Nineteenth Century Questions

by James Freeman Clarke

then Byron never really loved; for in his poetry the chord of self never passes out of sight.

In his plays the principal characters are Byron undiluted—as Manfred, Sardanapalus, Cain, Werner, Arnold. All the secondary characters are Byron more or less diluted,—Byron and water, may we say? Never, since the world began, has there been a poet so steeped in egotism, so sick of self-love as he; and the magnificence of his genius appears in the unfailing interest which he can give to this monotonous theme.

But he was the example of a spirit with which the whole age was filled to saturation. Almost all the nineteenth century poets of England are subjective, giving us their own experience, sentiments, reflections, philosophies. Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley, Keats, revolve in this enchanted and enchanting circle. Keats and Coleridge seem capable of something different. So, in the double star, made up of Wordsworth and Coleridge, the first is absolutely personal and lyric, the second sometimes objective and dramatic. And in that other double star of Shelley and Keats the same difference may be noted.

A still more striking instance of the combination of these antagonisms is to be found in our time, in Robert Browning and his wife. Mrs. Browning is wholly lyric, like a bird which sings its own tender song of love and hope and faith till "that wild music burdens every bough;" and those "mournful hymns" hush the night to listening sympathy.

But in her husband we have a genuine renaissance of the old dramatic power of the English bards. Robert Browning is so dramatic that he forgets himself and his readers too, in his characters and their situations. To study the varieties of men and women is his joy; to reproduce them unalloyed, his triumph.

One curious instance of this self-oblivious immersion in the creations of his mind occurs to me. In one of his early poems called "In a Gondola"—as it first appeared—two lovers are happily conversing, until in a moment, we know not why, the tone becomes one of despair, and they bid each other an eternal farewell. Why this change of tone there is no explanation. In a later edition he condescends to inform us, inserting a note to this effect: "He is surprised and stabbed." This is the opposite extreme to Milton's angels carefully explaining to each other that they possess a specific levity which enables them to drop upward.

If we think of our own poets whose names are usually connected,—Longfellow and Lowell, for instance,—we shall easily see which is dramatic and which lyric. But the only man of truly dramatic faculty whom we have possessed was one in whom the quality never fully ripened,—I mean Edgar Allan Poe.

In foreign literature we may trace the same tendency of men of genius to arrange themselves in couplets. Take, for instance, in Italy, Dante and Petrarch; in France, Voltaire and Rousseau; in Germany, Goethe and Schiller. Dante is dramatic, losing himself in his stern subject, his dramatic characters; his awful pictures of gloomy destiny. Petrarch is lyrical, personal, singing forever his own sad and sweet fate. Again, Voltaire is essentially dramatic,—immersed in things, absorbed in life, a man reveling in all human accident and adventure, and aglow with faith in an earthly paradise. The sad Rousseau goes apart, away from men; standing like Byron, among them, but not of them; in a cloud of thoughts that are not their thoughts. And, once more, though Goethe resembles Shakespeare in this, that some of his works are subjective, and others objective,—though, in the greatness of his mind he reconciles all the usual antagonisms of thought,—yet the fully developed Goethe, like the fully developed Shakespeare, disappears in his characters and theme. Life to him, in all its forms, was so intensely interesting that his own individual and subjective sentiments are left out of sight. But Schiller stands opposed to Goethe, as being a dramatist devoid of dramatic genius, but full of personal power; so grand in his nobleness of soul, so majestic in the aspirations of his sentiment, so full of patriotic ardor and devotion to truth and goodness, that he moves all hearts as he walks through his dramas,—the great poet visible in every scene and every line. As his tried and noble friend says of him in an equally undying strain:—

"Burned in his cheek, with ever-deepening fire,
The spirit's youth, which never passes by;
The courage, which though worlds in hate conspire,
Conquers at last their dull hostility;
The lofty faith, which ever, mounting higher,
Now presses on, now waiteth patiently;
By which the good tends ever to its goal—
By which day lights at last the generous soul."

Goethe's characters and stories covered the widest range: Faust, made sick with too much thought, and seeking outward joy as a relief; Werther, a self-absorbed sentimentalist; Tasso, an Italian man of genius, a mixture of imagination, aspiration, sensitive self-distrust; susceptible to opinion, sympathetic; Iphigenia, a picture of antique calm, simplicity, purity, classic repose, like that of a statue; Hermann and Dorothea, a sweet idyl of modern life, in a simple-minded German village with an opinionated, honest landlord, a talkative apothecary, a motherly landlady, a sensible and good pastor, and the two young lovers.