The firmament of fame is full of variable stars, and they are nowhere thicker than in that great constellation of poets which marks the end of the last and the commencement of this century. Among the names of Byron, Moore, Rogers, Southey, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Keats, Shelley, Burns, Campbell, Crabbe, Cowper, and Scott, there are only two the lustre of whose names has remained perfectly steady and seems likely to remain so. Two or three, which blazed forth at once as luminaries of the first magnitude, have gradually and persistently waned—whether or not ever to recover any part of their lost splendour is very doubtful. The light of one or two others has fluctuated violently, and continues to do so, with a manifest diminution, however, in their total sum of light; one or two others have suffered a distinct degradation from first into second or third class lustres, and at present show no sign of further alteration. Two at least have grown astonishingly in conspicuousness, and now glow like the Dog-star and Aldebaran—though there are not wanting sky-critics who declare that they discern conditions of coming change and retrogression; and one at least has almost disappeared from the heaven of public recognition, not, however, without prognostications from some of an assured reassertion of a moderate if not predominating position.
To quit figures of speech, Coleridge and Burns—though poets of very different calibre—are the only two of the thirteen above mentioned whose reputations have been altogether unaffected by the violent changes of literary fashion which have taken place in the course of the century. Each of these two poets has written a good deal which the world will willingly let die; but Coleridge in his great way, and Burns in his comparatively small way, have done a certain moderate amount of work so thoroughly and manifestly well that no sane critic has ever called it into question or ever will. By the leaders of poetic fashion Moore and Rogers have come to be accounted as almost nowhere as poets. Southey and Cowper now depend mainly for their fame upon a few small pieces, which in their own day were not regarded as of much account in comparison with such works as The Task and The Curse of Kehama; Campbell now lives only, but vigorously, in a few lyrics. Who but Mr. Ruskin is there that would not laugh now to hear the name of Scott coupled with those of Keats and Shelley? Byron, who once outblazed all others, is now considered, by many judges not altogether to be disregarded, less as a great fixed star than as a meteor formed from earthly fumes condensed and for a time incandescent in the upper air. Wordsworth’s fame, though all agree that it is assured, has suffered and is likely still to suffer some fluctuations; and, when poetry is talked about in circles of modern experts, no one ever hears of Crabbe, though here and there one comes upon some literary oddity who maintains that he has as good a claim as Shelley to a place in the heavens of abiding fame. As this, to most modern ears astounding, paradox is certainly maintained, in private at least, by several persons whose opinion the most advanced critic would not think of despising, it may be worth while to see what can be said for it.
Things, it is said, are best known by comparison with their opposites; and, if so, surely Crabbe must be best illustrated by Shelley and Shelley by Crabbe. Shelley was an atheist and profoundly immoral; but his irreligion was radiant with pious imagination, and his immorality delicately and strictly conscientious. Crabbe was a most sincere Christian in faith and life; but his religion and morality were intolerant, narrow, and scrupulous, and sadly wanting in all the modern graces. Shelley had no natural feeling or affection and the greatest sensitiveness; Crabbe had the tenderest and strongest affections, but his nerves and æsthetic constitution were of the coarsest. Shelley’s taste often stood him in the stead of morality. He would have starved rather than write begging letters to Thurlow, Burke, and other magnates, as Crabbe did when he wanted to better his condition as an apothecary’s apprentice. Crabbe’s integrity produced some of the best effects of taste, and made him at once an equal in manners with the dukes and statesmen with whom he associated as soon as he had been taken from his beggary by Burke. Through years and years of poverty and almost hopeless trial Crabbe was a devoted and faithful lover, and afterwards as devoted and faithful a husband to his “Myra,” whom he adored in verses that justified some one’s description of his style as “Pope in worsted stockings.” Shelley breathes eternal vows in music of the spheres, to woman after woman, whom he will abandon and speak or write of with hatred and contempt as soon as their persons have ceased to please him. Crabbe knew nothing of the “ideal,” but loved all actualities, especially unpleasant ones, upon which he would turn the electric light of his peculiar powers of perception till the sludge and dead dogs of a tidal river shone. Jeffrey described the true position of Crabbe among poets better than any one else has done when he wrote, “He has represented his villagers and humble burghers as altogether as dissipated and more dishonest and discontented than the profligates of higher life.... He may be considered as the satirist of low life—an occupation sufficiently arduous, and in a great degree new and original in our language.” In this his proper vocation Crabbe is so far from being a “Pope in worsted stockings,” that his lines often resemble the strokes of Dryden’s sledge-hammer rather than the stings of his successor’s cane. But, when uninspired by the intensely disagreeable or vicious, Crabbe’s “diction” is to modern ears, for the most part, intolerable. In his cooler moments he poured forth thousands of such couplets as
It seems to us that our Reformers knew
Th’ important work they undertook to do.
And to such vile newspaper prose he not only added the ghastly adornment of verse, but also frequently enlivened it with the “poetic licences” and Parnassian “lingo” of the Pope period. What a contrast with Shelley! He erred quite as much as Crabbe did from the imaginative reality which is the true ideal; but it was all in the opposite way. If Crabbe’s eye, in its love for the actual and concrete, dwelt too habitually upon the hardness and ugliness of the earth on which he trod, Shelley’s thoughts and perceptions were for the most part
Pinnacled dim in the intense inane
of a fancy which had no foundation in earth or heaven. His poetry has, however, the immortal reality of music; and his songs are songs, though they may be often called “songs without words,” the words meaning so little though they sound so sweet.
This “parallel”—as lines starting and continued in opposite directions have got to be called—might be carried much further with advantage to the student of poetry; and the comparison might be still more profitable if the best poems of Coleridge were examined as illustrations of the true poetic reality from which Crabbe and Shelley diverge equally, but in contrary ways. Crabbe mistakes actuality for reality; Shelley’s imagination is unreal. Coleridge, when he is himself, whether he is in the region of actuality, as in “Genevieve,” or in that of imagination, as in “Christabel,” is always both real and ideal in the only true poetic sense, in which reality and ideality are truly one. In each of these poems, as in every work of true art, there is a living idea which expresses itself in every part, while the complete work remains its briefest possible expression, so that it is as absurd to ask What is its idea? as it would be to ask what is the idea of a man or of an oak. This idea cannot be a simple negation; and simple evil—which is so often Crabbe’s theme—is simple negation. On the other hand, good, in order to be the ground of the ideal in art, must be intelligible—that is to say, imaginatively credible, though it may want the conditions of present actuality. But is there any such ideal as this in Shelley?
XXI
SHALL SMITH HAVE A STATUE?
The modern practice of sending the hat round for money to set up in the Abbey or elsewhere a statue, or at least a bust, of Smith, during or immediately after his lifetime, in grateful remembrance of the service or pleasure he may have done us, can rarely be indulged without danger of making him and ourselves ridiculous in the eyes of our children; or even in our own, should we survive for a few years the amiable folly of having raised an abiding memorial of our possibly transient enthusiasm. There could have been no doubt of the propriety of setting up a statue to the Duke of Wellington after Waterloo, however much there may reasonably have been about the propriety of the statue itself which the ladies of England dedicated to the hero. But even in the case of such obvious and measurable merits as those of warriors, it is best not to be in a hurry. Historical criticism has discovered that the credit of great battles and even campaigns has not always been rightly due to the commanders-in-chief. Again, improvements like those of the steam jet, by which it became at once possible to raise the rate of railway travelling from under ten to over fifty miles an hour, the penny post, and the electric telegraph, are certainly matters for permanent memorials, provided that they are raised to the right men. But improvements and inventions of this magnitude scarcely ever are, in the first instance, attributed to the right men, who are generally more or less obscure and unrewarded geniuses. It is the practical man, who has the quickness to see the money value of a great invention and the means of removing the last external hindrance to its popular use, that gets the statue, and the money too. Few would envy him the latter; but it is cruel to him no less than to ourselves to be in such haste to decorate him with a laurel crown, which the touch of time may change into a fool’s cap. Again, unless statues are due to good intentions ardently prosecuted without reference to results, we ought to be very careful how we impose immortality upon great philanthropists and humanitarians. It would not have been for the abiding happiness and honour of the two eminent prelates and the able editor who lately constituted themselves high commissioners of public morality, to have had their images set up in Hyde Park back to back, like the figure of Hecate Triformis, and so to have been forbidden eternally to blush unseen, as no doubt they now desire to do. It would be prudent, also, to wait a while before conferring diplomas of immortality upon the heroes of legislation. The fame of repealers of navigation laws and founders of household franchise should be considered as in a state of pupilage for at least fifty years; and they should not be allowed to sport bronze thighs and the toga virilis, before the public buildings or in the squares of the metropolis, ere the paper on which their Bills are printed is well dry. It should be remembered that, in our haste, we may be placing an awful and easy vengeance in the hands of posterity; which might choose, not to pull down such monuments, but—to let them stand.