LECTURE ON THE POETRY OF WORDSWORTH.
William Wordsworth was born in April 1770, at Cockermouth, in Cumberland; his father, of a family which came originally from Yorkshire, was a solicitor in the town. Left an orphan early in life, his recollections attach themselves less to his home than to the neighbourhood in which he was placed at school. Hawkshead, an antique village, the centre of one of the large straggling parishes of the North country, possessing an ancient and once famous grammar foundation, stands a little way from the west side of Windermere, beside a small lake of its own. Here, lodged in a country cottage, he spent most of his time from 1778 to 1787—nine years.
His reminiscences of this period and this locality form the most beautiful part of his biographical poem, ‘The Prelude’; and a considerable number of his most pleasing minor poems refer to the same years and place. It was then and there, beyond a doubt, that the substantive Wordsworth was formed; it was then and there that the tall rock and sounding cataract became his passion and his appetite, and his genius and whole being united and identified itself with external nature.
From this provincial, primitive seclusion, he passed, in October 1787, to St. John’s College, Cambridge, where his three years of academical residence, not much improved by attention to the studies of the place, were happily broken for him by visits to his own country, to Hawkshead, amongst his mother’s relations, and more remarkably by a bold pedestrian tour (almost wholly and literally pedestrian) through France, Switzerland, and the districts of the Italian lakes—regions which the revolutionary wars almost immediately afterwards closed to all English, and which were before comparatively unknown. The account of the journey is again one of the fine points of ‘The Prelude,’ and in particular the description of the passage of the Simplon, and of night on the shores of Lago Maggiore.
Taking his degree at Cambridge in January 1791, he again went over to France, led, it would seem, by enthusiasm for the political changes then at work there. He remained there, at Orleans and at Paris, about fifteen months, during which he was a witness of the culmination of the revolutionary tumult, and beheld the commencement of its period of bloodshed and terror. It gives a feeling of strange contrast to the after tranquillity of his life, to hear him speaking of the desire he then felt to enter himself as an actor into that terrible arena, and seriously seeming to consider it a thing, at the time, likely enough to happen, and from which chance, rather than his own wish, diverted him.
Chance, however, carried him back to England. Sympathising strongly with the original revolutionary movement, and continuing long, in spite of its crimes and horrors, to cling to republican feelings, he showed, to the mortification of his friends, no disposition to carry out their views by taking orders in the Church. He loitered, living in a desultory manner, partly alone in London, partly among his friends in the country, and was, at one time, on the point of engaging in the drudgery of writing for the newspapers. At last, in 1795, his twenty-sixth year, he found himself made what he considered to be independent, by a bequest of 900l., left him by a young friend in the faith of his vocation to literary achievement. He now settled down into domesticity with his sister in a country place in Somersetshire. This sister was one of the two persons whose minds, he said, had been most operative upon his. The other was Coleridge, whom he met for the first time in June 1797.
Coleridge, youngest son of a clergyman and schoolmaster at Ottery St. Mary, Devon, born two years after Wordsworth, bred up at Christ’s Hospital and at Cambridge—which Wordsworth, when he came up, was just quitting—had for the last three years been engaged with Southey, a young Oxford student, in wild schemes for a Pantisocratic settlement on the banks of the Susquehanna (a situation selected for the sweetness of the sound); had been publishing poems, lecturing and neglecting to lecture, preaching in a blue coat and yellow waistcoat, here and there and everywhere, especially at Bristol. Finally he had run into the most imprudent of marriages, and had settled himself at the village of Nether Stowey. Here, during more than a year, Wordsworth had continual intercourse with him, residing at a beautiful spot not far from it—Allfoxden.
Some years before 1793 he had published verses, not particularly promising, written in the established metre and manner—that of Pope and Dryden. But if Hawkshead had made the inner Wordsworth, Allfoxden, Coleridge, and his own sister gave us the expressed Wordsworth. The effect of this time on Coleridge was remarkable: his high poetic period is just this of his intercourse with Wordsworth; but to Wordsworth it was more distinctly an epoch.
His first characteristic poems were published, together with Coleridge’s ‘Ancient Mariner,’ under the title of ‘Lyrical Ballads,’ in 1798. They obtained considerable notice, and made his name well known; but that notice was not favourable, and his name was known rather for ridicule and censure than praise.
The following winter he spent in Germany, where Coleridge was proceeding to lose himself in metaphysics; Wordsworth returned, and, after some little wandering in Yorkshire, he and his sister finally settled, with their petty income, in a cottage at Grasmere, in December 1799.
In 1800, a new volume of Lyrical Ballads, containing some of his best poems, was published. Quite undaunted by their want of popularity and the adverse judgment of the highest critics, relying on his own feelings and perceptions, he worked in his mountain retirement steadily on, devoting himself chiefly at this time to the biographical poem which, with the name of ‘The Prelude,’ was published, for the first time, after his death in July 1850.
So ends his story before he was thirty years old. After his settlement at Grasmere we do not imagine that his mind or genius developed or grew at all. It grew perhaps in bulk, we may say, but never altered its form or character, attaining merely more and more what he himself calls ‘the monumental pomp of age.’ In 1803 he made a tour in Scotland, of which a very pleasing record remains, not only in the occasional poems suggested by its incidents, but in the journal of his companion—his sister. Returning southward, they paid a visit, on September 17, to Mr. and Mrs. Scott, at their cottage at Lasswade, near Edinburgh. They received a promise that their host would join them again at Melrose, and, stopping on their way thither at the inn of Clovenford, were assured by the landlady that Mr. Scott was a very clever man. At Melrose they met and spent the evening together. The landlady here, says Miss Wordsworth, made some difficulty about beds, and refused to settle anything till she ascertained from the sheriff himself, i.e. Scott, that he had no objection to sleeping in the same room with William, i.e. Wordsworth.
Mr. Scott was already known in the literary world as a translator of German, and an editor of Scottish ballad poetry. But he had published nothing original; and it was not till two years after this, that (as it stands recorded) nothing in the history of British poetry ever equalled the demand for the ‘Lay of the Last Minstrel,’ the first four cantos of which Wordsworth and his sister had heard their author read during their visit at the cottage of Lasswade. In the same year, 1803, Wordsworth married, without, however, any great internal or domestic revolution. In 1832 Scott died. This is also the date of the collected edition, in four volumes, of ‘Wordsworth’s Poems,’ including ‘The Excursion,’ which, under general unpopularity, he had steadily gone on writing and publishing.
In 1839, in the theatre at Oxford, he received an honorary degree with unusual acclamation.
In 1840, on the death of Southey, he was, with a general feeling that it was his due, made Poet Laureate: 1850 conveyed his body to the quiet churchyard of Grasmere.
We have presented this bare biographical outline as preliminary to all remark and criticism. But this meagre chronological table is not to be dismissed without some attention. The array of mere names and figures, dry as they may look, are really full of curious significance, and pregnant with many thoughts and conjectures.
Let us consider, for example, upon what sort of reading the youthful period of Wordworth’s life was cast. The English literature of the then closing eighteenth century, as deficient, perhaps, in force and fertility as it is remarkable for justness and propriety and elegance of diction, was attaining its completion in Cowper, who, born in 1731, and dying in 1800, published his one great poem, ‘The Task,’ in 1785.
As we now read Scott’s novels and poems, Byron, and Southey, and Wordsworth, so they in Wordsworth’s boyhood read the series from Pope to Johnson, read Fielding, and Richardson, and Sterne, and Gray, and Collins, and Goldsmith.
What effect upon the minds of young men of this time had Burns—or, to turn to foreign literature, the works of Rousseau?
To proceed lower down. The curious meeting of Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Southey deserves special notice. In proximity to Wordsworth, Coleridge blazed forth in a stream of poetic brilliancy, which his after years never, in any sort or kind, repeated; in no after moments did he ever create an ‘Ancient Mariner’ or a ‘Christabel.’ Wordsworth, also, was elevated and enkindled by the more vivid and radiating genius of Coleridge. Notice again how completely anterior and antecedent to Scott, and Moore, and Byron, are those Lake Poets, whose nascent influence and popularity they so completely overpowered. But without ‘Christabel’ the ‘Lay of the Last Minstrel’ would never have been written. Without Scott’s stories we should scarcely have had Byron’s; without Wordsworth’s, and the reminiscences of Hawkshead village-school, we should never have had the third and fourth cantos of ‘Childe Harold’; we should have lost, very probably, half the beauty of Byron alike and Scott.
Like the runners in the torch race, they hand along the flame. Who shall say, in these spiritual and subtle exchanges and interchanges, This is mine, and that is thine? We cannot indeed, I think, assert that Wordsworth derived anything directly from Byron, or even from Scott (the ‘White Doe of Rylstone,’ so far as it follows Scott at all, so far is a failure); but without that antagonism, and without the severe lessons their popularity taught him, he probably would not either have escaped his natural faults, nor exerted his natural strength.
Out of Wordsworth and Byron came forth Shelley; nor is Keats (there is no such thing) an independent genius. We may remark also how, as the brief career of Byron encloses within itself the yet briefer life of Shelley, and Keats’s briefest of all, so is Byron himself included in the larger arc of Scott, and the yet larger arc of Wordsworth. Wordsworth, gradually working his way to reputation, was displaced by the sudden glory of Scott. Scott, as a poet, presently has to resign the field to Byron, and to compete against his Corsairs and Beppos with the new phenomenon of the ‘Waverley’ novels. When Byron had died in early manhood, and Scott in premature age; when the furor for the poet had passed away, and the charm of the novelist had begun to decline, Wordsworth first tasted the sweets of popular acceptance, and received in his turn, at the end of his laborious and honourable life, the reward which his rivals had almost outlived.
It is a curious and yet an undeniable fact that Wordsworth, who began his poetical course with what was, at any rate, understood by most readers to be a disclaimer and entire repudiation of the ornament of style and poetic diction, really derives from his style and his diction his chief and special charm. I shall not venture categorically to assert that his practice is in positive opposition to the doctrine he maintains in the prefaces, and supplementary remarks, which accompanied his Lyrical Ballads, and which, calling down upon him and them the hostility of reviews and the ridicule of satirists, made him notorious as one
Who both by precept and example shows
That prose is verse, and verse is merely prose.
Certain it is, however, that he did bestow infinite toil and labour upon his poetic style; that in the nice and exquisite felicities of poetic diction he specially surpassed his contemporaries; that his scrupulous and painstaking spirit, in this particular, constitutes one of his special virtues as a poet. The moving accident, as he says, was not his trade; of event and of action his compositions are perfectly destitute; a lyrical and didactic almost exclusively, scarcely ever in any sense a dramatic writer, it is upon beauty of expression that by the very necessity of his position he has to depend. Scott and Byron are mere negligent schoolboys compared with him. The anecdote has often been told that Wordsworth said to Mr. Landor, or Mr. Landor to Wordsworth, that there was but one good line in all Scott. To which assertion of the one the other at once assented, and said that there was no doubt which it was:—
As the wind waved his garment, how oft did he start.
Wordsworth’s practice, in all probability, was far more just than his theory. His theory, indeed, as directed not against style in general, but against the then prevalent vices of style, was a very tolerably justifiable and useful theory, but his practice was extremely meritorious; his patience and conscientious labour deserve all praise. He has not, indeed (Nature had not bestowed on him), the vigour and heartiness of Scott, or the force and the sweep and the fervour of Byron; but his poems do more perfectly and exquisitely and unintermittedly express his real meaning and significance and character than do the poems of either Scott or Byron. Lyrical verse is by its nature more fugitive than drama and story; yet I incline to believe that there are passages of Wordsworth which, from the mere perfection of their language, will survive when the Marmions and the Laras are deep in dust. As writers for their age, as orators, so to say, as addressing themselves personally to their contemporaries, Byron and Scott, one cannot hesitate to say, were far more influential men, are far greater names. They had more, it may be, to say to their fellows; they entered deeper, perhaps, into the feelings and life of their time; they received a larger and livelier recognition, and a more immediate and tangible reward of popular enthusiasm and praise. It may be, too, that they had something not for their own generation only, but for all ages, which quite as well deserved a permanent record as anything in the mind of Wordsworth.
But that permanent beauty of expression, that harmony between thought and word, which is the condition of ‘immortal verse,’ they did not, I think—and Wordsworth did—take pains to attain. There is hardly anything in Byron and Scott which in another generation people will not think they can say over again quite as well, and more agreeably and familiarly for themselves; there is nothing which, it will be plain, has, in Scott’s or Byron’s way of putting it, attained the one form which of all others truly belongs to it; which any new attempt will, at the very utmost, merely successfully repeat. For poetry, like science, has its final precision; and there are expressions of poetic knowledge which can no more be rewritten than could the elements of geometry. There are pieces of poetic language which, try as men will, they will simply have to recur to, and confess that it has been done before them. I do not say that there is in Wordsworth anything like the same quantity of this supreme result which you find in Shakspeare or in Virgil; there is far less of the highest poetry than in Shakspeare, there is far more admixture of the unpoetic than in Virgil. But there is in him a good deal more truly complete and finished poetic attainment than in his other English contemporaries.
And this is no light thing. People talk about style as if it were a mere accessory, the unneeded but pleasing ornament, the mere put-on dress of the substantial being, who without it is much the same as with it. Yet is it not intelligible that by a change of intonation, accent, or it may be mere accompanying gesture, the same words may be made to bear most different meanings? What is the difference between good and bad acting but style? and yet how different good acting is from bad. On the contrary, it may really be affirmed that some of the highest truths are only expressible to us by style, only appreciable as indicated by manner.
That Raphael paints a Virgin and Child is not a very significant fact: half a thousand other painters have painted the same; but painted as Raphael—not one. It is as though you should suppose that to each poetic thought some particular geometric figure, or curve, it might be, specially appertained: just as to a particular definition the circle appertains, and no figure but the circle.
Those who write ill draw the figures half-right, half-wrong, imperfectly and incorrectly; their circle is not a true circle, not a circle all round; its radii would, many of them, be equal, but not all; no one will dare therefore to keep it as the model and pattern. To draw the figure which may truly stand as the model and the pattern, the unmisleading, safe representative—this is the gift and the excellence of style.
In Milton, the gems of pure poetry lie embedded in the rock of scholastic pomp. And in Wordsworth, you must traverse waste acres of dull verse, that had better far have been, if anything, plain prose, to seek out the rich felicitous spots of fragrance and pure beauty. There is no doubt, I think, that he wrote over much. Posterity, we must hope, will have an instinct to cast away the dross and keep the good metal, and judiciously to reduce his seven volumes to one. Setting himself laboriously and painstakingly to work, and being by nature, moreover, a little cumbrous and heavy, he sometimes measured his result, we cannot doubt it, by quantity, and fell into the not unnatural mistake of counting a great deal of silver to be worth a great deal more than one quarter the quantity of gold. Where a man has himself at once to produce and to judge of his production, it is certainly natural, it may be even desirable, that the judgment should not be exact; it cannot, perhaps, well be so without the accompanying evil of an excessive and vitiating introspection and self-consideration.
Had Wordsworth been more capable of discerning his bad from his good, there would, it is likely enough, have been far less of the bad; but the good, perhaps, would have been very far less good. The consequence is, however, that to prove him a true poet, you have to hunt down a bit here and a bit there, a few lines in a book of the ‘Prelude on the Excursion,’ one sonnet, perhaps, amongst eighty or ninety, one stanza in a series of Memorials of Tours in Scotland, or on the Continent; only very occasionally finding the reward of a complete poem, good throughout, and good as a whole.
What is meant when people complain of him as mawkish is a different matter. It is, I believe, that instead of looking directly at an object, and considering it as a thing in itself, and allowing it to operate upon him as a fact in itself, he takes the sentiment produced by it in his own mind as the thing, as the important and really real fact. The real things cease to be real; the world no longer exists; all that exists is the feeling, somehow generated in the poet’s sensibility. This sentimentalising over sentiment, this sensibility about sensibility, has been carried, I grant, by the Wordsworthians to a far more than Wordsworthian excess. But he has something of it surely. He is apt to wind up his short pieces with reflections upon the way in which, hereafter, he expects to reflect upon his present reflections. Nevertheless, this is not by any means attributable to all his writings.
Here then, even in this defect, is indicated one great praise attaching to Wordsworth, alike as a poet and as a man. He set himself manfully and courageously to his work, and through good report and evil, especially the latter, patiently and perseveringly kept to it, reminding one, with his hardy, unflinching, north-country spirit, of the story told of the Lancashire workman, who, when the easy looker-on took occasion to observe that he had a hard day’s work, simply rejoined that he was paid for a hard day’s work. Paid, I dare say, however, not very largely, any more than, till late in life, was Wordsworth.
Wordsworth, we have said, succeeded beyond the other poets of the time in giving a perfect expression to his meaning, in making his verse permanently true to his genius and his moral frame. Let us now proceed to inquire the worth of that genius and moral frame, the sum of the real significance of his character and view of life.
Unless above himself he can
Erect himself, how poor a thing is Man,
are words which he himself adopts from the Elizabethan poet Daniel, translated by him from Seneca, and introduces into that part of ‘The Excursion’ which gives us what I might call his creed, the statement of those substantive enduring convictions upon which after a certain amount of fluctuation and tossing about in the world he found himself or got himself anchored.
A certain elevation and fixity characterise Wordsworth everywhere. You will not find, as in Byron, an ebullient overflowing life, refusing all existing restrictions, and seeking in vain to create any for itself, to own in itself any permanent law or rule. To have attained a law, to exercise a lordship by right divine over passions and desires—this is Wordsworth’s pre-eminence.
Nor do we find, as in Scott, a free vigorous animal nature ready to accept whatever things earth has to offer, eating and drinking and enjoying heartily; like charity, hoping all things, believing all things, and never failing; a certain withdrawal and separation, a moral and almost religious selectiveness, a rigid refusal and a nice picking and choosing, are essential to Wordsworth’s being. It has been not inaptly said by a French critic that you may trace in him, as in Addison, Richardson, Cowper, a spiritual descent from the Puritans.
Into what Byron might have remade himself in that new and more hopeful era of his life upon which, when death cut him down at Missolonghi, he appeared to be entering, it would be over bold to conjecture. But assuredly (without passing judgment on a human soul simply according to the errors of those thirty-six years which may claim perhaps the name and palliation of an unusually protracted youth)—assuredly, to be whirled away by the force of mere arbitrary will, whose only law was its own wilfulness, to follow passion for passion’s sake, and be capricious for the love of one’s own caprice—this is not the honour or the excellence of a being breathing thoughtful breath, looking before and after.
The profounder tones of Walter Scott’s soul were never truly sounded until adversity and grief fell upon his latter days, and those old enjoyments in which he seemed to live, and move, and have his being, his natural and as it were predestined vocation, fell from him and were no more. The constancy, courage, and clear manly sense which, amid broken fortunes, severed ties, and failing health, spirits, and intellect, the extracts from his journals given in Mr. Lockhart’s life evince, constitute a picture, I think, far more affecting than any to be found in ‘Kenilworth’ or the ‘Bride of Lammermoor.’ But the sports and amusements of Abbotsford, the riding and coursing and fishing, and feasting, and entertaining of guests, &c. &c., these, it appears to me, a little disappoint, dissatisfy, displease us; and make us really thankful, while we read, for the foreknowledge that so strong and capable a soul was ere the end to have some nobler work allotted it, if not in the way of action, at any rate in that of endurance.
More rational certainly, either than Byron’s hot career of wilfulness, or Scott’s active but easy existence amidst animal spirits and out-of-door enjoyments, more dignified, elevated, serious, significant, and truly human, was Wordsworth’s homely and frugal life in the cottage at Grasmere. While wandering with his dear waggoners round his dearer lakes, talking with shepherds, watching hills and stars, studying the poets, and fashioning verses, amidst all this there was really something higher than either wildly crying out to have things as one chose, or cheerfully taking the world’s good things as one found them, working to gain the means and the relish for amusement. He did not, it is true, sweep away with him the exulting hearts of youth, ‘o’er the glad waters of the dark blue sea’; he did not win the eager and attentive ear of high and low, at home and abroad, with the entertainment of immortal Waverley novels; but to strive not unsuccessfully to build the lofty rhyme, to lay slowly the ponderous foundations of pillars to sustain man’s moral fabric, to fix a centre around which the chaotic elements of human impulse and desire might take solid form and move in their ordered ellipses, to originate a spiritual vitality, this was perhaps greater than sweeping over glad blue waters or inditing immortal novels.
Unless above himself he can
Erect himself, how poor a thing is Man.
Unless above himself, how poor a thing; yet, if beyond and outside of his world, how useless and purposeless a thing. This also must be remembered. And I cannot help thinking that there is in Wordsworth’s poems something of a spirit of withdrawal and seclusion from, and even evasion of, the actual world. In his own quiet rural sphere it is true he did fairly enough look at things as they were; he did not belie his own senses, nor pretend to recognise in outward things what really was not in them. But his sphere was a small one; the objects he lived among unimportant and petty. Retiring early from all conflict and even contact with the busy world, he shut himself from the elements which it was his business to encounter and to master. This gives to his writings, compared with those of Scott and of Byron, an appearance of sterility and unreality. He cannot, indeed, be said, like Cowper, to be an indoors poet; but he is a poet rather of a country-house or a picturesque tour, not of life and business, action and fact.
This also sadly lessens the value which we must put on that high moral tone which we have been hitherto extolling. To live in a quiet village, out of the road of all trouble and temptation, in a pure, elevated, high moral sort of manner, is after all no such very great a feat. It is something, indeed, anywhere. But I fear it cannot quite truly be said of him, as he has himself finely said of Burns—
In busiest street and loneliest glen
Are felt the flashes of his pen;
He lives ’mid winter snows, and when
Bees fill their hives;
Deep in the general heart of men
His power survives.
People in busy streets are inclined, I fear, a little to contemn the mild precepts of the rural moralist. They will tell you that he rather reminds them of the achievements of that celebrated French sea-captain,
Who fled full soon
On the first of June,
But bade the rest keep fighting.
Perhaps it is only those that are themselves engaged in the thick of the struggle and conflict that rightly can cheer on, or fitly can admonish, their fellows, or to any good purpose assume the high moral tone. Yet it must be confessed that even in a country village it still is something.
Nor was Wordsworth in the earlier years of his life by any means of a timid or valetudinarian virtue. A man who was in Paris in the heat of the first Revolution was not without experiences. And the poems, it may be observed, which follow closest upon this youthful period of living experience, are of far higher value than the later ones, which ensued upon his prolonged and unbroken retirement.
There may be, moreover, a further fault in Wordsworth’s high morality, consequent on this same evil of premature seclusion, which I shall characterise by the name of false or arbitrary positiveness. There is such a thing in morals, as well as in science, as drawing your conclusion before you have properly got your premises. It is desirable to attain a fixed point; but it is essential that the fixed point be a right one. We ought to hold fast by what is true; but because we hold wilfully fast, it does not follow that what we hold fast to is true. If you have got the truth, be as positive as you please; but because you choose to be positive, do not therefore be sure you have the truth.
Another evil consequence is the triviality in many places of his imagery, and the mawkishness, as people say, of his sentiment. I cannot myself heartily sympathise with the ‘Ode to the Smaller Celandine,’ or repeated poems to the daisy. I find myself a little recoil from the statement that—
To me the meanest flower that blows doth give
Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears.
These phenomena of external nature, which in the old and great poets come forward simply as analogies and similitudes of what is truly great—namely, human nature, and as expressions of curious and wonderful relations, are in Wordsworth themselves the truly great, all-important, and pre-eminently wonderful things of the universe. Blue sky and white clouds, larks and linnets, daisies and celandines—these it appears are ‘the proper subject of mankind’; not, as we used to think, the wrath of Achilles, the guilt and remorse of Macbeth, the love and despair of Othello.
This tendency to exaggerate the importance of flowers and fields, lakes, waterfalls, and scenery, I remember myself, when a boy of eighteen, to have heard, not without a shock of mild surprise, the venerable poet correct. People come to the lakes, he said, and are charmed with a particular spot, and build a house, and find themselves discontented, forgetting that these things are only the sauce and garnish of life. Nevertheless, we fear that the exclusive student of Wordsworth may go away with the strange persuasion that it is his business to walk about this world of life and action, and, avoiding life and action, have his gentle thoughts excited by flowers and running waters and shadows on mountain sides.
This we conceive is a grievous inherent error in Wordsworth. The poet of Nature he may perhaps be; but this sort of writing does justice to the proper worth and dignity neither of man nor of Nature.
ON THE FORMATION OF CLASSICAL ENGLISH:
AN EXTRACT FROM A LECTURE ON DRYDEN.
Dryden, a true littérateur, simply reflects his epoch; the revolution he was intent upon, and which we are especially bound to consider, was that of English verse composition. While Newton was balancing the earth, and Locke weighing the intellect, Dryden was measuring syllables. While Penn and Locke were venturing experiments in government, he was making them in prosody. Political movements and agitations—the plot and the new plot—dissolutions and elections—falls of ministries and impeachments and deaths were to him chiefly of interest because he must mould the subject of his verse accordingly. To please the King as laureate he is in duty bound; and to serve his cause with rhyme to the purpose. Also prose.
Yet what side should a littérateur of real excellence take if not that of the King and the court? who certainly had the best taste, were the most judicious critics as well as the most likely paymasters. Settle and Shadwell might suit the Aldermen and the Exclusionists, who knew no better. And nothing, I imagine, more completely suited Dryden, more exactly met his feelings, and gave freer scope to his talents, than the revolution in literature which the new King and court sought to naturalise in England. To guide the process of that change and to elevate a matter of mere passing court fashion into a permanent reformation of English literature; to dignify a mere slipslop aversion of pedantry by converting it into an appreciation of elegance and propriety of writing—this was his vocation. He devoted himself to it for forty years with infinite zeal and perseverance, laborious study, and patient carefulness. And certainly with some considerable success.
During the whole of the next century I suppose it was considered that our language first was written, so to speak, by him. For models of composition no one was recommended anterior to him. In English poetry he is for them the earliest name. Into Johnson’s collection Cowley and Butler, and one or two others coëval with Dryden, are admitted, but not Spenser. So too in prose it is only in our time that people have begun to talk of Jeremy Taylor and Milton as legitimate standards of English prose composition. Dryden was supposed to have commenced in the two kinds of writing what Pope and Addison made perfect. For style Shakespeare was dangerous and Hooker pernicious reading; Ben Jonson’s wit was ponderous and the wisdom of Bacon pedantic; the mirth of Fletcher was rude and vulgar, the elegance of Sidney formal and factitious.
Maxims of this kind prevailed from the days of Dryden to those of Byron and Scott. There are circles where they are still current, and there are possibilities of their again finding a more general acceptation. I incline to believe that there is a great deal of truth in them. Our language before the Restoration certainly was for the most part bookish, academical, and stiff. You perceive that our writers have first learnt to compose in Latin; and you feel as if they were now doing so in English. Their composition is not a harmonious development of spoken words, but a copy of written words. We are set to study ornate and learned periods; but we are not charmed by finding our ordinary everyday speech rounded into grace and smoothed into polish, chastened to simplicity and brevity without losing its expressiveness, and raised into dignity and force without ceasing to be familiar; saying once for all what we in our rambling talk try over and over in vain to say; and saying it simply and fully, exactly and perfectly.
This scholastic and constrained manner of men who had read more than they talked, and had (of necessity) read more Latin than English; of men who passed from the study to the pulpit, and from the pulpit back to the study—this elevated and elaborated diction of learned and religious men was doomed at the Restoration. Its learning was pedantry, and its elevation pretence. It was no way suited to the wants of the court, nor the wishes of the people. It was not likely that the courtiers would impede the free motions of their limbs with the folds of the cumbrous theological vesture; and the nation in general was rather weary of being preached to. The royalist party, crowding back from French banishment, brought their French tastes and distastes. James I. loved Latin and even Greek, but Charles II. liked French better even than English. In one of Dryden’s plays is a famous scene, in which he ridicules the fashionable jargon of the day, which seems to have been a sort of slipshod English, continually helped out with the newest French phrases.
Dryden then has the merit of converting this corruption and dissolution of our old language into a new birth and renovation. And not only must we thank him for making the best of the inevitable circumstances and tendencies of the time, but also praise him absolutely for definitely improving our language. It is true that he sacrificed a great deal of the old beauty of English writing, but that sacrifice was inevitable; he retained all that it was practicable to save, and he added at the same time all the new excellence of which the time was capable.
You may call it, if you please, a democratic movement in the language. It was easier henceforth both to write and to read. To understand written English, it was not necessary first to understand Latin; and yet written English was little less instructive than it had been, or if it was less elevating, it was on the other hand more refining.
For the first time, you may say, people found themselves reading words easy at once and graceful; fluent, yet dignified; familiar, yet full of meaning. To have organised the dissolving and separating elements of our tongue into a new and living instrument, perfectly adapted to the requirements and more than meeting the desires and aspirations of the age, this is our author’s praise. But it is not fully expressed until you add that this same instrument was found, with no very material modification, sufficient for the wants and purposes of the English people for more than a century. The new diction conquered, which the old one had never done, Scotland and Ireland, and called out American England into articulation. Hume and Robertson learnt it; Allan Ramsay and Burns studied it; Grattan spoke it; Franklin wrote it. You will observe that our most popular works in prose belong to it. So do our greatest orators. A new taste and a new feeling for the classics grew up with it. It translated, to the satisfaction of its time, Homer and Virgil.
Our present tongue, so far as it differs from this, cannot profess to have done nearly so much. Homer and Virgil no longer content us in Pope and Dryden, but we have not been able to get anything to content us. The English diction of the nineteenth century has no Burke or Chatham to boast of, nor any Hume or Johnson.
There may be some superiority in matter. We have had a good deal of new experience, both in study and in action—new books and new events have come before us. But we have not yet in England, I imagine, had any one to give us a manner suitable to our new matter. There has been a kind of dissolution of English, but no one writer has come to re-unite and re-vivify the escaping components. We have something new to say, but do not know how to say it. The language has been popularised, but has not yet vindicated itself from being vulgarised. A democratic revolution is effecting itself in it, without that aristocratic reconstruction which pertains to every good democratic revolution. Everybody can write, and nobody writes well. We can all speak, and none of us know how. We have forgotten or rejected the old diction of our grandfathers, and shall leave, it seems likely, no new diction for our grandchildren. With some difficulty we make each other understand what we mean, but, unassisted by personal explanations and comment, it is to be feared our mere words will not go far. Our grandfathers read and wrote books: our fathers reviews: and we newspapers; will our children and grandchildren read our old newspapers? Have we any one who speaks for our day as justly and appropriately as Dryden did for his? Have we anything that will stand wear and tear, and will be as bright and un-obsolete a hundred and fifty years hence, as ‘Alexander’s Feast’ is to-day?
LECTURE ON THE DEVELOPMENT OF ENGLISH LITERATURE
FROM CHAUCER TO WORDSWORTH.
(1852.)
The subject of my lecture is the Development of English Literature. It were idle for me to attempt, and would be foolish in me to desire, to say anything strikingly new upon it. Anything strikingly original could be striking only because incorrect; and would in the end most likely be found not even original.
Some novelty indeed there would be—the novelty of a rarely attained success—could I, while passing in review the literature of our country, treat of every part in proper place and due proportion, without undervaluing, without overcolouring, without either omission or exaggeration.
Something interesting too, if not striking, there might be, could I, in following the development of English literature, indicate to you truly its connection with the development of English character, point out correctly why it was natural at particular epochs that particular things should be said; how the times affected the writers, and the writers express the times; and what sequence of changing words and deeds has brought down the England of history to the modern England of our own times in the East and in the West.
In commencing such a conspectus, I can have no hesitation in selecting the first name: English literature begins with Chaucer. The most substantive and dominant element in our blood and in our language is, it may be perfectly true, the Anglo-Saxon. But it cannot be said that either in our blood or language this element had established its permanent relations to other—to Celtic, Danish, Norman, immigrant, invasive, and rebellious elements—had taken amidst these and communicated to these a distinct direction of its own, before the era of King Edward III. and the close of the fourteenth century. The same (and this is much more important) may be affirmed of the English national mind. In the age of Chaucer it may be said that the English people, such as ever since then it has been (and such never it had been till then), had, for good or for evil, or more truly for both, entered in various ways—in religion, in morals, in domestic habits, in government, in social relations, in relations to other members of the European body—upon a definite and positive course. The position which we still hold as a northern, part Scandinavian, part German people, ever resisting and yet ever submitting most largely to accept the subtle influences of Southern civilisation and refinement—our position, too, of antagonism, in particular to the other great mixed nation, England’s immediate neighbour, was ours in the era of the first French wars. And the picture of all that pertains to those first exhibitions (for good or for evil, or for both) of our English genius and temper you may see surviving unfaded in the lively colouring of the ‘Canterbury Tales’; exhibitions, I have said, of genius and temper; of dispositions, inclinations, tendencies, it is true, rather than of any formed and rigidly fixed determination. It is our boyhood; but the man in looking back to it is conscious that that boyhood was his:—folded and compressed within the bud we detect the petals of the coming flower, the rudiment of the future fruit. What, for example, can be truer to permanent English likings and dislikings, what more exact to the nation’s habitual views and preferences in life, than these lines in the description of the monk? Let me premise that St. Maure, and St. Benett or Benedict, St. Austin or Augustin, are the great monastic legislators: that wood, as in Scotch, still means crazy, and swink, as in Shakespeare, toil:—
The rule of Saint Maure and of Saint Benett
Because that it was old and some deal straight,
This ilkĕ monk let oldĕ thinges pace,
And held after the newĕ world the trace.
He gave not for that text a pulled hen,
That saith that hunters be not holy men.
And I say his opinion was good.
What should he studie and make himselven wood,
Upon a book in cloistre alway to pore,
Or swinken with his handes and laboure,
As Austin bid? How shall the world be served?
Let Austin have his swink to him reserved.
I do not think that our countrymen in this generation have lost their distaste to devout seclusion and associate task-work, or their passion for individual enterprise; the hearty acceptance, so only indeed they do exist, of all existing things, good, bad, and indifferent; the desire to grapple with common facts, and the feeling, that some way or other the question—How shall the world be served? must receive an answer.
Certainly we may still find in Old England ladies—I quote Chaucer—paining themselves to counterfeit cheer of court, and be estately of manere, and to be held worthy of reverence; busy or busy-seeming lawyers:—
No where so busy a man as he, as he there n’was,
And yet he seemed busier than he was;
country gentlemen, great at the sessions, and greater at the dinner table; the tried soldier, silent and unpretending; the young soldier, much the reverse; the merchant, so discreet and stedfast,
There wistĕ no man that he was in debt;
religious and laborious parish-clergymen, and church dignitaries, not very religious, and not at all laborious. Such is the picture given by Chaucer of his fellow-travellers on the highway from London to Canterbury in the year 1383, as the old tradition of the Tabard Inn in Southwark records, as it might be any present Englishman’s description of his in the year 1852.
From boyhood we step to early manhood; from Chaucer pass to Shakespeare, and behold now, not temper, and tendency, and disposition, but thought, contemplation, doubt. In language less easy far and natural, but infinitely more pregnant, significant, and profound, in a style abounding in faults as in beauties, we hear, not, as from Chaucer, all that Englishmen in his time were like, but all that man in all times may be. As on the mount of vision, from whose secret summit were seen the kingdoms of the world and the glory thereof, so on the elevation of his own poised intellect stood the spirit of the Elizabethan dramatist, sweeping slowly the horizon of human will and action—all the possible varieties of which were delivered into its power, ‘to be or not to be.’ So shone concentrated in the being of one man, as into the form of some irradiant star, the collective intelligence of centuries gone by,—
the prophetic soul
Of the great world dreaming o’er things to come.
Into details of critical remark on Shakespeare I do not now purpose to carry you. Let me but mark one point. It is impossible, I should suppose, for any reader who does not come to the plays of Shakespeare with a judgment overborne by the weight of authority or the force of general sentiment—it is impossible, I should imagine, for any ingenuous, dispassionate reader not to find himself surprised, checked, disappointed, shocked, even revolted, by what in any other author—in an author of modern times—he would call gross defects in point of plot, flagrant inconsistencies of character. In ‘As You Like It,’ for example, who is not astounded to meet in Act V. the unnatural brother of Act I., by the rehabilitation of a most cursory Deus-ex-machinâ sort of penitence, or shall I call it regret, qualified for the love, wedlock, and happiness which honest people had been working up to through the whole long drama? Whom does the marriage of Angelo and Mariana leave quite easy in his mind? Whose moral sensibilities are not a little ruffled by a strange phantasmagoria of good people becoming bad of a sudden, and all of a sudden good again; good and happy, too, after every sort of misconduct, after the wickedest and foulest actions, with one touch of the wand all made right; guilt converted to innocence, with not a stain left behind—long-suffering virtue shall wed quick repentant vice—and all, it would seem, simply to bring the play to a happy ending?
For the explanation of these apparent blemishes—these obvious incongruities in the comedies (for that is their region) of our great poet, I might refer you to M. Guizot’s criticism on Shakespeare. One element in it consists in the fact, which we are pretty safe in assuming, that with the story Shakespeare had little or nothing to do; he simply took what was given him, and made of it what he could—what he had occasion or time for. And yet that the taste of the time, and that he himself should acquiesce in such a representation, is a matter, I think, in some degree appertaining to that balanced, speculative character which I attempted but now to describe, natural to the age and characteristic of the writer.
Free and serene in youth, newly emancipated from teachers and directors, unfettered any longer by precept or injunction of others, unbound as yet by any self-imposed restriction, or even any formed determination—in the richness of a reflectiveness which even now is all but a malady, in the fulness of an almost premature maturity of thought—in a distant preconception or presentiment wandering undecided in the garden of the infinite choices; free as yet to select, loving much rather as yet to forbear; with a tranquil wistfulness, with a far-sighted consciousness, looking down those unnumbered, diverging, far-reaching avenues of future actuality, each one of which, but, if any one, then not any other, he may follow—such I venture to picture to myself the second poet of the English series—the second and the greatest—the creator of Othello and of Falstaff, of Hotspur and of Hamlet.
Not uncompromised, not uncommitted any longer, self-committed, strongly, deliberately, seriously, irreversibly committed; walking as in the sight of God, as in the profound, almost rigid conviction that this one, and no other of all those many paths is, or can be, for the just and upright spirit possible, self-predestined as it were, of his own will and foreknowledge, to a single moral and religious aim—such, I think, are we to imagine the writer of ‘Paradise Lost’ and of ‘Samson Agonistes,’ the third of the English poets. To what purpose these myriad phenomena, entering and traversing the field of that mighty object-glass of the speculative intellect? Is it life to observe? Is it a man’s service to know? As if it was a thing possible for us to forbear to act; as though there were not in God’s world, amidst ten thousand wrongs, one right, amidst the false choices that offend Him, the one that is His will. And yet, though in 1623, when the players put out the first collected edition, the first folio of the tragedies, comedies, and histories of William Shakespeare, Milton, aged sixteen, was translating psalms, to the second of these folios, in 1632, were prefixed the verses by John Milton, ‘What needs my Shakespeare.’ And among the productions of that pure protracted youth, ending, we may say, only in his thirty-third year, and devoted to books and letters,—though ‘Comus,’ it is true, seems prophetic of the stern and religious virtues of the after-manhood and old age—‘L’Allegro’ meantime, ‘Il Penseroso,’ and parts of ‘Comus’ itself show lineaments of a gentler and less positive, more natural and less merely moral character. Is there not here in these earlier poems, lingering still, and as yet undismissed, a little of that poetic hesitance, that meditative reluctance to take a part which I attributed but now as his characteristic to Shakespeare? Does not the youthful Milton, while in this immature period, pondering, examining, testing, as it were, upon his spiritual palate the viands of life, approximate, I will not determine how closely, to that personal undramatic Shakespeare, who sadly and almost remorsefully could say of himself?—
Alas! ’tis true, I have gone here and there,
And made myself a motley to the view.
Gored my own thoughts, sold cheap what is most dear.
Or again,—
Oh! for my sake, do you with fortune chide,
The guilty goddess of my harmful deeds.
Or in a graver tone still,—
Poor soul, the centre of my sinful Earth,
Fooled by those rebel powers that thee array.
Upon the broad brows and in the deep eyes of Shakespeare I could believe myself to see, during the inditing of records such as this, a mournful expression which might pass with ease into the fixed pure look of Milton, and could identify, under circumstances of no violent transmutation, the lips which uttered, ‘What! because thou art virtuous, shall there be no cakes and ale? aye, and ginger be hot in the mouth?’ with those of him who closed his drama with the sentence that
If virtue feeble were,
Heaven itself would stoop to her.
But such a fleeting similarity of transition, if there were, in the thoughtful countenance of the youthful Milton, was soon and totally effaced. He is a man of far different genius and character whom we see in the seventeen succeeding years of his prime, from his thirty-third to his fiftieth, teaching scholars and reforming education; married, and deserted, and propounding a new doctrine of divorce; taking a side in the great Civil War, joining in controversy with bishops and archbishops, acting as secretary to a republican government, and—
In Liberty’s defence, my noble task,
With which all Europe rings from side to side—
justifying the death of kings.
Or he again, who, blind and anon impoverished, neglected, imprisoned, persecuted in another and concluding space of seventeen years, bated nevertheless not one jot of heart and hope, and
On evil days though fallen, and evil tongues,
In darkness and with danger compassed round,
found in his lowest estate his highest inspiration, and converted his season of endurance and affliction into his period of most perfect and permanent achievement.
The spirit of Milton, no less than the spirit of Shakespeare, still lives and breathes in our native air; we imbibe it in the earliest and commonest influences that environ us; it has entered, for good, for evil, or for both, into the constituents of our national character.
Nevertheless, the proper manhood of the English nation dates, I believe, from the generation which rejected Milton. The Counter-Revolution of 1660 and the final Revolution of 1688 are the two critical convulsions which restored us to our proper natural course. It is impossible, after all, not to recognise in those seemingly senseless acclamations which welcomed back the exiled Stuart a real and important significance. It is impossible not to sympathise with the joy and exultation of people at throwing off the yoke of an iron system of morals, proved by experience not coextensive with facts, not true to the necessary exigencies and experiences of life.
Fain to return to that larger range from which for a while we had remained self-excluded, but incapable any longer of sustaining ourselves upon the unsupported elevation of speculative vision; eager again to see what in Shakespeare we had viewed, to feel ourselves again within the circle of those infinitely various relations, but too far engaged in actual things to be competent now of seeing merely, of feeling only; eager, were it possible—which it no longer is—to find satisfaction to adult impulses in the gratification of those old boyish instincts, dispositions, tempers, tendencies, left behind so far away as Chaucer; resolute, however, in any case, come what would or might, to face and confront, to acknowledge and accept the facts of that living palpable world which cannot for any long time be disowned or evaded, with the vision of the universe departed, with innocence and the untroubled conscience forfeited, behold us here at the close of the seventeenth century, embarking, in whose name we know not, and profess to ourselves that we care not, upon the seas of actual and positive existence.
You will observe that in the period commencing with the Restoration and continuing through the eighteenth century, literature, though gaining infinitely in variety, loses in elevation; its predominant and characteristic form is not, as hitherto, the highest, the poetical. What poetry does exist is by no means of the highest order, nor aims at the highest objects; it is rather as a source of elegant amusement, as an efficacious means towards refinement and polish, as an ally and auxiliary of carriage and high breeding, as an emollient of manners and antidote to brutality, that we are taught to regard it. What indeed the really instructive, the serious and significant form of literature is, were hard to say: it seems even doubtful at times whether it possesses at all any form deserving any such high-sounding epithets; at times we cannot refrain from the belief that the whole energy, moral, intellectual, and vital, of the nation has passed off into the common business, the ordinary hard work of individual everyday life; that what we see in the name of literature is but a mere dead and mechanical repetition, an aimless and meaningless observance of traditional habits. At times again, on the other hand, the abundance, and the variety, and the broad substantive character of what the Englishmen of this period wrote and have left for us, fill us with admiration while we contrast it with the poverty, narrowness, and uniformity of our preceding literature. The complexity of the picture is enhanced, and the embarrassment and doubt of our judgments and feelings aggravated, while we further observe how our national mind and literature begin to enter more now than ever before into intimate relations with the other great personal, national forces which have in the last hundred years sprung up into life and vigour on the Continent. Chaucer, it is true—and it is his praise—gave the final completion, by copious admissions of Norman-French vocables and phrases, to the transformation, shall I say, or new creation, of our homely, meagre, inarticulate semi-Saxon into a civilised and living speech, fit for the harmonious repetition to English ears of graceful Italian or classic story, and the enduring utterance of native thought and sentiment. By Italian cadence and rhythm Spenser tuned his docile ear, and learnt to remodulate, after an age of disuse, the language in which Shakespeare was to delineate the traditions of Verona and Venice, and give immortality to Florentine romances. The soul of Milton had dieted on ‘immortal notes and Tuscan airs,’ and been imbued with Italian scenes and Italian friendships, and had learnt in that converse to
Feed on thoughts that voluntary move
Harmonious numbers,
ere he thought them worthy to arise ‘to the height of that great argument.’
Nevertheless, this culture in classic grace, and this schooling in the nice accomplishment of verse which the English poets had sought with submission and deference from the descendants of Livy and Virgil, cannot, in any sort, be paralleled with that encounter and fusion which is now to come to pass with a national mind, single and original as our own, proved, chastened, and fortified by a long course of thought, action, and suffering. The French nation, marked from its original development, shall we say, in the era of the first and second Crusades, by a peculiar and distinct character, mingling in a wonderful compound the fervour of the south and the vigour of the north, heirs direct of an older civilisation, scene of the earliest resuscitation of thought, taking, in the later ages of religious contention, a separate and special position between the old, as in Italy and Spain, and the new, as in England and North Germany; with a readier understanding, with a more rapid and more immediate and seizing intellect; working out, by a logic of its own, conclusions, distinct from those of any, yet in relation to those of every European community; free-thinking from the first in Montaigne, sceptically devout in Pascal, embellishing the ancient faith in Bossuet, and scaling the summit of the latest doubt in Descartes, the French nation obviously had much to communicate to its insular neighbours—the Puritan, or all-but Puritan, English people.
Yet, on the other hand, to pass into the region of mere imitation, to sit at the feet even of writers as great as Racine and Molière, to owe fealty to the dicta of Boileau, to fit on the literary court-costume of Louis XIV., and pick up the fine language of the Regency, would appear to carry somewhat of indignity to men that
Speak the tongue
That Shakspeare spoke; the faith and morals hold
That Milton held.
From this dangerous communion it may be said that the English mind returned with little loss of originality, and with a large accession of ideas and perceptions; it had offered as freely, if not as copiously, as it had taken; in the mass of imitation the native genius is still to be discerned, surviving and subsisting; in the prostration of ancient tenets and habits the old character remains upright, unoverthrown and unsubdued. One could really believe that we might have consented to learn yet more and got no harm by it. And, reappearing strangely disguised and metamorphosed, we shall still find the spirit of the Elizabethan age and of the Puritan; the high functions which Shakespeare and Milton performed will be performed in the new era less splendidly but more effectually by smaller men and humbler agencies.
Dryden, born in 1631 and dying in 1700, and Cowper, born and dying in the corresponding years of the following century, we may make the limits of our new period.
After the age of Shakespeare, Milton, and the translation of the Bible, that of Addison, Swift, and the translations of Homer and Virgil may seem degenerate. Dryden, who heads the list, after commencing panegyrist under Oliver Cromwell, and showing his good-will in the same capacity under the restored Charles II., presently proceeds as playwright, political satirist, theological controversialist, critical essayist, classical translator. We may take him as an earnest of what is to follow. Playwrights, in Dryden and Otway, Congreve, Vanbrugh, Farquhar, assume first the pre-eminence. Classical translation, and almost at the same time the Essay, aspire next to supremacy, and claim Augustan honours in Pope and Addison. From 1740 to 1770 may be called the culmination of the novelists: from 1750 to 1790 is the period of the historians. The last decade of the century finds us restored to other and different poetry in Cowper and in Bums.
The items in the list may appear somewhat trivial. Yet you cannot fail to observe that they consist of names extremely well known; well known not there only or here, but wherever the English language is spoken or studied. It is to these that foreigners desirous of learning our language most naturally recur. They constitute our ordinary standard literature, and for models in English writing the tradition, not yet obsolete, of our fathers refers us imperatively hither. We cannot, with any safety, follow examples anterior to them; nor easily find any amongst their successors. Our own age is notorious for slovenly or misdirected habits of composition, while the seventeenth century wasted itself in the excesses of scholastic effort. English prose, before the age of Dryden, was in the hands, for the most part, of men who read and preached more than they talked, and had learnt to compose Latin before they set themselves to write the vernacular. But Latin is, by the inherent nature of its grammar and construction, a language singularly alien to the genius of a natural English style. French, which was the chief reading of the English writers after the Restoration, both as a living and as a modern language, was a far more useful auxiliary. And at their coffee-houses and clubs, the wits of our Augustan age were, even Addison included, fairly accustomed to lively conversation. And the study of French tended to save from vulgarity and meanness diction which conversational habits made thoroughly idiomatic. For manner, and for the subtle and potent impressions conveyed by manner, you may assuredly consult with great benefit the majority of these unpretending items.
I may further raise your estimate of these names if I remind you of their connection, at least in time, with workings of the human intellect not exactly included in the name of literature. The period of discoveries in Natural Philosophy begins with the reign of that restored Stuart whose picture looks down still, if I mistake not, with the title of founder on the meetings of the Royal Society. Newton’s ‘Principia’ is not, perhaps, a book pertaining to Belles Lettres; yet Newton and his fellow-discoverers have a good deal to do with the character of the age of Dryden. If I introduce, by the side of the translation of Virgil, the name of Locke on the ‘Human Understanding,’ I shall add, I suppose, some specific gravity to the close of the degenerate seventeenth century; and it will not be without some effect that I intercalate between Thomson’s ‘Seasons’ and Richardson’s ‘Pamela,’ at the date 1736, the title of Butler’s ‘Analogy of Religion.’ The advance of the century which presents us with the great histories of Hume, Robertson, and Gibbon, gains additional seriousness also from Hume’s philosophical as from Johnson’s moral writing. And certainly, though the apparent results were less brilliant, our respect and attention are claimed quite as strongly by the mental and moral as by the natural or physical philosophy of this age.
The subject belongs properly to profounder lecturers; I shall merely touch upon it in connection with that literature which it serves more than could anything else to explain. It was our mental philosophy which, far more than our ordinary Belles Lettres, drew upon us the attention of Europe in general. Voltaire was indeed acquainted with Pope, Dryden, and Swift, but he declared himself openly the student of Newton and the pupil of Locke; and professed the mission of an apostle to his countrymen of the doctrines of the English philosophy; and in that philosophy only we can expect to find the fundamental convictions upon which, when the worst came to the worst, Englishmen of that age conceived they could retreat: it therefore must be considered as the substantial reality upon which the fleeting phenomena of plays, poetry, and novels are sustained. Its temper was, I suppose, narrow and material: bent upon the examination of phenomena, it admitted only such as present themselves to the lower and grosser senses; to the notices of the higher and purer it peremptorily refused its attention. We cannot live without the impalpable air which we breathe, any more than without the solid earth which we tread upon; the intimations of a spiritual world of which we cannot be rigidly, and, as it were, by all our senses, certified, constitute for our inner life an element as essential as the plain matter of fact without which nothing can be done. But it is certain also that without that matter of fact nothing can be done, and, moreover, very little can be thought: palpable things, by divine right, by inevitable necessity, and intelligent ordinance, claim our habitual attention; we are more concerned with our steps upon the ground than our inhalation of the atmosphere; stories of the apparition of ghosts may very likely be true, but even if they are it matters extremely little.
This austere love of truth; this righteous abhorrence of illusion; this rigorous, uncompromising rejection of the vague, the untestified, the merely probable; this stern conscientious determination without paltering and prevarication to admit, if things are bad, that they are so; this resolute, upright purpose, as of some transcendental man of business, to go thoroughly into the accounts of the world and make out once for all how they stand: such a spirit as this, I may say, I think, claims more than our attention—claims our reverence.
We must not lose it—we must hold fast by it, precious to us as Shakespeare’s intellectual or Milton’s moral sublimities; while our eyes look up with them, our feet must stay themselves firmly here. Such, I believe, is the strong feeling of the English nation; the spirit of Newton and of Locke possesses us at least in as full measure as that of any one of their predecessors.
To trace that spirit working in the minds and morals of our fathers of the last century would be curiously instructive. Pure intellectual action is apt, no doubt, to be for the time so absorbing as to draw to itself all the agencies of our nature, as to suspend the just and fitting exercise of other, and it may be nobler, functions. Philosophers are frequently dim of sight for the phenomena of everyday life, a little hard of hearing for the calls of plain humanity. Let that moral purpose which should first embark, and through the whole voyage should accompany, the true philosopher be his justification. It is a special service that he undertakes, and he may be excused if, to execute it, he does not act wholly as others do, or as in itself would be best.
Such a pervading moral purpose is in England exhibited by the chief philosophers of the eighteenth century. Such a moral purpose, perhaps, we may claim for the century itself in general; admitting, however, at the same time, whether it be the fault of philosophy or of that particular style of philosophy which then prevailed, that, at any rate amongst the upper and more educated classes, both morality and religion seem to have held disadvantageous and precarious ground, to have maintained or struggled to maintain themselves in a position only just tenable. The maxim of the time appears to be that it is man’s duty to sustain himself upon a minimum of moral assumption; in point of fact, to strive to solve the problem of habituation to living on nothing. Morality survives, we know not well how, in Hume. Religion appears to be driven to its inmost line of defences, to be fighting from its encincture of fortification, in Butler’s analogical argument. And Johnson, in the last resort, can but confute Hume, as Berkeley—with a stamp upon the ground.
Of what dubious cogency, compared with ancient doctrine, is the morality implied in the summary of character with which Mary Queen of Scots is dismissed from the English History. How different from the idea of a religion meeting all the otherwise disappointed hopes, fulfilling all the profoundest and most secret needs of our spiritual nature, is the great argument of the ‘Analogy,’ which, nakedly stated, would seem to run, that we have no right to claim a religion according to our own fancies, that as the world of ordinary facts is full of difficulties, so also it is to be expected will be religion also. How matter-of-fact, and, as good people now would say, how low is the morality of Johnson; how indiscriminate, moreover, he is obliged, in his extreme need, to be in his religious faith and devotional observances.
Nevertheless, there is a cogency in this resting upon only the lowest grounds; the winter-vitality of the moral convictions of Hume is worth more than any summer exuberance of sentiment. Butler’s argument does hold water: Johnson’s character does prove something.
But by this time we are seeming to hear a sound as of very different voices, and it is well that we should begin to break off. Religious enthusiasm, wholly unconscious that amongst the upper classes it had been proved a chimera, awakening in all the extravagant force of youth at the touch of Wesley and Whitfield, had this long time, amongst the despised and neglected, been extending its dominions and augmenting its powers. Methodism, long plebeian, is attaining its literary patriciate in Cowper. We must listen, too, while in homely Scots vernacular we are told by an Ayrshire ploughman authentic tidings of living instincts, of spontaneous belief, which not all the philosophy in the brain of the intellectual can banish from the breast of the human being.
In France, also, even Parisian dilettanti are neglecting the persiflage of Voltaire for the sentiment of Rousseau, and the common people are ‘hearing him gladly.’
As men after long abstraction or too careful self-introspection need some sudden change to replace them in their ordinary attitude of life and action; or, as in the ancient Roman Empire, when the old civilisation, with its laws, its government, its intellectual superiority, its literary upper classes, was gradually sinking more and more into a sort of paralytic incapacity, the emergence from below of a plebeian, unintellectual, unrefined religion, and the inroad from without of Northern barbarian races, gave back life to the world—even so in England from the elements representable by Wesley and Burns, in France from what spoke by the mouth of the watchmaker’s son of Geneva, came strange renovation.
You observe, upon referring to a table of chronology, how as the stars, whose courses we have been contemplating, begin to disappear below, so already above the horizon there may be seen showing themselves the lights of a new generation. Before Johnson had left the world you see Coleridge, Wordsworth, Scott, Southey already entered upon it; entering it much about the time that Hume and Goldsmith quit it. Gibbon sees that last volume, which in his garden at Lausanne he rejoiced to lay down completed, issue from the press; and Byron is already born. The men whom we ourselves have seen, some of whom still survive—the men of whose careers some in this room may have been immediate witnesses, the impress from whose spirit is more immediately set upon us all, are already alive and even at work. Were I to pass over the momentous barrier of the great French Revolution, and look into the last decade of the eighteenth century, we should see there, while the light of Burns suddenly goes out, and the feeble spark which testifies to the existence of Cowper expires sadly with the expiring centenary, we should see there Coleridge and Wordsworth and Southey busy, and before the public, Coleridge and Southey planning as in a dream a Pantisocratic community on the banks of the smooth-sounding Susquehanna, Coleridge and Wordsworth presently writing in country seclusion together poems which the former never, the latter scarcely ever, improved upon.
But I shall be doing wrong, I feel and see, in overstepping this magic limit of the century. I am leading you unawares from a gallery of portraits of the dead through a door that opens upon a meeting of living, moving, and acting men. From history I am seducing you to self-observation; from the ripe and gathered sheaves I am diverting you to the field where good and bad, by no rash hand to be sundered, must grow together to an harvest which is not yet. Of the characteristics of this new epoch, of its purport and significance, let us not dream of seeking any analysis or giving any representation.
Twenty years hence, when the hot blood of Byron shall have cooled in the veins of the generation he addressed, and when Scott’s mountain excursions shall seem an exploded amusement, and Wordsworth’s evening walks a faded reverie, twenty years hence it will be time enough to meet together and discuss our past selves and the literature of the commencement of the nineteenth century.
REVIEW OF SOME POEMS
BY ALEXANDER SMITH AND MATTHEW ARNOLD.
(Published in the ‘North American Review’ for July 1853,
Vol. lxxvii., No. 160.)
Poems by Alexander Smith, a volume recently published in London, and by this time reprinted in Boston, deserve attention. They have obtained in England a good deal more notice than is usually accorded there to first volumes of verse; nor is this by any means to be ascribed to the mere fact that the writer is, as we are told, a mechanic; though undoubtedly that does add to their external interest, and perhaps also enhances their intrinsic merit. It is to this, perhaps, that they owe a force of purpose and character which makes them a grateful contrast to the ordinary languid collectanea published by young men of literary habits; and which, on the whole, may be accepted as more than compensation for many imperfections of style and taste.
The models whom this young poet has followed have been, it would appear, predominantly, if not exclusively, the writers of his own immediate time, plus Shakspeare. The antecedents of the ‘Life-Drama,’ the one long poem which occupies almost the whole of his volume, are to be found in the ‘Princess,’ in parts of Mrs. Browning, in the love of Keats, and the habit of Shakspeare. There is no Pope, or Dryden,[22] or even Milton; no Wordsworth, Scott, or even Byron to speak of. We have before us, we may say, the latest disciple of the school of Keats, who was indeed no well of English undefiled, though doubtless the fountain-head of a true poetic stream. Alexander Smith is young enough to free himself from his present manner, which does not seem his simple and natural own. He has given us, so to say, his Endymion; it is certainly as imperfect, and as mere a promise of something wholly different, as was that of the master he has followed.
We are not sorry, in the meantime, that this Endymion is not upon Mount Latmos. The natural man does pant within us after flumina silvasque; yet really, and truth to tell, is it not, upon the whole, an easy matter to sit under a green tree by a purling brook, and indite pleasing stanzas on the beauties of Nature and fresh air? Or is it, we incline to ask, so very great an exploit to wander out into the pleasant field of Greek or Latin mythology, and reproduce, with more or less of modern adaptation—
the shadows
Faded and pale, yet immortal, of Faunus, the Nymphs, and the Graces?
Studies of the literature of any distant age or country; all the imitations and quasi-translations which help to bring together into a single focus the scattered rays of human intelligence; poems after classical models, poems from Oriental sources, and the like, have undoubtedly a great literary value. Yet there is no question, it is plain and patent enough, that people much prefer ‘Vanity Fair’ and ‘Bleak House.’ Why so? Is it simply because we have grown prudent and prosaic, and should not welcome, as our fathers did, the Marmions and the Rokebys, the Childe Harolds and the Corsairs? Or is it, that to be widely popular, to gain the ear of multitudes, to shake the hearts of men, poetry should deal, more than at present it usually does, with general wants, ordinary feelings, the obvious rather than the rare facts of human nature? Could it not attempt to convert into beauty and thankfulness, or at least into some form and shape, some feeling, at any rate, of content—the actual, palpable things with which our everyday life is concerned; introduce into business and weary task-work a character and a soul of purpose and reality; intimate to us relations which, in our unchosen, peremptorily appointed posts, in our grievously narrow and limited spheres of action, we still, in and through all, retain to some central, celestial fact? Could it not console us with a sense of significance, if not of dignity, in that often dirty, or at least dingy, work which it is the lot of so many of us to have to do, and which some one or other, after all, must do? Might it not divinely condescend to all infirmities; be in all points tempted as we are; exclude nothing, least of all guilt and distress, from its wide fraternisation; not content itself merely with talking of what may be better elsewhere, but seek also to deal with what is here? We could each one of us, alas, be so much that somehow we find we are not; we have all of us fallen away from so much that we still long to call ours. Cannot the Divine Song in some way indicate to us our unity, though from a great way off, with those happier things; inform us, and prove to us, that though we are what we are, we may yet, in some way, even in our abasement, even by and through our daily work, be related to the purer existence?
The modern novel is preferred to the modern poem, because we do here feel an attempt to include these indispensable latest addenda—these phenomena which, if we forget on Sunday, we must remember on Monday—these positive matters of fact, which people, who are not verse-writers, are obliged to have to do with.
Et fortasse cupressum
Scis simulare; quid hoc, si fractis enatat exspes
Navibus, ære dato qui pingitur?
The novelist does try to build us a real house to be lived in; and this common builder, with no notion of the orders, is more to our purpose than the student of ancient art who proposes to lodge us under an Ionic portico. We are, unhappily, not gods, nor even marble statues. While the poets, like the architects, are—a good thing enough in its way—studying ancient art, comparing, thinking, theorising, the common novelist tells a plain tale, often trivial enough, about this, that, and the other, and obtains one reading at any rate; is thrown away indeed to-morrow, but is devoured to-day.
We do not at all mean to prepare the reader for finding the great poetic desideratum in this present Life-Drama. But it has at least the advantage, such as it is, of not showing much of the littérateur or connoisseur, or indeed the student; nor is it, as we have said, mere pastoral sweet piping from the country. These poems were not written among books and busts, nor yet
By shallow rivers, to whose falls
Melodious birds sing madrigals.
They have something substantive and lifelike, immediate and first-hand, about them. There is a charm, for example, in finding, as we do, continual images drawn from the busy seats of industry; it seems to satisfy a want that we have long been conscious of, when we see the black streams that welter out of factories, the dreary lengths of urban and suburban dustiness,
The squares and streets,
And the faces that one meets,
irradiated with a gleam of divine purity.
There are moods when one is prone to believe that, in these last days, no longer by ‘clear spring or shady grove,’ no more upon any Pindus or Parnassus, or by the side of any Castaly, are the true and lawful haunts of the poetic powers; but, we could believe it, if anywhere, in the blank and desolate streets, and upon the solitary bridges of the midnight city, where Guilt is, and wild Temptation, and the dire Compulsion of what has once been done—there, with these tragic sisters around him, and with pity also, and pure Compassion, and pale Hope, that looks like despair, and Faith in the garb of doubt, there walks the discrowned Apollo, with unstrung lyre; nay, and could he sound it, those mournful Muses would scarcely be able, as of old, to respond and ‘sing in turn with their beautiful voices.’
To such moods, and in such states of feeling, this ‘Life-Drama’ will be an acceptable poem. Under the guise of a different story, a story unskilful enough in its construction, we have seemed continually to recognise the ingenious, yet passionate, youthful spirit, struggling after something like right and purity amidst the unnumbered difficulties, contradictions, and corruptions of the heated and crowded, busy, vicious, and inhuman town. Eager for action, incapable of action without some support, yet knowing not on what arm to dare to lean; not untainted; hard pressed; in some sort, at times, overcome—still we seem to see the young combatant, half combatant, half martyr, resolute to fight it out, and not to quit this for some easier field of battle—one way or other to make something of it.
The story, such as we have it, is inartificial enough. Walter, a boy of poetic temperament and endowment, has, it appears, in the society of a poet friend now deceased, grown up with the ambition of achieving something great in the highest form of human speech. Unable to find or make a way, he is diverted from his lofty purposes by a romantic love-adventure, obscurely told, with a ‘Lady’ who finds him asleep, Endymion-like, under a tree. The fervour and force of youth wastes itself here in vain; a quick disappointment—for the lady is betrothed to another—sends him back enfeebled, exhausted, and embittered, to essay once again his task. Disappointed affections, and baffled ambition, contending henceforward in unequal strife with the temptations of scepticism, indifference, apathetic submission, base indulgence, and the like; the sickened and defeated, yet only too strong, too powerful man, turning desperately off, and recklessly at last plunging in mid-unbelief into joys to which only belief and moral purpose can give reality; out of horror-stricken guilt, the new birth of clearer and surer, though humbler, conviction, trust, resolution; these happy changes met, perhaps a little prematurely and almost more than half-way, by success in the aims of a purified ambition, and crowned too, at last, by the blessings of a regenerate affection—such is the argument of the latter half of the poem; and there is something of a current and tide, so to say, of poetic intention in it, which carries on the reader (after the first few scenes), perforce, in spite of criticism and himself, through faulty imagery, turgid periods, occasional bad versification and even grammar, to the close. Certainly, there is something of a real flesh-and-blood heart and soul in the case, or this could not be so.
We quote from the later portion, when Walter returns to the home of his childhood:—
’Twas here I spent my youth, as far removed
From the great heavings, hopes, and fears of man,
As unknown isle asleep in unknown seas.
Gone my pure heart, and with it happy days;
No manna falls around me from on high,
Barely from off the desert of my life
I gather patience and severe content.
God is a worker. He has thickly strewn
Infinity with grandeur. God is Love;
He yet shall wipe away creation’s tears,
And all the worlds shall summer in his smile.
Why work I not. The veriest mote that sports
Its one-day life within the sunny beam
Has its stern duties. Wherefore have I none?
I will throw off this dead and useless past,
As a strong runner, straining for his life,
Unclasps a mantle to the hungry winds.
A mighty purpose rises large and slow
From out the fluctuations of my soul,
As ghostlike from the dim and trembling sea
Starts the completed moon.
Here, in this determination, he writes his poem—attains in this spirit the object which had formerly been his ambition. And here, in the last scene, we find him happy, or peaceful at least, with Violet:—
Thou noble soul,
Teach me, if thou art nearer God than I!
My life was one long dream; when I awoke,
Duty stood like an angel in my path,
And seemed so terrible, I could have turned
Into my yesterdays, and wandered back
To distant childhood, and gone out to God
By the gate of birth, not death. Lift, lift me up
By thy sweet inspiration, as the tide
Lifts up a stranded boat upon the beach.
I will go forth ’mong men, not mailed in scorn,
But in the armour of a pure intent,
Great duties are before me, and great songs,
And whether crowned or crownless, when I fall,
It matters not, so as God’s work is done.
I’ve learned to prize the quiet lightning deed,
Not the applauding thunder at its heels,
Which men call Fame. Our night is past;
We stand in precious sunrise; and beyond,
A long day stretches to the very end.
So be it, O young Poet; Poet, perhaps it is early to affirm; but so be it, at any rate, O young man. While you go forth in that ‘armour of pure intent,’ the hearts of some readers, be assured, will go with you.
‘Empedocles on Etna, and other Poems,’ with its earlier companion volume, ‘The Strayed Reveller, and other Poems,’ are, it would seem, the productions (as is, or was, the English phrase) of a scholar and a gentleman; a man who has received a refined education, seen refined ‘society,’ and been more, we dare say, in the world, which is called the world, than in all likelihood has a Glasgow mechanic. More refined, therefore, and more highly educated sensibilities—too delicate, are they, for common service?—a calmer judgment also, a more poised and steady intellect, the siccum lumen of the soul; a finer and rarer aim, perhaps, and certainly a keener sense of difficulty, in life—these are the characteristics of him whom we are to call ‘A.’ Empedocles, the sublime Sicilian philosopher, the fragments of whose moral and philosophic poems testify to his genius and character—Empedocles, in the poem before us, weary of misdirected effort, weary of imperfect thought, impatient of a life which appears to him a miserable failure, and incapable, as he conceives, of doing anything that shall be true to that proper interior self—
Being one with which we are one with the whole world,
wandering forth, with no determined purpose, into the mountain solitudes, followed for a while by Pausanias, the eager and laborious physician, and at a distance by Callicles, the boy-musician, flings himself at last, upon a sudden impulse and apparent inspiration of the intellect, into the boiling crater of Etna; rejoins there the elements. The music of the boy Callicles, to which he chants his happy mythic stories somewhat frigidly perhaps, relieves, as it sounds in the distance, the gloomy catastrophe.
Tristram and Iseult (these names form the title of the next and only other considerable poem) are, in the old romantic cycle of North-France and Germany, the hero and the heroine of a mournful tale. Tristram of Lyonness, the famed companion of King Arthur, received in youth a commission to bring from across the sea the Princess Iseult of Ireland, the destined bride of the King of Cornwall. The mother of the beautiful princess gave her, as a parting gift, a cup of a magic wine, which she and her royal husband should drink together on their marriage-day in their palace at Tyntagil; so they should love each other perfectly and for ever.
On the dreamy seas it so befell, that Iseult and Tristram drank together of the golden cup. Tristram, therefore, and Iseult should love each other perfectly and for ever. Yet nothing the less for this must Iseult be wedded to the King of Cornwall; and Tristram, vainly lingering, fly and go forth upon his way.
But it so chanced that, after long and weary years of passion vainly contended with, years of travel and hard fighting, Tristram, lying wounded in Brittany, was tended by another, a youthful, innocent Iseult, in whose face he seemed to see the look of that Iseult of the past, that was, and yet could not be, his. Weary, and in his sad despondency, Tristram wedded Iseult of Brittany, whose heart, in his stately deep distress, he had moved to a sweet and tender affection. The modern poem opens with the wedded knight come home again, after other long years, and other wars, in which he had fought at King Arthur’s side with the Roman emperor, and subdued the heathen Saxons on the Rhine, lying once more sick and sad at heart, upon what ere long he feels shall be his death-bed. Ere he die, he would see, once yet again, her with whom in his youth he drank of that fatal cup:—
Tristram. Is she not come? the messenger was sure.
Prop me upon the pillows once again—
Raise me, my page: this cannot long endure.
Christ! what a night! how the sleet whips the pane!
What lights will those out to the northward be?
The Page. The lanterns of the fishing-boats at sea.
And so through the whole of Part I. of our poem lies the sick and weary knight upon his bed, reviewing sadly, while sadly near him stands his timid and loving younger Iseult, reviewing, half sleeping, half awake, those old times, that hapless voyage, and all that thence ensued; and still in all his thought recurring to the proud Cornish Queen, who, it seems, will let him die unsolaced. He speaks again, now broad awake:—
Is my page here? Come, turn me to the fire.
Upon the window panes the moon shines bright;
The wind is down; but she’ll not come to-night.
Ah no,—she is asleep in Tyntagil——
My princess, art thou there? Sweet, ’tis too late.
To bed and sleep; my fever is gone by;
To-night my page shall keep me company.
Where do the children sleep? Kiss them for me.
Poor child, thou art almost as pale as I;
This comes of nursing long and watching late.
To bed—good night.
And so (our poet passing without notice from Tristram’s semidramatic musings and talkings to his own not more coherent narrative)—
She left the gleam-lit fireplace,
She came to the bed-side;
She took his hands in hers; her tears
Down on her slender fingers rained.
She raised her eyes upon his face—
Not with a look of wounded pride—
A look as if the heart complained;
Her look was like a sad embrace;
The gaze of one who can divine
A grief, and sympathise.
Sweet flower, thy children’s eyes
Are not more innocent than thine.
Sleeping with her little ones, and, it may be, dreaming too, though less happily than they, lies Iseult of Brittany. And now—
What voices are those on the clear night air?
What lights in the courts? what steps on the stair?
PART II.
Tristram. Raise the light, my page, that I may see her.
—Thou art come at last, then, haughty Queen!
Long I’ve waited, long have fought my fever,
Late thou comest, cruel thou hast been.
Iseult. Blame me not, poor sufferer, that I tarried.
I was bound; I could not break the band.
Chide not with the past, but feel the present;
I am here—we meet—I hold thy hand.
Yes, the Queen Iseult of Cornwall, Iseult that was of Ireland, of the ship upon the dreamy seas long since, has crossed these stormy seas to-night, is here, holds his hand. And so proceeds, through some six or seven pages of Part II., the fine colloquy of the two sad, world-worn, late-reunited lovers. When we open upon Part III.,
A year had flown, and in the chapel old
Lay Tristram and Queen Iseult dead and cold.
Beautiful, simple, old mediæval story! We have followed it, led on as much by its own intrinsic charm as by the form and colouring—beautiful too, but indistinct—which our modern poet has given it. He is obscure at times, and hesitates and falters in it; the knights and dames, we fear, of old North-France and Western Germany would have been grievously put to it to make him out. Only upon a fourth re-reading, and by the grace of a happy moment, did we satisfy our critical conscience that, when the two lovers have sunk together in death, the knight on his pillows, and Queen Iseult kneeling at his side, the poet, after passing to the Cornish court where she was yesternight, returns to address himself to a hunter with his dogs, worked in the tapestry of the chamber here, whom he conceives to be pausing in the pictured chase, and staring, with eyes of wonder, on the real scene of the pale knight on the pillows and the kneeling lady fair. But
Cheer, cheer thy dogs into the brake,
Oh hunter! and without a fear
Thy golden-tasselled bugle blow,
And through the glade thy pastime take
For thou wilt rouse no sleepers here,
For these thou seest are unmoved;
Cold, cold as those who lived and loved
A thousand years ago.
Fortunately, indeed, with the commencement of Part III., the most matter-of-fact Quarterly conscience may feel itself pretty well set at ease by the unusually explicit statements that
A year had fled; and in the chapel old
Lay Tristram and Queen Iseult dead and cold.
The young surviving Iseult, one bright day
Had wandered forth; her children were at play
In a green circular hollow in the heath
Which borders the sea shore; a country path
Creeps over it from the tilled fields behind.
Yet anon, again and thicker now perhaps than ever, the mist of more than poetic dubiousness closes over and around us. And as he sings to us about the widowed lady Iseult, sitting upon the sea-banks of Brittany, watching her bright-eyed children, talking with them and telling them old Breton stories, while still, in all her talk and her story, her own dreamy memories of the past, and perplexed thought of the present, mournfully mingle, it is really all but impossible to ascertain her, or rather his, real meanings. We listen, indeed, not quite unpleased, to a sort of faint musical mumble, conveying at times a kind of subdued half-sense, or intimating, perhaps a three-quarters-implied question; is anything real?—is love anything?—what is anything?—is there substance enough even in sorrow to mark the lapse of time?—is not passion a diseased unrest?—did not the fairy Vivian, when the wise Merlin forgot his craft to fall in love with her, wave her wimple over her sleeping adorer?
Nine times she waved the fluttering wimple round,
And made a little plot of magic ground;
And in that daisied circle, as men say,
Is Merlin prisoner to the judgment-day,
But she herself whither she will can rove,
For she was passing weary of his love.
Why or wherefore, or with what purport, who will venture exactly to say?—but such, however, was the tale which, while Tristram and his first Iseult lay in their graves, the second Iseult, on the sea-banks of Brittany, told her little ones.
And yet, dim and faint as is the sound of it, we still prefer this dreamy patience, the soft submissive endurance of the Breton lady, and the human passions and sorrows of the Knight and the Queen, to the high, and shall we say, pseudo Greek inflation of the philosopher musing above the crater, and the boy Callicles singing myths upon the mountain.
Does the reader require morals and meanings to these stories? What shall they be, then?—the deceitfulness of knowledge and the illusiveness of the affections, the hardness and roughness and contrariousness of the world, the difficulty of living at all, the impossibility of doing anything—voilà tout? A charitable and patient reader, we believe (such as is the present reviewer), will find in the minor poems that accompany these pieces, intimations—what more can reader or reviewer ask?—of some better and further thing than these; some approximations to a kind of confidence; some incipiences of a degree of hope; some roots, retaining some vitality, of conviction and moral purpose:—
And though we wear out life, alas,
Distracted as a homeless wind,
In beating where we must not pass,
And seeking what we shall not find,
Yet shall we one day gain, life past,
Clear prospect o’er our being’s whole,
Shall see ourselves, and learn at last
Our true affinities of soul.
We shall not then deny a course
To every thought the mass ignore,
We shall not then call hardness force,
Nor lightness wisdom any more.
In the future, it seems, there is something for us; and for the present also, which is more germane to our matter, we have discovered some precepts about ‘hope, light, and persistence,’ which we intend to make the most of. Meantime, it is one promising point in our author of the initial, that his second is certainly on the whole an improvement upon his first volume. There is less obvious study of effect; upon the whole, a plainer and simpler and less factitious manner and method of treatment. This, he may be sure, is the only safe course. Not by turning and twisting his eyes, in the hope of seeing things as Homer, Sophocles, Virgil, or Milton saw them; but by seeing them, by accepting them as he sees them, and faithfully depicting accordingly, will he attain the object he desires.
In the earlier volume, one of the most generally admired pieces was ‘The Forsaken Merman.’
Come, dear children, let us away
Down, and away below,
says the Merman, standing upon the seashore, whither he and his children came up to call back the human Margaret, their mother, who had left them to go, for one day—for Easter-day—to say her prayers with her kinsfolk in the little gray church on the shore:—
’Twill be Easter time in the world—ah me,
And I lose my poor soul, Merman, here with thee.
And when she stayed, and stayed on, and it seemed a long while, and the little ones began to moan, at last, up went the Merman with the little ones to the shore, and so on into the town, and to the little gray church, and there looked in through the small leaded panes of the window. There she sits in the aisle; but she does not look up, her eyes are fixed upon the holy page; it is in vain we try to catch her attention:—
Come away, children, call no more,
Come away, come down, call no more.
Down, down to the depths of the sea. She will live up there and be happy, among the things she had known before. Yet sometimes a thought will come across her; there will be times when she will
Steal to the window and look at the sand;
And over the sand at the sea;
And anon there breaks a sigh,
And anon there drops a tear,
From a sorrow-clouded eye,
And a heart sorrow-laden,
A long, long sigh,
For the cold strange eyes of a little mermaiden,
And the gleam of her golden hair.
Come away, children, come down. We will be happy in our bright home under the sea—happy, though the cruel one leaves us lonely for ever. Yet we too, sometimes at midnight, when winds blow softly, and the moonlight falls clear,
Up the still glistening beaches,
Up the creeks we will hie,
Over banks of bright sea-weed
The ebb-tide leaves dry.
We will gaze from the sand hills
At the white sleeping town,
At the church on the hill-side;
And then come back down,—
Singing, ‘There dwells a loved one,
But cruel is she,
She left lonely for ever
The Kings of the sea.’
It is a beautiful poem, certainly; and deserves to have been given at full length. ‘The Strayed Reveller’ itself is more ambitious, perhaps a little strained. It is a pleasing and significant imagination, however, to present to us Circe and Ulysses in colloquy with a stray youth from the train of Bacchus, who drinks eagerly the cup of the enchantress, not as did the sailors of the Ithacan king, for gross pleasure, but for the sake of the glorious and superhuman vision and knowledge it imparts:—
But I, Ulysses,
Sitting on the warm steps,
Looking over the valley,
All day long have seen,
Without pain, without labour,
Sometimes a wild-haired mænad,
Sometimes a Faun with torches.
But now, we are fain to ask, where are we, and whither are we unconsciously come? Were we not going forth to battle in the armour of a righteous purpose, with our first friend, with Alexander Smith? How is it we find ourselves here, reflecting, pondering, hesitating, musing, complaining, with ‘A’? As the wanderer at night, standing under a stormy sky, listening to the wild harmonies of winds, and watching the wild movements of the clouds, the tree-tops, or possibly the waves, may, with a few steps, very likely, pass into a lighted sitting-room, and a family circle, with pictures and books, and literary leisure, and ornaments, and elegant small employments—a scene how dissimilar to that other, and yet how entirely natural also—so it often happens too with books. You have been reading Burns, and you take up Cowper. You feel at home, how strangely! in both of them. Can both be the true thing? and if so, in what new form can we express the relation, the harmony, between them? Such a discrepancy there certainly does exist between the two books that have been before us here. We close the one and open the other, and feel ourselves moving to and fro between two totally different, repugnant, and hostile theories of life. Are we to try and reconcile them, or judge between them?
May we escape from all the difficulty by a mere quotation, and pronounce with the shepherd of Virgil,
Non nostrum inter vos tantas componere lites:
Et vitulâ tu dignus, et hic.
Or will the reader be content to bow down with us in this place, and acknowledge the presence of that highest object of worship among the modern Germans, an antinomy? (That is, O unlearned reader, ignorant, not impossibly, of Kant and the modern German religion—in brief, a contradiction in terms, the ordinary phenomenal form of a noumenal Verity; as, for example, the world must have had a beginning, and, the world cannot have had a beginning, in the transcendental fusion or confusion of which consists the Intelligible or unintelligible truth.) Will you be content, O reader, to plod in German manner over miles of a straight road, that seems to lead somewhere, with the prospect of arriving at last at some point where it will divide at equal angles, and lead equally in two opposite directions, where you may therefore safely pause, and thankfully set up your rest, and adore in sacred doubt the Supreme Bifurcation? Or do you hold, with Voltaire, who said (à propos of the question then debated among the French wits, whether there were or were not a God) that ‘after all, one must take a side?’
With all respect for the Antinomies and Germans, and ‘most distinguished consideration’ for Voltaire and Parisian persiflage, still, it may not be quite necessary for us, on the present occasion, either to stand still in transcendental doubt, or toss up, as it were, for our side. Individuals differ in character, capacity, and positions; and, according to their circumstances, will combine, in every possible variety of degree, the two elements of thoughtful discriminating selection and rejection, and frank and bold acceptance of what lies around them. Between the extremes of ascetic and timid self-culture, and of unquestioning, unhesitating confidence, we may consent to see and tolerate every kind and gradation of intermixture. Nevertheless, upon the whole, for the present age, the lessons of reflectiveness and the maxims of caution do not appear to be more needful or more appropriate than exhortations to steady courage and calls to action. There is something certainly of an over-educated weakness of purpose in Western Europe—not in Germany only, or France, but also in more busy England. There is a disposition to press too far the finer and subtler intellectual and moral susceptibilities; to insist upon following out, as they say, to their logical consequences, the notices of some organ of the spiritual nature; a proceeding which perhaps is hardly more sensible in the grown man than it would be in the infant to refuse to correct the sensations of sight by those of the touch. Upon the whole, we are disposed to follow out, if we must follow out at all, the analogy of the bodily senses; we are inclined to accept rather than investigate; and to put our confidence less in arithmetic and antinomies than in
A few strong instincts and a few plain rules.
Let us remark also in the minor Poems, which accompany ‘Empedocles,’ a disposition, perhaps, to assign too high a place to what is called Nature. It may indeed be true, as the astronomers say, though after all it is no very great piece of knowledge, that the heavenly bodies describe ellipses; and go on, from and to all the ages, performing that self-repeating, unattaining curve. But does it, therefore, of necessity follow that human souls do something analogous in the spiritual spaces? Number is a wonderful thing, and the laws of Nature sublime; nevertheless, have we not a sort of intuition of the existence, even in our own poor human selves, of something akin to a Power superior to, and transcending, all manifestations of Nature, all intelligible forms of Number and Law? We quote one set of verses, entitled ‘Morality,’ in which our author does appear to have escaped for once from the dismal cycle of his rehabilitated Hindoo-Greek theosophy:—
MORALITY.
We cannot kindle when we will
The fire that in the heart resides,
The spirit bloweth and is still,
In mystery our soul abides;—
But tasks, in hours of insight willed,
Can be through hours of gloom fulfilled.
With aching hands and bleeding feet
We dig and heap, lay stone on stone;
We bear the burden and the heat
Of the long day, and wish ’twere done.
Not till the hours of light return,
All we have built do we discern.
Then when the clouds are off the soul,
When thou dost look in Nature’s eye,
Ask how she viewed thy self-control,
Thy struggling tasked morality—
Nature whose free, light, cheerful air,
Oft made thee, in thy gloom, despair.
And she, whose censure thou dost dread,
Whose eye thou wert afraid to seek,—
See, on her face a glow is spread,
A strong emotion on her cheek.
‘Ah child,’ she cries, ‘that strife divine
Whence was it, for it is not mine?
There is no effort on my brow—
I do not strive, I do not weep;
I rush with the swift spheres, and glow
In joy, and when I will, I sleep,—
Yet that severe, that earnest air,
I saw, I felt it once, but where?
I knew not yet the gauge of Time,
Nor wore the manacles of space,—
I felt it in some other clime,
I saw it in some other place.
’Twas when the heavenly house I trod,
And lay upon the breast of God.
It is wonderful what stores of really valuable thought may lie neglected in a book, simply because they are not put in that form which serves our present occasions. But if we have been inclined to yield to a preference for the picture of simple, strong, and certain, rather than of subtle, shifting, and dubious feelings, and in point of tone and matter to go along with the young mechanic, in point of diction and manner, we must certainly assign the palm to ‘A,’ in spite of a straining after the rounded Greek form, such as, to some extent, vitiates even the style of Milton. Alexander Smith lies open to much graver critical carping. He writes, it would almost seem, under the impression that the one business of the poet is to coin metaphors and similes. He tells them out as a clerk might sovereigns at the Bank of England. So many comparisons, so much poetry; it is the sterling currency of the realm. Yet he is most pleased, perhaps, when he can double or treble a similitude; speaking of A, he will call it a B, which is, as it were, the C of a D. By some maturer effort we may expect to be thus conducted even to Z. But simile within simile, after the manner of Chinese boxes, are more curious than beautiful; nor is it the true aim of the poet, as of the Italian boy in the street, to poise upon his head, for public exhibition, a board crowded as thick as they can stand with images, big and little, black and white, of anybody and everybody, in any possible order of disorder, as they happen to pack. Tanquam scopulum, insolens verbum, says the precept of ancient taste, which our author seems to accept freely, with the modern comment of—
In youth from rock to rock I went
With pleasure high and turbulent,—
Most pleased when most uneasy.
The movement of his poem is indeed rapid enough; there is a sufficient impetus to carry us over a good deal of rough and ‘rocky’ ground; there is a real continuity of poetic purpose;—but it is so perpetually presumed upon; the attention, which the reader desires to devote to the pursuit of the main drift of what calls itself a single poem, simplex et unum, is so incessantly called off to look at this and look at that; when, for example, we would fain follow the thought and feeling of Violet and of Walter, we are with such peremptory and frequent eagerness summoned to observe how like the sky is to x and the stars are to y, that on the whole, though there is a real continuity of purpose, we cannot be surprised that the critic of the ‘London Examiner’ failed to detect it. Keats and Shelley, and Coleridge, perhaps, before them, with their extravagant love for Elizabethan phraseology, have led to this mischief. Has not Tennyson followed a little too much in their train? Coleridge, we suppose, would have maintained it to be an excellence in the ‘myriad-minded’ dramatist, that he so often diverts us from the natural course of thought, feeling, and narrative, to see how curiously two trifles resemble each other, or that, in a passage of deep pathos, he still finds time to apprise us of a paronomasia. But faults which disfigure Shakspeare are not beauties in a modern volume.
I rot upon the waters when my prow
Should grate the golden isles,
may be a very Elizabethan, but is certainly rather a vicious expression. Force and condensation are good, but it is possible to combine them with purity of phrase. One of the most successful delineations in the whole poem is contained in the following passage, which introduces Scene VII.:—
[A balcony overlooking the sea.]
The lark is singing in the blinding sky,—
Hedges are white with May. The bridegroom sea
Is toying with the shore, his wedded bride,
And in the fulness of his marriage joy,
He decorates her tawny front with shells—
Retires a space to see how fair she looks,
Then proud, runs up to kiss her. All is fair,—
All glad, from grass to sun. Yet more I love
Than this, the shrinking day that sometimes comes
In winter’s front, so fair ’mongst its dark peers,
It seems a straggler from the files of June,
Which in its wanderings had lost its wits,
And half its beauty, and when it returned,
Finding its old companions gone away,
It joined November’s troop, then marching past;
And so the frail thing comes, and greets the world
With a thin crazy smile, then bursts in tears—
And all the while it holds within its hand
A few half-withered flowers;—I love and pity it.
It may be the fault of our point of view; but certainly we do not find even here that happy, unimpeded sequence which is the charm of really good writers. Is there not something incongruous in the effect of the immediate juxtaposition of these two images? We have lost, it may be, that impetuosity, that élan, which lifts the young reader over hedge and ditch at flying leaps, across country, or we should not perhaps entertain any offence, or even surprise, at being transferred per saltum from the one field to the other. But we could almost ask, was the passage, so beautiful, though perhaps a little prolonged, about the June day in November, written consecutively, and in one flow with the previous, and also beautiful, one about ocean and his bride? We dare say it was: but it does not read, somehow, in the same straight line with it—
Tantum series juncturaque pollet.
We venture, too, to record a perhaps hypercritical objection to ‘the blinding sky’ in this particular collocation. Perhaps in the first line of a scene, while the reader has not yet warmed to his duty, simplicity should be especially observed—a single image, without any repeated reflection, so to speak, in a second mirror, should suffice. The following, which open Scene XI., are better:—
Summer hath murmured with her leafy lips
Around my home, and I have heard her not;
I’ve missed the process of three several years
From shaking wind flowers to the tarnished gold
That rustles sere on Autumn’s aged limbs.
Except the two last lines. Our author will not keep his eye steady upon the thing before him; he goes off, and distracts us, and breaks the impression he had begun to succeed in giving, by bidding us look now at something else. Some simpler epithets than shaking, and some plainer language than tarnished gold or aged limbs, would have done the work better. We are quite prepared to believe that these faults and these disagreeables have personally been necessities to the writer, are awkwardnesses of growth, of which the full stature may show no trace. He should be assured, however, that though the rude vigour of the style of his Life-Drama may attract upon the first reading, yet in any case, it is not the sort of writing which people recur to with pleasure and fall back upon with satisfaction. It may be a groundless fancy, yet we do fancy, that there is a whole hemisphere, so to say, of the English language which he has left unvisited. His diction feels to us as if between Milton and Burns he had not read, and between Shakspeare and Keats had seldom admired. Certainly there is but little inspiration in the compositions of the last century; yet English was really best and most naturally written when there was, perhaps, least to write about. To obtain a real command of the language, some familiarity with the prose writers, at any rate, of that period, is almost essential; and to write out, as a mere daily task, passages, for example, of Goldsmith, would do a verse-composer of the nineteenth century as much good, we believe, as the study of Beaumont and Fletcher.