitted
to come and " couch unheeded ? "
In that loveliest of lyrics, "Three years she grew," we
have the picture of Lucy, to whom Nature was "law and
impulse," "an overseeing power to kindle or restrain," to
whom the cloud lent state, and the willow grace ; into whose
face from the rivulets passed " beauty, born of murmuring
sound," to whom belonged " the silence and the calm of
mute insensate things." Remember too that beautiful
passage in " The Excursion," where the old man corrects the
ON THE POETIC INTERPRETATION OF NATURE. 15
wanderer's despondency by pointing him to the spear-grass
on the wall, with the dew on it, as testifying to the clear-
hearted peace that abides in the bosom of things.
There is the magical poem about the boy, into whose
heart a voice of mountain torrents was borne, in those
intervals of blowing mimic hootings to the owls, under the
starlight, by the lake ; there is the dancing of the poet's
heart with the daffodils, and that picture in " Nutting,"
wherein " the green and mossy bower, deformed and sullied,
patiently gave up its quiet being." The voices of sea,
mountain torrent, and forest, are indeed the voice of Liberty,
as Coleridge in the Ode, Wordsworth in the Sonnet, and
Longfellow in the "Slave's Dream" declare. Every flower
"enjoys the air it breathes ; " the budding twigs spread out
their fan " to catch the breezy air," and can we doubt that
there is pleasure ? We ought indeed " to move among the
shades with gentleness of heart, and with gentle hand
touch, for there is a spirit in the woods." In all sobriety,
it is true that what the poet saw in the Simplon Pass was
" like the workings of one mind, features of one face,
characters of the great Apocalypse ; " in all sobriety it is
true that Nature
"can so inform
The mind that is within us, so impress
With quietness and beauty, and so feed
With lofty thoughts, that neither evil tongues,
Rash judgments, nor the sneers of selfish men,
Nor greetings where no kindness is, nor all
The dreary intercourse of daily life,
Shall e'er prevail against us, or disturb
Our cheerful faith, that all which we behold
Is full of blessings.
" While with an eye made quiet by the power
Of harmony, and the deep power of joy,
We see into the life of things."
Now if there be a great fundamental principle, the slow
recognition of which by modern art we owe to Mr. Ruskin,
it is this, that " nothing can be good or useful or ultimately
1 6 ESSAYS ON POETRY AND POETS.
pleasurable which is untrue." (Modern Painters, vol. iii. p.
1 60.) Yet here, he proceeds, in metaphor and pathetic
fallacy, " is something pleasurable in written poetry which
is nevertheless untrue." For, according to him, these forms
of thought result from the " extraordinary or false appear-
ances of things to us, when we are under the influence of
emotion or contemplative fancy false appearances, as
being entirely unconnected with any real power or character
in the object, and only imputed to it by us" (p. 159). Mr.
Ruskin further adds, that " the greatest poets do not often
admit this kind of falseness that it is only the second
order of poets who much delight in it." Yet he admits
that " if we think over our favourite poetry we shall find it
full of this kind of fallacy, and that we like it all the more
for being so." Now there is here a contradiction which is
well worthy of attentive examination. This attribution
by metaphor of spiritual qualities to material objects is
eminently characteristic of modern poetry notably of
Tennyson's and has been made a ground of serious objec-
tion to it, as fatal to any claim it might put forward to be
accounted first-rate, by more than one critic following in
the wake of Mr. Ruskin. And so far as such criticism has
been a protest against the undiscriminating admiration for
mere pretty disconnected freaks of fancy, which at one time
threatened to break up our poetry into so many foam-
wreaths of loose luxuriant images, the effect of it has been
beneficial. There is danger, on the other hand, that this
criticism may beget a blind dogmatism, very injurious to
the natural and healthy development of the poetic art
which may be proper to our own present age. For the
intellectual and aesthetic developments of each different
race and age will have a characteristic individuality of their
own. And criticism ought to point us to the great models
of the past, not that we may become their cold and servile
imitators, but that we may nourish on them our own
creative genius. The classification of artists as first, second,
ON THE POETIC INTERPRETATION OF NATURE. I?
and third rate, must always be somewhat arbitrary ; but the
criticism which disposes of a quality that is essential to such
poetry as Tennyson's, by calling it a weakness and a " note "
of inferiority, may itself be suspected of shallowness.
Let us examine a little more closely that instance of
metaphor which Mr. Ruskin takes from Keats :
" Down whose green back the short-lived foam, all hoar,
Bursts gradual with a wayward indolence."
Now, salt water cannot be either wayward or indolent ; on
this plain fact the charge of falsehood in the metaphor is
grounded. Yet this expression is precisely the most ex-
quisite bit in the picture. Can plain falsehood then be truly
poetic and beautiful ? Many people will reply, " certainly,"
believing that poetry is essentially pleasing by the number
of pretty falsehoods told or suggested. I beljeve with
Mr. Ruskin that poetry is only good in proportion to its
truth. Now, we must first inquire what the poet is here
intending to describe. If a scientific man were to explain
to us the nature of foam by telling us that it is a wayward
and indolent thing, this would clearly be a falsehood. But
does the poet profess to explain what the man of science
would profess to explain, or something else ? What are
the physical laws according to which water becomes foam,
and foam falls along the back of a wave that is one
question ; and what impression does this condition of things
produce on a mind that observes closely, and feels with
exquisite delicacy of sense the beauty in the movement of
the foam, and its subtle relations to other material things,
as well as to certain analogues in the sphere of spirit, to
functions and states of the human spirit this is a totally
different question. I submit that the office of the poet in
this connection is to answer the latter question, and that of
the scientific man to answer the former. But observe that
this is not granting licence of scientific ignorance or wanton
inaccuracy to the poet which some critics are disposed to
grant. For if the poet ignorantly or wantonly contradicts
C
1 8 ESSAYS ON POETRY AND POETS.
such results of scientific inquiry as are generally familiar to
the cultivated minds of his age, he puts himself out of
harmony with them, and does not announce truth, which
can commend itself to them as such. But the poetic aspects
of a circumstance do not disappear when the circumstance
is regarded according to the fresh light scientific inquiry has
thrown upon it. Such poetic aspects are increased as know-
ledge increases. Keats, in this instance, contradicts no
legitimate scientific conclusion. The poet who does so
wantonly, shows little of the true poet's reverence for Nature.
The poet undertakes to teach what the man of science does
not undertake to teach : their provinces are different ; but
if they contradict one another, they are so far bunglers in
their respective trades.
One source of error in this matter is, that in the popular
use of the words, we " fancy " and " imagine " what is not
the fact. I can here only afford room to refer the reader to
Mr. Ruskin's own fine dissertations on the respective func-
tions of true imagination and fancy one of his definitions
of imagination being that it is the faculty of " taking things
by the heart," and as such, certainly not a faculty of seeing
things falsely. The question is, does the metaphor of
Keats express the poetic truth forcibly to kindred imagi-
native minds, or does it not ? If, as is the case with so
many fine-sounding metaphorical expressions, this expres-
sion when examined should prove inaccurate, far-fetched,
affected, disturbing, and degrading, not intensifying and
ennobling to the harmonious presentment of that which
the poet intended to represent, then is the metaphor false,
and because false, therefore bad as art. Yet poetry is
groundlessly accused of mixing and confusing incongruous
metaphors, by men of cold prosaic temperament, when
several vital characteristics of an object are hinted at by
more than one metaphor, which is permissible even in the
same sentence. But there is a vicious, because a cold and
insincere mixing of metaphors. Wisdom is justified of
ON THE POETIC INTERPRETATION OF NATURE. 19
her children. The inspired poets men like Pindar, Shake-
speare, ^Eschylus, and Shelley constantly blend their
metaphors in the legitimate fashion that justifies itself to
kindred spirits by the result attained. But you might
multiply vague epithets for ever, and not hit it off not
transfix the core of a thing's individuality as you can do
by a single happy metaphor. There are correspondences
between spirit and matter, and it is in seizing these that
we find each analogue in spirit and matter becoming
suddenly luminous, intelligible, real. It would not, as is
assumed, be more accurate to say, " the foam falls gradually."
These terms are too abstract : other things also fall gradu-
ally ; and therefore they do not give the individuality of
the phenomenon in question. There is, indeed, some error
involved in the use of Keats' metaphor ; but this error is
allowed for, and it is the most accurate expression possible
of the fact ; for the error of poverty and vagueness which
the more abstract epithets would involve is a far more
radical error ; so that they are erroneously supposed to be
more scientific and exact. The commonest terms in use
for expressing mental and moral qualities are derived from
conditions and qualities of matter that is, are used meta-
phorically ; and yet we do not call them " fallacies." We
talk of an " upright man " in the moral sense as readily as
we talk of an upright man in the bodily. Our most graphic
and vigorous prose must share the fate of our best poetry
if metaphor be simply falsehood. How are you to avoid
speaking of a tortuous, crooked policy ? The splendid
vigour of Mr. Ruskin's own prose-poetry is largely due to
his felicitous use of metaphor.
Mr. Ruskin, indeed, remarks justly that Homer "would
never have written, never have thought of" such a meta-
phor as this of Keats'. He will call the waves " over-roofed,"
" full-charged," " monstrous," " compact-black," " wine-
coloured," and so on. These terms are as accurate, as
incisive, as terms can be, but they never show the slightest
20 ESSAYS ON POETRY AND POETS.
feeling of anything animated in the ocean. Now, this
faculty of seeing and giving the external appearance of a
thing precisely is eminently Homeric, and is one without
which a man can hardly be a poet at all. The " ideal " on
which poetasters pique themselves, means but a feeble, in-
secure grasp of reality ; they do not know that to find the
ideal they must first hold fast and see into the common
external thing which they deem so despicable. But the
fellowship of the external thing with certain spiritual things
is an additional though latent quality in it, the perception
of which may result from a keen gaze into that external
appearance. Does Keats, then, see more than Homer ?
Mr. Ruskin replies that Homer had a faith in the anima-
tion of the sea much stronger than Keats'. But " all this
sense of something living in it he separates in his mind
into a great abstract image of a sea power. He never says
the waves rage or are idle. But he says there is somewhat
in, and greater than, the waves, which rages and is idle, and
that he calls a god" (vol. iii. p. 174).
We must remark upon this that the early poets of a
people have seldom displayed so great a care for the beau-
ties of external Nature in general as their later poets have
done. Compare Homer and Theocritus, Chaucer and
Tennyson. The earlier poetry will deal chiefly with the
outward, active life of man his wars, hunting, passion for
women and other excitements, with all the intrigues and
adventures to which this may give rise ; and the noblest
songs have been sung about these simple universally
interesting themes. But the criticism which insists on the
poetry of a later age being squared on the model of that
of an earlier may surely be reminded that the earlier
poetry is so great and good precisely because it is sponta-
neous, the perfect expression of the age in which it was
produced. As men come to lead more artificial, quiet lives,
they reflect more on themselves and on the nature around
them, they stand in new relationships to external things,
ON THE POETIC INTERPRETATION OF NATURE. 21
they acquire new habits of feeling, acting, thinking, and
external Nature becomes the mirror of their own more
highly organized existence ; so that the earlier poet cannot
see those subtle meanings in the face of Nature which the
later poet sees. If the external features of Nature remain
the same, the spirit of men jn relation with them changes
ever. Even the senses, or some of them, become more
subtle, as Mr. Gladstone has shown in his essay on the
colour-sense of Homer and the Greeks. But if we admitted,
with Mr. Ruskin, that Homer was as sensitively alive to the
delicate play of expression on the mobile countenance of
Nature as Keats was, only that he ascribed it to some god,
and that Keats did not, we should be constrained to ask,
does Mr. Ruskin mean that Homer's was a more correct
mode of embodying that animation than was the meta-
phorical mode of Keats ? Are we to believe in the Pagan
nature-divinities ? I am not denying it. But if not, and if
yet Mr. Ruskin admits the animation in question, it is hard
to see why he praises Homer, and deems the metaphor of
Keats a pleasant falsehood, a characteristic of the vicious
modern manner. Surely we owe the restoration of our faith
in the glorious animation of Nature very largely to Mr.
Ruskin's own teaching, which makes his inconsistent doctrine
on this subject of metaphor the more to be regretted. What
renders the language of our poets often incorrect, confused,
affected, is that while they cannot help feeling that there
is a life and a spirit in Nature, they are instructed by our
teachers of authority that this feeling is but a pretty super-
stition, allowable, indeed, in poetry, yet not to be mistaken
for a true belief. Poetry, therefore, becomes an " elegant
pastime," by no means the expression of our deepest and
most earnest insight. The result last century was that in
our poetry " mountains nodded drowsy heads," and " flowers
sweated beneath the night dew." For if images of this
kind be delusions, with no basis in truth, the elegance of
them resolves itself into a mere matter of taste. And
22 ESSAYS ON POETRY AND POETS.
people at that time (drinking cockneys especially) thought
those ideas very lovely and poetic indeed. Even now,
many of our most intelligent minds believe that, as Clough
sings,
" Earth goes by chemic forces, Heaven's
A mecanique celeste,
And heart and mind of human kind
A watch work as the rest."
Others of us believe that there is a deity indeed, but one
who, having made all this, only watches it go, and occasion-
ally interferes with the order of it to prove to us that it did
not make itself, and to remind us of his own existence.
But of the God of St. Paul, " in whom we (and all other
things) live, move, and have our being," we hear very little.
If, however, it were permitted in so enlightened an age as
the present to broach so old-world an idea, we might yet
believe with Homer that there is a great Sea-power, a
Divinity in the sea, as well as a deal of salt-water ; then
we might still believe with the great modern poet, with
whom it was no pretty lie, but a profound faith, that
" There is a spirit in the pathless woods,
A presence that disturbs us with the joy
Of elevated thoughts, a sense sublime
Of something far more deeply interfused,
Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,
And the round ocean, and the living air,
And the blue sky, and in the mind of man,
A motion and a spirit that impels
All thinking things, all objects of all thought,
And rolls through all things."
I think it especially important to examine the position
which Mr. Ruskin has taken up on this question in his third
volume of " Modern Painters," because it tends to neutralize
the noble teaching of the second, to which our art owes
incalculable benefit. We have only to turn to the chapter
on " Imagination Penetrative" (vol. ii. p. 163) to be assured
of the inconsistency of his doctrine on this subject. As an
ON THE POETIC INTERPRETATION OF NATURE. 23
instance of what he means by Imagination Penetrative,
he quotes from Milton
" Bring the rathe primrose that forsaken dies,
With cowslips wan that hang the pensive head,
And every flower that sad embroidery wears."
How can a primrose be forsaken, or cowslips hang pensive
heads ? According to the chapter on " Pathetic Fallacy,"
only a poet of the secondary order would indulge in such
pretty fallacies, illusions ; though I must confess that these
particular images hardly seem to me quite in harmony with
spring, or with the gladsome cowslip. He goes on, how-
ever, to quote Shakespeare's image of "pale primroses dying
unmarried, before they can behold bright Phoebus in his
strength ; " yet what is his comment here ? " Observe
how the imagination goes into the very inmost soul of
every flower," and " never stops on their spots or bodily
shape," which last remark implies a half-censure of Milton
for describing " the pansy freaked with jet," which being
merely a touch of inferior fancy, mingles with, and mars
the work of imagination. Again, " the imagination sees
the heart and inner nature, and makes them felt, but is
often obscure, mysterious, and interrupted in its giving of
outer detail." Even in the case of elaborate imaginative
structures, such as those of Dante and Milton, the poet's
work, I would contend, is the product of sheer insight,
whose keen, long, ardent gaze into the eyes of Nature,
human and material, has drawn the very soul out of her.
From that central point to which the seer has pierced, all
parts are seen in their own relative proportion, harmony,
hidden meaning, and purpose ; while the several parts that
are chosen and united in his work form a perfect organic
whole, because married, not according to the accidental
juxtaposition in which the vulgar eye may chance to behold
them at the surface, but according to the eternal affinities
they have in nature for one another. The parts of such a
work are not pieced arbitrarily together ; they have vital
24 ESSAYS ON POETRY AND POETS.
unison ; and they grow up into a grand symphony in the
creative mind of the poet, which process is just a repro-
duction in small of the vast organic evolution of the
universe. Men see things in isolated, broken pieces ;
but the poet, like the comparative anatomist, brings to-
gether the fragments that indeed belong to one another,
and so forms for us living models of the universal
kosmos. In this manner, true artists have positively
created new individualities or at least gone to the verge
of creating them. If the idea of an imaginary living
creature were perfectly sufficient and self-consistent, it
would actually live. Meanwhile, great imaginations ap-
proach such a goal. There is the Dragon of Turner in the
Jason of his Liber Studiorum ; the terrible Lombard Griffin,
so intensely pourtrayed by Ruskin ; the Satan of Milton ;
the Caliban of Shakespeare ; the Mephistopheles of Goethe ;
the Quasimodo of Hugo. These may have actually breathed,
or may actually breathe some day, they seem so real, so
possible. This doctrine that all true poetry tells the most
fundamental truth about things, instead of being merely a
play of pretty or pathetic fallacies, an elegant relaxation
for after dinner, as modern critics seem to conceive, I
venture to propound as having the sanction of no mean
critic Aristotle. For Aristotle, while defining poetry
" viewed generally " as pip-hate, yet explains that he does
not mean such imitation as modern photography might
make. "Poetry," he explains, "represents actions less
ordinary and interchanged, and endows them with more
rareness," than is found in Nature. The poet's business is
" not to tell events as they have actually happened, but as
they might possibly happen." " Poetry is more sublime
and more philosophical than history." I contend, then,
for Aristotle's definition of poetry as jut/wjene, the imitative
or, as one might prefer to paraphrase it, the reproductive
art, as on the whole best and most helpful. And I have
merely wished here in passing to strengthen my argu-
ON THE POETIC INTERPRETATION OF NATURE. 25
ment by showing that the principles I apply to defend the
use of metaphor are of universal application in all depart-
ments of poetry. Thus I might proceed to point out that
there is more essential truth in the few lines embodying
Spenser's symbolic impersonations of the vices (envy,
gluttony, jealousy, etc.), than could be expressed in as
many pages of abstract dissertation.
It is unfortunate that Wordsworth, in the course of those
few discussions of his on the principles of Poetry, which are
worth their weight in gold (considering how little scientific
standard criticism our language can boast, in comparison
with the portentous amount of smart, conceited, futile
Babel-utterances, with which the weekly and daily press
teems to our bewilderment and confusion) it is unfortunate
that Wordsworth himself should have used some unguarded
language, relative to the question we are here discussing.
He says that imagination " confers additional properties on
an object, or abstracts from it some of those which it
actually possesses." (Preface to Edition of 1815, of Poetical
Works.) He gives several instances of this, which it may
be well for us to examine. First, from Milton
" As when far off at sea a fleet descried
Hangs in the clouds."
No fleet hangs in the clouds. But the poet, professing to
describe the appearance of a fleet far out at sea, describes
it exactly by these terms, and adds nothing to the picture
that does not belong to the actual appearance. Words-
worth next quotes from his own perfect descriptive poetry,
" Over his own sweet voice the stock-dove broods." The
word " broods," Wordsworth himself remarks, conveys the
manner in which the bird reiterates and prolongs the soft
note, as if participating in a still and quiet satisfaction, like
that which may be supposed inseparable from the con-
tinuous process of incubation. Now it is probably true,
scientifically as well as poetically, that the bird delights in,
26 ESSAYS ON POETRY AND POETS.
and broods over its own note, while his mate is sitting near
upon their eggs. Again
" O cuckoo, shall I call thee bird,
Or but a wandering voice ? "
If the poet, looking up at the grey cuckoo in the tree, were
to address it as a voice rather than a bird, the thought
would not be pleasing, but absurd, because untrue and
affected. But we may conceive him wandering medita-
tively about Rydal, as was his wont, lying upon the fresh
green grass, and listening to that beloved voice of the
spring, with all its old, sweet, sad associations. Has not
that cuckoo-voice become part of ourselves, a link of our
hearts to some long and lovely past ? Has not that quiet,
happy voice, falling into the hearts of lovers, beating very
close to one another, thrilled them into yet dearer union ?
And when such lovers have been parted, has not this gentle
voice united them in spirit again as they listened ? Is not
the cuckoo voice indeed all this, the very spirit of our English
spring, the voice of our childhood, as of the well-beloved
sister, or child, or mother, who used to hear it with us, and
is no more all this quite as much, nay, how very much
more, than the love-call of one individual cuckoo ? The poet
has told us one truth, and the naturalist may tell us another.
The one " lies " and " alters Nature " quite as little as the
other. Wordsworth's genius steals like moonlight, silent and
unaware, into many a hidden nook that seemed barren and
formless before, but now teems with shy and rare loveliness,
as of herb and flower ; yet the moonlight only reveals
what is already there. Creative, indeed, are these isolated
images and metaphors, having a vital truth and coherence
of their own, quite as real as that of the vaster completed
works of mighty art ; and while in the highest work these
inferior features will have their meaning in strict sub-
ordination to the whole, yet criticism is wrong to ignore
and decry beauty of detail, which, if genuine, is itself the
offspring of the same quickening, creative spark, fusing
ON THE POETIC INTERPRETATION OF NATURE. 2/
diverse elements into one. Though Keats was no weakling
of the Kirke White stamp, to be " snufifed out by an article,"
one pain more might have been spared him on his con-
sumptive deathbed, could his critic have been less malig-
nant, and intelligent enough to comprehend that if unity
of plan were all in all, and the character of the details of
no importance, then a symmetrical periwig, or a sensation
story, or a smart review, would be nobler than " Endy-
mion," which is absurd.
Again, take more particularly that instance from
Kingsley of what Mr. Ruskin calls " pathetic fallacy." Of
Mary, who was drowned in calling the cattle home across
the sands of Dee, he sings
" They rowed her in across the rolling foam,
The cruel crawling foam."
Now, how can foam be cruel ?' Mr. Ruskin admits there is
a dramatic propriety in the expression ; I mean, that the
feeling with which a spectator would regard the foam in
these circumstances is correctly expressed ; but he contends
that the reason in this condition is unhinged by grief:
foam is not cruel, whether we fancy it so or not. He
admits that a person feeling it so will probably be higher
in nature than one who should feel nothing of the kind, but
contends that there is a third order of natures, higher than
either natures which control such fallacious feelings by the
force of their intellects. Such men know and feel too
much of the past and future, and all things beside and
around that which immediately affects them, to be shaken
by it. Thus the high creative poet might be thought
impassive (shallow people think Dante stern) because he
has a great centre of reflection and knowledge in which
he stands serene, and watches the feeling, as it were, from
far off. I must admit that there is much truth in this
fine criticism ; but must remark that it is one thing to be
washed away from our anchorage of reason which, how-
28 ESSAYS ON POETRY AND POETS.
ever, as Mr. Ruskin admits, there are circumstances wherein
we should not think it a proof of men's nobleness not to
be and another to be tossed up and down on the strong
billows of feeling, holding yet fast to the anchor of reason.
I mean that the influence of feeling on our intellects need
not necessarily be a distorting influence ; feeling may
teach us what we could not learn without it. Love, e.g.,
may often blind us to the defects of a beloved person, and
so far confuse our judgment ; yet since love puts us en
rapport, in sympathy with that person, it imparts insight,
giving wider and more essential data for the exercise of
the understanding. The man to whom a primrose is " a
yellow primrose and nothing more," by no means knows it
correctly, because he does not feel any love for it or interest
in it. He knows nothing at all about it except the name.
A "dispassionate" judgment means too often a blind,
undiscriminating judgment formed by men who want
those fine inner organs of sensibility, without which the
data for a true judgment are necessarily wanting ; and
the stupid judgment of a cynic is infinitely more mis-
chievous than that of a warm partizan, because it has
the credit of exceptional " impartiality," and freedom from
" prejudice."
Let us examine this special instance of pathetic fallacy
from Kingsley. What and whence is this impression of
cruelty in the foam ? Is it not the appropriate expression of a
sense that comes over us in such-like terrible circumstances
that there is on the outside of our weak wills and impotent
understandings some mysterious Destiny manifesting itself,
especially in that fixed and iron-bound order of Nature so
implacable toward men if, in often innocent ignorance, they
happen to be caught into the blind whirl of its relentless
machinery ? For then it whirls on and crushes, not the
living flesh and blood only itself has wrought so cunningly,
but too often, alas ! as it seems, very human reason the
tenderest and holiest of human sensibilities. In the coolest
ON THE POETIC INTERPRETATION OF NATURE. 29
blood regarding such a spectacle, I ask how shall we express
the fact of it ? The ancients had their cruel gods and their
blind fate. Our faith, on the other hand, if faith we have
at all, is in a Supreme Being, whose nature we can best
conceive by naming Him Love. And yet he who does not
feel the weary burden and the mystery of all this unin-
telligible world he who does not confess what a feeble
glimmer is all our boasted light that he is an infant
crying in the dark, and with no language but a cry he
has not had the data upon which to form a real philosophy.
What, then, is it worth ? As men, as wise men, we must
feel these terrible realities in the core of our beings. If we
still retain our faith, after this, well and good. But how
shall we express the bewildered anguish of the spirit in such
seasons of calamity ? To me it seems as inevitable, and
therefore as proper as it is natural, that we should upbraid
the instrument the second cause the cruel, crawling sea-
foam, that swallowed up the innocent we loved. Let
the philosopher at least furnish us with correcter formulae
for the expression of the feeling due from us as human
beings on such an occasion as this. Behind those engulfing
seas is there not, indeed, some pitiless, murderous power,
some prince, or princes of a world that lieth in the wicked,
however that power may be overruled by a supreme Maternal
Love ?
Mr. Ruskin again quotes a very affecting ballad from
Casimir de la Vigne, as an instance of what he thinks the
highest manner, where the poet refuses to let himself be
carried away by the horror of the incident he relates, and
simply pictures the dreadful, naked, physical fact of it
without any comment, impressing us far more than if he
had indulged in any pathetic fancies of his own about it.
There is to be a ball at the French ambassador's, and a
fair young girl is dressing for it. All the little nothings
she babbles to her maid while beautifying herself she is
to meet her lover are told just as she would say them,
30 ESSAYS ON POETRY AND POETS.
when a spark catches her dress, and she is burnt to death.
What is the result ? The poet only tell us
" On disait, pauvre Constance !
Et on dansait jusqu'au jour
Chez 1'ambassadeur de France."
Now I do not believe with Mr. Ruskin that dark fallacious
thoughts occurred to the poet here, and that he resolutely
put them by because he philosophically held them to be
false. I do not believe that the highest poet is " unpartici-
pating in the passions " he depicts, as Coleridge affirms of
Shakespeare ; he is by turns in the situations of the cha-
racters he represents ; and here the emotion is so genuine,
that the poet's philosophy would have been torn to tatters
by it, for indeed such a philosophy would only have waited
the rending of reality.
But in cases of sudden, intense emotion, metaphor, which
implies some degree of reflection on the circumstance, is
for the most part out of place. Thought is overwhelmed
by feeling the bare, fearful fact, that alone we see and
know, we can but relate that. We are dazed, crushed,
annihilated by the shock of a great fall, of a great woe.
But Time, the healer, comes, and though we may not thank
him, now the anguish tinges every experience, every move-
ment, later it seems a pregnant necessity, and yet some relief*
to remember, to reflect, to utter forth our sorrow. The
poet here feels and relates just as a witness fresh from the
incident would do. This bare relation is the most appro-
priate to the incident related. But when meditation upon
an afflicting circumstance is possible and natural, then
metaphor and brief comment may be most appropriate
to the fullest impression derivable from the circumstance.
Wordsworth, therefore, comments a good deal on what he
relates (sometimes unduly, but usually with effect), because
he does not love violent passion, rapid action, stirring, over-
whelming situations. And yet it is true that the most
exalted and maddened feeling does sometimes burst forth
ON THE POETIC^INTERPRETATION OF NATURE. 31
into wild and tremendous hyperbole which justifies Shake-
speare, but I think only in a measure ; surely this is apt
to be overdone, and exaggerated by the Elizabethans, as
even by our greatest poet Partly, however, the dramatic
poet gives his own interpretation in words of what the
person may only vaguely feel but is it an appropriate one ?
that is the question.
One more striking instance where what seems to be
merely fallacy may be argued to be philosophically true
though to the poet himself the revelation was made rather
through feeling and imagination than through reasoning
we may take from Keats. Instead of treating our true
poets as amusing liars, I would often rather go to them for
solid intellectual food than to the professed dealers in that
article. In the " Endymion," Keats says
" For I have ever thought that (love) might bless
The world with benefits unknowingly."
And again
" Who of men can tell
That flowers would bloom, or that green fruit would swell
To melting pulp, that fish would have bright mail,
The earth its dower of river, wood, and vale,
The meadows runnels, runnels pebble-stones,
The seed its harvest, or the lute its tones,
Tones ravishment, or ravishment its sweet,
If human souls did never kiss and greet ? "
Now I will only briefly indicate the principle that it
is our human love, our power of loving, that gives these
beautiful things a being as we know them ; for their being,
though partly external to us, is also partly engendered by
contact with human minds and hearts. Are not the forces
which seem to constitute material things, with all their
strength, healthfulness, and beauty, forces cognate to Love,
which is the affinity and attraction of diverse spirits for
one another ? Physical attraction, which implies also dif-
ference and repulsion, is love in its lowest stage of develop-
ment. And what is the order, the law, according to which
32 ESSAYS ON POETRY AND POETS.
the highest human love is developed? We pass upward
from cohesion to chemical affinities, but it is in the first
faint fringes of the organic world that love dawns in her
own proper form. There are sexes in plants, and often the
pistil of one flower needs to be fertilized by the pollen
from another before it can become productive ; in animals,
the lower love is literally present, till in man it becomes
transfigured into its own proper spiritual and heavenly
being ; and without this for an end and aim, where would
cohesion and all the lower forces be ? The poet says this
in a different way. Looking at things as they are in life,
in the concrete, his quick sympathetic insight has discerned
this essential truth. Philosophical analysis may reach it in
another manner. When, therefore, we attribute to Nature
a sympathy with our moods, whether of joy or sorrow, we
are not under an amiable delusion ; the intuition is true,
although the shape it assumes may not always be scienti-
fically correct. Nature, like man, has her bright, rich,
joyous, and her desolate, decaying phases ; in joy we feel
the former most, in sorrow we feel and discern more espe-
cially the latter. We may indulge these feelings to a
morbid degree, and see things too brightly or too gloomily ;
but the sense of a sympathy in Nature has its basis in fact
In concluding, I must touch for a moment on Mr.
Ruskin's assertion that metaphor and pathetic fallacy are
characteristic rather of the secondary than of the primary
order of poets an assertion which I do not think the
facts of the case will bear out. I have already given a
reason for the rarity of such forms of thought in very early
poetry ; but for their rarity in classical poetry another reason
may be given. In Oriental poetry they are very usual,
because such modes of conceiving are much more appro-
priate to the Oriental genius. Look at the profound and
mystic symbolism of Egyptian, Persian, Phoenician, or In-
dian mythology ; to those races the material ever appeared
as a film floating upon the deeps of spirit a film not merely
ON THE POETIC INTERPRETATION OF NATURE. 33
transparent, but itself very spirit, only cooled as it were,
solidified, and become gross. The bold hyperbole of
Hebrew, Arabic, Persian love and war poetry is essential
to the genius of the Oriental nature. But in the classical
temper there is little sense of the infinite, vague, mysterious :
the different subject-matters on which intelligence can be
exercised are viewed apart, not in their occult relationships :
all delight is in the sunny actual life, in that which is
pleasant, symmetrical, clear, definite. What palpable, com-
plete, satisfying symmetry ! what bright beauty of material
and structure in those consummate temples, fragments
though they be, on and about the Acropolis at Athens !
How full is the sunlight blaze] upon their golden peristyles,
under the blue sky, overlooking the blue sea ! how black
and sharp-cut the shadows beside them ! There is sorrow
or fate with the Greeks, as with others ; but it stands by
itself, quite apart from joy. In a Gothic cathedral all is
dusk, sublime, mysterious, teeming with vague symbol
at once secretion and food of the imagination. Light and
shadow are married and mingled ; the light is dim and
religious ; derives a spiritual glory from its very fellowship
with darkness ; counterfeits a gloom ; while the dark be-
comes half luminous and opalescent from its fellowship
with light. " Our sweetest songs," the modern poet sings,
"are those that tell of saddest thought." And yet, with
respect to Homer, does not even Homer take the heart-
broken old man, when he leaves the tent of Agamemnon
empty-handed, back by the shore of the *jro\v(f>\oicr(3oLo
OaXaaar^ ? Has this magnificent epithet for the sea no
reference to the lonely, stormful, sorrowful spirit of the old
man as he walked by the long, lone surges of it? This
surely is not a purely physically-descriptive epithet, like
oTvoTra TTOVTOV. But go on to yEschylus, and what will
Mr. Ruskin say to his avfyiOfrov -/Aac/ia, the innumerable
smile or laughter of the sea ? In Theocritus, again, assuredly
metaphor and pathetic fallacy may be found (notably in
D
34 ESSAYS ON POETRY AND POETS.
the first idyl). The pathetic fallacy in Shakespeare's ex-
quisite poem, " Venus and Adonis," " No grass, herb, leaf,
or weed but stole his blood and seemed with him to bleed ;
this solemn sympathy poor Venus noteth," etc., is adapted
directly from the Sicilian poet Bion's " Lament for Adonis."
Again, that beautiful lament of Moschus the " Epitaph of
Bion " (third idyl) abounds in similar pathetic fallacy. Are
not Virgil and Catullus (no mean poets, surely) rich in
graphic and appropriate poetic metaphors? Mr. Tenny-
son's " dividing the swift mind in act to throw," in " Morte
d'Arthur," is of course from Virgil. Let us pass to Chris-
tian poetry. I have shown that we shall be more likely
to find these types of idea in modern than in classical
poetry, and that by no means because modern taste is
more vicious, but because the very conditions of life and
thought are changed. In the early mediaeval poets, indeed,
we have more allegory, and elaborate symbolism than
metaphor and pathetic fallacy. But science, and popular
theology alike setting themselves in opposition to poetic
insight and aspiration, our poets, striving to link the two
spheres of the universe together, do it in a confused, halting
manner, like children stealing a forbidden pleasure, when
the eye of the governing intellect is for a moment turned
away. Yet the stupendous poem of Dante forms, we may
say, one grand sustained metaphor. And realistic Chaucer
too, has he not written " The House of Fame," " The Flower
and the Leaf," " The Romaunt of the Rose ? " But Pe-
trarch, and Lorenzo de Medici are full of metaphor and
pathetic fallacy proper, as, had I space, I might prove.
Coming on to Shakespeare, in him these tendencies of
thought and feeling already assume their modern expres-
sion. Confining myself to his sonnets and poems, I
open them almost at random ; and in " The Rape of Lu-
crece " I find " a voice dammed up with woe ; " " sorrow
ebbs, being blown with wind of words." In the description
of the hare-hunt in "Venus and Adonis," as incisive, as
ON THE POETIC INTERPRETATION OF NATURE. 35
clear-cut in its workmanship as any gem intaglio, the
phrase occurs, " Each envious briar." In the sonnets we
have " The earth doth weep the sun being set." Endless
instances might be quoted from Ben Jonson, Fletcher,
Drayton, Drummond, and the lesser Elizabethans. But in
some of these, legitimate outgrowth of metaphor degene-
rates into parasitic conceit, as it did too often in our own
so-called " spasmodic " poets ; and yet in neither case did
our literature touch the base and frigid affectations of such
writers as are lashed in the " Dunciad " of Pope. It seems,
however, as if our criticism had of late too much con-
founded legitimate and genuine metaphor, illustrative of
the poet's main design, with mere arbitrary quirks of a
nimble, ingenious fancy. But we have only to compare two
poems, alike sensuous and rich in imagery, to feel the
difference the "Venus and Adonis" of Shakespeare, and
the " Hero and Leander " of Marlowe, beautiful as Mar-
lowe's portion of that may be.
CHATTERTON.
IT is to be hoped that, since the publication of the Rev.
Walter Skeat's edition, people may now read Chatterton ;
for he has long been to the majority a mere name. The
Rowley poems ought to be read, and they are now very easy
reading. Mr. Skeat has preserved their peculiar flavour by
retaining enough of their antique phraseology, but where
rhythm and rhyme are not involved he has often modern-
ized it, while the Rowleian words are translated at the
bottom of the page. I advisedly adopt Mr. Skeat's phrase,
" Rowleian," because he has made it, in his preliminary
essay, if possible more certain than before that the poems
are not written in fifteenth-century English ; that they are
not by the pseudo-monk Rowley, but by "the marvellous
boy" himself. Mr. Skeat makes one very important re-
mark. It is a most significant fact that Chatterton's words
in the foot-notes frequently suit the scansion of the line
better than his words in the Rowley text, and this made
the re-writing of the poems more easy. But why is the
fact so ? Because they were first written in modern English.
That a boy of fifteen or sixteen should have produced
such poems is certainly startling, but that any one should
have produced the works of Shakespeare is also start-
ling. This is a question of what genius can or cannot do ;
but that these poems should have been written in the
fifteenth century involves many more inconceivable diffi-
culties, of a different kind altogether. In fact, the only
CHATTERTON. 37
plausible argument on this side was the alleged inferiority
of Chatterton's acknowledged poems. But this partly
from a certain glamour cast over the Rowley series by their
supposed origin and archaic form, and partly from a spirit
of partizanship introduced into the controversy has been
very greatly exaggerated. They are not so good as the
others, taken as a whole ; but if they had stood alone,
they would have proved the child who wrote them who
poured them forth in profusion, partly under the pres-
sure of want to be a unique literary phenomenon. We
have lines like these, on a good organist :
" He keeps the passions with the sound in play,
And the soul trembles with the trembling key,"
Again :
"Conscience, the soul-chameleon's varying hue,
Reflects all notions, to no notion true."
But what strikes one most of all through these acknow-
ledged poems is the boy's almost ghastly precocity, though
there is also doubtless a good deal of swagger and hobbede-
hoyish assumption of worldly wisdom and immoral know-
ledge. Professor Masson, in his brief but beautiful memoir
(which we always associate with that other little gem of
poetical biography, Lord Houghton's " Life of Keats "), well
describes the impetuous young fellow, who had just come
off the Bristol coach, leaving his luggage at Mrs. Ballance's
in Shoreditch (where he first lodged), and setting off
instantly, though it was between five and six on a cold,
dusk April evening, to call on no less than four publishers,
who lived a long way off and in different directions ; seeing
them all, moreover, and "going through each interview
without any unnecessary degree of bashfulness." The
" Revenge," his little burletta which was written for Mary-
lebone Gardens, and probably performed there after his
death, is perfectly charming for gaiety and sprightliness ;
and the satirical humour of two pieces where he ridicules
the affected dilettante of Strawberry Hill is of the highest
38 ESSAYS ON POETRY AND POETS.
promise (" The Woman of Spirit " and " Memoirs of a Sad
Dog").
It has been well observed that Chatterton lived two
distinct lives, and produced literary work accordingly. He
had two distinct moods : in the graver, more imaginative
mood most of the Rowley series, prose and verse, are
written ; nevertheless, there are humour and sprightliness
in them too, which have not been sufficiently remarked.
How excellent the humour of " The De Bergham Pedigree,"
with which he hoaxed Bergum, the pewterer, whose arms
were supposed to include " two cat-a-mountains ermine,"
etc. ! Yet the pewterer, like Oliver Twist, positively "asked
for more," and straightway Chatterton brought it. But
what I wish to make clear is that in the finer serious pas-
sages of the modern series, the same manner is distinctly
discernible as in corresponding passages of the ancient ;
there is notably the strong Spenserian tendency to personi-
fication. Thus we have
" Self- frighted Fear creeps silent through the gloom,
Starts at the rustling leaf and rolls his eyes ; "
and
' ' Pale rugged Winter, bending o'er his tread,
His grizzled hair bedropt with icy dew,
His eyes a dusky light congealed and dead,
His robe a tinge of bright ethereal blue,
" His train a motleyed, sanguine, sable cloud,
He limps along the russet dreary moor,
Whilst rising whirlwinds, blasting keen, and loud
Roll the white surges to the sounding shore."
How do the s's hiss in the last couplet, as the sense de-
mands ! How large and open the vowel-sounds !
The elegy on the death of his great friend, Phillips, is
full of these personifications. Very beautiful are the follow-
ing lines !
' ' The darksome ruins of some sacred cell,
Where erst the sons of Superstition trod,
Tottering upon the mossy meadow, tell
We better know, but less adore our God.
CHATTERTON. 39
" Now as I mournful tread the gloomy nave,
Through the wide window, once with mysteries dight,
The distant forest, and the darkened wave
Of the swoln Avon ravishes my sight."
Again, the noble " Elegy at Stanton Drew," in which there
is a stately majesty of thought, imagery, and language, if it
had been translated into the Rowley dialect, would have
been hailed as among the best of that series, and seems
even now to be out of place among the juvenile, alloyed,
and insincere verses which (finding they paid better) the
boy wrote, chiefly at the later period, when he had lost his
faith in God and man, and had felt more of the muddy
passions, venal aspirations, and dreary disappointments of
life. Alas ! how young was he for such experience ; but,
noteworthy fact, in this elegy he touches upon that ancient
world which he loved. He is in a ruin, and he beholds the
Druid beside the altar. The " African Eclogues " also con-
tain beautiful poetry.
As to the Rowley series, I do not hesitate to say that
they contain some of the finest poetry in our language,
though they are unequal, just as the modern poems are.
They are jewels set in the prose-romance of ancient Bristol
as imagined by Chatterton ; though Canynge, the old
mayor, who is the central figure, was an actual person of
importance. Let us for a moment glance at the earlier
history of the boy-poet who conceived all this. For,
splendid as his poetry often is, there is no doubt that it
derives much of its interest for us from our knowledge
of the marvellous child who wrote it. There is a per-
sonal fascination about this prodigy of genius, and his
strange, grim, half-humorous, half-awful history. Even
some full-grown writers will always be associated with their
writings in our imagination ; their magic influence seems
to flash as much out of their lives as out of their works ;
such a one was Dante; such another Johnson; such another
Byron ; but of the child Chatterton it is, of course, more
40 ESSAYS ON POETRY AND POETS.
eminently true. Until he was six years old he was sup-
posed to be deficient in intellect, for he would sit alone for
hours, crying and moody. The utter inability of those at
home, and even of his acquaintances at Bristol, to appreciate
him, deepened his natural reserve, as Professor Wilson
observes, into habitual secretiveness ; and that love of
mystery and mystifying which he displayed is to some degree
thus accounted for. As to his literary patrons at Bristol,
the Catcotts and Barretts, etc., they were such a curious
compound of literary or bibliomaniacal taste, consummate
vanity, and portentous duncehood, that one can feel, if one
gets to know the boy at all, what a rare, grim, lonely bit of
fun it must have been to mystify them. Suddenly, however,
the illuminated capitals of an old musical folio of his father's,
which his mother was tearing up, attracted the child, and
he straightway fell in love with them ; henceforth he began
to learn, and she taught him to read out of an old black-
letter Bible, "so that he only turned in later years from
mediaeval illumination and antique typography, to the
unfamiliar aspect of contemporary literature." The corner
rounded, he devoured knowledge with insatiable voracity,
studying all day and all night up till quite early in the
morning, as his bedfellow in Shoreditch told Croft. Then
he shut himself up in an attic with a great piece of ochre,
pounce-bags full of charcoal-dust, and parchments (which
he mostly used for copying old heraldic devices, and other
architectural antique drawings).
He was the descendant of a long line of sextons, who
had in former times paced along the old aisles of St. Mary
Redcliffe, jangling its ponderous keys, and talking with
stony effigies of knights and saints buried below ; his father
was a wild, clever, drunken sub-chaunter, who died before
Thomas was born. The child, therefore, living close to the
church as he did (both at his mother's, and Colston's School
the Bristol Bluecoat School, to which he went at seven
years old), would have constant access to it ; and as a
CHATTERTON. 4 1
matter of fact, it was the master-spell that dominated his
passionate imagination ; it was the nucleus of the whole
Rowley romance. There was one spot in Redcliffe meadows,
in full view of the church, where a companion tells us he
delighted to lie ; and after fixing his eyes on the church in
a kind of trance, he would at last break out with " that
steeple was struck by lightning ; that was the place where
they formerly acted plays." The poems are full of allusions
to the church :
" Thou seest this maestrie of a human hand,
The pride of Bristowe and the Western land."
And to any one who has seen the church, its weird effect
upon this wonderful child who loved to haunt it will not
appear surprising. It is one of the most glorious old
churches in Europe ; the airy, solemn harmony of its nave,
aisles, pierced arches, groined roof, stained windows, and
monumental effigies of old worthies lying upon their tombs
is certainly unsurpassed. It is specially interesting now,
since unhappy genius has breathed life into these stone
figures and bidden them arise. Chatterton, in one of his
poems, says, if you prayed long enough, surely a crusader
or other worthy in the attitude of prayer would move,
and repeat the Ave Mary. I knew a child to whom
an imaginary history of his own creation was for many
years quite as real as the actual events of his life. So
it was with Chatterton. Only with him these conceptions
formed a whole of transcendent poetic beauty.. To ac-
knowledge to himself and others that the monk Rowley
did not write the poems would have broken the spell that
entranced him in his magical, beautiful world. As to the
manufacture of parchments, he never produced more than
one or two, when very much pressed by the dunderheads,
who would not believe him, even when he confessed to
writing some of the poems. Over the north porch of St.
Mary's there is a room called the muniment-room, in which
the celebrated old chests, full of parchments and deeds
42 ESSAYS ON POETRY AND POETS.
relating to the church, were placed ; they had been ran-
sacked, and all that was valuable removed before the poet's
birth, his father having appropriated much of what remained
as mere waste-paper. Some of the mouldering chests are
still there ; and the spot appears to the present writer a
sacred one, well worthy of a pilgrimage. Through the
mullions you see the old tower, with its beautiful tracery ;
birds cawing about it ; the sunshine streaming out of the
blue sky, over antique chests, and dim, dusty floor ; if you
pause, reverent and silent, the boy Chatterton himself
seems to muse once more there beside you.
Chatterton's mother's house was full of the old parch-
ments, and certainly some of these may have been actually
engrossed by old dead lawyers who lived in the time of
the Wars of the Roses. That Chatterton even got some
of his names out of them seems to me probable, perhaps
the very name of Rowley ; did he get any information,
any history? Possibly. It was in this mediaeval world of
his imagination, at any rate, that he breathed most freely-
all that was noblest, most reverent, most tender, and most
beauty-loving in his soul assumed as by instinct the garb of
a long-past age ; like this dim and venerable church, it was
aloof from the vulgarity, meanness, triviality, and grossness
of his contemporary life. Johnson stood in that muniment-
room, a little while after the suicide, with Bozzy, and with
that pewterer, who sold the Rowley poems which he had got
from Chatterton, partly by free gift, partly by paltry doles
of pocket-money, for 50 ; the man who, though the poet's
mother was in great indigence, put her off with the sum of
five guineas. The account of the coroner's inquest furnished
by Mr. Gutch seems of doubtful authenticity, though Masson
accepts it ; but it is a curiously poetical invention, if it be
not the truth. When he came into Mrs. Angell's, in Brooke
Street, on the last evening of his weary wanderings in
London, after buying the arsenic from Cross and walking
about all day with his hands in his pocket, no one knows
CHATTERTON. 43
where, he would not eat, but sat moping by the fire with
his chin on his knees, muttering rhymes in some old un-
known language. He then kissed Mrs. Angell he had
never done so before and went upstairs to his garret,
stamping on every stair as he went slowly up, as though he
would break it, locking the door of his room behind him.
If this account be true, the proof that his reason had failed
seems complete ; but even then, here he was turning back
at the last moment to the old home of his imagination, to a
bygone England peopled with figures of noble stature, and
St. Mary Redclifife in the midst. At any rate, it is note-
worthy that here in Brooke Street about a month before
his death, he wrote one of the finest of .the Rowley poems,
"The Ballad of Charity."* It is overshadowed with his own
deepening doom ; but it is in his highest region of pure,
tender, stately solemnity, abounding with the most graphic
touches of natural description he ever penned. It seems to
me perhaps his most uniformly excellent poetical work, and
speaks volumes for the stupendous height to which his
genius might have attained, seeing that it showed no signs
of declining, but rather maturing mastery, even at the last,
notwithstanding all the disadvantages, moral, intellectual,
and physical, which threatened and assailed it. But the editor
of the magazine to whom he sent this Rowley poem would
not take it ; slipshod scurrilities or ephemeral stories were
more to the taste of himself and his readers. A notice
appeared in the magazine after Chatterton had given up the
battle of life in disgust, addressed to him (its anonymous
contributor) to the effect that the poem " might have been
improved." And to think of the vapid, stilted stuff that
was thought fine poetry then !
* This essay was written in 1872. But only the other day I read Mr.
Theodore Watts's subtle and suggestive preface to Chatterton in Ward's
"British Poets," and must advert, with entire agreement, to his contention
that Chatterton may be named father of the romantic movement in England,
both in point of matter and manner. He points out the remarkable com-
binations of iambic and anapaest in the " Ballad of Charity," a metre adopted
subsequently by Coleridge in " Christabel," and stolen from him by Scott.
44 ESSAYS ON POETRY AND POETS.
In looking back along the line of our very foremost poets
after Milton, we see Pope arise, and after Pope who but the
boy Chatterton deserves the laurel-wreath of highest poet,
until Burns has risen above the horizon ? But after him
we have a galaxy of no less than seven between whom
the kingdom has to be divided Shelley, Byron, Coleridge,
Wordsworth, Keats, Scott, Landor even if we put Crabbe,
Campbell, Moore, and Hood into the secondary rank.* In
fact, Goldsmith, Collins, Thomson, Gray, and Cowper were
the only considerable contemporary poets ; and Chatterton
at sixteen was more than their equal, promising very un-
mistakably to rise much higher still. " ^Ella " is a drama
worthy of the Elizabethans ; there is, of course, no intricate
knowledge of human nature, such as only a longer ex-
perience could have given ; nevertheless, there is a great
dramatic faculty unmistakably announced ; the plot is good,
the movement is unembarrassed, and carries you along.
The character of Bertha is slightly, but tenderly and dis-
tinctly drawn ; those of ^Ella and Celmonde are vigorously
conceived and discriminated, while the working out is
specifically /w/z>. The often-quoted song, " Oh ! sing unto
my roundelay," though very touching, is too obviously
borrowed from Ophelia's lovely ditty; but there are two
other airy, sprightly songs sung by " the minstrels." A girl
says to her lover
" Once I heard my grandame say
Youthful damsels should not be
In the pleasant month of May
With young men by the greenwood tree."
" Goddwyn," which is a mere fragment, is a splendid torso,
for it contains " The Ode to Freedom." But fancy a
sonorous Pindaric ode in the reign of Henry VI. ! Else-
where Rowley writes in blank verse, anticipating Lord
Surrey. There is a passage in Byron's " Childe Harold " that
has been much admired, a personification of war ; but this
* I am not blind, however, to the merit of Parnell, Young, Shenstone,
Dyer, and Falconer.
CHATTERTON. 45
ode appears to me the original of it, and at any rate is finer.
Again, in this fragment a most Shakespearian dramatic
genius appears to be rising. King Edward the Confessor,
Harold, and Goddwyn are touched in by the hand of one
who had read history to some purpose, having a dramatic
imagination of his own. In the " Battle of Hastings " we
find many passages of the highest merit for distinctness of
vision, and nervous appropriateness of language ; they are
resonant with the din of battle. There is often a direct
Homeric force that startles one as with a blow, and withal
a sublime heroic atmosphere tempers the long, and some-
times tedious series of physical encounters described. There
is a brief, but graphic description of Stonehenge. (Chat-
terton was hardly ever over-luxuriant in that too very
mature.) We find true poetry in the third eclogue, and in
" The Parliament of Sprytes," where we hear the ghosts
of former " Bristowans " longing to be alive that they may
better see St. Mary's, which, however, they gaze upon on
misty moonlight nights, and describe as it is at service-
time, together with the dresses of canons and singers, " in
crimson chapeaux and scarfs of woaden blue." But one of
Chatterton's masterpieces is the " Song to ^Ella, Lord of the
Castle of Bristol." There seems to me a something in-
definite, but very grand about it ; the poet addresses the
spirit of ^Ella in stately and sonorous language
" Drawn by thy weapon fell,
Down to the depth of hell
Thousands of Dacians went. . . .
O thou ! where'er thy bones at rest
Thy sprite to haunt delighteth best,
Whether upon the blood-embrued plain,
Or where thou kenst from far
The dismal cry of war ;
Or seest some mountain made of corse of slain. . . .
Or in black armour stalk around
Embattled Bristowe, once thy ground,
And glow ardurous on the Castle stair ;
. Or fiery round the Minster glare,
Let Bristowe still be made thy care ;
46 ESSAYS ON POETRY AND POETS.
Guard it from foemen and consuming fire,
Like Avon's stream encirc it round,
Nor let a flame enharm the ground,
Till in one flame all the whole world expire."
As for Horace Walpole, he was only a link in the chain
of ignoble circumstances that led up to the suicide for
which act, however, it is absurd to make any one so respon-
sible as the boy himself. Why should this conceited literary
sybarite have been so very forward to befriend a sucking
author who had hoaxed him ? It is all fair for a nobleman
to amuse himself by elaborately concocting a series of
gossipy letters to be passed off as the offspring of unpre-
meditated friendly intercourse and to tell lies about a
trumpery " Otranto," writing when he is detected, " the
author flatters himself he shall appear excusable" but
when a poor attorney's clerk plays similar pranks in a work
of stupendous genius, then the noble "forger" bethinks
him that " all of the house of forgery are relations," and
that his younger brother in "forgery " " must be a consum-
mate villain:' (! /)
However, the publishers who profited by the boy's inex-
perience and obscurity in London were the more immediate
authors of his loss to the world. They paid him little doles
now and then ; but for much of his work he was never paid
at all, though his pieces kept coming out in the magazines
of these gentlemen long after the boy had been crammed
like a dead dog into a pauper's shell. " Hamilton," he said
one day, " was using him very badly." And to think with
what an ardent spirit he came to London ; going to the
coffee-houses among the celebrated wits, buying better
clothes, and sending home little presents of teacups and
fans and snuff to a mother and sister (of whom he was de-
votedly fond) out of his scanty earnings ! I fancy his few
letters home are among the most graphic, and cheerful, and
melancholy in all the world ; we are with him on the coach
journey in the snow over Marlborough Down ; we are his
CHATTERTON. 47
fellow-passengers ; and how vivid the letter about his catch-
ing a cold looking out of his garret window at a drunken
woman and a man with a movable fish-stall one night in
Brooke Street ! His political letters are not a quarter so
interesting to us now, though they served his turn well
enough.
Was he mad or not when he killed himself? If there
was a predisposition his sister had been in a madhouse
circumstances were very favourable to its fruition. He
worked his brain a brain truly of almost abnormal capacity
without mercy ; and he did not take sufficient nourish-
ment. Even before he was compelled to live on next to
nothing in London because the fat booksellers would not
pay him, all agree that he starved on bread and water and
tea. Whether he burnt the candle at both ends, and was
profligate in morals, we do not know ; but I suspect that at
any rate he devoted very little time to profligacy ; cer-
tainly he never drank. His anxieties, when he once began
to despond, must have been of the gravest ; for he was
doggedly determined never to write to Bristol for assistance,
lest his acquaintance there should triumph, seeing how
much he had boasted of what he could do, and what a great
name he would make. Nineteen-twentieths of his composi-
tion consisted of pride, as he says in his letter to Mr. Clay-
field ; we have it in his own handwriting in the British
Museum, and the word is underlined. He had evidently
the consciousness of his transcendent genius, and had come
into contact with no equal. Cross, the apothecary, says
that latterly his memory seemed to fail him when talking
rapidly. Cross once persuaded Chatterton to dine with
him, and then he devoured some oysters voraciously, so
that he was evidently starving ; but for the most part he
would accept even a morsel of bread from no one. How-
ever, he had always been dallying with the idea of suicide ;
men did at that time if they had no religious belief, and
the boy had lost his. In Bristol he was on the verge t of
48 ESSAYS ON POETRY AND POETS.
committing it, and wrote a half-serious, half-burlesque will,
which so scared Lambert, the attorney, that he turned the
boy out of his office. The mistaken idea that it is de-
grading to receive help from others an idea due partly
to the exaggerated individualism of the time is pretty
well enough to account for his conduct, whereas a man
or woman ought to be ready to accept help with dignity,
and with no sense of subserviency, as also to give it in a
brotherly spirit and kindly, with no arriere pensee of estab-
lishing a claim thereby. Whether, however, there was not
some madness in the dogged refusal to accept the smallest
favour from any one at the last is a difficult question ; only
we do not know how far such favours were offered, and
he was too proud to beg for them. It is strange that the
landlady, Mrs. Angell, would never show herself to Croft
when he went to inquire about Chatterton. But anyhow
this is the boy " who," according to Walpole, " might have
been led to those more facile imitations of prose, promis-
sory notes ! " Well, England, after having spurned from
her one of her greatest geniuses (as other nations, by the
agency of their blockheads, have spurned theirs, the follies
and sins of genius itself conspiring to help them), had many
years after the misfortune to lose Horace Walpole also ;
and indignant denunciations seem absurd after so long,
considering, too, how much fair-minded people always have
to say on the other side of every question ! There is some
evidence that our great boy-poet was not carted away with
other sour bodies when the graves at Shoe Lane Workhouse
were filled up to make room for Farringdon Market, but
that his mother had him sent down to Bristol, and privately
buried in Redcliffe churchyard, where now he rests. Is
there any authentic portrait of the poet ? Sir H. Taylor
has a very striking one, which he tells me he considers
authentic. The boy is described as having magnificent grey
eyes. Even Barrett said that " he used to send for him and
differ from him on purpose to make them flash fire ; fire
CHATTERTON. 49
seemed to roll at the bottom of them." And Mrs. Ballance
remarked that when he stared you in the face without
appearing to see you "it was something awful." Of all
the poetical tributes to him, perhaps Shelley's few lines are
the finest. He comes forward in the realms of death to
meet Keats :
"The inheritors of unfulfilled renown
Rose from their thrones, built beyond mortal thought,
Far in the Unapparent. Chatterton
Rose pale, his solemn agony had not
Yet faded from him. "
E
LORD BYRON AND HIS TIMES.*
" Sorrow seems half of his immortality." Cain.
BYRON is not an exhausted subject. For he, though one of
our greatest poets, has of late years been under-estimated
and neglected in England a new school of poetry being
in the ascendant, mainly an outgrowth from Keats, Words-
worth, Shelley, and foreign schools, Italian or French. It
is remarkable that, whereas on the Continent neither of
these last-named poets (except in some small degree
Shelley) has to any extent influenced literature, while Byron
has influenced it more than any other English poet except
Shakespeare and Pope, among his own Anglo-Saxon people
the reverse is true ; for I know not any artist of note,
English or American, unless it be Edgar Poe, Bulwer
Lytton, Disraeli, Joaquin Miller, Mr. Alfred Austin, whom
we may affiliate upon Byron ; and these very partially. Of
course he has had scores of imitators ; but imitators, how-
ever popular for a moment, soon perish. I speak of original
poets who are generally nurtured in some degree upon their
predecessors. Hugo, Heine, de Musset, Beranger, and
Lamartine occur at once as instances. But the Slavonic
races also have heard his fiery tones, and responded in their
poetry. Thus " the Russian poet, Puschkin, has stirred the
ardent youth of Russia with a lyre attuned to that of Byron,
and the most important Spanish poet of recent times has been
* By far the best thing I know on Byron (except Moore's Life) is Professor
J. Nichol's book in the English Men of Letters series.
LORD BYRON AND HIS TIMES. 51
termed the Spanish Byron." In England, however, such
Byronic growths as may be traced in literature (and there
are few) have taken their nourishment from the more
morbid elements in him. Notwithstanding his inordinately
inorganic form, Mr. Dobell is a very genuine poet ; but in
the spasmodic school to which he belongs, a strange, half-
tragic, half-grotesque figure seems always painfully pro-
minent the poet namely at once admiring and bemoan-
ing himself, torn asunder by his own passions, and loudly
arraigning his Maker, as it were in the market-place, for
making him so very disagreeable a person both to himself
and to his neighbours.
There is little response in our literature, as there is in
that of the Continent, to what is strongest and highest in
Byron. He is pre-eminently the poet of revolution, and of
what the Germans call " world-sorrow." But England is
not a congenial home of revolution. There is implied in
the Puritanism and Protestantism which dominated our two
English rebellions a most conservative and law-abiding
principle one of obedience to authority. If the principle
of private judgment as vindicated by Luther, Wyclif,
Cranmer, and the Reformers, opened the door to what is
now termed Rationalism, yet between them and the later
rationalists there is a great gulf fixed ; the former only
shifted and restored the fulcrum of that lever which they
held to have been displaced by human corruption, the lever
of Supernatural authority ; the latter threw away that lever
altogether. In England, religion and the political con-
stitution have been slowly and gradually liberalized ; the
Bible, however, remained (how far may we say, remains ?)
the fulcrum of authority, the rule of faith and conduct. In
France, in Italy, in Spain, both religious and political re-
forms have met with less success, have been crushed in the
bud ; hence the tendency is to violent explosions in ex-
tremes of theory and practice, to what we moderns mean
by the principle of revolution.
52 ESSAYS ON POETRY AND POETS.
With respect to Welt-Schmertz, Goethe affirms that
Byron introduced it into literature ; but I think that is say-
ing too much. Rousseau rather is the father of it, though
I am not sure we should not say Shakespeare in " Hamlet."
Goethe himself in " Werther " and in " Faust " may likewise
be regarded as one main source of the same spirit ; Jean
Paul also, and other contemporaries of Goethe. But there
has been so much of it since Byron, in France and Ger-
many, that it is difficult now to recognize Byron as a grand
fountain thereof in our more recent English literature. It is
in Shelley, in Novalis, Obermann, Heine, Musset, Leopardi,
George Sand. In Carlyle, Clough, Matthew Arnold, and
Tennyson's " In Memoriam," how different a semblance it
wears ! In these it is a reflecting, brooding, recluse-like
sorrow, serene Wordsworth even traceable therein ; we be-
hold the half-bewildering, half-apocalyptic suggestions of an
ever developing natural science seething in strange specu-
lations ! Access since Byron has also been attained to the
great systematic metaphysicians of Germany, whose thought
has penetrated, at least by infiltration, through their German
and French popularizers, to the stolid, practical, but rather
obtuse English mind these metaphysicians, together with
Schiller, Goethe, and the German critics, constituting the
Teutonic element in that vast intellectual and moral
upheaval, which characterized the opening of the grand
European era we name Revolutionary ; and as German
ideas permeated France and England, so, thank Heaven !
are French and English principles of social change now
conquering Germany, in spite of Bismarcks, Moltkes, and
Emperors William. Moreover, Orientalists have made
known to us the great religious philosophies of the East.
Carlyle is a prophet of welt-schmertz and of individualism
too, though he is most severe' on Byron because of his
lamentations. Yet Mr. Morley, with some reason, calls
Carlyle " Byron with shaggy breast." He has been one of
the strongest and most purifying prophets of our age, to
LORD BYRON AND HIS TIMES. 53
whom the gratitude of any generous pupil must be unfail-
ing. But his stern and solitary Stoic pride passed into
something of crabbed harshness. He has ever held up to
us Goethe as the great modern hero in life and in literature
While of Byron, hear what he says : " A strong man of
recent time fights little for any good cause anywhere, works
weakly as an English lord, weakly delivers himself from
such working, with weak despondency endures the cackling
of plucked geese at St. James', and sitting in sunny Italy
in his coach and four, writes over many reams of paper
the following sentence with variations, ' Saw ever the world
one greater or unhappier ? ' This was a sham strong man."
Now, if Byron's actual career be remembered and I
shall presently remind my readers of it this will seem
nothing but a marvellous and most unwarranted caricature.
Yet even when Byron is most absorbed in his own sorrow
and very surely he is not always so absorbed he is un-
consciously and by force of genius the mouthpiece and
representative of those who (like our own selves, how often
in this epoch of weary individualism !) feel " the weight and
burden of all this unintelligible world " pressing upon their
heart. He is the Human Soul, with infinite longings, that
nothing finite can satisfy, yet finding nought that it can
recognize as indeed infinite to rest upon. Cease your vain
whinings after enjoyment ! says Carlyle ; if you suffer, like
the Spartan boy conceal the ravening agony and say no-
thing. What right hast thou to happiness, even to being ?
Possess thy soul in patience and work ! This is noble and
well ; so far as it goes better than Byron But this in
Carlyle rests on a faith, such a faith as Byron had not.
And there are, perhaps, objections to this too stoical re-
pudiation of happiness. May it not tend to some undue
acquiescence in the unhappiness of others ? May it not
tend to repress that " enthusiasm of humanity," which must
at least include the desire of imparting happiness to all ? It
at any rate rather suggests fox and grapes. This ascetic
54 ESSAYS ON POETRY AND POETS.
independence of human sympathy and approbation, as of
all innumerable nature-provided external springs of enjoy-
ment, this haughty, assiduous self-culture, may possibly
result in a certain lonely callousness of heart, ungladdened
and ungraced with tenderly humane sensibilities, in a
certain stern self-satisfaction which may not really be more
noble than the self-loathing of a Manfred. "Thus I
trample on the pride of Plato," said Diogenes, treading on
the philosopher's purple robe. "With greater pride,
Diogenes," replied the sage.
In Carlyle, surely the bitter wailings over man's present
condition are even deeper than Byron's and fuily as mis-
anthropic while he hardly manifests the same generous
ardour of sympathy toward the efforts of mankind, however
ineffectual, to free themselves from oppression, and enter
upon the heritage of their manhood. Byron was a miserable
man amongst miserable men, but their helpful brother in the
blind groping toward light. This latter, indeed, Carlyle
strives and means to be ; and he is miserable enough ; but
perhaps he too much ignores the common and irrepressible
instincts of human nature, calling man to impossible heights
of renunciation and self-centred contentment, refusing to
aid them in attaining humbler human happiness more with-
in their reach, and the general development of those human
faculties, which they have a right to claim. A school-
master's rod for the foolish, naughty masses of men !
Surely the moral dragonnades of Carlyle's fierce invectives
against the criminal classes (in " Latter-Day Pamphlets ")
are almost inhuman 'in their undiscriminating pitilessness
further from Christ's " God be merciful to me, a sinner ! "
than anything of Byron's. But happiness is, though not
the whole of our being's end and aim, an integral part of it
What Byron lacked was a sane mind in a sane body. He
thirsted unduly after pure enjoyment, without that neces-
sary shadow of pain which must accompany it ; and he
did not, as Carlyle justly points out, face that pain so
LORD BYRON AND HIS TIMES. 55
courageously as he should have done. Yet a more iron
nature must allow for the acute sensibilities of such a
man; he was one nerve for pleasure or for pain to travel
over and surely such a nature is not without its rare uses
in the world. But the truth is (as we have lately learned)
that Carlyle did most of his cursing and swearing in
private, and Byron a good deal of his in public. That
was, on the whole, the difference between them. Besides,
albeit too ostentatiously, and with too much weeping,
he did defy and endure his anguish after all, as do his
heroes ; he, in addition, silencing it altogether at the last,
in order to set right the time " out of joint " (which
necessity, laid on him by Duty, this contemplative man,
like Hamlet, must have felt to be " a cursed spite "),
actually laying down the pen and taking up the sword
nay, more than the sword, for which he had some love, the
prosaic entanglement of practical politics also, for which he
had none, and showing therein admirable good sense. I
do not find that Goethe, for instance, had the smallest
inclination to do anything of the sort showed any keen
interest even in the piteous struggles of his fellow-men
that he left to his great rival, Schiller, to Fichte, and
Theodor Korner ; though indeed Goethe, in his most im-
mortal work, " Faust," as in " Werther," and his best drama,
" Goetz," is not the serene Olympian, the pure artist, which
is apparently what Mr. Carlyle admires in him.
But Byron knew not moderation or self-restraint ; he was
so spiritually infirm as to gratify every whim ; thus came
satiety and remorse. Mazzini, the illustrious Duty-loving
apostle of these latter days, whose life was one long sacrifice
for human welfare, and who yet never pandered for his
own advantage to popular errors, takes a far juster view of
Byron, and in spite of all his faults reverences in him not
only the great poet, but the noble man. Of his characters,
Mazzini says, " They are gifted with ability they know not
how to use ; with a power and energy they know not how
56 ESSAYS ON POETRY AND POETS.
to apply ; with a life whose purpose and aim they com-
prehend not. They are alone ; this is the secret of their
wretchedness and impotence. They thirst for good, but
cannot achieve it ; for they have no mission, no belief, no
comprehension of the world around them. They have
never realized the conception of humanity ; the continuity
of labour that unites all the generations into one whole ;
the common end and aim only to be realized by the com-
mon effort. The emptiness of the life and death of solitary
individuality has never been so powerfully and efficaciously
summed up as in the pages of Byron. His intuition of the
death of a form of society, men call wounded self-love ;
his sorrow for all, is misinterpreted as cowardly egotism.
Whilst Byron withered and suffered under a sense of the
wrong and evil around him, Goethe attained the calm I
cannot say of victory but of indifference. ' Religion and
politics,' said he, ' are a troubled element for art. I have
always kept myself aloof from them as much as possible.'
The day will come when democracy will remember what it
owes to Byron. I know no more beautiful symbol of the
future destiny and mission of Art than the death of Byron
in Greece. The holy alliance of poetry with the cause of
the people the union, still so rare, of thought and action
the grand solidarity of all nations in the conquest of the
rights ordained by God for all his children all that is
now the religion and the hope of the party of progress in
Europe, is gloriously typified in this image."
Indirectly, Kepler, Galileo, Descartes, Newton, Locke,
and Bacon ; more directly, Hobbes, Spinoza, and Pope ;
later still, Helvetius, Hume, Gibbon, Voltaire, Rousseau,
and the Encyclopaedists, had, as spokesmen of their time,
rudely shaken the venerable but decrepit fabrics of religion
and society because in truth the Divine Life once in
them was no longer there, was secretly creating for itself
newer and sounder habitations. The structure was unsound
at heart, eaten to the core, though it still might stand
LORD BYRON AND HIS TIMES. 57
externally whole and fair. Religion took the side of evil,
the side of the powerful oppressor, of the tyrant ; she
imposed dogmas, moreover, upon men, that daily grew
more incredible with the progress of discovery, and hoped
still to stunt the intellect and conscience of mankind with
bands and swaddling-clothes belonging to their infancy.
Europe felt the shock of revolution, and trembled. Never-
theless, when the allied nations had overthrown the mighty
dictator, Napoleon that Titan sprung from the loins of
revolution, governing in the name of the people, and at
least ostensibly in their interest, disposing of Europe in his
own anarchic fashion, with little regard to the consecrated
pretensions of ancient priests or ancient kings there came
a reaction, and lo ! the old orthodox spirit returned with
seven others more oppressive than itself. "The Holy
Alliance considered it not unholy to leave unfulfilled the
promise given to nations in the hour of trial, to beat down
by force of arms their right to self-government, which had
been bought at the price of much precious blood, and to
treat nations at their congresses like herds of cattle."
" When the Holy Alliance (says Gervinus) believed that it
had arrested for ever the aberrations of the spirit of revolu-
tion by the subjugation of France, then this English poet
knit again the thread, which a million of soldiers had been
called forth to sever for ever." The state of the world was
one great dissonance, and Byron, who possessed the special
organ of its expression, became the poet of this crisis.
That he had sacrificed his life for Greece and freedom,
surrounded his name with a halo of glory : this martyr-
death became an inspiring theme for poetry and passion.
And what, after all, if in this and other acts of his life, there
was some imaginative taste for artistic effect, some desire,
it may be, of applause ? Is that so very shocking ? Human
motives are mixed, and by mixed motives human progress
is secured. There are aspects of human affairs other than
the moral.
58 ESSAYS ON POETRY AND POETS.
Byron stood prominently before mankind, a man of high
social position, and even with aristocratic proclivities in
this, too, meeting his time half-way, for the reformers of
the Continent were often aristocratic like himself with
romantic and fascinating personality, a man of the world
as well as a cosmopolitan poet, obtruding his defiant revolt
and uncompromising individuality no less in life than in
poetry. An exile from England, Byron openly assisted
the Carbonari of Italy, and in every way proved himself
the friend of human freedom all over the world. No
wonder that the liberal youth of the Continent were stirred
profoundly by his words and example. Italy and Greece
are free. But how disappointing often were the results
of youthful enthusiasm and aspirations ! More fruit was
expected from sweeping political changes than could in the
slow growth of human history possibly result even if the
changes themselves were found practicable or beneficial,
and even if an ideal state could be created by any external
arrangement whatsoever. The kingdom of God is within.
A king may be a pauper in spirit, and a pauper may be
a king of men. Healthy desire for self-government was
repressed under tyrannical rulers where these retained or
regained the power, and here intelligent youth was forced
to champ the bit, resorting perforce to more animal, selfish,
and sordid outlets of activity. The boundless spirit of
discontent let loose over the world caused more unhappi-
ness than the former submissive acquiescence in any lot,
however degraded. The old world was passing from under
men's feet but where was the promised land ? Shouting
" freedom," men but " wore the name engraven on a heavier
chain. The sensual and the dark rebel in vain."
The right of private judgment, as vindicated by the
Renaissance and Reformation, was pushed to such an
extreme, that not so much the higher individual, with his
own special, rational idea, in essential harmony with all
others, was enthroned, but rather the capricious, anti-social,
LORD BYRON AND HIS TIMES. 59
disorganizing individual which exaggeration by inevitable
reaction leads to the riveting of new dogmatic chains upon
the limbs of unemancipated humanity, and so to renewed
triumph of corrupt hierarchies. In proportion to a man's
enlargement of intellect and intensity of sympathy was his
sorrow ; man was nay, still is a discord and burden to
himself that is, if he be more than a mere animal, or selfish
member of the privileged classes if his mind march in
harmony with the progress of the " world-spirit." So far
as in Byron's day the general conclusions of modern science,
born in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, shone for all,
they only served to flicker dim distrust from afar upon
time-honoured convictions and serviceable beliefs. For
Byron all is still doubt, negation, and despair. Nor can
he whistle, and chatter, and grin more or less complacently
and comfortably over the human welter, like a Voltaire or
a Diderot : in fact, the storm has burst since then ; one can
no longer nestle in old cosy nooks of courts that one is
helping to shake about the ears of one's children ; " After
us, the deluge," but the deluge has come. " Let us eat and
drink, for to-morrow we die," will not quite satisfy Rousseau
and Byron.
Yet negation and despair have never in any general
sense been so unmixed in England as they were with
Byron.* Since German criticism, and the development of
modern science, our scepticism is more profound and
common than before ; still it is more philosophical, quiet,
and discriminating than his, feeling its way, in however
tentative a manner, to a reconstruction of religion, not on
the whole attempting to shatter it altogether. Shelley, Cole-
ridge, Wordsworth, and Tennyson, for instance, poets of
faith, though they were ignored as long as possible, have now
* Those most distinguished poets, James Thomson, and Edgar Poe, are
distinctly exceptional in their tone. But we have become much more pessi-
mistic, dogmatic in denial, blank in agnosticism of late years. Idiosyncrasy
of temper, habit, and circumstance, however, explains much in the cases of
Leopardi, Schopenhauer, Poe, and Thomson.
60 ESSAYS ON POETRY AND POETS.
more influence over our spiritual life than Byron. Byron's
mocking, half-earnest, half-eighteenth-century temper is ill
in accordance with our present attitude ; scepticism is
reverent in an age, which has produced such earnest and
illustrious Christians as Newman and Maurice. But the
English public of Byron's own day were less tolerant of his
irreligion than the same public is now. The legal authori-
ties were on the point of refusing to protect his publisher's
copyright in the case of " Cain " and 'the " Vision of Judg-
ment." If Christianity is by our leading thinkers politely
ignored, at least it is ignored politely. Our tendency to
vindicate the glory and dignity of the body as against
orthodox asceticism is, however, a return in Byron's direc-
tion. And there are symptoms of reaction against that
elaborate, artificial affectation of poetic style, which is
characteristic of an age in England that calls itself practical
fairly domestic, devoted heart and soul to those material
gains, which involve, on the one hand, a population of
grimy native helots, who, being degraded from their higher
humanity, murmur, yet forbear from violence, and, on the
other, a population of Judases, ready to sell their very
Master (in the " dearest market ") for thirty pieces of silver,
or less each individual, and the whole nation being careless
of the rights or wrongs of any neighbour. From this sort
of public life our poets withdraw themselves into studies
and studios, there by the help of culture, criticism, and re-
vived antiquity, elaborating their native tongue, as a recent
critic in the Quarterly observes, into the most celestial of
Chinese ; in which I think we partly discern, indeed, the
result of richer thought and more complex imaginative
feeling, but chiefly that of deficient interest in action, and
deficient variety of true passion. Feeling and thought lose
themselves in tortuous labyrinths of wordy filigree, osten-
sibly provided for their habitat ; one sickly sentiment is
diluted homceopathically in oceans of what is called
" exquisite expression." The literary influences at work to
LORD BYRON AND HIS TIMES. 6 1
produce this result may be traced up to the sources I in-
dicated at the beginning. Though Lord Tennyson's lyrics
are among the most beautiful in the language, and he
himself is a master of true expression for he has much to
express indeed, his sovereignty over language and metre
is wonderful yet he has an occasional mannerism which
is dangerously catching, and which inferior writers are sure
to exaggerate. His high Miltonic standard, both of poetic
substance and artistic workmanship, however, has raised the
whole general tone of English writers and readers, and to
him we owe all grateful allegiance. But Byron had formed
his style on Pope and Dryden, two great models of clear,
nervous English ; and it would certainly be well if we
studied them more, together with Milton, Wordsworth,
Scott, and Byron himself.
Another word as to this element of welt-schmertz,
which the continental critics justly conceive to be so
eminently characteristic of Byron. Nearly all great writing,
we must remember, nearly all great art, has been sorrowful
or tragic. Even the favoured youthful Greeks, with their
healthful unconsciousness and exquisite instinct, in harmony
with their surroundings, once out of Homer's heroic age
(and there is high tragedy in Homer), have their great
dramatists composing terrible dramas of relentless, over-
whelming Fate. Turn to the grand Hebrew poets. What
of Isaiah, Jeremiah, Solomon ? Then, if we except our
own early poet, Chaucer, and examine the most illustrious
of Christian poets, we shall be led to the same conclusion.
Take Shakespeare, Dante, and Milton Shakespeare, with
all his rich humanity, and buoyant humour, how profoundly
sorrowful, how terribly tragic ! " Wo du das genie erblickst
erblickst du auch die martyr krone'' It was the Olympian
Goethe who said that. But our gods are not the pagan
Olympians. Our God is the Man of Sorrows ; and we
hold His life and death to be more godlike than any Greek
contentment with any present lot, however enviable. We
62 ESSAYS ON POETRY AND POETS.
ourselves suffer more ; new ideas, new imaginings, new
endeavours entail a heritage of more complex pain, bewil-
derment, and disappointment ; we can no longer lead the
gay, healthful life of a Greek ; and if we were ever so
favoured, how, since Christ, shall we be happy when so vast
a proportion of our brethren are miserable, for has not
Christ taught us that even helots and barbarians are our
brethren ? " Une immense esperance a traverse" la terre "
henceforth unrest is the law of our existence ; and what if
the Star of Hope have set ? It is here, we believe ; but for
Byron, labouring in the deep trough of a dark billow of the
world-ocean, the huge travelling wave of sorrow had blotted
it away ! And how, asks Mr. Symonds, in his brilliant
poet's book on the Greek poets, shall a race in its maturity,
with centuries of sad history behind it, be joyful ? Yet is
there much of glory and joy in this history. Nor are we
in our old age. For see how in Byron's day Nelson and
Wellington fought ; how we have taken and held India,
and colonized the world ; how Livingstone and our great
explorers penetrate the heart of mysterious continents ;
while ghostly ramparts of the old world's seclusion fall at
our mere presence, as those strong walls of Jericho fell before
the trumpet-blast of Israel ! * But in advanced civilizations,
with over-swollen luxury of the few, and contrasted misery
of the many, the noblest must be saddest especially
students, who live that unhealthy life which exaggerated
division of labour, and a sedentary habit, has entailed upon
them. To this must be added a peculiar, wild, melancholy
characteristic of Northern peoples in their damp, chill
atmosphere, and dark, romantic scenery that melancholy
which we feel in solemn purple mountains, umbrageous
forests, turbulent grey seas, and which has passed alike
into the primitive national songs, into the glory of Gothic
cathedrals, into the taciturn, rugged character of our common
* Franklin, Gordon, Lawrence, Havelock, Edwardes, Watt, Stevenson,
these also are names for a nation to be proud of !
LORD BYRON AND HIS TIMES. 63
people. Moreover, in Byron there was a lingering belief
in that very distinctive orthodoxy which he denied even
in the doctrine of everlasting punishment, and a revengeful
God, which he denounced so vehemently those Pagan
monstrosities which the world will be well rid of at what-
ever cost. Good service as he has done us herein, these
dogmas still manifestly haunted him. Nor had Byron the
power of thought necessary for shaping for himself our
eternal Christianity anew ; but in the form of some illogical
semi-theistic fatalism, Calvinism still appears in his writings,
in his conversations, in his conduct.
The concentrated gloom of many Puritan generations
on the one hand, and many half-insane lonely barbaric
nobles on the other, haunted his brain like some phantom
mist, waiting only to be summoned into palpable Horror
by individual experiences of the man which assuredly
were not wanting ! In the very face of his unbelief, nay,
in the very face of his personally unsensitive conscience as
to those carnal excesses which Christianity brands with
severest reprobation, his sense of guilt is in some moods
manifestly overwhelming ; almost equal to that of St. Paul
or, if you prefer it, reminding one of Judas.
Of Byron personally we have but to remember that
his own early youth was nourished by stern, dark influences
of Northern sea and sky, and heath-clad rocky mountain,
in a land haunted by weird legend ; pride of race was
in his blood pride of the old Barons Byron, and the yet
more illustrious ancestry of his impoverished mother ; she
who taught the sullen, brooding child to be so conscious
of his high position, and to resent the disproportion between
his fallen fortunes and the greatness of his house ; she who,
while injudiciously fond, yet taunted him with his lameness
when angry a lameness that so treated might well help
to make him bitter. What an education was this boy's,
who needed such extrajudicious and kindly moral training !
But fierce and ungovernable as his mother's moods were,
64 ESSAYS ON POETRY AND POETS.
his grandfather's had been the same he who killed his
neighbour in a savage duel by candle-light, and lived after-
wards, grimly secluded in the old abbey at Newstead,
shunned and gloomy, and accused of half-insane eccentri-
cities (himself a very Lara), as the boy heard when he and
his mother arrived at their ancestral abode, so ancient,
lonely, and ruinous. With dim traditions and ghost-tales
of old monks hovering about the place, and emblazoned
arms of warriors on the windows, what wonder if this boy
poet imbibed an air of mystery and mediaeval romance ?
A very exquisite description has he given of his early
home in " Don Juan," showing how profoundly it had im-
pressed him. As for his father, he was a handsome roue,
like Don Juan himself. How must the modern revolu-
tionary spirit have contended in this man for mastery with
the temper of a haughty English aristocrat the haughtier
for his poverty with the epicurean tastes, moreover, of a
beautiful dandy, and petted child of high society ! * But
he needed the stimulus of insult, of rejection, of opprobrium,
to rouse the slumbering lion, to develop his mighty genius
in the direction proper to it.
The " Hours of Idleness " are melancholy and querulous,
but they have no concentrated bitterness or agony. He
* There was indeed the feudal independence of a lawless baron piercing
through his post-revolutionary humanitarianism, both in conduct and in poetry.
It is true that he hated the stupid traditional orthodoxy of Legitimists, but he
sincerely liked those imposing despotisms that are on one side the modern
offspring of old tyrannies. He admired Napoleon ; loved to imitate and be
compared with him ; also Ali Pacha, and thought of setting up a Pachalik
himself on some Greek island ; if he had been offered the crown of Greece at
the congress of Salona, to attend which he was on the point of setting out
when he died, Trelawny and Dr. Elze both think he would have accepted it.
He burst out crying from flattered vanity when his name was first read out
with " Dominus " before it at Harrow and hated people to call him by his name
without the "Lord." He quarrelled with our ambassador at Constantinople
on a point of precedence would not land at Malta because he expected
a salute from the forts, and finally sneaked into La Valetta without it, as Gait
relates with a chuckle. The pomp of his travelling arrangements after the
separation was excessive and worse than absurd, for the meanest thing he ever
did was to use his wife's fortune after that event.
LORD BYRON AND HIS TIMES. 65
says himself, he should " never have worn the motley
mantle of the poet, if some one had not told him to forego
it." The taste of his true quality comes out first in the
" English Bards ; " though even that is chiefly noticeable
for wounded vanity, and talent in the region of sarcasm.
After this he travelled, on his return publishing successively
the " Tales," and " Childe Harold." In these he put him-
self forward under thin literary disguises as a melancholy
hero of romance, and a roue : the result being, that he
"woke one morning and found himself famous." Never
was there such sudden and general popularity, partly due,
no doubt, to the fact that he was a peer, and a parti who
mixed freely in society, with the special recommendations
of beautiful face and figure, " interesting " genius, spirituel
conversation, and the vague reputation of being charmingly
wicked ; so he got as much petting as any reigning belle,
and gave himself airs accordingly. But he was soon to
pay the penalty of good fortune. He had been over-
praised for the work actually performed, and he had,
moreover, made enemies among men and women by his
successes, and his affectations, though chiefly, no doubt,
by his sterling merits, which men, and especially literary
men, were not likely to forgive. He had married a truly
excellent and noble lady, who perhaps wished to reform
him, but soon retired in disgust from a task which she
found so far beyond her powers. This marriage, with little
affection, and with no mutual comprehension or toleration,
was soon broken up ; and then, no one knows exactly how,
the darkest rumours gathered about the husband, bursting
anon over his head in a tempest of most virtuous execra-
tion, wherein the notoriously sensitive holiness of English
society in the days of the Regency showed itself, like
Hamlet's father, " much offended." Byron, indeed, fancied
there might be some cant in all that, having himself seen
something of this holiness when it sat knee to knee with
him, cheek by jowl with him, drinking, and ogling though
F
66 ESSAYS ON POETRY AND POETS.
Mrs. Stowe appears to believe in it. The fact is, he had
no business to be a genius, and to sin out of the regular
grooves in which it is proper and respectable for good
society to sin. So villainous fashionable seducers, and
fraudulent tradesmen, " compounded for sins they were
inclined to, by damning those they had no mind to," waving
him aside as less pious than themselves. And he who
confessed that the meanest thing's blame gave him more
pain than the highest man's praise gave him pleasure
how must he have winced under the insult and oppro-
brium that raged around him, even though in his heart
he contemned most of the amateur inquisitors who
inflicted punishment. The finest skins are the most sensi-
tive what a triumph for vermin ! No doubt there are
men of cold, serene, self-possessed temperament, who are
as thoroughly independent of their fellows as Byron pro-
fessed to be, but, as has been said, these do not print so
many passionate cantos to inform their fellows of the fact.
Why, he winced even when a nameless jackass donned the
lion's-skin of some ephemerally popular review, and brayed
at his poetry from under it. He could not be content with
enduring fame, and the consciousness of good work done ;
but must needs clutch at immense and immediate reputa-
tion, though that was to be shared with him by jugglers
and acrobats, literary or otherwise. Hence in part the
blot of sensationalism, to catch the uneducated taste for
gaudiness of effect, in his work.
Byron, moreover, burnt the candle at both ends. Think
what an amount of intellectual labour and that of a
creative kind of a fierce, emotional, imaginative kind
this man went through before he was thirty-seven ! How
bulky are his works ; and in addition we have the long
destroyed memoirs, the innumerable letters sparkling with
wit, teeming with observation. Besides, he lived always,
and lived moreover in early youth, the life of a rout. These
conditions alone are sufficient, when we take into account
LORD BYRON AND HIS TIMES. 6/
his highly nervous, excitable, delicate organization, and
the deleterious amount of spirits he drank, to explain his
fits of depression, his moments of anguish. He was subject,
moreover, to constant fevers, than which nothing is more
depressing. So that on the whole, considering the utterly
different nature and circumstances of the two men, it does
not seem as if Mr. Carlyle's reiterated reproach to Byron,
that he was no stoic, amounted to very much.
I own I think the " Tales " are underrated by modern
critics. All their defects may be granted they are frag-
mentary, the plots are ill-constructed, sometimes almost
nil, they are monotonous, and, above all, there is a certain
theatrical hollowness about them, which is indeed the
vulnerable Achilles'-heel of Byron for his modern detractors.
Nevertheless, the episodes, even if they be only episodes,
are in themselves wonderfully astir with wild life and
turbulent passion ; the verse is generally musical and rapid,
while often we have a pause of softer lyrical beauty with an
exquisite perfume of its own, to which Scott far more
rarely attains. Thus almost all the passages (though they
can be detached and recited as separate lyrics) in the
"Giaour" are beautiful, and how lovely are the opening
lines about the lovers in " Parisina " as well as that incident
of the page bending over dying Lara ! The " Corsair," on
the whole, seems to me the finest and most spirited of this
series ; it has in it all the freshness of youth and buoyant
enjoyment, as well as the very spirit of romance and
troubadour love ; it has women, charming, beautiful, tender,
and passionate, pathetic passages, and some of the finest
lines that have ever been written about the sea, even by
Byron, the bounding clarion notes of the pirate's opening
song " O'er the glad waters of the dark blue sea." By
some able modern critics, indeed, accustomed to our
thoughtful, metaphysical, academic, or domestic strains, all
except one phase of Byron's mighty genius (that of " Don
Juan," and " Vision of Judgment ") has been abandoned,
68 ESSAYS ON POETRY AND POETS.
on the ground that it is theatrical, and conventional ; that
his heroes are not heroic. Now this has a great deal of
truth in it, and Byron acknowledges himself that these
early works were too sentimental and stagey. Still, for all
that, something may be said even in favour of their general
conception, in favour of that central ideal which gave them
such unity as they possess.
It does not follow, because a myriad dunces have
mouthed, and still mouth in the trappings of a great actor,
and we weary of these trappings, that he was not a great
actor. What astonished Walter Scott was this that Byron,
though in " Childe Harold," and we may even say in "Cain"
and " Manfred," as well as in the " Tales," he continued to
represent only one human figure as the centre of all, could
still succeed in forcibly arresting men's attention. In truth,
he wears the tragic mask of an actor in old Greek tragedy
set to one monotonous, terrible, or sorrowful expression :
his heroes are ideals of human misfortune, sin, woe, and
passionate power, that partly recall those of Greek drama.
This gloomy Byronic hero is now the favourite type of low
melodrama in cheap fiction and on the stage a capital sub-
ject, moreover, for burlesque. Nevertheless, he was at that
time a perfectly legitimate and fascinating hero of romance,
by virtue of certain obvious and indestructible tendencies to
admire, very common in human nature. He was, in fact,
a personage of the same order as Hamlet, Timon, Faust,
Wagner's Tannhauser, and Fouque's magical creation, Sin-
tram. He must be accepted as a modern descendant of
mediaeval Barons and Minstrels truly an evil modern
Knight, with conscience restless from remorse, with high
gifts of intellect and imagination, thirsting for joy and for
pure love, yet clogged with satiety, withered with disap-
pointment, endowed, however, with many knightly virtues,
in all the pride of blasted beauty and high lineage degraded ;
even in the bosom of Nature, the Healer whom he adores
as Divine, haunted by melancholy wrecks of his own spiritual
LORD BYRON AND HIS TIMES. 69
life. This semi-knight, and semi-Miltonic Satan, is an em-
bodiment of rebellion against God and man ; yet of recon-
ciliation with both through love of Mercy and Justice ; half
in harmony with the modern spirit, half in harmony with the
ancient that is passing away ; it has, moreover, even a
moral beauty of its own, as of a human ruin stern and
lonely in proud decay, festooned with some of Nature's
fairest perennial flowers. But it is eminently romantic
and picturesque Gothic, fantastic, all light and shadow,
mystery, and vast space, flushed here with gorgeous colours,
there grey and severe neither "classical," nor flippant,
courtly, and didactic, like poetry of the eighteenth century ;
nor moralized, and beginning to be reconciled in its own
fashion with the old faith, like Lord Tennyson's and some
of our best poetry now a transition poetry of tumult and
revolt, of volcanic, aggressive individualism, half reverting
to the lawlessness and anarchy of primaeval societies ;. to
the Ishmaelite whose hand is against every man ; the child
of Nature asserting himself against the decadence of an
artificial, decrepit, tyrannical civilization, wrongfully usurp-
ing the titles and thunders of the Most High. This is as
truly romantic as Spenser, Walter Scott, Ariosto, or the
Minnesingers. " Faust," and " Manfred " are in fact the
legitimate descendants of this mediaeval poetry even of
the early Mysteries and Miracle-Plays. Moreover, Spenser,
and the Italian romantic poets, are quite as luscious in
description as Byron ; that element they owe in common
to the study of later classical literature Theocritus, Virgil,
Ovid and some of it to that of the East, Byron personally
having a good deal of the soft, luxurious Eastern in him,
developed by personal experience in eastern climes. It
must be recollected further that the old heroes of romance,
for the most part sans peur, were very seldom sans reproche.
But the elements of moral mystery, tragical destiny, high
gifts rendered abortive and a curse to the possessor, and
what may be termed the more superficial graces of these
/O ESSAYS ON POETRY AND POETS.
heroes, all these, wrought up with the skill of a Byron,
whose " own " the " song " was, form a fine subject for
artistic presentation in the romantic region of art ; they
appeal to the imagination of mankind, to such imaginations
as those of Goethe, Shelley, Coleridge, and Scott ; although,
indeed, the perpetual repetition of such portraitures showed
the narrow range at that period of the poet's power. His,
indeed, were not self-possessed, self-sacrificing heroes of the
highest type, like Schiller's William Tell. But it is not
necessary to hold them up as models for imitation, even
though Byron may have a vain, self-conscious weakness for
these violent, ill-regulated, selfish characters. At any rate,
however low morally his poetic ideal might be (and one of
his ideals was Washington, as he tells us in a splendid
stanza of " Childe Harold," and as we might know by his
life), the question for criticism is how far his figures are
portrayed with the hand of a master ; and it was certainly
because he could identify himself with them in some moods
that he portrayed them so well. Whatever an artist can
render artistically interesting by art, that is a proper subject
for art ; it becomes imaginative truth ; but the error of
certain writers has been to distort some lower elements
of human nature by making them relatively too prominent,
and not duly contrasting them with other elements. Byron
made himself in " Childe Harold," not too obtrusively, the
centre of his graphic and imaginative descriptions of coun-
tries over which centuries of stirring and splendid history
expand wings of dusky glory, and surely the brooding,
melancholy figure was no inappropriate centre ; a beautiful
genius of death, of sorrow, and of unrest Ever he held up
before the world a vast and lurid Human Image, but too
thoroughly aware of its own dignity, and contemning others
herein reverting to the philosophic pride .of elect spirits
as inculcated by Paganism, and adapted thence by doctors
of theology into Christianity, under the guise of religious
Pharisaism (but retrograding from the true Christian ideal
LORD BYRON AND HIS TIMES. 7 1
of election to universal service), and now reappearing in
Academic halls under the name of" Culture," as intellectual
pride scarcely malignant, yet formed to be the ruin of all
who approached ; like Job, deserted in his calamity, yet
justifying himself in the face of Heaven as against hypo-
critical moral verdicts of his fellows ; communing alone in
whirlwind and cloud with phantoms of departed heroes,
and vanished empires Harold, in starlit palaces of the
Caesars, among ivied rents of ruin, or upon the solitary
seashore Manfred upon some desolate Alp, conversing
familiarly with spirits of the elements ; for whom the very
countenance of Love herself has been contorted into the
Gorgon-face of Crime Crime with fury features and snaky
hair. In what terrible harmony is this figure, half-man,
half-demon, with these blasted crags that surround him,
born of old in throes of earthquake and in fire, snowed
upon out of the slow centuries, shrouded in oceans of
implacable ice ! So looms this awful Image out of the
storm-cloud, as though stricken with the curse of a hateful
immortality ; wandering through all lands, bearing the
burden of a world's sorrow, wailing the wail of human
misery, like Prometheus on Caucasus, scarred with Heaven's
lightning, and blistered with His frost, agonizing for sins
inherited and imposed ; but, alas ! bearing no message for
human redemption ; no conscious martyr-conqueror of
sacred fire from divine altars, wherewithal to regenerate
the race ; only lifting ever a red right hand with Cain, and
huge scowling armies of the outcast rebel leader of all
who are miserable, fate-stricken, and oppressed testifying
in the face of God and men that all is not well, as the com-
fortable have decreed, though they feast with a smile over
buried bodies of their victims.
It seems to me uncritical to draw too broad a line of
demarcation between the early and later works of Byron,
though it is unquestionably right to prefer the later ; but
the same identical, intense, passionate, susceptible, scornful
/2 ESSAYS ON POETRY AND POETS.
soul appears in all. And it is part of the very essence of
this strange shroud of romantic, half-chivalrous mystery
wherewith Byron loves to invest his characters, and through
them indirectly his own personality, that there should glow,
as it were, doubtfully through the folds thereof a certain
deadly lurid light of guilt unnameable, whose inborn fatality
overwhelms the soul with despair, and leaves the man no
rest. This is especially the element that is now inveighed
against as poisonous and satanic now indicated as clap-
trap and humbug.
But it may be argued that as Byron has used the blood-
red hue, it is a perfectly legitimate, as well as effective,
element of tragic interest in his work of art. Toned down
to harmony with other features of the picture, represented
as in some sense a mysterious doom guilt, and the misery
which it works in a soul not destitute of virtue and aspira-
tions after a higher life these elements in Byron appear to
me neither immoral, nor inartistic, nor ridiculous. Is it
the duty of the artist always to hold up before us models
of excellence for imitation ? If so, of course we must con-
demn Byron, and enthrone Miss Edgeworth or Mr. Tupper.
But then, what of Othello and lago, Macbeth, Lady Mac-
beth, the Duchess of Malfi, and most of those other mixed
humanities of Elizabethan drama ? What of CEdipus and
Medea ? indeed, of all the greatest masters in imaginative
creation ? Byron's representations do not, I think, ignore
the difference between good and evil, any more than those
of Shakespeare do, though they may indicate laxity in his
own estimate of what is right and wrong, in certain respects.
I do not see, for instance, that he violates the conditions
under which evil may be represented, even as laid down in
the essays of Mr. R. H. Hutton ; only that Mr. Hutton
perhaps insists too much (by implication) on the moral
aspect of a subject being always prominently presented
That Byron dwells too much on the passionate, and so far
weak class of characters, and that these are not sufficiently
LORD BYRON AND HIS TIMES. 73
balanced by other types may be admitted. Herein he proves
himself an artist inferior to the greatest. But his heroes may
point a moral while they adorn a tale. There certainly arose
at that time Byron and Rousseau contributing much to the
phenomenon a kind of priesthood, which, claiming to
displace the old, showed itself scarcely more tolerant and
tender in its bearing toward the common people, in favour
of whose rights its members had ostensibly arisen, than
that traditional priesthood against whose tyranny they so
iconoclastically declaimed. Every "man of genius" became
a sort of supreme pontiff without a faith, whose whims, and
weaknesses, and peculiar fancies were to be held as sacred
a pretension perhaps more dangerous than those of a
regular priesthood, since these were at least defined and
confirmed by venerable authorities in the world's face.
Sensitive young persons, moreover, persuaded themselves
too easily that they were within this privileged indefinable
circle, being naturally eager to claim a right of participating
in such agreeable immunities ; so that the ranks of this new
priesthood did not want for candidates, whose credentials
there existed unfortunately no recognized bishop once for
all to verify. Doubtless, then, too much emphasis was laid
by Rousseau, Byron, and Shelley, upon mere sentiment,
impulse, and passion, as distinguished from conscience,
reason, and deliberate self-control. So far as Byronism is
to be regarded as an ideal, it is certainly a low one ; though,
at the same time, it is unquestionably a higher than that of
the average Mammon-worshipping Briton, and on the whole
advantageous as a corrective of his ; while Byron sets before
the Englishman, assuredly, certain high qualities for which
the elite of his nation have been deservedly celebrated, and
not least that aristocracy to which the poet belonged. Nor
is it amiss that the average man should learn to reverence
genius and superiority, and the glories of external Nature.
If Byron lays undue stress on such advantages as those
of rank and high lineage on those of beauty, strength,
74 ESSAYS ON POETRY AND POETS.
prowess, or refinement methinks his work is full of counter-
balancing influences ; and these things themselves may not
be quite so despicable as commonplace, levelling-down
democracy supposes. Science is teaching us not unduly to
despise race, as instinct had taught us before ; moreover,
since soul and body are but reverse faces of the same living
man or woman, I doubt beauty of body being so execrable
a thing as ill-favoured Methodism would persuade us.
Then, again, though the protest is a healthy one which
vigorous moralists, like Mr. Kingsley, have made against
that foolish, mischievous notion, that men of genius are
privileged in their errors and weaknesses, instead of possess-
ing their high gifts for purposes of human service, we must
not altogether forget that virtue is not knowledge or sensi-
bility, but rather, a due balance of the faculties under a
moral sense. Artistic genius is, on the other hand, a very
uncommon sensibility and corresponding faculty dominating
the possessor : it would certainly be well if with this were
always associated that balance and moral sense we call
virtue. But is it always so, and is it likely to be generally
so ? In proportion as sympathies and susceptibilities are
acute in one direction, must there be danger of undue pre-
dominance ; and in proportion to their variety will be the
probability of some one interfering now and again with the
claims of another. When a man feels a multitude of con-
flicting impulses, aspirations, and longings, he must be
endowed with an exceptionally virtuous spirit in order for
him to keep the middle path of virtue as securely and
invariably as another. But it does not follow that he must
be so endowed. He sees life, and a special phase of life
haloed with the aureole of imagination ; the reality disap-
points him : he then revolts against his condition, and seeks
some other, not always with due regard for the claims of a
partner, nor with the tender long-suffering he owes her.
His mobility of temperament, and ardour of imagination
are in arms against his constancy and duty.
LORD BYRON AND HIS TIMES. 75
That men of genius have, for the most part, been un-
happy in their domestic relations has been often affirmed
and explained, and perhaps cannot well be denied. Happy
are they who have proved exceptions ! happy in the noble,
gentle partners God gave them, and possibly in their own
highly gifted moral natures. But I do not see why sinners
of genius should be inveighed against as ipso facto greater
sinners than average men. Shakespeare, for instance, gives
one the notion of complete sanity, and balanced universality
in genius ; yet what we know of his history, and what
we read in the Sonnets does not favour the idea of a
perfectly proper person, who could have written perfectly
proper articles in the Saturday Review. There is no use
blinking the fact, moreover, that riot, self-indulgence, and
the irregular life Byron lived made him just the great
specific poetic personality he was the very interpreter of
his time. He drew more than any poet from personal ex-
perience, and his strongly marked passionate, wandering
career gave him the materials of his strongest and intensest
poetry. What would this man have done if he had " lived
at home and at ease ? " if he had gone out shooting all his
life with Sir Ralph Milbanke, and only listened over his
wine to " that damnable monologue which elderly gentle-
men are pleased to call conversation ? " He might have
gone to church at Kirkby Mallory on Sunday, fulfilling in
every way the decalogue, and the whole duty of an English-
man ; but he would not have written the concluding cantos
of " Childe Harold," " Cain," " Manfred," or " Don Juan ; "
he would not have been Byron ; for Sorrow and Sin trod
his spirit as their wine-press, and lo ! the blood-red wine of
Genius, with omnipotent aroma, expressed in bitter anguish
and boundless despair. " They learn in sorrow what they
teach in song." All honour to " deaneries," and " angels "
in balmorals, and clerical lawns for croquet. But volcanoes
and earthquakes too are needed, or they would not be.
" Wrong " we may brand the volcano, with its devastation
76 ESSAYS ON POETRY AND POETS.
of human cereals, dwelling-houses, and properties in general
very wrong indeed ; still " stormy wind," as well as gentle
breeze, "fulfilleth His word." All are not fitted for the
domestic ideal, though only fools or knaves fail to feel that,
when fulfilled by high human natures, it is the very noblest,
as, surely with one dear woman and sweet children, it
is happiest ; the obvious and true ideal of our civilized
majority. But in some there remains the wild blood of
the nomade, and dweller in tents of Ishmael ; these, whether
they be artists or explorers, soldiers or sailors, have their
true Bohemian function elsewhere, and are simply thrown
away upon drawing-rooms and deaneries, however decorous.
There are, too, for that matter, women who must be single,
and are better so ; Aspasias here and there it may be ;
students and devotees of knowledge, monks, ascetics, and
such-like abnormal persons ; hero-martyrs on occasion of
some ideal cause ; none of them fitted for the honourable
encumbrance of a family ; yet it may easily happen that
some of these will mistake their vocation, or perish in the
vain attempt to reconcile vocations that prove incompatible.
Let not, however, what one has called our "unlovely
temple of comfort " be regarded as though it were the very
temple of God !
But it must have been with some sense of triumphant
humour that Byron (he was a wag, and this must always
be borne in mind) proceeded to dispose his magician's robe
of stormful misanthropy in becoming folds around him,
and, positively by flaunting it all sulphurous with the crime
he had been banished for in the face of implacable society,
brought this stern stepmother to his feet dissolved in re-
pentant tears ! Now, I am far from believing that this
remorseful guilt was merely invented for purposes of art ;
it is so essential to the personality he generally delineates,
which is substantially his own. Byron is chiefly a lyrical
poet ; and I cannot think that he was either immaculate,
or the fiend which Mrs. Stowe, and other virtuous writers
LORD BYRON AND HIS TIMES. 77
have delineated. But an artist differs from others, in that
he lives a double life of experience and imagination, the
first proving so much material for the second.
When a man's life is so much before us, as he evidently
intended it should be, when he has deliberately put his life
into his poetry, we cannot ignore it. If the editor of
Macmillatfs Magazine had not expressed himself so happy
to introduce Mrs. Stowe's " strange story " to the British
public, that might have been left alone ; but Dr. Elze, and
even Saturday Reviewers have discussed it ; so I shall here
allude to it in passing.
Byron avers that he never seduced a woman, by which
I understand that he never took advantage of a young
girl's innocence, deceiving her to her injury. But it is
conceivable that he did not feel, any more than Shelley,
precisely the same instinctive attractions and repulsions
as the majority of mankind in sexual regions. Shelley
deliberately defends incest, and Byron certainly does some-
thing of the same sort in " Cain." I think with Mr. Rossetti
that the evidence on this head is so conflicting that we
cannot condemn him. Mrs. Stowe says Lady Byron told
her that he confessed and justified the crime to her. I
cannot help thinking that Lady Byron unwittingly exag-
gerated this and many other circumstances of their unfortu-
nate union, in talking matters over with intimate friends, and
brooding over her wrongs. So admirable a man of genius,
our national glory, and a noble lady of such rare excellence,
with so many admirable gifts, as all who knew her agree
(who but fool or knave dare deny them ?), alas ! what an
irony of Fate to bring just these two together ! Ascetic
purity face to face with sensuality incarnate ! If she
" wanted one sweet weakness, to forgive," how much self-
restraint, and chivalrous, affectionate service did he not
want ? His ideas and actions were revolting to her, his
very passionate impulsiveness was so ; when he broke a
valuable watch out of vexation at their pecuniary embar-
78 ESSAYS ON POETRY AND POETS.
rassment, this seemed to her one symptom of madness, as
did his other eccentricities also ; he, because she persistently
rubbed his fur the wrong way, and was so rigidly implacable,
became exasperated, painted himself to her in the blackest
of colours, and delighted the more to shock her. The
Guiccioli allows that he confessed to an unusual warmth of
manner towards his sister even in the presence of Lady
Byron, which familiarity is, it will be noticed, the only proof
Lady Byron gave to Mrs. Stowe (for the nonsense about a
child, since so amply refuted, I cannot but suppose Mrs.
Stowe must have misunderstood). This unusual warmth
in a fiery nature like his, where the ordinary demarcations
of affection and passion are not so definitely marked as in
most men, is conceivable, and would perfectly explain Lady
Byron's charge, especially as there were arguments between
them, and he would be likely obstinately to justify himself
even accuse himself of actions he had not committed. His
own heated imagination even may have magnified his
offence especially when he viewed it under the influence
of Lady Byron, he himself not clearly distinguishing his
strong affection from passion under the lurid horror re-
flected from the conscience of society. For Lady Byron
evidently did possess influence over him ; he respected her
greatly, and it is probable even that he drew her likeness
in one of the most exquisite descriptions ever penned of a
pure woman, that of Aurora Raby in " Don Juan." He
was eminently mobile and susceptible, and had there not
been too much mutual repulsion in these two natures, had
there been true love, she might have permanently influ-
enced him ; but she had her own reasons for giving up the
task so soon. He seems to have been often cold and cruel
to her at any rate her own instinctive aversions, and
perhaps fear for her daughter, worked powerfully upon her ;
but when her influence was upon him, he would feel as she
did. This, and the execration of society, if only unbridled
imagination had ever transgressed normal limits, would
LORD BYRON AND HIS TIMES. 79
suffice to fill him with very hell-fire of anguish and remorse,
especially as he never succeeded in shaking off that orthodox
creed against which he rebelled. Thus in " Manfred " we
have the most absorbing love (what can be more intense
than the passionate invocation of Manfred to the spirit of
his sister Astarte ?) steeped in self-accusing despair unutter-
able for the injury he may have done her, for the doom he
may have brought upon her in the other life, yea, for her
very love which he may have forfeited, that human love
which is his all in all ! His infinite is the finite, and on
the bosom of the finite he falls with infinite yearning a
bosom that crumbles in his embrace, so that he falls, falls
ever in the void ! But, in sooth, the mere accusation and
ban of civilized society might be sufficient to inflame Byron's
imagination with the idea of such a situation ; while his
own morbid pleasure in self-accusations of uncommon guilt
might have been almost enough originally to rivet such
charges upon himself, till he at last deluded even himself
into believing them. Mrs. Stowe's version of his reasons
for circulating stories about the separation only among his
intimates is surely very uncharitable. He might be too in-
continent to suppress these altogether, and yet might, out
of lingering regard for his wife, wish to imitate her quasi-
reticence, which, after all, was a 27/tf.rz-reticence chiefly ;
when he worked himself into a fury about his " wrongs," he
would, indeed, say anything, but, knowing he exaggerated,
with caution. He was a libertine and such men are not
as delicate as they should be a literary libertine, who
habitually made reprehensible confidences about his own
most private affairs. At times, from his fear of further
public ignominy if these charges became still more definite
than they were, knowing what Lady Byron believed, whether
truly or falsely, and had told to some persons, he might even
act in the spirit of such a threat as that which he is reported
to have used, alluding to " Caleb Williams," that she should
bear all the blame of their separation. Yet, on the other
80 ESSAYS ON POETRY AND POETS.
hand, he constantly affirmed that she was not to blame ;
but he naturally shrank from such definite charges as would
have been brought against him in a public court, knowing
that it might be difficult to refute them beyond controversy.
Here, as everywhere, he was made up of contradictions
insufficiently harmonized : he was a child of impulse, yet
could often give impulse and emotion a calculated turn.
What could be more inconsistent than to poison the public
mind by dark innuendoes against himself, in order to make
people stare, and be " interesting," and then to rant, and
rave, and lament in the most eloquent poetry when the
public took him at his word ? " Self-torturing sophist " he
was, like Rousseau. How he longed for love and tran-
quillity, and profound affection, and home, and children,
and how the demons within him drove him ever out of
sight of shore ! Such spiritual weakness arising from want
of harmony and balance must ever produce misery. A
recent writer has said that what proves him a thoroughly
bad man is his abusing one mistress to another ; but these
intrigues must not be judged like profound affairs of the
heart ; a libertine's mistress is not likely to spare her lover
after the connection is over, any more than her lover to
spare her. Byron was not spared in " Glenarvon," for
instance.
Byron somewhere enumerates the crimes of which
rumour had accused him, wonderful to say, with a curious
mixture of complacency, amusement, and yet by no means
affected indignation ; among others he mentions those of
Tiberius, and Heliogabalus. Assuredly some of his own
expressions, taken together with certain incidents of his
career, may quite as easily have exposed him to scandal
and exaggerations of this nature also. A cynical, unsocial
person is never very leniently regarded by his neighbours,
and genius seems " something uncanny " to the million. All
his friendships, he affirms, were passionate. The " Hours of
Idleness " abound with passionate addresses to his friends.
LORD BYRON AND HIS TIMES. . 8 1
" Shall fair Euryalus pass by unsung ? "
" Thy mind, in union with thy beauteous form,
Was gentle, but unfit to stem the storm," etc.
Of Lord Clare, who spent whole summer afternoons
with him on the tomb in Harrow churchyard, he writes
in 1821, "I never hear the word Clare without "a beating
of the heart even now ; " and his record of their unexpected
meeting on the road between Imola and Bologna that year
may well be unintelligible to persons of less intense and
fiery temperament. At Cambridge he was deeply attached
to a young chorister, and wore a cornelian heart which the
boy had given him. At Newstead, also, he felt more than
- usually warm friendship for the son of one of his tenants ;
and on his second visit to Athens we hear nothing of the
" maid," his " life," but his heart went forth to a poor youth
named Nicolo Giraud, the son of a widow ; while there are
some curious expressions in a letter of Shelley about his
life at Venice. We can imagine what malevolent gossip
might make of all this ; but is there any proof that it in-
dicates more than the extravagances of a nature far more
impulsive and comprehensive in its range of emotions, than
is to be met with every day ? Then again, while on the
one hand, he was brave and manly, much addicted to, and
skilled in physical exercises, devoted to outdoor and athletic
pursuits, on the other, he had a very feminine element in
his character, as in his person. Hunt sneers at the rings
he loved to display upon his fingers, and Ali Pacha pleased
him by praising his curling hair, together with the aristo-
cratic delicacy of his small ears and white hands. He was
once taken for a woman in disguise, and in " Don Juan "
he draws an attractive picture of the beautiful hero dressed
as an Eastern princess. Not only women, but even men
could not escape the magic of his fascination, and Lord
Holland's little son called him "the gentleman with the
beautiful voice." His countenance, like his spirit, was extra-
femininely mobile, says a lady, and he could look positively
G
82 ESSAYS ON POETRY AND POETS.
beautiful one moment, but positively ugly the next ; surely
herein his face was a reflex of his soul !
I fancy the English were a little unreasonable to cry
out when Countess Guiccioli took up the cudgels for Byron,
just after such very damaging statements about him had
been published, ostensibly on the authority of his wife. If
he turned different sides of himself to the two ladies, it
seems hard if both may not be shown. The Guiccioli in
her old age, having married an Anglophobe marquis, writes
that she found Byron a perfect angel during the six years
he was with her ; and Lady Byron herself, while analyzing
his character somewhat sternly and harshly to one of her
friends (she even says he only feigned enthusiasm, in
which case he ought to have been a great dramatist, for
he feigned enthusiasm to the life) wept when she heard of
his death, owning there was an angel in him. But alas !
the Guiccioli loved him, and he loved her, as well, at least,
as so libertine and disillusioned a nature could love. The
picture is a touching one of him at Ravenna, when she had
returned with her husband to Bologna, visiting her garden
and rooms at their wonted hour of meeting, reading in her
favourite books, and bursting into tears before the fountain
in the garden, as he reflected what evil his love might
bring upon her. This lady reclaimed him from his de-
baucheries as long as he lived he was faithful to her
and I think the charge against him of making no provision
for her is one quite susceptible of a favourable explanation.
Byron loved two Mary Chaworth, and the Guiccioli.
Would that he could have married his first love ! In that
beautiful poem, " The Dream," he confesses that her image
was in his soul, even when he stood at the altar with
another that was the crime of his life in the sight of
Heaven, and a black one, however shocking his fleshly
vagaries may appear to us ; but that is a crime against
which civilized society has no conscience. Yet an ideal
marriage demands a constancy and stability of soul, of
LORD BYRON AND HIS TIMES. 83
which, alas ! men like Byron and Shelley possess little,
chivalrous protectiveness, generosity, magnanimity, memory
of the past, faith in the future. And what if Love dies,
killed by the fading of early rose-colour, intrusion of fret-
ting trivialities, familiarity that breeds contempt, habitual
failure in mutual duties, great or small, ever-increasing
divergence of temperament, irritability, Love's own inani-
tion ? Even sadder than the death of an adored child is
the death of Love. Yet surely Love, if he be Love, may
sleep, may feign death, but cannot die. I verily believe it !
In two of Mr. Robert Browning's works, he attacks
Byron with a strange fury, that seems to me far less psycho-
logically discriminating than might have been expected
from him. He pokes fun at Byron's slip of " lay " for
" lie " in the deservedly celebrated passage of Childe
Harold about the sea a slip which Shelley also makes
in his splendid lines on the " Apennine." We have heard
a good deal about this in the newspapers, and it is all
very well there; for Byron was apt to be careless and
rude in diction, as well as in rhythm ; but it seems a little
strange for Mr. Browning (of whose genius I am a very
warm admirer) to pitch into him on this score, his own
language being as difficult to construe as the French of
Rabelais, the German of Hegel, or Bohme. However,
the substance of the passage is his grand object of attack.
In " Hohenstiel-Schwangau " he denies apparently that
Byron was a worshipper of Nature at all ; in " Fifine " he
argues that to exalt Nature so highly as Byron does is
false philosophy. He affirms, however, that in his admira-
tion for the sea and mountains Byron was insincere, and
only meant to attract attention to himself as an admirer
of the sea more than other men, using the sea merely as
convenient for " hitching into a stanza." In the latter work
he argues (if I rightly comprehend him) that the sea and
mountains, etc., are themselves constituted by what we men
please to think and feel about them. However, even on Mr.
84 ESSAYS ON POETRY AND POETS.
Browning's own showing, Byron was hardly the " flatfish,"
and " the cackling goose " he ventures to call him. For if
the sea be sublime only because a man thinks so, then, as
the average tourist who crosses from Dover to Calais, even
when not sick, thinks nothing of the sort, Byron, who made
the sea sublime by feeling and expressing its sublimity,
must be so far superior to the average man, and quite as
distinguished a person as he supposed himself. In fact,
however conceited, he would hardly have known himself in
this tremendous role of Creator ; which his philosophical
antagonist by implication assigns to him.
But really it is news that Byron was a humbug also in
this Nature-worship, of which we had all supposed him one
of the principal founders and priests ! whose burning words
of passionate adoration kindled one's own soul in boyhood
to behold and worship ; whose magnificent music, sonorous
with storm and ocean and all that is free, illimitable, and
enduring, thrilled the very heart of Europe, compelling it
as at a god's command to bow down once more, when the
angels of Faith and Hope seemed to be deserting for ever
the desecrated shrines of mankind. Byron felt his own
soul akin to all that was wild and stormful and immense,
the moods of Nature solemnly and mysteriously responding
to the moods in man. What though the soul be higher
than the sea? To the sensitive and reflective spirit, the
sea, the mountains, and the stars are very types and
symbols of permanence, order, eternity. Nature and man
are elder sister and younger brother ; she wakes intelligence
and will in him ; he knows himself in knowing her ; she is
a dumb and blind elder sister, whose laws inexorably bind
him, while he imposes his spirit upon her, and reads spiritual
meanings in her face. Man and his own soul were a chaos
to Byron ; yet in heroes and good women, but above all in
the order of everlasting Nature, he found again the grandeur
and divinity of a Kosmos. Individual human degradation,
of which we in the midst can but dimly see the issue,
LORD BYRON AND HIS TIMES. 85
receives a mystic interpretation from the unconscious inno-
cence of a Divine Sphere, that seems evil and good,
strong and weak, not individual but universal, and which
is a veiled Humanity. Thence one can look up with
greater trust than before even for the worms that sting one
another in the dust. Why do the Arab in the desert, the
Persian on his mountain, bow before the all-beholding
Sun? In him is no sin, no vanity, folly, falsehood, or vain
ambition ; he gives life and light to all ; himself the veritable
incarnation of one Invisible Sun.
Surely for Byron and such as he, in the absence of
revelation and philosophy, this was the best school of
morality. He who loses his own personality in Nature,
who lays down before her, the universal mother and tomb
of humanity, his own private wrongs and griefs and fevered
aspirations, hereby redresses the balance so unduly weighted
with the self-will and momentary longings of one restless,
passionate man. For she is one who toils not nor dreams,-
errs not nor supposes, raves not nor repents, but calmly
fulfils herself for ever.* Mr. Browning would be impossible
in those vast primeval realms where Nature still proudly
asserts her dominion where she oppresses men with
creatures "burning bright in the forests of the night,"
shakes them from their bubble habitations in her delirium,
decimates them with the breath of pestilence and famine,
overwhelms them in torrents of devastating fire !
In a time when all secrets were at length supposed to
be laid bare before man's microscopic understanding, all
superstitions exploded, all mysteries explained ; when the
universe emptied of ancient awe seemed no longer vener-
able, but a hideous lazar-house rather, made visible to all
human eyes in every ghastly corner of it ; before the Circe-
wand of materialism, Love metamorphosed into a sensa-
* I have ventured here to repeat a passage in my essay on " the inter-
pretation of Nature," because it is peculiarly applicable to Byron and Words
worth.
86 ESSAYS ON POETRY AND POETS.
tion, and Man shrivelled to a handful of dust ; when the
Body of God's own breathing world was laid with familiar
irreverence upon the board of a near-sighted professor to
be dissected then the Prophet-poets, Rousseau and Byron,
pointed men to the World-Soul, commanding them once
more to veil their faces before the swift, subtle splendour of
Life ; this they named Nature ; we may name it God !
The reaction in favour of Nature, and common humanity
was indeed commenced in the generation preceding Byron
by the three great poets, Chatterton, Burns, and Blake ; by the
genuine poets, Shenstone, Goldsmith, Gray, Thomson, and
Cowper. It was developed in its distinctively modern form
equally by Byron's contemporaries, Shelley, Wordsworth,
Coleridge, and Keats. Still none of Byron's contemporaries
filled the European role as Nature-poets that Byron filled,
though the four I have named are equally eminent in
this capacity, and in some respects even his superiors.
Thus Byron has not, like Wordsworth, distilled for us the
very essence of Nature's gentler moods ; has not listened
at her very heart, and beheld all the subtle changes of her
countenance in sunshine or other tranquil joy ; has not
associated these with gentle women walking along life's
cool, sequestered vale, and fading quietly heavenward, nor
the stern, strong power of northern mountains (which this
great poet equally felt) with calm, faithful, heroic men,
in however humble a guise ; while there was less in Byron
of the mystical element so hard to define, which was present
with magical effect in all those I have named, and is equally
present in Tennyson though with "Manfred " and "Heaven
and Earth " before me, I cannot say that in its own form it
was altogether absent. But in Wordsworth, on the other
hand, there is an absence of the Titanic, diabolic element ;
there is a certain hardness, or obstinate dulness, a sober,
cautious rationality, a serene self-complacency begotten of
good inherited physical and moral constitution, together
with general comfortableness of condition, that prevented
LORD BYRON AND HIS TIMES.
his responding fully to the mighty impulses of his time,
so wise, and unwise. The people about him were con-
tentedly orthodox, and he was as their fatherly minister :
he viewed his own venerable image in the lakes, and smiled
benignant ; very pleasant also seemed to him the stately
park of Lord Lonsdale, and he thanked Providence for all
Lonsdales, and stately parks. " Strong passions mean weak
will," sings Mr. Patmore ; but these are axioms that, like
certain toys, will stand equally well on either end. Strong
will may mean weak passions mere fluttering impulses of
a student, hardly needing the rock-built citadel of virtue to
withstand them ; there is a real giant strength in a Byron,
though it be ill-regulated. Nevertheless, so high-souled a
poet as Wordsworth must needs break forth, ever and
anon, into " a sadder and a wiser man ; " his genius was too
real not to be sorrowful, too reflective not to give its own
poetic, and distinctively modern colouring to the accepted
creed ; while in his reconstruction of the hollow conven-
tional poetic diction, as also in his resolute turning, with
Crabbe, toward " the humble annals of the poor," he showed
himself also in his measure a child of the Revolution,
though his political sympathies might be conservative. But
this Diabolic (not Revolutionary) element is far more pro-
nounced in Tennyson than in Wordsworth. His range is
a wide one, whatever poetlings, and criticasters may say ;
witness those haunting and terrible poems, " The Vision of
Sin," " Lucretius," and " Rizpah," to say nothing of " Maud."
In Byron, again, there is less of what we feel in so much
of Shelley, wherever Shelley is at his best harmonious
marriage of consummate feeling, imagery, and expression ;
perfect poetic music, equal to that of Shakespeare, and
Milton in their highest flights. We seldom feel in Byron's
as in Shelley's lyrics, the very quintessence of ethereal
spiritualization, the very soul of absolutely faultless verbal
melodies, rising, falling, wayward, and untameable as a
fountain blown ever by the wind, subject to no law but the
88 ESSAYS ON POETRY AND POETS.
law of their own lawless and superhuman loveliness. At
the same time, Shelley's Protean, impalpable, superabundant
splendours of imagery and diction are on the verge of
vanishing into a spray of mere verbal effects, and some-
times his poetry unsuccessfully usurps the function of music
proper. There was a certain absence in Shelley of that
sustained architectonic creative faculty, which is akin to
Reason ; an absence which, were it not for his transcendent
excellence in other respects, might even militate against
his claim to be considered one of our country's greatest
poets. There is, however, a rare transfused 'fragrance, a
pervading air or tone, that gives a certain unity to his
brilliant compositions ; but in Byron's best work, it is a
complex organic whole, with members of differentiated
function, that emerges no mere roods of floating prismatic
substance, with every part, as in low organizations, equally
fulfilling the function of every other. Yet he never gives an
impression of mostly mechanical ingenuity, as does Southey ;
his work is nourished upon passionate rational insight.
Herein he is akin to the great creators ; he is clear, luminous,
incisive, coherent in his descriptions ; healthy vision of a
sane human creature never deserts him ; his strokes are
few, yet sharp as those of a graving-tool, while Shelley's
vision seerns often blurred and confused. But it is only
the general character of an object Byron gives ; and where
he tries to be delicate and feathery in his touches, like
Wordsworth, Keats, or Shelley, he frequently becomes
merely tame and conventional. Moreover, in justice to
Wordsworth, it must be allowed that there are tedious
lengths of somewhat commonplace verse even in the early
tales, as likewise in the early parts of Childe Harold
plenty of them assuredly in the dramas.
In seeking for a note of this peculiar modern Nature-
worship, I think we must set down as a principal one,
Pantheism^ either overt or implicit. For it is a worship
precisely as the Scandinavian and Greek Mythologies are
LORD BYRON AND HIS TIMES. 89
worships only in a modern form ; and there was less of
this in Spenser, Shakespeare, the Fletchers, Browne, Drayton,
or Milton, although in these poets delight in external
nature was most fresh and genuine. But no less in Byron,
Wordsworth, and Coleridge than in Shelley, there was
worship of the creature ; though in Byron, because he had
less metaphysical grasp of thought, in Wordsworth because
by conviction he was a theist, the Pantheism was implicit ;
while in Shelley, as in Goethe, it was overt. In Tennyson,
a theist, it is again implicit. Goldsmith, and his genera-
tion, have not more of it than Chaucer. The fifth great
nature-worshipper, Keats, is so far not pantheistic, because
he is to all intents and purposes a polytheistic Greek myth-
maker, born out of due time. He personified Nature as,
indeed, to a large extent did Spenser, and the other Eliza-
bethans, and Chatterton ; where he does not, he endows
her with animation akin to the human, which again reveals
in him implicit pantheism. But Goldsmith (like the lesser
Georgian poets, Rogers, Milman, etc.) regards the external
world as the creation of a personal God, simply recording
what he sees, and the pleasure it gives him, together with
its remoter associations ; always putting Nature well outside
himself, humanity, and God, as something just created to
be perceived, and give us emotions or food and raiment.
Byron's tales are delightfully steeped in a sunny Eastern
atmosphere though, perhaps, they are hardly equal in this
respect to the few wonderful lines depicting Eastern travel
in his own " Dream," to E6then, or Beckford's " Vathek."
Byron's later story, " The Island," is, however, deliciously
suffused with the tropical glow, though the versification and
diction of it are in his most curiously careless, and objec-
tionable manner.
Like the best lyrics of Heine, Burns, and Scott, Byron's
are more alive with warm humanity, go more to the heart of
mankind, than those lovely dissolving phantasmal ones of
Shelley ; though it is to be admitted that there is a vein
90 ESSAYS ON POETRY AND POETS.
of coarse earthliness and commonness about Byron that
makes many of his lyrics poor and wooden, as Shelley's
never are. But his best are rich with a masculine sorrow,
often graceful, and tenderly musical in the highest degree.
One need name only " Bright be the place of thy soul,"
" When we two Parted," " The Wild Gazelle," the poems to
his sister, and Thyrza. Yet the most original and dis-
tinguished of Byron's lyrical work is certainly that in which
his manifold wrath, his passion for wild life, and his ardour
for human freedom, are embodied. How glorious the
" Isles of Greece," how fine " Sennacherib," and "The Song
of Saul ;" how powerful the " Ode on Bonaparte," and the
"Ode from the French!" The most concentrated venom
of hate is distilled into the lyric, " When the Moon is on
the Wave," in " Manfred." But his odes, on the whole, are
not equal to Shelley's, whose passion for human liberty
was quite as ardent, and more spiritual than Byron's ;
purified by his longing for a reign of Love and Peace ; so
that he breaks ever and anon into heavenly seraphic strains,
as in " Hellas," and " Prometheus," borne aloft upon the
strong wings of varied lyrical measures that never fail him.
Shelley's fury of indignation in face of armed oppression
is at w r hite-heat and tremendous ; but there is a want of
steadfast distinctness of thought, and aim, and feeling, even
here. Byron may droop his pinion and flounder ; but he
never lacks this manful grasp of his theme ; rejoicing, more-
over, like Antaeus, in the touch of his mother earth, in the
coarse common human effort, and mixed stormy strife by
which deliverance and the age of gold must be fought for
sternly, inch by inch. Hence, men in general will always feel
his poetry more germane to them and to the real world.
Shelley, the Peri, like his own skylark, sings to us from
the sky.
The finest of the " Tales," to my mind (it belongs to his
later period), is " The Prisoner of Chillon ; " that is
in perfect harmony, and unutterably beautiful, with its
LORD BYRON AND HIS TIMES.
solemn organ-peal of the " Sonnet to Liberty " as overture.
There is all Scott's unity of effect here, and more than his
aroma of poetry indefinable. For Scott, it should be
remembered, deliberately gave up the field of verse-poetry
to his younger rival ; he felt, and felt rightly, that they had
much in common as poets, but that there was a je ne sais
quoi about Byron's metrical work that made it for the most
part rarer and higher in quality ; they were both romantic
poets, delighting in themes of love, and strife, and pageantry
with the supernatural, mysterious element toning down
the brilliancy of their work here and there. Scott had
more of the plot-constructing faculty than Byron, and far
more dramatic power : accordingly, he became the greatest
writer of prose fiction in the English language. For I can-
not think (with all our abundant talent in this region) that,
regarding him as a spontaneous creative poet, in the wider
sense of that word, any English man or woman has ever
rivalled him except the man who surpasses all, Shakes-
peare though Dickens and Charlotte Bronte have their
own place apart, and Thackeray runs Scott very near. In
the " Bride of Lammermoor," by the way, Scott has
achieved, I think, a finer work of art than Byron himself,
in Byron's own literary vein. Moreover, Scott's feeling
of the supernatural in Nature comes out especially in
his novels, notably in the " Monastery." This is very real
and magical, and quite the feeling of mediaeval romance,
allowing for the difference of intellectual belief; but all
that was in his blood, and the traditions upon which he
had been nourished. It is quite akin to Pagan Poly-
theism, and is just the Nature-worship that could not be
expelled altogether by the crude carpenter-theory, which
the established religion had made orthodox. The old
gods might be devils and witches, as had been decreed ;
but, anyhow, they would not be expelled altogether ; there
they were mysteriously animating or inhabiting certain
elements of Nature. The clouds were full of angels or
Q2 ESSAYS ON POETRY AND POETS.
demons, the white light was God's throne, while fairies
peopled the woods and streams. This feeling of physical
elements as a habitat for spiritual beings is always associated
with an instinctive fancy (or rather intuition) that they are
a naturally fit habitation for them ; such spirits are virtually
the souls corresponding to the bodies of these elements, the
ideas, or spiritual essences of them personified a concep-
tion justified even by Science, when she teaches that man
is a final cause and consummation, a more perfectly developed
truth, as it were, implicit in physical agencies ; this
Humanity repeating in a higher sphere the life of Nature,
which is under one aspect that higher life in the forming,
and repeating more emphatically in some personalities than
in others the special type of certain physical agencies
flowing stream in one man, stolid mountain in another.
But the Polytheistic feeling that these agencies are distinct
though living powers, in communion with man, and influ-
encing him, seems more essentially true. Thus in Dante's
colossal poem, all the material imagery is informed with
spiritual significance ; it is the elaborate embodiment of
great moral and spiritual ideas ; and Dante evidently looked
with his earnest eyes upon the visible universe as God's
grand symbol ; though, of course, his creed was Catholic
and Theistic.
In " Childe Harold " there are passages which must hold
their own for ever in the ranks of English poetry :
* ' Once more upon the waters ! yet once more \
And the waves bound beneath me as a steed
That knows his rider ! Welcome to their roar !
Swift be their guidance wheresoe'er they lead !
Though the strained mast should quiver as a reed,
And the rent canvas fluttering strew the gale,
Still must I on, for I am as a weed
Flung from the rock on ocean's foam to sail,
Where'er the surge may sweep, the tempest's breath prevail ! "
The exquisite lines that refer to Waterloo can hardly
be forgotten, nor those sweet, peaceful ones about Lake
LORD BYRON AND HIS TIMES. - 93
Leman, that breathe the twin influence of Leman and of
Shelley, nor the magnificent reverberation in clanging
words of an Alpine thunderstorm :
" Lausanne ! and Ferney ! ye have been the abodes
Of names which unto you bequeathed a name ! "
Ay, and what of Rousseau's Clarens ; of Geneva, the city
of Calvin, that other great Genevese reformer, and now of
De StaeTs Coppet and Byron's Diodati ? These all, with
Bonnivard, are a felt presence by Leman consecrating
her shores and her waters. I went to Diodati lately. It
was deserted, and we wandered through the rooms and
about the garden where Byron and Shelley had sat con-
versing where Milton too had set his foot in days gone
by ! When Byron returned to Diodati, after sitting late
into the night with Shelley on the opposite shore, the
Shelleys from their chamber used to hear his rich voice
singing across the water in his boat. Like Julie and
St. Preux, he and Shelley were once nearly wrecked
in a boat off Meillerie. This was the period at which
one loves to think of the two poets together, and after-
wards at Venice, when they rode daily on the Lido. The
fourth Canto, however, is grandest of all, has some of the
finest descriptive poetry in our language. It opens wor-
thily with Venice in her sad glory. How splendidly is
the poet Tasso contrasted with his princely oppressor,
Alphonso of Ferrara ! How the thunder and lightning
of Terni's Cataract have passed into the shouting stanzas !
All the noble verses concerning Rome and her departed
glories, her ruins and her triumphs of art, are worthy of
the great subject. But what misery !
" For all are meteors with a different name ;
And Death the sable smoke where vanishes the flame ! "
With that " Marah of misanthropy and despair within,"
whom couldst thou trust, who could trust thee ? Not even
God to trust in, or the Divine All, which is self-reconciled,
94 ESSAYS ON POETRY AND POETS.
and of which thou wast one Age's world-agonizing Spirit !
After a stately and most pathetic lamentation over Princess
Charlotte, there grow upon the soul and resound those
ocean murmurs, which are the conclusion and crowning
poetry of a poem that will be forgotten only with its native
tongue. Vanishes here the " Pilgrim of Eternity " :
" BrJ Sctaeco*' irapa. 6?v& iro\v\oisfioio
But since Byron, let us remember that the Age is
awakening to new life " The age of ruins is past." It is
full of Devil and Mammon worship, death, agony, and
vulgar fever ; but he is no great poet who daintily hides
himself from it in the study or the studio. The people are
awake ; each must enter into the life of the rude giant ;
he only who does so dare pretend to see beyond. There
are great wars, and national movements, wonderful inven-
tions, terrible conflict of principles ; the world is recreated
at the breath of science ; our explorers visit all countries,
and Columbus-like discover new continents : " Pioneers !
O Pioneers ! "
Byron, in " Don Juan " especially, has shown a boundless
creative imagination of the realistic order. Where men and
women of a certain type are concerned and that type is by
no means so limited as Macaulay and some other critics
have maintained where the grander elements of Nature are
in question, as also, in the evocation of high thoughts and
feelings of a definite range in connection with these, he is
first-rate, as frequently in tenderness. But for the creation
of ideal worlds and their denizens, governed by lofty, reflec-
tive, imaginative purpose, and requiring sustained flights in
high spiritual atmospheres, we must turn to Dante, Milton,
or Shakespeare. In Byron fine typical personifications are
rare, such as we find in Spenser, or Chatterton Byron's
" War," in " Childe Harold," being adapted from a finer
personification in the " Marvellous Boy." Yet the strangely
beautiful "dramatic mystery," "Heaven and Earth/' might
LORD BYRON AND HIS TIMES. 95
almost be excepted from this criticism, for here the gloom of
coming Deluge and its deepening terrors are palpably, yet
with appropriate indistinctness of visionary imagery, rolled
around mystic loves of "woman wailing for her demon
lover." Here there is much of the fine sweep of a great
idealistic artist's brush : still even this required imagination
of a far less idealistic order than the construction of a Pan-
demonium, a Hell, or a Purgatory. Bring that sea, and
those mountains, which the poet knew so well, together
the great spectacular phenomena of mountain, cloud, and
ocean and there looms the Deluge. Byron's wonted range
of subject and treatment is hardly here self-surpassed. His
personages, even his immortals, are still embodiments of
the same feelings, thoughts, and desires. Yet the dim out-
lines of those exulting demons in the twilight ; those angel-
forms, and the women who call them, Aholibamah, and
tender Anah ; the good men, Japhet and Noah ; Raphael
appearing to summon the new rebel angels to their duty ;
the welter of common mortals struggling with doom all
this forms a magnificent lurid picture of a " world before
the flood," that is almost worthy of our loftier spiritual
masters. Still there is little here of sustained imaginative
incarnation, and realization of spiritual things, with wizard
flashings of weird, yet appropriate detail, helping to impress
the Dsedal individualities sprung from the brain of their
creator upon us. The Melancholia of Dtirer, Sin and
Death, Caliban, those apocalyptic souls in the Doom-
circles of the Florentine, the regions wherein they dwell
awfully aware with populous imagery, whereunto they
appear as native think of these ! and again of fantastic
dream-worlds, self-involved and subtly infinite like the rose
"Midsummer Night's Dream," "The Tempest," Shelley's
" Prometheus," visions of Calderon, Keats, and Coleridge.
Nevertheless, there is a harmonious lyrical atmosphere
pervading this grand shadowy creation, which sets it by
itself as a great ideal work of a master, who is perhaps
96 ESSAYS ON POETRY AND POETS.
greatest as a realistic poet. There is also one magnificent
verse in the " Vision of Judgment " describing Satan, which,
if it were not somewhat a reminiscence of Milton, one might
pronounce Miltonic.
But although I hold with Shelley, Goethe, Scott, and
Wilson, that " Cain " is one of the finest poems in our
language, the early portion of the poem, wherein Byron
may be said to enter into direct competition with Milton,
is surely a failure. There is no soul-overwhelming gran-
deur at all in those queer regions of space to which he
conducts Lucifer and Cain, while the verse halts terribly.
In the long discourse of Lucifer with Cain we discern little
difference between them, while we do painfully feel here,
as elsewhere in Byron where thought is wanted, that if
Byron had been a thinker like Dante, or Milton, or Goethe,
he might have sat beside the three greatest poets of Europe
Homer, Dante, and Shakespeare ; but the lucubrations of
Cain and Lucifer lack vigour and point, as those of Faust
and Mephistopheles never do. It is in the human element,
however, that Cain is so magnificent, as a great dramatic
picture. And I cannot but think that though Byron is not
a great dramatist, he is a great dramatic painter. I believe
it is Wilson who says, that his groups and personages are
as statuesque bronzes cast in the fire. It is to be recol-
lected that Goethe, who ought to be an authority, most
highly praised his dramas. Certainly he has not the won-
derful skill in dramatic dialogue of Landor ; nor in dramatic
monologue of Mr. Browning. But where Byron is effective
in drama, it is by lyrically pouring the quintessence of his
characters into the mould of one supreme situation, capable
of realizing them with the utmost intensity. This seems
to be somewhat true of Hugo also, though Hugo has more
plot-constructing faculty arranges and dovetails his inci-
dents with all the skill of Calderon and heightens his
effects by varying, as it were, and multiplying with tremen-
dous prodigality of power such great effective situations.
LORD BYRON AND HIS TIMES. 97
But there is little Shakespearian development of character
in Byron, yet I should maintain, as against the ordinary
criticism, that Byron can realize characters of a type
opposite to that one type most congenial to his genius,
sufficiently to present these as truly and vitally influ-
encing one another, especially in certain supreme scenes
or situations. That is not so in " Manfred," which is a
mere monologue ; but it is so in " Cain," " Marino Faliero,"
and " Sardanapalus." From the third act onward, Cain
becomes and continues magnificent from where Cain
mutters forebodings over little Enoch, his own and his
sister Adah's child, while she gently remonstrates, to where
Cain is contrasted with Abel, as the spirit of revolt and
denial with that of tranquil faith, rising to utmost heights
of moral dignity and wrath, where Abel confronts the
blasphemer who would overthrow the chosen altar of Jeho-
vah, his own proud offering lying unaccepted, his own altar
smitten to the dust. There is nothing in English poetry
finer for tragic intensity and pathos, than the supreme scene
where Cain strikes his brother dead with a brand snatched
from the altar, then bows in horrified remorse over the
corpse he who so sullenly arraigned the fated Doom, fated
through his own passions, half-righteous and half-evil, to
bring himself that dreaded Doom into the world ; Eve, the
mother of all, cursing with terrific energy her own eldest-
born, slayer of her well-beloved son ; gentle Zillah, Abel's
wife, lamenting over him ; and Adah, one of the most
perfect types of holy womanhood in literature Adah,
when the dark smitten murderer bids her leave him alone,
only answering with troubled wonder, " Why, all have left
thee ! " Then Cain, the brand upon his brow, wanders
forth with Adah into the wilderness, she leading their little
Enoch by the hand, kissing Abel's cold clay, and praying
" Peace be with him ! " to which Cain in the last words of
this great poem responds, " But with me ! " Byron's Cain
is by no means a very wicked man ; he is surprised as it
H
98 ESSAYS ON POETRY AND POETS.
were into the murder, and, as matters are here represented,
we feel that he did well to be angry. He with becoming
dignity makes an offering appropriate to him, according to
his light, which he may well hope that the all-seeing, just
God will accept ; he is throughout half-doubtful about his
God, half-defiant of what seems to himself evil in that God.
His veiy objection to the sacrifice of innocent animals
proves him to be humane, and a foe to all cruel oppression,
as also his abhorrence of human vengeance, even in Deity,
if it were true that Deity needed to be propitiated by
bloody sacrifice. Need Christians any longer think this
poem very blasphemous? That there are "no ideas" in
Byron, moreover, Mr. Arnold in the face of this poem
should scarcely maintain ; and Goethe goes a little too far
when he says, " He is a child when he begins to reflect."
I conceive " Cain " to be the philosophico-imaginative con-
summation to which the " Tales," " Manfred," and " Childe
Harold " tended. Together with " Manfred," moreover, it
proves Mr. Browning's objection as to Byron's unduly
exalting Nature over men, a somewhat unfortunate one.
If you must judge a poet as you would a didactic philo-
sopher, I should say that Byron's error is, on the contrary,
in unduly exalting the individual human spirit ; in a lack
of humility and resignation. Cain, like Faust, is insatiably
curious, and chafes against the limitations of human know-
ledge ; yet he represents a faithless, desultory time, which
ours still is, moreover ; for in this region of the intellect,
he rather seems angry at not knowing without being at the
trouble of learning ; he takes no laborious pains reverently
to seek truth. In that, too, Byronism represents an age
of rather shallow scepticism, that sneers and sighs over the
insolubility of problems, which it is too weak and idle man-
fully to grasp but with a doom overshadowing himself,
his beloved ones, and all mankind, which seems to him
unintelligible and unjust, he refuses to be meekly happy
and content, even though he loves Adah and his child. He
LORD BYRON AND HIS TIMES. 99
is the genius of speculative yearning, oppressed and over-
charged with evil within, the curse of hereditary sin ; mor-
bidly sensitive to evil without ; overclouding all past,
present, and prospective good with the gloom of his own
sullen frown, out of which must inevitably spring the
lightning of his crime ; even by the side of his own true
wife and his own sweet boy, alone! In a fine sonorous
invective Lucifer avers that God Himself, however powerful,
must be most miserable of all for He is the most alone.
Could He but annihilate Himself and all ; but alas for His
and our immortality ! Of such a God proud, capricious, re-
vengeful, apart had Byron heard from accredited teachers.
Cain finds too that " the tree of knowledge is not that of life!'
Byron's is the wail of baffled human understanding, with-
out faith, hope, resignation, self-control, inward harmony.
But if in " Cain " he defies heaven, in " Manfred " he defies
hell, and denies the power of any evil spirits over him,
asserting proudly, and with truly sublime daring, his own
spiritual independence and dignity. He is a Pagan, not
a Christian, though with some genuine Christian sympa-
thies, and a Hebrew creed still hanging about him. But
he never holds up self-sacrifice, humility, or patience ; is
always haughty and aggressive ; he endures, indeed, but
somewhat less than a Pagan he more actively despairs
and rebels.
Christianity has taught him discontent with this life,
but he cannot accept the solutions of her theologians ; so
with tenfold more bitterness than Atrides exclaiming to
Zeus, when his sword broke in his hand, " There is no God
more evil-minded than thou " than the Neapolitan fisher-
man beating the image of his Saint, who sends storms
instead of fine weather Byron defies and rails against his
Deity. But of course he had only a lingering notion that
the popular representation might be true, and that there
was really a Creator, who, having created immortal spirits,
tyrannically forbids them, as Lucifer finely phrases it, " to
100 ESSAYS ON POETRY AND POETS.
use their immortality" their reason, their conscience, and
their heart. It is against this God, formed in the image
of priests and kings, that Lucifer and Cain rebel, rather
than against the true Author and Essence of Things. Of
this true Author and Essence of Things Byron had un-
fortunately, from the circumstances of his time, and his
own want of philosophic grasp, very little idea ; yet he
believed in a God ; and very naturally, however irrationally,
confounded the true God with the current orthodox con-
ception of Him, against which he inveighed if vaguely,
still with enlightened soul, knowing that God was by
theology caricatured, and that the vulgar conception was
monstrous, and to be fought against. But after all, this
was a dominant conception, one that had always been
dominant more or less ; the force of education, authority,
universal conviction, practically moulding all the relations
of society, together with the poet's own ineffectual habit
of thought, forced the idea on him as a kind of reality ;
but his better, yet audacious self, dared to wrestle with it,
even on this basis of its dubious reality ; so Job ventures
to argue with the Lord. In fact, a half-truth this belief
must be, and for long it has been to mankind as a whole
truth ; " the times of this ignorance God winked at ; " but
the idea of Him must be slowly purified. Acquiescence
in evil is not altogether desirable, and to pronounce evil
good, because divinely appointed, may be to fetter our-
selves, the human race, and its destiny of progress. The
established fact, the conventional morality, the existing
order of society none of these are final. Good at one
time, they may become evil at another. Then God is no
longer in them, but rather in rebellion against them.
There might even be an evil Demiurgus, God of this world,
as some Gnostics believed ; if so, Byron will not worship
him. Byron holds the human spirit, or at least the elect
human spirit, with its eternal reason and sense of justice,
essentially equal to any gods or devils whatsoever, however
LORD BYRON AND HIS TIMES. IOI
powerful these may be. And here he is right. A God
who should gag and degrade our reason and conscience by
mere externally imposed authority cannot be the true, or
the fully revealed God. He is within the substantial
reason and conscience of Humanity most manifest in
Christ, the Human God, the Divine Man. So is brought to
light a higher eternal self in conscious solidarity with the
Divine universal will. Both Manfred and Cain hurl defiance
at the very skies. What makes Cain sound blasphemous is
that Cain believes in Jehovah, yet defies him ; this is pre-
cisely as Shelley's Prometheus defies Zeus ; but we have
been brought up to call this apparent wrong of theology
right, because we are assured that it is divinely revealed,
whereas we should have asked ourselves, how can doctrines
be revealed unless by an anti-Christ or usurping God, if they
are irrational or immoral? Lucifer and Cain, like Pro-
metheus, are champions of human liberty. The ultimate
arbiter, Fate, will dethrone the unjust Zeus in the end.
To this true God they virtually appeal, and they cannot be
disappointed ; or in other words, they really appeal from
God in His partial, to God in His fuller revelation of Him-
self, which He is indeed making through themselves. Yet
their shallow presumption and irreverence He disapproves
and punishes ; still it is He, the incarnate World-Spirit,
striving in them to free Himself, though he justifies also the
humble, holy Abels. If the evil cannot be destroyed, it can
be chained down ; the good, and just, and rational is lord
over the evil and inane ; that is a slave, a drudge, essential
indeed, yet subordinate and to be subordinated. One can
indeed only sympathize partly with this revolt ; it is in part
directed against the very nature of things, against the true
Sovereign God, who must be beyond our right and wrong
right in a manner and degree to which our rectitude cannot
attain. Neither Byron nor Shelley were possessed with
that awe which becomes a mortal before the unfathomable
mystery. Even in his beloved storms Byron felt little
IO2 ESSAYS ON POETRY AND POETS.
spiritual awe, was chiefly " sharer in their fierce and far de-
light," or recklessly contemptuous of humanity's weakness-
Cain's sullen hatred of effort and labour, his want of patient
faith, his obstinate self-will, his ignorance of how to conquer
Fate by calmly accepting it, or circumventing it by fertility
of resource, this is truly evil and folly, and miserable weak-
ness ; such, for instance, are some recent insane develop-
ments of anarchic irreligion. Like the later pessimists,
Leopardi and Schopenhauer, Byron cannot see that the
higher blessedness may be so far as we know can only be
born out of sorrow and pain, even out of experience of
moral evil.
Macaulay says Byron can only paint one man, and one
woman a gross exaggeration ; for Don Juan, and Sardana-
palus are so different from Cain that they cannot be con-
founded ; and as to women, it is mere confusion of thought
to confound Adah, Angiolina, Zarina, Donna Julia, Haidee,
Gulnare, and Myrrha, wonderfully realized, and thoroughly
feminine types all of them. Gulnare is the passionate, fierce
beautiful southern woman, of which type Byron has given
us many brilliant portraitures. Haidee is a loving, passionate
girl, but a thoroughly innocent, albeit fiery-natured one
she might indeed become Gulnare, but she is something
totally distinct. Adah is not to be surpassed for heavenly,
yet human, tender, unsullied perfection of womanliness a
perfect sister, mother, wife ; she is not surpassed in Shakes-
peare, Victor Hugo, George Sand, Walter Scott ; even the
Marguerite of Goethe is only equal to her. Then we have
Zarina in " Sardanapalus," Angiolina in " Marino Faliero,"
skilfully painted women of a totally different order noble
women too both evidently intended for idealized por-
traitures of Lady Byron self-possessed, stately, somewhat
cold, yet excellent and affectionate. In " Don Juan," how
marvellously good is Donna Julia and her letter, how
immortally inimitable ! We have again Lady Adelaide
Amundeville, a very clever sketch of an English lady of
LORD BYRON AND HIS TIMES. 103
fashion, and the sweet seraphic Aurora Raby, a sort of
English Adah.
" Aurora Raby, a young star who shone
O'er life, too sweet an image for such glass,
A lovely being scarcely formed or moulded,
A rose with all its sweetest leaves yet folded.
She gazed upon a world she scarcely knew,
As seeking not to know it ; silent, lone,
As grows a flower, thus quietly she grew,
And kept her heart secure within its zone.
There was awe in the homage which she drew ;
Her spirit seemed as seated on a throne
Apart from the surrounding world, and strong
In its own strength."
Myrrha in " Sardanapalus " is a heroine of the antique
type, beautiful and splendid-souled, rousing the luxurious
monarch to lofty action.
If Byron had possessed the instincts of a great dramatist
(but remember he was still young, and developing when he
died), he could never have surrendered himself to the bondage
of the so-called " unities." Yet on the whole he may instinc-
tively have felt that these laws furnished him with certain
artificial restraints, helpful to his desultory though intense
genius ; serving as a kind of blowpipe to concentrate its
flame upon one supreme moment. It is indeed difficult to
deliver a verdict on the dramas. For " Sardanapalus " is a
very fine play, and " Marino Faliero " shows real dramatic
power, yet is scarcely a good drama ; while the " Two
Foscari " is dull and wooden, and " Werner " a mere
plagiarism. The blank verse of Byron's dramas is probably
the worst ever written by a great poet ; the lines end in the
awkwardest of monosyllabic parts of speech, "ands""ofs," etc.
There is no harmonious flexibility and resonance in the
metre at all ; and there is a quantity of tedious prose cut
up into lengths. His ear was indeed most uncertain. The
motive in " Marino Faliero " strikes one as inadequate to
support the play's action, as Byron has represented that
motive ; he has not skilfully made us feel the mixed half-
104 ESSAYS ON POETRY AND POETS.
unconscious influences that probably prompted the old
Doge. Yet the fiery old man is finely drawn, and the
scene where he reveals himself to the conspirators in their
midnight meeting is full of stormy power, and thoroughly
true to nature, the conflict of feelings in the Doge as an
aristocrat in such a position being subtly realized. Here
again Byron draws from within. The concluding scene
(the execution) is eminently picturesque. But " Sardana-
palus " is certainly a very fine play a great dramatic
success, though it is, perhaps, hardly equal to Otway, " The
Cenci," Sheridan, or to a great English play of recent
times, Sir Henry Taylor's "Philip van Artevelde." In
" Sardanapalus " however, we behold (so far as the " unities "
allow) the march of tragic historic events, and these have a
palpable influence in developing the character of a luxurious,
effeminate, yet amiable, generous, and ultimately heroic
monarch. Myrrha, moreover, the grand Greek maiden,
together with Salemenes, the stern, honest warrior, who,
though but a sketch, is lifelike and well-realized, have
a noble influence upon the king, who can appreciate their
elevated characters. There is a weak side to the play, no
doubt, as Bishop Heber pointed out in the group of
Arbaces, and Beleses the priest, who are not dramatically
represented in their mutual relations with one another.
Admirable, however, is the scene wherein Sardanapalus
surprised feasting in his summer pavilion by those rebels,
whom with indolent good-nature he has half-pardoned,
starts forth, worthy of his ancestors, an avenging warrior,
though too late ; calling, in his vanity, for a mirror while
arming, and for his most bejewelled helmet, as lighter,
more becoming to his delicate beauty, and also more
conspicuous to friends and foes, even though it expose him
to a death which he half-recklessly courts. Excellent too
are the battle scenes, full of lusty movement and all the
din of onset. Nowhere has Byron so fully dramatized
himself as here, I suspect, though the gloomy phase of his
LORD BYRON AND HIS TIMES- IO5
character is suppressed ; but the hero is a half-sceptical
epicurean, masculine and brave, yet with many a feminine
trait
Whatever our verdict on Byron as dramatist, it remains to
be remarked that he was one of the greatest satirists England
has produced three only (if so many) can be elevated to
stand beside him Swift, Pope, and Butler. Thackeray
can hardly be placed so high, nor Dryden though as
wit he has no doubt other rivals, and as a humorist he is
surpassed by Shakespeare and Dickens. But in scathing,
savage, half-playful banter playful as a tiger in master-
ful, annihilating strokes of witty indignation he has again
a song, as Goethe says, " all his own " in spite of Pulci and
Whistlecraft ; he is Apollo discharging his arrows at the
Python, Michael with his proud foot upon the body of
Satan. The scornful wit of the " Vision of Judgment " is
Titanic as where " Turncoat Southey " offers to Satan to
write his life, and Satan declining with a bow, Southey glibly
appeals to Michael the Archangel with the same tempting
offer. Here is George III. " and amidst them an old man
with an old soul, and both extremely blind" Then what
terrific lines those are on the Prince Regent, on occasion of
his presence at the opening of the coffins of Charles I. and
Henry VIII. !
But I admit that " Don Juan " is on the whole Byron's
greatest work. Byron had a good deal of the eighteenth
century, and also of the Restoration period about him,
after all. The era of the Regency was, for scoffing profli-
gacy, not at all unlike that of the Restoration, and the con-
genial literary influence on him, not only of Pope, Dryden,
and their bitter personal animosities, but of licentious
Restoration dramatists, and of light, cynical men, such as
Rochefoucauld, Grammont, and Horace Walpole, is very
palpable. He was moulded also by English writers like
Smollett and Fielding ; certain libertine French novels too
reappear in his works. Yet I own " Don Juan " seems to
106 ESSAYS ON POETRY AND POETS.
me morality itself compared to a rotten whited sepulchre of
a book like " Chesterfield's Letters." Still the immoral
laxity of tone is not to be denied. If Byron had not led
the dissipated life he did, and moved for some time in
"good society" also, he could certainly not have written
this "man of the world's" poem, which is that, though
something more. But whatever advantage he and Moore
may have derived from " knowing life," it was not a moral
one, and there is an odour by no means of sanctity, a
rather sulphurous odour indeed, a certain conventional
humbug and hollowness and disbelief in good, that clings
both to the man and to his writings, simply because, while
he spurned the whole lot of enamelled corpses as poet, free-
man, and idealist, yet as aristocrat and man of fashion he
was half one of them, and even looked up with envy to
creatures like Beau Brummell, and " the first gentleman in
Europe." This taint has made Byron distasteful to some
who should have taken a more comprehensive view ; but
assuredly Byron has not quite shaken off the polite cere-
ments he spurns. In Burns and Shelley you breathe a
purer atmosphere. Shelley is a sort of volatile seraph ;
Burns is inconstant, but ever a true passionate man, as
Walter Scott is also. If Byron's head was of gold, his feet
were of clay.
For all this, " Don Juan " is one of the world's great
poems. Byron himself claimed that he had therein pro-
duced a true epic ; and I have always thought with some
reason. Is it not the epic of that transition period in
Europe ? The poem reflects faithfully that age's varying
moods, grave and gay, moods of stirring strife and battle, of
enterprize and revelry its appetite for pleasure, its cynical,
epicurean scepticism, denial, and mockery together with
the opposite mood of sentiment, pathos, bitter despair, as
well as nature-worship reverence for feudalism, refine-
ment, and tradition revolt in favour of simplicity, plain
goodness, and common humanity. It revels in war, yet
LORD BYRON AND HIS TIMES. IO/
inveighs against the tyranny and barbarism thereof; it
reverences the ideal, yet refuses to behold it in life chiefly
on account of its own wanton perverseness, and half blase,
half childish irreverence of soul. Even in the poem's very
want of artistic proportion, of beginning, middle, or ending
proper, in its daring originality of form, metre, and language,
it is faithful to the spirit of the time. For Auerbach justly
remarks that World- Sorrow, and we should add Negation,
or Heine's " Weltsvernichtung," cannot produce the perfect
work of art. Byron in fact never did. But Don Juan was
a well-known modern European Type, of which Byron
made his own use : the poet had pitched at last upon the
very subject and very manner perfectly adapted to develop
his transcendent powers :
" I rattle on exactly as I'd talk
With anybody in a ride or walk. "
He needed not here to be always up on the heroic stilts,
whether raised aloft by his theme or no ; and in his graver
work the small critics often caught him getting off the high
horse in those inevitable intervals of flight when Pegasus
desires to crop the earthly grass. And then they assembled
shouting that this was a poet with a " bad ear," a careless,
uncertain poet, with inadequate powers of expression ; for
in moments of less lofty emotion a first-rate poet, they tell
us, should make mouths and beat the air, and say pudding,
prunes, and prism, and many " blessed words " like " Meso-
potamia" to make the vulgar believe that he is always at
the boiling-point of inspiration. If he cannot be ever
moving, he can at least blow the steam off ostentatiously
when he stops. But what perfect English is " Don Juan ! "
it has always the right word ready. Alas ! how few
poets write English now ! In " Don Juan " the measure and
language seem to shape themselves out of the sense and
intent of the narrative ; here the style is to the matter what
the foam and impetus and tumult are to the wave. " Don
108 ESSAYS ON POETRY AND POETS.
Juan " is diffuse; its egotistic, half-chaffy gossip is often
empty enough, occasionally even a little tiresome ; but we
have always to admire its facile masterfulness of rhyme and
metre, while it is always relieved by endless versatility of
matter, and changeableness of mood. Cynical it is certainly,
and world-weary ; but half its paradox is chaff. There is a
vein of rollicking buffoonery through the whole, which by
ponderous moralists is always missed. " I rattle on exactly
as I'd talk " just so, and we know the half-grave, half-gay
nonsense Byron talked. The man was half an Aristophanes,
half a Rabelais. His buffoonery at Newstead with the
monk's skull for drinking cup, and monk's robes of sack-
cloth his dressing up the statues of Neville's Court at
Trinity with surplices his popping with his pistol at
those stone ornaments on the house-roof opposite his own
at Missolonghi, till all the old women came howling out to
remonstrate with this eccentric Milordo, who had arrived to
deliver Greece, and leave his weary life in their fever jungles
his hilarious practical jokes all showed the grown-up
schoolboy.
If you weep too much over this man, fair ladies and sad
young gentlemen, even though he bid you weep, he will
look up laughing in your faces, and overwhelm you with
mockery : you must not take all he sings for gospel ; in the
very heart of this there is a hollowness and a jeer ; and
surely he who has laid his hand upon the very heart of
God's universe must be, like Byron, both a weeping, and a
laughing philosopher ! Writers have become indeed more
radically miserable since Byron. I can hear no merriment
in the ghastly " Contes Drolatiques " of Balzac, none in
the hollow spectral mockery of Heine, none in the despair
of Leopardi. After all, Byron is no hysteric young French-
man to be manipulated by a mistress, and shoot himself !
His intellectual and emotional range is vast ; he can thunder
and rave and laugh like the sea. For the rest, as he says
himself, if he laughs, it is often that he may not weep.
LORD BYRON AND HIS TIMES. IOQ
And there is indeed much of bitterness and disappointment
in his hilarity ; he is still misanthropic, and incredulous of
human excellence ; but he will try now to disburthen
himself of his sorrow by a jest or an epigram. Reckless dis-
sipation, and carnal excesses, may have dimmed his ideal,
and he comes before us more as a roue man of the world,
or light-hearted sceptic ; but after all he cannot always
keep the mask on, and when he removes it we behold a
great and true man in tears " Childe Harold " himself,
but less egotistic in his thoughts and aims and interests,
less inclined to "pose," with maturer digested knowledge
of men and things than before ; on one side of his face,
indeed, a hoary, world-weary sinner, but on the other a
still generous, adventurous, high-spirited boy. Nowhere
in Byron can I, for my part, discern, the " fiend gloating
triumphantly over human frailties," which some profess to
see. Rousseau, let alone the Bible, would have taught him
better than that, and did teach him better.
In clear, graphic, realistic narrative power, as well as in
humour, Byron in "Don Juan" reminds one of Chaucer
and Boccaccio, while his descriptions of human loveliness
have all the luscious, luminous colouring of Ovid, or Cor-
reggio ; nay, there never were, and never will be such
descriptions. The harem scenes are in this respect un-
rivalled. Is there anything quite equal to that lovely idyl
of Haidee and Juan's love after the shipwreck on the
beautiful island ? Such incidents as those of the shipwreck,
the siege of Ismail, and the intrigue with Donna Julia, have
all the verve and narrative power of Homer, all his direct
reality and breathing life ; though there is not here, as in
the Iliad, one great action dominating all the incidents.
But there are certainly traces of development and change
in the charming dandy events and persons are transforming
him slowly into the man of the world, though the bloom of
generous youth is still on him ; he is consummately life-
like. Granted that type of character, mobile, eager, super-
1 10 ESSAYS ON POETRY AND POETS.
ficial, events and persons would have just the kind, and
amount of influence they have over him.* Here, moreover,
there is no longer any question of delineating a proud,
morose, melancholy genius : all men, if not all women, can
sympathize with this hero ; he is one of themselves, idealized
indeed, but only with the more ordinary popular qualities
furbished up and augmented ; commonplace, not more than
usually intellectual, emotional, or imaginative. This is one
of the notable merits of the poem, as a work of art. What
though Byron found this petted, spoiled personage in him-
self? Yet no other qualities of his own very heterogeneous
personalty, none of those he is accused of being able alone
to represent, has he attributed to this pleasant, handsome
boy. He never makes Juan moralise, or mock, or moan ;
though he drops him occasionally, and does that himself.
The fact is, that genius must always be, in some mysterious
manner, whatever it represents to the life. Goethe only
makes his women, and one or two types of man live ; the
rest he skilfully imitates. Shakespeare, on the other hand,
was an intellectual and moral miracle. He lives in innu-
merable human types. But we cannot pause to speak of
the inexhaustible wit, the pointed epigrams, the scathing
scorn, the numerous pithy couplets such as this, in the
cantos about English society :
" There was the Honourable Mrs. Sleep,
Who seemed a white lamb, and was a black sheep."
In our intellectual, competitive-examination, tradesman-
like, priggish age, it is perhaps possible a little to underrate
this Alcibiades kind of hero natural, adventurous, subtle
and supple as a Greek, beautiful, daring, courteous, athletic,
tender, half-feminine, fascinating who enjoys life in a
buoyant, dare-devil way ; is not too wise, self-conscious, or
* Macaulay's dictum that Juan is a poor copy of the page in " Figaro "
seems to be absurd, though hints from there, and from "Faublas" are not
wanting.
LORD BYRON AND HIS TIMES. Ill
scrupulous, to kiss any sweet mouth, which beauty, youth,
health, and good fortune may raise to his own ; nor so
afflicted with metaphysical hypochondria, as to lament very
long or very loud, when Dame Fortune for a change turns
capricious and smites him.*
I am far from sure that it is all loss for ordinary men
that they should be got to look for a moment at the world
at life, other countries and other persons, all the nooks
and corners of this wonderful young world of ours through
so magical and exhilarating an atmosphere as this of
Byron's should unlearn for awhile the commonness, cant,
ennu^ and grey, sordid vapidity of their own poor selves
even of what is ostensibly highest and holiest in their
existence, yet often circumscribed, dead, and conventional,
after all ; though, of course, I acknowledge the danger of
so much explosive material being stored where youthful
blood is burning. But, at any rate, a poet who could throw
himself so thoroughly into this youthful gaiety of tem-
perament cannot have been, even at this time, the played-
out, ruined devil, which excellent and reverend persons made
out even if he had not proved the contrary by writing the
most ideal cantos of Childe Harold, and many other of his
most ideal works, at the same time ; and those profoundly
pathetic verses on his birthday, only a few days before he
died for human freedom.
* This commonness, or somewhat theatrical attractiveness of Byron's heroes
does in some measure, as has been truly remarked, account for their so swift
and unparalleled universal popularity ; these heroes appealed, in some degree,
to the less-elevated instincts of admiration among men as did Schiller's
Robbers. The British public, in fact, with its accustomed generosity and dis-
crimination, are ready to condone Byron's merits for the sake of his faults.
Nevertheless, viewed with any seriousness, the tragic heroes of Byron have a
moral and spiritual significance quite as deep as that of Wallenstein, Macbeth,
or Coriolanus. After all, however, his tragic figures are rather ideal types
than real men, more like Moliere's than like Shakespeare's. And while Harold,
Manfred, and Cain are embodied types of fate-stricken human passion, and
illimitable imaginative yearning, Don Juan represents "omnivorous appetite
for pleasure," which must soon end in satiety and despair.
112 ESSAYS ON POETRY AND POETS.
On the whole, then, Byron is probably a greater English
poet than any of his great contemporaries, except Shelley,
Keats, and Wordsworth ; though I do not know that it is
profitable, or even really possible, to make such comparisons.
I have no patience with people who, because they admire
Byron, cannot, or say they cannot, admire Tennyson, and vice
versa. Tennyson, by no means wanting in passion, glowing,
rich, rare, intellectual, has given us much Byron did not
give. But, assuredly, Shakespeare only towers above Byron.
Mr. Browning, who believes in Shelley, might remember
that Shelley would not have called Byron a " flat-fish," or
" cackling goose ; " and Mr. Carlyle, who believes in Goethe,
might have remembered that Goethe said, " Byron alone I
place by my side ; Scott is nothing to him/' (If we take in
Scott's prose, however, then Scott must stand by our very
highest below Shakespeare.) " There were giants in those
days." Byron, though he had small sympathy with his
countrymen, and their foreign politics, for they took the
Legitimist orthodox side in continental strife, was still an
illustrious " Roman," and proud of being the citizen of no
mean city. He inveighed against " Villainton " and his
battles ; but yet the brilliant and gigantic struggles in
Europe and in India, out of which his country emerged
splendidly victorious, doubtless helped to mould his poetry
of warlike strife and fiery action. On his travels, and in
his foreign abodes, moreover, he was constantly in the very
focus of civil and international commotion. Byron was
English, however, in many respects, notably in his frag-
mentariness and self-contradiction, in his illogical intellect,
in his unsystematic, unfinished ruggedness both of mind
and style ; I do not think he will ever be long out of favour
with us. He is a rude mountain-mass, tropically gorgeous,
not perfectly symmetrical, a mighty ocean ever and anon
bursting through the dykes of our proprieties, and devas-
tating our plains ; superfine academic critics will always
prefer the dainty finish of men who are lesser poets,
LORD BYRON AND HIS TIMES. 113
though defter craftsmen. Perhaps most of what Byron
thought, wrote, and did, was, like his beauty, mutilated ;
but he was a glorious torso, worth a million smirking,
W9XCtopetits-matres; he has the splendid imperfection of an
yschylus, a Shakespeare, a Dante, and a Hugo. Of what
strange and variously mingled elements was this man
formed ! the breath of Genius descending from on high
upon him, angels and demons perchance having also some
unguessed concurrence in so vast a personality. I am often
reminded of Chatterton. For was not that child one of the
first English prophets of " world-sorrow," after all ? Study
his modern poems, and those " antiques," with the modern
wail piercing through so many of them ! conceived as they
were in the mystic shadow of old St. Mary's Church.
Consider his awful supernatural life of seventeen years
can it be that the sub-chaunter's boy of Bristol did not
altogether disappear from earth after that dark mad agony
of Brooke Street ? Dear Chatterton ! the only great
dramatic poet since Massinger, save Otway.
Wandering one day in the cemetery of Ferrara, Byron
found two epitaphs that struck him forcibly.
" Martini Luigi
Implora Pace."
' ' Lucrezia Picini
Implora eterna quiete."
These few words, he comments in a letter, say all that can
be said or sought : the dead have had enough of life ; all
they want is rest, and this they implore. Here is all the
helplessness, and humble hope, and death-like prayer that
can arise from the grave. " I hope," he continues, " that
whoever may survive me, and shall see me put in the
foreigners' burying-ground at the Lido, within the fortress
of the Adriatic, will have those two words and no more
put over me ' Implora Pace ! ' ' May he now find what
he sought not the sleep of the grave, but the " peace which
passeth understanding " !
I
SHELLEY.
SHELLEY has been termed the most poetical of poets, and
with some reason. He more seldom probably than any
poet, except Shakespeare, lapses into prose. A living,
original poetic diction seems to flow perennially from him ;
metaphor and imagery never fail him ; his ear for melody
and harmony of measure, not too obtrusive and artificial,
but spontaneous, varied, and charming, was unsurpassed ;
he is one of the great modern brotherhood of prophets,
or interpreters of Nature ; and the substance of his message
to us as seer concerning truth and life is of high value,
whatever may be its error and limitation.
Mr. Matthew Arnold, indeed, has lately pronounced a
severe judgment on Shelley, even venturing to affirm that
he will be remembered by his prose rather than his poetry.
In an essay, with which otherwise I often gravely disagreed,
Mr. Swinburne replied that few critical reputations could
survive such a judgment. But Mr. Arnold appeared to
found his indictment against Shelley on the fact that he
was the poet of clouds and sunsets rather than of man.
Considering Shelley's ardent aspirations for human good,
and for a more ideal condition of society, in which the
majority should enjoy fuller opportunities of developing
our common humanity, to say nothing of one of the most
intense dramas of modern days, " The Cenci," that assertion
is very questionable. Man, indeed, not men, Shelley cared
SHELLEY. 115
for. His men and women are mostly thin shadows, appari-
tions of dream or reverie, somewhat hectic and hysterical ;
they are usually idealized self-portraitures. His was a
recluse and solitary soul. No doubt Shelley is the poet
of clouds and sunsets the poet of Nature more distinc-
tively. But does not he who makes this a reproach to a
poet fail to comprehend a characteristic note of all the
best and most moving modern poetry ?
I shall venture to repeat here and elsewhere the sub-
stance of a few sentences from my first essay, since that
gives, as it were, the keynote and leading motif of my book ;
but some of the remarks in it apply more specifically to
particular poets.
Certainly man has always been a great subject-matter
for the muse ; but what if a new field has been added to
her triumphs, a new realm reclaimed from chaos for her
achievements? That I believe is a fact. This is an age
of material science, as former ages were not. It is also
the age of Nature-poetry. That is indeed the note of all
great recent verse of Byron, Wordsworth, Keats, Coleridge,
and Tennyson, quite as much as of Shelley. It is the
right and duty of modern men to interrogate and inter-
pret Nature. Science has furnished much material ; but her
own province as interpreter of Nature is quite distinct ; she
is minister for abstract knowledge, and practical utility ;
whereas poetry communes with Nature as living, and in
living fellowship with humanity as spiritual symbol, the
key to which lies hidden in the heart and imagination of
man, in the analogies that blend and unify the twin spheres
of thought and sense. But the poetic soul is not more
needed thus to find the clue to external nature than is
external nature needed to reverberate light (with a new
measure and manner of it added) upon the inmost recesses
of intellect and emotion. " Stone him with hardened hearts
harder than stones," sings Shakespeare in " Lucrece." How
is the hardness of the callous heart understood a thousand-
Il6 ESSAYS ON POETRY AND POETS.
fold by that image of the lesser hardness, the derived, the
merely phantasmal hardness in the stone !
I look upon a few lines in Shelley's " Mont Blanc " as
some of the finest he ever wrote :
" Thou hast a voice, great mountain, to repeal
Large codes of fraud and woe. "
This is the outcome of a deep penetration into the very
heart and essence of that magnificent calm of the snow-
spirit communing with eternal constellations, that journey
" ohne hast, und ohne rast" The pageant of imagery is
but as avenues of sounding glory, whereby we approach
the king. The yellow primrose that was only a yellow
primrose and nothing more to Peter Bell, was, as I
have said, less truly seen by Peter Bell than by Words-
worth, to whom it was also a yellow primrose, more accu-
rately perceived, indeed, by more delicate and cultivated
senses, but also a very infinitude beyond, only to be realized
by emotion, thought, and imagination. There is no more
reason that I can discover why those higher faculties should
be excluded from their share and function in the revelation
of truth than there is why the senses and the understanding
should be so excluded. The man of science, the practical
agriculturist, the engineer, have to tell us one thing, very
good in its way ; but the poet has to tell us something
quite different, and also good in its way. Hence, I cannot
enter into Mr. Ruskin's preference of Scott over Shelley
as a poet, which is founded on this distinction between
them. Scott (our great humanist, and romance-writer
as such next to Shakespeare) certainly had the eye of a
painter, an eye for picturesque presentation of the externals
of a landscape ; but to him, as to most of the elder poets,
it was a background and no more ; while even Thomson
fails to spiritualize it ; that is, to feel, and make us feel
its spirituality through the material veil, which is also a
symbol, as do Wordsworth and Shelley. Railroads and
machines, and the goods they manufacture, are well, cer-
SHELLEY. I I/
tainly ; but mental and emotional furniture is perhaps
worth even a little more than the decorative furniture
of drawing-rooms. Emotion may help us to discern in
Nature features, analogies, moods that are indeed hers,
though not all can discern them ; yet, of course, I fully
admit that such characteristics may be more superficial
and transitory, or more essential, vital, and abiding. The
imagination, as distinguished by Ruskin himself, will take
hold of the heart of things, while the fancy will glance
from one surface similitude to the other may even dis-
tort truth by seizing only on these, leading away from
profounder analogies, and structural homologues, more
essential. But he who uses the so-called poetic diction
which he has picked up by reading, without personal
feeling, who deals, moreover, in frigid conceits and artifices
that attract attention only to his own technical skill, has
touched the lowest deep, and is no seer, but a mere
clever writer of verses. As to the value of this modern
poetry of Nature as a revelation, not of Nature only, but also
of man, I have already asked what Wordsworth's Leech-
gatherer would be without the lonely moor, and the lonely
moor without the Leech -gatherer ; they form together one
vital unity. The Leech-gatherer is no common old man, but
a very messenger of God to the poet, revealing to him the
beauty of resignation and contentment. But he is dis-
embodied, as it were, in the poet's meditative imagination ;
he becomes a spiritual being of high order. That is not
the way Shakespeare, or Moliere, or Homer would have
represented him ; but it may be a true, and not a false
way notwithstanding ; it may illuminate to the depths of
him as no other method could do, and shew him as he
essentially is. What would Margaret in the " Excursion " be
without the cottage on the moor, and her neglected garden
once so trim and tidy ? What would Shelley's Alastor
be without the magnificent scenery of mountain and stream
amid which he moves onward to the close ? They are
Il8 ESSAYS ON POETRY AND POETS.
one. They have joined hands, and interpret one another.
The result of the poet's meditation is neither man alone,
nor Nature alone, but some fair, spiritual child of their
espousals. This, I maintain, is somewhat distinctively new
and precious added to our intellectual and emotional
treasure ; we cannot afford to lose it ; we are ungrateful
not to thank the poet who procures it.
The imaginative abstractions of Shelley are often grand,
worthy of a poet of the first order, to be placed beside
Milton's magnificent abstraction, " Far off His coming
shone." What can be finer in this line than the periphrasis
for, and personification of, earthquake in " Mont Blanc " ?
' ' Is this the scene
Where the old earthquake demon taught her young
Ruin ? "
How lovely is the personification in " Adonais ! " a passage
worthy to be placed beside the " Stone him with har-
dened hearts," which I quoted from Shakespeare.
" Out of her secret paradise she sped,
Through camps and cities, rough with stone and steel
And human hearts, which, to her aery tread
Yielding not, wounded the invisible
Palms of her tender feet where'er they fell ;
And barbed tongues, and thoughts more sharp than they
Rent the soft form they never could repel,
Whose sacred blood, like the young tears of May,
Paved with eternal flowers that undeserving way."
Could dissertations, or sermons say so well how love is
wounded by want of love, and the spectacle of hard in-
difference or cruelty ?
But yet we have to note something on the other side,
that may be justly urged against Shelley as poet. His
perennial affluence of imagery, metaphor, beautiful phrase,
and lovely rhythm, sometimes prevails to the injury of his
substance, which is in danger of vanishing in a mere spray
of verbal effects. His meaning is apt to be beaten out
very thin. A peculiarity in him is that, whereas his power
SHELLEY. 119
of interpreting, and making us feel the life in Nature
often through personifications is so remarkable (as in
"The Cloud," the "Ode to the West Wind," and the
" Hymn to Pan "), he sometimes endeavours to give a
semblance of independent vitality to abstractions, which
do not lend themselves readily to such endeavour. Thus,
greatly as I admire " Adonais," the elegy on the death of
Keats, I do think there is a certain frigidity and unreality
in parts ; I will not say a want of sincerity, because there is
an atmosphere of true poetry in the very subtlest and most
impalpable of the Shelleyan abstractions. He breathed in
rare atmospheres, where none but himself could breathe ;
he delighted in disporting himself in a region between
heaven and earth, in what occultism terms the astral region,
or ether, among the phantasmal shadows, or more refined
volatilizations of mundane solidities. At such times, as in
" The Witch of Atlas " (which is an exquisite iridescence of
the fancy, and no more), he did not penetrate to the heart
of things, but played, as it were, with the ghosts or wraiths
of them only ; more beautiful, indeed, or as beautiful as any
earthly appearance to sense, but not more spirit-sustaining
or substantial. He dwells often in some nebulous region
of rainbows, which corresponds not to the laws of Nature
as known by sense, or understanding ; nor to the deeper
spiritual laws in which these have their being. Thus when
he sings of Dawn
" On the brink of the night and the morning
My coursers are wont to respire ;
But the earth has just whispered a warning
That their flight must be swifter than fire."
this seems a mere gambol of fantasy, not true to the actual
fact, and not suggesting anything more essential than the
outward fact. In "Adonais" I think most of us refuse to
realize the personification of the Dreams and Splendours,
winged Persuasions and veiled Destinies, Desires and
Adorations, adapted from Bion, but which, with the Sicilian
120 ESSAYS ON POETRY AND POETS.
poet, were pretty, and very conceivable Cupids. Compare
and contrast Wordsworth's wonderfully imaginative per-
sonifications in the " Yew Trees," that solemnize and sub-
due the soul.
But then to Shelley thoughts easily took palpable form,
got themselves incarnated in some concrete image, more or
less distinct, and thus he leaves his readers behind. He
saw his thoughts. And, indeed, if we would pierce to the
reality, we must remain in, or rather return to, the concrete,
for that alone is real. It is a lovely realm of faery, all-
harmonious in itself, that the poet bodies forth. But the
stanzas about Spring, Summer, Autumn, and Echo lament-
ing Adonais, seem almost extravagant in their sentiment,
however beautiful. Only it was rather the ideal poet
that Shelley was thinking of; Keats had become one
with him. What lover of poetry has not wandered spell-
bound in the lush bowers of " Prometheus," all woven of
luxuriant trailers, and flushed over with rarest bloom ?
Most exquisite inventions of Paradisal loveliness ! Think
of the childlike spirit of the Earth asleep, in the light of his
own smiles, and pillowed on his alabaster arms ! The
martyrdom of the demi-god, Prometheus, benefactor of man,
is the noble central motive ; but it is overgrown with
entangled episode, imagery, and musical song. The poetry
of Shelley wanders away at its own sweet will ; there is an
absence of concentrating, architectonic, moulding power,
giving unity ; although we find, generally, unity of mood,
and lyrical feeling. The poet fades away down every lovely
avenue of fresh suggestion opened out to him by his posi-
tion of the moment. And so we are affected with a
cloying excess of sweetness and profusion. But " tell me
where the senses mix" sings Tennyson. Shelley can. His
metaphors, his epithets and similitudes, make you feel their
essential kinship and unity ; how they melt into and blend
with one another, like odours of many flowers in the
still garden of the soul. But in such odes as the " Ode
SHELLEY. 121
to Liberty," I do think there is no little confusion of
imagery, and substitution of sounding words for definite
thought, or representation, an error so fatally reproduced
and intensified in some of the poet's disciples. Even the
music is not always present. But what faults are not
atoned for by such beauties as those in the utterances of
Panthea ?
And while Shelley is bold and extravagant, it is an
yEschylean extravagance, that of genius, often magnificent.
All through "Prometheus" he displays the mythopceic faculty
of the world's primaeval poets, a faculty shared with him by
Keats. That passage about the orb which typifies the Earth,
and the childlike spirit asleep in it, the lovely picture of
the Chariot of the Hours, the Songs of the Earth and Moon,
are instances ; also his visions of the fairies, or nature-
spirits, as sung by the fawns, with the delicious nightingale
passage, all which Mr. Brooke has called " Music of the
woods." The " Mother of the months " is " borne in her
thin boat, floating up from her interlunar cave," " that orbed
maiden, with white fire laden, whom mortals name the
moon." One might almost be looking, as I have done, at
those sacred pictures in the temple-tombs of Thebes,
painted so many thousands of years ago. He tells us
stories about the sun, moon, and stars ; he narrates their
adventures. Of course I don't vouch for the strict accuracy
of all that ; still I fancy it is much more true than to
regard them as dead machines. We are told, indeed,
by prosaists, and Dryasdusts, that all religion, including
Nature-worship, arises from the mistake savages make in
taking dreams of their dead friends for ghosts of them,
which ghosts are afterwards stupidly supposed to animate
natural objects. Well, I wonder what Shelley and Keats
would have said to that ? But we need not discuss it here
and now ! The truth is, that Nature is animate to the child,
the primaeval man, and the true poet. She was animate
to Hesiod, and Homer, though they had their own way of
122 ESSAYS ON POETRY AND POETS.
expressing their conviction ; and we have ours. Certainly
the new birth of inductive science, and our modern habit
of observing details minutely, enable us to regard Nature
more truly, as more aloof from man, more as she is in her-
self. Shelley saw trance-visions with shut eyes ; they are
ideal landscapes that he mostly paints us, hardly the land-
scapes of earth ; these he beheld with inward eye, as he saw
the vision of the child in the bay of Lerici, when his out-
ward eye was open the child, who may have been his own
little William, beckoning him from the sea ; and shortly
after, we know how his beloved friend, the sea, received
him into her bosom. But in the pageantry of sky and
cloud and sea and forest and flowers he is at home, in
these he revels, the very Turner of poetry. " The Sensitive
Plant" reveals the essential soul of flowers. All the
feminine sensitiveness of the poet, his gentleness, his almost
irresponsible naivett of incontrollably childlike impulse,
made him feel with the pure, cool, passive, meek-blooded
world of flowers, as with the world of infancy and animal
life. Well did he call himself Ariel. He was a kind of
elf, but semi-human an yEolian lyre, breathed upon by
every wandering wind, and yielding sweetest melody. As
an instance at once of his strong, clangorous, inspiring-
verbal music, so germane to the song of glorious aspiration
for humanity that lifts him, and of many other excellences
too, I need refer only to the chorus from " Hellas," where
note especially the fine phrase, "fed with morning, 5 ''
applied to the eagle.
Then, as an example of sonorous blank verse, and of
the happy employment of sounding geographical names
one of the notes of great contemplative poets, for instance,
of Milton we may take many passages from " Alastor," and
again, others from that poem to show the poet's tender
gentleness with all his brothers and sisters, the lower
animals. The lines about Ethiopia powerfully appeal to
one who has seen the temple of Denderah in Egypt :
SHELLEY. 123
" His wandering step,
Obedient to high thoughts, has visited
The awful ruins of the days of old,
Athens, and Tyre, and Baalbek, and the waste
Where stood Jerusalem, the fallen towers
Of Babylon, the eternal pyramids,
Memphis, and Thebes, and whatsoe'er of strange,
Sculptured on alabaster obelisk,
Or jasper tomb, or mutilated sphinx,
Dark Ethiopia in her desert hills
Conceals. Among the ruined temples there,
Stupendous columns, and wild images
Of more than man, where marble demons watch
The Zodiac's brazen mystery, and dead men
Hang their mute thoughts on the mute walls around,
He lingered, poring on memorials
Of the world's youth ; through the long burning day
Gazed on those speechless shapes ; nor when the moon
Filled the mysterious halls with floating shades,
Suspended be the task, but ever gazed
And gazed, till meaning on his vacant mind
Flashed like strong inspiration, and he saw
The thrilling secrets of the birth of time."
A good example of Shelley's grand mountain land-
scapes we may find in " Prometheus," where he paints the
Alps at dawn. He loves the sublime, grandiose, vague ;
but in depicting clouds, and wood, and sky, and flower, he
was exquisitely minute, and true to fact. The noble lines
written among the Euganean Hills are too long to quote ;
but these, as also "Julian and Maddalo," contain great
pictures of sunset. The brief lyrics, which after all are
perhaps the most inestimable of Shelley's gifts to us, merely
as poetry, for perfection of form, and exquisite feeling,
express for the most part indefinable unsatisfied longing,
inconsolable regret, tender but poignant sorrow for the
transitoriness of earthly things, beauty, love, and all
delight ; also an oppressive sense of the perversity and
hard-heartedness of men. They are as the low outweeping
of a heart overweighted with the misery of the world.
The delicate evanescent grace of them is like nothing else
in literature :
124 ESSAYS ON POETRY AND POETS.
"When the lamp is shattered,
The light in the dust lies dead ;
When the cloud is scattered,
The rainbow's glory is shed ;
When the lute is broken,
Sweet notes are remembered not ;
When the lips have spoken,
Loved accents are soon forgot.
"As music and splendour
Survive not the lamp and the lute,
The heart's echoes render
No song when the spirit is mute :
No song but sad dirges,
Like the wind in a ruined cell,
Or the mournful surges
That ring the dead seaman's knell.
" When hearts have once mingled,
Love first leaves the well-built nest ;
The weak one is singled
To endure what it once possessed.
O Love, who bewailest
The frailty of all things here,
Why choose you the frailest
For your cradle, your home, and your bier ? "
Now I can say but a word on the poet's philosophy.
That we get in many poems in " Epipsychidion," " Mont
Blanc," " The Hymn to Intellectual Beauty ; " also in
"Prometheus," "Hellas," and " Adonais." The negative
and materialistic stage of " Queen Mab," written when he
was a boy, was soon transcended and left behind. Shelley
is an idealist in philosophy. The world is a phantasma-
goria of impressions and ideal, belonging to the soul, or
spirit ; and Love, or Ideal Beauty, the essential nature of
that spirit, the pervading principle of the universe. But
all is one, and diversity, variety, are but passing manifesta-
tions of that One. This, briefly and meagrely, is the idea
that runs through the poetry. He deifies impulse, in-
stinct, and resents constraint or law imposed ab extra by
the State, or even by conscience within. He would urge
that the law of Love is the highest law ; yet it is pretty
SHELLEY. 125
well impossible in our present condition to merge the sense
of Duty altogether in that, though in the ideal and future
existence even the sense of Duty may be transcended.
But swift transition was the keynote of Shelley's impres-
sionable nature, and it has been truly said that he thirsted
for rapture, highly-strung enjoyment, the only condition of
which is change. So no one laments the fading of our
joys more pathetically. On the whole, Shelley was, and is,
our most inspired and possessed poet, the most spontaneous
and demonic best example of that madness which Plato
ascribes to the true bard. He is carried out of himself
indeed, and reflects the world ; yet his is an intense and
rich personality ; it is in one very distinct personality that
the world is thus reflected ; the poet is full of elaborate
self-pourtrayals, though idealized, and therefore represen-
tative. Yet I think he had not strength and grip enough,
condensation and fusion enough, to make him grasp the
idea of will, of personality, of individual identity, nor does
he make us feel it. That is to me the defect of his idealism ;
for ideas and phenomena can only be in thinking persons
of given character ; and that leaves him the poet of some
delicious thrill or shimmer of ever-varying impressions or
appearances, as also of impermanence and inconstancy.
And, indeed, Nature-worship is related to impulse, pas-
sion, instinct, though there is a Nature beyond and beneath
nature, beyond mere appearance. There is a nature for
sense and feeling, as well as a Nature for conscience, affec-
tion, and reason. The fawn and the satyr, the nymph, the
naiad, and the elf, laugh and play there. But beyond
and behind them are angels, children, spirits of the just
made perfect, and God Himself. There was a certain lack
of stability, backbone, and prehensile grasp in what Shelley
wrote, even as in what he did. Love can only be in lovers ;
if you are to have noble constancy and permanence, you
must be individual, as well as universal and impersonal.
Perhaps the most beautiful expression of Shelley's idealism
126 ESSAYS ON POETRY AND POETS.
is put into the mouth of the mysterious Ahasuerus in
" Hellas."
" Adonais," besides philosophy, sublimated by imagina-
tion and feeling into poetry, contains a strange longing
prophesy of the manner of the poet's own death.
" Made one with nature ! " he sings, concerning the
dead ; and who does not know that those we call dead
may be made one with man be felt as a presence in the
home and abroad, to strengthen and sustain, to elevate and
to bless may even look out with their own dear eyes
from eyes we name living ?
" Adonais " is not more about Keats than about Shelley.
It is altogether in that sphere of the ideal and beautiful
into which the poet ever lifted any special subject and
person when he touched them. And thus, too, " Epipsy-
chidion" hardly concerns Emilia Viviani, but rather that
supernal, celestial loveliness for which his spirit thirsted,
and with which, for a moment, he identified that particular
lady.
Shelley was, indeed, as Mrs. Browning named him,
"in his white ideal, statue-blind." He would exhaust and
drain all to the dregs, which must end in satiety and dis-
illusion ; if you will worship your idol in its passing,
momentary aspect, then you will assuredly have to break
it. As one critic observes, Shelley would leave no veils
on, brook no reticences. Psyche will behold Cupid with
her bodily eyes, and retain him in all his visible beauty.
But the god will not have it so, and vanishes from her.
For Shelley the ideal is naked, but he invests it with the
rosy hue and glory of imagination ; (there is no poet less
gross or sensual, all is shadowy and ethereal ;) and so, when
the reality mocks the dream, like a wilful babe, in petu-
lant disappointment, he flings the toy away. Poor Emilia
Viviani ! poor Harriett ! But that rosy hue and glory
belong not to the phenomenon to the passing appearance
and temporary semblance ; they belong to the eternal idea
SHELLEY. 127
and reality underlying these. Now, in order to arrive there
it behoves mortals to respect modesties, mysteries, con-
cealments. "Noli me tangere !" "/ ascend to the Father"
Take not the part for the whole ; be willing to renounce
the arc, that you may follow after and dwell in the full orb.
The raptures of " Epipsychidion " (a poem of wonder-
ful beauty) seem presumptuously to overleap eternal
boundaries, and violate those awful penetralia of indivi-
duality, aspiring to lose distinction in a unit, which would
be neither unity, nor possession, nor knowledge through
love and sympathy, but rather the blank chaos and non-
being of an unorganized, inharmonious, and essentially
unrealizable absorption.
Such, too, was his theory of government. Men in the
ideal condition were to be tribeless, classless, unobedient to
law ; and yet he too could anathematize impulses, when they
did not tend in the direction of his personal taste (see the
" Witch of Atlas"). But this removal of all distinctions, and
differentiations would not of itself furnish any higher form
of society beautiful, organized body politic, or civitas Dei.
It is hardly wise to break abruptly with that past, which,
entering into our very blood and constitution, encompasses
us as an atmosphere even though Nature herself may
always contrive to grow something out of whatever ruins
man may take upon him to sow with salt.
A poet, however, is not bound to suggest details ; rather,
his function is to see, feel, and body forth ideals. Otherwise,
one might be disposed to remark that universal love, and
the mere abolition of all forms of government are prescrip-
tions sufficiently vague and unfruitful, perhaps mainly avail-
able for the founding of constitutions in cloud-cuckoo-land.
There is, indeed, little of practical suggestion about Shelley.
Nor need you ask a poet for it ; only his more thorough-
going admirers tell us that we may look to him for that,
as well as everything else. And if you do not insist on
casting all his burning exhortations and asseverations in
128 ESSAYS ON POETRY AND POETS.
sober prose, reducing them to dogmas and propositions for
the understanding, then are they pregnant, and vivifying
enough for the initiated. It has been disputed whether a
poet (but let me explain, once for all, that I never mean by
this term a mere writer of verse) is", or is not in advance of
his time. There seems little evidence that he is so in
respect of remoulding and anticipating future institutions,
or particular discoveries, such flashes of insight as that of
Goethe concerning colour being rare enough to start forth
as exceptions. Dante was an indifferent political prophet,
judging by the " De Monarchia ; " yet it is true that a
poet has often profounder insight into principles, human
character, or Nature, than a dry philosophical reasoner, or
hard prosaic observer ; and he throws all into living words
for us. But as to details, though he^may be in advance of his
time in which case he will be unpopular, and only appre-
ciated later he is more often interpreter of the dominant
ideas of his generation, and not rarely flings himself back
passionately upon the past, vindicating what has been for
the moment forgotten, but will have to be vivified again
in a fairer growth of more comprehensive synthesis.
Shelley was indeed a standard-bearer in the van of free-
dom, a pioneer in the emancipated front of human thought.
But as regards detail, he was only the organ of his day's
iconoclasm. All will be perfect when you have pulled down
kings, and priests, and existing institutions. And yet these
are the outgrowth of human nature. Perhaps, therefore, it
might be well to improve and reform that also ; then
possibly it may grow better institutions. Still, outworn
institutions assuredly are hindrances to free and healthy
growth.
The " Divine Comedy " was rather behind than in ad-
vance of the dawning religious philosophies of that age.
And yet Dante's "Apocalypse " is in substance for all time.
Remember the magnificent symbolism of the white, and
dark, and blood-red steps of Purgatory !
SHELLEY. 129
With respect to Shelley's celebrated teaching in " Epipsy-
chidion," that in love "to divide is not to take away," I
quite believe that this is the true ideal to be aimed at. It
ought to be, and will be thus ; in varied friendships, in
general kindness and mutual help, approximations should
be made thereto. Yet one must confess that Shelley
himself was scarcely successful in his own life realizations.
To divide, with him, was apparently to take away ; at least
one would be glad to hear poor Harriett Westbrook's
opinion on the subject.
I cannot agree with Kingsley that genius should be
expected to be more moral than talent. It is possession,
absorption, dominant sensibility, and power of expression ;
does what it must do, and has its own individual manner
of doing. In some respects, that is more allied to weakness
than to strength. We " have this treasure in earthen
vessels." It is an organ of the universal soul. But if we
pardon the errors of genius for what it gives even ad-
mitting that it could hardly be without them allow the
defauts de ses qualites, let us not proceed to confound the
errors with the virtues, and confuse good and evil in one
blind hysterical indiscriminate worship. Shelley has been
by some admirers compared to Christ. But the grand
distinction of Christ is calm patience, chivalrous generosity,
the sublime forbearance of a magnanimity that forgives
and still believes ; charity that creates a spirit under the
ribs of death, engenders and sustains life by divining it yet
warm and dormant where all but love assumes it absent,
pours forth freely of its own life till, by inbreathing and
blood transfusion, a living soul is roused, and dead Lazarus
comes forth. The love and ardour of Pygmalion called
a warm Galatea from cold marble. And so would a greater
and stronger have found the ideal in that kind and homely,
but weak child, Harriett, whom once the poet loved, and
who loved him. Fate and circumstance had thrown this girl
upon his protection ; nay, eagerly and voluntarily had he
K
130 ESSAYS ON POETRY AND POETS.
assumed the responsibility ; whatever her faults, it was not
one to be shaken off with a light heart. But suddenly he
left her, for days even uninformed of his whereabouts, and
with inadequate means, until she learned that, having
found his " affinity," he would return to her no more.
That was like the conduct of Lady Byron, whether better
or worse, Shelley being a man who professed, and certainly
felt, profound sympathy with human wrong, burning indig-
nation with human injustice, I will not take upon myself
to determine. But I do think that to condone such an
action, is to condone the worst kind of aristocratic arro-
gance the intolerant arrogance of intellectual superiority.
Are the intellectual commonalty indeed but as an orange
for their superiors to suck and throw away ? It is not
men of the first order who think so, though that appears
to have been the opinion of Goethe. I do not believe it
was that of our own " glorious Willy," any more than of
Sakya-muni. And it could scarcely have been the delibe-
rate conviction of a sincere and genuine democrat like
Shelley. His life does not suggest it ; and yet a curious
light is thrown upon the poet's democratic principles by
what he said to Trelawney on board the Greek man-of-war,
when the latter asked him, " Is this your idea of Hellas ? "
and he answered, " No ; but it is of hell," because, forsooth,
the loud rough swearing sea-dogs of modern Greece offended
the fastidious delicacy of his private taste. And yet these
were the men who fought and died at Missolonghi. But
the poet could not see through to the ideal in them, that
burst forth later. However, this may have been only from
an almost womanly shyness and refinement An Ariel, an
angel, an inspired babe, full of sweet impulses, rather than
a man ! By all means let us reverence and pardon our
dear poet, but not call his follies and human lapses supreme
wisdom and virtue, because they are his ! That his be-
haviour to Harriett was chivalric and manly, not all the
pretty tremors, or shrill shrieks of "uncircumcised Philistine "
SHELLEY. 131
from the neo-Israelite camp of aesthetic culture, upon the
evidence now before us, can make me ever admit. The
young and weak girl he took from her father, and from
school, and swore to cherish, he soon abandoned for a
prey to some cruel domination of hereditary foes within,
and yet more cruel mercy of a callous world without. Nor
does it appear that the deed weighed too heavily upon him.
His very personal poems reveal little of a Manfred's or a
Cain's remorse. His own example, therefore, proves that
humanity is hardly yet lifted high enough for " love " to
be " an unerring light, and joy its own security."
The indictment of Mr. Jeaffreson, though readable,
minute, and careful, is rather conventional, and malignant.
But one awaits with anxious interest the further and
authorized revelations of Professor Dowden.
WORDSWORTH.
IT is doubtful if Wordsworth is as much read and pon-
dered as he ought to be. He is commonly regarded as
a describer and interpreter of Nature. And of course
that he is. But on studying carefully the chief part of
his best work, one certainly derives the impression rather
of what Matthew Arnold especially calls attention to
his fertile application of ideas to human life. The mass
and main weight of impression is, I think, ethical. You
are braced in the mountain atmosphere of this poet. You
become stronger, more hopeful, encouraged to do your own
work vigorously and well. It is an air of faith stimu-
lating, healthful, with no miasma of luxurious languor,
oppression, or despair. There is an outlook from it, as
from a snow-peak or a strong tower, upon fair infinite
horizons, however veiled in vapour and dim with distance.
It is a Puritan poetry, breathing comfort and courage, yet
I think, with little of the Puritan intolerance, and blas-
phemy of the good God. Being of old a lover of Words,
worth, yet having laid him aside for some years, I had
somehow thought of him as a serene recluse, withdrawn
from the terrible world, and refusing to face its deadly
problems living by preference among virtuous Dalesmen,
cheerful, frugal, prosperous, content. Now this view has
assuredly a measure of truth. This was the life he did
elect to live, and his outlook on human nature had con-
sequently limitations:
WORDSWORTH. 133
" The moving accident is not my trade ;
-To freeze the blood I have no ready arts ;
'Tis my delight alone in summer shade
To pipe a simple song for thinking hearts."
The male characters he depicts are very much his own,
and those he found at his own doors. He, and Byron, who
was equally limited in his way, could not understand each
other, and Wordsworth never even appreciated Keats.
But we may turn to other poets for other treasures. And
this view has only a degree of truth ; for you may find
a deal of human nature in your own soul, in your own
house, and at your own door, if you know how to look
for it. Charlotte Bronte did ; and Wordsworth is full of
sympathy with sorrow. There is no pathos profounder
than his. Some one speaks of the iron pathos of Crabbe.
The phrase seems to apply to Wordsworth. It is a kind
of inarticulate, still-life pathos. That of the episode of
Margaret in the "Excursion" would be crushing but for
the old narrator's own calm faith. Our poet is austere,
self-restrained : the storm and whirlwind of passion are
not for him, as they are for Byron nor fierce negation
and revolt, which are the birth-pangs of the Time-spirit,
labouring to engender a new and larger life, casting off an
old form as the snake sloughs his skin.
Certainly Wordsworth is one of our very great poets,
for he can both soar with dignity, and stoop with grace.
His good and enduring work is not only ample in quantity,
but varied in scope. I say this in spite of recent detraction
from writers who might have been expected to know better,
but who have elected to make themselves the mouthpiece
of ignorant prejudice. Wordsworth could hardly hope to
escape the universal 'depreciation of Carlyle, but to Mr.
Ruskin he might have exclaimed : " Et tu, Brute ! " One
may be sorry indeed, but one ought hardly to be surprised
that Mr. Rossetti should have told his biographer that he
grudged Wordsworth " every vote he got." For, although
134 ESSAYS ON POETRY AND POETS.
he himself has done some very fine work, yet he was the
head of a school which is the natural enemy of Words-
worth, and which would seem to have aspired to force us
back into those old bad paths whence Wordsworth came
to deliver us one which can have little in common with
a poet whose mission, as he conceived it, was to " console
the afflicted, to add sunshine to daylight by making the
happy happier, to teach the young and the gracious of
every age to see, to think, to feel, and therefore become
more actively and securely virtuous." The beautiful
lines on the " Feast of Brougham Castle " describe him
perfectly :
" Love had he found in huts where poor men lie,
His daily teachers had been woods and rills,
The silence that is in the starry sky,
The sleep that is among the lonely hills."
But Wordsworth expresses the conviction that his
poetry " will co-operate with the benign tendencies of
human nature and society, and will in its degree be
efficacious in making men better, wiser, and happier."
Cheerful wisdom, and a prevailing inward happiness, be-
long to him, very stimulating and refreshing in these days
when languor, pessimism, despondency, and doubt have
invaded so many hearts, and so much literature. Once
he contrasts the nightingale, that " creature of a fiery
heart," with the stockdove, rather to the disadvantage of
the former :
" She sang of love with quiet blending,
Slow to begin, and never ending,
Of serious faith, and inward glee ;
That was the song, the song for me ! "
How enviable the disposition of that man who could
say, sweet-natured through all harsh judgment and neglect
" I've heard of hearts unkind, kind deeds
With coldness still returning ;
Alas, the gratitude of men
Hath oftener left me mourning ! "
WORDSWORTH. 135
Politically one may regret that the excesses and failures
of the Revolution should have thrown back this " lost
leader" so far into the arms of blind reaction and dull
convention. Still it is not to be denied that the religious,
reverential, ancestral elements needed a poetic champion
and interpreter. For the profane, all-dissolving understand-
ing would tear remorselessly away all our mosses and
lichens, all our herbage and flowers, laying us bare to the
very stones ; nay, threatens to take the solid earth from
under our feet, if that were possible ! Scott and Words-
worth were formidably matched with Shelley and Byron ;
and all these powers alike had a great work to do. More-
over, Wordsworth was himself essentially a child and pro-
duct of the Revolution. For he glorified, or rather taught
us to recognize the glory in so-called ordinary persons and
ordinary things, forbidding us to call anything common
or unclean. Think of Michael, Margaret, the Old Leech-
gatherer, the Brothers, the Old Cumberland Beggar,
Matthew, Ruth, Lucy Gray, the Mad Mother, the woman
in " The Thorn," figures chosen from the crowd, ennobled
by misfortune or simple virtues, not refined or cultured
with conventional refinement or culture, elementary and
grand, dumbly pathetic in their pain, or innocent, sweet,
and true, transfigured in the solemn light of imaginative
charity, and deep pitiful contemplation. Herein, as in his
interpretation of Nature, he proved himself a poet of the
utmost originality, although the honour of this glorification
of our common humanity must be shared with him by
Burns. Nor is it fair to ascribe the revival of our poetry
from the degradation entailed on it by Pope's school ex-
clusively to these. For we remember Goldsmith, Gray,
Cowper, Chatterton, Blake ; even Shenstone, Dyer, and
Parnell. Still there was a distinctly new element in Words-
worth's interpretation of Nature, upon which I shall speak
later.
Mr. Myers, in his admirable study of Wordsworth, well
136 ESSAYS ON POETRY AND POETS.
says : " The maxims of Wordsworth's form of natural
religion were uttered before Wordsworth only in the sense
in which the maxims of Christianity were uttered before
Christ The essential spirit of the lines on Tintern Abbey
was for practical purposes as new to mankind as the
essential spirit of the Sermon on the Mount. Not the
isolated expression of ideas, but the fusion into a whole
in one memorable personality is that which connects them
for ever with a single name." This is excellent. My only
doubt would be how far Rousseau must share with him
this honour. But I repeat that the range of Wordsworth
is wide, for, besides those fine narrative sketches already
spoken of austere statues hewn out of grey granite
we have delicate lyrics of childhood and dumb animals,
occasional lyrics of rare perfume, also some of the noblest
reflective sonnets in the language, together with the most
faithful, yet spiritualized descriptive verse, added to philo-
sophical poetry of very high order ; though of the latter
there is perhaps only a little of supreme excellence. In the
fullest sense Wordsworth lacked dramatic power, but he
did throw himself into, and graphically present the essen-
tials of certain characters. As to the intrusion of his own
personality must not every great lyric meditative poet
intrude his personality, and has he not done so ? Do not
Byron, Shelley, Burns, Leopardi, Tennyson, Victor Hugo ?
But it is a typical, a more or less representative personality
which he " obtrudes " one that feels more intensely the
common feelings, one that sees more clearly and deeply
the common visions,, expressing these more perfectly in
the supreme, royal, melodious utterance of song. And be-
yond this, he may be endowed with a prophet's revealing
power.
That Wordsworth may on rare occasions have mis-
taken his own superficial, transient idiosyncrasy for that
personality which is of eternal worth is probably true. And
this seems partly due to Wordsworth's very excellence
WORDSWORTH. 137
The spectacle of this poet, living on and greatening, se-
renely confident, unshaken, unsoured, benignant, amid per-
sistent neglect, ridicule, defamation, is noble and unique.
Yet he must have known that he, like all original men of
genius, could only be addressing an audience " fit though
," and that he had necessarily to mould his own public,
iill not many artists have been so little sensitive to
external sympathy or the want of it. There must have
been some happy domination of calm and balanced tempera-
ment ; over his House of Life presided chaste and peace-
ful stars ; while within him lived a deep well-spring of
religious faith. He was fortunate in his domestic surround-
o
ings, but none of these can avail a genius of inharmonious
nature, harassed by ill-health. But this temper, together
with his own immovable self-approval, his seclusion from
the world, and the slight response vouchsafed by it to the
deep accents of his soul, are perchance responsible for a
certain opinionative hardness, and undue accentuation of
his less amiable peculiarities ; he was thrown too much
upon himself, and the standards of his immediate circle, and
so wrote with scarce sufficient reference to universal human
feeling, emphasizing unduly the petty details of his ex-
perience ; caring chiefly to satisfy the desire for self-expres-
sion, even that engendered by casual moods of merely
passing interest.
We feel this in the grave sonnets commencing " Jones,
as from Calais," and " Spade, with which Wilkinson ; " also
in the earnest copy of verse addressed to the landlady of
his lodgings. But we feel it equally in the bald and
pompous metrical prose he poured forth so abundantly,
quite unconscious of its demerit ; nor can it be denied that
some of his pieces are trivial, though I am disposed to agree
with Mrs. Owen when she contends in her paper read be-
fore the Wordsworth Society that there is far less trivial
verse in Wordsworth than is commonly supposed. Even
the " Idiot Boy," and " Peter Bell," have fine motives ; there
138 ESSAYS ON POETRY AND POETS.
is, I think, a certain triviality about these poems ; but that
is rather because the materials are imperfectly fused in the
poet's imagination, insufficiently penetrated by it, than
because the subjects are trivial.
There is truth, however, in the criticism that Words-
worth poured forth verse too incessantly, and on too slender
a provocation. It will not do even for a great poet to
break into verse on every possible occasion, from the sing-
ing of a tea-kettle to the opening of a Mechanics' Institute,
or the marriage of a princess, however excellent and
respectable such occurrences may be. In other words,
a poet must be strongly moved to write if he would write
well. There is something in the Demonic inspiration, in
the Divine Afflatus after all, nor will that always breathe
when it is whistled for. You may summon spirits from the
vasty deep but will they come ?
Then no doubt there are occasional jars ; gratings of
harsh or inharmonious ideas, and pedestrian words. Words-
worth was not a perfect artist, but perhaps he was some-
thing better! Remember Browning's "Andea del Sarto,
the faultless painter." Wordsworth, Byron, and Shelley
were far greater poets than many a more faultless one.
What, again, of Shakespeare ?
But after all I deny that the so-called faultless ones are
faultless. Gray, and Campbell wrote very little, and yet
a good deal that they wrote is very indifferent poetry in-
deed, however correct and " elegant " as mere diction it may
be. Of " Don Juan " Byron writes to Murray : " You may
think yourself lucky if half of it is good. What poem is all
good ? " Dare we tell the truth about Dante or Milton ?
If so one may be bold enough to aver that there is almost
as much dull and dry reading in the " Divina Commedia," or
in " Paradise Lost" and " Regained," as there is in the " Pre-
lude " and the "Excursion :" but there is also much magnifi-
cent poetry ; and I believe there is a great deal of that in
Wordsworth. As regards triviality^ there are few subjects
WORDSWORTH. 139
that remain trivial after a true poet has laid his hand upon
the heart of them. When he breathes over them words
of consecration, the great transubstantiation takes place.
Nay, rather, he has just opened our eyes to what they are.
Instead of trivial, for all their simplicity of theme and
treatment, the poems about Lucy, the " Reverie of Poor
Susan," " We are Seven," the " Blind Highland Boy," the
" Childless Father," and many another like them are perfect
poetry.
In his ballad-anecdotes, and narrative poems, Words-
worth deliberately elected to write in homely phrase, and in
simple, direct, inornate language. In revolting against the
tawdry frippery, the cold, insincere, uninspired, conventional
diction then in vogue, appealing to no heart and no vision
whatsoever, perchance he went a little too far : but " The
Waggoner," for instance, would have been the worse, not
the better, for ornamental, inappropriate phrasemongery
There Wordsworth made too much of mere insignificant
details of every day. Good expression, a fine style, is that
best adapted to heighten, and interpret the substance of
what is said or sung ; and this may be either dignified,
elaborate, metaphorical, or homely and direct. Words-
worth commanded both styles. I maintain that for inter-
penetration of form and matter, which is style, he has no
superior. That is true of the " Ode on Immortality," " Yew
Trees," " There was a Boy," " Tintern," and equally so of
" Michael," " Margaret," " We are Seven." In proof of it listen
to this, but listen to it also for proof that the poet's heart,
to whatever party he professed to belong, beat in deep
sympathy with human rights. It is addressed to Toussaint,
the defeated slave, imprisoned by the tyrant Napoleon :
"Thou hast left behind
Powers that will work for thee, earth, air, and skies :
There's not a breathing of the common wind
That will forget thee ; thou hast great allies ;
Thy friends are exultations, agonies,
And love, and man's unconquerable mind."
140 ESSAYS ON POETRY AND POETS.
This is superb in matter and form, severe, majestic and
unlaboured. Other bards have been equal to writing
antique poems like " Dion " and " Laodamia," fine as they
are ; these have perhaps some of the inevitable academic
coldness of all such verse, or I should instance them also.
But what can be greater than the bald simplicity of the
larger part of " Michael " " a baldness as of mountain tops,"
as Matthew Arnold well says? What can be more pro-
found in pathos ? The story is briefly that Michael and his
wife, having been well-to-do mountaineers, suffered reverses
of fortune, and at last, with much heart-sorrow, resolved to
send their boy, Luke, adored by them both, away to seek
his fortune in the great city where others had prospered
before him. He had been his father's constant companion
on the hills, learning from him the shepherd's trade. And
before he goes, his father wishes him to lay the first stone
of the new sheepfold they were to have built together, ere
the necessity arose for sending the boy away :
' ' But lay one stone
Here, lay it for me, Luke, with thine own hands.
Nay, boy, be of good hope ; we both may live
To see a better day.
* * * * *
Now fare thee well
When thou returnest, thou in this place wilt see
A work which is not here : a covenant
'Twill be between us. But, whatever fate
Befall thee, I shall love thee to the last,
And bear thy memory with me to the grave."
The boy went wrong, and the father's heart broke ; but he
worked still at the unfinished sheepfold, only now alone.
" 'Tis believed by all
That many and many a day he thither went,
And never lifted up a single stone."
I do not envy the heart that cannot feel the marvellous
pathos of the conclusion. Akin to it, for the deep humanity
of its interest, is " The Leech-gatherer ; " but here you have
WORDSWORTH. 141
a style replete with dignity, because it is a meditative
poem, dealing with general principles, only illustrated by
the Leech-gatherer himself as he is contemplated by the
poet. Note here too the strange other- world abstraction
into which Wordsworth sometimes fell, while in face of the
homely external fact, which from opaque becomes a trans-
parent medium for him, letting in the too dazzling sun a
loophole, a portal opening upon the mysteries of eternity.
The ordinary old man grows disembodied for him, and
appears as God's angel, like the beggar leper in the legend
for her who received him.
Then note the serene faith of the conclusion, the lesson
preached here unconsciously by the aged man's example, as
by the old Cumberland beggar ; the same lesson that is
preached consciously by a similarly simple intellectual
nature, though one very rich in moral and spiritual gifts,
in the conclusion of " Margaret."
Next, I come to some of the poems referring to the
period of childhood " We are Seven," and one of the
poems on Lucy. With these two I shall connect the great
" Ode on Immortality," for these three all refer, not only to
childhood, but to death. They are simply perfect, each in
its own delightful way. Most sad, but wonderful verses :
" A slumber did my spirit seal ;
I had no human fears :
She seemed a thing that could not feel
The touch of earthly years.
" No motion has she now, no force,
She neither hears nor sees,
Rolled round in earth's diurnal course,
With rocks, and stones, and trees."
Here the terrible outward appearance of death mesme-
rises with strong eyes, and clasps to its own cold breast, as
in a death-trance, with no outlook beyond, the sensitive
soul of this poet, as it often did that of Shakespeare before
him. Contrast this with " We are Seven," where the child
over whom the glory of its immortality " broods like the
142 ESSAYS ON POETRY AND POETS.
day," feeling her life in every limb, knows not, understands
not, calmly overlooks death, while cheerily sitting on the
green mound of the very grave ; herein related to the
spiritual man or woman, who sees through and dwells not
on the appearance, but builds a wondrous fabric of divine
significance on the assumption of an immortality, which he
stays not, nor condescends to prove.
Let me now quote one short passage from the magnifi-
cent " Ode : "
" Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting :
The soul that rises with us, our life's star,
Hath had elsewhere its setting
And cometh from afar.
Not in entire forgetfulness,
And not in utter nakedness,
But trailing clouds of glory do we come
From God, who is our home :
Heaven lies about us in our infancy ! "
What can be more stately in expression ? How well
married are sense, phrase, and sound !
Mr. Matthew Arnold, found fighting often so nobly
against the prejudices of to-day, yet in this instance per-
chance partaking the repugnance of his Zeit-Geist, of the
spirit of his generation to Divine Philosophy, looks askance
at the Ode, as at other philosophical poetry of Wordsworth.
But, as Milton tells us, " divine philosophy is not harsh and
crabbed, as dull fools suppose, but musical as is Apollo's
lute " musical especially when the cold lyre of it is played
upon by lambent flames from a poet's heart ; by such
^Eolian airs as wander from his soul. Too often indeed it
is far otherwise, when not so transformed, in the mere
uninspired verse even of Wordsworth ; as more recently
also in the harsh, too crabbed, metrical dissertations of
another philosophical poet, who at his best is yet powerful
and profoundly poetic. There is, no doubt, a good deal
of polemical, prosy, quasi-clerical moralizing in Wordsworth,
justifying Mr. Arnold's amusing allusion to " the bold bad
WORDSWORTH. [43
men and women who haunt social science congresses," and
quote therefrom only for the correctness of the sentiments.
But I venture to think the great " Ode on Immortality " a
transcendent expression of profound primary truths, of
highest import for all. Wherever the child came from
immediately before birth, the auroral freshness of his dewy
joy, so innocent and so pure, his guileless unquestioning
trust, the glory that all things wear to him, the confiding
humbleness, all prove that " their angels behold the face
of the Father," that the gleam of the sanctuary is upon him
though the glory may return even more glorious when
dark experience grows as fuel in the fire, when the Divine
Child looks forth in his eternal youth from the sadder and
wiser eyes of man. The child-spirit is alone in the highest
sense immortal. " Except ye be converted and become as
little children " we know the rest. But the philosophy
of imagination suffers detriment when translated into the
language of understanding. In the sonnets we read :
" Plain living, and high thinking are no more ;
The homely beauty of the good old cause
Is gone ; our peace, our fearful innocence,
And pure religion breathing household laws. "
And now we come finally to the poetry of external
Nature. But in doing so we do not take leave, you will
find, of the human and philosophical poetry. They are
intermingled in Wordsworth. His rendering of Nature
is a spiritualized rendering, the presentment of some
spiritual offspring which she engenders in a poetic soul ;
of the light
" That never was on sea or land,
The consecration, and the poet's dream."
Our poet, indeed, has been accused of too great minute-
ness in his delineations of Nature. No doubt there may be
too much minuteness, if the general impression is interfered
with by the laborious attention required for the appreciation
of detail ; but this will be only, I think, when there is a
144 ESSAYS ON POETRY AND POETS.
want of unity in the mood or emotion with which the scene
is contemplated by the poet. The objection probably owes
its origin to a criticism of Lessing's, which I have never
thought well-founded, though it has met with very marked
approval. Substantially it is, that word-painting of co-
existing details is inadmissible, because, whereas in a land-
scape or picture the eye takes in the whole effect at once,
words being only successively pronounced and understood,
there cannot be the simultaneity of effect in a verbal
description ; you have to piece the parts together, as you
would in a puzzle. That of course is true ; but then it is
not true that in a landscape or picture, either the eye or the
mind can take in the whole effect at once : on the contrary,
you must travel over and realize the parts in succession,
though this may doubtless be done in a painting with more
rapidity, and in the former case you have to translate the
sound symbols of one sense into their visual equivalents.
The difficulty is that most persons only observe external
nature occasionally and vaguely. To them, as to Peter
Bell, " a primrose is a yellow primrose, and nothing more."
It is, therefore, very difficult for them to realize a scene
from the verbal description of it. But in any case the
intelligence, the sensibility, the sympathy must be there ;
we must be able to synthesize, to recreate the whole for our
own selves. Neither Nature, nor painter, nor poet, can save
us the trouble of doing that.
But the poet can express, or suggest the analogies and
affinities that add so much charm to the visible scene.
The painter and the landscape leave much more to be done
by the spectator himself. He must furnish a much larger
contribution from his own spiritual stores, in order to arrive
at the same rich result ; for the poet can relate the past
history of natural objects, and, ministering to all the inlets
of sensation, can blend space and colour with odour and
with sound, all being obedient to his so potent Art. Is the
ordinary man sure to have in readiness these materials for
WORDSWORTH. 1 45
use in the interpretation of landscape or picture ? If not,
he may resort with advantage to the poet. Even then,
however, trained faculties are implied. Neither Nature, nor
painter, nor poet, can speak with profit to the lazy, the
worldly-minded, or the unprepared. There is, indeed, a
" wise passiveness," but it must be responsive and ready,
if it is to reap what Wordsworth beautifully terms "the
harvest of a quiet eye." We see what we bring the power
to see. And hence descriptive poetry of an elevated order
is unpopular.
People do care for scenery in a general way. Therefore,
Scott's descriptions are not unpopular, nor were those of
Thomson before him. As a rule, they describe the surface
and general look of things with accuracy, and in Scott's
case with a good eye for broad effects. There is even an
unrealized influence of scenery upon the uncultured, espe-
cially on mountaineers. But the great majority, who give
a passing glance at the landscape, can scarcely understand
that rapt contemplation of Nature, which is as the long look
of a lover. And when these are called on to translate
elaborate word-pictures, not only into their visual equiva-
lents, but even into some spiritual imagery begotten in the
poet from his intimate familiarity with Nature, it is as if
a man born blind were called upon to realize a scene.
And how can this be poetry for after dinner, or for
reading in an express train? The man makes you think
too in all sorts of ways ! He has a meaning thoughts
of his own and his own way of putting them, moreover.
It is a kind of thing that " no fellow " of either sex can
be expected to put up with, or care for ! Away with a
poet who makes upon us such demands ! We turn, with
what relief, to the last exciting novel from Mudie's. But
to the elect, how dear in all ages will such a poet be !
The shy, subtle, delicate emotion, the ever-varying play
of fine evanescent expression on the face of Nature, few,
indeed, have noted with the same loving fidelity. Byron
L
146 ESSAYS ON POETRY AND POETS.
is great when he interprets her large, massive effects, her
sublime and stormy language, in harmony with his own
moods, but his touch is coarse, and his colour crude in
comparison with those of his rival. Coleridge came near him,
and the landscapes of Shelley and Keats, but they are
hardly of the earth.
" Such gentle mists as glide
Curling with unconfirmed intent
On that green mountain side."
" Over his own sweet voice the stockdove broods"
" The swan on still St. Mary's lake
Floats double, swan and shadow."
" His voice is buried among trees,
But to be come at by the breeze."
And those exquisite lines on the green linnet :
" There ! Where the flutter of his wings
Upon his back and body flings
Shadows and sunny glimmerings,
That cover him all over,
While thus before my eyes he gleams,
A brother of the leaves he seems."
But when I say that Wordsworth spiritualizes Nature,
do not suppose I mean that he puts into her what is not
there ! A lover is the only person who sees his mistress
truly. When he is disappointed, it is because cloudy
storms have drifted over her true self, and that is hidden
from view, or because his own eye is dulled. Only a loving
eye can see. Transfiguration by love ! What is it but
revelation of the hidden truth ? As I have already said,
the meditative rapture of Wordsworth and Shelley passes
at times into a kind of mystic disembodiment. The poet
seems caught up into some third heaven, where the boun-
daries of sense are confounded, and our poor earth-language
falters
" With the burden of an honour,
Unto which she was not born."
There is nothing of this in Chaucer, Goldsmith, or Gray,
WORDSWORTH. 147
and less of it even in the great imaginations of Shakespeare
or Milton. This difference belongs rather to the age than
to the man. Landscape of old was a background, hardly a
friend, still less, one passionately adored, or an apocalyptic,
symbol. In our recent great poets of Nature, there is an
element we may call Pantheism. The soul of Nature is as
distinctly felt and recognized as it was in the old-world
religions of Polytheism, though, in accordance with our
modified religion and philosophy, the expression of this
takes a different form. With Keats the gods verily live
again. He is a mythopceist. And even the Tory author
of " Ecclesiastical Sonnets " passionately exclaims that he
" would rather be a Pagan suckled in a creed outworn, if
he might have glimpses that should make him less forlorn ;
and hear old Triton blow his wreathed horn." With the
shattering of the hard orthodox conceptions of an un-
spiritual Christianity at the Renaissance, which culminated
in the Revolution, and the substitution for them of a
pseudo-scientific and soulless materialism, there heaved in
poetic souls a revulsion toward more ancient faiths, which
had discerned a Divinity not apart from, but pervading,
the very life and substance, alike of humanity, and ex-
ternal Nature. And though Wordsworth was more or
less orthodox in creed, yet in the presence of Nature, aye,
and of the great facts of human life, his spirit refuses to be
fettered by any rigid dogmas whatsoever. He felt, he saw
he little cared to understand. In such "access of high
moods," even " the imperfect offices of prayer and praise "
were transcended ; " thought was not ; in enjoyment it
expired."
I have said that Wordsworth represents chiefly the
effect and influence of Nature on poetic souls. Of course
he must. But that is not altogether so. In " Peter Bell "
a rude nature begins to be regenerated by the external
scene it had formerly despised. There is always a danger
of a poet's imputing himself to others. But nothing can
148 ESSAYS ON POETRY AND POETS.
be more lovely and true than the poem commencing " Three
years she grew," where the insensible influence of Nature
in moulding a beautiful, innocent young girl's character is
celebrated in such sweet song :
" Beauty born of murmuring sound
Shall pass into her face.
" She shall be sportive as the fawn
That, wild with glee, across the lawn
Or up the mountain springs j
And hers shall be the breathing balm,
And hers the silence and the calm
Of mute insensate things.
" The floating clouds their state shall lend
To her, for her the willow bend,
Nor shall she fail to see
Even in the motions of the storm
Grace that shall mould the maiden's form
By silent sympathy."
There are many " silent poets," only " lacking the art
and accomplishment of verse." Those who possess that
indeed often lack the far more essential poet's heart ; and
these are far less truly poets than are those " silent ones."
The " finest natures," Wordsworth tells us, " are often those
of whom the noisy world hears least." What happy sym-
pathies and sensibilities are implied in such words as
these :
" It is my faith that every flower
Enjoys the air it breathes.
" The budding twigs spread out their fan,
To catch the breezy air,
And I must think, do all I can,
That there was pleasure there."
" Then dearest maiden, move among these shades
In gentleness of heart ; with gentle hand
Touch for there is a spirit in the woods."
If such refinement of feeling adds to pain as well as to
pleasure, at all events it unbrutalizes and uplifts. In the
Margaret of " The Excursion " we find first noted the
WORDSWORTH. 149
tokens of sympathy which Nature may give with a deep
human sorrow, in the neglect and disorder that befell the
once trim cottage garden of the poor woman, whose loving
and beloved husband, her sole stay and support, has left
her to enlist as a soldier, in consequence of overwhelming
misfortune that befell both, and of whom, after long dreary
suspense, she can gain no tidings ; a fellow-feeling to be
noted also in the circumstance that those very sheep which
fed upon the common now seemed to come unheeded and
couch at her very threshold, for dull red stains and tufts
of wool discoloured the corner stones of the cot ; but finally,
when the listlessness and languor of hope long deferred
have bowed their victim to the grave, we hear of the en-
couragement this same Nature may infuse in correction
of a too hopeless despondency, for the poet traces " with
interest more mild "
"That secret spirit of humanity
Which 'mid the calm oblivious tendencies
Of nature, 'mid her plants and weeds and flowers
And silent overgrowings, still survived."
Having incidentally spoken much of Wordsworth in
my first essay and elsewhere, I shall not say more here.
KEATS.
OUR theme is Adonais, one who deserves the name of
" marvellous boy," fully as well as Chatterton, to whom
Coleridge gave it, whose glorious extinguished youth may
almost be characterized in that terribly pathetic sentence
of an old dramatist
" 'Tis not a life
'Tis but a piece of childhood thrown away."
who desired that there might be inscribed on his grave
" Here lies one whose name was writ in water."
Yet, as Shelley beautifully says
1 ' Ere the breath that could erase it blew,
Death, in remorse for that fell slaughter,
Death the immortalizing winter flew
Athwart the stream, and time's monthless torrent grew
A scroll of crystal, blazoning the name
Of Adonais."
Having re-read twice the little "Study" of my dear
friend, the late Mrs. John Owen, on Keats, I have become
convinced that she is, to a great extent at least, right ; and
to her certainly belongs the credit of being the first to see
the deeper meaning that underlies the young poet's work,
though, as she herself admits, but half-consciously, I have
no doubt that the spiritual significance was but dimly
present to the poet in " Endymion." It was characteristic
of his youth at least, that he allowed his luxuriant fancy
to overlay the central conception, whether that, was fair
KEATS. 151
mythologic story only, or allegory also, with lush wreaths
of episode and image, that assuredly make it almost
impossible for a reader to determine it. Had this been
otherwise, indeed, so many competent lovers of Keats
would not have failed to recognize the unity, and main
thought of the poem. It is entanglement within entangle-
ment, very delicious, like tendriled mazes of a creeper,
but wandering mazes, nevertheless. Certainly, there is
much more articulated structure, and bony framework in
" Hyperion," than in the earlier poems ; a far more distinct
vision, both spiritual and inventive, Mrs. Owen, indeed,
admits that Keats was less consciously a teacher than
Wordsworth. In fact, he saw imaginatively rather than
intellectually. His vision was of concrete images, or living
creatures, rather than abstractions. Only these are preg-
nant with a life more real and profound than that of the
senses ; yet because they are of the senses also, we may
easily miss the soul in the body of them. This, however,
is the distinctively poetic manner of vision.
He might, or might not have modified that profession
of faith which has become celebrated, that " Beauty is
Truth, and Truth Beauty." But he would hardly have
thus expressed himself at all, if he had not been uttering
a deliberate intellectual conviction. And the saying is
capable of ample vindication. It is Platonic, if only you
take into your conception elements not in themselves
beautiful, but capable of being eventually harmonized
with others into a higher ideal of beauty than were at all
realizable without them. In fact, the full truth is concrete
rather than abstract. It must be that which corresponds
to all our faculties, not to one or two of them only. Hence,
fuller vision is vision of the more rich, full, concrete, and
alive. The perfectly developed spiritual Individualities
are the truth, and this is the justification of our Lord's
saying, " I am the Truth." But that the sensuous element
was the most consummate in Keats can hardly be denied.
152 ESSAYS ON POETRY AND POETS.
Mrs. Owen says, " the sensuous faculties are the first to be
developed ; and in Keats they were developed to an un-
usual extent, probably by reason of the large scale of his
whole nature ; for it must never be forgotten that his life
was an arrested one, that his poetry remains to us a Titanic
fragment of that which might have been the unrivalled
work of genius of our age, and that the three small volumes
of verse which he left us with the memory of his twenty-
five years of life, are but a prelude to the music which
never was played."
I shall indicate what, as it seems to me now, Mrs. Owen
has justly discovered to be the leading thought in " Endy-
mion," before passing to the particular beauties of detail
in the poetry which are assuredly the most characteristic
feature of it after a word on the mythology of " Hyperion."
Mrs. Owen dwelt particularly on a letter, which she
quotes in full, from Keats to his friend, Mr. Reynolds, in
1818, as proving that Keats, like all greater poets, was seer
as well as singer. And in the early verses, entitled " Sleep
and Poetry," he clearly indicates that his own conception
of what was needed for high poetry was, indeed, in accord-
ance with that of his commentator.
The leading thought, then, of " Endymion " is the unity
of life. Cynthia is the ideal mistress, Love and Beauty,
whom Endymion, through so many wanderings, adventures,
and vicissitudes, seeks and, at last, finds
" He ne'er is crowned with immortality,
Who fears to follow where airy voices lead."
The prophesying is of the ideal beauty, which shall com-
prise not only the beauty already realized, but even the
seeming ugliness and loss, and which will have had fused
into its glowing splendour all reality. Through suffering
only, and through sympathy with suffering, can this per-
fection of vision be attained. Endymion, in the deep
ocean- world, rouses the dead lovers ; and by this Mrs.
KEATS. 153
Owen understands that he lays the spell of his trust in
eternal love and beauty on the cold, dead hearts, and shut
eyes of his brothers and sisters ; then is heard the voice
of harmony ; then do they spring to one another, whose
love has been not dead, but sleeping. Yet now he finds
_ iew love, a dark princess, and in finding her Endymion
loses sight of his ideal, contenting himself with a limited
apprehension of real beauty, and becoming blind to all
beyond. The soul that is absorbed in the external, or in
one phase of an object, becomes untrue to higher aspira-
tions, and a great bewildering unrest fills it. The ideal
fades, and disbelief in that supernal loveliness succeeds :
" I have clung to nothing, nothing seen, or felt but a great
dream."
" There never lived a mortal man, who bent
His appetite beyond his natural sphere,
But starved and died. Caverns lone, farewell !
And air of visions, and the monstrous swell
Of visionary seas ! No, never more
Shall airy voices cheat me to the shore
Of tangled wonder ! "
But if he contents himself with life as it is, he is lost. Yet,
at the end of all, the Indian Princess herself turns to him
with the very face and aspect of Cynthia, his soul's beloved
for in reverting to the ideal love, even the lower beauty
of the senses shall ultimately find true fulfilment and reali-
zation, since the higher involves, is, and constitutes the
lower, however that may seem to be lost and sacrificed for
awhile. But is it not, then, also necessary to know and
love that lower princess, I wonder ?
If " Endymion " be a parable of the development of
the individual soul, " Hyperion " refers to the evolution
and progress of the world. Hyperion, the Titan god of
the sun, must be dethroned by Apollo, the Olympian, as
exceeding him in worth and beauty ; " yet he himself
should live in his very successor, should indeed be fulfilled
and perfected in him, his ethereal presence passing into
154 ESSAYS ON POETRY AND POETS.
other forms, and living eternally, though heaven and
earth might pass away." The very fine speech of Oceanus
in the council of the gods is really conclusive proof that
we have all mistaken in holding Keats to have no grasp
of philosophical problems, young as he was, and not to
have embodied some solution of them in his poetry :
" So on our heels a fresh perfection treads,
A power more strong in beauty born of us,
And fated to excel us, as we pass
In glory that old darkness."
What profound practical wisdom is summed in the lines :
" Now comes the pain of truth, to whom 'tis pain.
O folly ! for to bear all naked truths,
That is the top of sovereignty. "
Again, " Receive the truth, and let it be your balm." But
there is also a passage in " Endymion," which I had noted
long since, and which might have convinced me that my
friend was right, and we had all been wrong. It contains
vital truth, indeed, perhaps the very last word to be said
in philosophy, though expressed in poetic language. The
beauty and use in Nature is here declared to be dependent
on the kisses of human lovers.
After illustrating yet a little further the conception of
" Hyperion," and the original myth, I shall turn to individual
beauties of the two longer poems, and then touch some of
the shorter. The " Hymn to Pan " affords evidence of the
freshness of individual conviction with which Keats recon-
structed and vivified anew the conceptions of Greek mytho-
logy, even though he could not read the original Greek.
But Nature to him was so verily alive and spiritual that,
when he read about the worship of Nature in Greek poets,
he understood them, and with enthusiasm embraced their
idea ; for him, indeed, Proteus did rise from the sea, and
Triton did blow his wreathed horn. Scientific modes of
thinking have provisional value ; they teach the reign
of order, the beauty of law ; but Keats pretty plainly
KEATS. 155
expressed what he thought of these, when they were taken
to be the ultimate truth of things, in his " Lamia : "
" Do not all charms fly
At the mere touch of cold philosophy ?
There was an awful rainbow once in heaven ;
We know her woof, her texture ; she is given
In the dull catalogue of common things."
It is with the imagination, he says in a letter, that we grasp
truth ; in other words, the ideal is truth ; the emotions,
moral, aesthetic, and affectional, are concerned in the com-
prehension of the universe quite as much as the senses and
understanding : while as communicating the sublimest,
most delicious, and enchanting feelings to the human heart
adapted to receive them, Nature surely must herself be
spiritual, not material, or rather the material must be spiritual
if truly apprehended. Indeed the material may be proved
philosophically to be only an ideal construction in and
through the spirit comprehending it ; it is also a symbol of
profounder and more vital reality ; so that Nature, as ex-
ternal to us, must be spiritual power, or powers. And is not
that very much what the Greeks meant by gods ? But man,
though not necessarily higher in the scale of creation than
the powers of Nature, when adequately comprehended, is
assuredly higher than those powers, regarded either as
" fetish," vaguely alive, with the infantile savage, or as
mechanical forces with the modern man of science. The
change and succession in the dynasties of gods, according
to the Greek, and other mythologies, may therefore repre-
sent a progress in our in the human conception of
Divinity. Nature, as it appears to most of us, is inferior
to man ; man is the more worshipful. And, therefore, to
assimilate the Divine powers at the root of Nature, to the
Greek, or Olympian type of manhood, is to advance on
the conception of them as Titanic, comparatively blind,
elemental, dim, vast, and shadowy, however potent. But
does not man make this advance in proportion as he himself
156 ESSAYS ON POETRY AND POETS.
makes progress in moral, emotional, and intellectual cha-
racter ? Moreover, man seems to be manifested on the stage
of the world chronologically later than external Nature
presents himself, indeed (so our men of science now say),
as evolved from inorganic elements, from earth, water, fire,
through lower vegetable and animal lives, his more imme-
diate progenitors. And may not this correspond to another
and primary evolution in the heavenlies, or unseen sphere ?
Some such idea seems to be expressed in the noble speech
of Oceanus. After all, humanity is the highest we know ;
we can know nothing else. Our notion of animal and
vegetable, even of the inorganic realm, is but formed, if you
will consider closely, by a subtraction from the human
True, we can dimly imagine something higher than man as
he is now, but only by taking hints from men and women
as they are in their highest and best moments, in their
noblest and most illustrious examples. And that is but to
conceive an ideal of the highest possibilities of Divine
humanity. Hence, the Greek conception was not final.
Physical loveliness, courage, serene tranquillity, sensuous
life, scorn, pride, power, are but transitional characteristics,
comparative virtues, of a grand superior race ; as of Epicu-
rean gods, also, whom those races worship. Yet this
religion was a justifiable Anthropomorphism, if indeed the
very essence of Nature herself must be human ; but if this
were not so, we could have no knowledge, comprehension,
or sympathy with Nature at all. Whereas, she is, indeed,
our mother, and we her children ; she is the all-con-
taining, all-nourishing parent. Certainly, then, she is
human, as well as divine.
The idea of Christ, however, was more divine than that
of Pan, or Apollo, as the Olympian was more divine than
the Titan. Hence the cry went forth in the hearing of
those mariners in the ^Egean, " Pan is dead ! great Pan is
dead ! " Yet Pan, or universal Nature, still lived ; the idea
of her was, indeed, much nearer consummation in Jesus
KEATS. IS/
Christ, His Divine Humanity being far nearer to the very
fact of Nature ; though the pagan thought toward which
there was so eager a recoil in Julian, and Hypatia, at the
mediaeval Renaissance, and now again in the neo-pagan-
ism of our own Nature-worship, and care for bodily beauty
may need and receive conciliation with the Christian in
a yet profounder apocalypse, or coming again of the Christ,
or Divine Word ; for Nature is infinite, as well as sacred,
ever removing boundaries, and inspiring her votaries through
genius. It may be that low, inferior orders of intelligence
part and parcel of the Kosmic system are really
dethroned from human allegiance, while higher orders suc-
ceed them in authority over us, as we ourselves advance
ethically and intellectually ; but they themselves are not
unconcerned in securing for the human race such advance-
ment. The Orb of Day is a grand, sensible phenomenon,
producing innumerable benefits, nay, the very life and heart
of our visible system ; but to the spiritual mystery thereof
who has penetrated ? The Sun is the outward body, wor-
shipped by many races and epochs ; but he expresses to
them a very different influence and idea according to their
own intellectual and moral condition. That is true, indeed,
of every visible religious symbol, or worshipped personality.
The Mary, or Christ, of the Abruzzi brigand, of the in-
quisitor, is not the Mary, or Christ, of Madame Guyon, the
Cure d'Ars, Fletcher of Madeley, or Melancthon. What
divine character we are capable of apprehending and living
up to, that is the vital question ; not what name we may
chance to give some mean religious conception, which is but
an idol after all. Now and again Apollo dethrones the Titan,
who becomes henceforth a Satan, an evil adversary. So the
Christians called the pagan divinities devils. However, it
seems probable that these wars of the gods point also to
the wars of rival races, severally under the protection of
rival gods : for instance, those of Zeus and the Titans
may indicate the strife of the Hellenes with those ancient
158 ESSAYS ON POETRY AND POETS.
inhabitants, who built the Cyclopean walls of Tiryns and
Mycenae ; but, then, this may indeed have involved an actual
contest between principalities and powers invisible tute-
lary deities, and guardians of these races. For evidently
the nation is gathered round the altar of the tribal god.
This may indeed be some ancestor, or hero. But are such
essentially different from gods of nature, if such there be ?
Not necessarily, if Shelley was justified in affirming, " he
is made one with Nature ; " and do not souls come forth
from what we name Nature into human birth ?
Verily " we receive but what we give." Nature is ever
formed in our image. And in proportion to our own stature
does the stature of Nature appear to us. The music of
universal reason can only utter itself according to the organ
and the chord. The green, teeming, blossoming mother
Earth is verily Cybele, Demeter, Isis, Hertha ; the warm,
radiant, creative, overflowing, orgiastic energy of the world
is Dionysos, Pan, and the corresponding receptive feminine
element is Aphrodite ; the Orb of Day is Hyperion, Apollo ;
that innumerable sea-smile is from the glad heart of Oceanus,
or Oceanides ; Oread and Hamadryad whisper in woodland
leaves ; ruffled lakes are lustrous with luminous looks of
nymph or naiad ; the Corybantic, Dithyrambic impulse
of Bacchic Maenad is crossed, bound in law, and wrought
to harmony by the grave innocence, high wisdom, severe
serenity of holy natures, represented by Ourania, Mel-
pomene, or Athena.
For an idealist ought to believe that these ideas or
aspects are not really abstractions, at least, in their essen-
tial nature, but may well be distinctively and peculiarly
characteristic of certain concrete spiritual individualities
with wider scope and influence than our own, concealed
from us, yet involving, ensphering, dominating both our-
selves and the world, even as the cells of our body are
ordered and dominated by the Idea of our human organism.
I have sometimes thought the truth may be a hierarchy
KEATS. 159
of spirit, one higher and wider sphere comprehending
another, like Chinese ivory balls, if only these were able
to interpenetrate and communicate. We ourselves help to
form the order of Nature by our innate moulds of thought
and sense ; but there is something in her beyond this,
external to ourselves ; only that cannot be blind, dead
matter. It must be conscious spirit in harmony with ours.
What is this, then, but gods, or angels, who have the rule
over, and peculiar commerce with certain departments, or
elements we name Nature, whose thought, emotion, imagi-
nation, sense, together with our own human reason, verily
and indeed constitute these kingdoms ? For what are
they, if not thought ? Even the idiosyncrasy of men
is in more special harmony with certain animals, and
certain natural elements or kingdoms than with others,
as Jacob Behmen has already observed, some with water,
some with air, some with earth, some with fire, and some
with ether, or stars, according to temperament or com-
plexion. So also there are " principalities and powers " of
light and love, balanced by principalities and powers of
hate and darkness, the higher heavenly Eros, and the
wanton Cupid, Uranian and Pandemian Aphrodite, angel
and devil, the one very shadow, mocking mimic, and
impish counterpart of the other. All Avatars are double,
say the Druses. Thus Jesus evokes His adversary, Satan,
Eros his Anteros ; so that the latter typifies, exists through,
and is even capable of transformation into the other. Thus
it is equally credible that gods, or angels, or saints, inferior
dignities, have authority also over the various departments
of human affairs, and over particular races ; neither
necessarily to the prejudice of our own liberty, unless we,
or our ancestors have either yielded it, or have not yet
attained thereto from a condition of moral nonage, or moral
infancy, nor to that order of fixed law, which natural and
psychological science has discovered. For such an order
of fixed law is always an order of thought and reason,
160 ESSAYS ON POETRY AND POETS.
whether in our own minds, or in the external world of
objects. Now, the laws of reason are in the nature of
things permanent, necessary, and harmonious throughout
the many and various provinces of intelligent existence,
having their root and substance in the eternal, spiritual
intuition of that Divine Being, who is one with all. So
much, perhaps too digressively, has been said concerning
the general idea involved in the myth of " Hyperion," hewn
into so grand a torso-poem by Keats.
And now turn to some individual beauties. The open-
ing lines of " Endymion," " A thing of beauty is a joy for
ever," I need scarcely quote, they are so well known, their
beauty so unquestionable and allowed.
In the succeeding paragraph we may note the poet's
skill in clothing with concrete beauty the most abstract
idea, here, that of distance :
"And now as deep into a wood as we
Might mark a lynx's eye, there glimmered light,
Fair faces, and a rush of garments white."
The suggestion of the lynx's eye being eminently in har-
mony with the objects actually visible, and the wood in
which they became so.
Thus again, in " Lamia " we have
" On the moth-time of that evening dim.''
And once more
" There she stood,
About a young bird's flutter from a wood."
Of the paragraph succeeding, the opening is especially
happy for variety of pause, choice of phrase, and felicitous
arrangement of vowel-sound :
" Leading the way, young damsels danced along,
Bearing the burden of a shepherd's song,
Each having a white wicker, overbrimmed
With April's tender younglings ; next, well trimmed,
A crowd of shepherds, with as sunburnt looks
As may be read of in Arcadian books."
Passing over the exquisite description of Adonis in his
KEATS. l6l
bower, where he has been put to sleep by Venus, and is
carefully tended by the little loves (Adonis the Sun, and
his sleep Winter), we come to the waking of Adonis by
the descent of Venus (or Love awakening Nature ; here
Adonis is rather the beautiful Earth, young with spring-
time) Venus in her car drawn by doves, " with silken traces
lightened in descent " first, her silver car-wheels spinning
off a drizzling dew, that " fell chill on soft Adonis' shoulders,
making him nestle, and turn uneasily about ; " then the
goddess " leaning downward open-armed "-
" Her shadow fell upon his breast, and charmed
A tumult to his heart, and a new life
Into his eyes."
What a delightful description of Spring !
' ' Then there was a hum
Of sudden voices, echoing, Come, come !
Arise, awake, clear summer has forth walked
Unto the clover sward, and she has talked
P'ull soothingly to every nested finch."
The short description of Cybele is also most pictorial ;
nor am I going to defend this from the criticism of Lessing,
that poetry should not be pictorial, for I have spoken of
this elsewhere. I am strongly convinced that all great
poetry has been so; and will be. There is another beautiful
expression a little further
" To his capable ears
Silence was music from the golden spheres."
And this, as describing the bottom of the sea, or some
shadowy sea-cave
" One faint eternal eventide of gems."
It must, however, be confessed that there is a great deal
in this poem most crude, even affected, and in bad taste ; there
are conceits, occasional ugliness of expression, and wanton
liberties taken with the language. What can be worse than
where Endymion calls his lady love's lips " slippery blisses ? "
All this belonged to the " cockney school " of Leigh Hunt,
M
1 62 ESSAYS ON POETRY AND POETS.
though it was soon left behind. So far the abominable
creatures who embittered the already too short and bitter
daysof Keats were not entirely without justification, as,indeed,
what abuse, or abomination, is altogether wanting in fair
excuses ? In Keats' early poems there was much that ought
not to have passed unreprehended by a judicious and sym-
pathetic censor. But, then, these bloodhounds either were,
or pretended to be, blind to all the positive and salient
original merits of the boy-poet ; his originality, however,
was almost their justification for mediocrity must ever
misapprehend that ; it has no palate or discernment of its
own ; merit for it must be labelled legibly with the appro-
bation of past times, or present, publicly proclaimed " meri-
torious " by the general voice, or, better still, by the shrill
consent of their own puny clique, before these Laura Bridge-
mans of aesthetic can distinguish its savour from demerit ;
and yet such are too frequently the afflicted creatures who
offer themselves as caterers, and literary tasters for the
public ! Read the " Cobwebs of Criticism " by Mr. Hall
Caine, if you wish to know what the most pretentious
censors of their day said, and refrained from saying (the
"conspiracy of silence") about all the poets without
exception, around whose brow posterity has entwined the
bay, and how they beslavered pretentious nonentities long
since consigned to everlasting obscurity.
These things tried, after their kind, to stifle one full throat
of song, as if song were too common. Let their memories
be dragged for a moment from that darkness, which is only
not a sink of infamy, because it is a pit of oblivion, for one
passing spurn from the foot of scorn, and then non ragionam
di lor\ ma guarda, e passa ! We do but haul them from
their grave, to kick them into it again. Posterity reversed
their verdict, and though they could deprive the poet of
his " porridge," they could not cancel the fact that he did
" fish the murex up," and that was the essential for him.
A noble, picturesque lyric is the " Triumph of Bacchus ; "
KEATS. 163
the scene is all before you worthy of a place beside that
glorious lyric of Redi, " Bacchus in Tuscany." But now
let us turn again to " Hyperion." Byron said it was
" inspired by the Titans, and sublime as ^Eschylus." " Hy-
perion " assuredly is one of the grandest word-torsos in
the language. In it blank verse has attained consummate
dignity, though certainly it owes something to Milton, as
" Endymion " does to Spenser, Browne of the " Pastorals "
and Elizabethan Masques.
But what poet does not owe much to his predecessors ?
Keats was, however, one of the truly original generative
powers of that great harvest-time of English poetry. The
debt of Tennyson to him is incalculable. The invention and
imagination of " Hyperion " are of the highest order. The
opening picture is noble, and strikes the key-note worthily:
" Deep in the shady sadness of a vale,
Far sunken from the healthy breath of morn,
Far from the fiery noon, and eve's one star,
Sat grey-haired Saturn, quiet as a stone,
Still as the silence round about his lair ;
Forest on forest hung about his head,
Like cloud on cloud. . . .
Along the margin-sand large footmarks went
No further than to where his feet had strayed,
And slept there since. Upon the sodden ground
His old right hand lay nerveless, listless, dead,
Unsceptred ; and his realmless eyes were closed,
While his bow'd head seemed listening to the earth,
His ancient mother, for some comfort yet."
Note the splendid phrase " realmless," as supremely ima-
ginative, and expressing the whole situation in a word.
A few lines on occurs the line, which has been elevated to
the dignity of proverbial quotation
" O how frail
To that large utterance of the early gods ! "
Then there is the extremely beautiful forest similitude
which haunts us ever after in all forest depths
" As when upon a tranced summer night,
Those green-robed senators of mighty woods,
164 ESSAYS ON POETRY AND POETS.
Tall oaks, branch-charmed by the earnest stars,
Dream, and so dream all night without a stir,
Save from one gradual solitary gust,
Which comes upon the silence and dies off,
As if the ebbing air had but one wave."
Worthy of the greatest poets is the vague suggestion of
awful portents in the sun-palace of Hyperion before his
fall. And how fine the characterization of Saturn's address
commencing with the sonorous lines
" There is a roaring in the bleak-grown pines,
When Winter lifts his voice "
a line further on repeated with great effect, the r's, and the
large open vowel-sounds giving some of the audible effect
of wind among pines.
That picture of the dethroned, and forlorn Titans is also
great
" Scarce images of life, one here, one there,
Lay vast and edgeways ; like a dismal cirque
Of Druid stones upon a forlorn moor,
When the chill rain begins at shut of eve
In dull November, and their chancel vault,
The heaven itself, is blinded throughout night."
But the opening of Book III., concerning the coming
of Apollo, or rather his awakening to a consciousness of
his own native dignity and lordly function as very destined
sun-god, alone worthy to assume royal insignia, and wield
imperial thunder, is perhaps most beautiful of all. There
is here an indefinable, unfathomable magic, and witchery
of words. They are indeed, as Leigh Hunt says, " Swan-
like, in love with the progress of their own beauty." The
cadence of them, the vowel-harmony, pauses, felicitous
phrase, clear, luminous picture, with all its beauty of god-
like form, and delicious concordant scene, combine to poetry
most exquisite indeed. The reticence and reserve, too, of
the passage as compared to the treatment in Endymion,
show that the poet, though so young, was already mature :
" Throughout all the isle
There was no covert, no retired cave
KEATS. 165
Unhaunted by the murmurous noise of waves,
Though scarcely heard in many a green recess.
He listened and he wept, and his bright tears
Went trickling down the golden bow he held.
Thus with half-shut, suffused eyes he stood,
"While from beneath some cumbrous boughs hard by,
With solemn step an awful goddess came."
" And there was purport in her look for him,
Which he with eager guess began to read,
Perplex'd, the while melodiously he said,
' How earnest thou over the unfooted sea ? ' "
Note the happy word "purport" here, and the accurately
pictorial " cumbrous boughs." Delicious the mere sound
of the lines commencing " Perplex'd, the while."
These gods and goddesses are so realized through the
poet's sensitive perception and spiritual interpretation of
Nature herself, of whom they are the animate and appro-
priate expression, that we are almost bound to believe in
them ; they are so much the soul, essence, and inevitable
denizens of the scenes and surroundings in the midst of
which we find them. Keats was the born mythopceist
of these later days, Landor being rather a colder, though,
indeed, as to external form, a more classical reproducer of
ancient tales, and fair humanities of old religion. But
Keats was the more unfettered in this function from the
fact of his attitude being one of comparative detachment
from the distinctive religious beliefs, as also equally from
the negations of his day and generation. He had a posi-
tive faith, but very little formulated creed, or formulated
antagonism to the established creed. The other great
poets, his contemporaries, were Nature-worshippers also ;
only with him this cult presented itself invested with the
beautiful and delicate forms of Greek mythology. I do
not say that his own belief was precisely that of Greece ;
yet, when he was poetically inspired, it was not essentially
different, allowing for the difference of his age and educa-
tion, and for that melancholy yearning toward the infinite,
which is Christian and modern. The Greeks were mere
1 66 ESSAYS ON POETRY AND POETS.
charming story-tellers, not allegorical, and moral at all ;
and so far, no doubt, our Keats was not Greek.
Through strange suffering, wonder, bewilderment, and
convulsion, which makes " Quiver all the immortal fairness
of his limbs," does Apollo (" most like the struggle at the
gate of death"), grow into his inheritance of glory, and
then the wondrous fragment breaks off abruptly.
Now turn to the lesser poems. " Lamia " and " Isabella "
are admirably- told stories, and there is no excess in the
manner over the matter, all which promised excellently for
a future that never arrived at least, on this earth of ours.
" Lamia " is clearly allegorical, or at least representative of
wider issues. It means passion, or impulse versus reason,
or philosophy. And here, again, we have the extraordinary
power of realizing the primitive mythological modes of
thought and feeling, notably in the transformation of the
serpent into the woman. These fairy, or " astral " regions,
are as palpable to Keats as the solid, visible world is to
any of us ; tinged they are indeed with the Gothic, or
mediaeval romance-feeling, that weird inflexion, which is
notable also in Coleridge, in the " Ancient Mariner," and
" Christabel." In " Isabella " we have the charming fancy
" Come down, we pray thee, ere the hot sun count
His dewy rosary on the eglantine ! "
And this brief imaginative touch of genius in a phrase,
which shows the great poet
" So the two brothers and their murdered man
Rode past fair Florence."
" Murdered " already, so inevitably had Death branded him
for slaughter. And then the pathos of the line
" There in that forest did his great love cease."
The lamentation of the poor lover's ghost, who appears to
Isabella in vision, is exquisitely pathetic too.
The lovely poem, " Eve of St. Agnes," is one of those
KEATS. 167
best known. What a Shakespearian, and startling unex-
pectedness of phrase is here :
"Sudden a thought came like a full-blown rose,
Flushing his brow, and in his pained heart
Made purple riot."
For magic of epithet, so utterly alien to the cold inge-
nuities and conceits of the false and vicious fantastic school,
it is not easy to rival Keats out of Shakespeare, once he
has outgrown the bad taste which disfigured the lush prodi-
gality of " Endymion." His vocabulary is extraordinarily
wealthy and varied for so very young a man. The luscious
richness of his description cannot be better illustrated
than by those two stanzas from this poem, wherein the
lover, Porphyro, views the beloved maiden in her chamber.
The poem ends with just a touch of that pathos, so full
of human-heartedness, which is also one of the traits that
makes Keats beloved :
' ' And they are gone ; aye, ages, long ago,
These lovers fled away into the storm."
It is really impossible to exaggerate the debt of Tennyson's
style to this poem.
The " Ode to Psyche " shows excellently well that so
characteristic trait, the soul of the Greek turning as naturally
to that bright and beautiful mythology in the young son of
the London livery-stableman as in any fair poet of Hellas,
nurtured in her delicate air. Thus Chatterton, too, lived in
the illumined world of mediaeval romance, how much more
truly than in those dingy streets of modern Bristol ! Only
here there is a tender regret for the old days. Exquisite
are the personifications in the " Ode to Autumn," and these
are precisely what we should expect from so mythopceic
a soul. Of all the poems of Mrs. Browning, delightful as
many of them are to me, the one I care for least is her
answer to Schiller's " Gotter Griechen-lands," commencing
" Gods of Hellas." It seems to me that the mistaken
sentiment of that poem finds for itself a righteous Nemesis
1 68 ESSAYS ON POETRY AND POETS.
in the slovenly rhymes of it " Gods of Hellas, will you
tell us ? " But then she wrote another poem called " Pan,"
later in life, whose beauty, and truth of mythological per-
sonification almost atone for the one called "The Dead
Pan."
Remember that crowned personification of the " Ode to
Melancholy "-
' ' And Joy, whose hand is ever at his lips,
Bidding adieu."
In his " Sleep and Poetry," an early work, Keats tells
us what in his view was the chief end of poetry
" Forgetting the great end
Of Poesy, that it should be a friend
To soothe the cares, and lift the thoughts of man."
While, a few lines further, he says
" They shall be accounted poet-kings,
Who simply tell the most heart-easing things."
Not a pessimist this Keats, nor a mere sensualist either.
And he concludes the clause with the line so fraught with
sadness to us who know the event
" O may these joys be ripe before I die ! "
There is a beautiful sonnet to the sea, and one contain-
ing a strange to me, very fascinating image concerning
the sea :
" The moving waters at their priest-like task
Of pure ablution round earth's human shores."
Of " La Belle Dame sans merci " Mr. Watts has well
spoken ; to it Mr. G. Rossetti is largely indebted. It is
mediaeval. Some noble sonnets were also written by the
young poet. " On first looking into Chapman's Homer "
is one of the finest.
And now, in conclusion, we pass to the two loveliest of
Keats' shorter poems two that have their calm celestial
KEATS. 169
faces set steadily toward immortality the " Ode on a
Grecian Urn," and the " Ode to a Nightingale."
The " Ode on a Grecian Urn " wonderfully enshrines the
poet's kinship with Greece, and with the spirit of her wor-
ship. There is all the Greek measure and moderation about
it also ; a calm and classic grace, with severe loveliness of
outline. In form it is perfect. There is an exquisiteness
of expression not that which is often mistakenly so de-
signated, but a translucence, as of silver air, or limpid water,
that both reveals and glorifies all fair plants, or pebbles,
or bathing lights.
In the " Ode to a Nightingale," how admirable are those
abstractions of the second stanza !
" O for a draught of vintage that hath been
Cool'd a long age in the deep-delved earth,
Tasting of Flora, and the country-green,
Dance, and Provenal song, and sun -burnt mirth !
O for a beaker full of the warm South,
Full of the true, the blushful Hippocrene,
With beaded bubbles winking at the brim,
And purpled-stained mouth.
" That I might drink, and leave the world unseen,
And with thee fade away into the forest dim."
What poetic genius is implied in the choice of such
epithets ; how bold, yet felicitous the " tasting " of these
things that yet cannot be "tasted" but so blended are
all sensations with memory, imagination, and the higher
faculties, that we may scarcely discriminate what is appro-
priate to each when association sets off one image, and
notion, and feeling after another, and fuses all into one !
And then " sun-burnt mirth " how easily would an inferior
talent pass the line of the ridiculous in attempting such
periphrases ! But as Nelson, with the instinct of genius,
at the battle of the Nile, knew that it was only just not
impossible to pass between the enemy's line of battleships
and the shore, so here also, the not impossible in descrip-
tion has been divined and dared. Not that the best poet
I/O ESSAYS ON POETRY AND POETS.
can remain always at this altitude ; sometimes -even his
often unerring intuition will fail him.
Whenever I enter a forest, this line haunts me
" And with thee fade away into the forest dim."
It is night, and the particular flower or fruit unseen that
breathes so delicate an aroma, and so we have the beautiful
generic " incense "
" Nor what soft incense hangs upon the boughs."
Again, note
" To cease upon the midnight with no pain."
Such periphrases, which are apt to brand a mere versifier
indelibly with the brand of inferiority, if coined in cold
blood, and with palpable design of drawing attention to
the writer's own cleverness, are in Keats true inspirations
of infinite delight.
" The same that oft times hath
Charmed magic casements, opening on the foam
Of perilous seas, in fairy lands forlorn."
Here we seem altogether lost in some ethereal supermun-
dane region of the phantasy, where all is intangible,
indefinite, but wonderfully lovely phrase, cadence, and
image. But the inspiration of " Ruth amid the alien corn"
has a touch of human pathos, that causes the dim and
fleeting generations to link hand with hand, and makes that
delightful story of the Bible very near.
Yet with all this immense sense of the beauty and
glory of life, of the world and its wonderful shows, he had
known many a disappointment, and suffered much love
unfulfilled, malignant scorn, cold indifiference, painful death
near, and work half done ; there was ever a melancholy
yearning after some unrealized, unrealizable ideal ; his
vision of the infinite, beyond and beneath sense, deepened
toward the close
KEATS. 1 7 1
" I know this being's lease ;
My fancy to its utmost blisses spreads ;
Yet would I on this very midnight cease,
And the world's gaudy ensigns see in shreds.
Verse, form, and beauty are intense indeed,
But Death intenser Death is Life's high meed."
How we love young Severn, his painter friend, who
nursed him like a woman in his last lingering illness and
agony !
In Shelley's noble words
" He lives, he wakes ; 'tis death is dead, not he ! "
VICTOR HUGO.
Is he whom Tennyson calls "Victor in song, Victor in
romance," indeed only a clever, but eccentric, and voluminous
creator of monsters ? That, though not the opinion of poets,
seems to be the opinion of some critics, English and foreign.
In the Spectator, a journal which, when it happens to be in
sympathy with the work criticized, unquestionably shows
insight, Hugo was lately characterized as colossal, but not
great ; and the dictum was hazarded that some reflective
lines of " In Memoriam " were worth all he had written put
together. That the present writer feels completely at fault
when such statements are made, he freely confesses. He
hears them as empty wind, without meaning ; for, though
not blind to the great poet's faults, and to all objections
that may be urged against him, he is nevertheless disposed
to regard Hugo as the greatest European poet of our
century. The latest romance of this veteran of literature,
" Quatre-vingt-treize," is surely enough to prove it. That a
poet of Hugo's years should retain all the fire and intensity
of youthful genius, while conquering for himself also the
moderation and artistic restraint of maturity, is a phe-
nomenon rare enough to be remarkable. We have not in
" Quatre-vingt-treize " the lurid, concentrated, and often
grotesque horror of some of the dramas, or of " L'Homme
qui rit." Nor, on the other hand, have we the episodical
and digressive voluminousness of that magnificent romance
" Les Miserables."
VICTOR HUGO. 1/3
It may be well, however, to premise that I have spoken
advisedly of Hugo as a poet. Those among us who appear
to regard poetry as rhythmic sound of a special and very
elaborate sort, into which (unfortunately) some semblance
of idea and feeling has, if possible, also to find its hinder-
ing way, such persons may demur to Hugo being called
a poet. For I hold that some of his greatest poetic crea-
tions are in prose ; and that if you want dainty devices of
epithet and sound, you must rather go to mediaeval trouba-
dours and trouveres, to men like Marini or Baudelaire, or
again, to sundry infusorial homologues of these in England
and America. That the French language does not admit of
melodious poetry indeed is a dictum of some critics to which
I, who love Be>anger, De Musset, and Ronsard, cannot
subscribe. There is beauty, too, in the verse of Lamartine ;
it abounds, moreover, in that of Hugo. But by poets I mean
imaginative creators, expressors of great imaginative types,
or ideas in appropriate verbal form ; or, again, singers with
the heart's true lyrical cry. To those who hold the Art for
Art theory Hugo can hardly seem a poet. He is one who,
like Homer, Shakespeare, yEschylus, Dante, Milton, is lifted
high in the sphere of art by stress and storm of great ideas
and aspirations ; he is in full sympathy with all the noblest
ideals and tendencies of his time ; to him there is in man
and Nature nothing common or unclean ; he is no bloodless
spectre of study or studio, inventing, or adapting quaint
feux d'artifices of syllabic euphony. He cannot understand
that an artist must be indifferent to humanity, to religion,
to politics, to moral and metaphysical problems ; that an
artist must work regardless of eternal distinctions in Nature,
of high and low, good and bad, hideous and beautiful ; or
that art, which may distinguish between beautiful and ugly
in the region of sense, must lose all such discrimination in
dealing with the higher sphere of spirit. To him such a
creed, whatever might be its advantages, would seem
inhuman, inartistic, degraded, and absurd.
174 ESSAYS ON POETRY AND POETS.
Let us then proceed to examine one or two of the chefs-
d'ceuvres of this poet. In " Quatre-vingt-treize " all is, on
the whole, restrained within the classic limits of highest art.
But some seem to suppose that for art to be classical it
must be cold and pale. Hugo is certainly never that. And
neither are any of the world's masterpieces. Not those of
Homer, yEschylus, Sophocles, Sappho, Chaucer, Dante,
Shakespeare, Milton, Shelley, Byron, Scott, Hawthorne,
Charlotte Bronte, George Sand, Tennyson. If these poets
had not high genius, they would be justly reproached as
" sensational." Cold and pale works are either pseudo-
classical imitations, or utterly insignificant as literature.
Racine was a true poet with fine sense of form ; but so far
as he was cold and pale, he was not classical. David is
cold, and pseudo-classical. Raphael, Michael Angelo, and
Titian radiate life, fire, and colour from their canvas, true
classics of pictorial art. Poor modern statues are very dead
and cold ; Apollo Belvedere, and Diana in the Louvre, are
gods that breathe, and ever do undying deeds in stone.
Death is pale, and cold, and rigid ; but the touch of art
makes alive ! And life is all varying complexity of subtle
curve and colour.
All this, of course, does not mean that there are not
certain general laws valid for, and to be found in great
art, whatever the variety of shapes it may assume. There
is a more complex and subtle, but as real a pervading
unity in a perfect Gothic cathedral like Salisbury as in the
Pagan Parthenon of Athens. The vital variety and rich-
ness of detail may sometimes overpower the sense of unity ;
but this is a fault less grave than that the unity should be
mechanical, dead, and barren, without vital variety to
inform it. Indeed, while there is hope of perfection in the
first case, there is no such hope in the last. Moreover,
these beautiful artistic creations of detail, episode, and
phrase, have organic unity of their own, or they would not
be beautiful at all, although there be still wanting the
VICTOR HUGO. 175
Divine breath to mould them into one consummate spirit.
But the carvings and festoonings of marble and jasper, and
oaken fruit or flower, the flamboyance of mullion, jewelled,
dim radiance of silver lamp-lit shrine or altar, the high,
solemn interfluence of dark pillared arches all these
may form high poetry, though the style of the whole
cathedral be not absolutely one and harmonious. We admit
the turbid, yet glorious faultiness of Hugo, as of Shake-
speare, the rich, wavering, incompleted ascent of Gothic
genius toward the twilight of infinity. But theirs is a
splendid cathedral for all its imperfection. And however
imperfect, however erring the worship, it is a fane dedicated
to the true God ; to Jesus Christ, His Son, our Lord.
There men may worship the Father in spirit and in truth,
according to the more or less light that is always vouch-
safed to those who sincerely seek it There may be per-
chance grotesque images of superstition ; there may even
be altars to the Unknown ; but on the whole, the atmo-
sphere and the ritual are Christian, elevated, advanced, and
ennobling. There is nothing overtly, deliberately, debasing
or impure ; all the fair lines of the high arches ascend and
marry far above our heads ; the spaces are large and ample ;
we behold man in his heaven-helped progress toward the
higher ideal of our Lord and Saviour, toward the coming
of His kingdom, toward human brotherhood in One the
spirit of these ideas informs the highest art of Christian
time, whether the artist's formal creed be strictly orthodox
or not. Nay, it informs the iconoclasm of Hugo and
Lamennais more than it does the orthodoxy of Chateau-
briand, or Boileau. " Other foundation can no man lay
than that is laid." But the poetry of despair, and material-
ism is in a temporary side-eddy merely ; for the craze of
scientific materialism is only that. In one sense it is
doubtless part of the main stream ; still the grand current
trends elsewhere. And the Ewigkeit-geist views tranquilly
these inevitable vagaries of the Time-spirit, his daughter.
176 ESSAYS ON POETRY AND POETS.
Victor Hugo has written some splendid verse-poetry.
But in this region he is perhaps more unequal, and falls
more below himself, than in any other. Much of it is
merely declamatory and rhetorical, as French verse is so
apt to be. That is especially true of " L'Annee Terrible."
Yet you are never long without startling thrusts of genius
in felicitous condensed epithet or line, that almost take
away your breath with their memorable, incisive appro-
priateness and force. In " L'Annee Terrible " we have
these concluding lines respecting the surrender at Sedan :
"Alors la Gaule, alors la France, alors la gloire,
Alors Brennus, 1'audace, et Clovis, la victoire. . . .
Et tous les chefs de guerre, Heristal, Charlemagne,
Charles Martel, Turenne, effroi de 1'Allemagne,
Napoleon, plus grand que Cesar et Pompee,
Par la main d'un bandit rendirent leurs epees."
And here we have also that exquisite poem about Hugo's
little grandchild " La Petite Jeanne " written during the
siege of Paris :
" Et vous venez, et moi je m'en vais, et j'adore,
N'ayant droit qu'a la nuit, votre droit a 1'aurore.
Votre blond frere George et vous, vous suffisez
A mon ame, et je vois vos jeux, et c'est assez ;
Et je ne veux, apres mes epreuves sans nombres,
Qu'un tombeau, sur lequel se decoupera 1'ombre
De vos berceaux dores par le soleil levant.
" Oh ! quand je vous entends, Jeanne, et quand je vous vois
Chanter, et me parlant avec votre humble voix,
Tendre vos douces mains au dessus de nos tetes,
II me semble que 1'ombre ou grondent les tempetes
Tremble, et s'eloigne avec des rugissements sourds,
Et que Dieu fait donner a la ville aux cents tours,
Desemparee ainsi qu'un navire qui sombre, . . .
A 1'univers qui penche, et que Paris defend,
Sa benediction par un petit enfant."
There are beautiful things about children, too, in the
great old poet's last volume of verse, " L'Art d'etre Grand-
pere," notably "Jeanne endormie," and " Le Jardin des
Plantes." In fact, he is never higher and more wonderful
VICTOR HUGO. 177
than when writing about little children. The glory of the
man's large, loving heart overflows whenever he beholds
those innocents, whom the Lord took in His arms, and
blessed with most peculiar blessing. And this is the writer
of the scathing " Chatiments." " J'ai fait peur aux petits
hommes" he says in " L'Art d'etre Grandpere, " jamais aux
petits enfants"
The design of the " Le*gende des Siecles " is grandiose,
and there are some grand representative pictures in it,
notably " Canute " and " Eviradnus." Certainly the can-
vases and designs of this master are colossal. He seems
to demand vast spaces for the free sweep of his magic
brush, nor can we always claim for] him perfect delicacy
of touch, and perfect refinement of taste. Still his vast
pictures are akin rather to the colossal works of Michael
Angelo, Tintoret, and Orcagna, than to the colossal works
of Haydon, Cornelius, or Horace Vernet ; for in the prose
romances there is little, enormous as they are, that is not
stamped with the impress of the master. And yet the
execution in small things is sometimes delicate, with all
the rare felicity of Heine, or De Musset. But the felicity
is rather the unforeseen felicity of Nature, as in Burns and
BeVanger. This is the song of the dying and half-wandering
girl, Fantine, longing to see her child before she dies, in
" Les Misdrables " a cradle-song, that comes to her, dying,
which she used to sing in happier days to her baby :
* ' Nous acheterons de bien belles choses,
En nous promenant le long des faubourgs !
Les bleuets sont bleus, les roses sont roses,
Les bleuets sont bleus, j'aime mes amours.
La vierge Marie aupres de mon poele
Est venue hier en manteau brode,
Et m'a dit : voici, cache sous mon voile,
Le petit qu'un jour tu m'as demande !
Courez a la ville, ayez de la toile,
Achetez du fil, achetez un de !
Nous acheterons de bien belles choses,
En nous promenant le long des faubourgs !
N
178 ESSAYS ON POETRY AND POETS.
" Bonne sainte vierge, aupres de mon poele
J'ai mis un berceau de rubans orne ;
Dieu me donnerait sa plus belle etoile,
J'aime mieux 1'enfant que tu m'as donne.
Madame, que faire avec cette toile ?
Faites un trousseau pour mon nouveau ne.
Les bleuets sont bleus, les roses sont roses,
Les bleuets sont bleus, j'aime mes amours.
" Lavez cette toile ou ? Dans la riviere
Faites en, sans rien gater ni salir,
Une belle jupe avec sa brassiere,
Que je veux broder et de fleurs emplir. . . .
L'enfant n'est plus la ; Madame, qu'en faire ?
Faites en un drap pour m'ensevelir !
Nous acheterons de bien belles choses
En nous promenant le long des faubourgs !
Les bleuets sont bleus, les roses sont roses,
Les bleuets sont bleus, j'aime mes amours."
Still, the cyclopean scale on which the master loves to
work is most characteristic ; the breadth of his touch, the
rapidity and profusion of his style a profusion as of starry
worlds ; a style resembling waves of the sea, sometimes,
indeed, weltering dark, opaque, and massive, but ever and
anon flashing with the foamy light of genius. The finish,
and rich accurate perfection of our own great living poet,
Tennyson, are absent. Hugo is far more akin to Byron,
but his range is vaster than Byron's. He has Byron's
fierce satire, and more than Byron's humour, though it is
the fashion to generalize, and say that the French have
none. To this point we shall return. He is both a lyrical
and epic poet. He is a greater dramatist than Byron ; and
whether in the dramas, or in the prose romances, he shows
that vast sympathy with, and knowledge of, human nature,
which neither Byron, Shelley, Coleridge, nor Wordsworth
had. Scott could be his only rival. For in France they
have lived dramatic lives for the last ninety years : we have
lived much more quietly in England. And in France there
is a real living drama.
We need not repeat the old story of Hugo's long battle
VICTOR HUGO. 179
as champion of so-called Romanticism against the pseudo-
classical Philistinism of academic prigs. In that battle
he simply incarnated the genius of his age, emancipating
itself from the fetters of simpering incapacity, masquerad-
ing in the guise of "correct taste." No capable person
can deny the genius of Racine, Corneille, Voltaire, Beau-
marchais. Still, Corneille was greater than Racine ; yet
the self-laureled, mumbling, official imbeciles of criticism,
or puppies fresh from school, whom they hired as their
bravoes, looked askance at Corneille, in proportion as his
great limbs could not be confined within old-fashioned
court uniforms, then officially prescribed for poets.
Voltaire was a power by the cold, keen, sparkling edge
of his supple raillery and denial ; Beaumarchais by the
salt of life, and grace of humour that belonged to him.
But none of these men travailed with the rich and sor-
rowful humanity of an art, whose creators had passed
through tremendous fires of an epoch-marking age. In
Germany, Goethe and Schiller, in France, two men and
one woman, have since stood forth as far greater art-
creators than either of them namely, Victor Hugo, Balzac,
George Sand. One solitary figure indeed, by sheer force
of native genius, rose to equality with these, and with
the greatest of all time Moliere. And one great writer
before them foreshadowed the future Rousseau. But
these spirits of our epoch, like Byron, Shelley, Scott, Keats,
and Wordsworth, in England, having fresh, original things
to say, necessarily made for themselves a more or less
original way of saying them. And such things originating
in a deepened, broadened current of human life, as in a
fuller comprehension of mankind than was possible to men
of the corrupt, artificial, and exclusive, however nationally-
stirring time of Louis-Quatorze also in a heightened
appreciation of external Nature the new creators found
themselves drinking at the deep, ever fresh, though ancient
wells of Shakespeare and his contemporaries. Moreover,
180 ESSAYS ON POETRY AND POETS.
they felt and saw in Greek poetry what they brought the
power to feel and see ; that which their predecessors had
no faculty for perceiving. Hence the imperious need to
them, wrestling with great problems, palpitating with
strange new prophecies and perceptions, of the large, free
Shakespearian form in art.
We shall quote one or two instances of the master's
satire from that tremendous book, " Les Chatiments."
Here is a poem called " Confrontations : "-
"O cadavres, parlez ! quels sont vos assassins?
Quelles mains ont plonge ces stylets dans vos seins ?
Toi d'abord que je vois dans cette ombre apparaitre,
Ton nom ? Religion Ton meurtrier ? Le pretre.
Vous, vos noms ? Probite, Pudeur, Raison, Vertu.
Et qui vous egorgez ? L'Eglise Toi, qu'es-tu ?
Je suis la Foi publique et qui t'a poignardee ?
Le Serment Toi, qui dors de ton sang inondee ?
Mon nom etait Justice et quel est ton bourreau ?
Le juge et toi, geant, sans glaive en ton fourreau,
Et dont la boue eteint 1'aureole enflammee ?
Je m'appelle Austerlitz. Qui ta tue ? L'armee.
"Ad majorem Dei gloriam " is fierce, scathing, annihilating
as Swift, Juvenal, or Byron. It is an arraignment of the
Church of Rome and her priests :
"Nous garroterons Tame au fond d'une caverne. . . .
Alors dans 1'ame humaine obscurite profonde !
Sur le neant des coeurs le vrai pouvoir se fonde !
Tout ce que nous voudrons, nous le ferons san? bruit.
Pas un souffle de voix, pas un battement d'aile
Ne remuera dans 1'ombre, et notre citadelle
Sera comme une tour plus noire que la nuit.
" Nous regnerons. La tourbe obeit comme 1'onde.
Nous serons tout-puissants, nous regirons le monde
Nous possederons tout, force, gloire, et bonheur ;
Et nous ne craindrons rien, n'ayant ni foi, ni regies. . . .
Quand vous habiteriez la montagne des aigles,
Je vous arracherais de la, dit le Seigneur !
To the dead of the fourth of December, he cries :
"Grace au quatre Decembre, aujourdhui, sans pensee,
Vous gisez etendus dans la fosse glacee,
Sous les linceuls epais.
VICTOR HUGO. l8l
O morts, 1'herbe sans bruit crolt sur vos catacombes ;
Dormez dans vos cercueils ! taisez-vous dans vos tombes !
'L'Empire, c'est la paix.' "
And again, every word of " Le Te Deum " is a thunderbolt.
These are the two last verses, addressed to the priest who
chanted the Te Deum of 1st January, 1852 :
" Ton diacre est Trahison, et ton sous-diacre est Vol :
Vends ton Dieu, vends ton ame !
Aliens, coiffe ta mitre, aliens, mets ton licol,
Chante, vieux pretre infame !
"Le Meurtre a tes cotes suit 1'office divin,
Criant : feu sur qui bouge !
Satan tient la burette, et ce n'est pas de vin
Que ton ciboire est rouge."
" A un martyr " shows the poet's perfect reverence for our
Saviour, while he slings syllables of fire at the Church, which
accepted " the bandit " for its patron. It is, we think, in
these brief eagle-swoops of fierce song that the sound of the
poet's verse is most striking. It has the resonant, quick
tramp of irresistible battalions. In " L'Homme a ri," and
elsewhere, he reveals how he believes in the power, and
survival for great ends of his own verse. And to those who
fancy Hugo is always over- verbose, or invertebrate, we
commend the " Chatiments," and the dramas. The former
are short, swift, concentrated, and deadly as a flash of light-
ning. See the terrific severity, where every word tells, and
none is merely for effect a stern brief severity as of Con-
science herself speaking in " Sacer esto." But it is the
loftiest moral indignation that burns and scalds in this
poetry ; no feigned false fire of artificial rhyme-mongery.
Warm, generous human blood is in this poet. Read " A un
qui veut se detacher ! "
In the dramas, however, you have also complete vital
concentration. That they are justly open to other charges
we think is true. They are sometimes French, rather than
human seeking too ostentatiously striking melodramatic
situations, sometimes laying bare a horror that is too raw
1 82 ESSAYS ON POETRY AND POETS.
and thrilling, sometimes revealing a Dora's love of the mon-
strous and grotesque. From this point of view some excep-
tion might be taken to " Marie Tudor," even to " Ruy Bias,"
" Hernani," and " Lucretia Borgia," three of the most
powerful dramas. But the finest in my judgment are " Le
Roi s'amuse " and " Marion Delorme." Yet the impression
left by " Le Roi s'amuse " is too thrillingly horrible, like that
of " Lucretia Borgia." Its power and fascination, however,
can hardly be surpassed : indeed, the unity of motive and
action in all Hugo's plays is generally perfect, and they are
admirably fitted for the modern stage, their movement
being rapid and stirring, the most minute directions also
being given by the author for the mise en scene, with an
admirable eye to pictorial and scenic effects. For reading,
truly, the many startling surprises seem often too calcu-
latedly theatrical. There is very little so-called "poetic
diction " in the dramas ; that is to be remarked : in the eyes
of our neo-fantastic ornate school of decadence in England
they must seem too natural, too direct, too human. All the
personages do not talk the same sonorous euphuism. Hugo
dares to write what penny-a-liners call " bald," when he sees
it to be appropriate. Perhaps it may be partly owing to
this that the naked realism of his horror sometimes shocks,
as an equal horror does not in Shakespeare, whose fault,
however, as Matthew Arnold has dared to say, is, though
not of course to the same extent as in our modern writers,
a somewhat indiscriminate euphuism of diction. For the
most part, indeed, Shakespeare varies rhythm and diction
with the situation, and sense. But there is a helpless
wounding sense of cruel, overwhelming destiny for the good,
and rampant, triumphant evil, in " Le Roi s'amuse," which
prevents its attaining rank among the highest works of art.
For we will not admit the new-fangled doctrine, that, so
long as the form is good, the substance is of no consequence,
and that art may say anything, however absurd, false, or
atrocious, provided she says it prettily. Art falls below
VICTOR HUGO. 183
herself, and unduly narrows her own scope, if she become a
prude ; yet if she distort Nature, or the grand spiritual
laws that underlie and form Nature, she is no longer Art at
all, but at best a harlot masquerading in the guise of Art.
She may not so one-sidedly and persistently misrepresent
things as virtually, even if not by set phrase, to become
pander for " the ape and tiger " in humanity. The Divine
Artist, who speaks through conscience and the human
heart, does not ignore morality ; he who does so remains
for ever outside the domain of high art, however swiftly his
deft fingers may travel over the whole gamut of men's lusts,
hatreds, and chicaneries. Nor may she, like the later
Realism, fix our stare, as by some photographic head-rest,
too persistently on loathsome, or sordid details of life, bid-
ding us look only at these, as if they, forsooth, were all the
world nor stifle us through her own near-sightedness, and
mad monstrous appetite for offal, with the hopeless and
desperate sense that this low dank vault of theirs, without
egress, lit only by some occasional corpse-candle, wherein
they have confined us, is indeed the universe, beyond
which there is nothing at all. Yet I admit the great
imaginative power of Zola. Art is a handmaid of heaven ;
and however solicitous her professed friends may be to
obtain for her the situation, she respectfully declines to
become procuress of hell. All this does not touch Hugo,
though it was indirectly suggested by " Le Roi s'amuse."
The subject of that play is briefly as follows. The gallant
and handsome Francis I. has seduced the daughter of an
old nobleman, and the hideous court dwarf, Triboulet, has
encouraged this, as well as the rest of his master's vices,
mocking openly the father's agony and tears. He is
deformed in body and soul, and thus avenges himself on
the more favoured fellow-mortals who cast him out. The
father curses Triboulet ; and it happens that he has one
tender place, one link indeed to virtue and salvation, his
own daughter. Now the king, who spares none, spares not
1 84 ESSAYS ON POETRY AND POETS.
her. Triboulet keeps her carefully concealed from the king,
but the latter finds her out, and corrupts her also. Then
Triboulet burns with hatred against his master, and plots
his destruction. He is to be lured into a coupe-gorge and
murdered. The sister of the bravo, however, takes pity on
the sleeping king, persuading her brother to murder the
first comer instead, and to hand the body to Triboulet in
a sack, as the object of his revenge. Now Triboulet's
daughter loves her seducer, and overhearing this, she
resolves to save the king at the cost of her own life. She
is killed, and handed over to her father, who gloats over
what he supposes to be the corpse of his child's betrayer.
But a flash of lightning reveals to him the corpse of his
child ; and his maddened agony now, as before his bitter-
ness, misery, fiendish rage, and satiate revenge are wonder-
fully depicted as also the beautiful light cruelty of Francis.
Yet we have a pained sense of innocence made victim, of
the prosperous tyrant laughing on, of the consummation of
nature's hatred wreaked on this deformed man, who might
be redeemed, one had hoped, through this one love. True,
the retribution on him for having scoffed at the other father
is just, and one's hatred changes to pity. There is nothing
really immoral here. This is the effect the poet intended ;
there is indeed hope even for this Triboulet, while there is
retribution also. Certainly what is called " poetical justice "
is an utterly mistaken contrivance ; substituting our own
shallow justice for God's though even that has its justifi-
cation in a healthy artistic as well as moral instinct. More-
over, it may be said there is the same oppressive sense of
doom in " King Lear," or " Hamlet" Yet in Shakespeare
there is, I think, a certain large air, a light and heat of
essential poetry, that clears this atmosphere of oppression,
we scarce know how. There is a palpable suggestion of
infinite horizons beyond the slaughter-house of this world ;
a feeling conveyed, however indistinctly, of a holy Mystery
that surrounds and sanctifies this mortal scene being but
VICTOR HUGO. 185
the antechamber of God's eternity. The rest is silence;
but an awe falls upon us, and we put our shoes from our
feet, for we stand upon holy ground. Around the sublime
anguish of Lear and Cordelia there abides a dim, tranquil
aureole, as around those piteous natural casts of distorted
Pompeian corpses, when lately brought to light, there
brooded the blue heaven, and warm, hazy horizons of
Southern landscape. Such an impression, somehow, though
nothing be overtly stated, can supreme genius give, so truly
does it see even the bare fact. Over its nudity is cast the
royal robe of Art. Hugo too often concludes with a ter-
rible mad shriek of helpless anguish a discord : the agony
is too crude, too harrowing, too poignant. The emotions
are hardly " purified ; " they are only lacerated through
" pity and terror." I can just endure the horror of Lear and
Othello, but hardly that of Marlowe's Edward III. Those
other inferior, though still potent Elizabethans, they likewise
do not rise to these Shakesperian, Sophoclean heights of
moving, yet tranquilizing tragedy not even Webster, nor
Marlowe. Whatever the great world-poet's creed, and
whatever the fierce writhings of his strong nature in doubt
and revolt, he had faith in the Divine order : the greatest
Greeks had it also ; and so has Hugo. But the breath of
faith does not seem here to dominate his art. Yet there is
necessary for high art some kind of " Katharsis," some kind
of reconciliation of moral elements, or upward tendency, to
give that restful sense of harmony which art demands. We
cannot bear to finish upon a discord. If there be no
" morality " indeed, the whole work is apt to seem one long
series of discords, and there can only be harmony in the
strange sense that between a series of discords there must
of course be some kind of agreement. Here is no permanent
material out of which to frame a permanently satisfying
work of art We have at best an elaborate structure with
sugar, or with cards, rife with all bias toward disintegration.
Lower elements are certainly needed to give variety and
1 86 ESSAYS ON POETRY AND POETS.
movement ; but the binding, transforming power is still
more needed. We cannot dispense with the loftiest, most
satisfying harmony man is capable of conceiving. As reli-
gion and philosophy, practically and dogmatically, so art
imaginatively, supplements the bewildering moral mysteries
of life. This is not, of course, to endorse the strange opinion
of some German critics, that Shakespeare had a series of
copybook maxims in his head, which he wrote his plays to
illustrate. Yet the more reflective, analytical, philosophical
bias of our own day will necessarily influence our greatest
poets, and perhaps not altogether to their advantage as
artists. You may learn from the artist, albeit indirectly ;
the image, the story, and the type, or teaching, grow up
together as one vital unity in his soul.
" Marion Delorme," however, seems to me among the
greatest of extant dramas. Marion is a woman of light
love, a celebrated courtezan. A young man of high and
austere character meeting her, without knowing who she is,
but taking her for a chaste maiden, indeed creating around
her the ideal of young love, believes in and adores her.
She is at first half amused, half astonished ; the experience
is something new to her, but she conceals from him her
real character ; in fact, without being aware of it, for the
first time she loves. That love is her salvation ; but
through what anguish and difficulty must she pass ! When
a work of this order is objected to as " immoral," the artist
may well refuse to be judged by the prurient incompetence
of literary prudes. The heroine is a woman originally of
loose character therefore, forsooth, the work is immoral !
Mary Magdalene, however, was also such. But Marion
should not, nay, she could not repent, or it would interest
us in her too much if she did. Cynics, or Pharisees may
say so ; but if the grace of God, and the story of the Mag-
dalene be not fables, we dare not say so. Let it not be
averred, however, that we admire this work because it
chimes in with our theology, or our deepest convictions
VICTOR HUGO.
there may be thousands of books which do so, without
being works of art at all. Still, we prefer to see a great
subject greatly treated to seeing a mean subject ever so
skilfully handled. The former requires greater faculties,
greater character, greater genius in the artist. Is Denner,
the painter of wrinkles, though wrinkles imply no de-
gradation, really equal to Leonardo, the painter of Christ
and His apostles at the Last Supper ? Art " gives form ; "
but whether she gives form to excrement, or gold can
hardly be pronounced indifferent, especially since her
materials themselves are spiritual, belonging to the artist's
own nature, and that of the persons to whom his work
appeals. Art "gives pleasure." But there is pleasure in
brothels and elsewhere.
The play opens with a scene in which a young gallant,
Saverny, is talking lightly to Marion, and reproaching her
with having a new lover. She, in fear and trembling, en-
treats him to go, without telling him the truth about her
pure lover, Didier (an enfant trouve- adopted and brought
up by a good woman of the people). Saverny goes, and
Didier enters ; but the former is attacked in the dim lamp-
lit street by murderers, and Didier hastens to the rescue.
Saverny, returning to thank him, too boldly gazes at
Marion. This Didier resents, and later takes the first
opportunity of picking a quarrel with Saverny, who fights
(nearly in the dark) without recognizing his rescuer. Now,
duels have been forbidden on pain of death by Richelieu ,
the master of France, and of the weak King Louis XIII.
Marion, by her cries, inadvertently attracts police-agents to
the place, who arrest Didier, Saverny feigning death.
Marion, however, contrives to deliver him from prison, and
they join a band of strolling players. The transition of
Marion's feelings from light to true love, traversed as they
are by the dread of discovery on the part of Didier t he
horror of pain, bewilderment, and fear with which she be-
holds the light of his pure avowals, and lofty sentiments
1 88 ESSAYS ON POETRY AND POETS.
streaming into her impure spirit, revealing her own un-
worthiness of him how she shrinks from his chaste and
loyal offer of marriage to her, a courtezan, who dare
not tell him her name all this is given with exquisite
subtlety and truth. One day he sees a book on her table,
gallant verses written to " Marion Delorme," and he up-
braids her for reading it, bursting forth into invective
against the vile woman of whom he has heard. He sup-
poses that she rejects him because of his mean birth and
fortune, which makes him bitter. When they are with the
strolling players, he bids her leave him, and not bring upon
herself his miserable fate ; but discovery is at hand. The
development of the plot here is somewhat involved and
improbable. Suffice it that both Didier, and Saverny are
re-arrested by a stratagem of Laffemas, the infamous
" lieutenant-criminal " of Richelieu, and that, without intend-
ing it, Saverny betrays the identity of Marion to her
lover. His disappointment and rage together with his
fierce, cutting rebuffs to her affectionate attentions, so
shocking to her before she knows she is discovered are
well given. But she resolves to save him again, and for
this purpose makes her way into the presence of the king,
Louis the Chaste, as his courtiers nickname him. He
refuses to grant her request ; but this leads to scenes that
admirably portray the king's pitiably weak, vacillating
character, as mere puppet in the hands of the proud and
cruel cardinal-minister, yet secretly chafing under his un-
worthy condition of tutelage. He lets the feeling escape
him in private converse with the fool, D'Angely, and the
Due de Bellegarde, an old courtier. The venerable pro-
vincial baron, who comes to plead for Saverny, his nephew,
and the courtier duke, are excellently drawn. The wily
courtier, invited by the king (who knows how Richelieu is
hated by the nobles) to give his frank opinion of the
cardinal, dares not do so openly even then, well aware of
the king's unreliable character ; but while Louis rails
VICTOR HUGO. 189
against his minister, Bellegarde lashes him into rage by
insinuating the shame of the king's position, though overtly
justifying and praising the priest. With profound know-
ledge of human nature, the poet afterwards makes the
irritated king reject the old baron's prayer for his nephew,
to a great extent through anger at the baron's having
brought an armed escort into the royal presence, which the
baron, imprudently asserting his feudal privileges at such
a moment, has proceeded to justify. The king, being
governed by Richelieu, is proportionately tenacious of his
rights with others even sullenly threatening Bellegarde to
repeat their private conversation to the cardinal. Later,
the fool, D'Angely, partly by an amusing stratagem
depending on the king's prudery, partly also by touching
Louis' weakness for the chase, and averring the duel was
caused by a dispute about falconry, induces him to pardon
the two prisoners. The conclusion shows them in prison.
Marion, on her way with the pardon, meets Laffemas, who
actually holds a revocation of it in his hand, which he
has wrung the moment after from the poor royal tool.
Laffemas will only allow Marion to save her lover (by him-
self conniving at the escape) on one infamous condition.
After a desperate moral struggle, she yields, for time presses.
The execution is to take place at once. But Didier
refuses to go with her. He upbraids her with the bitterest
vehemence for deceiving him, and divines that, in order to
get at him, she must have prostituted her person. Before
she knows he has discovered her secret, with all a woman's
affectionate wiles she entreats him to fly, reminding him of
old times, and of his protestations of love to her. The
loveliness of this poor creature's regenerated and self-
devoting soul is given with utmost fulness and beauty.
She wonders, dismayed, at his hardness ; she feels that, if
he will not come at once, he is lost, and she implores :
" Parle moi, voyons, park, appelle moi Marie ! " Then he
interrupts " Marie, ou Marion ? " upon which she falls
190
ESSAYS ON POETRY AND POETS.
horror-stricken to the ground. And yet in her despair,
urging him to tread on her, confessing her sin and un-
worthiness, she reminds him he once asked her to be his
wife. Then they hear the cannon, the death-signal ! But
he still loves her after all. As he is going, and taking leave
of his friend, she entreats him to kiss and forgive her. At
last he melts into tears, and falls into her arms. He for-
gives, and recognizing all the nobility of her soul, the truth
of her love, he asks her to forgive him. There is one hope
more the cardinal. He is coming to see the execution.
As he passes in his litter, she throws herself before it, en-
treating grace. But a voice comes from between the closed
red curtains, " Pas de grace ! " Senseless, she lets the crowd
and the victims pass by her, and in the end stands alone,
half-mad, upon the stage, pointing to the cardinal's retreat-
ing litter : " Regardez tous! Voila F/iomme rouge qui passe!"
One feels, horrible as it is, that Didier's pure love, and this
earthly hell have saved her soul. Though the plot is in
parts somewhat crude and involved (for it is an early
work), yet the tremendous passion, the tragic situations,
the movement of the action through contrasted develop-
ment of characters mutually influencing one another, all
this makes a tragedy of the first order. Is the creator of
Louis XIII., of the light, hare-brained, gallant French
nobleman, Saverny, of the wonderful Marion, of Bellegarde
the courtier, of the noble Didier is this man merely an
eccentric creator of monsters ? We had one dramatist
living in England, and only one, who could be compared to
Hugo, and that was Richard Hengist Home. But his plays
are of course too good to be much known, or read, or acted
in this country. He indeed has written some noble poetic
dramas, that are both poetry and drama. We need name
only " Cosmo dei Medici," and the " Death of Marlowe."
And to find an English dramatist of the same order before
him you must go back to Sheridan, if not to Otway ;
though the " Blot on the Scutcheon," and one or two early
VICTOR HUGO. IQI
pieces of Browning, may perchance make us hesitate before
we speak so sweepingly.
Still Victor Hugo has written three magnificent ro-
mances, that transcend the dramas, and all the other
works. All his romances indeed display the genius of
the master. " L'Homme qui rit " is about the perversest
and strangest, though there are passages in it of extra-
ordinary power. But his detailed, persistent, dogmatic
errors about England, and things English are what has
attracted most attention here. This betrays, no doubt, an
amusing weakness. And touching upon his weak points
(though we feel, in the presence of such a man, that it is
somewhat irreverent to do so, and too much like one who,
brought in front of Salisbury Cathedral, and remaining
awhile in open-mouthed contemplation, observed at last
to the enthusiastic but disappointed friend who brought
him, that he thought he saw a window broken high up
among the clerestories) we may admit that often his
political speeches seem to an English taste strangely
high-flown and bombastic. He is not without his sins
either as a French politician. I sympathize strongly
with his enlightened liberalism, but not with his flattery of
the national vanity, and shallow love of military "glory."
He is blinded by Napoleon's genius, and condones the
infinite mischief he wrought, far greater than that of his
nephew, and " monkey " in the crooked paths of crime.
Yet the career of the old exile of Guernsey is a grand one.
Exiled to those melancholy seas of the islands for his un-
dying hostility to the crime of December ; beloved there
by all the poor, especially by little children ; refusing to
return to his dear land with those who were amnestied
in the latter time of Louis Napoleon's reign returning only
when the enemy invaded France, and Bonaparte fell ; at
Paris during the terrible days of the siege ; in his old age
his deep, affectionate heart suffering irreparable domestic
losses consoling himself with tiny innocent grandchildren !
I 9 2 ESSAYS ON POETRY AND POETS.
" L'Histoire d'un Crime," is the story of the Coup d'dtat
by one who may with pride say, Quorum pars magna fui.
These minute details concerning one of the foulest crimes
in history, disgracefully condoned in England because
successful, came very opportunely when France seemed,
how lately ! to be on the verge of the same dark experience.
The circulation of this work there has been enormous.
There is a good deal about the vexata qucestio of passive
obedience in the army, when the army is called on by
Presidents in jackboots to commit treason against the
State, and cut the throats of fellow-citizens. It does
seem fortunate, on the whole, that the great French poet
has not been sitting for the last seventy years like an idol
with its arms folded, " holding no form of creed, but con-
templating all." What with the " Chatiments," " Napoleon
le Petit," and this book, posterity will be able to form a
good notion of M. Louis Bonaparte. However, it may
modify the impression, if it pleases, after the fancy portraits
drawn by Mr. Browning, and Mr. B. Jerrold. The auto-
biographic value of this work is at all events great. Hugo
did all the most reckless and energetic personal daring
could do to overthrow the military dictatorship set up by
Bonaparte on the bloodstained ruins of the French Re-
public, and his pen at any rate has had no small share in
actually overthrowing that dictatorship. There can be no
doubt, moreover, that now and again his " so potent art "
has paralyzed other Ultramontane " saviours of society," in
their impious hope of adding another to the black catalogue
of crimes perpetrated in the name of the long-suffering
Prince of Peace.
" L'Homme qui rit " is a monster, no doubt. So are
Quasimodo in "Notre Dame," Triboulet in " Le Roi
s'amuse," and Lucretia Borgia. But after all, Hugo is not
always making characters of this kind. And when he
makes them, does he make them from a pure love of the
monstrous? Emphatically, no. On the contrary. He
VICTOR HUGO. 193
has intense sympathy with the oppressed, rejected, and
outcast of humanity. He believes there is even in them
a certain Divine brotherhood with Christ. And some of
our great theologians have thought the same, have seen it
in the Bible, in the utterances of our Lord Himself. In
Jean Valjean the convict, in Triboulet, in Lucretia Borgia,
in Quasimodo, in the fallen woman, Marion, the poet shows
you the Divine discipline of circumstances leading these
dark, despised, damaged sinners up to higher life and light,
albeit through fiery waves of terrible suffering, the dis-
cipline laying hold of one clue, one hidden thread of holier
natural feeling, and by this drawing them out of the dark-
ness of their spiritual catacomb. Then Hugo, great dramatic
interpreter of human nature, as in duty bound, if only for
the sake of contrast, and the play of moral forces, paints
all ; but he puts all in its own place ; he does not insist on
the evil from dislike of, or personal incapacity for believing,
discerning, and sympathizing with the good : he puts it
beneath, in its own place, not above ; nor represents it as if
it stood alone. Evil, surely, is too prominent in the mar-
vellous realism of Balzac ("sacraments of adultery and
divorce," Carlyle says), as in the neo-paganism of other
inferior, though clever modern writers. But Hugo has painted
Josiane in " L'Homme qui rit," and a portrait of richest
colour it is.
Still our poet is doubtless an idealist. I do not, in
fact, just now remember more than three great portrayers
of humanity who are not to wit, Fielding, Balzac, and
Thackeray ; for writers like Smollett cannot be ranked
among the highest. Hugo represents men as they usually
are ; but sometimes also men as they might be. Indeed, of
Fielding, Balzac, and Thackeray, that they are realists in
art, is only true in a limited sense. For no true artist
reproduces individuals. But it will be asked, Does he not
create them ? Yes, certainly ; and the only question there-
fore is, Whether his individuals are more or less like the
O
I 9 4 ESSAYS OF POETRY AND POETS.
ordinary people one meets about ? Is an artist bound to
confine himself to these ? or may he not rather create indi-
viduals of a rarer, more ideal type, persons who might
be, who may have been, who will be ? so carrying us away
from the vulgar levels of every-day existence, interesting
our imaginations in remote mysterious regions, bearing us
toward grander, stranger, or higher possibilities, by means
of these very creations, one day to become realities ? May
not these be the more " real " after all ?
" Forms more real than living man,
Nurslings of immortality ? "
What we have a right to demand is that art-creations
shall be self -consistent, living with their own proper, native
harmony of life. Then these are indeed shadows of the
types, according to which men and the worlds are ever
created by the Divine Artist. The Hamlet of Shakespeare's
spirit is himself a living spirit, whether in Shakespeare, or
in those who make friends with the offspring of Shake-
speare. It is remarked, indeed, how often an artist differs
from his own ideals. Fundamentally, perhaps, he differs
not, but for the nonce and superficially he does differ.
Perugino paints saintly pictures, and is apparently not a
saintly person. Are not, then, other spirits uttering them-
selves through his spirit ? He is inspired ; even as Balaam,
who came to curse, was constrained to bless. For the rest,
what we insist on as specially "real" is, in fact, contingent
phenomenon of sense, is least real of all. Such grand
creations as CEdipus, Agamemnon, Achilles, Clytemnestra,
Hamlet, Lady Macbeth, Othello, Jean Valjean, Gilliatt,
Consuelo, Faust, stand towering above mortals, like colossal
images on cloud cast by veritable forms of gods standing
high upon the temple-wall of their own eternal habitation.
As for those characters that first strike us as types, rather
than as individuals, they are impersonations of particular
qualities, and only a genius like Moliere's can make them
VICTOR HUGO. 195
tolerable. The abstracting intellect is too much at work
here.
Some say, however, that Valjean is not self -consistent ;
the illiterate, rude convict could never become the Made-
leine of later times. Yet those who know something of the
history of " conversions " will never admit this. There was
a desperately bad character, coarse, violent, brutal, ap-
parently lost to all good feeling, in the Home of Mrs.
Vickers at Brighton Miss Ellice Hopkins has written
about her no love, no preaching seemed to affect her.
But she is now the most trusted and most trustworthy of
the matrons there. Tant pis pour les faits, a theorist or a
cynic may say. We say, Tant pis pour les theories! The
very point, moreover, of Valj can's history is that he was
made bad by the radically unjust, undiscriminating punish-
ment of society. He stole a bit of bread in a mad moment
of poignant anxiety, not for himself, but for those dear to
him, who were reduced to the last extremity through no
fault of his. Fate pressed this outcast hard from the
beginning ; he was one of the " Miserables ; " then, sorely
tempted, rightly, or wrongly, he stole. His punishment was
to be confined and herded with the worst of criminals.
The sense of doom, of injustice, rankled in him ; associated
with the worst and most desperate of his fellow-men,
he became bad. Released at length from prison, he was
the sullen foe of well-to-do, comfortable society. A good
old bishop houses him, and, though he knows his story,
treats him with the utmost confidence, as if his character
were undamaged, leaving silver candlesticks within his"
reach, and placing him in a guest-chamber near his own.
He is astonished ; but in the middle of the night he is
tempted to make off with the candlesticks : and one of the
most powerful scenes of the book is where he passes with
them through the bishop's room, and sees the moonlight
resting on the placid face of his kind and saintly host,
whom, had he wakened, Valjean might have murdered.
196 ESSAYS ON POETRY AND POETS.
He is arrested and brought back (not by the bishop's
order), and, to screen him, the bishop says that he has
given him the candlesticks; (Here, no doubt, the writers
of virtuous English novels may raise a point of casuistry.)
He dismisses Valjean with the solemn words, " Jean Val-
jean, mon frere, vous n'appartenez plus au mal, mais au
bien. C'est votre ame que je vous achete ; je la retire au
pense"es noires, et a 1'esprit de perdition, et je la donne a
Dieu ! " But after this he met a little Savoyard, as he was
tramping along, who dropped a piece of money in the
gathering twilight. Valjean instinctively, and savagely
put his foot on it, refusing to give it up, though the boy
scolded and cried. So the child went off sobbing. Yet
this brutality was the beast's expiring effort in Valjean,
and the tears of the boy, together with the Christ-like
conduct of the bishop toward him, did their holy work.
So years after we meet him as M. Madeleine, the self-
educated, upright, benevolent mayor of a country town,
beloved and trusted by all. He has dropped the old name
with the old nature. There is no verisimilitude in this, we
have been told. In whose eyes, we reply ? Not, we believe,
in the eyes of those unblinded by theory, who know most
of the history and profound secrets of human nature. Is
he represented, however, as perfect, as having no stain, as
free from all necessity to struggle with sin ? Not at all.
The very contrary. One of the most powerful passages in
all literature is the chapter called " Une tempete sous un
crane" wherein, another man having been arrested as
Valjean for the robbery of the Savoyard, Madeleine debates
all one night whether he shall give himself up or not, so
relinquishing the excellent and needful work he is doing as
mayor, leaving, moreover, the poor lost woman, Fantine,
who is expecting him to bring her child, Cosette, to her on
her death-bed, and whom he has already influenced for
good. But he must go the very next morning to Arras, if
he decides to surrender himself, where the man's trial will
VICTOR HUGO. 197
be taking place: he might even now be too late. But shall
he, must he go back to the horrible convict life, losing the
respect and love of men, now so dear to him in his new
existence ?
He decides to go. The accidents of his journey, the
delays, his entry into the judgment hall of Arras, where he
can only make his way through the crowd by sending a
message to the judge that the (well-known) Mayor Made-
leine requests he may have a seat on the bench ; his hesi-
tation when alone in the corridors leading thither as to
whether he shall push the old door or not ; his emergence into
the dirty, crowded hall, badly lighted by guttering candles ;
his bewildered observation of the scene ; the judge's bow
to him ; his own voice startling even himself, as he announces
himself to the incredulous court for the true Jean Valjean ;
Javert's the police-officer's recognition of him all is told
with a marvellous imaginative realism of detail, that lays
hold upon the soul and never lets it go. This Javert, a
very incarnation of the French detective police, is a portrait
painted with such solidity and perfection that one seems to
have known him in the flesh, as one does the original of a
portrait by Titian. He is at once type and individual, as
Othello is. He is the implacable foe of Valjean throughout
embodiment of formal law blindly carrying out the
(roughly moral and necessary) edict of human society upon
a branded criminal, who is indeed criminal no longer
right from its own limited point of view, yet wrong and
blundering in this instance as in many fulfilling, how-
ever, in the end, grand purposes of God by inflicting life-
suffering on this upward-tending human spirit. The figure
of poor Fantine, too, another victim of society and hard
circumstances, is quite imperishable. She dies, singing that
song of yearning for her child, whom in this world, alas !
she is not to see. Still more exquisite and imperishable,
if possible, is Cosette, the young girl whose life and fate are
bound up so inextricably with those of Valjean. The
198 ESSAYS ON POETRY AND POETS.
latter, again a convict, his chains having been struck off,
saves a drowning man in the harbour of Toulon, by an
extraordinary exertion of strength, courage, and agility ;
but he himself never reappears to the authorities, and is
supposed to be drowned. He has really dived, and swum
a long way under cover of darkness ; and we meet him far
off, seeking for the child Cosette, whom Fantine had
entreated him to seek out at the Thenardiers', where she
had placed the girl. They are publicans, and there the
poor child has been sadly ill-treated. The Thenardiers
seem to start out of the book as repulsive, mean, veritably
living persons. They are both bad, man and wife, but how
well-contrasted in their diverse, mutually reacting villainy !
Not a trace of exaggeration or caricature is there, though
Hugo is by some supposed always to exaggerate. The
effect is produced by depicting subtle nuances of word,
gesture, and action not by the author's reflective analysis,
as in George Eliot, or by that reflective analysis often
inappropriately put into the character's own mouth, as
in Mr. Browning. Hugo's is certainly the more dramatic
method, though he can analyze when he pleases with all
the psychological subtlety of either author. The misery of
the poor, neglected, overworked child, and all her ways in
that family, are described with unrivalled force and pathos
as she sits in the chimney corner of the cabaret, with
nervous, lifelong fear expressed in every lineament and
gesture, ragged, ugly, pale, thin. Thenardier is a small
man, popularly supposed to be ruled by his big, loud-
spoken wife ; but the contrary is true. The woman has one
good point she is fond of her own little girls. But she
" has not time " to teach Cosette to pray, or to take her
to church. One evening these little girls are playing with
the cat, and every one's attention being diverted, Cosette
ventures to drop the leaden sword she habitually nurses
for a doll, and furtively takes up the real one, belonging to
the other children. It is twilight, and she is in the shadow,
VICTOR HUGO. 199
sitting on the floor ; but the firelight happening to fall upon
a rosy leg of the wax doll, the children, looking round at
the moment, see what she has dared to do. They make an
exclamation ; and then the woman calls to her in a voice
of thunder, threatening to beat her. Jean Valjean (in his
soiled, tattered clothes) is sitting there, and he, who has
come in with the child and asked for lodgings, thereupon
walks out, returning soon with a wonderful doll, which
Cosette had been admiring open-mouthed in a shop window
when Mother Thenardier sent her that very evening to the
spring in the wood for water with a bucket. There Valjean
first met her. The shop-window lighted up had seemed
Paradise to the poor neglected child, with that large, lovely
lady doll in the midst ; and now, to the indignant astonish-
ment of all, Valjean presents Cosette with this very doll !
The child's despair at having to leave the town alone in
the chill evening, and enter the wood, is terribly felt and
rendered. When she enters the dark forest, she fancies
ghosts pursuing her, and at last, with beating heart, she
sits down exhausted at the spring. " A cdte* d'elle 1'eau
agite*e faisait des cercles, qui ressemblaient des serpents
de feu bleu. Au dessus de sa tete le ciel etait couvert de
vastes nuages noirs, qui dtaient comme des pans de fumee.
Le tragique masque de 1'ombre semblait se pencher vague-
ment sur cet enfant. Jupiter se couchait dans les profon-
deurs. L'enfant regardait d'un ceil egare cette grosse etoile
qu'elle ne connaissait pas, et qui lui faisait peur. La
planete en ce moment etait pres de 1'horizon, et traversait
une e*paisse couche de brume, qui lui donnait une rougeur
horrible. La brume lugubrement empourpre'e elargissait
1'astre." Then he describes the fearful branches of the trees,
and the dismal sounds of the chilly wind in them pro-
ceeding with his own extraordinary power to enlarge on
the strange weird living horrors of the twilit forest. Every
touch tells, though the mind is almost oppressed with the
multiplicity of detail. But he, and Charles Dickens have a
200 ESSAYS ON POETRY AND POETS.
similar faculty of feeling and expressing the dim, veiled,
spiritual life in Nature, which we can only discern through
a glass darkly, but which is there, and has so deep a
spiritual influence upon men. (Elsewhere, though not here,
Hugo injures his impressiveness by overloading his canvas,
and unduly multiplying epithets ; by a want of self-
restraint ; by the volubility, and sometimes alloyed appro-
priateness of his adjectives or similes ; by an almost artificial,
strained grotesqueness, and passion for lurid effects.)
" Cette penetration des tenebres est inexprimablement
sinistre dans un enfant. Les forts sont des apocalypses ;
et le battement d'aile d'une petite ame fait un bruit d'agonie
sous leur voute monstrueuse." At last she takes courage to
fill the bucket, and goes, counting " one, two, three," to
dissipate her horror, with the heavy iron bucket freezing
her hands, spilling its water on them, and her poor naked
legs. " C'etait un enfant de huit ans ; il n'y avait que Dieu
en ce moment qui voyait cette chose triste. Et sans doute
la mere helas ! Car il est des choses qui font ouvrir les
yeux aux mortes dans leur tombeau. Ell l e soufflait avec
une sorte de ralement douloureux ; des sanglots lui serraient
la gorge." And she reflected the Thenardiers would beat
her when she got back ! She often stops to rest. The
misery is almost too terrible here. " Cependant le pauvre
petit etre desespere ne put s'empecher de s'ecrier : O mon
Dieu ! mon Dieu ! En ce moment elle sentit tout a coup
que le seau ne pesait plus rien ! " Valjean had come behind,
and was carrying the bucket for her !
Valjean again takes another name, and lives retired in
Paris with Cosette. But he is tracked by his old enemy,
J avert, and the story of his escape with Cosette up a water-
pipe, with Cosette on his back, by help of a rope, into the
garden of a convent, is one of the sensational parts of the
book, reminding one of Dumas the Elder, or Eugene Sue,
and equallygood as their admirable writing about such things.
There is a dash of the boy, of the gamin, about this great
VICTOR HUGO. 201
poet, and he is not above a spice of adventure, excitement,
and romance. Let the reverend seniors shake their heads at
him then ! For his part the present writer likes it. Of this
sort, too, is Valj can's extraordinary exit from the convent
garden in a coffin, by the help of an old sexton, who only
knew him as Madeleine, in order that he may re-enter it to
put Cosette to school there. Another similar episode is his
bearing the senseless young Marius on his back through
the sewers of Paris, after he (Marius) has been shot on the
barricades of 1832. Extremely fascinating is his account
of this convent and its inmates. Here, as elsewhere, he
shows a perfect dramatic ability to understand and sym-
pathize with characters or modes of thought diametrically
opposed to his own, and to do them justice. There is,
moreover, one of the curious episodical dissertations here
with which the book abounds, and which no doubt interferes
with its technical perfection as a work of art, by breaking
up the unity of its impression ; but these could just be
bodily removed elsewhere, as wantonly stuck on, though
admirable enough in themselves, and then there would
stand forth one of the masterpieces of human genius in all
its own sublimely massive integrity. He has in this part a
chapter on prayer, which is refutation sufficient of bigots
or ignoramuses who have charged him, forsooth ! with
" atheism." He contends, on the contrary, for a personal
God, and for the necessity of prayer to Him. Nothing can
be further from the blind and bigoted sciolism that hurls
itself foaming against, or makes mouths of a monkey at, or
dismisses with a gesture of conceited contempt, the pro-
foundest and most universal religious convictions of man-
kind. His poetic humanity is too broad and deep for that.
But then he has the first requisite of the poet though one
scarcely necessary to the versifier, or the critic namely,
manhood. Before being poet, one must be man. " II y a
une philosophic qui nie 1'infini. II y a aussi une classic
pathologiquement qui nie le soleil ; cette philosophic
202 ESSAYS ON POETRY AND POETS.
s'appelle ctcitt. Eriger un sens qui nous manque en
source de verite", c'est un bel aplomb d'aveugle." Speaking
of the self-satisfied airs of atheists, he says : " On croit
entendre une taupe s'ecrier : ils me font pitie avec leur
soleil ! "
We have also a most brilliant account of Waterloo, and
Napoleon apropos of Marius and Thenardier and a
detailed dissertation about the Paris sewers ! In that part
there is, indeed, an almost morbid propensity to enlarge
unduly on the horrible. But though the political history
of events preceding 1832 is too long, the story of the bar-
ricades and their defenders, Enjolras, Gavroche, etc., is
admirable, and a quite legitimate episode from the point
of view of perfect art. The characters here are lightly
sketched, are connected with the main personages, and
by their side-eddies give relief to the intense strain of the
grand current. The sketch of the little Paris gamin, Gav-
roche, is a master-sketch for all time. Behold him finding
the poor little lost children in the Luxembourg gardens,
talking to them patronizingly, and taking them home with
him to sleep in his hole under an old broken statue of an
elephant ; making them comfortable ; a mite full of impu-
dence, and resource, and premature knowledge ; pure and
kindly, in spite of his bad human surroundings ! See the
awe of the small, gentle, carefully protected children in his
presence ! The humour of the talk between these three
is equal to any humour whatsoever. And here we stop to
note what absurd general statements are made upon insuf-
ficient data : e.g. that the French have no humour, only
wit. This, and much else in Hugo, shows most genuine
humour, and fills us with astonishment at the immense
range of his gifts. And those two lost boys in the Luxem-
bourg Gardens, before they met their powerful protector,
Master Gavroche! There was a bourgeois with his little
boy feeding swans in the pond. When they left, the other
lost boys approached, and the elder reached a bit of bread,
VICTOR HUGO. 203
which the ripple of water (made by the swans swimming
to it) had pushed within reach ; this he gave to his
hungry brother of five years old. Meanwhile, the noise of
distant fighting at the barricades is borne towards them.
As for Gavroche, he dies on the barricades, receiving first
one bullet, then another ; gaily singing light songs between
each wound, and making " vulgar signs," as Thackeray calls
them, after his kind, at the soldiers.
When Cosette leaves the convent, she lives quietly with
Valjean, and grows up into a woman. All this part is
literature of the very highest quality the girl's opening
nature is subtly and delicately unfolded nothing here is
heavy, or laboured, or difficult, but the tender touches are
worthy of so tender and sweet a rose. Except Juliet, in
Shakespeare, and Marguerite, in Goethe, we know of no
similar portrait to equal this. The love of Cosette for the
old man, and his infinitely greater love for her, who is the
only human object he has to love ; the ennobling, strength-
ening effect of this love upon him when his old nature
threatens to rule him again, feeling as he does the chaos,
the injustice, and blindness of society, the miserable spec-
tacle of human mistakes, and sins, and disappointments :
all this is unique, and intensely original, the climax being
when another love comes in between him and this child as
she grows up, her love for a young man, Marius Pontmercy,
and his love for her. Then begins in earnest again the
struggle of good and evil in this great chastised nature.
How can he yield her to another, who is the very channel
of God's grace to him, as well as his only little flower,
bringing sweetness and colour into his life? See then,
reader, that Valjean is no monster of perfection ! They
were living in an old retired house together ; and here, by
the side of his misery, obscurity, hateful memory of the
past, and dread lest she should know it, feeling himself
ever liable to be tracked and recaptured, Cosette grew from
a plain child into a pretty girl. She only began to be
204 ESSAYS ON POETRY AND POETS.
aware of her beauty when she heard some passer say,
" Jolie, mats mat mise" Though she could not fancy he
meant her, she began to look in the glass, and attend to
her dress after that. Valjean was sorry when she became
pretty ; " a mother would have been glad." Before, she
had been content with their retired life together ; now
she began to want to go out in the streets, and to need
some amusements. A slight sense of separation grows up
insensibly between them. Then Marius appears on the
scene a good-looking, but untidy and studious youth,
reading on a bench in the Luxembourg Gardens, as Cosette
and the old man pass of a morning. Marius and she only
gradually begin to take notice of one another. When
Cosette began to care about him, it was only as a kind
of charming distant vision ; and the girl really thought she
was expressing all she felt in saying to Valjean, "Quel
ddlicieux jardin que le Luxembourg ! " There is also much
humour in the account of Marius's budding love his put-
ting on a new coat and gloves, but always pretending to
read as the couple passed. Jean Valjean cordially detests
him, as a possible lover, and says to Cosette one day, " Que
ce jeune homme a 1'air pedant ! " to which she replies with
supreme calm, " Ce jeune homme la ? " as if she had noticed
him for the first time in her life. Then, " How stupid I
am ! " thought Valjean : " she had not remarked him. C'est
moi qui le lui montre ! O ! simplicite des vieux ! profon-
deur des enfants ! " At length he determines to remove ;
and she, albeit very tender to him whom she regards as her
father, seems silent and sorrowful, though (educated in a
convent) she scarce knows yet that she indeed loves Marius.
One morning the girl and Valjean go out to see the sun
rise. " Elle regardait les papillons sur les fleurs, mais ne
les prenait pas ; les mansudtudes, et les attendrissements
naissent avec 1'amour, et la jeune fille qui a en elle un ideal
tremblante et fragile a pitie' de 1'aile d'un papillon." At
last she meets Marius, and he avows his love. Then follows
VICTOR HUGO. 205
an exquisite idyl, and here with equal perfection are de-
scribed the young loves of their fresh souls, and the spring-
tide of the beautiful garden, so harmonious with them,
where they used to steal their brief meetings. " Foliis ac
Frondibus" is unsurpassed for tenderness of natural de-
scription : every feature and tint and tone in the spiritual
and the natural are here soft echoes of one another. But
Marius, one of the republicans, has to go to the barricades,
and Valjean goes also, though only to attend to the
wounded. As related, he saves Marius's life, and moreover
Javert's, who becomes his prisoner. But Marius was all the
time insensible, and does not know who his deliverer is.
Valjean consents to the marriage of the lovers, but his
heart is broken, for he feels he ought to reveal his true
history and position to them, separating himself from them
for ever. Yet this resolution causes him a fearful struggle.
This combat of the flesh and spirit could not be more
religiously described. " Combien de fois, terrassee par la
lumiere, lui avait il cri^ grace ! Cette lumiere implacable,
allumee en lui et sur lui par 1'eveque, 1'avait il ebloui de
force, lorsqu'il souhaitait etre aveugle ! Combien de fois
s'etait il releve* sanglant, meurtri, brise, eclair^, le ddsespoir
au cceur, la se'renite' dans Tame ! Et vaincu il se sentait
vainqueur ! et sa conscience lui disait : maintenant va en
paix ! "
The prose epithalamium on the first bridal night of
Marius and Cosette is a piece of chaste and lovely poetry.
But the climax of all modern poetry, as it seems to the
present writer, is in the chapter where Valjean leaves the
happy wedding supper, and goes alone to the old house
where the girl and he had lived so long. There he locks
himself into Cosette's empty room, and by candlelight un-
fastens an old box that he had always preserved, contain-
ing the childish frocks and stockings and trinkets that he
had given her when he took her away from the Thenardiers
at Montfermeil. These he arranges on her bed, one by
206 ESSAYS ON POETRY AND POETS.
one, calling to mind the far-away night when he found her
first ; and then their walk together through the wood on
leaving Montfermeil. The trees were without leaves, the
sky without sun or birds, but ah ! " Elle n'etait pas plus
haute que cela, elle avait sa grande poupee dans ses bras,
elle avait mis son louis d'or dans la poche de ce tablier :
elle riait ; ils marchaient tous les deux se tenant la main,
elle n'avait que lui au monde ! Alors sa venerable tete
blanche tomba sur le lit, ce vieux cceur stoi'que se brisa, sa
face s'abima dans les vetements de Cosette, et si quelqu'un
cut passd dans 1'escalier, on eut entendu d'effrayants sang-
lots." And here all night in the cold, with his head on
the bed, kissing the little child's things, he debates with
himself whether he dare do as the young husband and wife
have both entreated, go and live with them, and so run the
risk of inflicting his infamy upon them, should he be dis-
covered. This agony the poet calls, " Le septieme cercle,
et le huitieme del." Finally he denounces himself to
Marius. "Vous demandez pourquoi je parle ! je ne suis
ni denonce, ni poursuivi, ni traqud Si ! par qui ? par moi !
II faut si on veut etre heureux, monsieur, ne jamais com-
prendre le devoir ; car des qu'on la compris, il est implac-
able ; on dirait qu'il vous punit de le comprendre, mais
non ; il vous recompense, car il vous met dans un enfer, ou
Ton sent a cote de soi Dieu." But Marius, though he
shrinks from him at first, feels his grandeur, and Thenar-
dier, while trying to injure him in the eyes of Marius,
unintentionally reveals Valjean as the heroic deliverer he
has longed to discover. All the heroism of his life and
character becomes little by little as clear to the husband
as it is to Cosette ; but the end is near. Now that his
angel child is taken from him, he sinks in his lonely dwell-
ing, so full of memories of her. There is nothing in
Shakespeare, or Sophocles, more intensely pathetic than
his death, with Marius and Cosette, whom he has sent for,
kneeling by the bedside. This may stand as a companion
VICTOR HUGO. 207
picture to the death of Lear, or that of CEdipus. As
Madeleine, the mayor, he saved a little money, made by
discovery of a process of manufacture, which he, in broken
phrases, explains to the lovers : this money will be theirs.
He has placed a crucifix near him. To that he points.
"Behold," he says, "the Great Martyr!" Other tender,
loving, and beautiful things he speaks brokenly to his
children. " Cosette et Marius tomberent a genoux, eper-
dus, etouffes de larmes, chacun sur une des mains de Jean
Valjean. Ces mains augustes ne remuaient plus. La nuit
e*tait sans etoiles, et profondement obscure. Sans doute
dans 1'ombre quelque ange immense etait debout, les ailes
deployees, attendant 1'ame." That angel, the poet suggests,
may have been the bishop. " La mort, c'est 1'entree dans
la grande lueur." Truly God hath chosen the weak, and
foolish, and despised things of this world to confound the wise
and powerful ; and things that are not, to bring to nought
those that are, that no flesh should glory in His presence.
Here is no less than the story of the human soul, travelling
from darkness and through darkness up to light eternal,
" kept by the power of God unto salvation." And though
it has the misfortune to be elevating and ennobling, we
believe that it may almost be described as {pace a recent
school of critics) " a work of art."
We must not be tempted to linger over that other great
romance, the " Travailleurs de la Mer." Here is man in
presence of Nature, wrestling with her, as Jacob wrestled
with the angel, and overcoming. The colossal will and
energy of Gilliatt, the hero, are striving against the tre-
mendous and overwhelming infinitude of Nature's indignant
and infuriated legions. Baffled, thrown back, working on
to achieve the impossible, he at last achieves it. May not
this poem be described as the distinctively modern epic
desiderated by Carlyle ? It celebrates " tools and the man"
the dignity of labour. Yet one reward, beyond the reward
of great work achieved, he sought ; that had been his
208 ESSAYS ON POETRY AND POETS.
original motive-force love the love of a simple girl.
When he returns, his work achieved, he finds the girl loves
another, though to him she had been promised by her
father, in case he should do what seemed beyond human
power to do. The other is good and beautiful lovable
by a girl. Gilliatt is only heroic. He might marry her ;
the other has her love ; so he yields them to one another.
The ship that bears them away on a calm sea passes in the
evening close to the rock where he is sitting ; and, himself
unseen, he sees the lovers toying together in their young
joy. He does not move. The tide rises ; still he does not
move. The sea, that he has conquered, works her will on
him now unresistingly. This magnificent work has with
truth been compared to the " Prometheus " of ^Eschylus.
To that it bears much analogy. A ship has been wedged
high up between two rocks, partly by human treachery,
partly by the tempest. Gilliatt undertakes to float her,
unaided, and for this purpose he must live alone on these
barren rocks (the Douvres), in the midst of the raging
and melancholy northern seas. The poet's long exile in
Guernsey stood him in good stead here. The rocky
Channel islets, with their marvellous submarine habitations
and inhabitants, are most vividly described ; but the book
is in one aspect a long poem of the sea. The sea is repre-
sented in all her moods ; grave, sombre, terrific, in tem-
pestuous frenzy, gay, smiling, serene. The very salt breath
of turbulent storm blows and raves through these wonderful
pages, and the poet shows himself no less a master in
dealing with grand and awful, or tender and subtle forces
of external Nature, than with grand and awful, or tender
and subtle powers and emotions of man. Here he is
modern. The conscious and definite influence of external
Nature upon man, as also the increase of his power over
her, his study of her laws for his own purposes, this is
peculiarly modern. And this element accordingly is very
pronounced in the great modern romantic poet. But this
VICTOR HUGO. 209
element does not in him overpower the human. Nature,
in fact, here almost occupies the very place of the gods
in the older mythologies, which indeed is her right place.
The gods are Nature ; Nature is the gods. She is in some
sense stronger than man ; yet he is in some sense stronger
than she. He is greater than what seems to him material
nature, in so far as she is or seems material, though in this
character she lays the yoke of her Ananke upon him,
which now he overcomes, and which now overcomes him.
But as obeying the Divine law of her inmost being she is
greater than man ; he must bow to the Divine necessity of
her Order. Then there is that awful irony of Fate or cir-
cumstance, which is so pronounced in the work of Sophocles
and Shakespeare, as it is likewise in that of Victor Hugo.
Man is crossed and thwarted, after all his plans and pre-
parations, life-long exertions and fondest hopes ; some-
thing altogether different being determined as final outcome
and result. Gilliatt on the rock drowning, and his love
gliding to happiness with another. This is the end of the
life-toil ; yet he cannot have laboured or loved in vain.
" Behind the veil ! Behind the veil ! "
Hugo's intense realistic imagination of the terrible is of
course peculiarly manifest in Gilliatt's encounter with the
Pieuvre, or immense devil-fish, in the lovely sea-cavern, so
charmingly described. That this is exaggerated is not true,
for enormous creatures of the kind exist, at all events, in
tropical seas.* This is St. George and the Dragon over
again ; and you might as well blame Ariosto, or Dante, or
great mediaeval painters and sculptors, for their innumer-
able elaborate creations of such monstrous objects, as blame
the modern, who has, by his study of modern science, seen
* Hugo told me, when I had the honour of being presented to him in
Paris, and described my swims in and about the Gouliot caves in Sark, and
conversations with the boatmen there concerning the octopus, that he had
himself seen either in those caves, or in the Boutiques, an immense octopus
pursuing a bather.
P
210 ESSAYS ON POETRY AND POETS.
and restored much that our ancestors conceived. The
Pieuvre, moreover, is an ugly symbol of the evil spiritual
powers, with which man contends. For the rest, Hugo
may revel in his strength of creation in this region, as
Ariosto and Dante revelled before him ; as the builders too
of our great Gothic cathedrals revelled in their gargoyles
and hobgoblins. But before we quit this romance, observe
the perfect unity of it as a work of aft. The same is true
of " Notre Dame de Paris." In that I can only draw
attention to the splendid portrait of the supple, brilliant
gipsy girl, Esmeralda, and her goat, which I think must
have suggested Fedalma to George Eliot, as the wonderful
Anzoletto of George Sand must have suggested Tito.
In conclusion, we come to the recently-published ro-
mance of the Revolution " Quatre-vingt-tfeize." Nothing,
I have said already, can have more perfect artistic unity
than this. And remember that it may not be so easy to
rein in Pegasus as to drive a hackney-coach-horse with
perfect propriety along a well-worn high road, which hack-
ney-coachmen of the gentle, and ungentle crafts should
remember. Respectable people, nay, and " poetical," senti-
mental, superfine, academical people, with pouncet boxes,
and faultless " taste," who have successfully embanked
the tame waters of their canal, seem to claim the right,
therefore, of abusing Enceladus for not keeping his Etna-
fires in like prim order. A suburban villa garden making
mouths at a forest ! Is that very edifying ? Now here
there is near the commencement a powerful, though doubt-
less somewhat grotesque description of a carronade that
got loose on a ship, and behaved like a living demon, in
the end causing the destruction of the ship and her crew.
This has at once been pounced upon by the funny tribe of
criticasters, poetlings, parodists, and punsters, whom the
public pays to tickle, or sadden it with strange antics.
And the English people are too often only in a position
to judge the great Frenchman from such silly reproductions
VICTOR HUGO. 211
of, or strictures upon, his occasional tricks of manner say
the casual warts upon one of his fingers. That there is
anything very absurd in this description of the carronade's
behaviour, we for our part are not ready to admit. He
endows it with a terrible grotesque weird life of its own
indeed. But are the poetlings and criticasters prepared to
swear that these things are really dead ? that he who
should deem otherwise must necessarily be a fool ? Do
they know so much about it as all that ? Possibly Hugo
may know as much as they do. We do not attach great
importance to the mouths made by people to whom a
primrose is "a yellow primrose and nothing more" at
those to whom it is a deal more. And, after all, are these
people sure that, even from the most mechanical, prosaic
view of the matter, if a heavy iron carronade gets loose
upon a ship in a storm, it will not play the very deuce, as
this one did ? But here you have dapper pigmies standing
by a colossus, and spitting at him, because they can see
nothing more of him than a few casual stains and irregu-
larities, that are level with their own noses. Or rather,
they have a dim, uneasy sense of something towering, and
soaring away from them ; so the painful feeling of their
own dwarfed impotence makes them prefer to fix their
attention, and direct that of the passers, to these palpable
roughnesses on the base of the mighty Memnon, whose
solemn sounds are ringing in the pure dawn above.
What shall be said of the opening chapter, where the
republican sergeant, Radoub, and his soldiers, marching
through a wood, find a poor ragged woman with two
children in a thicket, where she has taken refuge from the
civil war that has desolated her home ? The conversation
between this poor peasant, the vivandihe of the regiment,
and the rough, rollicking, but generous-hearted and gallant
sergeant, reads just like life as if it were a transcript.
The keen political partizanship of these hot Parisian
warriors is contrasted with the vacant and ignorant replies
212 ESSAYS ON POETRY AND POETS.
of the poor Breton mother, who takes no side, and does
not understand either side, but just nai'vely and inevitably
lets out her superstitious, unquestioning reverence for things
established, in her replies, in spite of all she has suffered
from the feudal lord and from the priest. This at first
enrages her rough querists ; but the common humanity of
the parties asserts itself at last, and the regiment ends
by adopting the poor children, and taking the mother with
them. The rapid, broad mastery of the strokes bringing
out the figures of these poor illiterate people, is in the
manner of Scott, or Shakespeare, rather than in the elabo-
rate, analytic manner of Browning, or George Eliot. The
perfect fairness and truth, moreover, with which both parties
to this great and terrible modern controversy are given, not-
withstanding the poet's own strong bias toward Liberalism,
is most remakable, and evidence enough, surely, of his first-
rate dramatic capability.
Here you have the epic of the Revolution ; and you see
that one need not be cold and impassive, without personal
convictions, or passionate humanity, in order to be a great
artist. One need not take a merely artistic, aesthetic interest
in the world and its doings " sitting as God, holding no
form of creed, but contemplating all." Indeed, this is to be
a Brummagem god merely ; a stock, or a stone : he is most
like God, who is most human. Goethe was, in fact, an
exception, instead of being the rule, as minor aesthetic per-
sons appear to suppose. And, save in "Faust," which, as he
said himself, " is incommensurable," and assuredly one of
the world's masterpieces, I cannot think that Goethe, any
more than Schiller though he too was a great dramatist
attained the same degree of human truth, intensity, and
grandeur, as Victor Hugo. Schiller, however, died young.
Compare, for instance, Goethe's peasants and illiterate
people with Hugo's. The latter talk argot ; but it is not
the argot merely that makes Gavroche so living. This is
no exceedingly clever study by a catholic-minded litterateur.
VICTOR HUGO. 213
The man Hugo lives in Gavroche, Thenardier, Michelle
Flechard, or Radoub, as that other man, Shakespeare, lived
in Falstaff, lago, Malvolio, or the grave-digger lives more
even, we fancy, in his children, than that other lived in
Arthur, or Macduff 's little son. (If Shakespeare practised
all the trades he shows a knowledge of, as the critics seem
to think he did, we wonder, by the way, how many trades
Hugo has practised. He certainly has rather the weakness
of seeming omniscient ; and his technical terms, together
with his argot) make him very hard reading for a foreigner.)
Mephistopheles and Faust are indeed great representative
figures ; but as for Werther, the Saint Preux of Rousseau
anticipates him. Do you not see Goethe's temperament in
the comparative pallor of his pictures ? Shakespeare's in
the depth and richness of his ?
The old Breton marquis, Lantenac, represents the royalist
and conservative party. He is appointed commander-in-
chief of the royalist armies in La Vendee a stern, indeed
cruel old man, imbued with all ancient prejudices, and all
the unbending haughtiness of his illustrious race, reserved,
cold and sarcastic, brave, energetic, a grand seigneur of the
old school, a born soldier, full of resource and capability.
This is a magnificent full-length picture, without a tinge of
caricature, felt and represented with utter fidelity. To him
are opposed Gauvain, his grand-nephew, and Cimourdain,
an ex-priest, tutor of Gauvain. Both these again are splen-
didly portrayed. The corvette in which Lantenac has
embarked for Brittany, through fault of the man whose
business it had been to secure the carronades, becomes (as
already mentioned) unmanageable. This gives the repub-
lican fleet opportunity to close in upon the corvette, she
having the Minquiers rocks, and the choice of wreck on
them, behind her. The same man, by a daring act, manages
to secure the carronade in its place again, but the mischief
is done. Lantenac therefore decorates him for his bravery,
and has him shot for his carelessness. There is only one
214 ESSAYS ON POETRY AND POETS.
chance of Lantenac's escaping if somebody who knows
the coast will row him away from the doomed vessel in a
boat, and land him alone. One volunteers to do this. In
the open sea this man, however, informs Lantenac that he
is brother to that other person who has just been shot by
the marquis's order ; so he bids the marquis prepare to die.
Then follows a very powerful scene, wherein Lantenac
dominates the boatman, whose hand is on the trigger of his
pistol, by sheer force of character, by skilful appeal also to
their common beliefs and aspirations, political as well as
religious. This man (Halmalo) becomes his most devoted
adherent, to whom he gives commissions of the utmost im-
portance. Landed, he pursues his way alone, but finds
that his descent has been anticipated, and a price put upon
his head. An old beggar, named Telmarch,one of the people
of his own estate, conceals Lantenac in his strange wild den
under the roots of a tree, till all immediate danger is past.
Ultimately, Lantenac puts himself at the head of the
peasants. All these his adventures, and the crises of his
fate, are told with the utmost graphic power of keeping our
interest alive ; complicating and involving, then unravelling
the web of circumstances, so carrying the reader on through
the story, a faculty essential to the novelist's art, but which
those skilful in character-drawing do not always possess.
As general, Lantenac, to attain his political ends, shrinks
from no severity. Victorious, he has prisoners and women
shot. Among others, the mother of the children adopted
by the republican battalion is shot, while the children are
carried away as hostages. Telmarch, creeping out of his
den, finds the neighbouring village on fire, and corpses of
massacred persons in the street. Then he regrets having
saved Lantenac. But the mother is not quite dead. He
takes and cures her of her wounds. Yet she only revives
to find her children gone. Her scant-worded, brooding
despair, as she slowly recovers, is terribly given. At last
she sets off to seek the children. A passer informs her that
VICTOR HUGO. 215
they have probably been taken to La Tourgue. Gauvain, in
fact, defeats Lantenac in several battles (one of these in the
town of Dol is described with extraordinary power), and
forces him to find refuge at length with only a few faithful
followers in the old feudal tower or castle, La Tourgue, which
is the hereditary seat of their family. This Gauvain and
Cimourdain besiege. The illiterate peasant mother of these
children is a most admirable figure throughout. There is
no single trait or word inconsistent with her simple, rude,
almost savage concentration of yearning, devoted, suffering,
all-braving maternity. How grotesque would she have
seemed, rendered in the microscopic-psychology fashion of
Mr. Browning, analyzing her own self in Mr. Browning's
own peculiar, uncouth, involved, and learned diction ! But
how remote from the poet's own immediate personality is
such a figure, and what great dramatic genius is implied by
the transference of many such to his canvas !
Through the character of Cimourdain there is the best
truthful and sympathetic explanation extant of the terrible
violence of revolutionary idealists like Robespierre ; while
there is interpretation even of wretches like Marat as instru-
ments of providential purpose, as reaction too from the long
grinding tyranny of centuries ; such tyranny being incident-
ally indicated, partly by a minute description of the feudal
fortress, La Tourgue, with its horrors of dungeon and tor-
ture (a description likewise necessary to a due compre-
hension of the siege, which involves the catastrophe of the
whole piece, and occupies all the third volume), partly also
by what the mother, Flechard, relates to the Parisian
soldiers in that opening scene of all. In this arrangement
the reader will note there is consummate art. Cimourdain is
possessed with an idea the republican. He is possessed
with poignant, indignant pity for the sufferings of the
people. All the old Bastilles, all institutions founded upon
prejudice and selfish privilege of caste, which keep the
people in slavery, all these must fall ; and with them the
2i6 ESSAYS ON POETRY AND POETS.
castes themselves, the persons who are their inveterate, im-
placable supporters. Blood must be let in torrents at such
a crisis. The king, priests, and nobles must be slain ; nay,
even the women and children of these castes may not be
spared. All royal and aristocratic Europe must be " terri-
fied." No quarter shall be given. Even the imbruted,
priest-ridden peasant prisoners must be killed. This is a
Brutus. On either side, in great struggles of races and
principles, there have always appeared those terrible fanatics
Lantenacs, Cimourdains, Cromwells, Ziskas, Alvas. But
on the other hand you have leaders like Gauvain, Paoli, or
Garibaldi, equally full of love for the people, but clement,
generous, more far-sighted through love. Now the terrible
Cimourdain loves Gauvain like his own youngest and
dearest child. The spirit of liberty and sympathy with the
oppressed has passed from the tutor into the pupil ; but
here appears again the sad tragic irony of circumstance.
The two inevitably clash upon this irreconcilable rock of
difference in their natures. Gauvain is the frank, gallant,
idealistic, beautiful young soldier ; Cimourdain, the sombre,
thin-lipped priest, hating his old creed and caste, self-
devoted even to martyrdom, doing things for the miserable
all others shrank from doing, yet still full of the fierce,
fanatical, sacerdotal spirit of tyranny, enforcing his new
creed with sanguinary violence. The Committee of Public
Safety in Paris has deputed Cimourdain to watch Gauvain,
as general of the Republican army in La Vendee, because
Gauvain, being a noble, is suspected, and it is thought well
to set an ex-priest to watch an ex-noble. We have a
glimpse of the Convention, and of the principal figures that
swayed the destinies of France at that terrible time.
Robespierre, Danton, and Marat quarrel, and take counsel
together. We see enough of them. But if there is impar-
tiality in the representation of the several characters, there
is not so much of it in the political dissertation of this part.
Some rather wild and extravagant statements are made
VICTOR HUGO. 217
such as Victor Hugo has not unwarrantably been accused
of making when his imagination is much inflamed on a
particular side ; as, for instance, when he talks about Paris
being " centre of the universe." He calls the Convention
" the summit of history, the Avatar of peoples." But this is
to ignore the pre-Christian republics ; Buddhism in India ;
Switzerland ; the Italian free states ; the Netherlands ; the
Reformation in Germany; the revival of learning; especially
our own long, steady campaign in favour of universal
liberty, and progress of free, sound reason. Where tyranny
has for ages eaten into the vitals of a race, when the yoke
is thrown off there will too often appear excess, licence, ex-
travagance, unreason, misnamed reason, social disorganiza-
tion, Utopia, cruelty, the reign of the brute in man, the
denial of the angel in him. There is good and right in
such upheavings ; they are necessary ; they are helpful, as
the cyclone and whirlwind are ; they constitute a stride in
the true line of progress. Good fruit will be borne ; but
there are sure to be superstitious reaction and retrogression,
besides the loss of much that is all-important to human
society. Violence begets violence. Civil stability and
national sobriety are endangered. The calm, reverent, truly
conservative progress of peoples is a higher and surer pro-
gress. Therefore this claim of the great Frenchman for his
great revolution is immoderate.
The grand volume is the last. There is nothing more
magnificent in modern literature. The two children, who
have been taken as hostages by Lantenac, have been placed
in the second story of the castle in an old library. And
LTmanus, the cruel, unscrupulous lieutenant of Lantenac,
has proclaimed to the besiegers from the top of the tower,
that unless the besieged be allowed to leave it safe and
sound, he will fire the castle, and the children shall be
burned. This condition, however, is refused, for Lantenac
must not escape. The progress of the siege is elaborately
described. The hand-to-hand, fierce, uproarious death-
21 8 ESSAYS ON POETRY AND POETS.
combats by torchlight in each successively-defended vaulted
chamber, and on the narrow spiral staircase of the tower,
amid smoke and grime of gunpowder, these have all the
verve and movement of Homer or Walter Scott. We hold
our breaths, as the besiegers gain little by little upon the
desperate defence ; while, as a relief to the storm of rage
and slaughter, the innocent play and prattle of those two
little children in the library are elaborately recorded. It is
a wonderful contrast. And never has the poet written more
exquisitely of children than here. They talk, they laugh,
they eat the simple food provided for them ; they mimic
the awful battle sounds faintly heard through the thick
walls. They even smile at the terrible dawn of hell-fires
that are to consume them ; and then they slumber together
in their cot, their rosy limbs and curly heads illumined by
flame. But Gauvain has sent for a ladder, that every effort
may be made to save them. Something like it is seen
arriving ; but, alas ! no ladder ! it is the guillotine for
Lantenac. The sinister guillotine on the plateau opposite
the castle rock, and the sinister old tower are thus brought
face to face. Feudal privilege, darkness, superstition ;
cruelty, and the savage vengeance of revolution. Sergeant
Radoub appears again. He climbs like a cat by a breach
in the wall from the rez-de-chaussee to the first story.
Here there is a wounded man of the garrison. The en-
counter between these two is most vividly described
Radoub, while fighting, jesting half-savagely in barrack-
room, sans-culotte slang. The grim humour of this to-the-
life relation artistically relieves the horror and gravity of
the event. He finds up there arms laid ready for the
besieged when they shall be driven to this story. Of them
he makes the best use, till the besieged suppose that the
enemy have somehow taken this chamber of the first floor ;
so they abandon it, together with that below, and rush
up to the second story. Here the defenders barricade
themselves, and receive absolution from their priest, thinking
VICTOR HUGO. 219
their last hour arrived. Suddenly a great stone in the wall
turns, and reveals a secret passage. Halmalo, the boat-
man, who alone had known of it, had used the knowledge
to deliver them. He appears, and they are saved. But
one person must remain to keep the foe in check, while the
rest escape. L'Imanus remains. He kills many who try
to force their way up, until through an aperture Radoub
plunges a sword into his stomach, and springs into the
chamber alone, surprised to find it apparently untenanted.
L'Imanus, dying, has crept to the train of combustible
materials his infernal ingenuity has laid, communicating
with that more modern part of the building where the
children are, and set it alight. Radoub in the twilight
does not see any one ; but a shot fired by the prostrate
L'Imanus, grazing him, he says, " Mais si ! il y a quelqu'un !
Qui est ce qui a la bonte" de me faire cette politesse ? "
Now the mother, Michelle Flechard, has been wandering
on for many a league, to find her children at La Tourgue.
The behaviour of the rough strange woman, driven to
desperation among the frightened people of the country,
who hardly dare assist her ; her determined tramp onward,
though she is nearly dying from weakness and fatigue ;
her first sight of the sombre tower reddened with sunset ;
all is inimitably real. She arrives at the summit of a roll-
ing plateau that faces the castle, that faces, indeed, the
library where her children are, though there is a profound,
but very narrow ravine between this plateau and the rock
on which the castle is built. As soon as she arrives there,
the lower story of the castle begins to smoke, and a tongue
of fire rushes out of the window. And by the glare of
this flame she distinguishes in the library (for she can see
into it) her children asleep ! and the flames mounting
toward them. " Elle jeta un cri effrayant. Ce cri de
Michelle Flechard fut un hurlement. Hecube aboya, dit
Homere." Now Lantenac (his companions having dis-
persed by his orders), issuing out of the secret passage, sees
220 ESSAYS ON POETRY AND POETS.
between the trees this conflagration illumining the tower,
and the poor woman, hagard et lamentable, bending over
the ravine. He hears also her cry. " Cette figure, ce n'etait
plus Michelle Flechard ! c'etait Gorgone. Les mise'rables
sont les formidables. La paysanne s'etait transfiguree en
Eume'nide. Elle se dressait la, au bord de ce ravin, devant
cet embrasement, devant ce crime, comme une puissance
sepulcrale ; elle avait le cri de la bete, et le geste de la
de"esse : sa face, dont tombaient des imprecations semblait
un masque de flamboiement. Rien de souverain comme
r<clair de ses yeux noyes de larmes ; son regard foudroyait
1'incendie." Then he tells us what fell from this mother.
And all I can say is that if one would have his mind set
at rest] as to what is the true language of tragedy in
supreme situations, the simple, or the ornate and recondite,
let him read this and learn for here it is. There is, indeed,
one awful short phrase, and one only, in all her long prayer
and cry of agony, that descends to terrible depths, or rises
into sublime heights of imagination : " O ! s'ils devaient
mourir comme cela, je tuerais Dieu ! " One only means
there is of saving them a huge iron door of communication
between the second story of the tower, and the second
story of the modern castle, built upon arches thrown across
the ravine, where the children are. It cannot be stove in.
And one alone has the key of it Lantenac ! Now Lan-
tenac heard and saw the mother's awful despair he
thought of the little children he re-entered the secret
passage, and appeared among the astonished victors in the
tower, who were vainly thundering at the iron door. He
calmly opened it, and passed into the flames, the floor
crumbling to ashes behind him. The children, awake, were
admiring the ruddy glow, but feeling the great heat, were
calling " Maman ! " out of window, seeing her, while she
frantically shrieked their names. Lantenac brought a
ladder (kept in the castle) and reached it out of one of the
windows Raboub and the besiegers mounting to form a
VICTOR HUGO. 221
human chain up the rungs of the ladder. To the first of
them the marquis hands one child ; then he hands another.
Of the youngest, Georgette, two years old only, he inquires
her name. She answers with a lisp and a smile : the fierce
old man kisses her. Then Lantenac slowly and majestically
descends the ladder amid the flames. (Hugo has an eye
always to picturesque, grandiose external effect.) Arrived
at the bottom, Cimourdain arrests him, and confines him
in his own dungeon. But Gauvain meditates that night,
pacing to and fro before the prison. The sense of family
ties comes over him ; he is full of admiration and surprised
delight that, even in Lantenac, the light of love has dawned,
so as to cause him to sacrifice himself for these little ones ;
he cannot bear that this act should bring him to death.
Shall the righteous republic be so implacable ? Long he
debates with himself, feeling also how much there is to be
said in favour of seventy in this particular case ; but finally
he enters the prison, intending to remain there in place of
his relative. The marquis, on first seeing him, speaks at
great length to him with bitter upbraiding frankness about
existing complications and events, both public and private.
You can hear the cold, half-jesting, sarcastic, yet indignantly
eloquent, proud nobleman of the old school in every word.
All is a perfect revelation of the character, and of the
aristocratic idea. Hugo himself, be it remembered, has been
in early life a royalist, and is of noble family. Before
Lantenac half understands what his nephew is about, he
finds himself pushed into the open air, disguised as Gauvain.
Then, when the moment for Lantenac's trial comes on,
Gauvain appears before the tribunal, to be judged in his
place. Cimourdain trembles, and turns pale. He cannot
believe Gauvain's own confession. But Gauvain has come
to see that he was wrong ; he has released a mortal enemy
of his country ; and he asks to expiate his fault, and make
atonement, by himself submitting to the penalty of the
guillotine. Radoub delivers a generous speech in his
222 ESSAYS ON POETRY AND POETS.
favour ; the blunt old sergeant, in his half-humorous, half-
earnest way, declares Lantenac and Gauvain have both
done right, and that Gauvain ought to be promoted to the
highest rank in the republic rather than be executed. His
strange, rude protestations, garnished with extraordinary
oaths, make one smile in the' midst of tears. But Cimour-
dain gives the casting vote of president in favour of death.
Before the execution, he has a last interview with his dear
child and pupil, whom he loves best in the world. But he
has sworn to the Committee of Public Safety that, in such
an event as the present, he would show no mercy. He is
Brutus. Yet the two men converse on great principles by
night in the dungeon Gauvain quite calm, and reconciled
to his fate. What Gauvain enounces for his own noble,
hopeful beliefs, are doubtless those of the poet. The army
that adores him would fain grant him pardon, but Cimour-
dain is inexorable. At the moment when the axe of the
guillotine falls, the report of a pistol is heard ; and Cimour-
dain, who has been watching, cold and rigid as fate or
death, falls dead himself. He has done his duty, but he
cannot survive his darling child. " Et ces deux ames, sceurs
tragiques, s'envolerent ensemble, 1'ombre de Tune melee a
la lumiere de 1'autre."
Since I wrote this, now some years ago, the great poet
of Europe too has entered into what he once called " la
grande lueur."
THE POETRY OF TENNYSON.
IT is perhaps difficult for men of middle age to estimate
Tennyson aright. For we who love poetry were brought
up, as it were, at his feet, and he cast the magic of his
fascination over our youth. We have gone away, we have
travelled in other lands> absorbed in other preoccupations,
often revolving problems different from those concerning
which we took counsel with him ; and we hear new voices,
claiming authority, who aver that our old master has been
superseded, that he has no message for a new generation,
that his voice is no longer a talisman of power. Then we
return to the country of our early love, and what shall our
report be ? Each one must answer for himself ; but my
report will be entirely loyal to those early and dear im-
pressions. I am of those who believe that Tennyson has
still a message for the world. Men become impatient with
hearing Aristides so often called just, but is that the fault
of Aristides ? They are impatient also with a reputation,
which necessarily is what all great reputations must so
largely be the empty echo of living voices from blank
walls. " Now again " not the people, but certain critics
u call it but a weed." Yet how strange these fashions in
poetry are ! I well remember Lord Broughton, Byron's
friend, expressing to me, when I was a boy, his astonish-
ment that the bust of Tennyson by Woolner should have
been thought worthy of a place near that of Lord Byron
in Trinity College, Cambridge. " Lord Byron was a great
224 ESSAYS ON POETRY AND POETS.
poet ; but Mr. Tennyson, though he had written pretty
verses," and so on. For one thing, the men of that gene-
ration deemed Tennyson terribly obscure. " In Memoriam,"
it was held, nobody could possibly understand. The poet,
being original, had to make his own public. Men nurtured
on Scott and Byron could not comprehend him. Now we
hear no more of his obscurity. Moreover, he spoke as the
mouthpiece of his own time. Doubts, aspirations, visions
unfamiliar to the aging, breathed melodiously through him.
Again, how contemptuously do Broad-church psychologists
like George Macdonald, and writers for the Spectator, as
well as literary persons belonging to what I may term the
finikin school, on the other hand, now talk of our equally
great poet Byron. How detestable must the North be,
if the South be so admirable ! But while Tennyson spoke
to me in youth, Byron spoke to me in boyhood, and I still
love both.
Whatever may have to be discounted from the popu-
larity of Tennyson on account of fashion and a well-known
name, or on account of his harmony with the (more or less
provincial) ideas of the large majority of Englishmen, his
popularity is a fact of real benefit to the public, and highly
creditable to them at the same time. The establishment
of his name in popular favour is but very partially ac-
counted for by the circumstance that, when he won his
spurs, he was among younger singers the only serious
champion in the field, since, if I mistake not, he was at
one time a less " popular " poet than Mr. Robert Mont-
gomery. Vox populi is not always vox Dei, but it may be
so accidentally, and then the people reap benefit from their
happy blunder. The great poet who won the laurel before
Tennyson has never been " popular " at all, and Tennyson
is the only true English poet who has pleased the " public "
since Byron, Walter Scott, Tom Moore, and Mrs. Hemans.
But he had to conquer their suffrages, for his utterance,
whatever he may have owed to Keats, was original, and
THE POETRY OF TENNYSON. 225
his substance the outcome of an opulent and profound
personality. These were serious obstacles to success, for
he neither went " deep " into " the general heart " like Burns,
nor appealed to superficial sentiments in easy language like
Scott, Moore, Byron, and since, Longfellow. In his earliest
volume indeed there was a preponderance of manner over
matter ; it was characterized by a certain dainty prettiness
of style, that scarcely gave promise of the high spiritual
vision and rich complexity of human insight to which he
has since attained, though it did manifest a delicate feeling
for Nature in association with human moods, an extra-
ordinarily subtle sensibility of all senses, and a luscious
pictorial power. Not Endymion had been more luxuriant
All was steeped in golden languors. There were faults
in plenty, and of course the critics, faithful to the instincts
of their kind, were jubilant to nose them. To adapt
Coleridge's funny verses, not " the Church of St. Geryon,"
nor the legendary Rhine, but the " stinks and stenches " of
Kolntown do such offal-feeders love to enumerate, and
distinguish. But the poet in his verses on " Musty Chris-
topher " gave one of these people a Roland for his Oliver.
Stuart Mill, as Mr. Mathews, in his lately published and
very instructive lecture on Tennyson, points out, was the
one critic in a million who remembered Pope's precept
" Be thou the first true merit to befriend,
His praise is lost who waits till all commend."
Yet it is only natural that the mediocrities, who for a
moment keep the door of Fame, should scrutinize with
somewhat jaundiced eye the credentials of new aspirants,
since every entry adds fresh bitterness to their own ex-
clusion.
But really it is well for us, the poet's elect lovers, to
remember that he once had faults, however few he may
now retain ; for the perverse generation who dance not
when the poet pipes to them, nor mourn when he weeps,
Q
22 6 ESSAYS ON POETRY AND POETS.
have turned upon Tennyson with the cry that he " is all
fault who has no fault at all "they would have us regard
him as a kind of Andrea del Sarto, a " blameless " artistic
"monster," a poet of unimpeachable technical skill, but
keeping a certain dead level of moderate merit. It is as
well to be reminded that this at all events is false. The
dawn of his young art was beautiful ; but the artist had
all the generous faults of youthful genius excess, vision
confused with gorgeous colour and predominant sense, too
palpable artifice of diction, indistinctness of articulation
in the outline, intricately-woven cross-lights flooding the
canvas, defect of living interest ; while Coleridge said that
he began to write poetry without an ear for metre. Neither
Adeline, Madeline, nor Eleanore are living portraits, though
Eleanore is gorgeously painted. " The Ode to Memory "
has isolated images of rare beauty, but it is kaleidoscopic
in effect ; the fancy is playing with loose foam-wreaths,
rather than the imagination " taking things by the heart."
But our great poet has gone beyond these. He has himself
rejected twenty-six out of the fifty-eight poems published
in his first volume ; while some of those even in the second
have been altogether rewritten. Such defects are eminently
present in the lately republished poem written in youth,
" The Lover's Tale," though this too has been altered. As
a storehouse of fine imagery, metaphor, and deftly moulded
phrase, of blank verse also whose sonorous rhythm must
surely be a fabric of adult architecture, the piece can hardly
be surpassed ; but the tale as tale lingers and lapses, over-
weighted with the too gorgeous trappings under which it
so laboriously moves. And such expression as the follow-
ing, though not un-Shakespearian, is hardly quarried from
the soundest material in Shakespeare for, after all, Shake-
speare was a euphuist now and then
" Why fed we from one fountain? drew one sun ?
Why were our mothers branches of one stem,
If that same nearness
THE POETRY OF TENNYSON. 22/
Were father to this distance, and that one
Vaunt courier to this double, if affection
Living slew love, and sympathy hewed out
The bosom-sepulchre of sympathy ? "
Yet " Mariana " had the virtue, which the poet has
displayed so pre-eminently since, of concentration. Every
subtle touch enhances the effect he intends to produce, that
of the desolation of the deserted woman, whose hope is
nearly extinguished ; Nature hammering a fresh nail into
her coffin with every innocent aspect or movement. Beau-
tiful too, are " Love and Death " and " The Poet's Mind ; "
while in "The Poet" we have the oft-quoted line: "Dowered
with the hate of hate, the scorn of scorn, the love of love."
Mr. G. Brimley was the first, I believe, to point out the
distinctive peculiarity of Lord Tennyson's treatment of
landscape. It is treated by him dramatically ; that is to
say, the details of it are selected so as to be interpretative
of the particular mood or emotion he wishes to represent.
Thus, in the two Marianas, they are painted with the
minute distinctness appropriate to the morbid and sicken-
ing observation of the lonely woman, whose attention is
distracted by no cares, pleasures, or satisfied affections.
That is a pregnant remark, a key to unlock a good deal of
Tennyson's work with. Byron and Shelley, though they
are carried out of themselves in contemplating Nature, do
not, I think, often take her as interpreter of moods alien
to their own. In Wordsworth's " Excursion," it is true,
Margaret's lonely grief is thus delineated through the
neglect of her garden and the surroundings of her cottage ;
yet this is not so characteristic a note of his Nature-poetry.
In the " Miller's Daughter " and the " Gardener's Daughter "
the lovers would be little indeed without the associated
scene so germane to the incidents narrated, both as con-
genial setting of the picture for a spectator, and as virtually
fused with the emotion of the lovers ; while never was
more lovely landscape-painting of the gentle order than in
228 ESSAYS ON POETRY AND POETS.
the " Gardener's Daughter." Lessing, who says that poetry
ought never to be pictorial, would, I suppose, much object
to Tennyson's ; but to me, I confess, this mellow, lucid,
luminous word-painting of his is entirely delightful. It
refutes the criticism that words cannot convey a picture by
perfectly conveying it. Solvitur ambulando ; the Gardener's
Daughter standing by her rose-bush, " a sight to make an
old man young," remaining in our vision to confound all
crabbed pedants with pet theories.
In his second volume, indeed, the poet's art was well
mastered, for here we find " The Lotos-eaters," " CEnone,"
"The Palace of Art," "A Dream of Fair Women," the
tender " May-Queen," and the " Lady of Shalott." Perhaps
the first four of these are among the very finest works of
Tennyson. In the mouth of the love-lorn nymph, CEnone,
he places the complaint concerning Paris into which there
enters so much delightful picture of the scenery around
Mount Ida, and of those fair immortals who came to be
judged by the beardless apple-arbiter. How deliciously
flows the verse ! though probably it flows still more
entrancingly in "The Lotos-eaters," wandering there like
clouds of fragrant incense, or some slow heavy honey, or
a rare amber unguent poured out. How wonderfully har-
monious with the dream-mood of the dreamers are phrase,
image, and measure ! But we need not quote the lovely
choric song wherein occur the lines
" Music that gentlier on the spirit lies
Than tired eyelids upon tired eyes."
so entirely restful and happy in their simplicity. If Art
would always blossom so, she might be forgiven if she
blossomed only for her own sake ; yet this controversy
regarding A rt for A rt need hardly have arisen, since Art
may certainly bloom for her own sake, if only she consent
to assimilate in her blooming, and so exhale for her votaries,
in due proportion, all elements essential to Nature, and
Humanity ; for in the highest artist all faculties are trans-
THE POETRY OF TENNYSON. 229
figured into one supreme organ ; while among forms her
form is the most consummate, among fruits her fruit offers
the most satisfying refreshment. What a delicately true
picture have we here
" And like a downward smoke, the slender stream
Along the cliff to fall, and pause, and fall did seem."
where we feel also the poet's remarkable faculty of making
word and rhythm an echo and auxiliary of the sense. Not
only have we the three caesuras respectively after " fall,"
and " pause " and " fall," but the length, and soft amplitude
of the vowel sounds, with liquid consonant, said in the
realization of the picture, reminding of Milton's beautiful
"From morn to noon he fell, from noon to dewy eve,
a summer's day." The same faculty is notable in the
rippling lilt of the charming little ft Brook " song, and
indeed everywhere. In the " Dream of Fair Women " we
have a series of cabinet portraits, presenting a situation of
human interest with a few animating touches, but still
chiefly through suggestive surroundings. There occurs the
magnificent phrase of Cleopatra : " We drank the Lybian
sun to sleep, and lit Lamps which outburned Canopus."
The force of expression could be carried no further than
throughout this poem, and by " expression " of course I do
not mean pretty words, or power-words for their own sweet
sake, for these, expressing nothing, whatever else they may
be, are not " expression ; " but I mean the forcible or
felicitous presentment of thought, image, feeling, or inci-
dent, through pregnant and beautiful language in harmony
with them ; though the subtle and indirect suggestion of
language is unquestionably an element to be taken into
account by poetry. The " Palace of Art " is perhaps equal
to the former poem for lucid splendour of description,
in this instance pointing a moral, allegorizing a truth.
Scornful pride, intellectual arrogance, selfish absorption in
aesthetic enjoyment, is imaged forth in this vision of the
230
ESSAYS ON POETRY AND POETS.
queen's world-reflecting palace, and its various treasures
the end being a sense of unendurable isolation, engendering
madness, but at last repentance, and reconcilement with
the scouted commonalty of mankind.
The dominant note of Tennyson's poetry is assuredly
the delineation of human moods modulated by Nature,
and through a system of Nature-symbolism. Thus, in
" Elaine," when Lancelot has sent a courtier to the queen,
asking her to grant him audience, that he may present
the diamonds won for her in tourney, she receives the
messenger with unmoved dignity ; but he, bending low
and reverently before her, saw " with a sidelong eye "
" The shadow of some piece of pointed lace
In the queen's shadow vibrate on the walls,
And parted, laughing in his courtly heart."
The " Morte d'Arthur " affords a striking instance of this
peculiarly Tennysonian method. That is another of the
very finest pieces. Such poetry may suggest labour, but
not more than does the poetry of Virgil or Milton. Every
word is the right word, and each in the right place.
Sir H. Taylor, indeed, warns poets against " wanting to
make every word beautiful." And yet here it must be
owned that the result of such an effort is successful, so
delicate has become the artistic tact of this poet in his
maturity.* For, good expression being the happy adapta-
tion of language to meaning, it follows that sometimes
good expression will be perfectly simple, even ordinary
in character, and sometimes it will be ornate, elaborate,
dignified. He who can thus vary his language is the best
verbal artist, and Tennyson can thus vary it. In this
* But the loveliest lyrics of Tennyson do not suggest labour. I do not
say that, like Beethoven's music, or Heine's songs, they may not be the
result of it. But they, like all supreme artistic work, " conceal," not obtrude
Art ; if they are not spontaneous, they produce the effect of spontaneity, not
artifice. They impress the reader also with the power, for which no technical
skill can be a substitute, of sincere feeling, and profound realization of their
subject-matter.
THE POETRY OF TENNYSON. 231
poem, the " Morte d'Arthur," too, we have " deep-chested
music." Except in some of Wordsworth and Shelley, or
in the magnificent " Hyperion " of Keats, we have had no
such stately, sonorous organ-music in English verse since
Milton as in this poem, or in " Tithonus," " Ulysses,"
" Lucretius," and " Guinevere." From the majestic over-
ture
" So all day long the noise of battle rolled
Among the mountains by the winter sea,"
onward to the end, the same high elevation is main-
tained.
But this very picturesqueness of treatment has been
urged against Tennyson as a fault in his narrative pieces
generally, from its alleged over-luxuriance, and tendency
to absorb, rather than enhance, the higher human interest
of character and action. However this be (and I think it
is an objection that does apply, for instance, to "The
Princess "), here in this poem picturesqueness must be
counted as a merit, because congenial to the semi-mythical,
ideal, and parabolic nature of Arthurian legend, full of
portent and supernatural suggestion. Such Ossianic hero-
forms are nearly as much akin to the elements as to man.
And the same answer holds largely in the case of the
other Arthurian Idylls. It has been noted how well-
chosen is the epithet " water " applied to a lake in the lines,
" On one side lay the ocean, and on one Lay a great water,
and the moon was full." Why is this so happy ? For a?
a rule the concrete rather than the abstract is poeticaj,
because the former brings with it an image, and the former
involves no vision. But now in the night all Sir Bedevere
could observe, or care to observe, was that there was " some
great water." We do not he did not want to know
exactly what it was. Other thoughts, other cares, pre-
occupy him and us. Again, of dying Arthur, we are told
that " all his greaves and cuisses were dashed with drops
of onset." "Onset" is a very generic term, poetic because
232 ESSAYS ON POETRY AND POETS.
removed from all vulgar associations of common parlance,
and vaguely suggestive not only of war's pomp and cir-
cumstance, but of high deeds also, and heroic hearts, since
onset belongs to mettle and daring ; the word for vast and
shadowy connotation is akin to Milton's grand abstraction,
"Far off His coming shone," or Shelley's, "Where the
Earthquake Demon taught her young Ruin''
It has been noted also how cunningly Tennyson can
gild and furbish up the most commonplace detail as when
he calls Arthur's moustache " the knightly growth that
fringed his lips," or condescends to glorify a pigeon-pie,
or paints the clown's astonishment by this detail, " the
brawny spearman let his cheek Bulge with the unswallowed
piece, and turning stared ; " or thus characterizes a pun,
" and took the word, and play'd upon it, and made it of
two colours." This kind of ingenuity, indeed, belongs
rather to talent than to genius ; it is exercised in cold
blood ; but talent may be a valuable auxiliary of genius,
perfecting skill in the technical departments of art. Yet
such a gift is not without danger to the possessor. It may
tempt him to make his work too much like a delicate
mosaic of costly stone, too hard and unblended, from
excessive elaboration of detail. One may even prefer to
art thus highly wrought a more glowing and careless
strain, that lifts us off our feet, and carries us away as on
a more rapid, if more turbid torrent of inspiration, such
as we find in Byron, Shelley, or Victor Hugo. Here you
are compelled to pause at every step, and admire the
design of the costly tesselated pavement under your feet.
Perhaps there is a jewelled glitter, a Pre-Raphaelite or
Japanese minuteness of finish here and there in Tennyson,
that takes away from the feeling of aerial perspective and
remote distance, leaving little to the imagination ; not
suggesting and whetting the appetite, but rather satiating
it : his loving observation of minute particulars is so
faithful, his knowledge of what others, even men of science,
THE POETRY OF TENNYSON. 233
have observed so accurate, his fancy so nimble in the
detection of similitudes. But every master has his own
manner, and his reverent disciples would be sorry if he
could be without it. We love the little idiosyncrasies of
our friends.
I have said the objection in question does seem to lie
against "The Princess." It contains some of the most
beautiful poetic pearls the poet has ever dropped ; but the
manner appears rather disproportionate to the matter, at
least to the subject as he has chosen to regard it. For it
is regarded by him only semi-seriously ; so lightly and
sportively is the whole topic viewed at the outset, that the
effect is almost that of burlesque ; yet there is a very serious
conclusion, and a very weighty moral is drawn from the
story, the workmanship being laboured to a degree, and
almost encumbered with ornamentation. But the poet
himself admits the ingrained incongruity of the poem.
The fine comparison of the Princess Ida in the battle to a
beacon glaring ruin over raging seas, for instance, seems
too grand for the occasion. How differently, and in what
burning earnest has a great poet-woman, Mrs. Browning,
treated this grave modern question of the civil and political
position of women in " Aurora Leigh ! " Tennyson's is
essentially a man's view, and the frequent talk about
women's beauty must be very aggravating to the " Blues."
It is this poem especially that gives people with a limited
knowledge of Tennyson the idea of a " pretty " poet ; the
prettiness, though very genuine, seems to play too patron-
izingly with a momentous theme. The Princess herself, and
the other figures are indeed dramatically realized, but the
splendour of invention, and the dainty detail, rather dazzle
the eye away from their humanity. Here, however, are
some of the loveliest songs that this poet, one of our
supreme lyrists, ever sung : " Tears, idle tears ! " " The
splendour falls," " Sweet and low," " Home they brought,"
" Ask me no more," and the exquisite melody, " For Love
234 ESSAYS ON POETRY AND POETS.
is of the valley." Moreover, the grand lines toward the
close are full of wisdom
" For woman is not undeveloped man,
But diverse : could we make her as the man
Sweet love were slain," etc.
I feel myself a somewhat similar incongruity in the
poet's treatment of his more homely, modern, half-humorous
themes, such as the introduction to the " Morte d'Arthur,"
and " Will Waterproof ; " not at all in the humorous poems,
like the " Northern Farmer," which are all of a piece, and
perfect in their own vein. In this introduction we have
" The host and I sat round the wassail bowl, then half-way
ebb'd ; " but this metaphorical style is not (fortunately)
sustained, and so, as good luck would have it, a metaphor
not being ready to hand, we have the honester and homelier
line, " Till I tired out with cutting eights that day upon the
pond ; " yet this homespun hardly agrees with the above
stage-king costume. And so again I often venture to
wish that the Poet-Laureate would not say " flowed " when
he only means " said." Still, this may be hypercriticism.
For I did not personally agree with the critic who objected
to Enoch Arden's fish-basket being called " ocean-smelling
osier." There is no doubt, however, that " Stokes, and
Nokes, and Yokes " have exaggerated the poet's manner,
till the " murex fished up" by Keats and Tennyson has
become one universal flare of purple. Beautiful as some
of Mr. Rossetti's work is, his expression in the sonnets surely
became obscure from over-involution, and excessivefariture
of diction. But then Rossetti's style is no doubt formed
considerably upon that of the Italian poets. One is glad,
however, that, this time, at all events, the right man has
" got the porridge."
In connection with "Morte d'Arthur," I may draw
attention again to Lord Tennyson's singular skill in pro-
ducing a rhythmical response to the sense :
THE POETRY OF TENNYSON. 235
' c The great brand
Made lightnings in the splendour of the moon,
And flashing round and round, and whirled in an arch."
Here the anapest instead of the iambic in the last place
happily imitates the sword Excalibur's own gyration in the
air. Then what admirable wisdom does the legend, opening
out into parable, disclose toward the end ! When Sir
Bedevere laments the passing away of the Round Table,
and Arthur's noble peerage, gone down in doubt, distrust,
treachery, and blood, after that last great battle in the
West, when, amid the death-white mist, " confusion fell
even upon Arthur," and " friend slew friend, not knowing
whom he slew," how grandly comes the answer of Arthur
from the mystic barge, that bears him from the visible
world to " some far island valley of Avilion," " The old
order changeth, yielding place to new, And God fulfils
Himself in many ways, Lest one good custom should cor-
rupt the world ! " The new commencement of this poem,
called in the idyls " The Passing of Arthur," is well worthy
of the conclusion. How weirdly expressive is that last
battle in the mist of those hours of spiritual perplexity,
which overcloud even strongest natures and firmest faith,
overshadowing whole communities, when we know not
friend from foe, the holiest hope seems doomed to disap-
pointment, all the great aim and work of life have failed ;
even loyalty to the highest is no more ; the fair polity built
laboriously by some god-like spirit dissolves, and " all his
realm reels back into the beast ; " while men " falling down
in death " look up to heaven only to find cloud, and the
great-toned ocean, as it were Destiny without love and
without mind, with voice of days of old and days to be,
shakes the world, wastes the narrow kingdom, yea, beats
upon the faces of our dead ! The world-sorrow pierces
here through the strain of a poet usually calm and con-
tented. Yet " Arthur shall come again, aye, twice as fair ; "
for the spirit of man is young immortally.
236 ESSAYS ON POETRY AND POETS.
Who, moreover, has moulded for us phrases of more
transcendent dignity, of more felicitous grace and import,
phrases, epithets, and lines that have already become
memorable household words ? More magnificent expres-
sion I cannot conceive than that of such poems as " Lucre-
tius," " Tithonus," " Ulysses." These all for versification,
language, luminous picture, harmony of structure have
never been surpassed. What pregnant brevity, weight,
and majesty of expression in the lines where Lucretius
characterizes the death of his namesake, Lucretia, ending
" and from it sprang the commonwealth, which breaks, as
I am breaking now ! " Here is masterly power in poetically
embodying a materialistic philosophy, congenial to modern
science, yet in absolute dramatic keeping with the actual
thought of the Roman poet, and at the same time, strong
grasp of the terrible conflict of passion with reason, two
natures in one, significant for all epochs ! In " Tithonus "
and " Ulysses " we find embodiments in high-born verse
and illustrious word of ideal moods, adventurous peril-
affronting Enterprise contemptuously tolerant of tame
household virtues in " Ulysses," and the bane of a burden-
some immortality, become incapable even of love, in
" Tithonus." Any personification more exquisite than that
of Aurora in the latter were inconceivable.
M. Taine, in his " Litterature Anglaise," represents
Tennyson as an idyllic poet (a charming one), comfortably
settled among his rhododendrons on an English lawn, and
viewing the world through the somewhat insular medium
of a prosperous, domestic, and virtuous member of the
English comfortable classes, as also of a man of letters who
has fully succeeded. Again, either M. Taine, M. Scherer,
or some other writer in the " Revue des Deux Mondes,"
pictures him, like his own Lady of Shalott, viewing life
not as it really is, but reflected in the magic mirror of his
own recluse fantasy. Now, whatever measure of truth
there may formerly have been in such conceptions, they
THE POETRY OF TENNYSON. 237
have assuredly now proved quite one-sided and inadequate.
We have only to remember " Maud," the stormier poems
of the " Idyls," " Lucretius," " Rizpah," the " Vision of
Sin." The recent poem " Rizpah " perhaps marks the high-
water mark of the Laureate's genius, and proves hence-
forward beyond all dispute his wide range, his command
over the deeper-toned and stormier themes of human music,
as well as over the gentler and more serene. It proves also
that the venerable master's hand has not lost its cunning,
rather that he has been even growing until now, having
become more profoundly sympathetic with the world of
action, and the common growth of human sorrows.
" Rizpah " is certainly one of the strongest, most intensely
felt, and graphically realized dramatic poems in the lan-
guage ; its pathos is almost overwhelming. There is nothing
more tragic in " CEdipus," " Antigone," or " Lear." And
what a strong Saxon homespun language has the veteran
poet found for these terrible lamentations of half-demented
agony, " My Baby ! the bones that had sucked me, the
bones that had laughed and had cried, Theirs ! O no ! They
are mine, not theirs they had moved in my side." Then
the heart-gripping phrase breaking forth ever and anon in
some imaginative metaphorical utterance of wild emotion,
to which the sons and daughters of the people are often
moved, eloquent beyond all eloquence, white-hot from the
heart ! " Dust to dust low down ! let us hide ! but they
set him so high, That all the ships of the world could stare
at him passing by." In this last book of ballads the style
bears the same relation to the earlier and daintier that the
style of " Samson Agonistes " bears to that of " Comus."
" The Revenge " is equally masculine, simple, and sinewy
in appropriate strength of expression, a most spirited
rendering of a heroic naval action worthy of a place, as
is also the grand ode on the death of Wellington, beside
the war odes of Campbell, the " Agincourt " of Drayton,
and the " Rule Britannia " of Thomson. The irregular
238 ESSAYS ON POETRY AND POETS.
metre of the " Ballad of the Fleet " is most remarkable as
a vehicle of the sense, resonant with din of battle, full-
voiced with rising and bursting storm toward the close, like
the equally spirited concluding scenes of " Harold," that
depict the battle of Senlac. The dramatic characterizations
in " Harold," " Queen Mary," and " Becket," are excellent
Mary, Harold, the Conqueror, the Confessor, Pole, Edith,
Stigand, and other subordinate sketches, being striking and
successful portraits ; while " Harold " is full also of incident
and action a really memorable modern play ; and there
are scenes of great power in " Becket ; " but the main
motive of " Queen Mary " fails in tragic dignity and in-
terest, though there is about it a certain grim subdued
pathos, as of still life, and there are some notable scenes.
Tennyson is admirably dramatic in the portrayal of indi-
vidual moods, of men or women in certain given situations.
His plays are fine, and of real historic interest, but not
nearly so remarkable as the dramatic poems I have named,
as the earlier "St. Simeon Stylites," "Ulysses," "Tithonus,"
or as the " Northern Farmers," " Cobblers," and " Village
Wife," among his later works. These last are perfectly
marvellous in their fidelity and humorous photographic
realism. That the poet of " CEnone," " The Lotus-eaters,"
and the Arthur cycle should have done these also is won-
derful. The humour of them is delightful, and the rough
homely diction perfect. One wishes indeed that the
"dramatic fragments" collected by Lamb, like gold-dust
out of the rather dreary sand-expanse of Elizabethan play-
wrights, were so little fragmentary as these. Tennyson's
short dramatic poems are quintessential ; in a brief glimpse
he contrives to reveal the whole man or woman. You
would know the old " Northern Farmer," with his reproach
to " God Amoighty " for not " letting him aloan," and the
odious farmer of the new style, with his " Proputty ! Pro-
putty ! " wherever you met them. But " Dora," the
" Grandmother," " Lady Clare," " Edward Gray," " Lord of
THE POETRY OF TENNYSON. 239
Burleigh," had long since proved that Tennyson had more
than one style at command ; that he was master not only
of a flamboyant, a Corinthian, but also of a sweet, simple,
limpid English, worthy of Goldsmith or Cowper at their
best.
Reverting, however, to the question of Tennyson's ability
to fathom the darker recesses of our nature, what shall be
said of the " Vision of Sin ? " For myself I can only avow
that, whenever I read it, I feel as if some horrible grey
fungus of the grave were growing over my heart, and over
all the world around me. As for passion, I know few more
profoundly passionate poems than " Love and Duty." It
paints with glowing concentrated power the conflict of duty
with yearning passionate love, stronger than death. The
" Sisters," and " Fatima," too, are fiercely passionate, as also
is " Maud." I should be surprised to hear that a lover
could read " Maud," and not feel the spring and mid-noon
of passionate affection in it to the very core of him, so pro-
foundly felt and gloriously expressed are they by the poet
Much of its power, again, is derived from that peculiarly
Tennysonian ability to make Nature herself reflect, redouble,
and interpret the human feeling. That is the power also
of such supreme lyrics as " Break, break ! " and " In the
Valley of Cauterets " : such chaste and consummate ren-
dering of a noble woman's self-sacrifice as " Godiva,"
wherein " shameless gargoyles " stare, but " the still air
scarcely breathes for fear ; " and likewise of " Come into
the garden, Maud," an invocation that palpitates with rapture
of young love, in which the sweet choir of flowers bear their
part, and sing antiphony. The same feeling pervades the
delicious passage commencing, " Is that enchanted moon ? "
and " Go not, happy day." All this may be what Mr.
Ruskin condemns as " pathetic fallacy," but it is inevitable
and right. For " in our life doth Nature live, ours is her
wedding garment, ours her shroud." The same Divine
Spirit pervades man and Nature ; she, like ourselves, has
240 ESSAYS ON POETRY AND POETS.
her transient moods, as well as her tranquil, immovable
deeps. In her, too, is a passing as well as an eternal, while
we apprehend either according to our own capacity, together
with the emotional bias that dominates us at the moment.
The vital and permanent in us holds the vital and permanent
in her, while the temporary in us mirrors the transitory in
her. I cannot think, indeed, that the more troubled and
jarring moods of disharmony and fury are touched with quite
the same degree of mastery in " Maud " as are the sunnier
and happier. Tennyson hitherto had basked by preference
in the brighter regions of his art, and the turbid Byronic
vein appeared rather unexpectedly in him. The tame,
sleek, daintily feeding gourmets of criticism yelped, indeed,
their displeasure at these " hysterics," as they termed the
" Sturm und Drang " elements that appeared in " Maud,"
especially since the poet dared appropriately to body these
forth in somewhat harsh, abrupt language, and irregular
metres. Such elements, in truth, hardly seemed so con-
genial to him as to Byron or Hugo. Yet they were welcome,
as proving that our chief poet was not altogether irresponsive
to the terrible social problems around him, to the corrup-
tions, and ever-festering vices of the body politic, to the
doubt, denial, and grim symptoms of upheaval at his very
doors. For on the whole some of us had felt that the Poet-
Laureate was almost too well contented with the general
framework of things, with the prescriptive rights of long-
unchallenged rule, and hoar comfortable custom, especially
in England, as though these were in very deed divine, and
no subterranean thunder were ever heard, even in this
isle, thre^tc::,/iig Church and State, and the very
fabric of society. But the temper of his class and time
spoke through him. Did not all men rejoice greatly when
Prince Albert opened the Exhibition of 185 1 ; when Cobden
and the Manchester school won the battle of free-trade ;
when steam-engines and the electric telegraph were invented ;
when Wordsworth's " glorious time " came, and the Revised
THE POETRY OF TENNYSON. 24!
Code passed into law ; when science first told her enchant-
ing fairy tales ? Yet the Millennium tarries, and there is
an exceeding " bitter cry."
But in " Maud," as, indeed, before in that fine sonorous
chant, " Locksley Hall," and later in " Aylmer's Field," the
poet's emphasis of appreciation is certainly reserved for the
heroes, men who have inherited a strain of gloom, or ances-
tral disharmony moral and physical, within whom the
morbific social humours break forth inevitably into plague-
spots ; the injustice and irony of circumstance lash them
into revolt, wrath, and madness. Mr. R. H. Hutton remarks
that " ' Maud ' was written to reprobate hysterics." But I
fear nay, I hope and believe that we cannot credit the
poet with any such virtuous or didactic intention in the
present instance, though of course the pregnant lines begin-
ning " Of old sat Freedom on the heights," the royal verses,
the recent play so forcibly objected to by Lord Queens-
berry, together with various allusions to the " red fool-fury
of the Seine," and " blind hysterics of the Celt," do indicate
a very Conservative and law-abiding attitude. But other
lines prove that after all what he mostly deprecates is " the
falsehood of extremes," the blind and hasty plunge into
measures of mere destruction ; for he praises the statesmen
who " take occasion by the hand," and make " the bounds
of freedom wider yet," and even gracefully anticipates " the
golden year."
The same principle on which I have throughout insisted
as the key to most of Tennyson's best poetry is the key
also to the moving tale " Enoch Arden," where the tropical
island around the solitary shipwrecked mariner is gor-
geously depicted, the picture being as full-Venetian, and
resplendent in colour, as those of the " Day-Dream " and
" Arabian Nights." But the conclusion of the tale is pro-
foundly moving and pathetic, and relates a noble act of
self-renouncement. Parts of " Aylmer's Field," too, are
powerful.
242
ESSAYS ON POETRY AND POETS.
And now we come to the "Idyls," around which no
little critical controversy has raged. It has been charged
against them that they are more picturesque, scenic, and
daintily wrought than human in their interest. But though
assuredly the poet's love for the picturesque is in this noble
epic for epic the Idyls in their completed state may
be accounted amply indulged, I think it is seldom to
the detriment of the human interest, and the remark I
made about one of them, the " Morte d'Arthur," really
applies to all. The Arthur cycle is not historical, as
" Harold " or " Queen Mary " is, where the style is often
simple almost to baldness ; the whole of it belongs to the
reign of myth, legend, fairy story, and parable. Ornament,
image, and picture are as much appropriate here as in
Spenser's " Fairy Queen," of which, indeed, Tennyson's
poem often reminds me. But " the light that never was
on sea or land, the consecration and the poet's dream," are
a new revelation, made peculiarly in modern poetry of true
spiritual insight. And this not only throws fresh illumi-
nating light into Nature, but deepens also and enlarges our
comprehension of man. If Nature be known for a symbol
and embodiment of the soul's life, by means of their analo-
gies in Nature, the human heart and mind may be more
profoundly understood ; while human emotions win a
double dearness, or an added sorrow, from their fellowship
and association with outward scenes. Nature can only be
fathomed through her consanguinity with our own desires,
aspirations, and fears, while these again become defined
and articulate by means of her related appearances. A
poet, then, who is sensitive to such analogies confers a two-
fold benefit upon us.
I cannot at all assent to the criticism passed upon
the Idyls by Mr. John Morley, who has indeed, as it
appears to me, somewhat imperilled his critical reputation
by the observation that they are " such little pictures as
might adorn a lady's school." When we think of
THE POETRY OF TENNYSON. 243
"Guinevere," "Vivien," the " Holy Grail," the "Passing of
Arthur," this dictum seems to lack point and penetration.
Indeed, had it proceeded only from some rhyming criti-
caster, alternating with the feeble puncture of his sting the
worrying iteration of his own doleful drone, it might have
been passed over as simply an impertinence.* But while
the poem is in part purely a fairy romance tinctured with
humanity, Tennyson has certainly intended to treat the
subject in part also as a grave spiritual parable. Arthur,
Guinevere, Lancelot, Elaine, Galahad, Vivien, are types,
gracious or hateful. My own feeling, therefore, would
rather be that there is too much human nature in the
Idyls, than that there is too little ; or at any rate that,
while Arthur remains a mighty Shadow, whose coming
and going are attended with supernatural portents, a
worthy symbol of the Spirit of divine humanity, Vivien,
for instance, is a too real and unlovely harlot, too gross and
veritably breathing, to be in proportionate harmony with
the general design. Lancelot and Guinevere, again, being
far fuller of life and colour than Arthur, the situation be-
tween these three, as invented, or at least as recast from
the old legends in his own fashion by the poet, does not
seem artistically felicitous, if regarded as a representation
of an actual occurrence in human life. But so vivid and
human are many of the stories that we can hardly fail so to
regard them. And if the common facts of life are made the
vehicle of a parable, they must not be distorted. It is
chiefly, I think, because Arthur and Merlin are only seen,
as it were, through the luminous haze appropriate to
romance and myth, that the main motive of the epic, the
loves of Lancelot and Guinevere, appears scarcely strong
enough to bear the weight of momentous consequence im-
posed on it, which is no less than the retributive ruin of
* Mr. Alfred Austin, himself a true poet and critic, has long ago repented
of his juvenile escapade in criticism, and made ample amends to the Poet-
Laureate in a very able article published not long since in Macmillarfs Magazine.
244 ESSAYS ON POETRY AND POETS.
Arthur's commonwealth. Now, if Art elects to appeal to
ethical instinct, as great, human, undegraded Art con-
tinually must, she is even more bound, in pursuance of her
own proper end, to satisfy the demand for moral beauty,
than to gratify the taste for beauty intellectual or aesthetic.
And of course, while you might flatter a poetaster, you
would only insult a poet by refusing to consider what he
says, and simply professing a concern for how he says it.
Therefore if the poet choose to lay all the blame of the
dissolution and failure of Arthur's polity upon the illicit
loves of Lancelot and Guinevere, it seems to me that he
committed a serious error in his invention of the early
circumstances of their meeting ; nothing of the kind being
discoverable either in Malory, or the old chronicle of
Merlin. Great stress, no doubt, is laid by Sir Thomas
Malory on this illicit love as the fruitful source of much
calamity ; but then Malory relates that Arthur had met
and loved Guinevere long before he asked for her in
marriage ; whereas, according to Tennyson, he sent Lance-
lot to meet the betrothed maiden, and she, never having
seen Arthur, loved Lancelot, as Lancelot Guinevere, at first
sight. That circumstance, gratuitously invented (or adapted
from " Tristram and Iseult "), surely makes the degree of the
lovers' guilt a problem somewhat needlessly difficult to deter-
mine, if it was intended to brand their guilt as heinous enough
to deserve the ruin of a realm, and the failure of Arthur's
humane life-purpose. Guinevere, seeing Lancelot before
Arthur, and recognizing in him (as the sweet and pure
Elaine, remember, did after her), the type of all that is
noble and knightly in man, loves the messenger, and con-
tinues to love him after she has met her destined husband,
whom she judges (and the reader of the Idyls can hardly
fail to coincide with her judgment) somewhat cold, colour-
less, and aloof, however impeccable and grave ; a kind of
moral phantom, or imaginative symbol of the conscience,
whom Guinevere, as typifying the human soul, ought indeed
THE POETRY OF TENNYSON. 245
to love best (" not Lancelot, nor another "), but whom,
as a particular living man, Arthur, one quite fails to see
why Guinevere, a living woman with her own idiosyncrasies,
should be bound to love rather than Lancelot. For if
Guinevere, as woman, ought to love " the highest " man
" when she sees him," it does not appear why that obligation
should not equally bind all the women of her Court also !
And then what becomes of the monogamic moral ? If
the whole burden of the catastrophe was to belaid upon the
conception of a punishment deserved by the great guilt of
particular persons, that guilt ought certainly to have been
so described as to appear heinous and inexcusable to all
beyond question. The story need not have been thus
moralized ; but the Poet- Laureate chose to emphasize the
breach of a definite moral obligation as unpardonable, and
pregnant with evil issues. That being so, I submit that
the moral sense is left hesitating and bewildered, rather
than satisfied and acquiescent, which interferes with a
thorough enjoyment of the work even as art. The sacra-
ment of marriage is high and holy ; yet we feel disposed
to demand whether here it may not be rather the letter
and mere convention than the spirit of constant affection
and true marriage that is magnified. And if so, though
popularity with the English public may be secured by this
vindication of their domestic ideal, higher interests are
hardly so well subserved. Doubtless the treachery to
husband and friend on the part of the lovers was black and
detestable. Doubtless their indulged love was far from
innocent. But then why invent so complicated a problem,
and yet write as if it were perfectly simple and easy of
solution ? What I complain of is, that this love has a
certain air of grievous fatality and excuse about it, while
yet the poet treats it as mere unmitigated guilt, fully
justifying all the disaster entailed thereby, not only on the
sinners themselves, but on the State, and the cause of
human welfare. Nor can we feel quite sure, as the subject
2 4 6 ESSAYS ON POETRY AND POETS.
is here envisaged, that, justice apart, it is quite according
to probability for the knowledge of this constant illicit
affection to engender a universal^ infidelity of the Round
Table Knights to vows which not only their lips, as in the
case of Guinevere, but also their hearts have sworn ; in-
fidelity to their own true affection, and disloyalty to their
own genuine aspiration after the fulfilment of chivalrous
duty in championing the oppressed all because a rich-
natured woman like Guinevere proves faithful to her
affection for a rich kindred humanity in Lancelot ! How
this comes about is at any rate not sufficiently explained
in the poet's narrative ; and if so, he must be held to have
failed both as artist and as ethical teacher, which in these
Idylls he has certainly aspired to be. Then comes the
further question, not altogether an easy one to answer,
whether it is really true that even widespread sexual excess
inevitably entails deterioration in other respects, a lowered
standard of integrity and honour ? The chivalry of the
Middle Ages was sans peur, but seldom sans reproche.
History, on being interrogated, gives an answer ambiguous
as a Greek oracle. Was England, for instance, less great
under the Regency, or under Elizabeth, than under Crom-
well ? But at all events, the old legends make the process
of disintegration in Arthur's kingdom much clearer than it
is made by Tennyson. In Malory, for instance, Arthur is
by no means the sinless being of the Idyls. Rightly
or wrongly, he is resolved to punish Guinevere for her
infidelity by burning, and Lancelot is equally resolved to
rescue her, which accordingly he does from the very stake,
carrying her off with him to his castle of Joyous Gard.
Then Arthur and Sir Gawain make war upon him ; and
thus, the great knightly heads of the Round Table at
variance, the fellowship is inevitably dissolved, for Modred
takes advantage of their dissension to seize upon the
throne. But in the old legends, who is Modred ? The
son of Arthur and his sister. According to them, assuredly
THE POETRY OF TENNYSON. 247
the origin of the doom or curse upon the kingdom is the
unwitting incest, yet deliberate adultery of Arthur, or
perhaps the still earlier and deeply-dyed sin of his father,
Uther. Yet, Mr. Swinburne's contention, that Lord
Tennyson should have emphasized the sin of Arthur as
responsible for the doom that came upon himself and his
kingdom, although plausible, appears to me hardly to meet
all the exigencies of the case. Mr. Hutton says in reply
that then the supernatural elements of the story could have
found no place in the poem ; no strange portents could
have been described as accompanying the birth and death
of Arthur. A Greek tragedian, he adds, would never have
dreamt of surrounding CEdipus with such portents. But
surely the latter remark demonstrates the unsoundness of
the former. Has Mr. Hutton forgotten what is perhaps
one of the sublimest scenes in any literature, the super-
natural passing of this very deep'ly-dyed sinner, CEdipus, to
his divine repose at Colonos, in the grove of those very
ladies of divine vengeance, by whose awful ministry he had
been at length assoiled of sin ? the mysterious stairs ;
Antigone and Ismene expectant above ; he " shading his
eyes before a sight intolerable ; " after drinking to the dregs
the cup of sin and sorrow, rapt from the world, even he, to
be tutelary deity of that land ? Neither Elijah, nor Moses
was a sinless man ; yet Moses, after enduring righteous
punishment, was not, for God took him, and angels buried
him ; it was he who led Israel out of Egypt, and com-
muned with Jehovah on Sinai ; while Elijah rose from earth
in a chariot of fire ; both appearing with Jesus on the
Mount of Transfiguration. But I would suggest that the
poet might have represented suffering and disappointment,
not as penalty apportioned to particular transgressions,
rather as integral elements in that mysterious destiny
which determines the lot of man in his present condition
of defect, moral, physical, and intellectual, involved in his
" Hamartia," or failure to realize that fulness of being
248 ESSAYS ON POETRY AND POETS.
which yet ideally belongs to him as divine. Both these
ideas the idea of Doom or destiny, and that of Nemesis,
on account of voluntary transgression are alike present in
due equipoise in the great conceptions of Greek drama, as
Mr. J. A. Symonds has conclusively proved in his brilliant,
philosophic, and poetic work on the Greek poetry, against
the more one-sided contention of Schlegel. I feel through-
out Shakespeare this same idea of mystic inevitable destiny
dominating the lives of men ; you may call it, if you
please, the will of God. Yet if it dooms us to error,
ignorance, and crime, at all events this awful will cannot
resemble the wills of good mortal men. Othello expiates
his foolish credulity, and jealous readiness to suspect
her who had given him no cause to doubt her love. But
there was the old fool, Brabantio, and the devil lago ;
there were his race, his temperament, his circumstances
in general, and the circumstances of the hour, all these
were toils woven about him by Fate. Now, if the idea
of Destiny be the more accentuated (and a tragedian
surely should make us feel both this, and the free-will
of man), then, as it seems to me, in the interests of Art,
which loves life and harmony, not pure pain, loss, discord,
or negation, there ought to be a purifying or idealizing
process manifest in the ordeal to which the victims are
subjected, if not for the protagonists, at all events for some
of those concerned in the action. We must at least be
permitted to behold the spectacle of constancy and forti-
tude, or devotion, as we do in Desdemona, Cordelia,
Antigone, Iphigenia, Romeo and Juliet. But the ethical
element of free-will is almost exclusively accentuated by
Tennyson ; and in such a case we desire to be fully per-
suaded that the " poetical justice " dealt out by the poet
is really and radically justice, not a mere provincial or
conventional semblance thereof.
Yet if you confine your attention to the individual
Idyls themselves, they are undoubtedly most beautiful
THE POETRY OF TENNYSON. 249
models of sinewy strength, touched to consummate grace.
There can be nothing more exquisite than the tender
flower-like humanity of dear Elaine, nor more perfect in
pathetic dignity than the Idyl of Guinevere. Vivien is
very powerful ; but, as I said, the courtezan appears to me
too coarsely and graphically realized for perfect keeping
with the general tone of this faery epic. The " Holy
Grail " is a wonderful creation in the realm of the super-
natural ; all instinct with high spiritual significance, though
much of the invention in this, as in the other Idyls, be-
longs to Sir Thomas Malory. The adventures of the
knights, notably of Galahad, Percivale, and Lancelot, in
their quest for the Grail, are splendidly described. What,
again, can be nobler than the parting of Arthur and Guine-
vere at Almesbury, where the King forgives and blesses
her, she grovelling repentant before him, the gleaming
" dragon of the great Pendragonship " making a vaporous
halo in the night, as Arthur leaves her, " moving ghost-like
to his doom" ? Here the scenic element blends incorporate
with the human, but assuredly does not overpower it, as
has been pretended. Then how excellent dramatically are
the subordinate figures of the little nun at Almesbury,
and the rustic old monk, with whom Percivale converses in
the Holy Grail ; while, if we were to notice such similes
(Homeric in their elaboration, though modern in their
minute fidelity to nature) as that in Enid, which concerns
the man startling the fish in clear water by holding up
" a shining hand against the sun," or the happy comparison
of standing muscle on an arm to a brook "running too
vehemently" over a stone "to break upon it," our task
would be interminable. The Arthur Idyls are full too of
elevating exemplars for the conduct of life, of such chival-
rous traits as courage, generosity, courtesy, forbearance,
consecration, devotion of life for loyalty and love, service
of the weak and oppressed ; abounding also with excellent
gnomic sayings inculcating these virtues. What admirable
250 ESSAYS ON POETRY AND POETS.
and delightful ladies are Enid, Elaine, Guinevere! Of the
Laureate's longer works, this poem and " In Memoriam "
are his greatest, though both of these are composed of
many brief song-flights.
It may not be unprofitable to inquire what idea Tenny-
son probably intended to symbolize by the " Holy Grail,"
and the quest for it. Is it that of mere supernatural por-
tent? Certainly not The whole treatment suggests far
more. I used to think it signified the mystical blood of
Christ, the spirit of self-devotion, or, as Malory defines it,
" the secret of Jesus." But it scarcely seems possible that
Tennyson means precisely that, for then his ideal man,
Arthur, would not discourage the quest. Does it not rather
stand for that secret of the higher life as sought in any
form of supernatural religion, involving acts of worship
or asceticism, and religious contemplation ? Yet Arthur
deprecates not the religious life as such rather that life
in so far as it is not the auxiliary of human service. It
is while pursuing the quest that Percivale (in the " Holy
Grail ") finds all common life, even the most sacred rela-
tions of it, as well as the most ordinary and vulgar, turn to
dust when he touches them ; and to a religious fanatic
that is indeed the issue this life is less than dust to him ;
he exists for the future and " supernatural " only ; his soul
is already in another region than this homely work-a-day
world of ours ; and because it is another, he is only too
ready to think it must be higher. What to him are our
politics, our bewilderments, our fair humanities, our art and
science, or schemes of social amelioration ? Less than
nothing. What he has to do is to save first his own soul,
and then some few souls of others, if he can. But while,
as Arthur himself complained, such a one waits for the
beatific vision, or follows "wandering fires" of superstition,
how often, for men with strength to right the wronged,
will "the chance of noble deeds come and go unchal-
lenged"! Arthur even dares to call the Holy Grail "a
THE POETRY OF TENNYSON. 25 I
sign to maim this order which I made." " Many of you,
yea most, return no more." But, as the Queen laments,
" this madness has come on us for our sins." Percivale
turns monk, Galahad passes away to the spiritual city, Sir
Bors meets Lancelot riding madly all abroad, and shouting,
" Stay me not ; I have been the sluggard, and I ride apace,
for now there is a lion in the path ! " Lancelot rides on
the quest in order that, through the vision of the Grail, the
sin of which his conscience accuses him may be rooted out
of his heart. And so it was partly the sin the infidelity
to their vows that had crept in amongst the knights,
which drove the best of them to expiation, to religious
fervours, whereby their sin might be purged, thus com-
pleting the disintegration of that holy human brotherhood,
which had been welded together by Arthur for activities
of righteous and loving endeavour after human welfare.
Magnificent is the picture of the terrible, difficult quest
of Lancelot, whose ineradicable sin hinders him from full
enjoyment of the spiritual vision after which he longs.
Nor will Arthur unduly discourage those who have thus
in mortal peril half attained. " Blessed are Bors, Lancelot,
and Percivale, for these have seen according to their sight"
Into his mouth the poet also puts some beautiful lines on
prayer. More indeed may be wrought for the world by
the silent spiritual life, by the truth-seeking student, by the
beauty-loving artist, than is commonly believed. In wor-
shipping the ideal they bless men. Arthur rebukes Gawain
for light infidel profanity, born only of blind contented
immersion in the slime of sense ; while for the others, there
was little indeed of the true religious spirit in their quest.
"They followed but the leader's bell, for one hath seen,
and all the blind will see." With them it is mere fashion,
and hollow-lip service, or superstitious fear ; a very devil-
worship indeed, standing to them too often in the place
of justice, mercy, and plain human duty. Nay, what
terrible crimes have been committed against humanity in
252 ESSAYS ON POETRY AND POETS.
the name of this very religion ! Even Percivale only
attained to spiritual vision through the vision of Galahad,
whose power of strong faith came upon him, for he lacked
humility, a heavenly virtue too often lacking in the unco
guid, as likewise in those raised above their fellows through
any uncommon gifts, whether of body or mind. In the
old legends, the sin of Lancelot himself is represented as
consisting quite as much in personal ambition, over-self-
confidence, and pride on the score of his prowess, as in his
adultery with the Queen. Yet the "pure religion and un-
defiled " of Galahad, and St. Agnes had been long since
celebrated by our poet in two of his loveliest poems. But
these sweet children were not left long to battle for good-
ness and truth upon the earth ; heaven was waiting for
them ; though, while he remained, Galahad, who saw the
vision because he was pure in heart, " rode shattering evil
customs everywhere" in the strength of that purity and
that vision. Arthur, however, avers he could not himself
have joined in the quest, because his mission was to mould
and guard his kingdom, although, that done, " let visions
come and welcome ; " nay, to him the common earth and
air are all vision ; and yet he knows himself no vision, nor
God, nor the Divine Man. To the spiritual, indeed, all is
religious, sacred, sacramental, for they look through the
appearance to the reality, half hidden and half revealed
under it. This avowal reminds me of Wordsworth's grand
passage in the " Ode on Immortality" concerning " creatures
moving about in worlds not realized." But for men not so
far advanced, revelations of the Holy Grail, sacramental
observances, and stated acts of worship, are indeed of
highest import and utility. Yet good, straightforward,
modest Sir Bors, who is not over-anxious about the vision,
to him it is for a moment vouchsafed, though Lancelot and
Percivale attain to it with difficulty, and selfish, super-
stitious worldlings, with their worse than profitless head-
knowledge, bad hearts, hollow worship of Convention and
THE POETRY OF TENNYSON. 253
the Dead Letter, get no inkling of it at all. This whole-
some conviction I trace through many of the Laureate's
writings. Stylites is not intended to be a flattering, though
it is certainly a veracious portrait of the sanctimonious,
self-depreciating, yet self-worshipping 
