Handbook of Universal Literature, From the Best and Latest Authorities

by Anne C. Lynch Botta

5. THE NINETEENTH CENTURY.—In the illustrious band of poets who enriched the literature of England during the first generation of the present century, there are four who have gained greater fame than any others, and exercised greater influence on their contemporaries. These are Coleridge, Wordsworth, Scott, and Byron, who, though unlike, yet in respect of their ruling spirit and tendencies may be classed in pairs as they have been named; and all whose works call for exact scrutiny may be distributed into four groups. In the first of them stand Thomas Campbell and Robert Southey, dissimilar to each other, and differing as widely from their contemporaries. Campbell (1777-1844) employed an unusually delicate taste in elaborating his verses both in diction and melody. His "Pleasures of Hope" was written between youth and manhood, and "Gertrude of Wyoming," the latest of his productions worthy of him, appeared soon after his thirtieth year. His mind, deficient in manly vigor of thought, had worked itself out in the few first bursts of youthful emotion, but no one has clothed with more of romantic sweetness the feelings and fancies which people the fairy-land of early dreams, or thrown around the enchanted region a purer atmosphere of moral contemplation.

Southey (1774-1843), with an ethical tone higher and sterner than Campbell's, offers in other features a marked contrast to him. He is careless in details, and indulges no poetical reveries; he scorns sentimentalism, and throws off rapid sketches of human action with great pomp of imagery, but he seldom touches the key of the pathetic. In much of this he is the man of his age, but in other respects he is above it. He is the only poet of his clay who strove to emulate the great masters of epic song, and to give his works external symmetry of plan. He alone attempted to give poetry internal union, by making it the representation of one leading idea; a loftier theory of poetic art than that which ruled the irregular outbursts of Scott and Byron. But the aspiration was above the competency of the aspirer. He wanted spontaneous depth of sympathy; his emotion has the measured flow of the artificial canal, not the leaping gush of the river in its self-worn channel. In two of the three best poems he has founded the interest on supernatural agency of a kind which cannot command even momentary belief and the splendid panoramas of "Thalaba the Destroyer" pass away like the shadows of a magic lantern. In the "Curse of Kehama," he strives to interest us in the monstrous fables of the Hindoo mythology, and in "Roderick, the Last of the Goths," the story contains circumstances that deform the fairest proof the author gave of the practicability of his poetic theory.

The second group of poets, unless Moore find a place in it, will contain only Scott and Byron, who were in succession the most popular of all, and owed their popularity mainly to characteristics which they had in common. They are distinctively the poets of active life. They portray idealized resemblances of the scenes of reality, events which arise out of the universal relations of society, hopes, fears, and wishes which are open to the consciousness of all mankind. The originals of Scott were the romances of chivalry, and this example was applied by Byron to the construction of narratives founded on a different kind of sentiment. Scott, wearying of the narrow round that afforded him no scope for some of his best and strongest powers, turned aside to lavish them on his prose romances, and Byron, as his knowledge grew and his meditations became deeper, rose from Turkish tales to the later cantos of "Childe Harold."

Scott (1771-1832), in his poetical narratives, appealed to national sympathies through ennobling historic recollections. He painted the externals of scenery and manners with unrivaled picturesqueness, and embellished all that was generous and brave in the world of chivalry with an infectious enthusiasm. "The Lay of the Last Minstrel," a romance of border chivalry, has a more consistent unity than its successors, and is more faithful to the ancient models. "Marmion" seeks to combine the chivalrous romance with the metrical chronicle. "The Lady of the Lake" is a kind of romantic pastoral, and "Rokeby" is a Waverley novel in verse.

The moral faults of the poetry of Byron (1788-1824) became more glaring as he grew older. Starting with the carelessness of ill-trained youth in regard to most serious truths, he provoked censure without scruple, and was censured not without caprice; thus placed in a dangerous and false position, he hardened himself into a contempt for the most sacred laws of society, and although the closing scenes of his life give reason for a belief that purer and more elevated views were beginning to dawn upon his mind, he died before the amendment had found its way into his writings. He endeavored to inculcate lessons that are positively bad; his delinquency did not consist in choosing for representation scenes of violent passion and guilty horror, it lay deeper than in his theatrical fondness for identifying himself with his misanthropes, pirates, and seducers. He sinned more grievously still, against morality as against possibility, by mixing up, in one and the same character, the utmost extremes of vice and virtue, generosity and vindictiveness, of lofty heroism and actual grossness. But with other and great faults, he far excelled all the poets of his time in impassioned strength, varying from vehemence to pathos. He was excelled by few of them in his fine sense of the beautiful, and his combination of passion with beauty, standing unapproachable in his own day, has hardly ever been surpassed.

His tales, except "Parisina" and the "Prisoner of Chillon," rise less often than his other poems into that flow of poetic imagery, prompted by the loveliness of nature, which he had attempted in the two first cantos of "Childe Harold," and poured forth with added fullness of thought and emotion in the last two. "Manfred," with all its shortcomings, shows perhaps most adequately his poetic temperament; and his tragedies, though not worthy of the poet, are of all his works those which do most honor to the man.

The third section of this honored file of poets contains the names of Coleridge and Wordsworth; they are characteristically the poets of imagination, of reflection, and of a tone of sentiment that owes its attraction to its ideal elevation. Admired and emulated by a few zealous students, Coleridge became the poetical leader from the very beginning of his age, and effects yet wider have since been worked by the extended study of Wordsworth.

Coleridge (1772-1834) is the most original of the poets of his very original time, and among the most original of its thinkers. His most frequent tone of feeling is a kind of romantic tenderness or melancholy, often solemnized by an intense access of religious awe. This fine passion is breathed out most finely when it is associated with some of his airy glimpses of external nature, and his power of suggestive sketching is not more extraordinary than his immaculate taste and nervous precision of language. His images may be obscure, from the moonlight haze in which they float, but they are rarely so through faults of diction. It is disappointing to remember that this gifted man executed little more than fragments; his life ebbed away in the contemplation of undertakings still to be achieved, the result of weakness of will rather than of indolence. The romance of "Christabel," the most powerful of all his works, and the prompter of Scott and Byron, was thrown aside when scarce begun, and stands as an interrupted vision of mysterious adventures clothed in the most exquisite fancies. His tragedy of "Remorse" is full of poetic pictures; the "Ode to the Departing Year" shows his force of thought and moral earnestness; "Khubla Khan" represents in its gorgeous incoherence his singular power of lighting up landscapes with thrilling fancies; and "The Dark Ladye" is one of the most tender and romantic love-poems ever written.

The most obvious feature of Wordsworth (1770-1850) is the intense and unwearied delight which he takes in all the shapes and appearances of rural and mountain scenery. He is carried away by an almost passionate rapture when he broods over the grandeur and loveliness of the earth and air; his verse lingers with fond reluctance to depart on the wild flowers, the misty lake, the sound of the wailing blast, or the gleam of sunshine breaking through the passes among the hills, and the thoughts and feelings these objects suggest flow forth with an enthusiasm of expression which in a man less pious and rational might be interpreted as a raising of the inanimate world to a level with human dignity and intelligence. The tone which prevails in his contemplation of mortal act and suffering is a serene seriousness, on which there never breaks in anything rightly to be called passion; yet it often rises to an intensely solemn awe, and is not less often relieved by touches of a quiet pathos. Almost all his poems may be called poems of sentiment and reflection, and his own ambition was that of being worthy to be honored as a philosophical poet. His theory that the poet's function is limited to an exact representation of the real and the natural, a heresy which his own best poems triumphantly refute, often led him to triviality and meanness in the choice both of subjects and diction, and marred the beauty of many otherwise fine poems. A fascinating airiness and delicacy of conception prevail in these poems, and the tender sweetness of expression is often wonderfully touching. They were the effusions of early manhood, and the imperfect embodiments of a strength which found a freer outlet in prose. "Laodamia" and "Dion" are classical gems without a flaw; many of the sonnets unite original thought and poetic vividness with a perfection hardly to be surpassed; above all, "The Excursion" rolls on its thousands of blank verse lines with the soul-felt harmony of a divine hymn pealed forth from a cathedral organ. We forget the insignificance characterizing the plan, which embraces nothing but a three days' walk among the mountains, and we refuse to be aroused from our trance of meditative pleasure by the occasional tediousness of dissertation. "The Excursion" abounds in verses and phrases once heard never to be forgotten, and it contains trains of poetical musing through which the poet moves with a majestic fullness of reflection and imagination not paralleled, by very far, in anything else of which our century can boast.

Wilson, Shelley, and Keats make up the fourth poetical group. The principal poems of Professor Wilson (1785-1854) are the "Isle of Palms," a romance of shipwreck and solitude, full of rich pictures and delicate pathos, and the "City of the Plague," a series of dramatic scenes, representing with great depth of emotion a domestic tragedy from the plague of London.